Portuguese literature
are to be found in early Portuguese literature: to the lovers Tristan
and Iseult, to the _cantares de Cornoalha_,[117] to the chivalry of the
Knights of the Round Table. In the fourteenth century many in Portugal
were baptized with the name of Lancelot, Tristan, and Percival; and
Nun’ Alvarez (1360-1431) chose Galahad for his model, and came as near
realizing his ideal as may be given to mortal man. In Gil Vicente’s
time the name Percival had already descended to the sphere of the
peasants: as Passival (i. II) in 1502 (_Auto Pastoril Castelhano_) and
Pessival (i. 117) in 1534 (_Auto de Mofina Mendes_).
The early Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ contain many references to
this cycle, and the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ opens with five
celebrated songs,[118] imitations of Breton _lais_, with rubrics
explaining their subjects, and mentioning King Arthur and Tristan,
Iseult, Cornwall, Maraot of Ireland, and Lancelot. Whether they were
incorporated in the _Cancioneiro_ from a Portuguese _Tristam_ earlier
than the Spanish version (1343?), or, as is more probable, directly
from the Old-French _Historia Tristani_, their presence here is a
sufficient witness to the Portuguese fondness for such themes. It was
but natural that a Celtic people living by the sea, delighting in
vague legends and in foreign novelties, should have felt drawn towards
these misty tales of love and wandering adventure, which carried
them west as far as Cornwall and Ireland, and also East, through the
search for the Holy Grail. It was natural that they should undergo
their influence earlier and more strongly than their more direct
and more national neighbours the Castilians, whose clear, definite
descriptions in the twelfth-century _Poema del Cid_ would send those
legends drifting back to the dim regions of their birth. (Even to-day
connexion with and sympathy for Ireland is far commoner in Galicia than
in any other part of Spain.) Unhappily, most of the early Portuguese
versions of the Breton legends have been lost. King Duarte in his
library possessed _Merlim_, _O Livro de Tristam_, and _O Livro de
Galaaz_. The probability that these were written in Portuguese, not in
Spanish, is increased by the survival of _A Historia dos Cavalleiros
da Mesa Redonda e da Demanda do Santo Graall_, as yet only partially
published from the manuscript (2594) in the Vienna _Hofbibliothek_.
It was written probably in the fourteenth century, perhaps at the end
of the thirteenth, although the Vienna manuscript is more recent and
belongs to the fifteenth century, in which the work was referred to
by the poet Rodriguez de la Cámara.[119] It is a Portuguese version
of the story of the Holy Grail, and, although not a continuous
translation, was evidently written with the French original (doubtfully
ascribed to Robert de Boron,[120] author of a different work on the
same subject) constantly in view. Traces of French remain in its
prose.[121] This was clearly part of a larger work,[122] perhaps of
a whole cycle of works dealing with the search for the Holy Grail.
The only others that we have in print are the _Estorea de Vespeseano_
and the _Livro de Josep ab Arimatia_, the manuscript of which was
discovered in the nineteenth century in the Torre do Tombo. This, in
the same way as the _Demanda do Santo Graall_, is a later (16th c.)
copy of a thirteenth-fourteenth-century Portuguese translation or
adaptation from the French, and retains in its language signs of French
origin. The incunable _Estorea de Vespeseano_ (Lixboa, 1496) is a work
in twenty-nine short chapters, which only incidentally[123] refers
to the Holy Grail, but recounts vividly the event mentioned in the
_Demanda_[124]: the destruction of Jerusalem by Vespasian and Titus.
It was also known formerly as _Destroyçam de Jerusalem_.[125] It is an
anonymous translation, made in the middle of the fifteenth century,
not from the French _Destruction de Jérusalem_, but from the Spanish
_Estoria del noble Vespesiano_ (_c._ 1485 and 1499). Dr. Esteves
Pereira believes that the 1499 Spanish edition is a retranslation from
the Portuguese text originally translated from the Spanish.
Tennyson’s revival of the Arthurian legend in England evoked no
corresponding interest in Portugal in the nineteenth century, and
the primitive and touching story as published in 1887 has left Sir
Percival in the very middle of an adventure for over a generation. The
descent of the Amadis romances from the noble ideal of chivalry of
King Arthur’s Court is obvious, but their exact pedigree, the date and
nationality of the first ancestor of the Amadis who is still with us,
has been the subject of some little contention.
_Amadis de Gaula_ has indeed been doubly fortunate. The successor
of Lancelot, Galahad, and Tristan as a fearless and loyal knight, he
early won his way in the Peninsula; he was spared by the priest and
barber in the _Don Quixote_ scrutiny, and now when Vives’ ‘pestiferous
books’,[126] those ‘serious follies’, are no longer read widely, he has
received a new span of immortality as a corpse of Patroclus between the
contending critics. The problem of the date and authorship has become
more fascinating than the book. Champions for Spain and Portugal come
forward armed for the fight: Braunfels, Gayangos, Baist are met by
Theophilo Braga, Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Marcelino Menéndez
y Pelayo, while Dr. Henry Thomas holds the scales. The ground is thick
with their arrows. And beneath them all lies the simple ingenuous
story as retold by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo in or immediately after
1492 and published in 1508, still worth reading for its freshness and
for its clear good style, which Braunfels, following up the praise in
Juan de Valdés’ _Diálogo de la Lengua_ (_c._ 1535), declared could
not be a translation.[127] The argument, conclusive in the case of
the masterpiece of prose that is _Palmeirim_ _de Inglaterra_, loses
its force here, since Montalvo himself tells us that he corrected
the work from old originals. Naturally we are curious to know what
these _antiguos originales_ were, but the question did not arise in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: readers did not then concern
themselves greatly with the origin and authorship of a book; they were
content to enjoy it. Evidently _Amadis_ was enjoyed both in Spain and
Portugal. It is mentioned in the middle of the fourteenth century in
the Spanish translation, by Johan Garcia de Castrogeriz, of Egidio
Colonna’s _De regimine principum_, at the very time, that is, when
the Spanish poet and chronicler, Pero López de Ayala (1332-1407),
was reading _Amadis_ in his youth.[128] Half a century later, in the
last quarter of the fourteenth century, a poem by Pero Ferrus in the
_Cancionero de Baena_ refers to _Amadis_ as written in three books.
This is one of the most definite early references to _Amadis_, but of
course reference to the book by a Spaniard does not necessarily imply
that it was written in Spanish, and indeed some of the vaguer allusions
may refer to a French or Anglo-French original. The most frequent
Spanish references occur in the _Cancionero de Baena_, which was
compiled in the middle of the fifteenth century, at a period, that is,
which the last Galician lyrics written in Spain connected with the time
when all eyes were turned to Portuguese as the universal language of
Peninsular lyrics. Because the Portuguese language was used throughout
Spain in lyric poetry, it is sometimes argued as if the Portuguese had
no prose, could only sing. (The more real division was not between
verse and prose but between the Portuguese lyrical love literature and
the Spanish epic battle literature, and the early romances of chivalry,
although written in prose, belong essentially to the former.) The prose
rubrics of the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ and the _Poetica_ of the
_Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ are sufficient to dispel this delusion.
Whether this _Poetica_ be contemporary (13th c.) of the lyrics or
later (14th c.), it offers a striking contrast between the clumsiness
of its prose and the smooth perfection of the poetry for which it
theorizes. Miguel Leite Ferreira’s statement (1598) that _Amadis_ is
contemporary with the lyrics is therefore remarkable. He says that the
archaic (time of King Dinis) language of the two sonnets--_Bom Vasco
de Lobeira_ and _Vinha Amor pelo campo trebelhando_--written by his
father, Antonio Ferreira (1528-69), is the same as that in which Vasco
de Lobeira wrote _Amadis of Gaul_. We know that King Dinis encouraged
not only lyric poetry but also translations into Portuguese prose, but
all the early Portuguese prose works are assigned to the fourteenth,
not the thirteenth century. One of the earliest, the _Demanda do Santo
Graall_, the language of which bears a close relation to that of the
_Cancioneiros_, still belongs to the fourteenth century. Probably
the later development of prose misled Leite Ferreira into making
fourteenth-century prose contemporary with thirteenth-century verse.
The Infante whom he here on the strength of the passage in Montalvo’s
_Amadis_ identifies with the son of King Dinis, not with the earlier
Prince Afonso (_c._ 1265-1312), may as Infante have expressed dislike
of a certain incident (the treatment of Briolanja) in the already
well-known story, and his preference would be borne in mind when the
Portuguese version was written in his reign (1325-57). If the first
Peninsular version of _Amadis_ was composed in Portuguese in the
middle of the fourteenth century, it may have been eagerly read as a
novelty by López de Ayala. In the fourteenth century most Spaniards
read, a few wrote[129] Portuguese lyrics; and there seems to be no
reason why we should rigorously confine them to the reading of verse,
to the exclusion of Portuguese prose. There is no means of deciding
with certainty whether López de Ayala and Ferrus read _Amadis_ in
Spanish or in Portuguese, but there are inherent probabilities in
favour of Portuguese. No one without a thesis to support would deny
that, generally, the cycle of the Round Table, to which _Amadis_ is
so closely related, was more congenial to the Portuguese than to
the Spanish temperament, that the geographical position of Portugal
facilitated its introduction, and that, in the particular case of
_Amadis_, the style and subject of the work, certainly of the first
three books, are Portuguese rather than Spanish. Melancholy incidents,
sentimental phrases and tears occur on nearly every page. Some critics
even discern traces of Portuguese in the language.[130]
But if we admit that _Amadis_ was written _c._ 1350, who was its
author? It is noteworthy that while in Spanish it had been attributed
to many persons, in Portugal tradition has persistently hovered round
the name of Lobeira. Unfortunately the Lobeira authorship has given
far more trouble than that of prince, Jew, or saint in Spain. Zurara,
basing his statement on an earlier fifteenth-century authority,
in a perfectly genuine passage of his _Cronica do Conde D. Pedro
de Meneses_,[131] written in the middle of the fifteenth century,
ascribes _Amadis_ to Vasco de Lobeira. In the next century Dr. João
de Barros[132] (not the historian) and Leite Ferreira agree with
Zurara.[133] There was no reason why they should say Vasco rather
than Pedro or João. According to Nunez de Leam, Vasco de Lobeira was
knighted on the field of Aljubarrota (1385), according to Fernam Lopez
he was already a knight in 1383.[134] If he was not a young but an old
knight at Aljubarrota, it is just possible that he wrote the book
thirty-five years earlier, in the same way that the historian Barros
wrote _Clarimundo_ in his youth.
If he lived on through the reigns of Pedro I (1357-67) and Fernando
(1376-83), and acquired new distinction in battle in the reign