Portuguese literature
turn in the Portuguese poetry of the fifteenth century,[154] and later
became the subject of Lope de Vega’s _Porfiar hasta morir_ (1638). Of
his story we know definitely nothing, but some lines in one of his
poems, _En meu_ _cor tenno ta lança_ and _Aquesta lança. .. me ferio_,
would appear to have inspired the famous legend which dates from the
end of the fifteenth century. Imprisoned at Arjonilla in Andalucía
for paying court to his _sennora_, he continued to address her in
song and was killed by the lance that her infuriated husband hurled
through the prison window. In an older version, that of the Constable
D. Pedro in his _Satira de felice e infelice vida_, he saved the lady
of his heart from drowning, and afterwards, as he lingered where she
had stood, was struck down by the jealous husband. According to Argote
de Molina,[155] both he and the husband served in the household of D.
Enrique de Villena (1385-1434), who was perhaps only six when Macias
died. Most of the twenty poems ascribed to Macias that survive are
written in Galician, and of many, as _Loado sejas amor_,[156] the
authorship is doubtful. Clearly his fame would act as a strong magnet
to poems of uncertain origin. The matter is of the less importance in
that these poems, however love-sick, have but little literary merit.
If the Galician JUAN RODRIGUEZ DE LA CÁMARA, a native, like Macias, of
Padron, was the real author of the _romance_ of _Conde Arnaldos_ (which
is improbable), he was a far greater poet than his friend. Both the
lyrics and the prose of his _El Sieruo libre de Amor_ are in Castilian.
Of the other two fourteenth-century Galician poets mentioned by
Santillana, FERNAM CASQUICIO and VASCO PEREZ DE CAMÕES (†1386?),[157]
no poems have survived. The latter, a knight well known at the Court
of King Ferdinand and an ancestor of Luis de Camões, played a leading
part in the troubles preceding the battle of Aljubarrota, He had come
to Portugal from Galicia, and his name appears frequently in the pages
of Fernam Lopez (where it is written Caamoões) till the year 1386. In
the middle of the sixteenth century he is mentioned by Sá de Miranda’s
brother-in-law as a Court poet corresponding to Juan de Mena in Spain.
But there were other poets whose verse was probably not inferior to
that of Perez de Camões and Casquicio. Besides Macias the _Cancioneiro
Gallego-Castelhano_ contains the names of sixteen writers whose poems
may not attain high distinction but prove that the Galician lyric
continued to be cultivated by poets in the fourteenth and first half
of the fifteenth century in Castille and Leon, Aragon and Catalonia.
The Archdeacon of Toro, GONÇALO RODRIGUEZ (fl. 1385),[158] was one of
a group of such poets; a man with a keen zest of living and capable of
vigorous verse, in which he took a characteristic delight (_a minna
boa arte de lindo cantar_). In his farewell poem _A Deus Amor, a Deus
el Rei_, which Cervantes perhaps remembered, he bids good bye to the
_trobadores con quen trobei_, and in a quaint humorous testament he
mentions a number of friends and relatives, two of whom, at least, his
cousin Pedro de Valcacer or Valcarcel and Lope de Porto Carreiro, also
wrote verse. In the last of the sixteen stanzas (_abbacca_) of this
_testamento_ the Archdeacon appoints his namesake Gonçalo Rodriguez
de Sousa and Fernan Rodriguez to be his executors. He may have been
alive in 1402, for a Doctor Gonçalo Rodriguez, Archdeacon of Almazan,
is mentioned as one of the witnesses to the oath taken by the city of
Burgos to the Infante María in that year.[159] In that case he must
have been transferred to Almazan, some 150 miles farther up the Duero.
More chequered was the career of GARCI FERRANDEZ DE GERENA (_c._
1340-_c._ 1400). Having married one of King Juan I’s dancing girls
(_una juglara_) in the belief that she was rich, he repented when he
found _que non tenia nada_. He next became a hermit near Gerena, and,
this not proving more congenial than married poverty, he embarked
ostensibly for the Holy Land, but in fact landed at Malaga with his
wife and children. At Granada he turned Moor, satirized the Christian
faith, and deserted his wife for her sister. After such proven
inconstancy we may perhaps doubt the sincerity of his repentance when
he returned to Christianity and Castille at the end of the fourteenth
century. But for all his weakness and folly he seems not to have sunk
utterly out of the reach of finer feelings; he sang various episodes
of his life, e.g. when he went to his hermitage (_puso se beato_), in
lyrics of some charm, and addressed the nightingale in a dialogue, as
did his contemporary, ALFONSO ALVAREZ DE VILLASANDINO (_c._ 1345-_c._
1428). This Castilian Court poet, born at Villasandino near Burgos
and possessed of property at Illescas, was of a sleeker and more
subservient mind than Garci Ferrandez and prospered accordingly, _en
onra e en ben e en alto estado_. He wrote to order and was considered
the ‘crown and king of all the _poetas e trovadores_ who had ever
existed in the whole of Spain’. This extravagant claim of his admirers
need not prevent us from recognizing that there is often real feeling
and music in his poems, of which the _Cancionero de Baena_ has
preserved over twenty. He writes in varying metres with unfailing ease
and harmony, rarely sinks into mere verbal dexterity, and well deserves
to be considered the best of these later Galician poets. Side by side
with the lyric the _cantiga d’escarnho_ continued to flourish. Alfonso
Alvarez (C. G. C. 48) upbraids Garci Ferrandez for renouncing the
Christian faith and leaguing himself with the Devil (_gannaste privança
do demo mayor_); Pero Velez de Guevara (†1420), uncle of the Marqués de
Santillana, addresses a satiric poem to an old maid, and an anonymous
poet in a vigorous _sirventes_ attacks degenerate Castille, _cativa,
mezela Castela_, perhaps, as Professor Lang thinks, immediately after
the Portuguese victories of Trancoso, Aljubarrota, and Valverde in
1385. Five fragmentary poems belong to the Infante D. PEDRO (1429-66),
Constable of Portugal. There are, besides his three short Portuguese
poems in the _Cancioneiro de Resende_, only forty-one lines in all, for
while Galician, already separated from her twin sister of Portugal,
went to sleep--a sleep of nearly four centuries--in these last accents
of her muse preserved in the _Cancionero de Baena_, the Infante Pedro
turned definitely to the new forms of lyric appearing in Castille. As
a transition poet he may be mentioned here before his father D. Pedro,
Duke of Coimbra, since his prose works, which would naturally place
him with his father and with D. Duarte, his uncle, belong, together
with most of his poetry (_prosas_ and _metros_) to Spanish literature.
By stress of circumstance rather than any set purpose he inaugurated
the fashion of writing in Castilian, a fashion so eagerly taken up by
his fellow-countrymen during the next two centuries. After the tragic
death of his father at Alfarrobeira (1449) he escaped from Portugal,
of which his sister Isabel was queen,[160] spent the next seven years
as an exile in Castille, and after returning to his native land died
an exile, but now as King of Aragon (1464-6). His life of thirty-seven
years was thus as full of wandering adventure as that of any troubadour
of old. To him Santillana addressed his celebrated letter on the
development of poetry, and his own influence on Portuguese literature
was important, for he introduced not only a new style of poetry,
including _oitavas de arte maior_, but the habit of classical allusion
and allegory. His first work, _Satira de felice e infelice vida_, was
written in Portuguese before he was twenty, but re-written by himself
in Castilian, the only form in which it has survived. This firstfruit
of his studies was dedicated to his sister, Queen Isabel, whose death
(1455) he mourned in his _Tragedia de la Insigne Reyna Doña Isabel_
(1457), a work of deep feeling and some literary merit, first published
by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos 444 years after Queen Isabel’s
death. His longest and most important poem, in 125 octaves, _Coplas
del menosprecio e contempto de las cosas fermosas del mundo_ (1455),
reflects the misfortunes of his life and the high philosophy they had
brought him. Under a false attribution to his father, the Duke of
Coimbra[161] (his Portuguese poems were also wrongly ascribed to King
Peter I of Portugal, through confusion with the later King Peter, of
Aragon), it was incorporated in the _Cancioneiro de Resende_, which
appeared half a century after the Constable’s death.
FOOTNOTES:
[140] 1867 ed., p. 333.
[141] Ibid., pp. 304-7.
[142] _Cronica de Cister_, Bk. VI, cap. 1, 1602 ed., f. 372. It has
been several times reprinted: cf. J. F. Barreto, _Ortografia_ (1671),
p. 23; Bellermann, _Die alten Liederbücher_, p. 5; _Grundriss_, p. 163.
[143] _Monarchia Lusitana_, 1609 ed., ii. 296 (also in _Miscellanea_,
1867 ed., pp. 25-6; Bellermann, pp. 3-4).
[144] See _Grundriss_, p. 205. D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal supports the
suggestion of Leonese authorship (_Revista de Filología Española_, I. i
(1914), pp. 90-2).
[145] See J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, _Littérature Espagnole_, 1913 ed., p.
64.
[146] Cf. Rodriguez Lobo, _Primavera_ (1722 ed.), p. 369: _tinhão
os nossos guardadores por muyto difficultoso fazeremse em a lingoa
Portugueza, porque a tem por menos engraçada para os romances_. Sousa
de Macedo says that _Romance he poesia propria de Hespanha_, but
Hespanha here means Spain and Portugal and he instances Góngora and
Rodriguez Lobo (_Eva e Ave_, 1676 ed., p. 130).
[147] See _infra_, p. 258.
[148] _Obras_, 1834 ed., ii. 27.
[149] _Hist. da Litt. Port._, ii (1914), pp. 267-87.
[150] Ibid., pp. 280-5.
[151] _Estudos sobre o Romanceiro Peninsular. Romances velhos de
Portugal_, Madrid, 1907-9.
[152] Lucena (_Vida_, Bk. III, cap. 3) speaks of _romances velhos
em que elles_ [the natives of India] _como nos, por ser o ordinario
cantar da gente, guardam o successo das memorias e cousas antigas_.
The expression _romance velho_ in the sixteenth century may mean a
_romance_ that has gone out of fashion. Cf. Vicente, _Os Almocreves_:
_Hei os de todos grosar Ainda que sejam velhos._ _Antigo_ may similarly
mean ‘antiquated’ rather than ancient. Barros, _Grammatica_, 1785
ed., p. 163, mentions _rimances antigas_. D. Carolina Michaëlis de
Vasconcellos considers that the _romances_ came from Spain to Portugal
at the latest in the third quarter and perhaps in the first half of the
fifteenth century.
[153] See _Estudos sobre o Rom. Penins._ (the lines are _Polos campos
do Mondego Cavaleiros vi somar_).
[154] In later Portuguese his name was often written Mansias. So Moraes
transforms Mlle de Macy’s name into Mansi.
[155] _Nobleza de Andalvzia_ (1588), ii, f. 272 v.
[156] This and two other Macias poems (_Ai que mal aconsellado_ and
_Crueldad e trocamento_) are in C. G. C. (Nos. 33, 38, 41) ascribed to
Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino.
[157] The _Cancionero de Baena_ contains poems addressed to Vasco
_Lopez_ de Camões, _un cavallero de Galizia_, and an answering poem by
him.
[158] For the name of this hitherto anonymous poet see _The Modern
Language Review_ (July 1917), pp. 357-8.
[159] Gil Gonzalez Davila, _Historia de la Vida y Hechos del Rey Don
Henrique Tercero_, &c. (Madrid, 1638), p. 173. The name was a common
one. The Spanish translator of Pero Menino’s _Livro de Cetreria_,
Gonçalo Rodriguez de Escobar, may have been a relation. There was also
a fourteenth-century poet called Ruiz de Toro.
[160] Another sister, D. PHILIPPA DE LENCASTRE (1437-97), lived in
retirement in the convent of Odivellas near Lisbon, and as a dedicatory