Portuguese literature
of Lamentor and Belisa. It is only in the ninth chapter that the
knight Narbindel arrives and falls in love with Belisa’s sister
Aonia, adopting a shepherd’s life in order to be near her palace. It
is in fact a romance of chivalry in pastoral garb. But Ribeiro might
have introduced the pastoral romance without changing the fantastic
features. It is in his singular combination of passion and realism that
his true originality consists. His power of giving vivid expression
to tranquil scenes--the whole of the first part has something of the
quiet intensity of a background by Correggio, as well as his ‘softer
outline’, and although there is no explicit indication of colour it is
clearly felt by the reader--and his gentle love of Nature, or rather
his love of Nature in its gentler aspects, cast over the book a strange
charm. The softly flowing streams, the trees and birds and delicious
shade, beautiful dawns, the birds seeking their nests at evening, the
flowers _que a seu prazer se estendem_, the _mateiros_ going out to
cut brushwood, the shepherds asleep round their fire at night, are
described with great naturalness and truth, often with familiar words
and colloquial phrases. The reason of the extreme intricacy of the plot
was not the wish to conceal the author’s love story in a labyrinthine
maze[306] in order to exercise the ingenuity of nineteenth-century
professors, but to be true to life. In life events are not rounded and
distinct but merge into and react on one another in an endless ravelled
skein: _Das tristezas não se pode contar nada ordenadamente porque
desordenadamente acontecem ellas_ (cap. 1). Ribeiro thus anticipates
by four centuries the theory enunciated in Spain by Azorín that a
novel, like life, should have no plot,[307] and his book has a certain
modernity. We may refuse him the name of novelist, but many a novelist
might envy his lifelike portrayal of scenes and sentiments. It has been
doubted whether he wrote the second part of the story. It consists of
fifty-eight short chapters, and opens with a new episode, the love of
Avalor for Arima, daughter of Lamentor (cap. 1-24), and it is even
more bewildering in its confusion than is Part I. The scenes are less
idyllic, the tone more that of a conventional romance of chivalry, yet
the realism is maintained. It is on no hippogriff that Avalor goes to
the rescue of the distressed maiden: in fact, he had set out on his
adventure in a rowing-boat and his hands blistered. If later there
are mortal combats with wicked knights, with a bear, with giants,
there are also scenes, as in chapters 9, 12, 23--of an impassioned
_saudade_,[308] of dove and nightingale--which could only have been
written by the author of Part I.[309] His own story, still related by
the _dona_, is only resumed in chapter 26, or rather 32, since the
intervening chapters deal with events prior to those with which Part
I begins. Bimnarder, now again Narbindel--the name Bernardim was also
spelt Bernaldim--after Aonia’s marriage lives with an old hermit and
his nephew, Godivo, and passes his time in tears and contemplation,
as in Part I. But he is discovered by his faithful squire, and meets
Aonia, and the lovers are killed by the jealous husband (cap. 48). The
last chapters are concerned with the happier love story of Romabisa and
Tasbião.
Narbindel, the second of the two knights, the two friends _de que é a
nossa historia_,[310] dies: therefore Bernardim Ribeiro cannot have
written the second part. But it is rather a nice point; one may imagine
that Ribeiro’s delight in so tragic an episode would compensate him
amply for the obvious anachronism, and after all it is the _dona_ who
tells the story.[311] The inconsistencies of detail need not concern us
overmuch. That Belisa has a mother in Part I and is ‘brought up without
a mother’ in Part II, that the Castle of Lamentor exists in Part II at
a time when, according to Part I, it was not yet begun, that the name
of Aonia’s husband is in Part I Fileno, and in Part II Orphileno, are
just such contradictions as an alien continuer would most studiously
have avoided, and we all know what happened to Sancho’s ass in a far
less intricate story. Or they may be explained by the fact that Ribeiro
had not revised his tale before it was printed, or by corrections
made in copies of the original manuscript.[312] Perhaps on the whole
we may conclude that Ribeiro, like Cervantes, by an exception wrote a
valuable second part, but, unlike Cervantes, was unable to maintain it
altogether on a level with the first. The mingling of rapt passion and
colloquialisms is with Ribeiro not the inability of a poet to express
himself but a deliberate mannerism, and is present in the five eclogues
with which he introduced pastoral poetry. By his quiet resolution to
be natural he thus became doubly an innovator, in poetry and prose.
That he was a true poet is proved by the _romances_ in his novel:
_Pensando vos estou, filha_ (Pt. I, cap. 21) and _Pola ribeira de um
rio_ (Pt. II, cap. 11).[313] The eclogues may not excel those poems,
but in their directness, primitive freshness, and grace they form a
group apart, entirely distinct from their numerous eclogue progeny.
One eclogue only, the celebrated _Trovas de Crisfal_, resembles them.
The resemblance is remarkable and cannot fail to strike the most
careless reader. Before Snr. Delfim Guimarães began his spirited
campaign in favour of identification, the similarity had been recorded
by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in the _Grundriss_[314]: the
extraordinary similarity of these _Trovas_ to the poetry of Ribeiro
and to nothing else in Portuguese literature. In this poem of some
900 lines written in octosyllabic _decimas_, like Ribeiro’s eclogues,
we have that romantic, passionate _saudade_ and sentimental grief,
the mystic visions, the simplicity, the ingenuous conceits, wistfully
humorous, the sententious reflections, the elliptical concision, the
real shepherds, the familiar language, the love of Nature which are
peculiarly Ribeiro’s. Tradition assigns the _Trovas_ to CRISTOVAM
FALCÃO (_c._ 1512-53?),[315] who was born at Portalegre, in Alentejo,
was made a _moço fidalgo_ in 1527, and is supposed to have fallen in
love with and secretly married D. Maria Brandão (i.e. the Maria of the
_Trovas_), whom her parents confined as a punishment in the convent
of Lorvão. At the risk of being dubbed incorrigibly _simplicista_ one
must confess that the simultaneous appearance of these two poets from
Alentejo, not _fertil en poetas_, taxes one’s belief to the utmost. May
not the secret marriage deduced from the _Trovas_ have been described
by Ribeiro in his keen sympathy for his friend’s position, so like his
own? The contention is not that Cristovam Falcão did not exist--there
were several--or did not fall in love with Maria Brandão--_a do
Crisfal_--or did not marry her, but that he did not write verses in
the style familiar to us as that of Ribeiro.[316] It is remarkable
that the very critics who represent Ribeiro in his _novela_ as hiding
like a cuttle-fish in his own ink change their method when they come
to the eclogues and accept every name and allusion with the greatest
literalness, as though it were a poet’s duty to wear his heart in
his verses. It is idle to adduce the fact that Cristovam Falcão
wrote ungrammatical letters (so did Keats), or to devise far-fetched
interpretations (such as _Crisma falso_) for the word Crisfal. What
more probable than that Ribeiro and Falcão, born in the same province,
became friends at Court, and that Ribeiro introduced his friend in one
of his poems as he is supposed to have introduced Sá de Miranda in
another, and as Miranda introduces Ribeiro (_Canta Ribero los males
de amor_)? If in his favourite manner he added a little mystification
in the word Crisfal, what more characteristic? The very form of the
poem, in which first the _Autor_ and then Crisfal speaks (_Falla
Crisfal_) suggests this, as does the title: _Trovas de um pastor per
nome Crisfal_, compared with the definite _Trovas de dous pastores_ ...
_Feitas por Bernaldim Ribeiro_.[317] It is not difficult to explain
the printing of the _Trovas_ together with the works of Ribeiro and
the hesitancy of the early editions in ascribing them, on hearsay, to
Cristovam Falcão; but the word Crisfal caught the fancy, and those who
learnt that it stood for Cristovam Falcão would inevitably confuse
the explanation of the anagram with the authorship of the poem. One
of those who did so was Gaspar Fructuoso (or Antonio Cordeiro), and
the tradition which had begun so shakily with a _dizem ser_ gained
strength with the years. Presumably the editor of the 1559 edition knew
what was to be known on the subject, yet he speaks with a quavering
uncertainty: it is only much later that the ascription to Cristovam
Falcão becomes a fixed belief.[318] The eighth _Decada_ of Diogo do
Couto was not published till 1673, i. e. over half a century after
the death of its author. The explanatory sentence _aquelle que fez
aquellas antigas e nomeadas_ (or _namoradas_) _trovas de Crisfal_[319]
may well be, and probably is, a later interpolation. But although a
few scholars definitely hold that Ribeiro wrote this poem, _grammatici
certant_ and, should tradition prove too strong, we have to accept a
second writer who claims an undying place in Portuguese literature
owing to the marvellous success with which, divesting his muse of any
qualities of its own, he identified himself with a poet who is the
most characteristically Portuguese, but also the most individual of
impassioned singers: Bernardim Ribeiro.
A kind of continuation of the story of _Crisfal_ (who is now enchanted
within the fountain of his own tears) appeared at the end of the
century in a small collection of poems entitled _Sylvia de Lisardo_
(1597). It contains forty-one sonnets (of which one only is in
Spanish), three eclogues in _tercetos_ and _oitavas_, and various
_romances_ (in Spanish) and shorter poems, and has been ascribed,
without sufficient reason, to the historian Frei Bernardo de Brito.
These poems must remain anonymous, and they throw no light on the
_Crisfal_ problem, but in their true poetical feeling and power of
expression they deserved their popularity[320] in the first half of the
seventeenth century.
It is not certain but it is probable that Ribeiro went to Italy, and
his Italian travels may have coincided with those of his life-long
friend, the champion of humanism in Portugal, FRANCISCO DE SÁ DE
MIRANDA (_c._ 1485-1558), the most famous of all the Portuguese poets
with the exception of Camões and Gil Vicente. As a lyric poet far
inferior to either of them, his great influence was due partly to his
character, partly to his introduction of the new school of poetry, the
_versos de medida nova_, or _de arte maior_, replacing the national
_trovas de medida velha_ (octosyllabic _redondilhas_) by the Italian
hendecasyllabics: Petrarca’s sonnets and canzoni, Dante’s _terza rima_
(_tercetos_), and the _octava rima_ of Poliziano and Ariosto. The
exact date of Miranda’s birth is still uncertain, but if he was the
eldest of five sons of the Coimbra Canon, Gonçalo Mendez de Sá, who
were legitimized in 1490, he must have been born about the year 1485.
Yet one would willingly make him younger. His life in Minho certainly
sounds too active for a man of fifty: perhaps _c._ 1490 would be nearer
the mark. He studied at the University at Lisbon and early frequented
the Court. He soon won distinction as a scholar and was a Doctor of Law
when he contributed several poems to Garcia de Resende’s _Cancioneiro_
(1516). His journey to Italy a few years later, in 1521, may have been
due merely to the natural desire of a scholar to see Rome or there may