Portuguese literature
§ 2.
_The Cancioneiros_
If, besides the _Cancioneiros da Vaticana_, _Colocci-Brancuti_, and _da
Ajuda_, we include King Alfonso X’s _Cantigas de Santa Maria_ (C. M.)
we have over 2,000 poems, by some 200 poets. Of these the _Cancioneiro
da Ajuda_ (C. A.) contains 310. Preserved in the Lisbon _Collegio dos
Nobres_ and later in the Royal Library of Ajuda at Lisbon, it was
first published in an edition of twenty-five copies by Charles Stuart
(afterwards Lord Stuart of Rothesay), British Minister at Lisbon
(C. A. S.). Another edition, by Varnhagen, appeared in 1849 (C. A.
V.), and the splendid definitive edition by D. Carolina Michaëlis de
Vasconcellos in 1904 (C. A. M. V.). C. A. M. V. contains 467 poems, in
part reproduced from C. V. M. and C. C. B. The third volume, of notes,
is still unpublished.
Of the _Cancioneiro_ preserved as Codex Vaticanus 4803, and now
commonly known as _Cancioneiro da Vaticana_ (C. V.), fragments were
published soon after its rediscovery: viz. that portion attributed to
King Dinis, edited by Moura in 1847 (C. D. M.). This part received a
critical edition at the hands of Professor H. R. Lang in 1892; 2nd
ed., with introduction, Halle, 1894 (C. D. L.). A few more crumbs were
given to the world by Varnhagen in 1870, 2nd ed. 1872 (C. T. A.), and
in 1873 (C. A. P.) and 1875 (C. L.) by Ernesto Monaci, who printed his
diplomatic edition of the complete text (1,205 poems) in the latter
year (C. V. M.), and with it an index of a still larger _Cancioneiro_
(it has 1,675 entries) compiled by Angelo Colocci in the sixteenth
century and discovered by Monaci in the Vatican Library (codex 3217).
Dr. Theophilo Braga’s critical edition appeared in 1878 (C. V. B.).
In this very year a large _Cancioneiro_ (355 ff.), corresponding nearly
but not precisely to the Colocci index, was discovered in the library
of the Conte Paolo Antonio Brancuti (C. C. B. For convenience’ sake
C. C. B. also = the fragment published by Enrico Gasi Molteni), and
the 442 of its poems, lacking in C. V. (but nearly half of which are
in C. A.), were published in diplomatic edition by Enrico Molteni
in 1880 (C. C. B.). All these (C. A., C. V., and C. C. B.) were in
all probability derived from the _Cancioneiro_ compiled by the Conde
de Barcellos. When his father, King Dinis, died, silence fell upon
the poets. The new king, Afonso IV, showed no sign of continuing to
collect the smaller _Cancioneiros_ kept by nobles and men of humbler
position, a custom inaugurated by his grandfather, Afonso III (if
the _Livro de Trovas del Rei D. Afonso_ in King Duarte’s library was
his), continued by King Dinis (_Livro de Trovas del Rei D. Dinis_),
and perhaps revived by King Duarte a century later (_Livro de Trovas
del Rei_). It was thus a time suitable for a ‘definitive edition’, and
Count Pedro, who was the last of the _Cancioneiro_ poets and who was
more collector than poet, probably took the existing _Cancioneiros_
(of Afonso III and Dinis) and added a third part consisting of later
poems. Besides the chronological order there was a division by subject
into _cantigas de amor_, _cantigas de amigo_, and _cantigas d’escarnho
e de maldizer_ (Santillana’s _cantigas_, _serranas e dezires_, or
_cantigas serranas_, the Archpriest of Hita’s _cantares serranos e
dezires_). C. V. is divided into these three kinds; in the older
and incomplete C. A. 304 of the 310 poems are _cantigas de amor_.
Eleven years after the death of King Duarte the Marqués de Santillana
wrote (1449) to the Constable of Portugal, D. Pedro, describing the
Galician-Portuguese _Cancioneiro_--_un grant volume_--which he had
seen in his boyhood in the possession of D. Mencia de Cisneros. (This
may have been the actual manuscript compiled by D. Pedro, Conde de
Barcellos and bequeathed by him in 1350 to Alfonso XI of Castille and
Leon--a few days _after_ Alfonso XI’s death. Or it may have been a copy
of the _Cancioneiro_ of D. Pedro or the _Cancioneiro_ of Afonso III or
of Dinis.) It is significant that in this very important letter it is
a foreigner informing a Portuguese. Under the predominating influence
first of Spain then of the Renaissance, the old Portuguese poems, even
if they were known to exist, excited no interest in Portugal. They
were _musas rusticas, musas in illo tempore rudes et incultas_.[68]
With this disdain the _Cancioneiro_ became a real will-o’-the-wisp.
Even as late as the nineteenth century one disappeared mysteriously
from a sale, another emerged momentarily (see C. T. A.) from the
shelves of a Spanish grandee only to fall back into the unknown. In the
sixteenth century the evidence as to its being known is contradictory.
Duarte Nunez de Leam in 1585 says of King Dinis that _extant hodie
eius carmina_. Antonio de Vasconcellos in 1621 declares that time has
carried them away: _obliviosa praeripuit vetustas_.
A few vague allusions (as that of Sá de Miranda concerning the echoes
of Provençal song) were all that was vouchsafed in Portugal to the
_Cancioneiro_, although prominent Portuguese men of letters--as Sá de
Miranda, André de Resende, Damião de Goes--travelled in Italy and met
there Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), who had probably owned the
_Cancioneiros_ (copies by an Italian hand of a Portuguese original)
acquired by Angelo Colocci; yet at this very time Colocci (†1549) was
eagerly indexing and annotating the _Cancioneiros_ in Rome. It is
this Portuguese neglect and indifference to the things of Portugal
which explains the survival of the _cossantes_ only in Rome while the
more solemn and less indigenous poems of the _Cancioneiro da Ajuda_
remained in the land of their birth. A fuller account of the Portuguese
_Cancioneiros_, with the fascinating and complicated question of their
descent and interrelations, will be found in the _Grundriss_ (pp.
199-202) and D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos’ edition of the
_Cancioneiro da Ajuda_ (vol. ii, pp. 180-288).[69]
When the poetry of the troubadours flourished in Provence Portugal
was scarcely a nation. The first Provençal poet, Guilhaume, Comte de
Poitou (1087-1127), precedes by nearly a century Sancho I (1154-1211),
second King of Portugal, who wrote poems and married the Princess
Dulce of Aragon; and the Gascon Marcabrun, the first foreign poet to
refer to Portugal, in his poems _Al prim comens del ivernaill_ and
_Emperaire per mi mezeis_, in the middle of the twelfth century, spoke
not of her poetry but of her warrior deeds: _la valor de Portegal_.
Gavaudan similarly refers at the end of the twelfth century to the
Galicians and Portuguese among other (Castille, &c.) barriers against
the ‘black dogs’ (the Moors). It was in Spain that the Portuguese had
opportunity of meeting Provençal poets. The Peninsula in the thirteenth
century was, like Greece of old, divided into little States and
Courts, each harbouring exiles and refugees from neighbouring States.
Civil strife or the death of a king in Portugal would scatter abroad
a certain number of noblemen on the losing side, who would thus come
into contact with the troubadours as Provençal poetry spread to the
Courts of Catalonia and Aragon, Navarre, Castille and Leon. The first
King of Portugal, although a prince of the House of Burgundy, held
his kingdom in fief to Leon, and all the early kings were in close
touch with Leon and Castille. Fernando III, King of Castille and Leon
(St. Ferdinand), was a devoted lover of poetry, and his son Alfonso X
gathered at his _cort sen erguelh e sen vilania_ a galaxy of talented
troubadours, Provençal and Galician. Portugal came into more direct
touch with France in other ways, but the influence might have been
almost exclusively that of the _trouvères_ of the North had not the
more generous enthusiasm of Provence penetrated across the frontier
into Spain. Trade was fairly active in the thirteenth century between
Portugal and England, North France and Flanders. Many of the members
of the religious orders--as the Cluny Benedictines--who occupied
the territory of the Moors in Portugal were Frenchmen. With foreign
colonists the new towns were systematically peopled. The number of
French pilgrims was such that the road to Santiago became known as
the ‘French Road’. The Crusades also brought men of many languages
to Portugal.[70] The Court by descent and dynastic intermarriage
was cosmopolitan; but indeed the life of the whole Peninsula was
cosmopolitan to an extent which tallies ill with the idea of the Middle
Ages as a period of isolation and darkness. The Portuguese had already
begun to show their fondness for _novedades_. Yet it was they who
imposed their, the Galician, language. As the Marqués de Santillana
observed and the _Cancioneiros_ prove, lyric poets throughout the
Peninsula used Galician.[71] Probably the oldest surviving instance of
this language in verse by a foreigner is to be found (ten lines) in a
_descort_ (_descordo_) written by Raimbaud de Vaqueiras (1158-1217)
at the Court of Bonifazio II of Montferrat towards the end of the
twelfth century. We cannot doubt that the character and conditions
of the north-west of the Peninsula had permitted a thread of lyric
poetry to continue there ever since Silius Italicus had heard the youth
of Galicia wailing (_ululantem_) their native songs, and that both
language and literature had the opportunity to develop earlier there
than in the rest of Spain. The tide of Moorish victory only gradually
ebbed southward, and the warriors in the sterner country of Castille,
with its fiery sun and battles and epics, would look back to the green
country of Galicia as the idyllic land of song, a refuge where sons
of kings and nobles could spend their minority in comparative peace.
When from the ninth century Galicia became a second Holy Land its
attractions and central character were immeasurably increased. Pilgrims
thither from every country would return to their native land with some
words of the language, and those acquainted with Provençal might note
the similarity and the musical softness of Galician.[72] It is not
certain that the eldest of the ten children of San Fernando, ALFONSO
X (1221?-84), _el Sabio_, King of Castille and Leon, Lord of Galicia,
and brother-in-law of our Edward I, passed his boyhood in Galicia. But
when he was compiling a volume of poems referring to many parts of the
world besides Spain, to Canterbury and Rome, Paris and Alexandria,
Lisbon, Cologne, Cesarea, Constantinople, he would naturally choose
Galician not only, or indeed chiefly, because it was the more graceful
and pliant medium for lyric verse but because it was the most widely
known, and, like French, _plus commune à toutes_ _gens_.[73] He had
no delicate ear for its music and made such poor use of its pliancy
that it often becomes as hard as the hardest Castilian in his hands.
His songs of miracles offer a striking contrast to contemporary
Portuguese lyrics in the same language. Their jingles are only possible
as a _descort_ in the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_. At the same time
he would be influenced in his choice of language by his knowledge
of Galicia as the traditional home of the lyric, of the encouraging
patronage extended to Galician poets by his son-in-law Afonso III, of
the Santiago school of poets, and of the promising future before the
Galician language in the hands of the conquering Portuguese. _Multas
et perpulchras composuit cantilenas_, says Gil de Zamora, and likens
him to David. But when we remember the prodigious services rendered by
Alfonso X to Castilian prose, the first question that arises is whether
he was indeed the author of the 450 poems in Galician[74] that we
possess under his name. Of these poems 426, or, cancelling repetitions,