Portuguese literature
_levaime á ela_.[729] Here, as throughout the book, there is such
yearning passionate sadness that we may say, in her own words, _non
canta que chora_. The sadness is of _soedade_ and brooding over her
country’s plight. She has felt all the peasants’ sorrows, the longing
of the emigrant for his country, the fate of the women at home who
find no rest from toil but in the grave,[730] above all the neglect
and poverty in which those sorrows centre--with the result of sons
torn from their families and scattered abroad to Castile and Portugal
and across the seas in search of bread. Her themes are thus often
homely; their treatment is always plaintive and musical. The metres
used are very various. The book opens with a chain of _muiñeiras_
singing _Galicia frorida_, and the rhythmical beat of the _muiñeira_
constantly recurs throughout. Nothing could serve better to express, as
she so marvellously expresses, the very soul of the Galician peasantry
in its gentle, dreaming wistfulness and tearful humour. Her style is
so thin and delicate, yet so flowing and natural, that it is more
akin, almost, to music than to language. Few writers have attained
such perfection without a trace of artifice. It is Galician--_esta
fala mimosa_[731]--seen at its best, clear, soft, and pliant, rising
in protest or reproach to a silvery eloquence. In _Follas Novas_ the
melancholy note is accentuated, without becoming morbid: the new leaves
are autumnal. The music of her sad and exquisite poetry had been forged
in the crucible of her own not imaginary suffering and grief, and in
these lyrics she utters her _inmortales deseios_ (immortal longings)
as well as the woes of the peasant women of Galicia, ‘widows of the
living and widows of the dead’. New metres are introduced, the old
skill and perfection of form is maintained. A few poems in the second
half even succeed in repeating that identification between the poet and
the genius of the people which makes much of _Cantares Gallegos_ almost
anonymous and assures its immortality.
Midway between the publication of _Cantares Gallegos_ and _Follas
Novas_ appeared the first volume of Galician verse by the blind poet
of Orense, VALENTÍN LAMAS CARVAJAL (1849-1906). This book, _Espiñas,
Follas e Frores_ (1871), has remained the most popular of his
works.[732] He is a true poet of the soil (_poeta del terruño_), the
soil of Galicia which he sings with melancholy charm, and his verse is
filled with _soedades_. He complains of the peasant’s lot, protests
against its injustice and the tyranny of the _caciques_, laments
the drain on Galicia’s best forces through emigration and military
service, and his later work especially betrays a rustic cynicism and
disillusion. But the value both of his first book and of _Saudades
Gallegas_ (1889) and _A Musa d’as Aldeas_ (1890) is that in them speak
the voices of the peasants. Only occasionally does Aesop or Macías
intrude to dispel the charm, and even sophisticated touches--as when he
speaks of ‘this century of enlightenment’, of Galicia as ‘a poetical
garden’, or of the _tamborileiro_ as ‘the inseparable companion’ of
the _gaiteiro_--are not out of keeping, since the peasant, to whom
a long word is a sign of education, will in ambitious moments use
such phrases. The Galician peasants are shown in their sadness and
superstitions, at their common tasks and _festas_. When Lamas Carvajal
is describing an _escasula_[733] or a _fiadeiro_,[734] a dance in the
beaten space before the doors (_baile de turreiro_), a _foliada_[735]
in honour of some saint, a _ruada_ or _rueiro_ (street courting), a
summer _romaxe_ or _romaria_ (pilgrimage), or autumn _magosto_ (feast
of chestnuts), his melancholy almost deserts him, and he can sing, in
his own phrase,
Algun ledo cantar d’a sua terriña.
The toil often becomes a _festa_, in which, he says, there is more
mirth than in all the city’s joys. In _Ey, boy, ey_ he admirably
reproduces the thoughts of the slow-footed, slow-reasoning peasant
as he trudges along to market in front of his droning and shrieking
ox-cart. And, generally, all the life of the province of Orense is
in his poems: witches, exorcisers, _beatas_, _curandeiros_ (to whom
the peasants turn in place of the doctor), pilgrims, blind singers,
_santeiros_ selling images of saints, the wailing _alalaa_, the evening
litany or _rosario_, the angelus (_Ave Maria_ or _as animas_, or tocar
_ás oraciós_). The _gaiteiro_, of course, is a prominent figure, for
without his bagpipe (the _gaita gallega_) and the accompanying drum
(_tamboril_), cymbals (_ferriñas_, _conchas_), tambourine (_pandeiro_,
_pandeireta_), and castanets (_castañolas_),[736] no village _fête_
would be welcome or complete, and his _alborada_ or his rhythmical
dance-song, the _muiñeira_, is the emblem of all the peasant’s
pleasures. Melancholy pervades the _Rimas_ (1891) of D. JUAN BÁRCIA
CABALLERO (born in 1852), but it is no longer the melancholy of the
peasant, but of the poet. His verse is more artificial and subjective,
and expressions such as the ‘bed of Aurora’, ‘Olympic disdain’, ‘the
Nereids’, carry us far away from the peasant scenes so pleasantly
described by Lamas Carvajal. Yet in his lyrics lives a faint music
which raises them above the commonplace. He writes of moonlight, the
fall of the leaves, a flowing stream, tears, death, and admires Heine
and Leopardi; but in his slight fancies, often built into a single
brief sentence, he has a natural charm of his own.
BENITO LOSADA (1824-91) gained great popularity in Galicia with his
_Contiños_ (1888), epigrammatic and often far from edifying stories
in verse which mostly do not exceed ten lines. He is said to have had
them printed on matchboxes _ad maiorem gloriam_, but for this he was
probably not responsible. More interesting and equally racy of the soil
are the poems of his _Soaces d’un Vello_ (1886), of which the _contiños
d’a terra_ form only Part 3. The first part consists of a long legend
in octosyllabic verse, and in the second some thirty poems give a
coloured, homely, delightful picture of peasant life in Galicia:
En fias e espadelas,
En festas, en foliadas[737]
--song and dance, the pot of chestnuts (_zonchos_) over the _lareira_
fire on the night of All Saints’ Day, the ox-girl quietly singing,
the girl with spindle and distaff keeping the cows, the sorrowful,
hard-working peasant women, the priests exorcising those possessed by
the Devil. The gay notes of the _gaita_ with its plaintive undertone
sound from his pages. The language, _a garrida lengua nosa_, has rarely
been written more idiomatically or with a surer instinct for the force
and fascination of the native word used in its rightful place. To turn
from Losada to EDUARDO PONDAL (1835-1917), the poet of Ponteceso,
a small village in the district of Coruña, is to go from a village
_praça_ to a high mountain-top. He stands quite apart from the other
Galician poets.[738] Their irony and scepticism, sorrows and mirth, are
mostly of the peasant. But here we have no dance or rustic merriment.
The pipe and the drum give place to the wind blowing through an Aeolian
harp. The poet
soña antr’as uces hirtas
Na gentil arpa apoyado
En donde o vento suspira.[739]
He is a lonely, martial spirit, disdainful but never arrogant, hating
all servitude and looking upon a comfortable inertness as a kind of
servitude. There is no pettiness in him, although details of Nature
he may notice and love. The most learned of Galician poets, and not
sparing of classical allusions, he is yet entirely merged in the
forces of Nature and becomes a voice, a mystery. Some of his poems
are a single sentence of perhaps twenty words, a musical cry borne
slowly away on the wings of the wind. He sings of mists (the Gallegan
_brétoma_) and pregnant silences, the whispering of the pines, the
great chestnut-trees and Celtic oaks, of the swift daughter of the
mists and the ‘intrepid daughter of the noble Celts’, of old forgotten
far-off things, battles long ago. One must go to Ireland for a
parallel. It has been noticed of him that he is entirely pre-Christian;
he is almost prehistoric. His long epic on the discovery of America, in
twenty-seven cantos, _Os Eoas_, remained unpublished at his death. Nor
would it be easy to account for his popularity were it not for the poem
by which he won early fame: _A Campana d’Anllons_. It is full of music
and melancholy, a plaintive farewell addressed to his native village by
a Galician peasant imprisoned at Oran. His subsequent verses, collected
in _Rumores de los Pinos_ (1879) and _Queixumes dos Pinos_ (1886), if
they could not increase his popularity, brought him a wide recognition
among all lovers of poetry. The undefinable fascination of many of
these poems is due to their aloofness, tenderness, and sorrowful music.
He is a genuine Celtic bard, child of the wind and the rain, with
Rosalía de Castro the truest poet produced by modern Galicia.
The most prominent of the later Galician poets was MANUEL CURROS
ENRIQUEZ (1851-1908), whose work _Aires d’a miña terra_ (1880) was
condemned by the Bishop of Orense and republished in the following
year. Born at Celanova in the middle of the nineteenth century, he
studied law at Santiago de Compostela and became a journalist. His
advanced opinions caused him to emigrate, first to London, then to
South America. His anticlericalism was pronounced in _Aires d’a miña
terra_, and even more so in a forcible satire describing a pilgrimage
to Rome, written in _triadas_[740] and entitled _O Divino Sainete_
(1888). He writes of dogma assassinating liberty, heaps abuse on
Ignacio de Loyola, hails the advent of the railway to Galicia as
bringing not priests but progress. All this has caused his poems to
be widely read. But the reader has the agreeable surprise to find
that many of them deal quite simply with the legends (_A Virxe d’o
Cristal_) or customs (_Unha Boda en Einibó_, _O Gueiteiro_, &c.) of
his native country, and show a true poetic power and a quiet and
accurate observation of Nature. We forget all about anticlericalism and
the Pope in reading of spring in Galicia, of the _xentis anduriñas_,
the _anemas_ ringing, and the children who come singing a _mayo_ and
asking for chestnuts. Curros Enriquez would not be a Galician were not
his work of a melancholy cast, and the charm of some of his poems is
also indigenous. The torch of Galician poetry burnt on after Curros
Enriquez had ceased to write. D. EVARISTO MARTELO PAUMAN (born c.
1853) in his _Líricas Gallegas_ (1891) showed that he possessed the
traditional charm and satire of Galician verse, but a charm and satire
that in his case had become all individual and subjective. AURELIANO
J. PEREIRA (†1906), author of _Cousas d’a Aldea_ (1891), displayed
a rustic humour in sketching with many a gay note the life of the
Galician peasantry, and, in his more subjective poems, a very real and
delicate lyrical gift. A sly humour also marks the work of ALBERTO
GARCÍA FERREIRO (1862-1902) in _Volvoretas_ (1887) and _Chorimas_
(1890). It is sometimes marred by the bitterness of his anticlerical
and anti-Spanish feeling. In the stream’s voice he hears a murmur
against the mayor and the judge, the _cacique_ is ‘dragon, tiger and
snake’, the monks and priests are greedy and ignorant. On the other
hand, when they describe a fair (_N’a feira_) or a pilgrimage or the
woes of the Galician emigrant, his poems are moving, vivid, and full
of local colour. In a slight volume of poems, _Salayos_ (1895), MANUEL
NÚÑEZ GONZÁLEZ (1865-1917) shows true lyrical power. They are poems
in Galician rather than of Galicia, telling in a plaintive music of
night, autumn, _morriña_, _soedades_. For all the author’s love of his