Portuguese literature
420, are of a religious character, written, with one or two exceptions,
in honour of the Virgin: _Cantigas de Santa Maria_. Many of these poems
themselves provide an answer to the question: they record his illnesses
and enterprises and his _trobar_ in such a way that they could only
have been written by himself: he is the _entendedor_ of Santa Maria
(C. M. 130), he exhorts other _trobadores_ to sing her praises (C. M.
260), he himself is resolved to sing of no other _dona_ (C. M. 10: _dou
ao demo os otros amores_); and his attractive and ingenuous pride in
these poems accords ill with an alien authorship. When he lay sick at
Vitoria and was like to die it was only when the _Livro das Cantigas_
was placed on his body that he recovered (C. M. 209), and he directed
that they should be preserved in the church in which he was buried.
There is little reason to doubt that he was the author, in a strictly
limited sense, of the majority of the poems, although not of all.
Various phrases seem to imply a double method. C. M. 219 says: ‘I will
have that miracle placed among the others’; C. M. 295: ‘I ordered it to
be written.’ On the other hand, C. M. 47 is ‘a fair miracle of which I
made my song’; C. M. 84 ‘a great miracle of which I made a song’; of
106 ‘I know well that I will make a goodly song’; of 64 ‘I made verses
and tune’; for 188 ‘I made a good tune and verses because it caught my
fancy’; for 307 ‘according to the words I made the tune’; of 347 ‘I
made a new song with a tune that was my own and not another’s’. The
inference seems to be that, the personal poems and the _loas_ apart, if
a miracle especially attracted the king he took it in hand; otherwise
he might leave it to one of the _joglares_, and he would perhaps revise
it and be its author to the extent that the Portuguese _jograes_ were
authors of the early _cossantes_. We know that he had at his Court a
veritable factory of verse. The vignettes[75] to these _Cantigas_ show
him surrounded by scribes, pen and parchment in hand, by _joglares_ and
_joglaresas_. Poets thronged to his Court and he was in communication
with others in foreign lands. Some of the miracles might come to him
in verse, the work of a friendly poet or of a sacred _jogral_ such as
Pierres de Siglar, whom C. M. 8 shows reciting his poems from church
to church: _en todalas eigreias da Uirgen que non a par un seu lais
senpre dizia_,[76] and this would account for the variety of metre and
treatment. Of raw material for his art there was never a scarcity,
nor was the idea of turning it into verse original. In France Gautier
de Coincy (1177-1236) had already written his _Miracles de la Sainte
Vierge_ in verse, and the Spanish poet Gonzalo de Berceo (1180-1247)
had composed the _Milagros de Nuestra Sennora_. But there was no need
for direct imitation. If the starry sky were parchment and the ocean
ink, the miracles could not all be written down, says King Alfonso
(C. M. 110). Churches and rival shrines preserved an unfailing store
for collectors. Gautier de Coincy spoke of _tant miracles_, a _grant
livre_ of them, and King Alfonso chooses one from among 300 in a book
(C. M. 33), finds one written in an ancient book (265) written among
many others (258), in a book among many others (284), and refers to
a book full of them at Soissons. The miracles were recorded more
systematically in France, and the books of Soissons and Rocamadour
(_Liber Miraculorum S. Mariae de Rupe Amatoris_) provided the king with
many subjects, as did also Vincent de Beauvais’ _Speculum Historiale_,
of which he possessed a copy. But the sources in the Peninsula were
very copious, as, for instance, the Book of the Miracles of Santiago,
of which a copy, in Latin, exists in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale.
Of other miracles the king had had personal experience, or they were
recent and came to him by word of mouth. Thus he often does not profess
to invent his subject: he merely translates it into verse and sometimes
appraises it as he does so. It is ‘a marvellous great miracle’ (C.
M. 257), ‘very beautiful’ (82), ‘one in which I have great belief’
(241), ‘one almost incredible’, _mui cruu de creer_ (242), or ‘famous’
(195), ‘known throughout Spain’ (191). Many of these miracles occurred
to the peasants and unlettered: then as now the humbler the subject
the greater the miracle. Accordingly we find the king in his poems
dealing not with the conventional shepherdesses of the _pastorelas_ but
with lowly folk of real life, peasants, gleaners, sailors, fishermen,
beggars, pilgrims, nuns; and it is one of the king’s titles to be
considered a true poet that he takes an evident pleasure in these
themes and retains their graphic, artless presentment. The collection
abounds in charming glimpses of the life of the people. Indeed, in many
of the poems there is more of the people than of King Alfonso,[77]
and he sings diligently of the misdeeds of clerics and usurers, of
the incompetence of doctors, and of massacres of Jews. He seems to
have followed the originals very closely, and evident traces of their
language remain, French, English, and perhaps Provençal. The poems are
often of considerable length, sometimes twenty or thirty verses, and
as a rule the last line of each verse must rhyme with the refrain. The
attention thus necessarily bestowed upon the rhymes sometimes mars the
pathos of the subject, and the reader is reminded that he has to do
with a skilful, eager, and industrious craftsman but not with a great
original poet. In the remarkable _Ben vennas Mayo_ and in many of his
other poems materialism and poetical ecstasy go hand in hand. Yet in
several of the more beautiful legends the poet proves himself equal to
his theme. Some of these legends are still famous, that of the Virgin
taking the place of the nun (C. M. 55 and 94), of the knight and the
pitcher (155), of the stone miraculously warded from the statue of the
Virgin and Child (136 and 294), of the monk’s mystic ecstasy at the
_lais_ of the bird in the convent garden (103). Others had probably an
equal celebrity in the Middle Ages, as that of the captive miraculously
brought from Africa and awaking free in Spain at dawn (325),[78] of
the painter with whom the Devil was wroth for always painting him so
ugly (74), or of the peasant whose vineyard alone was saved from the
hail (161). Every tenth poem (the collection was intended originally
to consist of one hundred) interrupts the narratives of miracles by a
purely lyrical _cantiga de loor_, and some of these, written with the
fervour with which the king always sang _as graças muy granadas_ of
the _Madre de Deus Manuel_, are of great simplicity and beauty. The
king had not always written thus, and of his profane poems we possess
thirty[79] (since no one who has read the lively essay by Cesare de
Lollis will doubt that C. V. 61-79 and C. C. B. 359-72 (= 467-78) were
written by Alfonso X). The most important of these are historical, and
invoke curses on false or recalcitrant knights, _non ven al mayo!_ C.
V. 74 is a battle-scene description so swift and impetuous that we must
go to the _Poema del Cid_ for a parallel. And indeed some of the old
spirit peeps out from the _Cantigas de Santa Maria_, as when he prays
to be delivered from false friends or praises the Virgin for giving his
enemies ‘what they deserved’.
From the return and enthronement of Afonso III imitation of French and
Provençal poetry was in full swing in Portugal. The long sojourn of
the prince in France, accompanied by several noblemen who figure in
the _Cancioneiros_ (as Rui Gomez de Briteiros and D. Joan de Aboim),
had an important bearing on the development of Portuguese poetry.
He came back determined to act the part of an enlightened patron of
letters; he encouraged the immigration of men of learning from France
and maintained three _jograes_ permanently in his palace.[80] Princes
and nobles as _trobadores_ for their own pastime, the _segreis_,[81]
knights who went from Court to Court and received payment for the
recital of their own verses, the _jograes_, belonging to a lower
station, who recited the poems of their patrons the _trobadores_, all
vied in imitation of the love songs of Provence. In general, i. e.
in the structure of their poems, the resemblance is close and clear
enough. The decasyllabic love song in three or four stanzas with an
_envoi_, the satirical _sirventes_, the _tenson_ (_jocs-partits_) in
which two poets contended in dialogue, the _descort_ in which the
discordant sounds expressed the poet’s distress and grief, the _balada_
of Provence, the _ballette_ and _pastourelle_ of North France, were all
faithfully reproduced.
If, on the other hand, we look for imitations in detail it is perhaps
natural that we should find them less frequently.[82] The conventional
character of the Portuguese poems would sufficiently account for this,
and moreover their models were probably more often heard than read, so
that reproduction of the actual thought or words would be difficult.
When Airas Nunez in a poem of striking beauty, which is almost a sonnet
(C. V. 456), wrote the lines:
Que muito m’eu pago d’este verão
Por estes ramos et por estas flores
Et polas aves que cantan d’amores,
he need not have read Peire de Bussinac’s lines:
Quan lo dous temps d’Abril
Fa ’ls arbres secs fulhar
E ’ls auzels mutz cantar
Quascun en son lati,
in order to know that birds sing and trees grow green in spring.
And generally it is not easy to say whether an apparent echo is a
direct imitation or merely a stereotyped phrase. The Portuguese
_trobadores_ introduced little of the true spirit of the Provençal
_troubadours_--that had passed to Palestine and to the Lady of Tripoli.
In their _cantigas de amor_ is no sign of action--unless it be to die
of love; no thought of Nature. Jaufre Rudel (1140-70), that prince
of lovers, had ‘gone to school to the meadows’ and might sing in his
_maint bons vers_ of _la flor aiglentina_ or of _flors d’albespis_, but
in the Portuguese _cantigas_ nothing relieves the conventional dullness
and excessive monotony (which likewise marked the Provençal school of
poets in Sicily). Composed for the most part in iambic decasyllables
they describe continually the poet’s _coita d’amor, grave d’endurar_,
his grief at parting, his loss of sleep, his pleasure in dying for his
_fremosa sennor_. She is described merely as beautiful, or, at most, as
Tan mansa e tan fremosa e de bon sen (C. C. B. 206).
Fremosa e mansa e d’outro ben comprida (C. C. B. 278).
Vocabulary and thought are spectre-thin. Indeed, it was part of the
convention to sing vaguely. _Eu ben falarei de sa fremosura_, says
one poet[83] (C. C. B. 337)--he will sing of her beauty, but not in
such a way that the curious who _non o poden adevinhar_ should guess
his secret. As to allusions to Nature, perhaps the climate, with less
marked divisions than in Provence, furnished less incentive to sing
of spring and the earth’s renewal or to imitate Guiraut de Bornelh in
going to school all the winter (_l’ivern estava a escola a aprender_)
and singing only with the return of spring. King Dinis, perhaps in
reference to that troubadour, declares that his love is independent of
the seasons and more sincere than that of the singers of Provence:
Proençaes soen mui ben trobar
E dizen eles que é con amor,
Mais os que troban no tempo da frol
E non en outro sei eu ben que non
An tan gran coita ... (C. V. 127)
and even as he wrote the words he was unconsciously imitating the
thought of the Provençal poet Gace Brulé, who had spoken of _les
faus amoureus d’esté_. The exceeding similarity of the _cantigas
de amor_ did raise doubts as to the sincerity of all this dying of