Chapter XIX: Appendix: § 1 (1)

Literature of the People

Side by side with literature proper there has always existed in Portugal a literature of the people. Indeed, before Portuguese poetry was written it flourished on the lips of the people, in the songs of the women. Sometimes this popular literature almost coalesced with written literature, as in the case of the _cossantes_ in the thirteenth century. Its poetry lent a glow and magic to the work of Gil Vicente and later to some of the lyrics of Camões; its proverbial lore was reproduced in Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ prose plays and later by D. Francisco Manuel de Mello; in indigenous folk-tales Trancoso found part of his material. Eighteenth-century writers neglected it, but Filinto Elysio returned to popular sources, and in the nineteenth century they inspired two great poets, Almeida Garrett and João de Deus. Literature and illiteracy have often gone hand in hand. In Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ _Eufrosina_ (Act III, sc. ii) we read of the workwoman (_lavrandeira_) who ‘sings _de solao_, composes songs, loves to learn _trovas_ by heart, gives a schoolboy farthings to buy cherries in return for reading _autos_ to her’; and the _Pratica de Tres Pastores_ gives us a picture of an old peasant reading out from the Bible[700] of an evening to the whole village:

Esse velhinho
Tinha hum cartapolinho
Feito de letra de mão
Em papel de pergaminho,
E chamava-se o feitinho
Do livro da creação.
E então
Que sempre cada serão
Á noyte depois da cea
Com oculos á candea
O lia por devoção
A toda a gente d’aldea.

The popular appetite for _autos_, simple Christmas plays, legends of saints, and for long vague _romances_ never flagged, and some of the literature written to satisfy it, by Balthasar Diaz and others, is reprinted and hawked about the country in _folhas volantes_ at the present day, as Diaz’ _Historia da Imperatriz Porcina_ (Porto, 1906)--a _romance_ of some 1,500 octosyllables in -_ía_--and his _Tragedia do Marques de Mantua_. The prose _Verdadeira Historia do Imperador Carlos Magno_ (Porto, 1906) is the last descendant of Nicolas Piamonte’s Spanish translation (from the French original) _Carlomagno_, printed at Seville in 1525 and at Alcalá in 1570, or rather of Jeronimo Moreira de Carvalho’s Portuguese version (2 pts., 1728, 37). It is an instance of the Portuguese delight in strange, even fantastic, but in any case foreign, themes. The _Verdadeira Historia da Donzella Theodora_ (Porto, 1911), daughter of a merchant of Babylon, was introduced from the East and was translated by Carlos Ferreira from the Spanish (1524) and published at Lisbon in 1735. The _Verdadeira Historia do Grande Roberto Duque de Normandia e Imperador de Roma_ (Porto, 1912) is a belated echo of the French story of Robert le Diable, which also came to Portugal through Spain (Burgos, 1509). The _Verdadeira Historia da Princeza Magalona_ (Porto, 1912) has a similar derivation from France (14th or 15th c.) through Spain (Sevilla, 1519), and retains its popularity as a record of unswerving constancy _na fe e na virtude_. The _Verdadeira Historia de João de Calais_, reprinted at Oporto in 1914, is also undisguisedly foreign. The story of _Flores e Branca Fror_, last offshoot (a ‘vile extract’ Menéndez y Pelayo called it) of the charming Greek tale which came originally from the East,[701] was mentioned by several poets (King Dinis, Joan de Guilhade, the Archpriest of Hita) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries[702] and in the _Gran Conquista_ _de Ultramar_ (13th c.), and was condemned by Luis Vives. The prose story copied by Boccaccio in his _Filocolo_ is still popular in Portugal and Galicia. There is an edition printed at Oporto in 1912: _Historia de Flores e Branca-Flor, seus amores e perigos que passaram por Flores ser mouro e Branca-Flor christã_. García Ferreiro refers to _a historia de Branca Fror_ as recited at a Galician _escasula_.[703] Most of these popular threepenny leaflets are very quaintly illustrated on the title-page. The woodcut on the 1912 edition of _Flores e Branca-Flor_ is worth many an epic.[704] The portrait of Robert le Diable (1912 ed.) represents no less a person than Napoleon III, and the ‘true likeness of the beautiful Princess Magalona’[705] (1912 ed.) is Queen Alexandra. These _folhas volantes_ of the _literatura de cordel_ with many _farsas_, such as _Manoel Mendes_ by Antonio Xavier Ferreira de Azevedo (1784-1814), reprinted at Oporto in 1878, and various progeny of the ingenious Bertoldo, as _Astucias de Mengoto_, _Industrias de Malandrino_ (both Porto, 1879), _Astucias de Zanguizarra_ (Porto, 1878), _Vida de Cacasseno_ (Porto, 1904), contain little of the real people and less of literature. More indigenous, but still attracting by virtue of its foreign episodes, is the _Auto_, _Livro_ (1554?), _Historia_ or _Tratado do Infante D. Pedro que andou as quatro (sete) partidas do mundo_, which is attributed to Gomez de Santo Estevam, one of the prince’s attendants in his long travels, and of which the first known edition (1547) is in Spanish. It has been constantly reprinted and, with romances of chivalry, formed the education of the notary in _O Hyssope_.[706] Nor do the _Trovas do Bandarra_ belong to literature, although these verses of the cobbler prophet of Trancoso, GONÇALO ANNEZ BANDARRA (†1556?), which caused him to figure in one of the earliest trials before the Inquisition (1541) and were subsequently interpreted as referring to the return of King Sebastian, exercised the fancy of the people and even the wits of the educated for some three centuries. Forbidden in Portugal, they were printed abroad, probably at Paris in 1603, at Nantes in 1644, Barcelona 1809, London 1810 and 1815. It was not until 1852 (Porto) that an _Explicação_ of them could be published in Portugal. Their interest was then much diminished, since the thirty scissors of the verse,

Augurai gentes vindouras Que o Rey que de vos ha de hir Vos ha de tornar a vir Passadas trinta tesouras,

had been thought to signify the year 1808, i.e. thirty closed scissors = 30 × 8: 240 years after King Sebastian began to reign (1568). A more reasonable computation would have been from Alcacer Kebir (_de vos ha de hir_) = 1818, or, if the scissors were open: ✂ (10), = 1878. Many sought to connect with Bandarra’s prophecies the sayings of Simão Gomez (1516-76), the ‘Holy Cobbler’, and his biography, written by the Jesuit MANUEL DA VEIGA (1567-1647), _Tratado da Vida, Virtudes e Doutrina Admiravel de Simão Gomes, vulgarmente chamado o Çapateiro Santo_ (1625), a book in more than one respect singular and charming, was burnt by the public hangman at Lisbon in 1768 in ‘Black Horse Square’. The 1759 edition had received the ordinary _licenças_. But farther afield, deeper in the heart of the people and far more ancient, exists another literature. Writers who have gone to this source have never come away unrewarded. Their work has gained a freshness and a charm[707] which the most successful disciples of imported learning and latinity have in vain attempted to rival, and gives the reader the impression that if he is not plucking the bough of gold he is not far from the tree on which it grows. And the reason is, perhaps, that the Portuguese people still retains an element pre-Christian, even pre-Roman, an element which goes back to solar myths and pagan beliefs, and about which hangs a primaeval mystery and wonder, a glamour and enchantment born of direct contact with the forces of Nature, and the worship, fear, and propitiation of many unseen powers and divinities. A great part of the people still inhabits a region of fiery dragons and apples of gold, and with ready imagination peoples streams and woods, sea and air with spirits. December and June are connected with the birth and supremacy of the sun’s power, and paganism, thinly disguised, survives in several of the ceremonies of the Christian Church, and serves to increase the Church’s hold on the minds of the people. Both the songs and the dancing with which it was accompanied were no doubt originally religious. The movements of the dance seem to have influenced the song, so that its metre was divided by real feet. When the Archbishop of Braga, Frei Bartholomeu dos Martyres, was visiting his diocese in the sixteenth century he was met by Minhoto peasants with _danças e folias_ and with _cantigas que entoavam entre as voltas e saltos dos bailes_,[708] songs evidently similar to those in the works of Gil Vicente, with _leixapren_ and refrain (_aaxbbx_[709] or _abxbcx_).[710] The _volta_ would correspond in action to the _leixapren_[711] of the song, the _salto_ to the refrain. The origin of the refrain was perhaps the pause (preceded by a final leap into the air) made by the breathless dancers, as in the words _no penedo_ of this version of ‘The House that Jack Built’: _Quaes foram os perros que mataram os lobos que comeram as cabras que roeram o bacello que posera João preto no penedo._[712] The phrase _ver cantar_, ‘to see these songs sung’, might be defended.[713]

In modern times the refrain has not been entirely lost, it occurs occasionally, e.g. _Valhame Deus_, or _Valhame Deus e a Virgem Maria_, but the usual song is a refrainless quatrain rhyming in the second and fourth lines, perhaps originally a distich broken up into four lines like the sixteen-syllable lines of the old _romances_, and from which the refrain has disappeared. It is essentially a love song: instead of the song of the people, sung to the tread of dancing feet, the song of the love-lorn individual, sung to the strumming of his guitar or of the professional _cantadeira_ at a rustic pilgrimage. But they are also sung by the people generally, often by women[714] who can neither read nor write but have a large stock of these _cantigas_, which, indeed, are almost innumerable. They may be read in their thousands in Antonio Thomaz Pires’ _Cantos Populares Portuguezes_ (4 vols., Elvas, 1902-10), Dr. Theophilo Braga’s _Cancioneiro Popular Portuguez_ (2 vols., Lisboa, 1911, 1913), Snr. Jaime Cortesão’s _Cancioneiro Popular_ (Porto, 1914), and in other collections, and hundreds of thousands die uncollected and unknown. Although it is perhaps a pity that all the popular poetical talent should tend to adapt itself to one mould--the quatrain--their brevity is excellent in that it imposes concision. Their thought has to be expressed in some twenty words, although they are rarely epigrammatic in the sense of the modern epigram. Some are geographical, or local, in praise of some town or village, river or fountain. Many are religious, that is, they combine love and religion in honour of the Lady of the Hills, the Star, the Snows, the Rosary, the Sands, Pity, Affliction, Health, Hope, or in honour of saints, and especially of the three popular saints of June: St. Anthony, St. John, and St. Peter. Others are devoted to special festivals: Christmas (_Natal_), the New Year (_Anno Bom_), the Epiphany (_Os Reis_), the Resurrection.[715] The majority are concerned with Nature, either generally or in detail. Sometimes they are frankly pantheistic, more often they content themselves with singing the praises of a favourite flower, rosemary, myrtle, the rose, and especially the carnation--the red _cravos_ which glow in doorway or window-ledge of countless houses and cottages in June. Among the birds the swallow,[716] ‘the bird of the Lord’, as the peasants call it, is rare--perhaps its rhyme is disdained as too easy--the parrot, the dove, and the nightingale are far commoner. Numerous _cantigas_ are concerned with the sea, fewer with the sun, the stars, superstitions, witches, sirens; many with dancing and various occupations--the herdsman (_ganadeiro_), yokel (_ganhão_), shepherd (_pastor_), harvesters (_ceifeiros_, _ratinhos_, _malteses_, _mondadeiras_). But of course the principal subject is love, jealousy, separation, constancy, _saudade_, satire. The occasional presence of a French word, e.g. _négligé_ or _cache-nez_, is not necessarily a proof that the _cantiga_ in question is not of popular origin, but merely that it is urban. Of many _cantigas_ the first line consists simply of a long-drawn _Ailé_ (αἴλινον, αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ’ εὖ νικάτω) or _Ai lari lari lolé_ (where the fanatic of Basque can find _il_ (= dead) as easily as in the refrain of C. V. 415), so that they really consist of three lines, the _ailé_ being introductory.

Some of the quatrains rise to real poetical beauty, and most of them are charmingly spontaneous, forming in their unpremeditated art the natural song-book of a nation of poets. The number in print already approaches fifty thousand. In the mass they perhaps produce a monotonous effect, being mostly of the one pattern, despite the variety of their contents:

Tudo o que é verde se seca Em vindo o pino do verão:
Só meu amor reverdece Dentro do meu coração.[717]

Inda que o lume se apague Na cinza fica o calor:
Inda que o amor se ausente No coração fica a dor.[718]

Os tres reis foram guiados Por uma estrella do ceu:
Tambem teus olhos guiaram Meu coração para o teu.[719]

A few links in these modern _cantigas_ carry us back to the songs in Gil Vicente’s plays and beyond: a dialogue between mother and daughter, a reference to dancing _de terreiro_, _balho_, dance and song, to the _casada_, _mas mal casada_, or _i-a_ sequence, as _Filho da Virgem Maria_ (_Sagrada_). Other links in the popular literature throughout the ages are the riddles (_adivinhas_) at which Gil Vicente’s shepherds played in the _Auto Pastoril Castelhano_ (the example given in João de Barros’ _Grammatica_ (1540) is:

Ainda o pae não é nado
Já o filho anda pelo telhado (1785 ed., p. 176)

--the father is still unborn and the son is on the roof: a fire and its smoke; modern instances are printed in Dr. Theophilo Braga’s _Cancioneiro Popular Portuguez_, vol. i (1913), pp. 363-70); the lullabies (cf. the modern _Ró ró, meu menino, Dorme e descansa, Tu es meu alivio E a minha esperança_ with Gil Vicente’s _Ro, ro, ro, Nuestro Dios y Redentor, No lloreis_, &c., i. 57); the _cantigas de Anno Bom_; the ‘pagan _janeiras_’, as Filinto Elysio called them; the _cantigas dos Reis_, the _alvoradas_, the _maios_. The _alva_ or _alvorada_ should properly contain the word _alva_ in the refrain, as in C. V. 172, or Guiraut de Bornelh’s

Qu’el jorn es apropchatz,
Qu’en Orien vey l’estela creguda
Qu’adutz lo jorn, qu’ieu l’ai ben conoguda,
Et ades sera l’alba.

(For day is near, and high in the East appears the star that brings in the day: I know it well, and soon it will be dawn.) The theme is the parting of lovers at dawn:

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day....

A Catalan _alba-cossante_ is given in Milá y Fontanals’ _Romancerillo Catalán_[720]:

Marieta lleva’t lleva’t de mati
Que l’aygua es clara, el sol vol sortir.
Como m’en llevaré si gipo no tinch?
Marieta lleva’t, de mati lleva’t,
Que el sol vol sortir, que l’aygua es clara.
Como, &c.

An example of a Galician _mayo_, that is, a song introducing the _Mayo_ or May-boy (corresponding to our Queen of the May), is given in Milá’s article in vol. vi of _Romania_. It closely resembles that of Gil Vicente (_Este é o Mayo, o Mayo é este_) in the _Auto da Lusitania_:

Este é o Mayo que Mahiño é,
Este é o Mayo que anda d’o pé.
O noso Mayo anque pequeniño
Da de comer á Virxen d’o Camiño.
Velay o Mayo cargado de rosas,
Velay o Mayo que las trae más hermosas.

It then breaks into a _muiñeira_ (in Castilian):

Ángeles somos, del cielo venimos (bajamos),
Si nos dais licencia a la Reina le pedimos (la cantamos).

To the _janeiras_ more than one classical author alludes. Mello (_Epan._ i) thus notices them at Evora on New Year’s Eve, 1638, before the house in which the Conde de Linhares was lodged: _a fim de se lhe cantarem certas Bençoens & Rogatiuas (costume de nossos anciãos que com nome de Janeiras entoavam placidamente pelas portas dos mais caros amigos) se congregou grande numero de pouo_.[721] Some _romances_ (also _xacara_, _xacra_, and in the Azores _arabia_) have been printed direct from the lips of the people by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos in his _Romanceiro Portuguez_ (1886). The degenerate, more modern, and subjective form of the _romance_ is the _fado_, a ballad (melancholy as the old _solao_[722]), composed by the professional _fadistas_ of the towns. The _fado_ is even more modern than the _modinha_ (end of eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century). It dates from the first third of the nineteenth century, and has not even now penetrated to the south, being indeed largely a Lisbon product. It may be composed in verses of four (_quadras_), five (_quintilhas_), or ten (_decimas_) lines.

The individual in the favourite _quadras_ expresses his personal sorrow and his love; the immemorial lore of the Portuguese people as a whole survives less in them than in the no less numerous proverbs--_um bosque de muitas e varias maneiras de adagios_. There is scarcely a Portuguese writer whose works do not furnish a goodly crop of these proverbs, often in evidently popular form, sometimes betraying their Spanish origin in the rhyme. They have been collected in Antonio Delicado’s _Adagios Portugueses_ (1651), in _Adagios_ (1841), _Philosophia Proverbial_ (1882), and elsewhere. The language is full of proverbial phrases, and most Portuguese could at will conceal their meaning from a foreigner in a maze of idiomatic expressions. The variety of their names is sufficient proof of the extraordinary number of the proverbs. They are crystallizations of some forgotten fable or event (_adagios_)[723] or of a more personal anecdote (_anexins_), or the refrain of a long-lost song (_rifões_).[724] Or they are moral (_maximas_ and _sentenças_), biblical (_proverbios_), satirical (_dictados_ or _ditados_, _ditos_). Many of them embody the wisdom of the ages in a form admirably concise and forcible, e.g. _Quem muito abarca pouco abraça_ (which is the very reverse of Portuguese history: _e nulla stringe e tutto ’l mondo abbraccia_), or _Até ao lavar das cestas é vindima._ Many of course correspond more or less closely to those of other countries, e.g. _Muitos enfeitadores estragão a noiva_ (Too many cooks spoil the broth), _Gato escaldado de agua fria ha medo_ (The burnt child fears the fire); _Manhan ruiva, ou vento ou chuva_ (= _Alba gorri, hegoa edo uri_); _Pedra movediça não cria bolor_ (= _Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse_).[725] Many of these saws as well as the _contos_ (folk-tales) have their birth at _fiandões_ as the women sit spinning, or as _nossas velhas_ sit at their cottage doors and gossip in the sun (_soalheiro_), or as all gather round the spacious _lareira_. After the day’s work on the farm, in field and granary, to the sound of singing, legend and tradition come into their own of an evening round the great fire of logs and scented brushwood. The _contos_ have been collected by Z. Consiglieri Pedroso, _Portuguese Folk Tales_ (London, 1882); F. Adolpho Coelho, _Contos Populares Portuguezes_ (Lisboa, 1879); Dr. Theophilo Braga, _Contos Tradicionaes do Povo Portuguez_ (2 vols., Porto, 1883); F. X. de Athaide Oliveira, _Contos Tradicionaes do Algarve_ (2 vols., Tavira, 1900, 5). As was to be expected, they have their equivalents in the folklore of other nations, a fact which does not prevent them from possessing an indigenous character, a charm and flavour of their own. The glowing imagination of the peasants spins out fairy and allegorical tales with marvellous facility. Thus old Mother Poverty (_Tia Miseria_) owned a pear-tree in front of her cottage, and had obtained the privilege that whoever went up it to steal her pears should be unable to come down. When Death comes she asks him to fetch her one more pear. Once up the tree all the priests and lawyers cannot bring him down, and only when he agrees to the bargain that Poverty shall never die is she willing to release him.

A great part of the popular literature has been set down in cold print during the last half-century. Much remains ungarnered. In every province there are peculiar words, phrases, traditions, heirlooms of times prehistoric, waiting to be gathered in, and both the Portuguese literature and the Portuguese language of the future will owe a debt of gratitude to their collectors, and find rich material in the pages of the _Revista Lusitana_.

FOOTNOTES:

[700] The whole Bible in Portuguese was not translated until the eighteenth century, by JOÃO FERREIRA DE ALMEIDA, _O Novo Testamento_ (Amsterdam, 1681), _Do Velho Testamento_, 2 vols. (Batavia, 1748, 53). This is the version still commonly in use. Another translation, entitled _Biblia Sagrada_, was made from the Vulgate at the end of the eighteenth century by ANTONIO PEREIRA DE FIGUEIREDO (1725-97), author of some fifty theological and historical works in Latin and Portuguese, and a paraphrase (_Historia Evangelica_, 1777, 78, _Historia Biblica_, 1778-82) by Frei FRANCISCO DE JESUS MARIA SARMENTO (1713-90). See C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos et S. Berger, _Les Bibles Portugaises_ in _Romania_, xxviii (1899), pp. 543-8: _La littérature portugaise est en matière de traductions bibliques d’une pauvreté désespérante._ The _Parocho Perfeito_ (1675) speaks of _os parochos que não tiverem Biblias_ (p. 19). See also G. L. Santos Ferreira, _A Biblia em Portugal, 1495-1850_ (L. 1906).

[701] See _Floire et Blancheflor. Poèmes du xiiiᵉ siècle. Publiés d’après les manuscrits ... par E. du Méril_, Paris, 1856. In the original story Flores in a basket of roses enters the tower where Brancaflor is imprisoned. Señor Bonilla y San Martín (_La Historia de los dos Enamorados Flores y Blancaflor_, Madrid, 1916) attributes an Italian origin to the Spanish prose story. The Spanish translation probably dates from the fifteenth century.

[702] For its popularity with the Provençal troubadours see Raynouard, _Choix_, e. g. ii. 297, 304, 305.

[703] _A historia de Branca Fror Outra saca a relocer_ (_Chorimas_ (1890), p. 148).

[704] It has been reproduced, from an earlier edition, in T. Braga, _Os Livros Populares Portuguezes_ (_Era Nova_, vol. i, 1881).

[705] At either side explanatory verses, the only verse in the leaflet, tell us that ‘Magalona was the most beautiful of all contemporary princesses, beloved daughter of the King of Naples, and her heart full of goodness. She was a model of virtues, of pure beliefs and a loving heart, married with Pierres, Pedro of Provence, a noble knight and virtuous man.’

[706] One of the Elvas Chapter was _homem versado Na lição de Florinda e Carlo Magno_.

[707] This charm hangs over many anonymous lyrics of popular inspiration, as the _Trovas da Menina Fermosa_, seventeenth or eighteenth century variations of a sixteenth century song: _Menina fermosa Dizei do que vem Que sejais irosa A quem vos quer bem; Porque se concerta Rosto e condiçam Dais por galardam A pena mui certa. Sendo tam fermosa Dizei_, &c. Even less genuinely popular are the _Trovas do Moleiro_ (1602), written by an obscure native of Tangier, Luis Brochado, and others.

[708] Luis de Sousa, _Vida_, 1763 ed., i. 462.

[709] e. g. _Em Belem vila do amor_ (i. 183).

[710] e. g. _Que no quiero estar en casa_ (i. 73) (which is _como laa cantaes co’ gado_, essentially a peasant’s song).

[711] The _leixapren_ occurs in most of the songs accompanied by dance in Gil Vicente: e. g. _Quem é a desposada_ (_chacota_, i. 147), _Pardeus bem andou Castella_ (_em folia_) (ii. 389), _Ja não quer minha senhora_ (ii. 439, _Esta cantiga cantarão e bailarão de terreiro os foliões_). _Não me firaes madre_ (ii. 440, _em chacota_), _Mor Gonçalves_ (ii. 509, _bailão ao som desta cantiga_), _Por Mayo era, por Mayo_ (ii. 525, _a vozes bailarão e cantarão a cantiga seguinte_: i. e. a _romance_ with _leixapren_ and refrain). They are thus a combination of glee and dance.

[712] Gil Vicente, _Obras_ (ii. 448).

[713] _Não nas quero ver cantar_ (Gil Vicente) is, however, probably a misprint, for which D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos suggests _quer’ eu_.

[714] Cf. J. Leite de Vasconcellos, _Ensaios Ethnographicos_, ii. 264: _O povo (principalmente as mulheres) canta-as_ [_cantigas soltas_] _em qualquer occasião_.

[715]

_Já os campos reverdecem, Já o alecrim tem flor,
Já cantam os passarinhos A resurreição do Senhor._

(Now to the fields returns the green and the rosemary’s in flower, and the little birds are singing the Lord’s Resurrection hour).

[716]

_Ó triste da minha vida, Ó triste da vida minha,
Quem me dera ir contigo Onde tu vaes, andorinha._
(O how sad my life is, O how sad my plight!
Would I might go with thee, swallow, in thy flight!)

recalls the French _Si j’étais hirondelle Que je pusse voler, Sur votre sein, ma belle, J’irais me reposer_ (A swallow I Would be to fly And take my rest Upon thy breast).

[717] All green things in summer Their freshness lose: Only my heart Its love renews.

[718] When the light of the fire is dead The ashes its heat retain: When love is over and fled In the heart abides the pain.

[719] To the three kings was given A star in heaven for sign: And thy eyes have guided My heart unto thine.

[720] Reprinted in his article in _Romania_, vol. vi, and by Dr. Braga. _Aygua_ in the second line is probably a corruption from _alua_ (dawn) to _agua_ (water).

[721] Fernam Rodriguez Lobo Soropita, speaking of the _noites privilegiadas_--the eves of New Year and Epiphany--refers to _os villões ruins que essas noutes vos perseguem_ and to their _pandeirinhos, musica de agua-pé que toda a noute vos zune nos ouvidos como bizouro, e sobre tudo isto haveis de lhe offertar os vossos quatro vintens, e quando lh’os entregais a candeia vos descobre o feitio dos ditos musicos: um mocho com sombreiro com mais chocas que um corredor de folhas_. They thus resembled Christmas ‘waits’.

[722] The Spanish translator of _Eufrosina_ apparently derived this name from musical notes (= a sung _romance_), since he translates _un romance de sol la_, _Eufr._ i. 3; iii. 2 (_Oríg. de la Novela_, iii. 77 and 110), but even he would not derive it from the _selah_ of the Psalms (T. Braga, _Hist. da Litt. Port._ i (1914), p. 205). In the Spanish _solao_ in _Obras de Dom Manoel de Portugal_ (1605), Bk. XII, pp. 282-7, each singer takes three lines, of which the last two rhyme together.

[723] Formerly _verbos_ (e.g. in the _Canc. da Vat._) and _exemplos_ (_enxempros_).

[724] The word _rifão_ does not now mean the refrain or burden (_estribilho_) of a song but proverb, like the Spanish _refrán_.

[725] There is another proverb _Mentras a pedra vae e vem Deus dará de seu bem_ (While the [mill?] stone doth come and go God his blessing shall bestow).

§ 2

_The Galician Revival_

For over four hundred years--with the exception of a few poems by Padres José Sanchez Feijoo and Martín Sarmiento[726] in the eighteenth century--the Galician language held aloof from literature. It was peculiarly fitting that at a time when Portugal was recovering for her own literature the early Galician lyrics, which are now one of its most precious possessions, a new company of poets should have sprung up in the region now, as of old, _fertil de poetas_[727]--Galicia. They were no doubt multiplied and encouraged by the discovery of the _Cancioneiros_, but began independently of these, in the wake of that regionalism which manifested itself so vigorously in the second half of the nineteenth century, for instance in Provence, Catalonia, and Valencia. Besides their general character--the mingling of irony and sentimental melancholy--and a few conscious imitations, the new poets and the ancient _Cancioneiros_ present several striking similarities. It is now some three-quarters of a century since regionalism in Galicia assumed its first literary pretensions. In 1861 the poets had become sufficiently numerous and distinguished to warrant the holding of _Juegos Florales_ (_xogos froraes_) at La Coruña. JUAN MANUEL PINTOS (1811-76) had published eight years earlier a small volume of verses, _A Gaita Gallega_ (Pontevedra, 1853), and FRANCISCO AÑON (1817-78) had contributed poems to various local newspapers. Añon led the life of a wandering _jogral_ of old, and his occasional verses soon won him popularity, so that he came to be regarded as the father of modern Galician poetry. He could express his love for his native province in the tender and melancholy stanzas (_abbcdeec_) _A Galicia_, and in his other poems, at once ingenuous and satirical; he is also thoroughly Galician and foreshadowed the poetry that was to follow. A leaflet of his verses appeared in the year after his death, _Poesías_ (Noya, 1879), and a more satisfactory collection ten years later: _Poesías Castellanas y Gallegas_ (1889). JOSÉ MARÍA POSADA Y PEREIRA (1817-86), born at Vigo, the son of a Vigo advocate, published his first volume of verses in 1865 and others were collected in _Poesías Selectas_ (1888). The second part of this collection (pp. 111-250) is written in Spanish, but the Galician poems include a series of letters in octosyllabic verse, the wistful humour of which is attractive. Born in the same year as Añon, he survived Rosalía de Castro, twenty years his junior. He survived in disillusion, for he had been one of the pioneers and now felt himself neglected in the changed conditions. When the first floral games were celebrated the most talented of these early poets, ALBERTO CAMINO (1821-61), had but a few months to live. Another generation passed before his poems were published: _Poesías Gallegas_ (1896). Camino was not a prolific writer, and this tiny book contains but twelve of his poems; but there is not one of them that we would willingly miss, whether he is giving harmonious form to a poignant theme, as in _Nai Chorosa_ and _O Desconsolo_, or in lighter verses describing with a contagious glow and spirit some scene of village merriment, as in _A Foliada de San Joan_ or _Repique_.

Galician patriots, indignant at the neglect or contempt habitually meted out to their region, might persevere in their belief that the language which had produced the _cantigas_ of King Alfonso X, the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_, and the poems of Macías was capable of revival as an instrument of poetry; but it was for the most part by scattered poems, manuscript or printed in periodicals (especially the Coruña paper _Galicia_, 1860-6), that they justified their faith, until in 1863 appeared _Cantares Gallegos_ by ROSALÍA DE CASTRO[728] (1837-85). The authoress, born at Santiago, was but twenty-six when this collection of poems gave her a wider celebrity than has been granted to any Galician writer since Macías. Emilio Castelar wrote a preface for her second volume, _Follas Novas_ (1880), and hailed her as ‘a star of the first order’. Indeed, so great was her fame as a Galician singer that until recently it obscured her Spanish poems, _En las orillas del Sar_ (1884). It was an unsought fame. Rosalía de Castro wrote much more than she published and destroyed much that was worth publishing. She sank herself in Galicia; her voice is that of the Galician _gaita_ in all its varying moods. In her preface to _Cantares Gallegos_ she wrote: ‘I have taken much care to reproduce the true spirit of our people.’ That she succeeded in this all critics are agreed. A favourite method in the _Cantares Gallegos_ is to take a popular quatrain and develop it at some length, as, for instance, in the beautiful variations on the lines _Airiños_, _airiños_, _aires_, _Airiños_ _da miña terra_, _Airiños_, _airiños_, _aires_, _Airiños_, _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 smaller country, it is Galicia seen from without,[741] or sung from memory. The ‘vintage songs and the gay din of chestnut gatherings’ are no longer, as with Losada and Lamas, a part of life, but ‘a dream in the ideal realm of thought’,[742] a subject of disillusion and regret. _Folerpas_[743] (1894) by D. ELADIO RODRÍGUEZ GONZÁLEZ (born in 1864) is also essentially not of the people. In its less elaborate poems it often describes, attractively and with much colour, popular customs and dances, the night of St. John, _as festas d’a miña terra_. Yet after recording the pleasant superstition that on St. John’s Day the sun rises dancing, the author must needs pause to say ‘away with these fanatical beliefs, unworthy of a civilized region’, to which the answer is that such reflections may be sincere but are unworthy of poetry, and should be expressed in prose. But the author of these verses can, when he wishes, identify himself with the peasants whose life he depicts,[744] and is capable of writing poems of great delicacy. The general impression is that he has not grown up among these scenes but is observing them keenly as might a stranger. The edict of the Archbishop of Santiago (June 26, 1909), which made it a deadly sin to read _Fume de Palla_ (1909), by ‘ALFREDO NUN DE ALLARIZ’, as containing impious, blasphemous, and heretical propositions, gave these poems a wider publicity than they might otherwise have attained, and they received a second edition in the same year. It certainly savours of blasphemy and is bad criticism to call Curros Enriquez the Galician Christ, but it is to be feared that the excommunication of the author will only encourage him to abandon ‘simple verses written without art’, as in his preface he describes these, for more studied poems with a thesis to prove. It is perhaps disquieting to find that three poets in most respects so different, agree in this, that between them and popular poetry a gulf is fixed, owing to the sensitive aloofness of a true poet (for Núñez González was undoubtedly the most talented of the younger Galicians), or owing to the adoption of the superior standpoint of the rationalist or the anticlerical. Younger poets of remarkable promise and achievement are D. GONZALO LÓPEZ ABENTE (born in 1878), a relative of Eduardo Pondal, whom he sometimes recalls in the original inspiration of _Escumas da Ribeira_ (1914) and _Alento da Raza_ (1917); D. ANTONIO NORIEGA VARELA (born in 1869), whose deep love for his native moors and mountains gives an eternal magic to _Montañesas_ (1904) and _D’O Ermo_ (1920); D. RAMÓN CABANILLAS, who voices the sorrows and aspirations of Galicia in _Vento Mareiro_ and _Da Terra Asoballada_ (1917); and D. ANTONIO REY SOTO, who, however, writes chiefly in Castilian. D. XAVIER PRADO expresses the very soul of the peasantry in _A Caron do Lume_ (1918). The poets of the last half-century have unquestionably justified the literary revival of the Galician language, and even if in the future no poetry of the highest order be written in Galicia, it is unthinkable that so musical an instrument should be allowed to perish. Galician poetry may be a thin, an elfin music, a scrannel voice, as of a wind blowing through tamarisks, but it has a natural charm, a raciness, a native atmosphere which give it a peculiar flavour and attraction. Literary contests, _veladas_, _certames_, _xogos froraes_, keep the flame of poetry alive in Galicia, but in its anonymous form it is a very vigorous growth which needs no fostering, and flourishes now as it flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as it flourished in the time of the Romans. Hundreds of anonymous _quadras_ (_cantiga_, _cantar_, _cantariño_, _cantilena_, _cantiguela_, _cantiguiña_, _copra_, or _canció_) have been collected in the _Cancionero Popular Gallego_ (Madrid, 3 vols., 1886) by JOSÉ PÉREZ BALLESTEROS (†1918). The peasant women compose and sing their songs to-day[745] as when Fray Martín Sarmiento (1695-1772) noticed that _en Galicia las mujeres no solo son poetisas sino tambien músicas naturales_,[746] or the Marqués de Montebello listened to _los tonos que a coros cantan con fugas y repeticiones las mozuelas_, or the Archpriest of Hita watched the cantaderas dancing (as well as singing) in neighbouring Asturias.[747]

The ancient _muiñeira_ rhythm continues, and the parallel-strophed songs of the early _Cancioneiros_ have their echoes in the anonymous poetry of to-day. It is, indeed, of interest to note how the poets of the revival fall quite naturally into the same parallelism and the same repetition.[748] Besides these _muiñeiras_ the popular poetry consists principally of _quadras_.[749] Traditional _romances_ are nearly non-existent. This popular poetry (soft, musical, malicious, satirical) connects by a thread of anonymous song the Galicia of to-day with the whole of its past life, and the revivalists are likely to prosper in proportion as they seek their inspiration in popular sources, as did Rosalía de Castro. For the Galician peasants, living in a land of mists and streams, inlet arms of sea, dark pinewoods, deep-valleyed mountains, green maize-fields, and grey mysterious rocks, a land of spirits and fairies and witches, of legends and ruins, have the Celt’s instinct and love of poetry. Poetry is their natural expression. For prose in Galician literature there is less genius, and perhaps less incentive, since the country has been described with intimate knowledge and charm in the Castilian novels of Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) and Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (born in 1870), and more recently by Don Jaime Solá (born in 1877). But the value and possibilities of Galician prose have been shown by D. AURELIO RIBALTA (born in 1864) in _Ferruxe_ (1894) and by D. MANUEL LUGRIS Y FREIRE (born in 1863) in _Contos de Asieumedre_ (1909). It is, indeed, in the _conto_ that especial success has been won, and HERACLIO PÉREZ PLACER, whose novel _Predicción_ appeared in 1887, is widely known for his _Contos, Leendas e Tradiciós de Galicia_ (1891), _Contos da Terriña_ (1895), and _Veira do Lar_ (1901). _Contos da Terriña_, thirty-four stories in some two hundred brief pages, are various and unequal in value. Most of them are sad, even the harmless St. Martin _magosto_ ends in a death. They contain many intimate descriptions of Galicia and the life of the villages about Orense. There is much pathos in _Velliña, miña velliña!_, in _Rapañota de Xasmís_, and especially in _Follas Secas_, an exquisite picture of an old peasant dying alone in a dark room--its walls are black with smoke, yellow maize-cobs hang from the ceiling--while through the open door come all the gay sounds and colours of a Galician vintage. The poetess FRANCISCA HERRERA, author of _Almas de Muller_ (1915) and _Sorrisas e Bágoas_ (1918), has recently turned to prose with remarkable success in _Néveda_ (1920). Few Galician poets have published volumes of prose, although many have contributed as journalists to the local press, but it would be difficult to find a prose-writer who is not also a poet.[750] And it is by its poetry that Galicia has won for itself a notable place in modern literature and added another leaf to the literary laurels of the Peninsula.

FOOTNOTES:

[726] See Antolín López Peláez, _Poesías Inéditas del P. Feijoo ... seguidas de las poesías gallegas ‘Dialogo de 24 Rusticos’ y ‘O Tio Marcos da Portela’ por el P. Sarmiento_, Tuy, 1901.

[727] Cf. A. Ribeiro dos Santos, _Obras_ (MS.), vol. xix, f. 21: _Galicia ... muito affeita desde alta antiguidade ao exercicio de trovas e cantares._

[728] Or Rosalía Castro de (or y) Murguía. Her husband, DON MANUEL DE MURGUÍA (born in 1833), author of _Los Precursores_ (1886), _Diccionario de Escritores Gallegos_ (1862), and other works devoted to the study of Galicia, its ethnology and history, is still alive.

[729] O winds of my country blowing softly together, Winds, winds, gentle winds, O carry me thither! (1909 ed., pp. 95-8).

[730] _Follas Novas: Duas palabras d’a autora_, 1910 ed., p. 31.

[731] _Follas Novas_ (1910 ed.), p. 254.

[732] A sixth edition appeared in 1909, whereas most books of Galician verse cling to the obscurity of their first edition or at best obtain a second in the hospitable _Biblioteca Gallega_.

[733] _Esfolhada_ or _desfolla_: gathering to husk the maize.

[734] _Fiada_, _fiandon_: a rustic _tertulia_ (evening party) of women to spin.

[735] _Fuliada_, _afuliada_, _folion_.

[736] In Tras-os-Montes potatoes are called _castanholas_, i. e. large chestnuts, which recalls the fact that Andrea Navagero, eating potatoes for the first time at Seville in 1526, considered them to taste like chestnuts. In parts of Galicia they are called _castañas d’a terra_.

[737] _Soaces_, p. 156. The _espadela_ is the task of braking flax.

[738] Perhaps the only poem that might have been written by Pondal is that on p. 177 (the first verse) of Rosalía de Castro’s _Follas Novas_ (1910 ed.).

[739] _Queixumes dos Pinos_ (1886), p. 101.

[740] For an earlier example of the same kind of tercets (_abacdcefe_) see R. de Castro, _Follas Novas_, 1910 ed., p. 158.

[741] The very word _morriña_ is more common (in the sense of _saudade_) at Madrid than in Galicia.

[742] _Salayos_, p. 65.

[743] Also _flepa_, _folepa_, _folepiña_, Portuguese _folheca_--_floco_, _froco_, _copo_ (= ‘flake’).

[744] The passage (_Folerpas_, p. 182) in which a peasant, refusing alms to an old woman, bids her beg of the rich, is scarcely drawn from life.

[745] Cf. _Cancionero_, i. 50: _Cantade, nenas, cantade_; G. Ferreiro, _Chorimas_, p. 76, _as cantiguiñas das moças_; R. de Castro, _Cant. Gall._, p. 102, _As meniñas cantan, cantan_. Cf. also E. Pardo Bazán, _De mi tierra_ (1888), p. 122: _las_ [_coplas_] _gallegas de las cuales buena parte debe ser obra de hembras_.

[746] _Memorias para la historia de la poesía y poetas españoles_ (_Obras Postumas_, vol. i, Madrid, 1775, p. 238, § 538).

[747] See _C. da Ajuda_, ed. C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos (1904), ii. 902.

[748] Cf. R. de Castro, _Cantares Gallegos_ (1909 ed.), p. 18 (_mantelo_, _refaixo_), p. 19 (_mar_, _río_), pp. 20-1 (_e-a_), p. 27 (_terras_, _vilas_), p. 29 (_pousaban_, _vivían_), p. 85 (_vestira_, _calzara_); _Follas Novas_ (1910 ed.), p. 229 (_a-e_); _Aires d’a miña terra_ (ed. 1911). p. 35 (_quería_, _pensaba_), p. 139 (_i-a_), p. 249 (_á miles_, _á centos_); _Chorimas_, p. 36 (_estrevidos_, _ousados_); A. Camino, _Poesías Gallegas_, p. 19: _Qué noite aquela en que eu a vin gemindo!_ (_chorar!_).

[749] Quatrains of which lines 2 and 4 are in rhyme or assonance, e.g. _Ruliña que vas volando Sin facer caso á ninguen, Vai e dille á aquela nena Que sempre a quixen ben_. _Tercetos_ are rarer (_aba_). Sometimes the _quadra_ is really a tercet with line 1 repeated (_aaba_).