Chapter C: R. = Cancioneiro de Resende. Lisboa, 1516 (= Cancioneiro Geral) (2)

[77] Their popular origin is borne out by the music. See H. Collet et L. Villalba, _Contribution à l’étude des Cantigas_ (1911). Cf. also P. Meyer, _Types de quelques chansons de Gautier de Coinci_ (_Romania_, vol. xvii (1888), pp. 429-37): _paroles pieuses à des mélodies profanes_.

[78] Padre Nobrega came upon a crowd of _pobres pedintes peregrinos_ at Santiago feasting merrily and having _grandes contendas entre si_ as to which of them was cleverest at taking people in. The trick of one of them was to declare that, being captive in Turkey, _encommendando-me muito á Senhora ... achei-me ao outro dia ao romper da alva em terra de Christãos_ (Simão de Vasconcellos, _Cronica_, Lib. I, § 22). Cf. Jeronymo de Mendoça, _Jornada de Africa_, 1904 ed., ii. 34, and Frei Luis de Sousa, _Hist. de S. Domingos_, I. i. 5.

[79] i. e. besides the Spanish _cantiga_ (C. C. B. 363), C. C. B. 359, which belongs to the _Cantigas de Santa Maria_, and C. C. B. 372, which consists of a single line.

[80] _El Rei aia tres jograes en sa casa e non mais._

[81] Riquier’s _segriers per totas cortz_ (King Alfonso X (C. M. 194) speaks of a _jograr andando pelas cortes_). See also C. V. 556. The word probably has no connexion with _seguir_ (to follow). Possibly it was used originally to differentiate singers of profane songs, _cantigas profanas e seculares_. Frei João Alvarez in his _Cronica do Infante Santo_ has ‘obras ecclesiasticas e _segrãaes_’; King Duarte counted among _os pecados da boca_ ‘cantar cantigas _sagraaes_’, The _Cancioneiros_ show that the _segrel_ was far less common than the _jogral_ in the thirteenth century. For _segre_ (= _saeculum_) see _infra_, p. 93, n. 2.

[82] For instances see H. R. Lang, _The Relations of the Earliest Portuguese Lyric School with the Troubadours and Trouvères_ (_Modern Language Notes_ (April, 1895), pp. 207-31), and C. D. L., pp. xlviii et seq.

[83] This poet, Fernam Gonçalvez de Seabra or Fernant Gonzalez de Sanabria (C. V. 338; C. C. B. 330-7; C. A. 210-21, 445-7), apparently obtained some fame by his mystification, unless the object of his devotion was as high-placed as the Portuguese princess for love of whom, according to legend, D. Joan Soarez de Paiva died in Galicia. The latter wrote in the first years of the thirteenth century (C. V. 937, _Randglosse_ xi). They are the only two Galician-Portuguese poets--besides King Dinis--mentioned in Santillana’s letter.

[84] _Poetica_, ll. 126, 130. Much of the information of this _Poetica_ (printed in C. C. B.) may be gleaned from the _Cancioneiros_, but it shows how carefully the different kinds of poem were distinguished. There were apparently special names for poems to trick and deceive: _de logr’ e d’arteiro_, and for festive laughter poems: _de risadelha_ (or _refestela_?) = _de riso e mote_. Santillana’s _mansobre_ is, it seems, a misprint for _mordobre_. It occurs again in the _Requesta de Ferrant Manuel contra Alfonso Alvarez_ (_Canc. de Baena_, 1860 ed., i. 253):

Sin lai, sin deslai, sin cor, sin descor.
Sin dobre, mansobre, sensilla o menor.
Sin encadenado, dexar o prender.

[85] e. g. C. V. 300: _Por Deus, se ora, se ora chegasse Con el mui leda seria._

[86] _q’coi_ (C. V. M.), _qual cór_ (C. V. B.). D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos proposes _quiça_ (cf. C. V. 1006, I. 8).

[87] _Aqueste cantar da egoa que non andou na tregoa_ (C. V. 956).

[88] Or D. Joan Garcia de Guilhade. See C. A. M. V. ii. 407-15.

[89] C. V. 28-38, 343-61, 1097-1110; C. A. 235-9; C. C. B. 373-6.

[90] A large number of _cantigas_ by the same hand would emphasize the monotony of the kind and provide an unwelcome mirror for contemporary bards. Of Roy Queimado (fl. 1250) other love-lorn poets said that he was always dying of love--in verse.

[91] Soares de Brito in his _Theatrum_ mentions ‘Ferdinandus Garcia _Esparavanha_, optimus poeta’ (= _bom trovador_).

[92] See p. 31.

[93] See _Randglosse_ xii. An incidental interest belongs to this poem of eighteen dodecasyllabic lines from the fact that in C. V. B. it is printed in thirty-six lines, as a proof of the early predominance of the _redondilha_.

[94] Cf. the Provençal passage in Milá y Fontanals, _De los Trobadores_, p. 62.

[95] He thus overlapped Dante’s life by four years at either end.

[96] T. A. Craveiro, _Compendio_ (1833), cap. 5: _D. Diniz trouxe a idade de ouro a Portugal_.

[97] A late echo of the early (Alfonso X) legislation against the _jogral_ is to be found in King Duarte’s _Leal Conselheiro_, cap. 70: _Dos Pecados da Obra_. These include _dar aos jograaees_. Nunez de Leam translates _joglar_ as _truão_ (1606).

[98] C. V. 80-208 (= C. D. L. 1-75, 77-128, 76) and C. C. B. 406-15 (= C. D. L. 129-38). C. V. 116 = C. V. 174.

[99] _Cronica del Rei D. Diniz_, 1677 ed., f. 113 v.

[100] _Mandou hum livro delles escrito por sua mão a seu avò ... o qual eu vi na livraria do Real Convento do Escurial, em folha de papel grosso, de marca pequena, volume de tres ou quatro dedos de alto, de letra grande, latina, bem legivel, e o que ly era de Louvores a Nossa Senhora, e outras cousas ao divino_ (_Eva e Ave_, 1676 ed., pp. 128-9). This interesting passage is not included in those quoted in C. A. M. V. ii. 112-17; it is obviously the source of no. 17. It does not imply that the poems were exclusively religious. Can the book three or four fingers in height have been the _Canc. da Ajuda_ (460 millimètres) from which a section of sacred poems may have been torn? If so the letters _Rey Dõ Denis_ (C. A. M. V. i. 141) would explain the attribution to King Dinis.

[101] The language of C. M. and the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ was of course the same. Identical phrases occur.

[102] He twice visited Oxford, he says, in order to see the library, which he describes--_hũa das grandes cousas do mundo_ (_Eva e Ave_, 1676 ed., p. 156). At the Escorial he also examined an original manuscript of St. Augustine (ibid., p. 150).

[103] C. C. B. 406-15.

II

1325-1521

§ 1

_Early Prose_

With prose a new period opens, since, although there are Portuguese documents of the late twelfth century[104] and the Latin chrysalis was in an advanced stage of development even earlier, prose as a literary instrument does not begin before the fourteenth century or the end of the thirteenth at the earliest. The fragments of an early _Poetica_[105] clearly show how slow and awkward were still the movements of prose at a time when poetry had attained an exceedingly graceful expression. The next two centuries redressed the balance in the favour of prose. The victory of Aljubarrota (1385) made it possible to carry on the national work begun by King Dinis--the preparation of Portugal’s resources for a high destiny. In this constructive process literature was not forgotten, and indeed its deliberate encouragement, as though it were an industry or a pine-forest, may account for the fact that it consisted mainly of prose--chronicles, numerous translations from Latin, Spanish, and other languages, works of religious or practical import. The first kings of the dynasty of Avis, who rendered noble service to Portuguese literature, were not poets, and in the second half of the fifteenth century Spanish influence, checked at Aljubarrota, succeeded by peaceful penetration in recovering all and more than all that it had lost, till it became common to hear lyrics of Boscan sung in the streets of Lisbon,[106] and uncommon for a Portuguese poet to versify in his mother tongue.[107] Prose was more national. King Dinis had encouraged translation into Portuguese, and among other works his grandfather King Alfonso the Learned’s _Cronica General_ was translated by his order. The only edition that we have, _Historia Geral de Hespanha_ (1863), is cut short in the reign of King Ramiro (cap. ccii, p. 192). The first ‘O’ of the preface in the manuscript contains the king in purple robe and crown of gold, pen in hand, with a book before him. The style is primitive, often a succession of short sentences beginning with ‘And’.[108] In the convents brief lives of saints, portions of the Bible, prayers and regulations were written in Portuguese. Thus we have thirteenth-or fourteenth-century fragments of the rules of S. Bento, _Fragmentos de uma versão antiga da regra de S. Bento_, with its traces of a Latin original (e. g. _os desprezintes Deos_ = _contemnentes Deum_); the _Actos dos Apostolos_, written in the middle of the fifteenth century by Frei Bernardo de Alcobaça and Frei Nicolao Vieira, that is, copied by them from an older manuscript; the eloquent prayers (_Libro de Horas_) translated by another Alcobaça monk, Frei João Claro (†1520?); the _Historias abreviadas do Testamento Velho_, printed from a manuscript of the fourteenth century, or of the thirteenth retouched in the fourteenth. The translation is close; the style foreshadows that of the _Leal Conselheiro_. The importance of these and other fragmentary versions of the Bible, in which there can rarely be a doubt as to the meaning of the words, is obvious. Extracts from the _Vida de Eufrosina_ and the _Vida de Maria Egipcia_, published in 1882 by Jules Cornu from the manuscripts formerly in the Monastery of Alcobaça, now in the Torre do Tombo, show that they were written in vigorous if primitive prose (14th c.). _A Lenda dos Santos Barlaam e Josaphat_ is perhaps a little later (end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century). The _Visão de Tundalo_, of which the Latin original, _Visio Tundali_, was written by Frei Marcos not long after the date of the vision (1140), exists in two Portuguese versions, probably both of the fifteenth century (Monastery of Alcobaça). The _Vida de Santo Aleixo_ also exists in two codices belonging to the middle and beginning of the fifteenth century, and Dr. Esteves Pereira, who published the latter, considers that the variants point to an earlier manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth or end of the thirteenth century. To about the same period (14th-15th c.) belong the _Lenda de Santo Eloy_, the _Vida de Santo Amaro_, the _Vida de Santa Pelagia_, and many similar short devout treatises and legends which concern literature less than the development of the Portuguese language. Both literature and philology are interested in the early fifteenth-century work printed by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos from the manuscript in the Vienna _Hofbibliothek_: _O Livro de Esopo_, which consists not of direct translations[109] from _Exopo greguo_ of Antioch but of _estorias ffremosas de animalias_, told in the manner of Aesop, half a century before William Caxton and Robert Henryson, with great naturalness, vigour, and brevity.

The earliest entry of the _Cronica Breve do Archivo Nacional_ is dated 1391, and both it and the _Cronicas Breves e memorias avulsas de Santa Cruz de Coimbra_ are laconic annals of the first kings of Portugal, a few lines covering a whole reign. The _Livro da Noa de Santa Cruz de Coimbra_ is an extract from the _Livro das Heras_ of the same convent, and is, as the latter title indicates, a similar simple chronicle of events by years.[110] It begins in Latin, then Latin and Portuguese entries alternate till 1405. From 1406 to the end (1444) they are exclusively Portuguese. The _Cronica da Ordem dos Frades Menores_ (1209-85) is a fifteenth-century Portuguese translation of a fourteenth-century Latin chronicle, and has been carefully edited by Dr. J. J. Nunes from the manuscript in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional; the _Vida de D. Tello_ (15th c.), and the _Vida de S. Isabel_, the Queen-consort of King Dinis (earlier 15th c.), are ‘historical’ biographies which contain more legend and less history than the _Cronica da Fundaçam do Moesteiro de S. Vicente de Lixboa_ (_Cronica dos Vicentes_), a fifteenth-century version from a Latin original, _Indiculum_, of the eleventh century. There is far more life if equal brevity in the _Cronica da Conquista do Algarve_ (_Cronica de como Dom Payo Correa. .. tomou este reino de Algarve aos Moros_)--a rapid, vivid sketch which reads almost like a chapter out of Fernam Lopez. Here at last was some one with will and power to make the dry bones live.[111] But meanwhile history of another kind had been written from a very early date. As a first rough catalogue of names the _livros de linhagens_, books of descent, as they were called by their compilers,[112] go back farther than the chronicles or religious prose, but so far as concerns their claim to literary form they belong like those to the fourteenth century. Of the four that have come down to us the _Livro Velho_ is a jejune family register (11th-14th c.); the second is a mere fragment of the same kind. The manuscript of the third (_O Nobiliario do Collegio dos Nobres_) was bound up with the _Cancioneiro da Ajuda_, and together with the fourth, _O Nobiliario do Conde D. Pedro_, represents the lost original of the _Livro de Linhagens_ of D. PEDRO, CONDE DE BARCELLOS (1289-1354). The _Nobiliario do Conde_ has been shown by Alexandre Herculano, who printed it from the manuscript in the Torre do Tombo, to be the work of various authors extending over more than a century (13th-14th), the Conde de Barcellos being but one of them. It was in fact compiled like a modern peerage,[113] and was not intended to be final, new entries being added as time made them necessary, so that the passage _diz O Conde D. Pedro em seu livro_ is as natural as the mention of Innocencio da Silva in a later volume of his great dictionary. But it was this son of King Dinis who with infinite diligence searched for documents far and wide, had recourse to the writings of King Alfonso X and others, and spared no pains to give the work an historical as well as a genealogical character. His researches (_Ouue de catar, he says, por gram trabalho por muitas terras escripturas que fallauam das linhagens_) set an excellent example to Fernam Lopez. Certainly the _Livro de Linhagens_ is a vast catalogue of names, with at most a brief note after the name, as ‘he was a good priest’ or ‘a very good poet’; but it also gives succinct stories of the Kings of the Earth from Adam, including Priam, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and the early kings of Portugal, and it contains rare but charming intervals, green oases of legend and anecdote, such as the tale of King Lear with its happy ending, or the account of King Ramiro going to see his wife, who was a captive of the Moors.[114] Count Pedro, by his humanity and his generous conception of what a genealogy should be, really made the book his own. It was naturally consulted by the early chroniclers, its worth was recognized by the ablest author of the _Monarchia Lusitana_,[115] and recently, in the skilful hands of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, it has rendered invaluable service in reconstructing the lives of the thirteenth-century poets.[116]

The _Livro de Linhagens_ refers not only to King Lear but to Merlin, King Arthur, Lancelot, and the Isle of Avalon. Many other allusions, both earlier and later, to the Breton cycle, the _matière de Bretagne_, are to be found in early Portuguese literature: to the lovers Tristan and Iseult, to the _cantares de Cornoalha_,[117] to the chivalry of the Knights of the Round Table. In the fourteenth century many in Portugal were baptized with the name of Lancelot, Tristan, and Percival; and Nun’ Alvarez (1360-1431) chose Galahad for his model, and came as near realizing his ideal as may be given to mortal man. In Gil Vicente’s time the name Percival had already descended to the sphere of the peasants: as Passival (i. II) in 1502 (_Auto Pastoril Castelhano_) and Pessival (i. 117) in 1534 (_Auto de Mofina Mendes_).

The early Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ contain many references to this cycle, and the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ opens with five celebrated songs,[118] imitations of Breton _lais_, with rubrics explaining their subjects, and mentioning King Arthur and Tristan, Iseult, Cornwall, Maraot of Ireland, and Lancelot. Whether they were incorporated in the _Cancioneiro_ from a Portuguese _Tristam_ earlier than the Spanish version (1343?), or, as is more probable, directly from the Old-French _Historia Tristani_, their presence here is a sufficient witness to the Portuguese fondness for such themes. It was but natural that a Celtic people living by the sea, delighting in vague legends and in foreign novelties, should have felt drawn towards these misty tales of love and wandering adventure, which carried them west as far as Cornwall and Ireland, and also East, through the search for the Holy Grail. It was natural that they should undergo their influence earlier and more strongly than their more direct and more national neighbours the Castilians, whose clear, definite descriptions in the twelfth-century _Poema del Cid_ would send those legends drifting back to the dim regions of their birth. (Even to-day connexion with and sympathy for Ireland is far commoner in Galicia than in any other part of Spain.) Unhappily, most of the early Portuguese versions of the Breton legends have been lost. King Duarte in his library possessed _Merlim_, _O Livro de Tristam_, and _O Livro de Galaaz_. The probability that these were written in Portuguese, not in Spanish, is increased by the survival of _A Historia dos Cavalleiros da Mesa Redonda e da Demanda do Santo Graall_, as yet only partially published from the manuscript (2594) in the Vienna _Hofbibliothek_. It was written probably in the fourteenth century, perhaps at the end of the thirteenth, although the Vienna manuscript is more recent and belongs to the fifteenth century, in which the work was referred to by the poet Rodriguez de la Cámara.[119] It is a Portuguese version of the story of the Holy Grail, and, although not a continuous translation, was evidently written with the French original (doubtfully ascribed to Robert de Boron,[120] author of a different work on the same subject) constantly in view. Traces of French remain in its prose.[121] This was clearly part of a larger work,[122] perhaps of a whole cycle of works dealing with the search for the Holy Grail. The only others that we have in print are the _Estorea de Vespeseano_ and the _Livro de Josep ab Arimatia_, the manuscript of which was discovered in the nineteenth century in the Torre do Tombo. This, in the same way as the _Demanda do Santo Graall_, is a later (16th c.) copy of a thirteenth-fourteenth-century Portuguese translation or adaptation from the French, and retains in its language signs of French origin. The incunable _Estorea de Vespeseano_ (Lixboa, 1496) is a work in twenty-nine short chapters, which only incidentally[123] refers to the Holy Grail, but recounts vividly the event mentioned in the _Demanda_[124]: the destruction of Jerusalem by Vespasian and Titus. It was also known formerly as _Destroyçam de Jerusalem_.[125] It is an anonymous translation, made in the middle of the fifteenth century, not from the French _Destruction de Jérusalem_, but from the Spanish _Estoria del noble Vespesiano_ (_c._ 1485 and 1499). Dr. Esteves Pereira believes that the 1499 Spanish edition is a retranslation from the Portuguese text originally translated from the Spanish.

Tennyson’s revival of the Arthurian legend in England evoked no corresponding interest in Portugal in the nineteenth century, and the primitive and touching story as published in 1887 has left Sir Percival in the very middle of an adventure for over a generation. The descent of the Amadis romances from the noble ideal of chivalry of King Arthur’s Court is obvious, but their exact pedigree, the date and nationality of the first ancestor of the Amadis who is still with us, has been the subject of some little contention.

_Amadis de Gaula_ has indeed been doubly fortunate. The successor of Lancelot, Galahad, and Tristan as a fearless and loyal knight, he early won his way in the Peninsula; he was spared by the priest and barber in the _Don Quixote_ scrutiny, and now when Vives’ ‘pestiferous books’,[126] those ‘serious follies’, are no longer read widely, he has received a new span of immortality as a corpse of Patroclus between the contending critics. The problem of the date and authorship has become more fascinating than the book. Champions for Spain and Portugal come forward armed for the fight: Braunfels, Gayangos, Baist are met by Theophilo Braga, Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, while Dr. Henry Thomas holds the scales. The ground is thick with their arrows. And beneath them all lies the simple ingenuous story as retold by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo in or immediately after 1492 and published in 1508, still worth reading for its freshness and for its clear good style, which Braunfels, following up the praise in Juan de Valdés’ _Diálogo de la Lengua_ (_c._ 1535), declared could not be a translation.[127] The argument, conclusive in the case of the masterpiece of prose that is _Palmeirim_ _de Inglaterra_, loses its force here, since Montalvo himself tells us that he corrected the work from old originals. Naturally we are curious to know what these _antiguos originales_ were, but the question did not arise in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: readers did not then concern themselves greatly with the origin and authorship of a book; they were content to enjoy it. Evidently _Amadis_ was enjoyed both in Spain and Portugal. It is mentioned in the middle of the fourteenth century in the Spanish translation, by Johan Garcia de Castrogeriz, of Egidio Colonna’s _De regimine principum_, at the very time, that is, when the Spanish poet and chronicler, Pero López de Ayala (1332-1407), was reading _Amadis_ in his youth.[128] Half a century later, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a poem by Pero Ferrus in the _Cancionero de Baena_ refers to _Amadis_ as written in three books. This is one of the most definite early references to _Amadis_, but of course reference to the book by a Spaniard does not necessarily imply that it was written in Spanish, and indeed some of the vaguer allusions may refer to a French or Anglo-French original. The most frequent Spanish references occur in the _Cancionero de Baena_, which was compiled in the middle of the fifteenth century, at a period, that is, which the last Galician lyrics written in Spain connected with the time when all eyes were turned to Portuguese as the universal language of Peninsular lyrics. Because the Portuguese language was used throughout Spain in lyric poetry, it is sometimes argued as if the Portuguese had no prose, could only sing. (The more real division was not between verse and prose but between the Portuguese lyrical love literature and the Spanish epic battle literature, and the early romances of chivalry, although written in prose, belong essentially to the former.) The prose rubrics of the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ and the _Poetica_ of the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ are sufficient to dispel this delusion. Whether this _Poetica_ be contemporary (13th c.) of the lyrics or later (14th c.), it offers a striking contrast between the clumsiness of its prose and the smooth perfection of the poetry for which it theorizes. Miguel Leite Ferreira’s statement (1598) that _Amadis_ is contemporary with the lyrics is therefore remarkable. He says that the archaic (time of King Dinis) language of the two sonnets--_Bom Vasco de Lobeira_ and _Vinha Amor pelo campo trebelhando_--written by his father, Antonio Ferreira (1528-69), is the same as that in which Vasco de Lobeira wrote _Amadis of Gaul_. We know that King Dinis encouraged not only lyric poetry but also translations into Portuguese prose, but all the early Portuguese prose works are assigned to the fourteenth, not the thirteenth century. One of the earliest, the _Demanda do Santo Graall_, the language of which bears a close relation to that of the _Cancioneiros_, still belongs to the fourteenth century. Probably the later development of prose misled Leite Ferreira into making fourteenth-century prose contemporary with thirteenth-century verse. The Infante whom he here on the strength of the passage in Montalvo’s _Amadis_ identifies with the son of King Dinis, not with the earlier Prince Afonso (_c._ 1265-1312), may as Infante have expressed dislike of a certain incident (the treatment of Briolanja) in the already well-known story, and his preference would be borne in mind when the Portuguese version was written in his reign (1325-57). If the first Peninsular version of _Amadis_ was composed in Portuguese in the middle of the fourteenth century, it may have been eagerly read as a novelty by López de Ayala. In the fourteenth century most Spaniards read, a few wrote[129] Portuguese lyrics; and there seems to be no reason why we should rigorously confine them to the reading of verse, to the exclusion of Portuguese prose. There is no means of deciding with certainty whether López de Ayala and Ferrus read _Amadis_ in Spanish or in Portuguese, but there are inherent probabilities in favour of Portuguese. No one without a thesis to support would deny that, generally, the cycle of the Round Table, to which _Amadis_ is so closely related, was more congenial to the Portuguese than to the Spanish temperament, that the geographical position of Portugal facilitated its introduction, and that, in the particular case of _Amadis_, the style and subject of the work, certainly of the first three books, are Portuguese rather than Spanish. Melancholy incidents, sentimental phrases and tears occur on nearly every page. Some critics even discern traces of Portuguese in the language.[130]

But if we admit that _Amadis_ was written _c._ 1350, who was its author? It is noteworthy that while in Spanish it had been attributed to many persons, in Portugal tradition has persistently hovered round the name of Lobeira. Unfortunately the Lobeira authorship has given far more trouble than that of prince, Jew, or saint in Spain. Zurara, basing his statement on an earlier fifteenth-century authority, in a perfectly genuine passage of his _Cronica do Conde D. Pedro de Meneses_,[131] written in the middle of the fifteenth century, ascribes _Amadis_ to Vasco de Lobeira. In the next century Dr. João de Barros[132] (not the historian) and Leite Ferreira agree with Zurara.[133] There was no reason why they should say Vasco rather than Pedro or João. According to Nunez de Leam, Vasco de Lobeira was knighted on the field of Aljubarrota (1385), according to Fernam Lopez he was already a knight in 1383.[134] If he was not a young but an old knight at Aljubarrota, it is just possible that he wrote the book thirty-five years earlier, in the same way that the historian Barros wrote _Clarimundo_ in his youth.

If he lived on through the reigns of Pedro I (1357-67) and Fernando (1376-83), and acquired new distinction in battle in the reign of the latter, this might account for Zurara’s assertion that he wrote _Amadis_ in the reign of Fernando. But the chief obstacle to the authorship of Vasco is the existence in the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ (Nos. 230 and 232 A) of a song by Joan de Lobeira, _Leonoreta, fin roseta_, which reappears with slight variations in Montalvo’s _Amadis_ (Lib. II, cap. xi: _este villancico_). It would seem then that Joan, not Vasco, wrote _Amadis_. Joan de Lobeira,[135] or Joan Pirez Lobeira, flourished in the second half of the thirteenth century, and so we have _Amadis_ dating not only from the reign of King Dinis but from the first half of his reign. But does the existence of the poem entail that of a prose romance? The early mention of Tristan, e.g. by Alfonso X, does not necessarily imply the existence of a thirteenth-century Peninsular _Tristan_ in prose. May we not accept the poem, written in the stirring metre, dear to men of action, used by Alfonso X (C. M. 300), as merely a proof of the popularity of the story, fondness for an episode perhaps treated in greater detail in the Anglo-French original than in Montalvo’s version? Certainly it is in the highest degree improbable that a Spaniard, writing at the end of the fifteenth century, should extract a poem from the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ and insert it in his prose; but the improbability disappears if in the middle of the fourteenth century a Portuguese (Vasco de Lobeira), perhaps drawn to the story by the poem of his ancestor, incorporated it in his romance. The late Antonio Thomaz Pires in 1904 discovered at Elvas the will of a João de Lobeira, _mercador_, who died there in 1386, and in Dr. Theophilo Braga’s latest opinion[136] there were three Portuguese versions of _Amadis_: that of the father, this João de Lobeira, written in the time of King Dinis (a long-lived race these Lobeiras!), that of the son,[137] Vasco, and a third by Pedro de Lobeira in the first half of the fifteenth century. The threefold authorship of this family heirloom is even more _cruu de creer_ than the theory that a single Lobeira--Vasco--wrote it in the middle of the fourteenth century. A certain note of disapproval of _Amadis_ as fabulous, shared by Portuguese and Spanish writers,[138] perhaps indicates a fairly late date: its irresponsible fiction would be less excusable if it was written in an age which was beginning to attach serious importance to _nobiliarios_ and ‘true’ chronicles. Moreover, if the Portuguese adaptation of an Anglo-French legend had been even remotely as developed as the form in which we now have it, the Infante Afonso must have seen at once that the faithfulness of Amadis was absolutely essential to the story. But especially the fact that the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_, familiar with Tristan and the _matière de Bretagne_, are silent on the subject of _Amadis_ is significant.

In Gottfried Baist’s argument, based on a rigid division between early lyric poetry (as Portuguese) and early prose (as Spanish), the Leonoreta lyric, far from being a stumbling-block, is actually a sign of the Spanish origin of _Amadis_: as a fragment (14th c.) of a prose _Tristan_ exists in Spanish, and five Portuguese Tristan _lais_ figure in the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_, so the Leonoreta poem belongs to a Spanish _Amadis_ in prose. But although the priority and relations of early Portuguese and Spanish prose works are intricate and have not yet been thoroughly studied, it is clear that in many cases versions have been more carefully preserved in conservative Spain, while the Portuguese through neglect, fire, and earthquake have perished, and also that the natural tendency and development of prose, in view of the growing power of Castille and the greater pliancy of the Portuguese, was from Portuguese to Spanish, not from Spanish to Portuguese. And in one instance at least we have an early Portuguese prose work of the first importance, the _Demanda do Santo Graall_, which with its gallicisms can by no stretch of imagination be accounted a version from the Spanish. It is plainly legitimate to hold that the story of Amadis was first reduced to book form in the Peninsula in precisely the same way as was the story of Galahad, i.e. as a fourteenth-century Portuguese adaptation with the French text in view. Nicholas d’Herberay des Essarts, we know, claimed to have discovered fragments of _Amadis en langage picard_, Jorge Cardoso (1606-69) declared that Pero Lobeira translated _Amadis_ from the French,[139] and Bernardo Tasso, whose _Amadigi_ appeared in 1560, believed (_non è dubbio_) _Amadis_ to be derived _da qualche istoria di Bretagna_. Nor would the Portuguese, for all their familiarity with the story and topography of the Breton cycle, be likely to compose original works dealing with Vindilisora (Windsor) or Bristoya (Bristol). Unhappily, however deep may be our conviction (a conviction which stands in no need of antedating Hebrew versions of the 1508 _Amadis_) that the Peninsular _Amadis_ was originally Portuguese, it has now ceased to belong to Portuguese literature; another instance, if we may beg the question, of the gravitation to Spain. The Portuguese text, of which a copy, according to Leite Ferreira, existed in the library of the Duques de Aveiro in the sixteenth century (1598), and, according to the Conde da Ericeira, in the library of the Condes de Vimieiro in the seventeenth (1686), is still missing, as it was in 1726.

FOOTNOTES:

[104] Portuguese is then _uma lingua coherente, clara, um instrumento perfeito para a expressão do pensamento, cuja maior plasticidade dependerá apenas da cultura litteraria_, F. Adolpho Coelho, _A Lingua Portugueza_ (1881), p. 87.

[105] See _supra_, p. 48.

[106] See p. 160.

[107] Cf. for the seventeenth century Galhegos’ preface and _Mon. Lusit._ V. xvi. 3: _achandose neste reino poucos que escrevão versos e não seja na lingua estranjeira de Castilla_.

[108] e. g. _E matou a grande serpente dallagoa de lerne que auja sete cabeças. E persegujo as pias filhas de finees que lhe aujã odio e o queriã desherdar. E foy cõ jaasson o que adusse o velloso dourado da ylha de colcos. E destroyu troya_, &c.

[109] Cf. _Por este exemplo este doutor nos mostra_, or _este poeta nos dá ensinamento_, &c. The Fables of Aesop were translated into Portuguese prose by Manuel Mendez, a schoolmaster at Lagos (Algarve): _Vida e Fabulas do Insigne Fabulador Grego Esopo_. Evora, 1603.

[110] e. g. of an earthquake: _Era de mil e quatrocentos e quatro desoito dias do mez de Junho tremeo a terra ao serão muy rijamente e foi por espaço que disserom o Pater tres vezes._

[111] The _Cronica Troyana_, edited in 1900 by the Spanish scholar and patient investigator D. Andrés Martínez Salazar, is a fourteenth-century Galician version of Benoît de Saint-More’s _Roman de Troie_.

[112] The name _Nobiliario_ is one of the erudite words which in the sixteenth century, here as in so many other cases, ousted the indigenous.

[113] Its object was _por saberem os homens fidalgos de Portugal de qual linhagem vem e de quaes coutos, honras, mosteiros e igreias som naturaes_.

[114] His successful wile is similar to the stratagem in _Macbeth_: _e pois que a nave entrou pela foz cobrío-a de panos verdes em tal guisa que cuidassem que eram ramos, ca entonce o Douro era cuberto de hũa parte e da outra darvores_.

[115] _A escritura de maior utilidade que temos em Espanha_ (Frei Francisco Brandão, _Mon. Lus._ V. xvii. 5).

[116] i. e. the copy printed in _Portug. Mon. Hist._ from the only existing manuscript (= the copy by Gaspar Alvarez de Lousada Machado (1554-1634) in the Lisbon Torre do Tombo).

[117] The ‘songs of Cornwall’ are mentioned in C. V. 1007. Cf. 1140.

[118] See C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, _Cancioneiro da Ajuda_, ii. 479-525. They are called _lais_, _layx_ (C. C. B. 7, 8).

[119] _En la grand demanda de Santo Greal Se lee._ _Gral_ is still a common Portuguese word (= _almofariz_, a mortar).

[120] ruberte de borem is mentioned, 1887 ed., p. 44.

[121] Not to speak of _certas_, _onta_, _febre_ (= _faible_), _a voso sciente_, which may be found in other Portuguese works of the fifteenth century, _san_ (p. 136 _ad fin._) apparently = Fr. _s’en_.

[122] Cf. _asi como o conto a ja deuisado_ (1887 ed., p. 7).

[123] 1905 ed., p. 95.

[124] 1887 ed., p. 43: _despois uespesiom os eyxerdou e os destruio_.

[125] 1905 ed., pp. 17, 23, 106.

[126] _De Institutione Christianae Feminae_, Bk. I, cap. 5: ‘Tum et de pestiferis libris cuiusmodi sunt in Hispania [= the whole Peninsula], Amadisius, Splandianus, Florisandus, Tirantus, Tristanus, quarum ineptiarum nullus est finis; quotidie prodeunt novae: Caelistina laena, nequitiarum parens, carcer amorum: in Gallia Lancilotus a Lacu, Paris et Vienna, Ponthus et Sydonia, Petrus Provincialis et Magelona, Melusina, domina inexorabilis: in hac Belgica Florius et Albus Flos, Leonella et Cana morus, Curias et Floreta, Pyramus et Thisbe’ (_Ioannis Ludovici Vivis Valentini Opera Omnia_, 7 vols., Valentiae Edetanorum, 1782-8, iv. 87). A Portuguese _Tristan_ may have existed, a Portuguese original of _Tirant lo Blanch_ less probably, although Pedro Juan Martorell, who began it in the Valencian or Lemosin _a ii de Giner de lany 1460_, declares that he had not only translated it from English into Portuguese but (_mas encara_) from Portuguese into Valencian. He dedicated it to the _molt illustre Princep_ Ferdinand of Portugal. Very probably the fame and origin of _Amadis_ accounted for this ‘English’ original, as mythical as the Hungarian origin of _Las Sergas de Esplandian_, and for its alleged translation into Portuguese.

[127] Braunfels, _Versuch_: ‘Montalvo hatte, um einer Uebersetzung den Ruhm des mustergiltigen Styls und des reinsten Kastilianisch zu verschaffen, ein Geist ersten Rangs sein müssen, was er nicht war.’ Montalvo was probably not the real author even of the fourth book. The words (in this _Prólogo_ of his _Amadis_), _que hasta aquí no es memoria de ninguno ser visto_, refer not to the fourth book but to Montalvo’s _Sergas de Esplandian_, which is conveniently replaced by dots in T. Braga, _Questões_ (1881), p. 99, and _Hist. da Litt. Port._, i (1909), p. 313, and which the priest in _Don Quixote_ properly consigned to the flames.

[128] His connexion with Portugal was not voluntary. It was probably when he was a prisoner after the battle of Aljubarrota (1385) that he wrote the _Rimado de Palacio_, in which (st. 162) _Amadis_ is mentioned.

[129] For the later writers of Galician (second half 14th c.) see Professor Lang’s _Cancioneiro Gallego-Castelhano_ (1902).

[130] _Lua_ (glove), _cedo_, &c., of course occur in early Spanish prose. _Soledad_ certainly occurs in the first three books more frequently than in other Spanish prose. The Portuguese atmosphere is altogether absent in _Las Sergas_.

[131] Cap. 63: _o Livro d’Amadis, como quer que soomente este fosse feito a prazer de hum homem que se chamava Vasco Lobeira em tempo d’El Rey Dom Fernando, sendo todalas cousas do dito Liuro fingidas do Autor._

[132] _Libro das Antiguidades_ (1549), f. 32 v.: _E daqui_ [_do Porto_] _foi natural uasco lobeira ̃q fez os primʳᵒˢ 4 libros de amadis, obra certo muj subtil e graciosa e aprouada de todos os gallantes, mas comos_ [so] _estas couzas se secão em nossas mãos os Castelhanos lhe mudarão a linguoagem e atribuirão a obra assi_ [so]. This passage is, however, absent in the earliest manuscript. The spelling _couzas_ implies a late date for its introduction.

[133] So did Faria e Sousa, but he, too, had his Lobeira doubts, and after noting that Vasco de Lobeira was knighted by King João I says: ‘si ya no es que era otro del mismo nombre. Pero la Escritura de Amadis se tiene por del tiempo deste Rey don Iuan’ (_Fvente de Aganipe_ (Madrid, 1646), § 10). The obvious sympathy of the author for the _escudero viejo_ who is knighted in _Amadis_ (ii. 13, 14) amidst the laughter of the Court ladies is perhaps significant.

[134] _Cronica de D. Fernando_, cap. 177. The year of his death, given as 1403, is quite uncertain. Soares de Brito in the _Theatrum_ forms no independent opinion: ‘Vascus de Lobeyra inter Lusitanos Scriptores enumeratur a Faria.... Floruit tempore Fernandi Regis.’ Antonio Sousa de Macedo, in _Flores de España_, also follows Faria: Vasco de Lobeira _fué el primero que con gentil habilidad escribió libros de caballerías_. Nicolás Antonio (1617-84), _Bib. Nov._, 1688 ed., ii. 322, says that Vasco de Lobeira _vulgo inter cives suos existimari solet auctor celeberrimi inter famosa scripti_ Historia de Amadis de Gaula ... _cuius laudes nos inter Anonymos curiose collegimus. Ostendere autem Lusitanos Amadisium hunc Lusitane loquentem, uti Castellani Castellanum ostendunt, ius et aequum esset in dubia re ne verbis tantum agerent._ The challenge in the last sentence is of interest, as coming in date between the two statements (by Leite Ferreira and the Conde da Ericeira) asserting the existence of the Portuguese text.

[135] There was a Canon of Santiago of this name in 1295, and he may have come to the Portuguese Court on business concerning certain privileges of the Chapter which King Dinis confirmed in 1324.

[136] _Hist. da Litt. Port._ i (1909).

[137] In the document the only son mentioned is named Gonçalo.

[138] Zurara, loc. cit., _cousas fingidas_; López de Ayala, _mentiras probadas_. According to D. Francisco de Portugal (_Arte de Galantería_, p. 146) such lies could only be written in Spanish (_en la Portuguesa no se podía mentir tanto_). Portugal was writing in Spanish.

[139] _Agiologio Lusitano_, i (1652), p. 410: _E por seu mandado_ [of the Infante Pedro, son of João I] _trasladou de Frances em a nossa lingua Pero Lobeiro_ [so], _Tabalião d’Eluas, o liuro de Amadis._

§ 2

_Epic and Later Galician Poetry_

Some of the poems of the early _Cancioneiros_, as we have seen, have an historical character, but they are all written from a personal point of view. Portuguese history, with its heroic achievements such as the conquest of Algarve, seems to have begun just too late to be the subject of great anonymous epics, or rather the temperament of the Portuguese people eschewed them. Of five poems, long believed to be the earliest examples of Portuguese verse but no longer accepted by any sane critic as genuine, only one belongs to epic poetry. This _Poema da Cava_ or _da Perda de Espanha_ was an infant prodigy indeed, since it was supposed to have been written (in _oitavas_) in the eighth century. With a discretion passing that of Horace it kept itself from the world not for nine but nine hundred years, and was first published in Leitão de Andrada’s _Miscellanea_ (1629)[140]: _O rouço da Cava imprio de tal sanha_, &c.

Of the four other spurious poems, two[141] were alleged to be love letters of Egas Moniz Coelho, a cousin of the celebrated Egas Moniz Coelho of the twelfth century; another, published by Bernardo de Brito,[142] _Tinherabos nam tinherabos_, has a real charm as gibberish. Fascination, of a different kind, attaches also to the fifth:

No figueiral figueiredo, no figueiral entrei:
Tres niñas encontrara, tres niñas encontrei,