Portugal of the Portuguese

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

The first Portuguese poem was probably not prior to the beginning of the thirteenth century, or prior by a very few years only, but unwritten songs of the people had been composed, especially by the women, probably without a break since the days of Rome. The Portuguese Court poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were not cut off from the life of the people. How simple were the Courts of those days may be realised from the rules drawn up for the King’s children by Alfonso the Learned, whose daughter Isabel was mother of King Diniz of Portugal. The King’s sons must wash their hands before and after meals, and not wipe them on their clothes. They must not sing at meals lest they seem to be merry with wine, nor bend over the dish as if they wanted all the food. And thus among the more servile imitations of Provençal poetry crept in the Court versions of the Cantares de amigo, sung by the people in Galicia and Portugal, which still delight by their freshness and savour of the soil. With the death of King Diniz (1325), of whose own poems over a hundred survive, the Provençal Portuguese school of poetry ended. If Spain borrowed from Portugal in the composition of the early lyrics, she repaid the debt later with the romances, those lovely fifteenth and sixteenth century crystallisations of the longer early heroic poems and chronicles of Spain. So few romances originally belonged to Portugal that Spanish came to be regarded as the appropriate language for them, and a Portuguese poet composing a romance would do so in Castilian as in the thirteenth century a Spanish poet would compose his lyrics in Portuguese. Gil Vicente wrote his ballad of Duardos and Flérida in Spanish, and it was only three centuries later that it was translated into Portuguese, probably by Almeida Garrett. It was the Breton cycle which in its vague romance especially appealed to Portuguese taste, and its episodes have been, with the death of Inés de Castro, the prominent theme in Portuguese literature. In history, too, in the fourteenth century, Nun’ Alvares took Sir Galahad for ideal, and in the sixteenth King Sebastian became a Portuguese King Arthur, his return long looked for in Portugal. There is a gap in Portuguese literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, similar to that in the seventeenth and eighteenth, so far as poetry is concerned, and the sixteenth, during which Portuguese poetry revived and reached its highest expression, began with dull and uninspired Court poems—of a Court now more artificial than that of King Diniz—such as the majority of those in Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro, containing poems of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and published in 1516.

First Prose.

In prose, however, the fifteenth century was remarkable. Portuguese prose began with brief jejune chronicles, and with nobiliarios or livros de linhagens (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). A famous Livro de linhagens, or book of descents, was that compiled by Pedro, son of King Diniz, in prose which already possesses considerable literary pretensions, although it cannot compare for clearness, grace, and concision with the admirable work of King Duarte, O Leal Conselheiro (circa 1430).

Chronicles.

To the fifteenth century also belong the first important chronicles. Fernão Lopes, who died in the middle of the century, and wrote chronicles which have been set side by side with or even above those of Froissart, was Keeper of the Royal Archives, and Chronista môr. As such he was charged to “set forth in chronicles the histories of the kings—poer em coronycas as estorias dos reis.” He wrote that of King João I, and probably that of all the other Kings of Portugal to his own day. Lopes is described as “a notable person” by his successor, Gomes Eannes de Azurara, who died in 1474, and who completed the chronicle of João I, and wrote among other works the Chronica do descobrimento e conquista da Guiné (published at Paris, 1841; translated into English, with an important study, by Mr. Edgar Prestage). Ruy de Pina became Chronista môr in 1497, and wrote or re-wrote the chronicles of the Kings of Portugal from Sancho I to João II in a somewhat more affected and artificial style than that of his predecessors.

Damião de Goes.

The sixteenth century, famous for its poets in Portugal as in other countries, was also exceedingly rich in Portuguese prose of the most varied kinds. Damião de Goes (1502-74) took up the work of the early chronicles, and wrote during the years 1557-66 his famous Chronica de Dom Manoel, a clear and careful account of the discovery and conquest of India and of events at home. Damião de Goes’ life and character are even more interesting than his works, and although his travels did not extend beyond Europe they were as arresting in their way as are the Peregrinações of Fernão Mendes Pinto (1509-80) in theirs.

Fernão Mendes Pinto.

During twenty-one years the life of the latter was a series of “great hardships and misfortunes and dangers.” He was thirteen times taken captive, and twenty-one times (in another passage he says sixteen times) sold as a slave during his adventurous career in the East, and he has left us the most vivid and delightful memoirs. They read like a modern novel, but, except for some obvious mistakes in facts and figures, bear the stamp of truth.

History.