E o santo jardim de Deos
Florece sem fenecer.
The Auto da Lusitania is divided into two parts, the first of which is complete in itself and gives a description of a Jewish household at Lisbon, while the second is a medley which contains the celebrated scene of Everyman and Noman: Everyman seeks money, worldly honour, praise, life, paradise, lies and flattery; Noman is for conscience, virtue, truth. In the Romagem de Aggravados the fashionable and affected Court priest, Frei Paço, is the connecting link for a series of farcical scenes in which a peasant brings his son to become a priest, two noblemen discourse on love, two fishwives lament the excesses of the courtiers, Cerro Ventoso and Frei Narciso betray their mounting ambition, civil and ecclesiastic, the poor farmer Aparicianes implores Frei Paço to make a Court lady of his slovenly daughter, two nuns bewail their fate and two shepherdesses discuss their marriage prospects. The Auto da Mofina Mendes is especially celebrated because Mofina Mendes, personification of ill-luck, with her pot of oil is the forerunner of La Fontaine's Pierrette et son pot au lait: it was perhaps suggested to Vicente by the tale of Doña Truhana's pot of honey in El Conde Lucanor; the theme of counting one's chickens before they are hatched also forms the subject of one of the pasos, entitled Las Aceitunas, of the goldbeater of Seville, Lope de Rueda[147]. Vicente's piece consists, like some picture of El Greco, of a gloria, called, as Rueda's scenes, a passo, in which appear the Virgin and the Virtues (Prudence, Poverty, Humility and Faith) and an earthly shepherd scene. It is thus a combination of farce and religious and pastoral play. Vicente's last play, the Floresta de Enganos, is composed of scenes so disconnected that one of them is even omitted in the summary given after the first deceit: that in which a popular traditional theme, derived directly or indirectly from a French (perhaps originally Italian) source, Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, is presented, akin to that so piquantly narrated by Alarcón in El Sombrero de Tres Picos in the nineteenth century, the judge playing the part of the Corregidor and the malicious and sensible servant-girl that of the miller's wife.
In these last plays we see little or no advance: there is no attempt at unity or development of plot. We cannot deny that the creator of the penniless-splendid nobleman and the mincing courtier-priest and the author of such touches as the death of Ines' husband or the sudden ignominious flight of the judge possessed a true vein of comedy, but he remained to the end not technically a great dramatist but a wonderful lyric poet and a fascinating satirical observer of life. His influence was felt throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Portugal, by Camões and in the plays of Chiado, Prestes and a score of less celebrated dramatists, as well as in a considerable number of anonymous plays, but confined itself to the auto, which, combated by the followers of the classical drama and the Latin plays of the Jesuits, soon tended to deteriorate and lose its charm. In Spain his influence would seem to have been more widely felt, which is not surprising when we remember how many of his plays were Spanish in origin or language[148]. We may be sure that Lope de Rueda was acquainted with his plays and that several of them were known to Cervantes—the servant Benita insisting on telling her simple stories to her afflicted mistress is Sancho Panza to the life:
Benita. Diz que era un escudero....
Rubena. O quien no fuera nacida:
¿Viendome salir la vida
Paraste a contar patrañas?
Benita. Pues otra sé de un carnero....
Lope de Vega was likewise certainly familiar with some of Vicente's plays. If we consider these passages in El Viaje del Alma, the representación moral contained in El Peregrino en su Patria (1604), we must be convinced that the trilogy of Barcas, the Auto da Alma, and perhaps the Nao de Amores were not unknown to him:
Alma para Dios criada
Y hecha a imagen de Dios, etc.;
Hoy la Nave del deleite
Se quiere hacer a la mar:
¿Hay quien se quiera embarcar?;
Esta es la Nave donde cabe
Todo contento y placer[149].
The alleged imitation by Calderón in El Lirio y la Azucena is perhaps more doubtful. Vicente was already half forgotten in Calderon's day. In the artificial literature of the eighteenth century he suffered total eclipse although Correa Garção was able to appreciate him, nor need we see any direct influence in that of the nineteenth[150] except that on Almeida Garrett: the similar passages in Goethe's Faust and Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius were no doubt purely accidental. Happily, however, we are able to point to a certain influence of the great national poet of Portugal on some of the Portuguese poets of the twentieth century. The promised edition of his plays will increase this influence and render him secure from that neglect which during three centuries practically deprived Portugal and the world of one of the most charming and inspired of the world's poets.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Falamos do nosso Shakespeare, de Gil Vicente (A. Herculano, Historia da Inquisição em Portugal, ed. 1906, vol. I. p. 223). The references throughout are to the Hamburg 3 vol. 1834 edition.