RIBEYRA, GIL VICENTE, SAA DE MIRANDA, FERREIRA.
The same spirit that inspired the Spanish Cancionero, and animated the people of Castile with the love of song, spread itself to the western portion of the peninsula; and; from the earliest times, Portuguese poets composed, and the population of Portugal sang, in their native dialect: and thus using it as the medium for conveying their dearest feelings, caused it to be perpetuated as a national language. Originally the Portuguese tongue was the same as the Gallician; and, had Portugal remained a province of Spain, its peculiar dialect had, like that of Arragon and of Gallicia, been driven from the fields of literature by the Castilian, and while (to use an appropriate metaphor) it might creep in tiny rivulets here and there over the country, the Castilian had flowed a mighty river, receiving all minor streams as tributaries. But at quite the close of the eleventh century Alphonso VI., a Spanish sovereign, celebrated for his victories over the Moors, gave the county of Portugal as a dowry to his daughter on her marriage with Henry of Burgundy, a prince of the royal family of France. The son of this prince, Alphonso Henriquez, was the founder of the Portuguese monarchy. He conquered all that portion of the peninsula that forms Portugal, with the exception of the Algarve. He took Lisbon, and thus became possessed of a powerful and rich capital, and he signalised his successes, by changing the appellation of what had hitherto been a province, and by naming his dominions a kingdom. From this time the Portuguese became a separate nation from the Castilian; their institutions became national, and their language asserted for itself a distinct existence.
The Portuguese were a poetic people, and the Portuguese language adapted to poetry. It is softer than the Castilian, it discards more entirely Latin consonants; but with all, there is something truncated and incomplete in its sounds, very different from the sonorous beauty of the Spanish. It did not adopt the Arabic guttural, but it acquired, no one knows whence, a nasal twang, more decided and obtrusive even than that of the French, which considerably mars its melody. Still it is expressive, it is soft, and it is harmonious; and these qualities rendered it applicable to verse: so that a poet found no difficulty in clothing his ideas and emotions in the language of his native country. Many poets flourished therefore at an early age, though we know little of their productions. Endeavours have been made to find their ancient cancioneiro geral[125], but they were unsuccessful, and a guess only can be made as to the nature of their contents.
The Portuguese nation was as peculiar in its pursuits and character as in its language. They were not an agricultural but a pastoral people; and at the same time, their long extent of sea shore led them to the pursuits of commerce and navigation. While the Italian republics were enriching themselves by the trade of the Mediterranean, and while Spain, under Ferdinand and Isabella was, by conquering the whole of its territory from the Moors, laying the foundation of the brief grandeur of Charles V., and the despotism and national degradation that followed, the sovereigns of Portugal were encouraging their subjects in the maritime discoveries, which in a short time changed the aspect of the civilised globe: for the very expedition of Columbus was the offspring of the Portuguese voyages. It was for the sake of discovering another route to India, than the hitherto unsuccessful one along the coast of Africa, that he sailed over the illimitable Western Sea. In 1487, Bartolomeo Diaz doubled the Cape of Good Hope: many years had been previously occupied in creeping along the shores of Africa; but the moment this Cape was doubled, the navigators made a spring, and the celebrated Vasco de Gama reached the renowned and unvisited shores of India. In less than fifteen years from this time, Francisco de Almeida, and Alfonso de Albuquerque founded a Portuguese kingdom in Hindostan, of which Goa was the capital. We may imagine the spirit and enthusiasm that animated this people; they found a new world overflowing with all the precious treasures most valued in Europe; they did not content themselves with trading with the people, a people highly civilised, possessed of literature and all the appendages of an advanced state of human political association; but by their valour they conquered them and made a portion of the country their own. High notions of national importance and future national glory filled their souls; it was a period when each man could regard his native country with pride, and such a time is peculiarly favourable to the birth of genius, and, above all, to the developement of the spirit of poetry.
[Bernardim Ribeyro] is named the Ennius of Portugal. He was a man of an enthusiastic and tender disposition; his poems, full of passion and despair, emanated from an attachment to some unknown lady; some say the infanta Donna Beatrice, the king's daughter. His eclogues are more known than the rest of his works, and are considered the most excellent[126]; yet, though they are feeling, there is a poverty of ideas, and a want of classical correctness and compression, that speaks of the infancy of composition. But his most celebrated work is an unfinished prose romance, in which, under feigned names and obscure allusions, he narrates his own history and loves. We have not seen this work, and borrow the account of it from Bouterwek, who observes, that "such is the obscurity of the whole, that nothing can be comprehended of the circumstances without the utmost effort of attention. The monotony of incessant love complaints, renders the prolixity of the narrative still more tedious; but even amidst that monotony and prolixity, it is easy to recognise a spirit truly poetic, more remarkable however for susceptibility than energy."
Other poets succeeded to Ribeyro, who also sang of love and pastoral themes, and the poetry of Portugal as well as that of Spain, confined itself to the language of sentiment and description—instead of assuming an heroic and epic measure.
The reformation of Castilian poetry introduced into Spain by Boscan and Garcilaso, penetrated into Portugal; and, singularly enough, the poets who followed, quitted their native idiom to adopt that of the rival country. The cause of so unpatriotic an adoption can only be guessed at. Bouterwek attributes it to the more sonorous and complete sound of the Castilian. Spain, it may be observed, was the larger country and in more immediate connection with Italy; when, therefore, Italian forms of poetic composition were introduced into the peninsula, they flowed, as it were, through Spain, and arrived at the West clothed in a Spanish garb. Perceiving the superior power and charm of the Petrarchist compositions, their imitators at once adopted the very language in which they were clothed. [Saa de Miranda] wrote his best works, his eclogues, in Spanish, though the same spirit that led him to desert Latin, so long the favourite of educated men, also induced him to write in his native language, and Francisco Diaz names him the real founder of Portuguese poetry. Saa de Miranda was a man of strong feelings, with something too of an eccentric turn of mind. He insisted on marrying a lady neither young nor handsome, whom he had never seen; but whose reputation for discretion and goodness charmed him. He became so attached to her, that when she died some years after, he remained that most rare of all men, an inconsolable widower; giving up all the pursuits and purposes of life—neither shaving his beard nor paring his nails—and three years after following her to the grave. And Jorge de Montemayor altogether cast aside his native language, and enriched the Castilian by a new form of composition, the pastoral romance, which became a general favourite throughout Spain, imitated by every writer, but not excelled by any.
In this brief summary of the predecessors of Camoens, introduced chiefly to shew the state of national poetry when he appeared, we are unable to do full justice to any of these writers, and are obliged to omit the names of many. But we must not pass over [Gil Vicente], who is styled the Portuguese Plautus. Very little is known of him—the very period of his birth only guessed at; it is supposed that he was born at the close ofthe fifteenth century. He was an indefatigable writer, and furnished the royal family and public with dramatic entertainments suited to the taste of the age. He wrote entirely in the old national manner. He appears to have been the inventor of Autos, or spiritual dramas, which raised into a regular and poetic style of play the monkish or buffoonish festive representations.
Doctor Bowring has introduced translations of several of this poet's songs; these were written in Spanish, they are characterised by a charming simplicity, and are peculiarly short; one chord of a lyre struck, as it were, one emotion of the heart breathed forth in words; without elaborate display or any attempt at imagery or metaphor beyond the one single feeling that dictates the poem.
[Antonio Ferreira] must be mentioned as a classic poet of Portugal. He is styled the Portuguese Horace. He was of noble family, and destined by his parents to fill some high public office in the state. He took the degree of doctor in the university of Coimbra, where he studied civil law. He was an enthusiastic lover of his native language, and resolved never to write in any other, at the same time that he founded his taste and style on the study of Horace. He admired also the excellencies of Italian poetry, and introduced the measure and structure of its verse into the Portuguese. It was the object of his ambition at once to be himself a classic poet; and to give to his native Portugal a classic style of poetry. Ferreira was nine and twenty when he published the first collection of his poetic works. He had friends who admired his genius and joined him in his pursuits. He quitted the university for the court, and filled a high place as judge, and was also appointed gentleman of the royal household; he became an oracle of criticism, and looked forward to brilliant prospects through life, when he died of the plague which raged in Lisbon in 1569, at the age of forty-one.