Part 15

The romantic story of Macias had not been given literary form, but it exercised a wide influence over the Portuguese poets of the sixteenth century. Together perhaps with Diego de San Pedro’s _Carcel de Amor_, the Spanish version of Boccaccio’s _Fiammetta_, and especially Rodriguez de la Cámara’s _El siervo libre de Amor_ (containing the _Estoria de los dos amadores Ardanlier e Liesa_), it must have been in the mind of BERNARDIM RIBEIRO (1482-1552) when he wrote that ‘gentle tale of love and languishment’ the book of _Saudades_, which is always known (like the first farce of Gil Vicente) from its first three words as _Menina e moça_. Yet it is not really an imitative work, being, indeed, remarkable for its unaffected sincerity, as the expression of a personal experience. Its passionate truth continues to delight many readers.[302] Almost all our information about Ribeiro’s life is derived from his writings, which are in part evidently autobiographical, and it shrinks or expands according to the degree of the critic’s wariness or ingenuity. His birthplace is declared to have been the quaint Alentejan village of Torrão. A passage in the eclogue _Jano e Franco_ says that Jano fled thence at the time of the great famine. The unhappy frequency of famines makes the date doubtful, but if the year of Ribeiro’s birth be correctly stated in an official document of May 6, 1642, as 1482, we may suppose--since Jano was twenty-one--that he left his native Alentejo for Lisbon in 1503. It is possible that he studied law and took his degree at the University (at Lisbon) a few years later (1507-11?),[303] and became secretary to King João III in 1524. As a _cavalleiro fidalgo_ he had his place at Court, as poet he contributed to the _Cancioneiro Geral_ (1516). A hopeless passion drove him from the Court, drove him perhaps to Italy, and finally deprived him of his reason, so that his last years were spent in the Lisbon Hospital de Todos os Santos.[304] Successive generations have busied themselves over the object of his passion. The romantic tradition that it was the Princess Beatriz, twenty-two years his junior, the daughter of King Manuel for whose marriage to the Duke of Savoy in 1521 Gil Vicente wrote the _Cortes de Jupiter_, is now definitely discarded. That it was Queen Juana la Loca of Castille no one except Varnhagen has ever imagined. But literary critics continue to be tempted by the transparent anagrams of Ribeiro’s novel (adopted evidently in order to make the story unintelligible to all except the inner circle of the Court). Dr. Theophilo Braga has an ingeniously fabricated theory that Aonia was Ribeiro’s cousin, Joana Tavares Zagalo. Lamentor at least can scarcely have been King Manuel, since he sends his daughter to the king’s Court. The scenery appears to be a combination of that of the Serra de Sintra near Lisbon with that of Alentejo. The story opens with an introductory chapter in which a young girl (_menina e moça_), who has taken refuge in the _serra_ far from all human society, announces her intention of writing down what she had seen and heard in a small book (_livrinho_), not for the happy to read but for the sad, or rather for none at all, seeing that of him for whom alone it is intended she has had no news since his and her misfortune bore him away to far-distant lands. Thus we have the thirteenth-century _amiga_ mourning for her lover. _Ai Deus! e u é?_ Presently, as she shelters from the noonday _calma_ beneath trees that overhang a gently flowing stream, a nightingale pours forth its song, and then dying with its song falls with a shower of leaves and is borne away songless by the silent stream.[305] She is still bewailing its fate when another, older but equally sad, lady (_dona_) appears, and the _menina_ becomes an almost silent listener to the end of the book while the _dona_ unfolds the tale which is its true subject, the history of two friends Narbindel and Bastião. But it begins with the love adventure of Lamentor and Belisa. It is only in the ninth chapter that the knight Narbindel arrives and falls in love with Belisa’s sister Aonia, adopting a shepherd’s life in order to be near her palace. It is in fact a romance of chivalry in pastoral garb. But Ribeiro might have introduced the pastoral romance without changing the fantastic features. It is in his singular combination of passion and realism that his true originality consists. His power of giving vivid expression to tranquil scenes--the whole of the first part has something of the quiet intensity of a background by Correggio, as well as his ‘softer outline’, and although there is no explicit indication of colour it is clearly felt by the reader--and his gentle love of Nature, or rather his love of Nature in its gentler aspects, cast over the book a strange charm. The softly flowing streams, the trees and birds and delicious shade, beautiful dawns, the birds seeking their nests at evening, the flowers _que a seu prazer se estendem_, the _mateiros_ going out to cut brushwood, the shepherds asleep round their fire at night, are described with great naturalness and truth, often with familiar words and colloquial phrases. The reason of the extreme intricacy of the plot was not the wish to conceal the author’s love story in a labyrinthine maze[306] in order to exercise the ingenuity of nineteenth-century professors, but to be true to life. In life events are not rounded and distinct but merge into and react on one another in an endless ravelled skein: _Das tristezas não se pode contar nada ordenadamente porque desordenadamente acontecem ellas_ (cap. 1). Ribeiro thus anticipates by four centuries the theory enunciated in Spain by Azorín that a novel, like life, should have no plot,[307] and his book has a certain modernity. We may refuse him the name of novelist, but many a novelist might envy his lifelike portrayal of scenes and sentiments. It has been doubted whether he wrote the second part of the story. It consists of fifty-eight short chapters, and opens with a new episode, the love of Avalor for Arima, daughter of Lamentor (cap. 1-24), and it is even more bewildering in its confusion than is Part I. The scenes are less idyllic, the tone more that of a conventional romance of chivalry, yet the realism is maintained. It is on no hippogriff that Avalor goes to the rescue of the distressed maiden: in fact, he had set out on his adventure in a rowing-boat and his hands blistered. If later there are mortal combats with wicked knights, with a bear, with giants, there are also scenes, as in chapters 9, 12, 23--of an impassioned _saudade_,[308] of dove and nightingale--which could only have been written by the author of Part I.[309] His own story, still related by the _dona_, is only resumed in chapter 26, or rather 32, since the intervening chapters deal with events prior to those with which Part I begins. Bimnarder, now again Narbindel--the name Bernardim was also spelt Bernaldim--after Aonia’s marriage lives with an old hermit and his nephew, Godivo, and passes his time in tears and contemplation, as in Part I. But he is discovered by his faithful squire, and meets Aonia, and the lovers are killed by the jealous husband (cap. 48). The last chapters are concerned with the happier love story of Romabisa and Tasbião.

Narbindel, the second of the two knights, the two friends _de que é a nossa historia_,[310] dies: therefore Bernardim Ribeiro cannot have written the second part. But it is rather a nice point; one may imagine that Ribeiro’s delight in so tragic an episode would compensate him amply for the obvious anachronism, and after all it is the _dona_ who tells the story.[311] The inconsistencies of detail need not concern us overmuch. That Belisa has a mother in Part I and is ‘brought up without a mother’ in Part II, that the Castle of Lamentor exists in Part II at a time when, according to Part I, it was not yet begun, that the name of Aonia’s husband is in Part I Fileno, and in Part II Orphileno, are just such contradictions as an alien continuer would most studiously have avoided, and we all know what happened to Sancho’s ass in a far less intricate story. Or they may be explained by the fact that Ribeiro had not revised his tale before it was printed, or by corrections made in copies of the original manuscript.[312] Perhaps on the whole we may conclude that Ribeiro, like Cervantes, by an exception wrote a valuable second part, but, unlike Cervantes, was unable to maintain it altogether on a level with the first. The mingling of rapt passion and colloquialisms is with Ribeiro not the inability of a poet to express himself but a deliberate mannerism, and is present in the five eclogues with which he introduced pastoral poetry. By his quiet resolution to be natural he thus became doubly an innovator, in poetry and prose. That he was a true poet is proved by the _romances_ in his novel: _Pensando vos estou, filha_ (Pt. I, cap. 21) and _Pola ribeira de um rio_ (Pt. II, cap. 11).[313] The eclogues may not excel those poems, but in their directness, primitive freshness, and grace they form a group apart, entirely distinct from their numerous eclogue progeny. One eclogue only, the celebrated _Trovas de Crisfal_, resembles them. The resemblance is remarkable and cannot fail to strike the most careless reader. Before Snr. Delfim Guimarães began his spirited campaign in favour of identification, the similarity had been recorded by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in the _Grundriss_[314]: the extraordinary similarity of these _Trovas_ to the poetry of Ribeiro and to nothing else in Portuguese literature. In this poem of some 900 lines written in octosyllabic _decimas_, like Ribeiro’s eclogues, we have that romantic, passionate _saudade_ and sentimental grief, the mystic visions, the simplicity, the ingenuous conceits, wistfully humorous, the sententious reflections, the elliptical concision, the real shepherds, the familiar language, the love of Nature which are peculiarly Ribeiro’s. Tradition assigns the _Trovas_ to CRISTOVAM FALCÃO (_c._ 1512-53?),[315] who was born at Portalegre, in Alentejo, was made a _moço fidalgo_ in 1527, and is supposed to have fallen in love with and secretly married D. Maria Brandão (i.e. the Maria of the _Trovas_), whom her parents confined as a punishment in the convent of Lorvão. At the risk of being dubbed incorrigibly _simplicista_ one must confess that the simultaneous appearance of these two poets from Alentejo, not _fertil en poetas_, taxes one’s belief to the utmost. May not the secret marriage deduced from the _Trovas_ have been described by Ribeiro in his keen sympathy for his friend’s position, so like his own? The contention is not that Cristovam Falcão did not exist--there were several--or did not fall in love with Maria Brandão--_a do Crisfal_--or did not marry her, but that he did not write verses in the style familiar to us as that of Ribeiro.[316] It is remarkable that the very critics who represent Ribeiro in his _novela_ as hiding like a cuttle-fish in his own ink change their method when they come to the eclogues and accept every name and allusion with the greatest literalness, as though it were a poet’s duty to wear his heart in his verses. It is idle to adduce the fact that Cristovam Falcão wrote ungrammatical letters (so did Keats), or to devise far-fetched interpretations (such as _Crisma falso_) for the word Crisfal. What more probable than that Ribeiro and Falcão, born in the same province, became friends at Court, and that Ribeiro introduced his friend in one of his poems as he is supposed to have introduced Sá de Miranda in another, and as Miranda introduces Ribeiro (_Canta Ribero los males de amor_)? If in his favourite manner he added a little mystification in the word Crisfal, what more characteristic? The very form of the poem, in which first the _Autor_ and then Crisfal speaks (_Falla Crisfal_) suggests this, as does the title: _Trovas de um pastor per nome Crisfal_, compared with the definite _Trovas de dous pastores_ ... _Feitas por Bernaldim Ribeiro_.[317] It is not difficult to explain the printing of the _Trovas_ together with the works of Ribeiro and the hesitancy of the early editions in ascribing them, on hearsay, to Cristovam Falcão; but the word Crisfal caught the fancy, and those who learnt that it stood for Cristovam Falcão would inevitably confuse the explanation of the anagram with the authorship of the poem. One of those who did so was Gaspar Fructuoso (or Antonio Cordeiro), and the tradition which had begun so shakily with a _dizem ser_ gained strength with the years. Presumably the editor of the 1559 edition knew what was to be known on the subject, yet he speaks with a quavering uncertainty: it is only much later that the ascription to Cristovam Falcão becomes a fixed belief.[318] The eighth _Decada_ of Diogo do Couto was not published till 1673, i. e. over half a century after the death of its author. The explanatory sentence _aquelle que fez aquellas antigas e nomeadas_ (or _namoradas_) _trovas de Crisfal_[319] may well be, and probably is, a later interpolation. But although a few scholars definitely hold that Ribeiro wrote this poem, _grammatici certant_ and, should tradition prove too strong, we have to accept a second writer who claims an undying place in Portuguese literature owing to the marvellous success with which, divesting his muse of any qualities of its own, he identified himself with a poet who is the most characteristically Portuguese, but also the most individual of impassioned singers: Bernardim Ribeiro.

A kind of continuation of the story of _Crisfal_ (who is now enchanted within the fountain of his own tears) appeared at the end of the century in a small collection of poems entitled _Sylvia de Lisardo_ (1597). It contains forty-one sonnets (of which one only is in Spanish), three eclogues in _tercetos_ and _oitavas_, and various _romances_ (in Spanish) and shorter poems, and has been ascribed, without sufficient reason, to the historian Frei Bernardo de Brito. These poems must remain anonymous, and they throw no light on the _Crisfal_ problem, but in their true poetical feeling and power of expression they deserved their popularity[320] in the first half of the seventeenth century.

It is not certain but it is probable that Ribeiro went to Italy, and his Italian travels may have coincided with those of his life-long friend, the champion of humanism in Portugal, FRANCISCO DE SÁ DE MIRANDA (_c._ 1485-1558), the most famous of all the Portuguese poets with the exception of Camões and Gil Vicente. As a lyric poet far inferior to either of them, his great influence was due partly to his character, partly to his introduction of the new school of poetry, the _versos de medida nova_, or _de arte maior_, replacing the national _trovas de medida velha_ (octosyllabic _redondilhas_) by the Italian hendecasyllabics: Petrarca’s sonnets and canzoni, Dante’s _terza rima_ (_tercetos_), and the _octava rima_ of Poliziano and Ariosto. The exact date of Miranda’s birth is still uncertain, but if he was the eldest of five sons of the Coimbra Canon, Gonçalo Mendez de Sá, who were legitimized in 1490, he must have been born about the year 1485. Yet one would willingly make him younger. His life in Minho certainly sounds too active for a man of fifty: perhaps _c._ 1490 would be nearer the mark. He studied at the University at Lisbon and early frequented the Court. He soon won distinction as a scholar and was a Doctor of Law when he contributed several poems to Garcia de Resende’s _Cancioneiro_ (1516). His journey to Italy a few years later, in 1521, may have been due merely to the natural desire of a scholar to see Rome or there may have been other motives, a love affair of his own or his friendship with Bernardim Ribeiro. He was distantly related to the great Italian family of Colonna (as he was to Garci Lasso) and in Italy perhaps met the celebrated Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547), Marchesa di Pescara, besides probably most of the other distinguished Italians of the time, Lattanzio Tolomei, Sannazzaro, Cardinal Bembo, Giovanni Rucellai, Ariosto. During five years he saw the principal cities of Italy and Sicily and returned to Portugal in 1526 (or earlier, possibly after three years, in 1524) with a deep knowledge of Italian literature and the firm resolve to acclimatize in his country the metres in which the Italians had written things so divine. If he had seen at Rome the _Cancioneiro_ of thirteenth-century Portuguese poets[321] he must have realized that the metres were not so foreign as many might think; if he met Boscán on his homeward journey his determination to become innovator or restorer[322] would be strengthened. King João III was on the throne, and we are told in Miranda’s earliest biography (1614), which is attributed with some probability to D. Gonçalo Coutinho, that he became ‘one of the most esteemed courtiers of his time’. He was an enthusiastic believer in monarchy and in the divinity that doth hedge a king, but was less enamoured of the growing corruption and luxury at Court: probably he was himself more esteemed by the king than by the courtiers, and after the poetry of Italy he could scarcely share their taste for the trivial verses of the _Cancioneiro Geral_ nor could they see how a compliment could be turned more neatly than in the old _esparsas_ and _vilancetes_. During these years he wrote his first play, _Os Estranjeiros_, the eclogue _Alexo_ with _oitavas_ in Portuguese, and the _Fabula do Mondego_, perhaps in order to show his superiority over Gil Vicente.

There was an obvious antagonism between the laughing and the weeping reformer (for both protested vigorously in their different ways against the growing materialism of the day), between the learned, philosophical and the natural, human poet, and Vicente’s humour probably appeared to Sá de Miranda as unintelligible and undignified as Miranda’s hendecasyllabic poems may have appeared melancholy-thin and artificial to Vicente: _et ce n’est point ainsi que parle la Nature_. But the line in the introduction of the _Fabula do Mondego_ in which Miranda speaks of the king’s condescension,

Al canto pastoril ya hecho osado,