Part 16

probably refers to some previous effort of his own rather than to the work of Vicente, and Miranda was in Italy when Gil Vicente was taunted by certain _homems de bom saber_ and turned the tables on them in the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_. The _Fabula do Mondego_ is a cold, stilted production of 600 lines in Petrarcan stanzas, the subject of which was partly derived from Angelo Ambrogini (Poliziano). In 1532 the King gave Miranda a _commenda_ (benefice) of the Order of Christ on the banks of the Neiva in Minho, and having acquired the neighbouring estate of Tapada (_quinta da Tapada_) he left the Court and retired to it not many months later. Miranda’s love of Nature was very deep, from his boyhood at Coimbra he had preferred the country to life in cities, and probably no other incentive was required, although it is thought that he may have been too zealous in support of Bernardim Ribeiro and that a passage in _Alexo_ (1532?) offended the powerful favourite, the Conde da Castanheira. Whatever the cause of his withdrawal, literature must call it blessed, for his new life in the country suited his temperament; the independence of character shown in his fine letter (one of the most famous poems in the Portuguese language) addressed to King João III developed, and close contact with the country and the peasants gave his poetry that indigenous flavour and peculiar charm which have fascinated all readers of the eclogue _Basto_, that individual stamp in which the Court poetry was infallibly lacking. He had already written his best work--for this eclogue and the letters show the real Miranda, pointed, original, racy of the soil--and written it in _quintilhas_, when in 1536 he married Briolanja, the sister of his old friend, now his neighbour at Crasto, Manuel Machado de Azevedo. Some miles away, at the straggling little village of Cabeceiras de Basto, he had other intimate friends, the Pereiras, and the gift, by one of these two brothers, Antonio Nunalvarez Pereira, of a manuscript of Garci Lasso de la Vega’s poems shortly before Miranda’s marriage revived his enthusiasm for the alien metres. He turned again to the hendecasyllable and wrote the eclogues _Andrés_ (1535), _Celia_, and _Nemoroso_ (1537), the latter in memory of the tragic death of Garci Lasso in the preceding year. He returned to the _quintilha_ later, employing it with flowing ease in _A Egipciaca Santa Maria_ (or _Santa Maria Egipciaca_), which was probably written between 1544 and 1554, when he was educating his two sons with _amor encoberto e moderado_ (_A Egipciaca_, p. 3), and nearer the former than the latter date. Its vigour and the promise of more[323] after 721 _quintilhas_ preclude the date (1556-8) assigned to it by its first editor, even without the statement of the 1614 biographer that Miranda wrote scarcely anything after his wife’s death in 1555; but it may have been written even earlier, before 1544. And still through all these various poems, despite their undeniable value and incidental beauties, it is the man, his life and character, that interest us. The wild yet green and peaceful scenery of Minho accorded well with his _alma soberana_, at once active and contemplative, disciplined and independent. At first hunting the wolf and boar occupied his leisure--we see him out with his dogs Hunter, Swallowfoot, &c., in crimson dawn and breathless noonday--and gave him a hundred opportunities for quiet observation of Nature, the streams, especially the birds, and the peasants. The poems written soon after his arrival still retain the freshness of these impressions. His evenings were spent with his friends at Cabeceiras--true _noctes cenaeque deum_--or in the more formal society at Crasto or with music--he played the viola--or his favourite authors, Homer in Greek, or Horace, the Bible, the Italians, or Garci Lasso and Boscán. Later gardening[324] and the education of his sons and entertainment of visitors took the place of his favourite wolf-hunting. As his fame and influence spread, Diogo Bernardez (whose recollections of Miranda were recorded in the 1614 life) was not the only disciple who came to see him in his retreat, and he corresponded in verse with most of the poets of the time, Andrade Caminha, Montemôr, Ferreira, D. Manuel de Portugal, Bernardez. Cardinal Henrique was a steadfast admirer of his work, and the young Prince João asked for a copy: _lhas mandou pedir_. This wide recognition after the first coldness[325] was some measure of comfort for the many sorrows of his last years, the death of his eldest son Gonçalo, killed in his teens in Africa (1553), of his wife (1555), of that promising precocious Prince João (1537-54) to whom he had thrice sent a collection of his poems, the departure of his brother, Mem, to become one of the most notable Governors of Brazil (1557). In the latter year King João died, leaving an infant heir to a distracted kingdom, and Miranda’s death followed a few months later. In a sense this philosopher was the most un-Portuguese of poets, for he had no facility in verse. He went on hammering his lines, altering, erasing, compressing in a divine discontent. He had a lofty conception of the poet’s art--to express the noblest sentiment in the best and fewest words--five versions of _Alexo_, twelve of _Basto_, attest his untiring zeal and his ‘art to blot’. The elliptical abruptness of his native _quintilhas_, by which they have something in common with those of Ribeiro, are not their least charm, and gives an effective emphasis to his sententious philosophy. In introducing the new measures[326] he used the Castilian language as being the most natural and suitable until, but only until, they should be thoroughly acclimatized. He wrote Castilian not fluently--that was not his gift--but correctly, with only occasional _lusitanismos_. His best work, however, was written in Portuguese: in the new poetry with which his name is for ever associated he is only the forerunner of the work of Diogo Bernardez and Camões,[327] the founder of a school to which Portuguese literature owes some of its chief glories. In Portuguese he wrote his comedies and, about half a century before Samuel Daniel’s _Cleopatra_ (1592), a tragedy _Cleopatra_, of which we only possess a few lines.[328] The poem on the life and conversion of St. Mary of Egypt[329] (a favourite theme a few centuries earlier, as in the Spanish _Vida de Santa Maria Egipciaqua_ (13th c.?), the fourteenth-century _Vida de Maria Egipcia_, and the French _Vie de Sainte Marie l’Égyptienne_) is stamped with the author’s sententious wisdom and love of discipline. It contains quaint plays on words (_Ide ao mar que por amar_, p. 169), _tours de force_ such as the three _quintilhas_ of _esdruxulos_ (pp. 179-80), and rises to wonderful lyric beauty in the saint’s farewell to Earth (_Vou para um jardim de flores_, pp. 166-9). He intended the poem to be ‘rare, unique and excellent’ and to some extent he achieved his aim. In much of his work the diction is rough and halting, but the greatness of the man nevertheless extends to his poetry. Perhaps the best example of this is the melancholy grandeur of the sonnet, technically so imperfect, _O sol é grande_. Force of character made him not only a laborious but a successful craftsman. When he died, honoured and admired by all the best intellects in the country, the position of the new school was assured and he had been able to hail with joy the support of younger writers: _Venid buenos zagales!_ Foremost in time among these poets of _el verso largo_ was D. MANUEL DE PORTUGAL[330] (1520?-1606), son of the first Conde de Vimioso and of D. Joana de Vilhena, cousin of King Manuel. He outlived all his fellow-poets, welcomed the appearance of _Os Lusiadas_, and in 1580 took the side of the Prior D. Antonio. His _Obras_ (1605) consist of seventeen books of poems, mostly of a religious character and written in Spanish--books 9 and 15 contain some Portuguese poems, and among them the fine mystic sonnet _Apetece minha alma_ (Bk. ix, f. 199 v.).

Among those who welcomed and acclimatized the new style none was a more talented or truer poet than DIOGO BERNARDEZ (_c._ 1530-_c._ 1600),[331] who confessed that he owed everything to Sá de Miranda and Antonio Ferreira.[332] Born of a distinguished family[333] at Ponte da Barca on the river Lima, he would ride over to visit Sá de Miranda or send him letters in verse, and he mourned his death in sonnet, letter, and eclogue with unaffected grief. He himself continued to sing by the banks of his beloved Lima, endeared to him all the more by disillusion at Lisbon and captivity in Africa. In a letter to Miranda he alludes to an apparently unhappy love affair at Lisbon. Later the retirement of his poet brother, Frei Agostinho, into a convent, the deaths of Miranda and Ferreira, the great plague of 1569, and the misfortunes of his country were all deeply felt by his affectionate nature. In 1576 he went as secretary of Embassy to Madrid, but otherwise he seems to have been disappointed in hopes of lucrative employment, and he was always ready to exchange the mud of the streets and the ‘bought meals’ of Lisbon, with its penurious, importunate _moços_,[334] for the dewy golden dawns, the hills and streams of Minho, _entre simples e humildes lavradores_ (_Carta_ 27). In 1578, however, he who had lamented that no Maecenas encouraged those eager to sing the deeds of Portuguese heroes was chosen to accompany as official poet[335] the Portuguese expedition which ended disastrously in _aquelle funeral e turvo dia_--the battle of Alcacer Kebir. It was not till 1581 that Bernardez returned from captivity. Whether he was ransomed by King Philip, or by the Trinitarians or Jesuits, or by himself or his friends, is not known. After his return and his marriage he frequently laments his poverty: not, he says, that he wishes to be the Pope in Rome, but merely to have enough to eat (_Carta_ 31). Yet apparently he had no cause to regret the change of dynasty so far as his personal fortunes were concerned. Whereas he had merely held the post of _servidor de toalha_ at the palace under King Sebastian, he was now (1582) appointed a knight of the Order of Christ with a pension of 20,000 _réis_ and was granted 500 _cruzados_ (‘in property and goods’) in the same year. In 1593 his yearly pension was 40,000 _réis_, of which one-half was to revert to his wife and children. Either these moneys remained unpaid or the new _cavaleiro fidalgo’s_ ideas had changed greatly since he had sung of the joys of rustic poverty and the vanity of riches. Bernardez found his inspiration in the Portuguese and Spanish poets of the new school (_cantigas strangeiras_, _strañas_),[336] and through them in the great Italians. Dante’s name does not occur in his letters, written in _tercetos_,[337] but Tasso--_o meu Tasso_---Ariosto, Petrarca, and others are mentioned.[338] In form and sound some of his _canções_ are not unworthy of Petrarca, but they are more homely and bucolic, have more _saudade_ and less definite images, no concrete pictures like that of _la stanca vecchierella pellegrina_ of the fourth _Canzone_. His second source of inspiration was his native Minho and the transparent waters and _fresca praia_ of the Lima. He was never happier than when wandering _lungo l’amate rive_, and this gives a pleasant reality to his eclogues. His muse, _a bosques dada e a fontes cristalinas_, sings not only of the conventional ‘roses and lilies’ but of honeysuckle, of cherries red in May, grapes heavy with dew, golden apples, nuts, acorns, the trout so plentiful that they can be caught with the hand, hares, partridges, doves, the thrush and the nightingale, and mentions oak, ash, elm, poplar, beech, hazel, chestnut, and arbutus. These eclogues, written in various metres, sometimes with _leixapren_ or internal rhyme, are collected in _O Lima_ (1596), which also contains his letters. His other works are sonnets, elegies, odes in _Rimas Varias_, _Flores do Lima_ (1596), and a third small volume _Varias Rimas ao Bom Jesus_ (1594) which includes elegies and odes to the Virgin written during his captivity, a long _Historia de Santa Ursula_ in octaves, and other devotional verse of much fervour and his wonted perfection of technique. If, read in the mass, his poems produce the impression of a cloying sweetness, it must be remembered that never before had Portuguese poetry risen to so harmonious a music. Faria e Sousa accused him of plagiarizing Camões, but in the case of a writer whose accepted poems, the _dulcissima carmina Limae_, are of such excellence the accusation cannot be seriously entertained. Neither he nor Camões was a great original poet, but in both the command of the new style was such that their poems were often confused by collectors. A passage in one of Bernardez’ letters (5, l. 6) seems to imply that his poetry was not appreciated at Lisbon. It was too genuine and clear to suit the clever Court rhymesters. But he had his followers, who would send him their poems to be corrected, or rather, praised, and later Lope de Vega recognized him as his master in the eclogue in preference to Garci Lasso.

FRANCISCO GALVÃO (_c._ 1563-1635?), equerry to the Duke of Braganza, was a true poet if he wrote the sonnet _A Nosso Senhor_ ascribed to him by his editor, Antonio Lourenço Caminha, in _Poesias ineditas dos nossos insignes poetas Pedro da Costa Perestrello, coevo do grande Luis de Camões, e Francisco Galvão_ (1791): _Ó tu de puro amor Deos fonte pura_. Innocencio da Silva vigorously doubts the authenticity of these poems, which are mostly of a religious character or concerned with Horace’s theme of the golden mean, as that of the _Obras ineditas de Aires Telles de Meneses_ (1792) published by the same editor, who professed to have faithfully copied them from the _antigos originaes_ of the time of João II. Bernardez’ brother Frei AGOSTINHO DA CRUZ (1540-1619), born at Ponte da Barca, entered as a novice the Convent of Santa Cruz in the Serra de Sintra in 1560, and took the vows a year later. In 1605 he obtained permission to live as a hermit in the Serra da Arrabida, where he cultivated _saudade_ and the muses, although his poems were no longer profane, as when in his youth as Agostinho Pimenta he haunted with his brother Diogo the banks of the Lima. These early verses he burnt: _Queimei, como vergonha me pedia, Chorando par haver tão mal cantado_. The eclogues, elegies, letters, sonnets, and odes that survive prove that _mal_ is here a moral, not an aesthetic adverb, and that he shared his brother’s love of Nature and in no mean degree his power of expressing it in soft, harmonious verse.

That gift was denied to ANTONIO FERREIRA (1528-69), who combined enthusiasm for the new style--_a lira nova_--and for classical antiquity with a rooted antipathy against the use of a foreign language or foreign subjects. His uneventful life as judge, courtier, and poet was cut short by the plague of 1569. His poetry is not that of a poet but of the Coimbra law student who had become a busy magistrate.[339] It is thus at its best when it does not attempt to be lyrical, for instance in his excellent letters in _tercetos_. His odes are closely modelled on those of Horace (_o meu Horacio_). Nor did he claim originality: indeed, his plan of introducing certain new forms was a little too deliberate for a great poet,[340] and his best sonnet is a translation from Petrarca. For bucolic poetry neither the grave doctor’s style nor his inclinations were well suited. Not only is the smooth flow of the verse which charms us in Diogo Bernardez here absent but the metre often actually halts,[341] and throughout his work we have sincerity, lofty aims, a stiff unbending severity, but not poetical genius. Ferreira was a true patriot, and it was his boast and is his enduring fame that he devoted himself to exalt the Portuguese language.[342] It was most fortunate for Portuguese literature that at this time of changing taste a poet of Ferreira’s great influence should have forsworn foreign intrusions in the language with the exception of Latin (in the introduction of which, however, his characteristic restraint forbade excess), and left both in prose and verse abiding monuments of pure Portuguese. This was the more remarkable in a poet who disdained the old popular metres (_a antiga trova deixo ao povo_) and had no thought apparently for popular customs or traditions. His _Poemas Lusitanos_, published posthumously, contain over a hundred sonnets, besides his odes, eclogues, elegies, epigrams (which are but fragments of sonnets), and letters, and he also wrote a _Historia de Santa Comba_ in fifty-seven _oitavas_.

The work of PERO DE ANDRADE CAMINHA (1520?-89), an industrious writer of verse rather than a poet, is as cold and unmusically artificial as Ferreira’s in its form, while it lacks Ferreira’s high thought and ideals and his love for his native language. One may imagine that it was through friendship with Ferreira--who scolds him for writing in Spanish--that he became one of the set of Miranda and Bernardez. Camões he must have known,[343] and indeed refers to him satirically in his epigrams: he seems to have actively disliked so wayward a genius, a man so unfitted to be a Court official. Caminha himself was the son of João Caminha, Chamberlain of the Duchess Isabel of Braganza, and of Philippa de Sousa of Oporto, where (or at Lisbon) the poet may have been born. After studying at the University, either at Lisbon, or after its transference to Coimbra in 1537, he entered the household of the Infante Duarte. In 1576 the poet retired to the palace of the Braganzas at Villa Viçosa and died there thirteen years later. During the last ten years of his life he held a _tença_ of two hundred milreis besides other sources of income (he was Alcaide Môr of Celorico de Basto, as his father had been of Villa Viçosa), so that his lot compares handsomely with that of Camões. He had planned an edition of his works in nine books, but only a few occasional poems were published during his lifetime. He wrote short poems in all the usual kinds, but, although trusted and honoured by the princes he served, he entirely lacked Camões’ divine _furia_ and had no compensating sympathy or insight or lyrical charm. What would not Camões have made of his chanty, _cantiga para çalamear_![344]

In perfect contrast to the laboured verses of Andrade Caminha is the spontaneous flow of the lines to the river Leça beginning _Ó rio Leça_, by which the Conde de Mattosinhos, FRANCISCO DE SÁ DE MENESES (1515?-84), is chiefly remembered. They place him at once among the principal poets of the century. He succeeded the Conde de Vimioso as Camareiro Môr of Prince João, held the same post in the first years of King Sebastian’s reign, and subsequently under King Henrique, who created him Count of Mattosinhos in return for his services as Governor of Portugal (during the absence of King Sebastian) and on other occasions. After the death of the Portuguese king he retired to Oporto, and no doubt spent the remaining summers at Mattosinhos near the gentle stream which he had immortalized.

The Portuguese poems of ANDRÉ FALCÃO DE RESENDE (1527?-98), born at Evora, nephew of the antiquarian André and of the poet Garcia de Resende, were first published at Coimbra in an incomplete volume _Poesias_ [1865], and consist of the _Microcosmographia_ and some spirited anti-Drake ballads and good sonnets (e.g. _Ó fragil bem_, _Ó breve gosto humano_) and satires. BALTHASAR DE ESTAÇO (born in 1570), Canon of Viseu, and his brother the antiquarian GASPAR DE ESTAÇO, Canon of Guimarães and author of _Varias Antiguidades de Portugal_ (1625), were both born at Evora. The former’s _Sonetos, Eglogas e ovtras rimas_ (1604), published, according to the preface, in the author’s mature age but written in the green, contain some religious sonnets of high merit.

A far more celebrated writer than these minor poets was JORGE DE MONTEMÔR (_c._ 1520-61), or _hispanice_ Montemayor, who was early driven by poverty from Montemôr o Velho (where he was born between 1518 and 1528) a few years after Mendez Pinto. Fortunately the latter did not relate his travels in Chinese, but Montemôr, with the exception of a few brief passages[345] in his _Diana_, wrote exclusively in Spanish. In Spain his musical talent gave him a livelihood, and as musician and singer of the Royal Chapel he remained at the Court till 1552, when he accompanied the Infanta Juana as _aposentador_ on the occasion of her marriage with that promising patron of letters, the Infante João. But even before the prince’s death in 1554 Montemôr returned to Spain. In 1555 he may have gone in the train of Philip II to England, and subsequently served as a soldier in Holland and Italy till a duel, perhaps in a love affair, at Turin ended his days in 1561.[346] Despite his brief and restless life Montemôr, who showed in _Las obras de George de Montemayor_ (1554) that he was no mean poet, found time to write one of the most famous books in literature. The date of its publication--it was dedicated to Prince João and Princess Juana--is uncertain, but it was probably an early work. In spirit, since not in the letter, it belongs to Portugal. Its gentle, easy style (Menéndez y Pelayo calls it _tersa, suave, melódica, expresiva_), the sentimental love and melancholy, the introduction of bucolic scenes, the references to Portugal--_cristalino_ applied to the Mondego is no conventional epithet, as only those who have seen its transparent waters can fully realize--mark the _Diana_ as the work of a Portuguese. Its fame soon overleapt the borders of the Peninsula. In Spain it had a numerous progeny, to which Cervantes refused the grace somewhat grudgingly given to Montemôr’s work as ‘the first in its kind’. In Portugal this, the eldest child of Bernardim Ribeiro’s _Menina e moça_, had to wait over half a century before it found a worthy successor in the _Lusitania Transformada_.

Little certain is known of the life of FERNAM ALVAREZ DO ORIENTE (_c._ 1540-_c._ 1595?). Born at Goa, he served in the East, and may have fought in the battle of Alcacer Kebir. His resemblance to Moraes in temperament and adventures perhaps gave rise to the assertion that he wrote the fifth and sixth parts of _Palmeirim de Inglaterra_. The scene of his _Lvsitania Transformada_ (1617) is partly in Portugal (the banks of the river Nabão and the seven hills of Thomar) and partly in India (_no nosso Oriente_). Like Montemôr’s _Diana_, it is divided into _prosas_ and poems, and it is modelled on the _Arcadia_ of Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530)--the mountains of Arcadia transformed into Lusitania[347]--which, however, each of its three books equals in length. The prose setting, although devoid of thought, is mellifluous and clear, and the poems, which contain reminiscences of Camões, rival in the harmony and transparent flow of the verse that ‘prince of the poets of our time’, as Alvarez calls him. Some critics have even ventured to attribute the work to Camões, as though his genius were so poor that he must needs fall to quoting himself in whole lines, as is here the case. But Alvarez had certainly caught some measure of Camões’ skill and of _il soave stilo e ’l dolce canto_ of Sannazzaro and Petrarca. He is, moreover, less vague[348] than many writers of eclogues, and in singing his own love story describes what his eyes have seen. It was, however, an aberration to favour the _verso esdruxulo_ (Ariosto’s _sdruccioli_) (cf. Sannazzaro’s _Arcadia_, Ecl. 1, 6, 8, 9, 12), a truly Manueline adornment which other Portuguese poets unfortunately copied as a new artifice.[349]