Part 39

[721] Fernam Rodriguez Lobo Soropita, speaking of the _noites privilegiadas_--the eves of New Year and Epiphany--refers to _os villões ruins que essas noutes vos perseguem_ and to their _pandeirinhos, musica de agua-pé que toda a noute vos zune nos ouvidos como bizouro, e sobre tudo isto haveis de lhe offertar os vossos quatro vintens, e quando lh’os entregais a candeia vos descobre o feitio dos ditos musicos: um mocho com sombreiro com mais chocas que um corredor de folhas_. They thus resembled Christmas ‘waits’.

[722] The Spanish translator of _Eufrosina_ apparently derived this name from musical notes (= a sung _romance_), since he translates _un romance de sol la_, _Eufr._ i. 3; iii. 2 (_Oríg. de la Novela_, iii. 77 and 110), but even he would not derive it from the _selah_ of the Psalms (T. Braga, _Hist. da Litt. Port._ i (1914), p. 205). In the Spanish _solao_ in _Obras de Dom Manoel de Portugal_ (1605), Bk. XII, pp. 282-7, each singer takes three lines, of which the last two rhyme together.

[723] Formerly _verbos_ (e.g. in the _Canc. da Vat._) and _exemplos_ (_enxempros_).

[724] The word _rifão_ does not now mean the refrain or burden (_estribilho_) of a song but proverb, like the Spanish _refrán_.

[725] There is another proverb _Mentras a pedra vae e vem Deus dará de seu bem_ (While the [mill?] stone doth come and go God his blessing shall bestow).

§ 2

_The Galician Revival_

For over four hundred years--with the exception of a few poems by Padres José Sanchez Feijoo and Martín Sarmiento[726] in the eighteenth century--the Galician language held aloof from literature. It was peculiarly fitting that at a time when Portugal was recovering for her own literature the early Galician lyrics, which are now one of its most precious possessions, a new company of poets should have sprung up in the region now, as of old, _fertil de poetas_[727]--Galicia. They were no doubt multiplied and encouraged by the discovery of the _Cancioneiros_, but began independently of these, in the wake of that regionalism which manifested itself so vigorously in the second half of the nineteenth century, for instance in Provence, Catalonia, and Valencia. Besides their general character--the mingling of irony and sentimental melancholy--and a few conscious imitations, the new poets and the ancient _Cancioneiros_ present several striking similarities. It is now some three-quarters of a century since regionalism in Galicia assumed its first literary pretensions. In 1861 the poets had become sufficiently numerous and distinguished to warrant the holding of _Juegos Florales_ (_xogos froraes_) at La Coruña. JUAN MANUEL PINTOS (1811-76) had published eight years earlier a small volume of verses, _A Gaita Gallega_ (Pontevedra, 1853), and FRANCISCO AÑON (1817-78) had contributed poems to various local newspapers. Añon led the life of a wandering _jogral_ of old, and his occasional verses soon won him popularity, so that he came to be regarded as the father of modern Galician poetry. He could express his love for his native province in the tender and melancholy stanzas (_abbcdeec_) _A Galicia_, and in his other poems, at once ingenuous and satirical; he is also thoroughly Galician and foreshadowed the poetry that was to follow. A leaflet of his verses appeared in the year after his death, _Poesías_ (Noya, 1879), and a more satisfactory collection ten years later: _Poesías Castellanas y Gallegas_ (1889). JOSÉ MARÍA POSADA Y PEREIRA (1817-86), born at Vigo, the son of a Vigo advocate, published his first volume of verses in 1865 and others were collected in _Poesías Selectas_ (1888). The second part of this collection (pp. 111-250) is written in Spanish, but the Galician poems include a series of letters in octosyllabic verse, the wistful humour of which is attractive. Born in the same year as Añon, he survived Rosalía de Castro, twenty years his junior. He survived in disillusion, for he had been one of the pioneers and now felt himself neglected in the changed conditions. When the first floral games were celebrated the most talented of these early poets, ALBERTO CAMINO (1821-61), had but a few months to live. Another generation passed before his poems were published: _Poesías Gallegas_ (1896). Camino was not a prolific writer, and this tiny book contains but twelve of his poems; but there is not one of them that we would willingly miss, whether he is giving harmonious form to a poignant theme, as in _Nai Chorosa_ and _O Desconsolo_, or in lighter verses describing with a contagious glow and spirit some scene of village merriment, as in _A Foliada de San Joan_ or _Repique_.

Galician patriots, indignant at the neglect or contempt habitually meted out to their region, might persevere in their belief that the language which had produced the _cantigas_ of King Alfonso X, the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_, and the poems of Macías was capable of revival as an instrument of poetry; but it was for the most part by scattered poems, manuscript or printed in periodicals (especially the Coruña paper _Galicia_, 1860-6), that they justified their faith, until in 1863 appeared _Cantares Gallegos_ by ROSALÍA DE CASTRO[728] (1837-85). The authoress, born at Santiago, was but twenty-six when this collection of poems gave her a wider celebrity than has been granted to any Galician writer since Macías. Emilio Castelar wrote a preface for her second volume, _Follas Novas_ (1880), and hailed her as ‘a star of the first order’. Indeed, so great was her fame as a Galician singer that until recently it obscured her Spanish poems, _En las orillas del Sar_ (1884). It was an unsought fame. Rosalía de Castro wrote much more than she published and destroyed much that was worth publishing. She sank herself in Galicia; her voice is that of the Galician _gaita_ in all its varying moods. In her preface to _Cantares Gallegos_ she wrote: ‘I have taken much care to reproduce the true spirit of our people.’ That she succeeded in this all critics are agreed. A favourite method in the _Cantares Gallegos_ is to take a popular quatrain and develop it at some length, as, for instance, in the beautiful variations on the lines _Airiños_, _airiños_, _aires_, _Airiños_ _da miña terra_, _Airiños_, _airiños_, _aires_, _Airiños_, _levaime á ela_.[729] Here, as throughout the book, there is such yearning passionate sadness that we may say, in her own words, _non canta que chora_. The sadness is of _soedade_ and brooding over her country’s plight. She has felt all the peasants’ sorrows, the longing of the emigrant for his country, the fate of the women at home who find no rest from toil but in the grave,[730] above all the neglect and poverty in which those sorrows centre--with the result of sons torn from their families and scattered abroad to Castile and Portugal and across the seas in search of bread. Her themes are thus often homely; their treatment is always plaintive and musical. The metres used are very various. The book opens with a chain of _muiñeiras_ singing _Galicia frorida_, and the rhythmical beat of the _muiñeira_ constantly recurs throughout. Nothing could serve better to express, as she so marvellously expresses, the very soul of the Galician peasantry in its gentle, dreaming wistfulness and tearful humour. Her style is so thin and delicate, yet so flowing and natural, that it is more akin, almost, to music than to language. Few writers have attained such perfection without a trace of artifice. It is Galician--_esta fala mimosa_[731]--seen at its best, clear, soft, and pliant, rising in protest or reproach to a silvery eloquence. In _Follas Novas_ the melancholy note is accentuated, without becoming morbid: the new leaves are autumnal. The music of her sad and exquisite poetry had been forged in the crucible of her own not imaginary suffering and grief, and in these lyrics she utters her _inmortales deseios_ (immortal longings) as well as the woes of the peasant women of Galicia, ‘widows of the living and widows of the dead’. New metres are introduced, the old skill and perfection of form is maintained. A few poems in the second half even succeed in repeating that identification between the poet and the genius of the people which makes much of _Cantares Gallegos_ almost anonymous and assures its immortality.

Midway between the publication of _Cantares Gallegos_ and _Follas Novas_ appeared the first volume of Galician verse by the blind poet of Orense, VALENTÍN LAMAS CARVAJAL (1849-1906). This book, _Espiñas, Follas e Frores_ (1871), has remained the most popular of his works.[732] He is a true poet of the soil (_poeta del terruño_), the soil of Galicia which he sings with melancholy charm, and his verse is filled with _soedades_. He complains of the peasant’s lot, protests against its injustice and the tyranny of the _caciques_, laments the drain on Galicia’s best forces through emigration and military service, and his later work especially betrays a rustic cynicism and disillusion. But the value both of his first book and of _Saudades Gallegas_ (1889) and _A Musa d’as Aldeas_ (1890) is that in them speak the voices of the peasants. Only occasionally does Aesop or Macías intrude to dispel the charm, and even sophisticated touches--as when he speaks of ‘this century of enlightenment’, of Galicia as ‘a poetical garden’, or of the _tamborileiro_ as ‘the inseparable companion’ of the _gaiteiro_--are not out of keeping, since the peasant, to whom a long word is a sign of education, will in ambitious moments use such phrases. The Galician peasants are shown in their sadness and superstitions, at their common tasks and _festas_. When Lamas Carvajal is describing an _escasula_[733] or a _fiadeiro_,[734] a dance in the beaten space before the doors (_baile de turreiro_), a _foliada_[735] in honour of some saint, a _ruada_ or _rueiro_ (street courting), a summer _romaxe_ or _romaria_ (pilgrimage), or autumn _magosto_ (feast of chestnuts), his melancholy almost deserts him, and he can sing, in his own phrase,

Algun ledo cantar d’a sua terriña.

The toil often becomes a _festa_, in which, he says, there is more mirth than in all the city’s joys. In _Ey, boy, ey_ he admirably reproduces the thoughts of the slow-footed, slow-reasoning peasant as he trudges along to market in front of his droning and shrieking ox-cart. And, generally, all the life of the province of Orense is in his poems: witches, exorcisers, _beatas_, _curandeiros_ (to whom the peasants turn in place of the doctor), pilgrims, blind singers, _santeiros_ selling images of saints, the wailing _alalaa_, the evening litany or _rosario_, the angelus (_Ave Maria_ or _as animas_, or tocar _ás oraciós_). The _gaiteiro_, of course, is a prominent figure, for without his bagpipe (the _gaita gallega_) and the accompanying drum (_tamboril_), cymbals (_ferriñas_, _conchas_), tambourine (_pandeiro_, _pandeireta_), and castanets (_castañolas_),[736] no village _fête_ would be welcome or complete, and his _alborada_ or his rhythmical dance-song, the _muiñeira_, is the emblem of all the peasant’s pleasures. Melancholy pervades the _Rimas_ (1891) of D. JUAN BÁRCIA CABALLERO (born in 1852), but it is no longer the melancholy of the peasant, but of the poet. His verse is more artificial and subjective, and expressions such as the ‘bed of Aurora’, ‘Olympic disdain’, ‘the Nereids’, carry us far away from the peasant scenes so pleasantly described by Lamas Carvajal. Yet in his lyrics lives a faint music which raises them above the commonplace. He writes of moonlight, the fall of the leaves, a flowing stream, tears, death, and admires Heine and Leopardi; but in his slight fancies, often built into a single brief sentence, he has a natural charm of his own.

BENITO LOSADA (1824-91) gained great popularity in Galicia with his _Contiños_ (1888), epigrammatic and often far from edifying stories in verse which mostly do not exceed ten lines. He is said to have had them printed on matchboxes _ad maiorem gloriam_, but for this he was probably not responsible. More interesting and equally racy of the soil are the poems of his _Soaces d’un Vello_ (1886), of which the _contiños d’a terra_ form only Part 3. The first part consists of a long legend in octosyllabic verse, and in the second some thirty poems give a coloured, homely, delightful picture of peasant life in Galicia:

En fias e espadelas, En festas, en foliadas[737]

--song and dance, the pot of chestnuts (_zonchos_) over the _lareira_ fire on the night of All Saints’ Day, the ox-girl quietly singing, the girl with spindle and distaff keeping the cows, the sorrowful, hard-working peasant women, the priests exorcising those possessed by the Devil. The gay notes of the _gaita_ with its plaintive undertone sound from his pages. The language, _a garrida lengua nosa_, has rarely been written more idiomatically or with a surer instinct for the force and fascination of the native word used in its rightful place. To turn from Losada to EDUARDO PONDAL (1835-1917), the poet of Ponteceso, a small village in the district of Coruña, is to go from a village _praça_ to a high mountain-top. He stands quite apart from the other Galician poets.[738] Their irony and scepticism, sorrows and mirth, are mostly of the peasant. But here we have no dance or rustic merriment. The pipe and the drum give place to the wind blowing through an Aeolian harp. The poet

soña antr’as uces hirtas Na gentil arpa apoyado En donde o vento suspira.[739]

He is a lonely, martial spirit, disdainful but never arrogant, hating all servitude and looking upon a comfortable inertness as a kind of servitude. There is no pettiness in him, although details of Nature he may notice and love. The most learned of Galician poets, and not sparing of classical allusions, he is yet entirely merged in the forces of Nature and becomes a voice, a mystery. Some of his poems are a single sentence of perhaps twenty words, a musical cry borne slowly away on the wings of the wind. He sings of mists (the Gallegan _brétoma_) and pregnant silences, the whispering of the pines, the great chestnut-trees and Celtic oaks, of the swift daughter of the mists and the ‘intrepid daughter of the noble Celts’, of old forgotten far-off things, battles long ago. One must go to Ireland for a parallel. It has been noticed of him that he is entirely pre-Christian; he is almost prehistoric. His long epic on the discovery of America, in twenty-seven cantos, _Os Eoas_, remained unpublished at his death. Nor would it be easy to account for his popularity were it not for the poem by which he won early fame: _A Campana d’Anllons_. It is full of music and melancholy, a plaintive farewell addressed to his native village by a Galician peasant imprisoned at Oran. His subsequent verses, collected in _Rumores de los Pinos_ (1879) and _Queixumes dos Pinos_ (1886), if they could not increase his popularity, brought him a wide recognition among all lovers of poetry. The undefinable fascination of many of these poems is due to their aloofness, tenderness, and sorrowful music. He is a genuine Celtic bard, child of the wind and the rain, with Rosalía de Castro the truest poet produced by modern Galicia.

The most prominent of the later Galician poets was MANUEL CURROS ENRIQUEZ (1851-1908), whose work _Aires d’a miña terra_ (1880) was condemned by the Bishop of Orense and republished in the following year. Born at Celanova in the middle of the nineteenth century, he studied law at Santiago de Compostela and became a journalist. His advanced opinions caused him to emigrate, first to London, then to South America. His anticlericalism was pronounced in _Aires d’a miña terra_, and even more so in a forcible satire describing a pilgrimage to Rome, written in _triadas_[740] and entitled _O Divino Sainete_ (1888). He writes of dogma assassinating liberty, heaps abuse on Ignacio de Loyola, hails the advent of the railway to Galicia as bringing not priests but progress. All this has caused his poems to be widely read. But the reader has the agreeable surprise to find that many of them deal quite simply with the legends (_A Virxe d’o Cristal_) or customs (_Unha Boda en Einibó_, _O Gueiteiro_, &c.) of his native country, and show a true poetic power and a quiet and accurate observation of Nature. We forget all about anticlericalism and the Pope in reading of spring in Galicia, of the _xentis anduriñas_, the _anemas_ ringing, and the children who come singing a _mayo_ and asking for chestnuts. Curros Enriquez would not be a Galician were not his work of a melancholy cast, and the charm of some of his poems is also indigenous. The torch of Galician poetry burnt on after Curros Enriquez had ceased to write. D. EVARISTO MARTELO PAUMAN (born c. 1853) in his _Líricas Gallegas_ (1891) showed that he possessed the traditional charm and satire of Galician verse, but a charm and satire that in his case had become all individual and subjective. AURELIANO J. PEREIRA (†1906), author of _Cousas d’a Aldea_ (1891), displayed a rustic humour in sketching with many a gay note the life of the Galician peasantry, and, in his more subjective poems, a very real and delicate lyrical gift. A sly humour also marks the work of ALBERTO GARCÍA FERREIRO (1862-1902) in _Volvoretas_ (1887) and _Chorimas_ (1890). It is sometimes marred by the bitterness of his anticlerical and anti-Spanish feeling. In the stream’s voice he hears a murmur against the mayor and the judge, the _cacique_ is ‘dragon, tiger and snake’, the monks and priests are greedy and ignorant. On the other hand, when they describe a fair (_N’a feira_) or a pilgrimage or the woes of the Galician emigrant, his poems are moving, vivid, and full of local colour. In a slight volume of poems, _Salayos_ (1895), MANUEL NÚÑEZ GONZÁLEZ (1865-1917) shows true lyrical power. They are poems in Galician rather than of Galicia, telling in a plaintive music of night, autumn, _morriña_, _soedades_. For all the author’s love of his smaller country, it is Galicia seen from without,[741] or sung from memory. The ‘vintage songs and the gay din of chestnut gatherings’ are no longer, as with Losada and Lamas, a part of life, but ‘a dream in the ideal realm of thought’,[742] a subject of disillusion and regret. _Folerpas_[743] (1894) by D. ELADIO RODRÍGUEZ GONZÁLEZ (born in 1864) is also essentially not of the people. In its less elaborate poems it often describes, attractively and with much colour, popular customs and dances, the night of St. John, _as festas d’a miña terra_. Yet after recording the pleasant superstition that on St. John’s Day the sun rises dancing, the author must needs pause to say ‘away with these fanatical beliefs, unworthy of a civilized region’, to which the answer is that such reflections may be sincere but are unworthy of poetry, and should be expressed in prose. But the author of these verses can, when he wishes, identify himself with the peasants whose life he depicts,[744] and is capable of writing poems of great delicacy. The general impression is that he has not grown up among these scenes but is observing them keenly as might a stranger. The edict of the Archbishop of Santiago (June 26, 1909), which made it a deadly sin to read _Fume de Palla_ (1909), by ‘ALFREDO NUN DE ALLARIZ’, as containing impious, blasphemous, and heretical propositions, gave these poems a wider publicity than they might otherwise have attained, and they received a second edition in the same year. It certainly savours of blasphemy and is bad criticism to call Curros Enriquez the Galician Christ, but it is to be feared that the excommunication of the author will only encourage him to abandon ‘simple verses written without art’, as in his preface he describes these, for more studied poems with a thesis to prove. It is perhaps disquieting to find that three poets in most respects so different, agree in this, that between them and popular poetry a gulf is fixed, owing to the sensitive aloofness of a true poet (for Núñez González was undoubtedly the most talented of the younger Galicians), or owing to the adoption of the superior standpoint of the rationalist or the anticlerical. Younger poets of remarkable promise and achievement are D. GONZALO LÓPEZ ABENTE (born in 1878), a relative of Eduardo Pondal, whom he sometimes recalls in the original inspiration of _Escumas da Ribeira_ (1914) and _Alento da Raza_ (1917); D. ANTONIO NORIEGA VARELA (born in 1869), whose deep love for his native moors and mountains gives an eternal magic to _Montañesas_ (1904) and _D’O Ermo_ (1920); D. RAMÓN CABANILLAS, who voices the sorrows and aspirations of Galicia in _Vento Mareiro_ and _Da Terra Asoballada_ (1917); and D. ANTONIO REY SOTO, who, however, writes chiefly in Castilian. D. XAVIER PRADO expresses the very soul of the peasantry in _A Caron do Lume_ (1918). The poets of the last half-century have unquestionably justified the literary revival of the Galician language, and even if in the future no poetry of the highest order be written in Galicia, it is unthinkable that so musical an instrument should be allowed to perish. Galician poetry may be a thin, an elfin music, a scrannel voice, as of a wind blowing through tamarisks, but it has a natural charm, a raciness, a native atmosphere which give it a peculiar flavour and attraction. Literary contests, _veladas_, _certames_, _xogos froraes_, keep the flame of poetry alive in Galicia, but in its anonymous form it is a very vigorous growth which needs no fostering, and flourishes now as it flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as it flourished in the time of the Romans. Hundreds of anonymous _quadras_ (_cantiga_, _cantar_, _cantariño_, _cantilena_, _cantiguela_, _cantiguiña_, _copra_, or _canció_) have been collected in the _Cancionero Popular Gallego_ (Madrid, 3 vols., 1886) by JOSÉ PÉREZ BALLESTEROS (†1918). The peasant women compose and sing their songs to-day[745] as when Fray Martín Sarmiento (1695-1772) noticed that _en Galicia las mujeres no solo son poetisas sino tambien músicas naturales_,[746] or the Marqués de Montebello listened to _los tonos que a coros cantan con fugas y repeticiones las mozuelas_, or the Archpriest of Hita watched the cantaderas dancing (as well as singing) in neighbouring Asturias.[747]