Part 7

_Amadis de Gaula_ has indeed been doubly fortunate. The successor of Lancelot, Galahad, and Tristan as a fearless and loyal knight, he early won his way in the Peninsula; he was spared by the priest and barber in the _Don Quixote_ scrutiny, and now when Vives’ ‘pestiferous books’,[126] those ‘serious follies’, are no longer read widely, he has received a new span of immortality as a corpse of Patroclus between the contending critics. The problem of the date and authorship has become more fascinating than the book. Champions for Spain and Portugal come forward armed for the fight: Braunfels, Gayangos, Baist are met by Theophilo Braga, Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, while Dr. Henry Thomas holds the scales. The ground is thick with their arrows. And beneath them all lies the simple ingenuous story as retold by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo in or immediately after 1492 and published in 1508, still worth reading for its freshness and for its clear good style, which Braunfels, following up the praise in Juan de Valdés’ _Diálogo de la Lengua_ (_c._ 1535), declared could not be a translation.[127] The argument, conclusive in the case of the masterpiece of prose that is _Palmeirim_ _de Inglaterra_, loses its force here, since Montalvo himself tells us that he corrected the work from old originals. Naturally we are curious to know what these _antiguos originales_ were, but the question did not arise in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: readers did not then concern themselves greatly with the origin and authorship of a book; they were content to enjoy it. Evidently _Amadis_ was enjoyed both in Spain and Portugal. It is mentioned in the middle of the fourteenth century in the Spanish translation, by Johan Garcia de Castrogeriz, of Egidio Colonna’s _De regimine principum_, at the very time, that is, when the Spanish poet and chronicler, Pero López de Ayala (1332-1407), was reading _Amadis_ in his youth.[128] Half a century later, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a poem by Pero Ferrus in the _Cancionero de Baena_ refers to _Amadis_ as written in three books. This is one of the most definite early references to _Amadis_, but of course reference to the book by a Spaniard does not necessarily imply that it was written in Spanish, and indeed some of the vaguer allusions may refer to a French or Anglo-French original. The most frequent Spanish references occur in the _Cancionero de Baena_, which was compiled in the middle of the fifteenth century, at a period, that is, which the last Galician lyrics written in Spain connected with the time when all eyes were turned to Portuguese as the universal language of Peninsular lyrics. Because the Portuguese language was used throughout Spain in lyric poetry, it is sometimes argued as if the Portuguese had no prose, could only sing. (The more real division was not between verse and prose but between the Portuguese lyrical love literature and the Spanish epic battle literature, and the early romances of chivalry, although written in prose, belong essentially to the former.) The prose rubrics of the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ and the _Poetica_ of the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ are sufficient to dispel this delusion. Whether this _Poetica_ be contemporary (13th c.) of the lyrics or later (14th c.), it offers a striking contrast between the clumsiness of its prose and the smooth perfection of the poetry for which it theorizes. Miguel Leite Ferreira’s statement (1598) that _Amadis_ is contemporary with the lyrics is therefore remarkable. He says that the archaic (time of King Dinis) language of the two sonnets--_Bom Vasco de Lobeira_ and _Vinha Amor pelo campo trebelhando_--written by his father, Antonio Ferreira (1528-69), is the same as that in which Vasco de Lobeira wrote _Amadis of Gaul_. We know that King Dinis encouraged not only lyric poetry but also translations into Portuguese prose, but all the early Portuguese prose works are assigned to the fourteenth, not the thirteenth century. One of the earliest, the _Demanda do Santo Graall_, the language of which bears a close relation to that of the _Cancioneiros_, still belongs to the fourteenth century. Probably the later development of prose misled Leite Ferreira into making fourteenth-century prose contemporary with thirteenth-century verse. The Infante whom he here on the strength of the passage in Montalvo’s _Amadis_ identifies with the son of King Dinis, not with the earlier Prince Afonso (_c._ 1265-1312), may as Infante have expressed dislike of a certain incident (the treatment of Briolanja) in the already well-known story, and his preference would be borne in mind when the Portuguese version was written in his reign (1325-57). If the first Peninsular version of _Amadis_ was composed in Portuguese in the middle of the fourteenth century, it may have been eagerly read as a novelty by López de Ayala. In the fourteenth century most Spaniards read, a few wrote[129] Portuguese lyrics; and there seems to be no reason why we should rigorously confine them to the reading of verse, to the exclusion of Portuguese prose. There is no means of deciding with certainty whether López de Ayala and Ferrus read _Amadis_ in Spanish or in Portuguese, but there are inherent probabilities in favour of Portuguese. No one without a thesis to support would deny that, generally, the cycle of the Round Table, to which _Amadis_ is so closely related, was more congenial to the Portuguese than to the Spanish temperament, that the geographical position of Portugal facilitated its introduction, and that, in the particular case of _Amadis_, the style and subject of the work, certainly of the first three books, are Portuguese rather than Spanish. Melancholy incidents, sentimental phrases and tears occur on nearly every page. Some critics even discern traces of Portuguese in the language.[130]

But if we admit that _Amadis_ was written _c._ 1350, who was its author? It is noteworthy that while in Spanish it had been attributed to many persons, in Portugal tradition has persistently hovered round the name of Lobeira. Unfortunately the Lobeira authorship has given far more trouble than that of prince, Jew, or saint in Spain. Zurara, basing his statement on an earlier fifteenth-century authority, in a perfectly genuine passage of his _Cronica do Conde D. Pedro de Meneses_,[131] written in the middle of the fifteenth century, ascribes _Amadis_ to Vasco de Lobeira. In the next century Dr. João de Barros[132] (not the historian) and Leite Ferreira agree with Zurara.[133] There was no reason why they should say Vasco rather than Pedro or João. According to Nunez de Leam, Vasco de Lobeira was knighted on the field of Aljubarrota (1385), according to Fernam Lopez he was already a knight in 1383.[134] If he was not a young but an old knight at Aljubarrota, it is just possible that he wrote the book thirty-five years earlier, in the same way that the historian Barros wrote _Clarimundo_ in his youth.

If he lived on through the reigns of Pedro I (1357-67) and Fernando (1376-83), and acquired new distinction in battle in the reign of the latter, this might account for Zurara’s assertion that he wrote _Amadis_ in the reign of Fernando. But the chief obstacle to the authorship of Vasco is the existence in the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ (Nos. 230 and 232 A) of a song by Joan de Lobeira, _Leonoreta, fin roseta_, which reappears with slight variations in Montalvo’s _Amadis_ (Lib. II, cap. xi: _este villancico_). It would seem then that Joan, not Vasco, wrote _Amadis_. Joan de Lobeira,[135] or Joan Pirez Lobeira, flourished in the second half of the thirteenth century, and so we have _Amadis_ dating not only from the reign of King Dinis but from the first half of his reign. But does the existence of the poem entail that of a prose romance? The early mention of Tristan, e.g. by Alfonso X, does not necessarily imply the existence of a thirteenth-century Peninsular _Tristan_ in prose. May we not accept the poem, written in the stirring metre, dear to men of action, used by Alfonso X (C. M. 300), as merely a proof of the popularity of the story, fondness for an episode perhaps treated in greater detail in the Anglo-French original than in Montalvo’s version? Certainly it is in the highest degree improbable that a Spaniard, writing at the end of the fifteenth century, should extract a poem from the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ and insert it in his prose; but the improbability disappears if in the middle of the fourteenth century a Portuguese (Vasco de Lobeira), perhaps drawn to the story by the poem of his ancestor, incorporated it in his romance. The late Antonio Thomaz Pires in 1904 discovered at Elvas the will of a João de Lobeira, _mercador_, who died there in 1386, and in Dr. Theophilo Braga’s latest opinion[136] there were three Portuguese versions of _Amadis_: that of the father, this João de Lobeira, written in the time of King Dinis (a long-lived race these Lobeiras!), that of the son,[137] Vasco, and a third by Pedro de Lobeira in the first half of the fifteenth century. The threefold authorship of this family heirloom is even more _cruu de creer_ than the theory that a single Lobeira--Vasco--wrote it in the middle of the fourteenth century. A certain note of disapproval of _Amadis_ as fabulous, shared by Portuguese and Spanish writers,[138] perhaps indicates a fairly late date: its irresponsible fiction would be less excusable if it was written in an age which was beginning to attach serious importance to _nobiliarios_ and ‘true’ chronicles. Moreover, if the Portuguese adaptation of an Anglo-French legend had been even remotely as developed as the form in which we now have it, the Infante Afonso must have seen at once that the faithfulness of Amadis was absolutely essential to the story. But especially the fact that the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_, familiar with Tristan and the _matière de Bretagne_, are silent on the subject of _Amadis_ is significant.

In Gottfried Baist’s argument, based on a rigid division between early lyric poetry (as Portuguese) and early prose (as Spanish), the Leonoreta lyric, far from being a stumbling-block, is actually a sign of the Spanish origin of _Amadis_: as a fragment (14th c.) of a prose _Tristan_ exists in Spanish, and five Portuguese Tristan _lais_ figure in the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_, so the Leonoreta poem belongs to a Spanish _Amadis_ in prose. But although the priority and relations of early Portuguese and Spanish prose works are intricate and have not yet been thoroughly studied, it is clear that in many cases versions have been more carefully preserved in conservative Spain, while the Portuguese through neglect, fire, and earthquake have perished, and also that the natural tendency and development of prose, in view of the growing power of Castille and the greater pliancy of the Portuguese, was from Portuguese to Spanish, not from Spanish to Portuguese. And in one instance at least we have an early Portuguese prose work of the first importance, the _Demanda do Santo Graall_, which with its gallicisms can by no stretch of imagination be accounted a version from the Spanish. It is plainly legitimate to hold that the story of Amadis was first reduced to book form in the Peninsula in precisely the same way as was the story of Galahad, i.e. as a fourteenth-century Portuguese adaptation with the French text in view. Nicholas d’Herberay des Essarts, we know, claimed to have discovered fragments of _Amadis en langage picard_, Jorge Cardoso (1606-69) declared that Pero Lobeira translated _Amadis_ from the French,[139] and Bernardo Tasso, whose _Amadigi_ appeared in 1560, believed (_non è dubbio_) _Amadis_ to be derived _da qualche istoria di Bretagna_. Nor would the Portuguese, for all their familiarity with the story and topography of the Breton cycle, be likely to compose original works dealing with Vindilisora (Windsor) or Bristoya (Bristol). Unhappily, however deep may be our conviction (a conviction which stands in no need of antedating Hebrew versions of the 1508 _Amadis_) that the Peninsular _Amadis_ was originally Portuguese, it has now ceased to belong to Portuguese literature; another instance, if we may beg the question, of the gravitation to Spain. The Portuguese text, of which a copy, according to Leite Ferreira, existed in the library of the Duques de Aveiro in the sixteenth century (1598), and, according to the Conde da Ericeira, in the library of the Condes de Vimieiro in the seventeenth (1686), is still missing, as it was in 1726.

FOOTNOTES:

[104] Portuguese is then _uma lingua coherente, clara, um instrumento perfeito para a expressão do pensamento, cuja maior plasticidade dependerá apenas da cultura litteraria_, F. Adolpho Coelho, _A Lingua Portugueza_ (1881), p. 87.

[105] See _supra_, p. 48.

[106] See p. 160.

[107] Cf. for the seventeenth century Galhegos’ preface and _Mon. Lusit._ V. xvi. 3: _achandose neste reino poucos que escrevão versos e não seja na lingua estranjeira de Castilla_.

[108] e. g. _E matou a grande serpente dallagoa de lerne que auja sete cabeças. E persegujo as pias filhas de finees que lhe aujã odio e o queriã desherdar. E foy cõ jaasson o que adusse o velloso dourado da ylha de colcos. E destroyu troya_, &c.

[109] Cf. _Por este exemplo este doutor nos mostra_, or _este poeta nos dá ensinamento_, &c. The Fables of Aesop were translated into Portuguese prose by Manuel Mendez, a schoolmaster at Lagos (Algarve): _Vida e Fabulas do Insigne Fabulador Grego Esopo_. Evora, 1603.

[110] e. g. of an earthquake: _Era de mil e quatrocentos e quatro desoito dias do mez de Junho tremeo a terra ao serão muy rijamente e foi por espaço que disserom o Pater tres vezes._

[111] The _Cronica Troyana_, edited in 1900 by the Spanish scholar and patient investigator D. Andrés Martínez Salazar, is a fourteenth-century Galician version of Benoît de Saint-More’s _Roman de Troie_.

[112] The name _Nobiliario_ is one of the erudite words which in the sixteenth century, here as in so many other cases, ousted the indigenous.

[113] Its object was _por saberem os homens fidalgos de Portugal de qual linhagem vem e de quaes coutos, honras, mosteiros e igreias som naturaes_.

[114] His successful wile is similar to the stratagem in _Macbeth_: _e pois que a nave entrou pela foz cobrío-a de panos verdes em tal guisa que cuidassem que eram ramos, ca entonce o Douro era cuberto de hũa parte e da outra darvores_.

[115] _A escritura de maior utilidade que temos em Espanha_ (Frei Francisco Brandão, _Mon. Lus._ V. xvii. 5).

[116] i. e. the copy printed in _Portug. Mon. Hist._ from the only existing manuscript (= the copy by Gaspar Alvarez de Lousada Machado (1554-1634) in the Lisbon Torre do Tombo).

[117] The ‘songs of Cornwall’ are mentioned in C. V. 1007. Cf. 1140.

[118] See C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, _Cancioneiro da Ajuda_, ii. 479-525. They are called _lais_, _layx_ (C. C. B. 7, 8).

[119] _En la grand demanda de Santo Greal Se lee._ _Gral_ is still a common Portuguese word (= _almofariz_, a mortar).

[120] ruberte de borem is mentioned, 1887 ed., p. 44.

[121] Not to speak of _certas_, _onta_, _febre_ (= _faible_), _a voso sciente_, which may be found in other Portuguese works of the fifteenth century, _san_ (p. 136 _ad fin._) apparently = Fr. _s’en_.

[122] Cf. _asi como o conto a ja deuisado_ (1887 ed., p. 7).

[123] 1905 ed., p. 95.

[124] 1887 ed., p. 43: _despois uespesiom os eyxerdou e os destruio_.

[125] 1905 ed., pp. 17, 23, 106.

[126] _De Institutione Christianae Feminae_, Bk. I, cap. 5: ‘Tum et de pestiferis libris cuiusmodi sunt in Hispania [= the whole Peninsula], Amadisius, Splandianus, Florisandus, Tirantus, Tristanus, quarum ineptiarum nullus est finis; quotidie prodeunt novae: Caelistina laena, nequitiarum parens, carcer amorum: in Gallia Lancilotus a Lacu, Paris et Vienna, Ponthus et Sydonia, Petrus Provincialis et Magelona, Melusina, domina inexorabilis: in hac Belgica Florius et Albus Flos, Leonella et Cana morus, Curias et Floreta, Pyramus et Thisbe’ (_Ioannis Ludovici Vivis Valentini Opera Omnia_, 7 vols., Valentiae Edetanorum, 1782-8, iv. 87). A Portuguese _Tristan_ may have existed, a Portuguese original of _Tirant lo Blanch_ less probably, although Pedro Juan Martorell, who began it in the Valencian or Lemosin _a ii de Giner de lany 1460_, declares that he had not only translated it from English into Portuguese but (_mas encara_) from Portuguese into Valencian. He dedicated it to the _molt illustre Princep_ Ferdinand of Portugal. Very probably the fame and origin of _Amadis_ accounted for this ‘English’ original, as mythical as the Hungarian origin of _Las Sergas de Esplandian_, and for its alleged translation into Portuguese.

[127] Braunfels, _Versuch_: ‘Montalvo hatte, um einer Uebersetzung den Ruhm des mustergiltigen Styls und des reinsten Kastilianisch zu verschaffen, ein Geist ersten Rangs sein müssen, was er nicht war.’ Montalvo was probably not the real author even of the fourth book. The words (in this _Prólogo_ of his _Amadis_), _que hasta aquí no es memoria de ninguno ser visto_, refer not to the fourth book but to Montalvo’s _Sergas de Esplandian_, which is conveniently replaced by dots in T. Braga, _Questões_ (1881), p. 99, and _Hist. da Litt. Port._, i (1909), p. 313, and which the priest in _Don Quixote_ properly consigned to the flames.

[128] His connexion with Portugal was not voluntary. It was probably when he was a prisoner after the battle of Aljubarrota (1385) that he wrote the _Rimado de Palacio_, in which (st. 162) _Amadis_ is mentioned.

[129] For the later writers of Galician (second half 14th c.) see Professor Lang’s _Cancioneiro Gallego-Castelhano_ (1902).

[130] _Lua_ (glove), _cedo_, &c., of course occur in early Spanish prose. _Soledad_ certainly occurs in the first three books more frequently than in other Spanish prose. The Portuguese atmosphere is altogether absent in _Las Sergas_.

[131] Cap. 63: _o Livro d’Amadis, como quer que soomente este fosse feito a prazer de hum homem que se chamava Vasco Lobeira em tempo d’El Rey Dom Fernando, sendo todalas cousas do dito Liuro fingidas do Autor._

[132] _Libro das Antiguidades_ (1549), f. 32 v.: _E daqui_ [_do Porto_] _foi natural uasco lobeira ̃q fez os primʳᵒˢ 4 libros de amadis, obra certo muj subtil e graciosa e aprouada de todos os gallantes, mas comos_ [so] _estas couzas se secão em nossas mãos os Castelhanos lhe mudarão a linguoagem e atribuirão a obra assi_ [so]. This passage is, however, absent in the earliest manuscript. The spelling _couzas_ implies a late date for its introduction.

[133] So did Faria e Sousa, but he, too, had his Lobeira doubts, and after noting that Vasco de Lobeira was knighted by King João I says: ‘si ya no es que era otro del mismo nombre. Pero la Escritura de Amadis se tiene por del tiempo deste Rey don Iuan’ (_Fvente de Aganipe_ (Madrid, 1646), § 10). The obvious sympathy of the author for the _escudero viejo_ who is knighted in _Amadis_ (ii. 13, 14) amidst the laughter of the Court ladies is perhaps significant.

[134] _Cronica de D. Fernando_, cap. 177. The year of his death, given as 1403, is quite uncertain. Soares de Brito in the _Theatrum_ forms no independent opinion: ‘Vascus de Lobeyra inter Lusitanos Scriptores enumeratur a Faria.... Floruit tempore Fernandi Regis.’ Antonio Sousa de Macedo, in _Flores de España_, also follows Faria: Vasco de Lobeira _fué el primero que con gentil habilidad escribió libros de caballerías_. Nicolás Antonio (1617-84), _Bib. Nov._, 1688 ed., ii. 322, says that Vasco de Lobeira _vulgo inter cives suos existimari solet auctor celeberrimi inter famosa scripti_ Historia de Amadis de Gaula ... _cuius laudes nos inter Anonymos curiose collegimus. Ostendere autem Lusitanos Amadisium hunc Lusitane loquentem, uti Castellani Castellanum ostendunt, ius et aequum esset in dubia re ne verbis tantum agerent._ The challenge in the last sentence is of interest, as coming in date between the two statements (by Leite Ferreira and the Conde da Ericeira) asserting the existence of the Portuguese text.

[135] There was a Canon of Santiago of this name in 1295, and he may have come to the Portuguese Court on business concerning certain privileges of the Chapter which King Dinis confirmed in 1324.

[136] _Hist. da Litt. Port._ i (1909).

[137] In the document the only son mentioned is named Gonçalo.

[138] Zurara, loc. cit., _cousas fingidas_; López de Ayala, _mentiras probadas_. According to D. Francisco de Portugal (_Arte de Galantería_, p. 146) such lies could only be written in Spanish (_en la Portuguesa no se podía mentir tanto_). Portugal was writing in Spanish.

[139] _Agiologio Lusitano_, i (1652), p. 410: _E por seu mandado_ [of the Infante Pedro, son of João I] _trasladou de Frances em a nossa lingua Pero Lobeiro_ [so], _Tabalião d’Eluas, o liuro de Amadis._

§ 2

_Epic and Later Galician Poetry_

Some of the poems of the early _Cancioneiros_, as we have seen, have an historical character, but they are all written from a personal point of view. Portuguese history, with its heroic achievements such as the conquest of Algarve, seems to have begun just too late to be the subject of great anonymous epics, or rather the temperament of the Portuguese people eschewed them. Of five poems, long believed to be the earliest examples of Portuguese verse but no longer accepted by any sane critic as genuine, only one belongs to epic poetry. This _Poema da Cava_ or _da Perda de Espanha_ was an infant prodigy indeed, since it was supposed to have been written (in _oitavas_) in the eighth century. With a discretion passing that of Horace it kept itself from the world not for nine but nine hundred years, and was first published in Leitão de Andrada’s _Miscellanea_ (1629)[140]: _O rouço da Cava imprio de tal sanha_, &c.

Of the four other spurious poems, two[141] were alleged to be love letters of Egas Moniz Coelho, a cousin of the celebrated Egas Moniz Coelho of the twelfth century; another, published by Bernardo de Brito,[142] _Tinherabos nam tinherabos_, has a real charm as gibberish. Fascination, of a different kind, attaches also to the fifth:

No figueiral figueiredo, no figueiral entrei: Tres niñas encontrara, tres niñas encontrei,