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 of
the 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.
Ferreira, without possessing the originality of Gil Vicente, his
sweetness or his genius, was eminently useful to the art of poetry in
Portugal. He taught the writers of that country to aim at correctness,
and to enrich their compositions by the knowledge acquired from the
writings of other countries; but not, for that purpose, to adopt a
foreign tongue, but to raise the Portuguese to the level of other
languages, and gift it with the purest and noblest poetic measures. He
is, himself, novel, however, rather in his style than in his ideas. His
epistles are his best work; the sentiments he expresses are elevated,
and his fancy and poetic verve graced them with a diction and imagery
which raises them in the class of such compositions. The distinctive
feeling however to be found in Ferreira, animating all he wrote, was
patriotism. The glory, the advancement and the civilisation of Portugal,
were the themes of his praise, and the objects which he furthered with
his utmost endeavours. He exhorts his friends not to permit the Muses in
Portugal to speak any thing but Portuguese. Of himself, he says, in
very beautiful verses, that "he shall be content with the glory of
loving his native land, and his countrymen." It was this enthusiasm that
elevated Ferreira into a great man. He is a little misplaced here, as he
was a few years younger than Camoens; but it shows the spirit that was
abroad in Camoens' time--a patriotic spirit that loved to express its
genuine sentiments in language warm from the heart and familiar to the
tongue. In this Camoens and Ferreira were alike; they loved their native
country, and were eager to adorn its literature with native flowers. In
other respects they were different. Ferreira's classic pages bear no
resemblance to the fire, passion, and rich fancy of Camoens, to whom we
now turn as to one of the favourites of fame, though he was the
neglected child of his country, and the victim of an adverse fate.
[Footnote 125: In Castilian _cancioneros general_ or general song books.
_Vide_ Bouterwek; Sismondi.]
[Footnote 126: Bouterwek.]