Part 4

But four years earlier and ten before Luther's formal protest against the papal indulgences we find Vicente in his lay sermon referring to the question 'whether the Pope may grant so many pardons' and laughing at the hair-splitting of preachers: was the fruit that Eve ate an apple, a pear or a melon[104]? His own religion certainly had a mystical and pantheistic tendency[105]. It was as deep as was his love of Nature. He would have the hearts of men dance with jocund May[106]:

Hei de cantar e folgar E bailar c'os corações,

and he had an eye for the humblest flower that blows--chicory and camomile, hedge flowerets, honeysuckle and wild roses:

Almeirones y magarzas, Florecitas por las zarzas, Madresilvas y rosillas (I. 95. Cf. II. 29).

And he sympathized closely with what was nearest to Nature: peasants and children. Of the people of the towns he was probably less enamoured and he speaks of _a desvairada opinião do vulgo_ and of the folly of pandering to it[107]. At Court he certainly had many friends. A friendly rivalry in art and letters bound him to Garcia de Resende for probably over forty years and he was no doubt on excellent terms with the _dadivoso_ Conde de Penella (II. 511), the _muito jucundo_ Conde de Tentugal (III. 360) and the Conde de Vimioso. High rank was no certain shelter from the shafts of Vicente's wit, but when it was a case of princes he was more careful:

Agora cumpre atentar Como poemos as mãos,

as he ingenuously remarks[108]. King João II had seen to it that no class or individual should dispute the power of the throne, and now the King reigned supreme. Kings, says Vicente, are the image of God[109]. That was in 1533, when it might seem to him that the authority of the throne was more than ever necessary to cope with the confusion of the times. The King's power stood for the nation, that of a noble might mean mere private ambition or power in the hands of one unworthy, and Gil Vicente asks nobly:

Quem não é senhor de si Porqué o será de ninguem? (Who himself cannot control Why should he o'er others rule?)

He had witnessed many changes, and looking back as an old man his memory might well be overwhelmed by a period so crowded[110]. He had seen the provinces and capital of Portugal transformed by the overseas discoveries. We may be sure that he had watched with more interest than the ordinary _lisboeta_ the extension of the Portuguese empire and the deeds of the unfortunate Dom Francisco de Almeida ('Tomou Quiloa e Mombaça, Parece cousa de graça Ver de que morte acabou') and the redoubtable Afonso de Albuquerque, who snatched victories from defeat in the teeth of all manner of obstruction and indifference and placed Portugal's glory on a pinnacle scarcely dreamed of even in the intoxicating moment of Gama's first return to Belem in 1499:

Outro mundo encuberto Vimos então descubrir Que se tinha por incerto: Pasma homem de ouvir.

Meanwhile Vicente never lost sight of the fact that the nation's strength lay not in rich imports, however fabulous and envied, but in the good use of its own soil and capacities and in the vigour, energy and discipline of its inhabitants, and a note of warning sounded again and again in his plays as he saw the old simplicity sink and disappear before wave on wave of luxury, ambition and hollow display. He had felt the good old times, content with rustic dance and song, vanishing since 1510:

De vinte annos a ca Não ha hi gaita nem gaiteiro[111].

Now no one is content: _ninguem se contenta da maneira que sohia_[112]. _Tudo bem se vai ao fundo_[113]. He especially deplored the new confusion between the classes[114]. Shepherd, page and priest all wish to serve the King, that is, to become an official and to idle for a fixed wage while the land remained unploughed. The peasants do not know what they want and _murmuram sem entender_[115]. There is slackness everywhere (_todos somos negligentes_)[116]. Portugal was suffering from a crisis similar to that of four centuries later and men were inclined to leave their professions in order to theorize or in the hope of growing rich by a short cut or by chance instead of by hard, steady work; and the result was a period of upheaval and disquiet. Vicente suffered like the rest. He had embodied in his plays the simple pastimes of the Portuguese people, their delight in the processions, services and dramatic displays of the Church, in the mimicry of the early _arremedillos_, in the rich fancy-dress _momos_ which were an essential element at great festivities. But his drama was not classical, often it was not drama. Technically he is less dramatic than Lucas Fernández or Torres Naharro. He defied every rule of Aristotle and mingled together the grave and gay, coarse and courtly in a way faithful to life rather than to any accepted theories of the stage. While he continued to produce these natural and delightful plays all kinds of new conditions arose. It was the irony of circumstance that when the old Portuguese poetry held the field the taste of the Court for personal satire and magnificent show could scarcely appreciate at its true value the lyrical gift of Vicente; and later, after King Manuel's death, Vicente found himself confronted by a new school in which classicism carried the day, the long Italian metres superseded the merry native _redondilha_ of eight syllables, and the latinisers began to transform the language and shuddered like _femmes savantes_ at Vicente's barbarisms and uncouth _voquibles_. His attitude towards his critics was one of humility and good humour. It is at least good to know that Vicente with his _redondilhas_ continued to triumph personally in his old age and it was only the hand of death that drove him from the scene. Nor did he cease to point out abuses: the increase of _a falsa mentira_, the corruption of justice[117], the greed for money[118] and the growth of luxury[119]. He pillories the ignorance of pilots[120] by which so many ships were lost now and later, and he seems to doubt the wisdom of keeping women shut up like nuns both before[121] and after[122] marriage. If in many respects Vicente belonged to the Middle Ages, in his curiosity and many-sidedness he was a true child of the Renaissance. He dabbled in astrology and witchcraft, loved music (he wrote tunes for some of his lyrics), poetry, reading, acting and the goldsmith's art, and maintained his zest in old age: _Mofina Mendes_ was probably written when he was over sixty. Attempts to represent him as a Lutheran reformer, a deep philosopher or an authority in questions philological fall to the ground. He was a jovial poet and a keen observer who loved his country, and when he saw its inhabitants all at sixes and sevens he would willingly have brought them back to what he called _a boa diligencia_.

III. TYPES SKETCHED IN HIS PLAYS

In Vicente's notes and sketches of the Portugal of his day we may see the master hand of the goldsmith accustomed to set jewels. His miniatures are so distinct and the types described are so various that had we no other record of the first third of the sixteenth century in Portugal we might form a very fair and singularly vivid estimate from his plays. With a comic poet we have, of course, to be on our guard. When Vicente introduces the _lavrador_ who steals his neighbour's land, is he drawing from life or from Berceo's _mal labrador_ or from the _Danza de la Muerte_ (_fasiendo furto en la tierra agena_) or from the Bible: 'Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark'? When he presents the poverty-stricken nobleman, the dissipated priest, rustics from Beira, or negro slaves, for how much does the conventional satire of the day stand in these portraits and how much is drawn from Nature? Are they merely literary types? It is obvious that these themes were a great resource for the satirists of that time but their value to the satirist lay in their truth. The sad existence of the poor gentleman and the splendour maintained by penniless nobles are all too well attested. As to the priests, when we find King Manuel joining with King Ferdinand of Spain in a protest to the Pope to the effect that the whole of Christendom was scandalized by the dissolute life of the clergy and by the traffic in Bulls[123], and grave ecclesiastics in Spain and friends of grave ecclesiastics, like Franco Sacchetti[124] earlier in Italy, using language even more violent than that of Vicente, we need not doubt the truth of his sketches. He was perhaps more vivid than the other critics and his satire penetrated deeply for the very reason that he was a realist. There was no doubt some professional exaggeration in the language of his _beirão_ rustics, but his sympathy with the peasants and his wide knowledge of the province of Beira prove that his object was not merely mockery: _zombar da gente da Beira_[125]. Many of his types are foreshadowed in the _Cancioneiro Geral_, and especially in the _Arrenegos_ of Gregorio Afonso, of the household of the Bishop of Evora: the 'priest who lives like a layman,' 'the gentleman who has not enough to eat,' 'the man of great estate and small income,' the _preciosos_, the _borrachas_, the _fantasticos_, the _alcouviteira_, 'the peasants placed in a position of importance.' In developing these figures Vicente was always careful to keep close to Nature. Each speaks in his own language, 'the negro as a negro, the old man as an old man.' This is carried to such a length that the Spanish Queen in the lament on the death of King Manuel is made to speak her few lines in Spanish, the rest of the poem being in Portuguese[126].

Vicente is not an easy writer because his styles are so many and his allusions so local. But we must be infinitely grateful to him for the way in which he portrays a type in a few lines and for the fact that although they are types they are evidently taken from individuals whom he had observed and who continue to live for us in his pages. His gallery of priests is for all time. Frei Paço comes, with his velvet cap and gilt sword, 'mincing like a very sweet courtier'; Frei Narciso starves and studies, tinging his complexion to an artificial yellow in the hope that his hypocritical asceticism may win him a bishopric; the worldly courtier monk fences and sings and woos; the Lisbon priest, like his confessor one of Love's train, fares well on rabbits and sausages and good red wine, even as the portly pleasure-loving Lisbon canons; the country priest resembles a kite pouncing on chickens; the ambitious chaplain accepts the most menial tasks, compared with whom the sporting priest of Beira is at least pleasantly independent; and there are the luxurious hermit, the dissipated village priest who never prayed the hours, the inconstant monk who had been carrier and carpenter and now wishes to be unfrocked in order to join more freely in dance and pilgrimage, the mad friar Frei Martinho persecuted by dogs and Lisbon _gamins_, the ambitious preacher who glosses over men's sins. If the priests fared well in this life the satirists were determined that they should not be equally fortunate after their death. Vicente's proud Bishop is to be boiled and roasted, the grasping Archbishop is left perpetually aboiling, the ambitious Cardinal is to be devoured by dogs and dragons in a den of lions, while the sensual and simoniacal Pope is to have his flesh torn with red-hot iron. And we have--although here Vicente discreetly went to the _Danza de la Muerte_ for his satire--the vainglorious and tyrannical Emperor, the Duke who had adored himself and the King who had allowed himself to be adored. There are the careless hedonistic Count more given to love than to charity or churchgoing, the _fidalgo de raça_, the haughty _fidalgo de solar_ with a page to carry his chair, the judge who through his wife accepts bribes from the Jews, the rhetorical goldsmith, the usurer (_onzeneiro_) with his heart in his _cassette_ (_arca_)[127]. There too the pert servant-girl, the gossiping maidservant, the witch busy at night over a hanged man at the cross-roads, the faithless wife of the India-bound _lisboeta_, the Lisbon old woman copious in malediction, her genteel daughter Isabel, the wife who in her husband's absence only leaves her house to go to church or pilgrimage, the _mal maridada_ imprisoned by her husband, the peasant bride singing and dancing in skirt of scarlet, the woman superstitiously devout, the _beata alcouviteira_ who would not have escaped the Inquisition had she been printed like Aulegrafia in the seventeenth century, lisping gypsies, the _alcouviteiras_ Anna and Branca and Brigida, the _curandera_ with her quack remedies, the poor farmer's daughter brought to be a Court lady and still stained from the winepress, the old woman desirous of a young husband, the slattern Catherina Meigengra, the market-woman who plays the _pandero_ in the market-place, the peasant girls with pretentious names coming down to market basket on head from the hills, the shrew Branca and the timid wife Marta, the two irrepressible Lisbon fishwives, the voluble _saloia_ who sells milk well watered and charges cruel prices for her eggs and other wares, the country priest's greedy 'wife' who eats the baptism cake and is continually roasting chestnuts, the mystical ingenuous little shepherdess Margarida who sees visions on the hills, the superior daughter of the peasant judge who had once spoken to the King, the small Beira girl keeping ducks, Lediça the affectedly ingenuous daughter of the Jewish tailor, Cezilia of Beira possessed by a familiar spirit.

Or, again, we have the ceremonious Lisbon lover Lemos, the high-flown Castilian of fearful presence and a lion's heart, however threadbare his _capa_[128], the starving gentleman who makes a _tostão_ (= _5d._) last a month and dines off a turnip and a crust of bread, another--a sixteenth century Porthos--who imagines himself a _grand seigneur_ and has not a sixpence to his name but hires a showy suit of clothes to go to the palace, another who is an intimate at Court (_o mesmo paço_) but who to satisfy a passing passion has to sell boots and viola and pawn his saddle, the poor gentleman's servant (_moço_) who sleeps on a chest, or is rudely awakened at midnight to light the lamp and hold the inkpot while his master writes down his latest inspiration in his song-book, the incompetent Lisbon doctors with their stereotyped formulas, the frivolous persons who are bored by three prayers at church but spend nights and days listening to _novellas_, the _parvo_, predecessor of the Spanish _gracioso_, the Lisbon courtier descended from Aeneas, the astronomer, unpractical in daily life as he gazes on the stars, the old man amorous, rose in buttonhole, playing on a viola, the Jewish marriage-brokers, the country bumpkin, the lazy peasant lying by the fire, the poor but happy gardener and his wife, the quarrelsome blacksmith with his wife the bakeress, the carriers jingling along the road and amply acquainted with the wayside inns, the aspiring _vilão_, the peasant who complains bitterly of the ways of God, the _lavrador_ with his plough who did not forget his prayers and was charitable to tramps but skimped his tithes, the illiterate but not unmalicious _beirão_ shepherd who had led a hard life and whose chief offence was to have stolen grapes from time to time, the devout bootmaker who had industriously robbed the people during thirty years, the card-player blasphemous as the _taful_ of King Alfonso's _Cantigas de Santa Maria_, the delinquent from Lisbon's prison (the _Limoeiro_) whom his confessor had deceived before his hanging with promises of Paradise, the peasant _O Moreno_ who knows the dances of Beira, the negro chattering in his pigeon-Portuguese 'like a red mullet in a fig-tree,' the deceitful negro expressing the strangest philosophy in Portuguese equally strange, the rustic clown Gonçalo with his baskets of fruit and capons, who when his hare is stolen turns it like a canny peasant to a kind of posthumous account: _leve-a por amor de Deos pola alma de meus finados_, the Jew Alonso Lopez who had formerly been prosperous in Spain but is now a poor new Christian cobbler at Lisbon, the Jewish tailor who in the streets gives himself _fidalgo_ airs and is overjoyed at the regard shown him by officials and who at home sings songs of battle as he sits at his work[129].

In the actions and conversation of this motley crowd of persons high and low we are given many a glimpse of the times: the beflagged ship from India lying in the Tagus, the modest dinner (_a panela cosida_) of the rich _lavrador_, the supper of bread and wine, shellfish and cherries bought in Lisbon's celebrated Ribeira market, the Lisbon Jew's dinner of kid and cucumber, the distaff bought by the shepherd at Santarem as a present for his love, the rustic gifts of acorns, bread and bacon, the shepherdess' simple dowry or the more considerable dowry of a girl somewhat higher in society (consisting of a loom, a donkey, an orchard, a mill and a mule), the migratory shepherds' ass, laden with the milk-jugs and bells, and with a leathern wallet, yokes and shackles, the sheepskin coats of the shepherds, bristling masks for their dogs (as a defence against wolves), loaves of bread, onions and garlic. Thus in town and village, palace and attic, house and street, on road and mountain and sea the Portugal of the early sixteenth century is clearly and charmingly conveyed to us, and we can realize better the conditions of Gil Vicente's life at Court or as he journeyed on muleback to Evora or Coimbra, Thomar or Santarem or Almeirim.

IV. ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE

In 1523 the 'men of good learning' doubted Vicente's originality. They might point to the imitations of Enzina or to the resemblance between the trilogy of _Barcas_ and the _Danza de la Muerte_ or they might reveal the origin of many a verse and phrase used by Vicente in his plays and already familiar in the song-books of Spain and Portugal. Vicente could well afford to let his critics strain at these gnats. He had the larger originality of genius and while realizing that 'there is nothing new under the sun[130]' he could transform all his borrowings into definite images or lyrical magic. (There are flashes of poetry even in the absurd _ensalada_ of III. 323-4.) He was the greatest lyrical poet of his day and, in a strictly limited sense, the greatest dramatist. He is Portugal's only dramatist, without forerunners or successors, for the playwrights of the Vicentian school lacked his genius and only attain some measure of success when they closely copy their master, while the classical school produced no great drama in Portugal: it is impossible to except even Antonio Ferreira's _Ines de Castro_ from this sweeping assertion. But that is not to say that Vicente stands entirely isolated, self-sufficing and self-contained. Genius is never self-sufficing. Talent may live apart in an ivory palace but genius overflows in many relations, is acted on and reacts and has the generosity to receive as well as to give. The influences that acted upon Gil Vicente were numerous: the Middle Ages and the humanism of the first days of the Renaissance, the old national Portugal with its popular traditions and the new imperial Portugal of the first third of the sixteenth century, the Bible and the _Cancioneiro de Resende_, the whole literature of Spain and Portugal, the services of the Church, the book of Nature. But before examining how these influences work out in his plays it may be well to consider whether their sources may be yet further extended.

Court relations between Portugal and France had never entirely ceased and the 1516 _Cancioneiro_ contains many allusions to the prevailing familiarity with things French. But Vicente's genius was not inspired by the Court: it would be truer to say that, while he was encouraged by Queen Lianor and the King, the Court's taste for new things, superficial fashions and personal allusions tended to thwart his genius. When he introduces a French song in his plays this does not imply any intimate acquaintance with the lyrical poetry of France but rather deference to the taste of the Court. He would pick up words of foreign languages with the same quickness with which he initiated himself into the way of witch or pilot, fishwife or doctor, but we have an excellent proof that his knowledge of neither French nor Italian was profound. We know how consistently he makes his characters speak each in his own language. Yet in the _Auto da Fama_, whereas the Spaniard speaks Spanish only, the Frenchman and Italian murder their own language and eke it out with Portuguese[131]. Vicente read what he could find to read, but we may be sure that his reading was mainly confined to Portuguese and Spanish. The very words in his letter to King João III in which he speaks of his reading are another echo of Enzina[132], and although it cannot be asserted that he was not acquainted with this or that piece of French literature and with the early French drama, it may be maintained that whatever influence France exercised upon him came mainly through Spain, whether the connecting link is extant, as in the case of the _Danza de la Muerte_, or lost, as in that of the _Sumario da Historia de Deos_. Probably Vicente knew of French _mystères_ little more than the name[133]. As to the literature of Greece, Rome and Italy the conclusion is even more definite. Vicente had not read Plautus or Terence, his knowledge of _el gran poeta Virgilio_ (III. 104) does not extend beyond the quotation _omnia vincit amor_. Aristotle is a name _et praeterea nihil_. With the classical tragedy of Trissino and others he had nothing in common, and if he lived to read or see Sá de Miranda's _Cleopatra_ he probably had his own very marked opinion as to its value. Dante was, of course, a closed book to him as to most of his contemporaries. With Spanish literature the case is very different. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the most Spanish period of Portuguese literature. The _Cancioneiro de Resende_ is nearly as Spanish as it is Portuguese. Portuguese poets were, almost without exception, bilingual. The horsemen stationed to bring the news of the wedding from Seville to Evora in 1490 were emblematic of the close relations between the two countries. Men were in continual expectation that they would come to form one kingdom[134]. King Manuel's infant son was heir to Spain and Portugal and the empires in Africa and America.