GALICIA has had many sweet singers since the “days of MacÌas, the poet of true love, but none have poured forth a more moving or a more plaintive song than Rosalia Castro. This poetess loved her beautiful Galicia with a passionate love that could not be surpassed. Her tender woman’s heart ached with the pain of her country’s ever-bleeding wound, and she realised only too well that every bright and promising youth who left those shores to seek his fortune in a distant land represented a drop of Galicia’s life-blood. She wept for the old people whose children were torn from them in the first bloom of their manhood; she sorrowed for the lonely young wife left behind, and for the helpless babe that never knew its father; tears filled her eyes at the sight of those luxuriant hills and valleys with no peasants to cultivate their rich and fertile soil—

A strain of exalted sadness runs through all the poetry of Rosalia Castro, and its nature is essentially elegiac. Rosalia suffers with those who are afflicted, and speaks for those who are dumb. Rich and poor alike repeat her verses to express their deepest and most tender thoughts; there is not a Gallegan who does not quote her, not a peasant girl who does not love her name. All Galicia’s sorrows find an echo in her poems, and her sorrow of sorrows, the pain of parting, the anguish of absence, the throb of home-sickness—the sorrow of emigration, is felt in almost every line.[197]

Rosalia’s lyrics are sweet and simple idyls of Galicia’s pastoral life. As we read them we wander among the green valleys and beside the clear waters of her myriad brooks; we hear the singing of the wooden cart wheels in the country lanes, and feel the humidity of the mist-laden air. We rejoice with her in the warm spring sunshine, and when the summer comes we share with her the aroma of the abundant fruits and flowers; we hear the peasant boy singing to the accompaniment of his beloved gaita; we watch the white sails of the boats as they glide upon the calm blue surface of her glorious rias; we see the ocean foam dash mountain high against her rocky coast, and through all we feel the throbbing presence of Galicia’s pain and sorrow.

The beautiful hills and valleys of Galicia inspire her children with such a wild and passionate love of home as I have never met with elsewhere. Emigrants from all countries suffer more or less from home-sickness, but it is only the emigrants of Galicia who die of it. Yes, many and many a Gallegan peasant has died of sadness because he could not return to his native land. This home-sickness is a real malady, it has a special name in the Gallegan language; it is called morriÑa.[198] It is not surprising, then, that Galicia’s sons far away in Cuba should have collected money to raise a monument to the memory of a poetess who expressed their woes with such idyllic sweetness, and in the melodious dialect of their dear native province that they had learned as children at their mother’s knee. And this fervent appreciation of the poetess is no mere local cult; it goes wherever a Gallegan goes, it accompanies the emigrants as they embark for other shores, and the name of Rosalia Castro is honoured wherever Gallegans are to be found.

Rosalia Castro was brought up at Padron, and it was there that she breathed her last; a tablet on the house that she lived in bears the date of her death, 15th July 1885. Her earliest work, and perhaps her best, was a small volume of popular poems entitled Cantares Gallegas: she also wrote a book entitled As Viudas d’os vivos e as viudas d’os mortos (“The Widows of the Living and the Widows of the Dead”). Rosalia began to write poetry at the age of eleven. At the age of twenty she was married to SeÑor Murguia. Her death occurred in her forty-eighth year. She published several novels, and wrote a great deal more poetry than was ever published, but before her death she expressed a wish that all her unpublished writings might be burned—and her friends respected this wish.

Follas Novas is perhaps her most popular volume; it consists of a collection of short lyrics. I tried hard to buy a copy, but it has long been out of print, and was not to be had even in Madrid. Failde[199] relates that a man who possessed a copy, being asked to sell it, replied that he would not part with it for its weight in gold. The only one of Rosalia’s books which reached a second edition is her first, Cantares Gallegas, but that, too, is now out of print. Both of these volumes were, however, lent to me during my stay in Galicia, and from them I copied a few of the lyrics that pleased me most.

So well are the Cantares known in Galicia, that every one of them has become a part of the folklore of the province. “We hear them sung,” writes Failde, “in the most lonely villages on the most distant heights, and in the largest towns.” Yet Rosalia was not Galicia’s only poetess; contemporary with her were Sofia Casanova, who is still living, Narcisa Perez de Reoyo, “whose life was that of a flower,” Avelina Valladares, and Filomena Dato MuruÁis, whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making during my visit to Orense.

Failde speaks of Rosalia as “an Æolian harp made of Celtic oak,” and “Galicia’s nightingale,” and he tells us in his little biography of the poetess that she was a model daughter, wife, and mother. She came of an old and noble Gallegan family, a family that had already produced many poets. Rosalia was born at Santiago on 21st February 1837. She was always “very delicate,” and the greater part of her life was a martyrdom through ill-health. In some of her poems she complains of the damp and cold of the long Santiago winters.

Rosalia’s poems are not in sympathy with the socialistic agrarianism that is spreading so fast in Andalusia; she liked to think that there was not a family in Galicia, however poor, that did not possess its own home and its own bit of land.

were words breathed from her very soul, and we English can translate them by our own equivalent—

Thierry said of the Ancient Britons that they lived upon poetry, and their poets had but one theme, the destiny of their country, its sorrows and its hopes. The Gallegans come of the same Celtic stock, and their love of poetry and their passion for home are quite as intense. “A Gallegan sticks to his native land,” says Failde, “like meat to the bone.”

Rosalia’s poetry, though full of majestic sadness, is by no means pessimistic; she is full of Christian resignation, but she is not devoid of Christian hope. “Rosalia,” wrote Emilio Castelar, “by her Gallegan lyrics has become a star of the first magnitude in the vast horizon of Spanish art.” There is nothing more tender or more full of feeling to be found in Spanish poetry than her lyric, “Padron, Padron.” One of the most striking characteristics of this poetess was her insight into the relationship between the exterior and the interior world. To her the earthly horizon was an emblem of the horizon that spreads before the human mind, the light of the stars spoke to her of the light of the eyes; a shower of rain reminded her of human tears, electricity in the clouds brought to her poetic mind the electric current of human sympathy. Nature spoke to her, and she listened. There is no effort about her verses; they are the outpourings of a poetic soul, candid and pure and simple and sparkling as the limpid waters of her native streams. “I have only had a village education,” she says naÏvely in one of her prefaces, and in another she says, “We women are like a harp with only two strings, imagination and sentiment”;[200] and she adds that if a woman touches science she impregnates it with her innate debility.(!!) Rosalia writes because she cannot help writing; she is like a musical instrument that sounds because the strings are touched.

As de VoguË said of the Russian poets, “Les poetes Russes no sont et ne seront jamais traduits,” so it is with the poetry of Galicia. Both the Russian and the Gallegan are full of sweet and tender and untranslatable diminutives infinitely musical and vividly expressive.[201] When we try to interpret them into a foreign tongue their music dies and their soul evaporates, leaving nothing behind but a dry husk of words.

Here is one of Rosalia’s shorter lyrics:

I have translated it as literally as possible for those of my readers who may not be able to read the original—

On 25th May 1891, the earthly remains of Rosalia Castro were transferred to the church of Santo Domingo, “the Gallegan Pantheon.” The whole town of Santiago took part in the ceremony, and a procession followed the bier,—a procession in which all the societies, the university, the colleges, the professors, the students, the employers of the telegraph, of the banks,—in fact everybody took part. Long rows of children bearing lighted candles preceded the hearse, which was followed by men bearing the standards of Galicia; Cuba was also represented.

All the shops were shut, and the whole town presented an appearance of mourning. The townspeople walked two and two in perfect silence from the station outside the town to the entrance of the church, drawing up before the steps of the university, where a local orator gave a short address, upon the close of which a student recited one of Rosalia’s poems to the listening multitude. Then the students showered a rain of laurel wreaths upon the coffin, while the musicians played Shadello’s “Pieta Signor,” and tears flowed on every side.

As the procession arrived at the church of Santo Domingo, an unusual spectacle presented itself. The students of the university awaited with lighted torches the arrival of the bier, and carried it into the church upon their own shoulders. “I never saw anything more touching,” writes Failde, “than the sight of so many young faces streaming with tears, and I do not know whether those tears flowed more for their poetess or for their country.”

It has been said that only those regions which have a peculiar and individual vitality can produce a literature of their own. The very fact that Galicia possessed—in the early Middle Ages—both prose and poetry composed and written in her particular dialect is a sign in itself that she was once full of life and energy. As we have seen in a previous chapter, the language of Galicia has justly been called the mother of Portuguese. “Great is the excellence of the Gallegan tongue,” wrote the Marquis of Figueroa,[202] “not only because it adapts itself so easily to poetic expression, but also on account of its great and noble past.” Galicia is rich in legends, which, to the ignorant peasants, are gospel truths; she is rich in historic ruins; in every town the escutcheons on her houses tell of noble families that flourished in her midst. Once one of the most important and influential parts of the kingdom, she gave her language to the court, and it was through Galicia that the poetry of Provence passed into Castille and Portugal.[203] But after the fifteenth century, when her autonomy had been taken from her, and when she had sunk to the level of an abandoned and almost forgotten province, there was no vitality left in her, and the stream of her literature was dried. Her political decadence had brought with it literary decay. Her best families left her to settle in Madrid and the rising towns of Spain, and the interests of the province paled before those of the capital and the Court. Even her poets abandoned the language of Galicia in favour of that of Castille.[204]

For several centuries the poetry of Galicia lay as dead; there was practically no sign of life, and even her glorious past seemed to have sunk into oblivion. People even wondered, in the early years of the nineteenth century, how it could ever have come about that the trovadors of the Middle Ages should have chosen her archaic dialect for their medium. But there was a sudden and wonderful change a few years later. Galicia woke out of her long sleep; she had found a poetess in Rosalia Castro.

Rosalia’s sensitive and poetic mind was admirably adapted to interpret the beauties of Galicia; “her refined faculties surprise, by means of the secrets of language, the secrets of the soul.” Sometimes her verses are full of tender melancholy, at others they are penetrated with gentle irony, and now and again they reflect the innocent hilarity of childhood. As one of Rosalia’s own countrywomen has said, “If her tears are softened by smiles, her smiles in their turn are tempered by tears, and the one and the other are mingled to the sound of the gaita.”[205]

By virtue of her selection and her delicate talent, Rosalia purged the Gallegan tongue of certain prosaic vulgarities which her precursor, the Cura de Fruime, and one or two of that poet’s contemporaries, had allowed to creep into it, and so her name has come to stand as a symbol of the renaissance of Galicia’s poetry, and she will always be regarded as the first poet to open a new era in the annals of her native province.[206] So far no other Gallegan poet of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries has approached Rosalia in individuality. Clear and distinct her poetic personality stands out from amongst all the rest; she has given the impulse, and others are already following in the path her genius has so clearly indicated, and a literary movement has been set on foot which may possibly terminate in a third Golden Age for Galicia.

Is it necessary for the complete nationalisation of France that the language of Provence should die? Is it indispensable for the welfare of Belgium that the Flemish tongue should disappear? Must Great Britain drive her Welshmen to Patagonia if she hears them speak the language of their fathers? No; a thousand times, no. It is base and cowardly to fear a language. Rather, it is the bounden duty of Civilisation to do all in her power to preserve every tongue which has produced a literature. If we destroy individuality, we weaken nationality at the same time. It was during the war with Napoleon that the Gallegan spirit began to awake once more. Local writers made great efforts in the year 1808 to arouse the dormant patriotism of their province;[207] it was in 1813 that a native of Galicia living in London published a pamphlet, “Os rogos d’un Gallago,” addressed to his Gallegan compatriots with the intention of stirring them to action. When Ferdinand came to the throne the awakening country fell back into its former apathy, and progress was once more at a standstill. When Maria Christina succeeded Ferdinand, the dry bones again began to stir; and more books appeared in the Gallegan dialect, but matters moved very slowly. It was not till the year 1863 that Rosalia Castro published her first volume of poetry, Cantares Gallegas.