[581] Bernardo de Brito, no lover of Spain, bears witness to _o favor e
benevolencia com que trata os homens doutos_.
[582] _De Crepusculis_, Preface. Martim Afonso de Miranda later (_Tempo
de Agora_, _prologo_ to Pt. 2, 1624) writes of _a pouca curiosidade que
hoje ha acerca da lição dos liuros, como tambem o risco a que se expõem
os que escreuem_.
[583] Menéndez y Pelayo set Mello above all except his friend Quevedo.
[584] Mr. Edgar Prestage discovered his baptismal certificate and
established the date (1608) beyond doubt, though it is still often
given as 1611. On his mother’s side Mello was great-grandson of the
historian Duarte Nunez de Leam.
[585] Prefatory letter to _Las tres Mvsas del Melodino_ (1649): _el
lenguaje estrangero tan poco es favorable al que compone_.
[586] He was writing it in January 1650.
[587] _Historia de los movimientos y separacion de Cataluña y de la
guerra_, &c. Lisboa, 1645.
[588] On his release after four months of imprisonment the Count-Duke
Olivares said to him: _Ea, caballero, ha sido un erro, pero erro con
causa._
[589] The first five years were, in his own words, rigorous. In 1650
he was removed from the _Torre Velha_ to the Lisbon _Castello_, and
thenceforth enjoyed greater liberty. He had been transferred from the
Torre de Belem to the _Torre Velha_ on the left bank of the Tagus in
1646.
[590] The document was discovered by Dr. Braga and published in his _Os
Seiscentistas_ (1916), p. 339.
[591] _Approbatio of Cartas_, Roma, 1664.
[592] A copy of this rare and curious work exists in the Lisbon
Biblioteca Nacional (_Res._ 264 v.). It contains 71 ff. divided into
four parts. The author, in his apophthegms on the character of women,
quotes the classics widely, and refers to the Uthopia [so] of Sir
Thomas More and to _Celestina_.
[593] _Relaçam_, 1842 ed., p. 233.
[594] His digressions are methodical: _por este modo de historiar (que
é aquelle que eu desejo ler) pretendo escrever sempre_ (_Epan._ ii). In
_Epan._ i he says: _Refiro, pode ser com demasia, todos os accidentes
deste negocio._
[595] He re-wrote this _Epanaphora_ twice, the first two versions
having been lost.
[596] Cf. _Visita das Fontes_ (_Ap. Dial._ 3), 1900 ed., p. 89: _cada
qual desde o logar em que está acha uma linha muito junto de si que é o
caminho por onde pode ir a Deus_.
[597] Cf. _Hospital das Lettras_ (_Ap. Dial._ 4), 1900 ed., p. 114:
_por falta de cuidar cada um em se aproveitar deste mundo o que delle
lhe toca, o lançam todos a perder todos juntos do modo que vemos_.
[598] _Relogios Fallantes_ (_Ap. Dial._ 1).
[599] _Escriptorio Avarento_ (_Ap. Dial._ 2).
[600] _Visita das Fontes_ (_Ap. Dial._ 3).
[601] Cf. the backwoodsman described by Couto as _algum fidalgo criado
lá na Beira que nunca vio o Rei_ (_Dialogo do Sold. Prat._, p. 31).
[602] Cf. _Aulegrafia_ (1619), f. 85 v.: _emendar a Natureza_.
[603] Edgar Prestage, _Esboço_, pp. 128-9.
[604] Like another equally brilliant soldier historian, Napier, he
rarely spells a foreign word aright. Cf. _Epanaphoras_, p. 204: _A este
nome_ Milord _corresponde no estado feminil o nome_ Léde. Falmouth,
where he had actually been, becomes Valmud, the Isle of Wight Huyt,
Whitehall Huythal, the Earl of Northumberland Notaborlan (Brito has
Northũbria).
[605] A more personal and picaresque satirist was D. THOMAS DE NORONHA
(†1651), whose works were collected by Dr. Mendes dos Remedios in
his _Subsidios_, vol. ii: _Poesias Ineditas de D. Thomás de Noronha_
(Coimbra, 1899). The satiric poem _Os Ratos da Inquisição_ by ANTONIO
SERRÃO DE CASTRO (1610-85) was first published by Castello Branco in
1883.
[606] Vol. iii contains a poem by Jacinto Freire de Andrade with the
same title.
[607] _Fenix Ren._ ii. 406; iii. 225; v. 376.
[608] Hers is the deplorable pun of a superior superior:
Que se Prior sois agora
Sempre fostes suprior.
[609] The real title of the first (1623) edition is _Dos Novissimos
de Dom Francisco Rolim de Moura_. Adam is conducted by his son Abel
through Hell and comforted by a vision of Paradise. As he is the first
man and only Abel has died, he must forgo Dante’s pleasure in meeting
his personal enemies there, but there is something perhaps even more
awful in the thought of the emptiness of these _infinitos logares_
(iii. 48). Virgil’s _Facilis descensus_, &c., is translated in two
lines of great badness: _Onde descer he cousa tão factivel Quanto
tornar atraz tem de impossivel_ (iii. 36).
[610] _Nihil tamen eo vivente excussum nisi Solitudines (hoc est
Saudades)_, says the _Theatrum_.
[611] e.g. (x. 126):
Hũa montanha e serra inhabitada
Se erguia ao ar, em cuja corpulenta
Espalda....
[612] ii. 30-49:
Do undoso leito, donde repousava
O mar, &c.
[613] xii. 79: _Sou fragil lenho._
[614] In the storm in canto 2 (_Eis que o ceo de improuiso se
escurece_) he seems to have realized that Camões’ description could not
be improved upon.
[615] Numerous other academies of the same kind came into being in
this and the first half of the next century. Most of their members now
belong to the (Brazilian) _Academia dos Esquecidos_--the Forgotten.
[616] The slip in the second letter by which in the French version not
the Beja Mertola Gate but Mertola itself is seen from the convent, does
not favour this theory, which recently has been sustained by the Conde
de Sabugosa. This passage is held to be a convincing proof, were such
proof needed, of the genuineness of the letters. It is rather a proof
of the reality of the love intrigue than of the nun’s authorship. If
Chamilly, for the edification of his vanity, were fabricating such a
letter, what more likely than that he should wish to add his note of
local colour and remembered vaguely the word Mertola in connexion with
the view from the convent terrace? What he could scarcely have invented
or expressed is the real depth of feeling.
[617] Seven spurious letters, and subsequently others, were added in
many of the editions. Filinto Elysio translated the twelve.
[618] _Je parierais tout au monde que les Lettres portugaises ont été
écrites par un homme._
[619] e.g. ‘You told me frankly that you were in love with a lady in
your own country’ (letter 2). ‘Were you not ever the first to leave
for the front, the last to return?’ (5). ‘My passion increases every
instant’ (4). ‘I do not repent having adored you. I am glad that you
betrayed me’ (3).
[620] Ed. H. Butler Clarke (1897), pp. 17-18 and 65-7.
[621] The 1652 edition speaks of _coroneis_ (p. 277) who, it has been
argued, were called _mestres de campo_ till 1708 (Goes, however,
in his _Cron. de D. Manuel_, 1619 ed., f. 213, has _os fez todos
quatro coroneis de mil homens_; cf. Gil Vicente, i. 234: _Corregedor,
coronel_); it refers (p. 393) to João IV as still alive (†1656): _Que
Deos guarde e prospere_. It would appear to have been written at two
periods, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, unless the
passages implying the earlier date are as deliberately misleading as
the 1652 title-page.
[622] _Classicos Esquecidos_ (Rio de Janeiro, 1915). Duarte de Macedo
in his dedicatory letter says: ‘I have taken this _Summa Politica_ from
the Latin and Italian languages.’ ‘I do not offer it as my own, because
I restore it to your Highness as yours’, so that he had armed himself
against such charges of plagiarism.
[623] It loses nothing in Sir Peter Wyche’s translation. Cf. the
account of Castro’s first arrival at Goa: ‘When the entry was to be,
the two Governours were in a Faluque with gilded Oars, and an awning
of divers-coloured silks; the Castles and Ships entertain’d ’em with
the horrour of reiterated shootings, the Vivas and expectation of the
common people did without any cunning flatter the new Government, &c.’
[624] _Cada clausula he filha da eloquencia mats sublime_, &c. (Barbosa
Machado).
[625] e.g. 1759 ed., p. 342: _cujas ruinas serião de sua fama os
elogios maiores_ would be straightened out from Latin into Portuguese:
_serião os maiores elogios de sua fama_.
[626] On his homeward voyage in 1654 he had suffered from a violent
storm, and was only saved by a Dutch pirate who landed the passengers
of the Portuguese ship at the Ilha Graciosa without their belongings.
[627] _Historia do Futuro_ (1718), p. 93.
[628] See letters from Bahia, July 22, 1695.
V
1706-1816
_The Eighteenth Century_
The eighteenth century did not kill literature in Portugal any more
than in other countries, but poetry had lost its lyrism, and under
the influence of French and English writers assumed a scientific,
philosophical, or utilitarian character. No mighty genius arose in
Portuguese literature at the bidding of João V (1706-50), but the
king’s lavish patronage gave an impulse, and he founded the _Academia
Real de Historia_ in 1720. A crop of scholars and poets followed
in the second half of the century, so that it was not without some
unfairness that Giuseppe Baretti wrote of the Portuguese in 1760 that
_di letteratura non hanno punto fama d’essere soverchio ghiotti ...
quel poco que scrivono, sia in prosa sia in verso, è tutto panciuto
e pettoruto_.[629] It was the age of Arcadias: the famous _Arcadia
Ulyssiponense_[630] (1756-74) and the _Nova Arcadia_ founded in 1790
(i. e. precisely a century after the Italian _Arcadia_). All the
poets of the century belonged to one or other of these societies or
made their mark as _dissidentes_ from them. One of the founders of
the _Nova Arcadia_, FRANCISCO JOAQUIM BINGRE (1763-1856), lived on
into the middle of the nineteenth century, and a few of his poems
were collected under the title _O Moribundo Cysne do Vouga_ (1850).
A typical eighteenth-century poet is D. FRANCISCO XAVIER DE MENESES
(1673-1743), fourth Conde da Ericeira, who in turning to literature
was but following the traditions of his family. A staunch defender of
pure Portuguese against those who, he said, disfigure and corrupt the
language by the introduction of foreign words and phrases, he wrote a
large number of works in prose and in verse. The best known of them is
his _Henriqueida_ (1741), a heroic poem on the conquest of Portugal by
Count Henry in twelve long cantos of prosaic _oitavas_. It may contain
lines more inspiring than these:
E a contramina fabricou Roberto,
Da mina conhecendo o lugar certo,
but they do not really differ greatly from the rest of the poem. The
large quantity of poetry still written at the beginning of the century
had met with severe criticism in Frei Lucas de Santa Catharina’s _Seram
Politico_. He slyly calls the _egloga campestre_ ‘_poesia ervada_’. The
objects of the _Arcadia_ of 1756 were to free Portuguese literature
from foreign influences and restore the purity of the language. If
to some extent it merely substituted French or Italian influence for
Spanish, its cry was also back to the classics and to the Portuguese
_quinhentistas_. As to the language its services were invaluable,
for at a time when French influence was great in Portugal and in the
rest of Europe it checked the use of gallicisms; as to literature the
attempt to write poetry on an ordered plan was perhaps foredoomed to
failure: it plodded along in an artificial atmosphere of Roman gods and
antiquities, and became hidebound in imitation of the Horatian ode.
PEDRO ANTONIO CORRÊA GARÇÃO (1724-72), one of the first members
and most prominent poets of the _Arcadia_, did good service in his
determined efforts to deliver his country’s literature from foreign
imitations and the false affectation of the time, and to revert to the
classics, Greek, Roman, and Portuguese. He even prophesied that Gil
Vicente’s day would come. His master was Horace, _grande Horacio_, and
his Horatian odes, if they show no remarkable lyrical gift, have a dry
native flavour in the purity of their language. He was also successful
in reviving the cultivation of blank verse. There is a fine sound in
some of the sonnets in which he sings Marilia, Lydia, Belisa, Maria,
Nise, writes to a friend to ask for a doubloon or for Spanish tobacco,
sends birthday congratulations or laughs at a bald priest: the themes
are mostly of this level. His satirical vein is marked in his two short
comedies in blank verse, _Theatro Novo_, a skit on the drama then in
vogue, and _Assemblêa ou Partida_, in which certain Lisbon types are
ridiculed and which contains the famous and much overpraised _Cantata
de Dido_. Corrêa Garção’s days ended tragically in prison. The motive
of his arrest is not clear. Tradition wavers between a love intrigue
and political reasons,[631] and declares that the Marques de Pombal,
whom he had offended, signed the order for his release on the very day
of the poet’s death after eighteen months of imprisonment.
Pombal was effusively praised by DOMINGOS DOS REIS QUITA (1728-70),
a Lisbon hairdresser who wrote bucolic poetry melodiously, but with
perhaps even less originality than we have learnt to expect in that
kind since the time when Virgil mistranslated Theocritus. The influence
of Bernardez and Camões is clear,[632] in many passages too clear,
and he had undoubtedly caught something of their skill and harmony
in technique. But his poems leave the impression that he had no real
feeling for the rustic life which they describe; no doubt he was more
at home with the scissors than with the faithful Melampus or the
nymphs and shepherd’s pipe. When he is relating an event, such as the
earthquake of 1755, which touched him nearly, his ready flow of verse
deserts him, in spite of his skill in improvisation,[633] although the
sonnet written on the same occasion, _Por castigar, Senhor_, stands out
with a certain majesty from most of his other sonnets, which are mere
slices of eclogue. If his mellifluous idylls show no individuality, his
return to the classic poets of Portugal was, as with other Arcadian
poets, a welcome change from the Spanish influence, the _mao uso_, as
he calls it, of ‘rude strangers from the Manzanares’ (Eclogue 6). His
tragedies and pastoral drama _Licore_ are not more original. One of
his tragedies, _Inés de Castro_, suggested that of João Baptista Gomes
(†1813), _Nova Castro_, which had a great vogue in its day but is now
scarcely more remembered than _Osmia_ (1788), a tragedy of which the
blank verse has vigour, although it is often scarcely distinguishable
from prose. This play, published anonymously, was long attributed to
Antonio de Araujo de Azevedo (1754-1817), but its real author was D.
Theresa de Mello Breyner, Condessa de Vimieiro, who married her cousin,
the fourth Count, in 1767.
It was a cruel kindness to edit the works of ANTONIO DINIZ DA CRUZ E
SILVA (1731-99) in six volumes, for, despite the fame of his high-flown
Pindaric odes, his three centuries of sonnets and his other lyrics
are not of conspicuous merit and are often imitative. Having nothing
to say, _Elpino Nonacriense_, like too many of the Arcadian poets,
said it at inordinate length. _Que enorme confusão!_ he exclaims in an
elegy on the Lisbon earthquake, and most of his poems are on a like
plane of thought and expression. The son of a _Sargento Môr_,[634] he
was born at Lisbon, and after studying law at Coimbra was appointed a
judge at Castello de Vide. With Manuel Nicolau Esteves Negrão (†1824)
and Theotonio Gomes de Carvalho (†1800) he founded the _Arcadia
Ulyssiponense_, of which he drew up the statutes in September 1756.
The first aim of these early Arcadians was, as we have noticed, to
break the shackles of Spanish influence and _gongorismo_, which was,
indeed, on the wane in the land of its birth. Diniz da Cruz’ own poems
were written in good idiomatic Portuguese. In _O Hyssope_ he satirizes
with telling vigour the use of gallicisms, and his comedy _O Falso
Heroismo_ is thoroughly Portuguese in subject and treatment. From
1764 to 1774 he was stationed at Elvas, and here a quarrel between
the bishop, D. Lourenço de Lancastre, and the dean, D. José Carlos de
Lara, furnished him with the subject of his celebrated mock-heroic poem
_O Hyssope_. The legend runs that he was summoned to read his satire
to the all-powerful Pombal in the presence of the infuriated bishop,
and that the poem proved too much for the gravity of the minister,
who appointed him a judge at Rio de Janeiro (1776). Thence he was
transferred to Oporto (1787), but in 1790 was again appointed to Rio de
Janeiro, and showed himself merciless in sentencing the Brazilian poets
Claudio Manuel da Costa, Gonzaga, and Ignacio José de Alvarengo Peixoto
(1748-93), accused of conspiring to secure the independence of their
country. _O Hyssope_ was first published in 1802, three years after
the author’s death. The idea of the poem was derived from Boileau’s
_Le Lutrin_. Boileau would have been horrified by its eight cantos of
slovenly and monotonous blank verse, which often scarcely rises above
prose; but as a satire on the times and in its grotesque portraiture
of prelate and lawyer and notary it is sometimes irresistibly comic.
The mock-heroic _Benteida_, written by ALEXANDRE ANTONIO DE LIMA of
Lisbon (1699-_c._ 1760?) and published fifty years before _O Hyssope_,
consisted of three cantos of _oitavas_. Two editions appeared in
1752, published at ‘Constantinople’ as written by ‘Andronio Meliante
Laxaed’. Pedro de Azevedo Tojal (†1742) had used the same metre for his
_Foguetario_ (1729). The burlesque poem _O Reino da Estupidez_ (1819),
written in four cantos of easily-flowing blank verse by the Brazilians
Francisco de Mello Franco (1757-1823) and José Bonifacio de Andrade e
Silva (1763-1838), is professedly an imitation of _aquelle activo e
discreto Diniz na Hyssopaïda_, only the butt here is not the Chapter of
Elvas but the professors of Coimbra University.
Like the less celebrated poet son of an Alentejan painter, JOSÉ
ANASTASIO DA CUNHA (1744-87), artillery officer, mathematician,
Professor of Geometry at Coimbra, who translated Pope and Voltaire and
had milk in his tea and buttered toast on a fast-day, FRANCISCO MANUEL
DO NASCIMENTO (1734-1819), better known as _Filinto Elysio_,[635]
was denounced to the Inquisition. His thrilling escape in the year
of Cunha’s condemnation for apostasy and heresy (1778) brought him
almost as much fame as his poems. The son of a Lisbon lighterman and
a humble _varina_,[636] he was accused of not believing in the Flood
and of throwing ridicule on the doctrine of original sin, and by
another witness of being simply an atheist. He succeeded in locking
up in his own rooms the official sent to arrest him early on the 4th
of July, hid for eleven days in Lisbon, and then, disguised as a poor
man carrying a load of oranges, escaped on a boat bound for Havre. Had
this persecution come earlier, the disquieting atmosphere of Paris,
into which he was now transplanted and where, except for a few years
at The Hague, he lived for the rest of his life, might have given some
originality to his talent. But his mind and poetic style were already
fixed, and through every political disturbance he continued his steady
flow of Horatian odes and similar artificial verse. He wrote for
seventy years (Lamartine notes the _précoces faveurs_ of his muse),
and at the age of sixty-four calculated that he had already composed
730,000 lines, probably too modest an estimate. He received by royal
decree an amnesty and the restoration of his property, but never
returned to Portugal. His influence on younger Portuguese poets was
nevertheless great. Bocage, when his verses were praised by the older
poet, exclaimed:
Filinto, o gran cantor, prezou meus versos
... Posteridade, és minha!
His influence was bad and good. It encouraged a dry and artificial
classicism, but also careful versification in pure Portuguese. Although
the poems of Lamartine’s _divin Manuel_ are no longer even by his
countrymen held to be divine, they may be read with satisfaction
by virtue of their indigenous expressions and a hundred and one
allusions to popular traditions. It was by these characteristics
that he expressed his revolt from the _Arcadia_. Half a long life
spent in Paris was unable to imbue Filinto with the _mimo de fallar
luso-gallico_, against which he vigorously protested to the end. This
purity of style gives excellence to the many translations which he was
obliged to write for a bare livelihood, and his native land is present
even in his closest imitations of Horace (Falernian becomes _louro
Carcavellos_). Unfortunately his contemporaries and successors were not
always so discreet.
The genial satirist NICOLAU TOLENTINO (1741-1811), son of a Lisbon
advocate, after studying law at Coimbra spent some years teaching
rhetoric to the raw youth (_bisonhos rapazes_) of Lisbon. He was
perpetually discontented with his lot or ready to profess himself so.
‘Long years have I already spent in begging,’ he says candidly, ‘and
shall perhaps pass my whole life in the same way.’ He harps on his
poverty; the kitchen, he complains, is the coolest room in his house.
In 1781 he obtained a comfortable post in the civil service, his poems
were printed for him in two volumes twenty years later, he would
receive a pheasant from one friend, a Sunday dinner of turkey from
another, he acknowledges a thousand benefits, and still begs on. Before
he had had time to grow rich the habit had become incurable. His was no
lyrical gift, but he imitated with success the _quintilhas_ of Sá de
Miranda,[637] in which much of his work is composed (_O Bilhar_ is in
_oitavas_). He writes naturally; his style is thoroughly Portuguese,
often prosaic. His satire, repressed for personal reasons rather than
from any failure of wit or talent, reducible to silence by the gift of
a pheasant, lacks independence and thought, but sheds a gentle light
on the manners of the time--on the travelled coxcomb who returns to
Portugal affecting almost to have forgotten Portuguese, or the rich
nun who knows by heart whole volumes of the _Fenix Renascida_--and one
or two of his entertaining sonnets are likely to endure. The _Obras
Poeticas_ of the MARQUESA DE ALORNA (1750-1839), in Arcadia _Alcippe_,
are now more often praised than read, but her poetry is scarcely
inferior to that of many even more celebrated writers of the time. As a
child she defied the anger of the Marques de Pombal. She was detained
with her sister Maria and her mother D. Leonor de Almeida in the
convent of Chellas from the age of eight till the death of King José
(1777). Two years later she married the Count of Oeynhausen, who became
minister at Vienna in 1780. After his death in 1793 she lived partly
in England, but spent the last twenty-five years of her life in the
neighbourhood of Lisbon, and exercised considerable influence on young
writers--not Garrett but Bocage, and especially Herculano--and thus
with Macedo formed a link between the poets of the _Arcadia_ and the
nineteenth century. Her works contain over 2,000 pages of verse. There
are sonnets and odes, eclogues, elegies, epistles, translations or
paraphrases of Homer, Horace, Claudian (_De raptu Proserpinae_), Pope
(_Essay on Criticism_), Wieland, Thomson’s _Seasons_, Goldsmith, Gray,
Lamartine, and the Psalms. There is a long poem on botany which notices
more than a hundred kinds of scented geranium, and indeed the range
of her subjects is very wide, from May fireflies to the ‘barbarous
climate’ of England, from Leibniz to the ascent of Robertson in a
balloon. Classical allusions are everywhere; she even drags in Cocytus
in a sonnet on the death of her infant son. At the same time we have a
constant sense of high ideals and love of liberty.
The compositions of the ‘pale, limber, odd-looking young man’, which
‘thrilled and agitated’ William Beckford in 1787, now scarcely move
us, vanished the fire and glow which BOCAGE (1765-1805) brought to his
improvisations. For the reader they are for the most part _carboni
spenti_. His parents were a Portuguese judge and the daughter of a
French vice-admiral in the Portuguese Navy, and he enlisted in an
infantry regiment in the town of his birth, Setubal, in 1779. Ten
years later he deserted at Damão, and after wandering in China reached
Macao and thence Goa, which he still found a stepmother to poets, and
Lisbon. Here he continued to live a dissipated life, till in 1797 his
revolutionary opinions and his poem _A Pavorosa Illusão da Eternidade_
brought him first to the Limoeiro and then for a few months to the
prison of the Inquisition. His unstable romantic spirit was influenced
as much by the French Revolution during the latter years of his life
as by the wish in his youth to become a second Camões, but he wrote an
elegy on the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette, which he described
as ‘a crime from Hell’. He supported life during his last years
principally by translation. He was himself his chief enemy, and he
was also the victim of the critics who applauded his improvisations
until he no longer distinguished between poetry and prose, sense and
absurdity. No better Portuguese pendant to the celebrated line of
blank verse ‘A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman’ will be found than that in
one of Bocage’s elegies: _Carpido objecto meu, carpido objecto_. The
undoubted talent of _Elmano Sadino_, as he was in Arcadia, was thus
frittered away in occasional verse in which his fecund gift of satire
found expression, and a great poet was lost to Portuguese literature.
His impromptu sallies against rival poets, such as Macedo, brought him
contemporary fame, but in some of his poems, especially the sonnets,
we have proof of a possibility of greater things. No doubt his work
is disfigured by pompous phrases[638] and hollow classical allusions.
He did not always rise above the bad taste of the period; he was
unable to concentrate his talent or separate prosaic from poetical
subjects. Thus he sang of an ascent in a _balão aerostatico_ in 1794,
and saw in the _vil mosquito_ a proof of the existence of God. But
his was nevertheless a very real and above all a very Portuguese
inspiration,[639] and some of his sonnets have force and grandeur
and hover on the fringes of beauty, especially when they voice his
unaffected enthusiasm for Portugal’s past greatness and heroes.
One of the foremost poets of the _Nova Arcadia_ was BELCHIOR MANUEL
CURVO SEMEDO (1766-1838), two volumes of whose _Composições Poeticas_
appeared in 1803. A crowd of secondary lights revolved round the great
planets of the two _Arcadias_. The poems of _Alfeno Cynthio_, DOMINGOS
MAXIMIANO TORRES (1748-1810), are not without vigour (_Versos_, 1791).
Their unfortunate author died a political prisoner at Trafaria. The gay
and lively Abbade of Jazente, PAULINO ANTONIO CABRAL[640] (1719-89),
was the son of an Oporto doctor, and was parish priest at Jazente
(near Amarante) from 1753 to 1784. His poems are still read for their
pleasant satire, but he was careless of literary fame. Some of the
sonnets of both these writers deserve not to be forgotten. JOÃO
XAVIER DE MATTOS (†1789), a fourth edition of whose _Rimas_ appeared
in the year after his death, is now remembered chiefly for some of his
sonnets, as that beginning _Poz-se o sol_, with its melancholy charm.
He was a true but not a great or original poet. Born at Oporto, the son
of a Brazilian father and a Portuguese mother, THOMAS ANTONIO GONZAGA
(1744-1807?) was a judge at Bahia when he was accused of taking part
in the Republican conspiracy of Minas Geraes (1789), and after three
years’ imprisonment was deported (1792) to Mozambique, where he died
several years after his sentence had expired. Some of his Horatian and
Anacreontic _lyras_ in many metres, addressed to Marilia and collected
under the title _A Marilia de Dirceo_ (_Dirceo_ being his Arcadian
name), are graceful lyrics of an idyllic character. Of the other poets
implicated in the conspiracy, CLAUDIO MANUEL DA COSTA (1729-69), who
was found dead in his prison cell, was an Arcadian poet of the Italian
school, and shows a gentle love of Nature in his sonnets. Of the
hundred sonnets printed in his _Obras_ (1768) some are in Italian.
The eclogues number twenty. In Brazil at this time, as earlier in
Portugal, patriotism if not poetry suggested epics. JOSÉ BASILIO DA
GAMA (1740-95), who spent the greater part of his life in Portugal and
died at Lisbon, wrote _O Uraguay_ (1769) in five cantos of prosaic
blank verse--an account of the struggle between Portuguese and Indians.
JOSÉ DE SANTA RITA DURÃO (_c._ 1720-84), Doctor in Theology (Coimbra),
composed an epic entitled _Caramurú_ (1781) on the discovery of Bahia
in the sixteenth century by Diogo Alvarez Corrêa. This poem in ten
cantos of _oitavas_ is inferior to _O Uraguay_, but it contains some
interesting notes on the country and the customs of Brazil.[641]
If a great poet lurked in Bocage, he had certainly never existed in
Bocage’s contemporary and rival in Arcadia, JOSÉ AGOSTINHO DE MACEDO
(1761-1831), who lived to be confronted by an even more formidable
adversary in his old age, Almeida Garrett. (In one of his fierce
political letters he prays that either he or Garrett may be sent to
the galleys.) Born at Beja, he took the vows as an Augustinian monk
at Lisbon in 1778. The future champion of law and order provoked the
displeasure of his superiors at Lisbon, Evora, Coimbra, Braga, Torres
Vedras, by his pranks and mutinies, his boisterous and dissipated
life. Methodical theft of books was one of his minor failings. At
last after fourteen years, his Order, tired of transferring and
imprisoning, formally expelled the delinquent in 1792. He, however,
obtained recognition as a secular priest, won fame as a preacher, and
for the next forty years wrote in verse and prose with an amazing
copiousness.[642] He is said to have composed a hundred Anacreontic
odes in three days: _Lyra Anacreontica_ (1819). During the last three
years of his life, after he had, as he said, capitulated to the
doctors, he continued to write, although in great pain. His financial
circumstances did not require this effort. His works had brought him
considerable sums, he had become Court preacher and chronicler, and had
many friends in high places, including Dom Miguel himself. His vanity
was soothed, the unfrocked Augustinian had won the regard of princes.
But to this learned[643] and splenetic priest virulent denunciation of
his literary and political opponents had become a necessity, and he was
at work on the twenty-seventh number of his periodical _O Desengano_
a fortnight before his death. He was spared the mortification of
seeing his enemies triumph in 1832. His character was not amiable,
and a large part of his life was unedifying, but there is something
fine in his unfailing energy, for by sheer energy he imposed himself,
and his self-conceit was so colossal as to be virtually innocuous,
while his real horror of revolution, a horror based on experience,
was expressed with persistency and courage. He seems to have been
quite honest in the belief that the poems of Homer, which he could
not read in the original, were worthless,[644] and that his own _O
Oriente_ was a great epic. His utilitarian conception of literature
was inevitably fatal to his verse. He wished to extend the boundaries
of poetry.[645] He wrote a long poem--four cantos of blank verse--on
_Newton_ (1813), recast and increased to 3,560 lines under the title
_Viagem Extatica ao Templo da Sabedoria_ (1830), because Newton had
conferred greater benefits on humanity than many a great conqueror (yet
so may a dentist). He composed a long poem, _Gama_ (1811), re-written
as _O Oriente_ (1814),[646] to show how Camões should have written
_Os Lusiadas_. His poem is no doubt more correct; it observes all the
rules, but unfortunately it lacks genius and is as dull and turgid
as Macedo’s other verse. A good word for the sea in Portuguese is
_mar_; the poets often call it _oceano_, Camões had ventured to name
it _o falso argento_, _o liquido estanho_, _o fundo aquoso_, _o humido
elemento_; with Macedo it becomes _o tumido elemento_ (or perhaps
he adopted the phrase from _Caramurú_, in which it occurs). We can
scarcely blame Bocage for labelling him _tumido versista_.[647] Among
his other philosophical poems are _Contemplação da Natureza_ (1801),
_A Meditação_ (1813), _A Natureza_ (1846), and _A Creação_ (1865),
now not more often read than his many odes and other verse. The most
scandalous of his satires is _Os Burros_ (1827), in blank verse, in
which he lavishly and outrageously insults nearly all the writers of
the time, and which may have been suggested by Juan Pablo Forner’s _El
Asno Erudito_ (1782). Like his poems, his dramatic works usually have
some ulterior object; their purpose is not less practical than his
pamphlets against _Os Sebastianistas_ (1810) or _Os Jesuitas_ (1830):
behind Ezelino and Beatriz in his tragedy _Branca de Rossi_ (1819) loom
Napoleon and Joséphine, and the prose comedy _A Impostura Castigada_
(1822) is an attack upon the doctors. The fact is that Macedo was
essentially not a poet or a dramatist or a philosopher, but a forcible
and eloquent pamphleteer. His philosophical letters and treatises, _A
Verdade_ (1814), _O Homem_ (1815), _Demonstração da Existencia de
Deos_ (1816), _Cartas filosoficas a Attico_ (1815), are at their best
not when he is developing a train of scientific thought but when he is
arguing _ad hominem_; and his literary criticism in _Motim Literario_
(1811) is primarily personal. As a critic militant he has his merits,
and he is pleasantly patriotic in denouncing the glamour of _missangas
estranjeiras_. But it is in his political periodicals, pamphlets, and
letters, _Cartas_ (1821), _Cartas_ (1827), _Tripa virada_ (1823),
_Tripa por uma vez_ (1823), _A Besta Esfolhada_ (1828-31), _O
Desengano_ (September 1830-September 1831), that he puts forth all his
spice and venom. Ponderous and angry like a lesser Samuel Johnson, he
bullies and crushes his opponents in the raciest vernacular. He may be
unscrupulous in argument, but his idiomatic and vigorous prose will
always be read with pleasure.
Macedo’s dramatic works were neither better nor worse than those of
other playwrights of the time. It was the professed object of MANUEL
DE FIGUEIREDO (1725-1801) to ‘write plays morally and dramatically
correct’. The effect of this didacticism in the fourteen volumes of his
_Theatro_ (1804-15) is disastrous. He wrote in prose and verse, but the
plays in ordinary prose are to be preferred, since in the others, like
M. Jourdain, he made _de la prose sans le savoir_. He wrote comedies,
and tragedies in which he is involuntarily comic. Even in _Ignez_ he
keeps the even tenor of his dullness, and he warns the reader in a
preface that his Inés is not to be considered beautiful since she was
probably over thirty, and that her and Pedro’s passion had had time
to cool.[648] There is more life in the plays written in a medley
of prose and verse by ANTONIO JOSÉ DA SILVA (1705-39), whom Southey
considered ‘the best of their dramatic writers’, but it is doubtful
whether they would have received any attention in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries had it not been for the tragedy of their author’s
life. He was born at Rio de Janeiro, the son of Portuguese Jews,
his mother had been arrested by order of the Inquisition as early as
1712, and the whole family came to Lisbon, where the father practised
successfully as a lawyer. In 1726 his mother was re-arrested, and this
time Antonio José with her. He was released after suffering torture and
publicly abjuring Jewish doctrines in an _auto da fé_. Eleven years
later, after studying at Coimbra and following his father’s profession
in Lisbon, he was again arrested, with his wife--he had married his
cousin despite the dangerous fact that her mother had been burnt and
she herself imprisoned by the Inquisition--and on October 18, 1739, he
was first strangled and then burnt in an _auto da fé_ at Lisbon. For
some years (1733-8) before his death the people of Lisbon had admired
the plays of ‘the Jew’, as they called him, at the _Theatro do Bairro
Alto_. Of the eight plays that have survived in print it must be said
that they are for the most part very purposeless and ineffective. He
attracted his audience sometimes by wit, more often by sheer farcical
absurdity; the constant plays on words, the meaningless snatches of
verse interpolated, do not increase the interest, which flags on every
page because the author has not the slightest power of concentration.
The action at least is quick and varied; it shows Silva’s inventive
talent and explains the popularity of his _galhofeiras comedias_,[649]
however much it may weary the reader. His plays with classical
subjects are especially cold and dull, _A Ninfa Syringa ou Amores de
Pan e Syringa_,[650] _Os Encantos de Medea_,[651] _Esopaida_,[651]
_Amphitrião_,[651] _As Variedades de Proteo_,[652] _Laberinto de
Creta_.[652] His best play, _Guerras do Alecrim e Mangerona_ (1737),
contains some elements of character-drawing and describes the devices
of the starving gentlemen D. Gilvaz and D. Fuas to obtain rich wives at
the expense of miserly father and country cousin. The action consists
in a bewildering succession of disguises, the scene (Pt. ii, Sc. 5)
in which Gilvaz and Fuas doctor their stolid rival and ridicule the
medical profession has humour but shows the usual inability to end
before the reader’s patience has been long exhausted. In the _Vida do
Grande D. Quixote de la Mancha_ (1733) Silva made bold to dramatize
_Don Quixote_ in a series of scenes not over-skilfully connected. Of
his own invention there is a comical scene (Pt. i, Sc. 8), in which
Don Quixote is harassed by doubts as to whether the enchanters have
not transformed Dulcinea into Sancho Panza: he begins to see a certain
likeness; but most of the scenes are directly copied and here become
signally insipid, as that of Sancho’s judgements (ii. 4), or that of
the lion (i. 5), which is as far removed from Cervantes as the sorry
lions of the Alhambra at Granada from those in Trafalgar Square.
The drama of NICOLAU LUIS, whose life is obscure but whose name was
possibly Nicolau Luis da Silva, belongs to the _literatura de cordel_,
popular plays imitated and often directly translated from the Spanish
and Italian and acted with great applause in the eighteenth century
at Lisbon. Most of them were published without the author’s name, and
although it is believed that he wrote over one-third of the numerous
_comedias de cordel_ of the century[653] only a few, as _O Capitão
Belisario_ (1781) and _O Conde Alarcos_ (1788), can be definitely
assigned to him, a fact which incidentally bears witness to his lack of
individuality. His best-known tragedy is _D. Ignez de Castro_ (1772),
an imitation of _Reinar después de morir_ by Luis Velez de Guevara
(1579-1644).
In prose it was not an age of great writers, but of research and
learning. The Lisbon _Academia Real das Sciencias_,[654] founded by
the Duque de Lafões, met for the first time in 1780, and was not slow
in inaugurating the work which has won for it the gratitude of all who
care for the language or literature of Portugal. D. ANTONIO CAETANO
DE SOUSA (1674-1759) had published his valuable _Provas da Historia
Genealogica_ (1739-48) in seven volumes, and the learned _curé_ of
Santo Adrião de Sever, DIOGO BARBOSA MACHADO (1682-1772), had spent
a long life in bibliographical study and compiled his indispensable
and magnificent _Bibliotheca Lusitana_ (1741-59) with a generous
inaccuracy which is attractive in the minute pedantry of a later age.
The scarcely less famous _Vocabulario Portuguez_ of RAPHAEL BLUTEAU
(1638-1734), who was born of French parents in London but spent over
fifty years in Portugal, began to appear in 1712. The work of research
was now carried on, among others by FRANCISCO JOSÉ FREIRE (1719-73);
FREI JOAQUIM DE SANTA ROSA DE VITERBO (1744-1822); the librarian
ANTONIO RIBEIRO DOS SANTOS (1745-1818); D. FRANCISCO ALEXANDRE LOBO
(1763-1844), Bishop of Viseu; CARDINAL SARAIVA (1766-1845), Patriarch
of Lisbon; and FREI FORTUNATO DE S. BOAVENTURA (1778-1844). Critics of
poetry were LUIS ANTONIO VERNEY (1713-92), Archdeacon of Evora, ‘El
Barbadiño’, whose criticisms in his _Verdadeiro Methodo de Estudar_ (2
vols., 1746) are severe, even harsh; FRANCISCO DIAS GOMES (1745-95),
whom Herculano called _o nosso celebre critico_, and who was indeed a
better critic than poet, as may be seen in the notes and poems of his
_Obras Poeticas_ (1799); and MIGUEL DE COUTO GUERREIRO (_c._ 1720-93),
who showed good sense in the twenty-six rhymed rules of his _Tratado da
Versificaçam Portugueza_ (1784).
The best-known work of the learned son of a Lisbon blacksmith who
became the first Bishop of Beja and Archbishop of Evora, MANUEL DO
CENACULO VILLAS-BOAS (1724-1814), is his _Cuidados Litterarios_ (1791).
THEODORO DE ALMEIDA (1722-1804), an erudite and voluminous writer, one
of the original members of the Academy of Sciences, was more ambitious.
In _O Feliz Independente do Mundo e da Fortuna_ in twenty-four books (3
vols., 1779), he took Fénelon’s _Télémaque_ for his model and sought
to combine the gall of instruction with the honey of entertainment.
He wrote it first (_uma boa parte_) in rhyme, then turned to blank
verse, but, still dissatisfied, finally adopted prose, taking care,
however, he says, that it should not degenerate into a novel. The
book had a wide vogue, but is quite unreadable. One may be thankful
that it was not written in verse like that of his _Lisboa Destruida_
(1803), an account of the earthquake of 1755, with sundry moralizings
in six cantos of _oitavas_, of which a Portuguese critic has said that
the author, in an excess of Christian humility, resolved to mortify
his pride of learning by making himself ridiculous to posterity in
verse. A flickering interest enlivens the _Cartas Familiares_ (1741,
2) of FRANCISCO XAVIER DE OLIVEIRA (1702-83). Their subjects are
various: love, literature, witchcraft, and even the relation of a man’s
character to the ribbon on his hat. The author gave up a diplomatic
career, perhaps on account of his Protestant tendencies, and went to
Holland (1740) and England (1744), where he publicly abjured Roman
Catholicism (1746). After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 he addressed
a pamphlet in French to the King of Portugal, exhorting him to mend
his ways; to become Protestant with all his subjects and abolish the
Inquisition. He was duly burnt in effigy at Lisbon (1761), but died
quietly at Hackney twenty-two years later. The letters of ALEXANDRE DE
GUSMÃO (1695-1753), born at Santos in Brazil, have not been collected;
those of the remarkable Portuguese Jew of Penamacor, ANTONIO NUNES
RIBEIRO SANCHES (1699-1783), physician to the Empress Catherine II of
Russia, _Cartas sobre a Educação da Mocidade_, appeared in 1760 at
Cologne. The _Cartas Curiosas_ (1878) of the Abbade ANTONIO DA COSTA
(1714-_c._ 1780) consist of thirteen letters written from Rome and
Vienna from 1750 to 1780, mainly on the subject of music. The century
was not rich in memoirs. The _Miscellaneas_ of D. JOÃO DE S. JOSEPH
QUEIROZ (1711-64) contain some interesting and amusing anecdotes. He
speaks of the _Memorias Genealogicas_ of Alão de Moraes and of the
general discredit of genealogists, and attributes Mello’s imprisonment
to his polite acquiescence in the suggestions of the Condessa de Villa
Nova, made at the instigation of King João IV: _para lisongea-la disse
que seguiria o partido de Castella_. But without seeing the manuscript
it is impossible not to suspect that there is as much of Camillo
Castello Branco as of the Bishop of Grão-Para in the _Memorias_ (1868),
which he was the first to publish.