1816-1910
§ 1
_The Romantic School_
In Portugal the first quarter of the nineteenth century was filled
with violence and unrest. The French invasion and years of fighting
on Portuguese soil were followed by a series of revolutions and civil
wars. It seemed as if a more general earthquake had come to complete
the ruin of 1755, against which Lisbon had so finely re-acted. The
historian who attempts to record the conflicts between Miguelists
and Constitutionalists, and the miserable political intrigues
which accompanied the ultimate victory of the latter, must waver
disconsolately between tragedy and farce. But horrible and pitiful as
were many of these events, they succeeded in awakening what had seemed
a dead nation to a new life. The introduction of the parliamentary
system called into being eloquent orators, and, more valuable than
much eloquence, the conviction sprang up, partly under foreign
influence, partly through love of the soil, deepened by persecution
and banishment, that literature might have a closer relation to earth
and life than a philological Filintian ode. Returning exiles brought
fresh ideas into the country, and the two men who dominated Portuguese
literature in the first half of the century had both learnt much from
their enforced sojourn abroad. ALMEIDA GARRETT (1799-1854), one of
the strangest and most picturesque figures in literature, was born at
Oporto, but spent his boyhood in the Azores (Ilha Terceira), where his
uncles, especially the Bishop of Angra, gave him a classical education
and destined him for the priesthood. He, however, preferred to study
law at Coimbra (1816-21). Here politics were in the air and he soon
made himself conspicuous as a Liberal. The fall of the Constitution
drove him into exile (1823) in England (near Edgbaston and in London),
and France (Havre and Paris), and for the next thirty years politics
remained one of his ruling passions. His first great opportunity for
rhetorical display was his defence in the law-courts against the
charge of impiety incurred by the publication of his poem _O Retrato
de Venus_ (1821), although even before going to Coimbra he is said to
have preached to a church full of people. He was able to return to
Portugal in 1826, and edited _O Chronista_ and _O Portuguez_, which
evoked Macedo’s wrath and ended in Garrett’s imprisonment. When Dom
Miguel returned from Brazil and, instead of ‘signing the paper’ (the
famous _Carta_ of 1826), had himself declared absolute king (1828)
Garrett again became an exile, chiefly in London, and did not return
to his country till July 1832, when he landed as a private soldier at
Mindello, one of the famous 7,500 who fought for King Pedro and his
daughter, Maria da Gloria. His zeal and outspokenness rendering him an
uncomfortable colleague at Lisbon, he fared rather badly in the ignoble
scramble for office which followed the triumph of the cause. He was
sent first on a mission to London and then as _chargé d’affaires_ to
Brussels (1834-6). The diplomatic service was in many ways congenial
to his character, but his enemies made the mistake of slighting and
neglecting him, and, refusing the post of Minister at Copenhagen,
he returned to Portugal and helped to bring about the Revolution of
September 1836. But his life is the whole history of the time: enough
to say that for the next fifteen years his activities in politics and
literature were unceasing. In a hundred ways he showed his versatility
and energy. He served on many commissions, was appointed Inspector of
Theatres (1836), _Cronista Môr_ (1838), elected deputy (1837), raised
to the House of Peers (1852). As journalist, founder and editor of
several short-lived newspapers, as a stylist and master of prose, his
country’s chief lyric poet in the first half of the nineteenth century
(coming as a fire to light the dry sticks of the eighteenth-century
poetry) and greatest dramatist since the sixteenth; as politician and
one of the most eloquent of all Portugal’s orators, an enthusiastic
if unscientific folk-lorist,[655] a novelist, critic, diplomatist,
soldier, jurist and judge, Garrett played many parts and with success.
This patriot who did not despair of his country, this marvellous dandy
who seemed to bestow as much thought on the cut of a coat as on the
fashioning of a constitution, and who refused to grow old, preferring
to incur ridicule as a _velho namorado_ (his love intrigues ended only
with his life and he wrote his most passionate lyrics when he was over
fifty), this artist in life and literature, lover of old furniture
and old traditions, this lovable, ridiculous, human Garrett, whom his
countrymen called divine, can still alternately charm and repel us as
he scandalized and fascinated his contemporaries. His motives were
often curiously mixed. His immeasurable peacock vanity as well as his
generosity prompted him to champion weak causes and assist obscure
persons. A man of high ideals and an essential honesty, he only rarely
deviated into truth in matters concerning himself. When past fifty
he was still ‘forty-six’ and he wrote an anonymous autobiography and
filled it with his own praise. He often gave his time and talent
ungrudgingly to the service of the State and then cried out that his
disinterestedness went unrewarded. Fond of money but fonder of show
and honours, he died almost poor but a viscount. Although of scarcely
more than plebeian birth he liked to believe that the name Garrett,
which he only assumed in 1818, was the Irish for Gerald and that he
was descended from Garrt, first Earl of Desmond,[656] and through
the Geraldines from Troy.[657] At the mercy of many moods, easily
angered but never vindictive, capable occasionally of half-unconscious
duplicity but never of hypocrisy, he remained to the last changing
and sensitive as a child. His faults were mostly on the surface and
injured principally himself, offering a hundred points of attack to
critics incapable of understanding his greatness. That he did not play
a more fruitfully effective part in politics was less his fault than
that of the politics of the day; but the twofold incentive of serving
his country by useful legislation and of a personal triumph in the
Chamber prevented this ingenuous victim of political intrigue from
ever devoting himself exclusively to literature. In politics he was an
opportunist in the best sense of the word and a Liberal who detested
the art of the demagogue. His few months as Minister in 1852 gave no
scope for his real power of organization and of stimulating others.
In the life and literature of his country he was a great civilizing
and renovating force. He taught his countrymen to read and what to
read, and, having freed them from the trammels of pseudo-classicism,
did his utmost to prevent them from merely exchanging pedantry for
insipidity. _Adozinda_, based on the _romance_ _Sylvaninha_ and
originally published in London in 1828 and reviewed in the _Foreign
Quarterly Review_, October 1832) or by others, e. g. Balthasar Diaz’ _O
Marques de Mantua_, or popular _romances_ revised and polished by their
collector. His own compositions (vol. i) often have great charm, as
_Miragaia_, _Rosalinda_, _Bernal Francez_.]
His early verses, many of the poems published or reprinted in _Lyrica
de João Minimo_ (1829), _Flores sem Fructo_ (1845), and _Fabulas e
Contos_ (1853), were written under the influence of Filinto Elysio
and the eighteenth century, but, fired by romanticism during his
first exile in France, he introduced it into Portugal in his epic
poems _Camões_ (1825) and _Dona Branca_ (1826),[658] in which prosaic
passages alternate with others of fervent poetic beauty and glimpses
of popular customs which in themselves spell poetry in Portugal. But
Garrett was no super-romantic, in fact he deprecated ‘the extravagances
and exaggerations of the ephemeral romanticism which is now coming to
an end in Europe’.[659] At Brussels he learnt German, and the poetry,
and especially the plays, of Goethe cast a steadying influence over
his work. Garrett had early been attracted towards the theatre. His
_Merope_, in its subject derived from Alfieri, and _Catão_ (1821)
were both written in his student days. Neither of them can be called
dramatic. In vain a glow of liberty[660] and rhetoric strives to melt
the ice of _Catão_: its parliamentary debates still leave the reader
cold. When fifteen years later, in the tercentenary year of Vicente’s
last comedy, he was able definitely to undertake his favourite scheme
of providing Portugal with a national drama, he found difficulties.
He had to provide not only theatre, actors, and audience, but also
the plays. He succeeded in instilling his keenness into some of his
more lethargic countrymen, but, not content with translating from the
French, Italian, or Spanish, himself wrote a series of plays to pave
the way. His themes, unlike those of his earlier efforts, were now
entirely national: the legendary love of the poet Bernardim Ribeiro for
the daughter of King Manuel in _Um Auto de Gil Vicente_ (1838);[661]
the patriotism of the Condessa de Athouguia in arming her two sons
on the morning of December 1, 1640, to throw off the Spanish yoke,
in _Dona Philippa de Vilhena_ (1840); an early incident in the life
of one of the most chivalrous soldiers that the world has seen, the
Constable Nun’ Alvarez, in _O Alfageme de Santarem_ (1842); the fall
of Pombal in _A Sobrinha do Marquez_ (1848);[662] two famous episodes
in the life of Manuel de Sousa Coutinho, the first of which, the
setting fire to his palace rather than entertain the Spanish Governors,
preserves the national atmosphere, in _Frei Luiz de Sousa_ (1844).
These plays, with the exception perhaps of the hastily improvised _D.
Philippa de Vilhena_, are all remarkable, although their merit is
unequal. The characters, and especially the epoch in which they are
presented, lend their chief interest to the first and third. The fifth,
overpraised by some critics but praised by all--Menéndez y Pelayo
called it ‘incomparable’--_Frei Luiz de Sousa_, far excels the others
by reason of the concentration of interest and the really dramatic
character of the plot (or at least of the anagnorisis of Act II) and
by its intensity and deliberately simple execution. The intensity may
be almost too unrelieved, but the conception of the play showed a fine
dramatic instinct. Like most of Garrett’s work it was composed in a
white heat, and the effect is enhanced by its excellently clear and
restrained style, which brings out every shade and symptom of tragedy
without distracting the attention by any extraneous ornaments. But all
these plays are written in admirable prose. Indeed, a value is given
even to Garrett’s slighter pieces--_Tio Simplicio_ (1844), _Fallar
Verdade a Mentir_ (1845)[663]--apart from their indigenous character,
by his pliant, transparent, glowing prose, to which perhaps even more
than to his poetry he owes his foremost place in Portuguese literature.
Although essentially a poet, his poems of enduring worth are a mere
handful of beautiful episodes and graceful lyrics--in _Folhas Cahidas_
(1853) and vol. 1 (1843) of his _Romanceiro_--but his prose stamps with
individuality works so diverse as his historical novel _O Arco de Santa
Anna_ (2 vols., 1845, 51),[664] his charming miscellaneous _Viagens
na minha terra_ (1846) with its famous episode of Joaninha of the
nightingales, his treatises _Da Educação_ (1829), _Portugal na balança
da Europa_ (1830), _Bosquejo da Litteratura Portuguesa_ (1826), as well
as his plays. All his work was thoroughly national, and when he died a
group of younger writers was at hand ready to continue it.
Garrett intended as _Cronista Môr_ to write the history of his own
time. More serious historians existed in the Canon of Evora, ANTONIO
CAETANO DO AMARAL (1747-1819); his fellow-academician the Canon JOÃO
PEDRO RIBEIRO (†1839); LUZ SORIANO (1802-99), author of a _Historia da
Guerra Civil_ (1866-90) in seventeen volumes; the VISCONDE DE SANTAREM
(1791-1856), whose able and persistent researches were of inestimable
service to the history and incidentally to the literature of his
country; and the patient investigator CUNHA RIVARA (1809-79).
While scientific research work was accumulating the bones of history
a creator arose in the person of ALEXANDRE HERCULANO (1810-77). He
had emigrated to France and England in 1831, lived for a time at
Rennes, and from the Azores in 1832 with Garrett accompanied the
Liberal army to Oporto as a private soldier. In the following year he
obtained work as a librarian. His _A Voz do Propheta_ (1836) (Castilho
in this year translated Lamennais’ _Paroles d’un Croyant_), written
in the impressive style of a Hebrew prophet, although it appeared
anonymously, brought its author fame, and in 1839 the King Consort D.
Fernando appointed him librarian of the Royal Library of Ajuda. The
salary was not large, under £200 a year, but the post gave him the
two necessaries of literary work, quiet and books. From that year to
1867 his life was taken up with his work, with which politics only
occasionally interfered. He edited _O Panorama_ from 1837 to 1844 and
joined in founding _O Paiz_. Although he was elected deputy to the
Cortes in 1840 he rarely attended the sittings. His friendship with
D. Fernando and King Pedro V continued unbroken till their death. In
1867 with characteristic abruptness he left Lisbon and literature and
gave his last ten years almost entirely to agriculture on the estate
of Val de Lobos, near Santarem.[665] The call of the land was combined
with disgust at the politics of the capital and probably a natural
disinclination to a sedentary mode of life. His retirement was greeted
as a betrayal, and attacks formerly directed against his historical
work were now directed against him for abandoning it. But since he had
no intention of continuing his history, his literary work was really
ended. It has three main aspects, poetry, the historical novel, and
history. From the prosaic height of forty-six he informed Soares de
Passos in a letter that he had been a poet till he was twenty-five.
Some of the poems of _A Harpa do Crente_ (1838),[666] especially _A
Tempestade_ and _A Cruz Mutilada_, rise to noble heights by reason
of a fine conviction and a rugged grandeur, as of blocks of granite.
Herculano had returned to Portugal imbued with profound admiration
for the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, ‘immortal Scott’ as he
called him, and Victor Hugo, and in his remarkable stories and sketches
contributed to _O Panorama_ and published as _Lendas e Narrativas_
(1851), as well as in the more elaborate _O Monasticon_, consisting of
two separate parts _Eurico o Presbytero_ (1844) and _O Monge de Cister_
(1848), he wrote romance based upon scrupulous historical research. A
slight leaning towards melodrama is as a rule successfully withstood,
and his intense and powerful style enchains the attention. _Eurico_
is really a splendid prose poem,[667] in which the eighth-century
priest Eurico is Herculano brooding over the degeneracy of Portugal in
the nineteenth century. His glowing patriotism unifies the action and
raises the style to an impassioned eloquence. The Middle Ages were well
suited to him in their mixture of passion and ingenuousness and their
scope for violent contrasts of evil and virtue, light and shadow. Most
of the _Lendas e Narrativas_ and _O Bobo_ belong to that period, and
his _Historia de Portugal_ (4 vols., 1846-53) ends with the year 1279.
That he should have stopped there when the character and achievements
of King Dinis must have offered him a powerful incentive to proceed
shows how deeply he had felt the controversial attacks levelled at
his work; but with the Renaissance and the subsequent history of
Portugal he was too intensely national to have great sympathy. As a
historian he has been compared with Hallam, Thierry, and Niebuhr, and
he stands any such comparison well. A passion for truth drove him to
the original sources and documents, and, since _alle Gelehrsamkeit
ist noch kein Urteil_, he brought the same patience and impartial
sincerity to their interpretation. The results obtained he imposed on
thousands of readers by his impressive and living style.[668] In his
case the style was the man. Beneath coldness or roughness he concealed
an affectionate, impetuous nature, a hatred of meanness and injustice.
In his personal relations austere and difficult, sometimes no doubt
unfair and undiscerning in the severity of his judgements, he was a
perfect contrast to Almeida Garrett, compared with whom he was as
granite to chalk or as the rock to the stream that flows past it. His
strong will was fortunately directed by the Marquesa de Alorna in his
youth to the thoroughness of German writers. Thoroughness marked all
his work. When the Academy of Sciences entrusted him with the task of
collecting documents on the early history of Portugal he threw himself
into the labour with a fervour which produced the splendid _Portvgaliae
Monvmenta Historica_, a series of historical works and documents of
the first importance which began to appear in 1856. From 1867 to 1877
he undertook agriculture not as an amateur’s pastime but as the work
of his life, with the result that he achieved another great success
scarcely inferior to his success as a writer. The same thoroughness is
evident in the Cyclopean fragment of his history and in his shorter
writings, the _Opusculos_ (1873-76). His _Da Origem e Estabelecimento
da Inquisição em Portugal_ (3 vols., 1854-9), a deeply interesting
account of the negotiations and intrigues at the Vatican, in ceasing
to be dispassionate may suffer as a purely historical work, but its
vigour brooks no denial and its literary excellence is acknowledged
even by those who dispute its fairness. Great as scholar and man, too
great to be always understood during his life, his memory received a
tribute from men so different as Döllinger and Núñez del Arce, and it
is probable that his reputation will only increase with time.
In the historical novel Herculano had many followers. ANTONIO DE
OLIVEIRA MARRECA (1805-89) wrote two laborious fragments in _O
Panorama: Manoel Sousa de Sepulveda_ (1843) and _O Conde Soberano
de Castella_ (1844, 53). JOÃO DE ANDRADE CORVO (1824-90), poet and
dramatist,[669] author of a novel of contemporary politics, _O
Sentimentalismo_ (1871), which contains excellent descriptions of
Bussaco, wrote a long historical novel, _Um Anno na Corte_ (1850), in
which interest in the actors at the Court of Afonso VI, in incidents
such as a bullfight or a boarhunt, in witchcraft or the Inquisition,
is skilfully maintained. His style in its sober restraint is superior
to that of ARNALDO DA GAMA (1828-69), whose historical episodes of the
French invasion of 1809 (_O Sargento Môr de Villar_ and _O Segredo do
Abbade_), or of Oporto in the fifteenth century in _A Ultima Dona de
S. Nicolau_, or in the eighteenth in _Um Motim ha cem annos_ (1861),
are of considerable interest despite their author’s excessive fondness
for Latin quotations. Perhaps the influence of Camillo Castello
Branco may be traced in his novel _O Genio do Mal_ (4 vols., 1857).
GUILHERMINO AUGUSTO DE BARROS (1835-1900) is the author of a novel of
the fifteenth century, _O Castello de Monsanto_ (2 vols., 1879), of
great length and dullness. Its chief interest is for the student of the
Portuguese language, owing to its large vocabulary. BERNARDINO PEREIRA
PINHEIRO (born in 1837) in _Sombras e Luz_ (1863) described scenes from
the reign of King Manuel, and drew a strange portrait of King João
III in _Amores de um Visionario_ (2 vols., 1874). But the mantle of
Herculano, as historical novelist, fell especially upon LUIZ AUGUSTO
REBELLO DA SILVA (1822-71), politician and journalist. His _Rausso por
Homizio_, a short novel of the time of King Sancho II, written with
the exaggeration of extreme youth, appeared in the _Revista Universal
Lisbonense_ (1842-3), followed by _Odio Velho não cansa_ (reign of
Sancho I), with similar defects, in 1848. In the same (the first)
volume of _A Epocha_ appeared his short _conto_ entitled _A Ultima
Corrida de Touros em Salvaterra_, which won and has retained popularity
by its skilful presentment of a stirring and pathetic episode in the
reign of José I (1750-77). Four years later Rebello da Silva published
his principal novel, _A Mocidade de D. João V_ (1852). In its somewhat
tedious descriptions the reader soon loses the thread of the story,
but is entertained by the quick dialogue and almost clownish humour of
the separate scenes. _Lagrimas e Thesouros_[670] (1863) may interest
English readers from the fact that its principal character is William
Beckford, but it has not the great merits of the preceding novel. The
author was already at work on his unfinished _Historia de Portugal nos
seculos XVII e XVIII_ (5 vols., 1860-71). In this, as in his _Fastos da
Igreja_ (1854-5) and _Varões Illustres_ (1870), his defects fall away,
while his real skill as a historian, his intensity, and his excellent
style remain; indeed, an added intensity gives his style a new vigour
and simplicity. His _Historia_, although less rigorously scientific
and far less methodically ordered than that of his master Herculano,
has value as history as well as literature. Rebello da Silva wrote too
much, but his work generally improved with the years and might have
resulted in a real masterpiece had he not died before attaining the age
of fifty.
Meanwhile the novel had entered on a new and intensely modern phase
in the hands of a slightly younger contemporary. The life of CAMILLO
CASTELLO BRANCO (1825-90), whose numerous novels have been and still
are read enthusiastically in Portugal, had about it an element of
improbability which is reflected in his works and made it possible to
combine their apparent sincerity with a peculiar unreality. Born at
Lisbon but left an orphan at the age of eight, and brought up by a
sister, wife of a doctor, in a small village of Tras-os-Montes,[671] a
widower in his teens, then a boisterous Oporto medical student, twice
imprisoned for love affairs and finally guilty of abducting an heiress
as a bride for his son, his whole life was spent in a whirlwind, actual
or imaginary, a tragicomedy which, stricken with blindness, he ended
by suicide. He read and wrote in the same tempestuous fashion. The
sentimental atmosphere of his novels is relieved systematically by
outbursts of cynicism and sarcasm. When he began to write romanticism
was in full swing, but his last twenty years were spent under what
was to him the vexing and tantalizing shadow of the new realism. His
first story, _Maria não me mates, que sou tua mãe!_ (1848),[672]
was sentimental and sensational, and something of these qualities
remained in the greater part of his work. His first more elaborate
novel _Anathema_ (1851), in which the story is interrupted by lengthy
musings and moralizings, he himself described as ‘a kind of literary
crab’, and most of his novels are somewhat lop-sided: he confessed
that his discursiveness was incurable. It is the more hysterical among
his works, such as _Amor de Perdição_ (1862)--its character is well
described by the title of the Italian version, _Amor sfrenato_--or
_Amor de Salvação_ (1864) and those which combine this character with
a chain of amazing coincidences, as _Os Mysterios de Lisboa_ (1854)
and _O Livro Negro do Padre Diniz_ (1855), which were read most avidly
in Portugal. He himself favoured the quieter _Romance de um Homem
Rico_ (1861) and _Livro de Consolação_ (1872). We may prefer the attic
flavour of the humorous sketch of a country gentleman (born in the
year of Waterloo) at Lisbon, in _A Queda d’um Anjo_ (1866), which
somehow recalls the best work of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. Castello
Branco had a true vein of comedy, and although a great part of the
work of this specialist in hysterics has an air of unreality, he is
many-sided and yields frequent surprises. The true Camillo appears
only intermittently in his novels, and charms with a simplicity of
style and description worthy of Frei Luis de Sousa, as in some of
his _Novellas do Minho_ (12 vols., 1875-7), the country-house in
_Coração, Cabeça e Estomago_ (1862), the Tras-os-Montes _fidalgo_‘s
house in _Os Mysterios de Lisboa_, the village priest in _A Sereia_
(1865), Padre João in _Doze Casamentos Felizes_ (1861), the farrier
in _Amor de Perdição_, the charcoal-burners in _O Santo da Montanha_
(1865). Then (as if with the question: what will the Chiado, what
will the Lisbon critics say?) he pulls himself up, lashes himself
with sarcasms, and plunges into his improbabilities and passions.
A poet and a learned and ingenious if unscholarly critic, he saw
and described the charm of the villages of North Portugal, but he
satirized with peculiar venom the _bourgeois_ life and the enriched
_brazileiros_ of Oporto, as in _A Filha do Arcediago_ (1855), _A Neta
do Arcediago_ (1856), _A Douda do Candal_ (1867), _Os Brilhantes do
Brazileiro_ (1869), _Memorias de Guilherme do Amaral_ (1863), and _Um
Homem de Brios_ (1856),[673] the last two being continuations of _Onde
está a Felicidade?_ (1856). This last work has a broader historical
setting, and many of his novels are really historical episodes,[674]
some of which bear a strong resemblance to Pérez Galdós’ _Episodios
Nacionales_. Especially is this the case with the latter part of _As
Tres Irmãs_ (1862) and with _A Bruxa de Monte Cordova_ (1867), both
written before the appearance of the first _Episodio Nacional_. In
_Eusebio Macario_ and _A Corja_ he set his hand to the naturalistic
novel, and in _A Brazileira de Prazins_ (1882) modified this method to
suit his favourite phantasy of extremes, in which the angel and martyr
are contrasted with the romantic Don Juan or vulgar _brazileiro_ or
narrow-minded Minho noble. Apart from their historical interest and
occasional charming glimpses of life and literature, his books are
invaluable for their style, and he is the author of many masterly
passages rather than of any masterpiece. He sometimes--here, as in all
else, leaving moderation to the _bourgeois_ _épaté_--allows himself to
be carried away by his immense vocabulary, but often, indeed usually,
his language is a flawless marble, a rich quarry of the purest, most
vernacular Portuguese, derived from the Portuguese religious and mystic
writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[675] Absorbed in
his work night after night till the first songs of birds announced the
dawn, writing in or after a paroxysm of grief or excitement in his
own life, he first lived, then swiftly set on paper, the incidents
of his novels--_Amor de Perdição_ was written in a fortnight. Their
plot may be ill constructed, the delineation of characters shallow,
Balzac _manqué_, the episodes far-fetched and melodramatic, but they
corresponded, if not to life, to the life of their author and thereby
attained intensity of style and a certain unity of action. Yet he was
always greatly concerned with schools and tendencies (he imitated Émile
Zola in _Eusebio Macario_, although he declared the realistic school
to be the perversion of Nature, Émile Souvestre in _As Tres Irmãs_,
Octave Feuillet in _Romance de um Homem Rico_), sure of his genius but
not of the channels into which he should direct it, at his best perhaps
in brief essays and sketches from which his high-flown romanticism is
absent, as in the studies of the lives of criminals in _Memorias do
Carcere_ (2 vols., 1862) and his many scattered reminiscences of life
in Minho, the valley of the Tamega, and Oporto. With his sensitive
restless temperament, his imagination, his satire and sadness (of tears
rather than _saudade_, for which the action in his stories is too
rapid), his intolerant hatred of tyranny and intolerance, his essential
interest not in things nor even characters but in life and passion, and
his unfailing power of expression, he may well be called ‘the [modern]
Portuguese genius personified’.[676] His life is a strange contrast to
the almost idyllic serenity of that of ANTONIO FELICIANO DE CASTILHO
(1800-75), whose admirable persistency as poet and translator during
a period of nearly sixty years--he had been blind from the age of
six--enabled him to attain an extraordinary pre-eminence in Portuguese
poetry after Garrett and other poets had been broken like crystals
while he remained as a tile upon the housetop. A romantic with a
natural leaning to perfection of form, he always retained something
of the Arcadian school, and like the Arcadians sought his inspiration
in Bernardim Ribeiro and other bucolic _quinhentistas_. Unsympathetic
critics incapable of appreciating Castilho’s masterly style may feel
that in the twenty-one letters of the _Cartas de Echo e Narciso_
(1821), in _A Primavera_ (1822)[677] and _Amor e Melancholia ou a
Novissima Heloisa_ (1828) he combined the classical school’s dearth
of thought with the diffuseness of the romantics. But his _quadras_
(_A Visão_, _O São João_, _A Noite do Cemiterio_) and his blank verse
are alike so easy and natural, his style so harmonious and pure that,
despite the lack of observation and originality in these long poems,
they have not even to-day lost their place in Portuguese literature.
In their soft, vague melancholy and gentle grace they were even more
popular than his romantic poems, _A Noite do Castello_ (1836)[678]
and _Os Ciumes do Bardo_ (1838), and influenced many younger writers.
Like Garrett he taught them to seek the subjects of their verse in the
popular traditions of their own land. Indeed, so great was his bent
for the national in literature that his numerous translations (from
the French and English, Latin and Greek, to which, with an occasional
aftermath of poems such as _Outono_ (1862), his later years were
devoted) are often remarkable rather for their excellent Portuguese
versification than for faithfulness to the originals, and the _Faust_
of Goethe, whose powerful directness was unintelligible to his
translator, especially as he only read the poem in a French version,
became translated indeed.
The most prominent or the least insipid of the numerous group of
romantic and ultra-romantic poets, a generation younger than Garrett
and Castilho, who published their verses in _O Trovador_ (1848)[679]
and _O Novo Trovador_ (1856), were LUIZ AUGUSTO PALMEIRIM (1825-93),
whose _Poesias_ appeared in 1851, and JOÃO DE LEMOS (1819-89), some
of whose poems (one of the best known is _A Lua de Londres_) in
_Flores e Amores_ (1858), _Religião e Patria_ (1859), and especially
_Canções da Tarde_ (1875), have a delicacy of rhythm and are more
scholarly than those of most of the romantic poets. The three volumes
form the _Cancioneiro de João de Lemos_. JOSÉ DA SILVA MENDES LEAL
(1818-86), author of _Historia da Guerra no Oriente_ (1855), and, like
Palmeirim, a successful dramatist, in _Os Dois Renegados_ (1839) and
_O Homem da Mascara Negra_ (1843), and also a novelist (_O que foram
os Portugueses_), as a poet is at his best in patriotic, military,
or funeral odes: _O Pavilhão Negro_ (1859), _Ave Cesar_, _Gloria e
Martyrio_ (perhaps suggested by Tennyson’s _Ode on the Death of the
Duke of Wellington_), _Napoleão no Kremlin_ (1865), _Indiannas_, in
which his sonorous verse has a certain grandeur. His _Canticos_ (1858)
contain among others a good translation of _El Pirata_ of Espronceda,
whose influence is evident in the ode to Vasco da Gama, which forms
the first part of _Indiannas_. ANTONIO AUGUSTO SOARES DE PASSOS
(1826-60), son of an Oporto chemist, studied at Coimbra and published
a volume of sentimental romantic poems in 1856 (_Poesias_). The most
remarkable is the noble if a little too grandiloquent ode entitled
_O Firmamento_, which far excels the poems of death, pale moonlight,
autumn regrets, and vanished dreams of this excellent translator of
Ossian. After his death a fellow-student, Dr. Lourenço de Almeida e
Medeiros, accused him of having stolen _O Firmamento_ and other poems.
He had himself, he said, written the melancholy ballad _O Noivado do
Sepulchro_ in February 1853, but unfortunately for his contention it
had appeared over Soares de Passos’ signature eight months earlier in
_O Bardo_. A miscellaneous writer, like so many of his contemporaries,
FRANCISCO GOMES DE AMORIM (1827-92) achieved popularity with his plays,
published two volumes of sentimental poems, _Cantos Matutinos_ (1858)
and _Ephemeros_ (1866), of which perhaps _O Desterrado_ is now alone
remembered, and several pleasantly indigenous stories of his native
Avelomar (Minho) collected in _Fruitos de Vario Sabor_ (1876), with an
attractive sketch of the priest, Padre Manuel, _Muita parra e pouca
uva_ (1878), and _As Duas Fiandeiras_ (1881). He played the sedulous
Boswell to Almeida Garrett during the last three years of the latter’s
life, and the result was one of the few interesting biographies in the
modern literature of the Peninsula: _Garrett, Memorias Biographicas_ (3
vols., 1881-8). Among the host of pale moon-singers following in the
wake of Castilho it is a relief to find a satirist, FAUSTINO XAVIER
DE NOVAES (1822-64), who in his _Poesias_ (1855), _Novas Poesias_
(1858), and _Poesias Postumas_ (1877), preferred to take Tolentino for
his model. He ridiculed the _janota com pouco dinheiro, com fumos de
grande_ and other types of his native Oporto, where for some time he
worked as a goldsmith. Later he emigrated to Rio de Janeiro, but there
found ‘everything except literature well paid’.
Two of the romantic poets lived on into the twentieth century, one
even survived the Monarchy. THOMAZ RIBEIRO (1831-1901), born at Parada
de Gonta in the district of Tondella (Beira), advocate, journalist,
playwright, historian, politician, deputy, minister, peer of the realm,
won enduring fame with his long romantic poem _D. Jayme_ (1862), which
opens with fifteen striking stanzas addressed to Portugal. In this
introductory ode he rises on the wings of ardent patriotism and sturdy
faith in Portugal to a fine achievement in verse. Less rhetorical,
the rest of the poem (or series of poems in varying metre) would have
gained by reduction to half its length, but is sometimes not without
charm in its meanderings. Yet it is a kind of inspired rhetoric and
natural grandiloquence that best characterize Ribeiro, and when his
inspiration falters it leaves but a hollow and metallic shell of
verse. We will expect no delicate shades from a lyric poet who calls
the sky _o celico espectaculo_. Subsequent volumes--_Sons que passam_
(1867), which contains poems written as early as 1854, _A Delfina do
Mal_ (1868), _Vesperas_ (1880), _Dissonancias_ (1890), _O Mensageiro
de Fez_ (1899)--maintained, but did not increase, his reputation as a
poet. The chief work of RAIMUNDO ANTONIO DE BULHÃO PATO (1829-1912), a
Portuguese born at Bilbao, was _Paquita_, which he began to publish in
1866, and to the completion of which he devoted nearly forty years of
loving care. It is a facetious romantic poem of sixteen cantos, mostly
in verses of six lines (_ababcb_ or _ababca_), intended to be in the
manner of Byron but more akin to Antonio de Trueba, whose verses are
imitated in _Flores Agrestes_ (1870). The modern reader, after readily
agreeing with Herculano that the poem has its faults, will perhaps be
disposed to inquire further if it has any merits; but, although its
subject is often unpoetical and trivial, the versification is easy
and occasionally excellent. Bulhão Pato published other volumes of
gentle album poetry, as _Poesias_ (1850), _Versos_ (1862), _Canções da
Tarde_ (1866), and _Hoje: Satyras, Canções e Idyllios_ (1888), besides
sketches and recollections in prose. Nearly fifty years before his
death the romantic school in Portugal had received a severe shock, and
the fact that long romantic poems continued to appear is proof how deep
its roots had penetrated.