Part 31

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).