Part 32

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[629] _Lettere Familiari_, No. 30.

[630] Or _Arcadia Lusitana_. For a list of its members see T. Braga, _A Arcadia Lusitana_ (1899), pp. 210-29; for its statutes, ibid., pp. 189-205.

[631] Debt might seem a more probable cause, were it not for the apparent rigour of his confinement.

[632] _A sua alma conversava com Bernardes e Ferreira_, says his friend Tolentino, who advises another _cabelleireiro_ poet to cease writing verses, since _vale mais que cem sonetos a peior penteadura_. The _Arte de Furtar_ mentions a barber who sank still lower, since he left his profession in order to cut purses. The modern writer Antonio Francisco Barata (1836-1910) likewise began life as a poor hairdresser at Coimbra.

[633] Cf. _Ecloga_ 1. Dorindo to Alcino (_Alcino Mycenio_ was Quita’s Arcadian name):

E tu és dos pastores mais famosos No cantar de improviso o verso brando.

[634] i. e. the military governor of a district, with rank next to that of _Capitão Môr_.

[635] This Arcadian name was given to him by the Marquesa de Alorna, although he did not properly belong to the _Arcadia_, being, like Tolentino, one of the _dissidentes_.

[636] = fishwife; literally ‘woman of Ovar’, a small sea-town between Aveiro and Oporto.

[637] Sá do Miranda, he says, _em quem das doces quintilhas Sómente a rima aprendi.... Falta-me arte e natureza, Mas pude delle imitar A verdadeira singeleza._

[638] The sky is _a estellifera morada_ (the starry abode), birds _o plumoso aereo bando_, bees _mordazes enxames voadores_, &c.

[639] Menéndez y Pelayo (_Antología_, tom. xiii (1908), p. 377) calls him _el poeta de más condiciones nativas que ha producido Portugal después de Camoens_, ‘the most indigenous Portuguese poet since Camões’, and elsewhere gives the highest praise to his sonnets.

[640] His modern editor, Visconde (Julio) de Castilho, has shown that the additional surname de Vasconcellos was bestowed on him gratuitously.

[641] The _Couvade_ (ii. 62) is also described by Henrique Diaz, _Naufragio da Nao S. Paulo_, 1904 ed., p. 25, and Pero de Magalhães Gandavo, _Historia da Provincia Sancta Cruz_ (1576), cap. 10.

[642] His works in the _Dicc. Bibliog._ go from J. 2163 to J. 2475. Many are, however, single odes, sermons, &c. Other eighteenth-century sermons worth reading are those of the learned Franciscan Frei Sebastião de Santo Antonio: _Sermões_, 2 vols. (1779, 84).

[643] Superficially, at least, more than Manuel Caetano de Sousa (1658-1734) he deserves to be called a _varão encyclopedico_.

[644] He admires Cicero--not only as philosopher and orator but as a ‘sublime poet’! (_O Homem_ (1815), p. 98)--and Seneca, calls Petrarca immortal, Tasso incomparable, and is generous in his appreciation of English writers. At about the same time John Keats, as Petrarca five centuries earlier, was also reading Homer in translation, but in a somewhat different spirit.

[645] _Newton, Proemio._

[646] In the second edition (1827) he says that this poem, in twelve cantos and about 1,000 _oitavas_, written with ‘more fire and a purer light’ than those of Camões, had cost him ‘nine years of assiduous application’.

[647] Macedo called Bocage _fanfarrão glosador_, and much abuse of the same kind varied the monotony of _elogio mutuo_.

[648] Such woodenness was unlikely to appreciate El Greco’s pictures. In the preface to his _Agriparia_ (_Theatro_, vol. v, 1804) he speaks of _a extravagancia do vaidoso Domenico_, herein following Faria e Sousa, who calls Theotocopuli the Góngora of painters and adds: _Pero vale más una llaneza del Ticiano que todas sus extravagancias juntas por mas que ingeniosas_ (_Fuente de Aganipe Prólogo_, § 37).

[649] Arnaldo Gama, _Um motim ha cem annos_, 3ᵃ ed. (1896), p. 35.

[650] _Theatro Comico Portuguez_, 4 vols. (1759-90), vol. iii.

[651] Ibid., vol. i.

[652] Ibid., vol. ii.

[653] Innocencio da Silva, _Dicc. Bibliog._ vi. 275-85; xvii. 91-3, gives 217 titles.

[654] Now _Academia das Sciencias de Lisboa_, but it is found convenient to retain the original title in order to distinguish it from a more recent (private) institution, the _Academia das Sciencias de Portugal_.

VI

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).