Part 33

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[655] His _Romanceiro_ published in 3 vols. (1843, 51) contains poems of national themes drawn from popular songs and traditions, written by himself (as