Portuguese literature
now generally abandoned. Although no evidence of Mello’s participation
in the murder was forthcoming, he was condemned to be deported for
life to Africa, for which Brazil was later substituted. It was only
in 1655, after eleven years of more or less[589] strict confinement,
that he sailed for Brazil. João IV died in 1656 and two years later
Mello returned to Portugal: he was formally pardoned[590] and spent
the last years of his life in important diplomatic missions to London,
Rome, and Paris. The unfaltering courage and gaiety with which he faced
his adventures and misfortunes win our admiration, but his life can
strike no one as literary. Yet it is probable that but for his long
imprisonment he would never have found leisure to write many of his
best works, and prosperity might have dimmed his insight and dulled
his style--that style (influenced no doubt by Quevedo and Gracián)
which is hard and clear as the glitter of steel or the silver chiming
of a clock, with _concinnitas quaedam venusta et felix verborum_.[591]
Even when full of points and conceits it retains its clearness and
trenchancy, and in his more familiar works he is unrivalled, as the
_Carta de Guia de Casados_, in which, _innuptus ipse_, he brings
freshness and originality to the theme already treated in Fray Luis de
Leon’s _La Perfecta Casada_ (1583), Diogo Paiva de Andrade’s sensible
but less caustic _Casamento Perfeito_ (1631), and Dr. João de Barros’
_Espelho de Casados_ (1540),[592] or the pithy and delightful _Cartas
Familiares_, of which five centuries--a mere fragment--were published
at Rome in 1664, with a rapier-thrust of his wit and a maxim of good
sense on every page, preserving for us some vestige of what Frei Manuel
Godinho described as his ‘admirable conversation’ when he met him at
Marseilles in 1633.[593] The _Epanaphoras de varia Historia Portugueza_
(1660) are unequal and often excessively detailed.[594] Three of the
five are, however, the accounts of an eyewitness and as such are full
of interest: the _Alteraçoens de Evora_ (i), the _Naufragio da Armada
Portuguesa em França_ (ii), and the _Conflito do Canal de Inglaterra_
(iv).[595]
Mello’s knowledge of men was as wide as his knowledge of books, and
both appear to great advantage in his _Apologos Dialogaes_ (1721). An
individualist in religion[596] and politics,[597] an acute thinker and
a keen student of men and manners, he found no dullness in life even at
its worst and no solitude, for, if alone, his fancy instilled wit and
wisdom into clocks[598] and coins[599] and fountains.[600] The first
three _Apologos_ contain incisive portraits in which types and persons
are sharply etched in a few lines: the poor _escudeiro_, the _beata_,
the Lisbon market-woman, the litigious _ratinho_, the _fidalgo_ from
the provinces,[601] the ambitious priest, the shabby grammarian,, the
worldly monk, political place-hunter, _miles gloriosus_, or melancholy
author, a tinselled nobody boiling down the good sayings of past
writers. The fourth _Apologo_ entitled _Hospital das Lettras_ (1657)
is devoted more especially to literary criticism; Mello with Quevedo,
Justus Lipsius, and Traiano Boccalini (who died when Mello was five)
makes a notable scrutiny of Spanish and Portuguese literature. As a
literary critic Mello is excellent within limits. Himself an artificial
writer, although as it were naturally artificial, bred at Court, versed
in social and political affairs, he considered that the proper study of
mankind was man, and, like Henry Fielding a century later, admired ‘the
wondrous power of art in improving Nature’.[602] For him the country
and Nature, the bucolic poetry and prose of Fernam Alvarez do Oriente,
the ingenuous narratives of the early chroniclers, had no charm; he
preferred Rodrigo Mendez Silva’s _Vida y hechos del gran Condestable_
(Madrid, 1640) to the _Cronica do Condestabre_.[603] But all that was
vernacular and indigenous attracted him, as is proved in his letters,
in his lively farce _Auto do Fidalgo Aprendiz_ (1676), and in the
_Feira dos Anexins_, which is a long string of popular maxims and of
those plays upon words in which Mello delighted. His poetry--_Las Tres
Musas del Melodino_ (1649), _Obras Metricas_ (1665)--is marred by the
conceits which in his prose often serve effectively to point a moral
or drive home an argument. It is far too clever. When in a poem ‘On
the death of a great lady’ we find the line _contigo o sepultara a
sepultura_ we do not know whether to laugh or weep, but we suspect the
sincerity of the author’s grief, and although he wrote some excellent
_quintilhas_, most of his poems, which are, as might be expected,
always vigorous, are too sharp and thin, stalks without flowers, the
very skeletons of poetry. It is to his prose in its wit and grace, its
shrewd thought, its revelation of a sincere and lofty but unassuming
character, its directness,[604] its _bom portugues velho e relho_, that
he owes his place among the greatest writers of the Peninsula.
The taste in poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is
seen in two collections, partly Spanish, partly Portuguese: _Fenix
Renascida_ (5 vols., 1716-28) and _Eccos que o Clarim da Fama dá_
(2 vols., 1761, 2). The latter is sufficiently characterized by
its title, too long to quote in full. As to the former the Phoenix
seems to have given real pleasure to contemporary readers, but for
us the bird and song are flown and only the ashes remain, from which
a sixteenth-century poem such as the sonnet _Horas breves_ stands
out conspicuously. The subjects are often as trivial as those of the
_Cancioneiro_ published two centuries earlier and more domestic: to
a cousin sewing, to an overdressed man, to a large mouth, a sonnet
to two market-women fighting, another to the prancing horse of the
Conde de Sabugal, on a present of roses, two long _romances_ on a
goldfinch killed by a cat, verses sent with a gift of handkerchiefs or
eggs or melons, or to thank for sugar-plums--the _Fenix_ rarely soars
above such themes. The magistrate ANTONIO BARBOSA BACELLAR (1610-63)
figures largely, with glosses on poems by Camões, a _romance_ _A umas
saudades_, a satirical poem _A umas beatas_. His _romances varios_ are
mostly in Spanish, but a few of his sonnets in Portuguese have some
merit. The fifth volume opens (pp. 1-37) with a far more elaborate
satire by DIOGO CAMACHO (or Diogo de Sousa): _Jornada que Diogo Camacho
fez ás Cortes do Parnaso_, the best burlesque poem of the century,
in which the author did not spare contemporary Lisbon poets.[605]
The poems of JERONIMO BAHIA likewise cover many pages. He it is who
bewails at length the sad fate of a goldfinch. In _oitavas_ he wrote a
_Fabula de Polyfemo a Galatea_,[606] and in octosyllabic _redondilhas_
jocular accounts of journeys from Lisbon to Coimbra and from Lisbon
into Alentejo (on a very lean mule) which are sometimes amusing. His
sonnet _Fallando com Deos_ shows a deeper nature, and the collection
contains other religious verse, notably that of Violante Montesino,
better known as SOROR VIOLANTE DO CEO (1601-93). Here,[607] as in her
_Rythmas varias_ (Rouen, 1646) and _Parnaso Lusitano de divinos e
humanos versos_ (2 vols., 1733), this nun, who spent over sixty years
in the Dominican Convento da Rosa at Lisbon, and who from an early
age was known for her skill upon the harp and in poetry--admiring
contemporaries called her the tenth Muse--showed that she could write
with simple fervour, as in the Portuguese _deprecações devotas_ of the
_Meditações da Missa_ (1689) or her Spanish _villancicos_. But she
could also be the most gongorical of writers, her very real native
talent being too often spoilt by the taste of the time.[608] BERNARDA
FERREIRA DE LACERDA (1595-1644), another _femina incomparabilis_, like
Soror Violante and Dercylis considered the tenth Muse and fourth Grace,
wrote almost exclusively in Spanish, nor can her _Soledades de Buçaco_
(1634) or her epic _Hespaña Libertada_ (2 pts., 1618, 73) be considered
a heavy loss to Portuguese literature. SOROR MARIA MAGDALENA EUPHEMIA
DA GLORIA (1672-? _c._ 1760), in the world Leonarda Gil da Gama, in
_Brados do Desengano_ (1739), _Orbe Celeste_ (1742), and _Reino de
Babylonia_ (1749), rarely descends from the high-flown style indicated
in these titles. On the other hand, the Franciscan nun of Lisbon, SOROR
MARIA DO CEO (1658-1753), or Maria de Eça, in _A Preciosa_ (2 pts.,
1731, 3) and _Enganos do Bosque, Desenganos do Rio_ (1741), among much
verse of the same kind has some poems of real charm and an almost
rustic simplicity.
By reason of a certain intensity and a vigorous style D. FRANCISCO
CHILD ROLIM DE MOURA (1572-1640), Lord of the towns of Azambuja and
Montargil, although more versed in arms than in letters, wrote in _Os
Novissimos do Homem_ (1623) a poem quite as readable as the longer
epics of his contemporaries, despite its duller subject (man’s first
disobedience and all our woe). The four cantos in _oitavas_ are headed
Death, Judgement, Hell, Paradise.[609] Of the life of MANUEL DA VEIGA
TAGARRO we know little or nothing, but his volume of eclogues and
odes, _Lavra de Anfriso_ (1627), stands conspicuous in the seventeenth
century for its simplicity and true lyrical vein. There is nothing
original in these four eclogues, but the verse is of a harmonious
softness. In the odes he succeeds in combining fervent thought with a
classical restraint of expression. He aimed high; Horace, Lope de Vega,
and Luis de Leon seem to have been his models. Some measure of the
latter’s deliberate tranquillity he occasionally attained. The works of
the ‘discreet and accomplished’, keen-eyed and graceful D. FRANCISCO
DE PORTUGAL (1585-1632) appeared posthumously[610]: _Divinos e humanos
versos_ (1652) and (without separate title-page) _Prisões e solturas de
hũa alma_, consisting of mystic poems mostly in Spanish in a setting
of Portuguese prose, and, in Spanish, _Arte de Galanteria_ (1670), of
which a second edition was published in 1682. Lope de Vega praised the
‘elegant verses’ of the _Gigantomachia_ (1628) written by MANUEL DE
GALHEGOS (1597-1665). That he could write good Portuguese poetry the
author showed in the 732 verses of his _Templo da Memoria_ (1635),
in the preface of which he declares that it had become a rash act to
publish poems written in Portuguese but quotes the example of Pereira
de Castro and of Góngora as having used the language of everyday life
and plebeian words without indignity.
The later epics testified to the perseverance of their authors rather
than to their poetical talent. They are perhaps less guilty than the
critics, who should have discouraged the kind and recognized that
the _Lusiads_ were only an accident in Portuguese literature, the
accident of the genius of Camões. As a rule the epic spirit of the
Portuguese expressed itself better in prose. GABRIEL PEREIRA DE CASTRO
(1571?-1632) forestalled Sousa de Macedo in his choice of a subject.
His _Vlyssea, ov Lysboa Edificada, Poema heroyco_ (1636) was published
posthumously by his brother Luis, and perhaps the most remarkable
thing about it is that it should have run through six editions. The
structure of the poem, in ten cantos of _oitavas_, is closely modelled
on that of the _Lusiads_, and the gods of Olympus duly take a part
in the story. He sings, he says boldly, to his country, to the world
and to eternity, but his sails flap sadly for lack of inspiration and
enthusiasm, and his daring _enjambements_[611] do not compensate for
the dullness of theme and treatment. If, for instance, we compare his
storm[612] with that of the _Lusiads_ (vi. 70-91) it must be confessed
that the former has much the air of a commotion in a duckpond. Ulysses
on his way to Lisbon visits (canto 4) the infernal regions, is