Portuguese literature
in technique. But his poems leave the impression that he had no real
feeling for the rustic life which they describe; no doubt he was more
at home with the scissors than with the faithful Melampus or the
nymphs and shepherd’s pipe. When he is relating an event, such as the
earthquake of 1755, which touched him nearly, his ready flow of verse
deserts him, in spite of his skill in improvisation,[633] although the
sonnet written on the same occasion, _Por castigar, Senhor_, stands out
with a certain majesty from most of his other sonnets, which are mere
slices of eclogue. If his mellifluous idylls show no individuality, his
return to the classic poets of Portugal was, as with other Arcadian
poets, a welcome change from the Spanish influence, the _mao uso_, as
he calls it, of ‘rude strangers from the Manzanares’ (Eclogue 6). His
tragedies and pastoral drama _Licore_ are not more original. One of
his tragedies, _Inés de Castro_, suggested that of João Baptista Gomes
(†1813), _Nova Castro_, which had a great vogue in its day but is now
scarcely more remembered than _Osmia_ (1788), a tragedy of which the
blank verse has vigour, although it is often scarcely distinguishable
from prose. This play, published anonymously, was long attributed to
Antonio de Araujo de Azevedo (1754-1817), but its real author was D.
Theresa de Mello Breyner, Condessa de Vimieiro, who married her cousin,
the fourth Count, in 1767.
It was a cruel kindness to edit the works of ANTONIO DINIZ DA CRUZ E
SILVA (1731-99) in six volumes, for, despite the fame of his high-flown
Pindaric odes, his three centuries of sonnets and his other lyrics
are not of conspicuous merit and are often imitative. Having nothing
to say, _Elpino Nonacriense_, like too many of the Arcadian poets,
said it at inordinate length. _Que enorme confusão!_ he exclaims in an
elegy on the Lisbon earthquake, and most of his poems are on a like
plane of thought and expression. The son of a _Sargento Môr_,[634] he
was born at Lisbon, and after studying law at Coimbra was appointed a
judge at Castello de Vide. With Manuel Nicolau Esteves Negrão (†1824)
and Theotonio Gomes de Carvalho (†1800) he founded the _Arcadia
Ulyssiponense_, of which he drew up the statutes in September 1756.
The first aim of these early Arcadians was, as we have noticed, to
break the shackles of Spanish influence and _gongorismo_, which was,
indeed, on the wane in the land of its birth. Diniz da Cruz’ own poems
were written in good idiomatic Portuguese. In _O Hyssope_ he satirizes
with telling vigour the use of gallicisms, and his comedy _O Falso
Heroismo_ is thoroughly Portuguese in subject and treatment. From
1764 to 1774 he was stationed at Elvas, and here a quarrel between
the bishop, D. Lourenço de Lancastre, and the dean, D. José Carlos de
Lara, furnished him with the subject of his celebrated mock-heroic poem
_O Hyssope_. The legend runs that he was summoned to read his satire
to the all-powerful Pombal in the presence of the infuriated bishop,
and that the poem proved too much for the gravity of the minister,
who appointed him a judge at Rio de Janeiro (1776). Thence he was
transferred to Oporto (1787), but in 1790 was again appointed to Rio de
Janeiro, and showed himself merciless in sentencing the Brazilian poets
Claudio Manuel da Costa, Gonzaga, and Ignacio José de Alvarengo Peixoto
(1748-93), accused of conspiring to secure the independence of their
country. _O Hyssope_ was first published in 1802, three years after
the author’s death. The idea of the poem was derived from Boileau’s
_Le Lutrin_. Boileau would have been horrified by its eight cantos of
slovenly and monotonous blank verse, which often scarcely rises above
prose; but as a satire on the times and in its grotesque portraiture
of prelate and lawyer and notary it is sometimes irresistibly comic.
The mock-heroic _Benteida_, written by ALEXANDRE ANTONIO DE LIMA of
Lisbon (1699-_c._ 1760?) and published fifty years before _O Hyssope_,
consisted of three cantos of _oitavas_. Two editions appeared in
1752, published at ‘Constantinople’ as written by ‘Andronio Meliante
Laxaed’. Pedro de Azevedo Tojal (†1742) had used the same metre for his
_Foguetario_ (1729). The burlesque poem _O Reino da Estupidez_ (1819),
written in four cantos of easily-flowing blank verse by the Brazilians
Francisco de Mello Franco (1757-1823) and José Bonifacio de Andrade e
Silva (1763-1838), is professedly an imitation of _aquelle activo e
discreto Diniz na Hyssopaïda_, only the butt here is not the Chapter of
Elvas but the professors of Coimbra University.
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