Portuguese literature
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