Portuguese literature
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).