Portuguese literature
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