VI 1816-1910

§ 1 The Romantic School

In Portugal the first quarter of the nineteenth century was filled with violence and unrest. The French invasion and years of fighting on Portuguese soil were followed by a series of revolutions and civil wars. It seemed as if a more general earthquake had come to complete the ruin of 1755, against which Lisbon had so finely re-acted. The historian who attempts to record the conflicts between Miguelists 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).

While scientific research work was accumulating the bones of history a creator arose in the person of Alexandre Herculano (1810-77). He had emigrated to France and England in 1831, lived for a time at Rennes, and from the Azores in 1832 with Garrett accompanied the Liberal army to Oporto as a private soldier. In the following year he obtained work as a librarian. His A Voz do Propheta (1836) (Castilho in this year translated Lamennais’ Paroles d’un Croyant), written in the impressive style of a Hebrew prophet, although it appeared anonymously, brought its author fame, and in 1839 the King Consort D. Fernando appointed him librarian of the Royal Library of Ajuda. The salary was not large, under £200 a year, but the post gave him the two necessaries of literary work, quiet and books. From that year to 1867 his life was taken up with his work, with which politics only occasionally interfered. He edited O Panorama from 1837 to 1844 and joined in founding O Paiz. Although he was elected deputy to the Cortes in 1840 he rarely attended the sittings. His friendship with D. Fernando and King Pedro V continued unbroken till their death. In 1867 with characteristic abruptness he left Lisbon and literature and gave his last ten years almost entirely to agriculture on the estate of Val de Lobos, near Santarem.[665] The call of the land was combined with disgust at the politics of the capital and probably a natural disinclination to a sedentary mode of life. His retirement was greeted as a betrayal, and attacks formerly directed against his historical work were now directed against him for abandoning it. But since he had no intention of continuing his history, his literary work was really ended. It has three main aspects, poetry, the historical novel, and history. From the prosaic height of forty-six he informed Soares de Passos in a letter that he had been a poet till he was twenty-five. Some of the poems of A Harpa do Crente (1838),[666] especially A Tempestade and A Cruz Mutilada, rise to noble heights by reason of a fine conviction and a rugged grandeur, as of blocks of granite. Herculano had returned to Portugal imbued with profound admiration for the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, ‘immortal Scott’ as he called him, and Victor Hugo, and in his remarkable stories and sketches contributed to O Panorama and published as Lendas e Narrativas (1851), as well as in the more elaborate O Monasticon, consisting of two separate parts Eurico o Presbytero (1844) and O Monge de Cister (1848), he wrote romance based upon scrupulous historical research. A slight leaning towards melodrama is as a rule successfully withstood, and his intense and powerful style enchains the attention. Eurico is really a splendid prose poem,[667] in which the eighth-century priest Eurico is Herculano brooding over the degeneracy of Portugal in the nineteenth century. His glowing patriotism unifies the action and raises the style to an impassioned eloquence. The Middle Ages were well suited to him in their mixture of passion and ingenuousness and their scope for violent contrasts of evil and virtue, light and shadow. Most of the Lendas e Narrativas and O Bobo belong to that period, and his Historia de Portugal (4 vols., 1846-53) ends with the year 1279. That he should have stopped there when the character and achievements of King Dinis must have offered him a powerful incentive to proceed shows how deeply he had felt the controversial attacks levelled at his work; but with the Renaissance and the subsequent history of Portugal he was too intensely national to have great sympathy. As a historian he has been compared with Hallam, Thierry, and Niebuhr, and he stands any such comparison well. A passion for truth drove him to the original sources and documents, and, since alle Gelehrsamkeit ist noch kein Urteil, he brought the same patience and impartial sincerity to their interpretation. The results obtained he imposed on thousands of readers by his impressive and living style.[668] In his case the style was the man. Beneath coldness or roughness he concealed an affectionate, impetuous nature, a hatred of meanness and injustice. In his personal relations austere and difficult, sometimes no doubt unfair and undiscerning in the severity of his judgements, he was a perfect contrast to Almeida Garrett, compared with whom he was as granite to chalk or as the rock to the stream that flows past it. His strong will was fortunately directed by the Marquesa de Alorna in his youth to the thoroughness of German writers. Thoroughness marked all his work. When the Academy of Sciences entrusted him with the task of collecting documents on the early history of Portugal he threw himself into the labour with a fervour which produced the splendid Portvgaliae Monvmenta Historica, a series of historical works and documents of the first importance which began to appear in 1856. From 1867 to 1877 he undertook agriculture not as an amateur’s pastime but as the work of his life, with the result that he achieved another great success scarcely inferior to his success as a writer. The same thoroughness is evident in the Cyclopean fragment of his history and in his shorter writings, the Opusculos (1873-76). His Da Origem e Estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal (3 vols., 1854-9), a deeply interesting account of the negotiations and intrigues at the Vatican, in ceasing to be dispassionate may suffer as a purely historical work, but its vigour brooks no denial and its literary excellence is acknowledged even by those who dispute its fairness. Great as scholar and man, too great to be always understood during his life, his memory received a tribute from men so different as Döllinger and Núñez del Arce, and it is probable that his reputation will only increase with time.

In the historical novel Herculano had many followers. Antonio de Oliveira Marreca (1805-89) wrote two laborious fragments in O Panorama: Manoel Sousa de Sepulveda (1843) and O Conde Soberano de Castella (1844, 53). João de Andrade Corvo (1824-90), poet and dramatist,[669] author of a novel of contemporary politics, O Sentimentalismo (1871), which contains excellent descriptions of Bussaco, wrote a long historical novel, Um Anno na Corte (1850), in which interest in the actors at the Court of Afonso VI, in incidents such as a bullfight or a boarhunt, in witchcraft or the Inquisition, is skilfully maintained. His style in its sober restraint is superior to that of Arnaldo da Gama (1828-69), whose historical episodes of the French invasion of 1809 (O Sargento Môr de Villar and O Segredo do Abbade), or of Oporto in the fifteenth century in A Ultima Dona de S. Nicolau, or in the eighteenth in Um Motim ha cem annos (1861), are of considerable interest despite their author’s excessive fondness for Latin quotations. Perhaps the influence of Camillo Castello Branco may be traced in his novel O Genio do Mal (4 vols., 1857). Guilhermino Augusto de Barros (1835-1900) is the author of a novel of the fifteenth century, O Castello de Monsanto (2 vols., 1879), of great length and dullness. Its chief interest is for the student of the Portuguese language, owing to its large vocabulary. Bernardino Pereira Pinheiro (born in 1837) in Sombras e Luz (1863) described scenes from the reign of King Manuel, and drew a strange portrait of King João III in Amores de um Visionario (2 vols., 1874). But the mantle of Herculano, as historical novelist, fell especially upon Luiz Augusto Rebello da Silva (1822-71), politician and journalist. His Rausso por Homizio, a short novel of the time of King Sancho II, written with the exaggeration of extreme youth, appeared in the Revista Universal Lisbonense (1842-3), followed by Odio Velho não cansa (reign of Sancho I), with similar defects, in 1848. In the same (the first) volume of A Epocha appeared his short conto entitled A Ultima Corrida de Touros em Salvaterra, which won and has retained popularity by its skilful presentment of a stirring and pathetic episode in the reign of José I (1750-77). Four years later Rebello da Silva published his principal novel, A Mocidade de D. João V (1852). In its somewhat tedious descriptions the reader soon loses the thread of the story, but is entertained by the quick dialogue and almost clownish humour of the separate scenes. Lagrimas e Thesouros[670] (1863) may interest English readers from the fact that its principal character is William Beckford, but it has not the great merits of the preceding novel. The author was already at work on his unfinished Historia de Portugal nos seculos XVII e XVIII (5 vols., 1860-71). In this, as in his Fastos da Igreja (1854-5) and Varões Illustres (1870), his defects fall away, while his real skill as a historian, his intensity, and his excellent style remain; indeed, an added intensity gives his style a new vigour and simplicity. His Historia, although less rigorously scientific and far less methodically ordered than that of his master Herculano, has value as history as well as literature. Rebello da Silva wrote too much, but his work generally improved with the years and might have resulted in a real masterpiece had he not died before attaining the age of fifty.

Meanwhile the novel had entered on a new and intensely modern phase in the hands of a slightly younger contemporary. The life of Camillo Castello Branco (1825-90), whose numerous novels have been and still are read enthusiastically in Portugal, had about it an element of improbability which is reflected in his works and made it possible to combine their apparent sincerity with a peculiar unreality. Born at Lisbon but left an orphan at the age of eight, and brought up by a sister, wife of a doctor, in a small village of Tras-os-Montes,[671] a widower in his teens, then a boisterous Oporto medical student, twice imprisoned for love affairs and finally guilty of abducting an heiress as a bride for his son, his whole life was spent in a whirlwind, actual or imaginary, a tragicomedy which, stricken with blindness, he ended by suicide. He read and wrote in the same tempestuous fashion. The sentimental atmosphere of his novels is relieved systematically by outbursts of cynicism and sarcasm. When he began to write romanticism was in full swing, but his last twenty years were spent under what was to him the vexing and tantalizing shadow of the new realism. His first story, Maria não me mates, que sou tua mãe! (1848),[672] was sentimental and sensational, and something of these qualities remained in the greater part of his work. His first more elaborate novel Anathema (1851), in which the story is interrupted by lengthy musings and moralizings, he himself described as ‘a kind of literary crab’, and most of his novels are somewhat lop-sided: he confessed that his discursiveness was incurable. It is the more hysterical among his works, such as Amor de Perdição (1862)—its character is well described by the title of the Italian version, Amor sfrenato—or Amor de Salvação (1864) and those which combine this character with a chain of amazing coincidences, as Os Mysterios de Lisboa (1854) and O Livro Negro do Padre Diniz (1855), which were read most avidly in Portugal. He himself favoured the quieter Romance de um Homem Rico (1861) and Livro de Consolação (1872). We may prefer the attic flavour of the humorous sketch of a country gentleman (born in the year of Waterloo) at Lisbon, in A Queda d’um Anjo (1866), which somehow recalls the best work of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. Castello Branco had a true vein of comedy, and although a great part of the work of this specialist in hysterics has an air of unreality, he is 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 sketches and recollections in prose. Nearly fifty years before his death the romantic school in Portugal had received a severe shock, and the fact that long romantic poems continued to appear is proof how deep its roots had penetrated.

FOOTNOTES:

§ 2 The Reaction and After

It was in 1865 that Castilho, the acknowledged high-priest of literary aspirants, wrote a long letter which was published as introduction (pp. 181-243) to Pinheiro Chagas’ O Poema da Mocidade (1865), in which he deprecated the pretentious affectations of the younger poets. For while Castilho was dispensing his patronage to the acolytes of romanticism a new school of writers had grown up at Coimbra, who refused to know Joseph. They turned to Germany as well as to France, professed to replace sentiment by science, and in the name of philosophy chafed unphilosophically at the old commonplaces and unrealities. Castilho stood not only for romanticism but for the classical style of the eighteenth century, and in some respects the secession from his school may be described as the revolt of the Philistine against Filinto. Anthero de Quental now voiced the cause against the aged Castilho’s preface in an article entitled Bom Senso e Bom Gosto (1865). For the next few months it rained pamphlets.[680] Snr. Julio de Castilho, subsequently second Visconde de Castilho (1840-1919), and author of many well-known works, including the drama D. Ignez de Castro (1875) and the eight volumes of Lisboa Antiga (1879-90), took up the cudgels on behalf of his father. The high principles at stake, good sense and good taste, were sometimes forgotten in personal bitterness; a duel was even fought between Quental and Ramalho Ortigão, in which both the poet and his critic were happily spared to literature.

But romanticism in Portugal has nine lives, and raised its head at intervals during the second half of the century. In the domain of history Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins (1845-94) always remained more than half a romantic. His life explains the character of his historical writings. Born at Lisbon, obliged to work for a living when he was barely fifteen, he succeeded at the same time in educating himself, supported his mother and her younger children, married before he was twenty-five, had published a dozen works before he was forty, was elected deputy for Viana do Castello in 1886, became Minister of Finance in 1892, and died in his fiftieth year. A career so meteoric could scarcely give scope for that scrupulous research, that careful sifting of evidence which modern ideas associate with the work of the historian; and Oliveira Martins as historian embraced not only the whole of Portuguese but the whole of Iberian history, and that of Greece and Rome to boot. But even had he had more time, the result would only have been more subjects treated, not a different treatment. His whole idea of history was coloured with romance, his work impetuous and personal as that of a lyric poet. His first book, the historical novel Phebus Moniz (1867), passed almost unnoticed. After several pamphlets, appeared his first historical work, O Hellenismo e a Civilisação Christã (1878), and then in marvellous rapidity the Historia da Civilisação Iberica (1879), Historia de Portugal (1879), Elementos de Anthropologia (1880), Portugal Contemporaneo (1881), and a further succession of historical works ending with the Historia da Republica Romana (1885). Although politics now occupied much of his time he continued to publish, and wisely emphasized the biographical side of his work, of which Os Filhos de D. João I (1891) and A Vida de Nun’ Alvares (1893) are not the least valuable part. O Principe Perfeito (1896), dealing with King João II, appeared posthumously and incomplete. A master of psychology and impressionistic character-sketching, all his work is a gallery of pictures—and especially of portraits—from Afonso Henriquez to Herculano, which reveal the artist as well as his subjects. His style, nervous, coloured, insinuating, is a swift and supple implement for his exceptional power of skilfully summarizing a person or a period. He is capable of vulgarity (as in the account of Queen Philippa and the frequent use of colloquialisms perfectly unbefitting the dignity of history) but not of dullness. He uses and abuses epigram and metaphor, and is not free from the pompous rhetorical antitheses of Victor Hugo (e.g. De Cid transformou-se em Wallenstein), till the reader suspects him of being ready at all times to sacrifice truth to a phrase. Yet it is surprising, considering the circumstances of his life and the extent of his work, how often he bases his history, if not on documents, on the work of reliable earlier historians, Portuguese and foreign. If he fills in the gaps with pure romance or an uncritical use of texts (for instance, in A Vida de Nun’ Alvares he incorporates as authentic those charming ‘letters of Nun’ Alvarez’ which a mere glance at their style shows to be apocryphal) these are but the poet’s arabesques, the main structure is often sound enough. Were there no other history of Portugal it might be necessary to consider his work not only fascinating but dangerous, nor would Portugal Contemporaneo alone convey an impartial or complete idea of Portuguese history in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. We may deny him the title of great historian, we cannot deny him a foremost place in the literature of the century as a writer of brilliant intellect and feverish energy and a powerful re-constructor of characters and scenes in their picturesqueness and their passions.

The work of Manuel Pinheiro Chagas (1842-95), poet, playwright, critic, novelist, historian, was even more abundant and for the most part of a more popular character and more commonplace. He is also more Portuguese, and his works deserve to be read if only for their pure and easily flowing style. Many of his novels are historical. A Corte de D. João V (1867) has an account of an outeiro[681] in which figures the Camões do Rocio as the poet Caetano José da Silva Souto-Maior (c. 1695-1739) was called. The subject of the earlier novel Tristezas á beira-mar (1866) is that which Amorim in his A Abnegação derived from an English novel, but is here more naturally treated. A Mascara Velha (continued in O Juramento da Duqueza) appeared in 1873. As Duas Flores de Sangue (1875) is concerned with revolution in France and at Naples. A Flor Secca (1866) treats of more everyday scenes and contains some amusing if rather obvious character-sketches, as the old servant Maria do Rosario (a rustic Juliana), or the devout and vixenish old maid D. Antonia. His Novelas Historicas (1869) contains six historical tales dealing with Afonso I, Nun’ Alvarez, Prince Henry the Navigator, King Sebastian, Pombal, and the French Revolution. His Historia de Portugal (8 vols., 1867), begun on a plan originally laid down by Ferdinand Denis, contains lengthy and frequent quotations from previous historians but is coloured by later political ideas. The two shorter works Historia alegre de Portugal (1880) and Portugueses illustres (1869) are admirably suited for their purpose—to interest the people in the history and heroes of their country.

The chief work of the able and industrious critic and historian José Maria Latino Coelho (1825-91) was his Historia Politica e Militar de Portugal desde os fins do seculo XVIII até 1814 (3 vols., 1874-91). Antonio Costa Lobo (1840-1913), editor of the instructive Memorias de um Soldado da India, in his Historia da Sociedade em Portugal no seculo XV (1904) began a meticulous and well thought-out study of an earlier period of Portuguese history. José Ramos Coelho (1832-1914) is chiefly known for his elaborate romantic biography of the brother of King João V: Historia do Infante D. Duarte (2 vols., 1889, 90). Dr. Henrique da Gama Barros (born in 1833) in the invaluable Historia da Administração Publica em Portugal nos seculos XII a XV (3 vols., 1885, 96, 1914) has collected an abundance of concrete, carefully verified details, and thrown a searching light on the early history of Portugal.[682]

In literary criticism as well as in historical research the nineteenth century worthily continued the traditions of the eighteenth. Francisco Marques de Sousa Viterbo (1845-1910) after first appearing in print as a poet in O Anjo do Pudor (1870) rendered excellent service in both those fields; the best-known work of Luciano Cordeiro (1844-1900) is his study Soror Marianna (1890); Zophimo Consiglieri Pedroso (1851-1910) and Antonio Thomaz Pires (†1913) were celebrated for their studies in folk-lore[683]; the Visconde de Juromenha (1807-87) for his edition of the works of Camões; the Conde de Ficalho (1837-1903) for several remarkable studies and his edition of Garcia da Orta; Annibal Fernandes Thomaz (1840-1912) as a bibliographer; Augusto Epiphanio da Silva Dias (1841-1916) as scholar and critic; José Pereira de Sampaio (1857-1915), who used the pseudonym Bruno, as a critic; Aniceto dos Reis Gonçalvez Viana (1840-1914) and Julio Moreira (1854-1911) as philologists; Luiz Garrido (1841-82) as critic and classical scholar in his Ensaios historicos e criticos (1871) and Estudos de historia e litteratura (1879). After the death of the diligent and enthusiastic but sadly unmethodical bibliographer Innocencio da Silva (1810-76), his celebrated Diccionario Bibliographico Portuguez was carried on by Brito Aranha (1833-1914), and the task of continuing it is now entrusted to Snr. Gomes de Brito. To the eminent folk-lorist Francisco Adolpho Coelho (1847-1919) the language, literature, and folklore are indebted for many works of permanent value. Notable among living scholars, apart from D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos and Mr. Edgar Prestage, who both write in Portuguese, are Colonel Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira, whose editions of early works are invaluable; Dr. José Joaquim Nunes, who has devoted his careful scholarship to the early poetry and prose; the Camões scholar, Dr. José Maria Rodrigues; Snr. Pedro de Azevedo, archaeologist and historian; Snr. David Lopes, a scholar equally versed in literature and history; Snr. Candido de Figueiredo (born in 1846), enthusiastic student and exponent of the Portuguese language; while Dr. Fidelino de Figueiredo has a wide and growing reputation as critic and as editor of the Revista de Historia. Snr. Anselmo Braamcamp Freire (born in 1849), founder and editor of the Archivo Historico Portugues and a most sagacious critic and keen investigator, is the author of attractive and important historical studies and editions, which have become more frequent since he has been able to spare more time from public affairs. Dr. José Leite de Vasconcellos (born in 1858) has a European reputation as archaeologist, folk-lorist, philologist, and founder and editor of the Revista Lusitana. Ethnology, numismatics, and poetry are among his other subjects, and he maintains the renown of the Portuguese as polyglots, since he writes in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Latin, and Galician. His untiring enthusiasm for all that is popular or genuinely Portuguese is reflected in his numerous books and pamphlets, and he happily infects younger scholars. The gift and training of exact scholarship were denied to Dr. Theophilo Braga (born in 1843), but his exceptional ardour, industry, and ingenuity have been of inestimable value to Portuguese literature, which will always venerate his name even though his works perish. More than thirty years ago they numbered over sixty, and that was, as it were, only a beginning. His volumes of verse, Folhas Verdes (1859), Visão dos Tempos (1864), Tempestades Sonoras (1864), Ondina do Lago (1866), Torrentes (1869), Miragens Seculares (1884), which was intended to succeed where Victor Hugo’s Légende des Siècles had failed through lack of a plano fundamental, have been variously judged, some regarding them as real works of genius, others as a step removed from the sublime; his works on the Portuguese people are always full of interesting matter. His important Historia da Litteratura Portuguesa was to have been completed in thirty-two volumes, but his energies have been spent in many directions, and he has further written works of history, including that of Coimbra University in four volumes, positivist philosophy, and sociology, as well as short stories and plays.

The Portuguese novelists in the nineteenth century showed an increasing tendency to write plays, while authors whose reputation belonged more exclusively to the drama rarely rose above mediocrity. The success of Garrett’s plays was bound to fire a crowd of dramatists. Gomes de Amorim’s Ghigi (1852), on a fifteenth-century theme, was followed by plays with a thesis, such as A Viuva (1852), Odio de Raça (1854), written on the slavery question at Garrett’s request, and Figados de Tigre (1857), which entitles itself a parody of melodramas. Having emigrated as a boy to Brazil, he was able to use his knowledge of South America, sometimes with more zeal than discretion, as in O Cedro Vermelho, an exotic play in five acts and seventy-nine scenes, which the unfamiliar dresses and hybrid dialogue helped to make popular at Lisbon.[684]

The notable success of more recent playwrights has perhaps developed in proportion as the drama has ceased to be drama in order to become a series of isolated scenes, a novel or conto in green-room attire. They are at their happiest when they abandon formal drama for the lighter revista. Pathos is theirs and a deft handling of social themes; they can reproduce the peasant or bourgeois or noble as a class in thought and action and external conditions. Some of them possess technical skill, choose indigenous subjects and an atmosphere of chastened romanticism. But individual psychology and dramatic action are scarcely to be found. A reader with the patience to peruse the hundreds of plays acted and published in Lisbon during the last fifty years would be rewarded by many delicate half-tones, polished and impeccable verse, excellent prose, admirable sentiments, and poignant scenes, but could with difficulty afterwards recall a striking character or situation. Fernando Caldeira (1841-94) was a poet, and his plays, O Sapatinho de Setim, A Mantilha de Renda (1880), Nadadoras, A Madrugada (1894), are read less for the plot than for his carefully limned verse. His volume of poems, Mocidades, appeared in 1882. Antonio Ennes (1848-1901), journalist, librarian, politician, diplomatist, Minister of Marine, showed command of pathos and humour as well as of style in his plays O Saltimbanco (1885), the tragedy of the noble devotion of a mountebank, Falla-Só, descendant of Jean Valjean, for his daughter, who has been brought up in ignorance of her birth, Os Lazaristas (1875), and Os Engeitados (1876), which insists throughout on its thesis, the wickedness and cruelty of exposing children, but has some good scenes and living characters, and the notable one-act piece Um Divorcio (1877). The principal play of Maximiliano de Azevedo (1850-1911), author of many light and commonplace comedies, as Por Força (1900), was the drama Ignez de Castro (1894). The scene in which Inés, full of foreboding, takes leave of Pedro before he goes hunting, and that at the end of Act IV, in which Pedro returns to find Inés, in the words of their little son, ali a dormir, are effective. A fifth act six years later [1361] comes as an anti-climax. O Auto dos Esquecidos (1898) is the work not of a dramatist but of a poet, José de Sousa Monteiro (1846-1909), whose poems were published under the title Poemas: Mysticos, Antigos, Modernos (1883). The auto, written in the old redondilhas of which another modern poet has sung the praises, necessarily suffers by comparison with plays in which Gil Vicente touched upon the subject—the humbler forgotten heroes of the Portuguese discoveries—but it has its own charm and pathos.

But the most noteworthy of the dramatists of the latter part of the century was D. João da Camara (1852-1908), son of the first Marques and eighth Conde da Ribeira Grande and grandson of the third Duque de Lafões. He early began writing for the stage one-act pieces such as Nobreza (1873). His work is various, for it includes elaborate historical dramas in heroic couplets, as Affonso VI (1890), in which the king is treated with a sympathy denied to Cardinal Henrique in Alcacer-Kibir (1891), slight pieces in verse, as O Poeta e a Saudade or the Auto do Menino Jesus (1903); and prose plays of contemporary Lisbon society: O Pantano (a series of scenes of madness and murder), A Rosa Engeitada, A Toutinegra Real, A Triste Viuvinha, Casamento e Mortalha. In these he is lifelike and natural, but many may prefer him in his more fanciful pieces, portraying the old Canon who lives up under the roof of Lisbon Cathedral, in Meia Noite (1900), or the prior and other rustic worthies of Alentejo, in Os Velhos (1893), or the ancient mariner of O Beijo do Infante (1898). The mad José of O Pantano, the scatterbrained Clytemnestra in A Toutinegra Real, the parvenu Arroiolos and select Dona Placida in A Rosa Engeitada give little idea of the essential mellow humanity of his work, enhanced by a prose style carefully chosen and at times slightly archaic. Snr. Abel Botelho is more peculiarly concerned with the novel, and his plays Germano (1886), Os Vencidos da Vida (1892), Jucunda (1895) derive their interest from the description of certain phases of Lisbon life which could have been presented equally well in novel form. Marcellino Mesquita (1856-1919), doctor and deputy, wrote historical dramas, O Regente [1440] in prose, Leonor Telles (1889, published in 1893) in verse, O Sonho da India (1898) (scenes from the discoveries of Gama and ten other famous Portuguese navigators), and Pedro O Cruel (1916). If these historical tragedies are somewhat ponderous, he has a lighter touch in the redondilhas of Margarida do Monte (1910) and in the charming sketch Peraltas e Secias, and displays psychological insight in prose plays dealing with more modern problems: the comedy Perola (1889), Os Castros (1893), O Velho Thema (1896), Sempre Noiva (1900), Almas Doentes (1905), which treats of hereditary madness and suicide, and in the moving tragedy Envelhecer (1909), although it is perhaps out of keeping with the finely portrayed character of Eduardo de Mello that he should so end who had endured so nobly. His prose style has great merit (a few words require excision, e. g. restaurante, rewolver, desconforto), and he wrote many shorter problem pieces or episodes in prose: Fim de Penitencia (1895), O Auto do Busto (1899), O Tio Pedro (1902), A Noite do Calvario, A Mentira (in which a wife lies to her husband by the life of their child, who dies). The monotony of the rhymed couplets in Leonor Telles is intensified in the work of Snr. Henrique Lopes de Mendonça (born in 1856). His verse is more declamatory, the use of strained esdruxulo endings is carried so far that it becomes a mannerism and the verse often resembles a hurdle-race, the line running on smoothly to the obstacle at its end (thalamo—cala-m’o; silencio—recompense-o; phantasma—faz-m’a). This no doubt helps to increase the effect of hollow resonance. Nor is there a compensating skill in psychology. There is nothing subtle, for instance, in the characters of O Duque de Vizeu (1886): the cruel João II, the timid Manuel, the high-minded Duke, and self-sacrificing Margarida. A Morta (1891) deals with Pedro I’s justice and saudade for the dead Inés. Affonso d’Albuquerque (1898) has a tempting subject (handled previously by Costa Lobo in his play—also in verse—Affonso d’Albuquerque, 1886), but it is embarrassing to find the most unrhetorical of heroes, will of iron but not as here tongue of gold, solemnly haranguing in couplet after couplet, (although here, as in the other plays, the atmosphere of Portugal’s spacious days is well maintained):

It is perhaps a relief to turn to the prose plays, O Azebre (1909, written in 1904), the interest of which centres in the artist Fidelio, Nó Cego (1904), dealing with divorce, and especially to O Salto Mortal, which treats of more homely peasant affairs, and to the admirably natural fishermen’s scenes and dialogues enacted at Ericeira in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Amor Louco (1899). The author succeeds in giving a more definite picture of a whole community here than of any of his individual heroes in high places. A Herança (1913) also has the lives of fishermen for its subject. An equally slight but charming one-act piece in verse is Saudade (1916), while the dramatist’s power of evoking past scenes is shown in the glowing historical tales of Sangue Português (1920), Gente Namorada (1921), and Lanças n’Africa (1921).

The most conspicuous among slightly younger dramatists is Snr. Julio Dantas (born in 1876), who published a first volume of poems, Nada, in 1896. He is gifted with wit, lightness of touch, an excellent style, and a sense of atmosphere, which enables him to bring a pleasant archaic flavour to reconstructions of the past and observe the true spirit of history in periods the most diverse. His malleable talent is equally at its ease in O que morreu de amor (1899) and Viriato Tragico (1900); in Spain of the seventeenth century: Don Ramón de Capichuela (1911); contemporary Lisbon: Crucificados (1902), Mater Dolorosa (1908), O Reposteiro Verde (1912); the Inquisition-clouded Portugal of the seventeenth century: Santa Inquisição (1910), or its lighter side, with the bonbon marquis: D. Beltrão de Figueiroa (1902); the gentle, romantic Portugal of the middle of the nineteenth century: Um Serão nas Laranjeiras (1904), or the bull-fighting Portugal of the same period: A Severa (1901) with the gallant Marques de Marialva and the beautiful and magnanimous gipsy of the Mouraria. The filigree of his elaborate stage directions is skilfully used to enhance the effect,[685] and some of his scenes are exquisite, especially the simple, very charming, and tragic one-act comedy Rosas de todo o anno (1907). If the characters are usually sacrificed to their setting, here and there a slight sketch stands out, as that of the cynical old cardinal who delights in the mental torture of others, in Santa Inquisição, the attractive bishop of Soror Mariana (1915), or the characters in A Ceia dos Cardeais (1902). Ernesto Biester (1829-80) in the middle of last century wrote lively comedies of contemporary Lisbon life. The comedies of Gervasio Lobato (1850-95), as Os Grotescos, A Condessa Heloïsa (1878), O Festim de Balthazar (1892), O Commissario de Policia, Sua Excellencia, and many others, are natural, farcical scenes of high spirits and real good humour and good feeling. More literary and charming is the work of Snr. Eduardo Schwalbach, whose O Dia de Juizo (1915) and Poema de Amor (1916) came to crown a long series of plays and revistas. There are touches of real comedy in the lightly sketched scenes and characters of Snr. Augusto de Castro’s Caminho perdido (1906), Amor á Antiga (1907), As nossas amantes (1912), A Culpa (1918), as in his slight, attractive essays Fumo do Meu Cigarro (1916), Fantoches e Manequins (1917), and Conversar (1920); thought and character in Snr. Augusto Lacerda’s O Vicio (1888), Casados Solteiros (1893), Terra Mater (1904), A Duvida (1906), Os Novos Apostolos (1918). In Snr. Bento Mantua’s O Alcool (1909) and Novo Altar (1911) the problem may be a little too much in evidence, but in his prose plays Má Sina (1906) and Gente Moça (1910) the human interest is insistent. Má Sina, apart from the author’s weakness for strained coincidences, is a story of peasant life very naturally told. A young playwright of promise is Snr. Vasco de Mendonça Alves, author of Promessa (1910) and Filhos (1910). The subject of Filhos is unpleasant if not original (it is that of Eça de Queiroz’ Os Maias and Ennes’ Os Engeitados), but is treated with dignity and in a good prose style. Snr. Jaime Cortesão, hitherto known rather as a poet, has turned to the drama in Egas Moniz (1918).

The novelists of the second half of the century were numerous and, as a rule, too dependent upon foreign models, chiefly French. Joaquim Guilherme Gomes Coelho (1839-71) neither by date nor inclination belonged to one or other of the two schools between which lies his brief ten years’ activity. His talent developed early. As a medical student at his native Oporto he published poems and several stories, originally printed in the Jornal do Porto and later collected with the title Serões de Provincia (1870), and at the age of twenty-one, under the pseudonym Julio Diniz, he wrote the novel which brought him immediate fame and is still sometimes preferred to his later works: Uma Familia Ingleza (1868). In these scenes of the life of Oporto he drew with the most elaborate analysis the relations between English and Portuguese which he had had frequent opportunities of observing in that city. Portuguese critics hint that what to superficial readers has seemed the tediousness of his novels is due to the influence of Dickens and other English novelists who revel in detail, and it is interesting that Gomes Coelho’s maternal grandmother was an Englishwoman, Maria, daughter of Thomas Potter. But it is a mistake to call his work tedious; the deliberate dullness of his novels has an excitement of its own, ‘’tis a good dullness’. The reader, tired with sensational plots and strained incidents, follows not only with relief but with growing absorption the homely daisy-chain of his stories, in which not the tiniest link in the development of the action or thought, especially the latter, is omitted. The interest never flags and never disappoints, leading gently on with carefully measured steps; the approval of virtue and disapproval of wickedness only occasionally becomes obtrusive and insipid. Julio Diniz confessed to a preference for bourgeois types, but his real interest was in the country, and As Pupillas do Senhor Reitor[686] (1866), a village chronicle suggested by Herculano’s O Parocho de Aldea, is by many held to be his best work. The characters are delineated with the same delicate charm as that of Jenny in his earlier novel, and there is a background of curious observation—esfolhadas (husking the maize), espadeladas (braking flax), ripadas (dressing the flax), fiadas (gatherings of women to spin at the winter lareira in the faint light of a lamp hanging on the smoke-blackened wall), the men at cards in the tavern, the old country doctor going his rounds on horseback, the solemn greetings Guarde-o Deus, Louvado seja nosso Senhor Jesu Christo. If he sometimes sees the peasants as he would have them be rather than as they are, if his realism is subdued and gentle, his descriptions are at least truer than those of the naturalistic school. In A Morgadinha dos Canaviaes (1868), another village chronicle of Minho, the winter life of the peasantry is described, the consoada preceding ‘cock-crow mass’ on Christmas Eve, the auto represented on a rough stage in the village on the Day of Kings, together with the inevitable missionaries, beata, enriched ‘Brazilian’, and electioneering intrigues. Some critics have seen a falling off in his last novel, Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca (1871), written in the winter of 1869-70 at Madeira, whither he went in vain quest of health, but it is perfectly on a level with his previous work. There may be a slight tendency to exaggerate some of the characters, as there was in A Morgadinha, the contrast between Jorge and Mauricio may be too crude, the last scenes may be touched with melodrama, the style may have traces of the francesismo which Castilho noticed in his first novel, the execution may be excessively minute—these were not new defects in his works. On the other hand, the ruined fidalgo D. Luiz, his chaplain and agent Frei Januario, who scents a Liberal doctrine leagues away, the large-hearted peasants Anna do Vedor and Thomé da Povoa, are as interesting as Tio Vicente the herbalist or any of his previous characters, and the charming and accurate descriptions of the country that he loved so well show him at his best. This demure chronicler of quiet scenes, this specialist in the obvious, in his romances lentos, as he calls them—a Portuguese blend of Jane Austen, Enrique Gil, and Fernán Caballero: his delicacy is essentially feminine—achieved an originality which so often eludes those who most furiously pursue it. His Poesias (1873), partly consisting of poems interspersed in his novels, have a quiet, intimate charm. A curious originality had been attained earlier by a young naval lieutenant, Francisco Maria Bordallo (1821-61). When he published Eugenio (1846) at Rio de Janeiro, and a second edition at Lisbon in 1854, it was claimed that this sea novel (romance maritimo) was the first of its kind to be written in Portuguese; but his use of naval technical terms and descriptions of the sea is perhaps too deliberate. His Quadros maritimos appeared in O Panorama in 1854.

Few authors are more interesting to the critic (owing to the courageous and persistent development of his art) than José Maria de Eça de Queiroz (1843-1900), a far more robust writer than Julio Diniz and the greatest Portuguese novelist of the realistic school. Born at Villa do Conde, the son of a magistrate, he was duly sent to study law at Coimbra, and after taking his degree contributed in 1866 and 1867 a series of feuilletons to the Gazeta de Portugal. These folhetins, reprinted in Prosas Barbaras (1903), are remarkable because they show beside a love of the gruesome and fantastic (O Milhafre, O Senhor Diabo, Memorias de uma Forca) at least one story (Entre a neve) of a perfect simplicity, such as the author is sometimes supposed to have attained only towards the end of his life. His partiality for the exotic was fostered by travels in Egypt and Palestine in 1869 and manifested itself in A Morte de Jesus, Adão e Eva no Paraiso, and A Perfeição, as well as in A Reliquia and in part of A Correspondencia de Fradique Mendes. In 1873 he went to Havana as Portuguese Consul, and twenty-six years as Consul at Newcastle-on-Tyne (1874-6), Bristol (1876-88), and Paris (1888-1900), where he died, enabled him to see his own country in a new light. His prose lost its exuberance, his taste became more severe, his extravagant fancy, so strangely combined with realism in many of his works, was merged in natural descriptions of his native land. He regained his own soul without losing that peculiar mockery with which he veiled a kindly, sensitive temperament, and which agreeably stamps the greater part of his writings. But indeed the introducer of the naturalistic novel into Portugal only played with materialism, which in his hands was always unreal: legendary and romantic, as in Frei Genebro, S. Christovam, O Tesoiro; deliberately false and artificial, as A Civilisação; a macabre fantasy, as O Defunto; or half-intentional caricature, as O Primo Basilio and Os Maias. What more chimerical than A Reliquia or more elusive than O Suave Milagre, or more fanciful than O Mandarim (1879), in which without himself knowing China the author makes his readers know it! All through his life he was as it were groping through Manueline for a purer Gothic; the pity was that his education from the first should have thrown him into contact with French models—so that his very language too often reads like translated French—instead of directing him to a truer realism (such as that of his nearer neighbour Pereda), to which he turned in his last works, and in which he might have written regional masterpieces had he not died at a moment when his art apparently had lost nothing of its vigour. More probably, however, his still unsatisfied craving for perfection would have sought relief in mysticism. His first novel was a sensational story written in collaboration with Ramalho Ortigão: O Mysterio da Estrada de Cintra (1870), originally published in the Diario de Noticias (July 24-September 27, 1870). It was, however, O Crime do Padre Amaro (1876), in which he grafted the naturalistic novel on the quiet little town of Leiria, and the two notable if unpleasant Lisbon stories O Primo Basilio (1878) and Os Maias (1880), that marked him out as the most powerful writer of the time in Portugal. But he was still feeling his way. A Reliquia (1887) is as different from Os Maias as it is from the remarkable and charming letters of A Correspondencia de Fradique Mendes (1891) and his last two novels, A Illustre Casa de Ramires (1900), most Portuguese of his works, and A Cidade e as Serras (1901). The three fragments in Ultimas Paginas (1912) were probably written earlier. There are samples of all his phases in his Contos (1902), and the short story gave scope for his powers of observation and insight without calling for an elaborate plot, in which he often failed. A Cidade e as Serras, after developing the earlier story A Civilisação, is but a fascinating succession of country scenes. All Eça de Queiroz’ characters are caricatures, some more so, others less, but they are nevertheless true to a certain degree, that is to say, they are good caricatures, and living, and this is so especially in these later novels, which show how great a regionalist writer was lost in him through the influence of French schools. Yet no one can deny that his works have an originality of their own as well as power and personal charm, and all contain some striking character-sketches or delightful descriptions that are not easily forgotten.

The dullness of the naturalistic novels of Julio Lourenço Pinto (1842-1907) is not relieved by Eça de Queiroz’ pleasant irony and definite characterization. These ‘scenes of contemporary life’, while they display a praiseworthy restraint, give the idea rather of exercises in imitation of a French exemplar or of one of Eça de Queiroz’ early novels than of living stories. Their style is slovenly, the development of the plot prolix and monotonous. A certain interest attaches to Margarida (1879)—although even here the author is too methodical in detailing the past lives of the four protagonists, the nonentity Luiz, the aspiring Adelina (a Portuguese Madame Bovary), Fernando, and Margarida, after they have been duly presented in the opening pages—and to the descriptions of a fair, a bull-fight, a flood, or provincial politics in Vida Atribulada (1880), O Senhor Deputado (1882), Esboços do Natural (1882), and O Homem Indispensavel (1884). Snr. Jaime de Magalhães Lima (born in 1857) in O Transviado (1899), Na Paz do Senhor (1903), and O Reino da Saudade (1904), has written novels à thèse which are quite as interesting as naturalistic novels and more natural, but his art, especially in the presentation of contemporary politics, is a little too photographic. Snr. Luiz de Magalhães (born in 1859), author of several volumes of verse, wrote a single novel, O Brasileiro Soares (1886). It would offer little new in theme or treatment to distinguish it from other naturalistic novels were it not for the author’s success in drawing in Joaquim Soares a natural and attractive portrait of the Portuguese returned rich from Brazil (the Brasileiro). None of these novelists can rival the reputation of Francisco Teixeira de Queiroz (1848-1919). He became prominent as a novelist of the realistic school over forty years ago when under the pseudonym of Bento Moreno he inaugurated the series of his Comedia do Campo (8 vols.), of which the last volume is Ao Sol e á Chuva (1916), followed by a second series: Comedia Burgueza (7 vols.), which began with Os Noivos (1879). The obvious defects of his work—its laborious realism, its insistence on medical or physical details, its vain load of pedantry[687]—need not obscure its real merits. The careful style has occasional lapses, the psychology is thin, the conversations commonplace. His art, like a winter sunshine, fails to penetrate. Yet even in the Comedia Burgueza, where the interest must depend on the psychology, he succeeds in D. Agostinho and A Morte de D. Agostinho (1895) in giving individuality to that strange rickety figure of the old fidalgo in his ruined Lisbon palacio. And in the Minho scenes of the Comedia do Campo his scrupulous descriptions obtain their full effects. In the romaria (pilgrimage), the cantadeira (improvisator), the diligencia with its load of priests (in Amor Divino), the girl shepherdess, the abbade fond of hunting wolves and boars, the old women spinning, the lawsuit of centuries over the fruit of an orange-tree, the sexton Coruja and his dog Coisa (in Vingança do morto and O Enterro de um Cão), and especially some old familiar country-house, with Dona Maria and her preserves and receios infernaes, in Amor Divino and Amores, Amores (1897), Minho and the Minhotos are presented with naturalness and skill. Many of these scenes are from the short stories of Contos, Novos Contos (1887), A Nossa Gente (1900),[688] and A Cantadeira (1913),[689] some of which have been collected in an attractive volume, Arvoredos (1895).

Snr. Manuel da Silva Gayo (born in 1860), poet and novelist, wrote in Peccado Antigo (1893) a short novela as it calls itself, or rather a conto, remarkable for its combination of colour and restraint. It describes country scenes and customs in a style that may not be spontaneous but is well subservient to the matter in hand, and has a vigour, purity, and concision too often lacking in modern Portuguese prose. Some of his early stories were collected in A Dama de Ribadalva (1904). In his later novels this style is not maintained. We will not quarrel with its abruptness in Ultimos Crentes (1904), a remarkable story of nineteenth-century Sebastianistas in a fishing village to the extreme north of Estremadura, but it is more slovenly in Os Torturados (1911), in which a certain originality of thought seems to have damaged the form in which it was expressed. There is a welcome Spanish directness in the work of the able journalist Snr. Carlos Malheiro Dias (deputy for Vianna do Castello in 1903-5) in his novels O Filho das Hervas (1900), Os Telles de Albergaria (1901), and A Paixão de Maria do Ceo (1902). Frankly sensational in O Grande Cagliostro (1905), he displays his gift for the short story in A Vencida (1907), a volume of dramatic tales, of which A Consoada is especially effective. Snr. João Grave (born in 1872) carefully elaborates his prose in A Eterna Mentira (1904) and Jornada Romantica (1913). It turns to marble in the musings of the marble faun in O Ultimo Fauno (1906), but loses this unreality in studies of the poor in country, Gente Pobre (1912), and town, Os Famintos (1903), a tragic story of a workman’s family at Oporto. More recently he has treated historical themes with success in Parsifal (1919) and A Vida e Paixão da Infanta (1921). In the historical novel Snr. Francisco de Rocha Martins has won a special place by picturesque works such as Os Tavoras (1917). He has an eye for dramatic episodes and has composed many a living picture of the past.

Abel Botelho (1856-1917), a colonel in the Army, and for some years Minister of the Portuguese Republic at Buenos Aires, author of a volume of verse, Lyra Insubmissa (1885), showed an intermittent power of description in seven stories of his native Beira, collected under the title Mulheres da Beira (1898). In his series of novels published under the heading Pathologia Social: O Barão de Lavos (1891), O Livro de Alda (1898), Fatal Dilemma (1907), Prospera Fortuna (1910), he would seem to have laboured under a misapprehension, believing apparently that the introduction of physiology into literature might prove him an original writer.[690] Sainte-Beuve may speak of the saletés splendides of Rabelais, a great stylist like Signor Gabriele d’ Annunzio, except when his art fails, may redeem if he does not justify any theme. But Abel Botelho’s style in these wearisome novels can only be described as worthy of their matter. They are a welter of shapeless sentences, long abstract terms, French words, gallicisms, expressions such as pathognomonico, autopsiação, neuro-arthritico, a etiologia dos hystero-traumatismos. This may be magnificent pathology, but it is not art or literature. As Farpas had come to an end some years before these novels began to appear, otherwise their defects might have been pilloried by an adept in ridicule who in contemporary literature occupies a place apart. As critic José Duarte Ramalho Ortigão (1836-1915) took his share in the controversy of 1865, as a traveller he wrote a vivid, witty, and charming account of Holland, with malicious side-reflections on Portugal: A Hollanda (1883). Between these two dates a series of papers, As Farpas (1871-87), originally suggested by Alphonse Karr’s Les Guêpes and begun in collaboration with his friend Eça de Queiroz, had made him famous. His clear and pointed style was an excellent instrument for the barbed shafts of his satire and irony and, having discovered how powerful a weapon he possessed, he wielded it to right purpose. With abundant good sense he ridiculed and undermined the foibles and follies of Lisbon life, obstinately determined to bring health to the minds and the bodies of his fellow-countrymen and succeeding by his wit where a more sedate reformer might have failed. The range of subjects covered was very wide—the interest of many of them necessarily ephemeral—and his skill in brief character-sketches is remarkable. But although Ramalho Ortigão will always be remembered as the author of As Farpas it is perhaps A Hollanda that will be read. The former work was imitated by Fialho de Almeida in Os Gatos (1889-94), which achieved popularity in Lisbon. His is a more lumbering wit: the rapier of Ramalho Ortigão is exchanged for bludgeon or umbrella. But Os Gatos, despite much that is vulgar and much that is dull, contains some good literary criticism and successful descriptions, of places rather than of persons. A battling critic was Manuel José da Silva Pinto (1848-1911) in Combates e Criticas (1882), Frente a frente (1909), and Na procella (1909). Equally vigorous and pure was the style of Joaquim de Senna Freitas (1840-1913) in Per agoa e terra (1903) and A Voz do Semeador (1908), as likewise that of Francisco Silveira Da Mota in Viagens na Galliza (1889). The literature of travel is not extensive. Oliveira Martins published in the Jornal do Commercio of Rio de Janeiro in 1892 his A Inglaterra de hoje (1893); Eça de Queiroz showed a deeper acquaintance with England in his Cartas de Inglaterra (1905). Snr. Wenceslau José de Sousa Moraes (born in 1854), sometimes called the Portuguese Pierre Loti, has skilfully described China and Japan in Traços do Extremo Oriente (1905), Paisagens da China e do Japão (1906), and Cartas do Japão (three series, 1904-7). In a letter in French at the end of his Traços he says: J’ai dit ce que je pensais, naïvement, au gré de mes souvenirs.

Snr. Manuel Teixeira Gomes, versatile and gifted, traveller, diplomatist (Portuguese Minister at the Court of St. James), and author, is essentially an artist. With a clear, coloured, liquid style he excels in painting the blue seas, transparent air, and sun-burnt soil of Algarve in Agosto Azul (1904). His pagan and unconventional art has the power of impressing incidents on the mind, as of giving sharp relief to fantastic persons such as the Canon and his three witless sisters in Gente Singular (1909), the Danish literary lady in Inventario de Junho (1899), or the avaricious Dona Maria and the inane Minister of Sabina Freire (1905). This ‘comedy in three acts’ contains sufficient shrewdness, humour, and clever characterization for a long novel instead of a short play. The tiny volumes Tristia (1893) and Alem (1895) by Snr. Antero de Figueiredo (born in 1867) were notable for their style, and in other works, Partindo da Terra (1897), the passionate letters of Doida de Amor (1910), the novel Comicos (1908), and the fascinating historical studies D. Pedro e D. Inês (1913) and Leonor Teles, Flor de Altura (1916), his prose maintains a restraint and charm which place him among the best stylists of the day. One of the noblest qualities of this prose is its precision, the scrupulous use of the right word, common or archaic. It is the more disconcerting to find good Portuguese words such as estação, hospedaria, comodo, bondade ousted by gare, hôtel, confortavel, bonomia. But these are only occasional blemishes in a style of rare distinction. It can paint a whole scene in a brief sentence, as os milheiraes amarellecem-se caladamente. This power of description gives excellence to his Recordações e Viagens (1905), whether the recollections be of Minho or of uma aldeia espiritual in Italy. It is really as a writer of short sketches and essays that he excels. In Senhora do Amparo (1920) and especially in the seventeen sketches of Jornadas de Portugal (1918) skill in the choice of indigenous words gives a forcible and original poetry to glowing descriptions redolent of the soil.

D. Maria Amalia Vaz de Carvalho (1847-1921) collaborated with her husband, the poet Gonçalves Crespo, in Contos para os nossos filhos, and in Serões no Campo (1877), three stories, in one of which, A Engeitada, one may perhaps see reminiscences of Julio Diniz’ A Casa Mourisca, and Contos e Phantasias (1880) treated slight themes with a delicate charm. But she is less well known as writer of contos or as poet, in Vozes do Ermo (1876), than as the author of a notable historical biography, Vida do Duque de Palmella (1898-1903), and of critical essays on Portuguese and foreign literatures. In the latter the English predominates, but French, German, and Italian, as in Arabescos (1880), are not forgotten. The sane judgement, sympathy, and insight of Alguns homens do meu tempo (1889), Figuras de Hoje e de Hontem (1902), Cerebros e Corações (1903), No Meu Cantinho (1909), Coisas de Agora (1913), and other volumes have been appreciated by countless readers in Portugal and Brazil. A writer who likewise combines literary and historical criticism with original work in verse (Poemetos, 1882) and prose is the Conde de Sabugosa (born in 1854), skilful and delicate reconstructor of the past in Embrechados (1908), Donas de Tempos Idos (1912), Gente d’Algo (1915), Neves de Antanho (1919), and A Rainha D. Leonor (1921), who collaborated with another stylist, the Conde de Arnoso[691] (1856-1911), author of Azulejos (1886), in the volume of contos entitled De braço dado (1894). His historical portraits are full of life and charm, painted in the warm colours of knowledge and emotion.

If we except D. Maria Amalia Vaz de Carvalho, the literary achievement of women in Portugal in recent years has not been remarkable. Like D. Claudia de Campos, author of the novels Elle (1898) and A Esfinge and short stories, D. Alice Pestana (Caiel) has cultivated with success both the novel, as in Desgarrada (1902), and the conto, as in De Longe (1904), which contains stories of familiar life written with sincerity and truth. If D. Anna de Castro Osorio’s Ambições (1903) gives the impression rather of a series of scenes than of a long novel, in her short stories Infelizes (1898)—especially A Terra—and Quatro Novelas (1908) she ably describes common family life in town or country, or (in A Sacrificada) the lives, past and present, of aged nuns in a dwindling convent. D. Virginia de Castro e Almeida has written two novels concerning the development of the soil in Alentejo: Terra Bemdita (1907) and Trabalho Bemdito (1908).[692] They are frankly novels with a thesis to prove, but contain so much vigour and zest of living that they stand out from other more futile or anaemic novels of contemporary Portugal.

The growing prominence of the conto is felt in the work of Castello Branco, Eça de Queiroz, Teixeira de Queiroz, Snr. Jaime de Magalhães Lima (Via Redemptora, 1905, Apostolos da Terra, 1906, Vozes do Meu Lar, 1912), and many other novelists. Julio Cesar Machado (1835-90) showed talent in Contos ao luar (1861), Scenas da minha terra (1862), Quadros do campo e da cidade (1868), Á Lareira (1872). His skill in the description of rustic scenes would have been more convincing had he not thought it necessary to introduce touches of extraneous elegance and humour into his very real love of the country, so that the patent leather boot is ever appearing among the tamancos in these light humorous sketches and romantic tales. As slight but perhaps more natural are the Contos do Tio Joaquim (1861) by Rodrigo Paganino (1835-63); the pleasant stories of village life, Contos (1874) and Serões de Inverno (1880), written by Carlos Lopes (born in 1842) under the pseudonym Pedro Ivo; and Contos (1894) and Azul e Negro[693] (1897) by Afonso Botelho. The poet Augusto Sarmento (born in 1835) also wrote stories of village life, Contos do Soalheiro (1876), but stories à thèse, treating of emigration and other minhoto evils, among which he includes beatas, witches, and brasileiros de torna-viagem. A writer of contos as disappointing as Machado is Alberto Braga (1851-1911). He has a sense of style and technique, and some of his tales, especially O Engeitado, are pathetic, but after reading his Contos da minha lavra (1879), Contos de aldeia, Contos Escolhidos (1892), Novos Contos, one has the perhaps somewhat unfair impression that they are mainly concerned with viscondessas and canaries. The learned Conde de Ficalho in Uma Eleição Perdida (1888) evidently relates his own experiences, and this and the five accompanying contos contain some charming descriptions of Alentejo, of the reisinho cacique Lopes, Paschoal the passarinheiro, the gossips of the village botica, the girls carrying bilhas, the scent of rosemary in morning dew. The same province supplies the background of the work of José Valentim Fialho de Almeida (1857-1912). Born at Villa de Frades, the son of a village schoolmaster, he spent seven years sadly against the grain as chemist’s assistant before he was able to turn more exclusively to literature. No recent writer has had a greater vogue in Portugal. One must account for this by the fact that in the somewhat nerveless literature of the day he showed a virile and often brutal colour and energy. A few descriptions of Alentejo gave interest to his Contos (1881) and A Cidade do Vicio (1882), an interest strengthened in O Paiz das Uvas (1893). This collection of naturalistic stories of great variety and very unequal merit is, indeed, redeemed by the author’s love for his native province. He sometimes obtains powerful effects when his subject is the wide spaces, the night silences, or the summer drought and midday zinc-coloured sky of Alentejo. The shepherdess with her distaff, the village crier, the small proprietor, the harvesters with their week’s provision of coarse bread, goat’s cheese, and olives, toiling in a temperature of 122 degrees, appear in his stories. His art is wholly external. One need not have complained of his lack of psychology had he been able to express what he saw in good Portuguese prose. But if we turn to his style we find uncouth constructions, the constant use of French words, and worse still, French words disguised as Portuguese: deboche, coquettemente, crayonar. This is the more pity because, had he written in Portuguese, he might have left robust pictures of the Alentejan peasant’s life in its grim reality which would have been read with pleasure. A sober and fastidious style, sometimes recalling that of the Spanish essayist Azorín, marks the Contos (1900) of the dramatist D. João da Camara. The clear etching of the blind man and his grandson going through the streets on Christmas Eve in As Estrellas do Cego and, especially, the poignant sketch of the ruined old scholar fidalgo in O Paquete show admirably what a skilful craftsman can make of the slightest of themes. This is true to an even greater degree of the best of all the Portuguese contistas, José Francisco de Trindade Coelho (1861-1908). His contos collected under the title Os Meus Amores (1891), natural and deeply felt scenes of peasant life, are all marked by an exceptional delicacy of style and by a most alluring freshness and simplicity. The tinkling of the bells of flocks, the thin blue smoke above the roofs, the evening mists, the flight of doves are in these pages. And the peasants are treated with the same sympathetic insight as their surroundings, the women singing at their work in the fields, the olive-gatherers at supper in the great farm kitchen; vintage and harvest, tragedy and idyll. The sympathy is extended to the animals, donkey (Sultão), goat (Mãe), and hen (A Choca). The saudade of peasant soldiers for the land in Terra-Mater gives an opportunity for describing the life of the peasants with its hardy toil and many simple pleasures. In Á Lareira, the longest of these stories, a rustic serão of peasants ao borralho is pleasantly drawn out with quatrains, riddles, anecdotes, fairy-tales, only interrupted by the ringing of the angelus for the saying of prayer on prayer. Two little masterpieces stand somewhat apart from the rest: Abyssus Abyssum, the tragic story of two small boys, brothers, rowing to overtake the evening star, and Idyllio Rustico, which with its two ingenuous little shepherds and their flocks of sheep in the lonely places might almost be a chapter from Don Ramón María del Valle Inclán’s Flor de Santidad (1904). Os Meus Amores shows realism at its best, that is to say, hand in hand with idealism. The author is not so enamoured of his delightful style that he does not make the peasants speak their natural language, and although he realizes keenly and expresses the poetry of their life, he never sacrifices truth to this perception any more than to the strange and essentially false propensities of the naturalistic school, nor refines his descriptions to a rose-colour insipidity. A good scent of the earth and of wild flowers pervades these realistic descriptions. On such lines, if this book influences younger writers, it might lead the way to many a delightful novel of the parfum du terroir of Portugal. Snr. Julio Brandão (born in 1870), equally distinguished in prose and verse, is the author of Maria do Ceo (1902), mystic love letters in a chiselled style, only with the mystic writers of old the style flowed naturally from an inner fervour, here it has evidently been the chief consideration. If the effort is apparent it is sometimes very successful, and in Perfis Suaves (1903) and Figuras de Barro (1910), fantastic stories and fascinating fairy-tales, he occasionally achieves simplicity. Equally studied is the prose of Snr. Justino de Montalvão’s Os Destinos (1904), twelve stories, of which Conto dos Reis relates the death of a peasant child as voices outside sing São chegados os tres Reis. The Visconde de Villa-Moura (born in 1877) has shown in the five contos of Doentes da Belleza (1913), as in Bohemios (1914), that his sensitive plastic style is excellently suited to the short story. Snr. Antonio Patricio’s Serão Inquieto (1910) contains two poignant contos: O Precoce and O Veiga. Os Pobres by Snr. Raul Brandão (born in 1869) is a succession of scenes, a striking analysis of suffering as exhibited in various strange types of the poor and of its beauty and necessity in the philosophy of Gabiru. Snr. Severo Portela displays a tortured style in Os Condemnados (1906) and Agua Corrente (1909); smoother but equally artificial is that of Snr. Henrique de Vasconcellos in Contos Novos (1903) and Circe (1908), the former of which contains the slight sketch O Caminheiro. Excentricos is the title of a volume containing some notable stories by Snr. Alberto de Sousa Costa. The large number of contos is a sign of the times, corresponding to the favour shown towards the brief revista in the drama and the host of sonnets which now replace the long romantic poems of the past.

Anthero de Quental[694] (1842-91), the Coimbra student who waved the banner of revolt against a too complacent romanticism in 1865, was that rare thing in Portuguese literature, a poet who thinks. Powerfully influenced by German philosophy and literature, his was a tortured spirit, and when in his sincerity he attempted to translate his philosophy into action the result was too often failure. Born at Ponta Delgada in the Azores, he studied law at Coimbra from 1858 to 1864, became a socialist, worked for some time as a compositor in Paris, in spite of his independent means; then, after a visit to the United States of America, settled at Lisbon for some years and figured as an active socialist. Weary and ill, he retired in 1882 to the quieter town in the north, Villa do Conde, but he could not escape from his own turbulent thoughts and nine years later he shot himself in a square of his native town. If his life was ineffectual in its series of broken, noble impulses, there is nothing vague or uncertain about the splendid sonnets of Odes Modernas (1865) and Sonetos (1881). They are the effect, often perfectly tranquil, of a previous agony of thought, like brimmed furrows reflecting clear skies after rain. His search was for truth, not for words to express it, far less for words to describe his own sensations. Indeed, he was far from considering poetry as an end in itself and destroyed more of his poems than his friends published. In his autobiographical letter addressed to Dr. Storck in 1887 he states that his poetry was written involuntariamente. That is to say, after much thought on the great problems of existence verse came to him unrhetorical and spontaneous, as it did to João de Deus without any thought whatever:

Quental’s poems owe their strength and intensity to the fact that they had passed through the fire of tanta luta.

Totally different from Quental’s was the genius of João de Deus (1830-96), the most natural Portuguese poet of the nineteenth century. Born at Messines in Algarve, he studied law at Coimbra, became a journalist, but did not come to live permanently at Lisbon until he was elected to represent Silves in the Chamber of Deputies in 1868. It is significant that many of his most perfect lyrics were contributed to provincial journals. They are written in the simple language of a peasant composing a quatrain. He sought his inspiration not in books or any of the rival schools of poetry but in his native soil and popular speech, and through him Portuguese poetry was renovated. His first published work, A Lata (Coimbra, 1860), in oitavas, gives no measure of his genius, but some of his best poems, such as A Vida, were widely known before Flores do Campo (1868) appeared, followed by Ramo de Flores (1875), Folhas Soltas (1876), and finally the collected edition, Campo de Flores (1893). His last years were spent in advertising and perfecting his special method for teaching children to read. If ever poet was born, not made, it was João de Deus. He is at his best when he does not attempt thought or philosophy or even give rein to his satire. His verse, clear and light as a leaf, a cloud, a stream—its favourite metaphors—and entirely free from rhetorical effects, has a most spontaneous charm. Despite occasional defects, the use of lukewarm or unpoetical words, objectos, chaile, affavel, bussola, or such rhymes as gotta—dou-t-a, his work, which lacks the fire that more spacious times might have elicited, abounds in exquisite love lyrics. The popular inspiration is also evident in the Peninsulares (1870) of José Simões Dias (1844-99), many of whose poems are a mere string of quadras.

Guilherme Braga (1843-76), who wrote vigorous political verse against ‘Jesuit reactionaries’ and the like in Os Falsos Apostolos (1871) and O Bispo (1874), proved himself a talented poet in Heras e Violetas (1869), although even here are to be found words and expressions frequently out of tune. Like Alexandre da Conceição (1842-89), whose best-known volume of verses, Alvoradas (1866), belongs to the romantic school, Guilherme de Azevedo (1846-82) began with romantic verse in imitation of Garrett in Apparições (1861), wavered in Raçõdiaes da Noite (1871), and succumbed to the new school in A Alma Nova (1874). João Penha (1839-1919) in Rimas (1882) and Novas Rimas (1905) shows a command of metre and harmony worthy of something better than his commonplace themes. Gonçalves Crespo heard in his verse ‘the plaining music of a guitar of Andalucía’, but Penha never cared to be serious. Cesario Verde (1855-86) was a Lisbon poet who in verse written between 1873 and 1883, O Livro de Cesario Verde (1886), showed a most promising gift of presenting reality in phrases limpidly clear without straining after effect. Another poet who died almost as young left a far more definite achievement, although his poems are scarcely more numerous than those of Verde. Few Portuguese writers have, indeed, published less than Antonio Candido Gonçalves Crespo (1846-83), a Portuguese born at Rio de Janeiro. He studied at Coimbra University, and became a distinguished journalist and a colonial member of the Portuguese Parliament from 1879 to 1881. Two tiny volumes of lyrics, Miniaturas (1870) and Nocturnos (1882), comprise his whole work, but his restraint and his fastidiously chiselled verse place him at the head of the Portuguese Parnassians. Portuguese in his hands becomes a pliant medium crystallizing round an emotion, longes de saudade, or, more frequently, round a concrete image, a parting at sunset (Mater dolorosa) or a village in a summer noontide (Na Aldeia). The latter sonnet recalls a few lines of Leopardi’s Il Sabato del Villaggio, and in one respect, the perfection of form with which he describes quite ordinary scenes, the Portuguese poet need not fear the comparison. An old woman spinning, children at play, a peasant’s song in the fields, an orange-grove at dawn musical with birds—these are incidental pictures in his poems, and by his combination of a vague dreaming temperament with a delicate, definite artistic sense they receive a new significance. An earlier Brazilian poet, Antonio Gonçalves Dias (1823-64), author of Primeiros Cantos (1846), Segundos Cantos e Sextilhas de Frei Antão (1848), and Ultimos Cantos (1851), made a name for himself by his sextilhas.