Portuguese literature

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.