Portuguese literature

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.

It might be said of that marvellous poet Victor Hugo that he is not for exportation: the tendency has been for those who lack his genius to take shelter in his defects. Since one of his earliest followers, Claudio José Nunes (1831-75), published Scenas Contemporaneas (1873) his influence has been very marked in Portugal and manifests itself in the grandiloquence, over-emphasis, and love of antithesis of much of Snr. Abilio Manuel Guerra Junqueiro’s work. The greatest of Portugal’s living poets was born at Freixo de Espada á Cinta in 1850 and was thus a small child when Hugo’s poems Les Contemplations (1856) and La Légende des Siècles (1859) appeared. After studying law at Coimbra he was returned to Parliament in 1878. Enthusiastically revolutionary until 1910, he became Portuguese Minister at Berne in the following year, but retired from the service of the Republic in 1914. His first verses were published at the age of fourteen, Duas paginas dos quatorze annos (1864), and before he was twenty he had written Mysticae Nuptiae (1866), Vozes sem Echo (1867), and Baptismo do Amor (1868), with a preface by Camillo Castello Branco. But it was A Morte de Dom João (1874), a poem or series of poems in which Don Juan and Jehovah are attacked impartially, that brought him resounding success, a success followed up and increased by A Velhice do Padre Eterno (1885) and, under the influence of the political crisis of 1890, Finis Patriae (1890) and the play Patria, in which his eager and vigorous patriotism found vent. In all these, as in the quieter volume A Musa em Ferias (1879), there is true poetry (as well as unfailing sincerity and passionate sympathy for the oppressed), but it has to be looked for. A weird ghostliness in Finis Patriae and in the doido’s part in Patria is accompanied by a strange and impressive lilt in the rhythm[695] which corresponds to the haunting refrains of some of the shorter poems. But there seemed a danger that on the wings of applause, in political invective, and turgid rhetoric the poet might allow his genius to be totally misdirected, and it is his most remarkable achievement that in Os Simples (1892) he laid all that aside and returned to the simpler themes of peasant life which cast a spell over some of the lyrics in Finis Patriae: harvesters, the linda boeirinha guiding her great oxen, the old shepherd with his flute and crook on the scented hills, the cavador going to his work at cockcrow beneath the red morning star. A Caminho, the inimitable opening poem, has a delicate inspiration which is masterly in its restraint and ingenuous charm. It was well to rest on such laurels. In two subsequent odes, Oração ao Pão (1902) and Oração á Luz (1904), filled with a vague music, Snr. Guerra Junqueiro’s poetry merges into a mystic philosophy which he intends to express in prose. Some early poems appeared in Poesias Dispersas (1921). A victim of Victor Hugo to whom it is not easy for a critic to do justice, is the Lisbon poet Antonio Duarte Gomes Leal (1849-1921). His capacity is felt to be so much greater than his achievement. The grandiloquence and declamatory character of the verse in his first volume, Claridades do Sul (1875), are accentuated in subsequent works: A Fome de Camões (1880), A Historia de Jesus (1883), O Fim de um Mundo (1900), A Mulher de Luto (1902). His satire here, as in Satyras Modernas (1899), or the biting sonnets of Mefistófeles em Lisboa (1907), is sincerely indignant but too often based on ignorance. In O Anti-Christo (1884) it voices the eternal revolt against false civilization and materialism. This, the most celebrated of his works, presents a strange medley of persons, from Barabbas to Tolstoi and Huysmans, who have this in common that they all declaim in hollow sonorous Alexandrines. Science, saints, Hebrew prophets, Chinese philosophers, the eleven thousand Virgins pass in a vision before the Anti-Christ and converse with him. It is as if a Goethe without genius had written the second part of Faust. But Claridades do Sul contains poems in a totally different kind, poems like De Noute and Os Lobos, which seem to have caught something of the pathos and simplicity of Les Pauvres Gens, satire and humorismo forgotten. In his descriptions of homely scenes his verse becomes quiet, natural, and effective; after reading the restrained and skilful tercetos of De Noute one is inclined to wonder whether the secret of his comparative failure is that here was an excellent Dutch genre-painter striving to be a high-flown Velazquez. But certainly he has no lack of talent, imagination, and power of expression in resonant verse.

The cult of saudade has been deliberately revived by a group of poets in the north who have founded the school of Saudosismo, and in their monthly A Aguia and the Renascença press seek to foster all that is native in Portuguese literature. Their creed is a vague pantheism, their poetry is often equally vague and lacking in individuality, but they have the advantage of being remote from Lisbon and of not concerning themselves with foreign schools, and can therefore be natural and Portuguese. At the head of these poets Snr. Joaquim Teixeira de Pascoaes (born in 1877) sings musically in an enchanted land of mists and shadows of pantheism, saudade, and his native Tras-os-Montes. Merging itself entirely in Nature, his poetry becomes a wavering symphony[696] woven of night and silence. The vagueness present in the lyrics of Sempre (1897), Terra prohibida (1899), Jesus e Pan (1903), Vida Etherea (1906), As Sombras (1907), is more marked in his longer poems Marános (1911), in eighteen cantos, and Regresso ao Paraiso (1912), in twenty-two cantos of monotonous blank verse. But Nature is justified of her child, and Marános, like a mountain-stream threading its transparent pools, shows abundantly that the author has also the power of condensing a picture into a single line. To this group belong Snr. Mario Beirão (born in 1891), whose verse in O Ultimo Lusiada (1913) and Ausente (1915) is strong and concrete; Snr. Afonso Duarte (born in 1896), Snr. Augusto Casimiro, author of Para a Vida (1906), A Victoria do Homem (1910), and A Evocação da Vida (1912), and other young writers of promise.

Few if any of the younger poets have found in Portugal so ready a reception for their work as Antonio Nobre (1867-1900), whether this be due to the all-pervading melancholy, saudades de tudo, to the metrical skill, or to the haunting intensity of his verse. In a series of poems written between 1884 and 1894 he combined the dreams of a student at Coimbra, a lendaria Coimbra, the home-sickness of a Portuguese in Paris, and a real sympathy for the poor and miserable. In these poems of suffering and disillusion, published under the title Só (1892), a strange alternation of ingenuousness and satanism, fantastic visions and serene simplicity, genuine poetry and sheer prose, refrains of rustic gaiety and of morbid sentiment, produces a certain measure of originality. He can fit his pliant metres to his will, mould them like wax, and if the book contains no perfect poems this is partly due to a deliberate intention to reflect his own incoherent moods and to an evident pleasure in incongruous effects. A second volume, of poems written between 1895 and 1899, Despedidas (1902), appeared posthumously.

The permanent Secretary of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, Colonel Cristovam Ayres (born in 1853), has won distinction in many fields. Well known as an historian of the army (Historia Organica e Politica do Exercito Portuguez, 8 vols., 1896-1908) and as a critic, he has also written short stories and volumes of verse which have placed him in the front rank of the living Parnassian poets of Portugal. In Indianas (1878), Intimas (1884), Anoitecer (1914), and Cinzas ao Vento (1921), he displays great technical skill, especially in the reproduction of still scenes as in the sonnets Paizagem, Aguarella, or Ao luar. The Parnassian verse of Joaquim de Araujo (1858-1917) in Lyra Intima (1881), Occidentaes (1888), and Flores da Noite (1894) has a narcotic spell, a slow lulling music. And there is real opium in the pliant melodies of Antonio Feijó (1862-1917), during sixteen years Portuguese Minister at Stockholm, in Lyricas e Bucolicas (1884) and Ilha dos Amores (1897). The words are heavy with sleep like cistus flowers: Astros das noites limpidas velae-vos or A neve cae na terra lentamente (les lourds flocons des neigeuses années). This perfection of metre is seen at its highest in his Cancioneiro Chinez (1890), translations from the French Livre de Jade (1867), itself a translation by Judith Gautier from various Chinese poets. The poems of João Diniz, in Aquarellas (1889); Manuel Duarte de Almeida (1844-1914), in Estancias ao Infante Henrique (1889), Ramo de Lilazes (1887), and Terra e Azul; Snr. Manuel da Silva Gayo, in Novos Poemas (1906); Snr. Julio Brandão, in Saudades (1893), in which he weaves the linho luarento das saudades, O Jardim da Morte (1898) and Nuvem de Oiro (1912); Snr. Fausto Guedes Teixeira (born in 1872), in his remarkable O Meu Livro, 1896-1906 (1908); Snr. Luiz Osorio, in Neblinas (1884), Poemas Portuguezes (1890), and Alma lyrica (1891); Snr. Guilherme de Santa Rita in Vacillantes (1884) and O Poema de um Morto (1897), and indeed of a great caterva vatum,[697] belong to this school. The chiselling of faultless sonnets has become a mannerism, but the critic who recalls the vague and often slipshod diffuseness of earlier romantic poems pauses before condemning. Perhaps it may be possible in time to combine the cunning artifice of the verse-cutter with thought and a breath of life and Nature.

The Conde de Monsaraz (1852-1913) wrote some pleasant regional verse in Musa Alemtejana (1908), in which he describes life in the charnecas (moors) and herdades (estates) of Alentejo: the sound of the well-wheel among orange-trees, the ringing of trindades, the long lines of women hoeing, the old herdsman singing melancholy fados, the smoking açorda of the workmen’s meals, the storks fleeing from the July heat, the processions to pray for rain. The same out-of-door air and fullness of treatment pervade the work of Snr. Augusto Gil, with a more popular strain, in Musa Cerula (1894), Versos (1901), Luar de Janeiro (1909), Sombra de Juno (1915), Alba Plena (1916), Snr. José Coelho da Cunha’s Terra do Sol (1911) and Vilancetes (1915),[698] and D. Branca de Gonta Collaço’s Canções do Meio Dia (1912). A more vigorous talent, also, is that of Snr. João de Barros in Algas (1899), Entre a Multidão (1902), Dentro da Vida (1904), Terra Florida (1909), and Anteu (1912). At the head of the Portuguese Symbolists (their symbolism has been rather external than philosophic) stands Snr. Eugenio de Castro (born in 1869). He wished, while retaining perfection of form, to fill it with a new imagery and colour, and that his verse in describing Nature through his sensations should remain detached and impersonal: the poet is uma sombra saudosa d’outras sombras. The success achieved in Oaristos (1890) was strikingly maintained in Sagramor (1895), O Rei Galaor (1897), Constança (1900), Depois da Ceifa (1901), A Sombra do Quadrante (1906), O Annel de Polycrates (1907), O Filho Prodigo (1910), and the twenty-one sonnets of Camafeus Romanos (1921). His versification is not sufficiently varied (a defect naturally less apparent in the shorter poems), his rare words and rhymes often have a cumbrous air, but a real fire occasionally runs through the cold monotony of his verse, lighting up its heavy jewels with a glow almost of life. If it is sometimes an echo of Baudelaire, it is a Baudelaire thoroughly acclimatized.[699] His debt was not wholly to French Parnassian or Symbolist, for he had also drunk deep of Greek and German literature. His originality in modern Portuguese poetry is a very real one. Yet it is a pleasure to pass from verse often so perfect, always so artificial, to the more natural poems of two younger writers. Snr. Antonio Corrêa de Oliveira (born in 1880) in his Auto do Fim do Dia (1900), Raiz (1903), and Auto de Junho (1904) shows a true lyrical gift, an inspiration of the soil, of the quatrains of popular poetry:

In his later works, Alma Religiosa (1910), Auto das Quatro Estações (1911), Os Teus Sonetos (1914), A Minha Terra (1916), the effect is sometimes strained or marred by an almost morbid iteration. Snr. Afonso Lopes Vieira (born in 1878) displays a genuine talent in O Naufrago (1898), O Encoberto (1905), Ar Livre (1906), and O Pão e as Rosas (1908). Ilhas de Bruma (1918) is filled with the rhythm of the sea and with the traditions and native poetry of Portugal. There is a certain strength as well as a subtle music about his verse which is of good promise for the future. Whatever that future may be for Portuguese literature, Portugal will join the more worthily in the great literary age which will eventually spring from years of terrific upheaval if she studies and utilizes her full heritage of prose and verse. There is the less excuse now for its neglect since the devoted labour of many Portuguese scholars is rendering it yearly more accessible.