The Oxford book of Portuguese verse

Portugal only began to exist at the end of the eleventh century (1095), and the first century of its existence was tentative, since it was occupied in disengaging itself from Galicia in the north and in extending itself over the south, held by the Moors. The Cid had fought and died and the Poema de mio Cid had been written before Portugal became a separate kingdom. Thus a nation did not properly exist to sing the epic deeds of Afonso Henriquez (who was making a new nation) and other heroes, and the legends of the battle of Ourique (1139) were handed down orally, to be chronicled later in prose. Portuguese literature opens without epics. The lyric poetry of the troubadours came to Portugal as it went to Sicily and Spain, about a century after it had begun to flourish in Provence. The founder of Portugal had been a French prince of the House of Burgundy. Whole colonies of Frenchmen settled in the new country and helped to drive the Moors southward, and the Benedictines of Cluny played no small part in its affairs. Portugal, by its geographical situation, its extensive seaboard, and the neighbourhood of Galicia with the world-famous pilgrimages to Santiago, was peculiarly exposed to foreign influences and also received many crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, not a few of whom settled in the country. It is, therefore, not surprising that Portugal had close relations with France and was not ignorant of the poetry of the trouvères of the north, from which some of the Portuguese pastorelas may have been directly imitated. It was, however, the poetry of the troubadours of Provence that predominated, and this came to Portugal through Spain and the courts of Aragon, León, and Castille, with which that of Portugal became intimately connected by dynastic marriages. Unhappily, this poetry lost heavily in exportation to Portugal as to other lands, and although it was cultivated by Court poets with uncommon zeal, it grew up white and insipid, like a plant in a cellar. Despite astonishing technical excellence, the Portuguese-Provençal cantigas de amor lack variety and character. It was only the satirical cantigas de maldizer that were as coloured and personal as any sirventès of Provence. Perhaps it was the very monotony of the cantigas de amor that caused another kind of lyric to flourish side by side with the imported Provençal. This indigenous poetry is confined in Portugal to the region north of the Tagus, and King Dinis, the last poet to patronize it keenly, was the first king to establish his court so far south as Lisbon. The first specimen that we have is by King Sancho I, an earlier Dinis, and dates from 1199, ten years after the first recorded poem in Portuguese (Galician). During the period between 1220 and 1280 the indigenous poetry was cultivated abundantly, by noble trovador and humble jogral, by priest and soldier, in Portugal and Galicia, and by foreigners who composed their lyrics in Galician, the language of the new kingdom of Portugal. Other literatures offer no parallel to these strange, exquisite cossantes, as it is convenient to call them (always remembering that the Spanish cossante was by no means confined to the parallel-strophed lyrics); nor were it easy to find poems of such freshness and grace elsewhere. Portuguese literature is thus opened with a golden key. That we are privileged so to open it is due to the researches of recent years, which constitute, in the words of that great scholar Menéndez Pelayo, ‘one of the most splendid achievements of modern learning’. These researches were mainly those of foreigners. It has ever been a characteristic of the Portuguese, in their love of new things, to neglect their past, as the minhotos whitewash their ancient shrines; although a brilliant group of modern scholars, with Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos at its head, is now making up for past remissness. Writers of the sixteenth century, if they knew of these ancient lyrics, were half ashamed of their roughness and rusticity, and it was left for the nineteenth century to re-discover them in the Vatican Library at Rome. Even so, the full appreciation of the value and beauty of these poems has been reserved for the twentieth century. Together with the Portuguese-Provençal poetry they are preserved in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (1875), Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti (1880), and Cancioneiro da Ajuda (1904), fascinating song-books which are the most striking commentary on the statement of the Marqués de Santillana that it had been customary for poets throughout the Peninsula to compose their lyrics in Galician; for we have here not only poems by Galicians and Portuguese, King of Portugal or Canon of Santiago, but those of high-placed trovador, poor segrel, and lowly jogral from León and Castille and other parts of Spain. Although the earliest cossante we have belongs to the end of the twelfth century, they were in all probability of immensely older date in Galicia, and whatever influence may be assigned to the Arabic poetry of the south of Portugal must have been derivative, having been received originally from Galicia. Of Oriental origin in so far as they were copied from the psalms and hymns of Church services, the cossantes are Celtic (a term perhaps more convenient than scientific in this connexion) in spirit, and in tone and structure belong to the people. They consist of two, four, or more distichs with a refrain, of which the second and fourth, while often altering the sound from i to a (pino to ramo, amigo to amado), repeat the sense of the first and third, the first line of the third taking up the last of the first, and so on to the end, where the position of the song (always accompanied by its music—son) is found to be very much the same as it was after the first two verses, as far as the sense is concerned. They were dance-songs (bailadas), danced by the peasants in the villages de terreiro or before pilgrimage shrines; alvoradas (songs of dawn); pilgrimage songs (cantigas de romaria); shepherds’ hill-songs (serranilhas), boat-songs (barcarolas); songs of ría and sea (marinas). Those that we possess are not anonymous, although many of their authors are obscure. As a rule these cantigas de amigo are placed on the lips of a love-lorn girl waiting or mourning for her lover, and it is scarcely doubtful that in the twelfth century they were copied by the jograles from the songs composed and sung by the women in Galicia. The happy result for us is that this neglected literature yields at the outset something new and entirely charming, which lovers of poetry can as ill afford to neglect and ignore as the poems of Chaucer or any other priceless heritage of song. That they were danced by the peasants or sung as a glee by shepherds on the hills does not belie the religious origin of the cossantes, since dancing itself was primarily religious and to sing was the shepherd’s form of prayer. The fact merely indicates their immeasurable antiquity. A song, perfectly grave and melancholy, such as King Dinis’s Ai flores, ai flores might be sung by a solitary maiden in the gloom of the pinewoods or danced by pilgrims in the courtyard of a shrine.

The world-wide cult of St. James of Galicia certainly had much to do with the fact that Alfonso X, the Learned, who had nobly laid the foundations of Castilian prose, wrote his hymns to the Virgin in Galician. He may have learnt it as a boy, he certainly, himself, wrote the greater part of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which were first printed in 1889 and will be far more widely read when they are published in a more accessible edition. The king spread his net for miracles in many lands, and he claimed no originality of theme, but he could clothe the more beautiful legends in verse which preserves their beauty, and if his care for rhyme sometimes led him astray, he always retained the popular atmosphere of the miracles and often a word here and there belonging to the land of their origin. Some of those which interested him less he may have entrusted to the jograles at his Court, a few may have come to him already versified; but the majority are his own, and place him very high among early singers—not as a great original poet or a master of technique, but as a conscientious and delightfully eager craftsman who realized the poetry inherent in these simple stories. He has a genuine sympathy for the humble types described in many of his cantigas: reapers, fishermen, monks, nuns, poor old peasant-women, the little Musa garridelinna. Alfonso X wrote a few profane poems, one of which is in the stirring metre of the famous Leonoreta song composed by Joan de Lobeira in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Pai Charinho, Lord High Admiral of Castille under Alfonso X and a more delicate poet than his master, wrote no religious verse, but his cossantes, with the lyric of another Galician, Roy Fernandez, are the most beautiful, hauntingly beautiful, of the early poems relating to the sea.

A Portuguese writer of the seventeenth century, Antonio de Sousa de Macedo, says point-blank that he saw and read sacred poems by King Dinis in the Escoriai, and describes the codex. If in his youth the king, at the exhortation of his grandfather Alfonso X, wrote such verse, it has now disappeared, and among the 138 poems preserved under his name is none of a religious character. They comprise Provençal love-poems and cantigas de amigo,⁠[1] and some charming specimens of the cossante, in which he shows that he had inherited King Alfonso’s fondness for popular themes, whether he himself composed these delicious cossantes, or, as may appear more probable, merely collected them. He also wrote a few satirical poems. Satire had gone hand in hand with lyrism in Portugal from the first, and was considered one of the most important functions of poetry. The cantigas de escarnio and de maldizer, although often exceedingly coarse, form, historically, one of the most interesting sections of the early song-books. King Dinis was a true poet, even a great poet, although his inspiration may not have been as genuine as that of Airas Nunez, priest of Santiago. He strove with success to play the part in Portuguese literature that Alfonso X had played in Castille, encouraged the writing of Portuguese prose, and gave a last prosperity to Portuguese-Provençal song, which he himself wrote with conspicuous skill. It was characteristic of his national policy that he, the prince so carefully trained in Provençal song by his father Afonso III, who had returned from a long sojourn in France to usurp his brother’s throne, should so actively encourage the indigenous cossante, as did also one of his sons, D. Afonso Sanchez. It was a late harvest, and after King Dinis’s death a jogral of León tells us that the troubadours of Portugal and León, Castille and Aragon were silent: ‘nunca pois de sa morte trobaron’, and the jograles no longer received presents or money.

A long gap follows in Portuguese poetry, although a thin aftermath of Galician song continued in Spain up to the very threshold of the Renaissance. Macias, ‘the Lover’, composed verse and inspired poetry in others, but neither he nor any other of the Galician-Portuguese contributors to the Cancionero de Baena, the celebrated Villasandino, the less prosperous scapegrace Garci Sanchez, the jovial Gonzalo Rodriguez, Archdeacon of Toro, were poets of the first order. To Casquicio and to Vasco Perez de Camões (ancestor of Luis de Camões), since we possess none of their poems, it may be charitable to give the favour of a doubt. The Galician Joan Rodriguez del Padron, or de la Cámara, wrote in Spanish, and, indeed, when the Marqués de Santillana addressed his famous letter to D. Pedro, Constable of Portugal, son of Pedro Duke of Coimbra and nephew of Prince Henry the Navigator, Galician poetry in Spain was practically dead. Nor had the attempt at a religious-erudite poetry, made by the first princes of the House of Avis, prospered in Portugal, its most individual product being the short poem by João I’s granddaughter, D. Philipa de Lencastre. During the close relations between Spain and Portugal in the fourteenth century, the idea of uniting the two crowns was often in men’s minds. When the national spirit of the Portuguese people and the genius and energy of the Master of Avis and Nun’ Alvarez had prevented that union by the campaign of Aljubarrota (1385), a reaction followed in favour of Portuguese literature, but it mainly took the form of prose, and was expressed in the incomparable chronicles of Fernam Lopez. This lost opportunity of reviving the national poetry paved the way for the return of Castilian influence. This was many-sided, and of such force that the tables were completely turned and Castilian now became the more universal language. It was the brother of D. Philipa de Lencastre, the Constable D. Pedro, the prince of the strange, romantic career, poet, exile, and finally king in a foreign land, who brought back new metres from Castille and himself wrote his prose works as well as his long Menosprecio del Mundo in Castilian. Another even more significant and more popular importation from Spain was that of the romances, the growth of Spanish influence in Portugal happening to coincide with the increasing vogue of the romance in Spain. The Portuguese wrote romances in Spanish, which they considered the proper language for this form of poetry, and it has been suggested that some of the loveliest and most wistful of the Spanish romances were written by Portuguese or Galicians. In Portugal the epics out of which the Spanish romances sprang did not exist, and a large number of Portuguese romances show clear traces of their Spanish origin, but the Portuguese, with their power of rapid assimilation, also composed a considerable number more Portuguese in theme and treatment, their vague melancholy contrasting with the dramatic vigour of the Spanish, so that many romances are found not only in Tras-os-Montes bordering on Spain but as far west as the Azores.

Spanish influence is prominent also in the collection of poems embracing some three-quarters of a century (1445-1516) and published by Garcia de Resende in 1516 as a Portuguese Cancioneiro Geral. This vast repertory of Court verse contains the poems of some two hundred authors written in Spanish and Portuguese. Their poems have this much in common, that they are mainly artificial in metre and commonplace in theme. For the rest they vary greatly: there are cantigas, esparsas, and vilancetes, which consist of a few neatly turned lines containing a courtier’s compliment or jest or sigh; there are trovas de arte maior which were reserved for the poeta as opposed to the mere trovador; there are a few poems of true inspiration, such as that of the obscure Francisco de Sousa, and others in which the influence of Italian poetry, but once removed, coming, that is, through Spain and the Marqués de Santillana, is apparent. It is easy to see that their compiler was a courtier, and in fact Garcia de Resende was brought up at the palace of King João II, who appreciated his talents in drawing, music, and poetry, and he spent his whole life at the Portuguese Court, except when he was sent on friendly missions to other princes. His trovas on the death of Inés de Castro show that he could write with a fine simplicity and pathos, but everything genuinely popular was excluded from his collection, and it might well seem at the end of the fifteenth century that the indigenous poetry of Portugal had been definitively relegated to the hills.

But just when this poetry seemed—or to us it seems—to have disappeared, hustled out by the Court poets of the Spanish school, with no King Dinis to defend it from oblivion, the great events of 1490-1500, the discoveries and conquests in Africa, America, and Asia stirred Portugal to its depths and brought the popular poetry once more to the surface. Not a peasant, not a shepherd but dreamed of migrating to Lisbon to serve the King or to the Indies in search of gold. The songs of the people, the old parallel-strophed cossantes of the early Cancioneiros reappeared at Court, and their spirit was embodied in his plays by Gil Vicente, a great poet by reason of his devoted attachment to the soil, his sincerity, his divine lyrical gift. How far he improved on the real songs sung by the peasants and shepherds we cannot know, but judging from his very natural presentment of peasant types, his persistent realism, which disdained neither incorrect and coarse phrases, nor any of the most ordinary features in the life of the mountain villages which he knew so well, we may assume that such songs were really to be heard among the hills of Portugal and may believe that, had the taste of the time encouraged him, he might have collected a song-book of unparalleled interest and beauty, and perhaps with a surer instinct than three centuries later Almeida Garrett, whose impulse was to polish. We must be content with the lovely fragments and specimens of this lyrical poetry which his plays contain, and with the even more fragmentary gleanings in Barbieri’s Cancionero Musical. It was a short-lived opportunity; the people under the new conditions soon lost their songs, or rather they lost their simple gaiety and exchanged the native flavour of the cossante for what was considered a more refined melancholy. During the last years of his life Vicente was fighting an up-hill battle against the new influences and the Latinizers of the Renaissance. He had himself composed many of his plays in Spanish as the Spanish vogue grew and prospered. In 1490, when he perhaps first came to Court, on the occasion of the marriage of João II’s son Prince Afonso to a Spanish princess, all the devices for the great tournament at Evora were written in Spanish, with the exception of that of the King and one other. Indeed, only the death of the infant Prince Miguel prevented the consummation which occurred two generations later, when Philip II of Spain became Philip I of Portugal. But these two generations were of vital importance to Portugal and gave time for the fruit sown and so strenuously tended during the two centuries from Dinis to João II to reach its full maturity, so that Portugal could thereafter never suffer a loss of independence other than temporary and superficial. Nevertheless, about the year 1520 one might have looked forward to a second long blank in Portuguese poetry such as had occurred two centuries earlier—another Spanish blank. It was due to the personal triumph of one man, Gil Vicente’s rival, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, that this disaster was averted and that, when the national poetry which had momentarily emerged was melting away, yet another influence had arrived upon the scene. For however strange it may seem to us that poems such as Dante’s canzone ‘Donne che avete intelletto d’amore’ or his sonnet ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ should have remained without influence on Portuguese poetry for two centuries, it is certain that the Italian metres and dolce stil nuovo only came definitively to Portugal with Sá de Miranda on his return in or about 1526 from a several years’ stay in Italy, although the Marqués de Santillana had specifically mentioned el tercio rimo and sonnets in his letter to the Portuguese Constable three-quarters of a century earlier. Indeed, so alien was the new poetry and so jejune Miranda’s first attempts to acclimatize it that for some years he strove in vain while the old octosyllabic redondilhas and the Court vilancetes and esparsas continued to flourish. But a man of Miranda’s fine character and persistency, helped by the appearance in print in 1543 of the poems of Boscan and Garci Lasso, was not to be ignored, and presently the mountains began to go to Mahomet in his delightful retreat in Minho. D. Manuel de Portugal, the charming and mellifluous Diogo Bernardez, Antonio Ferreira, the severe magistrate who refused to write a single line of Spanish verse and who thus rendered an inestimable service to the Portuguese language, but who only occasionally attained lyrical beauty, perhaps indeed only in a single chorus of his celebrated play Inés de Castro; the even less inspired and less amiable Pedro de Andrade Caminha: these and others at Miranda’s death in 1557 were there to assure the success of his school, while the lyrical vein of the sixteenth century continued to find expression in such felicitous verses as those addressed to the river Leça by Francisco de Sá de Meneses and a few of the poems of the anonymous Sylvia de Lisardo. Of these writers Portuguese poetry owes most to Bernardez, and from what we possess of the poems of his brother, Frei Agostinho da Cruz, we suspect that he was as richly endowed as his brother Diogo in poetical talent, which he sacrificed to religious asceticism. It is owing to a group of eclogues written in the old national octosyllabic metre when the influence of the new school was beginning, and partly by its founder Miranda, that it is possible to claim for Portuguese bucolic poetry a character strongly original and indigenous and a quality of a strange, alluring charm. The mere fact of their being composed in the short redondilhas at once removes them from the Theocritus-Virgil tradition. Such poems as Miranda’s Basto, Bernardim Ribeiro’s Jano e Franco, and the Trovas de Crisfal traditionally assigned to Cristovam Falcam are works of a quaint and exquisite freshness, thickly redolent of the very soil of Portugal. Bernardim Ribeiro, whose mind became clouded by his ill-starred and to us mysterious passion, embodies the quintessence of the Portuguese genius. A foreigner nicely scanning the lines might be inclined to conclude that his eclogues are not poetry, and say: ‘Here is a poet in thought without a corresponding power of expression.’ But the Portuguese know better, and feel that there is much art hidden in these concise, elliptically halting verses, which are a deliberate and wonderfully successful expression of an ingenuous simplicity. This fascination, not of half-inarticulate versification but of an exceptionally gifted lyrism belongs also to the Trovas de Crisfal, which possess all the extraordinarily individual qualities of those eclogues but were probably not the work of Ribeiro himself but an inspired imitation by his friend and fellow-Alentejan Cristovam Falcam. The sorrows of Bernardez in and after his captivity, for he was taken prisoner in the rout of Alcacer Kebir (1578), having been chartered by King Sebastian to chronicle his deeds in verse, were powerless to introduce a discordant note into the unfailing smoothness of his verse; his sonnets and eclogues, which love of his native Lima coloured with local charm, rivalled those of his great contemporary Luis de Camões. Camões, however, was not content with a mere monotony of beautiful sound. He was one of those rare poets, perhaps especially rare in Latin countries, who can at once think and sing, and his outlook, moreover, was in every respect more universal than that of Bernardez. His wanderings led him not only to North Africa but to India and the Far East. The education of this child of the Renaissance, clearly imbued with Platonic and neo-Platonic influences, had been classical, but he had a deep sympathy for the popular poetry, both in its themes and metres. Evidently if he reverenced Sá de Miranda he rejoiced in Gil Vicente, and he succeeded in either school as no Portuguese poet before or since. His was an imitative genius, he read widely and there are passages in his poetry which are inspired translations; but he also brought to his work rich stores of thought and personal experience and observation, and, whereas Miranda, when he attempted to imitate, remained hard and wooden, Camões turned whatever he touched into delicate and flexible gold and ivory—popular redondilhas, Petrarcan canzoni, or Ariosto’s ottava rima. Six years before King Sebastian sailed away to his doom, Camões had published his Os Lusiadas, the epic which has ever since remained the national poem of the Portuguese, but, although his glowing patriotism inspired him to this magnificent effort, his true genius was lyrical. His ear was not faultless, and while he could soar to heights attained at most by half a score of the world’s poets, he did not always stop to finish a passage with the unerring art of many a lesser Italian craftsman. But occasional defects are forgotten in the transparent flow of his chryselephantine verse, in which the details of thought and description appear embedded clearly in their due order as pebbles in a stream. Vicente is Portugal’s most national poet, and potentially her greatest, but in actual achievement, and achievement fulfilled in the teeth of almost every possible obstacle and disappointment, Camões claims and retains the first place. When he died in 1580 this noble patriot and inspired singer was content, he said, to die with his country; but his fate has been happier, since largely through him his country continued to live and can still seek in him an impulse to fresh hope and effort.

The sixteenth century in Portugal was all flower and fruit: no one seemed to take thought for sowing and planting, so busily were all engaged in the work of gathering in the harvest. Thus spiritually and intellectually as well as physically Portugal lay at Spain’s mercy when the direct line in the succession to the Portuguese throne failed. Nor was the gongorical school which now invaded Portuguese literature in any way uncongenial to the Portuguese temperament since the Latinization of the Renaissance and the conquest of the East, which led its conquerors captive. Fernam Alvarez do Oriente carried on Portuguese bucolic poetry in its more harmonious, imitative shape: shorn of almost every vestige of the indigenous poetry but preserving the purity of the language used by Bernardez and Camões; and the same purity of style a little later in the Spanish domination marked the long pastoral works of Francisco Rodriguez Lobo, in which prose and verse are combined as in Alvarez do Oriente’s Lusitania Transformada and in the Arcadia of Sannazaro which he had taken for his model. Rodriguez Lobo, though not an original poet, was fortunately very Portuguese, a poet of a charming and authentic vein, whose only fault seems to be that he poured forth excellent prose and verse in too great abundance, and he could write such vilancetes as are the best, if not the only true poetry of the seventeenth century in Portugal. Most of the lyric poets whose verse is preserved for us in the Fenix Renascida, a collection which is more often a heap of weeds than a selection of flowers, cannot for long forgo their points and conceits, and this misuse of talent, often genuine enough, marred even the mystic verse in which the long-lived nuns Sor Violante do Ceo and Sor Maria do Ceo, and also courtiers such as D. Francisco de Portugal excelled. No doubt a slim volume of simple and attractive verse might be gleaned from the seventeenth century, but the general effect is gongorical and affected, and the rank growth of verse with no adequate criticism to check it is distressing. Some satirical verse of merit was produced, and the satirist occasionally turned his weapon against the affectations of style in vogue. No merciful criticism was at hand to prevent the lengthy epics with which one writer after another, for we will not call them poets, sought to eclipse Os Lusiadas and render themselves immortal in song. The length and number of these epics must have frightened away many readers from Portuguese literature, and partly justified an eighteenth-century Italian in describing that literature as a fungus growth. The greatest Portuguese prose-writer of the seventeenth century, D. Francisco Manuel de Mello, was at least never dull. If we except Rodriguez Lobo, as belonging indeed rather to the sixteenth than to the seventeenth century, Manuel de Mello’s claim to be regarded as the latter century’s chief poet in Portugal is not negligible. But it is truer, perhaps, to say that in his verse he remains a minnow among minnows. His trenchant energy is best fitted for prose; he could skilfully turn a quintilha or a sonnet, and his verse is always lively and spirited, but for poetry to retain its charm and at the same time be as forcible and incisive as Manuel de Mello’s temperament demanded would require the technique and imagination of a Camões, and Manuel de Mello’s verse too often resembles a plant from which the blossoms have been slashed away, leaving but a vigorous and pungent growth of stalk. On the whole, the poetry of this period was marked rather by a perversion of taste than by a lack of vigour, and certainly contained within it elements of better things. Yet no national poetry followed the Restoration of 1640, and over literature as over politics hung what Antonio Vieira in 1673 describes as ‘o nosso indifferentismo’.

The Fenix Renascida was not published until 1716, and the eccentricities of the seiscentistas lingered on into the eighteenth century, which in Portugal was as barren of lyrical poetry as elsewhere. Even when a new school, that of the Arcadias, arose and many poets came to the front, lyrical poetry remained far to seek. Spanish influence and the long-lived Portuguese gongorismo were replaced by the pseudo-classicism of a group of writers who believed that to imitate Horace successfully was sufficient and possible. In their hatred of the Spanish school they went to France and Italy, but they also turned to the classical poets of Portugal, especially to Miranda and Ferreira; if this could not give them the lyrical inspiration which they lacked, it did help them to write idiomatic Portuguese, and this remains for us the chief merit of their voluminous poetry. Corrêa Garção is perhaps, with Filinto, the best, at least the best known poet of the time, and his apparently harsh treatment by the Marqués de Pombal and death in prison have won for him among the critics a sympathy which his verse only occasionally justifies. Garrett, in one of those outbursts with which Portuguese critics vary their habitual neglect of their native literature, declared that Corrêa Garção’s Cantata de Dido is ‘one of the most sublime conceptions of human genius, one of the most perfect works executed by the hand of man’; but, without denying that this poem, as well as many of his sonnets, has merit, we are more inclined to agree with Macedo’s verdict of ‘meagre’. Antonio Diniz da Cruz e Silva won great fame among his contemporaries by his Odes Pindaricas; to posterity he is known not as a lyric poet but as the author of a burlesque poem entitled O Hyssope. Nicolau Tolentino de Almeida also stands out from among the eighteenth-century poets by virtue of his satire, which was of a more gentle vein than that of Diniz. Turning to Sá de Miranda for his model, he succeeded in composing skilful quintilhas and a few excellent sonnets. The Lisbon hairdresser, Domingos dos Reis Quita is at his best when he is somewhat closely imitating Camões or other Portuguese classics of bucolic poetry, from whom his idylls and eclogues caught an unreal but graceful beauty. The Marquesa de Alorna, who was born before the Lisbon earthquake and lived far into the reign of Maria da Gloria, was a lady of wide culture who wrote accomplished verse almost as voluminously as the more famous and equally long-lived poet Francisco Manuel do Nascimento, better known by his Arcadian name of Filinto Elysio. Of one of Filinto’s renowned odes Garrett exclaimed: ‘What is there in Pindar to compare with it?’ and we hasten to agree that there is nothing, for one does not compare a sparrow with an eagle or a star.⁠[2] All that can be said of Filinto’s immense output of verse is that it is written in excellent Portuguese and is of interest in its references to popular customs and traditions, but is only occasionally to be called poetry. The second half of the century witnessed a fierce poetical rivalry between the crabbed ex-monk José Agostinho de Macedo, who had the more virulent pen, and the runagate Manuel de Barbosa du Bocage, who had the more genuine poetical talent. The latter was encouraged by his admiring contemporaries to improvise continually, and the whole of his poetry, even the sonnets which are considered among the best in the Portuguese language, bear the mark of that straining after effect or after perfection which characterized the whole of his short life. The truest Portuguese poet of the eighteenth century, Bocage was crushed by the weakness of his own character, by the circumstances of his times, and by the prevalent lack of criticism. When he died at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he left only a few elderly Arcadian gods, Filinto, Tolentino, Macedo, the Marquesa de Alorna, solemnly nodding across a barren waste, in which a genuine lyric would have been as startling as a scarlet anemone springing up among the cobbles of a crowded street. In the absence of true poetry, such graceful lyrics as those of the Marilia de Dirceu by the unfortunate Brazilian poet Thomaz Antonio Gonzaga achieved a wide popularity.

A new poetry sprang out of the unpromising political welter in Portugal in the first decades of the nineteenth century. While the energetic Macedo in fierce pamphlets was calling down fire from Heaven, not to inspire his own verse, for he considered that already sufficiently inspired, but to blast his political opponents, Garrett was learning in exile that there were more things in heaven and earth than a stilted Filintian ode, the object of his youthful emulation. He returned to Portugal with romanticism, so to speak, in his pocket, his Arcadian manner shelved and forgotten. What was more, prompted by The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, he came with the determination to collect the popular ballads of Portugal, and set to work in his early home, the island of Terceira, in the interval which elapsed before the landing of the small Liberal army at Mindello in 1832. Thus the century was already well advanced when Garrett, seeking a double inspiration in the romantic school and in popular poetry, founded a new national literature in Portugal. The vague sentiment and subjective melancholy of romanticism had, of course, characterized the work of many Portuguese poets before Garrett; that of Bernardim Ribeiro no less than that of Bocage; but Garrett made himself the standard-bearer of the new tendencies which had spread themselves over the rest of Europe. Neither of his two great contemporaries possessed his lyrical genius. Alexandre Herculano impressed the poems written in his youth, before he had undertaken his historical labours, with the biblical fervour and strength of his character, in such a way as to give them a deep and permanent value. Antonio Feliciano de Castilho was a year younger than Garrett, and Garrett was but twenty-two when Castilho’s Primavera was published, harbinger of numerous poems of a dreamy charm prolificly expressed in verse of classical perfection. The Arcadian school still reigned unchallenged, and Castilho to the end of his long life belonged quite as much to the pseudo-classicism of the eighteenth century as to the romanticism of the second third of the nineteenth. Blind from childhood, he was not endowed with imaginative genius of the first order, which alone might have compensated for the irremediable lack of observation; but in the purity of his style he rendered a real service to Portuguese literature and became a model to younger writers. The singular, many-sided Garrett himself was not slow to react against an excessive romanticism, and his later lyrics in their concentrated intensity and clear outline can scarcely be assigned to the romantic school. But it was natural that younger writers, who could not inherit the glow and charm of Garrett’s poetry, should tend to exaggerate the characteristics of the new dispensation, and it soon became a mannerism with a crowd of minor poets to sing vaguely and sentimentally of moonlight, death, and autumn leaves. From these poets João de Lemos stands out by reason of a more definite lyrical gift, and Soares de Passos in his O Firmamento composed a fine poem which was something more than a metaphysical tour de force. The patriotic voice of Thomaz Ribeiro and the faintly satirical murmur of Bulhão Pato continued to sing sentimentally into the twentieth century; nor did Castilho ever bow the knee to the younger school which in 1865, ten years before his death, had ventured to dispute his supremacy. The group of students who inaugurated this ‘Coimbra School’ contained some distinguished poets. The delightful verse of João de Deus Nogueira does not belong to them, or indeed to any school but that of the Portuguese poetry of the soil and the popular cantigas, those charming quatrains of which many thousands are now in print. The agitated thinker Anthero de Quental, the greatest poet of the Coimbra group, although an inspired sonnetteer, was not a lyrical poet. In other writers of the realist reaction poetry succumbed to various influences; in the work of Theophilo Braga (1843-1924), for instance, whose first volume of verse appeared when he was sixteen and whose Visão dos Tempos received its definitive shape a generation later, true poetry is slain on the dull altar of Positivism, with scarcely a candle to cast a ray of light over the lugubrious sacrifice. In others it yields to politics, as in the poems of Guilherme Braga, whose Heras e Violetas are still remembered, and in much of the work of Guerra Junqueiro; or to a superficial satire, as in the verses of João Penha and many of the poems of Gomes Leal. The influence of Victor Hugo and the French Parnassians, Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle, predominated, but it was not a mere imitation, and if we consider the splendid sonnets of Quental, the spontaneous lyrics of João de Deus, the wistful and even morbid but genuine art of Antonio Nobre, the exquisite Parnassian verse of Gonçalves Crespo, Antonio Feijó, and of a very large number of less celebrated poets, the less ambitious among the poems of Gomes Leal, the jewelled symbolism of Snr. Eugenio de Castro, the dreaming music of Snr. Teixeira de Pascoaes, the natural and artistic inspiration of Snr. Corrêa d’Oliveira and Snr. Affonso Lopes Vieira, above all the original and arresting work of Guerra Junqueiro, one of the greatest modern Latin poets, we will readily admit that Portuguese poetry during the last fifty years can boast not only great variety but great success. If it has failed to produce a Pascoli or a Carducci, that is due perhaps rather to the absence of a basis of exact scholarship, of classical education, than to any dearth of talent.

A goodly foison of Portuguese poets confronts us in the twentieth century. Portugal has always been a land of numerous poets, and the blank spaces in her literature are usually those in which no collector was forthcoming to garner the harvest of song. One may not yet definitively judge the younger poets. It is for the Portuguese critics to warn them that if they are content to babble pleasantly in song they should do so not publicly but in private; while as to the cubists and dadaists it must always seem unjust that they should be granted the full light of publicity whereas schoolgirls practising over their scales are relegated to the schoolroom. Many of the recent poets, Parnassian, cloud-treader, decadent, symbolist, have realized the high seriousness of their art, and the poems poured forth in such abundance are so natural and occasionally charming that the critic is disarmed. The material is sound, and when it descends from vagueness and magniloquence to reality, to the life of the peasants, the scenery of Portugal and its rich indigenous vocabulary, it can, as in part of the poetry of Guerra Junqueiro, produce surprising results. Perhaps, too, one may say that it profits by deeper acquaintance with the literature of non-Latin countries and with the classics of Portugal, Greece, and Rome. On some such lines it may be hoped that the Portuguese poets of the twentieth century will be able to fill their cunningly shapen bottles with the sweet savour of their soil and the clear wine of light and life.

AUBREY F. G. BELL.

S. João do Estoril,
Portugal.