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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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