History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature (Vol 2 of 2)

by Friedrich Bouterwek

ANDRADE CAMINHA.

One of the warmest friends, admirers and imitators of Ferreira, was Pedro de Andrade Caminha, Camareiro (gentleman of the chamber) at the court of the Infante Dom Duarte, brother to King John III. He survived his friend Ferreira six-and-twenty years. During his life his poems seem rather to have been esteemed by a small circle of connoisseurs and dilettanti, than to have been favourites with the public. Thus it happened that at that period they were only circulated in manuscript, and that afterwards, with the exception of a few which had been admitted into spiritual collections, they totally disappeared; they have, however, been recently discovered, and have been printed at the expense of the Portuguese Royal Society.[185] Andrade Caminha seems to have had no notion of any thing more perfect in poetic composition than the works of his friend Ferreira, who, however, barely avoided the dangerous boundary where poetry ends and versified prose begins. Caminha’s compositions in elegant verse are, however, still more deficient in genuine poetry, than the works of Ferreira, and indeed they can scarcely be termed poems. His eclogues are cold, and their coldness is the more striking, as they are intended to express forcibly the language of romantic love. His epistles are better deserving of attention. They possess just about as much poetic warmth as is necessary to maintain the character of didactic poems. In these epistles Caminha, as a painter of manners and a moralist, alternately describes and reasons energetically and without pedantry in the style of Ferreira, and his unassuming manner gives more effect to the agreeable colouring of that style.[186] But Andrade Caminha is by no means so rich in ideas as Ferreira. He limits the circle of his free reflections, by constant reference to the relations in which he lived. In the epistles to his brother, and in those to Ferreira, he, however, indulges in a more unconstrained expression of feeling.[187] Of all these epistles, the seventeenth, in which he inveighs against impertinent critics, possesses most didactic merit.[188] Andrade Caminha seems to have supposed that he possessed a particular talent for elegiac poetry. Twenty of the elegies he composed are still preserved, exclusive of many songs of complaining love in redondilhas, to which the title of elegies is likewise given. But the sorrow for the death of the royal personages and ingenious friends, which is lavished in the first half of Caminha’s elegies, and the tender anguish occasioned by the inexorableness of his beloved Phyllis, which appears in the second half, seldom rouses any poetic sympathy in the reader, notwithstanding the beauty of language with which the sorrow and anguish are expressed. In some of the elegies to Phyllis, the descriptions of natural scenery possess considerable merit.[189]

But the most remarkable of all Caminha’s works are his epitaphs and epigrams, of which no Portuguese poet has bequeathed so many to posterity. His Epitafios which amount to eighty-one, and his Epigrammas which exceed two hundred and fifty in number, are almost all written in octave verse. In these little pictures of reflection and sentiment, which derive so much of their value from correctness and elegance, a limited fancy aided by solid taste is capable of rising above the level of prose. The labour which Andrade Caminha bestowed on the composition of his epitaphs and epigrams, sufficiently proves that he felt what was his proper vocation at the foot of Parnassus. But even there he could not travel without a guide, and the spirit of his age induced him to choose Ausonius for his conductor. He had, like Ausonius, sufficient talent for the proper keeping of the tenderness, precision and energy which distinguish the serious epigram of the Greeks; but in his imitation of the style of the Greek epigram, he missed the refined correctness of Ausonius by confounding poetic with prosaic simplicity. Of the eighty-one epitaphs which Caminha composed in honour of celebrated and exalted individuals, not one can claim an equal rank with the best ancient productions of the same kind. In most of them the reader finds only dry encomiums accompanied by trivial reflections.[190] In others the ideas rise but very little above the level of the commonest observation.[191] In Caminha’s epitaphs the result of the epigrammatic compound of the ideas, where he wishes to be uncommon, has sometimes a singularly frigid effect; as, for example, when speaking of the hero Affonso d’Albuquerque, he pompously says: “He sprang from kings, he honoured kings, and he subdued kings.”[192] Even the language of powerful feeling sinks, as in the epitaph on Ferreira, beneath the common place of the reflections.[193] The serious epigrams are more ingenious, though even they are, for the most part, merely agreeable plays of fancy.[194] In some the formality of the diction produces a very happy effect; in others the epigrammatic expression of feeling displays an astonishing degree of romantic intensity;[195] a few are truly excellent.[196] To this last class, however, the comic epigrams of Caminha do not belong. A truly comic turn of thought is scarcely ever to be found in them, and it is only occasionally that they betray a poignant conceit.[197] But it must be acknowledged that a poet of more fertile fancy would find it difficult to write nineteen strictly comic epigrams on an ugly face, (a uma feissima.)