The Love Letters.
In 1669 appeared in French five love letters purporting to be written by Marianna de Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun born in 1640, from her convent to a French officer, afterwards the Marquis de Chamilly. They were translated, or retranslated into Portuguese and are reckoned among the masterpieces of Portuguese prose. Portugal was known for its sentimental fervour, and the wholly untenable suspicion arises that a French writer may have composed these letters (basing them on a foundation of fact), and attributed them to the Portuguese nun as later Elizabeth Barrett Browning called her love sonnets “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”
The Eighteenth Century.
In the eighteenth century, when lyrical poetry seemed to have died out of Europe, it became more than ever evident how much the excellence of Portuguese literature depends on the lyric. None of the Portuguese poets of this any more than of the preceding century attained prominence, while in the eighteenth there was no compensating excellence in prose. Some letters and sermons and treatises on the Portuguese language there were, and Barbosa Machado (1682-1772) composed his valuable Bibliotheca Lusitana. It was the age of academies and arcadias. The Academia Real da Historia was founded in 1720, the Academia Real das Sciencias, which has done and continues to do such good service to Portuguese literature, first met in 1780.
Eighteenth-Century Poets.
Of the poets, many of whom met with a tragic fate, José Agostinho de Macedo (1761-1831) was a dull and copious versifier, who apparently reserved all his fire for attacks upon dead or contemporary writers. He made bold to supersede the Lusiads with his poem Gama (1811), subsequently revised and entitled Oriente (1814). Corrêa Garção (1724-72) was imprisoned by order of the powerful Minister, the Marquez de Pombal, in 1772, and is stated to have died in prison on the very day on which his release was ordered. His complete works were published at Rome in 1888. Domingos dos Reis Quita (1728-70), a Lisbon hairdresser, wrote odes, idyls, tragedies, a pastoral drama, but his poetry is second-rate except when it closely imitates Camões. Antonio José da Silva was born in Brazil in 1705. He belonged to a family of “new Christians,” and by the people of Lisbon, which enjoyed his comedies, he was known as “the Jew.” He perished, strangled and then burnt, in the auto da fé of 18th October, 1739. Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (Filinto Elysio), more fortunate, escaped from the Inquisition and lived and died in Paris. He earned a living by translation, and his copious poetry had a great vogue in his day but now has few readers. The most talented of all the Portuguese eighteenth-century poets was another Arcadian, Manuel Maria Barbosa de Bocage,[38] whose Arcadian name was Elmano Sadino. Born at Setubal in 1765, he deserted from military service in India, and returned to Lisbon in 1790, where he led a dissipated life and was in 1797 imprisoned during three months in the Limoeiro for having published a poem entitled A pavorosa illusão da Eternidade. After the Limoeiro he was a prisoner of the Inquisition for four months, and was then relegated to a monastery. He died, worn out by his own excesses, at the age of 40, in 1805. With a fund of satire and gift of facile improvisation, he rose occasionally to real poetry, as in some of his sonnets.
The Romantics.
In the nineteenth century lyric poetry revived in Portugal as elsewhere, although the influence of Byron did not there inspire any genius such as Espronceda in Spain. The romanticism of Antonio Feliciano de Castilho (1800-75) was of a gentler kind. Blind from the age of six, his literary activity was nevertheless untiring. Besides writing a large number of books of verse, he translated Ovid, Anacreon, Virgil, Molière, Shakespeare, Goethe’s Faust. Other romantic poets were Soares de Passos (1826-60); João de Lemos (1819-89), who in A Lua de Londres regrets Portugal and his native Douro; Mendes Leal (1818-86), who won a great reputation with his heroic odes (especially Ave Cesar, O Pavilhão, and Napoleão no Kremlin); José Simões Dias (1844-99), who, besides his poems (Peninsulares), wrote a history of Portuguese literature, and Gomes d’Amorim (1827-92).
The Reaction.
In 1865 appeared the Poema da Mocidade, by Pinheiro Chagas, with a letter by Castilho, which gave rise to Quental’s Bom senso e bom gosto and the beginning of a new school of poets. Foremost among these were Anthero de Quental (1842-91) himself, and João de Deus Ramos (1830-96). Their poetry has nothing in common, but they are both equally far removed from the traditional romantic school. The sonnets of Anthero (many of which have been translated into English by Mr. Edgar Prestage) have nothing to fear from comparison with those of any other nineteenth-century poet. Portuguese in his hands became adamantine and sonorous, and the sonnet a trumpet-call. João de Deus, on the other hand, wrote feathery light lyrics with great naturalness and charm, and in his easy flow of improvisation is far the more characteristically Portuguese of the two. Thomaz Ribeiro (1831-1901) belonged to the romantic school, and is the author of the celebrated ode A Portugal. Gonçalves Crespo (1846-83) published only two small volumes of poems, Miniaturas (1870) and Nocturnos (1882), which contain one or two little masterpieces, such as the sonnet Mater dolorosa.