In a general history of literature any particular notice of these half true, but mainly trivial declamations, would be quite unnecessary, had not this author been for a considerable period revered as a critical oracle in Portugal.[277] The absurd conversion of the pastoral style into a mere poetic figure was among other faults of Portuguese poetry, methodically favoured and confirmed by the fallacious theories of Faria e Sousa. The earlier Portuguese poets who availed themselves of this inappropriate freedom merely followed a custom which had accidentally arisen. After transforming all sorts of occasional poems into eclogues, they at least endeavoured to give these factitious eclogues a pastoral character. But Faria e Sousa having formed a perverted judgment on pastoral poetry, proceeded in conformity with that judgment to exhibit various kinds of completely disfigured eclogues. In his treatise on his own pastoral poems, he theoretically praises himself for never having attempted any species of poetic composition on which he did not confer some novelty. He was accordingly less scrupulous than the eclogue writers who had preceded him, in introducing into such poems characters from the great and polite world. It seems with him to be sufficient that the scene shall always be in the country. He composed, however, a few eclogues in the true spirit and style of pastoral life. He likewise endeavoured to introduce into pastoral poetry more of action and interesting incident than is usually exhibited in that species of composition, so that in this respect some of his eclogues are brought into comparison with serious comedies. According to these and similar principles, Faria e Sousa distinguished his love eclogues (eglogas amorosas,) from hunting eclogues (venatorias), sea-faring eclogues (maritimas), properly pastoral or rather rustic eclogues (rusticas), funeral eclogues (funebres), and other modifications of similar description. In pursuance of his theory he recognized even arbitrator eclogues (arbitrarias), monastic eclogues (monasticos), critical eclogues (criticas), genealogical eclogues (genealogicas), hermit eclogues (eremiticas), and finally, as a particular species, fantastical eclogues (fantasticas), the theme of which is a prophetic vision. Of all these styles he has given specimens according to his own fancy. The same confusion of ideas on which his art of poetry is founded, and the same search after the uncommon at the expense of sound judgment, pervades the whole of this collection of eclogues. The beautiful idea which pastoral poetry presents was completely lost in the way in which Faria e Sousa viewed it. He attached but little importance to the representation of a poetic rural life, and still less to ideal simplicity, his wish being to sport, after his own manner, in bucolic forms, with crude conceits, affected pathos, and extravagant images. His rustic eclogues are, it is true, sufficiently rural, but not in the style of Saa de Miranda, who with the most delicate art gave a poetic dignity to rustic manners. Faria e Sousa’s shepherds are absolute clowns; and he accordingly makes them discourse in a kind of low Portuguese, one half of which is unintelligible to foreigners unacquainted with the rudest dialect of the peasantry of Portugal.[278]
Faria e Sousa crowned his efforts towards the literary cultivation of his age by a diffuse commentary on the works of Camoens,—a production more calculated to obscure than to illustrate the original. This commentary is written in Spanish.[279] The value of the historical portion would be greatly enhanced, were it separated from the critical, so that the latter might be rejected and only the former retained. But the historical data which Faria e Sousa has collected for the elucidation of Camoens’s poems, and particularly the Lusiad, are everywhere interwoven with the critical paraphrase of the text, and that paraphrase is so overloaded with a mass of erudition not merely superfluous, but totally unconnected with the subject, that in the present age, a reader of the works of Camoens, might be enabled to estimate the extent of his admiration of the poet by the degree of patience with which he peruses the labours of this commentator. Faria e Sousa has furnished a new example of the little profit to be derived from critical investigation, by a man who does not commence with a mind rightly cultivated for such a study. His admiration of Camoens contributes nothing to the improvement of his own poetic talent, for he always forces his own perverted views into Camoens’s poetry.
The esteem which Faria e Sousa obtained in Portuguese literature, must have contributed not a little to promote the endless rhyming of sonnets, and to impede the developement of the loftier style of poetry in Portugal. The false liberality of his critical code proved very convenient for the sonneteers, who experienced but little difficulty in exhibiting the qualities which that critic required in their compositions; and the unreasonable severity with which he treated Tasso was calculated to seduce every eccentric sonneteer into the conceit that he was himself something more than a Tasso. The pretensions of Faria e Sousa were not, however, universally recognized on the Portuguese Parnassus. Even in the composition of sonnets, some of the principal Portuguese poets of the seventeenth century followed the more pure and elevated style of Camoens. But no one thought of avoiding the faults into which Camoens had fallen. That prince of Portuguese poets was always regarded as faultless.
THOMAS DE NORONHA.
Comic sonnet poetry, in which Camoens did not distinguish himself as a master, obtained a favourable reception from the Portuguese public on Thomas de Noronha, a contemporary of Faria e Sousa becoming celebrated for that kind of composition.[280] But Thomas de Noronha, though an agreeable man of the world, was but a pretender in wit. His writings probably acquired a particular interest from the convivial temper, for which he was distinguished in society, and of which the reader is reminded by his poetry. But such versified jests as this merry companion has left behind him, could only have obtained temporary popularity from personal and local circumstances. They want the sprightly extravagance of the burlesque poetry of the Italians, as well as the moral keeping and caustic delicacy of the more lofty style of satire. Burlesque, however, they certainly are. Some approach, at least in a coarse way, to the Italian jests of a similar kind;[281] and in others jesting and serious feeling are blended together in a very absurd manner. Thomas de Noronha thought fit to write a burlesque sonnet in honour of Rodriguez Lobo, when that poet was drowned in the Tagus. After a comic apostrophe to heaven and earth, Noronha declares that if he can catch Æolus he will give him a flogging.[282] In nearly the same manner he jests in comic canções and romances, and in redondilha stanzas, (decimas,) which may also be termed epigrams. In these verses the conceits frequently turn on a play of words. Many must be altogether unintelligible to the foreign reader, particularly in the nineteenth century.
BARBOSA BACELLAR.
As a writer of serious sonnets, and particularly of romantic love sonnets in the style of Camoens, no Portuguese poet of the seventeenth century was more successful than the elegant and ingenious Antonio Barbosa Bacellar, who was also celebrated as one of the most skilful disputants of the university of Coimbra. After filling various public offices, he died in the year 1663.[283] Barbosa Bacellar’s inclination to form his taste on the model of Camoens, is proved by several excellent glosses, which he composed on some of that great poet’s sonnets. He may indeed be ranked among the most distinguished writers of poetic glosses. In all his poems, many of which are written in the Spanish language, he has disdained those excrescences which Faria e Sousa commends as a proof of unconstrained genius. Barbosa Bacellar was one of the supporters of the correct style of sonnet composition, in whom the spirit of the sixteenth century survived; but so little was he disposed to approve the jejune correctness of Ferreira and Caminha, that he preferred deviating into the opposite extreme, rather than repress the spirit of his poetry by a rigid adherence to forms. He excelled in the art of ingeniously amplifying a romantic idea without allowing the sentimental to degenerate into the fantastic. Besides some very charming sonnets,[284] the most remarkable productions of this poet are the extended pictures of romantic aspiration which since his time have been distinguished in Portuguese poetry by the untranslatable name of Saudades.[285] The complaints of a lovelorn heart vented in solitude, are the only materials which enter into the composition of these poems; and the peculiar character of their class, which had rapidly grown into favour, was fixed by Barbosa Bacellar. A certain degree of prolixity is essential to these compositions. They do not well afford opportunity for the display of a brilliant store of novel ideas; and to employ an inexhaustible flow of words in painting the tender longing of love was deemed a proof of the ardour of the passion. They might very properly be classed with elegies, were it not that they have usually a narrative form. There are also among the Spanish and Portuguese eclogues, many poems which present the same character as these pictures of amatory aspiration. Barbosa Bacellar seems to have conferred on these pictures the highest degree of improvement which they were capable of receiving, consistently with fidelity to the style, which was then exclusively appropriated to the poetry of love in Spain and Portugal. But the modern forms of cultivation have given, at least on this side of the Pyrenees, a direction so totally different to poetic susceptibility, that the endless complaining of lovers must soon become tedious even to the readers most disposed to indulge in such romantic sentiments. It is, however, a remarkable circumstance in the history of the human mind, that the Portuguese taste in the seventeenth century fondly dwelt on every little feature of such never-ending repetitions in the expression of the same feeling. Barbosa Bacellar devoted no small portion of labour to every line in his Saudades. He is particularly successful in imparting a graceful colouring to the romantic conversations in which the solitary lover engages with natural objects.[286]
TORREZAÕ COELHO.
A doctor of canon law, and a member of the Inquisitorial college of Lisbon, named Simaõ Torrezaõ Coelho, vied with Barbosa Bacellar in this new modification of romantic poetry. His pictures of passion are, however, totally different from those of Bacellar. He imitated the perverted style of the Marinists and Gongorists, and followed the precepts of Faria e Sousa. He talks of “the just sensation of unjust love;”[287]—of the living feeling of a dead soul;[288] of “the memory that lives in the brass of the soul;”[289] and such like Marinisms and Gongorisms. His verses appear, however, to have been very popular.[290]