“Eu, que me não sei calar” …
I, who cannot hold my tongue …
Nor did Gregorio de Mattos hold his tongue, whether in the student days at Coimbra—where already he was feared for that wagging lance—or during his later vicissitudes in Brazil. In 1864 he married Maria dos Povos, whose reward for advising him to give up his satiric habits was to be made the butt of his next satire. It would have been a miracle if he were either happy with or faithful to her; he was neither. He slashed right and left about him; argued cases—and won them!—in rhyme; poverty, however, was his constant companion, so that, for other reasons aplenty, his wife soon left him. Now his venom bursts forth all the less restrained. Personal enmities made among the influential were bound soon or late to recoil upon him and toward the end of his life he was exiled to the African colony of Angola. Upon his return to Brazil he was prohibited from writing verses and sought solace in his viola, in which he was skilled.
Gregorio de Mattos’s satire sought familiar targets: the judge, the client, the abusive potentate, the venal religious. “Perhaps without any intention on his part,” suggests Carvalho, “he was our first newspaper, wherein are registered the petty and great scandals of the epoch, the thefts, crimes, adulteries, and even the processions, anniversaries and births that he so gaily celebrated in his verses.”[17] His own countrymen he likened to stupid beasts of burden:
Que os Brasileiros são bestas,
E estão sempre a trabalhar
Toda a vida por manter
Maganos de Portugal.[18]
There is a tenderer aspect to the poet, early noted in his sonnets; despite the wild life he led there are accents of sincerity in his poems of penitence; no less sincere, if less lofty, are his poems of passion, in which love is faunesque, sensual, a thing of hot lips and anacreontic abandon. He can turn a pretty (and empty) compliment almost as gracefully as his Spanish models. But it is really too much to institute a serious comparison between him and Verlaine, as Carvalho would do. Some outward resemblance there is in the lives of the men (yet how common after all, are repentance after ribaldry, and connubial infelicity), but Carvalho destroys his own case in the very next paragraph. For, as he indicates, the early Brazilian’s labours “represent in the history of our letters, it is needful to repeat, the revolt of bourgeois common sense against the ridiculousness of the Portuguese nobility.” How far from all this was the nineteenth century Frenchman, with a sensitive soul delicately attuned to life’s finer harmonies!
I am surprised that no Brazilian has found for Gregorio de Mattos Guerra a parallel spirit much nearer than Verlaine in both time and space. The Peruvian Caviedes was some twenty years younger than his Brazilian contemporary; his life has been likened to a picaresque novel. He was no closet-spirit and his addiction to the flesh, no whit less ardent than Gregorio’s, resulted in the unmentionable affliction. He, too, repented, before marriage rather than after; his wife dying, he surrendered to drink and died four years before the Brazilian, if 1692 is the correct date. As Gregorio de Mattos flayed the luxury of Bahia, so Caviedes guffawed at the sybarites of Lima.[19]