CHAPTER VIII TWO MODERN NOVELISTS DURING the last half-century the novel has attained a very prominent place in Spanish literature, in which it fascinates by its regional and indigenous character and by its keen impression of life and reality. In Portugal, although the novel was revived there by Camillo Castello Branco (1825-1899) at precisely the same time as by Fernán Caballero (1796-1877) in Spain, it has not prospered to the same extent, and Algarve still awaits its Valera, Minho its Emilia Pardo Bazán, Beira Baixa its Pereda. Camillo Castello Branco ("o Camillo") has been for two generations, and will probably long remain, a favourite novelist among Portuguese readers. It is easy to understand the enthusiasm provoked by the appearance of his novels, for, when he began to write, novel-reading in Portugal was for the most part confined to indifferent translations of indifferent French works. Castello Branco was born in Lisbon in 1825, but his father was of Traz-os-Montes, and when left an orphan}} in 1834 Camillo went to live with an aunt at Villa Real, capital of Traz-os-Montes, and later with a sister 1 His first novel appeared two years after Fernán Caballero's La Gaviota. in the transmontane village of Villarinho de Samardan. Before he was twenty he had married a girl of Ribeira da Pena, and when he went as a medical student to Oporto he was already a widower. During 1856-1857 he lived at Vianna do Castello (Minho), where he wrote his Scenas Contemporaneas. He had published verses in 1845, written a drama in 1847, and his first novel, Anathema, had appeared in 1851. For the next forty years he continued to write with great industry (his complete works comprise some 150 volumes), and two or three novels sometimes appeared from his pen during a single year. In 1885 he was created Visconde de Correia Botelho, and was granted a pension of a conto of réis (about £200). He had inherited from his father a tendency to a suicidal pessimism, and his life ended by suicide in the year 1890. His novels were the sincere expression of a temperament singularly restless and nervous, and at the same time impressionable as wax with regard to his surroundings and his reading. With this power of assimilation he wrote, under the influence of Octave Feuillet, O Romance de Um Homem Rico, while later, under the influence of Zola, he produced Eusebio Macario. But he was essentially an ultraromantic. If he desired to be the Portuguese Balzac, he failed through lack of psychological insight. His novels are all action and emotion. His personages pass rapidly from one passionate sensation to another, and end for the most part-since their paroxysms of 1 Senhor Fidelino de Figueiredo considers that his object in writing Eusebio Macario was less to prove that he could excel in the new realistic fiction than to reduce it to absurdity by caricaturing it; and he remarks wittily that the society presented in this novel is "absolutely ideal in its shamelessness" (Hist. da. litt. rom. port., pp. 223-24). tragic sentimentality could no further go-in death. This is the ending of the principal characters in the most celebrated of his novels, Amor de Perdição (1862), and the novel which he himself preferred, Livro de Consolação, is not more cheerful.1 The reader is nformed that the title is due to the fact that, however great his sorrow, he will find greater sorrow in the book. His vein of invention was inexhaustible. He wished, he said, to show foreigners and Portuguese that the lack of novels in Portuguese literature had been wrongly attributed to poverty of invention.2 All kinds of strange and strained fatalities throng his pages-sudden reversals of fortune, brazileiros returning rich to their country, noblemen disguised as almocreves, masked figures, plumes and swords and galloping steeds, the feuds of petty Montagues and Capulets, of Liberals and Miguelists, midnight murders, scaffolds, scaled convent walls: "L'enlèvement en poste avec deux chevaux, trois, L'enlèvement sinistre aux lueurs des éclairs, 1 In a letter to the poet Thomaz Ribeiro, he complains that, while a second edition of the least ordinary of his works, Livro de Consolação, was not called for until thirteen years after the first, of his more commonplace novels, Os Mysterios de Lisboa and Amor de Perdição, seven editions were necessary in under ten years. Of Amor de Perdição he says in the preface to the fifth edition (1879) that "' under the electric light of modern criticism it is a romantic, declamatory novel with many lyrical defects and criminal ideas which reach the limit of sentimentalism." 2 'Desaffrontar a litteratura patria de injurias com que estrangeiros e nacionaes a desconceituam, desairando-a como pobre de romances pela sua incapacidade inventiva." His work is related rather to the Spanish romantics of the seventeenth century than to modern novels, and his stories sometimes resemble the more sentimental interludes of Don Quixote. "Épater le bourgeois" was his constant aim, and the most fantastic episodes were legitimate means to this end. When he leaves this high flown romanticism there is an air of truth and naturalness about his writing, especially in scenes of humble life. All that part of Amor de Perdição which has for scene the farrier's cottage might have come out of one of Fernán Caballero's Relaciones. Many of his short stories, as Morrer por capricho in Scenas contemporaneas, are evidently sketches of his own experiences and adventures; and generally his novels represent his own impetuous, almost hysterical emotions, and are thoroughly sincere. His style has been called "the voice of a spirit."1 "I do not belong," he wrote, "to our word-chisellers "; 2 but his style is clear and fluent (linguagem san), true Portuguese, and has in fact also been described as pure marble from the national quarry." His vocabulary was extraordinarily extensive, but neither in style nor subjects had he any leaning towards the exotic. Camillo Castello Branco may still be read with pleasure on account of his style and on account of his portrayal of life at Oporto half a century ago, or of life in some village of Minho or Traz-os-Montes ruled by the mayor, the priest, and the apothecary, with wolves coming down in winter from the hills-some village in which the more prosperous peasants hid their savings 1 Fialho d'Almeida in the Revista Illustrada (1890). 66 2 "Não pertenço á escola dos nossos lapidarios de palavras." (Scenas contemporaneas. Uma paixão bem empregada). 3 By Manuel Pinheiro Chagas. under the flagstones of their lareira. In his choice of Portuguese themes and in the purity of his prose he set an admirable example-an example unhappily not always followed by subsequent Portuguese novelists. Totally different in nearly every way was his junior by some twenty years, Eça de Queiroz (1843-1900). The two were alike in being destructive rather than creative, and in their love of satire, but in other respects scarcely seem to belong to the same nation. José Maria Eça de Queiroz was born at Povoa de Varzim (entre Douro e Minho) in 1843. He took his degree at Coimbra in 1866, and in that year came to stay at Lisbon, where his father, a magistrate, then lived (in a house in the Rocio). During 1866 and 1867 he contributed Folhetins to the Gazeta de Portugal. The first half of 1867 he spent in Alemtejo, and in 1869 he travelled in Egypt and Palestine. Later he became Portuguese Consul at Havanna, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in Paris, where he died in August, 1900. His first stories (the Folhetins), reprinted in volume form after his death (Prosas Barbaras), had attracted some attention and a certain amount of ridicule. They are very various in character, according as the influence of Victor Hugo, Michelet, Heine, Baudelaire, or E. A. Poe (in Baudelaire's translation) prevailed. He is said to have written at this time with extreme facility, whereas later he erased and emended with a care that would have contented Boileau. The titles of some of these stories in themselves indicate a striving after the unusual, the sinister, the romantic-O Senhor Diabo, O Milhafre (The Kite), Memorias d'uma Forca (Reminiscences of a Gallows). Others are in simpler mood; |