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 O X F O R D M O D ER N L A N GUA G E S
A N D L I T ER AT U R E M O N O G R A P HS
Editorial Committee
C. DUTTLINGER S. GILSON
G. HAZBUN A. KAHN I. MACLACHLAN
C. SETH W. WILLIAMS
Dissident Authorship
in Mozambique
The Case of António Quadros
(1933–1994)
T O M ST EN N ET T
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Tom Stennett 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Data available
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ISBN 9780198885900
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198885900.001.0001
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Acknowledgements

This book is based on research carried out during my doctorate at St. Anne’s
College, Oxford University. Throughout the project, I benefited from the
engagement of colleagues at Oxford University and Exeter University. I
would like to thank, in particular, my doctoral supervisor, Phillip Rothwell,
for his generous and encouraging supervision.
Many thanks to the individuals that I interviewed or who provided aca-
demic support during my research: João Paulo Borges Coelho, José Forjaz,
Eugénio Lisboa, Olga Iglésias, Luı́s Cabaço, Ana Mafalda Leite, Paulina
Chiziane, Mia Couto, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro,
Rita Maia Gomes, and Sandra Quadros. A special thank you to Amélia Muge,
who gave me permission to photocopy a substantial portion of her archive
of António Quadros’s works.
A ‘thanking you’ to my friends and family, who can claim an indirect, if
not insubstantial, contribution. What follows is dedicated to my dad.
 Contents

Introduction: António Quadros and the Problematics

of Authorship and Readership in Mozambique 1
1. Late Coloniality and Post-coloniality in Mozambique 23
2. The Shifting Identity of João Pedro Grabato Dias 42
3. Duplicitous Writers and Totalitarian Readers in As
Quybyrycas (1972) 63
4. The Idiosyncratic Anti-colonial Poetics of João
Pedro Grabato Dias’s A Arca (1971) 83
5. I, the People: Onymous, Anonymous, and
Collective Subjects in Eu, o Povo 95
6. Quadros and his Readers 114
António Quadros and the Future 135

Bibliography 139
Index 152
 Introduction
António Quadros and the Problematics of
Authorship and Readership in Mozambique

In ‘A lula compartilhada’ (The Shared Squid), the poet describes his horror
as he watches a colonial official and an opponent of the colonial regime in
Mozambique eat squid together.¹ From the 1971 collection Uma Meditação,
21 Laurentinas e Dois Fabulı́rios Falhados (A Meditation, 21 Laurentinas
and Two Failed Lyrical Fables), ‘A lula compartilhada’ was published under
Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique. Seasoned with ‘enganos’ (trick-
eries), the meal is an exchange of ‘galhardetes’, of political allegiances, as the
politically ambidextrous ‘Ó pus (cisão … )’ (Oh puss (scission)) is revealed to
be pally with the colonial regime that it only notionally opposes. The sight of
the squid being shared by political enemies is enough to make the poet spew
words (‘vergomitar’, a neologism). The result of the poet’s heaving is the text
that his readers have before them. He wonders with some irony whether his
nausea is the result of his having drunk too many of the beers that give the
collection in which the poem appears its title (Laurentina is a Mozambican
beer brand) or his heightened sensibilities as a minor poet (‘poetazinho’).
Either way, the final lines reveal that the speaker too has been partaking
of squid: his vomit smells of the seafood that he has eaten. The speaker,
who is repulsed by this vision of political corruption, is also complicit in the
unseemly meeting. However, he does not act on his revulsion. His role is lim-
ited to observing, writing (vomitous) poetry, and retiring to bed to nurse a
hangover.
‘A lula compartilhada’ raises several questions relating to the politics of
authorship in colonial Mozambique. What is the function of authors in
colonial contexts? What strategies were available to writers to critique the

¹ Laurentinas, p. 35. When referencing quotations taken from works by Grabato Dias, Muti-
mati Barnarbé João, Frey Ioannes Garabatus, or António Quadros, I use abbreviated titles,
followed by a page number, where one is available (unlike most of the texts written by Quadros,
Laurentinas is paginated) and I provide an English translation of the quoted text.

Dissident Authorship in Mozambique. Tom Stennett, Oxford University Press. © Tom Stennett (2023).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198885900.003.0001
2 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

colonial regime in Mozambique? To what extent is poetry an efficacious

medium to speak truth to power? Can authors be politically indepen-
dent thinkers? What right do poets complicit in colonialism’s evils have to
denounce the iniquities that they witness? These are some of the questions
that will orientate my discussion of the works of Grabato Dias and the other
pennames of Portuguese artist and writer António Augusto de Melo Lucena
e Quadros (1933–1994).
Grabato Dias is one of three pennames under which António Quadros
published literary texts. Quadros hailed from Santiago de Besteiros, near
Viseu, in the North of Portugal. He studied at the Escola das Belas Artes do
Porto (now called the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto),
where he also lectured. He studied at the Escola das Belas Artes de Lisboa
and in Paris in the 1950s, at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts,
with a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation.
In 1964, Quadros left Portugal for Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the
capital of colonial Mozambique. Coincidentally, he arrived the same year
that the colonial war started between the Portuguese army and Mozambican
nationalist party Frelimo (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique), when the
latter launched strikes on Portuguese bases in the north of Mozambique. In
Lourenço Marques, Quadros taught at the Liceu Salazar, a high school, and
gave voluntary classes at the cultural association Núcleo de Arte on paint-
ing, sculpture, ceramics, and engraving. In Lourenço Marques, he was part
of a privileged social elite. With the poet Rui Knopfli, he co-edited a liter-
ary magazine called Caliban (1971–1972) for four issues, published in three
instalments, until production was halted by the secret police. The issues fea-
tured work from Knopfli, José Craveirinha, Glória de Sant’Anna, Herberto
Helder, Eugénio Lisboa, Jorge de Sena, and others. In Mozambique and
Portugal, Quadros’s artistic activities were varied: he was a painter, poet,
sculptor, engraver, illustrator, potter, and beekeeper.²
Quadros stayed in Mozambique until 1984. In the period after Mozam-
bique’s independence (achieved 25 June 1975), he taught at the Universidade
Eduardo Mondlane, before moving to the Direcção Nacional da Habitação
(the Mozambican Housing Ministry), where he worked with the archi-
tect José Forjaz. He initiated the experimental TBARN (Técnicos Básicos

² A selection of Quadros’s artworks are reproduced in António Quadros, O Sinaleiro das

Pombas (Porto: Árvore, Cooperativa de Actividades Artísticas, 2001). O Sinaleiro das Pombas is
the most comprehensive anthology of Quadros’s artistic work, which is scattered across galleries
and private collections in Portugal and elsewhere.
 INTRODUCTION 3

para o/no Aproveitamento Racional da Natureza) project, which sought to

develop agricultural techniques through collaboration between academics,
farmers, and the state. Along with Forjaz, he co-produced the Monumen-
tos aos Heróis Nacionais—a mausoleum to important figures from the
anti-colonial struggle.
In terms of his literary activities, Quadros’s time in Mozambique was the
most productive of his career. According to the dates of composition of his
published poems, the vast majority were written in Mozambique and many
of them in Lourenço Marques/Maputo. Grabato Dias’s literary début was
in 1968. That year, the judging panel of a poetry competition held by the
Lourenço Marques town hall awarded their prize to a poem, accompanied
by illustrations, submitted by an incognito poet called Grabato de Tete (Gra-
bato from Tete). The mysterious author did not attend the award ceremony
to collect the monetary prize. Two of the members of the panel, Eugénio
Lisboa and Rui Knopfli (both friends of Quadros), recount that they only
discovered that Quadros was behind Grabato de Tete after the competition.³
Quadros approached Lisboa in 1970 with the poems that would later be pub-
lished in his first collection, 40 e Tal Sonetos de Amor e Circunstância e uma
Canção Desesperada (40-odd Circumstantial Love Sonnets and a Song of
Despair) and asked him to write a text to introduce the collection. In the
meeting with Lisboa, Quadros mentioned that he was prompted to publish
his poetry by his then wife, Clara.⁴
Besides Grabato Dias, Quadros had two other pennames: Frey Ioannes
Garabatus, a fictional friar and drinking mate of sixteenth-century canonical
Portuguese poet Luı́s de Camões, to whom a mock sequel of Camões’s foun-
dational imperial epic Os Lusı́adas (The Lusiads, 1572), titled As Quybyrycas
(1972), is ludically attributed; and, Mutimati Barnabé João, a guerrilla
soldier whose collection Eu, o Povo (I, the People) was published by Mozam-
bique’s ruling party, Frelimo, in 1975 as part of Mozambique’s independence
celebrations.⁵
Quadros published five collections under Portuguese colonial rule: 40 e
Tal Sonetos (1970); the twin odes, O Morto (The Deceased, 1971) and A

³ Eugénio Lisboa, Acta est Fabula: Memórias, 6 vols (Guimarães: Opera Omnia, 2012–2017),
III, p. 333–335. Rui Knopfli, ‘Homem do Renascimento’, Jornal de Letras: Artes e Ideias, XIV:
632 (1995), 14.
⁴ Lisboa, Acta est Fabula, III, p. 337.
⁵ I refer to the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique as Frelimo throughout this book. Before
the party’s Third Congress, held in 1977, the party was called FRELIMO. Arcénio Francisco
Cuco, ‘FRELIMO: De um Movimento Revolucionário a Partido Político’, Revista Núcleo de
Estudos Paranaenses, 2:2 (2016), 138.
4 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

Arca (The Ark, 1971); As Laurentinas (1971); and, As Quybyrycas, ‘edited’

by Grabato Dias. In 1974, two months after the Carnation Revolution that
brought an end to Portugal’s dictatorship, he published a third ode attributed
to Grabato Dias, called Pressaga Pré-saga Saga/press: Ode Didáctica da
Primeira Singular à Segunda Plural sobre as Terceiras, Segundas e Primeiras
Pessoas (Presage Pre-Saga Saga/press: Didactic Ode Conjugated in the First-
Person Singular and Addressed to the Second-Person Plural, Regarding the
Third, Second, and First Persons). A year later, Eu, o Povo was published
by Frelimo as part of Mozambique’s independence celebrations. Besides a
series of anonymous articles that appeared in newspaper Domingo from late
1980 until early 1981 and a poem published in 1977 in Portuguese journal
Colóquio/Letras, Quadros did not publish again until 1986 (Facto/Fado:
piqueno tratado de morfologia: parte vii, Fact/Fate: a modest treatise on
morphology: part vii) after he had returned to Portugal from Mozambique.
In the early 1990s, Quadros revisited texts that he had written in Mozam-
bique in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1991, a second version of As Quybyrycas was
published by Afrontamento. In 1991 and 1992, Quadros self-published three
works attributed to Grabato Dias under the name ‘Edições Pouco’ that were
written in Mozambique after independence: Sete Contos para um Carnaval
(Seven Short Stories for Carnival), Sagapress: Poesia com Datas (Sagapress:
Poems with Dates) and the spiritual sequel to Eu, o Povo, O Povo é Nós
(We Are the People). The name of the fictitious publisher ‘Edições Pouco’
(Few Editions) appears to be an ironic reference to the fact that it was a
self-publishing venture.
Quadros’s time in Mozambique overlapped with a period of momentous
change in the country. His arrival in 1964 coincided with the beginning
of the anti-colonial struggle. He was in Lourenço Marques on the day of
the Carnation Revolution, when the Estado Novo (New State), Portugal’s
dictatorship, was brought down by a leftist military coup. He was present
at the country’s celebrations of independence from Portugal in 1975, to
which he contributed a collection of poems attributed to a dead guerrilla
soldier, fallen in the armed conflict against the Portuguese which contin-
ued until September 1974, five months after the fall of the Estado Novo.
Quadros remained in Mozambique until the mid-1980s, before leaving hav-
ing grown disillusioned with the ever-worsening political situation in the
country.
The Carnation Revolution marked a watershed moment in Mozam-
bique’s history. As Patrick Chabal remarks, the date ‘not only marks the
Portuguese revolution “of the carnations” but also, in effect, the beginning
 INTRODUCTION 5

of the transfer of power in the Portuguese African colonies’.⁶ The revolution

set in motion the decolonization process that would lead to Mozambique’s
independence from Portugal on 25 June 1975. Eugénio Lisboa, who was
with Quadros when he first heard news of the coup, recalls Quadros’s reac-
tion: ‘A caminho da Matola, Quadros barafustava: “Agora que tudo estava
a correr tão bem … ”.’ (On our way to Matola, Quadros remonstrated: ‘And
everything was going so well … ’).⁷ Quadros’s reaction, as reported by Lis-
boa, points to an ambivalence towards Mozambique’s independence, which
Grabato Dias expresses in Pressaga, published two months after the revolu-
tion, in June 1974. In Pressaga and in Eu, o Povo, published the following
year, in 1975, Grabato Dias and Mutimati express their concerns about
Mozambique’s future and, in particular, the place of settlers in independent
Mozambique.
The contrasts and similarities between the late colonial and post-
independence periods in Mozambique are a recurring theme of the chapters
that follow. In Dissident Authorship, I deploy Quadros’s quirky case to
think about how the place and function of authors changed during the two
decades that Quadros lived in Mozambique.

Authorship and Readership: Two Interlinked Questions

Grabato Dias’s literary début in 1968 coincided with the publication of two
foundational texts on authorship: Roland Barthes’s ‘La mort de l’auteur’
(The Death of the Author, 1968) and Michel Foucault’s ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un
auteur?’ (What Is an Author?, 1969).⁸ Barthes’s and Foucault’s essays are
primarily concerned with probing the centrality of authors in literary anal-
ysis. They ask, in different ways, why should we care who the author of
a given text is? Barthes’s declaration of the death of the flesh-and-blood
author, consigned to irrelevance in textual analysis, was written against the

⁶ Patrick Chabal, ‘The End of Empire’, in A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 17.
⁷ Lisboa opines that Quadros was referring to his personal projects. Lisboa, Acta est Fabula,
III, p. 426.
⁸ In an article published in 1973, Grabato Dias’s reader Maria Lourdes Cortez repeatedly
cites Barthes’s S/Z—the comprehensive analysis of the same short story, Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’
(1830), discussed in ‘La mort de l’auteur’. Cortez, ‘Grabato Dias e as Trangressões de Lin-
guagem’, in Craveirinha, Grabato Dias, Rui Knopfli: Leituras (Lourenço Marques: Minerva
Central, 1973), pp. 19–34; Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Uma Meditação, 21 Laurentinas e Dois Fab-
ulírios Falhados, edited by Jorge de Sena (Lourenço Marques: João Pedro Grabato Dias, 1971),
pp. 5–13.
6 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

backdrop of a French tradition of literary criticism that looked to biography

to explicate an author’s body of work. Barthes is concerned with rewrit-
ing the terms of authorship and readership: he replaces the notion of the
author with ‘écriture’ (writing)—which, as Adrian Wilson notes, he would
later substitute with ‘Texte’⁹—and the ‘Critic’ with a depersonalized reader.
Barthes dramatically notes at his essay’s conclusion that the ‘birth’ of this
reader comes at the cost of the author’s death.¹⁰ Barthes’s essay is a rejection
of authorial intention; of the idea that a given text contains a single, ‘the-
ological’ meaning—the ‘message’ of the Author-God.¹¹ He displaces the act
of the production of meaning from authors to readers. For him, reading is
fundamentally not a question of divining what the author intended to say.
As Andrew Bennett has noted, the declarative tone of Barthes’s announce-
ment of the author’s death belies an anxiety that the author—in many
critical practices—is not dead.¹² Barthes’s text, more manifesto than criti-
cal study, makes the case that the author as a biographical entity ought to
be excised from literary analysis. Paradoxically, the anonymous intertext
established with Nietzsche’s proposition that God is dead ‘links authorism
with theism’.¹³ Similarly, Adrian Wilson notes the ‘seeming ambiguity as to
whether [Barthes and Foucault] were signing a death warrant, carrying out
an assassination, or preaching at a funeral’.¹⁴
Foucault’s 1968 paper, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ is, in part, a response to
Barthes’s essay. Bennett describes Barthes as Foucault’s ‘unstated premise,
his silent progenitor and antagonist, his “intertext”’.¹⁵ Foucault says that it
is insufficient to declare that the author is dead; a statement so obvious is
tautologous.¹⁶ Foucault positions his paper as a preliminary post-mortem
and an analysis of the space opened up by the author’s demise. Foucault
calls the author a function of discourse. To put a name to a text, to attribute
authorship, is a complex process whose outcomes are revealing about the
importance assigned to different kinds of texts and the ways in which they
are read. Like Barthes’s essay, Foucault’s paper is a critique of a certain

⁹ Adrian Wilson, ‘Foucault on the Question of the Author: A Critical Exegesis’, The Modern
Language Review, 99:2 (2004), 343–344.
¹⁰ Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in Le bruissement de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1984), p. 67.
¹¹ Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, Le bruissement de la langue, p. 67.
¹² Andrew Bennett, The Author (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 17.
¹³ Bennett, The Author, p. 14.
¹⁴ Wilson, ‘Foucault on the Question of the Author: A Critical Exegesis’, 342.
¹⁵ Bennett, The Author, p. 19.
¹⁶ Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, 2 vols (Paris:
Gallimard, 2001), I, p. 824.
 INTRODUCTION 7

author-inflected mode of reading. According to Foucault, texts are read in

relation to the author to whom they are attributed and the body of work
of which they are a constituent part. For this reason, the names of authors
act differently to other names because an author is synonymous with their
work.¹⁷
For Foucault, the author-function conditions readings of literary texts. If
a writer’s work is littered with inconsistencies, problems, tensions, or con-
tradictions between works, this is a sign of maturation or evolution—these
things can be explained away by biography. If there are tensions, inconsis-
tencies, or contradictions within a given text, this can be rationalized by the
fact that it was authored by a human being, prone to perversities, quirks,
lapses in logic, and irrationality. The author confers on a work or body of
work a unity which reconciles its contradictions.¹⁸
The question with which Foucault begins and ends his paper is posed
by Samuel Beckett in Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien: ‘Qu’importe qui parle,
quelqu’un a dit qu’importe qui parle?’¹⁹ As Bennett remarks in a com-
parison of Foucault’s and Barthes’s essays, Foucault emphasizes that in
post-Romantic modes of reading, who speaks—or who readers think speaks
in a given text—matters, at the same time that he ‘yearn[s] towards a future
in which our only response to such a question would be a shrug or, as Fou-
cault puts it, at the close of the essay, a “stirring of an indifference”. Foucault
wants it to matter not at all who is speaking.’²⁰ Seán Burke’s contention that
one of the great paradoxes of Foucault’s text—that the author is most alive
when he is considered dead, most present when he is presumed absent—has
rather served the inverse of Foucault’s longing for a literary culture in which
the author’s identity were a matter of indifference: the names Foucault and
Barthes have become synonymous with their positions on authorship.²¹
Foucault’s author-function describes a specific socio-historical concep-
tion of authorship (Western, post-Romantic)—the author as an individu-
alized subject. Foucault’s critique of author-centred modes of readings rests
on the tension between the primacy of the author and the author’s continual
and endless disappearance in writing. As Bennett notes, Foucault’s framing
of writing as a process under which the author continually disappears and is

¹⁷ Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits, I, p. 820.

¹⁸ Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits, I, p. 830.
¹⁹ Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits, I, p. 820.
²⁰ Bennett, The Author, p. 19.
²¹ Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes,
Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992; reprint. 1998), pp. 6–7.
8 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

replaced through the creation of writing subject(s) contrasts with Barthes’s

concern with writing as a negative space: ‘Barthes is concerned only with a
certain absence, a “negative” space of writing. Foucault is concerned with the
social and historical construction of a “writing subject” and posits writing as
a space in which this disappearing is endlessly enacted.’²² Foucault’s model
focuses on the disappearance of authors, but it also consciously accounts for
their persistence.
Elizabeth Fox Genovese argues that Foucault’s project (and we might add
Barthes’s too) threaten to suppress the voices of authors who have not had
the historic privileged access to print culture that Foucault and others have
enjoyed.²³ Similarly, Odia Ofeimun writes that the timing of the proposition
of the dead author ‘rankles [because] it came at a time when African writers
were just emerging from the belly of the anti-colonial struggle onto a stage
that had been set and dominated by Euro-American writing for centuries’.²⁴
Ofeimun argues, moreover, that Barthes’s and Foucault’s confining writing
to a discursive activity in which authors can only imitate, parrot, or parody a
pre-written discourse—a discourse in which Africa and Africans have been
historically and largely represented by non-Africans—is inadequate for reck-
oning with the place of African authors living in authoritarian (‘illiberal’)
contexts.²⁵ Following Ofeimun, Dorothée Boulanger notes that to speak of
dead authors in the late-1960s in Portuguese African colonial contexts would
have been strange indeed, given the danger that Lusophone writers faced in
climates of political repression.²⁶ In Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s analysis, there is no
escaping, for African authors living in authoritarian contexts, state power:
either writers oppose authority, risking political reprisals, or they effectively
become propagandists for the state.²⁷
Following Ofeimun and Thiong’o, Dissident Authorship considers the
authoritarian features of the political contexts in which Quadros wrote as
fundamental factors that shaped the authorial strategies available to him

²² Bennett, The Author, p. 20.

²³ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-
American Women’, in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical
Writings, edited by Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press,
1988), p. 67.
²⁴ Odia Ofeimun, ‘Postmodernism and the Impossible Death of the Author’, African Quar-
terly on the Arts, 2: 3 (1998), 25.
²⁵ Ofeimun, ‘Postmodernism and the Impossible Death of the Author’, p. 40.
²⁶ Dorothée Boulanger, Fiction as History: Resistance and Complicities in Angolan Postcolo-
nial Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2023), pp. 2–3.
²⁷ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the
Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
 INTRODUCTION 9

and other writers. In contrast to Barthes, in particular, I consider the role

played by mediating agents such as publishers, editors, and the state in the
production of texts. I argue that writers in Mozambique have not experi-
enced political oppression equally. Although his fictional authors insistently
refer to the problems that a climate of political oppression poses for them
as authors, Quadros’s works were less impacted by the distinct authoritar-
ian contexts of Portuguese censorship and Frelimo rule than many other
writers—in particular, under Portuguese colonial rule, black writers—given
his privileged position under both regimes and the fact that he mostly
self-published his books.
Quadros’s works pose a fundamental challenge to his readers: how to
make sense of his often-cryptic writings within the contexts in which they
were produced? A knowingly difficult writer, and one aware of his lack of
a sizeable contemporary readership, Quadros insistently looks to poster-
ity, in whom he invests his hopes for literary recognition. In her insightful
introduction to Laurentinas, Maria Lourdes Cortez proposes the useful con-
cept of ‘processos de distanciamento’ (distancing processes)—according to
which Grabato Dias’s work can be best read by considering how the author
(Quadros) distances himself from the context in which he writes through
irony, alienating language, and the creation of discursive subjectivities (such
as Grabato Dias). Cortez’s introduction begins with a paradox. Echoing
Barthes, she disavows biography as a key factor in readings of literary texts,
and yet her preface is framed by a short ‘autobiography’ provided by Gra-
bato Dias and included at his request.²⁸ Cortez defends her inclusion of the
biography by arguing that it is a primary text through which the author
inscribes a discursive identity, a manoeuvre that she links to his distanc-
ing from the social and historical context in which he writes. She calls for a
nuanced appreciation of the relationship between author and context that
accounts for the author’s agency in ‘distancing’ himself from the context out
of which he writes, and which is disposed to readings that the author may
not have intended.²⁹
Cortez’s framing is simultaneously empowering and discouraging for
readers, who are tasked with making sense of texts authored by a coy writer,
who keeps his distance from his readership primarily through humour.³⁰
Cortez explains that humour has two functions in Grabato Dias’s poetry.

²⁸ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 5.

²⁹ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 7.
³⁰ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 8.
10 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

First, it guarantees critical distance from the turbulent context in which the
poet lives, thereby allowing him to analyse it lucidly.³¹ Second, it is the vehi-
cle through which the poet critiques the iniquities of the political context
out of which he writes. Playing the role of a ‘“clown” truculento e também
melacólico’ (a truculent and melancholic clown), Grabato Dias’s ‘carniva-
lesque’ poetics is subversive and given to the ‘destruição da ordem e do
regime habituais do mundo’ (destruction of the habitual order and routine
of the world).³² In this way, Cortez forestalls charges of political and social
indifference (and even betrayal) analogous to those levelled against poets
such as Rui Knopfli, and invites historicizing readings of the poet’s work.³³
Cortez’s analysis is useful in that it encourages an engagement with the
contexts of production of Grabato Dias’s texts that accounts for the agency
of the writer. According to her, a given text is not reducible to the con-
text in which it was written; texts are also responses to that same context.
Furthermore, she makes the case, in contrast to Barthes, that biography
is a significant context of literary analysis in contexts where authors’ rela-
tive positions in colonial and post-colonial society had a significant impact
on what they wrote, and under what conditions. The ‘distancing processes’
at play in Laurentinas cannot be appreciated by a reader who is unaware
of the context that ‘rodeia’ (surrounds) and ‘penetra[ … ]’ (penetrates) the
author, and the author’s relation to that context.³⁴ Cortez’s term ‘distanc-
ing processes’ shifts the focus—Barthes’s focus—from the absolute denial of
an intimate relationship between biography and literary texts, to an appre-
ciation of the ways in which the pseudo-absent author (Quadros) rewrites
himself through poetry; an emphasis is placed on the process of the denial of
identity and the whys and wherefores of the poet’s performative aloofness.
Writing out of the same censorship context as the author she introduces,
Cortex does not put her mode of reading into practice: there is no reference
to colonial rule or to censorship. In this way, she shadows Quadros’s own
coy approach to the context out of which he writes. Quadros withholds key
contextual information that he nudges his readers to uncover.
Perhaps surprisingly for a writer who engages in metatextual games of
hide and seek through his creation of discursive fictional authors, Quadros’s

³¹ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 13.

³² Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 12; p. 9.
³³ For a discussion of Rui Knopfli’s exclusion from the Mozambican canon, see Manoel de
Souza e Silva, Do alheio ao próprio (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo; Goiâna:
Editora da Universidade Federal de Goiás, 1996), pp. 105–107.
³⁴ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 7; p. 8.
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of common sense would save us from. The foolish liar, who
endeavours to excite the admiration of the company by the relation
of adventures which never had any existence; the important
coxcomb, who gives himself airs of rank and distinction which he
well knows he has no just pretensions to; are both of them, no
doubt, pleased with the applause which they fancy they meet with.
But their vanity arises from so gross an illusion of the imagination,
that it is difficult to conceive how any rational creature should be
imposed upon by it. When they place themselves in the situation of
those whom they fancy they have deceived, they are struck with the
highest admiration for their own persons. They look upon
themselves, not in that light in which, they know, they ought to
appear to their companions, but in that in which they believe their
104 companions actually look upon them. Their superficial weakness
and trivial folly hinder them from ever turning their eyes inwards, or
from seeing themselves in that despicable point of view in which
their own consciences must tell them that they would appear to
every body, if the real truth should ever come to be known.

As ignorant and groundless praise can give no solid joy, no

satisfaction that will bear any serious examination, so, on the
contrary, it often gives real comfort to reflect, that though no praise
should actually be bestowed upon us, our conduct, however, has
been such as to deserve it, and has been in every respect suitable to
those measures and rules by which praise and approbation are
naturally and commonly bestowed. We are pleased, not only with
praise, but with having done what is praise-worthy. We are pleased
to think that we have rendered ourselves the natural objects of
approbation, though no approbation should ever actually be
bestowed upon us: and we are mortified to reflect that we have
justly merited the blame of those we live with, though that
sentiment should never actually be exerted against us. The man who
is conscious to himself that he has exactly observed those measures
of conduct which experience informs him are generally agreeable,
reflects with satisfaction on the propriety of his own behaviour.
When he views it in the light in which the impartial spectator would
view it, he thoroughly enters into all the motives which influenced it.
He looks back upon every part of it with pleasure and approbation,
and though mankind should never be acquainted with what he has
done, he regards himself, not so much according to the light in
which they actually regard him, as according to that in which they
would regard him if they were better informed. He anticipates the
applause and admiration which in this case would be bestowed upon
him, and he applauds and admires himself by sympathy with
sentiments, which do not indeed actually take place, but which the
ignorance of the public alone hinders from taking place, which he
knows are the natural and ordinary effects of such conduct, which
his imagination strongly connects with it, and which he has acquired
a habit of conceiving as something that naturally and in propriety
ought to follow from it. Men have voluntarily thrown away life to
acquire after death a renown which they could no longer enjoy.
Their imagination, in the mean time, anticipated that fame which
was in future times to be bestowed upon them. Those applauses
which they were never to hear rung in their ears; the thoughts of
that admiration, whose effects they were never to feel, played about
their hearts, banished from their breasts the strongest of all natural
fears, and transported them to perform actions which seem almost
beyond the reach of human nature. But in point of reality there is
surely no great difference between that approbation which is not to
be bestowed till we can no longer enjoy it, and that which, indeed, is
never to be bestowed, but which would be bestowed, if the world
was ever made to 105 understand properly the real circumstances of
our behaviour. If the one often produces such violent effects, we
cannot wonder that the other should always be highly regarded.

Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an
original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his
brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and
pain in their unfavourable regard. She rendered their approbation
most flattering and most agreeable to him for its own sake; and their
disapprobation most mortifying and most offensive.

But this desire of the approbation, and this aversion to the

disapprobation of his brethren, would not alone have rendered him
fit for that society for which he was made. Nature, accordingly, has
endowed him, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with
a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he
himself approves of in other men. The first desire could only have
made him wish to appear to be fit for society. The second was
necessary in order to render him anxious to be really fit. The first
could only have prompted him to the affectation of virtue, and to the
concealment of vice. The second was necessary in order to inspire
him with the real love of virtue, and with the real abhorrence of vice.
In every well-formed mind this second desire seems to be the
strongest of the two. It is only the weakest and most superficial of
mankind who can be much delighted with that praise which they
themselves know to be altogether unmerited. A weak man may
sometimes be pleased with it, but a wise man rejects it upon all
occasions. But, though a wise man feels little pleasure from praise
where he knows there is no praise-worthiness, he often feels the
highest in doing what he knows to be praise-worthy, though he
knows equally well that no praise is ever to be bestowed upon it. To
obtain the approbation of mankind, where no approbation is due,
can never be an object of any importance to him. To obtain that
approbation where it is really due, may sometimes be an object of
no great importance to him. But to be that thing which deserves
approbation, must always be an object of the highest.

To desire, or even to accept of praise, where no praise is due, can

be the effect only of the most contemptible vanity. To desire it where
it is really due is to desire no more than that a most essential act of
justice should be done to us. The love of just fame, of true glory,
even for its own sake, and independent of any advantage which he
can derive from it, is not unworthy even of a wise man. He
sometimes, however, neglects, and even despises it; and he is never
more apt to do so than when he has the most perfect assurance of
the perfect propriety of every part of his own conduct. His self-
approbation, in this case, stands in need of no confirmation from the
approbation of other men. It is alone sufficient, and he is contented
with it. This self-approbation, if not the only, is at least the principal
object, 106 about which he can or ought to be anxious. The love of it
is the love of virtue.

As the love and admiration which we naturally conceive for some

characters, dispose us to wish to become ourselves the proper
objects of such agreeable sentiments; so the hatred and contempt
which we as naturally conceive for others, dispose us, perhaps still
more strongly, to dread the very thought of resembling them in any
respect. Neither is it, in this case, too, so much the thought of being
hated and despised that we are afraid of, as that of being hateful
and despicable. We dread the thought of doing any thing which can
render us the just and proper objects of the hatred and contempt of
our fellow-creatures; even though we had the most perfect security
that those sentiments were never actually to be exerted against us.
The man who has broke through all those measures of conduct,
which can alone render him agreeable to mankind, though he should
have the most perfect assurance that what he had done was for ever
to be concealed from every human eye, it is all to no purpose. When
he looks back upon it, and views it in the light in which the impartial
spectator would view it, he finds that he can enter into none of the
motives which influenced it. He is abashed and confounded at the
thoughts of it, and necessarily feels a very high degree of that
shame which he would be exposed to, if his actions should ever
come to be generally known. His imagination, in this case too,
anticipates the contempt and derision from which nothing saves him
but the ignorance of those he lives with. He still feels that he is the
natural object of these sentiments, and still trembles at the thought
of what he would suffer, if they were ever actually exerted against
him. But if what he had been guilty of was not merely one of those
improprieties which are the objects of simple disapprobation, but
one of those enormous crimes which excite detestation and
resentment, he could never think of it, as long as he had any
sensibility left, without feeling all the agony of horror and remorse;
and though he could be assured that no man was ever to know it,
and could even bring himself to believe that there was no God to
revenge it, he would still feel enough of both these sentiments to
embitter the whole of his life: he would still regard himself as the
natural object of the hatred and indignation of all his fellow-
creatures; and, if his heart was not grown callous by the habit of
crimes, he could not think without terror and astonishment even of
the manner in which mankind would look upon him, of what would
be the expression of their countenance and of their eyes, if the
dreadful truth should ever come to be known. These natural pangs
of an affrighted conscience are the dæmons, the avenging furies,
which, in this life, haunt the guilty, which allow them neither quiet
nor repose, which often drive them to despair and distraction, from
which no assurance of secrecy can protect them, from which no
principles of irreligion can entirely deliver them, and from which 107
nothing can free them but the vilest and most abject of all states, a
complete insensibility to honour and infamy, to vice and virtue. Men
of the most detestable characters, who, in the execution of the most
dreadful crimes, had taken their measures so coolly as to avoid even
the suspicion of guilt, have sometimes been driven, by the horror of
their situation, to discover, of their own accord, what no human
sagacity could ever have investigated. By acknowledging their guilt,
by submitting themselves to the resentment of their offended fellow-
citizens, and, by thus satiating that vengeance of which they were
sensible that they had become the proper objects, they hoped, by
their death to reconcile themselves, at least in their own
imagination, to the natural sentiments of mankind; to be able to
consider themselves as less worthy of hatred and resentment; to
atone, in some measure, for their crimes, and, by thus becoming the
objects rather of compassion than of horror, if possible, to die in
peace and with the forgiveness of all their fellow-creatures.
Compared to what they felt before the discovery, even the thought
of this, it seems was happiness.

In such cases, the horror of blame-worthiness seems, even in

persons who cannot be suspected of any extraordinary delicacy or
sensibility of character, completely to conquer the dread of blame. In
order to allay that horror, in order to pacify, in some degree, the
remorse of their own consciences, they voluntarily submitted
themselves both to the reproach and to the punishment which they
knew were due to their crimes, but which, at the same time, they
might easily have avoided.

They are the most frivolous and superficial of mankind only who
can be much delighted with that praise which they themselves know
to be altogether unmerited. Unmerited reproach, however, is
frequently capable of mortifying very severely even men of more
than ordinary constancy. Men of the most ordinary constancy,
indeed, easily learn to despise those foolish tales which are so
frequently circulated in society, and which, from their own absurdity
and falsehood, never fail to die away in the course of a few weeks,
or of a few days. But an innocent man, though of more than
ordinary constancy, is often, not only shocked, but most severely
mortified by the serious, though false, imputation of a crime;
especially when that imputation happens unfortunately to be
supported by some circumstances which gave it an air of probability.
He is humbled to find that any body should think so meanly of his
character as to suppose him capable of being guilty of it. Though
perfectly conscious of his own innocence, the very imputation seems
often, even in his own imagination, to throw a shadow of disgrace
and dishonour upon his character. His just indignation, too, at so
very gross an injury, which, however, it may frequently be improper
and sometimes even impossible to revenge, is itself a very painful
sensation. There is no greater tormentor of the human breast than
violent resentment which cannot be gratified. An innocent man,
brought to 108 the scaffold by the false imputation of an infamous or
odious crime, suffers the most cruel misfortune which it is possible
for innocence to suffer. The agony of his mind may, in this case,
frequently be greater than that of those who suffer for the like
crimes, of which they have been actually guilty. Profligate criminals,
such as common thieves and highwaymen, have frequently little
sense of the baseness of their own conduct, and consequently no
remorse. Without troubling themselves about the justice or injustice
of the punishment, they have always been accustomed to look upon
the gibbet as a lot very likely to fall to them. When it does fall to
them, therefore, they consider themselves only as not quite so lucky
as some of their companions, and submit to their fortune, without
any other uneasiness than what may arise from the fear of death; a
fear which, even by such worthless wretches, we frequently see, can
be so easily, and so very completely conquered. The innocent man,
on the contrary, over and above the uneasiness which this fear may
occasion, is tormented by his own indignation at the injustice which
has been done to him. He is struck with horror at the thoughts of
the infamy which the punishment may shed upon his memory, and
foresees, with the most exquisite anguish, that he is hereafter to be
remembered by his dearest friends and relations, not with regret and
affection, but with shame, and even with horror for his supposed
disgraceful conduct: and the shades of death appear to close round
him with a darker and more melancholy gloom than naturally
belongs to them. Such fatal accidents, for the tranquillity of
mankind, it is to be hoped, happen very rarely in any country; but
they happen sometimes in all countries, even in those where justice
is in general very well administered. The unfortunate Calas, a man of
much more than ordinary constancy (broke upon the wheel and
burnt at Tholouse for the supposed murder of his own son, of which
he was perfectly innocent), seemed, with his last breath, to
deprecate, not so much the cruelty of the punishment, as the
disgrace which the imputation might bring upon his memory. After
he had been broke, and was just going to be thrown into the fire,
the monk, who attended the execution, exhorted him to confess the
crime for which he had been condemned. ‘My father,’ said Calas, ‘can
you yourself bring yourself to believe that I am guilty?‘

To persons in such unfortunate circumstances, that humble

philosophy which confines its views to this life, can afford, perhaps,
but little consolation. Every thing that could render either life or
death respectable is taken from them. They are condemned to death
and to everlasting infamy. Religion can alone afford them any
effectual comfort. She alone can tell them that it is of little
importance what man may think of their conduct, while the all-
seeing Judge of the world approves of it. She alone can present to
them the view of another world; a world of more candour, humanity,
and justice, than the present; where their 109 innocence is in due
time to be declared, and their virtue to be finally rewarded: and the
same great principle which can alone strike terror into triumphant
vice, affords the only effectual consolation to disgraced and insulted
innocence.

In smaller offences, as well as in greater crimes, it frequently

happens that a person of sensibility is much more hurt by the unjust
imputation, than the real criminal is by the actual guilt. A woman of
gallantry laughs even at the well-founded surmises which are
circulated concerning her conduct. The worst founded surmise of the
same kind is a mortal stab to an innocent virgin. The person who is
deliberately guilty of a disgraceful action, we may lay it down, I
believe, as a general rule, can seldom have much sense of the
disgrace; and the person who is habitually guilty of it, can scarce
ever have any.

When every man, even of middling understanding, so readily

despises unmerited applause, how it comes to pass that unmerited
reproach should often be capable of mortifying so severely men of
the soundest and best judgment, may, perhaps, deserve some
consideration.

Pain, I have already had occasion to observe, is, in almost all

cases, a more pungent sensation than the opposite and
correspondent pleasure. The one, almost always, depresses us much
more below the ordinary, or what may be called the natural, state of
our happiness, than the other ever raises us above it. A man of
sensibility is apt to be more humiliated by just censure than he is
ever elevated by just applause. Unmerited applause a wise man
rejects with contempt upon all occasions; but he often feels very
severely the injustice of unmerited censure. By suffering himself to
be applauded for what he has not performed, by assuming a merit
which does not belong to him, he feels that he is guilty of a mean
falsehood, and deserves, not the admiration, but the contempt of
those very persons who, by mistake, had been led to admire him. It
may, perhaps, give him some well-founded pleasure to find that he
has been, by many people, thought capable of performing what he
did not perform. But, though he may be obliged to his friends for
their good opinion, he would think himself guilty of the greatest
baseness if he did not immediately undeceive them. It gives him
little pleasure to look upon himself in the light in which other people
actually look upon him, when he is conscious that, if they knew the
truth, they would look upon him in a very different light. A weak
man, however, is often much delighted with viewing himself in this
false and delusive light. He assumes the merit of every laudable
action that is ascribed to him, and pretends to that of many which
nobody ever thought of ascribing to him. He pretends to have done
what he never did, to have written what another wrote, to have
invented what another discovered; and is led into all the miserable
vices of plagiarism and common lying. But though no man of 110
middling good sense can derive much pleasure from the imputation
of a laudable action which he never performed, yet a wise man may
suffer great pain from the serious imputation of a crime which he
never committed. Nature, in this case, has rendered the pain, not
only more pungent than the opposite and correspondent pleasure,
but she has rendered it so in a much greater than the ordinary
degree. A denial rids a man at once of the foolish and ridiculous
pleasure; but it will not always rid him of the pain. When he refuses
the merit which is ascribed to him, nobody doubts his veracity. It
may be doubted when he denies the crime which he is accused of.
He is at once enraged at the falsehood of the imputation, and
mortified to find that any credit should be given to it. He feels that
his character is not sufficient to protect him. He feels that his
brethren, far from looking upon him in that light in which he
anxiously desires to be viewed by them, think him capable of being
guilty of what he is accused of. He knows perfectly that he has not
been guilty. He knows perfectly what he has done; but, perhaps,
scarce any man can know perfectly what he himself is capable of
doing. What the peculiar constitution of his own mind may or may
not admit of, is, perhaps, more or less a matter of doubt to every
man. The trust and good opinion of his friends and neighbours,
tends more than any thing to relieve him from this most
disagreeable doubt; their distrust and unfavourable opinion to
increase it. He may think himself very confident that their
unfavourable judgment is wrong: but this confidence can seldom be
so great as to hinder that judgment from making some impression
upon him; and the greater his sensibility, the greater his delicacy, the
greater his worth in short, this impression is likely to be the greater.

The agreement or disagreement both of the sentiments and

judgments of other people with our own, is, in all cases, it must be
observed, of more or less importance to us, exactly in proportion as
we ourselves are more or less uncertain about the propriety of our
own sentiments, about the accuracy of our own judgments.

A man of sensibility may sometimes feel great uneasiness lest he

should have yielded too much even to what may be called an
honourable passion; to his just indignation, perhaps, at the injury
which may have been done either to himself or to his friend. He is
anxiously afraid lest, meaning only to act with spirit, and to do
justice, he may, from the too great vehemence of his emotion, have
done a real injury to some other person; who, though not innocent,
may not have been altogether so guilty as he at first apprehended.
The opinion of other people becomes, in this case, of the utmost
importance to him. Their approbation is the most healing balsam;
their disapprobation, the bitterest and most tormenting poison that
can be poured into his uneasy mind. When he is perfectly satisfied
with every part of his own conduct, the judgment of other people is
often of less importance to him.

111 There are some very noble and beautiful arts, in which the
degree of excellence can be determined only by a certain nicety of
taste, of which the decisions, however, appear always, in some
measure, uncertain. There are others, in which the success admits,
either of clear demonstration, or very satisfactory proof. Among the
candidates for excellence in those different arts, the anxiety about
the public opinion is always much greater in the former than in the
latter.

The beauty of poetry is a matter of such nicety, that a young

beginner can scarce ever be certain that he has attained it. Nothing
delights him so much, therefore, as the favourable judgments of his
friends and of the public; and nothing mortifies him so severely as
the contrary. The one establishes, the other shakes, the good
opinion which he is anxious to entertain concerning his own
performances. Experience and success may in time give him a little
more confidence in his own judgment. He is at all times, however,
liable to be most severely mortified by the unfavourable judgments
of the public. Racine was so disgusted by the indifferent success of
his Phædra, the finest tragedy, perhaps, that is extant in any
language, that, though in the vigour of his life, and at the height of
his abilities, he resolved to write no more for the stage. That great
poet used frequently to tell his son, that the most paltry and
impertinent criticism had always given him more pain than the
highest and justest eulogy had ever given him pleasure. The
extreme sensibility of Voltaire to the slightest censure of the same
kind is well known to every body. The Dunciad of Mr. Pope is an
everlasting monument of how much the most correct, as well as the
most elegant and harmonious of all the English poets, had been hurt
by the criticisms of the lowest and most contemptible authors. Gray
(who joins to the sublimity of Milton the elegance and harmony of
Pope, and to whom nothing is wanting to render him, perhaps, the
first poet in the English language, but to have written a little more)
is said to have been so much hurt by a foolish and impertinent
parody of two of his finest odes, that he never afterwards attempted
any considerable work. Those men of letters who value themselves
upon what is called fine writing in prose, approach somewhat to the
sensibility of poets.

Mathematicians, on the contrary, who may have the most perfect

assurance, both of the truth and of the importance of their
discoveries, are frequently very indifferent about the reception which
they may meet with from the public. The two greatest
mathematicians that I ever had the honour to be known to, and I
believe, the two greatest that have lived in my time, Dr. Robert
Simpson of Glasgow, and Dr. Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, never
seemed to feel even the slightest uneasiness from the neglect with
which the ignorance of the public received some of their most
valuable works. The great work of Sir Isaac Newton, his
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, I 112 have been told,
was for several years neglected by the public. The tranquillity of that
great man, it is probable, never suffered, upon that account, the
interruption of a single quarter of an hour. Natural philosophers, in
their independency upon the public opinion, approach nearly to
mathematicians, and, in their judgments concerning the merit of
their own discoveries and observations, enjoy some degree of the
same security and tranquillity.

The morals of those different classes of men of letters are,

perhaps, sometimes somewhat affected by this very great difference
in their situation with regard to the public.

Mathematicians and natural philosophers, from their independency

upon the public opinion, have little temptation to form themselves
into factions and cabals, either for the support of their own
reputation, or for the depression of that of their rivals. They are
almost always men of the most amiable simplicity of manners, who
live in good harmony with one another, are the friends of one
another’s reputation, enter into no intrigue in order to secure the
public applause, but are pleased when their works are approved of,
without being either much vexed or very angry when they are
neglected.

It is not always the same case with poets, or with those who value
themselves upon what is called fine writing. They are very apt to
divide themselves into a sort of literary faction; each cabal being
often avowedly, and almost always secretly, the mortal enemy of the
reputation of every other, and employing all the mean arts of
intrigue and solicitation to pre-occupy the public opinion in favour of
the works of its own members, and against those of its enemies and
rivals. In France, Despreaux and Racine did not think it below them
to set themselves at the head of a literary cabal, in order to depress
the reputation, first of Quinault and Perreault, and afterwards of
Fontenelle and La Motte, and even to treat the good La Fontaine
with a species of most disrespectful kindness. In England, the
amiable Mr. Addison did not think it unworthy of his gentle and
modest character to set himself at the head of a little cabal of the
same kind, in order to keep down the rising reputation of Mr. Pope.
Mr. Fontenelle, in writing the lives and characters of the members of
the academy of sciences, a society of mathematicians and natural
philosophers, has frequent opportunities of celebrating the amiable
simplicity of their manners; a quality which, he observes, was so
universal among them as to be characteristical, rather of that whole
class of men of letters, than of any individual. Mr. D’Alembert, in
writing the lives and characters of the members of the French
Academy, a society of poets and fine writers, or of those who are
supposed to be such, seems not to have had such frequent
opportunities of making any remark of this kind, and no where
pretends to represent this amiable quality as characteristical of that
class of men of letters whom he celebrates.

113 Our uncertainty concerning our own merit, and our anxiety to
think favourably of it, should together naturally enough make us
desirous to know the opinion of other people concerning it; to be
more than ordinarily elevated when that opinion is favourable, and
to be more than ordinarily mortified when it is otherwise: but they
should not make us desirous either of obtaining the favourable, or of
avoiding the unfavourable opinion, by intrigue and cabal. When a
man has bribed all the judges, the most unanimous decision of the
court, though it may gain him his law-suit, cannot give him any
assurance that he was in the right: and had he carried on his law-
suit merely to satisfy himself that he was in the right, he never
would have bribed the judges. But though he wished to find himself
in the right, he wished likewise to gain his law-suit; and therefore he
bribed the judges. If praise were of no consequence to us, but as a
proof of our own praise-worthiness, we never should endeavour to
obtain it by unfair means. But, though to wise men it is, at least in
doubtful cases, of principal consequence upon this account; it is
likewise of some consequence upon its own account: and therefore
(we cannot, indeed, upon such occasions, call them wise men), but
men very much above the common level have sometimes attempted
both to obtain praise, and to avoid blame, by very unfair means.

Praise and blame express what actually are, praise-worthiness and

blame-worthiness what naturally ought to be, the sentiments of
other people with regard to our character and conduct. The love of
praise is the desire of obtaining the favourable sentiments of our
brethren. The love of praise-worthiness is the desire of rendering
ourselves the proper objects of those sentiments. So far those two
principles resemble and are akin to one another. The like affinity and
resemblance take place between dread of blame and that of blame-
worthiness.

The man who desires to do, or who actually does, a praise-worthy

action, may likewise desire the praise which is due to it, and
sometimes, perhaps, more than is due to it. The two principles are in
this case blended together. How far his conduct may have been
influenced by the one, and how far by the other, may frequently be
unknown even to himself. It must almost always be so to other
people. They who are disposed to lessen the merit of his conduct,
impute it chiefly or altogether to the mere love of praise, or to what
they call mere vanity. They who are disposed to think more
favourably of it, impute it chiefly or altogether to the love of praise-
worthiness; to the love of what is really honourable and noble in
human conduct; to the desire, not merely of obtaining, but of
deserving the approbation and applause of his brethren. The
imagination of the spectator throws upon it either the one colour or
the other, according either to his habits of thinking, or to the favour
or dislike which he may bear to the person whose conduct he is
considering.

114 Some splenetic philosophers, in judging of human nature,

have done as peevish individuals are apt to do in judging of the
conduct of one another, and have imputed to the love of praise, or
to what they call vanity, every action which ought to be ascribed to
that of praise-worthiness. I shall hereafter have occasion to give an
account of some of their systems, and shall not at present stop to
examine them.

Very few men can be satisfied with their own private

consciousness that they have attained those qualities, or performed
those actions, which they admire and think praise-worthy in other
people; unless it is, at the same time, generally acknowledged that
they possess the one, or have performed the other; or, in other
words, unless they have actually obtained that praise which they
think due both to the one and to the other. In this respect, however,
men differ considerably from one another. Some seem indifferent
about the praise, when, in their own minds, they are perfectly
satisfied that they have attained the praise-worthiness. Others
appear much less anxious about the praise-worthiness than about
the praise.

No man can be completely, or even tolerably satisfied, with having

avoided every thing blame-worthy in his conduct, unless he has
likewise avoided the blame or the reproach. A wise man may
frequently neglect praise, even when he has best deserved it; but, in
all matters of serious consequence, he will most carefully endeavour
so to regulate his conduct as to avoid, not only blame-worthiness,
but, as much as possible, every probable imputation of blame. He
will never, indeed, avoid blame by doing any thing which he judges
blame-worthy; by omitting any part of his duty, or by neglecting any
opportunity of doing any thing which he judges to be really and
greatly praise-worthy. But, with these modifications, he will most
anxiously and carefully avoid it. To show much anxiety about praise,
even for praise-worthy actions, is seldom a mark of great wisdom,
but generally of some degree of weakness. But, in being anxious to
avoid the shadow of blame or reproach, there may be no weakness,
but frequently there may be the most praise-worthy prudence.

‘Many people,’ says Cicero, ‘despise glory, who are yet most
severely mortified by unjust reproach; and that most inconsistently.’
This inconsistency, however, seems to be founded in the unalterable
principles of human nature.

The all-wise Author of Nature has, in this manner, taught man to

respect the sentiments and judgments of his brethren; to be more or
less pleased when they approve of his conduct, and to be more or
less hurt when they disapprove of it. He has made man, if I may say
so, the immediate judge of mankind; and has, in this respect, as in
many others, created him after his own image, and appointed him
his vicegerent upon earth, to superintend the behaviour of his
brethren. They are taught by nature, to acknowledge that power and
jurisdiction which 115 has thus been conferred upon him, to be more
or less humbled and mortified when they have incurred his censure,
and to be more or less elated when they have obtained his applause.

But though man has, in this manner, been rendered the immediate
judge of mankind, he has been rendered so only in the first
instance; and an appeal lies from his sentence to a much higher
tribunal, to the tribunal of their own consciences, to that of the
supposed impartial and well-informed spectator, to that of the man
within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of their conduct The
jurisdictions of those two tribunals are founded upon principles
which, though in some respects resembling and akin, are, however,
in reality different and distinct. The jurisdiction of the man without,
is founded altogether in the desire of actual praise, and in the
aversion to actual blame. The jurisdiction of the man within, is
founded altogether in the desire of praise-worthiness, and in the
aversion to blame-worthiness; in the desire of possessing those
qualities, and performing those actions, which we love and admire in
other people; and in the dread of possessing those qualities, and
performing those actions, which we hate and despise in other
people. If the man without should applaud us, either for actions
which we have not performed, or for motives which had no influence
upon us; the man within can immediately humble that pride and
elevation of mind which such groundless acclamations might
otherwise occasion, by telling us, that as we know that we do not
deserve them, we render ourselves despicable by accepting them. If,
on the contrary, the man without should reproach us, either for
actions which we never performed, or for motives which had no
influence upon those which we may have performed, the man within
may immediately correct this false judgment, and assure us, that we
are by no means the proper objects of that censure which has so
unjustly been bestowed upon us. But in this and in some other
cases, the man within seems sometimes, as it were, astonished and
confounded by the vehemence and clamour of the man without. The
violence and loudness with which blame is sometimes poured out
upon us, seems to stupify and benumb our natural sense of praise-
worthiness and blame-worthiness; and the judgments of the man
within, though not, perhaps, absolutely altered or perverted, are,
however, so much shaken in the steadiness and firmness of their
decision, that their natural effect, in securing the tranquillity of the
mind, is frequently in a great measure destroyed. We scarce dare to
absolve ourselves, when all our brethren appear loudly to condemn
us. The supposed impartial spectator of our conduct seems to give
his opinion in our favour with fear and hesitation; when that of all
the real spectators, when that of all those with whose eyes and from
whose station he endeavours to consider it, is unanimously and
violently against us. In such cases, this demigod within the breast
appears, like the demigods of the poets, though 116 partly of
immortal, yet partly too of mortal extraction. When his judgments
are steadily and firmly directed by the sense of praise-worthiness
and blame-worthiness, he seems to act suitably to his divine
extraction: but when he suffers himself to be astonished and
confounded by the judgments of ignorant and weak man, he
discovers his connexion with mortality, and appears to act suitably,
rather to the human, than to the divine, part of his origin.

In such cases, the only effectual consolation of humbled and

afflicted man lies in an appeal to a still higher tribunal, to that of the
all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived, and
whose judgments can never be perverted. A firm confidence in the
unerring rectitude of this great tribunal, before which his innocence
is in due time to be declared, and his virtue to be finally rewarded,
can alone support him under the weakness and despondency of his
own mind, under the perturbation and astonishment of the man
within the breast, whom nature has set up as, in this life, the great
guardian, not only of his innocence, but of his tranquillity. Our
happiness in this life is thus, upon many occasions, dependent upon
the humble hope and expectation of a life to come: a hope and
expectation deeply rooted in human nature; which can alone support
its lofty ideas of its own dignity; can alone illumine the dreary
prospect of its continually approaching mortality, and maintain its
cheerfulness under all the heaviest calamities to which, from the
disorders of this life, it may sometimes be exposed. That there is a
world to come, where exact justice will be done to every man, where
every man will be ranked with those who, in the moral and
intellectual qualities, are really his equals; where the owner of those
humble talents and virtues which, from being depressed by fortunes,
had, in this life, no opportunity of displaying themselves; which were
unknown, not only to the public, but which he himself could scarce
be sure that he possessed, and for which even the man within the
breast could scarce venture to afford him any distinct and clear
testimony; where that modest, silent, and unknown merit, will be
placed upon a level, and sometimes above those who, in this world,
had enjoyed the highest reputation, and who, from the advantage of
their situation, had been enabled to perform the most splendid and
dazzling actions; is a doctrine, in every respect so venerable, so
comfortable to the weakness, so flattering to the grandeur of human
nature, that the virtuous man who has the misfortune to doubt of it,
cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and anxiously to
believe it. It could never have been exposed to the derision of the
scoffer, had not the distribution of rewards and punishments, which
some of its most zealous assertors have taught us was to be made
in that world to come, been too frequently in direct opposition to all
our moral sentiments.

That the assiduous courtier is often more favoured than the

faithful and active servant; that attendance and adulation are often
shorter 117 and surer roads to preferment than merit or service; and
that a campaign at Versailles or St. James’s is often worth two either
in Germany or Flanders, is a complaint which we have all heard from
many a venerable, but discontented, old officer. But what is
considered as the greatest reproach even to the weakness of earthly
sovereigns, has been ascribed, as an act of justice, to divine
perfection; and the duties of devotion, the public and private
worship of the Deity, have been represented, even by men of virtue
and abilities, as the sole virtues which can either entitle to reward or
exempt from punishment in the life to come. They were the virtues
perhaps, most suitable to their station, and in which they themselves
chiefly excelled; and we are all naturally disposed to over-rate the
excellencies of our own characters. In the discourse which the
eloquent and philosophical Massillon pronounced, on giving his
benediction to the standards of the regiment of Catinat, there is the
following address to the officers: ‘What is most deplorable in your
situation, gentlemen, is, that in a life hard and painful, in which the
services and the duties sometimes go beyond the rigour and severity
of the most austere cloisters; you suffer always in vain for the life to
come, and frequently even for this life. Alas! the solitary monk in his
cell, obliged to mortify the flesh and to subject it to the spirit, is
supported by the hope of an assured recompense, and by the secret
unction of that grace which softens the yoke of the Lord. But you, on
the bed of death, can you dare to represent to Him your fatigues
and the daily hardships of your employment? can you dare to solicit
Him for any recompense? and in all the exertions that you have
made, in all the violences that you have done to yourselves, what is
there that He ought to place to His own account? The best days of
your life, however, have been sacrificed to your profession, and ten
years’ service has more worn out your body, than would, perhaps,
have done a whole life of repentance and mortification. Alas! my
brother, one single day of those sufferings, consecrated to the Lord,
would, perhaps, have obtained you an eternal happiness. One single
action, painful to nature, and offered up to Him, would, perhaps,
have secured to you the inheritance of the saints. And you have
done all this, and in vain, for this world.’

To compare, in this manner, the futile mortifications of a

monastery, to the ennobling hardships and hazards of war; to
suppose that one day, or one hour, employed in the former should,
in the eye of the great Judge of the world, have more merit than a
whole life spent honourably in the latter, is surely contrary to all our
moral sentiments: to all the principles by which nature has taught us
to regulate our contempt or admiration. It is this spirit, however,
which, while it has reserved the celestial regions for monks and
friars, or for those whose conduct and conversation resembled those
of monks and friars, has condemned to the infernal all the heroes, all
the statesmen and lawgivers, all the poets 118 and philosophers of
former ages; all those who have invented, improved, or excelled in
the arts, which contribute to the subsistence, to the conveniency, or
to the ornament of human life; all the great protectors, instructors,
and benefactors of mankind; all those to whom our natural sense of
praise-worthiness forces us to ascribe the highest merit and most
exalted virtue. Can we wonder that so strange an application of this
most respectable doctrine should sometimes have exposed it to
contempt and derision; with those at least who had themselves,
perhaps, no great taste or turn for the devout and contemplative
virtues?3
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