On the contrary, the problems had become worse and it had also become necessary to combat the delirious romanticism that had established itself together with the inability to create that came with it – or caused it. “Such romanticism, making us incapable of changing the present and preparing the future, also prevents us from appreciating the past in any intelligent way.”

Sérgio did not ignore political history and its chronology, paying special attention to D. Sebastião and here adopting a controversial stance. He claims D. Sebastião was a “crazy young man, a simpleton and a braggart” and “the fanatics and lunatics of the time filled his head, through prose and verse, with the idea of becoming the defender of the Catholic faith against the Protestant and the Mohammedan”. However, it is the expedition to Africa and Ksar El-Kebir which lead the King, and the Kingdom, to perdition. But there is also the invented notion of D. Sebastião, ‘the Hidden One’, which Sérgio notes has become worn out “by the ideological anaemia of modern Portuguese letters.” As for the Sebastianists, he says they were but “a few harmless idiots, of whom their contemporaries made fun”. At this point, he was already preparing an attack on irrationalism and patriotic sentimentalism which he would unleash a short time later, the pretext being Carlos Malheiro Dias’ Exortação à Mocidade (Exhortation to Youth), and which culminates with the exquisite Tréplica (Rejoinder). This was a controversial debate which, like so many other positions adopted by Seara Nova, aimed to provide the “slow work of collective education”.

This was to become a remarkable controversy, not about the historical D. Sebastião but about the inconsequential sentimentalism that was settling into society, to a large extent generated by anti-rationalist philosophies, but also by imported political nostalgic longings, primarily integralist. The polemical debate ended without Sérgio responding to other attacks that the integralists and others similar continued to plague him with.

Closer to a polemical disagreement with a historical topic was the one he started with Seiscentismo (17th century Portugal) although this was interrupted by the death of António Sardinha, one of the contenders. These were disagreements lateral to the central objective which was to provoke society into carrying out indispensible reforms: “Economic and pedagogic reforms, linked and interwoven amongst themselves like threads in a single piece of cloth” and this always “subordinating to the eternal values of freedom and morality all problems from the major cases of individual or collective conscience to the smallest incidents of social life”.

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