Friedrich Bouterwek

“ In those nations, as elsewhere, fate has, by incomprehensible laws, sometimes summoned the right spirit at the right hour, and has sometimes denied the art to the artist when all external circumstances appeared most favourable, and when the perseverance of emulative competitors was most conspicuous. Thus Portugal cannot boast of a Cervantes, and Spain has given birth to no Camoens.
The Portuguese had raised their country to the same height of political glory as Spain, when their poets began to vie with the Spanish in the ingenious imitation of the Italian forms. ”

“ It would be impossible to furnish an abstract of the tale of love and heroism which forms the subject of this romance. Even on a perusal of the whole, so great is the obscurity, that nothing can be comprehended of the circumstances, without the utmost effort of attention. That Ribeyro has clothed in the disguise of this story, the most interesting events of his own life, is a fact which admits of no doubt; for the contrivance which he adopted with the view of concealing his personal implication, by the intricate arrangement of his romance, is disclosed with the greatest simplicity. ”

“ The twenty-six years reign of Joseph Emanuel, from 1750 to 1777, proved more salutary for the Portuguese nation. The rigid despotism of the powerful Marquis de Pombal, who in the name of the king ruled with unlimited sway, left unpleasant recollections in the minds of a portion of the nation. Nevertheless the spirit of the higher nobility and of the ecclesiastics was not wholly subdued by his measures. In the dungeons which were filled with state prisoners, it is possible that some men of talent languished. But Pombal’s iron arm roused the slumbering nation. ”

“ Portuguese poetry is no less national than the Spanish. The tendency to orientalism, with which the Spaniards have been so frequently reproached, was, in like manner, a characteristic of the poetic genius of the Portuguese, until the general influence of French taste produced a remarkable change in manners and in literature. To form a just estimate of the works of Saa de Miranda, Camoens, Rodriguez Lobo, and the other principal Portuguese poets, it is not the Greek or Latin, and by no means the French rule of criticism, which ought to be made the measure of poetic excellence. ”

“ To the Portuguese nation must be attributed the excellencies and the defects which Portuguese poetry and eloquence presented throughout the whole of this period. In Portugal, no poet, who wished to distinguish himself within the sphere of his art, presumed to dictate legislatorily to the national taste. No one, by striking out a new path, sought to explore the unbeaten regions of his native Parnassus. No sects, like those which occasionally arose in Spain, disturbed the poetic harmony of the Portuguese poets, whose various voices were always attuned in national concord. ”

“ Indeed to a poet of Rodriguez Lobo’s talent it certainly could not be difficult to produce an exaggerated imitation of the style of the Spanish national romance. But such extravagant imitation will not deprive the best of those romances of the merit which they really possess. Lobo seems purposely to have introduced among these compositions, some pastoral romances in the Portuguese language; as if it were not as easy and even easier to ridicule pastoral poetry ”

“ That Portuguese writers, who, in other instances have shewn themselves so careful in the collection of 227 biographic details, should be almost silent respecting the life of such a poet as Francisco Rodriguez Lobo, is a circumstance only to be explained by one of those sports of fortune, through which in literature, as in life, honour is often withheld from the most deserving, and lavished on the worthless. ”

“ On a general comparison of the treasures of the polite learning of Spain with the poetry and eloquence of Portugal, there will appear on the Spanish side a balance of literary riches, but not of genius and cultivation. The heroic romances, the satire of Cervantes, and the dramatic poetry of the Spaniards, still preponderate, though the epic poem of Camoens, and all the beautiful and singular productions of Portuguese pastoral poetry be weighed in the opposite scale. ”

“ In this general history it is sufficient briefly to describe how the new spirit of Portuguese literature acquired, even on its poetic side, a marked influence, though it did not unfold itself with that energy which was necessary to reproduce the poetry of the sixteenth century under somewhat varied features. This period must not yet be extolled as the commencement of a second golden age of Portuguese poetry; but the poetic talent of the Portuguese has opened for itself a wider field; and fantastic rhyming no longer finds admirers among the educated class of readers. ”

“ The love of wealth being now his governing passion, he rapidly enriches himself at the expense of the nation, and at last dies of vanity.
What this satire occasionally wants in refinement, is compensated by its extraordinary features, in which Andrada’s wit shines with peculiar lustre: and though the comic effusions of the ingenious author can only rank as poetic trifles, they are nevertheless entitled to some attention in consequence of their being chiefly directed against the absurd style which then distinguished and disfigured Spanish and Portuguese literature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His imagination, which never of itself took a lofty flight, was much more inclined to enlarge artificially upon any pleasing subject, than to seize with inspiration and freely fashion a subject of its own; and the rules of French criticism doubtless contributed to allure him to the cultivated occasional style, as that style may justly be denominated, which, whenever the opportunity for an occasional poem offers, is always at the command of a writer possessing no common share of descriptive talent. ”

“ This, which is in other respects an inferior style of poetry, is nevertheless held in consideration by all cultivated nations. To reject it as altogether worthless would indeed be very unjust, since it serves to shew how judgment, talent, and taste, can by the study of ancient models, produce, even without the aid of genius, a certain kind of poetic beauty, which is not unmeritorious, though it frequently presents scarcely a shadow of that pure and sublime beauty which is the offspring of real genius. ”

“ Keeping this principle in view, attention must be paid to local circumstances, which, whenever ancient or modern poetry has arisen out of the poetic perception of nature and human life, rather than out of reading, or philosophic and critical abstractions, give to the poetic creations of 405 the mind the true impress of reality;—and, amidst realities, the poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lived. These poets sufficiently satisfied their contemporaries and their age, but they had no wish to recommend themselves to posterity by a theoretically cultivated and universal style of poetry. ”

“ Among the poets of all ages Camoens is one of the most eminent; and though to a foreigner it may at first sight seem strange that he has permanently obtained in the literature of his country the surname of O Grande (the Great) , a title given in history only to a few distinguished sovereigns, yet in the unbounded homage which the Portuguese render to the name of the man, who during his life was suffered to languish in penury, the citizen of the world will readily recognize a general desire to compensate for the injustice with which he was treated by his contemporaries. ”

“ That the spirit of vigorous emulation should so suddenly have vanished among the Portuguese poets, would, however, be inconceivable, were it not that in Spain about the same period, every species of poetic composition, except dramatic poetry, which flowed like an impetuous torrent, remained stationary at the point at which it stood in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Both the Spaniards and the Portuguese felt the paralyzing influence of the political relations of their deeply humiliated countries ”

“ Even the nobility and the ecclesiastics, who, contrary to the express wish of the people, had favoured the claims by which Philip II. of Spain was declared Philip I. of Portugal, could not possibly be warm partisans of a government which oppressed the whole country by an absurd and despotic system of administration. During the sixty years therefore in which Portugal felt the weight of Spanish supremacy, every patriotic Portuguese regarded the three Philips, who ruled over his native country, merely as kings of Portugal, unfortunately residing in Madrid. ”

“ That no writer of talent should have produced a work in Portuguese prose, which in a rhetorical point of view is worthy to mark an epoch, may in some respects be accounted for by peculiar circumstances, and must in others be attributed merely to the caprice of chance. The same restrictions on intellectual freedom, which in Portugal so effectually opposed the full developement of pure eloquence, had likewise held captive the thinking faculty in Spain. ”

“ He attached more importance to noble than to extraordinary ideas. But to poetic energy, precision and plenitude of picturesque expression, or what may be termed the poetry of language, his attention was chiefly directed. This quality he cultivated with a degree of talent and judgment, which would have imparted to his style Horatian perfection, were it not for the philosophic laconism peculiar to the diction of Horace, and which no modern poet, Klopstock alone excepted, has been able to approach. ”

“ At the same time it must not be forgotten that the Lusiad is a totally different kind of heroic poem from all those epopees, whether successful or unsuccessful, in which a single hero is the main spring of the whole epic action. According to the plan which Camoens sketched for his national poem, he was enabled to dispense with the choice of a hero whose atchievements should throw those of all others into the shade, and form the sole source of epic interest. To this plan, however, an essential beauty of epic poetry was necessarily sacrificed. ”

“ The efforts made by the poets of this classic school to attain the correctness of the ancients seem to have checked their powers of fancy, and it may be presumed that imaginations which were so easily repressed, could not be very creative and energetic. Those who, like some modern German writers would, in defiance of every rule of language, render genius the measure of classic excellence, must find a new term to designate that poetry, the greatest merit of which is the elegant perfection and pure rounding of poetic forms after the example of the ancients. ”

“ The extraordinary predilection of the more ancient Portuguese for this species of pastoral poetry, had therefore descended from one generation to another, down to these latter times. One of Da Costa’s eclogues is dedicated to the prime minister, the Marquis of Pombal, or as he was then still called, the Count of Oeyras, with a warmth of feeling which seems to have been the genuine effusion of the poet’s heart. ”

“ 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 common fate of humanity, which, independently of his personal circumstances, he always viewed profoundly and poetically, was in India more than ever present to his imagination; and in his elegies he has poured forth, without restraint, all the feelings of his heart. Thus is sympathy more powerfully excited by these compositions than by many of the same class, the beauties of which are of a less prosaic character. No other works of the poet so irresistibly command the reader’s regret for his misfortunes, and love for him as a man. ”