Portuguese literature

“ The Portuguese language can be most conveniently described in relation to the other languages of the Peninsula (see Spain: Language) . Portuguese literature is distinguished by the wealth and variety of its lyric poetry, by its primacy in bucolic verse and prose, by the number of its epics and historical books, by the relative slightness of the epistolary element, and by the almost complete absence of the memoir. ”

“ As some little familiar trait will sometimes give a fresher insight into a great man than the more important facts of his biography, so the ploughing, harvesting and singing of a Portuguese peasant, with their bucolic simplicity, bring the life of the ancients a little nearer to us than the sight of their great aqueducts and columns. But the nineteenth century is striking the death-blow of the bucolic very fast, the world over, and Portugal is awake and bestirring herself—not the less effectively that she is making no noise about it. ”

“ The greatest poet of this period, and indeed in the whole history of Portuguese literature, is Luiz de Camoens, in whose works, epic, lyric, and dramatic, the cultivation of the two literary currents of this epoch, the national and the Renaissance, attained to its highest perfection, and to whom Portuguese literature chiefly owes its place in the literature of the world. ”

“ Every great—or small—landowner who takes a personal interest in his property, every non-political politician—the phrase is no contradiction in terms—who studies not rhetoric but reality, every Portuguese, however humble, who cultivates his own garden, whether that garden be the Portuguese language or literature or soil or subsoil or industry, will go a step towards constituting a real Portugal of the Portuguese, and will deserve as many laurels of his country as crown the brows of the old Conquistadores. ”

“ Its presence in Portuguese literature, was scarcely perceptible. It has already been shewn that during the first half of the eighteenth century, Portuguese poetry, even in the hands of the few poets who were not unwilling to learn elegance from the French, continued subject to the style of the Gongorists and Marinists. Of course still less was it to be expected that Portuguese writers should be capable of imitating the polite prose of the French, since such an imitation would pre-suppose a cultivation of the understanding which at that time was not practicable in Portugal. ”

“ Latin nations give more importance to literature than is perhaps attributed to it in England, and the fact that Portuguese literature and Portuguese history meet with little sympathy or study in England undoubtedly has its effect in Portugal when it is compared with the attitude of Germany. The difference leaps to the eyes of all educated persons in Portugal, and it must not be forgotten that in Portugal the uneducated people—apart from the trained demagogues’ bands in the cities—has no part or parcel in the affairs of the nation. ”

“ All that need be said respecting the Portuguese eloquence of the seventeenth century, may be related within the compass of a few pages. The obstacles which had hitherto impeded the free cultivation of energetic and reasoning prose in Portuguese literature, operated still more fatally, when the restraints on conscience became more oppressive, and when there was no longer any feeling of political greatness to give excitement to the thinking mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In spirit and style they so closely resemble each other, that they may all be considered as the production of one individual. If at this period French taste had acquired any decided influence on Portuguese literature, such dramas, though they might, for the sake of incident, music, and decoration, have been tolerated on the stage, would never have been sought for in print. ”

“ The praiseworthy diligence which the Portuguese now manifest in collecting scientific knowledge of every kind, and in republishing the works of their early authors, appears, however, to have operated indirectly to the prejudice of eloquence, for among the men of talent, to whom Portugal is indebted for her regeneration, none have yet distinguished themselves in prose composition. ”

“ No great literature can come of Portuguese as it is at present too often spoken and written, and without a literature a nation dwindles and dies. (Witness the Basques, who have the vigour of six ordinary nations, and are losing their language and nationality because they have never given much attention to the written word, content with their splendid old games and customs.) It is a pity that the passion for politics in Portugal has not inspired its devotees with nobler prose ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is intensely patriotic, although it is touched by both Greek mythology, and the Italian style, which during this epoch had been slightly blended with the Portuguese. Portugal had little or no influence on the literature of any nation but her own, receiving her strongest impressions from outsiders. In the eighteenth century she was dominated both in taste and manners by the French, and the beginning of the nineteenth century found her a great admirer and imitator of English literature. ”

“ Two things occur to produce this development in Brazilian literary expression, at the very beginning of civilization in this country: the vigor of literary expression in Portugal and the Jesuit collegios. Whatever be the value of Portuguese literature, it is beyond dispute that no literature of the smaller peoples rivals it in wealth and variety. When Brazil was discovered, only a small part of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal possessed a literary life. ”

“ The Portuguese have reason to be proud of their literature, which, though it does not abound in masterpieces of the first order, possesses a very large number of works, in verse and prose, of conspicuous merit and deserving to be far better known, both in Portugal and abroad. ”

“ In art, as in literature, caricature usually flourishes in Portugal, and it is perhaps a useful corrective of the tendency to copiousness and vagueness of outline, and, in the hands of clever draughtsmen, has given ample proof that it need not degenerate into vulgarity. The fervent activity in many fields gives good hope, at any rate, of a twentieth-century crop of writers and artists who may maintain or surpass the achievement of the nineteenth. ”

“ It is a question of encouraging the indigenous side of Portuguese civilisation—in language, literature, dress, legislation, drama, cookery, in everything—which since the sixteenth century has been set aside for the imported foreign-erudite; to develop as it were the Saxon element at the expense of the Norman. The people have succeeded in keeping many of their old and excellent customs—but by the skin of their teeth now—as they have their own names for many of the Lisbon streets and their own words side by side with those of learned origin. ”

“ It is natural, then, that early letters in Brazil should have been Portuguese not only in language, but in inspiration, feeling and spirit. Similarly, we find the early intellectual dependence of the Spanish American countries upon Spain, even as later both the Spanish and the Portuguese writers of America were to be influenced greatly by French literature. "Brazilian poetry," says Verissimo in the little essay already referred to, "was already in the seventeenth century superior to Portuguese verse." ”

“ Without enforcing with pedantic rigour the restoration of all the old forms of the sixteenth century, the best Portuguese authors now endeavour to write their mother tongue with purity, and at the same time to satisfy the new wants created by the progress of time and the spirit of the age. ”

“ Now the Portuguese language was then, as the loud complaint of Lobo sufficiently proves, frequently denied, even in Portugal, any claim to the possession of that accuracy and elegance, without which poetry, deficient merely in cultivation, might indeed exist, but which is indispensably necessary to prose composition, when it is to be elevated above the formal style of ceremony, and the negligent expression of common life. ”

“ A taste for the fine arts, for philosophy, and literary cultivation, became fashionable in Portugal. The connexion with England proved, in some respects, advantageous to the new progress of Portuguese genius, and promoted literary improvement; for the Gallicists lost a considerable portion of their political ascendancy, when English literature began to be properly estimated in Portugal. ”

“ But the historical works which were written in the Portuguese language in the sixteenth century, are more important to the lover of literature, as well as the politician, than the other compositions in prose which have just been noticed. In Portugal, as well as in Spain, relations of real events had long been completely distinguished from romantic prose. But before the old chronicle style could become entirely obsolete, it was necessary that the old chronicle spirit should yield to the nobler spirit of historic art ”

“ He remained at Lisbon a month or two, renewing old associations, and in July took up his abode at Cintra. Here he busied himself in collecting materials for his "History of Portugal," the work that was to hand down his name to posterity, almost the first and the last day dream of his life. He devoted himself likewise to the assiduous study of Portuguese literature, nothing daunted by its comparatively unimportant character. "It is not worth much," says he, "but it is not from the rose and the violet only that the bee sucks honey." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An effort to avoid the bad taste of the preceding age, and upon the whole to cultivate a clear and dignified form of expression, is perceptible in most of the modern treatises of the Portuguese. Empty bombast has given place to the language of reason. The Portuguese nation have 391 now to wish for a modern historian qualified to tread in the footsteps of Barros, Brito and Andrada. Such a writer might succeed in still more firmly rivetting the connecting link between the promising present and glorious past in the hearts of Portuguese patriots. ”

“ The foreigner, who is not prepossessed by any national partiality, in favour of either the Castilian or the Portuguese modifications of the Hispanic romance, might, perhaps, be induced to conclude that poetry would on the whole have sustained no essential loss, had the language of Portugal been rejected by literature, and reduced like the Galician dialect to the rank of a common popular idiom ”

“ The great mass of the people adhered to the old romance style; while the nobility, men of education, and finally, all who wished to mingle in fashionable society, preferred the Italian forms, on which, however, the Portuguese national impress was always discernible. But the majority of the poets whose names acquired celebrity, belonged to noble families;—for in Portugal, as in Italy and Spain, every one who wished to gain distinction at court, or in the army, or as a well educated man of the world, composed verses ”

“ But the effect of the union is very imperfectly appreciated by a foreigner; and the finest charm of the expression is lost in the labour of studying a poetic language of this kind. Besides the simplicity of 68 the composition does not exclude from Saa de Miranda’s eclogues, those mysterious allusions to the romantic manners of the age, which are so common in the writings of the old Portuguese poets. ”