ortucjuese iterature to the eno of tbe t8tb Century EDGAR PRESTAGE SHERi' \ T ; Manchester: >ss Street nW~ f* Portuguese literature to the y_ of the I8tb Century . . . j^ flbortugueee %tterature to the enb of the I8tb Century: Being a Hectare fceliverefc at flfeancbester TUnivereity on tbe 1st Jfebruarp, 1909 BY EDGAR PRESTAGE Commendador of the Order of S. Thiago, Special Lecturer on Portuguese Literature in the University. LONDON SHERRATT 6- HUGHES Manchester: 34 Cross Street 1909 ^o tbe flbemors of Sir "Ricbarfc Burton translator of Camoens ; first outc>e in Portuguese letters. 2139190 Portuguese Literature to the End of the i8th Century . . BEFORE beginning to speak of the literature, I should like to make a few remarks about the language in which it is written. Some persons, who are less than wise, imagine that Portuguese is a dialect of Spanish, but I need hardly say that this is a serious error. Portuguese is one of several descendants of the ' lingua rustica ' spoken in the countries which formed part of the Roman Empire, and both in its morphology and syntax, it represents an organic transformation of Latin, without the direct intervention of any foreign tongue. The sounds, the grammatical forms and the syntactical types, with a few exceptions, derive from Latin, but the vocabulary has absorbed a considerable number of Germanic and Arabic words, and there are a few which have a Celtic or Iberian origin. The i8th century poet, Cruz e Silva, doubtless went too far when he called Portuguese "the first-born daughter" of Latin; but it is, in some respects, the nearest of the Romance languages to Latin, so that Camoens could say, referring to Venus and his countrymen : " And for their tongue which, as her fancy deems, With slight corruption, e'en the Latin seems." l Portuguese has every right, philological and historical, 1. Lusiads, Canto I, stanza 33. 8 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE to be considered a distinct and independent language with an original character of its own, while from a literary standpoint, it may even claim to be the elder sister of Spanish, seeing that the early love-songs of the whole Peninsula were composed in Gallician-Portuguese. By the close of the Middle Ages the written language had travelled far from its beginnings and threatened to become as abbreviated as French, but the learned writers of the 1 6th century, in their passion for classical antiquity, set about to re-approximate the vocabulary to Latin, and so far succeeded that it has been possible to write a sentence which is at once Portuguese and Latin. There then began that tendency to a separation between the written and spoken tongue between the men of letters and the people, which with a few exceptions, as in the case of D. Francisco Manoel de Mello, lasted almost into the igth century, and though Francisco Manoel do Nasci- mento and others did much to bridge the gulf, it was not until the Romantic School appealed to tradition and folklore and drew on the everyday speech of the people, that the written tongue became once more national in the ..fl full sense. Now, thanks to the writings of such men as Almeida Garrett, Camillo Castello Branco and E$a de Queiroz, written Portuguese once more fairly represents the spoken language, and it has even been enriched to such an extent that its wealth of metaphors and synonyms not infrequently places an English translator in serious difficulties. Another very common error which I would like to correct is the belief that Portugal has produced no considerable writer except Camoens, and that The EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 9 Lusiads contain his only work of the first rank. To the last point my reply must be that very many students of the complete writings of the " Prince of Spanish l Poets," as he is named, find him greater and more original as a lyric than as an epic poet, while as to the first point, I would say that only lack of acquaintance with the literature excusable enough, seeing that it is written in a little known language, that translations are lacking, and that no modern account of it exists in English can explain why men like Gil Vicente, Sa de Miranda, D. Francisco Manoel de Mello, Padre Antonio Vieira, the Visconde de Almeida Garrett, Camillo Castello Branco, Joao de Deus, Anthero de Quental and Ega de Queiroz {inter alios) have failed to receive the honour they deserve and actually enjoy outside England. 2 Setting aside its importance to students of compara- tive literature, and especially of Spanish, because the one cannot be separated from the other, Portuguese has claims to your attention for its own sake, quite apart from Camoens, and these are some of them : (a) Amadis of Gaul, the prototype and greatest of the romances of chivalry, probably suffered its prose redaction in Portugal, and a Portuguese, Francisco de Moraes, inaugurated a famous series with the Palmerin of England. It will be 1. " Spanish " is here used in the old sense as applying to the whole Peninsula. The "Coronica do Condestabre " (cap. 79), referring to the Holy Constable's death, says : ' ' El Rey e o Infante Ihe mandaro fazer suas exequias mui honrradamete, como em espafia se nom fez a homem de seu estado," and the Archbishop of Braga still uses the title "Primate of the Spains." 2. Unlike Germans, Italians and even Frenchmen, we English seem to translate very little of the best foreign literature nowadays. Our ancestors of the 17th century had a more catholic taste, though they worked in the great period of English letters. \ io PORTUGUESE LITERATURE remembered that these two books were commended by Cervantes in Don Quixote, and spared from the bonfire to which he consigned other works of the kind. Another Portuguese, Bernardim Ribeiro, furnished the true model of the pastoral novel, a form of art which Jorge de Montemor carried to perfection in his Diana, a book of European influence. 1 (b) Its wealth of folk poetry, which is still alive in the mouths of the peasantry, and its long line of lyric, and especially bucolic, poets through the ages, from the days of King Diniz to the present. Love has always been a serious business, and often a fatality, with the Portuguese, hence the country can boast the most exalted erotic poets, men instinct with the delicate sensibility of the Celt and his tender melancholy. (c) Its stirring and unrivalled historical and travel literature of the i5th, i6th, and early iyth centuries, during which Portugal initiated the ocean voyages, made the discoveries, built up and ruled an Empire wider than that of Rome, and was, for a brief space, a world power. (d) Portugal had one of the fathers of the Spanish drama in Gil Vicente who prepared the way for and influenced both Lope de Vega and Calderon, and during the iyth century she made important 1. " Let Palmerin of England be preserved as a thing rarely delectable and let such another box as that which Alexander found among Darius' spoils and deputed to keep Homer's works, be made for it." (Shelton's version.) The "Diana" gave Shakespeare the story of the "Two Gentlemen of Verona." It is interspersed with poetry, a good portion of which is reprinted in " England's Helicon," 1600. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY n contributions to its wealth, just as in the Diana she had enriched the Spanish, and through it the European novel, and as in the Historia de Cataluna she gave a classic to Spanish history. (e) The literary output of the igth century, which has seen a succession of poets and prose writers such as few nations can rival and still fewer surpass. (/) The number of classic works which differ from anything found in other literatures sufficiently to prove the distinct individuality of Portuguese : Among these are : 1. The Chronicles of Fernao Lopes the Froissart of his country. 2. The Eclogues of Bernardim Ribeiro and Christovam Falcao. 3. The plays of Gil Vicente. 4. The Historia Tragico-Maritima which has been named the prose epic of saudade. 5. The Peregrination of Fernao Mendes Pinto. 6. The Apologos Dialogaes of D. Francisco Manuel de Mello. 7. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. 8. The Folhas Cahidas and Frei LuizdeSousa of Garrett. The geographical situation of Portugal, lying, as she does, between the continent and the ocean, has largely determined the course of her history, and explains many features of her literature. The struggle to win and guard her independence from her bigger 12 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE Eastern neighbour drove the country time after time to seek foreign alliances and assistance, and by this means, among others, she acquired a knowledge of "the gay science" and the romances of chivalry; but the secular strife is broken by periods of friendship with Castile and united Spain, cemented by inter- marriages between the reigning houses, during which Portugal draws upon, or is conquered by, Spanish culture. Alternatively she accepts Castilian-Spanish models, as in the i$th and i;th centuries, and reacts against them, seeking inspiration from Italy in the i6th century, and from France in the i8th, while, with true Celtic love of imitation and receptivity, the leaders of the Romantic movement were attracted by and absorbed the ideas of contemporary French, English and German writers. The union of two unequal powers almost always results in detriment to the smaller and weaker, hence it happened that in the sixty years that intervened between 1580 and 1640, Spanish influence proved as overpowering in the domain of letters as of politics, and Portugal lost her literary as well as her political autonomy. On the other hand, it was the very impossibility of expansion in Europe that drove Portugal to undertake the ocean voyages and led to the discoveries, and to this we owe the most characteristic and valuable portion of her literary output, e.g., the Lusiads and part of the lyrics of Camoens, the Historia Tragico-Maritima, the Decades of Barros, and the Peregrination of Fernao Mendes Pinto. Although no literary documents belonging to the first century of Portuguese history have come down to us, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 13 there are evidences, in the Romanceiro and elsewhere, of the existence of an indigenous popular poetry which had probably been awakened by the Arabs, and if Prove^al influence furnished both the forms and the stimulus and moulded the manifestations of poetical talent for nearly two hundred years, they did little more. Already by the end of that century the lyric poetry of the troubadours had its cultivators in Portugal, but little of moment was written prior to the middle of the I3th century. In 1248, however, the accession of King Affonso III., who had lived for some years in France at the Court of St. Louis, and married a French wife, inaugurated an epoch of original and vigorous production, the results of which may be seen in the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, the oldest collection of Peninsular verse. The Cancioneiro da Vaticana illustrates the most brilliant period of Palace poetry, that of the reign of King Diniz, a cultivated man, who had been educated by Aymeric, Bishop of Cahors, and founded the University of Coimbra. His court became a literary centre, to which singers flocked from all parts to compete for his favour by displaying their poetical talent and artifice, and he himself was the most productive troubadour of the time, for of the 1,200 songs of that age which have been preserved, no less than 128 are attributed to his pen. They are mainly erotic, and it must be confesed rather conventional in treatment, but his ballads and pastorals have a natural flavour and a real charm. He had two bastard sons, D. Affonso Sanches and D. Pedro, Conde de Barcellos : the first sings of love with sincerity, but the second has his father's defects without his merits, and is only represented by some gross 14 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE songs of maldizer. This I3th century Court poetry is partly artificial, as copied directly from Provencal models, but in other part, though conceived after a traditional type, it is cast in a popular form and its principal subjects are love and satire. In this last, the Portuguese hold the palm, and though they lacked the culture of their Provencal masters, their compositions, for all the monotony and poverty of ideas they display, not rarely reveal a greater sincerity, while the Cant ares de Ami go, derived straight from the people, have a simple directness which makes them unique of their kind. The death of King Diniz dealt a severe blow to troubadour verse, and, during the reign of his successor, Court poetry was in full decadence, while only the names of a few bards belonging to the last half of the I4th century have survived, among them the Gallicians Vasco Peres de Camoens, an ancestor of the great epic poet, and the typical lover Macias, "the Enamoured." It is curious that the stirring events of the long struggle with the Moors find not an echo in the Cancioneiros, which with one exception have no heroic songs, but are purely lyrical in form and tone ; indeed the sole attempt at an epic in mediaeval times is a poem by Affonso Giraldes on the battle of the Salado, of which only fragments remain. But while the Court was the centre for the production of this somewhat artificial verse, the people were elaborating a ballad poetry of their own, the body of which is known as the Romanceiro. It consists of lyrico- narrative poems though some seem rudimentary epics- dealing with adventures, love, war, chivalry, religious EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 15 legends and the sea, many of which are common to the whole Peninsula, but though the Spanish collection is the richer, the Portuguese versions are sometimes the more complete. Being essentially popular, the Roman- ceiro contains traces of the various civilisations which have existed in Portugal. Together with Celtic traditions, it has Germanic symbolism and superstitions, while the heroic songs called 'Aravias,' were sung to the accom- paniment of an Arab instrument, the guitar, and we meet with many Moorish legends : moreover the Romanceiro contains elements imported from the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles whose presence must be ascribed to erudite influence. The oldest specimens have unfor- tunately perished, and scarcely any of the ' romances ' now existing date back before the i5th century. Even before that time, the Provencal school had died of inanition and the Court poets, having exhausted all the artifices of troubadour lyricism, had recourse for novelty's sake to the popular romances, imitating and adapting them. Thus they were brought into fashion, and the literature of this and the following century teems with allusions to and citations from the once despised poetry of the people. The triumph of the Classical Renaissance, however, thrust them once more into the background, and there they remained until the igth century, when Almeida Garrett, basing his renovation of the literature on the national traditions, collected the folk poetry direct from the mouths of the peasantry. His literary instinct, however, led him to polish and adorn it, and it is only within the last forty years that, by the labours of Dr. Theophilo Braga and others, this treasury of 16 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE nationality has been critically explored and fully laid bare. The first prose documents which can fairly be included under the title of literature only appear in the 1 4th century ; previous to that date Latin was the medium of expression. They consist of chronicles, lives of saints and genealogical treatises called Livros de Linhagens, the last being aristocratic registers, portions of which have considerable interest, e.g., the Nobiliano do Conde D. Pedro contains the genealogy of King Arthur and the adventures of Merlin and Lear. As you will infer from what I have already said, Portugal never elaborated her own chansons de gestes, but received the great medieval poems of love adventure from abroad, and gave some of them a prose form at an early date. Among these was Amadis. The redaction in prose of the first three books, much as we possess them, is attributed, with good reason, to Joao Lobeira, a troubadour of the Court of King Diniz at the end of the I3th century, though the Portuguese version has been lost and only the Spanish remains ; while the fourth book may well be the work of a descendant, Vasco de Lobeira. Introduced partly from France, partly from England, the romances of chivalry played a great part in Portugal from early times, 1 and when their ideal decayed, a sort of quixotism remained and became incarnated in the figure of the ' fidalgo pobre ' (the poor notable), the most original type of the national comedy. In the I5th century, King John I., the bastard elect of the people, compared himself 1. The " Cancioneiro da Ajuda " has a number of Breton " lais " on chivalric subjects. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 17 to Arthur, and called his knights after the names of the paladins of the Round Table, his chief henchman, the Holy Constable, Nuno Alvares Pereira, desired to be a virgin in imitation of Galahad, King Duarte stocked his library with the best novels of adventure, the Infante D. Pedro, like a wandering knight, was fabled to have visited " the seven parts of the world," King AfTonso, the African, travelled out of his way to see a copy of Lancelot of the Lake, and even King John II., the Perfect Prince after the manner of Machiavelli, could take part in a palace entertainment dressed as the Knight of the Swan. 1 The cultivated taste of the Renaissance affected to despise Amadis, and the medieval stories but adapted them, altering the scenes and episodes in imitation of and out of homage to classical antiquity. Hence came the great cycle of the Palmerins, while the Chronica do Emperador Clarirmmdo of Joao de Barros, which gives a legendary account of the origin of the Burgundian Dynasty in Portugal, must be ascribed to the same influences, combined with an ingrained national taste. On another side the medieval romance of chivalry gave place to the pastoral novel. The first of these was the ingenuous and beautiful Saudades by Bernardim Ribeiro, who had probably read Sanazzarro's Arcadia and told the secret of his love and sorrows under the guise of an allegory. This form was also annexed by the Classicists, and the Portuguese, Jorge de Montemor, originated yet another series of romances with his Diana, where he described the scenery of his native country in a foreign 1. Cf. the episode of the Twelve of England in the " Lusiads " which, though legendary, shows how firm a root the idea of chivalry had taken in Portugal. i8 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE land and tongue. By way of supplement to what has been said of the mediaeval romance and its development, I may mention that Portugal contributed to ^Esop litera- ture with the Livro de Esopo, recently published, but her best story-teller, previous to modern times, is Gon^alo Fernandes Trancoso, whose Historias de Proveito e Exem-plo, though they owe something to Boccaccio, have a strong traditional element, and remained popular until the middle of the i8th century. 1 The Revolution of 1383, which placed John the Bastard on the throne, while it heralded the oversea expeditions and led to the discoveries, inaugurated a new era in literature as in politics : though poetry languished, prose immediately took its place, and the 1 5th century became that of the Chroniclers. The King wrote a book of the chase, his sons, Duarte and Pedro, each composed a moral treatise, and both John and his successors proved themselves liberal patrons of letters. An anonymous account of D. Nuno Alvares Pereira, the Portuguese Cid, written in a charming infantile style, opens the series of historical books, but the father of Portuguese history is Fernao Lopes, who in his Chronicles of Kings Pedro, Fernando and John I. proves himself both an historian and a great prose writer. Endowed with a poet's soul and a lawyer's care of state- ment, he possessed rare descriptive powers, and writes in a simple direct style. His portraits are admirably vivid and it is not too much to say that with him a whole epoch 1. One of these stories entitled "The Merchant Knight" was Englished by the late Dr. R. Garnett and appeared in "The Venture," London, 1903. The same Lusophil translated forty sonnets of Camoens in the volume "Dante Petrarch Camoens," London, 1896, as well as a few of Quental, still un- published. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 19 comes to light again. Azurara, who succeeded him as Royal Chronicler, and wrote the story of the Capture of Cent a and the Chronicle of Guinea, our chief authority for the work of Prince Henry the Navigator, is too pedantic, too fond of moralising. If as reliable an historian as Lopes, he cannot rival him as a writer, while Ruy de Pina, though neither a great Chronicler nor an artist like Lopes, avoids the defects of Azurara, and his accounts of the reigns of D. Duarte, D. Affonso V. and D. John II. are creditable pieces of work. Later on, fat and jovial Garcia de Resende appropriated Pina's last Chronicle and adding a number of anecdotes which he had learnt during his personal intimacy with the Monarch, issued it under his own name, though most of it is Pina word for word, a daring piracy only pardonable by his real services to literature in another department. The introduction of Italian poetry, especially that of Petrarch, promoted a revival of Spanish verse which accounts for its superiority to and absolute authority in Portugal throughout the i$th century. The Constable D. Pedro, son of the Infant of that name, made himself the first representative of the new school which adopted a taste for allegory and a reverence for classical antiquity, both derived from Italy. He wrote in Castilian as well as in Portuguese, and to him it was that the Marquis de Santillana addressed the famous letter in which he outlined the history of Peninsular verse. The poetry of the reign of Kings Affonso V. and John II. is contained in the Cancioneiro Geral compiled by Garcia de Resende, which includes the compositions of nearly 300 knights and gentlemen, some 29 of whom 20 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE wrote in Castilian. The chief influence perceptible is that of Juan de Mena, but, side by side with imitations of Mena and Jorge Manrique, appear the allegorical poems of Duarte de Brito and Diogo Brandao which have something of the spirit of the Divina Commedia as reflected through the Inferno de Amor of Garci Sanchez de Badajoz. The famous process of Cuidar e Suspirar has all the characteristics of allegorical poetry, and is a pallid paraphrase of the courts of love of Provencal tradition. The Cancioneiro represents the poetical efforts of more than fifty years, but inspiration is conspicuously lacking in this maze of empty gallantry, gross witticism and commonplace satire. Resende's lines on the death of D. Ignez de Castro, the Fingimento de Amores of Brandao and D. Pedro's Coplas are an exception ; the remainder breathe an artificial atmosphere and seem remote from the realities of life. These idle courtiers appear to have considered verse-making as a diversion, and it is significant that, though they included the leading men of the time, they are silent about the great deeds of the century, the lifelong efforts of Prince Henry to disclose the unknown world and spread the Faith, the epic combats in Africa, and the rounding of the Cape of Storms. Three names, however, figure in the Cancioneiro Geral which were destined to profoundly influence the literary history of their country those of Bernardim Ribeiro, Gil Vicente and Sa de Miranda. If Portuguese pastoral poetry in its best perod has a truth and sincerity unknown in that of other modern peoples, the reason is that, instead of contenting themselves with a copy of EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 21 classical models, its exponents sought inspiration from national sources, the popular Pastor ellas and Serranilhas. It seems probable that a knowledge of the idylls of Theocritus and of the Dantesque allegory had reached Bernardim Ribeiro, the founder of the bucolic school, from Italy, and stimulated thereby, he put new life into the old forms and, in his eclogues, contrived to make the dialogue natural, and to combine simplicity with feeling, in verses of rare rhythmic beauty and perfect harmony. His disciple Christovam Falcao, who was imbued with the same spirit, soared even higher, and writing in tears with his heart's blood the story of his love and loss produced the eclogue "Crisfal," which is probably unique in the literature of Europe. It is worthy of note that, even after the triumph of the Italian Renaissance, most of the poets of the i6th century continued to employ, in part at least, the national metre called Versos de arte mayor, and to write in Castilian as well as in their native tongue. Sa de Miranda is the author of charming eclogues and sententious Cartas or satires in the Medida Velha, as it came to be called to distinguish it from the Italian endecasyllable, and some of the so-called Minor Works of Camoens are in the same measure. Furthermore, being essentially popular, it was naturally preferred by those who depended on or desired to communicate with the people, e.g. by the authors of religious Autos, by Bandarra in his prophecies, by satirists and by teachers of Christian doctrine, but its greatest exponent was Gil Vicente, whose use and defence of the metre made it the vehicle of the national drama for centuries. Though he 22 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE is generally described as the founder of the Portuguese theatre, Gil Vicente was not the originator of dramatic representations, which already formed part of the Court diversions and popular custom, but he raised them to a higher sphere, gave them shape, unity, progressive action and literary form, and infused into them the breath of life. 1 Of his forty-four pieces, fourteen are in Portuguese, eleven in Castilian and the remainder bilingual, while, according to his own division by subjects, they consist of religious Autos, Tragicomedies and Farces. Beginning with works of devotion, among the most remarkable of which are the Auto of the Soul and the trilogy of the Boats of Hell, Purgatory and Glory, he even there introduces the comic and satirical element by way of relief, while, before the end of his career, he arrives at pure comedy, as in I gnez Pereira and the Floresta de Enganos, and develops the study of character. His plots are very simple, he excels in dialogue, his lyrics have a finished beauty, and no other Portuguese writer can rival this goldsmith and son of the people in reflecting the language, types, customs and general colour of the age Even the rudest of his plays is instinct with life and, with a gift of genuine comic feeling, he had the nature of a moralist who made use of satire to chastise the loose morals of the period in a spirit of splendid common sense. He seems sometimes to have caught the critical spirit of the Renaissance, though he affected to 1. "One little corner of Europe alone possessed in the early 16th century a drama at once living, indigenous, and admirable as literature. Nothing in literary history is more surprising than the gap between Gil Vicente and his contemporaries, whether classical or romantic. Had he been born an Italian instead of a Portuguese, the history of the Italian stage might possibly have been different." " History of Italian Literature," by Dr. Garnett, London, 1898, p. 225. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 23 disdain its culture, and while he appeared too early to be a great dramatist, the man who in his plays mirrors to perfection the Portugal of the i6th century cannot be considered as less than a great artist in words. In the various towns where he stayed and produced his plays, writers for the stage sprung up, and these formed the Eschola Velha or School of Gil Vicente, but, except Camoens, all these men were his inferiors in dramatic invention, productiveness and power of expression Moreover they lacked Court patronage, which was with- drawn on Vicente's death, and they were attacked by the classical school for their lack of culture and by the Inqui- sition, through the Index, for their grossness. Hence the Vicentean dramatists came to depend on and write for the lower classes only, and though the school lingered on, its productions found no better interpreters than travelling companies at country fairs. The movement commonly known as the Renaissance reached Portugal indirectly through Spain and directly from Italy. King Affonso V. had learnt with Matthew of Pisa, King John II. corresponded with Politian, who educated the sons of some of the best families, and early in the i6th century a number of foreign humanists took up their residence in Portugal. Among them, Nicholas Cleynarts taught the Infant Henry, afterwards King, and lectured on the classics at Braga and Evora, and George Buchanan accompanied other professors to Coimbra when King John III. reformed the University. At the same time some distinguished Portuguese teachers returned home at the King's invitation, including Ayres 24 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE Barbosa, Andre de Gouveia, 1 " the greatest principal of France," as Montaigne called him, Achilles Estac^o and Diogo de Teive. In addition to these Portugal pro- duced the antiquary Andre de Resende, the painter Francisco de Hollanda, a friend of Michael Angelo, and Damiao de Goes, the historian and the chosen disciple of Erasmus, while a band of learned women formed a sort of academy under the presidency of the Infanta D. Maria, daughter of King Manoel. As far as poetry is concerned, the year 1526 is generally accepted as the date of the introduction of the Italian or Classical School. In that year Sa de Miranda, at once a fidalgo, an able lawyer and a man of noble and austere temper, returned from a six years' tour in Italy, and dazzled by the splendid culture that prevailed there, he initiated a reform of letters which amounted to a revolution. He brought with him and employed the forms of the sonnet, canzon, ode and epistle in ottava rima and in tercets, and though he is somewhat laboured, he raised the whole tone of poetry. Attacked by the partisans of the old school and by the learned, who were abandoning their native tongue to write in Latin, he nevertheless persevered, and drew to his side a band of disciples which included the mellifluous Diogo Bernardes, Pero d'Andrade Caminha, Jorge de Montemor and Antonio Ferreira. The last, a fine character, surpassed his master in style and the handling of verse, but though his patriotism forbad him from writing except in Portuguese, 1. "The Gouveias," says Dr. Braga, "formed, in Bordeaux and Paris, a pedagogic dynasty and had among their pupils, St. Ignatius Loyola, Calvin and Montaigne." EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 25 he carried his classical proclivities so far that his odes and epistles are little more than copies of Horace. An absence of spontaneous inspiration and an exclusive imitation of the ancients were the rocks on which most of the Quinkentistas made shipwreck. Their strife with the adherents of the Eschola Velha was over questions of form, not over ideas, and lacking these, they endeavoured to make up for the want by fidelity to their models while they flattered each other in magniloquent stanzas. Camoens they would not recognise, yet this turbulent dreamer was to fuse together the best elements of the Italian and the popular muse, using the forms of the one which Sa de Miranda had introduced and Ferreira had perfected, to express the spirit and traditions of the other. He is an entire literature in himself, and most of what Portuguese poetry has achieved since his time is due to him. To appreciate this, it is only neces- sary to compare his verses with those of his predecessors and even of his contemporaries ; there is a gulf between him and them, and his superiority is that of genius over the merely second best. He did not merely found a school, though the ranks of the Camoistas contain some excellent lyric poets, but all who wrote after him were, consciously or unconsciously, more or less, his disciples. Inspiration came to him from life and not from books : the circumstances of his life, which was parcelled out among the fortresses in Africa and the East, between exiles, voyages and prisons, gave him a sense of reality and saved him from that overdue respect for authority which rendered much of the work of the Quinhentistas futile. If Camoens was Virgilian, it was not study of the 26 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE /Eneid, though he knew it well, but the spirit of the age that made him so. He was a son of the Classical Renaissance, but he was also a man of action, and though highly educated, he was never a mere scholar. During his seventeen years abroad, he saw nature under every clime and learnt to understand her varying moods, for he possessed that fine gift of observation which induced Humboldt to call him a " great maritime painter," while hard experience taught him to take refuge in the ideal and brought out that tender melancholy which is part of the Celtic strain in the race. His philosophic sonnets are tinged with Platonism, and the amorous, inspired, most of them, by his lady D. Catherina de Atayde, breathe a noble passion and illustrate every aspect of saudade. He has some poignant and powerful auto- biographical canzons, and these, with a selection from his eclogues, elegies and roundels, stand out from similar compositions of other poets by their broad humanity combined with a vigorous individualism, their high ideals, their concise and admirable diction and their general perfection of form. The mighty achievements of the Portuguese and their greatness in the i6th century had suggested to more than one the idea of an heroic poem. Barros laid the foundations of an historical epic in some octaves inserted in his Clarimundo, and there is a tradition that Montemor was collecting material for a poem on the discovery of the East Indies when death overtook him, but the actual achievement was reserved for Camoens. The Lusiads celebrates the combination of faith and patriotism which led to the discoveries and conquests, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 27 and though the voyage of Vasco da Gama forms the skeleton of the poem, the illustrious deeds of his country- men through the centuries are the true subject of the poet's song. Yet while intensely patriotic and Portuguese in object and treatment, it is also the universal poem of discovery and commerce, and this, together with its sublime inspiration and the variety and beauty of its episodes and descriptive passages, make itthe most successful of modern epics cast in the ancient mould. Almost immediately after its publication in 1572, The Lusiads was recognised as the national poem, par excellence, and it has been a bulwark of Portuguese independence ever since, while even now it forms a spiritual bond between the Mother Country and her former colony, the United States of Brazil. Camoens' success excited the ambitions of many to imitate him during the following centuries, but most of these historical epics are little more than Chronicles in verse; they all suffer from an absence of sustained inspiration, nor can they compare with The Lusiads in truth or artistic value, and most of them are as wearisome to read as Spenser's Faery Queen. Not content with the revolution he had effected in lyric poetry, Sa de Miranda was moved by what he had seen in Italy to try and reform the art of play writing, but here he was less happy. In 1528 Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos had produced Eufrosina, the first prose play, under the joint influence of the Celestina and of ancient models, and the applause it met with determined Sa de Miranda to attempt a classical comedy. Shaping himself by Terence as reflected in Ariosto, he wrote the Estrangeiros to combat the school of Gil Vicente, but his 28 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE comedies and those of Antonio Ferrelra are artificial productions that appealed only to the learned. Even their types and characters are foreign and the action takes place in Italy. The latter's tragedy, 1 ' guez de Castro, the second in date in modern Europe, has more merit because Ferreira wisely selected for his subject an episode at once national and highly dramatic, moreover not content with Seneca he went to Sophocles for the spirit and form of the verse, but if it succeeds as a poem, it fails as a drama, since both plot and action are weak and the characters are ill drawn. The best prose writing of the i6th century is nearly all devoted to history and travel, and extensive as the published matter is, far more is thought to be yet unprinted. Many of the writers assisted at the events they relate, and though generally conscientious narrators, this very fact somewhat diminishes their critical value, but it adds greatly to the clearness and vigour of their descriptions. To avoid prolixity, I propose to select the names of two men as representative of the rest Barros and Mendes Pinto. The title of the Decades of the Portuguese Livy is no less significant than sonorous " The Asia of foao de Barros, concerning the deeds which the Portuguese achieved in the discovery and conquest of the seas and lands of the Orient " and this heading is no more a piece of bombast than the lines which Buchanan dedicated to King John III. proclaiming that on his Empire the sun never set : Inque tuis Phoebus regnis, oriensque cadensque, Vix longum fesso conderet axe diem; Et quaecumque vago se circumvolvit Olympo, Affulget ratibus flamma ministra tuis. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 29 Barros founded himself on the records of the India House and drew from his own invaluable collection of Oriental MSS., and his intellectual power and eloquence are as undeniable as his faithful research, but his omission to record the dark side of Portuguese activity in the East must be considered a mistake, though it was honestly made and confessed. Camoens fixed the poetical language and Barros did the same for prose in his monumental work, and in his wake there followed a succession of notable historical writers such as Diogo do Couto, Bishop Osorio, Antonio Galvao, Caspar Correia, and Lopes de Castanheda the most meritorious of all. The typical traveller and raconteur of the age is Fernao Mendes Pinto, soldier, merchant, missionary, and diplomat, who has bequeathed the record of his 21 years' stay in the East, during which he was 13 times made captive and 17 times sold. Nothing was impos- sible to the Portuguese in those days, and their serene consciousness of strength and profound belief in them- selves is reflected in many of the pages of this amazing story. 1 While Mendes Pinto represents the Portuguese conquistador, the Historica Tragico-M aritima is equally characteristic of the race of seamen, some obscure members of which wrote down these anonymous records. These twelve accounts of notable wrecks suffered by Portuguese galleons between 1552 and 1604 are models of simple, spontaneous popular writing. During the i6th century, theologians, moralists, and 1. Pinto's travels are mentioned by Isaak Walton in the " Compleat Angler." Modern research has shown that the great traveller was far from deserving the reproach which the dramatist Congreve cast upon him in the words : " Mendes Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magni- tude." ("Love for Love.") 30 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE philosophers generally made use of Latin, a language none wrote with more classic correctness than the Portuguese, and it is worthy of note that by far the larger number of books that were issued from the press deal with religious subjects, which tended more and more to absorb the best intellects. Literature accompanied the political fortunes of the country in their rise, decay, and fall. The I5th century had been a time of preparation, the i6th was the Golden Age and by the end of it Portugal was so far exhausted by her herculean efforts and corrupted by the plunder of the East, that the Spanish army had only to come in order to conquer. The decline, which had set in at the beginning of the reign of John III., at length became manifest to all but such as were possessed by a blind nationalist vanity. The introduction of the Inquisition and the Index, necessary as they may have seemed, the impotence of the Cortes, and the concentration of all power in the hands of the King, in short a system of ecclesiastical and political absolutism, combined, side by side with the exaggerated humanism of the Jesuits, to stifle initiative, and freedom of expression, as well as to fetter liberty of action, while the taint of Gongorism and Marinism attacked each of the Seiscentistas in varying degrees, as witness the Fenix Renascida and rhetoric conquered style. The Revolution of 1640, while it liberated Portugal from the political yoke of Spain, could not undo the effect of the sixty years captivity on the literature. The use of Spanish continued to prevail because it was the language of the upper classes John IV. himself wrote in it and because the sister country had writers of EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 31 European fame to whom the Portuguese naturally looked as models. The best that can be said for the numerous Academies with far-fetched names which were established during the lyth century is that they did something to promote the study of good literature, the worst that they encouraged ridiculous theses and extravagant metaphors, became hotbeds of pedantry, and contributed to the triumph of bad taste. Nevertheless lyric poetry had an autumn flowering and the century was far from sterile, for if those who wrote were one and all infected with "conceptismo" or "culteranismo," it produced a few men who are in the front rank. 1 We cannot include under this head Rodrigues Lobo, though the lyrics interspersed through his pastoral romances are stamped by simplicity, sincerity, and a genuine love of nature, while the qualities of purity of diction and elegance distinguish his otherwise monotonous and insipid prose, but D. Francisco Manoel de Mello, who like Lobo knew the poetry of the people, and the best Quinhentista work, is in a different case. A man of encyclopaedic mind, he made his mark as an historical, didactic, political, moral, and letter writer, and though he penned a Spanish classic he strove at a later date with success to free himself from subservience to foreign faults of style. His Portuguese sonnets display a depth of thought, gravity, and moral strength, expressed in a terse and natural form ; his Memorial to King John IV. is a triumph of 1. Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly well says : " Conceptismo was no less an evil than culteranismo, but it was less likely to spread ; the latter played with words, the former with ideas." "History of Spanish Literature," London, 1898, p. 299. 32 reasoning, vehemence, and style, and his Apologos Dialogaes show rare inventive power and abundance of wit, while the Carta de Guia de Casados is a unique treatise of homely philosophy written by a man who knew the world under the most varied aspects. It was with Mello as it had been with Camoens; imprison- ment and exile made of him a great writer. The historians of the country are, in general, friars who worked in their cells and no longer, as in the i6th century, travellers and eye-witnesses of the events they describe. Among the five contributors to the ponderous Monarchia Lusitana, one only, Frei Antonio Brandao, fully understood the value of documentary evidence, but n Frei Bernardo de Brito constantly mistook legend for fact, he must be allowed the credit of being a diligent investigator and remarkable stylist, though in this last respect he is inferior to Frei Luiz de Sousa, author of (inter alia) z.Life of Frei Bartholomew of the Martyrs, Archbishop of Braga, which still ranks as the best of hagiographies. Manoel de Faria y Sousa, a voluminous writer and the arch-commentator of Camoens, wrote by a curious irony of fate in Spanish, and Jacintho Freire de Andrade, by as great an irony told the life story of the austere Viceroy, D. Joao de Castro, with a grandilo- quence which his English translator, Sir Peter Wyche, does his best to equal. In the 1 7th century the various Religious Orders, and especially the Jesuits, drew to themselves more of the energies and counted for more, even in the politics of the country, than in any age, before or since, and at a time when it required three separate licences, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 33 those of the King, the Bishop, and the Inquisition, before a book could be published, the pulpit enjoyed full freedom and occupied very much the position of the modern press. It was the heyday of ecclesiastical eloquence in Portugal, as elsewhere. Father Antonio Vieira of the Company of Jesus, missionary, diplomat, and Versatile writer, touched greatness at several points and earned in Rome the title of the Prince of Catholic Orators; his two hundred sermons form a mine of human experience, and : t woj'M be hard to find their equals for imaginative power, originality of views, variety of treatment, and audacity of expression. The Oratorian, Father Manoel Bernardes, was not a man of action like Vieira but a recluse, and his discourses and devotional works form even richer treasuries of the language, and have a calm and sweetness foreign to the genius of the Jesuit. While the writings of Father Bernardes breathe the pure love of God, at the other pole are those documents of human affection, the five epistles addressed by Marianna Alcoforado to the Comte de Chamilly, which have been the wonder of successive generations of men and women in every country since they saw the light in 1669. Surely it was one of the great passions of the world that is laid bare in " The Letters of a Portuguese Nun." 1 If the i7th century is reviewed as a whole, it will be found that the best prose work consists in sermons, polemical and moral treatises, criticism, memoirs, and letters; in the following, history divides the honours with letter writing. 1. Mr. W. E. Gladstone wrote to me in 1893 "the psychology of the Letters is, I think, most remarkable." 34 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE The literature of the first half of the i8th century is marked by the same affectation and lack of sound taste as that of the preceding age, but gradually signs appeared of a literary revolution which preceded the political and prepared the way for that regeneration which is identified with the Romantic Movement. Men of illustration, who fled abroad to escape what they considered the stupid tyranny in Church and State, did much for intellectual progress by encouragement and example. Verney attacked the obsolete educational system of the Jesuits in an epoch making book, the V erdadeiro Methodo de Estudar, and the various Academies and Arcadias co-operated in the work of reform by purifying diction and style and translating good foreign models. The Academy of History, established by King John V. in 1720 in imitation of the French Academy, published fifteen volumes of learned memoirs, and its members, by the documents they printed, laid the foundations for a critical study of the annals of Portugal. The Royal Academy of Sciences, founded in 1780, continued the historical work of its predecessor with even greater success, and placed literary criticism on a scientific basis, but the principal exponents of belles letters belonged to the various Arcadias. Cruz e Silva founded the Arcadia Ulysiponense " to form a school of good examples in eloquence and poetry which should serve as models to studious youths and spread through the nation a desire to restore the ancient beauty of those forgotten arts." Ga^ao, the leading Arcadian, composed the Cantata de Dido, a classic gem, as well as some charming sonnets and elegant odes and epistles, and the bucolic verse of Quita, a hairdresser EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 35 has a tender simplicity which recalls Bernardim Ribeiro. If the lyrics of Cruz e Silva himself are merely correct, his comic-heroic poem " Hyssope " satirises ecclesiastical jealousies, local types, and the prevailing Gallomania with originality and humour, and though he perhaps owes something to the Lutrin of Boileau, he improves on his master. Internal disputes caused the dissolution of this Arcadia in 1774, but it had made for purity of style and diction, had introduced new poetical forms, and venti- lated questions of importance for the well-being of letters. Unfortunately however its adherents lacked creative power and contented themselves with a servile copying of the Ancients and the Quinhentistas. Being ignorant oi tradition, they could but reflect the national decadence and since the despotic rule of Pombal made flights of fancy dangerous, they were driven to spend themselves in inconsequent discussions, while, with con- spicuous lack of dignity, they fawned upon the Minister and the nobles in the hope of improving their worldly positions. The Arcadians, says Dr. Braga, restricted their classical models to a small number of poets such as Theocritus, Virgil, and Horace, and to imaginative excursions, expressed in figured language, they opposed a reasoned cold style of prosaic good sense, without either emotion or colouring. In short their whole outlook was purely and painfully academic. But in addition to their worship of the Ancients, many of the Arcadians followed the example of that latter-day Maecenas, the Conde de Ericeira, and endeavoured to naturalise in Portugal the pseudo-classicism that obtained in France. This can hardly be wondered at seeing that, during the 36 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE greater part of the century, the whole life of the nation was concentrated in the Court and circled round the King and his favourites, who sought in every way to imitate the French whom they considered the models of elegance and good taste. In 1790 the New Arcadia came into being and had in Bocage a man with the makings of a really great poet, but a life of excess, combined with the atmosphere of flattery in which he moved, prevented his achieving any sustained flights, while poverty compelled him to waste his time in translating the second-rate French poets who where then in fashion. Nevertheless his turbulent genius led him to react with advantage against the general medio- crity, and he succeeded at intervals in rising above the vitiated air of the society in which he was forced to live. A victim of his environment, he yet had the good fortune to take hold of the popular imagination, which showed its gratitude by immortalising him as it had done Camoens. Bocage's sonnets on patriotic and serious themes vie with those of Camoens in power, elevation of thought, and tender melancholy, and he further approved his talents in short improvised lyrics of which he was a master and in satire, notably in the Pena de Taliao, directed against his enemy Frei Agostinho de Macedo. This bohemian ex-friar, court preacher, and journalist, attempted to supplant Camoens as the national poet by composing a lifeless epic " Orient e" and in " Os Burros " he surpassed all his brother bards by the virulence of his invective : but he has the credit of introducing the didactive poem, he wrote some spirited EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 37 odes, and his letters reveal great learning and a versatile pen. 1 The Dissidents, a name bestowed on those poets who remained outside the Arcadias, included three distinguished men who gave evidence of a certain independence and sense of reality, Jose Anastacio da Cunha, Nicolao Tolentino, and Francisco Manoel do Nascimento, better known by his literary name of Filinto Elysio. The first, who was a notable mathematician, composed in a philosophic and tender strain, verses which show the influence of contemporary French authors, while the second sketched and satirised the customs and follies of the time with patent realism and attacked his foes or begged for favours in sparkling quintilhas. The third spent his long life of eighty-five years, most of which was passed in exile in Paris, in reviving the cult of the Quinhentistas., and he purified and enriched the language by means of numerous compositions in prose and verse, both originals and translations. His Contos^ or scenes of Portuguese life, strike a new note of truth, his patriotic odes have the real fire, and his blank verse translation of the Martyrs has been preferred by some to Chateaubriand's prose. Shortly before his death, he became a convert to the Romantic Movement and he did much to prepare the way for the triumph it achieved in the person of his eminent disciple the Visconde de Almeida Garrett. A few words about the drama and I have finished. The popular theatre dragged on its existence through 1. The list of his works fills 30 pages in vol. 4 of the "Diccionario Bibliographico Portuguez" of Innocencio da Silva. the i ;th century, but few of the pieces survive, and these are mainly religious Autos which teem with conceits and high-flown metaphors. Except for Manoel de Mello, who produced a witty comedy Auto do Fidalgo A-prendiz, an anticipation of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme of Moliere, Portuguese playwrights who aspired to be heard, wrote in Spanish, and like Jacintho Cordeiro and Mattos Fragoso, added to the extraordinary wealth of the Spanish drama, while Spanish actors monopolised the Portuguese boards and, as if to secure their supremacy, the leading dramatists of Spain vied with one another in treating subjects taken from Portuguese history. So moribund was the native drama that Father Vieira, writing in 1655, refers to " the end of Comedies in Portugal," and though a Court returned to Lisbon after the Revolution of 1640, it preferred, for one hundred and fifty years, Italian opera and French plays to dramatic performances in the vernacular. Early in the 1 8th century various authors sprung from the people attempted to refound a national drama, but they all lacked some essential for success and had to write for spectators who were both coarse and ignorant of letters. Their pieces belong to low comedy and were staged at the popular theatres of the Bairro Alto and Mouraria. The O-p eras Portuguezas of Antonio Jose da Silva, nicknamed " the Jew," have a real comic force and a certain originality, and if neither their plots, style, or language are remarkable, the author is none the less a legitimate i8th century follower of Gil Vicente and his inferiority to the founder of the drama is the measure of Portugal's decline. His comedies exploit EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 39 the faults and foibles of the time and, together with those of Nicolao Luiz, contain a faithful though depressing picture of both the upper and lower classes of society. The latter divided his attention between heroic comedies and comedies de capa y espada, and though all of them lack ideas and taste, while the characters are lifeless and give vent to conventional emotions in inflated language, they yet enjoyed a popularity as great as those of "the Jew" and held the stage until the end of the century. Meanwhile the Arcadia had endeavoured to raise the tone of the stage by drawing inspiration from the contemporary French theatre, but its members failed because they lacked dramatic talent, and being out of touch with the people they were unable to create a national drama. Gar^ao wrote two bright little comedies in which he pleaded for a return to tradition, Quita produced some stillborn tragedies, and Figueiredo com- piled no less than thirteen volumes of plays in prose and verse, choosing national subjects, but though he possessed inventive power, he could not make his characters live. In the absence of Court patronage, Portugal remained without a drama of her own, and the task of its re-creation was reserved for Almeida Garrett, who, in the happy phrase of Rebello da Silva, was " not a man of letters, but an entire literature in himself." Here I am compelled to close my lecture, lest I exceed my time and abuse your patience. For the literature of the igth century I must refer you to my sketch in the volume entitled " Later igth Century " in Professor Saintsbury's " Periods of Eureopean Litera- ture." I regret not to be able to touch on this time 40 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE of active and fruitful production, because its absence disturbs the balance of my essay and renders the picture incomplete. Still, if you will read it in conjunction with what I have said here remembering that I have neces- sarily omitted very much you may not disagree very markedly with the conclusion I have reached after twenty years of study, namely, that if the fields of philosophy and science be excepted, no other small nation in modern times has a literature so extensive, so varied, so rich in quality of achievement. EDGAR PRESTAGE.