Portuguese literature

Portuguese literature may be said to belong largely to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Europe can boast of no fresher and more charming early lyrics than those which slept forgotten[1] in the Vatican Library until the late Professor Ernesto Monaci published Il Canzoniere Portoghese in 1875. And, to take a few more instances out of many, the poems of King Alfonso X, of extraordinary interest alike to historian and literary critic, first appeared in 1889; the plays of Gil Vicente were almost unknown before the Hamburg (1834) edition, based on the Göttingen copy of that of 1562; Sá de Miranda only received a definitive edition in 1885; the Cancioneiro Geral became accessible in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the three volumes of the Stuttgart edition were published; the exquisite verses[1] of Sá de Meneses, which haunted Portuguese poetry for a century,[2] then sank into oblivion till they were discovered by Dr. Sousa Viterbo in the Torre do Tombo.[3] The abundant literature of popular quadras, fados, romances, contos has only begun to be collected in the last fifty years.

In prose, the most important Leal Conselheiro[4] of King Duarte was rediscovered in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale and first printed in 1842, and Zurara’s Cronica da Guiné, lost even in the days of Damião de Goes,[5] similarly in 1841; Corrêa’s Lendas da India remained in manuscript till 1858; so notable a book as King João I’s Livro da Montaria appears only in the twentieth century, in an edition by Dr. Esteves Pereira, and the first trustworthy text of a part of Fernam Lopez was published by Snr. Braamcamp Freire in 1915; D. Francisco Manuel de Mello, who at the end of his second Epanaphora wrote ‘Se por ventura tambem despois de meus dias acontece que algum vindouro honre ao meu nome quanto eu procuro eternizar e engrandecer o dos passados’, had to wait two and a half centuries before this debt was paid by Mr. Edgar Prestage.[6] Even now no really complete history of Portuguese literature exists, but the first systematic work on the subject was written by Friedrich Bouterwek in 1804. Other histories have since appeared, and during the last half-century the ceaseless, ingenious, and enthusiastic studies of Dr. Theophilo Braga have sifted Portuguese literature, chiefly the poetry, in all directions, and a flood of light has been thrown on it by the works of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. Perhaps, therefore, one may be forgiven for having been tempted to render some account of this ‘new’ literature which continues to be so strangely neglected in England and other countries.[7] Yet a quarter of a century hence would perhaps offer better conditions, and a summary written at the present time cannot hope to be complete or definitive. Every year new studies and editions appear, new researches and alluring theories and discoveries are made. The Lisbon Academy of Sciences during its long and honourable history[8] has rarely if ever rendered greater services—‘essential services’ as Southey called them in 1803—to Portuguese literature. A short history of that literature must, apart from unavoidable errors and omissions, do less than justice to many writers. In appropriating the words of Damião de Goes, ‘Haud ignari plurima esse a nobis omissa quibus Hispania ornatur et celebrari possit,’ one may hope that Mr. Edgar Prestage, who has studied Portuguese literature for a quarter of a century,[9] and whose ever-ready help and advice are here gratefully acknowledged, will eventually write a mellower history in several volumes and give their full due both to the classics and to contemporary authors and critics.

No one can study Portuguese literature without becoming deeply indebted to D. Carolina Wilhelma Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. Her concise history, contributed to Groeber’s Grundriss (1894), necessarily forms the basis of subsequent studies, but indeed her work is as vast as it is scholarly and accurate, and the student finds himself constantly relying on her guidance. Even if he occasionally disagrees, he cannot fail to give her point of view the deepest attention and respect. Born in 1851, the daughter of Professor Gustav Michaëlis, she has lived in Portugal during the last forty years and is the wife of the celebrated art critic, Dr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos (born in 1849). Her edition of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (1904) is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and literary criticism, and her influence on Portuguese literature generally is as wide as her encouragement and assistance of younger scholars are generous.[10] Femina, as was said of the Princess Maria, undequaque spectatissima et doctissima.

Most of the works of Dr. Theophilo Braga are of too provisional a nature to be of permanent value, but a summary, Edade Medieval (1909), Renascença (1914), Os Seiscentistas (1916), Os Arcades (1918), gives his latest views. The best detailed criticism of the literature of the nineteenth century is that of Dr. Fidelino de Figueiredo, Member of the Academy of Sciences and Editor of the Revista de Historia: Historia da Litteratura Romantica Portuguesa (1913) and Historia da Litteratura Realista (1914).

The only completely methodical history of Portuguese literature in existence is the brief manual by the learned ex-Rector of Coimbra University, Dr. Joaquim Mendes dos Remedios: História da Literatura Portuguêsa (5th ed., Coimbra, 1921), since it contains that rarity in Portuguese literature: an index.[11] Dr. Figueiredo published a short essay in its general bibliography in 1914 (Bibliographia portuguesa de critica litteraria), largely increased in a new (1920) edition, but otherwise little has been done in this respect (apart from a few special authors). The bibliography attached to the present book[12] follows—longo intervallo—the lines of Professor James Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s Bibliographie de l’Histoire de la Littérature Espagnole (Paris, 1913). After its proved excellence it would, indeed, have been folly to adopt any other method.

It has been thought advisable to add a list of works on popular poetry, folk-lore, &c. (since in no country are the popular and the written literatures more intimately connected), and of those concerning the Portuguese language. Unless energetic and persistent measures are taken to protect this language it will be hopeless to look for a great Portuguese literature in the future. Yet with the gradually developing prosperity of Portugal and her colonies such expectations are not unfounded. A new poet may arise indigenous as Gil Vicente and technically proficient as Camões. And in prose, if it is not allowed to sink into a mere verbiage of gallicisms, great writers may place Portuguese on a level with and indeed above the other Romance languages. The possibilities are so vast, the quarry ready to their hand so rich—the works of Manuel Bernardes, Antonio Vieira, Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, Luis de Sousa, João de Lucena, Heitor Pinto, Arraez; an immense mass of sermons (milhões de sermonarios), most of them in excellent Portuguese, as those of Ceita, Veiga, Feo, Luz, in which, as in a large number of political tracts, notably those of Macedo, intense conviction has given a glow and concision to the language; old constituições, ordenações, and foros[13]; technical treatises,[14] folk-lore, popular phrases,[15] proverbs. But unless a scholarly use of Portuguese be more generally imposed no masterpieces will be produced. The same holds good of Brazilian literature, which, although, or perhaps because, it has provided material for a history in two portly volumes (Sylvio Romero, Historia da Litteratura Brazileira, 2nd ed., 1902-3), is here, with few exceptions, omitted.

A supplementary chapter on modern Galician literature has been added, for although the language from which Portuguese parted only after the fourteenth century is now quite independent,[16] modern Galician is not more different from modern Portuguese than is the language of the Cancioneiros with which Portuguese literature opens. The Portuguese have always shown a strong aptitude for acquiring foreign languages, and the individual’s gain has been the literature’s loss. Jorge de Montemôr, who

was not by any means the only Portuguese who wrote exclusively in Spanish, and others chose Latin. The reason usually given in either case was that Portuguese was less widely read.[17] It was a short-sighted view, for the more works of importance that were written in Portuguese the larger would naturally become the number of those who read them. While Portuguese literature may be taken to be the literature written in the Portuguese language, in a sense it must also include the Latin and Spanish works of Portuguese authors. Of the former, one collection alone, the Corpus Illustrium Poetarum Lusitanorum qui latine scripserunt (Lisbonae, 1745), consists of eight volumes, and Domingo Garcia Peres’ Catálogo Razonado (Madrid, 1890) contains over 600 names of Portuguese authors who wrote in Spanish.

Portuguese names present a difficulty, for often they are as lengthy as that which was the pride of Dona Iria in Ennes’ O Saltimbanco. The course here adopted is to relegate the full name to the index and to print in the text only the form by which the writer is generally known.[18]

The Portuguese, a proud and passionate people with a certain love of magnificence and adventure, an Athenian receptivity,[19] an extensive sea-board and vague land-frontiers, naturally came under foreign influences. Many and various causes made their country cosmopolitan from the beginning. It is customary to divide Portuguese literature into the Provençal (13th c.), Spanish (14th and 15th c.), Italian (16th c.), Spanish and Italian (17th c.), French and English (18th c.), French and German (19th c.) Schools. The question may therefore be asked, especially by those who confuse influence with imitation, as though it precluded originality: What has Portuguese literature of its own? In the first place, the Celtic satire and mystic lyrism of the Galicians is developed and always present in Portuguese literature. Secondly, the genius for story-telling, displayed by Fernam Lopez, grew by reason of the great Portuguese discoveries in Africa and Asia to an epic grandeur both in verse and prose. Thirdly, the absence of great cities, the pleasant climate, and fertile soil produced a peculiarly realistic and natural bucolic poetry. And in prose, besides masterpieces of history and travel—a rich and fascinating literature of the East and of the sea—a fervent religious faith, as in Spain, with a more constant mysticism than in Spain, led to very high achievement. Had one to choose between the loss of the works of Homer, or Dante, or Shakespeare, and that of the whole of Portuguese literature, the whole of Portuguese literature must go, but that is not to say that the loss would not be very grievous. Indeed, those who despise Portuguese literature despise it in ignorance,[20] affecting to believe, with Edgar Quinet, that it has but one poet and a single book; those who are acquainted with it—with the early lyrics, with the quaintly alluring eclogues of Ribeiro and Sá de Miranda, with the works of Fernam Lopez, described by Robert Southey as ‘the best chronicler of any age or nation’, naïf, exact, touchant et philosophe[21]; of Gil Vicente, almost as far above his contemporary Juan del Enzina as Shakespeare is above Vicente; of Bernardim Ribeiro, whose Menina e moça is the earliest and best of those pastoral romances which led Don Quixote to contemplate a quieter sequel to his first adventures; of Camões, ‘not only the greatest lyric poet of his country, but one of the greatest lyric poets of all time’[22]; with Fernam Mendez Pinto’s travels, ‘as diverting a book of the kind as ever I read’[23]; or Corrêa’s Lendas, Frei Thomé de Jesus’ Trabalhos, or the incomparable prose of Manuel Bernardes—know that, extraordinary as were Portugal’s achievements in discovery and conquest, her literature is not unworthy of those achievements. Unhappily the Portuguese, with a notorious carelessness,[24] have in the past set the example of neglecting their literature, and even to-day scarcely seem to realize their great possessions and still greater possibilities in the realm of prose.[25] The excessive number of writers, the excessive production of each individual writer, and the desleixo by which innumerable books and manuscripts of exceptional interest have perished, are all traceable to the same source: the lack of criticism. A nation of poets, essentially lyrical,[26] with no dramatic genius but capable of writing charmingly and naturally without apparent effort, needed and needs a severely classical education and stern critics, to remind them that an epic is not rhymed history nor blank verse mangled prose, that in bucolic poetry the half is greater than the whole, and to bid them abandon abstractions for the concrete and particular and crystallize the vague flow of their talent. But in Portugal, outside the circle of writers themselves, a reading public has hitherto hardly existed, and in the close atmosphere resulting the sense of proportion was inevitably lost, even as a stone and a feather will fall with equal speed in a vacuum. The criticism has been mainly personal,[27] contesting the originality or truthfulness of a writer, without considering the literary merits of his work. To deprecate such criticism became a commonplace of the preface, while numerous passages in writers of the sixteenth century show that they feared their countrymen’s scepticism, expressed in the proverb De longas vias mui longas mentiras, which occurs as early as the thirteenth century.[28] The fear of slovenly or prolix composition was not present in the same degree. But these are defects that may be remedied partly by individual critics, partly by the increasing number of readers. Meanwhile this little book may perhaps serve to corroborate the poet Falcão de Resende’s words: