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. The Portuguese have aroused themselves from their indifference in this respect. Dr. Theophilo Braga has produced an immense work of discovery and criticism. Dona Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, a far more scholarly critic, has, during the last forty years, carried through a work no less immense and far more valuable and abiding. Her genius is like an electric torch shedding powerful light as it rests in turn on each of the great Portuguese writers, and illuminating by the way all the nooks and crannies. The difference between these, the two great authorities on Portuguese literature, is that the works of the former satisfy no one but himself, those of the latter everyone but herself. And there are many younger workers now in the same field eager to discover, decipher, print and re-edit the old monuments of Portuguese literature.

In the past the carelessness has been such that several famous works which were in all probability originally Portuguese, have been allowed to perish utterly or to survive only in Spanish translations. Amadis of Gaul is probably one of these, and another masterpiece claimed wrongly by Spain is Palmeirim of England, by Francisco de Moraes Cabral, in the first half of the sixteenth century, and held by Cervantes worthy to be preserved as carefully as the poems of Homer. In the sixteenth century Garcia de Resende regretted the loss of many poems, and Damião de Goes lamented the number of valuable manuscripts that had perished because they had not been placed in the Torre do Tombo. Even as recently as the nineteenth century (in the eighteenth the earthquake and the fire that followed it swallowed up hundreds of precious books and manuscripts), the archives of the family of Niza were sold by a servant of the family as waste-paper, like the original manuscripts of the Polyglot Bible of Alcalá some thirty years earlier. The Niza papers had been placed for safety in a cellar during the Peninsular War, and were sold by the kilo. (The first Marquis of Niza was the great-great-grandson of Vasco da Gama. The last Marquis was the grandfather of Dona Constança Telles da Gama, whose imprisonment for eight months under the Republic caused so great a sensation.) But although by this and similar mischances a vast number of invaluable documents have been lost, a large store remains, and a considerable number have been published of late years, the Lisbon Academy of Sciences doing excellent work in this respect.

It was in verse that the Portuguese first distinguished themselves. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they attained such proficiency in imitations of Provençal song that it became the fashion for lyrics throughout Spain to be composed in Galician or Portuguese, and a large collection of lyrics in praise of the Virgin was compiled and in part written by King Alfonso X of Castille in the Galician tongue.

The first Portuguese poem was probably not prior to the beginning of the thirteenth century, or prior by a very few years only, but unwritten songs of the people had been composed, especially by the women, probably without a break since the days of Rome. The Portuguese Court poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were not cut off from the life of the people. How simple were the Courts of those days may be realised from the rules drawn up for the King’s children by Alfonso the Learned, whose daughter Isabel was mother of King Diniz of Portugal. The King’s sons must wash their hands before and after meals, and not wipe them on their clothes. They must not sing at meals lest they seem to be merry with wine, nor bend over the dish as if they wanted all the food. And thus among the more servile imitations of Provençal poetry crept in the Court versions of the Cantares de amigo, sung by the people in Galicia and Portugal, which still delight by their freshness and savour of the soil. With the death of King Diniz (1325), of whose own poems over a hundred survive, the Provençal Portuguese school of poetry ended. If Spain borrowed from Portugal in the composition of the early lyrics, she repaid the debt later with the romances, those lovely fifteenth and sixteenth century crystallisations of the longer early heroic poems and chronicles of Spain. So few romances originally belonged to Portugal that Spanish came to be regarded as the appropriate language for them, and a Portuguese poet composing a romance would do so in Castilian as in the thirteenth century a Spanish poet would compose his lyrics in Portuguese. Gil Vicente wrote his ballad of Duardos and Flérida in Spanish, and it was only three centuries later that it was translated into Portuguese, probably by Almeida Garrett. It was the Breton cycle which in its vague romance especially appealed to Portuguese taste, and its episodes have been, with the death of Inés de Castro, the prominent theme in Portuguese literature. In history, too, in the fourteenth century, Nun’ Alvares took Sir Galahad for ideal, and in the sixteenth King Sebastian became a Portuguese King Arthur, his return long looked for in Portugal. There is a gap in Portuguese literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, similar to that in the seventeenth and eighteenth, so far as poetry is concerned, and the sixteenth, during which Portuguese poetry revived and reached its highest expression, began with dull and uninspired Court poems—of a Court now more artificial than that of King Diniz—such as the majority of those in Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro, containing poems of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and published in 1516.

In prose, however, the fifteenth century was remarkable. Portuguese prose began with brief jejune chronicles, and with nobiliarios or livros de linhagens (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). A famous Livro de linhagens, or book of descents, was that compiled by Pedro, son of King Diniz, in prose which already possesses considerable literary pretensions, although it cannot compare for clearness, grace, and concision with the admirable work of King Duarte, O Leal Conselheiro (circa 1430).

To the fifteenth century also belong the first important chronicles. Fernão Lopes, who died in the middle of the century, and wrote chronicles which have been set side by side with or even above those of Froissart, was Keeper of the Royal Archives, and Chronista môr. As such he was charged to “set forth in chronicles the histories of the kings—poer em coronycas as estorias dos reis.” He wrote that of King João I, and probably that of all the other Kings of Portugal to his own day. Lopes is described as “a notable person” by his successor, Gomes Eannes de Azurara, who died in 1474, and who completed the chronicle of João I, and wrote among other works the Chronica do descobrimento e conquista da Guiné (published at Paris, 1841; translated into English, with an important study, by Mr. Edgar Prestage). Ruy de Pina became Chronista môr in 1497, and wrote or re-wrote the chronicles of the Kings of Portugal from Sancho I to João II in a somewhat more affected and artificial style than that of his predecessors.

The sixteenth century, famous for its poets in Portugal as in other countries, was also exceedingly rich in Portuguese prose of the most varied kinds. Damião de Goes (1502-74) took up the work of the early chronicles, and wrote during the years 1557-66 his famous Chronica de Dom Manoel, a clear and careful account of the discovery and conquest of India and of events at home. Damião de Goes’ life and character are even more interesting than his works, and although his travels did not extend beyond Europe they were as arresting in their way as are the Peregrinações of Fernão Mendes Pinto (1509-80) in theirs.

During twenty-one years the life of the latter was a series of “great hardships and misfortunes and dangers.” He was thirteen times taken captive, and twenty-one times (in another passage he says sixteen times) sold as a slave during his adventurous career in the East, and he has left us the most vivid and delightful memoirs. They read like a modern novel, but, except for some obvious mistakes in facts and figures, bear the stamp of truth.

The glorious enterprises and discoveries of King Manoel’s reign naturally found many chroniclers. Fernão Lopes de Castanheda spent more than twenty years over his “History of the Discovery and Conquest of India by the Portuguese” (1554), scrupulously visiting the places and many of the persons concerned. The knowledge thus acquired was all the wealth he brought back with him from India, and he was reduced to accept the office of beadle of the Faculty of Arts at Coimbra University. The style of his history is plain and unadorned, sentence after sentence beginning with “And”; the narrative is simple and outspoken, and has an ingenuous freshness suitable to the account of the “seas ne’er traversed before.” Some of his pages, as the description of the natives of Malabar, might have come straight out of Herodotus. João de Barros, of Vizeu (1496-1570) began the famous Decadas, describing the Portuguese conquests in the East, and wrote a romance of chivalry and a Portuguese grammar. His Decadas were continued by Diogo de Couto (1544-1616), who was able to bring to their composition the knowledge from fifty years of personal experience in India. Gaspar Correa, born in 1495, wrote the Lendas da India, and was killed in a quarrel, or perhaps deliberately murdered at Malaca in 1564. Bras d’Albuquerque (1500-1580) composed the Commentarios of his father, the great Affonso d’Albuquerque, from original letters written by the latter in India to King Manoel, a straightforward account marked by much restraint and regard for truth, and enlivened by vivid scenes here and there. Many of those who went to India, missionaries, adventurers, soldiers, officials, wrote narratives of their experiences. The Roteiros of Vasco da Gama and João de Castro are of remarkable interest both for their contents and their style. There are few more stirring and pathetic narratives than those of the tragedies of the sea, the Historia Tragico-Maritima (Lisbon, 2 vols., 1735-6), tales of shipwreck which made the greatest impression on those who read and listened to them. One suspects that Mendes Pinto wrote some of his wonderfully vivid shipwreck scenes under the recollection of those longer narratives, to the most famous of which, the Shipwreck of Sepulveda, he refers in his memoirs. Antonio Tenreiro wrote an Itinerario of his journey by land from India to Europe, combining with this an account of other travels. His principal journey was from Ormuz to Tripoli by camel with a single Arab (Mouro alarve) attendant, taking twenty-two days to cross the desert. From Tripoli he proceeded to Cyprus, Crete, Ferrara, Genoa, thence “with much fear of the Turks,” by sea to the coast of Valencia, and on to Toledo and Lisbon. He observes minutely and raps out his information in concise disconnected sentences. Pantaleão de Aveiro wrote an Itinerary of the Holy Land, Frei Gaspar Fructuoso the Saudades da Terra, Frei Gaspar da Cruz a Tratado das Cousas da China e de Ormuz.

Apart from these profane writings, there were several notable preachers in this century, as the celebrated Archbishop of Braga, Frei Bartholomeu dos Martyres (1514-90), Frei Miguel dos Santos (d. 1595), only one of whose sermons, on the death of King Sebastian, remains. Of Diogo de Paiva de Andrade (1528-75) 181 survive (3 vols., 1603, 4, 15), and there are three volumes (1611, 3, 6) of those of Frei Francisco Fernandes Galvão (1554-1610). Heitor Pinto (d. 1584), Professor of Scripture at Coimbra University, wrote eleven dialogues: Imagem da vida christã (Coimbra, 2 vols., 1563, 72). The Trabalhos de Jesus by Frei Thomé de Jesus did not appear till 1620 and 1629 (Lisbon, 2 pts.). Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso is remembered by his Contos e historias de proveito e exemplo, twenty-nine of which first appeared in 1585. João de Lucena wrote the life of St. Francis Xavier: Historia da Vida do Padre Francisco Xavier. Samuel Usque, a Portuguese Jew of Lisbon, composed a Consolaçam ás tribulações de Israel (Ferrara, 1552), much needed in that period of massacres of “new Christians.” It is written in a coloured and exuberant style, recalling at times that of the Spanish writer Luis de León. All these works and many more, though unequal in merit, are worth recording and reading partly from the interest of the facts and descriptions they contain, and partly because after them good Portuguese prose only occasionally revisited the earth.

But, of course, the sixteenth century, for all the excellence of its prose, was also the golden age of Portuguese poetry. Gil Vicente (about 1470-1540), although he inaugurated the Portuguese drama in 1502, was essentially a lyric poet. In his work the true spirit of old Portugal survives, a spirit of simple mirth with dance and song, and a note of gaiety so rare in Portuguese literature. His plays are of extreme value to students of Portugal in the sixteenth century, the cantigas and romances, etc., which they contain are for all time.

Francisco de Sá de Miranda (c. 1490-1558) brought back from his travels in Italy the fixed resolve to introduce the Italian metres into Portuguese poetry, and, retiring some years later from the Court, devoted the rest of his life to poetry, gardening, and the chase in the beautiful province of Minho. A man of austere and noble character, he was less generous to himself than to his friends, wrote an early biographer. Friends he had many, among the peasants and shepherds of the Minho hills, the neighbouring nobles and poets from all parts of Portugal. He imprinted his individuality on his poems written in the new style, and especially on his eclogues composed in the old octosyllabic redondilhas. Among his friends were Diogo Bernardes, some thirty years his junior, who celebrated his beloved river Lima, on whose banks was his birthplace, with a softness and fluency in the new metres not given to Sá de Miranda, and whose sonnets rivalled those with which Camões soothed an exile’s grief; Antonio Ferreira (1528-1569), who was the first to write a classical drama, Inés de Castro, and who remained faithful to Portuguese when most of his contemporaries wrote indifferently in Portuguese or Spanish; Dom Manoel de Portugal (1520-1606), the first poet to follow Sá de Miranda in adopting the Italian measures; Pedro de Andrade Caminha (c. 1520-89), highly praised by his contemporaries, but whose verse has a certain wooden quality foreign to theirs. To name all the poets whose verse was inspired by the genius of those spacious times were an endless task. Frei Agostinho da Cruz (c. 1540-1619) wrote verses, like his brother Diogo Bernardes—

Of Francisco de Sá de Meneses, Conde de Mattosinhos (he was created Count of Mattosinhos in 1580 and died there in 1584) much of the poetry has been lost, but what survives is of high excellence. His delightful verses to the river Leça were not rediscovered till the nineteenth century, by Dr. Sousa Viterbo in the Torre do Tombo.

About the lives of the two poets of Saudade, Bernardim Ribeiro and Christovam Falcão, little is known, but their eclogues are notable for their perfection of form and that passionate melancholy peculiar to Portuguese literature. Elaborate efforts have been made to construct their biographies out of their poems, a risky proceeding with poets who so evidently delighted in dismal incidents for their own sake.

Luis de Camões, the greatest of all these poets, was a few years younger than most of them. To him at least grief and disappointment came in flowing measure, and he lived to die with his country in 1580, probably at the age of 56. Out of his sorrows he built a fairy edifice of verse, which has delighted and sustained his countrymen ever since. With him Portuguese poetry reached a level only dimly heralded by his predecessors: to judge from their poetry only, it would be difficult to believe that the lives of Vicente, Miranda and Camões overlapped.

The most notable literary figure of the seventeenth century in Portugal is Dom Francisco Manuel de Mello (1608-66). Those who read of his manifold adventures in Mr. Prestage’s biography will perhaps wonder that he should have found time or temper to write at all, and his works are many and various, from the “History of the War in Catalonia” to the Carta de Guia de Casados and Cartas Familiares, admirably clear and direct in style.

Most of his contemporaries were infected with gongorismo from Spain, and their writings defaced by conceits and hyperbole. Jacyntho Freire d’Andrade (1597-1657) wrote the biography of Dom João de Castro in an artificial style closely modelled on that of Tacitus. Frei Bernardo de Brito (1569-1617) composed A Monarchia Lusitana (parts 1 and 2), of which it has been said that it ends where it should have begun—with the history of Portugal,[37] but which was written in good Portuguese prose. Frei Luis de Sousa (1555-1632) wrote among other works the life of Bartholomeu dos Martyres, Archbishop of Braga. As Manoel de Sousa Coutinho, he returned from the disastrous Alcacer Kebir expedition after a year’s captivity, and married the widow of Dom João de Portugal, who was killed at Alcacer Kebir. He retired to a convent, as did also his wife, after their daughter’s death. The legend of the return of Dona Magdalena’s first husband inspired Garrett with his celebrated play, Frei Luis de Sousa. There were a considerable number of miscellaneous prose works of merit, as the Discursos varios of Manoel Severim de Faria (1583-1655) and the Itinerario da India por terra até a ilha de Chipre by Frei Gaspar de S. Bernardino. The works of the Jesuit Antonio Vieira (1608-1697) fill twenty-six volumes (with 200 sermons, 500 letters), those of Manoel Bernardes (1644-1710) nineteen volumes (sermons and moral treatises). In both Portuguese prose is seen at its best.

In 1669 appeared in French five love letters purporting to be written by Marianna de Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun born in 1640, from her convent to a French officer, afterwards the Marquis de Chamilly. They were translated, or retranslated into Portuguese and are reckoned among the masterpieces of Portuguese prose. Portugal was known for its sentimental fervour, and the wholly untenable suspicion arises that a French writer may have composed these letters (basing them on a foundation of fact), and attributed them to the Portuguese nun as later Elizabeth Barrett Browning called her love sonnets “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

In the eighteenth century, when lyrical poetry seemed to have died out of Europe, it became more than ever evident how much the excellence of Portuguese literature depends on the lyric. None of the Portuguese poets of this any more than of the preceding century attained prominence, while in the eighteenth there was no compensating excellence in prose. Some letters and sermons and treatises on the Portuguese language there were, and Barbosa Machado (1682-1772) composed his valuable Bibliotheca Lusitana. It was the age of academies and arcadias. The Academia Real da Historia was founded in 1720, the Academia Real das Sciencias, which has done and continues to do such good service to Portuguese literature, first met in 1780.

Of the poets, many of whom met with a tragic fate, José Agostinho de Macedo (1761-1831) was a dull and copious versifier, who apparently reserved all his fire for attacks upon dead or contemporary writers. He made bold to supersede the Lusiads with his poem Gama (1811), subsequently revised and entitled Oriente (1814). Corrêa Garção (1724-72) was imprisoned by order of the powerful Minister, the Marquez de Pombal, in 1772, and is stated to have died in prison on the very day on which his release was ordered. His complete works were published at Rome in 1888. Domingos dos Reis Quita (1728-70), a Lisbon hairdresser, wrote odes, idyls, tragedies, a pastoral drama, but his poetry is second-rate except when it closely imitates Camões. Antonio José da Silva was born in Brazil in 1705. He belonged to a family of “new Christians,” and by the people of Lisbon, which enjoyed his comedies, he was known as “the Jew.” He perished, strangled and then burnt, in the auto da fé of 18th October, 1739. Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (Filinto Elysio), more fortunate, escaped from the Inquisition and lived and died in Paris. He earned a living by translation, and his copious poetry had a great vogue in his day but now has few readers. The most talented of all the Portuguese eighteenth-century poets was another Arcadian, Manuel Maria Barbosa de Bocage,[38] whose Arcadian name was Elmano Sadino. Born at Setubal in 1765, he deserted from military service in India, and returned to Lisbon in 1790, where he led a dissipated life and was in 1797 imprisoned during three months in the Limoeiro for having published a poem entitled A pavorosa illusão da Eternidade. After the Limoeiro he was a prisoner of the Inquisition for four months, and was then relegated to a monastery. He died, worn out by his own excesses, at the age of 40, in 1805. With a fund of satire and gift of facile improvisation, he rose occasionally to real poetry, as in some of his sonnets.

In the nineteenth century lyric poetry revived in Portugal as elsewhere, although the influence of Byron did not there inspire any genius such as Espronceda in Spain. The romanticism of Antonio Feliciano de Castilho (1800-75) was of a gentler kind. Blind from the age of six, his literary activity was nevertheless untiring. Besides writing a large number of books of verse, he translated Ovid, Anacreon, Virgil, Molière, Shakespeare, Goethe’s Faust. Other romantic poets were Soares de Passos (1826-60); João de Lemos (1819-89), who in A Lua de Londres regrets Portugal and his native Douro; Mendes Leal (1818-86), who won a great reputation with his heroic odes (especially Ave Cesar, O Pavilhão, and Napoleão no Kremlin); José Simões Dias (1844-99), who, besides his poems (Peninsulares), wrote a history of Portuguese literature, and Gomes d’Amorim (1827-92).

In 1865 appeared the Poema da Mocidade, by Pinheiro Chagas, with a letter by Castilho, which gave rise to Quental’s Bom senso e bom gosto and the beginning of a new school of poets. Foremost among these were Anthero de Quental (1842-91) himself, and João de Deus Ramos (1830-96). Their poetry has nothing in common, but they are both equally far removed from the traditional romantic school. The sonnets of Anthero (many of which have been translated into English by Mr. Edgar Prestage) have nothing to fear from comparison with those of any other nineteenth-century poet. Portuguese in his hands became adamantine and sonorous, and the sonnet a trumpet-call. João de Deus, on the other hand, wrote feathery light lyrics with great naturalness and charm, and in his easy flow of improvisation is far the more characteristically Portuguese of the two. Thomaz Ribeiro (1831-1901) belonged to the romantic school, and is the author of the celebrated ode A Portugal. Gonçalves Crespo (1846-83) published only two small volumes of poems, Miniaturas (1870) and Nocturnos (1882), which contain one or two little masterpieces, such as the sonnet Mater dolorosa.

Of living poets the most widely known is Senhor Abilio Guerra Junqueiro (born in 1850), who now, however, rarely publishes any verse. He is a true poet, and Finis Patriae, and, above all, Os Simples (1892, sixth edition, 1913), contain the best poems in the Portuguese language of the last twenty years. In other works his poetry has often suffered from an invasion of rhetoric, but it always displays vigour and courageous patriotism. There are many schools, the Cloud Treaders (Nephelibatas), of whom Snr. Eugenio de Castro is the head; the Parnassians, as Colonel Christovam Ayres, Snr. Antonio Feijó, João Diniz, Joaquim de Araujo, aiming at and sometimes achieving that perfection of form which marked the work of Gonçalves Crespo, João Penha, Antonio Nobre; the pantheistic school of the Renascença, of which the principal poets are Snr. Teixeira de Pascoaes, and Snr. Mario Beirão. Two notable living poets are Snr. Affonso Lopes Vieira and Snr. Antonio Correa d’Oliveira, whose works are always read with eagerness, the latter especially having caught some of the sixteenth-century lyrical vein. The living poets of Portugal are, however, so numerous that it is impossible even to give the names of all of them. A French critic, who names some sixty, says modestly: “On ne peut tout citer.”[39]

It is preferable to leave them on one side (although an anthology of some merit might easily be formed from their works) and to go back to that strange figure and very real poet of the first half of the nineteenth century, the Visconde de Almeida Garrett (1799-1854). He was master of a peculiar and fascinating style of Portuguese prose, he revived the Portuguese drama, he wrote long romantic poems and exquisitely finished short lyrics, and he collected old Portuguese romances, which, however, he could not refrain from retouching and adorning. It is impossible to over-estimate his services to Portuguese literature, although the works written by him that will be read a hundred years hence will probably fit into a very small volume.

In prose the other great figure of the nineteenth century in Portugal was Alexandre Herculano (1810-77), historian, poet and historical novelist (Historia de Portugal; Lendas e Narrativas; Eurico, etc). His works are of permanent value, and his prose bears the impress of his strong exceptional character. Other historical writers were Pinheiro Chagas (1842-95), Latino Coelho (1825-91), Rebello da Silva (1821-72), and Oliveira Martins (1845-94).

The latter’s first work was a historical novel, and his work remained romantic throughout, but he had the power of reconstituting historical scenes in their picturesqueness and colour, and making the dry bones live. His most celebrated works are his Historia de Portugal, Portugal Contemporaneo, A Vida de Nun’ Alvares, and the Filhos de João I. He did not, however, confine himself in his historical writings to Portugal, but embraced the histories of Greece, Rome, and Iberian civilisation. When one remembers that he was also an active politician and Minister of Finance in 1892, it is not surprising that he had worn himself out before reaching the age of 50.

The novel in Portugal since the middle of the nineteenth century has embraced the most varied kinds and sometimes attained a high degree of merit. Camillo Castello Branco (1826-1890), most Portuguese of writers in theme and style, wrote over a hundred novels. He was gifted with a temperament that could not fail to make his life restless and unhappy and is reflected in the sentimental tragedies and nervous pessimism and vitriolic satire of his books. By his countrymen his novels, especially Amor de perdição, are still read with enthusiasm; for foreigners they are redeemed by the pure Portuguese of their style and by the occasional insight to be won from them into the Portuguese life of the second half of the nineteenth century. But probably it is necessary to be born a Portuguese in order to do them full justice. For those who wish to learn Portuguese untainted with Gallicisms they are invaluable.

Eça de Queiroz (1846-1900), the other great Portuguese novelist of the century, is, on the contrary, almost as much French as Portuguese in style, and is probably the best known of modern Portuguese writers outside Portugal. His work contains many arresting pages, especially those which describe country or provincial life in Portugal (in O Crime do Padre Amaro, 1875; A Correspondencia de Fradique Mendes, 1891; A Illustre Casa de Ramires, 1897; A Cidade e as Serras, 1901). Life in Lisbon is described, or perhaps one should say distorted, caricatured in O Primo Basilio (1878), Os Maias (1880), and in part of A Reliquia (1887). Eça de Queiroz went from strength to strength, or rather from weakness to strength. His later work is more original and above all more Portuguese. It is in parts very striking indeed, and through all his novels runs that peculiar flavour of irony and sarcasm which prevents him from ever being merged entirely in the French realistic or naturalistic school.

A writer of less vigorous talent was “Julio Diniz” (Joaquim Guilherme Gomes Coelho) (1839-71), whose novels, Uma Familia Inglesa (1862), As Pupillas do Sr. Reitor (1867), A Morgadinha dos Cannaviaes (1868), Os Fidalgos da Casa Morisca (1871) treat of country themes with a quiet charm and no little psychological interest. Some of his pages recall those of the Spanish novelist Fernán Caballero in their delicate observation and gentle optimism.

Of living novelists, Snr. Teixeira de Queiroz (born in 1848) also occasionally recalls Fernán Caballero in a certain naïve and delightful power of description, preferably of country scenes and peasants. His best work is contained in the short stories of his Comedia do Campo—Contos, Amor Divino, Antonio Fogueira, Novos Contos, Amores, Amores, A Nossa Gente, A Cantadeira (1913). Sr. Luiz de Magalhães, born in 1859, who was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Senhor João Franco’s Ministry, wrote in 1886 a novel entitled O Brazileiro Soares, a careful study of a “Brazilian” (that is, a Portuguese returning enriched from Brazil), which placed him in the front rank of contemporary Portuguese novelists. Senhor Magalhães Lima, born in 1857, did not publish his first novel, O Transviado, till 1899. Other novels by the same author are A Paz do Senhor (1903) and O Reino da Saudade (1904). Senhor Abel Botelho, born in 1854, and appointed Minister at Buenos Aires by the Republic, has a great reputation as a novelist. His novels are professedly “pathological.” A Portuguese critic remarks that his books sometimes “cause more moral indignation than aesthetic enjoyment.”[40] Younger contemporary novelists, as contemporary poets, are very numerous.

The short story, or conto, has been written with success by so many authors that it has almost become a special feature of modern Portuguese literature: Eça de Queiroz, Snr. Teixeira de Queiroz, Affonso Botelho, Fialho d’Almeida (1857-1911)—stories of Alemtejo in O Paiz das Uvas and other works—the Conde de Ficalho, the Conde de Sabugosa, Julio Cesar Machado, the Visconde de Villa Moura (Os Humildes, Bohemios, etc.), and above all, Trindade Coelho, whose Os Meus Amores are stories deliberately ingenuous, remarkable for their style. Dona Maria Amalia Vaz de Carvalho, whose husband was the poet Gonçalves Crespo, has also written contos and poems. But her chief work consists in historical studies and in critical essays. Her works comprise over twenty volumes, and especially she has won English gratitude by introducing some part of modern English literature to Portuguese and Brazilian readers.

“Em Portugal nunca chegou a haver theatro—a Portuguese drama has never existed,” said Garrett (life to a Portuguese is perhaps not dull enough to drive him to the theatre), and his own plays for long continued to be an isolated achievement. Recently, however, a number of playwrights by no means to be despised have arisen in Portugal. Foremost among them are Snr. Julio Dantas, Dom João da Camara (1852-1912), Antonio Ennes (1848-1901), Snr. Marcellino de Mesquita, Snr. Henrique Lopes de Mendonça and Snr. Abel Botelho, the novelist. It would almost seem as if there were two writers to every reader in Portugal. “Every passing season inundates the bookshops with a flood of brochures in verse and prose, the proof of an exaggerated output of books. It seems as if even the illiterates must be authors” (Diario de Noticias, 6th April, 1914). What most amazes the foreigner is to see the Lisbon bookshops parade a crowd of foreign books, while those in Portuguese are often tucked away in some obscure corner. Modern Portuguese literature is, unhappily, like finance and politics, largely of artificial growth, imported from abroad. There is plenty of writers but no critical reading public.

The excessive number of writers is no doubt due in part to the defects of a criticism which appears not to realise its power of regulating this stream of production. A little sincere condemnation may serve to prevent a whole series of inferior works of fiction or poetry, especially as Portuguese writers are very sensitive to criticism. Fortunately contemporary Portuguese literature now has a promising young critic in Senhor Fidelino de Figueiredo, who combines sympathy with sincerity and may do something to check copious, slovenly, and slavishly imitative writing, and inaugurate a school of concrete criticism. Senhor Theophile Braga does not deal with contemporary literature, but is still piling Ossa on Pelion in the wide range of his works. His long poem, A Visão dos Tempos, was published in 1864, and his Historia da Litteratura Portugueza continues to receive valuable additions from time to time. There is plenty of literary talent in Portugal, but it needs direction: it would be a thousand pities were it all to be frittered away from an inability to select and concentrate.

In art the Portuguese have never occupied a very high position. Perhaps they are too vague and romantic. Yet in early times they would seem to have excelled rather in realistic representation on a small scale than in large romantic pictures, as may be seen in the admirable, minute sculpture on the tombs at Alcobaça and in the illustrations of old manuscripts—for instance, the wonderfully life-like portrait of Prince Henry the Navigator in the Chronicle of Gomes Eannes de Azurara, a masterpiece attributed to Nuno Gonçalves, who painted the exceedingly fine triptychs now in the Lisbon Museum. What treasures of art are or were (being now transferred to museums) contained in Portugal’s churches and convents is amply shown by an excellent magazine of art now being published by Snr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos, whose researches in connection with Damião de Goes, Francisco de Hollanda, and other Portuguese classics have earned him the gratitude of all who interest themselves in Portuguese literature. This Arte Religiosa de Portugal, begun in 1914, is published monthly, each part containing eight beautifully reproduced plates, and costing 500 réis (about two shillings). No one who cares for art will regret subscribing for it, and certainly after seeing these plates they will never think of Portugal as a country without art. Nor is talent lacking in painting and in sculpture at the present day in Portugal. Witness the painters Sr. Bordallo Pinheiro, Sr. Carlos Reis, Sr. José Malhoa and others, and the sculptors, Sr. Soares dos Reis and Sr. Teixeira Lopes, whose Eça de Queiroz statue and other works have won him universal admiration. 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.

The restoration of the Portuguese language to its original purity is an essential condition, since it is vain to hope to gather figs from thistles. The late Gonçalves Vianna, Julio Moreira, and others watched over Portuguese with loving care, and it is now under the protection of the celebrated philologist and folk-lorist, Dr. José Leite de Vasconcellos. But all may do their share by forswearing and rooting out Gallicisms to the best of their knowledge (Snr. Candido de Figueiredo does excellent service here), and when the ground has been cleared of these noxious weeds—Gallicisms, abstractions, trailing circumlocutions—Portuguese literature is likely to thrive as it has not thriven for the last three hundred years.