The Political Press.
It is the misfortune of existing Portuguese politics and of the Portuguese Press that the party-leader is often a newspaper-editor. If we imagine Mr. Balfour as Leader of the Conservatives and editor and leader-writer of the Morning Post, Mr. Asquith as Leader of the Liberals and editor of the Westminster Gazette, Mr. Lloyd George at the Daily Chronicle, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald at a paper of his own, we have some idea on a large scale of the state of affairs in Portugal. “Men are rarely good judges in their own interests,” one of the characters in Francisco de Sá de Miranda’s play, Os Vilhalpandos, informs us. The Latin temperament, with its many merits and excellences, its logical and intelligent outlook, rarely has the quality of objective justice. It is too fervent and impassioned, loves and hates too ardently to pause to consider coldly the fairness of a matter. All the more welcome would be some independent organs in the Lisbon Press, some steadying element, some kind of Portuguese Spectator. As to partisan newspapers, there are far too many of them.
Journalism.
At Lisbon alone—if we include all kinds and descriptions of periodical publications—there are upwards of a hundred, and the majority of these are political. There are too many writers, who drift from a Coimbra degree into journalism at Lisbon, and who consider it far less important to write good Portuguese than to drag in some French or Latin quotation in and out of season, and most often misspelt.
THE WASHING PLACE, COIMBRA
Portuguese and Portugibberish.
It is worth while to consider the sad case of the Portuguese language, since it is or might be one of the finest languages in Europe. It is to be hoped that the Bible Society will distribute far and wide the Portuguese translation of the Bible by João Ferreira d’Almeida among all, peasants and others, who can read. It may not convert them to Protestantism, but will lay the basis for a revival of the Portuguese language, murdered daily in the Press. It is not only the Latin tags that are misspelt; in spite of the intricate official rules drawn up for Portuguese spelling, it remains unfixed, and words are sometimes transformed almost out of recognition. E, being often pronounced as i, becomes so written, s takes the place of c, and when these and other errors combine the result is remarkable; for instance, “scepticism” becomes siticismo, “miscellany” mecellanea, and so forth. The most minute rules of Portuguese orthography were drawn up after the Revolution. They went so far as to forbid you to write Sarah, while permitting ah and oh, with final H(aga). The confusion has only become worse confounded.
Polysyllables.