Portugal of the Portuguese

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

Carlos I.

Luiz I was succeeded in 1889 by his son, Carlos I, whose reign began as it ended, disastrously for Portugal. In the very year of his accession, the house of Braganza was driven from Brazil, which declared itself a Republic. In the following year a colonial question between Great Britain and Portugal led to the presentation of an ultimatum by Great Britain, and what was ignorantly regarded as the King’s weakness inspired an abortive republican rising at Oporto in 1891. In the following year Portugal’s credit was laid in the dust by a formal declaration of bankruptcy. The events of these four years were sufficient to disgust anyone with the business of king. The King, under the Constitution, had really little power to interfere. The Queen, Marie Amélie, daughter of the Comte de Paris, was looked upon askance as a friend of the religious orders, and her courage and charity awakened no response of chivalry in the hearts of the Portuguese. The position came to be this: that every kind of support was refused to the Monarchy, which was then bitterly criticised and attacked by those who, had they supported it loyally, might have made it a success. It was “a Monarchy without any monarchists,” said King Carlos.

CHAPTER VIII
LITERATURE

Theophilo Braga, and Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos.

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.

Lost Treasures.

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.

Earliest Poetry.

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.