Mr. Morse Stephens in this connection affirms (Portugal, p. 259) that "it has always been the case in the history of a nation which can boast of a golden age, that the epoch of its greatest glory is that in which its literature chiefly flourished.... It was so with Portugal. The age which witnessed the careers of its famous captains and conquerors was also the age of its greatest poets and prose writers." The proposition on inquiry will be found to be inaccurate in its terms and fallacious in its implications. As thus: (1) Greek literature is, on the whole, at its highest in the period of Plato, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Aristotle; while the period of "glory" or expansion must be placed either earlier or later, under Alexander, when the golden age of literature is past. (2) The synchronism equally breaks down in the case of Rome. There is little literature in the period of the triumph over Cartilage; and literature does not go on growing after Augustus, despite continued military "glory." Trajan had neither a Horace nor a Virgil. (3) In England the "glory" of Marlborough's victories evokes Addison, not Shakespeare, who does most of his greatest work under James I. And though Chaucer chanced to flourish under Edward III, there is no fine literature whatever alongside of the conquests of Henry V. (4) In Germany, Schiller and Goethe, Fichte and Hegel, wrote in a period of political subordination, and Heine before the period of Bismarckism. Who are the great writers since? (5) In France, the period of Napoleon is nearly blank of great writers. They abounded after the fall of his empire and the loss of his conquests. (6) The great literary period of Spain begins with the decline of the Spanish empire. (7) The great modern literature of the Scandinavian States has arisen without any national "glory" to herald it.
It is hardly necessary to bring further evidence. It remains only to point out that in Portugal itself the brilliant literary reign is not the period of discovery, since all the great exploration had been done before John III came to the throne. It is true that the retrospect of an age of conquest and effort may stimulate literature in a later generation; but the true causation is in a literary plus a social sequence, though the arrest of literary development is always caused socially and politically. Portuguese and Spanish literature and drama alike derive proximately from the Italian Renaissance. When both polities were in full decadence, with the Inquisition hung round their necks, their intellectual life necessarily drooped. But it is pure fallacy to suppose—and here Mr. Stephens would perhaps acquiesce—that a period of new conquest is needed to elicit new and original literature. Homer, Plato, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Bacon, Molière, Voltaire, Goethe, Leopardi, Poe, Balzac, Heine, Flaubert, Hawthorne, Tourguenief, Ruskin, Ibsen—these are in no rational sense by-products of militarism or "expansion." Given the right social and economic conditions, Spain and Portugal may in the twentieth century produce greater literature than they ever had, without owning a particle of foreign empire any more than do Sweden and Norway.
The causes of the decline of the Portuguese empire are very apparent. At the best, with its narrow economic basis in home production, it would have had a hard struggle to beat off the attack of the Dutch and English; but the royal policy, reducing all Portuguese life to dependence on the throne, had withered the national energies before the Dutch attack was made. Hence the easy fall of the crown to Philip of Spain when, the succession failing, he chose to grasp it (1581): the nation had for the time lost the power of self-determination; and under the Spanish dominion the Portuguese possessions in the Indies were defended against the Dutch and English with but a moiety even of the energy that a Portuguese king might have elicited. So the imposing beginnings came well-nigh to naught, the Portuguese empire lasting in its entirety, as a trade monopoly, for just a hundred years. Within the first thirty or forty years of the seventeenth century Dutch and English, Moslems, and even Danes, had captured from Spain-ruled Portugal the Moluccas, Java, most of its Indian territory, its Persian and Chinese settlements, and much of the coast of Brazil; and the two former enemies harried at sea what Oriental trade it had kept. The rest of the Indian settlements were lost in the next generation. "Empire" had run for Portugal the usual course.
It was at this stage that the new life of the nation began. In 1640 came the successful revolt against Spain; and the Dutch power in Brazil, which had seemed decisively established under Prince Maurice of Nassau, was entirely overthrown within ten years after his recall in 1644. In Portugal the revolution was primarily the work of the nobility, exasperated by Spanish arrogance and exclusiveness; but they were effectually supported by the people for the same reason; and the state of Spain, financially decrepit and embroiled in war abroad and rebellion in Catalonia, left the new dynasty of Braganza able to maintain itself, with French help, against the clerical and other elements of pro-Spanish reaction. The overthrow of the Dutch in Brazil was almost against the new king's will, for they had at first supported him against Spain; but the movement there was as spontaneous, and fully as well justified, as the revolt at home against Spain itself.
§ 2. The Colonisation of Brazil
Brazil was and is in fact for Portugal the analogue to the North American colonies of Britain. Where "empire" was sought in the Indies as a means of revenue, savage Brazil, after the gold-seeking rush of 1530 which first raised it above the status of a penal settlement, was a colony, resorted to by men—many of them Jews—seeking freedom from the Inquisition, and men driven from the soil by slave-labour seeking land to till for their own subsistence.[957] All things considered, it has been one of the soundest processes of colonisation in history. The low state of the autochthonous inhabitants is sufficient proof of Buckle's proposition that there the combination of great heat and great moisture made impossible a successful primary civilisation, nature being too unmanageable for the natural or primitive man.[958] The much higher development of pre-European civilisation not only in Mexico and Peru but among the North American Indians[959] can be explained in no other way. But that science may not in time so exploit the natural forces as to turn them to the account of a high tertiary civilisation is an assumption we are not entitled to make, though Buckle apparently inclined to it. When he wrote, the population of Brazil was computed at six millions. To-day it stands at over twenty-three millions;[960] and in Brazil the prospect has never been reckoned otherwise than hopeful. The progress all along, relatively to the obstacles, has been so great that there is no visible ground for anticipating any arrest in the near future.
In Brazil, from the first, individual and collective energy had the chance that the royal monopoly denied to the Asiatic settlements. There was here no exigible revenue to arrange for; and the first colonists, being left to themselves, set up local self-government with elected military magistrates called captains[961]—an evolution more remarkable than any which took place in the first century of English colonisation in North America. The first governor-general sent out, Alfonso de Sousa, had the wisdom to preserve and develop the system of captaincies;[962] and colonisation went steadily on throughout the century. It was first sought, as a matter of course, to enslave the natives; but the attempt led only to a race-war such as grew up later in the New England colonies; and in the Catholic as later in the Protestant colonies resort was had to the importation of negroes, already so common as slaves in Portugal. With a much slower rate of progress, the Brazilians have in the end come much better than the North Americans out of the social diseases thus set up.
In the first place, the Jesuits had a missionary success among the aborigines such as the Puritans never approached in North America, thus eventually arresting the race-struggle and securing the native stock as an element of population—a matter of obvious importance, in view of the factor of climate. And whereas the labours of the Jesuits in India had been turned to naught by the Inquisition which they brought in their train, Brazil was by the wisdom of the early governors saved from that scourge.[963] Thus fortunately restrained by the civil power, the Jesuits did a large part of the work of civilising Brazil. So long as the stage of race-war lasted—and till far on in the seventeenth century it was chronic and murderous[964]—they strove to protect the natives whom they converted.[965] It is noteworthy, too, that just before expelling the Jesuit order from Portugal in 1759, by which time it had become a wealthy and self-seeking trading corporation in Brazil,[966] the Marquis of Pombal secured the emancipation in Brazil[967] of all the Indians who had there been enslaved as a result of the old race-wars, thus giving effect to a law which the Jesuits had got passed in 1680 without being able to enforce it against the slave-owners.[968] And it is apparently due in part to the culture they maintained[969] that, though the emancipation of the negroes was to be delayed till late in the nineteenth century, an energetic plea was made for them by a Portuguese advocate of Batria at the time of the emancipation of the Indians.[970] Their own degeneration into a wealth-amassing corporation was an exact economic duplication of the process that had occurred in Europe among all the monastic and chivalrous orders of the Middle Ages in succession.[971]
In the eighteenth century Brazil, still limited, for its direct trade, to Portugal, so prospered that the loss of empire in Asia was much more than compensated even to the royal revenue of Portugal; the new discoveries of gold bringing for a time as much as £300,000 a year to the treasury under the system by which, the goldfields remaining free to their exploiters, the crown received a fifth of the total export.[972] The trouble was that the influx of gold in Portugal, as in Spain, paralysed industry; and the country became poorer in a double ratio to its bullion revenue;[973] and not till this was scientifically realised could a sound polity be raised. But in Portugal itself, after the advent of the anti-clerical Marquis of Pombal, there went on as striking a regeneration of government (1750-77) as occurred in Spain under Charles III; and though the storms of the French Revolution, and the tyrannous reactions which followed it, fell as heavily on Portugal as on the rest of the peninsula, its lot is to-day hopeful enough. In common with those of Spain and Italy, its literature shows plenty of fresh intellectual life; and, again as in their case, its worst trouble is a heritage of bad finance, rather than any lack of progressive intelligence. With sound government, the large outlet offered by Brazil to emigration should make Portugal a place of plenty—if, that is, its burden of debt be not too great. But herein lies a problem of special importance for the people of Great Britain. Portugal, like Britain, began to accumulate a national debt in the period of chronic European war; but between 1850 and 1890 the sum had actually multiplied tenfold, rising from twenty-five to two hundred and fifty-eight millions of milreis; and at the close of 1910 it stood at over one thousand millions, the interest upon which constitutes two-fifths of the total national expenditure. All the while, the balance of productivity is more and more heavily on the side of Brazil. As a similar evolution may conceivably take place within the next century or two in England, it will be of peculiar interest to note how Portugal handles the problem. When the English coal supply is exhausted, a vast debt, it is to be feared, may be left to a population ill-capable of sustaining it; and the apparently inevitable result will be such a drift of population from Britain to America or Australia as now goes from Portugal to Brazil, leaving the home population all the less able to bear its financial burden. It is difficult to see how any arrangement, save a composition with creditors, can meet the Portuguese case.[974] Yet within the last twenty years Lisbon has been enormously improved; and if but the law of 1844 prescribing compulsory education could be enforced, Portuguese resources might be so developed as to solve the problem progressively. As it is, the nation is still largely illiterate—a heavy handicap.
Meanwhile Brazil, after passing from the status of colony to that of kingdom or so-called "empire," has become a republic, like the other Iberian States of South America; and throughout the nineteenth century its development has been comparatively fortunate. The flight of the Portuguese king[975] thither in 1808 gave it independent standing without its paying the price of war; whence came free trade with the friendly States of Europe; and when on the return of the king it insisted on maintaining its independence under his son, against the jealous effort of the Portuguese Cortes to reduce it to a group of dependent provinces,[976] the tradition of freedom set up by its past prevailed. Thus the Brazilians effected peacefully what the English colonies in North America achieved only by an embittering and exhausting war; and so far as those of us can judge who are not at home in Portuguese literature, the culture evolution in Brazil at the date of the French Revolution had on some lines equalled that of the United States.[977] But where the United States were in educative and enriching contact with the relatively high civilisations of England and France, Brazil could still draw only on the relatively small intellectual and commercial stores of Portugal, with some addition from general commerce with Europe. It was in the latter half of the century, when intellectual influences from France had been prevalent, that Brazilian possibilities began to emphasise themselves.