GLIMPSES OF PORTUGAL AND THE PORTUGUESE.
Sketch Map of NORTH SPAIN and PORTUGAL.
The mere name of Spain calls up at once a string of flashing, barbaric pictures—Moorish magnificence and Christian chivalry, bull-fights, boleros, serenades, tattered pride and cruel pleasure. All these things go to form that piquant whole, half Eastern, half European, which is the Spain of our imaginations. Our associations with the western part of the Peninsula are, on the other hand, vague and incomplete. Vasco da Gama, the earthquake of Lisbon, port wine and Portuguese plums are the Lusitanian products most readily called to mind. After them would come perhaps the names of Magellan, of Prince Henry the Navigator and of the ill-fated Don Sebastian. One poet of the country, Camoens, is as often referred to as Tasso or Ariosto. Those whose memories go back to the European events of 1830 and thereabouts may recall the Portuguese civil wars, the woes of Dona Maria and the dark infamy of Don Miguel. And more recently have we not heard of the Portuguese Guide to English Conversation and relished its delicious discoveries in our language? All these items do not, however, present a very vivid or finished picture of the country: like the words in a dictionary, they are a trifle disconnected.
Portugal was the first station of Childe Harold's pilgrimage, but it holds no place in the ordinary European tour of to-day. It does not connect with any of the main lines of travel in such a manner as to beguile the tourist insensibly over its border: a deliberate start must be made by steamer from England in order to reach Lisbon from the north. Another and probably stronger reason for our neglect of its scenery is that it is not talked of. We go to Europe to see places and follow up associations with which fame has already made us familiar, and, though Portugal has had a great past of which the records are still extant, it has not been brought to our notice by art.
The two nations living side by side on the Peninsula, though originally of the same stock and subjected to the same influences, present more points of difference than of likeness. Their early history is the same. Hispania and Lusitania both fell successively under the dominion of the Romans and of the Moors, and were modified to a considerable extent by the civilization of each. Moorish influence was predominant in Spain—Portugal retained more deeply the Roman stamp. This is easily seen in the literature of the two countries. Spanish ballads and plays show the Eastern delight in hyperbole, the Eastern fertility of invention: Portuguese literature is completely classic in spirit, avoiding all exaggeration, all offences against taste, and confining itself to classic forms, such as the pastoral, the epic and the sonnet. Many Moorish customs survive in Portugal to this day, but they have not become so closely assimilated there as in Spain to the character of the people. The cruelty which has always marked the Spanish race is no part of the Portuguese national character, which is conspicuous rather for the "gentler-sexed humanity." True, the bull-fight, that barbarous legacy of the Moors, still lingers among the Portuguese, but the sport is pursued with no such wanton intoxication of cruelty as in the country with which its name is now associated. On the other hand, the Roman tradition has been preserved in Portugal more perfectly than in Italy itself: in the "fairest of Roman colonies," as it was once called, there will be found manners and customs which bring up more vividly the life portrayed by the classic poets than any existing among the peasants of modern Italy.
ANCIENT HOUSE IN OPORTO.
Both Rome and Arabia stood sponsors for the land they thus endowed. The name Portugal is compounded of the Latin portus, a "port," and the Arabic caläh, a "castle" or "fortress." The first of these names was originally given to the town which still retains it—Oporto—one of the oldest of Portugal, and at one time its capital.
The history of Portugal, when it separates from that of Spain, is the history of a single stupendous achievement. A small nation raising itself in a short time to the power of a great empire, reaching a height which to gain was incredible, to keep impossible, and at the first relaxation of effort suddenly falling with a disastrous crash,—that is the drama of Portugal's greatness. There was no gradual rise or decline: it mounted and fell. There is a tradition that the first king of Portugal, Affonso Henriquez, was crowned on the battlefield with a burst of enthusiasm on the part of the soldiers whom he was leading against the Saracens, and that on the same day he opened his reign by the glorious victory of Ourique. Less than half a century previously the country had been given as a fief to a young knight, Count Henry of Burgundy, on his marriage with a daughter of the king of Castile. The Moors were overrunning it on the one hand, Castile was eying it jealously on the other, yet Affonso Henriquez made it an independent and permanent kingdom. This prince slaughtered Saracens and carried off honors on the field as fast as the Cid, but his deeds were not embalmed in an epic destined to become a storehouse of poetry for all the world. His chronicler did not come till about four centuries later, and then nearer and vaster achievements than those of Affonso Henriquez lay ready to his pen. At the birth of Camoens, in 1525, Portugal had gained her greatest conquests, and, if the shadows were already falling across her power, she had still great men who were making heroic efforts to retain it. Vasco da Gama had died within the year. Albuquerque, the hero of the Lusiado, the noblest and most far-sighted mind in an age of great men, had been dead ten years. Camoens, like the Greek dramatists, was soldier as well as poet: he was not alone the singer of past adventures—he was the reporter of what took place under his own eyes. His epic was already finished before the defeat of Don Sebastian in the battle of Alcazar put an end to the glory it celebrated, and in dying shortly after the poet is said to have breathed a prayer of thanksgiving at being spared the pain of surviving his country.