PORTUGUESE LITERATURE. The lit erature of the most westerly of the Romance lands, Portugal. was one of the latest to arrive at a consciousness of national unity and in dependence, and therefore one of the latest to begin to achieve a literary history. Further more, as a result of the somewhat sluggish and unassertive temperament of the people as a whole, Portuguese literature has been less inde pendent than that of the sister tongues, and has been only ton ready to limit itself to imitation of what had arisen within the bounds of Northern France, Provence, Italy. and especially of the near neighbor Spain. To the lack of any long continued originality in the domain of Portu g,uese letters there has also contributed to a large degree the excess of sentimentality and the consequent elegiac effusiveness that mark the national character and life. So it is that the lyric spirit, with decided tendencies toward the idyllic and the bucolic, has ever predominated in Portugal. It was so at the very outset, for whereas lyric verse followed in the wake of epic verse in Spain and in France. it appeared at the very beginning of literary activity in Portugal. and the epic appeared there only three centuries and a half later, and then as the result of a con sciously artistic development. And the love lyric, from which we date the rise of Portuguese litera ture. was not of spontaneous growth or native to the soil; on the contrary, it was an exotic that had thriven in France before it was transplanted to the more westerly land.
According to the scheme adopted by Theophilo Braga and by C. N. de Vaseoneellos, six main periods may he distinguished in the course of Portuguese literary history.
(1) In the first period (1200 to 1385) the impulse to literary production came from France. The first Portuguese dynasty was founded by Burgundian nobles, in whose train there entered into the land, with their French habits and predilections, soldiers and colonists who settled on the territory regained from the Arabs during the age of the reconquest.
over. the constant pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint James at Compostella, ecclesiastical rela tions of various kinds, and royal and noble intermarriages, made the relations between France and Portugal exceedingly close. The more important literary influence at this earl• stage was that which entered from Southern France. The troubadours early penetrated into the western territory and met with particular favor in Galicia. a district linguistically con nected with Portugal. Their strains were soon taken and reechoed by native poets, who imi tated as well as they might the love lyric, the panegyric, the satire, the debate. and the other conventional poetical forms of Provence. The high-water mark of composition in Provencal measures and according to Provencal ideals was reached in the reign of the King Dom Diniz (1279-1325), the greatest of all the native trou badours. whose poetical gifts were inherited by his natural sons, Alfonso Sanches and Pedro, Count of Barcellos. Of these poets and some two hundred others of this period there are preserved about 2000 poems, nearly 140 of which are from the pen of the monarch himself, and not a few of them are due to courtiers such as the Chancel lor Estevam da Guarda and the Admiral homes Charinho. We find the great body of this verse in certain Cancioneiros or song books, one set of which contains the Galician lyrics of the Castil ian monarch Alfonso the Wise; three of them— the Caneioneiro da Ajuda and the Caneioneiro do Vaticano, so named from the libraries in which they are deposited, and the Cancioneiro Colocci Brancuti. bearing the name of its present and former owners—have the poems of native Portu guese authors. Although the prevailing tone in the Galician-Portuguese literature of this age is that of the artificial Provencal lyric, there is a noticeable tendency to take up and adapt popular forms of a kind that still live on in the oral tradition of Portugal and Northern and Western Spain.