VIII.]

PORTUGAL AND BRAZIL.

199

VIII.

POINTS IN THE HISTORY OF PORTUGAL AND BRAZIL.*

A VERY short time back we should hardly have reckoned either the kingdom of Portugal or its great American colony among the lands whose names we were eager to hear whenever any news was brought from foreign parts. Suddenly both Portugal and Brazil have leaped into an unusual amount of importance. They have at least become the subject of an unusual amount of talk. And the events which have brought both the mother-country and the colony into special notice at the same moment do not seem to have had anything to do with one another. It is of course likely enough that the late revolution in the colony may have something to do with republican movements in the mother-country; but the two events, which have directly struck men's minds in Great Britain, the fact that Brazil has driven out its sovereign and that Portugal has had a dispute with ourselves, are events which seem to have no kind of connexion with one another beyond that of time. How far the happening of the two so nearly at the same moment may help to affect the future course of events is another question. All that we are concerned with now is that the two things have happened, and that the happening of the two so close together has served to draw an

[This piece has not before been printed. It was an Oxford lecture, delivered by deputy in February, 1890, when Portuguese and Brazilian matters were a good deal in men's minds. It was written at Bordighera, where I had no opportunity of reference to any books whatever. In revising it, I have made only a few verbal changes.]

unusual amount of English attention to the Portuguese lands on both sides of Ocean.

Now, when the events of our own time do in this way draw our eyes in a special way to any particular part of the world, it does not seem alien to the duties of a Professor of History to improve the occasion, so to speak, from his own point of view. When the affairs of a country that has not hitherto been greatly in men's minds come suddenly to fill a considerable place in them, there is sure to be a good deal of talk about them, and much of that talk is likely to be loose and inaccurate. To be sure Portugal and Brazil are not countries in the worst case, in that worst case which for some purposes is the best. Everybody has at least heard of them before. They are European lands, Christian lands; one of them has for ages been held to stand in a special relation to our own. They are not wrapped up in the mystery which attaches to some land which, whether nearer or further, European or barbarian, is practically newly discovered. Portugal and Brazil cannot boast the same charm which attached to the lands of Crim and of Soudan, when they suddenly sprang into notice, the one six-and-thirty years back, the other a good deal later. There is no need to puzzle over the names. There is neither the puzzling of those to whom the names are new at hearing them at all, nor yet the puzzling of those to whom they are not new at seeing them used in strange shapes and in strange uses. No class of our instructors marks either name with the definite article, that sure sign that they had never heard of it before they began to write about it. 'The Brazils' in the plural used to be a common form, and I have a dim notion that the reason has to be sought for in the vegetable kingdom. But the memory of 'Portugal pieces' is surely enough of itself to keep our 'ancient ally' from being spoken of as we speak of the last new land of which the newspapers chance to be full.

In seizing then the opportunity of saying a word or two about the lands which have thus suddenly come into

VIII.]

'NICHTS NEUES.

201

special notice, I may as well forestall the sentence to which one is so well used at the hands of German critics. This day you will assuredly hear nothing new. I make the announcement in our own tongue, though the judicial formula of nichts neues' is so familiar that it perhaps comes more readily to the lips. Now I am not fully convinced that even he who writes a book is always bound to put anything strictly new into it. The ready scribe who brings out of his treasure things old as well as new is not always an useless character. Still less am I convinced that he who speaks from this or any other professorial chair is bound to utter something new every time he officially opens his mouth. Even the last Commission did not bind us by such cruel fetters as that. But I am most fully convinced that, in this particular case, while I am bound by my office to say something on some subject, while I have chosen what seems to me a fitting subject, it is yet more impossible than ever that I should say anything new about it. In the place and under the circumstances under which I am putting this discourse together, I am altogether cut off from learning anything fresh-save of course from the newspapers of the day-on any subject in the world except certain parts of the remote history of Sicily. On a subject of which I have never made a special study, I have just now neither book nor man to turn to, if I wish either to call to mind or to learn for the first time, a single fact or name or date. And yet I am vain enough to believe that I can nevertheless say something that may be worth hearing. And why? Because all that I can give you will be the very simplest and plainest and broadest facts. And those very simplest and plainest and broadest facts are exactly those which it is most important to mark and to bear in mind, and they are also those which are more certain than any others to be passed by.

Of the immediate events which have in a manner given cause to this lecture I will say nothing. They have not yet come within my range. They are still only present

history; they have not yet become past politics. I will ask you to do a much simpler thing, a thing which at this moment I cannot do myself, namely, to look at the modern map of Europe. There, most western land of the European mainland, you will see the kingdom of Portugal, and you can hardly fail to mark the unique position which that kingdom holds on the map. If I were to say that Portugal is the only land in Europe which has a frontier and only one frontier, which has a neighbour and only one neighbour, I should be saying what is not strictly accurate. The kingdom of Greece has only one frontier and one neighbour; so have the principality of Monaco and the commonwealth of San Marino; so has the continental part of the kingdom of Denmark. But in these cases, save that of San Marino, very modern causes have been at work to bring about this state of things. Free Greece has no neighbour but the Turk, because the wisdom of Europe refuses to set free those enslaved parts of Greece, Servia, and Bulgaria, which would naturally be neighbours to one another. Greece again, so far as it is insular, has no frontier, though even its insular parts unhappily have a neighbour. This is still more true of Denmark, even without calling in the help of Iceland. That continental Denmark has one neighbour only is the result of several compulsory changes in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth. That Monaco exists and has France to her one neighbour is the result of some singular choppings and changings thirty years back. And in the two really important cases, those of Greece and Denmark, neither the look of the map nor the facts of history supply any real analogy with Portugal. I trust that no one asks why Greece is not part of the dominion of the Turk, or why Denmark is not part of the dominions of the House of Brandenburg. But every one who looks at the map, every child who is learning geography, does instinctively ask why Portugal and Spain are two different countries. If he should even put his question into

VIII.]

GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF PORTUGAL.

203

the less civil shape, Why does not Portugal 'belong to' Spain? one could hardly be surprised at it.

In sober truth no country in Europe has the same air which Portugal has of being something cut off, one might say unnaturally cut off, from another country. Spain in the geographical sense, the Iberian peninsula, seems in every way to make a natural whole. The frontier between Portugal and the rest of the peninsula looks purely artificial and accidental; it seems to answer to nothing either in nature or in earlier history. No striking natural boundary divides the two kingdoms; what does strike one is that several Spanish rivers, above all the great Tagus, have their mouths in Portugal. Modern Portugal seems to answer to no earlier division. It is fond of taking the Lusitanian name, but the boundaries of Roman Lusitania were quite different from those of modern Portugal; they went further to the east and not so far to the north. Nor is it easy to call up any exact analogy, past or present. When England and Scotland were two separate kingdoms, Scotland might seem to be in the same position as Portugal, but the analogy will hardly hold. The difference between Britain as an island and Spain as a peninsula now comes in. If Scotland had only one frontier, England had no more. Except that England was larger than Scotland, there was no more reason to say that Scotland was cut off from England than to say that England was cut off from Scotland. The boundary between the two kingdoms was a fairly natural one, and assuredly Scotland did not cut off England or her capital from the mouth of any of her great rivers.

Something more like the geographical relation of Portugal towards Spain might be seen in past ages of geography, when Prussia was a duchy with Poland all round it, save where it opened to the sea. It might be seen in an earlier age again, when Normandy and her capital cut off France and her capital from the mouth of their great river. Yet even here there were differences.