Romanticism — Garrett and Herculano

Romanticism was the movement that renewed Portuguese letters in the first half of the nineteenth century, breaking with the neoclassical and Arcadian rhetoric of the preceding age. In Portugal it has two indispensable founders, friends and political comrades: Almeida Garrett [ɣɐˈʁɛt] (1799–1854) and Alexandre Herculano [iɾkuˈlɐnu] (1810–1877). More than an aesthetic, they brought the Portuguese language a new, flexible and modern prose, and the recovery of its medieval and popular roots.

A liberal generation

Portuguese Romanticism was born in exile, to the rhythm of the wars between liberals and absolutists. Garrett, persecuted for his liberal convictions, emigrated to England and then to France; it was in Paris that he published, in 1825, the poem Camões, conventionally taken as the beginning of Romanticism in Portugal. Herculano, of the following generation, went into exile in 1831 and returned with the liberal expedition that landed at Mindelo (1832), fighting in the siege of Oporto.

Both were public men — deputies, polemicists, builders of institutions. This civic dimension is inseparable from their work: for them, literature was an instrument for the building of the nation and of its memory.

Garrett: the national theatre and modern prose

It was Garrett who reorganised the theatre in Portugal. He founded the Conservatory and drove the creation of the D. Maria II National Theatre, championing a repertoire of national inspiration. His dramatic masterpiece, Frei Luís de Sousa (1843), is regarded as the summit of Portuguese Romantic theatre: a tragedy on a historical theme, restrained and sober in its language, far from the melodramatic excess of the day.

In prose, Viagens na Minha Terra (Travels in My Homeland, 1846) is his most influential book. Under the pretext of a journey from Lisbon to Santarém, Garrett interweaves narrative, ironic digression, political critique and the sentimental tale of Joaninha, a menina dos rouxinóis (the girl of the nightingales). The conversational, nimble and digressive tone of this prose broke with the earlier Latinate solemnity, and earns Garrett the title of creator of modern literary prose in Portuguese.

The Romanceiro: the language of the people

As decisive for the language as his fiction was Garrett’s work of collection. In the Romanceiro (published between 1843 and 1851) he gathered and reworked traditional romances — narrative ballads handed down orally — rescuing from loss a heritage that, as he put it, lived on the lips of the people. He was among the first to give scholarly attention to Portuguese oral poetry, anticipating the philological and ethnographic interest that would later flourish.

His mature lyric poetry, in Folhas Caídas (Fallen Leaves, 1853), abandons ornament for direct emotion and a pared-down language, opening the way to modern Portuguese poetry.

Herculano: history as documentary prose

Alexandre Herculano was a poet (A Harpa do Crente, 1838) and the man who introduced the historical novel in the manner of Walter Scott, with Eurico, o Presbítero (1844) and O Monge de Cister (1848). But his greatest work is the História de Portugal (1846–1853), grounded in the critical reading of sources: by rejecting pious legends, such as the miracle of Ourique, he set off a famous controversy with the clergy.

Editor of the periodical O Panorama and librarian at the Ajuda Palace, Herculano also devoted himself to the edition of the Portugaliae Monumenta Historica, a vast collection of medieval documents whose publication he directed from 1856. For the language this labour was fundamental: it made accessible old texts that would underpin Portuguese historical linguistics and lexicography, and it set a model of rigorous, documented prose.

Landmark works

Work	Author	Year	Genre
Camões	Garrett	1825	narrative poem
Frei Luís de Sousa	Garrett	1843	theatre
Romanceiro	Garrett	1843–1851	folk poetry (collection)
Viagens na Minha Terra	Garrett	1846	narrative prose
Eurico, o Presbítero	Herculano	1844	historical novel
História de Portugal	Herculano	1846–1853	historiography

The legacy for the language

The Romanticism of Garrett and Herculano was not merely a literary school: it was a moment of redefinition of the written language itself. Garrett freed prose from classical rigidity and gave it back the naturalness of spoken discourse; Herculano gave it the rigour of documentation and history. Together they tied modern Portuguese to its medieval and popular memory, preparing the ground for the realism of the next generation.