HERCULANO DE CARVALHO E ARAUJO, ALEXANDRE (1810-1877)

This article appears in Volume V13, Page 345 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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HERCULANO DE CARVALHO E ARAUJO, ALEXANDRE (1810-1877) , Portuguese historian, was born in Lisbon of humble stock, his grandfather having been a foreman stonemason in the royal employ. He received his early education, comprising Latin, logic and rhetoric, at the Necessidades Monastery, and spent a year at the Royal Marine Academy studying mathematics with the intention of entering on a commercial career. In 1828 Portugal fell under the absolute rule of D. Miguel, and Herculano, becoming involved in the unsuccessful military pronunciamento of August 1831, had to leave Portugal clandestinely and take

refuge

REFUGE

in England and France. In 1832 he accompanied the Liberal expedition to Terceira as a volunteer, and was one of D. Pedro's famous army of 7500 men who landed at the Mindello and occupied Oporto. He took part in all the actions of the great siege, and at the same time served as a librarian in the city archives. He published his first volume of verses, A Voz de Propheta, in 1832, and two years later another entitled A Harpa do Crente. Privation had made a man of him, and in these little books he proves himself a poet of deep feeling and consider-able power of expression. The stirring incidents in the political emancipation of Portugal inspired his muse, and he describes the bitterness of

exile

EXILE (Lat. exsilium or exilium, from exsul or exul, which is derived from ex, out of, and the root sal, to go, seen in salire, to leap,
consul
- CONSUL
- CONSUL (in Gr. generally ihraros,ashortened form of errpavgybs 8hraeos, i.e. praetor maximus)
, &c.; the connexion with solum, soil, country is now generally considered wrong)

, the adventurous expedition to Terceira, the heroic defence of Oporto, and the final combats of liberty. In 1837 he founded the Panorama in imitation of the English Penny Magazine, and there and in Illustraco he published the historical tales which were afterwards collected into Lendas e Narratives; in the same year he became royal librarian at the Ajuda Palace, which enabled him to continue his studies of the past. The Panorama had a large circulation and influence, and Herculano's biographical sketches of great men and his articles of literary and historical criticism did much to educate the middle class by acquainting them with the story of their nation, and with the progress of knowledge and the state of letters in foreign countries. On entering parliament in 184o he resigned the editorship to devote himself to history,-but he still remained its most important contributor.
Up to the age of twenty-five Herculano had been a poet, but he then abandoned poetry to Garrett, and after several essays in that direction he definitely introduced the historical novel into Portugal in 1844 by a book written in imitation of Walter Scott. Eurico treats of the fall of the Visigothic monarchy and the beginnings of resistance in the

Asturias

ASTURIAS

which gave
The diagram shows the arrangement and proportions of the Villa Ercolanese. The dotted lines show the course taken by the excavations, which began at the lower part of the plan.
Plan of
Villa Ercolanese,
Herculaneum
I Main Entrance
II imp/nu/um
IV Principal

Hall

V Garden
VI Pond
birth to the Christian kingdoms of the Peninsula, while the Monge de Cister, published in 1848, describes the time of King John I., when the middle class and the municipalities first asserted their power and elected a king in opposition to the

nobility

NOBILITY

. From an artistic standpoint, these stories are rather laboured productions, besides being ultra-romantic in tone; but it must be remembered that they were written mainly with an educational object, and, moreover, they deserve high praise for their style. Herculano had greater book learning than Scott, but lacked descriptive talent and skill in dialogue. His

touch

TOUCH (derived through Fr. toucher from a common Teutonic and Indo-Germanic root, cf. " tug," " tuck," O. H. Ger. zucchen, to twitch or draw)

is heavy, and these novels show no dramatic power, which accounts for his failure as a playwright, but their influence was as great as their followers were many, and they still find readers. These and editions of two old chronicles, the Chronica de D. Sebastiao (1839) and the Annaes del rei D. Joao III (1844), prepared Herculano for his life's work, and the year 1846 saw the first volume of his History of Portugal from the Beginning of the Monarchy to the end of the Reign of Affonso III., a book written on critical lines and based on documents. The difficulties he encountered in producing it were very great, for the foundations had been ill-prepared by his predecessors, and he was obliged to be artisan and architect at the same time. He had to collect MSS. from all parts of Portugal, decipher, classify and weigh them before he could begin work, and then he found it necessary to break with precedents and destroy traditions. Serious students in Portugal and abroad welcomed the book as an historical work of the first rank, for its evidence of careful research, its able marshalling of facts, its learning and its painful accuracy, while the sculptural simplicity of the style and the correctness of the diction have made it a Portuguese classic. The first volume, however, gave rise to a celebrated controversy, because Herculano had reduced the famous battle of Ourique, which was supposed to have seen the birth of the Portuguese monarchy, to the dimensions of a mere skirmish, and denied the apparition of Christ to King Affonso, a fable first circulated in the 15th century. Herculano was denounced from the pulpit and the press for his lack of patriotism and piety, and after bearing the attack for some time his

pride

PRIDE, THOMAS (d. 1658)

drove him to reply. In a letter to the cardinal patriarch of Lisbon entitled Eu e o Clero (1850), he denounced the fanaticism and ignorance of the clergy in plain terms, and this provoked a fierce pamphlet war marked by much personal abuse. The professor of Arabic in Lisbon intervened to sustain the accepted view of the battle, and charged Herculano and his supporter Gayangos with ignorance of the Arab historians and of their language. The conduct of the controversy, which lasted some years, did credit to none of the contending parties, but Herculano's statement of the facts is now universally accepted as correct. The second volume of his history appeared in 1847, the third in 1849 and the fourth in 1853. In his youth, the excesses of absolutism had made Herculano a Liberal, and the attacks on his history turned this man, full of sentiment and deep religious conviction, into an anti-clerical who began to distinguish between political Catholicism and Christianity. His History of the Origin and

Establishment

ESTABLISHMENT (0. Fr. establissement, Fr. etablissement, late Norm. Fr. establishement, from O. Fr. establir, Fr. etablir, Lat. stabilire, to make stable)

of the Inquisition (1854-1855), relating the thirty years' struggle between King John III. and the Jewshe to establish the tribunal and they to prevent himwas compiled, as the preface showed, to stem the Ultramontane reaction, but none the less carried weight because it was a recital of events with little or no comment or evidence of passion in its author. Next to these two books his study, Do Estado des classes servas na
Peninsula desde o VII. ate o XII. seculo, is Herculano's most valuable contribution to history. In 1856 he began editing a

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of Portugalliae monuments historica, but personal differences between him and the keeper of the Archive office, which he was forced to frequent, caused him to interrupt his historical
studies, and on the death of his friend King Pedro V. he left the
Ajuda and retired to a country house near Santarem.
Disillusioned with men and despairing of the future of his
country, he spent the rest of his life devoted to agricultural
pursuits, and rarely emerged from his retirement; when he
did so, it was to fight political and religious reaction. Once he

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