PART II
REPRESENTATIVE PERSONALITIES
I
CASTRO ALVES
During the last half of the month of February, 1868, two admirable letters were exchanged by a pair of notable men, in which both discerned the budding fame of a twenty-year-old poet. The two notables were José de Alencar, chief novelist of the “Indianist” school, and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, not yet at the height of his career. The poet was Castro Alves. His real “discoverer” was the first of these two authors, who sent him from Tijuca to Machado de Assis at Rio de Janeiro. In his letter of the 18th of February, José de Alencar wrote (I quote only salient passages):
“Yesterday I received a visit from a poet.
“Rio de Janeiro does not yet know him; in a very short while all Brazil will know him. It is understood, of course, that I speak of that Brazil which feels; with the heart and not with the rest.
“Sr. Castro Alves is a guest of this great city, for but a few days. He is going to São Paulo to finish the course that he began at Olinda.
“He was born in Bahia, the region of so many excellent talents; the Brazilian Athens that does not weary of producing statesmen, orators, poets and warriors.
“I might add that he is the son of a noted physician. But why? The genealogy of poets begins with their first poem. And what is the value of parchments compared with these divine seals?…
“Sr. Castro Alves recalled that I had formerly written for the theatre. Appraising altogether too highly my experience in this difficult branch of literature, he wished to read me a drama, the first fruits of his talent.
“This production has already weathered the test of competent audiences upon the stage.…
“_Gonzaga_ is the title of the drama, which we read in a short time. The plot, centered about the revolutionary attempt at Minas,--a great source of historical poetry as yet little exploited,--has been enriched by the author with episodes of keen interest.
“Sr. Castro Alves is a disciple of Victor Hugo, in the architecture of the drama, as in the coloring of the idea. The poem belongs to the same ideal school; the style has the same brilliant touches.
“To imitate Victor Hugo is given only to capable intelligences. The Titan of literature possesses a palette that in the hands of a mediocre colorist barely produces splotches.…
“Nevertheless, beneath this imitation of a sublime model is evidenced an original inspiration that will later form the literary individuality of the author. His work throbs with the powerful sentiment of nationality, that soul of the fatherland which makes great poets as it makes great citizens.…
“After the reading of his drama, Sr. Castro Alves recited for me some of his verses. _A Cascata de Paulo Affonso_, _As duas ilhas_ and _A visão dos mortos_ do not yield to the excellent examples of this genre in the Portuguese tongue.…
“Be the Virgil to this young Dante; lead him through the untrodden ways over which one travels to disillusionment, indifference and at length to glory,--the three vast circles of the _divine comedy_ of talent.”
The reply from Machado de Assis came eleven days later. He found the newcomer quite as original as José de Alencar had made him out to be. Castro Alves possessed a genuine “literary vocation, full of life and vigour and revealing in the magnificence of the present the promise of the future. I found an original poet. The evil of our contemporary poetry is that it is imitative--in speech, ideas, imagery.… Castro Alves’s muse has her own manner. If it may be discerned that his school is that of Victor Hugo, it is not because he copies him servilely, but because a related temperament leads him to prefer the poet of the _Orientales_ to the poet of _Les Méditations_. He is certainly not attracted to the soft, languishing tints of the elegy; he prefers the live hues and the vigorous lines of the ode.”
Machado de Assis found in the poet the explanation of the dramatist. _Gonzaga_, to be sure, is no masterpiece of the theatre, and Castro Alves quickly returned from that interlude in his labours to the more potent appeal of resounding verse. If he was fortunate, at the outset, to find so influential a pair to introduce him into the literary world, it was his merit alone that won him early prominence. Only a year ago, signalizing the commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of his death, Afranio Peixoto prefaced the two splendid volumes of his complete works--including much hitherto unpublished material--with a short essay in which he calls Castro Alves _O Maior Poeta Brasileiro_ (The Greatest of Brazilian Poets). Let the superlative pass. If it is not important to criticism--and how many superlatives are?--it shows the lasting esteem in which his countrymen hold him. He is not only the poet of the slaves; to many, he is the poet of the nation and a poet of humanity as well.
* * * * *
His talents appeared early; at the Gymnasio Bahiano, by the time he was twelve--and this was already the mid-point of his short life--he not only wrote his first verses, but showed marked aptitude for painting. Long before his twentieth year he had become the rival of Tobias Barreto, the philosopher of Sergipe, not only in poetry, it seems, but in theatrical intrigue that centred about the persons of Adelaide do Amaral and Eugenia Camara. While Barreto, the half-forgotten initiator of the _condoreiro_ style, led the admirers of the first, Eugenia Camara exercised a powerful attraction over Castro Alves, in whom she inspired his earliest lyrics. Perhaps it was because of her that he aspired to the dramatic eminence which he sought with _Gonzaga_, produced on September 7, 1867, at the Theatro São João amidst scenes of tumultuous success. It was directly after this triumph that he came to José de Alencar. As we see from that writer’s letter, the youth was intent upon continuing his studies; in São Paulo he rose so quickly to fame among the students, not alone for his verses but for his gifted delivery of them and his natural eloquence, that he was shortly hailed as the foremost Brazilian poet of the day.
But unhappiness lay straight before him. His mistress left him; on a hunt he accidentally shot his heel and later had to go to Rio to have the foot amputated; the first symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis appeared and, in 1869, he returned to Bahia to prepare his _Espumas Fluctuantes_ for the press. Change of climate was of temporary benefit; he went back to the capital to be received in triumph; new loves replaced the old. He was foredoomed, however, and during the next two years he worked with the feverish haste of one who knows that his end is near. He died on July 6, 1871.
* * * * *
In the history of Brazilian poetry Castro Alves may be regarded as a figure characterized by the more easily recognized traits of romanticism plus the infiltration of social ideas into the sentimental content. Some would even discover in a few of his products the first signs of the nascent Parnassianism in Brazil. Long before Carvalho selected him as the chief exponent of social themes in the romantic period, Verissimo had indicated that Castro Alves was “our first social poet, the epic writers excepted. He is the first to have devoted a considerable part of his labours not to sentimental subjectivism, which constitutes the greatest and the best part of our poetry, but to singing or idealizing social feeling, fact and aspiration.”
Hugo is his great god; … “nosso velho Hugo.--mestre do mundo! Sol da eternidade!” he exclaims in _Sub tegmine fagi_. “Our old Hugo. Master of the world! Sun of eternity!” Alves, often even in his love poetry, seems to orate from the mountain tops. “Let us draw these curtains over us,” he sings in _Boa Noite_ (Good Night); “they are the wings of the archangel of love.” Or, in the _Adeus de Thereza_, if time passes by, it must be “centuries of delirium, Divine pleasures … delights of Elysium.…” His language, as often as not, is the language of poetic fever; image clashes upon image; antithesis runs rife; verses flow from him like lava down the sides of a volcano. Nothing human seems alien to his libertian fervour. He captures the Brazilian imagination by giving its fondness for eloquence ideas to feed upon.[1] Now he is singing the glories of the book and education, now upbraiding the assassin of Lincoln, now glorifying the rebel, now picturing the plight of the wretched slaves in words that are for all the world like a shower of sparks. In his quieter moments he can sing love songs as tender as the cooing of any dove, as in _O Laco de fito_; he can indite the most graceful and inviting of bucolics as in _Sub tegmine fagi_; and this softer note is an integral part of his labours.
But what brought fame to Castro Alves was his civic, social note. From Heine, to whom he is indebted for something of his social aspiration, he took as epigraph for his collection _Os Escravos_, a sentiment that reveals his own high purpose. “Flowers, flowers! I would crown my head with them for the fray. The lyre! Give me, too, the lyre, that I may chant a song of war.… Words like flaming stars that, falling, set fire to palaces and bring light to hovels.… Words like glittering arrows that shoot into the seventh heaven and strike the imposture that has wormed into the holy of holies.… I am all joy, all enthusiasm; I am the sword, I am the flame!…” The quotation is almost a description of Alves’s method. Once again, for the part of _Os Escravos_ that was published separately five years after his death, we find an epigraph from Heine prefacing _A Cachoeira de Paulo Affonso_ (The Paulo Affonso Falls): “I do not really know whether I shall have deserved that some day a laurel should be placed upon my bier. Poetry, however great be my love for it, has ever been for me only a means consecrated to a holy end.… I have never attached too great a value to the fame of my poems, and it concerns me little whether they be praised or blamed. It should be a sword that you place upon my tomb, for I have been a brave soldier in the war of humanity’s deliverance.” This, too, is a description of Castro Alves. He was a sword rather than a lyre; certainly his verse shows a far greater preoccupation with purpose than with esthetic illumination, and just as certainly does he fall far short of both Hugo and Heine in their frequent triumph over whatever purpose they professed.
I am not sure that the Brazilians do not confuse their admiration for Alves’s short life and its noble dedication with the very variable quality of his poetry. Read by one with no Latin blood in his veins it seems too often a dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics, freighted with a few central slogans rather than any depth of idea. I speak now of the work as a whole and not of the outstanding poems, such as _As vozes da Africa_ (Voices from Africa), _O Navio Negreiro_ (The Slave Ship), _Pedro Ivo_. It is in these few exceptions that the poet will live, but just as surely, it seems to me, will his esthetic importance shrink to smaller proportions than the national criticism today accords it. The ever-scrupulous, ever-truthful Verissimo, who does not join the general chorus of uncritical admiration of Castro Alves, indicates that even his strongest claim upon us--that of a singer of the slaves--is injured by an evident exaggeration. What might be called Alves’s “Africanism” is thus condemned of untruth to artistic as well as to quotidian reality, in much the same manner as was the “Indianism” in the poetry of Gonçalves Dias.… “The lack of objective reality offends us and our taste, habituated as we are to the reality of life transported to artistic representations. As I have already had occasion to observe, Castro Alves’s defect as a poet of the slaves is that he idealized the slave, removing him from reality, perhaps in greater degree than art permits, making him escape--which is evidently false--the inevitable degradation of slavery. His slaves are Spartacuses or belong to the gallery of Hugo’s _Burgaves_. Now, socially, slavery is hateful chiefly because of its degrading influence upon the human being reduced to it and by reaction upon the society that supports it.”
* * * * *
When Castro Alves prepared the _Espumas Fluctuantes_ for publication he already felt the hand of death upon him. In the short foreword that he wrote for the book--in a style that is poetry, though written as prose--he compared his verses to the floating spume of the ocean, whence the title of the book. “Oh spirits wandering over the earth! O sails bellying over the main!… You well know how ephemeral you are … passengers swallowed in dark space, or into dark oblivion.… And when--actors of the infinite--you disappear into the wings of the abyss, what is left of you?… A wake of spume … flowers lost amid the vast indifference of the ocean.--A handful of verses … spume floating upon the savage back of life!…”
This mood, this language, this outlook, are more than half of the youngster that was Castro Alves. For the most part he is not original, either in form or idea; the majority of his verses seem to call for the rostrum and the madly moved audience. Yet more than fifty years after his death the numerous editions of his poems provide that rostrum, and the majority of his literate countrymen form that audience.
When his powers are at their highest, however, he achieves the true Hugoesque touch, as, for example, in the closing stanzas of the famous _Voices from Africa_, written in São Paulo on June 11, 1868:
Christo! embalde morreste sobre um monte.… Teu sangue não lavou da minha fronte A mancha original. Ainda hoje são, por fado adverso, Meus filhos--alimaria do universo, Eu--pasto universal.
Hoje em meu sangue a America se nutre: --Condor, que transformara-se em abutre, Ave de escravidão. Ella juntou-se ás mais … irmã traidora! Qual de José os vis irmãos, outr’ora, Venderam seu irmão!
…
Basta, Senhor! De teu potente braço Role atravez dos astros e do espaço Perdão p’ra os crimes meus! Ha dous mil annos eu soluço um grito.… Escuta o brado meu lá no infinito, Meu Deus! Senhor, meu Deus!…[2]
This poem is the _Eli Eli lama sabachthani_ of the black race.
It is matched for passionate eloquence by the lashing lines that form the finale of _O Navio Negreiro_;
Existe um povo que a bandeira empresta P’ra cobrir tanta infamia e cobardia!… E deixa a transformar-se nessa festa Em manto impuro de bacchante fria!… Meu Deus! meu Deus! mas que bandeira é esta, Que impudente na gavéa tripudia? Silencio, Musa … chora, e chora tanto Que o pavilhão se lave no teu pranto!…
Auri-verde pendão de minha terra, Que a briza do Brasil beija e balança, Estandarte que á luz do sol encerra As promessas divinas da esperança.… Tu que, da liberdade apos da guerra, Foste hastiado dos heroes na lança, Antes te houvessem roto na batalha, Que servires a um povo de mortalha!…
Fatalidade atroz que a mente esmaga! Extingue nesta hora o brigue immundo O trilho que Colombo abriu nas vagas, Como um iris no pelago profundo! Mas é infamia de mais!… Da etherea plaga Levantai-vos, heroes do Novo Mundo! Andrade! arranca esse pendão dos ares! Colombo! fecha a porta dos teus mares![3]
As Napoleon, before the pyramids, told his soldiers that forty centuries gazed down upon them, so Alves, in the opening poem of _Os Escravos_ called _O Seculo_ (The Century), invoking the names of liberty’s heroes--Christ, Carnaris, Byron, Kossuth, Juarez, the Gracchi, Franklin--told the youth of his nation that from the heights of the Andes, vaster than plains or pyramids, there gazed down upon them “a thousand centuries.” Even in numbers he is true to the high-flown conceits of the _condoreiro_ school; the raising of Napoleon’s forty to the young Brazilian’s thousand is indicative of the febrile passion that flamed in all his work. Castro Alves was a torch, not a poem. When he beholds visions of a republic (as in _Pedro Ivo_), man himself becomes a condor, and liberty, like the poet’s truth, though crushed to earth will rise again.
Não importa! A liberdade E como a hydra, o Antheu. Se no chão rola sem forças, Mais forte do chão se ergueu.… São os seus ossos sangrentos Gladios terriveis, sedentos.… E da cinza solta aos ventos Mais um Graccho appareceu!…[4]
This is not poetry that can be read for very long at a time. It is not poetry to which one returns in quest of mood, evocative beauty, or surrender to passion. It is the poetry of eloquence, with all the grandeur of true eloquence and with many of the lesser qualities of oratory at its less inspiring level. Castro Alves, then, was hardly a poet of the first order. He sang, in pleasant strains, of love and longing; he whipped the nation’s conscience with poems every line of which was a lash; some of his verses rise like a pungent incense from the altars where liberty’s fire is kept burning; he was a youthful soul responsive to every noble impulse. But his passion is too often spoiled by exaggeration,--the exaggeration of a temperament as well as a school that borrowed chiefly the externals of Hugo’s genius. Nor is it the exaggeration of feeling; rather is it a forcing of idea and image, accent and antithesis,--the failings of the orator who sees his hearers before him and must have visible, audible token of their assent.
So that, when all is said and done, the permanent contribution of Alves to Brazilian poetry is small, consisting of a few love poems, several passionate outcries on behalf of a downtrodden race, and a group of stanzas variously celebrating libertarian ideas. All the rest we can forget in the intense appeal of the surviving lines. I know that this does not agree with the current acceptation of the poet in Brazil, where many look upon him as the national poet, but one can only speak one’s honest convictions. With reference to Castro Alves, I admire the man in the poet more than the poet in the man.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “It has already been said,” writes Verissimo, “that the Latins have no poetry, but rather eloquence; they confound sentimental emotion, which is the predicate of poetry, with intellectual sensation, which is the attribute of eloquence. There is in the poetry of the so-called Latin peoples more rhetoric than spontaneity, more art than nature, more artifice than simplicity. It is more erudite, more ‘laboured,’ more intellectual, and for that reason less felt, less sincere, less ingenuous than that of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, for example. I do not discuss this notion. We Brazilians, who are scarcely half Latin, are highly sensitive, I know, to poetic rhetoric,--which does not prevent us, however, from being moved by the sentimentalism of poetry--though superficially--when it comes in the simple form of popular lyrism and sings, as that does, with its naïve rhetoric, the sensual passions of our amorous ardor, which is characteristic of hybrids. Examples of this are Casimiro de Abreu, Laurindo Rabello, Varella and Gonçalves Dias himself. When the poets became refined, and wrapped their passion, real or feigned--and in fact rather feigned than real--in the sightly and false externals of the Parnassian rhetoric, bending all their efforts toward meticulous perfection of form, rhyme, metre, sound, they ceased to move the people, or impressed it only by the outer aspect of their perfect poems through the sonority of their verses. For at bottom, what we prefer is form, but form that is rhetorical and eloquent, or what seems to us such,--_palavrão_ (wordiness), emphasis, beautiful images.…”
[2] Christ! In vain you died upon a mountain.… Your blood did not erase the original spot upon my forehead. Even today, through adverse fate, my children are the cattle of the universe, and I--universal pasture. Today America feeds on my blood.--A condor transformed into a vulture, bird of slavery. She has joined the rest … treacherous sister! Like the base brothers of Joseph who in ancient days sold their brother.… Enough, O Lord. With your powerful arm send through the planets and through space pardon for my crimes! For two thousand years I have been wailing a cry.… Hear my call yonder in the infinite, my God, Lord my God!
[3] There exists a people who lends its flag to cover such infamy and cowardice!… And allows it to be transformed, in this feast, into the impure cloak of a heartless bacchante!… My God! my God! but what flag is this that flutters impudently at the masthead? Silence, Muse … weep and weep so much that the banner will be bathed in your tears!… Green-gold banner of my country, kissed and blown by the breezes of Brazil, standard that enfolds in the light of the sun the divine promise of hope.… You who, after the war, was flown by the heroes at the head of their lances, rather had they shattered you in battle than that you should serve as a race’s shroud!… Horrible fatality that overwhelms the mind! Let the path that Columbus opened in the waves like a rainbow in the immense deep, shatter in this hour the polluted ship! This infamy is too much!… From your ethereal realm, O heroes of the New World, arise! Andrade! Tear that banner from the sky! Columbus! shut the fates of your sea!
[4] No matter! Liberty is like the hydra, or like Antheus. If, exhausted, it rolls in the dust, it rises stronger than ever from the earth.… Its bleeding members are terrible, thirsting swords, and from the ashes cast upon the winds a new Gracchus arose!
II
JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS
Had he been born in Europe and written, say, in French, Machado de Assis would perhaps be more than a name today--if he is that--to persons outside of his native country. As it is, he has become, but fourteen years after his death, so much a classic that many of his countrymen who will soon gaze upon his statue will surely have read scarcely a line of his work. He was too human a spirit to be prisoned into a narrow circle of exclusively national interests, whence the cry from some critics that he was not a national creator; on the other hand, his peculiar blend of melancholy charm and bitter-sweet irony have been traced to the mingling of different bloods that makes Brazil so fertile a field for the study of miscegenation. His work, as we all may read it, is, from the testimony of the few who knew him intimately, a perfect mirror of the retiring personality. His life and labours raised the letters of his nation to a new dignity. Monuments to such as he are monuments to the loftier aspirations of those who raise them, for the great need no statues.
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 and died there in 1908; he came of poor parents and was early beset with difficulties, yet the very nature of the work he was forced to take up brought him into contact with the persons and the surroundings that were to suggest his real career. As a typesetter he met literature in the raw; at the meetings of literary men and in the book shop of Paulo Brito he began to feel the nature of his true calling. At twenty he commenced to write with the indifference and the prolixity of the ’prentice hand; comedies, tales, translations, poems--all was grist that came to his literary mill. His talent, though evident, was slow to develop; it could be seen that the youth had a gift for understanding the inner workings of the human soul and that by nature he was an ironist, yet his poetry, especially, lacked fire--it came from the head, not the heart. Take the man’s work as a whole, for that matter, and the same observation holds generally true. He is not of the sort that dissolves into ecstasies before a wonderful sunset or rises to the empyrean on the wings of song; for such self-abandonment he is too critical, too self-conscious. In him, then, as a poet we are not to seek for passion; in his tales we must not hunt too eagerly for action; in his novels (let us call them such) we are not to hope for adventure, intrigue, climax. Machado de Assis is, as far as a man may be, sui generis, a literary law unto himself. His best productions, which range over thirty years of mature activity, reveal an eclectic spirit in whom something of classic repose balances his innate pessimism. It has been written of him that he was “a man of half tints, of half words, of half ideas, of half systems.…” Such an estimate, if it be purged of any derogatory insinuations, is, on the whole, just; if Machado de Assis seems to miss real greatness, it is because of something inherently balanced in his make-up; he is never himself carried away, and therefore neither are we. Yet he belongs to a company none too numerous, and when Anatole France, some years ago, presided at a meeting held in France to honour the noted Brazilian, he must have appeared to more than one in the audience as a peculiarly fitting symbol of the spirit that informed the departed man’s work.[1]
Not that Machado de Assis was an Anatole France, as some would insinuate. But he was not unworthy of that master’s companionship; his outlook was more circumscribed than the Frenchman’s, as was his environment; his garden, then, was smaller, but he cultivated it; his glass was little, like that of another famous Frenchman, but he drank out of his own glass.
* * * * *
The poetry of Machado de Assis appears in four collections, all of which go to make up a book of moderate size. And, if the truth is to be told, their worth is about as moderate as their size. If critics have found him, in his verse, very correct and somewhat cold; if they have pointed out that he lacked a vivid imagination, suffered from a limited vocabulary, was indifferent to nature, and thus deficient in description, they have but spoken what is evident from a reading of the lines. This is not to say that a poem here and there has not become part of the national memory--as, for example, the well-known _Circulo Vicioso_ (Vicious Circle) and _Mosca Azul_ (The Blue Fly)--verses of a broadly moralistic significance and of little originality. His _Chrysalides_, the first collection, dates back to 1864; already his muse appears as a lady desirous of tranquillity (and this at the age of twenty-five!) while in the poem _Erro_ he makes the telltale declaration:
Amei-te um dia Com esse amor passageiro Que nasce na phantasia E não chega ao coração.
“I loved you one day with that transient love which is born in the imagination and does not reach the heart.” There you have the type of love that appears in his poetry; and there you have one of the reasons why the man is so much more successful as a psychological ironist in his novels than as a poet. Yet close study would show that at times this tranquillity, far from being always the absence of torment, is the result of neutralizing forces; it is like the revolving disk of primary hues that seems white in the rapidity of its whirling.
These early poems dwell upon such love; upon a desire for justice, as revealed in his _Epitaphio do Mexico_ (Mexico’s Epitaph) and _Polonia_ (Poland); upon an elegiac note that seems statement rather than feeling. “Like a pelican of love,” he writes in one of his poems that recalls the famous image of de Musset, “I will rend my breast and nurture my offspring with my own blood; my offspring: desire, chimera, hope.…” But read through the verses of _Chrysalides_ and it is hard to find where any red blood flows. The vocabulary is small, the phrases are trite; his very muse is named _Musa Consolatrix_, bringing solace rather than agitated emotion.
_Phalenas_ (Moths, 1870) is more varied; the collection shows a sense of humour, a feeling for the exotic, as in the quasi-Chinese poems, which are of a delicate pallor. But there is little new in his admonitions to cull the flower ere it fade, and his love poetry would insult a sensitive maiden with its self-understanding substratum of commentary. His reserve is simply too great to permit outbursts and like the worshipper of whom he speaks in his _Lagrimas de Cera_, he “did not shed a single tear. She had faith, the flame to burn--but what she could not do was weep.”[2] He is altogether too frequently the self-observer rather than the self-giver; nor would this be objectionable, if out of that autoscopy emerged something vital and communicable to the introspective spirit in us all. He can sing of seizing the flower ere it fades away, yet how frequently does he himself seize it? There is humour in the ninety-seven octaves of _Pallida Elvira_,--a queer performance, indeed, in which a thin comic vein blends imperfectly with a trite philosophic plot. Romantic love, the satiety of Hector, the abandonment of Elvira, the world-wanderings of the runaway, his vain pursuit of glory and his return too late, to find a child left by the dead Elvira, the obduracy of grandfather Antero; such is the scheme. Hector, thus cheated, jumps into the sea, which he might well have done before the poem began.
More successful is _Uma Oda de Anacreonte_, a one-act play in verse, in which is portrayed the power of money over the sway of love. Cleon, confiding, amorous youth that he is, is disillusioned by both love (Myrto) and friendship (Lysias). There is a didactic tint to the piece, which is informed with the author’s characteristic irony, cynicism, brooding reflection and resigned acceptation. Of truly dramatic value--and by that phrase I mean not so much the conventional stageworthiness of the drama’s technicians as a captivating reality born of the people themselves--there is very little.
In _Americanas_ (1875) the poet goes to the native scenes and legends for inspiration; _Potyra_--recounting the plight of a Christian captive who, rather than betray her husband by wedding a Tamoyo chief, accepts death at the heathen’s hands--is a cold, objective presentation, unwarmed by figures of speech, not illuminated by any inner light; _Niani_, a Guaycuru legend, is far better stuff, more human, more vivid, in ballad style as opposed to the halting blank verse of the former; for the most part, the collection consists of external narrative--feeling, insight, passion are sacrificed to arid reticence.
Thus _A Christã Nova_ (The Converted Jewess) contains few ideas; neither colour nor passion, vision nor fire, inhere in it. There is a sentimental fondness for the vanquished races--a note so common in the “Indian” age of Brazilian letters, and in analogous writings of the Spanish-Americans, as to have become a convention. The poem tells the story of a converted Jewess who is betrothed to a soldier. She is met by her betrothed after the war, with her father in the toils of the Inquisition. Rather than remain with her lover, she chooses to die with her parent; father and daughter go to their end together. Chiefly dry narrative, and perhaps better than _Potyra_, though that is negative praise. The poem is commendable for but two poetic cases: one, a very successful _terza rima_ version of the song of exile in the Bible, “By the waters of Babylon sat we down and wept …” and the other, a simple simile:
… o pensamento E como as aves passageiras: voa A buscar melhor clima.…
… Thought Is like a bird of passage, ever winging In quest of fairer climes.…
It is in the _Occidentaes_ of 1900 that we find more of the real Machado de Assis than in the series that preceded it. The ripened man now speaks from a pulsing heart. Not that any of these verses leap into flame, as in the sonorous, incendiary strophes of Bilac, but at least the thoughts live in the words that body them forth and technical skill revels in its power. Here the essence of his attitude toward life appears--that life which, rather than death, is the corroding force, the universal and ubiquitous element. The _Mosca Azul_ is almost an epitome of his outlook, revealing as it does his tender irony, his human pity, his repressed sensuality, his feeling for form, his disillusioned comprehension of illusions. His resigned acceptance of life’s decline is characteristic of the man--part, perhaps, of his balanced outlook. One misses in him the rebel--the note that lends greatness to the hero in his foreordained defeat, raising the drama of surrender to the tragedy of the unconquered victim. But this would be asking him to be some one else--an inartistic request which we must withhold.
I give the _Mosca Azul_ entire, because of its central importance to the poetry of the man, as well as to that more discerning outlook upon life which is to be found in his prose works.
Era uma mosca azul, azas de ouro e granada, Filha da China ou da Indostão, Que entre as folhas brotou de uma rosa encarnada Em certa noite de verão.
E zumbia e voava, e voava, e zumbia, Refulgindo ao clarão do sol E da lua,--melhor do que refulgia Um brilhante do Grão-Mogol.
Um poléa que a viu, espantado e tristonho, Um poléa lhe perguntou: “Mosca, esse refulgir, que mais parece um sonho, Dize, quem foi que t’o ensinou?”
Então ella, voando, e revoando, disse: “Eu sou a vida, eu sou a flor Das graças, o padrão da eterna meninice, E mais a gloria, e mais o amor.”
E elle deixou-se estar a contemplal-a, mudo, E tranquillo, como un fakir, Como alguem que ficou deslumbrado de tudo, Sem comparar, nem reflectir.
Entre as azas do insecto, a voltear no espaço, Uma cousa lhe pareceu Que surdia com todo o resplendor de um paço E viu um rosto, que era o seu.
Era elle, era um rei, o rei de Cachemira, Que tinha sobre o collo nú, Um immenso collar de opala, e uma saphyra Tirado ao corpo de Vischnu.
Cem mulheres em flor, cem nayras superfinas, Aos pés delle, no liso chão, Espreguiçam sorrindo as suas graças finas, E todo o amor que tem lhe dão.
Mudos, graves, de pé, cem ethiopes feios, Com grandes leques de avestruz, Refrescam-lhes de manso os aromados seios, Voluptuosamente nus.
Vinha a gloria depois--quatorze reis vencidos, E emfim as pareas triumphaes De tresentas nacões, e os parabens unidos Das coroas occidentaes.
Mas o melhor de tudo é que no rosto aberto Das mulheres e dos varões, Como em agua que deixa o fundo descuberto, Via limpos os corações.
Então elle, estendo a mão calloso y tosca, Affeita a só carpintejar, Com um gesto pegou na fulgurante mosca, Curioso de examinar.
Quiz vel-a, quiz saber a causa do mysterio. E fechando-a na mão, sorriu De contente, ao pensar que alli tinha um imperio, E para casa se partiu.
Alvoroçado chega, examina, e parece Que se houve nessa occupação Mudamente, como um homem que quizesse Dissecar a sua illusão.
Dissecou-a, a tal ponte, e com tal arte, que ella, Rota, baca, nojenta, vil, Succumbiu; e com isto esvaiu-se-lhe aquella Visão fantastica e subtil.
Hoje, quando elle ahi vae, de áloe e cardamono, Na cabeça, com ar taful, Dizem que ensandeceu, e que não sabe como Perdeu a sua mosca azul.[3]
As one reads this, a fable comes to mind out of childhood days. What is this poem of the fly, but the tale of the man who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, retold in verses admirable for colour, freshness,--for everything, indeed, except originality and feeling? Those critics are right who find in Machado de Assis a certain homiletic preoccupation; but he is never the preacher, and his light is cast not upon narrow dogmas, with which he had nothing to do, but upon the broad ethical implications of every life that seeks to bring something like order into the chaos we call existence,--a thing without rhyme or reason, as he would have agreed, but what would you? Every game has its rules, even the game of hide and seek. And if rules are made to be broken, part of the game is in the making of them.
Companioning the search for roots of illusion is the theme of eternal dissatisfaction. This Machado de Assis has put into one of the most quoted of Brazilian sonnets, which he calls _Circulo Vicioso_ (Vicious Circle):
Bailando no ar, gemia inquieto vagalume: --“Quem me dera que fosse aquella loura estrella Que arde no eterno azul, como una eterna vela!” Mas a estrella, fitando a lua, com ciume:
--“Pudesse eu copiar o transparente lume, Que, de grega columna á gothica janella, Contemplou, suspirosa, a fronte amada e bella!” Mas a lua, fitando o sol, com azedume:
--“Misera! tivesse eu aquelle enorme, aquella Claridade immortal, que toda a luz resume!” Mas o sol, inclinando a rutila capella:
--“Pesa-me esta brilhante aureola de nume.… Enfara-me esta azul e desmedida umbella.… Porque não nasci eu um simples vagalume?”[4]
Between the loss of illusion and eternal dissatisfaction lies the luring desert of introspection; here men ask questions that send back silence as the wisest answer, or words that are more quiet than silence and about as informing. The poet’s tribute to Arthur de Oliveira is really a description--particularly in the closing lines--of himself. “You will laugh, not with the ancient laughter, long and powerful,--the laughter of an eternal friendly youth, but with another, a bitter laughter, like the laughter of an ailing god, who wearies of divinity and who, too, longs for an end.…” This world-weariness runs all through Machado de Assis; it is one of the mainsprings of his remarkable prose works. It is no vain paradox to say that the real poet Machado de Assis is in his prose, for in his prose alone do the fruits of his imagination come to maturity; only in his better tales and the strange books he called novels does his rare personality reach a rounded fulfilment. Peculiarly enough, the man is in his poetry, the artist in his prose. The one is as revelatory of his ethical outlook as the other of his esthetic intuitions. What he thinks, as distinct from what he feels, is in his verse rather than in his novels or tales.
* * * * *
He was haunted, it seems, by the symbol of a Prometheus wearied of his immortality of anguish,--by the _tedium vitae_. This world-weariness appears in the very reticence of his style. He writes, at times, as if it were one of the vanities of vanities, yet one feels that a certain inner pride lay behind this outer timidity. His method is the most leisurely of indirection,--not the involved indirection of a Conrad, nor the circuitous adumbration of a Hamsun. He has been compared, for his humourism, to the Englishman Sterne, and there is a basis for the comparison if we remove all connotation of ribaldry and retain only the fruitful rambling. Machado de Assis is the essence of charming sobriety, of slily smiling half-speech. He is something like his own Ahasverus in the conte _Viver!_, withdrawn from life not so much because he hated it as because he loved it exceedingly.
In that admirable dialogue, wherein Prometheus appears as a vision before the Wandering Jew, the tedium of existence is compressed into a few brief pages.
We have come to the end of time and Ahasverus, seated upon a rock, gazes for a long while upon the horizon, athwart which wing two eagles, crossing each other in their path. The day is waning.
AHASVERUS
I have come to the end of time; this is the threshold of eternity. The earth is deserted; no other man breathes the air of life. I am the last; I can die. Die! Precious thought! For centuries I have lived, wearied, mortified, wandering ever, but now the centuries are coming to an end, and I shall die with them. Ancient nature, farewell! Azure sky, clouds ever reborn, roses of a day and of every day, perennial waters, hostile earth that never would devour my bones, farewell! The eternal wanderer will wander no longer. God may pardon me if He wishes, but death will console me. That mountain is as unyielding as my grief; those eagles that fly yonder must be as famished as my despair.
Whereupon Prometheus appears and the two great symbols of human suffering debate upon the life everlasting. The crime of the Wandering Jew was great, Prometheus admits, but his was a lenient punishment. Other men read but a chapter of life, while Ahasverus read the whole book. “What does one chapter know of the other? Nothing. But he who has read them all, connects them and concludes. Are there melancholy pages? There are merry and happy ones, too. Tragic convulsion precedes that of laughter; life burgeons from death; swans and swallows change climate, without ever abandoning it entirely; and thus all is harmonized and begun anew.” But Ahasverus, continuing the tale of his wanderings, expresses the meaninglessness of immortality:
I left Jerusalem. I began my wandering through the ages. I journeyed everywhere, whatever the race, the creed, the tongue; suns and snows, barbarous and civilized peoples, islands, continents; wherever a man breathed, there breathed I. I never laboured. Labour is a refuge, and that refuge was denied me. Every morning I found upon me the necessary money for the day.… See; this is the last apportionment. Go, for I need you no longer. (_He draws forth the money and throws it away._) I did not work; I just journeyed, ever and ever, one day after another, year after year unendingly, century after century. Eternal justice knew what it was doing: it added idleness to eternity. One generation bequeathed me to the other. The languages, as they died, preserved my name like a fossil. With the passing of time all was forgotten; the heroes faded into myths, into shadow, and history crumbled to fragments, only two or three vague, remote characteristics remaining to it. And I saw them in changing aspect. You spoke of a chapter? Happy are those who read only one chapter of life. Those who depart at the birth of empires bear with them the impression of their perpetuity; those who die at their fall, are buried in the hope of their restoration; but do you not realize what it is to see the same things unceasingly,--the same alternation of prosperity and desolation, desolation and prosperity, eternal obsequies and eternal halleluiahs, dawn upon dawn, sunset upon sunset?
PROMETHEUS
But you did not suffer, I believe. It is something not to suffer.
AHASVERUS
Yes, but I saw other men suffer, and in the end the spectacle of joy gave me the same sensations as the discourses of an idiot. Fatalities of flesh and blood, unending strife,--I saw all pass before my eyes, until night caused me to lose my taste for day, and now I cannot distinguish flowers from thistles. Everything is confused in my weary retina.
As Prometheus is but a vision, he is in reality identical with Ahasverus; and as Ahasverus here speaks, according to our interpretation, for Machado de Assis, so too does Prometheus. Particularly when he utters such sentiments as “The description of life is not worth the sensation of life.” Yet in Machado de Assis, description and sensation are fairly one; like so many ironists, he has a mistrust of feeling. The close of the dialogue is a striking commentary upon the retiring duality of the writer. Ahasverus, in his vision, is loosening the fetters of Prometheus, and the Greek addresses him:
Loosen them, new Hercules, last man of the old world, who shall be the first of the new. Such is your destiny; neither you nor I,--nobody can alter it. You go farther than your Moses. From the top of Mount Nebo, at the point of death, he beheld the land of Jericho, which was to belong to his descendants and the Lord said unto him: “Thou hast seen with thine eyes, yet shalt not pass beyond.” _You_ shall pass beyond, Ahasverus; you shall dwell in Jericho.
AHASVERUS
Place your hand upon my head; look well at me; fill me with the reality of your prediction; let me breathe a little of the new, full life … King, did you say?
PROMETHEUS
The chosen king of a chosen people.
AHASVERUS
It is not too much in recompense for the deep ignominy in which I have dwelt. Where one life heaped mire, another life will place a halo. Speak, speak on … speak on … (_He continues to dream. The two eagles draw near._)
FIRST EAGLE
Ay, ay, ay! Alas for this last man; he is dying, yet he dreams of life.
SECOND EAGLE
Not so much that he hated it as that he loved it so much.[5]
So much for the weariness of the superhuman,--an attitude matched among us more common mortals by such a delirium as occurs in a famous passage of Machado de Assis’s _Braz Cubas_, one of the mature works of which _Dom Casmurro_ is by many held to be the best. What shall we say of the plots of these novels? In reality, the plots do not exist. They are the slenderest of strings upon which the master stylist hangs the pearls of his wisdom. And such a wisdom! Not the maxims of a Solomon, nor the pompous nothings of the professional moralist. Seeming by-products of the narrative, they form its essence. To read Machado de Assis’s central novels for their tale is the vainest of pursuits. He is not interested in goals; the road is his pleasure, and he pauses wherever he lists, indulging the most whimsical conceits. For this Brazilian is a master of the whimsy that is instinct with a sense of man’s futility.
Here, for example, is almost the whole of Chapter XVII of _Dom Casmurro_. What has it to do with the love story of the hero and Capitú? Nothing. It could be removed, like any number of passages from Machado de Assis’s chief labours, without destroying the mere tale. Yet it is precisely these passages that are the soul of the man’s work.
The chapter is entitled The Worms (_Os Vermes_).
“ … When, later, I came to know that the lance of Achilles also cured a wound that it inflicted, I conceived certain desires to write a disquisition upon the subject. I went as far as to approach old books, dead books, buried books, to open them, compare them, plumbing the text and the sense, so as to find the common origin of pagan oracle and Israelite thought. I seized upon the very worms of the books, that they might tell me what there was in the texts they gnawed.
“‘My dear sir,’ replied a long, fat bookworm, ‘we know absolutely nothing about the texts that we gnaw, nor do we choose what we gnaw, nor do we love or detest what we gnaw; we simply go on gnawing.’
“And that was all I got out of him. All the others, as if they had agreed upon it, repeated the same song. Perhaps this discreet silence upon the texts they gnawed was itself another manner still of gnawing the gnawed.”
This is more than a commentary upon books; it is, in little, a philosophical attitude toward life, and, so far as one may judge from his works, it was Machado de Assis’s attitude. He was a kindly sceptic; for that matter, look through the history of scepticism, and see whether, as a lot, the sceptics are not much more kindly than their supposedly sweeter-tempered brothers who dwell in the everlasting grace of life’s certainties.
Machado de Assis was not too hopeful of human nature. One of his most noted tales, _O Infermeiro_ (The Nurse or Attendant) is a miniature masterpiece of irony in which man’s self-deception in the face of his own advantages is brought out with that charm-in-power which is not the least of the Brazilian’s qualities.
A man has hired out as nurse to a testy old invalid, who has changed one after the other all the attendants he has engaged. The nurse seems more fortunate than the rest, though matters rapidly approach a climax, until “on the evening of the 24th of August the colonel had a violent attack of anger; he struck me, he called me the vilest names, he threatened to shoot me; finally he threw in my face a plate of porridge that was too cold for him. The plate struck the wall and broke into a thousand fragments.
“‘You’ll pay me for it, you thief!’ he bellowed.
“For a long time he grumbled. Towards eleven o’clock he gradually fell asleep. While he slept I took a book out of my pocket, a translation of an old d’Alancourt novel which I had found lying about, and began to read it in his room, at a small distance from his bed. I was to wake him at midnight to give him his medicine; but, whether it was due to fatigue or to the influence of the book, I, too, before reaching the second page, fell asleep. The cries of the colonel awoke me with a start; in an instant I was up. He, apparently in a delirium, continued to utter the same cries; finally he seized his water-bottle and threw it at my face. I could not get out of the way in time; the bottle hit me in the left cheek, and the pain was so acute that I almost lost consciousness. With a leap I rushed upon the invalid; I tightened my hands around his neck; he struggled several moments; I strangled him.
“When I beheld that he no longer breathed, I stepped back in terror. I cried out; but nobody heard me. Then, approaching the bed once more, I shook him so as to bring him back to life. It was too late; the aneurism had burst, and the colonel was dead. I went into the adjoining room, and for two hours I did not dare to return. It is impossible for me to express all that I felt during that time. It was intense stupefaction, a kind of vague and vacant delirium. It seemed to me that I saw faces grinning on the walls; I heard muffled voices. The cries of the victim, the cries uttered before the struggle and during its wild moments continued to reverberate within me, and the air, in whatever direction I turned, seemed to shake with convulsions. Do not imagine that I am inventing pictures or aiming at verbal style. I swear to you that I heard distinctly voices that were crying at me: ‘Murderer; Murderer!’”
By one of the many ironies of fate, however, the testy colonel has left the attendant sole heir to his possessions; for the invalid has felt genuine appreciation, despite the anger to which he was subject. Note the effect upon the attendant, whose conscience at first has troubled him acutely:
“Thus, by a strange irony of fate, all the colonel’s wealth came into my hands. At first I thought of refusing the legacy. It seemed odious to take a sou of that inheritance; it seemed worse than the reward of a hired assassin. For three days this thought obsessed me; but more and more I was thrust against this consideration: that my refusal would not fail to awake suspicion. Finally I settled upon a compromise; I would accept the inheritance and would distribute it in small sums, secretly.
“This was not merely scruple on my part, it was also the desire to redeem my crime by virtuous deeds; and it seemed the only way to recover my peace of mind and feel that the accounts were straight.”
But possession is sweet, and before long the attendant changes his mind.
“Several months had elapsed, and the idea of distributing the inheritance in charity and pious donations was by no means so strong as it first had been; it even seemed to me that this would be sheer affectation. I revised my initial plan; I gave away several insignificant sums to the poor; I presented the village church with a few new ornaments; I gave several thousand francs to the Sacred House of Mercy, etc. I did not forget to erect a monument upon the colonel’s grave--a very simple monument, all marble, the work of a Neapolitan sculptor who remained at Rio until 1866, and who has since died, I believe, in Paraguay.
“Years have gone by. My memory has become vague and unreliable. Sometimes I think of the colonel, but without feeling again the terrors of those early days. All the doctors to whom I have described his afflictions have been unanimous as regards the inevitable end in store for the invalid, and were indeed surprised that he should so long have resisted. It is just possible that I may have involuntarily exaggerated the description of his various symptoms; but the truth is that he was sure of sudden death, even had this fatality not occurred.…
“Good-bye, my dear sir. If you deem these notes not totally devoid of value reward me for them with a marble tomb, and place there for my epitaph this variant which I have made of the divine sermon on the mount:
“‘Blessed are they who possess, for they shall be consoled.’”
I have omitted mention of the earlier novels of Machado de Assis because they belong to a romantic epoch, and he was not of the stuff that makes real romantics.[6] How could he be a genuine member of that school when every trait of his retiring personality rebelled against the abandonment to outspokenness implied in membership? He is as wary of extremes, as mistrustful of superlatives, as José Dias in _Dom Casmurro_ is fond of them. “I wiped my eyes,” relates the hero of that book, when apprised of his mother’s illness, “since of all José Dias’s words, but a single one remained in my heart: it was that _gravissimo_, (very serious). I saw afterward that he had meant to say only _grave_ (serious), but the use of the superlative makes the mouth long, and through love of a sonorous sentence José Dias had increased my sadness. If you should find in this book any words belonging to the same family, let me know, gentle reader, that I may emend it in the second edition; there is nothing uglier than giving very long feet to very short ideas.” If anything, his method follows the reverse order, that of giving short feet to long ideas. He never strains a thought or a situation. If he is sad, it is not the loud-mouthed melancholy of Byronic youth; neither is he the blatant cynic. He does not wave his hands and beat his breast in deep despair; he seems rather to sit brooding--not too deeply, for that would imply too great a concern with the silly world--by the banks of a lake in which the reflection of the clouds paints fantastic pictures upon the changing waters.
The real Machado de Assis stands apart from all who have written prose in his country. Senhor Costa, in his admirable book upon the Brazilian novel, has sought to present his nation’s chief novelist by means of an imagery drawn from Greek architecture; Aluizio Azevedo thus becomes the Doric column; Machado de Assis, the sober, elegant Ionian column; Graça Aranha, the Corinthian and Coelho Netto the composite. Sobriety and elegance are surely the outstanding qualities of the noted writer. His art, according to Costa, is the secret of _suggesting_ thoughts; this is what I have called his indirect method.
* * * * *
Machado de Assis belongs with the original writers of the nineteenth century. His family is the family of Renan and Anatole France; he is their younger brother, but his features show the resemblance.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The occasion was the _Fête de l’Intellectualité Brésilenne_, celebrated on April 3, 1909, at the Sorbonne in the Richelieu amphitheatre. Anatole France delivered a short, characteristic speech upon _Le Génie Latin_, emphasizing his disbelief in the idea of race. “Je dis le génie latin, je dis les peuples latins, parce que l’idée de race n’est le plus souvent qu’une vision de l’orgueil et de l’erreur, et parce que la civilization hellénique et romaine, comme la Jérusalem nouvelle, a vu venir de toutes parts à elle des enfants qu’elle n’avait point portés dans son sein. Et c’est sa gloire de gagner l’univers.… Latins des deux mondes, soyons fiers de notre commun heritage. Mais sachons le partager avec l’univers entier; sachons que la beauté antique, l’éternelle Hélène, plus auguste, plus chaste d’enlèvement en enlèvement, a pour destinée de se donner à des ravisseurs étrangers, et d’enfanter dans toutes les races, sous tous les climats, de nouveaux Euphorions, toujours plus savants et plus beaux.”
[2] “I do not like tears,” he says, in his last novel, _Memorial de Ayres_, “even in the eyes of women, whether or not they be pretty; they are confessions of weakness, and I was born with an abhorrence for the weak.”
[3] It was a blue fly, with wings of gold and carmine, daughter of China or of Hindustan, who was born on a certain summer’s night amid the petals of a red, red rose. And she buzzed and flew, and flew and buzzed, glittering in the light of the sun and the moon--brighter than a gem of the Grand Mogul. A humble toiler saw her, and was struck with amazement and sadness. A humble toiler, asking: “Fly, this glitter that seems rather a dream, say, who taught it to you?” Then she, flying around and about, replied: “I am life, I am the flower of grace, the paragon of earthly youth,--I am glory, I am love.” And he stood there, contemplating her, wrapt like a fakir, like one utterly dazed beyond power of comparison or reflection. Between the wings of the insect, as she flew in space, appeared something that rose with all the splendour of a palace, and he beheld a face that was his own. It was he,--he was a king,--the king of Cashmire, who wore upon his bare neck a huge necklace of opals, and a sapphire taken from the body of Vishnu. One hundred radiant women, a hundred exquisite _nayras_, smilingly display their rare graces at his feet upon the polished floor, and all the love they have they give to him. Mute, gravely on foot, a hundred ugly Ethiopians, with large ostrich fans, refresh their perfumed breasts, voluptuously nude. Then came glory,--forty conquered kings, and at last the triumphal tribute of three hundred nations, and the united felicitations of western crowns. But best of all is, that in the open face of the women and the men, as in water that shows the clear bottom, he saw into their hearts. Then he, extending his callous, rough hand that was accustomed only to carpentry, seized the glittering fly, curious to examine it. He wished to see it, to discover the cause of the mystery, and closing his fist around it, smiled with contentment to think that he held there an empire. He left for home. He arrives in excitement, examines and his mute behaviour is that of a man about to dissect his illusion. He dissected it, to such a point, and with such art, that the fly, broken, repellent, succumbed; and at this there vanished that fantastic, subtle vision. Today, when he passes, anointed with aloes and cardamom, with an affected air, they say that he went crazy, and that he doesn’t known how he lost his blue fly.
[4] Dancing in the air, a restless glow-worm wailed, “Oh, that I might be that radiant star which burns in the eternal blue, like a perpetual candle!” But the star: “Oh, that I might copy the transparent light that, at the gothic window of a Greek column the beloved, beautiful one sighingly contemplated!” But the moon, gazing at the sun, peevishly: “Wretched I! Would that I had that vast, undying refulgence which resumes all light in itself!” But the sun, bowing its rutilant crown: “This brilliant heavenly aureole wearies me.… I am burdened by this vast blue canopy.… Why was I not born a simple glow-worm?”
[5] The excerpts from _Viver!_ and _O Infermeiro_ are taken from my _Brazilian Tales_, Boston, 1921.
[6] See Part One of this book, Chapter V, § III, for the more romantic aspects of Machado de Assis.
III
JOSÉ VERISSIMO
It was a favourite attitude of Verissimo’s to treat of the author as the author appears in his work, rather than as he may be constructed from his biography and his milieu. Some of the national critics have referred to this as if it were a defect; it is, on the contrary, in consonance with the finest work now done in contemporary esthetic criticism and places Verissimo, in my opinion, at the head of all critics who have treated in Brazil of Brazilian letters. It is in precisely such a spirit that I shall try to present him to an alien audience,--doubly alien, shall I say?--in that criticism itself, wherever practised, is quite alien to the surroundings in which it is produced. Verissimo was what the Spaniards call a _raro_; he was as little Brazilian, in any restrictive sense, as was Machado de Assis. A conscientious reading of the thousands of pages he left fails to reveal anything like a hard and fast formula for literary appreciation. He was an intellectual freeman, truly in a spiritual sense a citizen of the world. In a country where even the more immediately rewarded types of creative endeavour were produced under the most adverse conditions, he exercised the least rewarded of literary professions; in a nation where the intellectual oligarchy was so small that every writer could have known his fellow scribe,--where the very language betrays one into the empty compliment and a meaningless grandiloquence,--he served, and served with admirable scruple, gentility and wisdom, the cause of truth and beauty. His manner is, with rare interludes of righteous indignation, generally serene; his approach is first of all esthetic, with a certain allowance for social idealism that never degenerates into hollow optimism; his language, which certain Brazilian have seen fit to criticize for lack of stylistic amenities, is to one foreigner, at least, a source of constant charm for its simplicity, its directness, its usually unlaboured lucidity.
And these various qualities seem but so many facets of the man’s unostentatious personality. He was not, like Sylvio Romero, a nature compelled, out of some seeming inner necessity, to quarrel; his pages, indeed, are restful even when most interesting and most alive with suggestion and stimulating thought. His Portuguese, surely, is not so beautiful as the Spanish of his twin-spirit of Uruguay, José Enrique Rodó, but there is something in both these men that places them apart from their contemporaries who practised criticism. They were truly modern in the better sense of that word; they brought no sacrifices to the altar of novelty, of sensation, of an unreasoned, wholesale dumping of the past. They did not confuse modernity with up-to-date-ness; they did not go into ecstasies for the sake of enthusiasm itself. They would have been “modern” in any age, and perhaps for that very reason a certain classic repose hovers over their pages. Each knew his classics; each knew his moderns. But I doubt whether either ever gave himself much concern over these really futile distinctions,--futile, that is, when mouthed merely as hard and fast differences, as if restless, “romantic” spirits did not exist among the ancients, and as if, today, no serene soul may dwell in his nook apart, watching the world roll on. Such a serenity lives in the pages of the Uruguayan and of the Brazilian; like all things born of human effort, they will lose as the years roll on, but something of permanence is there because Verissimo, like Rodó, possessed the secret of seizing upon something universal in whatever he choose to consider.
That Europe, with its ancient culture, its aristocratic intellectual circles and its concentrated audiences, should have produced great critics, is not, after all, so much to be wondered at,--surely, hardly more to be marvelled at than the emergence of the great playwright, the great novelist. That the United States, in recent years, reveals the promise of notable criticism, is somewhat more a cause for congratulation in that here we lack--or up to yesterday, lacked--inspiring intellectual leaders. But at least we possessed the paraphernalia, the apparatus, the national wealth. We had publishers, we had printing-presses, we had a generally literate populace, whatever the use to which the populace put those capabilities. Our young writers did not have to seek publishers abroad, whence alone could come likewise, literary consecration. That a Rodó should arise in Spanish America--and more than one notable critic had preceded him--or that a Verissimo should appear in Brazil, is fairly a triumph of mind over matter. It is true that such an event would have been impossible without the influence--and the decided influence--of European culture; but it is a triumph, none the less. And it is the sort of triumph that comes from the sacrifice of material boons to values less tangible, yet more lasting. I do not mean that Verissimo went about deploring the humble position of the artist and the true critic in Brazil; I am a mite mistrustful of self-analytic martyrs, of whom we are not exempt in these United States. He exercised a deliberate choice. Much of his work first appeared in the newspapers, and this alone must stand as a tribute to the organs that printed his critiques. For the rest, his life and labours serve to prove that south of the Rio Grande, no less than north, economic materialism and the life of the spirit are at everlasting grips with each other, and that there are men (again on both sides of that stream) who are masters rather than slaves of the chattels they possess.
He was not religious (remember that I am treating him as he treated his own subjects--as he is revealed in his writings); he was not intensely emotional; he looked love and death straight in the eyes, as much with curiosity as with any inner or outer trembling before either. He was, in his realm, what Machado de Assis was in his,--a spirit of the Limbo, shall we say? His motto, if he would have accepted the static connotation of mottoes, might have been Horace’s _medio tutissimus ibis_, only that he sought the middle path not so much through desire of safety as out of a certain philosophical conviction. But there again I use a word that does not harmonize with Verissimo’s intellectual elasticity, for words are almost as hard and cold as the type that prints them, while thoughts rather resemble the air that takes them into space. And Verissimo is especially sensible to this permanence-in-transiency. “As to permanence,” he wrote in an interesting essay on _Que é Literatura_[1] (What is Literature?), “it might be said, in a sort of paradox, that it is precisely the transitoriness of the emotion that makes a book of lasting interest. It is an essential difference between knowledge and emotion that the first is lasting and the second transitory. A fact learned remains, is added to the sum of our knowledge. We may forget it, but such forgetting is not in the nature of things necessary, and the truths that are contained in a book of science that we have read join our permanent intellectual acquisitions. The emotions are by very nature fleeting,--they are not, like the facts we learn, added to and incorporated into one another; they are a series of experiences that change constantly. Within a few hours the emotion aroused by the reading of a poem is extinguished; it cannot endure. It may be renewed, by the re-reading of the poem or by resorting to memory, and, if it be a masterpiece, successive readings and recollection will not blunt its power to move us.”
He commits himself to no definite esthetic system, thus suggesting his affinities to the French impressionists and to that Jules Lemaître whom he so much admired. “No meio não está só a virtude, mas a verdade,” he writes; “not only virtue, but truth, lies in the middle.” This, as I have said, is not a wish for the Horatian safety of the middle course, but rather an innate mistrust of extremes. To the ancient apophthegm that there is nothing new under the sun--and it would be just as true to say that there is nothing old under it, or that all things under the sun are new--he composes a variant that might well stand as the description of the best in our newer criticism: “Nada ha de definitivo debaixo do Sol”; “there is nothing definitive under the sun.” In United States criticism there is a lapidary phrase to match it, and from a spirit who, allowing for all the modifications of time, space and temperament, is kin to Verissimo. I refer to a brief sentence that occurs in the Introduction to Ludwig Lewisohn’s _A Modern Book of Criticism_, in a paragraph devoted to demonstrating the futility of absolute standards, as represented in the important work of Paul Elmer More.… “Calmly oblivious of the crumbling of every absolute ever invented by man,” writes Mr. Lewisohn, “he (i. e., Mr. More) continues in his fierce and growing isolation to assert that he knows what human life ought to be and what kind of literature ought to be permitted to express its character. That a form of art or life exists and that it engages the whole hearts of men makes little difference to him. He knows.… And what does he know? Only, at bottom, his own temperamental tastes and impulses which he seeks to rationalize by an appeal to carefully selected and isolated tendencies in art and thought. And, having rationalized them by an artifice so fragile, he seeks to impose them upon the men and the artists of his own day in the form of laws. I know his reply so well. It is this, that if you abandon his method, you sink into universal scepticism and undiscriminate acceptance. The truth is that I believe far more than he does. For I love beauty in all its forms and find life tragic and worthy of my sympathy in every manifestation. I need no hierarchical moral world for my dwelling-place, because I desire neither to judge nor to condemn. _Fixed standards are useless to him whose central passion is to have men free._ Mr. More needs them for the same inner reason--infinitely rarified and refined, of course,--for which they are necessary to the inquisitor and the militant patriot. He wants to damn heretics.… I do not. His last refuge, like that of every absolutist at bay, would be in the corporate judgment of mankind. Yes, mankind has let the authoritarians impose upon it only too often. But their day is nearly over.…”[2]
This is one of the most important passages in contemporary United States criticism,--doubly so because the men thus ranged against each other are both accomplished scholars and thus rise to symbols of the inevitable contest between the intellect that dominates the emotions and the intellect that has discovered wisdom in guidance rather than domination. Verissimo was no Lewisohn; he possessed many of that critic’s signal qualities, but in lesser degree. His language is not so instinct with human warmth, his culture not so wide nor so deep, his perceptions not so keen; but he belongs in company of such rare spirits. He is as unusual amidst the welter of verbose opinions that passes for criticism in Spanish and Portuguese America as is Lewisohn amidst our own colder but equally vapid and empty reviewers and as was Rodó in the milieu that but half understood him. Neither Rodó nor Verissimo, for that matter, had a firm grasp upon the budding intellectual life of these States; each died a trifle too early for the signs of hope that they would have been happy to discern. As it is, they possessed the somewhat stencilled view of the United States as the country of the golden calf; a view none too false, more’s the pity, but too “absolute” in the sense that we have just seen discussed. There is, for all the truth in Rodó’s famous _Ariel_, a certain half-concealed condescension that might not have appeared were that essay written today.[3] The younger Spanish Americans and Brazilians who have come north to study at our universities and to acquaint themselves with the newer phases of our culture, have been quick to respond to such spirits as Van Wyck Brooks, Henry L. Mencken, Ludwig Lewisohn, Joel Elias Spingarn. During the next decade, as these young men rise to power in their own intellectual world, their books will doubtless reveal a different attitude toward the attainments of their Northern neighbours,--unless--and there is always that unless,--political happenings should contort their views and our scant spiritual population should once again suffer, as so often in the past, for the misdoings of our diplomats.
Verissimo, then, is the critic-artist. The drum-beat of dogma that pounds over the pages of Sylvio Romero is never heard in his lines. Though he holds that art is a social function--a form indispensable to the existence of society--he realizes its individual import, without carrying his belief to the point of that mystifying esoterism so beloved of certain latter-day poets and dramatists.
To him, criticism was an art, and, reduced to its essential elements, is practised by any one who expresses an opinion or a feeling concerning a work of art. His mind was open to every wind of doctrine that blew, but this was hospitality rather than indiscrimination. “Let us not rebel against the new poetic tendencies,” he wrote in a controversy with Medeiros e Albuquerque, “for we must understand that they are all natural, the result of poetry’s very evolution. Let us not, on the other hand, accept them as universal and definitive. There is nothing definitive under the sun.… Schools, tendencies, fashions, pass. Poetry remains, invariable in its essence, despite the diversity of its form.”
It is possible, however, that the conditions under which he wrote prevented his work from attaining the heights that often it suggests. His Brazil needed a teacher rather than a critic,--a policeman of the arts, as it were,--and he had to supply the deficiency. Perhaps it is one’s imagination that detects in his lines a certain all-pervading sadness,--a sadness that seems sister to serenity. Only when stirred to just combat--as in his controversy with Sylvio Romero--does he abandon his unruffled demeanour, and ever here he is more restrained than Sylvio could be in his moments of calm. Verissimo,--and again he suggests Rodó for a similar quality,--is ever a mite melancholy. His thought and its expression at their best are like a beautiful landscape seen in the afterglow of sunset; a sort of intellectual twilight, most natural to one who found truth and virtue in the middle. Yet is there much Truth and Virtue in Verissimo,--whoever that lady and gentleman may be? He sought to bring no eternal verities; his aim, like Rodó’s, was to instil rather the love of truth than any specific truth itself. He is a dispassionate analyst. Hence his tolerance (another quality of the middle, it will be noted), his diffidence, his sincerity. After Verissimo, Brazilian criticism is confronted with new standards,--flexible, it is true, but all the more exigent. As Machado de Assis belongs to the company of Anatole France, so Verissimo belongs with Lemaître. At a proper distance, to be sure, but within the circle of the elect. He was not deceived by theories, for he looked to the creation itself; neither was he deceived, and for the same reason, by men and women. By their works he knew them, as by his work we know him. It was his attitude as much as his accomplishment that made of him the national glory he has become. And no little of that glory is his because his sincerity transcended the narrower claims of nationalism,--a nationalism in Brazil as elsewhere too often identical with unthinking pride, puerile boastfulness and the notions of whatever political party happens to be predominant.
* * * * *
With Sylvio Romero he shares pre-eminence as the foremost modern Brazilian critic of letters. A passing glance at the controversy between these contrasting personalities will bring out not only their divergent qualities, but more than one sidelight on the problems of Brazilian culture and literature. I give it as it may be seen through Verissimo’s eyes, because I think that he sums up the case with his characteristic sincerity and modesty.
Romero’s notable work, _Historia da literatura brasileira_, was first published, in two volumes, in the year 1888, and brought the history of the nation’s letters down to the year 1870. A second edition appeared in 1902-3, revised by the author. It was upon the appearance of this second edition that Verissimo estimated the qualities of the work in terms that should meet with the approval of all but the blindest of partisans. He noted not only its value as research, its solid qualities, but its contradictions, incoherencies and abuses of generalization as well. He called it “one of the most original, or at least personal, most suggestive, most copious (in opinions and ideas), most interesting” of books and noted, what the most superficial must note at once, the man’s polemical temper. “The source of our literary history,” he wrote, “is the Introduction by Varnhagen to his _Florilegio_ of Brazilian poetry (Lisbon 1850, I and II vols., Madrid, 1853, III). It was he who laid in those pages the corner stone of the still unfinished edifice of our literature.… Wolf, Norberto Silva, Fernandes Pinheiro and others merely followed his lead, and if they improved upon him, it was according to his indications. And, if not by its philosophic spirit and critical method, Sylvio Romero’s _Historia_ derives in its general design from the _Introduction_ or Varnhagen.…”
The review, short as it was, revealed Verissimo’s intellectual contrast to Romero. He is calm, even, logical, somewhat cold, clear, French,--while Romero is the born fighter, impassioned, rambling, eager to embrace his vast subject, crowding into his history a mass of names and works wholly without pertinence to the field, lacking in literary grace.
In 1906 Verissimo was obliged to take up the subject once more, this time in less dispassionate terms, forced into a distasteful controversy when further silence would have been tantamount to cowardice. Romero, in that year, published together with Sr. Dr. João Ribeiro, a _Compendio de historia da literatura brazileira_ in which Verissimo was acrimoniously attacked, “not only in my opinions as a critic, which does not offend me, nor in my qualities as a writer, which it would be ridiculous to enter the field and defend, but in my literary probity, which compels me to this refutation.…
“Sylvio Romero cannot suffer--and this is a proof of a certain moral inferiority--contradiction and criticism, and must have unconditional admiration.…” The voluminous historian was vain. “It is an absolutely certain fact, and most easily verified, that in no country, in no literature, has any author quoted himself so much as (I do not say more than) Sylvio Romero.… Despite the fact that there was never a break or even a difference in our relations, which for my part I prized and which he did not seem to disdain, I felt, despite his praise and his verbal animation--that of a master toward his pupil--that my poor literary production contended with his and therefore, in short, I was not agreeable to him. It was evident to me that there were two things that my friend could not pardon me for: my small esteem (small in relation to his) for Tobias Barreto and my great appreciation for a writer whose highly justified glory has for some time seemingly robbed the great critic of sleep.”
“I continue to maintain,” wrote Verissimo, “and all the documents support me, that Varnhagen was the father of our literary history, principally of that history as it is conceived and realized by Sylvio Romero in his _Historia da literatura brazileira_, whose inspiration and economy derive far more from the studies of Varnhagen than from the generalizations … of Fernand Denis or Norberto Silva … I know perfectly well … what was accomplished before him by Norberto Silva and Fernand Denis, Bouterwek and Sismondi, etc.… The oldest of these writers is the German Bouterwek. But I doubt whether Sylvio Romero ever read him. In fact this author concerns himself only in passing fashion with Brazilian literature.…” And in turn Verissimo takes up the work of Denis, Silva and other predecessors of Varnhagen, rectifying the position of the investigator whose merits have been so unjustly slighted by the dogmatic “Pontifex Maximus of Brazilian letters,” as Romero was called by Eunapio Deiró.[4]
“A disciple of the French through Sainte-Beuve and Brunetière, and of the English through Macaulay,” says Carvalho in his recent work upon Brazilian literature, “Verissimo was what might be called an objective critic. Versed in many literatures, even erudite, he lacked, in order to be a great writer, a finer taste for beautiful things, and likewise, the spirit, or rather, the fineness of understanding and sensibility. His _Historia da Literatura Brazileira_ which is, we will not say a perfect, but an honest synthesis of our literary evolution, shows the primordial defect of its method, which was that of seeking the individual to the detriment of the milieu, the personal work to the prejudice of the collective. Verissimo, who possessed a direct observation that could appreciate isolated values keenly, lacked on the other hand a deep intuition of universal problems; he was content to point them out in passing; he did not enter into them, he circled prudently around them.…”[5]
What Carvalho points out as a defect I consider Verissimo’s chief contribution to Brazilian criticism,--his primary concern with the individual. True, this may lessen his value as a literary historian, but it makes of him one of the very few genuine esthetical critics that have appeared on this side of the Atlantic. It renders him easily superior to Romero and Carvalho, the latter of whom is much indebted to both Verissimo and Romero, as is every one who seeks to write of the nation’s letters.
Verissimo has put into a very short essay his general outlook upon Brazilian literature. It is instinct with the man’s honesty of outlook, his directness of statement, his fidelity to fact, his dispassionate approach. For that reason I translate it almost entire as the best short commentary available. It is entitled _O Que Falta á Nossa Literatura_ (What Our Literature Lacks).
“What I know of American literature--and in truth it is very little--authorizes me to say that ours is perhaps the oldest of the continent.[6] From the literary standpoint our nationality seems to have preceded the other American nations. It is clear that I am not here insisting upon a strict question of date; it is possible that in Mexico, and even in Peru,--I haven’t at hand the means for verifying the facts,--some writers may have arisen earlier than our own, poets necessarily. Chronology, in literature, however, though of considerable importance, cannot alone serve to establish priority. A literature is a grouping, and cannot in fact exist through a single poet or an isolated book, unless that poet or that book resume in eminent degree the entire thought or feeling of a people who is already in some manner conscious of itself. This is the case of Homer, if that name stands for an individual.
“Since the XVIIth century we reckon in our midst poets and prosers. This would prove that the necessity of reporting oneself, of defining oneself,--which creates literature,--already existed amongst us, no sooner than we were born. The work of Gabriel Soares may, and I believe should, be excluded from a history of Brazilian literature, because such a history can be only that of literature published and known in its day,--literature that could have influenced its time and those who came after. But it comprises part of a history of the civilization, thought and spiritual progress of Brazil, showing how already in that century a native of the country, sequestered upon his plantation in the sertão, not only possessed sufficient culture to write of matters pertaining to his country, but felt also the necessity of writing it down. It is certain that he was inspired likewise by interest and that his work is a memorial to the Sovereign, seeking personal concessions. But, on account of the thoroughness and the breadth with which it is done, and, above all, because of the general, disinterested spirit in which it is accomplished,--the variety of its aspects and the national breath that animates it, it far exceeds the nature of a simple memorial. In the same position are the _Dialogues upon the Grandeurs of Brazil_ and their author, whoever he may be. Preoccupation with history is the surest token of a reflective national consciousness. This preoccupation awoke early in Brazil, and not only as a means of information with which the religious orders tried to instruct themselves concerning the lay of the land and to glorify themselves by publishing their own deeds, but also in this same more general, more disinterested spirit. Frei Vicente do Salvador is thus early a national historian and not a simple religious chronicler.
“Two things occur to produce this development in Brazilian literary expression, at the very beginning of civilization in this country: the vigor of literary expression in Portugal and the Jesuit _collegios_. Whatever be the value of Portuguese literature, it is beyond dispute that no literature of the smaller peoples rivals it in wealth and variety. When Brazil was discovered, only a small part of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal possessed a literary life. England was scarcely emerging into it, with the predecessors of Shakespeare, who had not yet been born and whose first works date from the end of the century. Germany, from the literary standpoint, did not exist.
“Portugal, for already a century, had possessed a language solidly constructed and policed, and in this respect the labor of Camões is incomparably less than that of Dante. Portugal was in its golden age of literature, which already possessed chroniclers such as Fernão Lopes, novelists like Bernardim Ribeiro, historians like João de Barros, dramatists like Gil Vicente, poets such as those of the _cancioneiros_ and a line of writers of all kinds dating back to the fourteenth century. Despite the rusticity of the people, Portugal, in the epoch of Brazil’s colonization, is one of the four countries of Europe that may be called intellectual. The identification of the colony of Brazil with the mother-country seems to me one of the expressive facts of our history, and this identification rendered easy the influence of Portuguese spiritual life upon a wild region, so that it was possible to obtain results which, given other feelings between the court and the colony, would not have been forthcoming. Since gold was not at once discovered here, and those mines that were discovered proved relatively few and poor, Brazilian life soon took on, from Reconcavo to Pernambuco, where it was first lived, and later in Rio Janeiro and even--though less--in S. Vicente, a modest manner,--what today we should call bourgeois,--more favourable to literary expression, to the leisure needed for writing, than the agitated, adventurous existence of the colonizers of mine lands.
“The collegios of the Jesuits, established with higher studies as early as the XVIth century, and later--in imitation of them--the convents of the other religious orders, infiltrating Latin culture into the still half-savage colony, favoured the transmigration hither of the powerful literary spirit of the metropolis.
“Soon, then, perhaps sooner than any other American nation, and certainly sooner than, for example, the largest of them all, the United States, we had a literature, the written expression of our collective thought and feeling. Certainly this literature scarcely merits the name of Brazilian as a regional designation. It is Portuguese not only in tongue but in inspiration, sentiment, spirit. There might perhaps already exist, as in the author of the _Dialogos das grandezas_ or in Gabriel Soares, a regional sentiment, the love of the native soil, a taste for its traits, but there was no national sentiment other than the selfsame Portuguese national sentiment. Even four centuries later, I hesitate to attribute to our literature the qualification of Brazilian.… For I do not know whether the existence of an entirely independent literature is possible without an entirely independent language as well. Language is the constituent element of literatures, from the fact that it is itself the expression of what there is most intimate, most individual, most characteristic in a people. Only those peoples possess a literature of their own who possess a language of their own. In this sense, which seems to me the true one, there is no Austrian literature or Swiss or Belgian literature, despite the existence in those peoples of a high culture and notable writers in all fields.[7]
“Therefore I consider Brazilian literature as a branch of the Portuguese, to which from time to time it returns by the ineluctable law of atavism, as we may see in the imitations of the literary movements in Portugal, or better still, in the eagerness--today almost universal in our writers--to write Portuguese purely, according to the classic models of the mother literature. This branch, upon which have been engrafted other elements, is already distinguished from the central trunk by certain characteristics, but not in a manner to prevent one from seeing, at first glance, that it is the same tree slightly modified by transplantation to other climes. It is possible that new graftings and the prolonged influence of milieu will tend to differentiate it even more, but so long as the language shall remain the same, it will be little more--as happens in the botanical families--than a variety of the species.
“A variety, however, may be very interesting; it may even be, in certain respects, more interesting than the principal type, acquiring in time and space qualities that raise it above the type. Brazilian literature, or at least poetry, was already in the XVIIth century superior to Portuguese. It is by no means patriotic presumption, which I lack completely, to judge that, with the development of Brazil, its probable politic and economic greatness in the future will give to the literary expression of its life supremacy over Portugal, whose historic rôle seems over and which, from all appearances, will disappear in an Iberic union. If this country of ours does not come apart and split up into several others, each a ‘patria’ with a dialect of its own, we shall prove true to the prophecies of Camões and Fr. Luiz de Souza, becoming the legitimate heirs of Portugal’s language and literature. If such a thing should happen, it would give us an enormous moral superiority to the United States and the Spanish-American nations, making of us the only nation in America with a truly national language and literature.
“But this literature of ours, which, as a branch of the Portuguese already has existed for four centuries, possesses neither perfect continuity, cohesion, nor the unity of the great literatures,--of the Portuguese, for example. The principal reason, to explain the phenomenon in a single word, is that it depended ever, in its earliest periods, rather upon Portugal and later upon Europe, France especially, than upon Brazil itself. It always lacked the principle of solidarity, which would seem to reveal lack of national sentiment. It always has lacked communicability,--that is, its writers, who were separated by vast distances and extreme difficulty of communication, remained strangers one to the other. And I refer not to personal communication, which is of secondary importance, but to intellectual communication that is established through books. The various influences that can be noted in all our important literary movements are all external. What is called improperly the Mineira School of the XVIIIth century, and the Maranhão pléiade of the middle of this (the XIXth) received their inspiration from Portugal, but did not transmit it. As is said in military tactics, contact was never established between the writers or between their intellects.
“This lack of contact continues today (Verissimo wrote the essay toward the end of the XIXth century) and is greater now than it was for example during the Romantic period. There was always lacking the transmitting element, the plastic mediator of national thought, a people sufficiently cultured to be interested in that thought, or, at least, ready to be influenced by it. In the construction of a literature the people plays simultaneously a passive and an active rôle: it is in the people that the inspiration of poet and thinker has its source and its goal. Neither the one nor the other can abstract himself, for both form an integral part of the people. Perhaps only during our Romantic period, from 1835 to 1860, may it be said that this condition of communicability existed, limited to a tiny part of the country. The sentiment of a new nation co-operated effectively in creating for writers a sympathetic public, which felt instinctively in their work an expression of that nationality. Then we learned a great deal of French, some English and Italian, a smattering of German and became intellectually denationalized. A success such as that of Macedo’s _Moreninha_ is fairly inconceivable today. Success in literature, as in clothing, comes ready made from Paris.
“Do not take me for a nationalist, and less still, for a nativist. I simply am verifying a fact with the same indifference with which I should perform the same office in the domains of geology. I am looking for the explanation of a phenomenon; I believe I have found it, and I present it.
“So that, from this standpoint, it may be said that it was the development of our culture that prejudiced our literary evolution. It seems a paradox, but it is simply a truth. Defective and faulty as it was, that culture was enough to reveal to our reading public the inferiority of our writers, without any longer counterbalancing this feeling by the patriotic ardor of the period during which the nationality was being formed. The general cultural deficiency of our writers of all sorts in Brazil is, then, one of the defects of our literature. Doing nothing but repeat servilely what is being done abroad, without any originality of thought or form, without ideas of their own, with immense gaps in their learning, and no less defects of instruction that are today common among men of medium culture in the countries that we try to imitate and follow, we cannot compete before our readers with what they receive from the foreign countries at first hand, by offering them a similar product at second.
“In addition to study, culture, instruction, both general and thorough, carried on in time and with plenty of time, firm and substantial, our literature lacks at present sincerity. The evident decadence of our poetry may have no other cause. Compare, for example, the poetry of the last ten or even fifteen years, with that produced during the decade 1850-1860, by Gonçalves Dias, Casimiro de Abreu, Alvares de Azevedo, Junqueira Freire, Laurindo Rabello, and you will note that the sincerity of emotion that overflowed the verses then is almost completely lacking in today’s poetry. And in all our literary labors, fiction, history, philosophy, criticism, it is impossible for the careful reader not to discern the same lack. Perhaps it is due to a lack of correlation between milieu and writer.… To aggravate this, there was, moreover, lack of ideas, lack of thought, which reduced our poetry to a subjectivism from which exaggerated fondness for form took emotion, the last quality that remained to it; it reduced our fiction to a copy of the French novel, which obstructed the existence of a dramatic literature, which sterilized our philisophic, historic and critical production. This lack, however, is a consequence of our lack of culture and study, which do not furnish to brains already for several reasons naturally poor the necessary restoratives and tonics. And the worst of it is that, judging from the direction in which we are moving, this very culture, as deficient and incomplete as it is, threatens to be extinguished in a widespread, all-consuming, and, anyway you look at it, coarse preoccupation with politics and finance.”[8]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Many cultured Brazilians know English literature in the original. The essay here referred to was suggested to Verissimo by the book of a United States professor, Winchester, on _Some Principles of Literary Criticism_.
[2] _A Modern Book of Criticism_, New York, 1919. Page iii. The italics are mine.
[3] Mr. Havelock Ellis, writing in 1917 upon Rodó, (the article may be found in his book entitled _The Philosophy of Conflict_), expressed an opinion that comes pat to our present purpose. “ … Rodó has perhaps attributed too fixed a character to North American civilization, and has hardly taken into account those germs of recent expansion which may well bring the future development of the United States nearer to his ideals. It must be admitted, however, that if he had lived a few months longer Rodó might have seen confirmation in the swift thoroughness, even exceeding that of England, with which the United States on entering the war sought to suppress that toleration for freedom of thought and speech that he counted so precious, shouting with characteristic energy the battle-cry of all the belligerents, ‘Hush! Don’t think, only feel and act!’ with a pathetic faith that the affectation of external uniformity means inward cohesion.… Still, Rodó himself recognised that, even as already manifested, the work of the United States is not entirely lost for what he would call the ‘interests of the soul.’”
[4] For this discussion, which is of primary importance to students of Brazilian letters, see Verissimo’s _Estudos_, 6a serie, pages 1-14, and his _Que é Literatura_, Rio de Janeiro, 1907, pages 230-292.
[5] _Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira._ 2a Ed. Revista e augmentada. Rio, 1922. Pp. 344-345.
[6] This opinion he later rectified.
[7] In _Studies in Spanish-American Literature_ (pages 98-99) I have discussed briefly this attitude of Verissimo’s. I do not believe the entire question to be of primary _literary_ importance. It is the noun _literature_ that is of chief interest; not the adjective of nationality that precedes it.
[8] Verissimo was born at Belem, Para, on April 8, 1857. He initiated his career as a public official in his native province, but soon made his way to the directorship of the Gymnasio Nacional, and then the Normal School of Rio de Janeiro. For a long time, concurrently with his scholarly labors, he edited the famous _Revista Brasileira_. His _Scenes of Life on the Amazon_ have been compared to the pages of Pierre Loti for their exotic charm. He died in 1918.
IV
OLAVO BILAC
His full name was Olavo Braz Martins dos Guimarães Bilac; he is one of the most popular poets that Brazil has produced; his surroundings and his person, like the poetry that brought him his fame, were exquisite,--somewhat in the tradition of the French dandies and the Ibero-American versifiers who imitated them--yet in him the note was not overdone. He passes, in the history of the national letters, for one of the Parnassian leaders, yet he is one of their most subjective spirits. Toward the end of his life, as if the feelings that he had sought so long to dominate in his poetry must at last find vent, he became a sort of Socialist apostle, preaching the doctrine of education. “Brazil’s malady,” he averred, “is, above all, illiteracy.” And like so many of his creative compatriots, he set patiently about constructing text-books for children. In his early days he found inspiration in the Romantic Gonçalves Dias and the Parnassian Alberto de Oliveira; very soon, however, he attained to an idiom quite his own which lies somewhat between the manner of these two. “He is the poet of the city,” one critic has written, “as Catullus was of Rome and as Apuleius was of Carthage.” He has been compared, likewise, to Lucian of Samosata. Most of all, however, he is the poet of perfumed passion,--not the heavy, drugged perfumes of D’Annunzio, which weigh down the votaries until they suffer amidst their pleasures, but--and again like some of his Spanish-American brothers in the other nations of the continent--a faun in frock coat, sporting with naiads in silk. Bilac has his ivory tower, but its doors stand ajar to beauty of body and of emotion. His is no withdrawal into the inner temple; his eyes are always peering into the world from which he supposedly stands aloof, and his heart follows them.
We are not to look to him, then, for either impersonality or impassivity. Even when he wrote of the Iliad, of Antony, of Carthage, he had his native Brazil in mind, as he revealed in his final poems. “We never really had a literature,” he said shortly before his death. “We have imitations, copies, reflections. Where is the writer that does not recall some foreigner,--where is the school that we can really call our own?… There are, for the rest, explanations of this fact. We are a people in process of formation, in which divers ethnical elements are struggling for supremacy. There can be no original literature until this is formed.…”
Again: “We regulate ourselves by France. France has no strife of schools now, neither have we; France has some extravagant youths, so have we; it shows now an even stronger tendency,--the humanitarian, and we begin to write socialistic books.” He spoke of poets as “the sonorous echo of Hugo’s verse, between heaven and earth, to transmit to the gods the plaints of mortals,” yet only in the end do any of his poems ring with such an echo, and the plaints that rise from the poems of Bilac that his countrymen most love are cries of passion. “Art,” he said, as if to bely the greater part of his own life’s work, and with something of repentance in his words, “is not, as some ingenious visionaries would have it, an assertion and a labor apart, without filiation to the other preoccupations of existence. All human concerns are interwoven and blend in an indissoluble manner. The towers of gold and ivory in which artists sequestered themselves, have toppled over. The art of today is open and subject to all the influences of the milieu and the epoch. In order to be the most beautiful representation of life, it must hear and preserve all the cries, all the complaints, all the lamentations of the human flock. Only a madman or a monstrous egoist … could live and labor by himself, locked under seven keys within his dream, indifferent to all that is happening outside in the vast field where the passions strive and die, where ambition pants and despair wails, where are being decided the destinies of peoples and races.…”
This is, as we shall presently be in position to note, fairly a recantation of his early poetic profession of faith. Which is right,--the proclamative self-dedication to Form and Style that stands at the beginning of his _Poesias_, or this consecration to humanity? Both. For at each stage of his career, Bilac was sincere and filled with a vision; in art, for that matter, only insincerity and inadequacy are ever wrong. And perhaps not in art alone. M. Gsell, who lately wrote an altogether delightful book made up of notes taken at Anatole France’s retreat at Villa Saïd, quotes this little tale from the master, who was reminded of it by a portrait of Paolo Uccello in Vasari. “This is the painter,” said France, “whose wife gently reproached him with working too slowly.
“‘I must have time,’ the artist said, ‘to establish the perspective of my pictures.’
“‘Yes, Paolo,’ the poor woman protested, ‘but you are drawing for us the perspective of destitution and the grave.’
“She was right,” commented France, “and he was not wrong. The eternal conflict between the scruples of the artist and harsh reality.”
Bilac’s seeming recantation at the end was the result of just such a clash between artistry and harsh reality. Had he chosen, in the beginning, to devote his poetic gifts to humanity, he might have been remembered longer as a man, but it is doubtful whether he would have achieved his standing as an artist. And Brazil would have been the poorer by a number of poems that have doubtless enriched the emotional life of the nation. I wonder whether, in his later days, Bilac did not in a manner confuse art with social service. There are souls in whom the human comedy kindles the fires of song; such as they sing,--they do not theorize. Bilac was not one of them. There was nothing to prevent his serving humanity in any of the countless ways in which man may be more than wolf to man. But he himself, as an artist, was not fashioned to be a social force. He was the born voluptuary.
“Art,” he said, “is the dome that crowns the edifice of civilization: and only that people can have an art which is already a people,--which has already emerged triumphant from all the tests through which the character of nationalities is purified and defined.…” Here again, his practice excels his theory. There is in him little Brazilianism, and even when he uses the native suggestion, as in his brilliant _O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ (The Emerald-Hunter, an epic episode of the seventeenth-century sertão) he is, as every poet should be, first of all himself. “Perhaps in the year 2500 there will exist diverse literatures in the vast territory now comprising Brazil,” he prophesied, in disapproval of that sectionalism in letters which several times has tried to make a definite breach in the national literature. But is not all literature psychologically sectional? If the ambient is not filtered through the personality of the individual, is the product worth much more as art than a county report? In our own country, of late, there has been much futile talk of Chicago literature and New York literature, and other such really political chat. “Isms” within “isms,” which make good “copy” for the newspapers and magazines, and which, no doubt, may have a certain sociological significance. But when you or I pick up a book or a poem, what care we, after all, for the land of its origin or even the life of its author, except as both are revealed in the work? Was not one of Bilac’s own final admonitions to his nation’s youth to “Love your art above all things and have the courage, which I lacked, to die of hunger rather than prostitute your talent?” And “above all things” means above the unessential intrusion of petty sectionalism, partisan aim, political purpose, moral exhortation, national pride. I have no quarrel, then, with Bilac’s hopes for a national literature, with his aspirations for our common humanity. But I am happy that he was content to leave that part of him for public life rather than contriving to press it willy-nilly into the service of his only half Parnassian muse.
Bilac was, on the whole, less a Parnassian than was Francisca Julia. She transmuted her passion into cold, yet appealing, symbols; Machado de Assis’s feelings do not quite fill his glass to the brim; Olavo Bilac’s passion overflows the banks of his verse. Yet he remained as true as so warm a nature as his could be to the vows of his _Profissão de Fe_, with its numerous exclamation points that stand as visible refutation of his avowed formalism. The very epigraph of the poem--and the poem itself stands as epigraph to the collection that follows--is taken from none other than that ardent soul, Victor Hugo, with whom at first the very opponents of the Romantic movement tried to maintain relations. So true is it that we retain a little of all things that we reject.
Le poète est ciseleur, Le ciseleur est poète.
Bilac’s would-be Parnassian _Profession of Faith_, beginning thus inconsistently with a citation from the chief of the Romantics (a citation, it may be added, that is not all consistent with Hugo’s own characteristic labours) is the herald of his own humanness. Let us now leave the “isms” to those who love them, and seek in Bilac the distinctive personality. His _Profissão de Fe_ is a bit dandified, snobbish, aloof, with a suggestion of a refined sensuality that is fully borne in his work.
Não quero a Zeus Capitolino, Herculeo e bello, Talhar no marmore divino Com o camartello.
Que outro--não eu!--a pedra córte Para, brutal, Erguer de Athene o altivo porte Descommunal.
Mais que esse vulto extraordinario, Que assombra a vista, Seduz-me um leve relicario De fine artista.
…
Assim procedo. Minha penna, Segue esta norma, Por te servir, Deusa serena, Serena Fórma!
…
Vive! que eu viverei servindo Teu culto, e, obscuro, Tuas custodias esculpindo No ouro mais puro.
Celebrarei o teu officio No altar: porem, Se inda é pequeno o sacrificio, Morra eu tambem!
Caia eu tembem, sem esperanca, Porém tranquilo, Inda, ao cahir, vibrando a lança, Em prol de Estylo![1]
The _Poesias_[2] upon which Bilac’s fame rests constitute but a book of average size, and consist of the following divisions: _Panoplias_ (Panoplies); _Via Lactea_ (The Milky Way); _Sarças de Fogo_ (Fire-Brambles); _Alma Inquieta_ (Restless Soul); _As Viagens_ (Voyages); _O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ (The Emerald-Hunter).
The inspiration of the panoplies derives as much from the past as from the present; there is verbal coruscation aplenty,--an admirable sense of colour, imagery, fertility, symbol. Even when reading the Iliad, Bilac sees in it chiefly a poem of love:
Mais que as armas, porém, mais que a batalha, Mais que os incendios, brilha o amor que ateia O odio e entre os povos a discordia espalha:
Esse amor que ora activa, ora asserena A guerra, e o heroico Paris encadeia Aos curvos seios da formosa Helena.[3]
In _Delenda Carthago_ there is the clash of rutilant arms and the sense of war’s and glory’s vanity; this is the typical motif of the voluptuary, whether of love or of battle. It is not, however, the sorrowful conclusion of the philosopher facing the inevitable,--“the path of glory leads but to the grave.” Rather is it the weariness of the prodded senses. Scipio, victorious, grows mute and sad, and the tears run down his cheeks.
For, beholding in rapid descent, Rolling into the abyss of oblivion and annihilation, Men and traditions, reverses and victories, Battles and trophies, six centuries of glory In a fistful of ashes,--the general foresaw That Rome, the powerful, the unvanquished, so strong in arms, Would go perforce the selfsame way as Carthage.… Nearby, the vague and noisy crackling Of the conflagration, that still roared furiously on, Rose like the sound of convulsive weeping.
It is perhaps in _Via Lactea_ that the book--and Bilac’s art--reaches its apex. This is a veritable miniature milky way of sonnet gems; all claims to objectivity and impersonality have been forgotten in the man’s restrained, but by no means repressed passion. His love is not the ivory-tower vapouring of the youthful would-be Maeterlinckian that infests verse in Spanish and Portuguese America; it is of the earth, earthy. When he writes of his love he mingles with the idea the thought of country, and when he writes of his country it is often in terms of carnal passion. Verissimo has noted the same phenomenon in some of the poets that preceded Bilac and, of course, it is to be verified repeatedly in the singers of every land; indeed, is not Liberty always a woman, as our national coinage proves for the millionth time, and when soldiers are urged to fight and die _pro patria_, is it not a beautiful lady that hovers over the fields and trenches? In these sonnets he becomes the poet-chiseller of Hugo’s distich; into a form that would seem to have lost all adaptability to new manipulation he manages to pour something new, something his own. There is, in his very attitude, a preoccupation with form for its own sake that enables him to employ the sonnet without loss of effect. His devotion to the cameo-like structure is not absolute, however. In none of these poems does one feel that he has cramped his feelings in order to mortise quatrain into tercet. When, as in _A Alvorada de Amor_, he feels the need of greater room, he takes it.
He is the lover weeping over gladness:
Quem ama inventa as penas em que vive: E, em lugar de acalmar as penas, antes Busca novo pezar com que as avive.
Pois sabei que é por isso que assim ando: Que e dos loucos sómente e dos amantes Na maior alegria andar chorando.[4]
He is ill content to feed upon poetic imaginings of kiss and embrace, or to dream of heavenly beatitudes instead of earthly love:
XXX
Ao coração que soffre, separado Do teu, no exilio em que a chorar me vejo, Não basta o affecto simples e sagrado Com que das desventuras me protejo.
Não me basta saber que sou amado, Nem só desejo o teu amor: desejo Ter nos braços teu corpo delicado, Ter na bocca a doçura do teu beijo.
E as justas ambiçoes que me consomem Não me envergonham: pois maior baixeza Não ha que a terra pelo céo trocar;
E mais eleva o coração de um homem Ser de homem sempre e, na maior pureza, Ficar na terra e humanamente amar.[5]
So runs the song in his more reflective mood, which is half objection and half meditation. There are other moments, however, in _Alma Inquieta_ when a similar passion bursts out beyond control and when, in his pride of virility, he rejects Paradise and rises superior to the Lord Himself.
The sonnet that follows this in _Via Lactea_ is notable for its intermingling of love, country and _saudade_:
XXXI
Longe de ti, se escuto, porventura, Teu nome, que uma bocca indifferente Entre outros nomes de mulher murmura, Sobe-me o pranto aos olhos, de repente.…
Tal aquelle, que, misero, a tortura Soffre de amargo exilio, e tristemente A linguagem natal, maviosa e pura, Ouve falada por estranha gente.…
Porque teu nome é para mim o nome De uma patria distante e idolatrada, Cuja saudade ardente me consome: E ouvil-o é ver a eterna primavera E a eterna luz da terra abençoada, Onde, entre flores, teu amor me espera.[6]
_Sarças de Fogo_, as its name would imply, abandons the restraint of _Via Lactea_. In _O Julgamento de Phryné_ beauty becomes not only its own excuse for being, but the excuse for wrong as well. Phryne’s judges, confronted with her unveiled beauty, tremble like lions before the calm gaze of their tamer, and she appears before the multitude “in the immortal triumph of Flesh and Beauty.” In _Santania_ a maiden’s desires rise powerfully to the surface only to take flight in fright at their own daring. _No Limiar de Morte_ (On The Threshold of Death) is the voluptuary’s _memento mori_ after his _carpe diem_. There is a touch of irony borrowed from Machado de Assis in the closing tercets:
You, who loved and suffered, now turn your steps Toward me. O, weeping soul, You leave behind the hate of the worldly hell.…
Come! for at last you shall enjoy within my arms All the wantonness, all the fascinations, All the delights of eternal rest!
This is impressed in far superior fashion by one of the best sonnets Bilac ever wrote: _Sahara Vitae_. Here, in the image of life’s desert, he conveys a haunting sense of helpless futility such as one gets only rarely, from such sonnets, say, as the great Shelleyan one, _Ozymandias of Egypt_.
Lá vão! O céo se arqueia Como um tecto de bronze infindo e quente, E o sol fuzila e, fuzilando, ardente Criva de flechas de aço o mar de areia.…
Lá vão, com os olhos onde a sêde ateia Um fogo estranho, procurando em frente Esse oasis do amor que, claramente, Além, bello e falaz, se delineia.
Mas o simun da morte sopra: a tromba Convulsa envolve-os, prostra-os; e aplacada Sobre si mesma roda e exhausta tomba.…
E o sol de novo no igneo céo fuzila.… E sobre a geração exterminada A areia dorme placida e tranquila.[7]
For the clearness of its imagery, for the perfect progress of a symbol that is part and parcel of the poetry, this might have come out of Dante. It is not often that fourteen lines contain so complete, so devastating a commentary. Side by side with _Beijo Eterno_ (Eternal Kiss) it occurs in the _Poesias_, as if to reveal its relation as reverse to the obverse of the poet’s voluptuousness. _Beijo Eterno_, like _A Alvorada de Amor_, is one of the central poems of Olavo Bilac. It is the linked sweetness of Catullus long drawn out. It is the sensuous ardour of the poet inundating all time and all space, while _Sahara Vitae_ is the languor that follows upon the fulfilment of ardour. They are both as much a part of the poet as the two sides are part of the coin. The first and last of the ten stanzas of _Beijo Eterno_ epitomize the Dionysiac outburst; they are alike:
Quero um beijo sem fim, Que dure a vida enteira e aplaque a meu desejo! Ferve-me o sangue. Acalma-o com teu beijo, Beija-me assim! O ouvido fecha ao rumor Do mundo, e beija-me querida! Vive so para mim, só para a minha vida, Só para o meu amor![8]
In less amorous mood he can sing a serenade--_A Canção de Romeu_--(Romeo’s Song) to which any Juliet might well open her window:
As estrellas surgiram Todas: e o limpio veo Como lirios alvissimos, cobriram Do ceo. De todas a mais bella Não veio ainda, porem: Falta uma estrella.… És tu!… Abre a janella, E vem![9]
And if, in the closing piece of this section--_A Tentação de Xenocrates_--(The Temptation of Xenocrates) the courtesan’s charms seem more convincing than the resistance of the victorious philosopher, it must be because Bilac himself subtly sided with the temptress, and spoke with her when she protested that she had vowed to tame a man, not a stone. If, in the manner of the Freudians, we are to look upon the poem as a wish that the poet could on occasion show such scorn of feminine blandishments, it is doubly interesting to note that, though the moral victory lies with Xenocrates, the poet has willy-nilly made the courtesan’s case the more sympathetic. What, indeed, are the fruits of a philosophy that denies the embraces of a Laïs?
Just as Olavo Bilac’s voluptuousness brings to him inevitably thoughts of death, so does his cult of form lead him at times to a sense of the essential uselessness of all words and all forms. He has expressed this nowhere so well as in the sonnet _Inania Verba_ from the section _Alma Inquieta_:
Ah! Quem ha-de exprimir, alma impotente e escrava, O que a bocca não diz, o que a mão não escreve? --Ardes, sangras, pregada á tua cruz, e, em breve, Olhas, desfeito em lodo, o que te deslumbrava.… O Pensameto erve, e é um turbilhão de lava: A Fórma, fria e espessa, é um sepulcro de neve.… E a Palavra pesada abafa a Idéa leve, Que, perfume e clarão, refulgia e voava.
Quem o molde achara para a expressão de tudo? Ai! quem ha-de dezir as ansias infinitas Do sonho? e o céo que foge a mão que se levanta?
E a ira muda? e o asco mudo? e o desespero mudo? E as palavras de fé que nunca foram ditas? E as confissões de amor que morrem na garganta?[10]
Alma Inquieta reaches its climax with _A Alvorada de Amor_ (The Dawn of Love). It is important enough to be quoted in full, as one of the sincerest and most passionate outbursts of the Brazilian muse, in which Olavo Bilac’s countrymen find mirrored that sensual part of themselves which is the product of climate, racial blend and the Adam and Eve in all of us.
Um horror grande e mudo, um silencio profundo No dia do Peccado amortalhava o mundo. E Adão, vendo fechar-se a porta do Eden, vendo Que Eva olhava o deserto e hesitava tremendo, Disse: Chega-te a mim! entra no meu amor, E á minha carne entrega a tua carne em flor! Preme contra o meu peito o teu seio agitado, E aprende a amar o Amor, renovando o peccado! Abençóo o teu crime, acolho o teu desgosto, Bebo-te, de uma em uma, as lagrimas do rosto!
Ve! tudo nos repelle! a toda a creação Sacóde o mesmo horror e a mesma indignação.… A colera de Deus torce as arvores, cresta Como um tufão de fogo o seio de floresta, Abre a terra em vulcões, encrespa a agua do rios; As estrellas estão cheias de calefrios; Ruge soturno a mar; turva-se hediondo o céo.…
Vamos! que importa Deus? Desate, como um véo, Sobre a tua nudez a cabelleira! Vamos! Arda em chammas o chão; rasguem-te a pelle os ramos; Morda-te o corpo o sol; inuriem-te os ninhos; Surjam féras a uivar de todos os caminhos; E vendo-te a sangrar das urzes atravez, Se enmaranhem no chão as serpes aos teus pés.… Que importa? o Amor, botáo apenas entreaberto Ilumina o degredo e perfume o deserto! Amo-te! sou feliz! porque do Eden perdido, Levo tudo, levando o teu corpo querido!
Póde, em redor de ti, tudo se anniquilar: Tudo renascerá cantando ao teu olhar, Tudo, mares e céos, arvores e montanhas, Porque a Vida perpetuo arde em tuas entranhas! Rosas te brotarão da bocca se cantares! Rios te correrão dos olhos, se chorares! E se, em torno ao teu corpo encantador e nú, Tudo morrer, que importa? A Natureza és tu, Agora que és mulher, agora que peccaste! Ah! bemdito o momento em que me revelaste O amor com o teu peccado, e a vida com a teu crime! Porque, livre de Deus, redimido e sublime, Homem fico na terra, á luz dos olhos teus, --Terra, melhor que o Céo! homem, maior que Deus![11]
So, in _Peccador_ (Sinner) he presents the figure of a proud, unrepentant sinner--it might be the amorous Don Juan himself,--who “accepts the enormousness of the punishment with the same countenance that he wore when formerly he accepted the delight of transgression!” He is no less sincere, doubtless, when in _Ultima Pagina_ (Final Page) he exclaims
Carne, que queres mais? Coração, que mais queres? Passam as estações, e passam as mulheres.… E eu tenho amado tanto! e não conheço o Amor!
Flesh, what would you more? What would you more, my heart? The seasons pass and women, too, pass with them.… And I have loved so much, yet know not what is Love!
_Tedio_ (Ennui) is the voluptuousness of Nirvana after the voluptuousness of Dionysus; like all sinners, he comes for rest to a church. “Oh, to cease dreaming of what I cannot behold! To have my blood freeze and my flesh turn cold! And, veiled in a crepuscular glow, let my soul sleep without a desire,--ample, funereal, lugubrious, empty as an abandoned cathedral!…”
The section _As Viagens_ (Voyages) consists chiefly of twelve admirable sonnets--a form in which Bilac’s blending of intense feeling with artistic restraint seems as much at home as any modern poet--ranging from the first migration, through the Phoenicians, the Jews, Alexander, Cæsar, the Barbarians, the Crusades, the Indies, Brazil, the precursor of the airplane in Toledo, the Pole, to Death, which is the end of all voyages. At the risk of overemphasizing a point that has already been made, I would quote the sonnet on Brazil:
Pára! Uma terra nova ao teu olhar fulgura! Detem-te! Aqui, de encontro a verdejantes plagas, Em caricias se muda a inclemencia das vagas.… Este é o reino da Luz, do Amor e da Fartura! Treme-te a voz affeita ás blasphemias e as pragas, Ó nauta! Olha-a, de pé, virgem morena e pura, Que aos teus beijos entrega, em plena formosura, --Os dous seios que, ardendo em desejos, afagas.…
Beija-a! O sol tropical deu-lhe a pelle dorada O barulho do ninho, o perfume da rosa, A frescura do rio, o esplendor da alvorada.…
Beija-a! é a mais bella flor da Natureza inteira! E farta-te de amor nesse carne cheirosa, Ó desvirginador da Terra Brasileira![12]
What is this, indeed? Part of some ardent Song of Songs? Note how the imagery is exclusively that of burning passion. Brazil becomes a fascinating virgin who falls to the fortunate discoverer. In that sonnet, I should say, is concealed about one half the psychology of the narrower patriotism.
_O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ is a splendid episode in four parts, containing some forty-six sextets in all, filled with movement, colour, pervading symbolism and a certain patriotic pantheism. More than a mere search for emeralds the poem recounts the good that man may work even in the vile pursuit of precious stones,--the vanity of all material quest. For sheer artistry it ranks with Bilac’s most successful accomplishments.
* * * * *
“His inspiration,” wrote Verissimo, considering the verse of Bilac, “is limited to a few poetic themes, all treated with a virtuosity perhaps unparalleled amongst us … but without an intensity of feeling corresponding to the brilliancy of the form, which always is more important in him. This is the characteristic defect of the Parnassian esthetics, of which Sr. Bilac is our most illustrious follower, and to which his poetic genius adjusted itself perfectly and intimately.” I believe that Verissimo was slightly misled by Bilac’s versified professions. There is no doubt that Bilac’s temperament, as I have tried to show, was eminently suited to some such orientation as was sought by those Parnassians who understood what they were about; there is as little doubt, in my mind, that his feeling was intense, though not deep. He may have spoken of the crystalline strophe and the etcher’s needle--which, indeed, he often employed with the utmost skill,--but there were moments when nothing but huge marbles and the sculptor’s chisel would do. It was with such material that he carved _A Alvorada de Amor_. “If Sr. Machado de Assis was,” continues Verissimo, “more than twenty years previous to Bilac, our first artist-poet,--if other contemporaries or immediate predecessors of Bilac also practised the Parnassian esthetics, none did it with such manifest purpose, and, above all with such triumphant skill.…”
I am not sure whether Verissimo is right in having asked of Bilac a more contemporary concern with the currents of poetry. The critic grants that Bilac is perhaps the most brilliant poet ever produced by his nation, “but other virtues are lacking in him without which there can be no truly great poet. I do not know but that I am right in supposing that, conscious of his excellence, he remained a stranger to the social, philosophical and esthetic movement that is today everywhere renewing the sources of poetry. And it is a great pity; for he was amongst us perhaps one of the most capable of bringing to our anaemic poetry the new blood which, with more presumption than talent, some poets--or persons who think themselves such--are trying to inject, without any of the gifts that abound in him.”
Bilac, as we have seen, did, toward the end of his life, become a more social spirit. But this was not necessary to his pre-eminence as a poet. He was, superbly, himself. Rather that he should have given us so freely of the voluptuary that was in him--voluptuary of feeling, of charm, of form, of language, of taste--than that, in a mistaken attempt to be a “complete” man, he should sprawl over the varied currents of the day and hour. For it is far more certain that each current will find its masterly spokesman in art, than that each artist will become a masterly spokesman for all of the currents.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I have no wish to chisel the Capitoline Zeus, Herculean and beautiful, in divine marble. Let another--not I!--cut the stone to rear, in brutal proportions, the proud figure of Athene. More than by this extraordinary size that astounds the sight I am fascinated by the fragile reliquary of a delicate artist. Such is my procedure. My pen, follow that standard. To serve thee, serene Goddess, serene Form! Live! For I shall live in the service of thy cult, obscurely sculpturing thy vessels in the purest of gold. I will celebrate thine office upon the altar; more, if the sacrifice be too small, I myself will die. Let me, too, fall, hopeless, yet tranquil. And even as I fall, I’ll raise my lance in the cause of Style!
[2] Published originally in 1888, and ending, in its first form, with _Sarças de Fogo_.
[3] More than arms, however, more than battle, more than conflagrations, it is love that shines here, kindling hatred between peoples and scattering discord. That love which now incites, now abates war, and chains the heroic Paris to the curved breasts of Helen the beautiful.
[4] He who loves invents the pangs in which he lives; and instead of soothing these griefs, he seeks a new care with which he but rekindles them. Know, then, that this is the reason why I go about so. Only madmen and lovers weep in their greatest joy.
[5] For the heart that suffers, severed from you, in this exile that I weep, the simple and sacred affection with which I shield myself against all misfortunes is not enough. It is not enough to know that I am loved; I would have your delicate body in my arms, taste in my mouth the sweetness of your kiss. Nor am I shamed by the just ambitions that consume me. For there is no greater baseness than to change the earth for the sky. It more exalts the heart of a man to be a man ever, and, in the greatest purity, remain on earth and love like a human being.
[6] Far from you, if peradventure I hear your name, murmured by an indifferent mouth amidst other women’s names, the tears come suddenly to my eyes.… Such is he who suffers in bitter exile and sadly, hears his native tongue, so pure and beautiful, spoken by foreign lips.… For your name is to me the name of a distant, worshipped fatherland, the longing for which consumes me. And to hear it is to behold eternal springtime, and the everlasting light of the blessed land, where, amidst flowers, your love awaits me.
An excellent example of a similar identification of sweetheart and fatherland occurs in the sonnet _Desterro_ (Exile), in the section _Alma Inquieta_, in which his beloved is called “patria do meu desejo” (land of my desire).
[7] There they go! The sky arches over like an endless burning roof of bronze, and the sun shoots, and shooting, riddles with arrows of steel the sea of sand. There they go, with eyes in which thirst has kindled a strange fire, gazing ahead to that oasis of love which yonder, clearly rises in its deluding beauty. But now blows the simoon of death: the shattering whirlwind envelops them, prostrates them; sated, it rolls upon itself and falls in exhaustion.… And once again the sun shoots in the fiery sky.… And over the exterminated generation the sand sleeps its peaceful, tranquil sleep.
[8] I want an endless kiss, that shall last an entire life and sate my desire! My blood seethes. Slake it with your kiss, kiss me so! Close your ears to the sound of the world, and kiss me, beloved! Live for me alone, for my life only, only for my love!
[9] The stars have all come out, and have broidered the pure veil of heaven with the whitest of lilies. But the most beautiful of all I do not yet see. One star is missing. It is you!… Open your window and come!
[10] Ah, who can express, enslaved and impotent soul, what the lips do not speak, what the hand cannot write. Clasping your cross, you burn, you bleed, only soon to behold in the mire that which had dazzled you.… Thought seethes; it is a whirlwind of lava: Form, cold and compact, is a sepulchre of snow.… And the heavy word stifles the fragile Idea which, like perfume and light, flew glittering about. Who can find the mould in which to cast expression? Ah! who can speak the infinite anxieties of our dreams? The heavens that flee from the hand that is raised? And mute ire? And this wretched world? And voiceless despair? And the words of faith that were never spoken? And the confessions of love that die in one’s throat?
[11] A vast, mute horror, a deep silence shrouded the world upon the day of Sin. And Adam, beholding the gates of Eden close, seeing Eve gaze in hesitant trembling at the desert, said: “Come to me! Enter into my love, and surrender to my flesh your own fair flesh! Press your agitated breast against my bosom and learn to love Love, renewing sin. I bless your crime, I welcome your misfortune, I drink, one by one, the tears from your cheeks! Behold! Everything rejects us! All creation is shaken by the same horror and the same indignation.… The rage of the Lord twists the trees, ravages the heart of the forest like a hurricane of flame, splits the earth into volcanoes, curls the water of the rivers; the stars are aquiver with shudders; the sea mutters with fury; the sky is dark with anger.… Let us go! What matters God? Loosen like a veil your tresses over your nakedness! Let us be gone! Let the earth burn in flames; let the branches rend your skin; let the sun bite your body; let the nests harm you; let wild beasts rise on all the roads to howl at you; and seeing you bleed through the brambles, let the serpents entangle themselves upon the ground at your feet.… What matters it? Let love, but a half-open bud, illumine our banishment and perfume the desert! I love you! I am happy! For from the lost Eden I bear everything, having your beloved body! Let everything crumble to ruin about you; it will all rise new born before your eyes,--all, seas and skies, trees and mountains, for perpetual life burns in your bowels! Roses will burgeon from your mouth if you sing! Rivers will flow from your eyes, if you weep! And if, about your enchanting, nude body, all should die, what matters it then? You are Nature, now that you are woman, now that you have sinned! Ah, blessed the moment in which you revealed to me love with your sin and life with your crime! For, free from God, redeemed and sublime, I remain a man upon earth, in the light of your eyes,--Earth, better than Heaven! Man, greater than God!”
[12] Hold! A new land shines before your eyes! Stop! Here, before the green shores, the waves’ inclemency turns to caresses.… This is the kingdom of Light, of Love and Satiety! Oh, mariner! Let your voice, accustomed to blasphemies and curses, tremble! Gaze at her standing there, a dark, pure virgin who surrenders to your kisses, in the fulness of her beauty, her two breasts which, burning with desire, you soothe.… Kiss her! The tropical sun gave her that gilded skin, the nest’s content, the rose’s perfume, the coolness of the river, the splendour of dawn.… Kiss her! She is the fairest of all Nature’s flowers! Sate yourself with love in this fragrant flesh, oh first lover of the Brazilian Land!
V
EUCLYDES DA CUNHA
_Os Sertões_, which first appeared in 1902--a happy year for Brazilian letters, since it witnessed the publication of Graça Aranha’s _Chanaan_ as well--is one of the outstanding works of modern Portuguese literature. At once it gave to its ill-fated author a fame to which he never aspired. His name passed from tongue to tongue, like that of some new Columbus who with his investigation of the sertão had discovered Brazil to the Brazilians. His labour quickened interest in the interior, revealed a new source of legitimate national inspiration and presented to countrymen a strange work,--disturbing, illuminating, disordered, almost a fictional forest, written in nervous, heavily-freighted prose. Yet this is harsh truth itself, stranger than the fiction of Coelho Netto, wilder than the poetry of Graça Aranha, though instinct with the imagination of the one and the beauty of the other. The highly original work struck a deep echo in English letters and if Englishmen have neglected to read Richard Cunninghame-Graham’s remarkable book called _A Brazilian Mystic: The Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro_--a book that would never have been written had not Euclydes da Cunha toiled away in obscurity to produce _Os Sertões_--it is their loss rather than their fault. It is a hurried and a harried world. Who, today, has time for such beauty of thought and phrase as Richard the wandering Scots sets down almost carelessly in his books and then sends forth from the press with mildly mocking humour for his prospective, but none too surely anticipated readers? Yet it is not the least of Euclydes da Cunha’s glories that he was the prime cause of Mr. Cunninghame-Graham’s _A Brazilian Mystic_. Not a fault of English readers, surely; but none the less their loss.
* * * * *
The author of _Os Sertões_ was born on January 20, 1866, in Santa Rita do Rio Negro, municipality of Cantagallo. Losing his mother when he was three years old, he went first to Theresopolis to an aunt, and thence, after two years, to São Fidelis to another aunt, with whom he remained until his first studies were completed. His father retiring to Rio de Janeiro in 1876, Euclydes was transported to the capital, where he attended in due course the _collegios_ called Victorio da Costa, Anglo-Brasileiro and Aquino. Naturally, he went through his baptism of verse, preparing a collection called _Ondas_ (Waves); since every Brazilian early suffers an attack of this literary measles--it would be almost impolite not to indite one’s obligatory number of sonnets--the notice is without any importance to a man’s later career. It was at the Escola Militar da Praia Vermelha, which he entered at the age of twenty, that he laid the foundations of his scientific studies, and it is the scientist in Euclydes da Cunha that solidifies _Os Sertões_.
The man--as his mature prose testifies--was of nervous temperament, and was led into one political scrape after another. At the very beginning of his career, carried away by the propaganda of Benjamin Constant, he committed an act of indiscipline against the Minister of War which has become famous in the annals of Brazilian politics, having required the benevolent intervention of the Emperor.
His journalistic labours began in 1888; the following year found him at the Escola Polytechnica of Rio de Janeiro, finishing his course as an engineer, but the proclamation of the Republic interrupted his studies and he returned to the army.
The material for his famous book was gathered while in the service of the important newspaper _Estado de São Paulo_, for which he went into the wilds to report the government campaign against the fractious inhabitants of the sertão.
The campaign, as taught in the Brazilian schools, marked another stage in the establishment, the consolidation, of the Brazilian republic. It took place during the presidency of Prudente de Moraes (1894-1898) and brought within the folds of the new régime the rebellious sertanejos, who had rallied round the leadership of Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel. Maciel was born circa 1835 in Ceará and had, since 1864, attracted attention because of his strange religious notions, his queer garb, his legendary personality. Accused of crime, he was vindicated and went off toward the interior of Bahia, wandering in every direction over the sertões and reaching, at last, a tiny hamlet of Itapicuru, which he christened with the name Bom Jesus (Good Jesus) on November 10, 1886. The Archbishop of Bahia objecting, Maciel was ousted in 1887 as a preacher of subversive doctrines. His followers accompanied him, however, to Canudos, an old cattle ranch which, in 1890 was an abandoned site with some fifty ramshackle ruins of cottages. Thither came flocking an army of devotees and riff-raff, so that, when Maciel resisted the government that was intent upon collecting its taxes, he had a respectable number to heed his cry of insurrection.
At first the new republic tried religious methods, sending a Capuchin friar to win over the rebels to the Church and the Law. The monk despaired. Then followed four expeditions against the mystical Antonio; the first in November of 1896, the second during December-January of 1896-1897, the third during February and March of 1897, the last from April to October of the same year. “The sad chronicle of the tragedy of Canudos, the most important civil war in the history of the country,” concludes one popular text-book account,[1] “indicated the immediate necessity of the unification of the country.… It revealed, furthermore, the great resources of strength and virility among the sertanejos, who, though conservative and little disposed to lend themselves easily to novelty, possess none the less qualities important to the development of the country, once they are in fact bound to the national life.”
Euclydes da Cunha’s revelatory book opened the doors of the Brazilian Academy of Letters to him in 1903. He produced other books, one on the eternal question of Peru versus Bolivia, in which he sides with Bolivia; he became known for his speeches. The end of his life, which occurred through assassination on the 15th of August, 1909, was caused by a sexual snarl in which the corruptors of his domestic happiness added crime to betrayal.
* * * * *
The plan of _Os Sertões_ is that of a scientific spirit at the same time endowed with the many-faceted receptivity of the poet. Before approaching the campaign of Canudos itself, the author studies the land and the man produced by it; he is here, indeed, as Verissimo early indicated, the man of science, the geographer, the geologist, the ethnographer; the man of thought, the philosopher, the sociologist, the historian; the man of feeling, the poet, the novelist, the artist who can see and describe. But nowhere the sentimentalist. From one standpoint, indeed, the book is a cold confirmation of the very law against whose operative details the author protests:--“the inevitable crushing of the weak races by the strong.”
Though a sertanejo school of fiction had existed before _Os Sertões_, the book brought to Brazilians a nearer, more intimate conception of the inhabitants of those hinterlands.
“The sertanejo,” writes the author in Chapter III of the section devoted to the man of the sertão, “is first of all a strong man. He does not possess the exhaustive rachetism of the neurasthenic hybrids of the coast.
“His appearance, however, at first blush, reveals the contrary. He lacks the impeccable plasticity, the straightness, the highly correct structure of athletic organisms.
“He is graceless, seemingly out of joint, crooked. Hercules-Quasimodo, he reflects in his appearance the typical ugliness of the weak. His loose gait, curved, almost waddling and tortuous, suggests the manipulation of unarticulated members. This impression is aggravated by his normally abject posture, in a manifestation of displeasure that gives him an appearance of depressing humility. On foot, when standing still, he invariably leans against the first door-post or wall that he finds; on horseback, if he reins in the animal to exchange a few words with a friend, he at once falls upon one of the stirrups, resting upon the side of the saddle. Jogging along, even at a rapid trot he never traces a straight, firm line. He advances hastily in a characteristic zig-zag, of which the meandering tracks of the sertão seem to be the geometric pattern.…
“He is the everlastingly tired man.…
“Yet all this seeming weariness is an illusion.
“There is nothing more amazing than to see him disappear all of a sudden.… It takes only the arising of some incident that requires the unleashing of his dormant energy. The man is transfigured.…”[2]
And it is this same powerful denizen of the Brazilian hinterlands that is a prey to the most primitive of superstitions, so that it was an easy matter for his resistance to a distant seat of government to become coupled in his mind with a resurgence of Sebastianism as newly incarnated in the person of Antonio Maciel.
“This feeling of uneasiness in regard to the new government,” writes Cunninghame-Graham, “the mysticism of the people as shown in the belief in the return to earth of Dom Sebastian, and the fear that the government meant the destruction of all religion, tended to make the dwellers in the sertão especially susceptible to any movement, religious or political alike, during the time between the abdication of the Emperor and the firm establishment of the new government. Out of the depths of superstition and violence, Antonio Conselheiro arose to plunge the whole sertão into an erethism of religious mania and blood.”
As relatively late as 1837 the region had witnessed a veritable orgy of sacrifice. A fanatic had mounted the so-called _pedra bonita_ (pretty stone) and preached the coming of King Dom Sebastian, “he who fell at the field of Alcazar-el-Kebir. He foretold that the stone would be cut into steps; not cut with any earthly tools, but smoothed away by the shedding of the blood of children. Up these steps, so miraculously to be prepared, surrounded by his guard of honour, dressed in armour, the King, who had been dead three hundred years, should ascend and come into his own again, reigning in Portugal and in Brazil, and bountifully rewarding those who had been faithful to him and by their faith contributed to his disenchantment.… A multitude of women, all a prey to the mysterious agitation … came through the mountain passes, followed the trails through the virgin forests and assembled to hear the word preached at the wondrous pulpit made by no earthly hands. Unluckily they brought their children with them. Then, roused to a religious frenzy beyond belief, as they stood listening to the words of the illuminated _cafuz_ or _mamaluco_--for history has not preserved his name--women strove with one another who should be the first to offer up her child, so that its blood should split the rock and form the sacred stair, by which the King, the long lamented Dom Sebastian, should ascend in glory, bringing back peace and plenty upon earth.… A common-sense historian (Cunninghame-Graham refers to Araripe Junior’s _Reino Encantado_) says that for days the rocks ran blood.…”
Further incident is unnecessary to a notion of the sertanejos’ mystic habit of mind and action. The Brazilian government became in their eyes a rule of dogs, and their favourite phrase for the republic was _a lei do cão_ (the law of the dog). In the popular quatrains that Euclydes da Cunha collected are found merged the hatred of the sertanejos for the governing class of Brazil, their millenial hope in Dom Sebastian and their faith in Antonio surnamed Conselheiro (i. e., the Councillor) as the deliverer from all evil.
O Anti-Christo nasceu Para o Brazil governar Mas ahi esta O Conselheiro Para delle nos livrar.
Antichrist was born To govern poor Brazil, But God raised up our Councillor To save us from that ill.[3]
Garantidos pela lei Aquelles malvados estão. Nos temos a lei de Deus Elles tem a lei do cão.
Protected by the law Are those wretches in their lairs. Ours is the law of God, The law of the dog is theirs.
Visita nos vem fazer Nosso rei D. Sebastião. Coitado daquelle pobre Que estiver na lei do cão!
Our good King D. Sebastian Comes to visit us. Pity the poor wretch Who supports the law of the dog!
Cunninghame-Graham, like Euclydes da Cunha, and like the better of the Brazilian’s critics, feels a strong sympathy for the man in whom the new hopes of the sertanejos were centred. It is a sympathy, moreover, born of the understanding without which all knowledge is as fruit turned to ashes in the mouth. The Scot, like the Brazilian, is a psychologist. “Antonio Conselheiro himself did not so much rebel against authority as against life, perhaps expecting from it more than it had to give upon the spiritual side, not understanding that a fine day, with health to enjoy it, is the most spiritual of pleasures open to mankind,” he writes, in his amiable, worldly-wise (and heavenly-wise) way. And later: “When all is said, it is impossible not to sympathize to some extent with the misguided sectaries, for all they wanted was to live the life they had been accustomed to and sing their litanies. Clearly Antonio Conselheiro had no views on any subject under heaven outside his own district. His dreams were fixed upon a better world, and his chief care was to fit his followers for the change that he believed was to take place soon.”
It is Verissimo, who, with his almost unerring insight, extracts from his countryman’s book its central significance. Here is a volume that is a remarkable commentary upon the formation of all religions, “without excepting our own Christianity. In another milieu, under other conditions, Antonio Conselheiro is a Christ, a Mohammed, a Messiah, one of the many Mahdis, creators of religions in that fecund soil of human belief which is Asia. In the sertão, friends and enemies and even the constituted authorities, hold him (i. e., Antonio Maciel, the people’s councillor) as a good, honest, upright man, despite the legend--and is it only a legend?--which attributes to a tragic matricide his transformation from a business man into a religious preacher, his life as a saint and a missionary of the sertão.”
* * * * *
I find that I have spoken as much of Cunninghame-Graham as of the Brazilian in whom he found his most important source; that is because the Scotsman’s book is the best possible revelation in English of the remarkable account given by Euclydes da Cunha.
_Os Sertões_ stands alone in the nation’s literature; we, in ours, have no book to parallel it in spirit, purport or accomplishment. Yet even today there are regions to which a similar method might be applied, for Verissimo’s words about Asia seem to cover the United States as well,--in less degree, of course, but for our purpose with equal patness. More, a close reading of the government’s application of force to a situation that might have yielded to less warlike methods,--or, at least, that might have been managed without the necessity of the final massacre--could teach something to all governmental departments that are brought into contact with alien or extra-social groups which must be incorporated into the national entity. _Os Sertões_ is the best answer to the young Brazilian regionalists who have made the book a rallying-point. Here is a volume--and a thick, compact volume it is--dealing in quasi-reportorial spirit with a brief incident in the most hidden recesses of the national interior; it was not written with belles-lettres in mind; it is strewn with terms and processes of thought that baffle the ordinary reader. Yet the man who composed it was a vibrant personality, and whether knowingly or unwittingly, he made the book a symbol,--a symbol of uncomprehending persecution, of human fanaticism, of religious origins, of man’s instinctive seeking after something higher. It is true that the persecution was in part necessary, that the aspect of fanaticism here revealed is most repugnant, that the spectacle of religious origins does not flatter our unctuous, supposedly civilized, superior souls. But it is true, likewise, that we must gaze into such depths as these to remind ourselves occasionally that we dwell in these inferiors. Such is the wisdom of Euclydes da Cunha, of Richard Cunninghame-Graham, of José Verissimo.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Resumo da Historia do Brazil._ Maria G. L. de Andrade. Edição Ampliada, 1920, Pages 277-278.
[2] “This struggle for existence,” writes Cunninghame-Graham in _A Brazilian Mystic_ (pages 17-18) “amongst plants and animals presents its counterpart amongst mankind. The climate sees to it that only those most fitted to resist it arrive at manhood, and the rude life they subsequently lead has forged a race as hard as the Castilians, the Turks, the Scythians of old, or as the Mexicans.
“No race in all America is better fitted to cope with the wilderness. The sertanejo is emphatically what the French call ‘a male.’ His Indian blood has given him endurance and a superhuman patience in adversity. From his white forefathers he has derived intelligence, the love of individual as opposed to general freedom inherent in the Latin races, good manners, and a sound dose of self-respect. His tinge of negro blood, although in the sertão it tends to disappear out of the race, at least in outward characteristics, may perchance have given him whatever qualities the African can claim. Far from demonstrative, he yet feels deeply; never forgets a benefit, and cherishes an insult as if it were a pearl of price, safe to revenge it when the season offers or when the enemy is off his guard.
“Centaurs before the Lord, the sertanejos do not appear (almost alone of horsemen) to have that pride in their appearance so noticeable in the gaucho, the Mexican and in the Arabs of North Africa. Seated in his short, curved saddle, a modification of the ‘recao’ used on the Pampas of the Argentine, the sertanejo lounges, sticks his feet forward, and rides, as goes the saying, all about his horse, using, of course, a single rein, and the high hand all natural horsemen affect. Yet, when a bunch of cattle break into a wild stampede, the man is suddenly transformed. Then he sits upright as a lance, or, bending low over his horse’s neck, flies at a break-neck pace, dashing through the thick scrub of the _caatingas_ in a way that must be seen to be believed. Menacing boughs hang low and threaten him. He throws himself flat on the horse’s back and passes under them. A tree stands in his way right in the middle of his headlong career. If his horse, highly trained and bitted, fails to stop in time, he slips off like a drop of water from a pane of glass at the last moment, or if there is the smallest chance of passing on one side, lies low along his horse’s flank after the fashion of an old-time Apache or Comanche on the war-path.”
[3] I quote the translation of this quatrain from Cunninghame-Graham. The third quatrain, here given as I find it in _Os Sertões_, 1914, fifth edition, differs in a single unimportant spelling from that used by the author of _A Brazilian Mystic_, who translates it: “Our King, Dom Sebastian, will come to visit us and free us from the reign of the dog.” I do not think this is correct, as the two final lines are a threat to the other side.
VI
MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA
Oliveira Lima belongs, more than to the history of Brazilian letters, to the history of Brazilian culture. He is an integral part of that culture and his life, coincidentally, runs parallel with the emergence of Brazil into an honoured position among the nations of the world. Once, in a happy phrase, the Swedish writer Goran Björkman, a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, characterized him aptly as “Brazil’s intellectual ambassador to the world,” and the phrase has stuck because it so eminently fitted the modest, indefatigable personality to whom it was applied. In a sense Oliveira Lima has been, too, the world’s intellectual ambassador to Brazil; he has seen service literally in every corner of the globe,--in Argentina as in the United States, in Japan as in France, Belgium, Sweden and Germany. Wherever he has come he has torn aside the dense veil of ignorance that has hidden Brazil from the eyes of none too curious foreigners; from wherever he has gone he has sent back to his native land solidly written, well considered volumes upon the civilization of the old world and the new. In both the physical and the intellectual sense he has been, largely, Brazil’s point of contact with the rest of the world. And the nation has been most fortunate in that choice, for Manoel de Oliveira Lima, most “undiplomatic” of diplomats, is the most human of men. He is, in the least spectacular sense of the word, an inspirer, not of words but of deeds. Trace his itinerary during the past twenty-five years and it is a miniature map of a double enlightenment. If diplomacy is ever to achieve anything like genuine internationality, it must travel some such path as this. And I dare say that Senhor Oliveira Lima is one of the rare precursors of just such a diplomacy. The example of his career has helped to raise that office from one of sublimated social hypocrisy to the dignity of lofty human intercourse.
Manoel de Oliveira Lima was born on December 25th, 1867, in the city of Recife, Pernambuco,--that state of which Silveira Martins has strikingly declared that the Brazilian gaucho--indomitable defender of the nation’s frontiers--was simply a Pernambucan on horseback. He was sent early to Portugal to complete his education, becoming one of the favourite students of the noted historian Oliveira Martins; at the age of twenty-one he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Letters from the University of Lisbon and set out, after a couple of years, upon his career of diplomacy, into which he was initiated by Carvalho Borges and the Baron de Itajubá.
“Oliveira Lima never wrote verses,” declared Salvador de Mendonça once in a speech of welcome. “I believe that, with the exception of the _Lusiads_, all poems are to him like the _Colombo_ of Porto Alegre to the readers of our literature, an unknown land awaiting some Columbus to discover it. Like an old philosopher friend of mine, who doesn’t admit monologues or asides in the theatre because only fools or persons threatened with madness converse with themselves, so Oliveira Lima finds it hardly natural for people to write in verse, for the language of seers was never the spoken tongue. His spirit is positive and direct; only curved lines are lacking for him to be a geometer. His characteristic trait is sincerity; he says only what he thinks is true, and says it without beating about the bush, in the explicit form of his conviction. I believe that he is but a lukewarm admirer of music, and prefers, to the contemplation of nature, the study of social phenomena and the examination of the human beehive.”
For a Brazilian never to have written verses is indeed almost a violation of the social code, and it may be that Senhor Lima’s lukewarmness toward music helps to explain a certain lack of musicality in his clear but compact prose. But lack of poetic appreciation should not be inferred from his friend’s lines; one has but to go through one of Lima’s earliest and most solid works, _Aspectos da Litteratura Colonial Brazileira_, to discover, in this original contribution, a deep, unostentatious feeling for those beautiful emotions we call poetry.
His literary career, as we have seen, is closely identified with his numerous peregrinations. It opened with a historical study of his birthplace: _Pernambuco, seu Desenvolimento historica_ (1894), followed two years later by the _Aspectos_. Thereafter is pursued, rather closely, the travels of Lima, resulting in _Nos Estados Unidos_ (1899), a work of uneven value upon the United States, _No Japão_, (1903), a more mature volume upon the land of the rising sun, countless speeches and series of lectures delivered in the universities of both hemispheres--now at the Sorbonne, now at the University of Louvaine, at Harvard, Yale, Stanford University and lesser institutions--and always upon his favourite theme: the history of Brazilian and Latin-American culture. Out of these lectures have arisen more than one of his books, some of them originally delivered in English and French; for Lima is an accomplished linguist, employing English and French with ease and speaking German, Italian and Spanish as well.
It is history that forms his main interest; even when he makes a single attempt--and not a highly successful one--at the drama, his _Secretario d’El Rey_ (The King’s Secretary, 1904) turns upon the historic figure of Alexandre de Gusmão in the days of 1738. It is worth while noting, as a commentary upon Lima’s unfanatic patriotism, that he justly considers this work a Brazilian drama, though the action takes place in Portugal. For, “in the first place, our historic period anterior to the Independence necessarily involves so intimate a connection of the colony with the court that it is almost impossible, treating of the one, to lose the other from sight. Material communication and above all moral relations established a sort of territorial continuity between both sides of the Atlantic, which formed a single fatherland. Besides, the action of the piece could hardly have been made to take place in Brazil, since the protagonist of the play, perhaps the most illustrious Brazilian of the XVIIIth century, and one whose personality merited, as few others, consecration upon the stage, lived in Europe from his earliest youth. For identical reasons the action of _O Poeta e a Inquisção_ (The Poet and the Inquisition) by Domingos de Magalhães, our first national tragedy, takes place in Lisbon. And finally the author would remind his reader that the spirit of his piece is entirely Brazilian, trying to symbolize--and more direct pretension would be anachronistic--the differentiation which had already begun between the mother country and its American colony, which was destined to continue and propagate its historic mission in the new world, and the economic importance of which was daily becoming more manifest.”
It is in history that, with a few exceptions, Lima’s most enduring work has been performed. He has recreated the figure of Dom João VI (_Dom João no Brasil_, 2 vols.); he has thrown light into dark places of the national narrative, particularly in the period beginning with the French invasion of Portugal that sent John VI to Brazil in 1808 and thus made the colony a virtual kingdom, and ending with 1821. “Dr. Lima’s investigations in hitherto unused sources also led to a revision of judgment,” wrote Professor P. A. Martin, “of many personages and events of the period; an instance of which is his successful rehabilitation of the character of Dom John VI. This sovereign, treated with contempt and contumely by the bulk of the Portuguese historians who have never forgiven him for deserting his native land, now appears in a new and deservedly more favorable light. The author makes it clear that John’s rule in Brazil was as liberal and progressive as was desirable in a country in which all thorough-going reforms must of necessity be introduced gradually. And these same reforms, especially the opening of the chief Brazilian ports to the commerce of all friendly nations, not only redounded to the immediate benefit of the country, but what was infinitely more important, paved the way for ultimate independence.”[1] So well, indeed, that the year following John’s departure is the year of Brazil’s complete emancipation.
Oliveira Lima’s internationalism--employing that word in a broader sense than it is usually given in political discussion--is thus at once territorial and spiritual. He knows his own country too well to glorify it in the unthinking patriotism of a Rocha Pitta; he knows the rest of the world too well to harbour faith in the exclusivistic loyalties that patriotism everywhere connotes. His very books, as if to symbolize his universal attitude, trace the amplification of his interests and of his cosmopolitan spirit. He began with a study of his birthplace; he continued with a study of his nation’s colonial letters; he then initiated a series dealing with national, historical figures and events, in conjunction with books upon the four corners of the world. Latterly, as if to round out the whole, he has completed a _History of Civilization_, intended chiefly for use in Brazil’s higher centres of education; but it is far more than a mere text-book. It is the natural outgrowth of a dignified lifetime,--the work of a man who, early placed in the diplomatic service, outgrew the confines of that profession because, in simple words, he was too human for it.
“In fact,” he himself once declared in a speech, “to be a good diplomat is to be able to deceive wisely.” And Lima has been wiser in goodness than in deceit.
It is easy enough now, with the distance of a few years between us and the end of a war that need never have been fought, to proclaim a humanistic spiritual world-unity. It was not easy for Lima while the war was going on; perhaps he, as well as any other, recognized the futility of his efforts to keep at least the western hemisphere of the world sane during the carnage; perhaps this was but an example of what one of his youthful disciples has called his “quixotism.” It was, together with these things, a simple, if striking, example, of the man’s devotion to the truth he sees.
“Through love of the truth,” he said, at a banquet given to him in Rio Janeiro in 1917, “I became a diplomat, who did not correspond to the ideal of the type, despite the remark of a departed friend of mine who used to say that I had spent my life lying, in Europe, Asia and America, saying, in foreign countries and to foreign audiences, that Brazil possesses a dramatic history, a brilliant literature, a promising economy,--in short--all the characteristics of a civilization …, of which my friend, apparently, was sceptical.
“Through love of the truth, I am now a journalist who ought to correspond to the ideal of the type, and if I do not, it is for the simple reason that in a certain sense, truth is the most burdensome luggage a person can carry through life, for it is always getting into our way. I don’t see why it should be inculcated with such arduous effort--and, paradoxically, a sincere effort--into the souls of children, since, in their future life it can cause so much trouble to those of us who continue to invoke and apply what was taught us as a virtue.”
If Lima has been an undiplomatic diplomat, he is an unjournalistic journalist. As another paradox in his life, this man of Brazilian birth, Portuguese education and tri-continental wanderings has settled down in Washington, D. C., having presented his remarkable library to the Catholic University. Back from his present home he sends, to be sure, political chronicle and such chat, but also literary letters that are read with avidity by a youth whom he is strongly influencing. This is the stuff out of which a number of his books have grown; it is the sort of journalism that Bernard Shaw has boasted about, because of its intimate relation to significant, immediate life.
That he has chosen the United States for his permanent home sufficiently indicates a predilection early evidenced in his book upon this country; but that preference is neither blind nor unreasoned, any more than his Pan-Americanism is the hollow proclamation that deceives nobody less than alert South Americans. In his attitude to our nation he is candid, direct, with the reserve of a Martí, a Rodó, a Verissimo, only that he knows us more intimately than did those sterling spirits. At the end of a series of lectures dedicated to the then President of Leland Stanford Junior University, John Casper Branner, “distinguished scientist, eminent scholar and true friend of Brazil,” and delivered at that university, as well as others of this country, Lima declared that “The filiation and evolution of Portuguese America are separate from those of Spanish America; not infrequently, nay frequently rather, was this evolution hostile to that of Spanish America; but today they have common, identical interests, and a desire for a closer approximation appears so reciprocal that this movement becomes every day more pronounced and more firmly rooted. For Pan-Americanism to be complete, it would be necessary for the United States to ally itself with Latin America, with the importance, the influence, the prestige, the superiority to which its civilization entitles it--it would not be human to do otherwise--but without any thought, expressed or reserved, of direct predominance, which offends the weaker element and renders it suspicious.
“It is this which those who, like myself, know and esteem the United States,--and the best way of showing one’s esteem is not by praising unreservedly,--are hoping will come as the result of the great university movement which is gradually crystallizing in this country. Here idealism is a feature of the race (nor would you without it belong to a superior race), an ideal so noble and elevated as that of respect for the right of others, as that of human solidarity through the unification of culture. The great statesman who now presides over the destinies of the Argentine Republic, proclaimed at the First Pan-American Conference, at Washington, that America belonged to all humanity, not to a fraction of it; and indeed America is and will continue to be more and more the field for the employment of European capital, of study for European scholars, of commerce for European merchants, of activity for European immigration. Only thus will the New World fulfil its historical and social mission and redeem the debt contracted with Europe, which has given it its civilization.”[2]
This is an example of that “Spirit of peace and concord to which I have ever subordinated my spiritual activity.”[3]
As an investigator, Lima has always gone to the sources; he has the born historian’s patience with detail, and if he lacks the music of a seductive prose, he compensates for this more purely literary grace with a gift for vivifying the men and events of the past. Thus, if his sole venture into the historical drama has been unproductive of dramatic beauty, his historical writings abound in passages of colourful, dramatic power. Carlos Pereyra, himself a prolific writer upon American history, has, in his Spanish translation of Lima’s _Historic Formation of the Brazilian Nationality_, compared him to such painters of the soul as Frans Hals. “Oliveira Lima paints portraits in the fashion of Hals. Thus we behold his personages not only in the ensemble of the canvas and in the external perfection of each figure, but in that mysterious prolongation that carries us into the intimate shadows of the personality.…”
Lima’s eclecticism is but the natural result of his residence in many parts of the world; it is also an aspect of a spiritual tolerance which is a trait of his personality, and which despite his “historic Catholicism” evokes, even from an unbeliever, the simple tribute which in this modest essay I seek to render as much to that personality as to any of its products.
As for his growing influence upon the youth of Brazil, I will let one of the most promising of those young men speak for his colleagues. Writes Senhor Gilberto de Mello Freyre,[4] “This independence of view and attitude explains the fascination that he exercises over the intellectual youth of Brazil.… He is generous toward the newcomers, without for that reason being easy with his praise. On the contrary, he is discreet. His generosity never reaches the extremes of indulgence. His intellectual hospitality has been great; he has been a sort of bachelor uncle to the nation’s ‘enfants terribles.’ He was one of the first to proclaim the powerful, strange talents of Euclydes da Cunha. He has sponsored other youthful intellects whose brilliant future he can foresee, such as Sr. Assis Chateaubriand, Sr. Antonio Carneiro Leão, Sr. Mario Mello, Sr. Annibal Fernandes.”
There are men whose lives are the best books they have written; to this company Manoel de Oliveira Lima belongs. He has identified himself so completely with the cultural history of his nation that, as I said at the beginning, he is an integral part of it, and if his works were removed from the national bookshelf, a yawning gap would be left. That is the better nationalism, to which he has devoted an unchauvinistic career of the higher patriotism. He has, on the other hand, become so essentially cosmopolitan as to have earned the rare title of world-citizen. If more diplomats have not been able to reconcile these two supposed “opposites,” it is not because such a patriotism is incompatible with the international mind, but because under their ceremonial clothes they hide the age-old predatory heart and serve the age-old predatory interests. Lima has not labelled others, and I am not going to label him; men, like countries, must remain ever different. But countries, like men, may bridge the gulf of difference by patient understanding, and the rivers of blood that flow under those bridges must be the blood of human tolerance and aid, not the blood of barter and battle. It would be easy to point out a certain “conservatism” in Lima, as in more than one other, and yet, if it be possible for us to live in anything but the present, he is a man of the future, for he has always dwelt above boundaries, above battles, above most of the sublimated childishness which we grown-ups pompously call “the serious business of the world.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Introduction to _The Evolution of Brazil compared with that of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America_. Stanford University, California, 1914. The introduction, by Professor Percy Alvin Martin, should be read with care, as it assigns Lima’s year of birth erroneously to the year 1865, and gives wrong dates for the _Aspectos_ (1896, not 1906) and _Pernambuco_ (1894, not 1895); moreover, it ascribes to Björnstjerne Björnsen, instead of to Goran Björkman, the bestowal upon Lima of the epithet “intellectual ambassador of Brazil.”
[2] Lima here refers to Dr. Roque Saenz-Peña, inaugurated 1910. The citation is from Lecture VI (and last); the series was delivered in English.
[3] See Preface to his book on Argentina (1920, Spanish version, Buenos Aires).
[4] In a recent letter to me.
VII
GRAÇA ARANHA
Graça Aranha, like Euclydes da Cunha (from whom in so many other respects he is so different), is a man virtually of a single book. And, as _Os Sertões_ in 1902 created so profound an impression upon Brazilian letters as to suggest a partial reorientation of the national literature, so, in the same year, did the appearance of Aranha’s _Chanaan_ work a profound change in the Brazilian novel. Much ink has been spilled about it and often, if not generally, in that exalted rhetorical mood for which the Ibero-American critic does not lack models abroad; upon the strength of _Chanaan_ alone, Senhor Costa (and not entirely without justice) has created a new phase of the national novel: the critico-philosophical; Guglielmo Ferrero, the noted Italian historian, a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, made it known to Europe with his fulsome praise of it as the great American novel,--a term that had already been applied to _María_ (by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs) and Taunay’s _Innocencia_. There is a distinct basis for comparison between _Innocencia_ and the more famous tale from Colombia; between these and _Chanaan_, however, there is little similarity, if one overlooks the poetic atmosphere that glamours all three. Aranha’s book is of far broader conception than the other two; it adds to their lyricism an epic sweep inherent in the subject and very soon felt in the treatment. It is, in fact, a novel difficult to classify, impregnated as it is with a noble, Tolstoian idealism, yet just as undoubtedly streaked with an unrelenting realism so often coupled with the name of Zola. Yet one does not perceive too plainly an inept mingling of genres; the style is a mirror of the vast theme--that moment at which the native and the immigrant strains begin to merge in the land of the future--the promised land that the protagonists are destined never to enter, even as Moses himself, upon Mount Nebo in the land of Moab, beheld Canaan and died in the thrall of the great vision.
Aranha seems truly to have been called to this task rather than to have chosen it. He is cosmopolitan by culture as well as training. Himself a descendant of an old family, he has not been hampered by the false aristocracy of the family, else how could he have composed the epic of Brazil’s melting-pot? He has served his nation at home and abroad, having been secretary to Joaquim Nabuco when that diplomat went to Italy to settle before the king the boundary dispute between Brazil and Great Britain in the matter of British Guiana; he was Brazilian minister at Christiania, and later Plenipotentiary for Brazil at The Hague. He is philosophically, critically inclined; he knows not only the Latin element of his nation, but the Teutonic as well; his native exuberance has been tempered by a serenity that is the product of European influence, in which may be reckoned a tithe of English.
_Chanaan_ is of those novels that centre about an enthralling idea. The type that devotes much attention to depictions of life and customs, to discussions of present realities and ultimate purposes, is perhaps more frequent among Spanish and Portuguese Americans than among our own readers, who are too apt to be over-insistent in their demands for swift, visible external action. Yet, in the hands of a master, it possesses no less interest--for myself, I freely say more--than the more obvious type of fiction. Ideas possess more life than the persons who are moved by them.
The idea that carries Milkau from the Old World to the New is an ideal of human brotherhood, high purpose and dissatisfaction with the old, degenerate hemisphere. In the State of Espirito Santo, where the German colonists are dominant, he plans a simple life that shall drink inspiration in the youth of a new, virgin continent. He falls in with another German, Lentz, whose outlook upon life is at first the very opposite to Milkau’s blend of Christianity and a certain liberal Socialism. The strange milieu breeds in both an intellectual languor that vents itself in long discussions, in brooding contemplation, mirages of the spirit. Milkau is gradually struck with something wrong in the settlement. Little by little it begins to dawn upon him that attributes akin to the Old-World hypocrisy, fraud and insincerity are contaminating this supposedly virgin territory. Here he discovers no paradise à la Rousseau--no natural man untainted by the ills of civilization. Graft is as rampant as in any district of the world across the sea; cruelty is as rife. His pity is aroused by the plight of Mary, a destitute servant who is betrayed by the son of her employers. Not only does the scamp desert her when she most needs his protection and acknowledgment, but he is silent when his equally vicious parents drive her forth to a life of intense hardship. She is spurned at every door and reduced to beggary. Her child is born under the most distressing of circumstances and devoured by a pig before her very eyes, as she gazes helplessly on.
Mary is accused of infanticide, and since she lacks witnesses, is placed in an extremely difficult position. Moreover, the father of her child bends every effort to loosen the harshest measures of the community against her, whereupon Milkau, whose heart is open to the griefs of the universe, has another opportunity to behold man’s inhumanity to woman. His pity turns to what pity is akin to; he effects her release from jail, and together they go forth upon a journey that ends in the delirium of death. The promised land has proved a mirage--at least for the present. And it is upon this indecisive note that the book comes to a close.
Ferrero,[1] in his introduction to the book is substantial and to the point. It is natural that he should have taken such a liking to the novel, for Aranha’s work is of intense interest to the reader who looks for psychological insight, and Ferrero himself is the exponent of history as psychology rather than as economic materialism. “The critics,” he says, “will judge the literary merits of this novel. As a literary amateur, I will point out among its qualities the beauty of its style and its descriptions, the purity of the psychological analysis, the depth of the thoughts and the reflections of which the novel is full, and among its parts a certain disproportion between the different parts of the book and an ending which is too vague, indefinite, and unexpected. But its literary qualities seem to me to be of secondary importance to the profound and incontrovertible idea that forms the kernel of the book. Here in Europe we say that modern civilization develops itself in America more freely than in Europe, for in the former country it has not to surmount the obstacle of an older society, firmly established as in the case of the latter. Because of this we call America ‘the country of the young,’ and we consider the New World as the great force which decomposes the old European social organization.” That idea is, as Ferrero points out, and as Milkau discovered for himself, an illusion due to distance. Ferrero points out, too, that here is everywhere “an old America struggling against a new one and, what is very curious, the new America, which upsets traditions, is formed above all by the European immigrants who seek a place for themselves in the country of their adoption, whereas the real Americans represent the conservative tendencies. Europe exerts on American society--through its emigrants--the same dissolving action which America exerts--through its novelties and its example--on the old civilization of Europe.” The point is very well taken, and contains the germ of more than one great novel of the United States. And just as _Chanaan_ stands by itself in Brazilian literature, so might such a novel achieve pre-eminence in our own.
“It is probable,” says Milkau to Lentz during one of their numerous discussions, in words that may have suggested this criticism to Ferrero and that may be applicable to our own nation,--“it is probable that our fate will be to transform this country from top to bottom, to substitute another civilization for all the culture, religion and traditions of a people. It is a new conquest, slow, dour, peaceful in its means, but terrible in its ambitious schemes. The substitution must be so pure and luminous that upon it may not fall the bitter curse of devastation. In the meantime we are a dissolvent of the race of this country. We soak into the nation’s clay and soften it; we mix ourselves with the natives and kill their traditions, and spread confusion among them.… No one will understand anyone else; there is a confusion of tongues; men coming from everywhere--bring with them the images of their several gods; they are all alien to each other; there is no communion of thought; men and women do not make love to each other in the same words.… Everything is disintegrating; one civilization falls and is transformed into an unknown one.… The remodelling of the nation is being set back. There is tragedy in the soul of a Brazilian when he feels that his race will not last for evermore. The law of nature is that like begets like.… And here tradition is broken; the father will not transmit his own image to his son; the language is dying; the old aspirations of the race, the deep-rooted desires for a distinct individuality, will become dumb; the future will not understand the past.”[2]
Ferrero is quite right in indicating the great non-literary importance of the novel; indeed, Brazilian criticism, as a whole, has in the consideration of _Chanaan_ been so dazzled by the language and the social implications of the novel that it has overlooked or condoned its structural defects as a work of art. But not all readers will agree with Ferrero, I imagine, as to the excessive vagueness of the end. Hardly any other type of ending would have befitted a novel that treats of transition, of a landscape that enthralls, of possibilities that founder, not through the malignance of fate so much as through the stupidity, the cupidity, the crassness of man. There is an epic swirl to the finale that reminds one of the disappearance of an ancient deity in a pillar of dust. For an uncommon man like Milkau an uncommon end was called for.
In this novelized document upon Brazil’s racial problems and popular customs a certain and facile symbolism seems to inhere. Milkau is, as we have seen, the blend of Christianity and Socialism,--two concepts which, for all their recent historic enmity, are closely related, though by no means identical, in philosophical background. Lentz is the apostle of Nietzscheanism. Mary is the suffering land, a prey to the worse elements. The pot that melts the peoples melts their philosophies. So are they fused in this book, which terminates in a cloud, as of the first smoke to rise from the crucible.
_Chanaan_ is not, for all its novelty and substantiality, the “splendid alliance of artistic perfection and moral grandeur” that one of its countless panegyrists has discovered it to be. Neither does it contain that mixture of Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Maeterlinck and Anatole France which was found in it by an editorial writer in the _Jornal do Commercio_. Even Verissimo, it seems to me, exaggerated the artistic importance of the novel in his enthusiasm--a rare thing in Verissimo--over the newness and the social significance of the book. He speaks of its drama as being “curto, rapido e intenso,” yet surely there is nothing “brief” or “rapid” in the telling of _Chanaan_, though intense it undoubtedly is. “New in theme,” he wrote, “new in inspiration and conception, new in style, _Chanaan_ is the first and only manifestation worthy of appreciation among the new spiritual and social currents that are everywhere influencing literature and art. This novel brought to literature, not only Brazilian but Portuguese as well, human and social preoccupations, and modern forms of expression.… It may well be that chronologically some other came before him, but in art excellency is more important than priority.… This is the first novel of its kind in Brazil or Portugal. One may note the lack of action, that is, a more or less complicated plot.… _Chanaan_, then, belongs in the category of contemporary literature. The intense drama that animates it is chiefly internal, but the feelings, the sensations, the ideas vibrate in it like deeds.” Like deeds, in truth, for feelings, sensations and ideas are the raw material of action; more, the motive power itself of “action.” Verissimo is not so much blind to the artistic deficiencies of _Chanaan_ as he is unmindful of them. He readily grants that “not all the episodes adjust themselves perfectly to the central action of the novel or even to the general fact that it presents.… In a detailed analysis of the architecture of the book perhaps other objections would be possible, but contemplating the structure as a whole--and this is how a work of art should be viewed--the impression is one of solid beauty. _Chanaan_ is truly a work of talent in the most noble acceptation and the rarest application of that word. With its generous inspiration, its penetrating symbolism and its moving lyricism … with its wealth of ideas and sensations and its rare emotional sincerity, what is perhaps most admirable in Graça Aranha’s novel is the difficult union--intimate and perfect in this book--of the loftiest idealism and the most inviting realism.”
Costa, as we have seen, has centred a new epoch of the Brazilian novel around this one work, which he considers to have fixed the moment of transition that is so eloquently suggested in the passage from Milkau given above. “The problem of immigration was disquieting,” he writes. “Moreover, as reaction against French culture,” (a reaction that is now again to the fore) “the only culture that dominated without rivalry in Brazil, our men of letters began to read the German authors: Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. It was a moment of mental elaboration,--an élan, a great hope, a fertile stirring of ideas, and, at the same time, there was doubt as to one’s powers of resistance, incertitude, puerile indecision, vague, formless aspirations,--that state of semi-lethargy, with acute intermittent crises of vitality, which characterizes the periods of transition amongst individuals and nations, the burgeoning of the youthful intelligence of a new people, the first attempts at independence, the will to learn and to produce, to affirm and to acquire the consciousness of one’s worth as a nation amongst the nations. It was in this period that there took place the most memorable event in the intellectual life of Brazil: the foundation of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.… Graça Aranha is, perhaps, the fusion of two different cultures.” This is evident in _Chanaan_, I may add in passing, without any reference to the known facts of the man’s life and his education. And though it may be _studied_ in his book, from him it flowed into the narrative out of his very nature. He is, again in Costa’s words, “the focal point of two vigorous and independent Brazilian thinkers: Tobias Barreto and Joaquim Nabuco. The mysterious power of the race, its abandon, its sensual basis, its curiosity for learning--revealing a little the rudimentary traits of the mixed breed--the power of conception, the absolutist tendency, that make and are the strength of Tobias Barreto, encounter, in the manner of the law of compensation, a moderating force, a stabilization of values in the Apollonian genius of Joaquim Nabuco, in the Aryan clarity of his ideas, the Hellenic grace of his concepts, the brilliancy of his rhythmic style, so elegant, delicate and noble,--in the loftiness of his thoughts, in his civilized relativism. There are not in Brazil two spirits, two esthetics, that are more different from, more antagonistic to, each other. The first, despite his vast learning, his admiration for and bedazzlement before European thought, is in every attitude, every phrase, every gesture, an American, Brazilian, an exuberant son of the tropics, sensual and barbarous; the second, despite his love of his native land, despite his devotion … is, in his thought, in manner, in tastes, in soul, in ideas and affections, in pleasures and in style, a European, a Latin, a descendant in direct line of Greek culture. Graça Aranha, by a phenomenon that I discover in his style, has succeeded,--at the same time retaining complete independence,--in effecting an alliance between two opposite poles, the harmonious conjunction of these two different principles, the integration into a single beautiful and lofty form of these two contradictory esthetics. He has transformed the sensualism of Tobias Barreto into voluptuousness and the eloquence of Joaquim Nabuco into poetry.”
Costa has stated the case with tropical luxuriance of phrase and feeling; perhaps one must be a Brazilian to see all this--_as art_--in the novel to which it is applied. Take up the book in and for itself, as a product of a sensitive imagination transmuting the elements of experience into a new reality, and it contains, surely, all the qualities that its most intense admirers discover, but in less degree. Milkau is really the only character in the novel; he is the soloist. Too many of the beautiful thoughts remain here as isolated by-products of conversation rather than living emanations of interplay of emotions. There is a certain hesitancy as to form, which is now the frank dialogue of the stage, now the exaltation of a nativist hymn in a manner recalling, though of course not repeating, Rocha Pitta. Milkau himself, speaking doubtless for Aranha, says that “man is not governed by ideas; he is governed by feelings,” yet, so like the wise men who discover that simple truth, continues to expatiate upon the ideas. Could his sentence, indeed, have originated in one of simple feelings? The very recognition that feeling dominates us is a token that it has ceased to dominate entirely. This is another excellent reason for that indecisive close of the book to which Ferrero objected, for Milkau is caught in a mesh of indecision. It reveals, in the author, one of the sources of his own indecision as to form; but in the novel something of that uncertainty is felt in the telling, and interferes with one’s complete enjoyment in the epoch-making book. Yet, strangely enough, out of the weakness of the separate parts is forged a strength of the whole. Once again, the book becomes the mirror of the folk who people it, for out of the weakness of the individual would Milkau make the strength of human solidarity. “My eyes cannot reach the limits of the Infinite,” he cries at the very end. “My sight is limited to what surrounds you.… But I tell you, if this is going to end so that the cycle of existence may be repeated again elsewhere, or if some day we will be extinguished with the last wave of heat coming from the maternal bosom of earth, or if we be smashed with it in the Universe and be scattered like dust on the roads of the heavens, let us not separate from each other in this attitude of hatred.… I entreat you and your innumerable descendants, let us reconcile ourselves with each other before the coming of Death.…”
To sum up the artistic aspect of the case, I would say--with all admiration for the novel _Chanaan_ and its countless fascinating moments of speech, attitude and vision--that the book itself is even in this respect a mirror, a symbol, of its people and its problems: it is a high promise rather than the perfect fulfilment that so many of its critics would see in it. It ascends the literary Mount Nebo, gazes toward the Promised Land, but does not enter. It is one of the peaks of Brazilian literature, both artistically (for detail) and historically (as a whole), but I dare say that its artistic importance will diminish as its historic significance increases. One’s sharper critical examination of the book is a tribute to its disturbing qualities and its peculiar individuality among the products of the modern novel.
* * * * *
Its historic importance is less to be questioned, though it has not created a school. Costa’s very characterization of it as a critico-philosophical novel contains a criticism, which is further brought out in his short concluding chapter upon his personal theory regarding the Brazilian novel. For here he suggests as the coming type what he calls the _esthetico-social_ novel,--“the theory of art for art’s sake employed in representing the social moment of a people.” I am not concerned with this inartistic theory; inartistic because it would choose the subject for the artist, who alone has the right to select and combine his materials. Neither am I concerned with Costa’s uncomprehending attitude toward the Russian novel, in which he can find only folly, cruelty and delirium! It is a large world, and we must each write what is in ourselves, not what preceptive critics would order to fit in with their clamping theories. But I wish to point out that Costa’s employment of the word _esthetic_ in his term for the novel of Brazil’s future indicates, for all his praise of the Aranha book, a sense of something lacking in _Chanaan_.
“The philosophy of Graça Aranha, … is a philosophy of hope, of intoxication, before the glorious majesty of nature; it is like a magnificent flower of dream, life, desire, aspiration toward happiness, which returns incessantly to the august bosom of the eternal Pan. Man passes on; he is a particle of dust that is blown for a moment across the earth. His whole struggle aims to merge him with nature, through religion, through love, through philosophy. It is this unceasing anxiety to dissolve into something superior to ourselves that produces the great mystics, the great lovers or the great philosophers; yet, at bottom, life in itself is worth what the dust is worth that glitters for an instant in the sun’s rays.… Such surely is the philosophy of Graça Aranha; a sunflower gilded by thought, it turns eternally toward fleeting happiness, in a perpetual desire to merge with it and drink in the light through its petals.… Flower of serene, victorious life, but with distant roots in the banks of the Ganges, nurtured by a vague pessimism, in nihilism, in incipient anarchy, in the everlasting beatitude of Nirvana.…”
This is the poetry of criticism, as _Chanaan_ is the poetry of the novel,--a poetry not unlike Alencar’s _Guarany_, yet as unlike as Alencar was to Aranha. Like Aranha’s novel, so this criticism, for all its preoccupation with Brazilianism, is the result of European culture acting upon the native spirit. It is but another revelation of the literary axiom that renaissance springs from the impact of foreign influences; parthenogenesis is as rare in literature as in life.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See, for citations from Ferrero and _Chanaan_, the English version of the book (Boston, 1920) by M. J. Lorente.
[2] In such passages as these Senhor Aranha seems to fall into the exaggeration of that very imagination which he has sought to interpret to foreigners. Araripe Junior, in a study of Gregorio Mattos, coined the word _obnulation_ to signify the transformation worked upon early settlers by their new surroundings,--a retrogressive subsidence into the savage state. Here Milkau seems at once to fear and prophesy a new “obnulation.”
VIII
COELHO NETTO
As Bilac is the poet of Brazilian voluptuousness, Coelho Netto is its novelist. But there is this essential difference: Bilac etches his lines while Netto splashes the colours over his canvas with unthinking prodigality. Bilac is the silver stream glittering along through the landscape that it reflects with the transmuting touch of its own borrowed silver; Netto is the gushing torrent that sweeps everything along in its path, part and parcel of the surrounding exuberance.
“Our literature lacks original character,” says the talkative Gomes in _A Capital Federal_, one of Netto’s earliest novels (1893),--less a novel, indeed, than a series of impressions in which not the least element is the fairly unceasing chatter of its persons. “It is not really a national literature because, unhappily, nobody concerns himself with the nation. The eyes of our poets scan the constellations of other heavens, the waters of other rivers, the verdure of other forests.” Again: “We are still a people in process of formation,--still at the beginning of life and yet, at the age when Greece was lyrical, in the youthful days in which all men try to compose poems of religion and hope for the shelter of the soul, we despair, we are pessimistic.… By conviction? Because of suffering? Absolutely not. Scarcely by imitation. We lament in the cradle and ask for death, Nirvana. We begin reading with the Book of Job. Show me our Romantic period, which is, so to speak, the adolescence of Art, in its second phase, after the renaissance. We had none. We leaped into naturalism, which is analysis, and already we are headed for the cachexy of decadentism.…” There is much to be said against the plaints of this citation, whether one consider its nationalistic implications or its insinuation that Brazil’s Romantic period lacked genuineness. I quote it, however, to show that at the very beginning of his career Netto intended a conscious reorientation of the Brazilian novel away from the naturalism of Azevedo in the direction of what we may term neo-romanticism. Both men are concerned with what blurred thinking so readily calls the baser passions; both are sensualists, each envisaging life not so much through a different theory as through a different temperament.
Netto is the Anselmo Ribas of his early books, wherein already appears the voluptuary, the creature of extravagant language and unbridled imagination, the weaver of tangled imagery, the wielder of a copious vocabulary that has been estimated at as high as 20,000 words. And that voluptuary appears everywhere, in the images, the narrative, the thoughts. “Amber-hued wine that seems to sing in its glasses a dithyramb of gold,--impatient wine that seethes and foams,--wine that rages like the mighty ocean,--ambrosia of a new era,--live, intelligent wine,--wine with a soul.” Such is the wine that is drunk by Ribas and his friend Gomes, who has his scents for each colour, sound and feeling. When the silks of a lady rustle, the noise is comparable to the sounds “made by the flocks of wild pigeons when they raise their flight on the riverbanks of my native province.” In his work, as in this simile, his sensuousness is mingled with the primitivity of mother earth. He has written much of the city life, and has traveled with his pen through all the forms, but he is strongest when closest to that primitive urge. I prefer him, for short tales, in such an early work as _Sertão_; for the novel, in such a concise miniature masterpiece as _Rei Negro_.
Henrique Maximiano Coelho Netto was born on February 21, 1864, in the city of Caxias, department of Maranhão, of a Portuguese father and an Indian mother. In 1870 the family moved to Rio de Janeiro. From his slave attendant Eva he imbibed a wealth of Brazilian folk lore; from Maria, the Portuguese housekeeper, he drank in (and with what avidity his later work reveals) the common heritage of Oriental tales. Another powerful influence (and this, too, is duly chronicled in _A Capital Federal_) was his uncle Rezende, a book-keeper with a taste for the Portuguese and Latin classics. For the fundamental traits of Netto as a creative spirit one need hardly go farther than these childhood impressions. Here we have his mixed blood, his predilection for the native lore and exotic artistry, his preference for the ancient writers and a fondness for the Portuguese classics that reveals itself in his not infrequently archaic language. Some of his pages, Verissimo has shown, would be better understood in Portugal than in Brazil.
Though his early education lacked method, already at the age of eight he read Cicero; he pursued his studies at various institutions, never remaining through the complete number of years. Like most Brazilians, he began with a sonnet, followed by a number of poems which fortunately, he never issued; his newspaper experience commenced in the _Gazeta da Tarde_, 1887. Unlike most Brazilians he wrested a living from the nation by his pen, and 1892 found him teaching the history of the arts. His restlessness, however, seems to keep him flitting from place to place and from interest to interest. In 1900 he is found in Campinas teaching literature, remaining for three years. In 1909 he is back in Rio at the Gymnasio Nacional, lecturing upon letters. From that year until 1917 he represents the state of Maranhão in the national assembly. Today finds him busily at work revising the long list of his labours and issuing them with as keen an interest as if they were the first fruits of his imagination.
“Even to this day,” he confessed to an interviewer a few years ago, “I feel the influence of the first period of my life in the sertão. It was the histories, the legends, the tales heard in my childhood,--Negro stories filled with fear, legends of _caboclos_ palpitant with sorcery, tales of white men, the phantasy of the sun, the perfume of the forest, the dream of civilized folk.… Never did the mixture of ideas and race cease to predominate, and even now it makes itself felt in my eclecticism.… My imagination is the resultant of the soul of Negro, _caboclo_ and white.” The criticism is born out by a study of his many books, most of which, as the author himself would be the first to agree, will be speedily forgotten in the excellence of the salient few.
Neo-romantic though he be, Netto is no believer in the false Indianism that for a time held sway in the native letters. His affection for the Portuguese tongue, which he considers the most plastic of languages, does not preclude a belief in a Brazilian literature. Asked whether he was religious--and here again reading of his representative books bears witness to his self-knowledge--he replied, “Very. I don’t know whether I believe in Lord Christ, or in Lord Nature, but I believe in the immanent principle of divinity. And perhaps, for this reason, I am one of the rare men who hope.”
“One may say of him,” writes Costa, “what Taine said of Balzac: ‘he is a sort of literary elephant, capable of bearing prodigious burdens, but slow of gait.’” And before Costa, Netto said of himself that he was a “Trappist of labor,--what the French call a _bête de somme_.” Better than any one else Verissimo, upon whom Costa largely draws for his consideration of Netto, has defined the qualities of the prolific polygraph. Netto has tried all the styles; he has from the first revealed that exuberance which makes of him a splashing colourist, a vivid describer of externals, an expert in word pageantry; his prose is often a wild cataract, a tangled forest. He is not a writer of ideas, but of sensations. Erroneously he has termed himself a Hellenist and a primitive, unmindful, as the scrupulous Verissimo has indicated, that these terms in themselves are contradictory. Much of his labour is “literature”; many of the novels are spoiled by their evident origin in the desires of newspaper readers; his fondness for archaisms offends linguistic common sense; even his descriptions, according to the testimony of compatriots, are largely invented, no truer to the native scene than are some of his characters to the native life. His defects, notably carelessness in structure, are the defects of improvisation. And yet--for all that his critics so justly note, he compels the reader with the peculiar fascination that is his own--the attraction of a volcano in eruption, of a beauty whose very exoticism draws even as it repels.
He is that rare flower of the literary life,--a personality. His rôle has been that of a minor Balzac, pouring forth volume after volume in disconcerting and damaging confusion, coupled with that of a Mæcenas-Hugo, encouraging the youth of his nation to ardent effort in the arena of letters. “He reproduced,” says Costa, “unconsciously in his own country what was being practised in France consciously by the neo-romantics, the idealists,--all those who revolted against the ever-increasing asperities of agonizing naturalism.”
* * * * *
Much of what is best in Netto is concentrated in one of his earliest books, _Sertão_, published in 1896 at Rio de Janeiro. This is a collection of some seven tales notable for atmosphere, power, poetry. In _Praga_ (Curse), we are plunged deep into the past of superstition and sensuality that lies in the sertanejo’s breast. Even burning with fever, Raymundo wants Lucinda. In his delirium he recalls how he tried to rob, and murdered, Mãi Dina the year before, the crime being laid to gipsies; the murdered woman visits him in his visions and he has a terrific battle with her; rushing forth from his cabin he encounters a colt and mounting it, makes a mad dash, like a Mazeppa of the sertão, for the salvation that he feels lies in flight. He exhausts his mount and then makes his wandering way to Mãi Dina’s grave; in a frenzy he begins to slash right and left with his knife, when a misdirected blow sends him rolling off into a swamp, where he meets his end. Not her curse but his conscience has wrought retribution. This is a strange mingling of reality with fancy,--a sultry realism sprinkled with scientific terms and heavy with tropical luxuriance of phraseology; but there is poetry, too,--poetry of the indigenous mind, as in the tale that follows: _O Enterro_ (The Burial). This account of the burial of the Indian witch Tecai, a pagan for whom the pious Christians of Itamina refuse even to give a coffin, is really a poem. So too, largely, is _A Tapera_, a tale of mingled legend, wild dream and virgin forest, in which the hermit of Santa Luzia recounts to the teller, the tale of his beautiful wife Leonor. Within a year she proved unfaithful and was discovered by her husband’s black foster-mother Eva. On the night of the discovery she is slain by Eva and together they bury her. The husband goes mad, taking it into his head that a certain tree follows him vengefully about. Under that tree one day he digs her up and morbidly caresses the skull. After hearing the tale, the narrator dashes off on his horse at a mad gallop and is told, three days later, that he must have dreamed all this in a fever. This is strained situation, no doubt, but Netto knows how to produce the Poesque thrill of horror, not merely by accumulation of detail but by adroit manipulation of it. That he may at times achieve simplicity is shown in _Firmin, O Vaqueiro_, in which the aged cattleman dies amidst the songs and the animals that he loved and dominated so well, even as he did the girls of his early hey-day. The song of the story might serve as the epigraph to much of what Netto has written:
No coração de quem ama Nasce uma flor que envenena. Morena, essa flor que mata, Chama-se paixão, morena.
In the heart of him who loves Is born a flower with poison laden. Dark-brown maiden, that flower which slays,-- They call it passion, dark-brown maiden.
For sex in Coelho Netto is at once the Fate that snares man and woman and the Furies who pursue them. Take _Céga_ (Blind), one of the best things he has done; it is a powerful tale, instinct with a deep human pity, yet with no trace of preceptiveness. Life here goes and comes with the radiant indifference of the sun that shines over all and of the crickets that shrill their monotonous accompaniment. Anna Rosa, married to Cabiúna, loses her sight at the birth of her child Felicia; then, through the fever of the sertão, she loses her Cabiúna; then she loses Felicia herself, because the maiden has kept her approaching motherhood a secret until it is too late. The grandchild lives on as a token of the continuity of life’s urge, which brooks no restraint of human laws. Rarely does Netto attain such proportion in description, narrative, psychology; here Nature may smile upon her folk, but humour, gladness do not dwell for long amongst them. Even when humour comes, it is the smiling face of fear, as in the account of _Mandoví_, the _caboclo_ whose superstitious fancy was lashed into terror by a forest bird that seemed to be calling his name and by a wraith-like palm-leaf swaying in the moon. Most gruesome of all, yet of undeniable fascination, is the concluding tale, _Os Velhos_, (The Aged Couple),--a study in obsession that is passed on by an old husband to his faithful wife. He suffers from a sort of catalepsy and fears that some day, while in the death-like state, he will be buried alive. At last his final attack slays him, but she, fearing lest he be not really gone, lets him rot in his hut until the stench rises beyond endurance and the village populace take matters into their own hands. It is harrowing, repelling, morbid, but done with something of the skill that a Poe attains in such a piece as _The Fall of the House of Usher_. The motif of the ominous urubus--the black vultures of the southern continent--is most artistically handled, as is that of the contagious obsession as it grows upon the aged husband. Even here we discover evidence of the author’s voluptuousness, inverted to be sure, until it becomes a species of olfactory sadism. Few tales display such an effective treatment of the sense of smell made into an inevitable, primary attribute of the story itself.
_Rei Negro_ (The Black King) belongs to the maturity of the writer’s career, having appeared in 1914. It is told in straightforward, uninterrupted manner, without an entangling opulence of words or a dazzling series of irrelevant descriptions. Equally at home in the desert sertão, the glitter of life in the capital, or the _fazenda_ that is a link between the two, the author in this novel, presents as background the lively, multifarious life upon a large plantation, and as persons, the proprietors above and the virtual serfs below. The bare plot is simplicity itself; a favourite slave, Macambira, marries one of the black belles of the _fazenda_; the son of the proprietor, indulged since his birth and sensuous with the double unrestraint of climate and assumed racial prerogatives, attacks and overcomes the prospective bride. Fright seals the woman’s lips, but when, after her happy marriage, the child is born white, the truth must come out. The proprietor’s efforts to hide his son’s misdeed--for the child is born during a prolonged absence of the woman’s husband--prove abortive and Macambira wreaks vengeance by slaying his wife’s assailant. The wife has died in the agony of her knowledge and the birth; the husband, once his revenge is accomplished, disappears beyond the mountains.
This is no common slave, however; Macambira, from the lips of the old Balbina, hears thrilling accounts of his regal provenience. Here he is but a humble black; among his own tribe, yonder in the African wilds, he is a king, a black king. His wrongs are more than matters of individual care; his slaying of Julinho is more than a personal vengeance. It is the vengeance of a tribe, the assertion of a race, the proclamation of human dignity. The greater to heighten the contrast between black and white, Netto has made Macambira a chaste, Herculean figure, proof against the temptations of mind and milieu to which Julinho succumbs and is ultimately sacrificed. The environment is drawn with swift, but effective strokes; the minor characters really live; there is genuine pathos in the common situation out of which the author draws uncommon results; there is poetic beauty, as well as psychological power, to the legendary evocations of old Balbina as she whispers the tale of greatness into the black king’s ears and arouses his spirit to what to him is a mighty deed.
I have singled out, for more than passing comment, but two works of some threescore and a half that range from short tales and newspaper fragments to the novel, the drama, the text-book, speeches and essays upon the education of women. For such early novels as _A Capital Federal_ and such later ones as _A Conquista_ I can feel no literary interest; they are, together with more than one other of their fellows, valuable for a study of the day in which they were written and for the instable temperament that produced them. Similarly, _Esphinge_, a novel of exotic mystery that begins with high promise soon descends to the helpless confusion which threatens all dallying with other-worldly themes, particularly when the author would maintain contact with external reality rather than plunge frankly and fearlessly into the unseen realms. As to the short stories, one may open any collection quite at random; the good will be strangely mixed with the bad. Now the tale is a mere excuse for commentary, usually upon men and women and passion, with Netto in cynical mood; nature becomes a luxuriant, inciting procuress, as witness the long titular story in the collection called _Agua de Juventa_ (Fountain of Youth),--a tale that, like more than one of Netto’s, belongs rather to the liquor and cigars of stag parties than to literature. Not, understand, because it is “immoral,” but because it lacks the texture, the illumination, the significance, of art. That he can be sentimental he shows in _Epithalamio_ of the same collection; the propaganda impulse is so strong that it overflows into tale after tale. And over it all, the fructifying ardour of his voluptuousness, as prodigal as nature itself, which scatters myriad seeds where only one can take root and thrive.
* * * * *
“Naturalism,” writes Costa, “with Aluizio de Azevedo was the epic of the race’s sexual instincts; with Coelho Netto, neo-romanticism will be the eternal praise of Nature,--the incessant and exaggerated exaltation of the landscape.” Both “isms,” I believe, are but the reflection of the authors’ temperaments; in Netto, Nature is but one of the symbols of sex, one of the means of representing, expressing the superabundant vitality. It is his imagination that works upon Nature rather than Nature upon his imagination; he is a distorting mirror; he has not created character, he has not invented situation, so much as he has utilized men, places and events in the presentation of his overflowing personality.
As a historical phenomenon, Coelho Netto represents veritably a period in the national letters; literature becomes a self-supporting profession--it had already been that with Aluizio de Azevedo--and the production of a steady stream of novels for avid metropolitan readers is as systematized as ever in our own supposedly more materialistic nation. As an artist Netto is less significant; haste, disorientation and constant supply of a none too exigent demand rendered him less exacting with himself,--something that by nature he has never been in any case, though he can view his labours objectively and note their demerits. A spontaneous, not a premeditative artist, achieving, at his most happy moments, a glowing union of creature and creation,--a creation truly Amazonian in its prodigality of scene and sense, with creatures as unreal, yet as fascinating as itself. This is no small accomplishment, for it makes of the reader a participant, and that is what all art, major or minor, must do. Netto here expresses not only the ardent Brazilian dwelling amidst a phantasmagoria of the senses; this overflow of primitive instincts is a human heritage that, with its torch of life, makes us no less than the one touch of nature, kin to the rest of the world. “The Colonel’s lady and Mary O’Grady are sisters under the skin,” sang Kipling, to whom Netto has been rashly compared. And changing the genders, the Colombian poet Silva has sung in the poem Egalité of his _Gotas Amargas_ (Bitter Drops)
Juan Lanas, el mozo de la esquina, es absolutamente igual al Emperador de la China: los dos son el mismo animal.
“Juan Lanas, the street-corner loafer is on absolute terms of equality with the Emperor of China. They both are the selfsame beast.”
IX
FRANCISCA JULIA
Women have played an interesting, if necessarily minor part in the material and cultural development of the South American republic. The name of the world’s largest river--the Amazon, or, more exactly speaking, the Amazons--is supposed to stand as a lasting tribute to the bravery of the early women whom the explorer Orellana encountered during his conquest of the mighty flood; according to this derivation, by many considered fanciful, he named the river in honour of the tribes’ fighting heroines, though a more likely source would be the Indian word “amassona” (i. e., boat-destroyer, referring to the tidal phenomenon known as _bore_ or _proroca_, which sometimes uproots trees and sweeps away whole tracts of land). Centuries later, when one by one the dependencies of South America rose to liberate themselves from the Spanish yoke, the women again played a noble part in the various revolutions. The statue in Colombia to Policarpa Salvarieta is but a symbol of South American gratitude to a host of women who fought side by side with their husbands during the crucial days of the early nineteenth century. One of them, Manuela la Tucumana, was even made an officer in the Argentine army.
If women have enshrined themselves in the patriotic annals of the Southern republics, they have shown that they are no less the companions of man in the agreeable arts of peace. When one considers the great percentage of illiteracy that still prevails in Southern America, and the inferior intellectual and social position that has for years been the lot of women particularly in the Spanish and Portuguese nations, it is surprising that woman’s prominence in the literary world should be what it is. Yet the tradition--if tradition it may be called--boasts a remarkable central figure in the person of Santa Teresa, of sixteenth century Spain. “A miracle of genius” was that famous lady, in Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s fulsome words, … “perhaps the greatest woman who ever handled pen, the single one of all her sex who stands beside the world’s most perfect masters.” In the next century, Mexico produced a personality hardly less interesting in Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, (who only yesterday was indicated as her nation’s first folklorist and feminist), blazoned forth to her audience as “la Musa Decima mexicana,”--nothing less than the tenth muse, if you please, who happened then to be residing in Mexico. And we of the North, in the same century, ourselves boasted a tenth muse in the English-born Anne Bradstreet of Massachusetts Colony, whose book of verses was published in London, in 1650 (ten years after the original Massachusetts edition) with the added line, “The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in America.”[1]
The most distinguished Spanish poetess of the nineteenth century, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, was a Cuban by birth, going later to Spain, where she was readily received as one of the nation’s leading literary spirits. Her poetry is remarkable for its virile passion; her novel “Sab” is the Spanish “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She was a woman of striking beauty, yet so vigorous in her work and the prosecution of it that one facetious critic was led to exclaim, “This woman is a great deal of a man!” This, too, is in the tradition, for had not Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, as a girl, been so eager for learning that she begged her parents to send her to the University of Mexico in male attire? She was hardly more than eight at the time, to be sure, but the girl is mother to the woman no less than the boy is father to the man.
South America has its native candidate for the title of Spanish “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and this, too, is the work of a woman. Clorinda Matto’s _Aves Sin Nido_ (Birds Without a Nest) is by one of Peru’s most talented women, and exposes the conscienceless exploitation of the Indians. In Peru, it would seem, fiction as a whole has been left largely to the pens of women. Such names as Joana Manuele Girriti de Belzu, Clorinda Matto and Mercedes Cabello de Carbonero stand for higher aspiration rather than achievement, but they reveal an unmistakable tendency. The latest addition to their number is the youthful Angélica Palma, daughter of the famous author of the _Tradiciones Perruanas_.
Brazil has not yet produced any woman who has secured the recognition accorded to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz or to Gómez de Avellaneda; it has, however, added some significant names to the Ibero-American roster. To poetry it has given Narcisa Amalia, Adelina Vieira, Julia Lopes d’Almeida, Zalina Rolim, and lastly Francisca Julia da Silva. They are sisters in a choir that boasts choristers in every nation of the Ibero-American group,--now a civic spirit like the Dominican Salomé Ureña, who belongs to the latter half of the nineteenth century, now such a more passionate continuator as the lady who writes in Puerto Rico under the pseudonym of La Hija del Caribe (The Daughter of the Carribees),--again the Sapphic abandon of Alfonsina Storni of Argentina, the domestic charm of Maria Enriqueta of Mexico, the pallid perfection of the Uruguayan Juana de Ibarbourou, the apostolic intensity of Gabriela Mistral (Lucilla Godoy) of Chile, and the youthful passion of Gilka Machado, youngest of the new Brazilians.
These women do not, as a rule, and despite some too broad assumptions in South America as to the exclusively materialistic spirit of the United States, enjoy the advantages of culture that are possessed by our lady poets. There is no Amy Lowell among them to revel in the smashing of canons and amuse herself with the erection of new ones for others to smash. There is no atmosphere of Bohemianism and night life in metropolitan cafés. Facile analogies might be drawn, but not too much faith should be placed in them. Thus Maria Enriqueta would suggest Sara Teasdale; Alfonsina Storni would similarly suggest Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is indubitably her superior. Over them all, except in the rare and welcome moments of spiritual rebellion, hovers an air of domesticity, as if, upon venturing into the half-forbidden precincts of art,--which means perfect expression and therefore is “unwomanly,”--they carried with them something of that narrower home and hearth which only now they are abandoning.
“It is not easy,” wrote Verissimo upon the consideration of a volume of poetry by Sra. D. Julia Cortines, “to speak freely of women as authors, since, however much as writers they detach themselves from their sex, the most elementary gallantry requires us to treat them solely as women. I, who am very far from being a feminist (which is perhaps not quite consistent with my social opinions), do not deny absolutely the intellectual capacities of womankind, and, with the same impartiality (at least, so I presume) I cannot discover in them any exceptional qualities of heart or mind.… It may have been for this reason that the Muse, who is a woman, never deigned to endow me with her favors and denied me the gifts of poesy.… Happily, Brazilian poetesses are few in number; unhappily, they are not good poets. Almost all, past and present, are mediocre. There has been none up to this time who might dispute a place with the half dozen of our best poets of the other sex. I could never understand, or I understand it in a manner that could hardly brook explanation, since woman according to current opinion is far richer in matters of feeling than man, she has never given anything really notable or extraordinary in art, which is chiefly feeling.… One of the forces of art is sincerity, and woman, either because her own psychological organism forbids it, or because the social organization that limits her expansion has never consented to it, has never been able to be sincere without endangering her privileges or even declassifying herself.” Love, he continues, being the chief of lyric themes, and woman prevented by social custom from really expressing herself, the virtual silence of woman in art is inevitable.[2]
Some such reasoning as this explains the domesticity of the women poets. It explains, too, I believe, why Francisca Julia, for whom a number of Brazilian critics would claim a respectable place with the men of her nation, embraced the Parnassian cult during the few years that were vouchsafed her. She was, if her poems tell anything, an ardent spirit; her passions were too great for the routine of civic and domestic verse; she would do something more than merely transfer her “kitchen, church and children” into homiletic poems. Lacking either the courage or the temperament of an Alfonsina Storni, she could express herself through an apparently cold and formal imagery. Her early impassivity may have been the defence reaction of a highly sensitive compassionate nature. Throughout her work she is, if we must use terms, more “Parnassian” than a number of avowed men of that cult, which had reached its crest in Brazil at the time Francisca Julia was emerging from adolescence. She was little more than twenty when her first collection, _Marmores_, appeared in 1895, and it is common knowledge that she had been writing then for some six years for such organs as the _Estado de São Paulo_ (one of the most important, and the oldest, of Brazilian newspapers), the _Correio Paulistano_, the _Diario Popular_, the _Semana_. Between _Marmores_ and the next book, _Esphinges_, intervened some eight years. Late in 1920 she died, and perhaps the crown of her recognition--for her ability had been recognized with the publication of her first book--was the phrase from the speech by Umberto de Campos in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, on November 4th, several days after her burial. “If the Academy of Letters, upon its establishment, had permitted the entrance of women into its body,” declared the youngest of its members, “it would in this hour be mourning a vacant chair.”[3]
As her poetry was cold imagery of her ardent inner life, so are the titles of Francisca’s two books of verse symbols of her artistic aims. _Marmores_ and _Esphinges_: the first, the marble of the statue, external aspect of impassivity; the second, the silent sphinx, symbol of internal passionlessness. She was a vestal tending the eternal flame, but the fire was carved out of stone. Her artistic life traces a curve from religious serenity and impassability to compassion, thence to a sort of indifferentism. All this was inherent in her early paganism, to which in later life she really returns. Her mastery of form is, one feels, a mastery of her emotions; much of her poetry is impassive, chiefly _a fior di labbra_, as the Italians would say,--on the rim of her lips. Not that she is insincere. For, as there is a sincerity of candour, so is there a sincerity of silence. The sphinx, a poetic figure, cannot, from its very muteness, be a poet, though its speechlessness lends itself to poetry. Francisca Julia, however much she would be the sphinx, more than once gives the answers to her own questionings. It is then that she is most at one with her art, producing some of the finest poetry that has come out of modern Brazil.
Her _ars poetica_ is summed up in the two sonnets grouped under the title _Musa Impassivel_ (Impassive Muse) and serving as the motto of the collection _Marmores_.
I
Musa! um gesto siquer de dor ou de sincero Lucto, jamais te afeie o candido semblante! Deante de um Job, conserva o mesmo orgulho, deante De um morto, o mesmo olhar e sobrecenho austero.
Em teus olhos não quero a lagrima; não quero Em tua bocca o suave e idyllico descante. Celebra ora um phantasma anguiforma de Dante, Ora o vulto marcial de um guerreiro de Homero.
Dá-me o hemistichio de ouro, a imagem attractiva, A rima, cujo som, de uma harmonia crebra, Cante aos ouvidos d’alma; a estrophe limpa e viva;
Versos que lembrem, com os seus barbaros ruidos, Ora o aspero rumor de un calháo que se quebra, Ora o surdo rumor de marmores partidos.
II
O’ Musa, cujo olhar de pedra, que não chora, Gela o sorriso ao labio e as lagrimas estanca! Dá-me que eu vá comtigo, em liberdade franca, Por esse grande espaço onde o impassivel mora.
Leva-me longe, ó Musa impassivel e branca! Longe, acima do mundo, immensidade em fóra, Onde, chammas lançando ao cortejo da aurora, O aureo plaustro do sol nas nuvens solavanca.
Transporta-me de vez, numa ascenção ardente, A’ deliciosa paz dos Olympicos-Lares Onde os deuses pagãos vivem eternamente;
E onde, num longo olhar, eu possa ver comtigo Passarem, através das brumas seculares, Os Poetas e os Héroes do grande mundo antigo.[4]
This is genuine aristocracy of comportment; it is genuine attitude rather than absence of feeling. Note that the poet’s Muse is not to reveal the sign of her emotions lest they sully the beauty of her countenance; the emotions, however, are there, and tears, at times, fall from the stony eyes. Such emotion, in her finer work, is most artistically blended with the aloofness that Francisca Julia sought. Impassivity is a meaningless word for poets, since it cannot by very nature seek to express itself, being the antithesis of expression; withdrawal, however, is a legitimate artistic trait, and she exhibits it in as successful a degree as has been attained by any poet of her country. So much a part of her nature is her coyness, that even when conquered by feminine pity she conveys her mood through an imagery none the less effective for its indirection; as in _Dona Alda_:
Hoje Dona Alda madrugou. Ás costas Solta a opulenta cabelleira de ouro, Nos labios um sorriso de alegria, Vae passear ao jardim; as flores, postas Em longa fila, alegremente, em coro, Saúdam-n’a: “Bom dia!” Dona Alda segue … Segue-a uma andorinha: Com seus raios de luz o sol a banha; E Dona Alda caminha.… Uma porção de folhas a acompanha.… Caminha.… Como um fulgido brilhante O seu olhar fulgura. Mas--que cruel!--ao dar um passo adeante, Emquanto a barra do roupão sofralda, Pisa um cravo gentil de lactea alvura.… E este, sob os seus pés, inda murmura: “Obrigado, Dona Alda.”[5]
This is not poetry that shakes one to the depths, nor does it come from one who was so shaken; but there is artistry in ivory as well as in marble, and Francisca Julia here has caught the secret of the light touch that stirs the deep response.
There is a remarkable sonnet that opens the collection _Esphinges_, and I wonder whether it is not, in symbolized form, the keynote to the woman’s poetic aloofness.
Read for the first time the _Dança de Centauras_ (Dance of the Centaurs, and note that these centaurs are females); a sonnet of sculptural, plastic beauty, you are likely to tell yourself, as vivid as a bas-relief come suddenly to life. Read it again, more slowly, and its impassivity seems to melt into concrete emotion; this is virgin modesty hiding behind verse as at other times behind raiment. The poet herself is in the dance of the centaurs and leads them in their flight when Hercules appears. It is worth noting, too, that the poem does not reach its climax until the very last words are spoken; the wild rout is a mystery until the very end. Form and content thus truly become the unity that they are in the artist’s original conception.
DANÇA DE CENTAURAS
Patas dianteiras no ar, boccas livres dos freios, Núas, em grita, em ludo, entrecruzando as lanças, Eil-as, garbosas vêm, na evolução das danças Rudes, pompeando á luz a brancura dos seios.
A noite escuta, fulge o luar, gemem as franças, Mil centauras a rir, em lutas e torneios, Galopam livres, vão e veem, os peitos cheios De ar, o cabello solto ao léo das auras mansas.
Empallidece o luar, a noite cae, madruga.… A dança hyppica pára e logo atrôa o espaço O galope infernal das centauras em fuga:
E’ que, longe ao clarão do luar que impallidece, Enorme, acceso o olhar, bravo, do heróico braço Pendente a clava argiva, Hercules apparece.[6]
It is the twilight and the night that bring to her lines their more subjective moods; but even here, rarely do present emotions invade her. It is as if she must feel by indirection, even as she writes--now harking back to a longing, now looking forward unmoved, to the inevitable end. Yet there are moments when the impassive muse forgets her part; she strides down from her pedestal and cries out upon Nature as a “perfidious mother,” creator, in the long succession of days and nights, of so much vanity ever transforming itself. This Parnassianism then, is the mask of pride. And in such a sonnet as _Angelus_ the mask is thrown off:
Oft, at this hour, when my yearning speaks Through the lips of night and the droning chimes, Chanting ever of love whose grief o’erwhelms me, I would be the sound, the night, full madly drunk With darkness,--the quietude, yon melting cloud,-- Or merge with the light, dissolving altogether.
This pantheism is paralleled, in _Vidas Anteriores_ (Previous Lives) by her consciousness of having lived, in the past, a multiplicity of lives. It may be said, in general, that as a modern pagan she is far more real than as the rhyming Christian she reveals herself in her few attempts at religious poetry.
Shortly before her death she wrote a sonnet called _Esperança_ (Hope), that is clear presentiment. She did not weaken at its approach; she was, as near as is humanly possible, the impassive muse of her own sonnets:
I know it’s a kindly road and the journey’s brief.
Her didactic works, _Livro da Infancia_, published in 1899, consisting of prose and verse, and _Alma Infantil_, written in collaboration with Julio Cesar da Silva, 1912, for school use, do not belong to her major productions. It is significant of the status of the Brazilian text-book, as well as of the varied tasks thrown upon the shoulders of the educated in a continent where the major portion of the population has been thus far condemned to illiteracy, when we see how frequently even the major creative spirits of the country turn to the writing of text-books. Yesterday Olavo Bilac, fellow Parnassian of Francisca Julia, spared time for the labour; today Coelho Netto, Oliveira Lima, Monteiro Lobato do so. Again and again is one reminded what a sacrifice, what a luxury, is the creative life in a land that lacks anything like the creative audience. And how much better off are we, who are only on the threshold of a truly national literature?
* * * * *
It is not impossible that the fame of Francisca Julia da Silva will grow with the coming years. She will be recognized not only as a gifted woman who was one of the few to carry on, worthily, the difficult perfection of Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Theophile Gautier and their fellows, but as the equal, when at her best, of Brazil’s foremost Parnassians. There are not many sonnets in the poetry of Olavo Bilac, who so generously received her, to match the sheer artistry of her _Dance of the Centaurs_, her _Argonauts_, her _Impassive Muse_. Indeed, compare the _Impassive Muse_ with Bilac’s over-ardent _Profissão de Fe_ (Profession of Faith) and see whether the woman has not in the very words and images and tonality of the piece exhibited the inner and outer example of that Parnassianism which Bilac here expresses in words rather than attains in spirit. Bilac, as we have seen, was too passionate a nature not to warm all his statues to life; in Francisca, as João Ribeiro said in his preface to _Marmores_, we find “ecstasy rather than passion,”--a cold ecstasy, one might add, like the upper regions of the atmosphere, which, though flooded with the sunlight, are little warmed by its passage through them.
The same commentator suggests, as a possible reason for her acute auditive sense, the short-sightedness from which she suffered. Her poetry, indeed, is a hearing poetry, but a seeing one as well. The few superior pieces she has left are among the rare productions of Brazilian verse; they are, in that province, unsurpassed for their blend of the proportion that we usually call classic with that harmonious sensitivity which is supposedly the trait of refined modernity. If in art it is the individual rather than the literature that counts, and if in that individual’s labour it is only what we consider best that really matters, I should venture the seemingly rash statement that Francisca Julia da Silva is the equal, as a personality in verse, of Machado de Assis. He, too, was a cold poet, even as a Romantic, yet never attained the ecstasy of her salient pieces. He, too, was withdrawn, aloof, and might have signed such a poem as Francisca Julia’s _O Ribeirinho_ (The Streamlet), without any one being the wiser. Yet his aloofness--speaking solely of his work in verse--was on the whole lack of emotion, while hers is suppression, domination, transmutation of it. She can be as banal as Wordsworth, and has written in her _Inverno_ (Winter) probably two of the most prosaic lines of verse that Brazilian poetry knows:
Das quatro estaçoes de todas, O inverno é a peor, de certo.
Of all the four seasons Winter’s certainly the worst.
She committed her childhood indiscretions, as do we all, though in less abundance. At her best, however, (and neither is this too abundant) she should rank with the few Brazilian creators who have produced a charm that is sister to Keats’s eternal joy. She has no landscapes labelled native; her longing is no mere conventional _saudade_; she formed no preconceived notion of Brazilianism; she simply wrote, amidst her labours, some two or more score lines that cannot be omitted from any consideration of Brazilian poetry, because they enriched it with a rare, sincere artistry that may find appreciation wherever the language of men and women is beauty.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] These Tenth Muses are relatively common. In Portuguese letters, among others, there are Soror Violante do Ceo (1601-93) and Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda (1595-1644).
[2] Mr. Havelock Ellis, with his customary lucidity and serenity, discusses _The Mind of Woman_ (See _The Philosophy of Conflict_) in a manner to suggest fruitful pursuit of the problem that Verissimo poses. Had the Brazilian critic been more conversant with the newer poetry by women--I refer to increasing frankness rather than to increasing worth--he might have changed his mind as to the prohibitive influences of social custom. The next fifty years will probably witness some startling changes; among them some salutary ones.
[3] At least one Academician in Brazil has argued sensibly in favor of woman’s admission to that body.
[4] Muse! Let not ever even a gesture of grief or of sincere feeling spoil your serene countenance! Before a Job, preserve the same pride, before a corpse, the same gaze, the same austere brow. I would have no tears in your eyes; no soft, idyllic song upon your lips. Celebrate now the serpent-like phantasm of a Dante, now the martial figure of a Homeric warrior. Give me the hemistych of gold, the attractive image, rhyme whose sound, like a compact harmony, sings to the ears of the soul; the limpid, living strophe; verses that recall with their barbarous accents now the rasping noise of breaking flint, now the muffled sound of cracking marble.… Oh, Muse, whose stony eye that never weeps freezes the smile upon the lip and stanches the flow of tears! Let me go with you, in utter liberty, through those vast spaces where the Impassive dwells. Take me far, oh white impassive Muse! Far above the world into the immensity where, launching flames at the dawn’s procession, the golden wain of the sun swings through the clouds. Transport me in a flaming ascension, to the delicious peace of the Olympic-Hearth where the pagan gods dwell eternally; and where, in a long look, I may in your company watch pass by across the secular haze the poets and the heroes of the great ancient days.
[5] Dona Alda rose early today. Her rich tresses flowed loosely golden over her sides; on her lips a joyful smile; she goes for a walk in the garden. The flowers, ranged in a long row, gleefully in chorus salute her: “Good day!” Dona Alda continues.… A swallow follows her: the sun bathes her in his light; and Dona Alda walks on.… A whirl of leaves accompanies her.… She walks on.… Her glance glitters like a brilliant flash. But--how cruel!--as she steps forward, holding up the hem of her dress, she treads upon a tender carnation of lily whiteness.… Yet the flower, beneath her feet, still murmurs, “Oh, thank you so much, Dona Alda!”
[6] With their forefeet raised in the air, their mouths free of reins, naked, interlacing their lances as they shout in their play, here they come in all their beauty, tripping the mazes of their dance, rudely displaying to the light the whiteness of their breasts. The night hearkens, the moonlight shines, the tree-tops moan; a thousand she-centaurs, laughing, playing, struggling, gallop freely on, go and come, their bosoms filled with air, their tresses free to the blowing of the zephyrs. The moonlight pales, night falls, and now dawn comes.… The hyppic dance is stopped, and soon all space thunders with the mad dash of the centaurs in flight; for, from afar, in the light of the moon grown pale,--huge, with his eyes aflame, brave, with Argive club hanging from his heroic arm, Hercules has appeared.
X
MONTEIRO LOBATO
Among recent literary currents that present several interesting phases one should not overlook the nationalistic tendencies in Brazil, championed so ardently and with such immediate effect by the most active of the “new” spirits, Monteiro Lobato. Lobato is but little over thirty-five and has at hand for his purpose an influential publishing house in São Paulo; he is thus able to make himself heard and read as well as felt; he seems to be, in the intellectual sense of the word, a born propagandist; certainly he does not lack ink or courage and whatever one may think of his ideas, he makes highly entertaining and instructive reading. First and foremost he is the champion of the national personality. And by that same token he becomes the enemy of undue foreign influence upon the nation. As one reads his numerous short stories, his crisp and vigorous criticisms and his essays, one comes to the realization that, as far as Lobato is concerned, foreign influence is chiefly French and in large measure to be condemned.
The profound effect of French literature upon Spanish and Portuguese America is as undeniable as it is occasionally deleterious, but it is possible to overstate the case against the French influence in Brazil and, as one strikes in Lobato the same protest reiterated time and again, one begins to feel that he is somewhat afflicted with Gallophobia. Yet this is, after all, on his part, the over-emphasis of earnestness rather than an absolute error in values. He is not lacking in appreciation of the great Frenchmen; he does not seem to scorn the use, as epigraph to one of his children’s books, a quotation in French from Anatole France; he does not object to having some of his short stories mentioned in the same breath with de Maupassant and, above all, he recognizes the creative power of imitation, however paradoxical that may sound. “Let us agree,” he writes, in the preface to his stimulating collection of critiques, _Idéas de Jéca Tatú_, “that imitation is, in fact, the greatest of creative forces. He imitates who assimilates processes. Who copies, does not imitate; he steals. Who plagiarizes does not imitate, he apes.” The whole book he presents as “a war-cry in favor of personality.” At the bottom of Lobato’s nationalism is the one valid foundation of art: sincerity. If he occasionally overdoes his protest, he may well be forgiven for the sound basis of it; it is part of his own personality to see things in the primary colors, to play the national zealot not in any chauvinistic sense--he is no blind follower of the administrative powers, no nationalist in the ugly sense of cheap partisan drum-beating--but in the sense that true nationalism is the logical development of the fatherland’s potentialities. A personally independent fellow, then, who would achieve for his nation that same independence.
* * * * *
The beginning of the World War found Monteiro Lobato established upon a _fazenda_, far from the thoughts and centres of literature. It was by accident that he discovered his gifts as a writer. The story is told that one day, rendered indignant by the custom of setting fire to the fields for cleansing purposes, and thus endangering the bordering inhabitants, he sent a letter of protest to a large daily in São Paulo. It seems that the letter was too important, too well-written, too plainly indicative of natural literary talent, to be relegated to the corner where readers’ jeremiads usually wail, and that, instead, it was “featured” upon the first page. From that day the die was cast. The episode, in my opinion, is far more important than it appears. For, whatever form in which the man’s later writings are published, they are in a more important degree just what this initial venture was: a protest, a means of civic betterment, a national contribution. Turn this letter and its mood into a short story and you have, say, such a tale-message as _O Jardineiro Timotheo_, in which even a garden may be transformed into a mute, many-hued plea for the native flora; make politics of it, and you get such a genuinely humorous product as _A Modern Torture_, from that strange collection called _Urupês_. Indeed is not the piece _Urupês_ itself a critique and an exposition of the indigenous “cobrizo”?
* * * * *
It was with the collection _Urupês_ that Monteiro Lobato definitely established himself. In three years it has reached a sale that for Brazil is truly phenomenal: twenty thousand copies. It has been extravagantly praised by such divergent figures as the uncrowned laureate Olavo Bilac (who might have had more than a few words to say about legitimate French influence upon Brazilian poetry) and the imposing Ruy Barbosa, who instinctively recognized the fundamentally sociological value of Lobato’s labours. For of pure literature there is little in the young Saint-Paulist. I fear that, together with a similar group in Buenos Aires, he underestimates the esthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapoury spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely, is the criticism that may be made against him when his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality and when what was meant to be humour falls away to caricature. From which it may be gathered that Lobato writes--or rather reprints--too much; for plenty of good journalism should be left where it first appeared and not be sent forth between covers. Also, in an appreciable amount of his work, his execution lags behind his intention, owing in no small measure to a lack of self-discipline and an artistically unripe sincerity.
_Urupês_ was soon followed by _Idéas de Jéca Tatú_, his Jéca Tatú being a fisherman of Parahyba, a “cobrizo,” first introduced in the preceding book and symbolizing the inertia of the native. In the second book, however, the ideas are anything but those of inertia; Lobato has got into the skin of the fisherman and produced a series of admirable essays and critiques. Of similar nature are the chapters embodied in _Cidades Mortas_. _Negrinha_ is a collection of short stories. In addition to being the author of these books, he is the editor of a splendid magazine, _Revista do Brazil_, the publisher of volumes by the rising generation of literary redeemers, instructor to his nation in hygiene, and his energies flow over into yet other channels. He is also the writer of several books for children. The best known of these is _Narizinho Arrebitado_ or, as who should say _Little Snub-Nose_, and with an appropriate blush I confess that the little girl’s adventures among the flowers and creatures of her native land were responsible for the theft of some hours from the study of fatter, less childish, tomes. As one who would renovate the letters of his nation, Lobato naturally has much to say, inside of Brazil and outside, of the former and present figures of the country’s literature. His work in every phase is first of all an act of nationalism.
From the exclusive stylistic standpoint Lobato is terse, vigorous, intense, to the point. The chapters devoted to the creation of a style (in _Jéca Tatú_) form a valid plea for a genuinely autochthonous art, and it is instructive to see how he treats the question in its relation to architecture. Brazil has native flora, fauna and mythology which its writers are neglecting for the repetition of the hackneyed hosts of Hellas. (Yet Lobato nods betimes and sees the Laocoön in a gnarled tree.) He is an “anti-literary” writer, scorning the finer graces, yet, besides betraying acute consciousness of being a writer, he employs situations that have been overdone time and again, and worse still, in plots that are no more Brazilian than they are Magyar or Senegalese. Thus, in _O Bugio Moqueado_ we encounter a tale of a woman forced daily to eat a dish prepared by her vindictive husband from the slain body of her lover. It is characteristic that the Brazilian author heaps the horror generously, without at all adding to the effect of the theme as it appears in Greek mythology or in the lore of old Provence.
The truth would seem to be that at bottom Lobato is not a teller of stories but a critic of men. His vein is distinctly satiric, ironic; he has the gift of the caricaturist, and that is why so often his tales run either into sentimentality or into the macabrous. When he tells a tale of horror, it is not the uncannily graduated art of a Poe, but rather the thing itself that is horrible. His innate didactic tendency reveals itself not only in his frankly didactic labours, but in his habit of prefixing to his tales a philosophical, commentative prelude. Because he is a well-read, cosmopolitan person, his tales and comments often possess that worldly significance which no amount of regional outlook can wholly obscure; but because he is so intent upon sounding the national note he spoils much of his writing by stepping onto the pages in his own person.
At his best he suggests the arrival in Brazilian literature of a fresh, spontaneous, creative power. Tales like _A Modern Torture_ (in which a rural dabbler in politics, weary of his postal delivery “job,” turns traitor to the old party and helps elect the new, only to be “rewarded” with the same old “job”) are rare in any tongue and would not be out of place in a collection by Chekhov or Twain. Here is humour served by--and not in the service of--nation, nature and man. Similarly _Choo-Pan!_ with its humorous opening and gradual progress to the grim close, shows what can be done when a writer becomes the master and not the slave of indigenous legend. A comparison of this tale with a similar one, _The Tree That Kills_, may bring out the author’s weakness and his strength. In the first, under peculiar circumstances, a man meets his death through a tree that, according to native belief, avenges the hewing down of its fellow. In the second, the _Tree That Kills_ is explained as a sort of preface, then follows a tale of human beings in which a foster-child, like the _Tree That Kills_, eats his way into the love of a childless pair, only first to betray the husband and then, after wearying of the woman, to attempt her life as well. The first story, besides being well told, is made to appear intimately Brazilian; the death of the man, who is a sot and has so bungled his work that the structure was bound to topple over, is natural, and actual belief in the legend is unnecessary; it colours the tale and lends atmosphere. _The Tree That Kills_, on the other hand, is merely another tale of the domestic triangle, no more Brazilian than anything else, with a twist of retribution at the end that must have appealed to the preacher hidden in Lobato; the analogy of the foster-son to the tree is not an integral part of the tale; the story, in fact, is added to the explanation of the tree parasite and is itself parasitical.
Lobato’s attitude toward education may be gleaned from his child’s book _Little Snub-Nose_ and the epigraph from Anatole France. He wishes to cultivate the imagination rather than cram the intellect. And even in this second reader for public schools--refreshingly free of the “I-see-a-cat” method--one can catch now and then his intention of instructing and satirizing the elder population.
To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil--the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future--lies in the interior of the country. There he finds the genuine Brazilian, uncontaminated by the “esperanto of ideas and customs” characteristic of the centres that receive immigration from all over the world. There he discovers the raw material for the real national art, as distinguished from cities with their phantasmagoria of foreign importations. And for that art of the interior he has found the great precursor in Euclydes da Cunha--a truly remarkable writer upon whom the wandering Scot, Richard Cunninghame-Graham, drew abundantly, as we have seen, in his rare work upon that Brazilian mystic and fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro. “It was Euclydes da Cunha,” writes Lobato in his _Idéas de Jéca Tatú_, “who opened for us, in his _Sertões_, the gates to the interior of the country. The Frenchified Brazilian of the coast cities was astonished. Could there, then, be so many strong, heroic, unpublished, formidable things back there?… He revealed us to ourselves. We saw that Brazil isn’t São Paulo, with its Italian contingent, nor Rio, with its Portuguese. Art beheld new perspectives opened to it.”
* * * * *
To present a notion of Monteiro Lobato’s style and his general outlook, I shall confine myself to translating an excerpt or two from his most pithy volume, _Idéas de Jéca Tatú_.
One of the pivotal essays is that entitled _Esthetica Official_ (Official Esthetics). “The work of art,” it begins, “is indicated by its coefficient of temperament, color and life--the three values that produce its unity, deriving the one from man, the other from milieu, the third from the moment. Art that flees this tripod of categories and that has as its human-factor the _heimatlos_ person (the man of many countries brought into evidence by the war); that has as _terroir_ the world and as epoch all Time, will be a superb creation when volapuk rules over the globe: until then, no!
“Whence we derive a logical conclusion: the artist grows in proportion as he becomes nationalized. The work of art must reveal to the quickest glance its origin, just as the races denote their ethnological group through the individual type.”
Yet note how Lobato, for all his nationalism, in the very paragraph that opens his somewhat uncritical critique, employs a German word, soon followed by a French, and all this a few seconds before ridiculing volapuk! Not that this need necessarily vitiate his argument, which has, to my way of thinking, far stronger points against it. But it does serve to indicate, I believe, that the world has grown too small for the artificial insistence upon a nationalism in literature which only too often proves the disguise of our primitive, unreasoned loyalties. Lobato’s unconscious use of these foreign terms provided, at the very moment he was denying it, a proof of the interpenetration of alien cultures. He has, too strongly for art as we now understand it, the regional outlook; for him Brazil is not the Brazil that we know on the map, or know as a political entity; it is the interior. His very nationalism refers, in this aspect, to but part of his own nation, though, to be fair, it is his theory that sins more seriously than his practice.
“Nietzsche,” he says elsewhere in the book, “served here as a pollen. It is the mission of Nietzsche to fecundate whatever he touches. No one leaves him shaped in the uniformity of a certain mould; he leaves free, he leaves as _himself_. (The italics are Lobato’s.) His aphorism--_Vademecum? Vadetecum!_--is the kernel of a liberating philosophy. Would you follow me? Follow yourself!” Now this, allowing for the personal modifications Nietzsche himself concentrates into his crisp question and answer, is the attitude of an Ibsen, a Wagner; in the new world, of a Darío, of a Rodó, and of all true leaders, who would lead their followers to self-leadership. And once again Lobato answers himself with his own citations, for he himself, showing the effect of Nietzsche upon certain of the Brazilian writers--a liberating effect, and one which helped them to a realization of their own personalities--produces the most telling of arguments in favour of legitimate foreign influences.
His characteristic attitude of indignation crops out at every turn. In an essay upon _A Estatua do Patriarcha_, dedicated to the noble figure of José Bonifacio de Andrade, he gives a patient summary of the man’s achievements--as patient as his nervous manner and his trenchant language can accomplish. As he approaches his climax, he becomes almost telegraphic:
“He (that is, Bonifacio) works in the dark.
“His strength is faith.
“His arms, suggestion.
“His target, the cry of Ipiranga.
“The work that he is then accomplishing is too intense not to sweep aside all obstacles thrust in his path; his power of suggestion is too strong not to conquer the Prince Regent; his look too firm for the shot not to hit the bull’s eye.
“He conquered.
“The fatherland went into housekeeping for itself and it was he who ordered the arrangement of all the furniture and the standards of a free life.
“This is José Bonifacio’s zenith. He is the Washington of the South.[1]
“Less fortunate, however, than Washington, he afterwards sees the country take a direction that he foresaw was mistaken.
“He starts a struggle against the radical currents and against evil men.
“He loses the contest.…
“Brought to trial as a conspirator, he was absolved.
“He betook himself to the island of Paquetá and in 1838 died in the city of Nitheroy.
“There you have José Bonifacio.”
There, incidentally, you have Monteiro Lobato, in the quivering vigour of the phrase, in the emotional concentration. But all this has been but the preparation for Lobato’s final coup.
“José Bonifacio is, beyond dispute, the greatest figure in our history.
“Very well: this man was a Paulist, (i. e., a native of São Paulo). Born in Santos, in 1763. It is already a century since the Paulists were struck with the idea of rearing him a statue. Not that he needs the monument. In a most grandiose manner he reared one to himself in the countless scientific memoirs that he published in Europe, the greater part in German, never translated into his own tongue,--and in his fecund political action in favour of the _fiat_ of nationality.
“It is we who need the monument, for its absence covers us with shame and justifies the curse which from his place of exile he cast upon the evil persons of the day.…”
Now, Monteiro Lobato’s nationalism, as I try to show, is not the narrow cause that his theoretical writings would seem to indicate. It is, as I said at the beginning, really an evidence of his eagerness for the expansion of personality. But it is contaminated--and I believe that is the proper word--by an intense local pride which vents itself, upon occasion, as local scolding. The entire essay upon José Bonifacio was written for the sake of the final sting. Not so much to exalt the great figure as to glorify São Paulo and at the same time excoriate the forgetful, the negligent Paulistas. It is such writing as this that best reveals Lobato because it best expresses his central passion, which is not the cult of artistic beauty but the criticism of social failings.
This is at once a step backward and a step forward. Forward in the civic sense, because Brazil needs the unflattering testimony of its own more exigent sons and daughters,--and is Brazil alone in this need? Backward in the artistic sense, because it tends to a confusion of values. It vitiates, particularly in Lobato, the tales he tells until it is difficult to say whether the tale points a moral or the moral adorns the tale.
That Lobato is alive to the genuineness of legitimate foreign influence he himself shows as well as any critic can for him, in the essay upon _A Questão do Estylo_ (The Question of Style), in a succinct paragraph upon Olavo Bilac’s poem _O Caçador de Esmeraldas_. “The poet … when he composed The Emerald-Hunter, did not take from Corneille a single word, nor from Anatole a single conceit, nor a night from Musset, nor a cock from Rostand, nor frigidity from Leconte, nor an acanthus from Greece, nor a virtue from Rome. But, without wishing it, from the very fact that he was a modern open to all the winds that blow, he took from Corneille the purity of language, from Musset poesy, from Leconte elegance, from Greece the pure line, from Rome fortitude of soul--and with the ancient-rough he made the new-beautiful.”
But what, he asks, shall we say of a poem composed of ill-assimilated suggestions from without,--“in unskilled adaptations of foreign verses, and with types of all the races? The ‘qu’il mourût’ of Corneille in the mouth of a João Fernandez, who slays Ninon, mistress of the colonel José da Silva e Souza, consul of Honduras in Thibet, because an Egyptian fellah disagreed with Ibsen as to the action of Descartes in the battle of Charleroi?…”
Even such a mixture does Lobato discover in the architecture of latter-day São Paulo. But more to our present point: note how, as long as Lobato sticks to actual example, his nationalism is a reasoned, cautious application. As soon as he deserts fact for theory he steps into caricature; nor is it, perhaps, by mere coincidence that the longest essay in the book is upon Caricature in Brazil.
There can be no question as to the dynamic personality of this young man. There can be little question as to the wholesome influence he is wielding. Thus far, however, he is weakest when in his rôle as short-story writer--with the important exceptions we have noted--and strongest as a polemical critic. His personal gifts seem destined to make of him a propagandist of the ironical, satirical sort, with a marked inclination for caricature. One may safely hazard the opinion that he has not yet, in the creative sense--that of transforming reality, through imagination, into artistic life--found himself fully. He is much more than a promise; it is only that his fulfilment is not yet clearly defined.[2]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Another “Washington of the South,” according to some Spanish Americans, is Marshal Sucre Bolívar’s powerful associate. Bolívar himself has been compared to Washington, perhaps most illuminatingly by the notable Equatorian, Juan Montalvo, in his _Siete Tratados_.
[2] Some time after writing the article of which the above is an amplification, I received from Senhor Lobato a letter which is of sufficient importance to contemporary strivings in Brazil, and to the life and purpose of Lobato himself, to merit partial translation. I give the salient passages herewith:
“I was born on the 18th April, 1883, in Taubate, State of São Paulo, the son of parents who owned a coffee estate. I initiated my studies in that city and proceeded later to São Paulo, where I entered the department of Law, being graduated, like everybody else, as a Bachelor of Laws. Fond of literature, I read a great deal in my youth; my favourite authors were Kipling, Maupassant, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Wells, Dickens, Camillo Castello Branco, Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis … but I never let myself be dominated by any one. I like to see with my own eyes, smell with my own nose. All my work reveals this personal impression, almost always cruel, for, in my opinion, we are the remnant of a race approaching elimination. Brazil will be something in the future, but the man of today, the Luso-Africano-Indio will pass out of existence, absorbed and eliminated by other, stronger races … just as the primitive aborigine passed. Even as the Portuguese caused the disappearance of the Indian, so will the new races cause the disappearance of the hybrid Portuguese, whose rôle in Brazilian civilization is already fulfilled, having consisted of the vast labour of clearing the land by the destruction of the forests. The language will remain, gradually more and more modified by the influence of the new milieu, so different from the Lusitanian milieu.
“Brazil is an ailing country.” (In his pamphlet _Problema Vital_, Lobato studies this problem, indicating that man will be victorious over the tropical zone through the new arms of hygiene. The pamphlet caused a turmoil throughout Brazil, and sides were at once formed, the one considering Lobato a defamer of the nation, the other seeing in it an act of sanative patriotism. As a result, a national program of sanitation was inaugurated. This realism of approach, so characteristic of Lobato, made of his figure Jéca Tatú a national symbol that has in many minds replaced the idealized image of _Pery_, from Alencar’s _Guarany_. _Jéca_ thus stands for the most recent critical reaction against national romanticism.)
“I recognize now that I was cruel, but it was the only way of stirring opinion in that huge whale of most rudimentary nervous system which is my poor Brazil. I am not properly a literary man. I take no pleasure in writing, nor do I attach the slightest importance to what is called literary glory and similar follies. I am a particle of extremely sensitive conscience that adopted the literary form,--fiction, the conte, satire,--as the only means of being heard and heeded. I achieved my aim and today I devote myself to the publishing business, where I find a solid means of sustaining the great idea that in order to cure an ailing person he must first be convinced that he is, in fact, a sick man.”
Here, as elsewhere, Lobato’s theory is harsher than his practice. He is, of course, a literary man and has achieved a distinctive style; but he knows, as his letter hints, that his social strength is his literary weakness.
SELECTIVE CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
As the purpose of this book is largely introductory, the works listed below have been chosen carefully as a miniature critical library for the student. Numerous other volumes are mentioned in the footnotes of the text. I have not considered it necessary to include here a number of works that possess importance chiefly for the specialist.
FERDINAND DENIS. _Resumé de l’histoire littéraire du Portugal, suivi du Resumé de l’histoire littéraire du Brésil._ Paris, 1826.
The chapters upon Brazilian letters occupy pages 513 to 601 of this 16mo book. The French cleric, with a style inclining toward eloquence, makes highly pleasant reading, and the century that followed upon his work has borne out more than one of his expectations. He realized, thus early, the effect of the racial blend upon the imaginative output, indicating the African for ardour, the Portuguese for chivalry, the Indian native for dreaminess. As a resident upon the spot, he noted the several-month droughts which Buckle, much to Romero’s indignation, later failed to take into account. “America,” wrote Denis, “sparkling with youth, ought to think thoughts as new and energetic as itself; our literary glory cannot always illumine it with a light that grows dim on crossing the seas, and which should vanish completely before the primitive inspiration of a nation vibrant with energy.” Denis, in his prophetic strain, even predicted that America would some day visit Europe as Europe today visits Egypt, to witness the scenes of a departed civilization. In general, he favours a distinctive, national note. He is cursorily informative rather than critical, and susceptible to few aesthetic values.
FERDINAND WOLF. _Le Brésil Littéraire. Histoire de la littérature brésilienne suivie d’un choix de morceaux tires des meilleurs auteurs b(r)ésiliens._ Berlin, 1863.
The quarto volume is dedicated to the Emperor of Brazil. Wolf, of course, was a German; the book was translated into French at the publisher’s request, in order to reach a larger audience. Its author regarded it as “the first and only one to appear in Europe on the subject.” Since Denis’s treatment forms a sort of appendix to his Portuguese section, Wolf’s statement, understood as referring to an independent volume upon Brazil, may be allowed to pass. The book is chiefly one of facts and analyses of works. Of criticism in the higher sense there is little, and what there is, is of the conventional sort. There is a moral, anti-French outlook; a Teutonic preoccupation with data; no glimmer of aesthetic criticism. Wolf’s style is far from the amenable style of Denis.
FRANCISCO ADOLPHO DE VARNHAGEN. _Florilegio da Poesia Brasileira._ (Vols. I and II, Lisbon, 1850. Vol. III, Madrid, 1853.)
It is the _Introduction_ preceding the first volume of these noted selections, together with the prefatory notes to the selections themselves, that virtually begins the writing of Brazilian literary history. Without this work Ferdinand Wolf could not have written his _Le Brésil Littéraire_. All later investigators and critics have really built upon Varnhagen’s foundations, tearing a stone away here and there and substituting another, but leaving the structure fundamentally the same.
SYLVIO ROMERO. _Historia da Litteratura Brasileira. 2a edição, melhorada pelo auctor._ Rio Vol. I, 1902, Vol. II, 1903.
Romero is one of the most picturesque literary figures of the nineteenth century. He was a born fighter, with all the traits of the ardent polemist. Throughout a lifetime that was rife with self-contradiction, self-repetition, and self-glorification, he fought for Brazilian independence in the literary, scientific and political fields. He was by no means blind to esthetic beauty, but he insisted overmuch upon the national element and was easily lost in fogs of irrelevancy. He was a great admirer of German methods, and--justly, to my way of thinking--a believer in Anglo-German culture as a complement to Latin. As his life sought to cover almost every field of intellectual activity, so does his History of Brazilian Literature, which was left incompleted, seek to cover altogether too much ground. His book might more properly have been named a history of Brazilian culture. Such, indeed, was his conception of literature, which to him, as he states in his very first chapter, possessed “the amplitude given to it by the critics and historians of Germany. It comprises all the manifestations of a people’s intelligence:--politics, economics, art, popular creations, sciences … and not, as was wont to be supposed, in Brazil, only those entitled _belles lettres_, which finally came to mean almost exclusively _poetry_!…” A knowledge of this important work--important despite the list of objections that might be raised against it--is indispensable to the student.
SYLVIO ROMERO and JOAO RIBEIRO. _Compendia da Literatura Brasileira._ 2a edição refundida. Rio, 1909.
A useful compendium and condensation. The authors here consider art “a chapter of sociology,” laying down a belief in the “consciousness of the identity of human destinies,” which is, “in our opinion, the basis of all sociology and morality.”
JOSÉ VERISSIMO. _Estudos de Literatura Brazileira._ Six series, published at Rio de Janeiro and Paris, between 1901 and 1910. These largely formed the basis for his _Historia da Literatura Brazileira_, Rio, 1916.
Verissimo, in my opinion, is the leading critic of letters Brazil has thus far produced, and one of the country’s greatest minds. His whole life was a beautiful attitude,--a serene, usually unruffled spirit open to anything that proceeded from creative sincerity. He is, as I have tried to show in the text, the spiritual opposite of Romero. If the student has time only for a limited reading of Brazilian criticism, he should approach Verissimo before he goes any farther. Verissimo had learned, or perhaps had been born with, the secret that beauty owed allegiance to no flag; he was not bogged, as was Romero so often, by extraneous loyalties; he erected no pompous structures of “scientificist” criticism. He was, what every significant critic must be, an artist.
RONALD DE CARVALHO. _Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira._ Rio, 1919, 1922. The book was awarded a prize by the Brazilian Academy--as was the same author’s book of poetry _Poemas e Sonetos_--and appeared later in a revised, augmented edition. De Carvalho is a brilliant young man on the sunny side of thirty. His book--as, for that matter, every other recent one upon the subject--is under great debts to Romero and Verissimo, but it reveals an independent personality and an agreeably cosmopolitan conception of literature.
For the facts--as distinguished from opinions--in my own book I have relied largely upon the works of Romero, Verissimo, Lima and Carvalho. The number of lesser books that may be read is far greater than their individual worth. I would suggest, merely as a starting-point for more individual delving, such informative books as the following:
VICTOR ORBAN. _Le Brésil Litteraire._ Paris, no date. An anthology with many illustrations of authors.
M. GARCIA MEROU. _El Brasil Intelectual._ A highly diverting account by an Argentine who was once Minister to the United States.
ENRIQUE BUSTAMANTE Y BALLIVIAN. _Poetas Brasileros._ Rio, 1922. A translation into Spanish of a number of poems representing the various movements since (and including) Romanticism. Bustamante is a Peruvian poet of worth and has added short notes to his selections.
LIVRO DO CENTENARIO. Rio, 1900. As part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Brazil’s discovery, the government has sponsored the publication of four tomes, which covered the culture of the nation.