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BRAZILIAN 

LITERATURE

BOOKS BY ISAAC GOLDBERG 

STUDIES IN SPANISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE 

THE DRAMA OF TRANSITION 

BRAZILIAN LITERATURE

BRAZILIAN 

LITERATURE 

ISAAC GOLDBERG, Ph.D. 

Pff9^// 

WITH A FOREWORD BY 

J. D. M. FORD ' ^^ 

Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages, Harvard University 

NEW YORK ALFRED • 

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KNOPF 

MCMXXII

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COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 

ALFRED A. I^JSTOPF, Inc. 

Published, September, 1922 

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get «p ond printed 61/ tfte Foil-BoHou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. 

Paper supplied by W. F. Etherington £ Co., New York, N. Y. 

Bound by the H. WoW Estate, New York, N. Y. 

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO 

BURTON KLINE 

of the Philadelphia Public Ledger 

Dear Burton: 

You were, some eight years ago, my 

guide into the thorny mazes of Journalism, 

and printed, in the Boston Evening Tran- 

script, my first articles upon Spanish and 

Portuguese American letters. This is but 

a small return for the friendship since then 

established. 

I. G.

FOREWORD 

Brazil is preparing to commemorate worthily the cen- 

tenary of her independence. The world outside is bidden 

to the feast, and to beautiful Rio de Janeiro many 

nations are sending their envoys with felicitations and 

gifts. Our own country, the United States of North 

America, is mindful of her duty and her privilege on 

this occasion, and accredited delegates are bearing her 

congratulations to her ever-faithful associate in the promoting 

of peace and fraternity throughout the Western 

Hemisphere. Perhaps it will not be taken amiss, if the 

scholar and critic add his testimonial to the expressions 

of good-will coming from all sides. What more fit- 

ting than that a scholar and critic of our United States 

should join the chorus and voice an honest appreciation 

of Brazilian letters? 

Dr. Goldberg, who has already paid ample tribute to 

the literary output of Spanish-speaking America, gives 

proof now of the catholicity of his interest by surveying 

the whole course of literature in Portuguese-speaking 

America, the vast land of Brazil, and by analyzing the 

compositions of certain outstanding figures among the 

writers of the region. He knows at first hand the au- 

thors and the works that he treats; he knows what nat- 

ive and foreign critics have to say about them; he expresses 

unreservedly his own opinion about them. He 

gives praise where praise is due, and, in kindly fashion, 

he puts stricture upon that which calls for stricture. 

On the whole, his pages contain more laudation than 

vii

viii FOEEWOED 

censure; and this is as it should be, for very many of the 

literary achievements of colonial, imperial and republican 

Brazil are unquestionably of lasting worth. His lauda- 

tion, moreover, is uttered without any tinge of that condescension 

which European critics deem it incumbent upon 

them to manifest when they pass judgment on the culture 

of North or South America. 

To his fellow-citizens of the United States of North 

America Dr. Goldberg now presents an opportunity of 

viewing aspects of the soul of a noble Southern land, 

their constant ally. Brazil's political and commercial importance 

they know well, but her literary significance 

has not been so evident to them. If, reading his words, 

they conceive respect for Brazilian effort and accomplishment 

in the world of letters, his reward will be truly 

great; and that reward is truly deserved. 

J. 

D. M. Ford.

PREFACE 

The plans for this book, as well as for my Studies 

in Spanish-American Literature, were conceived during 

the years 1910-1912 while I was engaged in research 

work under Professor J. D. M. Ford, head of the Department 

of Romance Languages, Harvard Univer- 

sity. It was not merely that text-books were lacking 

in both the Spanish-American and the Brazilian fields, for 

my interest is centred upon aesthetic pleasure rather 

than upon the depersonalized transmission of facts. A 

yawning gap of ignorance separated us then from the 

America that does not speak English, nor was the ig- 

norance all on our side. Commercial opportunities, 

more than cultural curiosity, served to impart an im- 

petus to the study of Spanish and soon we were reading 

fiction not only from Spain but from Spanish America. 

In so far as the mercantile spirit was responsible for this 

broader literary interest, it performed an undoubted 

service to art by widening our horizons, but one should 

be wary about overestimating the permanent gain. Un- 

fortunately, the phonographic iteration of diplomatic 

platitudes brings continents no nearer, unless it be for 

the mad purposes of war. If, then, we are, as a people, 

quite as far as ever from Spanish America, what shall 

we say of our spiritual distance from the United States 

of Brazil? 

I may be pardoned if I indicate, for example, that 

the language of Brazil is not Spanish, but Portuguese. 

is

X 

PREFACE 

And should this simple fact come as a surprise to any 

reader, let him not be unduly overwhelmed, for he errs 

in distinguished company. Thus, Gustave Le Bon, 

he of crowd-psychology fame, speaks of South America 

in his Lois psychologiques des peuples (p. 131, 12th 

ed., 19 16) as being predominantly of Spanish origin, 

divided into numerous republics, of which the Brazilian 

is one. As late as 1899, Vacher de Lapouge, in his 

book on UAryen could describe Brazil as a "vast negro 

state returning to a state of savagery," important, like 

Mexico, only in a numerical way.* A small return, it 

seems, for Brazil's intellectual adherence to France, yet 

indicative of inexcusable ignorance not only of Brazil, 

but of Mexico, where the cultural life, though concentrated, 

is intense and productive of results that would 

repay examination. By 1899 Brazil had already pro- 

duced a fairly respectable array of original creative 

writers, while Mexican poetry was adding to the wealth 

of new Spanish verse. Where specialists stray, then, 

who shall guide the innocent layman? Nor are the 

Brazilians without their case against the English, as we 

shall presently note in the discussion of a mooted sec- 

tion of Buckle's History of Civilization in England, 

though they owe to more than one earlier Englishman 

a history of their land. Robert Southey, for not- 

able example, after the collapse of the "pantisocratic" 

plans harboured by him and Coleridge, found the time to 

write a History of Brazil that is read today only somewhat 

less frequently than his poetry. 

*I take these examples from Senhor De Carvalho. Students of Bra- 

zilian letters will not find it difficult to multiply instances from their 

personal experience with educated friends. 

—

PREFACE XI 

The history of Brazil, like Caesar's unforgettable 

Gaul, is generally divided into three parts: (i) from 

the discovery by the Portuguese in 1500 to the Inde- 

pendence in 1822; (2) the independent monarchy, which 

lasted until 1889; (3) 

the republic, 1889 to the present. 

This, then, is the centenary year of Brazilian independ- 

ence and, as no English book has yet sought to trace the 

literary history of the nation, the occasion seems pro- 

pitious for such a modest introductory one as this. 

.The fuller volume which it precedes I hope to have ready 

in a few years, as a contribution to the study of the 

creative imagination on this side of the Atlantic. 

If, in any part, I seem dogmatic, I can but plead the 

exigencies of space, which permit of little analytic dis- 

cussion. I am no believer in clear-cut formulas as ap- 

plied to art; where facts are presented, they are given 

as succinctly as possible, while opinions are meant to 

be suggestive rather than—ugly word!—definitive. 

The first part of the book is devoted to an outline history 

of Brazilian literature; this is meant to provide the 

background for a proper appreciation of the representa- 

tive figures treated in the second part. Since the first 

part deals largely with facts, I have aimed to give the 

reader not solely a personal view—which belongs 

more properly among the essays of the second—but 

also a digest of the few authorities that have treated 

the subject. It thus forms a reasonably adequate in- 

troduction to the deeper study of Brazilian literature 

that may some day interest a portion of our student 

body, and will, moreover, be of aid in rounding out 

the sharp corners of a general knowledge of letters. 

More important still, it should help to an appreciation

xli PREFACE 

of the Brazilian national personality. As to the repre- 

sentative figures chosen for more Individual treatment, 

through one trait or another they emerge from the background 

as Brazil's contributions to something more than 

an exclusively national Interest, or else afford striking 

opportunity for studying phases of the national mind. 

Though none of the text as it here appears has been 

printed elsewhere, some of the matter has formed the 

substance of articles that have been published, between 

19 14 and the present, In the Boston Evening Transcript, 

the Christian Science Monitor, the Literary Review of 

the New York Evening Post, the Nezv York Times, 

the Bookman, the Stratford Journal and other period- 

icals, to the management and editors of which I am in- 

debted not only for permission to reprint, but for their 

readiness to accept such exotic material. For biblio- 

graphical aid and other favours I am also thankful to the 

Brazilian Academy of Letters, Carlos de Laet, President; 

to Manoel de Oliveira Lima, of the Brazilian Academy; 

Gllberto Freyre; C. J. Babcock, Librarian of the Colum- 

bus Memorial Library, Washington, D. C; C. K. Jones; 

Prof. H. R. Lang, Yale; Dr. A. C. Potter and the Harvard 

Library; to Sr. Hello Lobo, Consul General in New 

York for Brazil; and to my friend Professor J. D. M. 

Ford of Harvard. For the Index I am indebted to my 

wife. 

Roxbury, Massachusetts, 

Isaac Goldberg.

CONTENTS 

FOREWORD BY J. D. M. FORD vii 

PREFACE ix 

PART ONE 

AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF BRAZILIAN LITERA- 

TURE 

I Introductory—The Milieu and the Racial 

Blend—Portuguese Tradition, African 

AND Native Contribution—Linguistic 

Modification—Nationalism and Literature—Problems 

of the Future—Phases 

of Brazilian Literature 3 

II Period of Formation (1500-1750) 28 

III Autonomous Development (1750-1830) 53 

IV Romantic Transformation (1830-1870) 72 

V Critical, Naturalist Reaction, (1870-1900) 

Parnassians, Symbolists, etc. 102 

PART TWO 

REPRESENTATIVE PERSONALITIES 

I Castro Alves 129 

II Machado de Assis 142 

III Jose Verissimo 165 

IV Olavo Bilac 188 

V Euclydes da Cunha 210 

xiii

xlv CONTENTS 

VI Oliveira Lima 222 

VII Graâ Aranha 234 

VIII CoELHo Netto 248 

IX Francisca Julia 261 

X The Newer Writers 227 

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 293 

INDEX 299

PART ONE 

AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF BRAZILIAN 

LITERATURE

I 

INTRODUCTORY 

The Milieu and the Racial Blend—Portuguese Tradition, African 

and Native Contributions—Linguistic Modification—Na- 

tionalism and Literature—Problems of the Future—Phases of 

Brazilian Literature. 

ALTHOUGH 

Brazil was not discovered until the 

opening year of the sixteenth century, the name 

had long hovered in the mediaeval conscious- 

ness together with that of those other mysterious 

islands which peopled the maps and the Imaginations 

of the dark, fantastic days. Down from the Greeks 

had come the legend of an Atlantis, which, through 

the centuries assumed changing shapes, losing soon 

its status as continent and becoming an Island. Thus, 

In a map of the Atlas Medicis, dating back to 

135 1, there Is registered a Brazil. The name varied 

from Braclr, Brazil, Brazylle to O'Brasile, and the 

position shifted with equal Instability; now the mythical 

island was near the Azores, now near the western coast 

of the British Isles. Charles Squire, In his The Mythol- 

ogy of the British Islands,^ relates that according to leg- 

end, the gods having lost their celestial dwelling, delib- 

erated upon some earthly substitute. Into their dis- 

cussion came a paradise beyond the sea,—a western Island 

variously described as a land of promise, of felicity and 

1 London, 1905. Page 113.

4 

BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

of youth, and as the "island of Breasal" or "Hy-Brea- 

sail." It is supposed that some of the early discoverers, 

imagining that they had come upon the island Eden, 

named it Brazil in much the same way that Columbus 

named the Indies, considering his quest for India at last 

successful. 

However this may be, the first name officially given to 

Brazil was The Land of the True (or Holy) Cross; only 

later did the name Brazil, said to have been bestowed 

by King Emanuel of Portugal, replace the pious title. 

There is something symbolic in the change ; brazil ^ is 

the name of the reddish dyewood which became so im- 

portant commercially that it caused naval combats and 

Portuguese-French rivalry, leading to the effective occu- 

pation of the land by the Portuguese. The beam of the 

cross yielded to a humbler wood as the national designa- 

tion, just as the pious pretensions of the early colonizers 

quickly vanished before their impious greed. 

The early reports of the newly discovered land lived 

up to the paradisical visions that had partly inspired the 

quest. Truly here was a land of promise, a terrestrial 

paradise that made men dip their pens in milk and 

honey when they wrote of its wonders. Vaz de Ca- 

minha, in what has been called the nation's "baptismal 

certificate," grew rhapsodical in vain; Vespucci,—he for 

whom the American continent was named,—actually 

termed it an earthly paradise, but the Portuguese were 

slow to value the new possession; the cross was not a 

cross of gold. Nobrega, in 1549, exaggerated the extent 

of the new discovery even as others were to exaggerate 

the variety and magic of its fauna and flora; he consid- 

2 Cf. Spanish and Portuguese brasa, a live coal. 

Also, English brazier.

INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS 5 

ered that it occupied no less than two-thirds of the 

world's area. Padre Anchieta, the noble leader of the 

Jesuits, repeated (1585) Vespucci's glorification and 

thought the new land not inferior to Portugal, and thus 

ran the litany of adoration from the topographical pen 

of Gabriel Soares to the chronicler Cardim, to the pom- 

pous Rocha Pitta, and—now with realistic modifications 

aplenty—down to our own day, when Graga Aranha, by 

the very title of his novel Chanaan, reveals his conception 

of his native country as the Land of Promise. From 

the very beginning the new discovery had captivated the 

imaginations of the Europeans; to this day its chief 

quality is the imagination which Senhor Aranha, in a 

speech at the Sorbonne (19 13) has distinguished 

from the imagination of other peoples. "In Brazil," he 

explained, "the collective trait is the imagination. It 

is not the faculty of idealization, nor the creation of life 

through esthetic expression, nor the predominance of 

thought; it is rather the illusion that comes from the 

representation of the universe, the state of magic, in 

which reality is dissipated and is transformed into an 

image. . . . The 

distant roots of this imagination may 

be found in the souls of the various races that met amidst 

the lavishness of tropical nature. Each people brought 

to the fusion its own melancholy. Each, having arrived 

with a spirit full of the terror of several gods, with the 

anguish of memories of a past forever lost, was possessed 

by the indefinable uneasiness of the foreign land. Thus 

was developed that implacable sensibility which magnifies 

and distorts things, which alternately exalts and depresses 

the spirits, which translates anxieties and desires; a 

troubled source of poetry and religion, through which

6 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

we aspire to the possession of the Infinite, only to lose 

ourselves at once In the Nirvana of Inaction and daydreaming." 

Benedlcto Costa ^ has likened this same 

imagination to the Brazilian forest, with Its "disorder and 

opulence. Its vigour and languor; trees that last for cen- 

turies and flowers that bloom but a few moments; lianas 

that live upon the sap of other growths; the brilliancy of 

orchids, the voices of birds of Iridescent coloration, the 

heat. . . . There Is In the soul of every Brazilian the 

same contrasts that characterize the tropical forest." "* 

Brazil, however. Is not all forest any more than. In- 

tellectually, it Is all tropical confusion. There are 

mountains and valleys and extensive coasts, and each 

region has a distinguishing Influence upon the inhabitant. 

Thus the chmate of the sertao ^ (Interior highlands) Is 

less variable and far more salubrious than that of the 

littoral. "Man here represents perfectly the traits of 

3Le Roman au Bresil. Paris, 1918. 

4 Sylvio Romero (See Lltteratura Contemporanea, Rio de Janeiro, no 

date, pages 45-46, chapter upon the poet Luiz Murat) refers in char- 

acteristic fashion to the Brazilian habit of overstating the case of the 

native imagination. There is no audacious flight, he declares; no soaring 

of eagles and condors. "Whether we examine the popular litera- 

ture or the cultured, we find overwhelming proof of this assertion. 

Our popular novels and anonymous songs are scant in plot, ingenious 

imaginings, marvelous imagery, which are so common in their Slavic, 

Celtic, Greek and Germanic congeners. And the contribution brought 

by the negroes and indigenous tribes are even poorer than the part 

that came to us from the Portuguese. Cultivated literature . . . is even 

inferior to the popular productions from the standpoint of the imagina- 

tion. . . . Our 

imagination, which is of simply decorative type, is the 

imagination of lyric spirits, of the sweet, monodic poetry of new souls 

and young peoples." 

^Sertao. iLkerally, interior, midland part. It refers here to the 

plateau of the Brazilian interior. In the opening pages of his excellent 

A Brazilian Mystic, R. B. Cunninghame-Graham suggests as a periphrasis, 

"wooded, back-lying highlands." The German hinterland conveys 

something of the idea.


the surroundings into which he is born and where he 

dwells: the sertanejo (i. e., the inhabitant of the sertao) 

is sombre, thin, mistrustful and superstitious, rarely- 

aggressive, rash in his impulses, as silent as the vast 

plains that surround him, calm in gesture, laconic in 

speech, and, above all, sunk in an inexpressible melan- 

choly that is in his eyes, in his mysterious countenance, in 

all the rough curves of his agile body, which is rather 

slender than muscular. The man of the coast is nervous, 

of acute sensibility; he can smile and laugh, he has a 

brilliant imagination and is a boisterous, turbulent 

thinker; he is an artist, preferring colored images to 

abstract ideas; he is slender, of well-proportioned lines, 

speaks at his best when improvising, discusses affairs with 

the utmost ease, and at times with daring, and generally 

respects only his own opinions; he is almost always 

proud and bold. The man of the sertao, for example, 

is Euclydes da Cunha; the man of the coast, Joaquim 

Nabuco." « 

It is in connection with the climate of Brazil that her 

writers have taken Henry Thomas Buckle to task; the 

passages responsible for the trouble occur in Chapter II 

of the famous History of Civilization in England, wherein 

the investigator considers the "influence exercised by 

physical laws over the organization of society and over 

the character of individuals." I quote the original passages 

from Buckle, and give the refutation, which was 

originally made by the indefatigable polemist Sylvio 

Romero. 

SRonaldo de Carvalho. Peqtiena Historia da Literatura Brasileira. 

Rio de Janeiro, 1919. Pp. 13-14- For Euclydes da Cunha, see the special 

chapter devoted to him in part two. Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) 

was a distinguished publicist and writer, born in Pernambuco. In 1905 

he was ambassador to the United States.


The trade wind, blowing on the eastern coast of South America, 

and proceeding from the east, crosses the Atlantic ocean, and 

therefore reaches the land charged with the vapours accumulated 

in its passage. These vapours, on touching the shore, are, at 

periodical intervals, condensed into rain ; and as their progress 

westward is checked by that gigantic chain of the Andes, which 

they are unable to pass, they pour the whole of their moisture on 

Brazil, which, in consequence, is often deluged by the most de- 

structive torrents. This abundant supply, being aided by that 

vast river-system peculiar to the eastern part of America, and 

being also accompanied by heat, has also stimulated the soil into 

an activity unequalled in any other part of the world. Brazil, 

which is nearly as large as the whole of Europe, is covered with a 

vegetation of incredible profusion. Indeed, so rank.and luxuriant 

is the growth, that Nature seems to riot in the very wantonness 

of its power , . . Such is the flow and abundance of life by which 

Brazil is marked above ail other countries of the earth. But, 

amid this pomp and splendour of Nature, no place is left for Man. 

He is reduced to insignificance by the majesty with which he is 

surrounded. The forces that oppose him are so formidable, that 

he has never been able to make head against them, never able to 

rally against their accumulated pressure. The whole of Brazil, 

notwithstanding its immense apparent advantages, has always 

remained entirely uncivilized, its inhabitants, wandering savages, 

incompetent to resist these obstacles which the very bounty of 

Nature had put in their way. . . . The mountains are too high 

to scale, the rivers are too wide to bridge ; everything is contrived 

to keep back the human mind, and repress its rising ambition. 

It is thus that the energies of Nature have hampered the spirit of 

Man. Nowhere else is there so painful a contrast between the 

grandeur of the external world and the littleness of the internal. 

And the mind, cowed by this unequal struggle, has not only been 

unable to advance, but without foreign aid it would undoubtedly 

have receded. For even at present, with all the improvements 

constantly introduced from Europe, there are no real signs of


progress. . . . These considerations explain why it is, that in the 

whole of Brazil there are no monuments even of the most imperfect 

civilization ; 

no evidence that the people had, at any period, raised 

themselves above the state in which they were found when their 

country was first discovered. 

In his Historia da Litteratura Brasileira, "^ Romero 

de- 

votes his third chapter to setting Buckle right. Brazil, 

he declares, far from suffering excessive rainfall, is subject 

to calamitous and destructive droughts. The Eng- 

lishman, who never visited Brazil, errs likewise in his 

conception of the country's natural wonders, which he 

exaggerates in the traditional fashion that was handed 

down by the earliest comers. Despite the presence of 

the Amazon, the rivers in general are small, not the 

largest in the world; the mountains, similarly, far from 

rearing their crests into unattainable cloudy heights, are 

"of the fourth and fifth order when compared with their 

fellows of the old world or the new. Neither are the 

animals in Brazil more gigantic and ferocious than else- 

where. "Our fauna," writes Romero, "is neither the 

richest nor the most terrible in the world. We haven't 

the elephant, the camel, the hippopotamus, the lion, the 

tiger, the rhinoceros, the zebra, the giraffe, the buffalo, 

the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the condor and the eagle." 

Buckle speaks of Brazil's unrivalled fertility as an im- 

pediment; the truth is that her fertility is not unrivalled, 

nor is it an impediment. In conclusion, "Buckle is right 

in the picture he draws of our backwardness, but wrong 

in the determination of its causes." According to 

Romero, three chief reasons are to be adduced; these are 

(i) natural, (2) ethnic and (3) moral. To the first 

^ Rio. 1902. (2a Edigao, melhorada pelo auctor.)

lo BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

belongs the excessive heat, in conjunction with the 

droughts in the major part of the country, as well as the 

malignant fevers prevalent on the coast. Chief among 

the second is the "relative incapacity" of the three 

races that comprise the population. To the last be- 

long the "historic factors called politics, legislation, 

habits, customs, which are effects that afterward act 

as causes." 

Ronaldo de Carvalho ^ 'considers Romero's reply 

somewhat timid, inasmuch as he accepts, erroneously, 

many of Buckle's conclusions. Buckle's passage "is not, 

as it appeared to the illustrious Brazilian writer, 'true in 

a general sense.' Yet it should 'be meditated upon by 

all Brazilians', that they may see what a dangerous snare 

it is to rely so much, in our inveterate fondness for 

things foreign, upon the notions imported from the 

intellectual markets on the other side of the Atlan- 

tic. . . . Buckle's error consisted in considering the 

evolution of peoples solely under the influence of physical 

and geographical factors; more enduring than these are 

the ethnico-historical factors, which are much more important 

and far more powerful than the first." Dc 

Carvalho adds little to Romero's refutation, which. In 

substance, he repeats. At the time that Buckle's first 

volume was originally published (1857), BrazIHan literature 

had long entered upon an autonomous career 

and was In the throes of Romanticism, which in Brazil 

was an era of intense and highly fruitful production. 

He can hardly be blamed for his ignorance on this score, 

when an authority like Ferdinand Wolf, writing his Le 

Bresil Litteraire some six years later, is accused by the 

8 Op. Cit. 16-17.

INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS ii 

querulous Romero of setting down many laughable ex- 

aggerations. 

II 

Three ethnic strains have combined to produce the 

Brazilian of today: (i) the Portuguese, (2) the native 

Indian, (3) the African Negro, who was brought in as a 

slave by the Portuguese. 

The native element, known as the Brazilian-Guarany, 

at the time of the discovery knew no metals; they pos- 

sessed a rudimentary knowledge of weaving, and some of 

them practised ceramics; their instruments were of pol- 

ished stone, and their fishing and hunting implements 

were of the most primitive. The form of organization 

was rough. "Some spoke a rich language of delicate ac- 

cents and varied expression; they had traditional cus- 

toms and were skilful in the arts of war and peace; 

others, however, were coarse, deficient in culture, roam- 

ing in nomadic bands along the coast or amidst the high 

sertoes. Some respected certain rules of morality and 

religion, in which, for example, the family ties were 

sacred. . . ." '^ Others dwelt in a certain "embryonic 

socialism" which permitted free love and the participa- 

tion of woman in masculine pursuits. Ethnologists are 

not agreed upon the religious status of the tribes, hover- 

ing between the hypotheses of polytheism and anthropo- 

morphic animism; the latter is more likely. 

The Portuguese came at the height of their national 

glory. The sixteenth century, famed among them for 

its physical prowess, is also the epoch of Camoes, Sa da 

Miranda, Bernardim Ribeiro and Gil Vicente. As to 

9De Carvalho. Op. Cit. P. 27.


the Negro, his history in Brazil is much the same as that 

of the blacli slave in the United States, except that, 

owing to the proportions of interbreeding, ihe "color 

line" is less tightly drawn in the southern republic. 

Two chief ethnic periods of formation have been dis- 

tinguished in Brazil's development, the first from the 

XVIth century to the end of the XVIIIth; the second, 

from the opening of the XlXth century to the present 

day. In the first period there was, chiefly, a crossing of 

the Portuguese with the Indian (mameluco) , 

of the Por- 

tuguese with the Negro (miilato) and of the Indian 

with the Negro (cafuso). Later interbreeding becomes 

more complex, owing to the influx of new immigrants 

from Europe (Italians and Germans in particular, 

and Slavs in the south), and to the abolition of black 

slavery. So that the question has arisen whether the fu- 

ture of the land will be in the hands of the Luso-Brazilian 

or the Teuto-Italo-Brazilian. Brazilians naturally favour 

the former eventuality and in order to insure dominance 

by the Portuguese-Brazilian element propose new 

systems of colonization as well as immigration zones. 

Romero reached the conclusion that the Brazilian people 

did not constitute a race, but rather a fusion. As to 

whether this was a good or an evil he answered, in 

his "sclentlficlst" way, that it was a fact, and that 

this should be sufiicient Since the Indian is fast disap- 

pearing and as traffic in blacks was abolished in 185 1, 

and slavery in 1888, white predominance seems assured. 

"Every Brazilian," said Romero, "is a mestee, if not 

in blood, in ideas." So that white supremacy, never 

an unmixed blessing, does not, and cannot under the cir- 

cumstances, imply an unmixed mentality.


III 

What of the effect of this milieu and this racial blend 

upon the nation's tongue and its creative output? The 

Brazihan is by nature melancholy, for melancholy is an 

attribute of each of the three streams that flow in his 

blood. The peculiar, haunting sadness of the Portuguese 

lyric muse is summed up in their untranslatable word 

"saudade" i^*^ both the conquered native and the subjected 

black are sad, the first through the bepuzzled contact with 

superior natural forces, the second through the wretched- 

ness of his economic position. It has been recognized 

that the climate of Brazil has resulted in a lyrism 

sweeter, softer and more passionate than that of the 

Portuguese. "Our language," says Romero, "is more 

musical and eloquent, our imagination more opulent." 

So, too, De Carvalho: "Brazilian prosody has more 

delicate accents than the Portuguese and numerous inter- 

esting peculiarities." 

In the matter of linguistic modification, as of racial 

blend and national psychology, we of the North have 

problems similar to those of the Brazilians,— problems 

often enough obscured by unscientific, sentimental fixa- 

tions or political dogma. The simple fact is that life, 

in language as In biology, is change. Whether we are 

concerned with the evolution of English In the United 

States, of Spanish In the cluster of Spanish-American 

republics, or of Portuguese in Brazil, change is the Inevitable 

law. For the Spanish of Spanish-America, Remy 

de Gourmont, with his insatiable appetite for novelty, 

originated the term neo-Spanish. It met with much op- 

10 Saudade. Compare English longing, yearning, or German Sehnsucht.

14 


position from the purists, yet it recognizes the ineluc- 

table course of speech. The noted Colombian philol- 

ogist Rufino Cuervo, in a controversy with the genial 

conservative Valera, voiced his belief that the Spanish 

of the new world would grow more and more unlike the 

parent tongue. ^^ In the same spirit, if with most unacademic 

hilariousness, Mencken has, in The Amer- 

ican Language,^'^ indicated the lines of cleavage between 

English and "American." Brazilian scholars have naturally 

assumed a similar attitude toward their own 

language and have, likewise, met with the opposition of 

the purists. It does not matter, for the purpose of the 

present discussion, whether the linguistic cleavage in any 

of the instances here given will eventually prove so 

definite as to originate new tongues. Such an outcome 

is far less probable today than it was, say, in the epoch 

when Latin, through its vulgar form, was breaking up 

into the Romance languages. Widespread education 

and the printing press are conserving influences, acting 

as a check upon capricious modification. 

One of the soundest and most sensible documents upon 

the Portuguese language in Brazil comes from the pen of 

the admirable critic Jose Verissimo.^^ "As a matter of 

fact," he writes, "save perhaps in the really Portuguese 

period of our literature, which merely reproduced in an 

11 Rufino Jose Cuervo (1842-1911) was called by Menendez y Pelayo 

the greatest Spanish philologist of the Nineteenth Century. 

A species of national pride finds vent in philological channels through 

the discovery of "localisms" in each of the Spanish-American republics. 

At the most this is of dialectic or sub-dialectic importance, but it illustrates 

an undoubted trend and supports Cuervo's contentions. 

12 New York, 1921. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged. 

13 Estudos de Literatura Brazileira. Sexta serie. Rio de Janeiro, 1907. 

Pp. 47-133-


inferior fashion the ideas, the composition, the style and 

the language of the Portuguese (already entered upon its 

decadence), authors never wrote in Brazil as in Por- 

tugal; the masters of language abroad never had dis- 

ciples here to rival them or even emulate them. ... It 

would be a pure absurdity, then, to expect the Brazilian, 

the North American or the Spanish-American to write 

the classic tongue of his mother country." 

Chaucer wrote "It am I" where we would say "It is I" 

and where current colloquial usage, perhaps foreshadow- 

ing the accepted standard of tomorrow, says "It's me." 

English changes in England; why shall it cease to change 

in the United States? And justly, Verissimo asks a 

similar question for Brazil. "I have always felt," he 

remarks somewhat farther on, "that the Portuguese 

tongue never attained the discipline and the relative gram- 

matical and lexical fixity that other languages arrived at. 

I do not believe that among cultured tongues there is one 

that has given rise to so many controversial cases, or to 

so many and so diverse contradictions among its lead- 

ing writers." The fight about the collocation of per- 

sonal pronouns is waged so earnestly in Brazil that it 

has become as funny, in some of its aspects, as the quarrel 

of the "lo-istas" and the "le-istas" in Spain. And so 

true are Verissimo's words that as late as March, 192 1, 

a writer could complain in the Revista do Brazil '^ 

that "we are at the very height of linguistic bolshevism" 

the very next month, indeed, the editorial board of the 

same representative intellectual organ found it necessary 

to comment upon the various systems of orthography em- 

i*An important monthly published at Sao Paulo, then under the editorship 

of Srs. Afranio Peixoto and Monteiro Lobato. 

;

i6 


ployed by its contributors and to designate a choice. ^^ 

Verissimo, in accordance with A. H. Sayce, takes as his 

standard of grammatical correctness that which is "ac- 

cepted by the great body of those who speak a language, 

not what is laid down by a grammarian." Still more to 

the point, Verissimo, who was a man of exemplary 

honesty and fearlessness in a milieu that easily tempts 

to flattery and the other social amenities, declares that 

"if we are by language Portuguese, if through that tongue 

our literature is but a branch of the Portuguese, we have 

already almost ceased to be such . . . because of our 

fund of ideas and notions, which were all constituted out- 

side of Portuguese influence." The important thing, 

then, is "to have something to say, an idea to express, a 

thought to transmit. Without this, however deep his 

grammatical knowledge of the language, however per- 

fectly he apes the classics, no man is a writer." Platitu- 

dinous, perhaps, but how often some platitudes bear 

repetition 

! 

The language of Brazil, then, is not the Portuguese 

of Lisbon. From the phonological viewpoint there is 

less palatalization of the final 5 and z than is customary 

in Portugal; Brazil has a real diphthong ou, which in 

Lisbonese has become a close o or the diphthong oi. 

Its pronunciation of the diphthong ei is true, whereas 

in Lisbon this approximates to ai (with a as in English 

above, or like the u of cut). Neither is the grammar 

identical with that of Portugal. "The truth is, that by 

correcting ourselves we run the danger of mutilating ideas 

and sentiments that are not merely personal. It is no 

15 Note, for example, the various spellings of the word literature here 

used as in the originals.


longer the language that we are purifying; it is our spirit 

that we are subjebting to inexplicable servility. To 

speak differently is not to speak incorrectly. . . . To 

change a word or an inflexion of ours for a different one 

of Coimbra ^^ is to alter the value of both in favor of 

artificial and deceptive uniformity." ^'^ 

Brazilianisms, so-called, make their appearance very 

early; they are already present in the letters sent by 

the Jesuits, as well as in the old chronicles. New plants, 

new fruits, new animals compelled new words. Native 

terms enriched the vocabulary. Of course, as has hap- 

pened with us, often a word for which the new nation 

is reproached turns out to be an original importation 

from the motherland. One of the oldest documents in 

the history of Brazilianisms appeared in Paris during 

the first quarter of the XlXth century and is reprinted by 

Joao Ribeiro as a rarity little known to his countrymen; it 

formed part of the Introduction a I'Atlas ethnographique 

du globe, prepared by Adrien Balbi and covering the 

races and languages of the world. The Portuguese sec- 

tion was entrusted to Domingos Borges de Barros, baron 

and later viscount de Pedra Branca, a warm advocate of 

Brazilian independence, then recently achieved. This, 

according to Ribeiro, is supposed to constitute the "first 

theoretical contribution" to the study of Brazilianisms. 

It is written in French, and because of its documentary 

importance I translate it in good measure 

"Languages reveal the manners and the character of 

peoples. That of the Portuguese has the savor of their 

religious, martial traits; thus the words honnete, galant, 

1^ The famous Portuguese seat of learning at Coimbra. 

1'^ Joao Ribeiro. A Lingua Nacional. Sao Paulo. 1921. 

:

i8 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

heate^ bizarre, etc., possess a meaning quite different from 

that they have in French. The Portuguese tongue 

abounds in terms and phrases for the expression of im- 

pulsive movements and strong actions. In Portuguese 

one strikes with everything; and when the Frenchman, 

for example, feels the need of adding the word coup to 

the thing with which he does the striking, the Portuguese 

expresses it with the word of the instrument alone. 

One says, in French, tin coup de pierre; in Portuguese, 

pedrada (a blow with a stone) ; un coup de couteau 

is expressed in Portuguese by facada (a knife thrust) 

and so on. . . . 

"Without becoming unidiomatic, one rnay boldly form 

superlatives and diminutives of every adjective; this is 

done sometimes even with nouns. Harshness of the pro- 

nunciation has accompanied the arrogance of expression. 

. . . But this tongue, transported to Brazil, breathes 

the gentleness of the climate and of the character of 

its inhabitants ; it has gained in usage and in the expression 

of tender sentiments, and while it has preserved all its 

energy it possesses more amenity. . . . 

"To this first difference, which embraces the generality 

of the Brazilian idiom, one must add that of words which 

have altogether changed in accepted meaning, as well as 

several other expressions which do not exist in the Portuguese 

language and which have been either borrowed 

from the natives or imported into Brazil by the inhabi- 

tants of the various oversea colonies of Portugal." 

There follow some eight words that have changed 

meaning, such, for example, as faceira, signifying lower 

jaw in Portugal, but coquette in Brazil; as a matter of 

fact, Ribeiro shows that the Portuguese critics who cen-


sured this "Brazilianism" did not know the history of 

their own tongue. In the XVIIth century faceira was 

synonymous with pelintra, petimetre, elegante (respectively, 

poor fellow, dandy, fashionable youth) ; it became 

obsolete in Portugal, but in Brazil was preserved with 

exclusive application to the feminine. The Brazilian 

words unknown in Portugal are some fifty in number 

upon the Baron's list. 

Costa finds that Portuguese, crossing the Atlantic, 

'.'almost doubled its vocabulary, accepting and assimilat- 

ing a mass of words from the Indian and the Negro. 

Through the influence of the climate, through the new 

ethnic elements,—the voluptuous, indolent Negro and 

Indian, passionate to the point of crime and sacrifice, 

the pronunciation of Portuguese by the Brazilian ac- 

quired, so to say, a musical modulation, slow, chanting, 

soft,—a language impregnated with poesy and languor, 

quite different from that spoken in Portugal." ^^ 

IV 

A new milieu and a racial amalgamation that effect 

changes in speech are bound soon or late to produce a 

new orientation in literature. The question whether that 

literature is largely derivative or independent is relatively 

unimportant and academic, as is the analogous question 

concerning the essential difference of language. The im- 

18 Varnhagen, in his Introduction to the Florilegio da Poesia Brazileira 

(Vol. I of the two volumes that appeared in Lisbon in 1850, pages 19-20), 

has some interesting remarks upon the early hispanization of Portuguese 

in Brazil. Among such effects of Spanish upon Brazilian Portuguese he 

notes the transposition of the possessive pronouns; the opening of all 

vowels, thus avoiding the elision of final e or converting final into u; 

the pronunciation of s at the end of a syllable as s instead of as sh, which 

is the Portuguese rule. 

—


portant consideration for us is that the law of change is 

operating, and that the change is in the direction of inde- 

pendence. Much has been written upon the subject of 

nationalism in art—too much, indeed,—and of this, alto- 

gether too large a part has been needlessly obscured by 

the fatuities of the narrowly nationalistic mind. There Is, 

of course, such a thing as national character, though even 

this has been overdone by writers until the traits thus 

considered have been so stencilled upon popular thought 

that they resemble rather caricatures than characteristics. 

True natlonahsm in literature is largely a product of the 

writer's unconscious mind; it is a spontaneous manifesta- 

tion, and no Intensity of set purpose can create It unless 

the psychological substratum is there. For the rest, 

literature belongs to art rather than to nationality, to 

esthetics rather than to politics and geography. ^® The 

consideration of literature by nations, then, is itself the 

province of the historian of Ideas; It is, however, a useful 

method of co-ordinating our knowledge and of explaining 

the personality of a country. If I bring up the matter 

here at all it Is because such a writer as Sylvlo Romero, 

intent upon emphasizing national themes, now and again 

distorts the image of his subject, mistaking civic virtue 

19 The wise Goethe onjce said to Eckermann: "The poet, as a man 

and citizen, will love his native land; but the native land of his poetic 

powers and poetic action is the good, noble and beautiful, which is confined 

to no particular province or country, and which he seizes upon 

and forms wherever he finds it. Therein is he like the eagle, who hovers 

with free gaze over whole countries, and to whom it is of no consequence 

whether the hare on which he pounces is running in Prussia or in 

Saxony. . . . And then, what is meant by love of one's country? What 

is meant by patriotic deeds? If the poet has employed a life in battling 

with pernicious prejudice, in setting aside narrow views, in enlightening 

the minds, purifying the tastes, ennobling the feelings and thoughts of 

his countrymen, what better could he have done? how could he have 

acted more patriotically?


and patriotic aspiration for esthetic values, or worse still, 

deliberately exalting the former over the latter. The 

same Romero, for example,—a volcanic personality who 

never erred upon the side of modesty, false or true, 

speaks thus of his own poetry: "... I initiated the 

reaction against Romanticism in 1870. . . ." And how 

did he initiate it? By calling for a poetry in agreement 

with contemporary philosophy. Now, it is no more the 

business of poetry to agree with contemporary philosophy 

than for it to "agree" with contemporary nationalism. 

Goethe, reproached for not having taken up arms in the 

German War of Liberation, "or at least co-operating as a 

poet," replied that it would have all been well enough to 

have written martial verse within sound of the enemy's 

horses; however, "that was not my life and not my busi- 

ness, but that of Theodor Korner. His war-songs suit 

him perfectly. But to me, who am not of a warlike nature 

and who have no warlike sense, war-songs would 

have been a mask which would have fitted my face very 

badly. ... I have never affected anything in my poetry. 

... I have never uttered anything which I have 

not experienced, and which has not urged me to production. 

I have only composed love-songs when I have 

loved. How could I write songs of hatred without hat- 

ing!" Those are the words of an artist; they could not 

be understood by the honourable gentleman who not so 

long ago complained in the British parliament because 

the poet laureate, Mr. Robert Bridges, had not produced 

any appropriate war-verse in celebration of the four 

years' madness. 

If, then, we note the gradual resurgence of the national 

spirit in Brazilian letters, it is primarily as a contribution 

—


to a study of the nation's self-consciousness. The fact 

belongs to literary history; only when vitalized by the 

breath of a commanding personality does it enter the 

realm of art. The history of our own United States 

literature raises similar problems, which have compelled 

the editors of The Cambridge History of American Liter- 

ature to make certain reservations. "To write the in- 

tellectual history of America from the modern esthetic 

standpoint is to miss precisely what makes it significant 

among modern literatures, namely, that for two centuries 

the main energy of Americans went into exploration, 

settlement, labour for sustenance, religion and statecraft. 

Tor nearly two hundred years a people with the same 

traditions and with the same intellectual capacities as their 

contemporaries across the sea found themselves obliged 

to dispense with art for art." -*^ The words may stand 

almost unaltered for Brazil. It is indicative, however, 

that where this condition favoured prose as against 

verse in the United States, verse in Brazil flourished from 

the start and bulks altogether too large in the national 

output. We may take it, then, as axiomatic that Brazilian 

literature is not exclusively national; no literature is, and 

any attempt to keep it rigidly true to a norm chosen 

through a mistaken identification of art with geography 

and politics is merely a retarding influence. Like all de- 

rivative literatures, Brazilian literature displays outside 

influences more strongly than do the older literatures with 

a tradition of continuity behind them. The history of 

all letters is largely that of intellectual cross-fertilization. 

From its early days down to the end of the XVIIIth 

century, the literature of Brazil is dominated by Portugal; 

20 New York, 1917. P. X.


the land, intellectually as well as economically, is a colony. 

The stirrings of the century reach Brazil around 1750, 

and the interval from then to 1830, the date of the Ro- 

manticist triumph in France, marks what has been termed 

a transitional epoch. After 1830, letters in Brazil dis- 

play a decidedly autonomous tendency (long forecast, 

for that matter, in the previous phases), and exhibit that 

diversity which has characterized French literature since 

the Romantics went out of power. For It is France that 

forms the chief influence over latter-day Brazilian letters. 

So true Is this that Costa, with personal exaggeration, 

can write: "I consider our present literature, although 

written in Portuguese, as a transatlantic branch of the 

marvellous, Intoxicating French literature." -^ There 

can be no doubt as to the immense influence exercised upon 

the letters of Spanish and Portuguese America by France. 

A Spanish cleric,^- author of an imposing fourteen-volume 

history of Spanish literature on both shores of the 

Atlantic, has even made out France as the arch vlllalness, 

who with her wiles has always managed to corrupt the 

normally healthy realism of the Spanish soul. Only yesterday, 

in Brazil, a similar, if less Ingenious, attack was 

launched against the same country on the score of its de- 

nationalizing effect. Yet It is France which was chiefly re- 

sponsible for that modernism (1888-) which Infused 

new life into the language and art of Spanish America, 

later (1898) affecting the motherland itself. And If liter- 

ary currents have since, in Spanish America, veered to a 

new-world attitude, so are they turning In Brazil. From 

21 op. cit. p. 48. 

22 Julio Cejador y Frauca. Historia de la Lengua y L'lteratura Cas- 

tellana, Madrid, 1915 to the present.


this to the realization that Art has no nationality is a forward 

step; some day it will be taken. As in the United 

States, so in Brazil, side by side with the purists and the 

traditionalists a new school is springing up,—native yet 

not necessarily national in a narrow sense; a genuine na- 

tional personality is being forged, whence will come the 

literature of the future. 

As to the position of the writer in Brazil and Spanish 

America, it is still a very precarious one, not alone from 

the economic viewpoint but from the climatological. "In- 

tellectual labour in Brazil," wrote Romero, "is torture. 

Wherefore we produce little; we quickly weary, age and 

soon die. . . . The nation needs a dietetic regimen 

. . . more than a sound political one. The Brazilian is 

an ill-balanced being, impaired at the very root of exis- 

tence; made rather to complain than to invent, contem- 

plative rather than thoughtful; more lyrical and fond 

of dreams and resounding rhetoric than of scientific, 

demonstrable facts." Such a short-lived, handicapped 

populace has everything to do with literature, says this 

historian. "It explains the precocity of our talents, their 

speedy exhaustion, our facility in learning and the super- 

ficiality of our inventive faculties." 

Should the writer conquer these difficulties, others await 

him. The reading public, especially in earlier days, was 

always small. "They say that Brazil has a population 

of about 13,000,000," comments a character in one of 

Coelho Netto's numerous novels. "Of that number 

12,800,000 can't read. Of the remaining 200,000, 

150,000 read only newspapers, 50,000 read French books, 

30,000 read translations. Fifteen thousand others read


the catechism and pious books, 2,000 study Auguste 

Comte, and 1,000 purchase Brazilian works." And the 

foreigners? To which the speaker replies, "They don't 

read us. This is a lost country." Allowing for original 

overstatement, the figures do not, of course, hold for 

today, when the population is more than twice the number 

in the quotation, when Netto himself goes into edition 

after edition and, together with a few of his favoured 

confreres, has been translated into French and English 

and other languages. But they illustrate a fundamental 

truth. Literature in Brazil has been, literally, a triumph 

of mind over matter. Taken as a whole it is thus, at 

this stage, not so much an esthetic ais an autonomic af- 

firmation. Just as the nation, ethnologically, represents 

the fusion of three races, with the whites at the head, 

so, intellectually, does it represent a fusion of Portuguese 

tradition, native spontaneity and modern European cul- 

ture, with France still predominant. 

: 

We may recapitulate the preceding chapter in the following 

paragraph 

Brazilian literature derives chiefly from the Portuguese 

race, language and tradition as modified by the blending 

of the colonizers with the native Indians and the imported 

African slaves. At first an imitative prolongation of the 

Portuguese heritage, it gradually acquires an autonomous 

character, entering later into the universal currents of 

literature as represented by European and particularly 

French culture. French ascendency is definitely estab- 

lished in 1830, and even well into the twentieth century 

most English, German, Russian and Scandinavian works


come in through the medium of French criticism and as- 

similation.^^ 

No two literary historians of Brazil agree upon a plan 

of presentation. Fernandez Pinheiro (1872) and De 

Carvalho (19 19) reduce the phases to a minimum of 

three; the first, somewhat too neatly, divides them into 

that of the Formative Period (XVIth through XVIIth 

century), the Period of Development (XVIIIth cen- 

tury), the Period of Reform (XlXth century) ; the talented 

De Carvalho accepts Romero's first period, from 

1500 to 1750, calling it that of Portuguese dominance, 

inserts a Transition period from 1750 to t"he date of the 

triumph of French Romanticism in 1830, and labels the 

subsequent phase the Autonomous epoch. This is better 

than Wolf's five divisions (1863) and the no less than 

sixteen suggested by the restless Romero in the resume 

that he wrote in 1900 for the Livro do Centenario. I 

am inclined, on the whole, to favour the division sug- 

gested by Romero in his Historia da Litteratura Bra- 

sileira ( 1902) ^^ 

Period of Formation: 1500-17 50 

Antonomous Development: 1 750-1 830 

23 In their Compendio de Historia da Literatura Brasileira (1909, Rio, 

2a ediâo refundida) Sylvio Romero and Joao Ribeiro point out the existence 

of a certain Germanism from 1870 to 1889, due chiefly to the con- 

stant labours of Tobias Barreto. Italian influence is very strong in law, 

and that of the United States in political organization. As will be 

seen in a later chapter, the United States had, through Cooper, a share 

in the "Indianism" of the Brazilian Romanticists. Our Longfellow, 

Hawthorne, Whitman and Poe are well known, the latter pair through 

French rather than the original channels. 

2* Rio. Second edition, Revised.

, 


Romantic Transformation: 1 830-1 870 

Critical, Naturalist Reaction, followed by 

Parnassians, Symbolists, etc.: 1870— 

The fourth division allows for the decidedly eclectic tend- 

encies subsequent upon the decline of Romanticism. 

Accordingly, the four chapters that follow will deal 

succinctly with these successive phrases of the nation's lit- 

erature. Not so much separate works or men as the suf- 

fusing spirit will engage our attention; what we are here 

interested in is the formation and development of the 

Brazilian imaginative creative personality and its salient 

products. ^^ 

25 This by no means implies acceptance of Romero's critical standards. 

See, for details, the Selective Bibliography at the back of the book.

CHAPTER II 

PERIOD OiF FORMATION (1500-1750) 

The Popular Muse—Sixteenth Century Beginnings— Jesuit In- 

fluence—Seventeenth Century Nativism—The "Bahian" school 

Gregorio de Mattos Guerra—First Half of Eighteenth Century 

—The Academies—Rocha Pitta—Antonio Jose da Silva. 

IT 

Is a question whether the people as a mass have 

really created the poetry and legends which long 

have been grouped under the designation of folk 

lore. Here, as in the more rarefied atmosphere of art, 

it is the gifted individual who originates or formulates the 

central theme, which is then passed about like a small 

coin that changes hands frequently; the sharp edges are 

blunted, the mint-mark is erased, but the coin remains 

essentially as at first. So that one may agree only halfway 

with Senhor De Carvalho, ^ when he writes that 

"true poetry is born in the mouths of the people as the 

plant from wild and virgin soil. The people is the great 

creator, sincere and spontaneous, of national epics, the 

inspirer of artists, stimulator of warriors, director of the 

fatherland's destinies." The people furnishes rather 

the background against which the epics are enacted, the 

audience rather than the performers. Upon the lore and 

iQp. Cit. P. 51. 

28 

—

PERIOD OF FORMATION 29 

verses of their choosing they stamp the distinguishing folk 

impress; the creative inspiration here, as elsewhere, is 

the labour of the salient individual. 

The study of the Brazilian popular muse owes much 

to the investigations of the tireless, ubiquitous Sylvio 

Romero, whom later writers have largely drawn upon.^ 

There are no documents for the contributions of the 

Africans and few for the Tupys, whom Romero did not 

credit with possessing a real poetry, as they had not 

reached the necessary grade of culture. The most- 

copious data are furnished, quite naturally, by the Portu- 

guese. Hybrid verses appear as an aural and visible 

symbol of the race-mixture that began almost immedi- 

ately; there are thus stanzas composed of blended verses 

of Portuguese and Tupy, of Portuguese and African. 

Here, as example, is a Portuguese-African song transcribed 

by Romero in Pernambuco: 

Voce gosta de mim, 

Eu gosto de voce 

Se papa consentir, 

Oh, meu hem, 

Eu caso com voce. . . . 

Ale, ale, calunga, 

Mussunga, mussunga-e. 

Se me da de vestir, 

Se me da de comer, 

Se me paga a casa, 

Oh, meu hem, 

Eu moro com voce. . . . 

2 See his Cantos Populates do Brasil, Contos Populares do Brasil, 

Estudos sobre a Poesia Popular Brasileira. ' These 

; 

works he summar- 

izes in Chapter VII, Volume I, of his Historia da Litteratura Brasileira, 

2a Ediqao melhorada pelo auctor. Rio de Janeiro, 1902.

30 


Ale, ale, calunga, 

Mussunga, mussunga-e. ^ 

On the whole, that same melancholy which is the hallmark 

of so much Brazilian writing, is discernible in the 

popular refrain. The themes are the universal ones of 

love and fate, with now and then a flash of humour and 

earthy practicality. 

Romero, with his excessive fondness for categories (a 

vice which with unconscious humour he was the very first 

to flagellate), suggested four chief types of popular 

poetry, (i) \ht romances a.nd xacaras, (2) the reisados 

and chegancas, (3) the oracoes and parlendos, (4) 

versos geraes or quandrinhas. In the same way the folk 

tales are referred to Portuguese, native and African ori- 

gin, with a more recent addition of mestico (hybrid, 

mestee) material. "The Brazilian Sheherezade," writes 

De Carvalho,^ "is more thoughtful than opulent, she educates 

rather than dazzles. In the savage legends Nature 

dominates man, and, as in the fables of y5^sop and La 

Fontaine, it is the animals who are charged with reveal- 

ing life's virtues and deficiencies through their ingenious 

wiles. . . . To the native, as is gathered from his most 

famous tales, skill was surely a better weapon than 

strength." Long ago, the enthusiastic Denis, the first to 

accord to Brazilian letters a treatment independent of 

those of Portugal,^ had commented on the blending of 

3 The frank, practical song, minus the African refrain, runs thus: 

"You like me and I like you. If pa consents, oh my darling, I'll marry 

you. ... If you'll give me my clothes and furnish my food, if you 

pay all the household expenses, oh, my darling, I'll come to live with 

you." 

4 Op. Cit. P. 58. 

^Resume de I'histoire Litteraire du Portugal su'wi du Resume de 

I'histoire litteraire du Bresil. Ferdinand Denis. Paris, 1826. The 

Brazilian section occupies pages 513-601.


the imaginative, ardent African, the chivalrous Portu- 

guese, and the dreamy native, and had observed that "the 

ffiameliico is almost always the hero of the poetic tales 

invented in the country." For, underneath the crust of 

this civilization flows a strong current of popular inspira- 

tion. At times, as during the Romantic period, this be- 

comes almost dominant. "We all, of the most diverse 

social classes," avers De Carvalho, "are a reflection of 

this great folk soul, fashioned at the same time of melan- 

.choly and splendour, of timidity and common sense. Our 

folk lore serves to show that the Brazilian people, despite 

its moodiness and sentimentality, retains at bottom a 

clear comprehension of life and a sound, admirable inner 

energy that, at the first touch, bursts forth unexpected 

and indomitable." This is, perhaps, an example of that 

very sentimentality of which this engaging critic has been 

speaking, for the folk lore of most nations reveals pre- 

cisely these same qualities. For us, the essential point 

Is that Brazilian popular poetry and tale exhibit the characteristic 

national hybridism; the exotic here feeds upon 

the exotic.^ 

II 

The sixteenth century, so rich In culture and accom- 

plishment for the Portuguese, is almost barren of litera- 

ture in Brazil. A few chroniclers, the self-sacrificing 

Father Anchieta, the poet Bento Teixeiro Pinto,— ^ând the 

list is fairly exhausted. These are no times for esthetic 

leisure; an Indifferent monarch occupies the throne in 

6 For an enlightening exposition of the Portuguese popular refrain 

known as cossantes, see A. F. G. Bell's Portuguese Literature, London, 

1922, pages 22-35. Their salient trait, like that of their Brazilian re- 

lative, is a certain wistful sadness.

32 


Lisbon for the first quarter of the century, with eyes 

turned to India ; in the colony the entire unwieldy ap- 

paratus of old-world civilization is to be set up, races are 

to be exterminated or reconciled in fusion, mines lure with 

the glitter of gold and diamonds; a nationality, however 

gradually and unwittingly, is to be formed. For, though 

the majority of Portuguese in Brazil, as was natural, 

were spiritually inhabitants of their mother country, 

already there had arisen among some a fondness for a 

land of so many enchantments. 

Jose de Anchieta (1530— 1597) 

is now generally re- 

garded as the earliest of the Brazilian writers. He is, 

to Romero, the pivot of his century's letters. For more 

than fifty years he was the instructor of the population; 

for his beloved natives he wrote grammars, lexicons, 

plays, hymns; a gifted polyglot, he employed Portuguese, 

Spanish, Latin, Tupy; he penned the first autos and mys- 

teries produced in Brazil. His influence, on the whole, 

however, was more practical than literary; he was not, in 

the esthetic sense a writer, but rather an admirable Jesuit 

who performed, amidst the greatest difficulties, a work 

of elementary civilization. The homage paid to his 

name during the commemoration of the tercentenary of 

his death was not only a personal tribute but in part, too, 

a rectification of the national attitude toward the Jesuit 

company which he distinguished. It was the Jesuits who 

early established schools in the nation (in 1543 they 

opened at Bahia the first institution of "higher educa- 

tion") ; it was they who sought to protect the Indians 

from the cruelty of the over-eager exploiters; Senhor 

Oliveira Lima has even suggested that it was owing to 

a grateful recollection of the services rendered to the


country by the Jesuits that the separation between Church 

and State, decreed by the Republic in 1890, was effected 

in so dignified and peaceful a manner. Lima quotes 

Ribeiro to the effect that the province of Brazil already 

possessed three colegios in Anchieta's time, and that the 

Jesuits, by the second half of the sixteenth century had 

already brought at least 100,000 natives under their 

guidance.''' Romero, "scientifist" critic that he was, con- 

sidered the Jesuit influence "not at all a happy one in the 

intellectual and esthetic formation of the new nation- 

ality." Of one thing we may be quite certain, in any 

event: Anchieta's position as precursor is more secure 

than his merits as a creative spirit. His chief works are 

Brasilica Societatis Historia et vita clarorum Patriim qui 

in Brasilia vixerunt, a Latin series of biographies of his 

fellow-workers; Arte da grammatica da litigoa mats 

usada na costa do Brasil, a philological study; his Cartas 

and a number of aiitos and poems. 

Next to Anchieta, Bento Teixeira Pinto, who flour- 

(letters) ; 

ished in the second half of the sixteenth century, is 

Brazil's most ancient poet.^ Much ink has been spilled 

over the question as to whether he was the author of the 

entertaining Dialogo das Grandezas do Brazil and the 

scrupulous Varnhagen, who at first denied Bento Teix- 

eira's authorship of that document, later reversed his 

position. Similar doubt exists as to the real author of 

the Relacdo do Naufragio que passou Jorge de Albuquerque 

Coelho, vindo do Brasil no anno de 156^, a mov- 

^ Oliveira Lima. Formacion Historica de la Nacionalidad Bras'tlena. 

Madrid, 1918. This Spanish version, by Carlos Pereyra, is much easier 

to procure than the original. Pp. 35-38. 

8 See, however, on the matter of priority, Jose Verissimo's Estudos de 

LiUratura Brazileira, Quarta Serie- Pp. 25-64.

34 


ing prose account of a shipwreck in which figures the 

noble personage of the title, but wherein the supposed 

author nowhere appears. 

To that same noble personage, governor of Pernambuco, 

is dedicated the Prosopopea, undoubtedly the work 

of Bento Teixeira, and just as undoubtedly a pedestrian 

performance in stilted hendecasyllabic verses, ninety-four 

octaves in all, in due classic form. There is much imi- 

tation of Camoes, who, indeed, entered Brazilian liter- 

ature as a powerful influence through these prosaic lines 

of Bento Teixeira. "His poem (i, e., the Lusiads of 

Camoes) is henceforth to make our epics, his poetic lan- 

guage will provide the instrument of our poets and his 

admirable lyrism will influence down to the very present, 

our own in all that it has and preserves of sorrow, long- 

ing, nostalgia and Camonean love m.elancholy." ^ 

In the Prosopopea occurs a description of the rec'ife 

of Pernambuco which has been looked upon as one of the 

first evidences of the Brazilian fondness for the native 

scene. The passage is utterly uninspired; Neptune and 

Argos rub shoulders with the harharos amid an insipid 

succession of verses. Verissimo sees, in the entire poem, 

no "shadow of the influence of the new milieu in which 

it was conceived and executed." The earliest genuine 

manifestation of such nativism in poetry he does not dis- 

cover until A lUia da Mare, by Manoel Botelho de Oliv- 

eira, which, though published in the eighteenth century 

was, most likely, written in the seventeenth. 10 

9 Ibid. P. 54. Also pp. 63-64. "To be the first, the most ancient, the 

oldest in any pursuit, is a merit. . . . This is the only merit that Bento 

Teixeira can boast." 

i


The chroniclers of the early colonial period present 

chiefly points of historic, rather than literary, interest. 

Pero de Magalhaes Gandavo, with his Historia da Prov- 

incia de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente cha^namos Brasil 

(with a verse-letter by Luiz de Camoes as preface, pub- 

lished in 1576 in Lisbon, is regarded as the first in the 

long line of historians; even today he is valuable as a 

source. Gabriel Soares de Souza^ is far better known for 

his Tractado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587, printed in 

1851 by Varnhagen and highly praised by that volumin- 

ous investigator for its "profound observation." . . . 

"Neither Dioscorides nor Pliny better explains the plants 

of the old world than Soares those of the new. ... It is 

astonishing how the attention of a single person could oc- 

cupy itself with so many things . . . such as are con- 

tained in his work, which treats at the same time, in re- 

lation to Brazil, of geography, history, typography, 

hydrography, intertropical agriculture, Brazilian horti- 

culture, native materia medica, wood for building and for 

cabinet-work, zoology in all its branches, administrative 

economy and even mineralogy!" 

Of less importance is the Jesuit Father Fernao Cardim 

( 1540— 1625), whose work was made known in 1847 

by Varnhagen under the geographic title Narrativa epis- 

tolar de uma viagem e missao jesnitica pela Bahia, Ilheos, 

Porto Seguro, Pernambiico, Esp'nito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, 

etc. It consists of two letters, dated 1583 and 

addressed to the provincial of the Company in Portugal. 

preceding notes, pages 50-51. He attributes the swelling fhorus of eulogies 

to what might today be called a national "inferiority complex." 

"Having no legitimate cause for glory,— great deeds accomplished or 

great men produced,—we pride ourselves ingenuously upon our primi- 

tive Nature, or upon the opulence,—which we exaggerate—of our soil."


Father Cardim was translated Into English as early as 

1625, being thus represented by the manuscript called Do 

Principo e origem dos indios do Brasil e de sens cos- 

tumes, adoraqao e cerei?ionias, if this is, as Capistrano 

de Abreu has tried to prove, really the work taken in 

1 60 1 by Francis Cook from a Jesuit bound for Brazil. 

For, "it was exactly in this year . . . that Father Fernao 

Cardim, who was returning to Brazil from a voyage 

to Rome, was taken prisoner by English corsairs and 

brought to England." 

There is little profit in listing the men and works of 

this age and character. According to Romero the chron- 

iclers exhibit thus early the duplex tendency of Brazilian 

literature,—description of nature and description of the 

savage. The tendency grows during the seventeenth 

century and in the eighteenth becomes predominant, so 

that viewed in this light, Brazilian natlvism, far from 

being the creation of nineteenth century Romanticism, was 

rather a historic prolongation. 

Ill 

The sporadic evidences of a nascent natlvism become 

in the seventeenth century a conscious affirmation. The 

struggle against the Dutch in Pernambuco and the 

French in Maranhao compelled a union of the colonial 

forces and instilled a sort of Brazilian awareness. The 

economic situation becomes more firm, so that Romero 

may regard the entire century as the epoch of sugar, even 

as the succeeding century was to be one of gold, and the 

nineteenth,—as indeed the twentieth,—one of coffee. 

Agriculture even before the mines,—as Lima has pointed


out,—was creating the fortune of the land.^^ "|The new 

society of the prosperous American colony is no longer 

essentially Portuguese; the mill-owners, well off and intel- 

ligent, forming a sort of rural aristocracy, similar to that 

of the feudal barons, are its best-read and most enlight- 

ened representatives. Around this tiny but powerful 

nucleus revolve all the political and economic affairs of 

the young nationality. Two profoundly serious factors 

also appear: the Brazilian family, perfectly constituted, 

and a hatred for the foreigner, nourished chiefly by re- 

ligious fanaticism. The Lutheran, English or Flemish, 

was the common enemy . 

. . against whom all vengeance 

was sacred, all crime just and blessed." ^^ 

In Brazilian literature, the century belongs mainly to 

Bahia, which during the second half became a court in 

little, with its governor as the center of a luxurious en- 

tourage. Spanish influence, as represented in the all- 

conquering Gongora, vied with that of the poets of the 

Italian and Portuguese renaissance; Tasso, Lope de 

'Vega, Gabriel de Castro and a host of others were much 

read and imitated. And in the background rose a rude 

civilization reared upon slavery and greed, providing rich 

11 Oliveira Lima, op. cit. pages 45-46, comments interestingly upon 

Brazil's lack of a national poet during the sixteenth century. "Brazil 

did not possess, during the XVIth century a national poet who could express, 

with all the sincerity of his soul, the passion of the struggle undertaken 

by culture against nature. . . . And this absence of a representative 

poet is evidenced throughout our literature, since, after all, the 

Indianism of the XlXth century was only a poetic convention grafted 

upon the trunk of the political break with the Portuguese fatherland. 

. . . The fact is that the exploits of yesterday still await the singer 

who shall chant them. The Indians were idealized by a Romanticism 

in quest of elevated souls; the Africans found defenders who rose in 

audacious flight, but the brave pioneers of the conquest, men of epic 

stature, have not received even the same measure of sympathy." 

12 Ronald de Carvalho. Op. Cit, P. 87-88.

38 


material for the satirical shafts of Gregorio de Mattos 

Guerra, well-named by his contemporaries the "hellmouth" 

of Bahia, In Antonio Vieira and Gregorio 

Mattos, Romero discovers the two antagonistic forces of 

the epoch : Vieira, the symbol of "Portuguese arro- 

gance in action and vacuity in ideas"; Gregorio Mattos, 

the most perfect incarnation of the Brazilian spirit, "face- 

tious, informal, ironic, sceptical, a precursor of the Bo- 

hemios." As we shall presently note, opinion upon the 

"hell-mouth's" Brazilianism is not unanimous. 

The salient chroniclers and preachers of the century 

may be passed over in rapid review. At their head 

easily stands Frei Vicente do Salvador, (1564—1536-39) 

author of the Historia da Ciistodia do Brasil, which was 

not published until 1888, more than two hundred and 

sixty years after it was written (1627). His editor, 

Capistrano de Abreu, has pointed out his importance as 

a reagent against the dominant tendency of spiritual serv- 

itude to Portugal. "To him Brazil means more than a 

geographical expression; it is a historical and social term. 

The XVIIth century is the germination of this idea, as 

the XVIIIth is its ripening." The Historia possesses, 

furthermore, a distinct importance for the study of folk 

lore. Manoel de Moraes ( 1586-165 1) enjoys what 

might be called a cenotaphic renown as the author of a 

Historia da America that has never been found. Little 

more than names are Diogo Gomes Carneiro and Frel 

Christovao da Madre de Deus Luz. 

Of far sterner stuff than his vagrant brother Gregorio 

was the preacher Eusebio de Mattos (1629— 1692) who 

late in life left the Company of Jesus. There is little in


his sermons to fascinate the modern mind or rejoice the 

soul, and one had rather err in the company of his Bohemian 

brother. As Eusebio was dubbed, in the fashion 

of the day, a second Orpheus for his playing upon the 

harp and the viola, so Antonio de Sa (1620— 1678) became 

the "Portuguese Chrysostom," Yet little gold 

flowed in his speech, which fairly out-G6ngora-ed Gon- 

gora himself. "His culture, like that of almost all the 

Jesuits was false; rhetorical rather than scientific, swollen 

rather than substantial." ^^ 

The poets of the century narrow down to two, of 

whom the first may be dismissed with scant ceremony. 

Manoel Botelho de Oliveira (i 636-171 1) was the first 

Brazilian poet to publish a book of verses. His Miisica 

do Parnaso em quatro coros de rimas portuguezas, cas- 

telhanas, itaJianas e latinas, com sen descante comico re- 

diizido em duas comedias was published at Lisbon in 1705. 

Yet for all this battery of tongues there is little in the 

book to commend it, and it would in all likelihood be all 

but forgotten by today were it not for the descriptive 

poem A Ilha da Marc, in which has been discovered,—as 

we have seen in our citation from Verissimo,—one of the 

earliest manifestations of nativism; Botelho de Oliveira's 

Brazilianism, as appears from his preface, was a con- 

scious attitude, and the patient, plodding cataloguing of 

the national fruit-garden precedes by a century the seventh 

canto of the epic Caramuru; but for all this, there are in 

the three hundred and twenty-odd lines of the poem only 

some four verses with any claim to poetic illumination. 

The depths of bathetic prose are reached in a passage oft 

13 De Carvalho. Op. P. 96-97.

40 


quoted by Brazilian writers ; it reads like a seed catalogue 

Tenho explicado as fruitas e os legumes, 

Que dao a Portugal muitos ciumes; 

Tenho recopilado 

O que Brasil contem para invejado, 

E para preferir a toda terra, 

Em si perfeitos quatro AA encerra. 

Tem o primeiro A, nos arvoredos 

Sempre verdes aos olhos, sempre ledos; 

Tem o segunda A nos ares puros, 

Na temperie agradaveis e seguros; 

Tem o terceiro A, nas aguas frias 

Que refrescam o peito e sao sadias, 

O quarto A, no assucar deleitoso. 

Que e do mundo o regalo mais mimoso; 

Sao, pois, OS quatro AA por singuares 

Arvoredos, assucar, aguas, ares. ^* 

All of which bears almost the same relation to poetry 

as the grouping of the three B's (Bach, Beethoven and 

Brahms) to musical criticism. Romero found the poet's 

nationalism an external affair; "the pen wished to de- 

pict Brazil, but the soul belonged to Spanish or Portu- 

guese cultism." So, too, Carvalho, who would assign 

the genuine beginnings of Brazilian sentiment to Gre- 

gorio de Mattos, 

Gregorio de Mattos Guerra (i 633-1 696) is easily the 

14 "I have explained the fruits and the vegetables that cause so much 

jealousy on Portugal's part; I have listed those things for which Brazil 

may be envied. As title to preference over all the rest of the earth it 

enfolds four A's. It has the first A in its arvoredos (trees), ever green 

and fair to gaze upon; it has the second A in its pure atmosphere {ares), 

so pleasant and certain in temperature; it has the third A in its cool 

waters {aguas), that refresh the throat and bring health; the fourth A 

in its delightful sugar (assucar), which is the fairest gift of all the 

world. The four A's then, are arvoredos, assucar, aguas, ares. 

:

. tions 


outstanding figure of his day. Romero, who considered 

him the pivot of seventeenth-century letters in Brazil, 

would claim for him, too, the title of creator of that liter- 

ature, because he was—though educated, like most of 

the cultured men of his day, at Coimbra—a son of the 

soil, more nationally minded than Anchieta and in perfect 

harmony with his milieu. He reveals a Brazilian man- 

ner of handling the language; indeed, he "(is the document 

in which we can appreciate the earliest modifica- 

undergone by the Portuguese language in America. 

. . ." He reveals a consciousness of being something 

new and distinct from Europe's consideration of the newworld 

inhabitants as a species of anima vilis. He repre- 

sents the tendency of the various races to poke fun at 

one another. More important still, he betrays a nas- 

cent discontent with the mother country's rule. He is 

"the genuine imitator of our lyric poetry and of our 

lyric intuition. His brasileiro was not the caboclo nor 

the Negro nor the Portuguese; he was already the son of 

the soil, able to ridicule the separatist pretensions of the 

three races." Thus far Romero. Verissimo however 

and the case may well be taken as an instance of the un- 

settled conditions prevailing in Brazilian literary criti- 

cism—takes a view antipodally apart. "The first gen- 

eration of Brazilian poets, Gregorio de Mattos included, 

is exclusively Portuguese. To suppose that there is in 

Gregorio de Mattos any originality of form or content 

is to show one's ignorance of the Portuguese poetry of 

his time, and of the Spanish, which was so close to It and 

which the Portuguese so much imitated, and which he, in 

particular, fairly plagiarized." ^^ Long ago, Ferdinand 

^Êstudos, quarta serie. P. 47-48. 

—

42 


Wolf, in the first history of Brazilian letters that made 

any claims to completeness,^*^ noted the poet's heavy in- 

debtedness to Lope de Vega and Gongora, and his servile 

imitation of Quevedo. 

Verissimo, I believe, overstates his case. That Gregorio 

de Mattos was not an original creative spirit may 

at once be admitted. But he was an undoubted per- 

sonality; he aimed his satiric shafts only too well at prom- 

inent creatures of flesh and blood and vindictive pas- 

sions ; 

he paid for his ardour and temerity with harsh exile 

and in the end would seem even to have evinced a sincere 

repentance. The motto of his life's labours, indeed, 

might be a line from one of his most impertinent poems: 

"Eu, que me nao sei calar". . . 

I, who cannot hold my tongue . . . 

Nor did Gregorio de Mattos hold his tongue, whether 

in the student days at Coimbra—where already he was 

feared for that wagging lance—or during his later vicis- 

situdes in Brazil. In 1864 he married Maria dos Povos, 

whose reward for advising him to give up his satiric 

habits was to be made the butt of his next satire. It 

would have been a miracle if he were either happy with 

or faithful to her; he was neither. He slashed right 

and left about him; argued cases—and won them!—in 

rhyme; poverty, however, was his constant companion, 

so that, for other reasons aplenty, his wife soon left 

him. Now his venom bursts forth all the less restrained. 

Personal enmities made among the influential were bound 

^^ Le Bresil Litteraire. Histolre de la Litterahire bresilienne suwie 

d'un cho'ix de morceaux tires des meilleurs auteurs b (r) esiliens par 

Ferdinand Wolf. Berlin, 1863. See, for a discussion of this book, the 

Selective Critical Bibliography at the back of the present work.


soon or late to recoil upon him and toward the end of 

his life he was exiled to the African colony of Angola. 

Upon his return to Brazil he was prohibited from writing 

verses and sought solace in his viola, in which he was 

skilled. 

Gregorio de Mattos's satire sought familiar targets: 

the judge, the client, the abusive potentate, the venal 

religious. "Perhaps without any intention on his part," 

suggests Carvalho, "he was our first newspaper, wherein 

are registered the petty and great scandals of the epoch, 

the thefts, crimes, adulteries, and even the processions, 

anniversaries and births that he so gaily celebrated in his 

verses." ^'^ His own countrymen he likened to stupid 

beasts of burden: 

Que OS Brasileiros sao bestas, 

E estao sempre a trabalhar 

Toda a vida por manter 

Maganos de Portugal. ^* 

There is a tenderer aspect to the poet, early noted in 

his sonnets; despite the wild life he led there are accents 

of sincerity in his poems of penitence; no less sincere, if 

less lofty, are his poems of passion, in which love is faun- 

esque, sensual, a thing of hot lips and anacreontic aban- 

don. He can turn a pretty (and empty) compliment 

almost as gracefully as his Spanish models. But it is 

really too much to institute a serious comparison between 

him and Verlaine, as Carvalho would do. Some outward 

resemblance there is in the lives of the men (yet how common 

after all, are repentance after ribaldry, and connubial 

17 Op. Cit. p. 109. 

IS The Brazilians are beasts, hard at work their lives long, in order 

to support Portuguese knaves.

44 

infelicity) , 

! 


but Carvalho destroys his own case in the very 

next paragraph. For, as he indicates, the early Brazil- 

ian's labours "represent in the history of our letters, it is 

needful to repeat, the revolt of bourgeois common sense 

against the ridiculousness of the Portuguese nobility." 

How far from all this was the nineteenth century Frenchman, 

with a sensitive soul delicately attuned to Hfe's finer 

harmonies 

I am surprised that no Brazilian has found for Gre- 

gorio de Mattos Guerra a parallel spirit much nearer than 

Verlaine in both time and space. The Peruvian Ca- 

viedes was some twenty years younger than his Brazilian 

contemporary; his life has been likened to a picaresque 

novel. He was no closet-spirit and his addiction to the 

flesh, no whit less ardent than Gregorio's, resulted in 

the unmentionable affliction. He, too, repented, before 

marriage rather than after; his wife dying, he surrendered 

to drink and died four years before the Brazilian, if 1692 

is the correct date. As Gregorio de Mattos flayed the 

luxury of 

of Lima.^^ 

Bahia, so Caviedes guffawed at the sybarites 

He castigated monastic corruption, trounced the 

physicians, manhandled the priests, and his snickers 

echoed in the high places. He knew his Quevedo quite 

as well as did Gregorio and has been called "the first 

revolutionary, the most illustrious of colonial poets." -*' 

And toward his end he makes his peace with the Lord in 

a sonnet that might have been signed by Gregorio. 

Of Gregorio de Mattos I will quote a single sonnet 

19 For a good resume of Caviedes' labours, with valuable biographical 

indications, see Luis Alberto Sanchez, Historia de la Literatura Peruana, 

I. Los Poetas de la Colonia, Pp. 1 86-200, 

80 Ibid. P. 190.


written in one of his more sober moods. There is a 

pleasant, if somewhat conventional, epigrammatical 

quality to it, as to more than one of the others, and there 

Is little reason for questioning its sincerity. Every 

satirist, at bottom, contains an elegiac poet,—the ashes 

that remain after the fireworks have exploded. If here, 

as elsewhere, only the feeling belongs to the poet, since 

both form and content are of the old world whence he 

drew so many of his topics and so much of his inspiration, 

there is an undoubted grafting of his salient personality 

upon the imported plant. 

Nasce o Sol; e nao dura mais que um dia, 

Depois da luz, se segue a noite escura, 

Em tristes sombras morre a formosura, 

Em continuas tristezas a alegria. 

Porem, se acaba o sol, porque nascia? 

Se formosa a luz e, porque nao dura? 

Como a belleza assim se trasfigura? 

Como o gosto, da pena assim se fia? 

Mas no sol, e na luz, fake a firmeza, 

Na formosura nao se da constancia, 

E na alegria, sinta-se a tristeza. 

Comece o mundo, emfim, pela ignorancia; 

Pols tem qualquer dos bens, por natureza, 

A firmeza somente na inconstancia. ^^ 

'21 The sun is born and lasts but a single day; dark night follows upon 

the light; beauty dies amidst the gloomy shadows and joy amid con- 

tinued grief. Why, then, if the sun must die, was it born? Why, if 

light be beautiful, does it not endure? How is beauty thus transfigured? 

How does pleasure thus trust pain? But let firmness be lacking in sun 

and light, let permanence flee beauty, and in joy, let there be a note of 

sadness. Let the world begin, at length, in ignorance; for, whatever 

the boon, it is by nature constant only in its inconstancy.


IV 

The first half of the eighteenth century, a review of 

which brings our first period to a close, is the era of the 

bandeirantes in Brazilian history and of the Academies 

in the national literature. The external enemies had 

been fought off the outer boundaries in the preceding 

century; now had come the time for the conquest of the 

interior.-- The bandeirantes were so called from 

bandiera, signifying a band; the earliest expeditions 

into the hinterland were called entradas, and it is only 

when the exploring caravans grew more, numerous and 

organized that the historic name bandeirantes was be- 

stowed. Men and women of all ages, together with the 

necessary animals, composed these moving outposts of 

conquest. This was a living epic; the difficulties were all 

but insurmountable and the heroism truly superhuman. 

No literature this,—with its law of the jungle which is no 

law,—with its immitigable cruelty to resisting indigenous 

tribes, and finally, the internecine strife born of partial 

failure, envy and vindictiveness. 

While the bandeirantes were carrying on the tradition 

of Portuguese bravery—evidence of a restlessness which 

Carvalho would find mirrored even today in the "intel- 

lectual nomadism" of his countrymen, as well as in their 

political and cultural instability—the literary folk of the 

civilized centers were following the tradition of Portuguese 

imitation. At Bahia and Rio de Janeiro Academies 

22 "The story of Xenophon's Ten Thousand is but a child's tale compared 

with the fearless adventure of our colonial brothers." Carvalho. 

Op. Cit. P. 127.


were formed, evidencing some sort of attempt at unifying 

taste and aping, at a distance, the favourite diversion that 

the Renaissance had itself copied from the academies 

of antiquity. The first of these, founded in 1724 by the 

Viceroy Vasco Fernandez Cezar de Menezes, was chris- 

tened Academia Brazilica dos Esquecidos,—that is, the 

BraziHan Academy of those Forgotten or Overlooked 

by the Academia de Historia established, 1720, at Lis- 

bon. A sort of "spite" academy, then, this first Brazil- 

ian body, but constituting at the same time, in a way, a 

new-world affirmation. Among the other academies 

were that of the Felizes 1736 (i. e., happy), the Selectos, 

1752, and the Renascidos, 1759, (reborn) none of which 

continued for long. Although the influence of Gongora 

was receding, Rocha Pitta's Historia da America Portiigueza 

is replete with pompous passages, exaggerated 

estimates and national "boostings" that read betimes 

like the gorgeous pamphlets issued by a tourist company. 

Pride in the national literature is already evident. The 

itch to write epics is rife; it bites Joao de Brito Lima, 

who indites a work (Cezaria) in 1300 octaves 

praising the Viceroy. Gonzalo Soares de Franca 

exceeds this record in his Brazilia, adding 500 octaves to 

the score. Manoel de Santa Maria Itaparica composes 

a sacred epic, Eustachidos, on the life of St. Eustace, in 

six cantos, each preceded by an octave summary; the 

fifth canto contains a quasiprophetic vision in which 

posterity, in the guise of an old man, requests the author 

to celebrate his native isle. This section, the Ilha da 

Itaparica, has rescued the poem from total oblivion. 

But the passage possesses hardly any transmissive fervor

48 


and the native scene is viewed through the glasses of 

Greek mythology. 

Some wrote In Latin altogether upon Brazilian topics, 

as witness Prudencio do Amaral's poem on sugar-man- 

ufacture (no less!) entitled De opifichio sacchario; the 

cultivation of manioc and tobacco were equally repre- 

sented in these psuedo-VIrgllian efforts. 

It is a barren half century for literature. Outside of 

the author of the Eustachidos and the two Important 

figures to which we soon come only the brothers 

Bartholomeu Lourengo and Alexandre de Gusmao are 

remembered, and they do no-t come properly within the 

range of literary history. The one was a physicist and 

mathematician; the other, a statesman. The latter In 

his Marido Confundido, 1737, wrote a comedy In reply 

to Mollere's Georges Dandin, much to the delight of the 

LIsbonese audiences. 

The two salient figures o-f the epoch are Sebastlao da 

Rocha Pitta (1660-1738) and Antonio Jose da Silva 

(1705-1739)- 

Brazilian critics seem well disposed to forget Rocha 

Pitta's mediocre novels and sterile verses; it is for his 

Historia that he Is remembered, and fondly, despite all 

the extravagances of style that mark the book. Romero 

regards it as a patriotic hymn, laden with ostentatious 

learning and undoubted leanings toward Portugal. 

Ollveira Lima's view, however, Is more scientific and 

historically dispassionate. One could not well expect of 

a writer at the beginning of the eighteenth century a 

nationalistic sentiment, "which In reality was still of 

necessity embryonic, hazy, or at least. Ill-defined. ... In 

pur historian, none the less, there reigns a sympathy for


all that Is of his land." ^^ And, indeed, the Historia, as 

Romero wrote, is more a poem than a chronological 

narrative, cluttered with saints and warriors, prophets, 

heroes of antiquity and mediaeval days. 

"In no other region," runs one of the passages best 

known to Brazilians, "is the sky more serene, nor does 

dawn glow more beautifully; in no other hemisphere does 

the sun flaunt such golden rays nor such brilliant noc- 

turnal glints; the stars are more benign and ever joyful; 

the horizons where the sun is born or where it sinks to 

rest are always unclouded; the water, whether it be drunk 

from the springs in the fields or from the town aqueduct, 

is of the purest; Brazil, in short, is the Terrestrial Para- 

dise discovered at last, wherein the vastest rivers arise 

and take their course." 

I am inclined to question whether Antonio Jose da 

Silva really belongs to the literature of Brazil. Romero 

would make out a case for him on the ground of birth in 

the colony, family influences and the nature of his lyrism, 

which, according to that polemical spirit, was Brazilian. 

Yet his plays are linked with the history of the Portuguese 

drama and it is hard to discover, except by excessive 

reading between the lines, any distinctive Brazilian 

character. Known to his contemporaries by the sobri- 

quet O Judeu (The Jew) 

, Antonio Jose early experienced 

the martyrdom of his religion at the hands of the Inquisi- 

tion. At the age of eight he was taken to Portugal by 

his mother, who was summoned thither to answer 

23 Olivelra Lima. Aspectos da Litteratura Colonial Brazileira. Leip- 

zig, 1896. This youthful work of the eminent cosmopolite furnishes 

valuable as well as entertaining collateral reading upon the entire 

colonial period in Brazil. The standpoint is often historical rather 

than literary, yet the proportions are fairly well observed.

50 


the charge of Judaism; in 1726 he was compelled to an- 

swer to the same charge, but freed; hostile forces were 

at work against him, however, not alone for his religious 

beliefs but for his biting satire, and chiefly through the 

bought depositions of a servant he was finally convicted 

and burned on October 21st, 1739. The strains of one 

of his operettas fairly mingled with the crackling of the 

flames. This fate made of him a national figure in Brazil; 

the first tragedy written by a Brazilian makes of him 

the protagonist (O Poeta e a Inqtdsicao, 1839, by 

Magalhaes) ; 

the second of Joaquim Norberto de Sousa's 

Cantos Epicos is dedicated to him ( 1 86 1 

) . Still another 

literature claims Antonio Jose, who occupies an honoured 

place in the annals of the Jewish drama. ^* And it is not 

at all impossible that the melancholy which Romero dis- 

covers amidst the Jew's gay compositions is as much a 

heritage of his race as of the Brazilian niodinhasr^ Al- 

ready Wolf had found in Antonio Jose's musical farces 

a likeness to the opera bouffe of Offenbach, a fellow Jew; 

the Jew takes naturally to music and to satire, so that 

his prominence in the history of comic opera may be no 

mere coincidence. Satire and melancholy, twin sisters 

with something less than the usual resemblance, inhere in 

the race of Antonio Jose. 

Antonio Jose da Silva had in him much of the rollick- 

ing, roistering, ribald, rhyming rogue. For long, he 

24 See, for just such inclusion, B. Gorin's Die Geshichte vun Yiddishen 

Theater, New York, 1918, 2 vols. (In Yiddish.) Page 33. Volume 

I. With reference to the Jew and comic opera, rumours of Sir Arthur 

Sullivan's partial Jewish origin still persist. 

25 Diminutive of moda, and signifying, literally, a new song. The 

modinha is the most characteristic of Brazilian popular forms, a transformation 

of the troubadors' jdcara and the Portuguese fado. It is gen- 

erally replete with love and the allied feelings.


he was the most popular of the Portuguese dramatists 

after Gil Vicente. He studied Rotrou, Moliere and the 

libretti of Metastasio to good advantage, and for his 

musical ideas went to school to the Italians. Sr. Ri- 

beiro has repudiated any connection between these con- 

ventionalized airs—the form of the verses is just as con- 

ventional—and the distinctivê Brazilian modinha; the 

truth is that Romero, eager to make as good an appear- 

ance for the national literature as possible, and realizing 

that the eighteenth century in Brazil needed all the help 

it could receive, made an unsuccessful attempt to dragoon 

Antonio Jose into the thin ranks. -^ As it is, his repu- 

tation in Portugal has suffered a decline, merging into the 

obscurity of the very foibles it sought to castigate. The 

martyred Jew has had no creative influence upon Bra- 

zilian literature. 

• ••••• 

•• 

The first phase of Brazilian letters is, then, a tentative 

groping, reflecting the numerous influences across the 

ocean and the instability of a nascent civilization at war 

on the one hand with covetous foreigners and on the 

other with fractious, indigenous tribes. The chroniclers 

25 The chief works of Antonio Jose da Silva are Vida do Grande D. 

Quixote de la Mancha e do gordo Sancho Panâ (lys's) ; Ezopaida ou 

Vida de Ezopo (1734) ; Os Encantos de Medea (1735) ; Amphytriao ou 

Jupiter e Alcmena (1736) ; Lahyrintho de Creta (1736) ; Guerras do 

Alecrim e da Manjerona (1737) ; a highly amusing Molieresque farce, 

considered by many his best; As Variedades de Proteu (1737) ; Precipicio 

de Faetonte (posthumous). 

The latest view of Antonio Jose (See Bell's Portuguese Literature, pages 

Southey considered "the best of their drama writers," 

282-284) ; whom 

is that his plays would in all likelihood have received little "attention 

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had it not been for the tragedy 

of the author's life." This probably overstates the case against O Judeu, 

but it indicates an important non-literary reason for his popularity.

52 


are in the main picturesque, informative, rambling rather 

than artistic; the poets are either vacuous or swollen with 

the pomp of old-world rhetoric. Even so; virile a spirit 

as Gregorio de Mattos conducts his native satire with 

the stylistic weapons forged in Europe, and the dawn of 

a valid nativism is shot through with gleams of spiritual 

adherence to Portugal and intellectual subjection to the 

old continent. Yet, as the child is father to the man, so 

even in these faltering voices may be detected the domin- 

ant notes of the later literature,—its imagination, its 

fondness for rotund expression, its pride of milieu, its 

Oriental exuberance, its wistful moodiness, its sensual 

ardor.

CHAPTER III 

PERIOD OF AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT 

(1750-1830) 

Stirrings of Revolt—The Inconfidencia—Two Epics: Ura- 

ffuay and Caramuru—The Lyrists of Minas Geraes: Claudio da 

Costa, Gonzaga, Alvarenga Peixoto, Silva Alvarenga—Minor 

figures—Political Satire—Early Nineteenth Century— Jose Boni- 

facio de Andrade e Silva. 

STRUGGLE 

for the territory of Brazil had bred 

a love for the soil that was bound sooner or 

later to become spiritualized into an aspiration 

toward autonomy. The brasileiros were not forever to 

remain the bestas that the hell-mouth of Bahia had called 

them, nor provide luxury for the maganos de Portugal. 

The history of colonial exploitation repeated itself: Spain 

with Spanish-America, Portugal with Brazil, England 

with the future United States. Taxes grew, and with 

them, resentment. Yet, as so often, the articulation of 

that rebellious spirit came not from the chief sufferers of 

oppression, but from an idealistic band of poets whose 

exact motives have not yet been thoroughly clarified by 

historical Investigation. Few less fitted to head a separatist 

movement than these lyric, idealistic spirits who 

form part of the Inconfidencia (Disloyalty) group im- 

53

54 


mortalized in Brazilian history through the hanging of 

Tiradentes and the imprisonment and exile of a number 

of others. These men were premature in their attempt, 

and foredoomed to failure, but they lived, as well as 

wrote, an ideal and thus form at once an epoch in the 

national history and the nation's letters. The freedom 

won by the United States, the foreshadowing of the 

French revolution, inspired in them ideas of a Brazilian 

republic; how surely idealistic was such an aim may be 

realized when we recall that Brazil's emancipation was 

initiated with a monarchy (1822) and that, although it 

has been a republic since 1889, there are a number of 

serious thinkers who consider the more liberal form of 

government still less a boon than a disadvantage. 

In 1783, Luis da Cunha de Menezes, a vain, pompous 

fellow, was named Captain-General of the Province of 

Minas. It was against him that were launched the nine 

satirical verse letters called Cartas Chilenas and signed 

by the pseudonym Critillo (1786). Menezes was suc- 

ceeded by Barbacena (1788) who it was rumoured, 

meant to exact the payment of 700 arrohas of gold, over- 

due from the province. It was this that proved the im- 

mediate stimulus to an only half-proved case of revolt, 

which, harshly suppressed, deprived Brazil of a number 

of its ripest talents. 

From the name of the province—Minas Geraes 

these poets have been grouped into a so-called Mineira 

school, which includes the two epicists, Frei Jose de Santa 

Rita Durao and Jose Basilio de Gama, and the four 

lyrists, Claudio Manoel da Costa, Thomas Antonio Gonzaga, 

Ignacio Jose de Alvarenga Peixoto and Manoel 

Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga. 

—

AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT ^S 

II 

Critics are not agreed upon the relative non-esthetic 

values of Basilia da Gama's Uraguay ( 1769) ^ and Santa 

Rita Durao's Caramurii (1781). Wolf, with Almeida- 

Garret, finds the first a truly national poem; Carvalho 

calls it "the best and most perfect poem that appeared in 

Brazil throughout the colonial period"; the early Denis 

found it not very original, for all its stylistic amenities; 

Romero, conceding its superiority to Caramtiru in style 

and form, finds it Inferior in historical understanding, 

terming the latter epic "the most Brazilian poem we 

possess." Verissimo, who has written an extended com- 

parison of the two poems,- is, to me, at least, most satis- 

fying of all upon the problems involved and the esthetic 

considerations implied. In both the epics he discerns 

the all-pervading influence of Camoes, the emulation of 

whom has seemed to cast upon every succeeding poet 

the obligation of writing his epic. Thus the chief initi- 

ators of Brazilian Romanticism, Porto Alegre and Magal- 

haes, had to indite, respectively, a Colombo and a Co7tfederacdo 

dos Tamoyos, and Goncalves Dias began Os 

Tymbiras, while Jose de Alencar, romantic of the Roman- 

tics, started a Ftlhos de Tupan, "jwhich happily for our 

good and his own, he never completed." But what ren- 

ders both the Uruguay and the Caramuru important in 

the national literature is the fact that they stand out from 

the ruck of earlier and later Camonean imitations by 

virtue of a certain spontaneity of origin and an intuitive, 

historic relation with their day. It is not known whether 

1 The original title was spelled Uraguay. Later writers either retain 

the first or replatee it with the more common u. 

Êstiidos. Segunda Serie, pp. 89-129.

S6 


the authors, though contemporaries, knew each other or 

read their respective works. Yet both instinctively em- 

ployed indigenous material and revealed that same "na- 

tional sentiment which was already stammering, though 

timorously, in certain poets contemporaneous with them 

or immediately preceding, such as Alvarenga Peixoto and 

Silva Alvarenga, with whom there enter into our poetry, 

mingled with classical images and comparison, names and 

things of our own. Though like Basilio and Durao, 

loyal Portuguese, these poets speak already of fatherland 

with exaltation and love. The idea of the fatherland, the 

national thought, which in Gregorio de Mattos is as yet a 

simple movement of bad humour, vagrant spite and 

the revolt of an undisciplined fellow, becomes in them the 

tender affection for their native land. . . ." 

The Uruguay especially reveals this nascent national- 

ism as it existed among the loyal Portuguese in the epoch 

just previous to the Inconfidencia. "We must remember 

that the work of the Mineira poets" (and here Verissimo 

includes, of course, the lyrists to which we presently 

come) "abound in impressions of loyalty to Portu- 

gal. . . . Let us not forget Jose Bonifacio, the so-called 

patriarch of our Independence, served Portugal devot- 

edly first as scientist in official intellectual commissions 

and professor at the University of Coimbra, and then as 

volunteer Major of the Academic Corps against the 

French of Napoleon, and finally as Intendente Geral, or 

as we should say today. Chief of Police, of the city of 

Porto. And Jose Bonifacio, like Washington, was at 

first hostile, or at least averse, to independence." 

The Uruguay is certainly less intense than the Caramuru 

in its patriotism. The author of the first wrote

AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT 57 

it, as he said, to satisfy a certain curiosity about Uruguay; 

also, he might have added, to flatter his patron, the then 

powerful Pombal, who, it will be recalled, at one time 

harboured the idea of transplanting the Portuguese 

throne to the colony across the sea. It would be an er- 

ror, however, to see in the small epic (but five cantos 

long) a glorification of the native. The real hero, as 

Verissimo shows, is not Cacambo, but the Portuguese 

General Gomes Freire de Andrade. The villains, of 

course, are the Jesuits out of whose fold the author had 

come,—the helpers of the Indians of Uruguay who re- 

volted against the treaty between Portugal and Spain 

according to which they were given into the power of the 

Portuguese. The action, for an epic, is thus restricted 

in both time and space, let alone significance, yet thus 

early the liberating genius of Basilio da Gama produced, 

for Portuguese literature, "its first romantic poem." 

Here is the first—or surely one of the first—authentic 

evidences of what the Spanish-American critics call 

"literary Americanism,"—all the more interesting be- 

cause so largely unpremeditated. 

The "romanticism" of the Uruguay Is worth dwelling 

upon, if only to help reveal our long-tolerated termin- 

ological inadequacy.^ It begins, not with the regular 

3 In Portuguese literature, as Verissimo points out in his interesting 

parallel between the two epics, it is no easy matter to indicate the exact 

line between classic and romantic styles. A Frenchman has even 

spoken of the romanticism of the classics, which is by no means merely 

a sample of Gallic paradox. The Brazilian critic considers France the 

only one of the neo-Latin literatures that may be said to possess a genuinely 

classic period. As I have tried to suggest here and elsewhere, we 

have need of a change in literary terminology; classic and romantic are 

hazy terms that should, in time, be supplanted by something more in 

consonance with the observations of modern psychology. The emphasis, 

I would say, should be shifted from the subject-matter and external

58 


invocation, but with a quasi-Horatian plunge in medias 

res. It does not employ the outworn octave, but sonor- 

ous blank verse. The freedom of its style and the harmony 

of its verse "announce Garrett, Gongalves Dias * 

and the future admirable modellers of blank verse, in the 

distribution of the episodes and the novelty of language 

and simile." The language is not the Gongoristic ex- 

travagance of the Academicians; it is modern, even con- 

temporary, grandiloquent in the Spanish style. The "In- 

dianism" of the poem, in which Basilio da Gama fore- 

casts the later Indianism of the Romantics, is not to be 

confused with that later type; for it must be recalled 

that Basilio da Gama did not look upon his Indians with 

that sentimental veneration characteristic of the nine- 

teenth century Brazilians. As they were secondary to 

his purpose, so were they in his conception. "Two and 

distinct are the features of this aspect of our literature. 

The first Indianism, initiated by Basilio da Gama, con- 

tinued by Durao and almost limited to the two epics, is 

hardly more than a poetic artifice; the Indian enters as 

a necessity of the subject, a simple esthetic or rhetorical 

means. He is not sung, but is rather an element of the 

song. In the second Indianism, that of the Roman- 

tics,—the loftiest representative of which is Gonâlves 

Dias,—the Indian advances from the position of an acces- 

sory to that of an essential element; he is the subject 

and the object of the poem. In this first phase of Indian- 

aspects to the psychology of the writer and his intuitive approach. 

The distinctions have long since lost their significance and should therefore 

be replaced by a more adequate nomenclature. 

4 Long before Verissimo, Wolf (1863) had written in his pioneer work 

already referred to, "Thus Jose Basilio da Gama and Durao only prepared 

the way for Magalhaes and Gongalves Dias."


ism the sympathy of the poet is transferred only inciden- 

contrary case obtains in 

tally to the savage. . . . The 

the second phase; the sympathy of the poet is his entirely. 

So that, in the main, it is the attitude of the poet that 

distinguished the two Indianisms: indifferent in the first, 

sympathetic in the second." And since choices must be 

made, Verissimo is right when he finds the earlier poets 

nearer to the sociological truth in preferring Portuguese 

civilization, with all its defects, to the imaginary charms 

of indigenous life. Yet sociological error of the Romantic 

Indianists proved more than poetic truth, for it was 

fecund "not only for literature, but even for the development 

of the national sentiment." ... "O Uruguay 

possesses in Portuguese literature the value of being the 

first poem of a freer, newer, more spontaneous character 

after the series of epics derived from Os Lusiadas, 

and in Brazilian literature that of being the initiator 

of the movement which, whatever its aberrations, 

contributed the most to the independence of our let- 

ters. . . ." 

There is far less artistic pleasure in reading O Cara- 

murir, it may well be, as most agree, that is, rather than 

O Uruguay^ is the national poem, but such a distinction 

pertains rather to patriotism than to poetry. The better 

verses of the earlier epic are a balm to the ear and a 

stimulus to the imagination; those of the later lack com- 

municative essence. Santa Rita Durrio, proclaiming in 

his preface the parity of Brazil with India as the subject 

of an epic, thus places himself as a rival of Camoes; in- 

stead, he is an indifferent versifier and an unconscionable 

imitator; his patriotism, as his purpose, is avowed. The

6o BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

subject of his epic is the half-legendary figure of Diogo 

Alvares Correa,^ a sort of Brazilian John Smith, who, 

wrecked upon the coast, so impressed the natives with the 

seeming magic of his firearms that he was received as 

their chief. His particular Pocahontas was the maiden 

Paraguassu, whom he is supposed to have taken with him 

to France; here she was baptized—as the disproved story- 

goes—and at the marriage of the pair none less than 

Henry II and Catherine de Medicis stood sponsor to 

them. 

Paragussu's chief rival is Moema, and the one undis- 

puted passage of the poem is the section in which, to- 

gether with a group of other lovelorn maidens, she swims 

after the vessel that is bearing him and his chosen bride 

off to France. In her dying voice she upbraids him and 

then sinks beneath the waves. 

Perde o lume dos olhos, pasma e treme, 

Pallida a cor, o aspecto moribundo, 

Com a mao ja sem vigor soltando o leme, 

Entre as salsas espumas desce ao fundo; 

Mas na onda do mar, que irado frema, 

5 The natives named him Caramtirii, whence the name of the epic. 

The word has been variously interpreted as signifying "dragon risen 

out of the sea" (Rocha Pitta) and "son of the thunder" (Durao's own 

version), referring in the first instance to the man's rescue from the 

wreck and in the second to his arquebuse. Verissimo rejects any such 

poetic interpretation and maices the topic food for fruitful observation. 

He considers the Brazilian savage, as any other, of rudimentary and 

scant imagination, incapable of lofty metaphorical flights. "The Indians, 

infinitely less poetic than the poets who were to sing them, called Diogo 

Alvares as they were in the habit of calling themselves, by the name 

of an animal, tree or something of the sort. They named him Caramuru, 

the name of a fish on their coast, because they caught him in the sea 

or coming out of it. And to this name they added nothing marvellous, 

as our active imagination has pictured." And "this very sobriquet as 

well as the epoch in which it was applied, are still swathed in legend."

AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT 6i 

Tornando a apparecer desde o profundo: 

"Ah! Diogo cruel!" disse com magua. 

E sem mais vista ser, sorveu-se n'agua. ^ 

Yet there is a single line in O Uruguay which contains 

more poetry than this octave and many another of the 

stanzas in this ten-canto epic. It is that in which is des- 

cribed the end of Cacambo's sweetheart Lindoya, after 

she has drunk the fatal potion that reveals to her the des- 

truction of Lisbon and the expulsion of the Jesuits by 

P6mbal, and then commits suicide by letting a serpent 

bite her. 

Tanto ere bella no seu rostro a morte! 

So beautiful lay death upon her face! 

Like O Uruguay, so O Caramuru ends upon a note of 

spiritual allegiance to Portugal. It is worth while re- 

calling, too, that the Indian of the first is from a Spanish- 

speaking tribe, and that the Indian of the second is a 

native Brazilian type. 

And Verissimo points out that if the Indian occupies 

more space in the second, his role is really less signifi- 

cant than in O Uruguay. 

Ill 

The four lyrists of the Mineira group are Claudio 

Manoel da Costa (1729-1789) ; Thomas 

Antonio Gon- 

zaga ( 1 744-1 807-9) the most famous of the quartet; 

^ The light of her eyes is extinguished, she swoons and trembles; her 

face grows pale, her look is deathly; her hands, now strengthless, let go 

the rudder and she descends to the bottom of the briny waves. But returning 

from the depths to the waves of the sea, which quivers in fury, 

"Oh, cruel Diogo!" she said in grief. And unseen ever after, she was 

engulfed by the waters.


Jose Ignacio de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744-1793), and 

Manoel Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga (1749-18 14). Examination 

of their work shows the inaccuracy of terming 

them a "Jschool," as some Brazihan critics have loosely- 

done. These men did not of set purpose advance an es- 

thetic theory and seek to exemplify it in their writings; 

they are children of their day rather than brothers-in- 

arms. Like the epic poets, so they, in their verses, foreshadow 

the coming of the Romanticists some fifty years 

later; the spirits of the old world and the new contend in 

their lines as in their lives. They are, in a sense, transi- 

tion figures, chief representatives of the "Arcadian" 

spirit of the day. 

Claudio de Costa, translator of Adam Smith's "Wealth 

of Nations," was chiefly influenced by the Italians and 

the French. Romero, in his positive way, has catalogued 

him with the race of Lamartine and even called him a 

predecessor of the Brazilian Byronians. A certain sub- 

jectivity does appear despite the man's classical leanings, 

but there is nothing of him of the Childe Harold or the 

Don Juan. Indeed, as often as not he is a cold stylist 

and his influence, today, is looked upon as having been 

chiefly technical; he was a writer rather than a thinker or 

a feeler, and one of his sonnets alone has suggested the 

combined influence of Camoes, Petrarch and Dante: 

Que feliz fora o mundo, se perdida 

A lembranga de Amor, de Amor e gloria, 

Igualmente dos gostos a memoria 

Ficasse para sempre consumida! 

Mas a pena mais triste, e mais crescida 

He ver, que em nenhum tempo e transitoria


Esta de Amor fantastica victoria, 

Que sempre na lembranqa e repetida. 

Amantes, os que ardeis nesse cuidado, 

Fugi de Amor ao venenozo intento, 

Que la para o depois vos tem guardado. 

Nao vos engane a infiel contentamento 

Que esse presente bem, quando passado, 

Sobrara para idea de tormento. "^ 

The native note appears in his work, as in A FabuJa do 

Riherao do Carmo and In Villa-Rica, but It Is neither 

strong nor constant. He Is of the classic pastoralists, 

"the chief representative," as Carvalho calls him, of 

Arcadism In Brazil. 

Of more enduring, more appealing stuff Is the famous 

lover Thomas Antonio Gonzaga, termed by Wolf a 

"modern Petrarch" (for all these Arcadians must have 

each his Laura) and enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen 

as the writer of their Song of Songs. For that, 

in a sense. Is what Gonzaga's poems tO; Marilia suggest. 

No other book of love poems has so appealed to the 

Portuguese reader; the number of editions through which 

the Marilia de Dirceii has gone Is second only to the print- 

ings of Os Lusiadas, and has, since the original issue In 

1792, reached to thirty-four. Gonzaga's Marilia (in 

real life D. Maria Joaquina Dorothea de Selxas Brandao) 

rises from the verses of these lyras into flesh and blood 

reality; the poet's love, however much redolent of Pe- 

^ How happy were the world, if, with the remembrance of 'ove and 

glory lost, the recollection of pleasures would likewise be consumed for- 

ever! But worst and saddest grief of all is to find that at no time is 

this fantastic victory of love transitory, for always it is repeated in 

remembrance. Lovers, you who burn in this fire, flee Love's venomous 

assault that it holds for you there in later days. Let not treacherous 

;

64 


trarchian conventions, is no imagined passion. His heart, 

as he told her in one of his most popular stanzas, was 

vaster than the world and it was her abode. Gonzaga, 

like Claudio, was one of the Inconfidencia; he fell in love 

with his lady at the age of forty, when she was eighteen, 

and sentimental Brazilians have never forgiven her for 

having lived on to a very ripe old age after her Dirceu, 

as he was known in Arcadian circles, died in exile. Yet 

she may have felt the loss deeply, for a story which 

Verissimo believes authentic tells of D. Maria, once 

asked how old she was, replying: "When he was ar- 

rested, I was eighteen. . . ." It is sweet enough not 

to be true. 

As Antonio Jose, despite his Brazilian birth, is 

virtually Portuguese in culture and style, so Gonzaga, 

despite his Portuguese birth, is Brazilian by virtue of his 

poetic sources and his peculiar lyrism,—a blend of the 

classic form with a passion which, though admirably re- 

strained, tends to overleap its barriers. If, as time goes 

on, he surrenders his sway to the more sensuous lyrics of 

later poets, he is none the less a fixed star in the poetic 

constellation. He sings a type of constant love that 

pleases even amid today's half maddened and half mad- 

dening erotic deliquescence. Some poets' gods bring 

them belief in women ; his lady brings him a belief in God 

Noto, gentil Marilia, os teus cabellos; 

E noto as faces de jasmins e rosas: 

Noto OS teus olhos bellos; 

Os brancos dentes e as feigoes mimosas: 

contentment deceive you ; for this present pleasure, when it has passed, 

will repâin as a tormenting memory. 

:


Quem fez uma obra tao perfeita e linda, 

Minha bella Marilia, tambem pode 

Fazer o ceo e mais, si ha mais ainda. ^ 

The famous book is divided into two parts, the first 

written before, the second, after his exile. As might be 

expected; the first is primaveral, aglow with beauty, love, 

joy. Too, it lacks the depth of the more sincere second, 

which is more close to the personal life of the suffering 

artist. He began in glad hope; he ends in dark doubt. 

"The fate of all things changes," runs one of his refrains. 

"Must only mine not alter?" One unconscious testimony 

of his sincerity is the frequent change of rhythm in his 

lines, which achieve now and then a sweet music of 

thought. 

''Marilia de Dirceu," Verissimo has written, "is of 

exceptional importance in Brazilian literature. It Is the 

most noble and perfect idealization of love that we pos- 

sess." (I believe that the key-word to the critic's sen- 

tence is "idealization.") "Despite its classicism, it is 

above all a personal work; it is free of and superior to, 

the formulas and the rivalries of schools. ... It is perhaps 

the book of human passion, such as the many we 

have now in our literatures that are troubled and tormented 

by grief, by doubt or despair. It is, none the 

less, in both our poetry and in that of the Portuguese 

tongue, the supreme book of love, the noblest, the purest, 

the most deeply felt, the most beautiful that has been 

Î gaze, comely Marilia, at your tresses; and I behold in your cheeks 

the jessamine and the rose; I see your beautiful eyes, your pearly teeth 

and your winsome features. He who created so perfect and entrancing 

a work, my fairest Marilia, likewise could make the sky and more, if 

more there be.


written in that itongue since Bernardim Ribeiro and the 

sonnets of Camoes." ^ 

Of the work of Alvarenga Peixoto, translator of 

Maffei's Merope, author of a score of sonnets, some 

odes and lyras and the Canto Genethliaco, little need here 

be said. The Canto Genethliaco is a baptismal offering 

In verse, written for the Captain-General D. Rodrigo Jose 

de Menezes In honour of his son Thomaz; It is recalled 

mainly for its "nativism," which, as is the case with the 

epic-writers. Is not inconsistent with loyalty to the crown. 

There is a certain Brazillanism, too, as Wolf noted. In 

his Ide to Maria. 

As Gonzaga had his Marllia, so the youngest of the 

Mineira group, Sllva Alvarenga, had his Glaura. In 

him, more than In any other of the lyrists, may be noted 

the stirrings of the later romanticism. He strove after, 

and at times achieved a cor americana ("American 

color"), and although he must introduce mythological 

figures upon the native scene, he had the seeing eye. 

Carvalho considers him the link between the Arcadians 

and the Romantics, "the transitional figure between the 

seventeenth-century of Claudio and the subjectivism of 

Goncalves Dias." To the reader In search of esthetic 

pleasure he is not such good company as Gonzaga and 

Marllia, though he possesses a certain communicative 

ardour. 

IV 

The question of the authorship of the Cartas Chilenas, 

salient among satirical writings of the eighteenth century, 

has long troubled historical critics. In 1863, when 

^ Estudos. Segunda Serie, pp. 217-218,^


the second edition of the poem appeared, it was signed 

Gonzaga, and later opinion tends to reinforce that claim. 

If the query as to authorship is a matter more for history 

than for literature, so too, one may believe, is the poem 

itself, which, in the figure of Fanfarrao Minezio tra- 

vesties the Governor Luis da Cunha Menezes.^" 

Like Gregorio de Mattos, the author of the Cartas is 

a spiteful scorpion. But he has a deeper knowledge of 

things/ and there is more humanity to- his bitterness. 

"Here the Europeans diverted themselves by going on 

the hunt for savages, as if hot on the chase of wild beasts 

through the thickets," he growls in one part. "There 

was one who gave his cubs, as their daily food, human 

flesh; wishing to excuse so grave a crime he alleged that 

these savages, though resembling us in outward appearance, 

were not like us in soul." He flays the loose man- 

ners of his day—thankless task of the eternal satirist! 

—that surrounded the petty, sensuous tyrant. There is, 

in his lines, the suggestion of reality, but it is a reality 

that the foreigner, and perhaps the Brazilian himself, 

must reconstruct with the aid of history, and this dimin- 

ishes the appeal of the verses. One need not have 

known Marilia to appreciate her lover's rhymes; the 

Cartas Chilenas, on the other hand, require a knowledge 

of Luiz de Menezes' epoch. 

The lesser poets of the era may be passed over with 

scant mention. Best of them all is Domingos Caldas 

Barbosa (1740— 1800) known to his New Arcadia as 

Lereno and author of an uneven collection marred by fre- 

quent improvisation. The prose of the century, inferior 

1'^ For Romero's strenuous attempt to prove the Cartas the work of 

Alvarenga Peixoto, see his Historia, Volume I, pages 207-211.


to the verse, produced no figures that can claim space 

in so succinct an outline as this. 

On January 23, 1808, the regent Dom Joao fled from 

Napoleon to Brazil, thus making the colony the temporary 

seat of the Portuguese realm. The psychological effect 

of this upon the growing spirit of independence was tremendous; 

so great, indeed, was Dom Joao's influence 

upon the colony that he has been called the founder of 

the Brazilian nationality. The ports of the land, hith- 

erto restricted to vessels of the Portuguese monarchy, 

were thrown open to the world; the first newspapers ap- 

peared; Brazil, having tasted the power that was bestowed 

by the mere temporary presence of the monarch 

upon its soil, could not well relinquish this supremacy 

after he departed in 1821. The era, moreover, was one 

of colonial revolt; between 18 10 and 1826 the Spanish 

dependencies of America rose against the motherland and 

achieved their own freedom; 1822 marks the establishment 

of the independent Brazilian monarchy. 

Now begins a literature that may be properly called 

national, though even yet it wavered between the moribund 

classicism and the nascent romanticism, even as the 

form of government remained monarchial on its slow 

and dubious way to republicanism. Arcadian imagery 

still held sway in poetry and there was a decline from 

the originality of the Mineira group. 

Souza Caldas (1762-18 14) and Sao Carlos (1763- 

1829) represent, together with Jose Eloy Ottoni ( 1764- 

1851), the religious strains of the Brazilian lyre. The


first, influenced by Rousseau, is avowedly Christian in 

purpose but the inner struggle that produced his verses 

makes of him a significant figure in a generally sterile era, 

and his Ode ao homien selvagem contains lines of appeal 

to our own contemporary dubiety. Sao Carlos's mystic 

poem A Assiimpcdo da Santissima Virgem possesses, to- 

day, merely the importance of its nativistic naivete; for 

the third Canto, describing Paradise, he makes exten- 

sive use of the Brazilian flora. There is, too, a long de- 

scription of Rio de Janeiro which describes very little. 

Jose Eloy Ottoni, more estimable for his piety and his 

patriotism than for his poetry, translated the Book of 

Job as Souza Caldas did the Psalms, and with great suc- 

cess. 

Though these religious poets are of secondary im- 

portance to letters, they provided one of the necessary in- 

gredients of the impending Romantic triumph; their 

Christian outlook, added tO; nationalism, tended to pro- 

duce, as Wolf has indicated, a genuinely Brazilian roman- 

ticism. 

Head and shoulders above these figures stands the 

patriarchal form of Jose Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva, 

(1763-1838) one of the most versatile and able men of 

his day. His scientific accomplishments have found ample 

chronicling in the proper places; quickly he won a repu- 

tation throughout Europe. "The name of Jose Boni- 

facio," wrote Varnhagen, "... is so interwoven with 

all that happened in the domains of politics, literature 

and the sciences that his life encompasses the history of a 

great period. . . ." His poems, in all truth but a small 

part of his labours, were published in 1825 under the Ar-

70 

! 


cadian name of Americo Elysio. They are, like himself, 

a thing of violent passions. In Aos Bahianos he exclaims 

Amei a liberdade e a independencia 

Da doce cara patria, a quem o Luso 

Opprimia sem do, com risa e mofa: 

Eis o meu crime todo! ^^ 

Yet this is but half the story, for the savant's political 

life traced a by no means unwavering line. Two years 

before the publication of his poems he who so much loved 

to command fell from power with the dissolution of the 

Constituinte and he reacted in characteristic violence. 

Brazilians no longer loved liberty: 

Mas de tudo acabou da patria gloria! 

Da liberdade o brado, que troava 

Pelo inteiro Brasil, hoje enmudece, 

Entre grilhoes e mortes. 

Sobre sus ruinas gemem, choram, 

Longe da patria os filhos foragidos: 

Accusa-os de traigao, porque o amavam, 

Servil infame bando.^- 

A number of other versifiers and prose writers are in- 

cluded by Brazilians in their accounts of the national 

letters; Romero, indeed, with a conception of literature 

more approaching that of sociology than of belles lettres, 

expatiates with untiring gusto upon the work of a formid- 

1^ I loved the liberty and independence of my dear sweet fatherland, 

which the Portuguese pitilessly oppressed with laughter and scorn. This 

is my sole crime 

12 The glory of the fatherland is wholly gone. The cry of liberty 

that once thundered through Brazil now is mute amidst chains and 

corpses. Over its ruins, far from their fatherland, weep its wandering 

sons. Because they loved it, they are accused of treason, by an infamous, 

truckling band. 

:


able succession of mediocrities. We have neither the 

space nor the patience for them here. 

It is during the early part of the period epitomized in 

this chapter that Brazilian literature, born of the Portu- 

guese, began to be drawn upon by the mother country. 

"In the last quarter of the eighteenth century," 

quotes Verissimo from Theophilo Braga's Filinto Elysio, 

"Portuguese poetry receives an impulse of renovation 

•from several Brazilian talents. . . . They 

call to mind 

the situation of Rome, when the literary talents of the 

Gauls, of Spain and of Northern Africa, enrich Latin 

literature with new creations." 

The period as a whole represents a decided step forward 

from the inchoate ramblings of the previous epoch. 

Yet, with few exceptions, it is of interest rather in retro- 

spection, viewed from our knowledge of the romantic 

movement up to which it was leading.

CHAPTER IV 

THE ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION 

(1830-1870) 

New Currents in Brazilian Poetry—Gongalves de Magalhaes, 

Gongalves Dias, Alvarez de Azevedo, Castro Alves—Lesser Fi- 

gures—Beginnings of the Brazilian Novel—Manoel de Macedo, 

Jose de Alencar, Taunay and Others—The Theatre. 

THOUGH 

usually associated with French litera- 

ature, the Romanticism of the first half of the 

nineteenth century, like that later neo-romantic- 

ism which nurtured the Symbolist and the Decadent 

schools of the second half, came originally from Germany, 

and was in essence a philosophy of self-liberation.^ 

In Brazil it is thus In part applied suggestion rather than 

spontaneous creation. But national creative production 

thrives on cross-fertilization and self-made literatures are 

1 "True Romanticism," says Wolf, "is nothing other than the expression 

of a nation's genius unrestrained by the trammels of convention." 

He would derive the name through the same reasoning that called the 

lingua romana rustica (country Roman speech) Romance, as in the 

phrase Romance Languages, in opposition to the learned Latin known 

as the sermo urbanus, or language of the city. Such liberation as Wolf 

points out, was the work of German criticism. "The Germans avenged 

themselves for the double servitude, political and literary, with which 

the French had so long oppressed them, by at last delivering the people 

from the pseudo-classic fetters." A service they performed a half-cen- 

72

THE ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION 73 

as unthinkable as self-made men. There is marked differ- 

ence between mere imitation and subjection to valid in- 

fluence, and few literary phenomena in the history of the 

new-world literature, north or south of Panama, attest 

the truth of this better than Brazil's period of Romanti- 

cism; this is the richest—it not the most refined—of its 

intellectual epochs. Brazilian culture is thrown open to 

the currents of European thought, as its ports with the 

advent of Joao VI had been thrown open to European 

commerce, and receives from romanticism, in the words 

'ideal consecration" of its nativism. And 

of Wolf, the ' 

herein, of course, lies the great distinction between the 

mere nativism which is so easily taken for a national 

note, and that nationalism which adds to the exaltation 

of the milieu the spiritual consciousness of unity and inde- 

pendence. A national literature, in the fuller sense, is 

now passible because it is the expression not solely of 

an aspiration but of partial accomplishment, with a his- 

toric background in fact. Poetry becomes more varied; 

the novel takes more definite form; genuine beginnings 

tury later, as we have suggested, bringing a new breath to the later 

pseudo-classicism of the Parnassians. The real contribution of the so- 

called Romantic movement, then, was one of release from academicallyorganized 

repression,—repression in form, in thought, in expression, 

which are but so many aspects of the genetic impulse, and not detach- 

able entities that may be re-arranged at will. The measure of literary 

repression may be taken as one of the measures of classicism; the measure 

of release from that repression may be taken as one of the meas- 

ures of romanticism. To argue in favour of one or the other or to attempt 

to draw too definite a line between them is a futile implication 

of the possibility of uniformity and, moreover, is to shift the criteria of 

art from an esthetic to a moralistic basis. There are really as many 

"isms" as there are creative individuals; classic and romantic are as- 

pects of all creative endeavour rather than definite and opposing qualities. 

The observation which I translate herewith from Wolf relates Romanticism 

to its originally individualistic importance as applied to nations. 

"The accessory ideas that have been grafted upon that of Roman-

74 


are made in the theatre, though, despite valiant attempts 

to prove the contrary, the Brazilian stage is the least of 

its glories. 

Carvalho, selecting the four representative poets of 

the period, has characterized each by the trait most 

prominent in his work. Thus Gongalves de Magalhaes 

(1811— 1882) stands for the religious phase of Brazilian 

romanticism; Gonqalves Dias (i 823-1 864) f or the natur- 

istic; Alvarez de Azevedo (i 831-185 2) for the poetry 

of doubt, and Castro Alves (1847) ^^^ the muse of 

social reclamation, particularly the abolition of black 

slavery. This group is but a solo quartet in a veritable 

chorus of singers that provides a variegated setting. The 

individual songs resound now more clearly, like so many 

strains in the polyphonic hymn of national liberation. 

The salient four are by no means restricted to the style of 

verse indicated by their classification, but such a grouping 

helps to emphasize the main currents of the new 

poetry. 

II 

In 1832, when Magalhaes published his first collec- 

tion, Poesias, he was a conventional worshipper of the 

ticism as a result of its decadence," writes the German critic, "serve only 

to confuse the etymological and historical truth of this definition. It is for 

the same reasons that the art of the Middle Ages, proper to modern 

peoples and opposed to antiquity, has been named Romantic, or rather, 

Roman. In order to re-establish the continuity of their spontaneous development 

and to paralyze the modern influence of the humanists, the 

reformists, classicism and rationalism, these same peoples had to turn 

back and drink from the ever abundant springs of the Middle Ages, 

—a brilliant epoch of development which was more in conformity with 

their genius. This is another reason why the two terms Middle Ages 

and Romanticism have been confused. But as this poetry and art of 

the Middle Ages are bigoted, excessively idealistic, taking pleasure in 

mysticism and the fantastic, these diverse acceptations have been wrongly


Portuguese classics. A visit to Europe in 1833 con- 

verted him thoroughly to French Romanticism and when, 

three years later, he issued the Suspiros poeticos e Sau- 

dades (Poetic Sighs and Longings), the very title pro- 

claimed the advent of a new orientation. His invoca- 

tion to the angel of poesy is in itself a miniature declar- 

ation of poetic independence: 

Ja nova Musa 

meu canto inspira; 

nao mais empunho 

profana lyra. 

Minha alma, imita 

a natureza; 

quern veneer pode 

sua belleza? 

De dia, de noite 

Louva o Senhor; 

Canta os prodigios 

Do Creador. ^ 

The chaste virgins of Greece, as he announces in the lines 

preceding this virtual, if distinctly minor ars poetica, 

have fascinated his childhood enough. Farewell Homer 

the poet will dream now of his native land and sigh, 

amid the cypress, a song made of his own griefs and long- 

given to romanticism. Taking the accessory for the central nucleus, 

modern romanticism has caricatured all this and discredited true romanticism, 

so that the name in the realms of art has been applied to every- 

thing that is subjective, arbitrary, nebulous, capricious and without fixed 

form." 

2 A new Muse now inspires my song. No more do I grasp the pagan 

lyre. My soul, imitate nature. Who can surpass her beauty? By day, 

by night, sing praises to the Lord; chant the wonders of the Creator. 

;

76 


ings. Nature, fatherland and God guiding humanity are 

the trinity of his emblem. They are his constant thought 

at home and abroad. "Nothing for me," he exclaims in 

his Deos e o Homem, written in the Alps in 1834, "for 

my fatherland all." In these Suspiros form becomes 

fairly free, rhythm alters with change in the thought; it 

is difficult to point to anything in them that has not al- 

ready appeared in Brazilian poetry from the earliest 

days, but the same outward elements of religion, patriot- 

ism and subjectivity have been fused into a more personal, 

more appealing product. Os Mysterios, a funereal can- 

ticle in memory of his children, published in Paris in 

1858, is in eight cantos that sing the triumph of faith. 

As he wrote in his philosophical work issued in this same 

year, Factos de Espiritu Hiimano: "This world would 

be a horrible comedy, a causeless illusion, and human 

existence a jest perpetrated by nothingness,—all would 

be but a lie, if there were not a just and kind God! . . . 

That which is absurd cannot be true. God exists and the 

human spirit is immortal in that knowledge." There is 

the kernel of his poetry. Urania, Vienna 1862, chants 

love through the symbol of his wife. The epic attempt, 

A Confederacao dos Tamoyos, in ten cantos, is noteworthy 

not so much for lofty flights as for its evidence of 

the author's blending of the patriotic and the religious 

motives. The attitude toward the Jesuit missionaries 

is the opposite to the stand taken by Basilio da Gama in 

the Uruguay; they alone among the Portuguese are 

worthy; the Indians yield at last to civilization, but they 

are idealized into defenders of justice against the Portu- 

guese exploiters.


In his epic he underwent the influence of Concalves 

Dias, as did Manoel de Araujo Porto-Alegre (1806- 

1879) in his Brazilianas (1863). This noted painter 

was also affected by the free metrical structure of the 

Suspiros of Magalhaes, as he revealed in A voz da 

Natureza of 1835. The boresome epic Colombo, 

seeking inspiration in the great discoverer, is commendable 

for imagination rather than truly creative 

poetry. 

Goncalves Dias is more lyrical in spirit than Magalhaes, 

who was rather the meditative worshipper. The 

poet of nature was the first to reveal to Brazilians in its 

full significance the pride of nationaHty, to such an extent, 

indeed, that his "Americanism" became a blind hostility 

toward Europe as being only a source of evil to the 

new continent. In him flowed the blood of all three 

races that make up the Brazilian blend and he has cele- 

brated each of the strains,—the Indian in Os Tymbiras, 

Poema Americano, the African in A Escrava, the Portu- 

guese in the Sextilhas de Frei Antdo. To this blend 

Carvalho, not without justice, attributes the inner turmoil 

of the poet's soul. He is religious in his patriotism, just 

as Magalhaes is patriotic in his religion, but if his aver- 

sion to Europe is unreasoning, his patriotism is not a 

blind flag-waving: 

A patria e onde quer a vida temos 

Sem penar e sem dor; 

Onde rostos amigos nos rodeam, 

Onde temos amor; 

Onde vozes amigas nos consolam, 

Na nossa desventura,

78 


Onde alguns olhos chorarao doridos 

Na erma sepultura.^ 

It is with the name of Gongalves Dias that "Indiahism" 

in Brazilian poetry is most closely associated. As 

we have already seen, Verissimo indicates an important 

difference between this "second" type and the first that 

appeared in the epics of the Mineira poets. The native 

was exalted not so much for his own sake as by intense reaction 

against the former oppressors of the nation. As 

early as the date of Brazil's declaration of Independence 

(September 7, 1822), numerous families had foresworn 

their Portuguese patronymics and adopted indigenous 

names; idealization in actual life could not go much 

farther. In literature such Indianism, as in the case of 

Gongalves Dias, could serve the purpose of providing a 

highly colourful background for the poetic exploitation of 

the native scene, 

Verissimo would call Gongalves Dias the greatest 

Brazilian poet, though the noted critic discovers more 

genius in Basilio da Gama and In Alvares de Azevedo and 

even Laurindo Rabello,—more philosophical emotion in 

Junqueira Frelre. And before the national criticism had 

awarded Gonqalves Dias that place of honour, the people 

had granted it. "The history of our Romanticism will 

recognize that the strength of this spiritual movement 

came not alone from the talent of Its chief authors, but 

from their communion with the milieu, from the sympathy 

which they found there. Our literature was then for the 

2 Our fatherland is wherever we live a life free of pain and grief; 

where friendly faces surround us, where we have love; where friendly 

voices console us in our misfortune and where a few eyes will weep 

their sorrow over our solitary grave.


first time, and perhaps the last, social." Goncalves Dias, 

in his Cancclo de E.xilio, captured the soul of his people 

with a simple lyrism that the slightest exaggeration might 

have betrayed into sentimental doggerel. 

Minha terra tern palmeiras, 

Onde canta o sabia; 

As aves que aqui gorgeam, 

Nao gorgeiao como la. * 

These stanzas, set to music, became the property of the 

nation. "If, like the Hebrews, we were to lose our 

fatherland, our song of exile would be already to hand in 

the Cancao of Goncalves Dias. With it he reached and 

conquered the people and our women, who are—in all 

respects—the chief element in the fame and success of 

poets. And not only the people, but Brazilian literature 

and poetry. Since that time the poet is rare who does 

not sing his land. 

" 'All chant their fatherland,' runs a verse by Casimiro 

de Abreu, whose nostalgia proceeds directly from the 

Cancao of Goncalves Dias. Nor does he hide this, call- 

ing part of his verses, Cancoes do Exilio. And to the 

name of Casimiro de Abreu we can add, following in the 

wake of the poet of Maranhao, Magalhaes, Porto Al- 

egre, Alvares de Azevedo, Laurindo Rabello, Junqueira 

Freire and almost all his contemporaries. In all you 

will find that song, expressed as conscious or disguised 

imitation. Dominated by the emotion of the Song of 

Exile, Brazil made of Goncalves Dias her favorite poet, 

^ My land has graceful palm-trees, where sings the sabid. The birds 

that warble here (i. e., in Portugal, where he wrote the poem) don't war- 

ble as ours over there.

8o 


the elect of her feeHngs. The nativist instinct, so char- 

acteristic of peoples in their infancy, found also a sympa- 

thetic echo in his Poesias Americanas, and received as a 

generous reparation the idealization of our primitive inhabitants 

and their deeds, without inquiring into what 

there was in common between them and us, into the fidel- 

ity of those pictures and how far they served the cause of 

a Brazilian literature. His lyrism, of an intensity which 

then could be compared in our language only to that of 

Garrett,^ whose influence is evident in it, found similarly 

a response in the national feeling." 

Verissimo, somewhat sceptical in the matter of love as 

experienced by poets, does not even care whether love 

in Goncalves Dias was imaginary or real. He counts 

it the distinguishing trait of the poet that his love poems 

move the reader with the very breath of authenticity. 

"I find in them the external theme translated into other 

words, into another form, perhaps another manner, but 

with the same lofty generality with which it was sung 

by the truly great, the human poets. In him love is not 

the sensual, carnal, morbid desire of Alvares de Azevedo; 

the wish for caresses, the yearning for pleasure character- 

istic of Casimiro de Abreu, or the amorous, impotent 

fury of Junqueira Freire. It it the great powerful feeling 

purified by idealization,—the love that all men feel, 

not the individual passion, the personal, limited case." 

I am not so inclined as Verissimo to accept at full value 

the statements of poets like Goncalves Dias that they 

have never felt love. It is rather that they have never 

5 The critic here refers to Joao Baptlsta da Silva Leitao Almeida 

Garrett (1799-1854) who together with Alexandre Herculano (1810- 

1877) dominated the Portuguese Romantic epoch. 

—

THE ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION 8i 

found it as they have visloned it. Indeed, this is just 

what Goncalves Dias himself has written: 

O amor que eu tanto amava de imo peito 

Que nunca pude achar. 

The love that so much I loved in my 

innermost heart, 

And that never I could find. 

The poet who wrote the lines that follow, with their 

refrain, 

Isso e amor e desse amor se morre 

This is love, the love of which one dies 

must have been something more than the man 

gifted with divination that Verissimo would make of 

him. I would hazard the guess that Verissimo's deduc- 

tions are based on a certain personal passionlessness of 

the critic himself, whose writings reveal just such an 

idealizer of love as he would find in Gongalves Dias. 

Amor e vida; e ter constantemente 

Alma, sentidos, coragao—abertos 

Ao grande, ao hello; e ser capaz de extremes, 

D'altas virtudes, ate capaz de crimes; 

Comprehender o infinito, a immensidade, 

E a natureza e Deus, gostar des campos; 

D'aves, flores, murmurios solitaries; 

Buscar tristeza, a soledade, o ermo, 

E ter o coraqao em riso e festa; 

E a branda festa, ao riso da nossa alma 

Pontes de pranto intercalar sem custo; 

Conhecer o prazer e a desventura 

No mesmo tempo e ser no mesmo ponto 

O ditoso, o miserrimo dos entes:


Isso e amor e desse amor se morre! 

Amar, e nao saber, nao ter coragem 

Para dizer o amor que em nos sentimos; 

Temer que olhos profanos nos devassem 

O templo, onde a melhor porgao da vida 

Se concentra ; onde avaros recatamos 

Essa fonte de amor, esses thesouros 

Inesgotaveis, de illusoes floridas; 

Sentir, sem que se veja, a quern se adora, 

Comprehender, sem Ihe ouvir, seus pensamentos, 

Seguil-a, sem poder fitar seus olhos, 

Amal-a, sem ousar dizer que amamos, 

E, temendo rogar os seus vestidos, 

Arder por afogal-a em mil abragos: 

^ 

Isso e amor e desse amor se morre ! 

Yet from 'Goncalves DIas to the refined, clamant volup- 

tuousness of Olavo Bilac is a far cry. The reason for the 

difference is to be sought rather in personal constitution 

than In poetic creed. Even the Romantics differ 

markedly from one another, and though the Brazilian 

^ Love is life; it is to hold one's soul, one's senses, one's heart, open 

ever to the great, the beautiful; to be capable of extremes, of lofty virtues 

and lowest crimes; to understand the infinite, the vastness. Nature and 

God, to enjoy the fields; the birds, the flowers, solitary murmurs; to 

seek sadness, solitude, the desert, to fill the heart with laughter and 

festivity; and to inundate the smiling fete, the laughter of our soul, with 

fountains of tears; to know pleasure and misfortune at the same time 

and to be at once the happiest and the most wretched of mortals: This 

is love, the love of which one dies. To love, and not know, not possess 

the courage to speak the love we feel within us; to fear lest profane 

eyes cast their defiling glance into the temple where is concentrated the 

best portion of our lives; where like misers we conceal this fountain of 

love, these inexhaustible treasures of flourishing illusions; to feel the 

presence of the adored one, though she be not seen, to understand, with- 

out hearing her speak, her thoughts; to follow her, without being able 

to gaze into her eyes; to love her without being able to say that we 

love. And, fearing to brush her garments, to burn to stifle her in a 

thousand embraces. This is love, the love of which one dies!


muse is an ardent lady (a truth which, as we shall see, 

rendered anything like a genuine Parnassianism fairly 

impossible in Brazil) Goncalves Dias is after all re- 

strained in his expression of a passion which clearly he 

felt. The passage just quoted, with all deference to 

Verissimo, is not great poetry, and precisely because it 

is too general. It is statement, not the unfolding of 

passion in a form spontaneously created. It proves 

that ^Gongalves Dias loved,—one woman or many,—but 

it reveals rather a certain incapacity to generalize than 

a faculty for transposing the particular into the univer- 

sal. 

Alvares de Azevedo is the standard-bearer of the 

Brazilian Byronists, but he should not be classed offhand 

as a mere echoer of the Englishman's strophes. 

His Lira dos Veinte Annos is exactly what the title an- 

nounces; the lyre of a twenty-year-old, which, though 

its strings give forth romantic strains of bitterness and 

melancholy and imagination that have become associated 

with Byron, Musset and Leopardi, sounds an individual 

note as well. The poet died in his twenty-first year; it 

was a death that he foresaw and that naturally coloured 

his verses. "Eat, drink and love; what can the rest 

avail us?" was the epigraph he took from Byron for his 

Vagahundo. His brief, hectic career had no time for 

meticulous polishing of lines; if the statue did not come 

out as at first he desired, he broke it rather than recast 

the metal. Not a little of his proclamative rhyming is 

the swagger of his youth, which is capable, at times, of 

giving to a poem so banal a quadruplicative title as " 'Tis 

she ! 

" 'Tis she ! 'Tis she ! 'Tis she !" With the frus- 

trated ambitions of weakness he longed for illimitable


84 

power. In the 12 de Setemhro (his birthday) he ex- 

claims : 

Fora bello talvez sentir no craneo 

A alma de Goethe, e reunir na fibra 

Byron, Homero e Dante; 

Sonhar-se n'um delirio momentaneo 

A alma da creagao, e som que vibra 

A terra palpitante. '' 

Like the hero of Aucassin et Nicolette, he prefers hell to 

heaven for a dwelling-place. 

No inferno estao suavissimas bellezas, 

Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras; 

La se namora em boa companhia, 

Nac pode haver inferno 

^ 

com Senhoras ! 

he declares in O Poeta Moribimdo. 

He is Brazil's sick child par excellence, ill, like so 

many after him, with the malady of the century. But 

one must guard against attributing this to the morbid 

pose that comes so easy at twenty. Pose there was, and 

flaunting satanism, but too many of these poets in Brazil, 

and in the various republics of Spanish-America died 

young for one to doubt their sincerity altogether. The 

mood is a common one to youth ; in an age that, like the 

romantic, made a literary fashion of their weakness, they 

were bound to appear as they appeared once again when 

' It were beautiful to feel in one's brain the soul of Goethe, and to 

unite in his body Byron, Homer and Dante. To dream in the 

delirium of a moment that one is the soul of creation and the sound 

sent forth by the palpitant earth. 

8 Hell contains exquisite beauties, Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras; there 

is where one falls in love in good company. There can't be a hell 

with ladies around!


Symbolism and the Decadents vanquished for a time the 

cold formalism of the Parnassian school. 

That Alvares de Azevedo, for all his millennial doubts 

and despairs was a child, is attested by the following pe- 

destrian quatrain from the poem of the quadruplicative 

title 

: 

Mas se Werther morreu por ver Carlotta 

Dando pao com manteiga as criancinhas, 

Se achou-a assim mais bella,—eu mais te adoro 

^ 

Sonhando-te a lavar as camisinhas ! 

Thackeray's famous parody seems here itself to be 

parodied. Alvares de Azevedo's love, if Verissimo was 

right, was "um amor de cabega,"—of the head rather 

than the heart, a poet's love, the "love of love," without 

objective reality. . . . "It is rather a desire to love, the 

aspiration for a woman ideally beloved, than a true, per- 

sonal passion. What does it matter, however, if he give 

us poems such as Anima mea, Vida, Esperancas, and all, 

almost all, that he left us?" 

The boy-poet is still an appreciable influence in the 

national letters, as well he might be among a people in- 

clined to moodiness; for many years he was one of the 

most widely read poets of the country, in company of his 

fellow-romantics, Goncalves Dias and Castro Alves. 

Among his followers are Laurindo Rabello (1826- 

1864), Junqueira Freire (1832-1855) and Casimiro 

de Abreu (i 837-1 860),—not a long lived generation. 

Rabello was a vagrant soul whose verses are saved by 

evident sincerity. "I am not a poet, fellow mortals," he 

9 But if Werther longed to see Carlotta giving bread and butter to 

the children and found her thus more beautiful than ever, I adore you 

sll the more when I vision you doing the laundry.


sings, "and I know it well. My verses, inspired by grief 

alone, are not verses, but rather the cries of woe exhaled 

at times involuntarily by my soul." He is known chiefly 

as a repentista (improvisator) and himself spread the 

popularity of his verses by singing them to his own accompaniment 

upon the violin. He tried to improvise 

life as well as verses, for he drifted from the cloister to 

the army, from the army to medicine, with a seeming 

congenital inability to concentrate. Misfortune tracked 

his steps, and, as he has told us, wrung his songs from 

him. Verissimo calls him one of the last troubadours, 

wandering from city to city singing his sad verses and 

forcing the laugh that must entertain his varying audi- 

ences. The popular mind so confused him with the 

Portuguese Bocage that, according to the same critic, 

some of Bocage's verses have been attributed to the 

Brazilian. 

"My pleasures," he sings in his autobiographical poem 

Minha Vida (My Life) "are a banquet of tears! A 

thousand times you must have seen me, happy amidst the 

happy, chatting, telling funny stories, laughing and caus- 

ing laughter. Life's a drama, eh?" He is, indeed, as 

his lines reveal, a Brazilian PagUacdo : 

Porque julgar-se do semblante, 

Do semblante, essa mascara de carne 

Que o homem recebeu 

O que por dentro vai? 

pr'a entrar no mundo, 

E quasi sempre, 

— 

Si ha estio no rosto, inverno na alma. 

Confesso-me ante vos; ouvi, contentes! 

O meu riso e fingido; sim, mil vezes 

Com elle afogo os ecos de un gemido 

Que imprevisto me chega a flor ^gs labi'os;


Mil vezes sobre as cordas afinadas 

'Que tanjo, o canto meu accompanhando 

Cahe pranto. 

Eu me finjo ante vos, que o fingimento 

E no lar do prazer prudenia ao triste.^" 

Junqueira Freire is of firmer stuff, though tossed about 

by inner and external vicissitudes that are mirrored In 

the changing facets of his verse. 

He, too, sought—with as little fundamental sincerity 

• as Laurlndo Rabello—solace In the monastery, which he 

entered at the unmonastic age of twenty as the result of 

being crossed In love. Of course he thought first of 

suicide, but "the cell of a monk is also a grave,"—and a 

grave, moreover, whence the volatile soul of youth may 

rise In carnal resurrection. Junqueira Freire was the 

most bookish of children. He read his way through the 

Scriptures, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid (an unbibllcal trio!) 

and Imbibed modern currents through Milton, Klopstock, 

De Malstre, Herculano, Garrett, Tsmartlne, Hugo. 

His prose critiques are really remarkable in so young a 

person, and one sentence upon philosophy is wiser by far 

than many a tome penned by the erudite. Philosophy he 

found to be a "vain poetry, not of description but of 

raclotlnation, nothing true, everything beautiful; rather 

art than science; rather a cupola than a foundation." 

Such a view of philosophy Is of course not new, though it 

1*^ Why judge from the face—the face,—that mask of flesh which 

man received on entering the world,—that which goes on within? Almost 

always if it is summer on one's face, it is winter in the soul. I 

confess before you; hear, contented ones! My laughter is feigned; yes, 

a thousand times I stifle with it the echoes of a groan that of a sudden 

rises to my lips; a thousand times upon the tempered strings I play, in 

accompaniment to my song fall tears. I pretend before you, for in the 

house of mirth pretence is the sad man's prudence.


is none too current. It is brilliant for a mere youth 

of Romanticist Brazil—an intuitive forecast, as it were, 

of Croce's philosophy of the intuition. 

Soon weary of the cloister walls, our poet sang his dis- 

illusionment in lines that turn blasphemous, even as the 

mother in Meu filho no claustro curses the God that 

"tore from my arms my favorite son. . . ." "We all 

illude ourselves !" he cries elsewhere. "|We conceive an 

enternal paradise and when greedily we reach after it, 

we find an inferno." 

He is, as an artist, distinctly secondary. He is more 

the poet in his prose than in his poems, and I am inclined 

to think that his real personality resides there. 

Casimiro de Abreu, in Carvalho's words, "is the most 

exquisite singer of saiidades in the older Brazilian 

poetry; ^^ his work is a cry of love for all that lay far 

away from him, his country and his family, whom he left 

when but a child. 

Meu Deus, eu sinto e tu bem ves que eu morro 

Respirando este ar; 

Faz que eu viva, Senhor! da-me de novo 

Os gozos de meu lar! 

Quero dormir a sombra dos coqueiros, 

As folhas por docel: 

E ver se apanho a borboleta branca 

Que voa no vergel 

Quero sentar-me a beira do riacho 

Das tardes ao cahir, 

! 

11 The same poet, in Verissimo's words, is the singer of "love and 

saudade. These two feelings are the soul of his poetry." Estudos, II, 47.


E sosinho scismando no crepusculo 

Os sonhos de porvir! 

Da-me os sitios gentis onde eu brincava, 

La na quadra infantil; 

Da que eu veja uma vez o ceu da patria 

O ceu do meu Brazil! 

Minha campa sera entre as mangueiras 

Banhada ao luar, 

Eu contente dormirei tranquillo 

A sombra do meu lar! 

As cachoeiras chorarao sentidas 

Porque cedo morri, 

E eu sonho ne sepulcro os meus amores, 

^^ 

Na terra onde nasci ! 

In his study of Casimiro de Abreu Verissimo has some 

illuminating things to say of love and wistful longing 

{amor e saudade) in connection with the poet's patriot- 

Ism In especial and with love of country in general. "It 

is under the influence of nostalgia and love, for both in 

him are really an ailment—that he begins to sing of 

Brazil. But the Brazil that he sings In such deeply felt 

verses, the Patria that he weeps ... Is the land In 

12 Oh, Lord, I feel and well you see that I am dying as I breathe this 

air; let me live, O Lord, let me feel, once again the joys of my native 

hearth. I would sleep in the shade of the cocoa-trees with their leaves 

as my canopy; and see whether I could catch the white butterfly that 

flies in the orchard. I want to sit beside the little stream at the fall of 

dusk, alone in the twilight filled with dreams of the future. Give me the 

sweet spots where I romped with the other children, let me see once 

again the sky of my fatherland, the skies of my Brazil. My grave will 

be among the mango-trees, bathed in the light of the moon. And there 

I shall sleep contentedly in the shadow of my hearth. The waterfalls 

will weep in deep-felt grief because I died so soon, while I in my sepul- 

chre shall dream of my loves, in the land where I was born.

90 


which were left the things he loves and chiefly that unknown 

girl to whom he dedicated his book. The long- 

ing for his country, together with the charms that this 

yearning increased or created, is what made him a pa- 

triot, if, with this restriction may be applied to him an 

epithet that from my pen is not a token of praise. His 

nostalgia is above all the work of love,—not only the 

beloved woman, but all that this loving nature loved, 

the native soil, the paternal house, country life. . . . 

Without these two feelings, love and longing, the love of 

country is anti-esthetic. If Os Liisiados, with the intense 

patriotism that overflows it, is the great poem it is, it 

owes this greatness to them alone. It is love and long- 

ing, the anxious nostalgia of the absent poet and the deep 

grief of a high passion that impart to it its most pa- 

thetic accents, its most lyric notes, its most human emo- 

tions, such as the speeches of Venus and Jupiter, the sub- 

lime episode of D. Ignes de Castro, that of Adamastor, 

the Isle of Love. . . ." ^^ 

13 With respect to a related subject Verissimo has uttered words quite 

as wise, in harmony with the esthetic view of nationalism. 

"In no other Brazilian poets do I find, together with a banal facility 

in versification, the eminent qualities of poetry. . . . Another salient 

quality of these poets (that is, of those whom Verissimo groups into 

the second Romantic generation, including Gongalves Dias, Alvares de 

Azevedo, Casimiro de Abreu, Junqueiro Freire, Laurindo Rabello)^ is 

their nationalism. Not that factitious nationalism of duty or erudition, 

in which intention and process are clearly discernible, but the expression 

—ûnconscious, so to say—of the national soul itself, in its feeling, its man- 

ner of speech, its still rudimentary thought. They are not national because 

they speak of bores, tacapes or inubias, or sing the savages that 

rove these lands. With the exception of Gonqalves Dias, none of them 

is even 'Indianist.' Casimiro de Abreu, upon whom Gongalves Dias 

made so great an impression, whose nostalgia derives largely from the 

Caned do Exilio (Song of Exile) no longer sings the Indian. Neither 

do Alvares de Azevedo, Laurindo or the others." Estudos, II, Pages 

19-20. 

—


In Fagundes Varella (i 841-1875) we have a disputed 

figure of the Romantic period. Verissimo denies him 

originality except in the Cantico de Calvario, "where 

paternal love found the most eloquent, most moving, 

most potent representation that we have ever read in 

any language," while Carvalho, championing his cause, 

yet discovers in him a mixture of Alvares de Azevedo's 

Byronic satanism, Goncalves Dias's Indianism and the 

condoreirismo of Castro Alves and Tobias Barreto. He 

• is a lyrist of popular inspiration and appeal, and "one of 

our best descriptive poets. . . ." Vârella, then, to- 

gether with Machado de Assis and Luis Guimaraes 

Junior, is a transitional figure between Romanticism and 

Parnassianism." 

The influence of Victor Hugo's Les Chatiments was 

great throughout South America and in Brazil brought 

fruit chiefly in Tobias Barreto and Castro Alves, the 

salient representatives of the so-called condoreirismo 

like the condor their language flew to grandiloquent 

heights, whence the name, for which in English we have 

a somewhat less flattering counterpart in the adjective 

"spread-eagle." Barreto (1839-1889) belongs rather 

to the history of Brazilian culture; he was largely re- 

sponsible for the introduction of modern German thought 

and exerted a deep influence upon Sylvio Romero. Alves 

was less educated—his whole life covers but a span of 

twenty-four years—but what he lacked in learning he 

made up in sensitivity and imagination. Though he 

can be tender with the yearnings of a sad youth, he be- 

comes a pillar of fire when he is inspired by the cause 

of abolition. 

Romero, with his customary appetite for a fight, has. 

;

92 


despite his denials of preoccupation with mere questions 

of priority, given himself no little trouble to prove 

Barreto's precedence in the founding of the condoreiro 

school; ^^ we shall leave that matter to the historians. 

Brazilians themselves, as far as concerns the esthetic element 

involved, have made a choice of Alves. He is one 

of the national poets. His chief works are three in 

number: Espumas Fluctuantes, Gonzaga (a play) and 

O Poema dos Escravos (unfinished). Issued separately, 

the Poem of the Slaves, is not, as its title would imply, 

a single hymn to the subjected race; it is a collection of 

poems centering around the theme of servitude. He 

does not dwell upon the details of that subjection; he is, 

fundamentally, the orator. The abolition of slavery did 

not come until 1888; on September 28, 1871, all persons 

born in Brazil were declared free by law; it was such 

poems as Alves's Vozes d' Africa and O Navio Negreiro 

that prepared the way for legislation which, for that 

matter, economic change was already fast rendering in- 

evitable. ^^ 

III 

The Brazilian novel is a product of the Romantic 

movement. Such precursors as Teixeira e Souza 

(1812— 1861) and Joaquim Noberto de Souza Silva 

( 1 820-1 891) belong rather to the leisurely investigator 

of origins. The real beginnings are to be appreciated 

in the work of Joaquim Manoel de Macedo (i 820-1 822) 

and Jose de Alencar (i 829-1 877). 

Macedo portrayed the frivolous society of the epoch 

1* See Historia da Litterature Brasileira Vol. II, pages 476-601. 

15 See, in Part Two of this book, the chapter devoted to Castro Alves.


of Dom Pedro II. He was not so much a leader of taste 

as a skilful exploiter of It. He has been called "par ex- 

cellence the novelist of the Brazilian woman"; we need 

look to him, then, for little In the way of frankness or 

psychological depth. To the reader of today, who has 

been tossed high In the waters of the contemporary novel, 

Macedo and his ilk are tame, naive, a mite Insipid. 

Not that some of his pages lack a certain piquancy in 

their very simplicity. His Rachel, for example, in O 

Moco Loiiro {The Blond Young Man) can talk like 

a flapper who has been reading Bernard Shaw, but we 

know that love Is to teach her better In the end. Ma- 

cedo was a writer for the family hearth; his language, 

like his Ideas, Is simple. But our complex civilization 

has already outdistanced him; it is not at all impossible 

that in a short while he will join the other precursors and, 

with the exception of his books Moreninha ( The Bru- 

nette) and O Moqo Louro, be but a name to his countrymen 

and even his countrywomen. The first, published In 

1849, rnade his reputation; it Is a tale of the triumph of 

pure love. The second is after The Brunette, his bestknown 

novel, narrating the hardly original tale of the 

virginal, dreamy Honorina and the free, mocking Rachel 

who love the same youth; Honorina's true love, as we 

might expect, wins out, for Rachel sacrifices her passion 

without letting the happy pair realize the extent of her 

abnegation. 

"By no means should I say that he possesses the power 

of idealization of Jose de Alencar, the somewhat pre- 

cieiise quality of Taunay or the smiling, bitter pessimism 

of Machado de Assis; if we wish to judge him in comparison 

with them or with the writers of today, his work

94 


pales; his modest creations disappear into an inferior 

category. But accepting him in the time for which he 

wrote, when the novel had not yet received the Flauber- 

tian esthetics that ennobled it and had not been enriched 

by the realistic genius of Zola,—beside his contempor- 

aries Teixeria de Souza, Manoel de Almeida and Ber- 

nardo Guimaraes, he seems to us living, picturesque, 

colorful, as indeed he is. I esteem him because he has 

contributed to the development and the wealth of our 

literature." ^° 

More important to the history and practice of the 

Brazilian novel is Jose de Alencar, famous for his Guar- 

any and Iracema, the first of which, in the form of an 

opera libretto set to music by the native composer Carlos 

'Gomes, has made the rounds of the operatic world. 

Alencar is to the novel what Gongalves Dias is to the 

poem: the typical Indianist. But Brazilians find his 

Indianism superior to that of the poet in both sincerity 

and majesty. "His Indians do not express themselves 

like doctors from Coimbra; they speak as Nature has 

taught them, loving, living and dying like the lesser plants 

and animals of the earth. Their passions are as sudden 

and as violent as the tempest,—rapid conflagrations that 

burst forth for an instant, flaring, glaring and soon dis- 

appearing." ^^ 

At his best Alencar is really a poet w^ho has chosen 

prose as his medium. He uses the Indian milieu, as 

Gongalves Dias in his poetry, for the descriptive oppor- 

tunities it affords. Brazilians rarely speak of his plots, 

iG Benedicto, Costa, Le Roman au Bresil. P. 70. 

1^ Carvalho, Op. Cit. P. 263. Yet many will refuse to believe that 

Alencar's Indians are natural. Indeed, Alencar himself has repudiated 

any realistic intention.


which are simplicity itself; what fascinates them, even 

today, is his rich palette, which challenges comparison 

even with the opulent coloration of Coelho Netto and 

Graga Aranha. Chief among foreign Influences were 

the Frenchmen Chateaubriand, de Vigny, Balzac, Dumas, 

Hugo. Our own Cooper, himself an "Indianist" contemporaneous 

with Alencar, influenced the Brazilian in- 

novator, but not in the manner that Brazilian critics have 

seemed to discern. Alencar himself, in a rare document, 

has sought to refute those who find his Guarany a novel 

in Cooper's style. To him Cooper was, first of all, the 

"poet of the sea." As far as concerned American 

poetry, Alencar's model (and model is his own word) 

was Chateaubriand. "But my master was that glorious 

Nature which surrounds me, and in particular the magnificence 

of the deserts which I studied in early youth 

and which were the majestic portals through which I 

penetrated into m.y country's past. ... It was from 

this source, from this vast, secular book that I drew the 

pages of Guarany and Iracema and many another. . , . 

From this source, and not from the works of Chateau- 

briand, still less from those of Cooper, which were only 

a copy of the sublime original that I had read within my 

heart. 

"Brazil, like the United States and most other coun- 

tries of America, has a period of conquest in which the 

invading race destroys the indigenous. This struggle 

presents analogous characters because of the similarity of 

the native tribes. Only in Peru and Mexico do they 

differ. 

"Thus the Brazilian novelist who seeks the plot of his 

novel in this period of invasion cannot escape a point of

96 


contact with the American writer. But this approxima- 

tion comes from history; it is inevitable and not the re- 

sult of imitation. 

"If neither Chateaubriand nor Cooper had existed, the 

American novel would have appeared in Brazil in due 

season. 

"Years after having written Guarany" ( Alencar wrote 

the book in his twenty-seventh year, and would have it 

that the tale occurred to him in his ninth year, as he 

was crossing the sertoes of the North on the road from 

Ceara to Bahia)." I re-read Cooper in order to verify 

the observation of the critics, and I was convinced that it 

is of minor importance. There is not in the Brazilian 

novel a single personage whose type may be traced to 

the Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, Ontario, The Sap- 

pers and Lionel Lincoln. . . . Cooper considers the na- 

tive from the social point of view and was, in the de- 

scription of indigenous customs, a realist. ... In Guar- 

any the savage is an ideal, which the writer tried to poet- 

ize, divesting him of the coarse incrustation in which he 

was swathed by the chroniclers, and rescuing him from 

the ridicule that the stultified remnants cast upon the. al- 

most extinct race. 

"But Cooper, say the critics, describes American na- 

ture. And what was he to describe if not the scene of 

his drama? Walter Scott before him had provided the 

model for these pen landscapes that form part of local 

color. 

"What should be investigated is whether the descrip- 

tions of Guarany show any relationship or afiinity to 

Cooper's descriptions; but this is what the critics fail to 

do, for it means work and requires thought. In the


meantime the comparison serves to show that they re- 

semble each other neither in genre nor style." ^^ 

The Brazilian novelist, presenting thus his own case, 

hits precisely upon those two qualities—sea lore and 

realism—for which Cooper only yesterday, fifty years 

after Alencar wrote this piece of auto-criticism, was re- 

discovered to United States readers by Professor Carl 

Van Doren. "Not only did he outdo Scott in sheer 

accuracy," writes the critic of the United States novel, 

"'but he created a new literary type, the tale of adventure 

on the sea, in which, though he was to have many 

followers in almost every modern language, he has not 

been surpassed for vigour and swift rush of narra- 

tive.^^ 

Alencar is no realist nor is he concerned with sheer 

accuracy. Guaranyj the one book by which he is sure to 

be remembered for many a year, is, as we have seen, a 

prose poem in which the love of the Indian prince Pery 

for the white Cecy, daughter of a Portuguese noble, is 

unfolded against a sumptuous tapestry of the national 

scene. Alencar wrote other novels, of the cities, but in 

Brazilian literature he is identified with his peculiar 

Indianism. From the stylistic standpoint he has been 

accused of bad writing; like so many of his predecessors 

—and followers—he plays occasional havoc with syn- 

tax, as if the wild regions he depicts demanded an analo- 

gous anarchy of language. Yet Costa, granting all this, 

18 From a document first published by the author's son, Dr. Mario 

de Alencar of the Brazilian Academy, in 1893, twenty years after it 

was written, under the title Como E Porque Sou Romancista (How And 

Why I Became a Novelist). I have translated these excerpts from the 

article as reprinted in Joao Ribeiro's Auctores Contemporaneos, 6a 

Edigao, Refundida, Rio de Janeiro, 1907. 

19 The American Novel, New York, 1921.

98 


adds that "before Jose de Alencar the Portuguese language 

as written in Brazil was, without exaggeration, a 

horrible affair. What man today possesses sufficient 

courage to brave with light heart that voliminous agglom- 

eration of verses in the Confederacdo dos Tamoyos, In 

Colo?nbo, m Caramiiru or Uruguay? In prose . . . 

but let us rather not speak of It. It Is enough to read 

the novels of Telxelra de Souza and Manoel de Al- 

meida." -^ This same style Is viewed by others as a 

herald of the nervous prose of another man of the ser- 

toes, Euclydes da Cunha, who has enshrined them In one 

of the central works of modern Brazil. 

Sertanismo Itself, however, was initiated by Bernardo 

Joaqulm da Silva Gulmaraes (1827— 1885) in such works 

as Pelo Sertao, Mauricio, Escrava Isaurd. He was 

followed in this employment of the sertao as material 

for fiction by Franklin Tavora (1842— 1888) and particu- 

larly Escragnole Taunay (1843— 1899), whose In- 

nocenc'm, according to Verlssimo, Is one of the country's 

few genuinely original novels. Merou, in 1900, called 

it "the best novel written in South America by a South 

American,"—a compliment later paid by Guglielmo 

Ferrero to Graca Aranha's Chanaan. Viscount Taunay's 

famous work—one might call It one of the central pro- 

ductions of Brazilian fiction— Is but scant fare to 

the contemporary appetite In fiction, yet It has been 

twice translated Into French, and has been put Into 

English, Italian, German, Danish and even Japa- 

nese. 

The scene Is laid In the deserted Matto Grosso, a favour- 

20 Op. Cit. Pp. 77-78.


ite background of the author's. Innocencia, all that her 

name implies, dwells secluded with her father, a miner, 

her negress slave Conga and her Caliban-like dwarf Tico, 

who is in love with Innocencia, the Miranda of this dis- 

trict. Into her life comes the itinerant physician Cirino 

de Campos, who is called by her father to cure her of 

the fever. Cirino proves her Ferdinand; they make love 

in secret, for she is meant by paternal arrangement for a 

mere brute of a mule-driver, Manecao by name. Inno- 

cencia vows herself to Cirino, when the mule-driver comes 

to enforce his prior claim; the father, bound by his word 

of honour, sides with the primitive lover. Innocencia 

resists; Manecao avenges himself by killing the doctor. 

A comic figure of a German scientist adds humour and 

a certain poignant irony to the tale. 

Students of Spanish-American letters are acquainted 

with the Colombian novel Maria by the half-jew Jorge 

Isaacs; it has been termed a sister work to Innocencia 

and if it happens to be, as is my opinion, superior to the 

Brazilian, a comparison reveals complementary quali- 

ties in each. The Spanish-American work is rather an 

idyll, instinct with poetry; Innocencia, by no means de- 

void of poetry, is more melodramatic and of stouter tex- 

ture. Taunay, in Brazilian fiction, is noted for having 

introduced an element of moderation in passion and 

characterization, due perhaps to his French pro- 

venience. His widely-known account of an episode in 

the war with Paraguay was, indeed, first written in 

French. 

Manoel Antonio de Almeida (i 830-1 861) in his 

Memorias de urn Sargento ct^ Milicias had made a prema-


ture attempt to introduce the realistic novel; his early 

death robbed the nation of a most promising figure. 

IV 

The theatrical literature of Brazil is poor; the origin 

of the modern drama is generally attributed to Magalhaes' 

tragedy upon Antonio Jose, 1838, and to the comedies 

of Luis Carlos Martins Penna (18 15-1848). Of 

drama there is no lack; all that is needed is the drama- 

tist. Martins Penna stands out easily from the ruck 

for elementary realism, but he is almost alone. Even 

today, the plays of Claudio de Souza, for all their suc- 

cess upon the stage, cannot compare with the quality that 

may be encountered in contemporary poetry, novels and 

tales. 

The Romantic period in Brazil is distinguished as 

much for activity as for actual accomplishment; histor- 

ically it is of prime importance in the national develop- 

ment, while esthetically it reveals a certain broadening 

of interests. The national writer, as a type, has attained 

his majority; he gazes upon broader horizons. Yet take 

away Guarany, Iracema, Innocencia, O Mogo Louro, 

Moreninha, and what, really, is left in prose? The 

poets fare better; they are nearer to the sentient heart of 

things. Yet implacable esthetic criteria would do away 

with much of their product as well. It is by such tokens 

as these that one may recognize the secondary impor- 

tance of the national letters, for, of course, Brazilian 

letters do not constitute a major literature. Here it is 

the salient individual that counts, and I, for one, am in- 

clined to think that in art such an individual, as bodied

THE ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION loi 

forth in his work, is the only thing that counts. The 

rest— genres, evolution, periods,—is important in the 

annals of national development; it is, however, sociology, 

history, what you will, but not the primary concern of 

art.

CHAPTER V 

CRITICAL REACTION 

(1870-1900) 

French Background— ;Naturalists, Parnassilans,—Theophilo 

Dias, 

The 

Raymundo Correia, 

Novel—Aluizio de 

Alberto de Oliveira, Olave Bilac 

Azevedo, Machado de Assis—The 

Decadents—Later Developments. 

later course of Brazilian letters follows prac- 

THEtically the same line traced by the reaction in 

France against the Romantic school. To and 

fro swings the pendulum of literary change in unceasing 

oscillation between dominance of the emotions and rule 

of the intellect. Life, as Havelock Ellis somewhere has 

shown, is an eternal process of "tumescence and detumescence"; 

the formula is quite true of literature. Buds 

and human beings alike swell to maturity in the womb of 

nature and then follows the inevitable contraction. So, 

in letters, the age of full expression is succeeded by one 

of repressed art,—the epoch of a blatant proclamative 

"ism" by an era of restraint and withdrawal. Who 

shall, in a priori fashion, pretend to say that this "ism" 

is right and that one wrong? By their works alone shall 

ye know them. 

If, then, Romanticism in France, as subsequently else- 

where, gave way to a rapid succession of inter-reacting 

102 

— 

'-

CRITICAL REACTION 103 

schools or groups, the phenomenon was the familiar one 

of literary oscillation. The Naturalists, nurtured upon 

advancing science, looked with scorn upon the emotional 

extravagances of the Romantics. To excessive preoc- 

cupation with the ego and with unreality, they opposed 

the critical examination and documentation of reality. 

Milieu, social environment, psychology ceased to be ideal- 

ized; enthusiasm and exaltation were succeeded by cold 

scrutiny. The doctrine of "impersonality" (a most in- 

artistic and psychologically impossible creed) was crystal- 

lized around the powerful literary personality of Flau- 

bert, and Romantic egolatry looked as silly in the search- 

ing day of the new standards as last night's flowers with- 

out the breath of spring and the moonlight that excuse 

the sweet folly they incite. 

In poetry the Parnassians revolted against Romantic 

self-worship on the one hand and the realistic preoccupa- 

tion of the naturalists on the other. They, too, believed 

themselves impersonal, impassive—terms only relative 

in creative endeavour. They climbed up their ivory 

towers, away from vulgar mundanity, and substituted for 

the musical vagaries of their unrepressed predecessors 

the cult of the clear image and the sculptural line. And 

fast upon them followed the Symbolist-Decadents, 

some of whom, indeed, were nourished upon the milk of 

Parnassianism,—and who, in their turn, abjured the 

modern classicism of the Parnassians with their cult of 

form and clarity, and set up instead a new musicality of 

method, a new intensity of personalism. Their ivory 

towers were just as high, but were reared on subtler 

fancies. Suggestion replaced precision; sculpture melted 

into music. In a word, already neo-classicism had swung 

—


to neo-romanticism ; the pendulum, on its everlasting 

swing, had covered the same distance in far faster time. 

Yet each seeming return to the old norms is a return 

with a difference; more and more the basic elements of 

the reaction are understood by the participants in their 

relations to society and to the individual. Especially is 

their psychological significance appreciated and—most 

important of all and most recent—their nature as complements 

rather than as antagonists. When Dario, in a 

famous poem, asked "^Quien quieii es no es Romantico?" 

(Who that is, is not a Romantic?) he but stressed the 

individualism at the bottom of all art. Perhaps the days 

of well-defined "schools" in art are over; perhaps the 

days of the label in criticism are gone, or going fast, even 

in academic circles; all men contain the potentialities of 

all things and opposites grow out of opposites. Man is 

thus himself unity in variety,—the old shibboleth of the 

estheticists,—and the "schools" are but phases of the 

multiple personality. 

The reaction against Romanticism, if varied in France, 

was even less disciplined in Ibero-America. And here 

we come upon a curious fact in comparative literature that 

is deserving of investigation. In the first place, Parnas- 

sianism in Brazil (and in Spanish America, for that 

matter) was hardly ever the frigidly perfect thing it became 

in the hands of the Frenchman. A certain tropical 

warmth is bound, in the new-world poets, to glow in the 

marble veins of their sonnets. In the second,—and this 

is truly peculiar,—that Symbolism (especially In its Decadent 

phase) which was responsible for a fundamental 

renovation of letters In Spanish America and later affected 

Spain itself, passed over Brazil with but scant influence.


Brazil produced some highly interesting Parnassians 

(with proper reservations made in the use of that term) ; 

Bilac, in his realm, is the peer of any Spanish American. 

But the Portuguese-speaking republic shows no figure approaching 

the epochal Ruben Dario, whose life and 

labours fairly sum up the modernist era in Spanish 

America.^ 

II 

The scientific spirit in Brazilian poetry ^ns of short 

duration, even though Romero, one of its chief expo- 

nents, gives himself credit for having initiated in 1870 the 

reaction against Romanticism with a poetry that sought 

harmony with the realistic philosophy of the day. He 

and Martins Junior (whom Carvalho places at the head 

of the "scientific" poets) are today considered to have 

troubled the waters of Brazilian lyrism for but a pass- 

ing moment. In reality, they but hastened the advent 

of Parnassianism. Brazil for a while was weary 

of the great Latin weakness,—eloquence. Its poetical 

condors had too long orated from mountain-tops; it was 

high time for swans, for towers of ivory. Besides, I be- 

lieve, this answered a certain need of the national psyche. 

The sensualist, too, has his moments of refinement, and 

he becomes the exquisite voluptuary. Science in poetry, 

as exemplified by the strophes of Martins Junior, is too 

1 The so-called Modernist movement (another meaningless name!) 

was really not a movement, but a scattered reaction against Spanish 

academic domination. It was French in inspiration and chiefly behind 

the lead of the Decadents resulted in a species of continental affirmation. 

I have tried, in my Studies in Spanish-American Literature, New York, 

1920, to show the emergence of this affirmation, from the romantic pred- 

ecessors in the New World and the French background, to such salient 

personalities as Dario, Rodo, Eguren, Blanco-Fombona and Chocano.

io6 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

often but rhymed harangue, even as the early Brazilian 

versifiers presented us with rhymed fruit-baskets, avia- 

ries and geographies. Note the unscientific worship of 

science in his lines,—that science which so prosaically he 

terms "o grande agente altruista," the great altruistic 

agent: 

O seculo immortal, 6 seculo em que a conquista, 

A guerra, as religioes e as velhas monarchias 

Tem tombado no chao, nojentas como harpias, 

Tristes como o deserto! Eu curvo-me ante ti 

E ponho o joelho em terra afim de orar 

Ao teu busto ideal, titanico, estrellado! . . .^ 

The transition from Romanticism to Parnassjanlsm In 

Brazil may be studied In the poetry of Luiz Guimaraes 

and the earlier verses of Machado de Assis. I find It 

dlfl'icult to agree with either Verissimo or Carvalho In 

his estimate of Machado de Assls's poetry; Romero 

has by far the more tenable view. It may be true that the 

ChrysaUdas and the Phalenas of Machado de Assis, like 

the Sonetos e Rimas of Luiz Guimaraes, reveal a great 

refinement of form and elegance of rhyme,—even a 

wealth of rhythm. But colour and picturesqueness are 

hardly the distinguishing poetic traits of Machado de 

Assis, whose real poetry, as I try to show in the chapter 

dedicated especially to him, Is In his prose. 

Luiz Guimaraes was, from one aspect, a Romantic 

2 Oh, immortal century (i. e., the nineteenth), oh, century in which 

conquest, war, religions and the ancient monarchies have crumbled to 

earth, loathsome as harpies, gloomy as the desert! I bow before thee, 

touch my knee to the earth, that I may pray to thine ideal titanic, 

starry bust!


with a more precise technique; his form, in other words, 

was quite as transitional as his content. In addition to 

French influence he underwent that of the Italians Stec- 

chetti and Carducci, of whom he made translations into 

Portuguese. His sonnet on Venice is illustrative of a 

number of his qualities,—his restrained saudade, his gift 

of picturesque evocation, his rich rhymes, his vocalic mel- 

ody: 

Nao es a mesma, a flor de morhidezza, 

Rainha do Adriatico! Brilhante 

Jordao de amor, onde Musset errante 

Bebeu em ondas a lustral belleza. 

Ja nao possues, 6 triumphal Veneza, 

O teu sorriso—olympico diamante, 

Que se engastou do lord bardo amante 

Na fronte heroica de immortal grandeza. 

Tua escura laguna ja nao sente 

Da antiga serenata o som plangente, 

E OS soluQos de amor que nos teus barcos 

Exhalava a patricia voluptuosa. . . . 

Resta-te apenas a cangao saudosa 

Das gemedoras pombas de Sao Marcos. ^ 

"Machado de Assis," writes Carvalho,* "was a poet of 

3 You're not the same, oh flower of morhidezza, queen of the Adriatic! 

Glittering Jordan of love, where the wandering Musset drank lustral 

beauty in waves. Your smile, oh triumphal Venice, is gone—Olympic 

diamond that was set in the heroic forehead of the lord, bard and 

lover, immortally great. Your dark lagoon no longer hears the plangent 

strains of the olden serenade,—the sighs of love heaved by the voluptuous 

patrician in your gondolas. . . . There remains but the yearnful 

song of San Marco's moaning pigeons. 

*0p. Cit. P. 301.

io8 BRAZILIAN .LITERATURE 

greater resources and fuller metrical invention than Luiz 

Guimaraes. His poetry . . . reveals a psychological 

intensity rarely attained in this country. Possessing a 

firm classical education, a profound knowledge of those 

humanities which in seventeenth century France were the 

distinguishing characteristic of the honnete hoifime, 

Machado succeeded In stamping upon his verses a truly 

singular Impress of subtlety and discretion. His Images 

are, as a rule, of a perfect realism, a clearness worthy 

of the old masters. His images are veritable par- 

ables. . . ." But, to one foreigner at least,—and, I 

suspect, to more than one Brazilian, Machado de Assis 

as a poet Is cold, not often achieving artistic communica- 

tion; he Is colourful, maybe, but his colours are seen 

through a certain diaphanous mist that rubs off their 

bloom. What Carvalho would find In the man's verses I 

discover, strangely enough. In his remarkable prose—his 

humorism, his pessimism. The themes most cer- 

tainly Inhere In his verse, but they are expressed at their 

best, most artistically developed, in his prose. Carvalho, 

seeking to rectify the position of this great figure In the 

history of Brazilian letters, would even make of him a 

pioneer. "This feeling of the tragico quotidiano," he as- 

serts, "which only today Is beginning to enter Into Brazilian 

poetry, was first revealed to our literature by Machado 

de Assis. Although such notes are not frequent nor 

many In his work. It is none the less true that, before him, 

they were completely unknown. . . . Even in his poetry, 

his poetry that has been so unjustly judged and so pettily 

understood, Machado de Assis Is a pioneer, an originator 

of the first order. It was natural for his art not to be 

to the taste of the popular palate; it did not resound


with the fireworks and the hoarse cries of Brazil's most 

loudly applauded verse-manufacturers." ^ 

Pioneering, however, is not poetry. In art, the idea 

belongs to him who makes the best use of it. In Mach- 

ado de Assis, the thought often subjected the emotion; 

this was characteristic of the man's peculiar psychology. 

I wpuld not be understood as denigrating his poetic 

memory; far from it. But in my opinion (and I can 

speak for no one else) he is in the conventional sense, 

only secondarily a poet, and a secondary poet. 

At the head of the true Parnassians stand Theophilo 

Dias, Raymundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira and Olavo 

Bilac, though Verissimo sees in the Miniaturas of Gon- 

calves Crespo "the first manifestation of Parnassian 

poetry published here." ^ Crespo was not out-and-out 

Parnassian, however, as was Affonso Celso in his Telas 

sonantes of 1876. The very title—Sounding Canvases, 

i. e., pictures that sing their poetry— is in itself a pro- 

gram. Brazilian Parnassianism thus begins, according to 

Verissimo, in the decade 1 880-1 890. 

Sonetos e Rimas, 

by Luiz Guimaraes, appears in 1879; Raymundo Cor- 

reia's Symphonias are of 1883, his Versos e Fersoes, of 

5 Ibid. p. 303. 

^ Estudos 2a serie, P. 283. The book was published in Portugal, in 

1872, and was "read and admired here in 1872. The Miniaturas, the 

poems of which bear dates from 1867, to 1870, mention the poet as a 

Brazilian, native of Rio de Janeiro. He was, in fact, such by birth, by 

intention, and, what is of more importance, by intuition and sentiment, 

genuinely Brazilian. We ought, then, to count this, his first book, de- 

spite the fact that it was conceived and generated abroad, in the roster 

of our Parnassianism, and perhaps as one of its principle factors."' See, 

however, Afranio Peixoto's splendid two-volume edition of the Obras 

Completes de Castro Ahves, Rio de Janeiro, 1921, for a refutation of 

this opinion. (Page 15.) According to Alberto de Oliveira there are 

decided Parnassian leanings in Castro Alves's Espumas Fluctuantes, 1870, 

in the sonnets called Os anjos da meia noite (Midnight Angels.)

no BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

1884; Alberto de Oliveira's Meridionaes are of 1884, 

and th.t Sonetas e poemas of 1886. In the very year that 

the Nicaraguan, Dario, with a tiny volume of prose and 

poetry called Aztil . , . and published in Chile, was in- 

itiating the "modernist" overturn in Spanish America, 

Bilac was issuing (1888) his Poesias. 

Brazilian Parnassianism, as we have seen, is less ob- 

jective, less impersonal than its French prototype. Poetic 

tradition and national character were alike opposed to 

the Gallic finesse, erudition, ultra-refinement. Pick up 

the many so-called Parnassian poems of Spanish or Portu- 

guese America, remove the names of the authors and the 

critical excrescences, and see how difficult it is from the 

evidence of the poem itself—to apply the historical la- 

bel 

Theophilo Dias is hardly the self-controlled chiseller of 

Greek marbles. How "Parnassian," for example, is 

— 

such a verse as this, speaking of his lady's voice? 

Exerce sobre mim um brando despotismo 

Que me orgulha, e me abate;—e ha nesse magnetismo 

Uma forca tamanha, uma electricidade, 

Que me fascina e prende as bordas de um abysmo, 

Sem que eu tente fugir,—inerte, sem vontade. '^ 

This is not the kind of thought that produces genuine 

Parnassian poetry. How "impersonal" is it ? How 

"sculptural"? More than one poem of the "Romanti- 

cist" Machado de Assis is far more Parnassian. 

And listen to this description, by Carvalho, of Ray- 

"^ It exercises over me a gentle tyranny that fills me with pride and 

casts me down; there is in this magnetism such power, an electricity 

that fascinates me and draws me to the edge of an abyss. And I, inert, 

without will power, make no attempt to flee.

CRITICAL REACTION in 

mundo Correia. How "Parnassian" does it sound? 

"Anger, friendship, hatred, jealousy, terror, hypocrisy, 

all the tints and half-tints of human illusion, all that is 

closest to our innermost heart ... he weighed and 

measured, scrutinized and analysed with the patient care 

of a naturalist who was, at the same time, a prudent and 

well-informed psychologist. Nor is this all. . . . Raymundo 

is an admirable painter of our landscape, an ex- 

quisite impressionist, who reflects, with delicious senti- 

ment, the light and shade of the Brazilian soil." ^ 

There is no denying the beneficial influence of the Par- 

nassians upon the expressive powers of the Brazilian 

poets. The refinement of style mirrored a refinement of 

the thought. If I stress the difference between the 

French and the Brazilian Parnassians it is not alone to 

emphasize the partial inability of the latter to imitate the 

foreign models, but to show how genuine personality 

must triumph over group affiliations. Raymundo Cor- 

reia was such a personality; his sensibility was too re- 

sponsive for complete surrender to formula. One of 

his sonnets long enjoyed the reputation of being the most 

popular ever penned in his country: 

AS POMBAS 

Vae-se a primeira pomba despertada. . . . 

Vae-se outra mais . . . mais outra . . . enfin dezenas 

De pombas vao-se dos pombaes, apenas 

Raia, sanguinea e fresca, a madrugada. 

E a tarde, quando a rigida nortada 

Sopra, aos pombaes de novo ellas serenas, 

Ruflando as azas, sacudindo as pennas, 

Voltam todas em bando e em revoada. 

8 Op. Cit. Page 307. Tb? italics gre mine.


Tambem dos coraqoes, onde, abotoam, 

Os sonhos, um por um, celeres voam, 

Como voam as pombas dos pombaes. 

No azul da adolescencia as azas soltam, 

Fogem . . . mas aos pombaes as pombas voltam, 

E elles aos coragoes nao voltam mais. . . 

^ 

. 

This is the more yearnful voice of Raymundo Correia's 

muse, who knows, too, the futility of rebellion against 

"God, who cruelly creates us for grief; God, who created 

us and who was not created." This conception of uni- 

versal grief is his central theme, and it is significant that 

when Carvalho seeks spiritual analogies he goes—to Par- 

nassians? No. To Leopardi, to Byron, to Pushkin, 

to Buddha. 

Alberto de Oliveira, genuine artist that he was—and 

it was the fashion at one time for the Brazilian poets, 

under Parnassian influence, to call themselves artists 

rather than poets—maintained his personality through 

all his labours. Like a true Brazilian, he renders homage 

to the surrounding scene and even his sadness is several 

parts softness. In the manner of the day he wrote many 

a sonnet of pure description, but this represents restraint 

rather than predilection, for at other times, as in his Vo- 

lupia, he bursts out in a nostalgia for love that proves his 

possession of it even at the moment of his denial. 

9 The first dove, awakened, flies off, then another and another. Fi- 

nally they leave the cote by tens, as soon as the fresh, red, dawn appears. 

And at evening, when the bitter north-wind blows, fluttering their wings 

and shaking their feathers, they all return to the cote in a flock. So, 

from our hearts, where they burgeon, our dreams, one by one, depart 

in flight like the doves from the cote. They spread their wings in 

the azure of youth, and fly off. . . . But the doves return to the dovecote, 

while our dreams return nevermore.


Fico a ver que tudo ama. E eu nao amo, eu somente! 

Ama este chao que piso, a arvore a que me encosto, 

Esta aragem subtil que vem rocar-me o rosto, 

Estas azas que no ar zumbem, esta folhagem, 

As feras que no cio o seu antro selvagem 

Deixam por ver a luz que as magnetiza, os broncos 

Penhascaes do deserto, o rio, a selva, os troncos, 

E OS ninhos, e a ave, a folha, e a flor, e o fructo, e o ramo. . . . 

E eu so nao amo ! eu so nao amo ! 

^° 

eu so nao amo ! 

Note how similar are these verses in content to the cries 

of love denied that rise from Goncalves DIas and Caslmiro 

de Abreu,—two Romantics of the movement's 

height. Carvalho, too, sees that in Alberto de Ollveira 

there Is, In addition to the talent for description, "a sub- 

jective poet of genuine value." 

For a long time Olavo Bllac enjoyed the sobriquet 

"Prince of Brazilian poets." It matters little that part 

of his posthumous book, Tarde^ reveals a social preoc- 

cupation. To the history of Brazilian letters, and to his 

countrymen, he Is first of all the resounding voice of vo- 

luptuousness. And, as happens so often with the ultra- 

refined of his kin, the taste of his ecstasies at times is 

blunted by the memento mori of weary thought. The 

world becomes a pendulum swinging between vast con- 

trasts, and It takes both swings to complete the great vi- 

bration. 

I*' I see that everything loves. And I, I alone, love not. This soil I 

tread loves,—the tree against which I lean, this gentle zephyr that fans 

my cheek,— ^these wings that flutter in the air,—this foliage,—the beasts 

who, in rut, leave their wild lairs to gaze upon the light that magnetizes 

them,—^the crags of the desert,—the river, the forest, the tree-trunks, the 

children, the bird, the leaf, the flower, the fruit, the branch. . . . And I 

alone love not ! I alone love not ! I alone love not 

!


O Natureza! o mae piedosa e pura! 

O cruel, implacavel assassina! 

—Mao, que o veneno e o balsamo propina 

E aos sorrisos as lagrimas mistura! 

Pois o bergo, onde a bocca pequenina 

Abre o infante a sorrir, e a miniatura 

A vaga imagem de uma sepultura, 

O germen vivo de uma atroz ruina?! 

Sempre o contraste! Passaros cantando 

Sobre tumulos . . . flores sobre a face 

De ascosas aguas putridas boiando. . . . 

Anda a tristeza ao lado de alegria. . . . 

E esse teu seio, de onde a noite nasce, 

E o mesmo seio de onde nasce o dia. . .-. ^^ 

The theme is as common as joy and sorrow; at the very 

beginning of Brazilian literature we meet it in a coarser 

sensualist, Gregorio de Mattos Guerra. In Raymundo 

Correia, in Machado de Assis, such rhymed homilies are 

common. They illustrate rather the philosophical background 

of the poets than their more artistic creativeness. 

Voluptuary that he was, Bilac preferred in poetry the 

carefull}^ wrought miniature to the Titanic block of 

marble; at his best he attains a rare effect of eloquent 

simplicity. He was as Parnassian as a Brazilian may be 

in verse, yet more than once, as he chiselled his figurines, 

1^ Oh, nature! O pure, piteous mother! oh, cruel, implacable assassin! 

Hand that proffers both poison and balm, and blends smiles with tears. 

The cradle, where the infant opens her tiny mouth to smile, is the miniature, 

the vague image of a coffin,— ^the living germ of a frightful end 

Eternal contrast. Birds twittering upon tombs . . . flowers floating 

upon the surface of ugly, putrid waters. . . . Sadness walks at the side 

of joy. . . . And this your bosom, wherein night is born, is the selfsame 

bosom whence is born the day. . . . 

!


they leaped to life under his instrument, like diminutive 

Galateas under the breath of Pygmalion. 

Assim procedo, Minha penna 

Segue esta norma, 

Por te servir, Deusa serena, 

Serena Forma! 

"Thus I proceed," he declares in the poem that opens his 

Poesias, presenting his particular ars poetica. "My pen 

follows this standard. To serve you. Serene Goddess, 

Serene Form!" Yet read the entire poem; note, as an 

almost insignificant detail, the numerous exclamation 

points; note, too, that he is making love to that Goddess, 

that he is promising to die in her service. The words are 

the words of Parnassianism, but the voice is the voice of 

passionate personality, romantically dedicated to Style. 

Indeed, for the epigraph to his entire work one might 

quote the lines from Musset's "Rolla": 

J'aime!—voila le mot que la nature entiere 

Crie au vent qui I'emporte, a I'oiseau qui le suit! 

Sombre et dernier soupir que poussera la terre 

Quand elle tombera dans I'eternelle nuit! 

Bilac's passion at its height may replace the Creator of 

life himself; thus, in A Alvorada do Amor, Adam, be- 

fore his Eve, cries ecstatically his triumph, despite their 

lost paradise. He blesses the moment in which she re- 

vealed her sin and life with her crime, "For, freed of 

God, redeemed and sublime, I remain a man upon earth, 

in the light of thine eyes. Earth, better than Heaven; 

Man, greater than God!" 

All, or almost all, of Bilac, is in this poem, which is

ii6 


thus one of his pivotal creations. De Carvalho has 

termed him a poet of "pansexualism"; the name might 

be misleading, as his verses more often reveal the gour- 

met, rather than the gourmand of eroticism. ^^ 

The more to show the uncertain nature of Brazilian 

Parnasslanism, we have the figures of Luiz Delfino and 

Luiz Murat, termed by some Parnassians and by others 

Romantics. Delfino has been called by Romero {Livro 

do Centen'ario, Vol. I, page 71), "for the variety and extent 

of his work, the best poet of Brazil." The same 

critic, some thirty-three pages farther along In the same 

account, calls Murat deeper and more philosophic than 

Delfino, and equalled only by Cruz e Souza in the penetration 

of the human soul. And by the time (page no, 

Ibid.) he has reached the last-named of these poets, 

Cruz e Souza becomes "in many respects the best poet 

Brazil has produced." 

Yet the effect of the French neo-classlcists upon the 

Brazilian poets was, as Verisslmo has shown, threefold: 

form was perfected, the excessive preoccupation with 

self was diminished, the themes became more varied. 

"This same Influence, following the example of what had 

happened In France, restored the sonnet to the national 

poetry, whence the Romantics had almost banished It, 

and on the other hand banished blank verse, which 

is so natural to our tongue and our poetry. ... As 

to form, our Parnassian poets merely completed the evo- 

lution led in Portugal and there by two poets who, 

whatever their merits, had a vast effect upon our poetry, 

Antonio de Castilho and Thomaz Ribeiro. Machado de 

Assis evidently and confessedly owes to the first, If not 

12 See the chapter devoted to him in Part Two of this book.


also to the second, the advantages of his metrification 

and of his poetic form in general over that of some of his 

contemporaries, such as Castro Alves and Varella. Par- 

nassianism refined this form . . . with its preoccupations 

with relief and colour, as in the plastic arts,—with ex- 

quisite sonorities, as in music,—with metrical artifices that 

should heighten mere correctness and make an impression 

through the feeling of a difficulty conquered,—with the 

search for rich rhymes and rare rhymes, and, as in prose, 

for the adjective that was peregrine, and if not exact, 

surprising. All this our poets did here as a strict imita- 

tion of the French, and since it is the externality of things 

that it is easy and possible to imitate and not that which 

is their very essence, a great number of them merely re- 

produced in pale copy the French Parnassians. 

Thus, for some fifteen years, we were truly inundated 

with myriads of sonnets describing domestic scenes, landscapes, 

women, animals, historic events, seascapes, moon- 

light ... a veritable gallery of pictures in verse that 

pretended to be poetry." 

Here, as everywhere else, the true personalities sur- 

vive. Chief among the Brazilian Parnassians are the 

few whom we have here considered. 

Ill 

The naturalistic novel in Brazil is, from the artistic 

standpoint, the work of some four men,—Machado de 

Assis, Aluizio de Azevedo, Julio Ribeiro and Raul Pompeia. 

Ribeiro's Came (Flesh) and Pompeia's Atheneu 

represent, respectively, the influence of Zola upon the 

natural sensuousness of the Brazilian and the impact of 

complex modernity upon that sensuousness.

ii8 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

The prose work of Machado de Assis is not exclu- 

sively naturalistic; indeed, he should be considered, though 

of his age, a spirit apart; as he rises above the limitations 

of Brazilian letters, so he is too big for any circumscribed 

epoch to contain. With the year 1879 he began a long 

period of maturity that was to last for thirty years. It 

was during this fruitful phase that he produced the 

Memorias Postumas de Braz Cubas, Oiiincas Borba, 

Historias Sem Data, Dom Casmurro, Farias Historias, 

and other notable works. His long fiction, as his short, 

exhibits the same bitter-sweet philosophy and gracious, 

yet penetrating irony. In the best of his prose works 

he penetrates as deep as any of his countrymen into the 

abyss of the human soul. 

The judgment of Verissimo upon Machado de Assis 

differs somewhat from that of his distinguished com- 

patriots. 

"With Farias Historias," he says in his studies of 

Brazilian letters, "Sr. Machado de Assis published his 

fifteenth volume and his fifth collection of tales. . . . 

To say that in our literature Machado de Assis is a figure 

apart, that he stands with good reason first among our 

writers of fiction, that he possesses a rare faculty of 

assimilation and evolution which makes him, a writer of 

the second Romantic generation, always a contempor- 

ary, a modern, without on this account having sacrificed 

anything to the latest literary fashion or copied some 

brand-new esthetic, above all conserving his own distinct, 

singular personality ... is but to repeat what has been 

said many times already. All these judgments are confirmed 

by his latest book, wherein may be noted the same 

impeccable correctness of language, the same firm grasp


upon form, the same abundancy, force and originality of 

thought that make of him the only thinker among our 

writers of fiction, the same sad, bitter irony. . . . 

"After that there was published another book by Sr. 

Machado de Assis, Yaya Garcia. Although this is really 

a new edition, we may well speak of it here since the 

first, pubhshed long before, is no longer remembered by 

the public. Moreover, this book has the delightful and 

honest charm of being in the writer's first manner. 

"But let us understand at once, this reference to Mach- 

ado de Assis's first manner. In this author more than 

once is justified the critical concept of the unity of works 

displayed by the great writers. All of Machado de 

Assis is practically present in his early works; in fact, he 

did not change, he scarcely developed. He is the most 

individual, the most personal, the most 'himself of our 

writers; all the germs of this individuality that was to 

attain in Bras Cithas, in Quincas Borha, in the Papeis 

Avidsos and in Farias Historias its maximum of virtu- 

osity, may be discovered in his first poems and in his ear- 

liest tales. His second manner, then, of which these 

books are the best example, is only the logical, natural, 

spontaneous development of his first, or rather, it is the 

first manner with less of the romantic and more of the 

critical tendencies. . . . The distinguishing trait of 

Machado de Assis is that he is, in our literature, an artist 

and a philosopher. Up to a short time ago he was the 

only one answering to such a description. Those who 

come after him proceed consciously and unconsciously 

from him, some of them being mere worthless imitators. 

In this genre, if I am not misemploying that term, he 

remained without a peer. Add that this philosopher is a

I20 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

pessimist by temperament and by conviction, and you will 

have as complete a characterization as it is possible to 

design of so strong and complex a figure as his in two 

strokes of the pen. 

"Yaya Garcia, like Resurreiqao and Helena, is a ro- 

mantic account, perhaps the most romantic written by the 

author. Not only the most romantic, but perhaps the 

most emotional. In the books that followed it is easy 1 

to see how the emotion is, one might say, systematically 1 

repressed by the sad irony of a disillusioned man's real- 

ism." Verissimo goes on to Imply that such a work as 

this merits comparison with the humane books of Tolstoi. 

But this only on the surface. "For at bottom, it con- 

tains the author's misanthropy. A social, amiable mis- 

anthropy, curious about everything, interested In everything—what 

Is, in the final analysis, a way of loving man- 

kind without esteeming It. . , . 

"The excellency with which the author of Yaya Garcia 

highest dis- 

writes our language is proverbial. . . . The 

tinction of the genius of Machado de Assis in Brazilian 

literature is that he is the only truly universal writer we 

possess, without ceasing on that account to be really Bra- 

zilian.' 

When the Brazihan Academy of letters was founded In 

1897, Machado de Assis was unanimously elected president 

and held the position until his death. Ollveira 

Lima, who lectured at Harvard during the college season 

of 19 1 5— 19 16, and who is himself one of the most intel- 

lectual forces of contemporary Brazil, has written of 

Machado de Assis: "By his extraordinary talent as 

writer, by his profound literary dignity, by the unity of a 

life that was entirely devoted to the cult of intellectual


beauty, and by the prestige exerted about him by his work 

and by his personality, Machado de Assis succeeded, de- 

spite a nature that was averse to acclaim and little inclined 

to public appearance, in being considered and respected as 

the first among his country's men-of-letters : the head, if 

that word can denote the idea, of a youthful literature 

which already possesses Its traditions and cherishes above 

all its glories. . . . His life was one of the most regu- 

lated and peaceful after he had given up active journal- 

ism, for like so many others, he began his career as a polit- 

ical reporter, paragrapher and dramatic critic." ^^ 

With the appearance of O Mulato, 1881, by Aluizlo 

Azevedo ( 1857-1912), the literature of Brazil, prepared 

for such a reorientation by the direct influence of the great 

Portuguese, Ega de Queiroz and of Emile Zola, was de- 

finitely steered toward naturalism. "In Aluizio Aze- 

vedo," says Benedicto Costa, "one finds neither the poetry 

of Jose de Alencar, nor the delicacy,—I should even say, 

archness,—of Macedo, nor the sentimental preciosity of 

Taunay, nor the subtle irony of Machado de Assis. His 

phrase Is brittle, lacking lyricism, tenderness, dreaminess, 

but It Is dynamic, energetic, expressive, and, at times sen- 

sual to the point of sweet delirium." 

O Mulato, though It was the work of a youth In his 

early twenties, has been acknowledged as a solid, well- 

constructed example of Brazilian realism. There is a 

note of humour, as well as a lesson in criticism, in the 

author's anecdote (told in his foreword to the fourth edi- 

tion) about the provincial editor who advised the youth- 

ful author to give up writing and hire himself out on a 

farm. This was all the notice he received from his native 

13 See Part Two for a special chapter on Machado de Assis.


province, Maranhao. Yet Azevedo grew to be one of the 

few Brazilian authors who supported himself by his pen. 

Aluizio de Azevedo's types (O Cort'iqo, O Livro de 

Uma Sogra) are the opposite to Machado de Assis's; 

they are coarse, violent, terre-a-terre. They are not so 

much a different Brazilian than we find in the poetry of 

Bilac, as a lower stratum of that same intelligence and 

physical blend. 

IV 

Symbolism, even more than Parnassianism in Brazil, 

was a matter of imitation, "in many cases," as the truth- 

ful Verissimo avers, "unintelligent. It most certainly 

does not correspond to a movement of reaction, mystical, 

sensualist, individualistic, socialistic, anarchistic and even 

classic, as in Europe,—to a movement, in short, which is 

the result, on one side, of a revolt against the social organ- 

ization, proved incapable of satisfying legitimate aspira- 

tions and needs of the individual, and on the other, of the 

exhaustion of Naturalism and Parnassianism." In po- 

etry, the school itself centres in Brazil about the personal- 

ity of Cruz e Souza, an African with a keen sense of the 

racial injustice visited upon him, and with a pride that 

could not stifle his outcries. He is often incorrect, and it 

is true that carping scrutiny could find ample fare in his 

verses, but they are saved by a creative sincerity. 

It takes but a superficial knowledge of French Symbolism 

to see how far are such poets as Cruz e Souza 

and B. Lopez from their Gallic brethren. Insert Cruz c 

Souza's verses, without their author's name, among the 

clamorous output of the Romantics that preceded him, 

and see how difficult it is to single many of them out for


any qualities that distinguish them as technique or matter. 

The African was a spontaneous rather than an erudite 

spirit. Verissimo does not even believe that he was con- 

scious of his gifts. And if, at any time, he pretended to 

possess a special theory of esthetics, the noted critic 

would have it that the poet's well-meaning but ill-advised 

friends instigated him. He was a "good, sentimental, 

ignorant" soul "whose shocks against the social ambient 

resulted in poetry." De Carvalho holds a higher opinion: 

"He introduced into our letters that horror of concrete 

form of which the great Goethe was already complaining 

at the close of the eighteenth century. And such a serv- 

ice, in all truth, was not small in a country where poetry 

flows more from the finger-tips than from the heart." 

Verissimo, indeed, does Cruz e Souza something less 

than justice. In his short life (1863-1898) the ardent 

Negro poet succeeded in stamping the impress of his 

personality upon his age and, for that matter, upon 

Brazilian letters. He is incorrect, obscure, voluble, 

— , 

but he is contagiously sincere and transmits an impression 

of fiery exaltation. His stature will grow, rather than 

diminish with time. Bernadim do Costa Lopez (1851— 

19 16) began as a bucolic Romanticist (in Chromos) 

later veering to a Parnassianism (in Hellenos) that con- 

tained less art than imitative artifice. 

Among the outstanding spirits of the later poets are 

the mystical Emilio de Menezes and the serenely simple 

Mario Pederneiras. The latter (1868-1915) seems to 

have undergone the influence of Francis Jammes; he is 

one of the few Brazilians who acquired ease in the 

manipulation of free verse. Emilio de Menezes, who 

like Machado de Assis has translated Poe's The Raven,


is best known for his remarkable trio of religious sonnets 

grouped under the title Os Tres Othares de Maria (The 

Three Glances of Mary) ^^ 

Later developments in Brazil, as in Spanish America, 

reveal no definite tendencies that may be grouped 

under any particular "ism." Rampant individualism pre- 

cludes the schools of literary memory. Aranha's Cha- 

naan directed attention to the Brazilian melting-pot. 

One result of the recent war has been, in Bra- 

zil, to strengthen the national spirit, and in 

Sao Paulo, particularly, a young group headed 

by the industrious Monteiro Lobato s.eems to 

show a partial return to regionalism. The directing 

inspiration for the more clearly regionalistic art came per- 

haps from Euclydes da Cunha, whose Sertoes brought so 

poignant a realization that Brazil lived in the interior 

as well as on the coast. As a corollary of the aspiration 

toward national intellectual autonomy, there is setting in 

a reaction against France, in favour of national, even 

local types and themes. The literary product, if not at 

its highest, is upon a respectable level. The novel is 

ably represented by Coelho Netto, ^^ while the drama, not 

so fortunate, plods along a routine path with such purveyors 

as Claudio de Souza in the lead. To the Sao 

Paulo group I look for the early emergence of some 

worth-while talents,— young men of culture and vision 

1* See, for a good study of Emilio de Menezes, Elysio de Carvalho's 

As Modernas Correntes Estheticas na Literatura Brazileira. Rio, 1907. 

Pp. 62-74. 

IS See Part Two for chapters on Gra?a Aranha, Monteiro Lobato, 

Euclydes da Cunha and Coelho Netto.


who will bring to Brazil not merely the plethora of poesy 

that gluts her eyes and ears, but a firm grasp upon the 

prose that is the other half of life. Romero, years ago, 

said that what Brazil needed more than anything else was 

a regimen for its daily life. Only yesterday, Lobato, in 

his Problema Vital, studied the problem of what he calls 

the ailment of an entire country, seeking first of all to 

convince the nation that it was ill. And his initial pre- 

scription, like that of Romero, calls for a national hy- 

giene. To this purpose he subordinates his activities as 

litterateur. 

Thus conditions, though not so bad as when Verissimo 

studied his problem of the Brazilian writer some 

thirty years ago, are still analagous. He found the liter- 

ature of his country, at that time, an unoriginal, pupil- 

literature, often misunderstanding its masters, yet endowed 

with certain undisputed points of originality. 

"The Brazilian writer, in his vast majority of cases, 

does not learn to write; he learns while writing. And 

it is doubtless useful to him as well as to our letters that 

the critic, at times, should turn instructor. The lack of 

a public interested in literary life, and capable of intel- 

ligent choice among works and authors, makes this se- 

condary function of criticism even more necessary and 

serviceable. . . ." 

Brazilian literature, as is highly evident, is not one of 

the major divisions of world letters. It lacks contin- 

uity, It Is too largely derivative, too poor in master- 

pieces. Yet today, more at least than when Wolf wrote 

so enthusiastically in 1863, it is true that "Brazilian 

literature may justly claim consideration as being really 

national; in this quality It has its place assigned in the


ensemble of the literatures of the civilized world; fi- 

nally, and above all in its most recent period, it has de- 

veloped in all directions, and has produced in the prin- 

cipal genres works worthy the attention of all friends of 

letters." 

The finest fruits of a national literature are the sal- 

ient personalities who cross all frontiers and achieve 

such a measure of universality as is attainable in this 

best and worst of all possible worlds. As the region 

nurtures the national letters, so the national nurtures the 

international. And this internationality is but the most 

expansive phase of the individual in whom all art begins 

and in whom all art seeks its goal. For art begins and 

ends in the individual. A few such personalities Brazil 

has already produced, notably in the criticism of Jose 

Verissimo, the prose of Machado de Assis, the intel- 

lectuality of Oliveira Lima, the poetry of Olavo Bilac. 

They are valuable contributions to Goethe's idea of a 

JVeltliteratur. Such as they, rather than a roster of 

"isms," "ists" and "ologies," justify the study of the 

milieu and the tradition that helped to produce them. 

But precisely because they triumph over the milieu, be- 

cause they shape it rather than are shaped by it, do they 

rise above the academic confines into that small library 

whose shelves know only one classification: significant 

personality.

PART II 

REPRESENTATIVE PERSONALITIES

DURING 

CASTRO ALVES 

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 Jose de Alencar, chief novelist of the "In- 

dianist" 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 i8th of 

February, Jose 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 Sao Paulo to finish the 

course that he began at Olinda. 

"He was born in Bahia, the region of so many excel- 

lent talents; the Brazilian Athens that does not weary of 

producing statesmen, orators, poets and warriors. 

*


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 revolution- 

ary attempt at Minas,—a great source of historical po- 

etry 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 intel- 

ligences. The Titan of literature possesses a palette 

that in the hands of a mediocre colorist barely pro- 

duces 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 

Jffonso, As dims ilhas and A visdo dos mortos do not

CASTRO ALVES 131 

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 disillu- 

sionment, 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 Jose 

de Alencar had made him out to be. Castro Alves pos- 

sessed a genuine "literary vocation, full of life and vigour 

and revealing in the magnificence of the present the prom- 

ise 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 ser- 

vilely, but because a related temperament leads him to 

prefer the poet of the Orientales to the poet of Les Med- 

itations. He is certainly not attracted to the soft, lan- 

guishing 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 com-

132 


plete works—including much hitherto unpublished ma- 

terial—with a short essay in which he calls Castro Alves 

O Maior Poeta Brasiletro (The Greatest of Brazilian 

Poets). Let the superlative pass. If it is not impor- 

tant 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 Ca- 

mara. 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 Sao Joao amidst 

scenes of tumultuous success. It was directly after 

this triumph that he came to Jose de Alencar. As we see 

from that writer's letter, the youth was intent upon con- 

tinuing his studies; in Sao 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 unhapplness lay straight before him. His mis- 

tress 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 

Fhictuantes 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 con- 

siderable part of his labours not to sentimental subjectiv- 

ism, 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 eternldade! " he exclaims in 

Sub tegmine fagi. "Our old Hugo. Master of the world I 

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

134 


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; an- 

tithesis 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.^ 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 

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 naive rhetoric, the sensual passions of our amorous 

ardor, which is characteristic of hybrids. Examples of this are Casimiro 

de Abreu, Laurindo Rabello, Varella and Gongalves 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, 

palavrao (wordiness), emphasis, beautiful images. . . 

." 

—


In O Laco de fito; he can indite the most graceful and 

inviting of bucolics as in Sulb 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 Escra- 

vos that was published separately five years after his 

death, we find an epigraph from Heine prefacing A Ca- 

choeira de Paulo Afonso (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. Po- 

etry, 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 hu- 

manity's deliverance." This, too, is a description of Cas- 

tro 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


lie fall far short of both Hugo and Heine in their fre- 

quent 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 ev'er-scrupu- 

lous, ever-truthful Verissimo, who does not join the gen- 

eral chorus of uncritical admiration of Castro Alves, in- 

dicates that even his strongest claim upon us—that of a 

singer of the slaves—is injured by an evident exaggera- 

tion. What might be called Alves's "Africanism" is 

thus condemned of untruth to artistic as well as to quoti- 

dian reality, in much the same manner as was the "Indianism" 

in the poetry of Gongalves Dias. . . . "The 

lack of objective reality offends us and our taste, habitu- 

ated as we are to the reality of life transported to artistic 

representations. As I have already had occasion to ob- 

serve, 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 degrada- 

tion of slavery. His slaves are Spartacuses or belong 

to the gallery of Hugo's Burgaves. Now, socially, slav-


ery 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 pubhcation 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 pro- 

vide that rostrum, and the majority of his literate coun- 

trymen 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 Sao Paulo on June 11, 1868: 

Christo! embalde morreste sobre um monte. . . . 

Teu sangue nao lavou da minha fronte

138 


A mancha original. 

Ainda hoje sao, por fado adverse, 

Meus filhos—alimaria do universe, 

Eu— pasto universal. 

Hoje em meu sangue a America se nutre: 

—Condor, que transformara-se em abutre, 

Ave de escravidao. 

Ella juntou-se as mais . . . irma traidora. 

Qual de Jose os vis irmaos, outr'ora, 

Venderam seu irmao! 

Basta, Senhor! De teu potente braqo 

Role atravez dos astros e do espago 

Perdao p'ra os crimes meus! 

Ha dous mil annos eu solugo um grito. . . . 

Escuta o brado meu la no infinito, 

Meu Deus! Senhor, meu Deus! . . .^ 

This poem is the EU EU lama sahachthani 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! . . . 

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 infinitCj 

my God, Lord my God


E deixa a transformar-se nessa festa 

Em manto impuro de bacchante fria! . . . 

Meu Deus! meu Deus! mas que bandeira e esta, 

Que impudente na gavea tripudia? 

Silencio, Musa . . . chora, e chora tanto 

Que o pavilhao se lave no teu pranto! . . . 

Auri-verde pendao de minha terra, 

Que a briza do Brasil beija e balanga, 

Estandarte que a luz do sol encerra 

As promessas divinas da esperanga. . . . 

Tu que, da liberdade apos da guerra, 

Foste hastiado dos heroes na langa, 

Antes te houvessem roto na batalha. 

Que servires a um povo de mortalha ! . . . 

Fatalidade atroz que a mente esmaga! 

Extingue nesta bora o brigue immundo 

O trilho que Colombo abriu nas vagas, 

Como um iris no pelago prof undo! 

Mas e infamia de mais! . . . Da etherea plaga 

Levantai-vos, heroes do Novo Mundo! 

Andrade! arranca esse pendao dos ares! 

Colombo! fecha a porta dos teus mares! ^ 

* There exists a people who lends its flag to cover such infamy and 

allows it to be transformed, in this feast, into 

cowardice ! . . . ^nd 

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 

who, after the war, was flown 

You the divine promise of hope. . . . 

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! 

realm, O heroes of 

This infamy is too much! . . . From your ethereal 

the New World, arise! Andrade! Tear that banner 

from the sky! Columbus! shut the gates of your sea! 

!


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 Cen- 

tury), 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 num- 

bers he is true to the high-flown conceits of the condoreiro 

school; the raising of Napoleon's forty to the young Bra- 

zilian'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. 

Nao importa! A liberdade 

E como a hydra, o Antheu. 

Se no chao rola sem forgas, 

Mais forte do chao se ergueu. . . . 

Sao OS seus ossos sangrentos 

Gladios terriveis, sedentos. . . . 

E da cinza solta aos ventos 

Mais um Graccho appareceu ! . . 

* 

. 

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 elo- 

* No matter! Liberty is like the hydi-a, 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 

!


quence 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 re- 

sponsive 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 con- 

tribution of Alves to Brazilian poetry Is small, consisting 

of a few love poems, several passionate outcries on be- 

half of a downtrodden race, and a group of stanzas var- 

iously 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 accepta- 

tion 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.

II 

JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS 

AD he been born in Europe and written, say, 

in French, Machado de Assis would perhaps 

be more than a name to-day—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 

minghng 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 retir- 

ing personality. His life and labours raised the let- 

ters 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 ^"^ ^^^^ 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 

142

JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS 143 

him into contact with the persons and the surroundings 

that were to suggest his real career. As a typesetter he 

met Hterature 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, 

iust; 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

144 


neither are we. Yet he belongs to a company none too 

numerous, and when Anatole France, some years ago, pre- 

sided at a meeting held in France to honour the noted \ 

Brazihan, 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.^ 

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 cir- 

cumscribed than the Frenchman's, as was his environ- 

ment; his garden, then, was smaller, but he cultivated it; 

his glass was Httle, like that of another famous French- 

man, but he drank out of his own glass. 

The poetry of Machado de Assis appears In four col- 

lections, 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 

iThe occasion was the Fete de I'InteUectualite Bresilennc, celebrated 

on April 3, 1909, at the Sorbonne in the Richelieu amphitheatre. Ana- 

tole France delivered a short, characteristic speech upon Le Genie Latin, 

emphasizing his disbelief in the idea of race. "Je dis le genie latin, je 

dis les peuples latins, parce que I'idee de race n'est le plus souvent qu'une 

vision de I'orgueil et de I'erreur, et parce que la civilization hellenique 

et romaine, comme la Jerusalem nouvelle, a vu venir de toutes parts 

a elle des enfants qu'elle n'avait point portes dans son sein. Et c'est 

sa gloire de gagner I'univers. . . . Latins des deux mondes, soyons 

fiers de notre commun heritage. Mais sachons le partager avec I'univers 

entier; sachons que la beaute antique, Teternelle Helene, plus auguste, 

plus chaste d'enlevement en enlevement, a pour destinee de se donner 

a des ravisseurs etrangers, et d'enfanter dans toutes les races, sous tons 

les cliraats de nouveaux Euphorions, toujours plus savants et plus beaux."


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 

Circiilo Vicioso (Vicious Circle) and Mosca Azul (The 

Blue Fly)—verses of a broadly moralistic significance 

and of httle originality. His Chrysalides, the first col- 

lection, 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 tell- 

tale declaration: 

Amei-te um dia 

Com esse amor passage! ro 

Que nasce na phantasia 

E nao chega ao coracao. 

"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 dwelt upon such love; upon a 

desire for justice, as revealed in his Epitaphio do Mexico 

(Mexico's Epitaph) and Polonia (Poland) ; upon an el- 

egiac note that seems statement ratheri 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;

146 


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 emo- 

tion. 

Phalenas (Moths, 1870) is more varied; the collec- 

tion 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 com- 

mentary. His reserve is simply too great to permit out- 

bursts 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." ^ He is altogether too frequently the self- 

observer rather than the self-giver; nor would this be 

objectionable, if out of that autoscopy emerged some- 

thing 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 

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 

jconfessions of weakness, and I was born with an abhorrence for the 

weak." 

I


a child left by the dead Elvira, the obduracy of grand- 

father 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 

ihat 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 accep- 

tation. 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—recount- 

ing the plight of a Christian captive who, rather than be- 

tray her husband by wedding a Tamoyo chief, accepts 

death at the heathen's hands— is a cold, objective presen- 

tation, 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— feel- 

ing, insight, passion are sacrificed to arid reticence. 

Thus A Chris td Nova (The Converted Jewess) con- 

tains 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 be- 

trothed 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 

commmendable 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. ... 

Is like a bird of passage, ever winging 

In quest of fairer climes. . . . 

.... Thought 

It is in the Occidentaes of 1900 that we find more of 

the real Machado de Assis than in the series that pre- 

ceded 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 ubi- 

quitous element. The Mosca Azid 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 surren- 

der 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 Indostao, 

Que entre as folhas brotou de uma rosa encarnada 

Em certa noite de verao. 

E zumbia e voava, e voava, e zumbia, 

Refulgindo ao clarao do sol 

E da lua,—melhor do que refulgia 

Um brilhante do Grao-Mogol. 

Um polea que a viu, espantado e tristonho, 

Um polea Ihe perguntou: 

"Mosca, esse refulgir, que mais parece um sonho, 

Dize, quem foi que t'o ensinou ?" 

Entao ella, voando, e revoando, disse: 

"Eu sou a vida, eu sou a flor 

Das gragas, o padrao 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.

150 


Entre as azas do insecto, a voltear no espago, 

Uma cousa Ihe pareceu 

Que surdia com todo o resplendor de um pago 

E viu um rosto, que era o seu. 

Era elle, era um rei, o rei de Cachemira, 

Que tinha sobre o collo nu, 

Um immenso collar de opala, e uma saphyra 

Tirado ao corpo de Vischnu. 

Cem mulheres em flor, cem nayras superfinas, 

Aos pes delle, no liso chao, 

Espreguigam sorrindo as suas gragas finas, 

E todo o amor que tem Ihe dao. 

Mudos, graves, de pe, 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 nacoes, e os parabens unidos 

Das coroas occidentaes. 

Mas o melhor de tudo e que no rosto aberto 

Das mulheres e dos varoes, 

Como em agua que deixa o fundo descuberto, 

Via limpos os coragoes. 

Entao elle, estendo a mao calloso y tosca, 

Affeita a so carpintejar, 

Com um gesto pegou na fulgurante mosca, 

Curioso de examinar. 

Quiz vel-a, quiz saber a causa do mysterio. 

E fechando-a na mao, sorriu


De contente, ao pensar que alii tinha um imperio, 

E para casa se partiu. 

Alvorogado chega, examina, e parece 

Que se houve nessa occupagao 

Mudamente, como um homem que quizesse 

Dissecar a sua illusao. 

Dissecou-a, a tal ponte, e com tal arte, que ella, 

Rota, baca, nojenta, vil, 

Succumbiu ; e com isto esvaiu-se-lhe aquella 

Visao fantastica e subtil. 

Hoje, quando elle ahi vae, de aloe e cardamono, 

Na cabeqa, com ar taful, 

Dizem que ensandeceu, e que nao sabe como 

Perdeu a sua mosca azul.^ 

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 feli- 

citations 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

152 


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 ethi- 

cal 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: 

— "Quern me dera que fosse aquella loura estrella 

Que arde no eterno azul, como una eterna vela!" 

Mas a estrella, fitando a lua, com ciume: 

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 illu- 

sion. 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.


— "Pudesse eu copiar o transparente lume, 

Que, de grega columna a 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 sol, inclinando a rutila capella: 

— "Pesa-me esta brilhante aureola de nume. . . . 

Enfara-me esta azul e desmedida umbella. . . . 

Porque nao nasci eu um simples vagalume?" ^ 

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 des- 

cription— 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 

* 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 

this vast blue canopy. . . 

aureole wearies me. ... I am burdened by 

. Why was I not born a simple glow-worm?

154 


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 revel- 

atory 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 Prome- 

theus 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 adum- 

bration 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 smil- 

ing half-speech. He is something like his own Ahasverus 

in the conte Viver! , withdrawn from life not so much be- 

cause he hated it as because he loved it exceedingly. 

In that admirable dialogue, wherein Prometheus ap- 

pears 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 com- 

ing to an end, and I shall die with them. Ancient na- 

sky, clouds ever reborn, roses of 

ture, farewell ! Azure 

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 moun- 

tain 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 ever- 

lasting. 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 immor- 

tahty: 

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 genera- 

tion 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 per- 

petuity; those who die at their fall, are burled 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 dis- 

courses of an idiot. Fatalities of flesh and blood, un- 

ending strife,—I saw all pass before my eyes, until night 

caused me to lose my taste for day, and now I cannot dis- 

tinguish 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, accord- 

ing 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 strik- 

ing commentary upon the retiring duality of the writer. 

Ahasverus, in his vision, is loosening the fetters of Prome- 

theus, 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.

158 


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 tivo eagles draw near.) 

Ay, ay, ay ! 

First Eagle 

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.^ 

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 Cuhas, one of the mature works of 

which Dom Casmiirro 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 profes- 

sional moralist. Seeming by-products of the narrative, 

they form its essence. To read Machado de Assis's 

^ The excerpts from Vwer/ and Infermeiro are taken from my 

Brazilian Tales, Boston, 1921.


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 Casmiirro. What has it to do with the 

love story of the hero and Capitu? 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 con- 

ceived 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 Jâgan 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 de- 

test 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

i6o BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

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

JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS i6i 

book, I, too, before reaching the second page, fell asleep. 

The cries of the colonel awoke me with a start; in an in- 

stant 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 re- 

turn. It is impossible for me to express all that I felt 

during that time. It was intense stupefaction, a kind of 

vague and vacant dehrlum. 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

1 62 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

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 refus- 

ing 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. Fi- 

nally I settled upon a compromise; I would accept the in- 

heritance 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 distribut- 

ing 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 orna- 

ments; 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 be- 

lieve, 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 mar- 

ble 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, 

soled.' 

for they shall be con- 

" 

I have ommitted 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 roman- 

tics.^ 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 Jose Dias in Dom Casniurro is fond 

of them. "I wiped my eyes," relates the hero of that 

book, when apprised of his mother's illness, "since of all 

Jose Bias'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) 

6 See Part One of this book, Chapter V, §111, for the more romantic 

aspects of Machado de Assis. 

: 

,

1 64 


but the use of the superlative makes the mouth long, 

and through love of a sonorous sentence Jose 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; Graga Aranha, 

the Corinthian and Coelho Netto the composite. So- 

briety 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.

IT 

Ill 

JOSE VERISSIMO 

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 con- 

sonance 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 Bra- 

zilian 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 Assls. 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 intellec- 

tual 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 

i6s


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 Brazilians 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 seem- 

ing inner necessity, to quarrel; his pages, indeed, are rest- 

ful 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, Jose Enrique Rodo, but there is some- 

thing 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 wth 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 per- 

haps 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 him- 

self much concern over these really futile distinctions, 

—

JOSE VERISSIMO 167 

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 Rodo, possessed 

the secret of seizing upon something universal in what- 

ever he chose 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 Rodo 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 in- 

fluence—of European culture; but it is a triumph, none

1 68 


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 curios- 

ity 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 tiitissimus 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- 

translency. "As to permanence," he wrote In an interest-

JOSE' VERISSIMO 169 

Ing essay on Que e Literatura^ (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 can- 

not 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 Lemaitre whom he so much admired. "No 

meio nao esta so 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 ex- 

tremes. To the ancient apophthegm that there is noth- 

ing new under the sun—and it would be just as true to 

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.

lyo BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

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 abso- 

lute 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 tempera- 

mental 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 zuhose 

central passion is to have men free. Mr. More needs 

them for the same inner reason—infinitely rarified and re- 

fined, of course,—for which they are necessary to the in- 

quisitor and the militant patriot. He wants to damn here- 

tics. ... 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 im- 

pose upon it only too often. But their day is nearly 

over. . . . 

-^ 

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 accom- 

plished 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 Rodo 

in the milieu that but half understood him. Neither 

^Rodo 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 

Â Modern Book of Criticism, New York, 1919. Page iii. The italics 

are mine.

172 


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 Rodo's famous Ariel, a certain half-concealed conde- 

scension that might not have appeared were that essay 

written today. ^ The younger Spanish Americans and 

Brazilians who have come north to study at our universi- 

ties 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 Lewlsohn, 

Joel Ellas Splngarn. During the next decade, as these 

young men rise to power in their own intellectual wprld, 

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. 

3 Mr. Havelock Ellis, writing in 1917 upon Rodo, (the article may be 

found in his book entitled The Philosophy of Conflict), expressed an 

opinion that comes pat to our present purpose. ". . . Rodo 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 Rodo 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, Rodo 

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.'" 

—


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 esoter- 

ism so beloved of certain latter-day poets and dramatists. 

To him, criticism was an art, and, reduced to its essen- 

tial 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 noth- 

ing 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 im- 

agination 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 demean- 

our, and even here he is more restrained than Sylvio could 

be in his moments of calm. Verissimo,—and again he 

suggests Rodo for a similar quality,—is ever a mite mel-

174 


ancholy. His thought and its expression at their best are 

like a beautiful landscape seen in the afterglow of sun- 

set; 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 Rodo'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 con- 

fronted 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 

Lemaitre. 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 tran- 

scended the narrower claims of nationalism,—a nation- 

alism in Brazil as elsewhere too often identical with 

unthinking pride, puerile boastfulness and the no- 

tions of whatever political party happens to be pre- 

dominant. 

With Sylvio Romero he shares pre-eminence as the 

foremost modern Brazilian critic of letters. A passing 

glance at the controversy between these contrasting per- 

sonalities will bring out not only their divergent quali-


ties, 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 Uteratura hrasi- 

leira, 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 appear- 

ance 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 generaliza- 

tion as well. He called it "one of the most original, or 

at least personal, most suggestive, most copious (in opin- 

ions 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 11 

vols., Madrid, 1853, ^Ô- It was he who laid in those 

pages the corner stone of the still unfinished edifice of our 

literature. . . . Wolf, Norberto Silva, Fernandes Pln- 

heiro 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 In- 

tellectual contrast to Romero. He Is calm, even, logical,

176 


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. Joao Ribeiro, a 

Compendio de historia da Uteratiira hrazileira 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 en- 

ter 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 criti- 

cism, and must have unconditional admiration. . . 

The voluminious historian was vain. "It is an abso- 

lutely 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, de- 

spite his praise and his verbal animation—that of a mas- 

ter 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 : 

gmall esteem (small in relation to his) for Tobias Barreto 

." 

my


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 Histo- 

ria da literatiira 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 dog- 

matic "Pontifex Maximus of Brazilian letters," as 

Romero was called by Eunapio Deiro. '^ 

"A disciple of the French through Sainte-Beuve and 

Brunetiere, 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 

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 e Literatura, Rio de Janeiro, 1907, pages 230-293.

178 


understanding and sensibility. His Historia da Litera- 

tura 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 seek- 

ing the individual to the detriment of the milieu, the per- 

sonal work to the prejudice of the collective. Veris- 

simo, 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. . . ." ^ 

What Carvalho points out as a defect I consider Ver- 

issimo'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 a 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 

^ Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira. aa Ed. Revista e aug- 

mentada. Rio, 1922. Pp. 344-345.

JOSE VERISSIMO 

^79 

the oldest of the continent. ^ From the literary stand- 

point our nationality seems to have preceded the other 

American nations. It is clear that I am not here insist- 

ing 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 impor- 

tance, cannot alone serve to establish priority. A liter- 

ature 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 civili- 

zation, thought and spiritual progress of Brazil, show- 

ing how already in that century a native of the country, 

sequestered upon his plantation in the sertao, not only 

possessed sufficient culture to write of matters pertaining 

to his country, but felt also the necessity of writing it 

6 This opinion he later rectified.

i8o 


down. It is certain that he was inspired likewise by in- 

terest 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 disin- 

terested 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 expres- 

sion 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 pos- 

sessed 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 stand- 

point, did not exist. 

"Portugal, for already a century, had possessed a Ian-

JOSE VERISSIMO i8i 

guage solidly constructed and policed, and in this respect 

the labor of Camoes is incomparably less than that of 

Dante. Portugal was in its golden age of literature, 

which already possessed chroniclers such as Fernao Lopes, 

novelists like Bernardim Ribeiro, historians like Joao 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 rus- 

ticity 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 iden- 

tification rendered easy the influence of Portuguese spirit- 

ual 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 imi- 

tation of them—the convents of the other religious or- 

ders, infiltrating Latin culture into the still half-savage 

colony, favoured the transmigration hither of the power- 

ful literary spirit of the metropolis.

i82 . 

BRAZILIAN 

LITERATURE 

"Soon, then, perhaps sooner than any other American 

nation, and certainly sooner than, for example, the larg- 

est 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 re- 

gional 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 litera- 

ture 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 expres- 

sion 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 litera- 

ture, despite the existence in those peoples of a high cul- 

ture and notable writers in all fields. '^ 

"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 bet- 

^ 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. 

J


ter 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 al- 

ready 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 pos- 

sible 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 

principle 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 great- 

ness in the future will give to the literary expression of 

its life supremacy over Portugal, whose historic role 

seems over and which, from all appearances, will disap- 

pear 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 Camoes 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

1 84 


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, pos- 

sesses 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 communi- 

cation, 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 move- 

ments are all external. What is called improperly the 

Mineira School of the XVIIIth century, and the Maranhao 

pleiade of the middle of this (the XlXth) re- 

ceived their inspiration from Portugal, but did not trans- 

mit 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 XlXth century) 

and is greater now than it was for example during the 

Romantic period. There was always lacking the trans- 

mitting 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 simulta-


neously a passive and an active role : 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 him- 

self, for both form an integral part of the people. Per- 

haps only during our Romantic period, from 1835 to 

i860, 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 creat- 

ing for writers a sympathetic public, which felt instinc- 

tively 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 intel- 

lectually 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 in- 

difference with which I should perform the same office 

in the domains of geology. I am looking for the expla- 

nation 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 infe- 

riority of our writers, without any longer counterbal- 

ancing 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, with- 

out Ideas of their own, with immense gaps in their learn- 

ing, 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 for- 

eign 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 1 850-1 860, by Gongalves DIas, Ca- 

slmlro de Abreu, Alvares de Azevedo, Junqueira Freire, 

Laurlndo Rabello, and you will note that the sincerity 

of emotion that overflowed the verses then Is almost com- 

pletely lacking In today's poetry. And In all our liter- 

ary 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 dra- 

matic literature, which sterilized our philisophic, historic 

and critical production. This lack, however, Is a conse- 

quence 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 wide- 

spread, all-consuming, and, anyway you look at it, coarse 

preoccupation with politics and finance." ^ 

8 Verissimo was bom at Belem, Para, on April 8, 1857. He initiated 

his career as a public official in his native province, but soon made his 

vpay 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 

full name was Olavo Braz Martins dos 

HISGuimaraes Bilac; he Is one of the most popular 

poets that Brazil has produced; his surround- 

ings 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 

Goncalves 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 Car- 

thage." He has been compared, likewise, to Lucian of 

Samosata. Most of all, however, he is the poet of per- 

i88

OLAVO BILAC 189 

fumed 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 imperson- 

ality 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 pro- 

cess of formation, in which divers ethnical elements are 

struggling for supremacy. There can be no original liter- 

ature 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 mor- 

tals," 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 repent- 

ance in his words, "is not, as some ingenious vision- 

aries would have it, an assertion and a labor apart, with- 

out filiation to the other preoccupations of existence. 

All human concerns are interwoven and blend in an in- 

dissoluble 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- him- 

self, locked under seven keys within his dream, indif- 

ferent 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 Said, quotes this little tale from 

the master, who was reminded of it by a portrait of 

Paolo Uccello in Vasarl. "This is the painter," said


France, "whose wife gently reproached him with work- 

ing 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 

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 man- 

ner 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 char- 

acter of nationalities Is purified and defined. . . ."

192 


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 Cacador de Esmeraldas 

(The Emerald-Hunter, and epic episode of the seven- 

teenth-century sertao) 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 Profissiio 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 poete est ciseleur, 

Le ciseleur est poete. 

Bilac's would-be Parnassian Profession of Faith, begin- 

ning 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 Profissdo de Fe is a bit dan- 

dified, snobbish, aloof, with a suggestion of a refined 

sensuality that is fully borne in his work. 

Nao quero a Zeus Capitolino, 

Herculeo e hello, 

Talhar no marmore divino 

Com o camartello. 

—

194 


Que outro—nao eu!—a pedra corte 

Para, brutal, 

Erguer de Athene o altivo porta 

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, 

For te servir, Deusa serena, 

Serena Forma! 

• • • • • • 

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 e pequeno o sacrificio, 

Morra eu tambem! 

Caia eu tembem, sem esperanca, 

Porem tranquilo, 

Inda, ao cahir, vibrando a langa, 

Em prol de 

^ 

Estylo ! 

II have no wish to chisel the Capitoline Zeus, Herculean and beauti- 

ful, 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


The Poesias ^ upon which Bilac's fame rests constitute 

but a book of average size, and consist of the following 

divisions: PanopUas (Panoplies); Via Lactea (The 

Milky Way) ; Sargas de Fogo (Fire-Brambles) ; Alma 

Inquieta (Restless Soul); As Viagens (Voyages); O 

Cacador de Esmeraldas (The Emerald-Hunter). 

The inspiration of the panopHes derives as much from 

the past as from the present; there is verbal coruscation 

aplenty,—an admirable sense of colour, imagery, fer- 

tility, symbol. Even when reading the Iliad, Bilac sees 

in it chiefly a poem of love: 

Mais que as armas, porem, 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. ^ 

In Delenda Carthago there is the clash of rutilant arms 

and the sense of war's and glory's vanity; this is the typi- 

cal motif of the voluptuary, whether of love or of battle. 

It is not, however, the sorrowful conclusion of the phi- 

losopher 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. 

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 

Sargas de Fogo. 

3 More than arms, however, more than battle, more than conflagrations, 

It is love that shines here, kindling hatred between peoples and scatter- 

ing discord. That love which now incites, now abates war, and chains 

the heroic Paris to the curved breasts of Helen the beautiful.

196 


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 milkyway 

of sonnet gems; all claims to objectivity and imper- 

sonality 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. 

Verlsslmo has noted the same phenomenon in some of 

the poets that preceded Bllac 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 son- 

nets he becomes the poet-chlseller 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, how- 

ever. 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: 

Quern 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 e por isso que assim ando: 

Que e dos loucos somente e dos amantes 

Na maior alegria andar chorando. "* 

He is ill content to feed upon poetic imaginings of 

kiss and embrace, or to dream of heavenly beatitudes in- 

stead of earthly love 

: 

XXX 

Ao coracao que soffre, separado 

Do teu, no exilio em que a chorar me vejo, 

Nao basta o affecto simples e sagrado 

Com que das desventuras me protejo. 

Nao me basta saber que sou amado, 

Nem so desejo o teu amor: desejo 

Ter nos bragos teu corpo delicado, 

Ter na bocca a dogura do teu beijo. 

E as justas ambigoes que me consomem 

Nao me envergonham : pois maior baixeza 

Nao ha que a terra pelo ceo trocar; 

* 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.

198 


E mais eleva o coragao de um homem 

Ser de homem sempre e, na maior pureza, 

Ficar na terra e humanamente amar. ^ 

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 pas- 

sion 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 saiidade: 

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 e para mim o nome 

De uma patria distante e idolatrada, 

Cuja saudade ardente me consome: 

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. 

4


E ouvil-o e ver a eterna primavera 

E a eterna luz da terra abencoada, 

Onde, entre flores, teu amor me espera. ^ 

Sarcas de Fogo, as its name would imply, abandons the 

restraint of Via Lactea. In Julgamento de PhrynS 

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 mul- 

titude "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 tlie worldly hell. . . . 

Come! for at last you shall enjoy within my arms 

All the wantonness, all the fascinations, 

All the delights of eternal rest! 

6 Far from you, if peradventure I hear your name, murmured by an indiflFerent 

mouth amidst other women's names, the tears come suddenly 

to my eyes. . . . Such is he who suflfers 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 raeu desejo" (land of 

my desire).


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. 

La vao! O ceo se arqueia 

Como um tecto de bronze infindo e quente, 

E o sol fuzila e, fuzilando, ardente 

Criva de flechas de ago o mar de areia. . . . 

La vao, com os olhos onde a sede ateia 

Um fogo estranho, procurando em frente 

Esse oasis do amor que, claramente, 

Alem, 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 ceo fuzila. . . . 

E sobre a geragao exterminada 

A areia dorme placida e tranquila. ^ 

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 com- 

'^ 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.


mentary. Side by side with Beijo Eterno (Eternal Kiss) 

it occurs in the Poesias, as if to reveal its relation as re- 

verse to the obverse of the poet's voluptuousness. Beijo 

Eterno, like A Alvarada 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 Dio- 

nysiac 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, so para a minha vida, 

So para o meu amor ! 

^ 

In less amorous mood he can sing a serenade 

Cancao 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. 

8 1 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! 

! 

— 

A

202 


De todas a mais bella 

Nao veio ainda, porem: 

— 

Falta uma estrella. 

^ E vem ! 

. . . fis tu! . . . Abre a janella, 

And if, In the closing piece of this section A Tentagao 

de Xenocrates— (The Temptation of Xenocrates) 

the courtesan's charms seem more convincing than the re- 

sistance 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 blandish- 

ments, 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 La'i's? 

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 sec- 

tion Alma Inquieta: 

Ah! Quern ha-de exprimir, alma impotente e escrava, 

O que a bocca nao diz, o que a mao nao escreve? 

—Ardes, sangras, pregada a tua cruz, e, em breve, 

Olhas, desfeito em lodo, o que te deslumbrava. . . . 

8 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!


O Pensameto erve, e e um turbilhao de lava: 

A Forma, fria e espessa, e um sepulcro de neve. . . . 

E a Palavra pesada abafa a Idea leve, 

Que, perfume e clarao, refulgia e voava. 

Quem o molde achara para a expressao de tudo? 

Ail quem ha-de dezir as ansias infinitas 

Do sonho? e o ceo que foge a mao que se levanta? 

E a ira muda? e o asco mudo? e o desespero mudo? 

E as palavras de fe que nunca foram ditas? 

E as confissGes de amor que morrem na garganta?^** 

Alma Inquleta reaches its climax with A Alvorada de 

Amor (The Dawn of Ijove) . 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 Adao, vendo fachar-se a porta do Eden, vendo 

Que Eva olhava o deserto e hesitava tremendo, 

Disse 

: 

"Chega-te a mim! entra no meu amor, 

^•^ 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?


E a 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! 

Abengoo o teu crime, acolho o teu desgosto, 

Bebo-te, de uma em uma, as lagrimas do rosto 

Ve! tudo nos repelle! a toda a creagao 

Sacode o mesmo horror e a mesma indignagao. . . . 

A colera de Deus torce as arvores, cresta 

Como um tufao de fogo o seio de floresta, 

Abre a terra em vulcbes, encrespa a agua do rios; 

As estrellas estao cheias de calefrios; 

Ruge soturno a mar; turva-se hediondo o ceo. . . . 

Vamos! que importa Deus? Desate, como un veo, 

Sobre a tua nudez a cabelleira! Vamos! 

Arda em chammas o chao; rasguem-te a pelle os ramos; 

Morda-te o corpo o sol ; inuriem-te os ninhos 

Surjam feras a uivar de todos os caminhos; 

E vendo-te a sangrar das urzes atravez, 

Se enmaranhem no chao as serpes aos teus pes. . . . 

Que importa? o Amor, botao apenas entreaberto 

Ilumina o degredo e perfume o deserto! 

Amo-te! sou feliz! porque do Eden perdido, 

Levo tudo, levando o teu corpo querido! 

Pode, em redor de ti, tudo se anniquilar: 

Tudo renascera cantando ao teu olhar, 

Tudo, mares e ceos, arvores e montanhas, 

Porque a Vida perpetuo arde em tuas entranhas! 

Rosas te brotarao da bocca se cantares! 

Rios te correrao dos olhos, se chorares! 

E se, em torno ao teu corpo encantador e nu, 

Tudo morrer, que importa? A Natureza es tu. 

Agora que es mulher, agora que peccaste! 

; 

! 

4


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, a luz dos olhos teus, 

—Terra, melhor que o Ceo! homem, maior que Deus! ^^ 

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 

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 indigna- 

tion. . . . 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! 

!

2o6 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

no less sincere, doubtless, when in Ultima Pag'ina (Final 

Page) he exclaims 

Carne, que queres mais? Coragao, que mais queres? 

Passam as estagoes, e passam as mulheres. . . . 

E eu tenho amado tanto! e nao conhego 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; lilce all sinners, he comes 

for rest to a church. "Oh, to cease dreaming of what 

I cannot behold ! To 

turn cold ! And, 

have my blood freeze and my flesh 

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 blend- 

ing 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, Alex- 

ander, Ccesar, 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: 

Para! Uma terra nova ao teu olhar fulgura! 

Detem-te! Aqui, de encontro a verdejantes plagas, 

Em caricias se muda a inclemencia das vagas. . . . 

Este e reino da Luz, do Amor e da Fartura!


Treme-te a voz affeita as blasphemias e as pragas, 

O nauta! Olha-a, de pe, 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! e a mais bella flor da Natureza inteira! 

E farta-te de amor nesse carne cheirosa, 

O desvirginador da Terra Brasileira! ^^ 

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 Cacador de Esmeraldas is a splendid episode in 

four parts, containing some forty-six sextets In all, filled 

with movement, colour, pervading spmbolism and a cer- 

tain 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 

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!

2o8 


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 im- 

portant in him. This is the characteristic defect of the 

Parnassian esthetics, of which Sr. Bilac is our most illus- 

trious 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 orienta- 

tion 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 Ver- 

issimo, "more than twenty years previous to Bilac, our 

first artist-poet,—if other contemporaries or immediate 

predecessors of Bilac also practised the Parnassian es- 

thetics, 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 per-


haps 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 es- 

thetic 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, him- 

self. 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.

V 

EUCLYDES DA CUNHA 

X^ 5 Sertoes, which first appeared in 1902—a happy 

I M y^î* foi" Brazilian letters, since it witnessed the 

^•^ publication of Graga Aranha's Chanaan as 

well—is one of the outstanding works of modern Portu- 

guese 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 sertao 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 Graga 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 Cun- 

nlnghame-'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 pro- 

duce Os Sertoes—it is their loss rather than their fault. 

210

EUCLYDES DA CUNHA 211 

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 Sertoes was born on January 20, 

1866, in Santa Rita do Rio Negro, municipality of Can- 

tagallo. Losing his mother when he was three years 

old, he went first to Theresopolis to an aunt, and thence, 

after two years, to Sao Fidelis to another aunt, with 

whom he remained until his first studies were completed. 

His father retiring to Rio de Janerio 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 en- 

tered 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 Sertoes. 

The man—as his mature prose testifies—was of nerv- 

ous temperament, and was led into one political scrape 

after another. At the very beginning of his career, car-


ried 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 Sao 

Paulo, for which he went into the wilds to report the 

government campaign against the fractious inhabitants 

of the sertao. 

The campaign, as taught in the Brazilian schools, 

marked another stage in the establishment, the consoli- 

dation, of the Brazilian republic. It took place during 

the presidency of Prudente de Moraes (i 894-1 898) and 

brought within the folds of the new regime the rebellious 

sertanejos, who had rallied round the leadership of An- 

tonio Vicente Mendes Maciel. Maciel was born circa 

1835 in Ceara and had, since 1864, attracted attention 

because of his strange religious notions, his queer garb, his 

legendary personality. Accused of crime, he was vindi- 

cated and went off toward the interior of Bahia, wander- 

ing in every direction over the sertoes 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 1 896-1 897, 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,^ 

"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 qual- 

ities 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 

1 Resumo da Historia do Brazil. Maria G. L. de Andrade. Edicao 

Ampliada, 1920, Pages 277-278.

214 


which the corrupters of his domestic happiness added 

crime to betrayal. 

The plan of Os Sertoes 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 geolo- 

gist, the enthnographer; 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 be- 

fore Os Sertoes, 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 sertao, "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 ag- 

gravated by his normally abject posture, in a manifesta- 

tion of displeasure that gives him an appearance of 

depressing humihty. 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 ex- 

change 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 character- 

istic zig-zag, of which the meandering tracks of the 

sertao 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 dis- 

appear 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 "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 sertao it tends to disappear out of the race, at least in 

outward characteristics, may perchance have given him whatever quali- 

ties 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.

2i6 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

And it is this same powerful denizen of the Brazilian 

hinterlands that is a prey to the most primitive of super- 

stitions, 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 mysti- 

cism 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 sertao 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 Consel- 

heiro arose to plunge the whole sertao into an erethism 

of religious mania and blood." 

As relatively late as 1837 the region had witnessed a 

"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 *caat'lngas 

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 Com^ 

anche on the war-path."


veritable orgy of sacrifice. A fanatic had mounted the 

so-called pedra honita (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 cafiiz 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 ser- 

tanejos' mystic habit of mind and action. The Brazilian 

government became in their eyes a rule of dogs, and their

21 

8 


favourite phrase for the republic was a lei do cdo (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 mll- 

lenlal hope in Dom Sebastian and their faith in Antonio 

surnamed Conselheiro (I. e., the Councillor) as the de- 

liverer 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. ^ 

Garantidos pela lei 

Aquelles malvados estao. 

Nos temos a lei de Deus 

Elles tern a lei do cao. 

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. Sebastlao. 

s I quote the translation of this quatrain from Cunninghame-Graham. 

The third quatrain, here given as I find it in Os Serfbes, 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.


Coitado daquelle pobre 

Que estiver na lei do cao! 

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, 

worldy-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 Verisslmo, who, with his almost unerring Insight, 

extracts from his countryman's book its central signifi- 

cance. Here is a volume that is a remarkable com- 

mentary 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 sertao, friends and enemies and 

even the constituted authorities, hold him (i. e., Antonio 

Maciel, the people's councillor) as a good, honest, up- 

right 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 sertao." 

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 remark- 

able account given by Euclydes da Cunha. 

Os Sertoes 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 ap- 

plication 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 en- 

tity. Os Sertoes is the best answer to the young Brazil- 

ian 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 per- 

secution, 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 Jose Ver- 

issimo. 

—

VI 

MANGEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA 

OLIVERIA 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 Bjorkman, a corresponding mem- 

ber of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, characterized 

him aptly as "Brazil's intellectual ambassador to the 

world," and the phrase has stuclc 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 for- 

eigners; from wherever he has gone he has sent back 

to his native land solidly written, well considered volumes 

upon the civihzation 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 for- 

222

MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA 223 

tunate 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 hke 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 inter- 

course. 

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 horse- 

back. 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 Phi- 

losophy and Letters from the University of Lisbon and 

set out, after a couple of years, upon his career of di- 

plomacy, into which he was initiated by Carvalho Borges 

and the Baron de Itajuba. 

"Oliveira Lima never wrote verses," declared Salva- 

dor de Mendonca 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

224 


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 ex- 

plicit 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 Litteratiira Colonial Brazileira, to discover, 

in this original contribution, a deep, unostentatious feel- 

ing for those beautiful emotions we call poetry. 

His literary career, as we have seen, is closely identi- 

fied with his numerous peregrinations. It opened with 

a historical study of his birthplace: Pernambiico, sen 

DesenvoUmento 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 Japao, (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, em- 

ploying 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 Gusmao in the days of 1738. It is 

worth while noting, as a commentary upon Lima's un- 

fanatic patriotism, that he justly considers this work a 

Brazilian drama, though the action takes place in Por- 

tugal. For, "in the first place, our historic period an- 

terior 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 illus- 

trious 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 Inquiscdo 

:


(The Poet and the Inquisition) by Domingos de Magal- 

haes, 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 sym- 

bolize—and more direct pretension would be anachron- 

istic—the differentiation which had already begun be- 

tween the mother country and its American colony, 

which was destined to continue and propagate its his- 

toric mission in the new world, and the economic im- 

portance of which was daily becoming more mani- 

fest." 

It is in history that, with a few exceptions, Lima's 

most enduring work has been performed. He has re- 

created the figure of Dom Joao VI {Dom Jodo 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 in- 

stance 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 Portu- 

guese historians who have never forgiven him for de- 

serting his native land, now appears in a new and de- 

servedly more favorable light. The author makes it 

clear that John's rule In Brazil was as hberal and pro- 

gressive as was desirable in a country in which all 

thorough-going reforms must of necessity be introduced 

gradually. And these same reforms, especially the

MANGEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA 227 

opening of the chief Brazilian ports to the commerce 

of all friendly nations, not only redounded to the im- 

mediate benefit of the country, but what was infinitely 

more important, paved the way for ultimate independ- 

ence." 1 So well, indeed, that the year following 

John's departure is the year of Brazil's complete eman- 

cipation. 

Oliveira Lima's internationalism—employing that 

word in a broader sense than it is usually given in politi- 

cal 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 exclu- 

sivistic loyalties that patriotism everywhere connotes. 

His very books, as if to symbolize his universal attitude, 

trace the amphfication of his interests and of his cosmo- 

politan 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, in- 

tended chiefly for use in Brazil's higher centres of edu- 

cation; 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, 

1 See Introduction to The Evolution of Brazil compared ivitk 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 Bjornsterne Bjornsen, instead 

of to Goran Bjorkman, the bestowal upon Lima of the epithet "intellectual 

ambassador of Brazil."


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, recog- 

nized the futility of his efforts to keep at least the west- 

ern 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 19 17, "I became a diplo- 

mat, 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 his- 

tory, a brlUIant 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 Washing- 

ton, 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 signif- 

icant, 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 prefer- 

ence is neither blind nor unreasoned, any more than his 

Pan-Americanism is the hollow proclamation that de- 

ceives nobody less than alert South Americans. In his 

attitude to our nation he is candid, direct, with the reserve 

of a Marti, a Rodo, 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 Presi- 

dent 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

230 


"The filiation and evolution of Portuguese America are 

separate from those of Spanish America; not Infre- 

quently, 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 approxima- 

tion appears so reciprocal that this movement becomes 

every day more pronounced and more firmly rooted. 

For Pan-Amerlcanism to be complete. It would be neces- 

sary 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 suspici- 

ous. 

"It Is this which those who, like myself, know and es- 

teem 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 ele- 

vated 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 be- 

longed 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

MANGEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA 231 

thus will the New World fulfil its historical and social 

mission and redeem the debt contracted with Europe, 

which has given it its civilization." ^ 

This is an example of that "Spirit of peace and con- 

cord to which I have ever subordinated my spiritual 

activity." ^ 

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 com- 

pensates 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 un- 

productive 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. "Olive- 

Ira 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 mod- 

'2 Lima here refers to Dr. Roque Saenz-Pena, inaugurated 1910. The 

citation is from Lecture VI (and last) ; the series was delivered in Eng- 

lish. 

3 See Preface to his book on Argentina (1920, Spanish version, Buenos 

Aires).

232 


est 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, ^ "This independence of view and attitude 

explains the fascination that he exercises over the in- 

tellectual 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 Leao, 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 

* In a recent letter to me.


because such a patriotism is incompatible with the inter- 

national 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 pom- 

pously call "the serious business of the world."

GRACA 

VII 

GRAgA ARANHA 

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 Sertoes in 1902 created so profound an im- 

pression 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-Amer- 

ican critic does not lack models abroad; upon the strength 

of Chanaan alone, Senhor Costa (and not entirely with- 

out justice) has created a new phase of the national 

novel: the critlco-philosophlcal; 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 Ameri- 

can novel,—a term that had already been applied to 

Maria (by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs) and Taunay's 

Innocencia. There is a distinct basis for comparison between 

Innocencia and the more famous tale from Colom- 

bia; 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 

234

GRACA ARANHA 235 

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 clas- 

sify. Impregnated as It is with a noble, Tolstolan ideal- 

Ism, 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 aris- 

tocracy 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 Britian in the matter of British Guiana; 

he was Brazilian minister at Chrlstianla, and later Pleni- 

potentiary for Brazil at The Hague. He Is philosophi- 

cally, 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 en-

236 


thralling 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 ac- 

tion. 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 Mllkau from the Old World to 

the New is an Ideal of human brotherhood, high pur- 

pose and dissatisfaction with the old, degenerate hemi- 

sphere. In the State of Espirlto 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 

Mllkau's blend of Christianity and a certain liberal So- 

cialism. The strange milieu breeds In both an Intellectual 

languor that vents itself in long discussions, in brooding 

contemplation, mirages of the spirit. Mllkau 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 hyprocrisy, fraud and insincerity are 

contaminating this supposedly virgin territory. Here he 

discovers no paradise a 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 em- 

ployers. 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. 

Ferraro,^' in his introduction to the book is substan- 

tial 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 psycho- 

logical insight, and Ferrero himself is the exponent of his- 

tory as psychology rather than as economic materialism. 

"The critics," he says, "will judge the hterary 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 

1 See, for citations from Ferrero and Chanaan, the English version of 

the book (Boston, 1920) by M. J. Lorente.

238 


different parts of the book and an ending which is too 

vague, indefinite, and unexpected. But its literary quali- 

ties seem to me to be of secondary importance to the pro- 

found and incontrovertible idea that forms the kernel 

of the book. Here in Europe we say that modern civil- 

ization 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 orginization." 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 them- 

selves in the country of their adoption, whereas the real 

Americans represent the conservative tendencies. 

Europe exerts on American society—through its emi- 

grants—the same dissolving action which America ex- 

erts—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

GRAgA ARANHA 239 

fate will be to transform this country from top to bot- 

tom, 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 aUen 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 

re- 

modelling 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." ^ 

Ferrero Is quite right in Indicating the great non-liter- 

ary importance of the novel; indeed, Brazilian criticism, 

as a whole, has in the consideration of Chanaan been so 

2 In sui'ch passages as these Senhor Aranha seems to fall into the exag- 

geration 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,— â retrogressive subsidence into the savage 

state. Here Milkau seems at once to fear and prophesy a new "obnulation,"

240 


dazzled by the language and the social implications of 

the novel that it has overlooked or condoned its struc- 

tural 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 suf- 

fering 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 dis- 

covered It to be. Neither does it contain that mixture of 

Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Maeterlinck and Ana- 

tole France which was found in It by an editorial writer In 

the Jornal do Commercio. Even Verisslmo, it seems to 

jne, 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 litera- 

ture and art. This novel brought to literature, not only 

Brazilian but Portuguese as well, human and social pre- 

occupations, and modern forms of expression. . . . 

It may well be that chronologically some other came be- 

fore him, but in art excellency is more important than pri- 

ority. . . . 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 artis- 

tic deficiencies of Chanaan as he is unmindful of them. 

He readily grants that "not all the episodes adjust them- 

selves 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 struc- 

ture 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 Graga Aranha's novel is the difficult union 

'—intimate and perfect in this book—of the loftiest ideal- 

ism 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 con- 

siders 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 elan, 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 Brazil- 

ian Academy of Letters. . . . Graga 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 vigor- 

ous 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, en- 

counter, in the manner of the law of compensation, a 

moderating force, a stabilization of values in theApol- 

lonian genius of Joaquim Nabuco, in the Aryan clarity of 

his ideas, the Hellenic grace of his concepts, the bril- 

liancy of his rhythmic style, so elegant, delicate and noble, 

—in the loftiness of his thoughts, in his civilized relati- 

vism. 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 ad- 

miration 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 affec- 

tions, in pleasures and in style, a European, a Latin, a 

descendant in direct line of Greek culture. Graga 

Aranha, by a phenomenon that I discover in his style, 

has succeeded,—at the same time retaining complete in- 

dependence,—in effecting an alliance between two op- 

posite poles, the harmonious conjunction of these two 

—

244 


different principles, the integration into a single beauti- 

ful 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 ex- 

perience 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 beauti- 

ful thoughts remain here as isolated by-products of con- 

versation 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 exal- 

tation 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 gov- 

erned 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 rec- 

ognition 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 in- 

decision. It reveals, in the author, one of the sources 

of his own indecision as to form; but in the novel some-

GRAgA ARANHA 245 

thing of that uncertainty is felt in the telling, and in- 

terferes 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 sur- 

rounds you. . . . But I tell you, if this is going to end 

so that the cycle of existence may be repeated again else- 

where, 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

246 


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 characteri- 

zation of it as a critico-philosophlcal novel contains a 

criticism, which is further brought out In his short con- 

cluding 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 Graca Aranha, ... is a phi- 

losophy 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 Graca 

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 pessi- 

mism, 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 

Giiarany, yet as unlike as Alencar was to Aranha. 

Like Aranha's novel, so this criticism, for all its preoccu- 

pation with Brazilianism, is the result of European cul- 

ture acting upon the native spirit. It is but another rev- 

elation of the literary axiom that renaissance springs 

from the impact of foreign influences; parthenogenesis 

is as rare In literature as in life.

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 unthink- 

ing prodigaHty. Bilac is the silver stream ghttering along 

through the landscape that it reflects with the transmut- 

ing touch of its own borrowed silver; Netto is the gush- 

ing 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 con- 

viction? Because of suffering? Absolutely not. Scarcely 

248

COELHO NETTO 249 

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 natu- 

ralism, 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 Aze- 

vedo in the direction of what we may term neo-roman- 

ticlsm. 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 extrav- 

agant 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,—im- 

patient 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

250 


sounds "made by the flocks of wild pigeons when they 

raise their flight on the riverbanks of my native prov- 

ince." In his work, as in this simile, his senuousness 

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 clos- 

est to that primitive urge. I prefer him, for short tales, 

in such an early work as Sertao ; for the novel, in such a 

concise miniature masterpiece as Rei Negro. 

Henrique Maximiano Coelho Netto was born on Feb- 

ruary 21, 1864, in the city of Caxias, department of 

Maranhao, 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 power- 

ful influence (and this, too, Is duly chronicled in A Cap- 

ital 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 an- 

cient writers and a fondness for the Portuguese classics 

that reveals Itself in his not infrequently archaic lan- 

guage. Some of his pages, Verlssimo 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 for- 

tunately, 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 

19 17 he represents the state of Maranhao 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 imag- 

ination. 

"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 sertao. It was the histories, the legends, 

the tales heard In my childhood,—Negro stories filled 

with fear, legends of cahoclos 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, 

cahoclo 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

252 


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 repre- 

sentative 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 imma- 

nent 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 bete de somme." 

Better than any one else Verissimo, upon whom Costa 

largely draws for his consideration of Netto, has de- 

fined the qualities of the prolific polygraph. Netto has 

tried all the styles; he has from the first revealed that ex- 

uberance 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, unmind- 

ful, 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 de- 

fects 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 vol- 

cano in eruption, of a beauty whose very exoticism draws 

even as it repels. 

He is that rare flower of the literary life,—a per- 

sonality. His role has been that of a minor Balzac, 

pouring forth volume after volume in disconcerting and 

damaging confusion, coupled with that of a Maecenas- 

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, Sertiio, 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 sen- 

suality 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, Mai 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 sertao, for the salvation that he feels 

lies in flight. He exhausts his mount and then makes 

his wandering way to Mai 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

254 


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 to- 

gether they bury her. The husband goes mad, taking it 

into his head that a certain tree follows him vengefuUy 

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 manip- 

ulation of it. That he may at times achieve simplicity is 

shown in Firm'm, 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 coragao de quern ama 

Nasce uma flor que envenena.


iMorena, essa flor que mata, 

Chama-se paixao, 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 

Cega (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 preceptlveness. Life here goes and comes 

with the radiant indifference of the sun that shines over 

ail and of the crickets that shrill their monotonous ac- 

companiment. Anna Rosa, married to Cabiuna, loses 

her sight at the birth of her child Felicia; then, through 

the fever of the sertao, she loses her Cabiuna; 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, narra- 

tive, 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 Mandovi, the cahoclo whose super- 

stitious 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, repel- 

ling, 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 19 14. 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 

sertao, 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, in- 

dulged since his birth and sensuous with the double un- 

restraint of climate and assumed racial prerogatives, at- 

tacks 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 ven- 

geance 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 

Agiia de Jiiventa (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 Alulzio 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 rep- 

resenting, 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 be- 

comes 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 signifi- 

cant; haste, disorientation and constant supply of a none 

too exigent demand rendered him less exacting with him- 

self,—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,

26o. BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

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 Egalite 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."

WOMEN 

IX 

FRANCISCA JULIA 

have played an Interesting, if neces- 

sarily 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 Pollcarpa Salvarleta 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 

261


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." ^ 

The most distinguished Spanish poetess of the nine- 

teenth century, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, was a 

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 (1595-144). 

—

FRANCISCA JULIA 263 

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 learn- 

ing 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 as- 

piration rather than achievement, but they reveal an un- 

mistakable tendency. The latest addition to their 

number is the youthful Angelica Palma, daughter of the 

famous author of the Tradic'iones Perruanas. 

Brazil has not yet produced any woman who has se- 

cured the recognition accorded to Sor Juana Ines de la 

Cruz or to Gomez 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 Fran-


cisca 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 Salome 

Urena, 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 apostohc intensity of Gabriela 

Mistral (Lucilla Godoy) of Chile, and the youthful 

passion of Gilka Machado, youngest of the new Bra- 

zilians. 

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 advan- 

tages 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 atmos- 

phere of Bohemianism and night life in metropolitan 

cafes. Facile analogies might be drawn, but not too 

much faith should be placed in them. Thus Maria En- 

riqueta 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 expres- 

sion 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 consider- 

ation 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 fem- 

inist (which is perhaps not quite consistent with my social 

opinions), do not deny absolutely the Intellectual capac- 

ities of womankind, and, with the same impartiality (at 

least, so I presume) I cannot discover in them any ex- 

ceptional 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 accord- 

ing 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 be- 

cause her own psychological organism forbids It, or be- 

cause 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 de- 

classifying herself." Love, he continues, being the chief

266 . BRAZILIAN 

LITERATURE 

of lyric themes, and woman prevented by social custom 

from really expressing herself, the virtual silence of 

woman in art is inevitable. - 

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 Sao 

Paulo (one of the most important, and the oldest, of 

2 Mr. Havelock Ellis, with his customary lucidity and serenity, discusses 

T/ie 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 changvjd 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. 

—


Brazilian newspapers), the Correio Paulistano, the Di- 

ario Popular, the Se^nana. Between Marmor es and the 

next book, Esphinges, intervened some eight years. Late 

in 1920 she died, and perhaps the crown of her recog- 

nition—for her ability had been recognized with the pub- 

lication 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. ^ 

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 im- 

passivity; the second, the silent sphinx, symbol of inter- 

nal 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 impas- 

sability 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 sin- 

cerity 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 

3 At least one Academician in Brazil has argued sensibly in favor of 

woman's admission to that body.


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 Miisa Inipassivel (Impassive 

Muse) and serving as the motto of the collection Mar- 

mores. 

Musa! um gesto siquer de dor ou de sincero 

Lucto, jamais te afeie o candido semblante! 

I 

Deante de um Job, conserva o mesmo orgulho, deante 

De um morto, o mesmo olhar e sobrecenho austero. 

Em teus olhos nao quero a lagrima; nao 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. 

Da-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 calhao que se quebra, 

Ora o surdo rumor de marmores partidos. 

O' Musa, cujo olhar de pedra, que nao chora, 

Gela o sorriso ao labio e as lagrimas estanca! 

Da-me que eu va comtigo, em liberdade franca, 

Por esse grande espago onde o impassivel mora. 

Leva-me longe, 6 Musa impassivel e branca! 

Longe, acima do mundo, immensidade em fora, 

II


Onde, chammas lancando ao cortejo da aurora, 

O aureo plaustro do sol nas nuvens solavanca. 

Transporta-me de vez, numa ascencao ardente, 

A' deliciosa paz dos Olympicos-Lares 

Onde OS deuses pagaos vivem eternamente; 

E onde, num longo olhar, eu possa ver comtigo 

Passarem, atraves das brumas seculares, 

Os Poetas e os Heroes do grande mundo antlgo.^ 

This is genuine aristocracy of comportment; it is gen- 

uine 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 

* 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.


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. As 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, 

Saudam-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 porgao 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 roupao sofralda, 

Pisa um cravo gentil de lactea alvura. . . . 

E este, sob os seus pes, inda murmura: 

"Obrigado, Dona Alda." " 

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 glit- 

ters 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!"


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 Danca de Centaiiras (Dance 

of the Centaurs, and note that these centaurs are fe- 

males) ; a sonnet of sculptural, plastic beauty, you are 

likely to tell yourself, as vivid as a bas-relief come sud- 

denly to life. Read it again, more slowly, and its impas- 

sivity 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 cen- 

taurs and leads them in their flight when Hercules ap- 

pears. 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. 

DANgA DE CENTAURAS 

Patas dianteiras no ar, boccas livres dos freios, 

Nuas, em grita, em ludo, entrecruzando as langas, 

Eil-as, garbosas vem, na evolugao das dangas 

Rudes, pompeando a luz a brancura dos seios. 

A noite escuta, fulge o luar, gemem as frangas, 

Mil centauras a rir, em lutas e torneios, 

Galopam livres, vao e veem, os peitos cheios 

De ar, o cabello solto ao leo das auras mansas,

272 


Empallidece o luar, a noite cae, madruga. . . . 

A danga hyppica para e logo atroa o espago 

O galope infernal das centauras em fuga: 

E' que, longe ao clarao do luar que impallidece, 

Enorme, acceso o olhar, bravo, do heroico brago 

Pendente a clava argiva, Hercules apparece.*^ 

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, 

^ 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. 

:


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 

Esperanca (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 Sllva, 19 12, 

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 Illiter- 

acy, when we see how frequently even the major creative 

spirits of the country turn to the writing of text-books. 

Yesterday Olavo Bllac, fellow Parnassian of Francisca 

Julia, spared time for the labour; today Coelho Netto, 

Ollveira 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 

— 

;

274 


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 

Profissao 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 ex- 

ample 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 Joao RIbeiro said In his 

preface to Marmores, we find "ecstasy rather than pas- 

sion,"—a cold ecstasy, one might add, like the upper re- 

gions 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 sup- 

posedly 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 de 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 with- 

drawn, aloof, and might have signed such a poem as 

Francisca Julia's O Ribeirinho (The Streamlet), with- 

out any oneJ)eing the wiser. Yet his aloofness—speak- 

ing 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 estagoes de todas, 

O inverno e 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 land- 

scapes labelled native; her longing is no mere conven- 

tional saudade; she formed no preconceived notion of 

Brazilianism; she simply wrote, amidst her labours, some

276 


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.

AMONG 

X 

MONTEIRO LOBATO 

recent literary currents that present 

several interesting phases one should not over- 

look the nationalistic tendencies in Brazil, 

championed so ardently and with such immediate effect 

by the most active of the "new" spirits, Monteiro Lo- 

bato. Lobato is but little over thirty-five and has at 

hand for his purpose an influential publishing house in 

Sao 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 occasion- 

ally deleterious, but It Is possible to overstate the case 

against the French Influence In Brazil and, as one strikes 

277

278 


in Lobato the same protest reiterated time and again, one 

begins to feel that he is somewhat afflicted with Gallo- 

phobia. Yet this is, after all, on his part, the over-em- 

phasis 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 epi- 

graph to one of his children's books, a quotation in 

French from Anatole France; he does not object to hav- 

ing 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, Ideas de Jeca Tatu, 

"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 Lo- 

bato'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 na- 

tionalist in the ugly sense of cheap partisan drum-beat- 

ing—but in the sense that true nationalism is the logical 

development of the fatherland's potentialities. A per- 

sonally independent fellow, then, who would achieve for 

his nation that same independence. 

The beginning of the World War found Monteiro 

X-obato established upon a fazenda^ far from the

MONTEIRO LOBATO 279 

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 Sao 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 pubhshed, 

they are in a more important degree just what 

this initial venture was : a protest, a means of civic bet- 

terment, 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 Urupes. 

Indeed is not the piece Urupes itself a critique and an 

exposition of the indigenous "cobrizo" ? 

It was with the collection Urupes 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 laure- 

ate Olavo Bilac (who might have had more than a few 

words to say about legitimate French influence upon

28o BRAZILIAN LITERATURE 

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 in- 

festing 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 am- 

bient 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. 

Unipes was soon followed by Ideas de Jeca Tatu, 

his Jeca Tatu 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 ad- 

mirable 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 mag-


azine, 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 SnuU-Nose, and 

with an appropriate blush I confess that the little girl's 

adventures among the flowers and creatures of her na- 

tive 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 nat- 

urally 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 national- 

ism. 

From the exclusive stylistic standpoint Lobato is 

terse, vigorous, intense, to the point. The chapters de- 

voted to the creation of a style (in Jeca Tatu) form a 

valid plea for a genuinely autocthonous art, and it is in- 

structive to see how he treats the question in its relation 

to architecture. Brazil has native flora, fauna and my- 

thology which its writers are neglecting for the repeti- 

tion of the hackneyed hosts of Hellas. (Yet Lobato 

nods betimes and sees the Laocoon 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 char-


acteristic that the Brazilian author heaps the horror gen- 

erously, 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 cari- 

caturist, 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. Be- 

cause 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 liter- 

ature 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 collec- 

tion 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 fol- 

lows a tale of human beings in which a foster-child, like 

the Tree That Kills, eats his way into the love of a child- 

less 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 in- 

timately 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 an- 

other 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 Lo- 

bato; 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 parasit- 

ical. 

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 im- 

agination 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 pop- 

ulation.

284 


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 phan- 

tasmagoria 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 Cunnlnghame-Graham, 

drew abundantly, as we have seen, in his rare work 

upon that Brazilian mystic and fanatic, Antonio Consel- 

helro. "It was Euclydes da Cunha," writes Lobato in his 

Ideas de Jeca Tatii, "who opened for us. In his Sertoes, 

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, formid- 

able things back there? ... He revealed us to ourselves. 

We saw that Brazil isn't Sao 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 translat- 

ing an excerpt or two from his most pithy volume, 

Ideas de Jeca Tatii. 

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 Hfe—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 hei- 

inatlos 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 cri- 

tique, employs a German word, soon followed by a 

French, and all this a few seconds before ridiculing vola- 

puk! 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 loyal- 

ties. 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 as- 

pect, to but part of his own nation, though, to be fair, 

it is his theory that sins more seriously than his prac- 

tice. 

!

— 


"Nietzsche," he says elsewhere in the book, "served 

here as a pollen. It is the mission of Nietzsche to fe- 

cundate whatever he touches. No one leaves him shaped 

in the uniformity of a certain mould; he leaves free, he 

leaves as 

aphorism 

himself. (The italics are Lobato's.) His 

Vademeciimf Fade tecum!—is the kernel of 

a liberating philosophy. Would you follow me? Fol- 

low 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 Dario, of a Rodo, and 

of all true leaders, who would lead their followers to 

self-leadership. And once again Lobato answers him- 

self 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 in- 

fluences. 

His characteristic attitude of indignation crops out 

at every turn. In an essay upon A Estatua do Patriarcha, 

dedicated to the noble figure of Jose Bonifacio de An- 

drade, he gives a patient summary of the man's achieve- 

ments—as patient as his nervous manner and his trench- 

ant 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 fur- 

niture and the standards of a free life. 

"This is Jose Bonifacio's zenith. He is the Washing- 

ton of the South. 

^ 

"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, lie was absolved. 

"He betook himself to the island of Paqueta and in 

1838 died in the city of Nitheroy. 

"There you have Jose Bonifacio." 

There, incidentally, you have Monteiro Lobato, in the 

quivering vigour of the phrase, in the emotional concen- 

tration. But all this has been but the preparation for 

Lobato's final coup. 

"Jose Bonifacio is, beyond dispute, the greatest figure 

in our history. 

"Very well: this man was a Paulist, (i.e., a native 

of Sao 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. 

'^ Another "Washington of the South," according to some Spanish 

Americans, is Marshal Sucre Bolivar's powerful associate. Bolivar himself 

has been compared to Washington, perhaps most illuminatingly by 

l:he notable Equatorian, Juan Montalvo, in his Side Tratadof,


In a most grandiose manner he reared one to himself 

In the countless scientific memoirs that he published m 

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 person- 

ality. 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 

Jose Bonifacio was written for the salce of the final 

sting. Not so much to exalt the great figure as to glorify 

Sao Paulo and at the same time excoriate the forgetful, 

the negligent Paullstas. 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 fallings. 

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 Questao do Estylo (The 

Question of Style), in a succinct paragraph upon Olavo 

Bilac's poem O Cacador 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 mourut' of Corneille in the mouth of 

a Joao Fernandez, who slays Ninon, mistress of the 

colonel Jose 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 Char- 

leroi? . . ." 

Even such a mixture does Lobato discover In the ar- 

chitecture of latter-day Sao Paulo. But more to our pres- 

ent point: note how, as long as Lobato sticks to actual 

example, his nationalism Is a reasoned, cautious applica- 

tion. 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.

290 


There can be no question as to the dynamic person- 

ality 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 role 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 cari- 

cature. One may safely hazard the opinion that he has 

not yet, in the creative sense—that of transforming real- 

ity, 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 Some time after writing the article of which the above is an ampli- 

fication, I received from Senhor Lobato a letter which is of sufficient im- 

portance 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 i8th April, 1883, in Taubate, State of Sao Paulo, 

the son of parents who owned a coffee estate. I initiated my studies in 

that city and proceeded later to Sao 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, Ega 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 role 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, gradu- 

ally 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, Lo- 

—


bato 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 Jeca Tatu a national symbol that has in many minds 

replaced the idealized image of Pery, from Alencar's Guarany. Jeca 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, 

— âs 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.

i 

I

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. Resume de I'histoire litteraire du 

Portugal, suivi du Resume de I'histoire litteraire du 

Bresil. Paris, 1826. 

The chapters upon Brazilian letters occupy pages 513 

to 601 of this i6mo 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 

293

294 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

of a departed civilization. In general, he favours a dis- 

tinctive, national note. He is cursorily informative rather 

than critical, and susceptible to few aesthetic values. 

FERDINAND WOLF. Le Bresil Litteraire. Histoire de la 

litterature bresilienne suivie d'un choix de morceaux tires 

des meilleurs auteurs b{r)esiliens. 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 re- 

ferring 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 pre- 

occupation 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. Ill, 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 Bresil Litteraire. 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 295 

SYLVIO ROMERO. Historia da Litteratura Brasileira. 2a 

edigao, melhorada pelo auctor. Rio Vol. I, 1 902. 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 ir- 

relevancy. 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 in- 

completed, 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 lit- 

erature, which to him, as he states in his very first chapter, 

possessed "the amplitude given to it by the critics and his- 

torians of Germany. It comprises all the manifestations of 

a people's intelligence :— politics, economics, art, popular cre- 

ations, 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 knowl- 

edge 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. Compendio da 

Literatura Brasileira. 2a edigao refundida. Rio, 1909. 

A useful compendium and condensation. The authors 

here consider art "a chapter of sociology," laying down a

296 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

belief in the "consciousness of the identity of human 

destinies," which is, "in our opinion, the basis of all so- 

ciology and morality." 

JOSE VERISSIMO. Estudos de Literatura Brazileira. Six 

series, published at Rio de Janeiro and Paris, between 

igoi and igio. These largely formed the basis for his 

Historia da Literatura BrazileirUj Rio, 19 16. 

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, 19 19, 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 Veris- 

simo, but it reveals an independent personality and an 

agreeably cosmopolitan conception of literature. 

For the facts—as distinguished from opinions—in my

BIBLIOGRAPHY 297 

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 Bresil Litteraire. Paris, no date. An 

anthology with many illustrations of authors. 

M. GARCIA MEROU. El Brasil Intelectud. A highly divert- 

ing account by an Argentine who was once Minister 

to the United States. 

ENRIQUE BUSTAMANTE Y BALLIVIAN. Poetas Bra- 

sileros. 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 cele- 

bration of the 400th anniversary of Brazil's discovery, the 

government has sponsored the publication of four tomes, 

which covered the culture of the nation. Volume I 

contains a resume of Brazilian literature by the ubiqui- 

tous Romero, in which he slashes through the field in 

characteristic fashion. 

Very little has been translated into English from the Brazilian 

authors, particularly in the United States. As an example of the 

novel, there is, however, Aranha's Chanaan, issued as Canaan in 

Boston, 1 91 9. In Boston, too, 1921, was issued Brazilian Tales, 

containing short stories from Machado de Assis, Coelho Netto, 

Medeiros e Albuquereque and Carmen Dolores. Coelho's fine 

novel Rei Negro (The Black King), may be procured in a good 

French translation under the title Macambira.

INDEX 

Abreu, Caplstrano de, 36, 38 Beethoven, 40 

Abreu, Casimiro de, 79, 80, 85, 88- Bell, A. F. G., 31, 51 

90, 113, 134, 186 Biiac, 82, to9, H3-116, 126, i5 

^sop, 30 209, 248, 273, 274, 279 

Alencar, Jose de, 55, 92, 94-98, 121, Bjorkman, Goran, 222, 227 

129, 131, 132, 247, 291 

Alencar, Mario de, 97 

d'Almeida, Julia Lopes, 263 

Almeida, M. de, 94, 99 

Alvarenga Peixoto, I. J. de, 54, 

56, 62, 66, 67 

Alves, Castro, 74, 85, 91, 92, 109, 

117, 129-141 

Amalia, Narcisa, 263 

Amaral, A. de, 132 

Amaral, P. de, 48 

Anchieta, Jose de, 5, 31, 32, 41 

Andrade, M. G. L. de, 213 

d'Annunzio, 189 

Apuleius, 188 

Bjornsen, B., 227 

Blanco-Fombona, 105 

Bonifacio, de Andrade, Jose, 56, 69- 

70, 286, 287, 288 

Borges, Carvalho, 223 

Borges de Barros, D., 17 

Botelho de Oliveira, M., 34, 39 

Bouterwek, 177 

Bradstreet, Anne, 262 

Braga, Theophilo, 71 

Brahms, 40 

Branner, J. C, 229 

Bridges, Robert, 21 

Brito Lima, J. de, 47 

Brito, Paulo, 143 

Aranha, Graga, 5, 95, 98, 124, 164, Brooks, Van Wyck, 172 

210, 234-247 

Araripe Junior, 217, 239 

Azevedo, Aluizio de, 117, 121, 122, 

164, 258, 259 

Azevedo, Alvares de, 74, 78, 79, 

80, 83-85, 90, gj, i86 

Brunetiere. 177 

Buckle, Thomas, 7, 9, 10 

Buddha, 112 

Byron, 83, 112, 140 

Cabello 

263 

de Carbonero, Mercedes, 

Bach, 40 

Caldas Barbosa, 67 

Balbi, A., 17 

Camara, Eugenia, 132 

Balzac, 95, 252, 253, 290 

Camoes, ii, '34, 35, 55, 59, 62, 66, 

Barbacena, 54 

74. 77, 183 

Barreto, Tobias, 26, 91, 92, 132, Campos, Umberto de, 267 

176, 243, 244 Cardim, 5, 35, 36 

Barros, Joao de, 181 Carvalho, Elysio de, i, 24 

Basilio da Gama, J., 54, 55, 56, 57, Carvalho, Ronald de, 7, 10, 13, 

58, 78 26, 30, 31, 37, 40, 43, 44, 46, 

299

300 

INDEX 

55. 63, 88, 91, 94, 105, 106, 107, Delfino, Luiz, 116 

108, no, 113, 123, 133, 177, Denis, Ferdinand, 30, 55, 177 

178 

Carducci, 107 

Carnaris, 140 

Carniero, Leao, A., 232 

Castello Branco, C, 290 

Castilho, Antonio de, 116 

Castro, G. de, 37 

Catherine de Medicis, 60 

Catullus, i88, 2or 

Caviedes, 44 

Cejador y Frauca, Julio, 23 

Celso, Affonso, 109 

Cezar de Menezes, V. F., 47 

Chateaubriand, Assis, 232 

Chateaubriand, Rene, 95, 96 

Chaucer, 14 

Chekhov, 282 

Chocano, 105 

Christ, 140, 220, 252 

Cicero, 250 

Comte, A., 25 

Cook, F., 36 

Cooper, Fenimore, 26, 95, 96, 97 

Corneille, 289 

Correa, Diogo Alvares de, 60 

Correia, Raymundo, 109, 110-112, 

114 

Cortines, Julia, 265 

Costa, Benedicto, 6, 19, 23, 94, 97, 

121, 164, 234, 242, 243, 246, 

Deus Luz, Fr. Chr, da M., 38 

Dias, Goncalves, 55, 58, 66, 74 

77-83, 85, 90, 94, 113, 134, 136, 

186, 188 

Dias, Theophilo, 109, no 

Dickens, 290 

Dioscorides, 35 

Dostoievsky, 290 

Dumas, 95 

Durao, Fr. J. Santa Rita de, 54, 55, 

56-59, 60 

Eckermann, 20 

Ega de Queiroz, 121, 290 

Eguren, J. M. de, 105 

Ellis, Havelock, 102, 172, 266 

Emanuel, King, of Portugal, 4 

Enrigueta, Maria, 264 

Fernandes, A., 232 

Ferrero, G., 98, 234, 237, 238, 240 

Ferreira de Lacerda, B., 263 

Fitzmaurice-Kelly, 262 

Flaubert, 103 

France, Anatole, 144, 164, 174 190, 

191, 240, 278, 283 

Franklin, 140 

Freire, Junqueira, 78, 79, 80, 85, 

87-88, 90, 186 

Freyre, Gilberto, 232 

252, 258 

Costa, Claudo M. da, 54, 61, 64, 66 Garrett, 58, 80, 87 

Crespo, Gongalves, 109 Gautier, Th., 274 

Croce, Benedetto, 88 Girriti de Belzu, Juaiia Manuela, 

Cruz e Souza, 116, 122-123 263 

Cuervo, Rufino, 14 Godoy, Lucilla, see Mistral, G. 

Cunha, Euclydes da, 7, 98, 124, Goethe, 19, 21, 84, 123, 242 

210-221, 234, 284 Gomes Carneiro, D. de, 38 

Cunninghame-Graham, R., 6, 210, Gomez de Avellaneda, 262, 263 

211, 215, 216, 217, 2i8, 219, Gongora, 39, 42, 47 

220, 221, 284 Gonzaga, Thomaz Antonio, 54, 61, 

Dante, 62, 84, 131, 200 63-66, 67 

Dario, Ruben, 104, 105, no, 286 Gorin, B., 50 

Deiro, E., 177 Gourmont, Remy de, 13

Gracchi, 140 

Gsell, 190 

Guimaraes, Bernardo, 94, 98 

Guimaraes Junior, Luis, 91, 106, 

109 

Gusmao, A. de, 48, 225 

Gusmao, B. L. de, 48 

Hals, Frans, 231 

Hawthorne, 26 

Heine, 136 

Henry H, (France), 60 

Herculano, A, de, 80, 87 

Heredia, 274 

Homer, 84, 179 

Horace, 87, 168 

Hugo, 87, 91, 95, 130, 131, 133. 

136, 141, 193, 196, 253 

Ibarbourou, Juana de, 264 

Ibsen, 240, 286 

Ines de la Cruz, Sor Juana, 262, 

263 

Isaacs, Jorge, 99, 234 

Joao, Dom, 68, 73, 226, 227 

Juarez, 140 

Julia, Francisca, 193, 261-276 

Kant, 242 

Keats, 275 

Kipling, 260, 290 

Klopstock, 87 

Korner, T., 21 

Kossuth, 140 

La Fontaine, 30 

Lamartine, 87 

Leconte de Lisle, 274 

Lemaitre, 169, 174 

Leopardi, 83, 112 

Lewisohn, Ludwig, 170, 171, 172 

Lima, M. Oliveira de, 33, 36, 37, 

49, 120, 126, 222-233, 273 

Lobato, Monteiro, 15, 124, 125, 273, 

277-291 

INDEX 301 

Longfellow, 26 

Lope de Vega, 37, 42 

Lopez, B., 122, 123 

Lopez, Fernao, i8i 

Lorente, M. J., 2?7 

Lowell, Amy, 264 

Lucian, 188 

Lucretius, 87 

Macaulay, 177 

Macedo, J. M. de, 92-94, 98, 121, 

185 

Machado, Gilka, 264 

Machado de Assis, J. M. de, 91, 

93, 106, 107, 108, 109, no, 114, 

116, 117, ii8-t2i, 122, 123, 126, 

129, 131, 142-164, 165, 168, 

174, 193. 208, 27s, 290 

Maciel, A., 212, 213, 216, 218, 219, 

220 

Maeterlinck, 240 

Maffei, 66 

Magalhaes, Gandavo, Pero de, 35 

Magalhaes, Gongalves de, 50, 55, 

58, 7+-77, 79. 100, 226 

Maistre, De, 87 

Marti, 229 

Martin, P. A., 226 

Martins Junior, 105 

Martins, Oliveira, 223 

Martins Penna, L. C, 100 

Martins, Silveira, 223 

Matto, Clorinda, 263 

Mattos, E. de, 38 

Mattos Guerra, Gregorio de, 38, 

40-45- 52, 56, 67, 114, 239 

Maupassant, 278, 290 

Medeiros e Albuquerque, 173 

Mello, Mario, 232 

Mencken, H. L., 14, 172 

Mendonga, S. de, 223 

Menendez y Pelayo, R., 14 

Menezes, E. de, 123 

Menezes, L. da Cunha de, 54 

Merou, Garcia, 98 

Metastasio, 51

302 INDEX 

Milton, 87 

Miranda, Sa de, 11 

Mistral, Gabriela, pseud, of L. 

Godoy, 264 

Mohammed, 220 

Moliere, 51 

Montalvo, Juan, 287 

Moraes, Manoel de, 38 

Moraes, Prudente de, 212 

More, p. E., 170, 171 

Murat, Luiz, u6 

Musset, 83, 145 

Nabuco, J., 7, 23s, 243, 244 

Napoleon, 56, 140 

Netto, Coelho, 24, 25, 95, 124, 164, 

210, 248-260, 273 

Nietzsche, 242, 286 

Nobrega, 4 

Norberto de Sousa, J., 50, 92 

Norberto Silva, 175, 177 

Offenbach, 50 

Oliveira, Alberto, 109, no, 112- 

"3, 188 

Ottoni, Jose Eloy, 68, 69 

Ovid, 87 

Palma, Angelica, 263 

Pederneiras, Mario, 123 

Pedro II, Dom, 93 

Peixoto, Afranio, 15, 109, 131 

Pereyra, Carlos, 33, 231 

Petrarch, 62, 63 

Pinheiro, F., 26, 175 

Pliny, 35 

Pocohontas, 60 

Poe, 26, 123, 256, 282 

Pombal, 57, 61 

Pompeia, Raul, 117 

Porto-Alegre, M. A. de, 55, 77, 79, 

223 

Pushkin, 112 

Quevedo, 42, 44 

Rabello, Laurindo, 78, 79, 85-87, 90, 

134, 186 

Renan, 164 

Ribeiro, B., n, 66, 181 

Ribeiro, Joao, 17, 26, 33, 51, 97, 

176, 274 

Ribeiro, Julio, 117 

Ribeiro, Thomaz, 116 

Rocha Pitta, 5, 47, 48, 60, 227, 244 

Rodo, 105, 166, 167, 171, 172, 173, 

174, 229, 286 

Rolim, Zalina, 263 

Romero, Sylvio, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 

20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 

33, 36, 38, 40, 41. 49, 50, 55, 

62, 67, 70, 91, io6, ii6, 125, 

166, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 

Rotrou, 51 

Rousseau, 69, 236 

Sa, Antonio de, 39 

Saenz-Pena, R., 231 

Sainte-Beuve, 177 

Salvador, Fr. V. de, 38, 180 

Salvarieta, Policarpa, 261 

Sao Carlos, 68, 69 

Sanchez, L. A., 44 

Santa Maria Itaparica, M. de, 47 

Sayce, A. H., 16 

Schopenhauer, 242 

Scott, 97 

Sebastian, Dom (King), 217, 218 

Shaw, B., 92 

Shelley, 200 

Silva, A. J, da, 48, 49-51, 64 

Siiva Alvarenga, M. I. de, 54, 56, 

62, 66 

Silva, Francisca Julia da, See 

Julia. 

Silva, Jose Asuncion, 260 

Silva, J. C. da, 273 

Sismondi, 177 

Smith, John, 60 

Soares de Franca, G. de, 47

Scares de Souza, Gabriel, 5, 35, 

179, 182 

Souza, Claudio de, 100, 124 

Souza Caldas, 68, 69 

Souza, Fr. Luiz de, 183 

Spingarn, Joel Elias, 172 

Squire, Charles, 3 

Stecchetti, 107 

Storni, Alfonsina, 264, 266 

St. Vincent Millay, Edna, 264 

Sucre, 287 

Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 50 

Taine, 252 

Tasso, 37 

Tavora, Franklin, 98 

Taunay, Viscount Escragnolle de, 

98-99, 121 

Teasdale, Sara, 264 

Teixeira e Souza, 92, 94, 98 

Teixeira Pinto, Bento, 31, 33, 34 

Thackeray, 85 

Tolstoi, 240, 290 

Tueumana, Manuela la, 261 

Twain, 282 

Uccello, P., 190 

Urena, Salome, 264 

Valera, 14 

Van Doren, Carl, 97 

INDEX 303 

Varella, Fagundes, 91, 117, 13+ 

Varnhagen, 19, 33, 35, 69, 175, 177 

Vasari, 190 

Vaz de Caminha, 4 

Verissimo, Jose, 14, 15, 16, 33, 34, 

39, 41, 42, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 

61, 64, 65, 71, 78, 80, 81, 83, 

86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 98, 106, 109, 

116, 118, 120, 123, 126, 133, 

134, 136, 165-187, 208, 214, 219, 

220, 221, 229, 240, 241, 250, 

252, 265 

Verlaine, 43 

Vespucci, 4, 5 

Vicente, G., 11, 181 

Vieira, Adelina, 263 

Vieira, Antonio, 38 

Vigny, de, 95 

Violante do Ceo, Sor, 262 

Virgil, 131 

Wagner, 286 

Washington, 287 

Wells, 290 

Whitman, 26 

Winchester, 169 

Wolf, 10, 26, 42, 50, 55, 58, 63, 66, 

69, 72, 125, 175 

Wordsworth, 275 

Zola, 94, 117, 121, 23s, 240

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Brazilian literature - Cristo Raul

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