PERIOD OF FORMATION (1500-1750)
The Popular Muse--Sixteenth Century Beginnings--Jesuit
Influence--Seventeenth Century Nativism--The “Bahian”
school--Gregorio de Mattos Guerra--First Half of Eighteenth
Century--The Academies--Rocha Pitta--Antonio José da Silva.
I
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,[1] 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 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.[2] 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 Portuguese. Hybrid verses appear as an aural and visible symbol of
the race-mixture that began almost immediately; 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:
Você gosta de mim,
Eu gosto de você;
Se papa consentir,
Oh, meu bem,
Eu caso com você.…
_Alê, alê, calunga,_
_Mussunga, mussunga-ê._
Se me dá de vestir,
Se me dá de comer,
Se me paga a casa,
Ob, meu bem,
Eu moro com você.…
_Alê, alê, calunga,_
_Mussunga, mussunga-ê._[3]
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, (1) the _romances_ and _xacaras_,
(2) the _reisados_ and _cheganças_, (3) the _oraçoes_ and _parlendos_,
(4) _versos geraes_ or _quandrinhas_. In the same way the folk
tales are referred to Portuguese, native and African origin, with a
more recent addition of _mestiço_ (hybrid, mestee) material. “The
Brazilian Sheherezade,” writes De Carvalho,[4] “is more thoughtful
than opulent, she educates rather than dazzles. In the savage legends
Nature dominates man, and, as in the fables of Æsop and La Fontaine,
it is the animals who are charged with revealing 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,[5]
had commented on the blending of the imaginative, ardent African, the
chivalrous Portuguese, and the dreamy native, and had observed that
“the _mameluco_ 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 inspiration. At times, as during the
Romantic period, this becomes 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 melancholy 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 precisely 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.[6]
II
The sixteenth century, so rich in culture and accomplishment for
the Portuguese, is almost barren of literature in Brazil. A few
chroniclers, the self-sacrificing Father Anchieta, the poet Bento
Teixeiro Pinto,--and the list is fairly exhausted. These are no times
for esthetic leisure; an indifferent monarch occupies the throne in
Lisbon for the first quarter of the century, with eyes turned to India;
in the colony the entire unwieldy apparatus 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.
José de Anchieta (1530-1597) is now generally regarded 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 mysteries 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 education”); 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.[7] Romero, “scientifist” critic
that he was, considered the Jesuit influence “not at all a happy one
in the intellectual and esthetic formation of the new nationality.” 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
Patrum qui in Brasilia vixerunt_, a Latin series of biographies of his
fellow-workers; _Arte da grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do
Brasil_, a philological study; his _Cartas_ (letters); and a number of
_autos_ and poems.
Next to Anchieta, Bento Teixeira Pinto, who flourished in the second
half of the sixteenth century, is Brazil’s most ancient poet.[8]
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 Teixeira’s authorship
of that document, later reversed his position. Similar doubt exists as
to the real author of the _Relação do Naufragio que passou Jorge de
Albuquerque Coelho, vindo do Brasil no anno de 1565_, a moving 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 _Prosopopéa_, 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
imitation of Camões, who, indeed, entered Brazilian literature as a
powerful influence through these prosaic lines of Bento Teixeira. “His
poem (i. e., the _Lusiads_ of _Camões_) is henceforth to make our
epics, his poetic language 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, longing, nostalgia and
Camonean love melancholy.”[9]
In the _Prosopopéa_ occurs a description of the _recife_ 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 _barbaros_ 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 discover until _A Ilha da Maré_, by Manoel Botelho
de Oliveira, which, though published in the eighteenth century was,
most likely, written in the seventeenth.[10]
The chroniclers of the early colonial period present chiefly points of
historic, rather than literary, interest. Pero de Magalhães Gandavo,
with his _Historia da Provincia de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente
chamamos Brasil_ (with a verse-letter by Luiz de Camões as preface),
published 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
voluminous 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 occupy itself with so many things … such as are
contained in his work, which treats at the same time, in relation to
Brazil, of geography, history, typography, hydrography, intertropical
agriculture, Brazilian horticulture, 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 Fernão Cardim (1540-1625),
whose work was made known in 1847 by Varnhagen under the geographic
title _Narrativa epistolar de uma viagem e missão jesuitica pela Bahia,
Ilheos, Porto Seguro, Pernambuco, Espirito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, etc._
It consists of two letters, dated 1583 and addressed to the provincial
of the Company in Portugal. 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 seus costumes, adoração e
ceremonias_, if this is, as Capistrano de Abreu has tried to prove,
really the work taken in 1601 by Francis Cook from a Jesuit bound for
Brazil. For, “it was exactly in this year … that Father Fernão 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 chroniclers 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 nativism, far from being the creation of
nineteenth century Romanticism, was rather a historic prolongation.
III
The sporadic evidences of a nascent nativism become in the seventeenth
century a conscious affirmation. The struggle against the Dutch in
Pernambuco and the French in Maranhão 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.[11] “The new society of
the prosperous American colony is no longer essentially Portuguese;
the mill-owners, well off and intelligent, forming a sort of rural
aristocracy, similar to that of the feudal barons, are its best-read
and most enlightened 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 religious fanaticism. The Lutheran, English or
Flemish, was the common enemy … against whom all vengeance was sacred,
all crime just and blessed.”[12]
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 entourage. Spanish influence, as represented
in the all-conquering Góngora, 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 material for the satirical shafts of Gregorio de
Mattos Guerra, well-named by his contemporaries the “hell-mouth” of
Bahia. In Antonio Vieira and Gregorio Mattos, Romero discovers the two
antagonistic forces of the epoch: Vieira, the symbol of “Portuguese
arrogance in action and vacuity in ideas”; Gregorio Mattos, the most
perfect incarnation of the Brazilian spirit, “facetious, informal,
ironic, sceptical, a precursor of the _Bohemios_.” 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,
(1564-1636/39) author of the _Historia da Custodia 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 servitude 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 (1586-1651) 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 Frei Christovão 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 Sá (1620-1678) became the “Portuguese Chrysostom.” Yet little gold
flowed in his speech, which fairly out-Góngora-ed Góngora himself. “His
culture, like that of almost all the Jesuits was false; rhetorical
rather than scientific, swollen rather than substantial.”[13]
The poets of the century narrow down to two, of whom the first may be
dismissed with scant ceremony. Manoel Botelho de Oliveira (1636-1711)
was the first Brazilian poet to publish a book of verses. His _Musica
do Parnaso em quatro coros de rimas portuguezas, castelhanas, italianas
e latinas, com seu descante comico reduzido 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 Maré_, 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 conscious attitude, and the patient, plodding
cataloguing of the national fruit-garden precedes by a century the
seventh canto of the epic _Caramurú_; 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 quoted by Brazilian writers; it
reads like a seed catalogue:
Tenho explicado as fruitas e os legumes,
Que dão a Portugal muitos ciumes;
Tenho recopilado
O que o Brasil contém 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 são sadias,
O quarto A, no assucar deleitoso,
Que é do mundo o regalo mais mimoso;
São, pois, os quatro AA por singuares
_Arvoredos_, _assucar_, _aguas_, _ares_.[14]
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 depict Brazil, but the soul belonged to Spanish or Portuguese
cultism.” So, too, Carvalho, who would assign the genuine beginnings of
Brazilian sentiment to Gregorio de Mattos.
Gregorio de Mattos Guerra (1633-1696) is easily the 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 literature, 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 manner of handling the language;
indeed, he “is the document in which we can appreciate the earliest
modifications undergone by the Portuguese language in America.…” He
reveals a consciousness of being something new and distinct from
Europe’s consideration of the new-world inhabitants as a species of
_anima vilis_. He represents the tendency of the various races to
poke fun at one another. More important still, he betrays a nascent
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 unsettled conditions prevailing
in Brazilian literary criticism--takes a view antipodally apart. “The
first generation 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.”[15] Long ago, Ferdinand Wolf,
in the first history of Brazilian letters that made any claims to
completeness,[16] noted the poet’s heavy indebtedness to Lope de Vega
and Góngora, 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 personality; he aimed his satiric shafts only too well
at prominent creatures of flesh and blood and vindictive passions; 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 não 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 vicissitudes 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 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.”[17] His own countrymen he likened to stupid beasts of burden:
Que os Brasileiros são bestas,
E estão sempre a trabalhar
Toda a vida por manter
Maganos de Portugal.[18]
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 faunesque, sensual, a thing of hot lips
and anacreontic abandon. 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 infelicity), but Carvalho destroys his own case in the very
next paragraph. For, as he indicates, the early Brazilian’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 life’s finer
harmonies!
I am surprised that no Brazilian has found for Gregorio de Mattos
Guerra a parallel spirit much nearer than Verlaine in both time and
space. The Peruvian Caviedes 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
Bahia, so Caviedes guffawed at the sybarites of Lima.[19]
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.”[20] 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 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 não dura mais que um dia,
Depois da luz, se segue a noite escura,
Em tristes sombras morre a formosura,
Em continuas tristezas a alegria.
Porém, se acaba o sol, porque nascia?
Se formosa a luz é, porque não dura?
Como a belleza assim se trasfigura?
Como o gosto, da pena assim se fia?
Mas no sol, e na luz, falte a firmeza,
Na formosura não se da constancia,
E na alegria, sinta-se a tristeza.
Comece o mundo, emfim, pela ignorancia;
Pois tem qualquer dos bens, por natureza,
A firmeza somente na inconstancia.[21]
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.[22]
The _bandeirantes_ were so called from _bandeira_, 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 bestowed. 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 “intellectual 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 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 christened _Academia
Brazilica dos Esqueçidos_,--that is, the Brazilian Academy of those
Forgotten or Overlooked by the _Academia de Historia_ established,
1720, at Lisbon. A sort of “spite” academy, then, this first Brazilian
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
Góngora was receding, Rocha Pitta’s _Historia da America Portugueza_
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 João de Brito Lima, who
indites a work (_Cezaria_) in 1300 octaves praising the Viceroy.
Gonzalo Soares de França 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 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-manufacture (no less!) entitled
_De opifichio sacchario_; the cultivation of manioc and tobacco were
equally represented in these pseudo-Virgilian 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 Lourenço and Alexandre de Gusmão are
remembered, and they do not 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 Molière’s _Georges Dandin_, much to the delight of the
Lisbonese audiences.
The two salient figures of the epoch are Sebastião da Rocha Pitta
(1660-1738) and Antonio José 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.
Oliveira 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
our historian, none the less, there reigns a sympathy for all that is
of his land.”[23] 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 nocturnal 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 Paradise discovered at last,
wherein the vastest rivers arise and take their course.”
I am inclined to question whether Antonio José 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 sobriquet _O Judeu_ (The Jew), Antonio José early experienced the
martyrdom of his religion at the hands of the Inquisition. At the age
of eight he was taken to Portugal by his mother, who was summoned
thither to answer the charge of Judaism; in 1726 he was compelled
to answer 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 Inquisição_, 1839, by Magalhães); the second of Joaquim Norberto
de Sousa’s _Cantos Epicos_ is dedicated to him (1861). Still another
literature claims Antonio José, who occupies an honoured place in the
annals of the Jewish drama.[24] And it is not at all impossible that
the melancholy which Romero discovers amidst the Jew’s gay compositions
is as much a heritage of his race as of the Brazilian _modinhas_.[25]
Already Wolf had found in Antonio José’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 José.
Antonio José da Silva had in him much of the rollicking, roistering,
ribald, rhyming rogue. For long, he was the most popular of the
Portuguese dramatists after Gil Vicente. He studied Rotrou, Molière
and the libretti of Metastasio to good advantage, and for his musical
ideas went to school to the Italians. Sr. Ribeiro has repudiated any
connection between these conventionalized airs--the form of the verses
is just as conventional--and the distinctive Brazilian _modinha_; the
truth is that Romero, eager to make as good an appearance 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 José into the thin ranks.[26]
As it is, his reputation 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 Brazilian 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 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 dominant 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Op. Cit. P. 51.
[2] See his _Cantos Populares do Brasil_, _Contos Populares do Brasil_,
_Estudos sobre a Poesia Popular Brasileira_. These works he summarizes
in Chapter VII, Volume I, of his _Historia da Litteratura Brasileira,
2a Edição melhorada pelo auctor_. Rio de Janeiro, 1902.
[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.
[5] _Résumé de l’histoire Littéraire du Portugal suivi du Résumé de
l’histoire littéraire du Brésil._ Ferdinand Denis. Paris, 1826. The
Brazilian section occupies pages 513-601.
[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 relative, is a certain wistful sadness.
[7] Oliveira Lima. _Formación Historica de la Nacionalidad Brasileña._
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, José Verissimo’s _Estudos
de Literatura Brazileira, Quarta Serie_. Pp. 25-64.
[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.”
[10] Verissimo, always a suggestive commentator, presents an
interesting reason for these early national panegyrics. See the
essay cited in the preceding notes, pages 50-51. He attributes the
swelling chorus 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 primitive Nature, or upon the opulence,--which we
exaggerate--of our soil.”
[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 XIXth 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.
[13] De Carvalho. Op. P. 96-97.
[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_.”
[15] _Estudos, quarta serie._ P. 47-48.
[16] _Le Brésil Litteraire. Histoire de la Littérature brésilienne
suivie d’un choix de morceaux tirés des meilleurs auteurs b(r)ésiliens
par Ferdinand Wolf. Berlin, 1863._ See, for a discussion of this book,
the Selective Critical Bibliography at the back of the present work.
[17] Op. Cit. P. 109.
[18] The Brazilians are beasts, hard at work their lives long, in order
to support Portuguese knaves.
[19] For a good résumé of Caviedes’ labours, with valuable biographical
indications, see Luis Alberto Sánchez, _Historia de la Literatura
Peruana, I. Los Poetas de la Colonia_, Pp. 186-200.
[20] Ibid. P. 190.
[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
continued 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.
[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.
[23] Oliveira Lima. _Aspectos da Litteratura Colonial Brazileira._
Leipzig, 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.
[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’ _jácara_ and the Portuguese _fado_.
It is generally replete with love and the allied feelings.
[26] The chief works of Antonio José da Silva are _Vida do Grande D.
Quixote de la Mancha e do gordo Sancho Pança_ (1733); _Ezopaida_ ou
_Vida de Ezopo_ (1734); _Os Encantos de Medea_ (1735); _Amphytrião_
ou _Jupiter e Alcmena_ (1736); _Labyrintho de Creta_ (1736); _Guerras
do Alecrim e da Manjerona_ (1737); a highly amusing Molièresque
farce, considered by many his best; _As Variedades de Proteu_ (1737);
_Precipicio de Faetonte_ (posthumous).
The latest view of Antonio José (See Bell’s _Portuguese Literature_,
pages 282-284); whom Southey considered “the best of their drama
writers,” 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.