PERIOD OF AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT (1750-1830)
Stirrings of Revolt--The Inconfidencia--Two Epics: _Uraguay_
and _Caramurú_--The Lyrists of Minas Geraes: Claudio da
Costa, Gonzaga, Alvarenga Peixoto, Silva Alvarenga--Minor
figures--Political Satire--Early Nineteenth Century--José
Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva.
I
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 immortalized
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 succeeded by
Barbacena (1788) who it was rumoured, meant to exact the payment of 700
_arrobas_ of gold, overdue from the province. It was this that proved
the immediate 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 José de Santa Rita Durão and José Basilio de Gama, and
the four lyrists, Claudio Manoel da Costa, Thomas Antonio Gonzaga,
Ignacio José de Alvarenga Peixoto and Manoel Ignacio da Silva
Alvarenga.
II
Critics are not agreed upon the relative non-esthetic values of Basilio
da Gama’s _Uraguay_ (1769)[1] and Santa Rita Durão’s _Caramurú_ (1781).
Wolf, with Almeida-Garrett, 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 _Caramurú_ 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 comparison of
the two poems,[2] is, to me, at least, most satisfying of all upon the
problems involved and the esthetic considerations implied. In both the
epics he discerns the all-pervading influence of Camões, the emulation
of whom has seemed to cast upon every succeeding poet the obligation of
writing his epic. Thus the chief initiators of Brazilian Romanticism,
Porto Alegre and Magalhães, had to indite, respectively, a _Colombo_
and a _Confederação dos Tamoyos_, and Gonçalves Dias began _Os
Tymbiras_, while José de Alencar, romantic of the Romantics, started a
_Filhos de Tupan_, “which happily for our good and his own, he never
completed.” But what renders both the _Uruguay_ and the _Caramurú_
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 the authors, though contemporaries,
knew each other or read their respective works. Yet both instinctively
employed indigenous material and revealed that same “national 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 Durão, 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 nationalism 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 Portugal.… Let us
not forget José Bonifacio, the so-called patriarch of our Independence,
served Portugal devotedly 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 José Bonifacio, like Washington, was
at first hostile, or at least averse, to independence.”
The _Uruguay_ is certainly less intense than the Caramurú in its
patriotism. The author of the first wrote 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 error, 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 revolted 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 because so largely
unpremeditated.
The “romanticism” of the _Uruguay_ is worth dwelling upon, if only to
help reveal our long-tolerated terminological inadequacy.[3] It begins,
not with the regular invocation, but with a quasi-Horatian plunge
_in medias res_. It does not employ the outworn octave, but sonorous
blank verse. The freedom of its style and the harmony of its verse
“announce Garrett, Gonçalves Dias[4] 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 extravagance
of the Academicians; it is modern, even contemporary, grandiloquent
in the Spanish style. The “Indianism” of the poem, in which Basilio
da Gama forecasts 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 nineteenth 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, continued by Durão 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 Romantics,--the loftiest
representative of which is Gonçalves Dias,--the Indian advances from
the position of an accessory to that of an essential element; he
is the subject and the object of the poem. In this first phase of
Indianism the sympathy of the poet is transferred only incidentally
to the savage.… The contrary case obtains in 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 letters.…”
There is far less artistic pleasure in reading _O Caramurú_; it may
well be, as most agree, that it, 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
communicative essence. Santa Rita Durão, proclaiming in his preface
the parity of Brazil with India as the subject of an epic, thus places
himself as a rival of Camões; instead, he is an indifferent versifier
and an unconscionable imitator; his patriotism, as his purpose, is
avowed. The subject of his epic is the half-legendary figure of Diogo
Alvares Correa,[5] 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 Paraguassú, 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.
Paragussú’s chief rival is Moema, and the one undisputed passage of the
poem is the section in which, together 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 côr, o aspecto moribundo,
Com a mão ja sem vigor soltando o leme,
Entre as salsas espumas desce ao fundo;
Mas na onda do mar, que irado frema,
Tornando a apparecer desde o profundo:
“Ah! Diogo cruel!” disse com magua.
E sem mais vista ser, sorveu-se n’agua.[6]
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 described the end of Cacambo’s sweetheart
Lindoya, after she has drunk the fatal potion that reveals to her the
destruction of Lisbon and the expulsion of the Jesuits by Pombal, 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 Caramurú_ ends upon a note of spiritual
allegiance to Portugal. It is worth while recalling, 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 rôle is really less significant than in _O Uruguay_.
III
The four lyrists of the Mineira group are Claudio Manoel da Costa
(1729-1789); Thomas Antonio Gonzaga (1744-1807-9) the most famous of
the quartet; José Ignacio de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744-1793), and Manoel
Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga (1749-1814). Examination of their work shows
the inaccuracy of terming them a “school,” as some Brazilian critics
have loosely done. These men did not of set purpose advance an esthetic
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, transition 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
subjectivity 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 Camões, Petrarch and Dante:
Que feliz fôra o mundo, se perdida
A lembrança de Amor, de Amor e gloria,
Igualmente dos gostos a memoria
Ficasse para sempre consumida!
Mas a pena mais triste, e mais crescida
He vêr, que em nenhum tempo é transitoria
Esta de Amor fantastica victoria,
Que sempre na lembrança é repetida.
Amantes, os que ardeis nesse cuidado,
Fugi de Amor ao venenozo intento,
Que lá para o depois vos tem guardado.
Não vos engane a infiel contentamento;
Que esse presente bem, quando passado,
Sobrará para idéa de tormento.[7]
The native note appears in his work, as in _A Fabula do Riberão 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 Dirceu_ has gone is second only
to the printings 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 Seixas Brandão) rises from the verses of
these _lyras_ into flesh and blood reality; the poet’s love, however
much redolent of Petrarchian 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 arrested, I
was eighteen.…” It is sweet enough not to be true.
As Antonio José, 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
restrained, 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
maddening 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 feições mimosas:
Quem fez uma obra tão perfeita e linda,
Minha bella Marilia, tambem pôde
Fazer o céo e mais, si ha mais ainda.[8]
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 possess.” (I believe that the key-word to
the critic’s sentence 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 written in that tongue since Bernardim
Ribeiro and the sonnets of Camões.”[9]
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 José 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
Brazilianism, too, as Wolf noted, in his _Ide to Maria_.
As Gonzaga had his Marilia, so the youngest of the Mineira group,
Silva 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 _côr 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 Gonçalves
Dias.” To the reader in search of esthetic pleasure he is not such
good company as Gonzaga and Marilia, 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 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 _Fanfarrão Minezio_ travesties the Governor
Luis da Cunha Menezes.[10]
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 manners 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
diminishes 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 frequent
improvisation. The prose of the century, inferior to the verse,
produced no figures that can claim space in so succinct an outline as
this.
V
On January 23, 1808, the regent Dom João 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 João’s influence
upon the colony that he has been called the founder of the Brazilian
nationality. The ports of the land, hitherto restricted to vessels
of the Portuguese monarchy, were thrown open to the world; the first
newspapers appeared; 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 1810 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 (1762-1814) and São Carlos (1763-1829) represent,
together with José 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 homen selvagem_ contains lines of appeal to our
own contemporary dubiety. São Carlos’s mystic poem _A Assumpção da
Santissima Virgem_ possesses, today, merely the importance of its
nativistic naïveté; for the third Canto, describing Paradise, he makes
extensive use of the Brazilian flora. There is, too, a long description
of Rio de Janeiro which describes very little. José 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 success.
Though these religious poets are of secondary importance to letters,
they provided one of the necessary ingredients of the impending
Romantic triumph; their Christian outlook, added to nationalism, tended
to produce, as Wolf has indicated, a genuinely Brazilian romanticism.
Head and shoulders above these figures stands the patriarchal form
of José 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
reputation throughout Europe. “The name of José Bonifacio,” 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 Arcadian 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 dó, com risa e mofa:
Eis o meu crime todo![11]
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 traição, porque o amavam,
Servil infame bando.[12]
A number of other versifiers and prose writers are included 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
formidable 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 Portuguese, 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 retrospection, viewed from our knowledge of
the romantic movement up to which it was leading.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The original title was spelled _Uraguay_. Later writers either
retain the first or replace it with the more common _u_.
[2] _Estudos._ Segunda Serie, pp. 89-129.
[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 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 José Basilio da Gama and Durão only prepared
the way for Magalhães and Gonçalves Dias.”
[5] The natives named him _Caramurú_, 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” (Durão’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 makes 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
Caramurú, 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.”
[6] 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.
[7] How happy were the world, if, with the remembrance of love and
glory lost, the recollection of pleasures would likewise be consumed
forever! 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
contentment deceive you; for this present pleasure, when it has passed,
will remain as a tormenting memory.
[8] I 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.
[9] _Estudos._ Segunda Serie, pp. 217-218.
[10] For Romero’s strenuous attempt to prove the _Cartas_ the work of
Alvarenga Peixoto, see his _Historia_, Volume I, pages 207-211.
[11] 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.