THE ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION (1830-1870)
New Currents in Brazilian Poetry--Gonçalves de Magalhães,
Gonçalves Dias, Alvarez de Azevedo, Castro Alves--Lesser
Figures--Beginnings of the Brazilian Novel--Manoel de Macedo,
José de Alencar, Taunay and Others--The Theatre.
I
Though usually associated with French literature, the Romanticism
of the first half of the nineteenth century, like that later
neo-romanticism 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.[1] 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 as unthinkable as self-made men. There is marked difference
between mere imitation and subjection to valid influence, 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 Romanticism; this is the richest--if 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 João VI had been
thrown open to European commerce, and receives from romanticism, in the
words of Wolf, the “ideal consecration” of its nativism. And 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 independence. A national literature, in the fuller sense, is
now possible because it is the expression not solely of an aspiration
but of partial accomplishment, with a historic background in fact.
Poetry becomes more varied; the novel takes more definite form; genuine
beginnings 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
Gonçalves de Magalhães (1811-1882) stands for the religious phase of
Brazilian romanticism; Gonçalves Dias (1823-1864) for the naturistic;
Alvarez de Azevedo (1831-1852) for the poetry of doubt, and Castro
Alves (1847) for 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 Magalhães published his first collection, _Poesias_, he
was a conventional worshipper of the Portuguese classics. A visit
to Europe in 1833 converted him thoroughly to French Romanticism and
when, three years later, he issued the _Suspiros poeticos e Saudades_
(Poetic Sighs and Longings), the very title proclaimed the advent of a
new orientation. His invocation to the angel of poesy is in itself a
miniature declaration of poetic independence:
Ja nova Musa
meu canto inspira;
não mais empunho
profana lyra.
Minha alma, imita
a natureza;
quem vencer pode
sua belleza?
De dia, de noite
Louva o Senhor;
Canta os prodigios
Do Creador.[2]
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
longings. 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 already appeared in
Brazilian poetry from the earliest days, but the same outward elements
of religion, patriotism and subjectivity have been fused into a more
personal, more appealing product. _Os Mysterios_, a funereal canticle
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 Humano_: “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 Confederação 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 Portuguese
exploiters.
In his epic he underwent the influence of Gonçalves 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 Magalhães, 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.
Gonçalves Dias is more lyrical in spirit than Magalhães, who was rather
the meditative worshipper. The poet of nature was the first to reveal
to Brazilians in its full significance the pride of nationality, 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 celebrated each of the strains,--the Indian in
_Os Tymbiras_, _Poema Americano_, the African in _A Escrava_, the
Portuguese in the _Sextilhas de Frei Antão_. To this blend Carvalho,
not without justice, attributes the inner turmoil of the poet’s soul.
He is religious in his patriotism, just as Magalhães is patriotic
in his religion, but if his aversion to Europe is unreasoning, his
patriotism is not a blind flag-waving:
A patria é 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,
Onde alguns olhos chorarão doridos
Na erma sepultura.[3]
It is with the name of Gonçalves Dias that “Indianism” 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 Gonçalves Dias, could serve the
purpose of providing a highly colourful background for the poetic
exploitation of the native scene.
Verissimo would call Gonçalves 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 Freire. And before the national criticism had
awarded Gonçalves 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 first time, and
perhaps the last, social.” Gonçalves Dias, in his _Canção de Exilio_,
captured the soul of his people with a simple lyrism that the slightest
exaggeration might have betrayed into sentimental doggerel.
Minha terra tem palmeiras,
Onde canta o sabiá;
As aves que aqui gorgeam,
Não gorgeião como lá.[4]
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 _Canção_ of Gonçalves 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 _Canção_ of Gonçalves Dias. Nor
does he hide this, calling part of his verses, _Canções do Exilio_.
And to the name of Casimiro de Abreu we can add, following in the wake
of the poet of Maranhão, Magalhaes, Porto Alegre, 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 Gonçalves Dias her favorite poet, the elect of her feelings. The
nativist instinct, so characteristic of peoples in their infancy, found
also a sympathetic 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 fidelity 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,[5] 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 Gonçalves 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
characteristic 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 Gonçalves Dias that they have never felt love.
It is rather that they have never found it as they have visioned it.
Indeed, this is just what Gonçalves 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 é 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
deductions 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 Gonçalves Dias.
Amor é vida; é ter constantemente
Alma, sentidos, coração--abertos
Ao grande, ao bello; é ser capaz de extremos,
D’altas virtudes, até capaz de crimes;
Comprehender o infinito, a immensidade,
E a natureza e Deus, gostar des campos;
D’aves, flores, murmurios solitarios;
Buscar tristeza, a soledade, o ermo,
E ter o coração em riso e festa;
E á branda festa, ao riso da nossa alma
Fontes 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 é amor e desse amor se morre!
Amar, e não saber, não ter coragem
Para dizer o amor que em nos sentimos;
Temer que olhos profanos nos devassem
O templo, onde a melhor porção da vida
Se concentra; onde avaros recatamos
Essa fonte de amor, esses thesouros
Inesgotaveis, de illusoes floridas;
Sentir, sem que se veja, a quem se adora,
Comprehender, sem lhe ouvir, seus pensamentos,
Seguil-a, sem poder fitar seus olhos,
Amal-a, sem ousar dizer que amamos,
E, temendo roçar os seus vestidos,
Arder por afogal-a em mil abraços:
Isso é amor e desse amor se morre![6]
Yet from Gonçalves Dias to the refined, clamant voluptuousness 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
muse is an ardent lady (a truth which, as we shall see, rendered
anything like a genuine Parnassianism fairly impossible in Brazil)
Gonçalves Dias is after all restrained 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 Gonçalves Dias loved,--one woman
or many,--but it reveals rather a certain incapacity to generalize than
a faculty for transposing the particular into the universal.
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 announces; 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 _Vagabundo_. 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 frustrated ambitions of weakness he longed for
illimitable power. In the _12 de Setembro_ (his birthday) he exclaims:
Fôra 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 creação, e som que vibra
A terra palpitante.[7]
Like the hero of _Aucassin et Nicolette_, he prefers hell to heaven for
a dwelling-place.
No inferno estão suavissimas bellezas,
Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras;
La se namora em boa companhia,
Não pode haver inferno com Senhoras![8]
he declares in _O Poeta Moribundo_.
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 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 pedestrian quatrain from the poem
of the quadruplicative title:
Mas se Werther morreu por ver Carlotta
Dando pão com manteiga as criancinhas,
Se achou-a assim mais bella,--eu mais te adoro
Sonhando-te a lavar as camisinhas![9]
Thackeray’s famous parody seems here itself to be parodied. Alvares de
Azevedo’s love, if Verissimo was right, was “um amor de cabeça,”--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, personal passion.
What does it matter, however, if he give us poems such as _Anima mea_,
_Vida_, _Esperanças_, 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 inclined to moodiness; for many
years he was one of the most widely read poets of the country, in
company of his fellow-romantics, Gonçalves Dias and Castro Alves.
Among his followers are Laurindo Rabello (1826-1864), Junqueira Freire
(1832-1855) and Casimiro de Abreu (1837-1860),--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 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 audiences. 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
causing laughter. Life’s a drama, eh?” He is, indeed, as his lines
reveal, a Brazilian _Pagliaccio_:
Porque julgar-se do semblante,--
Do semblante, essa mascara de carne
Que o homem recebeu pr’a entrar no mundo,
O que por dentro vai? E quasi sempre,
Si ha estio no rosto, inverno na alma.
Confesso-me ante vos; ouvi, contentes!
O meu riso é fingido; sim, mil vezes
Com elle afogo os ecos de un gemido
Que imprevisto me chega a flor dos labios;
Mil vezes sobre as cordas afinadas
Que tanjo, o canto meu accompanhando
Cahe pranto.
Eu me finjo ante vos, que o fingimento
É no lar do prazer prudenia ao triste.[10]
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 Laurindo
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 unbiblical trio!) and imbibed modern currents through Milton,
Klopstock, De Maistre, Herculano, Garrett, Lamartine, 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
ratiocination, 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 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 disillusionment
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!” “We conceive an eternal 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 _saudades_ in the older Brazilian poetry;[11] 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! dá-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,
E sosinho scismando no crepusculo
Os sonhos de porvir!
Dá-me os sitios gentis onde eu brincava,
Lá na quadra infantil;
Da que eu veja uma vez o céu da patria
O céu do meu Brazil!
Minha campa será entre as mangueiras
Banhada ao luar,
Eu contente dormirei tranquillo
A sombra do meu lar!
As cachoeiras chorarão sentidas
Porque cedo morri,
E eu sonho ne sepulcro os meus amores,
Na terra onde nasci![12]
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 patriotism 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 which were left the things he
loves and chiefly that unknown girl to whom he dedicated his book. The
longing for his country, together with the charms that this yearning
increased or created, is what made him a patriot, 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 Lusiadas_, with the intense patriotism that overflows it, is the
great poem it is, it owes this greatness to them alone. It is love and
longing, the anxious nostalgia of the absent poet and the deep grief of
a high passion that impart to it its most pathetic accents, its most
lyric notes, its most human emotions, such as the speeches of Venus and
Jupiter, the sublime episode of D. Ignes de Castro, that of Adamastor,
the Isle of Love.…”[13]
In Fagundes Varella (1841-1875) 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, Gonçalves 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.…” “Varella, then, together with Machado de Assis and
Luis Guimarães Junior, is a transitional figure between Romanticism and
Parnassianism.”
The influence of Victor Hugo’s _Les Châtiments_ 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 responsible 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 becomes a
pillar of fire when he is inspired by the cause of abolition.
Romero, with his customary appetite for a fight, has, 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;[14] 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 inevitable.[15]
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 (1820-1891) belong rather to the leisurely investigator
of origins. The real beginnings are to be appreciated in the work of
Joaquim Manoel de Macedo (1820-1882) and José de Alencar (1829-1877).
Macedo portrayed the frivolous society of the epoch of Dom Pedro
II. He was not so much a leader of taste as a skilful exploiter of
it. He has been called “par excellence 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, naïve, a mite insipid. Not that some of his pages lack a certain
piquancy in their very simplicity. His Rachel, for example, in _O Moço
Louro_ (_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. Macedo 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 Brunette_) and _O Moço Louro_, be but a name to his
countrymen and even his countrywomen. The first, published in 1849,
made his reputation; it is a tale of the triumph of pure love. The
second is after _The Brunette_, his best-known 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 José de Alencar, the somewhat _précieuse_ 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 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 Flaubertian esthetics that ennobled it and had not been enriched by
the realistic genius of Zola,--beside his contemporaries Teixeria de
Souza, Manoel de Almeida and Bernardo Guimarães, 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.”[16]
More important to the history and practice of the Brazilian novel
is José de Alencar, famous for his _Guarany_ 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 Gonçalves 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 disappearing.”[17]
At his best Alencar is really a poet who has chosen prose as his
medium. He uses the Indian milieu, as Gonçalves Dias in his poetry,
for the descriptive opportunities it affords. Brazilians rarely speak
of his plots, 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 Graça 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 innovator, 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 my 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 Chateaubriand, 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 countries 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 contact with the American
writer. But this approximation comes from history; it is inevitable and
not the result 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 sertões of the North on the
road from Ceará 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 Sappers and Lionel Lincoln_.… Cooper considers the
native from the social point of view and was, in the description
of indigenous customs, a realist.… In _Guarany_ the savage is an
ideal, which the writer tried to poetize, 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 almost
extinct race.
“But Cooper, say the critics, describes American nature. 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 descriptions of _Guarany_
show any relationship or affinity 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 resemble each
other neither in genre nor style.”[18]
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 rediscovered 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 narrative.”[19]
Alencar is no realist nor is he concerned with sheer accuracy.
_Guarany_, 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 syntax,
as if the wild regions he depicts demanded an analogous anarchy of
language. Yet Costa, granting all this, adds that “before José 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 voluminous agglomeration of
verses in the _Confederacão dos Tamoyos_, in _Colombo_, in _Caramurú_
or _Uruguay_? In prose … but let us rather not speak of it. It
is enough to read the novels of Teixeira de Souza and Manoel de
Almeida.”[20] This same style is viewed by others as a herald of the
nervous prose of another man of the sertões, Euclydes da Cunha, who has
enshrined them in one of the central works of modern Brazil.
_Sertanismo_ itself, however, was initiated by Bernardo Joaquim da
Silva Guimarães (1827-1885) in such works as _Pelo Sertão_, _Mauricio_,
_Escrava Isaura_. He was followed in this employment of the sertão as
material for fiction by Franklin Tavora (1842-1888) and particularly
Escragnole Taunay (1843-1899), whose _Innocencia_, according to
Verissimo, is one of the country’s few genuinely original novels.
Mérou, in 1900, called it “the best novel written in South America by
a South American,”--a compliment later paid by Guglielmo Ferrero to
Graça Aranha’s _Chanaan_. Viscount Taunay’s famous work--one might call
it one of the central productions 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 Japanese.
The scene is laid in the deserted Matto Grosso, a favourite 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 district. 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, Manecão by
name. Innocencia 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; Manecão 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
qualities in each. The Spanish-American work is rather an idyll,
instinct with poetry; _Innocencia_, by no means devoid of poetry,
is more melodramatic and of stouter texture. Taunay, in Brazilian
fiction, is noted for having introduced an element of moderation in
passion and characterization, due perhaps to his French provenience.
His widely-known account of an episode in the war with Paraguay was,
indeed, first written in French.
Manoel Antonio de Almeida (1830-1861) in his _Memorias de um Sargento
de Milicias_ had made a premature 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 Magalhães’ tragedy upon Antonio José,
1838, and to the comedies of Luis Carlos Martins Penna (1815-1848). Of
drama there is no lack; all that is needed is the dramatist. 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
success 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; historically it is of prime importance
in the national development, 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 Moço 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 importance 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 inclined to think that in art such an individual, as bodied
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[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-century 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
academically organized repression,--repression in form, in thought, in
expression, which are but so many aspects of the genetic impulse, and
not detachable 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 measures 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 aspects 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 Romanticism 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 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 everything 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.
[3] 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.
[4] My land has graceful palm-trees, where sings the _sabiá_. The birds
that warble here (i. e., in Portugal, where he wrote the poem) don’t
warble as ours over there.
[5] The critic here refers to João Baptista da Silva Leitão Almeida
Garrett (1799-1854) who together with Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877)
dominated the Portuguese Romantic epoch.
[6] 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 fête,
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, without 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!
[7] 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!
[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
all the more when I vision you doing the laundry.
[10] 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.
[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.
[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 sepulchre shall dream of my loves, in the land where I
was born.
[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 Gonçalves 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--unconscious, so to say--of the national soul itself, in
its feeling, its manner 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
Gonçalves Dias, none of them is even ‘Indianist.’ Casimiro de Abreu,
upon whom Gonçalves Dias made so great an impression, whose nostalgia
derives largely from the _Cançõ do Exilio_ (Song of Exile) no longer
sings the Indian. Neither do Alvares de Azevedo, Laurindo or the
others.” _Estudos_, II, Pages 19-20.
[14] See _Historia da Litteratura Brasileira_ Vol. II, pages 476-601.
[15] See, in Part Two of this book, the chapter devoted to Castro Alves.
[16] Benedicto, Costa, _Le Roman au Brésil_. P. 70.
[17] 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.
[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 João Ribeiro’s _Auctores Contemporaneos_, 6a Edição,
Refundida, Rio de Janeiro, 1907.
[19] _The American Novel_, New York, 1921.
[20] Op. Cit. Pp. 77-78.