CHAPTER V

CRITICAL REACTION (1870-1900)

French Background--Naturalists, Parnassians--Theophilo

Dias, Raymundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira, Olave

Bilac--The Novel--Aluizio de Azevedo, Machado de Assis--The

Decadents--Later Developments.

I

The later course of Brazilian letters follows practically the same line

traced by the reaction in France against the Romantic school. To and

fro swings the pendulum of literary change in unceasing oscillation

between dominance of the emotions and rule of the intellect. Life,

as Havelock Ellis somewhere has shown, is an eternal process of

“tumescence and detumescence”; the formula is quite true of literature.

Buds and human beings alike swell to maturity in the womb of nature and

then follows the inevitable contraction. So, in letters, the age of

full expression is succeeded by one of repressed art,--the epoch of a

blatant proclamative “ism” by an era of restraint and withdrawal. Who

shall, in _a priori_ fashion, pretend to say that this “ism” is right

and that one wrong? By their works alone shall ye know them.

If, then, Romanticism in France, as subsequently elsewhere, gave way to

a rapid succession of inter-reacting schools or groups, the phenomenon

was the familiar one of literary oscillation. The Naturalists,

nurtured upon advancing science, looked with scorn upon the emotional

extravagances of the Romantics. To excessive preoccupation with the

ego and with unreality, they opposed the critical examination and

documentation of reality. Milieu, social environment, psychology

ceased to be idealized; enthusiasm and exaltation were succeeded by

cold scrutiny. The doctrine of “impersonality” (a most inartistic and

psychologically impossible creed) was crystallized around the powerful

literary personality of Flaubert, and Romantic egolatry looked as silly

in the searching day of the new standards as last night’s flowers

without the breath of spring and the moonlight that excuse the sweet

folly they incite.

In poetry the Parnassians revolted against Romantic self-worship on

the one hand and the realistic preoccupation of the naturalists on the

other. They, too, believed themselves impersonal, impassive--terms

only relative in creative endeavour. They climbed up their ivory

towers, away from vulgar mundanity, and substituted for the musical

vagaries of their unrepressed predecessors the cult of the clear

image and the sculptural line. And fast upon them followed the

Symbolist-Decadents,--some of whom, indeed, were nourished upon the

milk of Parnassianism,--and who, in their turn, abjured the modern

classicism of the Parnassians with their cult of form and clarity,

and set up instead a new musicality of method, a new intensity of

personalism. Their ivory towers were just as high, but were reared on

subtler fancies. Suggestion replaced precision; sculpture melted into

music. In a word, already neo-classicism had swung to neo-romanticism;

the pendulum, on its everlasting swing, had covered the same distance

in far faster time. Yet each seeming return to the old norms is a

return with a difference; more and more the basic elements of the

reaction are understood by the participants in their relations to

society and to the individual. Especially is their psychological

significance appreciated and--most important of all and most

recent--their nature as complements rather than as antagonists. When

Darío, in a famous poem, asked “¿Quien quieñ es no es Romántico?” (Who

that is, is not a Romantic?) he but stressed the individualism at the

bottom of all art. Perhaps the days of well-defined “schools” in art

are over; perhaps the days of the label in criticism are gone, or going

fast, even in academic circles; all men contain the potentialities of

all things and opposites grow out of opposites. Man is thus himself

unity in variety,--the old shibboleth of the estheticists,--and the

“schools” are but phases of the multiple personality.

The reaction against Romanticism, if varied in France, was even less

disciplined in Ibero-America. And here we come upon a curious fact

in comparative literature that is deserving of investigation. In the

first place, Parnassianism in Brazil (and in Spanish America, for that

matter) was hardly ever the frigidly perfect thing it became in the

hands of the Frenchman. A certain tropical warmth is bound, in the

new-world poets, to glow in the marble veins of their sonnets. In the

second,--and this is truly peculiar,--that Symbolism (especially in

its Decadent phase) which was responsible for a fundamental renovation

of letters in Spanish America and later affected Spain itself, passed

over Brazil with but scant influence. Brazil produced some highly

interesting Parnassians (with proper reservations made in the use of

that term); Bilac, in his realm, is the peer of any Spanish American.

But the Portuguese-speaking republic shows no figure approaching the

epochal Rubén Darío, whose life and labours fairly sum up the modernist

era in Spanish America.[1]

II

The scientific spirit in Brazilian poetry was of short duration, even

though Romero, one of its chief exponents, gives himself credit for

having initiated in 1870 the reaction against Romanticism with a poetry

that sought harmony with the realistic philosophy of the day. He and

Martins Junior (whom Carvalho places at the head of the “scientific”

poets) are today considered to have troubled the waters of Brazilian

lyrism for but a passing moment. In reality, they but hastened the

advent of Parnassianism. Brazil for a while was weary of the great

Latin weakness,--eloquence. Its poetical condors had too long orated

from mountain-tops; it was high time for swans, for towers of ivory.

Besides, I believe, this answered a certain need of the national

psyche. The sensualist, too, has his moments of refinement, and he

becomes the exquisite voluptuary. Science in poetry, as exemplified

by the strophes of Martins Junior, is too often but rhymed harangue,

even as the early Brazilian versifiers presented us with rhymed

fruit-baskets, aviaries and geographies. Note the unscientific worship

of science in his lines,--that science which so prosaically he terms “o

grande agente altruista,” the great altruistic agent:

O seculo immortal, ó seculo em que a conquista,

A guerra, as religiões e as velhas monarchias

Tem tombado no chão, nojentas como harpias,

Tristes como o deserto! Eu curvo-me ante ti

E ponho o joelho em terra afim de orar

Ao teu busto ideal, titanico, estrellado!…[2]

The transition from Romanticism to Parnassianism in Brazil may be

studied in the poetry of Luiz Guimarães and the earlier verses of

Machado de Assis. I find it difficult to agree with either Verissimo

or Carvalho in his estimate of Machado de Assis’s poetry; Romero has

by far the more tenable view. It may be true that the _Chrysalidas_

and the _Phalenas_ of Machado de Assis, like the _Sonetos e Rimas_

of Luiz Guimarães, reveal a great refinement of form and elegance of

rhyme,--even a wealth of rhythm. But colour and picturesqueness are

hardly the distinguishing poetic traits of Machado de Assis, whose real

poetry, as I try to show in the chapter dedicated especially to him, is

in his prose.

Luiz Guimarães was, from one aspect, a Romantic with a more precise

technique; his form, in other words, was quite as transitional as

his content. In addition to French influence he underwent that of

the Italians Stecchetti and Carducci, of whom he made translations

into Portuguese. His sonnet on Venice is illustrative of a number of

his qualities,--his restrained _saudade_, his gift of picturesque

evocation, his rich rhymes, his vocalic melody:

Não es a mesma, a flor de _morbidezza_,

Rainha do Adriatico! Brilhante

Jordão de amor, onde Musset errante

Bebeu em ondas a lustral belleza.

Já não possues, ó triumphal Veneza,

O teu sorriso--olympico diamante,

Que se engastou do lord bardo amante

Na fronte heroica de immortal grandeza.

Tua escura laguna ja não sente

Da antiga serenata o som plangente,

E os soluços de amor que nos teus barcos.

Exhalava a patricia voluptuosa.…

Resta-te apenas a canção saudosa

Das gemedoras pombas de São Marcos.[3]

“Machado de Assis,” writes Carvalho,[4] “was a poet of greater

resources and fuller metrical invention than Luiz Guimarães. His poetry

… reveals a psychological intensity rarely attained in this country.

Possessing a firm classical education, a profound knowledge of those

humanities which in seventeenth century France were the distinguishing

characteristic of the _honnête homme_, Machado succeeded in stamping

upon his verses a truly singular impress of subtlety and discretion.

His images are, as a rule, of a perfect realism, a clearness worthy

of the old masters. His images are veritable parables.…” But, to one

foreigner at least,--and, I suspect, to more than one Brazilian,

Machado de Assis as a poet is cold, not often achieving artistic

communication; he is colourful, maybe, but his colours are seen

through a certain diaphanous mist that rubs off their bloom. What

Carvalho would find in the man’s verses I discover, strangely enough,

in his remarkable prose--his humorism, his pessimism. The themes most

certainly inhere in his verse, but they are expressed at their best,

most artistically developed, in his prose. Carvalho, seeking to rectify

the position of this great figure in the history of Brazilian letters,

would even make of him a pioneer. “This feeling of the _tragico

quotidiano_,” he asserts, “which only today is beginning to enter into

Brazilian poetry, was first revealed to our literature by Machado de

Assis. Although such notes are not frequent nor many in his work, it

is none the less true that, before him, they were completely unknown.…

Even in his poetry, his poetry that has been so unjustly judged and so

pettily understood, Machado de Assis is a pioneer, an originator of the

first order. It was natural for his art not to be to the taste of the

popular palate; it did not resound with the fireworks and the hoarse

cries of Brazil’s most loudly applauded verse-manufacturers.”[5]

Pioneering, however, is not poetry. In art, the idea belongs to him

who makes the best use of it. In Machado de Assis, the thought often

subjected the emotion; this was characteristic of the man’s peculiar

psychology. I would not be understood as denigrating his poetic memory;

far from it. But in my opinion (and I can speak for no one else) he is

in the conventional sense, only secondarily a poet, and a secondary

poet.

At the head of the true Parnassians stand Theophilo Dias, Raymundo

Correia, Alberto de Oliveira and Olavo Bilac, though Verissimo sees

in the _Miniaturas_ of Gonçalves Crespo “the first manifestation of

Parnassian poetry published here.”[6] Crespo was not out-and-out

Parnassian, however, as was Affonso Celso in his _Telas sonantes_ of

1876. The very title--Sounding Canvases, i. e., pictures that sing

their poetry--is in itself a program. Brazilian Parnassianism thus

begins, according to Verissimo, in the decade 1880-1890. _Sonetos

e Rimas_, by Luiz Guimarães, appears in 1879; Raymundo Correia’s

_Symphonias_ are of 1883, his _Versos e Versões_, of 1884; Alberto

de Oliveira’s _Meridionaes_ are of 1884, and the _Sonetas e poemas_

of 1886. In the very year that the Nicaraguan, Darío, with a tiny

volume of prose and poetry called _Azul…_ and published in Chile, was

initiating the “modernist” overturn in Spanish America, Bilac was

issuing (1888) his _Poesias_.

Brazilian Parnassianism, as we have seen, is less objective, less

impersonal than its French prototype. Poetic tradition and national

character were alike opposed to the Gallic finesse, erudition,

ultra-refinement. Pick up the many so-called Parnassian poems of

Spanish or Portuguese America, remove the names of the authors and the

critical excrescences, and see how difficult it is--_from the evidence

of the poem itself_--to apply the historical label.

Theophilo Dias is hardly the self-controlled chiseller of Greek

marbles. How “Parnassian,” for example, is such a verse as this,

speaking of his lady’s voice?

Exerce sobre mim um brando despotismo

Que me orgulha, e me abate;--e ha nesse magnetismo

Uma forca tamanha, uma electricidade,

Que me fascina e prende as bordas de um abysmo,

Sem que eu tente fugir,--inerte, sem vontade.[7]

This is not the kind of thought that produces genuine Parnassian

poetry. How “impersonal” is it? How “sculptural”? More than one poem of

the “Romanticist” Machado de Assis is far more Parnassian.

And listen to this description, by Carvalho, of Raymundo Correia.

How “Parnassian” does it sound? “Anger, friendship, hatred, jealousy,

terror, hypocrisy, all the tints and half-tints of human illusion,

all that is closest to our innermost heart … he weighed and measured,

scrutinized and analysed with the patient care of a naturalist who was,

at the same time, a prudent and well-informed psychologist. Nor is this

all.… Raymundo is an admirable painter of our landscape, an _exquisite

impressionist_, who reflects, with delicious sentiment, the light and

shade of the Brazilian soil.”[8]

There is no denying the beneficial influence of the Parnassians upon

the expressive powers of the Brazilian poets. The refinement of style

mirrored a refinement of the thought. If I stress the difference

between the French and the Brazilian Parnassians it is not alone to

emphasize the partial inability of the latter to imitate the foreign

models, but to show how genuine personality must triumph over group

affiliations. Raymundo Correia was such a personality; his sensibility

was too responsive for complete surrender to formula. One of his

sonnets long enjoyed the reputation of being the most popular ever

penned in his country:

AS POMBAS

Vae-se a primeira pomba despertada.…

Vae-se outra mais … mais outra … enfin dezenas

De pombas vão-se dos pombaes, apenas

Raia, sanguinea e fresca, a madrugada.

E á tarde, quando a rigida nortada

Sopra, aos pombaes de novo ellas serenas,

Ruflando as azas, sacudindo as pennas,

Voltam todas em bando e em revoada.

Tambem dos corações, onde, abotoam,

Os sonhos, um por um, celeres vôam,

Como vôam as pombas dos pombaes.

No azul da adolescencia as azas soltam,

Fogem … mas aos pombaes as pombas voltam,

E elles aos corações não voltam mais.…[9]

This is the more yearnful voice of Raymundo Correia’s muse, who knows,

too, the futility of rebellion against “God, who cruelly creates us for

grief; God, who created us and who was not created.” This conception

of universal grief is his central theme, and it is significant that

when Carvalho seeks spiritual analogies he goes--to Parnassians? No. To

Leopardi, to Byron, to Pushkin, to Buddha.

Alberto de Oliveira, genuine artist that he was--and it was the fashion

at one time for the Brazilian poets, under Parnassian influence, to

call themselves artists rather than poets--maintained his personality

through all his labours. Like a true Brazilian, he renders homage to

the surrounding scene and even his sadness is several parts softness.

In the manner of the day he wrote many a sonnet of pure description,

but this represents restraint rather than predilection, for at other

times, as in his _Volupia_, he bursts out in a nostalgia for love that

proves his possession of it even at the moment of his denial.

Fico a ver que tudo ama. E eu não amo, eu sómente!

Ama este chão que piso, a arvore a que me encosto,

Esta aragem subtil que vem roçar-me o rosto,

Estas azas que no ar zumbem, esta folhagem,

As féras que no cio o seu antro selvagem

Deixam por ver a luz que as magnetiza, os broncos

Penhascaes do deserto, o rio, a selva, os troncos,

E os ninhos, e a ave, a folha, e a flor, e o fructo, e o ramo.…

E eu só não amo! eu so não amo! eu so não amo![10]

Note how similar are these verses in content to the cries of love

denied that rise from Gonçalves Dias and Casimiro de Abreu,--two

Romantics of the movement’s height. Carvalho, too, sees that in Alberto

de Oliveira there is, in addition to the talent for description, “a

subjective poet of genuine value.”

For a long time Olavo Bilac enjoyed the sobriquet “Prince of Brazilian

poets.” It matters little that part of his posthumous book, _Tarde_,

reveals a social preoccupation. To the history of Brazilian letters,

and to his countrymen, he is first of all the resounding voice of

voluptuousness. And, as happens so often with the ultra-refined of his

kin, the taste of his ecstasies at times is blunted by the _memento

mori_ of weary thought. The world becomes a pendulum swinging between

vast contrasts, and it takes both swings to complete the great

vibration.

O Natureza! o mãe piedosa e pura!

O cruel, implacavel assassina!

--Mão, que o veneno e o balsamo propina

E aos sorrisos as lagrimas mistura!

Pois o berço, onde a bocca pequenina

Abre o infante a sorrir, e a miniatura

A vaga imagem de uma sepultura,

O germen vivo de uma atroz ruina?!

Sempre o contraste! Passaros cantando

Sobre tumulos … flores sobre a face

De ascosas aguas putridas boiando.…

Anda a tristeza ao lado de alegria.…

E esse teu seio, de onde a noite nasce,

E o mesmo seio de onde nasce o dia.…[11]

The theme is as common as joy and sorrow; at the very beginning of

Brazilian literature we meet it in a coarser sensualist, Gregorio

de Mattos Guerra. In Raymundo Correia, in Machado de Assis, such

rhymed homilies are common. They illustrate rather the philosophical

background of the poets than their more artistic creativeness.

Voluptuary that he was, Bilac preferred in poetry the carefully wrought

miniature to the Titanic block of marble; at his best he attains a rare

effect of eloquent simplicity. He was as Parnassian as a Brazilian may

be in verse, yet more than once, as he chiselled his figurines, they

leaped to life under his instrument, like diminutive Galateas under the

breath of Pygmalion.

Assim procedo, Minha penna

Segue esta norma,

Por te servir, Deusa serena,

Serena Fórma!

“Thus I proceed,” he declares in the poem that opens his _Poesias_,

presenting his particular _ars poetica_. “My pen follows this standard.

To serve you, Serene Goddess, Serene Form!” Yet read the entire poem;

note, as an almost insignificant detail, the numerous exclamation

points; note, too, that he is making love to that Goddess, that

he is promising to die in her service. The words are the words of

Parnassianism, but the voice is the voice of passionate personality,

romantically dedicated to Style. Indeed, for the epigraph to his entire

work one might quote the lines from Musset’s “Rolla”:

J’aime!--voilà le mot que la nature entière

Crie au vent qui l’emporte, à l’oiseau qui le suit!

Sombre et dernier soupir que poussera la terre

Quand elle tombera dans l’eternelle nuit!

Bilac’s passion at its height may replace the Creator of life himself;

thus, in _A Alvorada do Amor_, Adam, before his Eve, cries ecstatically

his triumph, despite their lost paradise. He blesses the moment in

which she revealed her sin and life with her crime, “For, freed of God,

redeemed and sublime, I remain a man upon earth, in the light of thine

eyes. Earth, better than Heaven; Man, greater than God!”

All, or almost all, of Bilac, is in this poem, which is thus one

of his pivotal creations. De Carvalho has termed him a poet of

“pansexualism”; the name might be misleading, as his verses more often

reveal the gourmet, rather than the gourmand of eroticism.[12]

The more to show the uncertain nature of Brazilian Parnassianism,

we have the figures of Luiz Delfino and Luiz Murat, termed by some

Parnassians and by others Romantics. Delfino has been called by

Romero (_Livro do Centenario_, Vol. I, page 71), “for the variety and

extent of his work, the best poet of Brazil.” The same critic, some

thirty-three pages farther along in the same account, calls Murat

deeper and more philosophic than Delfino, and equalled only by Cruz e

Souza in the penetration of the human soul. And by the time (page 110,

_Ibid._) he has reached the last-named of these poets, Cruz e Souza

becomes “in many respects the best poet Brazil has produced.”

Yet the effect of the French neo-classicists upon the Brazilian poets

was, as Verissimo has shown, threefold: form was perfected, the

excessive preoccupation with self was diminished, the themes became

more varied. “This same influence, following the example of what had

happened in France, restored the sonnet to the national poetry, whence

the Romantics had almost banished it, and on the other hand banished

blank verse, which is so natural to our tongue and our poetry.… As

to form, our Parnassian poets merely completed the evolution led in

Portugal and there by two poets who, whatever their merits, had a

vast effect upon our poetry, Antonio de Castilho and Thomaz Ribeiro.

Machado de Assis evidently and confessedly owes to the first, if

not also to the second, the advantages of his metrification and of

his poetic form in general over that of some of his contemporaries,

such as Castro Alves and Varella. Parnassianism refined this form …

with its preoccupations with relief and colour, as in the plastic

arts,--with exquisite sonorities, as in music,--with metrical artifices

that should heighten mere correctness and make an impression through

the feeling of a difficulty conquered,--with the search for rich

rhymes and rare rhymes, and, as in prose, for the adjective that was

peregrine, and if not exact, surprising. All this our poets did here as

a strict imitation of the French, and since it is the externality of

things that it is easy and possible to imitate and not that which is

their very essence, a great number of them merely reproduced in pale

copy the French Parnassians. Thus, for some fifteen years, we were

truly inundated with myriads of sonnets describing domestic scenes,

landscapes, women, animals, historic events, seascapes, moonlight … a

veritable gallery of pictures in verse that pretended to be poetry.”

Here, as everywhere else, the true personalities survive. Chief among

the Brazilian Parnassians are the few whom we have here considered.

III

The naturalistic novel in Brazil is, from the artistic standpoint, the

work of some four men,--Machado de Assis, Aluizio de Azevedo, Julio

Ribeiro and Raul Pompeia. Ribeiro’s _Carne_ (Flesh) and Pompeia’s

_Atheneu_ represent, respectively, the influence of Zola upon the

natural sensuousness of the Brazilian and the impact of complex

modernity upon that sensuousness.

The prose work of Machado de Assis is not exclusively naturalistic;

indeed, he should be considered, though of his age, a spirit apart; as

he rises above the limitations of Brazilian letters, so he is too big

for any circumscribed epoch to contain. With the year 1879 he began

a long period of maturity that was to last for thirty years. It was

during this fruitful phase that he produced the _Memorias Postumas de

Braz Cubas_, _Quincas Borba_, _Historias Sem Data_, _Dom Casmurro_,

_Varias Historias_, and other notable works. His long fiction, as his

short, exhibits the same bitter-sweet philosophy and gracious, yet

penetrating irony. In the best of his prose works he penetrates as deep

as any of his countrymen into the abyss of the human soul.

The judgment of Verissimo upon Machado de Assis differs somewhat from

that of his distinguished compatriots.

“With _Varias Historias_,” he says in his studies of Brazilian letters,

“Sr. Machado de Assis published his fifteenth volume and his fifth

collection of tales.… To say that in our literature Machado de Assis is

a figure apart, that he stands with good reason first among our writers

of fiction, that he possesses a rare faculty of assimilation and

evolution which makes him, a writer of the second Romantic generation,

always a contemporary, a modern, without on this account having

sacrificed anything to the latest literary fashion or copied some

brand-new esthetic, above all conserving his own distinct, singular

personality … is but to repeat what has been said many times already.

All these judgments are confirmed by his latest book, wherein may be

noted the same impeccable correctness of language, the same firm grasp

upon form, the same abundancy, force and originality of thought that

make of him the only thinker among our writers of fiction, the same

sad, bitter irony.…

“After that there was published another book by Sr. Machado de Assis,

_Yaya Garcia_. Although this is really a new edition, we may well

speak of it here since the first, published long before, is no longer

remembered by the public. Moreover, this book has the delightful and

honest charm of being in the writer’s first manner.

“But let us understand at once, this reference to Machado de Assis’s

first manner. In this author more than once is justified the critical

concept of the unity of works displayed by the great writers. All of

Machado de Assis is practically present in his early works; in fact,

he did not change, he scarcely developed. He is the most individual,

the most personal, the most ‘himself’ of our writers; all the germs

of this individuality that was to attain in _Bras Cubas_, in _Quincas

Borba_, in the _Papeis Avulsos_ and in _Varias Historias_ its maximum

of virtuosity, may be discovered in his first poems and in his earliest

tales. His second manner, then, of which these books are the best

example, is only the logical, natural, spontaneous development of his

first, or rather, it is the first manner with less of the romantic

and more of the critical tendencies.… The distinguishing trait of

Machado de Assis is that he is, in our literature, an artist and a

philosopher. Up to a short time ago he was the only one answering to

such a description. Those who come after him proceed consciously and

unconsciously from him, some of them being mere worthless imitators.

In this genre, if I am not misemploying that term, he remained without

a peer. Add that this philosopher is a pessimist by temperament and

by conviction, and you will have as complete a characterization as it

is possible to design of so strong and complex a figure as his in two

strokes of the pen.

“_Yaya Garcia_, like _Resurreição_ and _Helena_, is a romantic account,

perhaps the most romantic written by the author. Not only the most

romantic, but perhaps the most emotional. In the books that followed

it is easy to see how the emotion is, one might say, systematically

repressed by the sad irony of a disillusioned man’s realism.” Verissimo

goes on to imply that such a work as this merits comparison with the

humane books of Tolstoi. But this only on the surface. “For at bottom,

it contains the author’s misanthropy. A social, amiable misanthropy,

curious about everything, interested in everything--what is, in the

final analysis, a way of loving mankind without esteeming it.…

“The excellency with which the author of _Yaya Garcia_ writes our

language is proverbial.… The highest distinction of the genius of

Machado de Assis in Brazilian literature is that he is the only truly

universal writer we possess, without ceasing on that account to be

really Brazilian.”

When the Brazilian Academy of letters was founded in 1897, Machado de

Assis was unanimously elected president and held the position until

his death. Oliveira Lima, who lectured at Harvard during the college

season of 1915-1916, and who is himself one of the most intellectual

forces of contemporary Brazil, has written of Machado de Assis:

“By his extraordinary talent as writer, by his profound literary

dignity, by the unity of a life that was entirely devoted to the cult

of intellectual beauty, and by the prestige exerted about him by his

work and by his personality, Machado de Assis succeeded, despite

a nature that was averse to acclaim and little inclined to public

appearance, in being considered and respected as the first among

his country’s men-of-letters: the head, if that word can denote the

idea, of a youthful literature which already possesses its traditions

and cherishes above all its glories.… His life was one of the most

regulated and peaceful after he had given up active journalism, for

like so many others, he began his career as a political reporter,

paragrapher and dramatic critic.”[13]

With the appearance of _O Mulato_, 1881, by Aluizio Azevedo

(1857-1912), the literature of Brazil, prepared for such a

reorientation by the direct influence of the great Portuguese, Eça de

Queiroz and of Emile Zola, was definitely steered toward naturalism.

“In Aluizio Azevedo,” says Benedicto Costa, “one finds neither the

poetry of José de Alencar, nor the delicacy,--I should even say,

archness,--of Macedo, nor the sentimental preciosity of Taunay, nor

the subtle irony of Machado de Assis. His phrase is brittle, lacking

lyricism, tenderness, dreaminess, but it is dynamic, energetic,

expressive, and, at times sensual to the point of sweet delirium.”

_O Mulato_, though it was the work of a youth in his early twenties,

has been acknowledged as a solid, well-constructed example of Brazilian

realism. There is a note of humour, as well as a lesson in criticism,

in the author’s anecdote (told in his foreword to the fourth edition)

about the provincial editor who advised the youthful author to give

up writing and hire himself out on a farm. This was all the notice he

received from his native province, Maranhão. Yet Azevedo grew to be

one of the few Brazilian authors who supported himself by his pen.

Aluizio de Azevedo’s types (_O Cortiço_, _O Livro de Uma Sogra_)

are the opposite to Machado de Assis’s; they are coarse, violent,

terre-à-terre. They are not so much a different Brazilian than we find

in the poetry of Bilac, as a lower stratum of that same intelligence

and physical blend.

IV

Symbolism, even more than Parnassianism in Brazil, was a matter

of imitation, “in many cases,” as the truthful Verissimo avers,

“unintelligent. It most certainly does not correspond to a movement

of reaction, mystical, sensualist, individualistic, socialistic,

anarchistic and even classic, as in Europe,--to a movement, in short,

which is the result, on one side, of a revolt against the social

organization, proved incapable of satisfying legitimate aspirations

and needs of the individual, and on the other, of the exhaustion of

Naturalism and Parnassianism.” In poetry, the school itself centres in

Brazil about the personality of Cruz e Souza, an African with a keen

sense of the racial injustice visited upon him, and with a pride that

could not stifle his outcries. He is often incorrect, and it is true

that carping scrutiny could find ample fare in his verses, but they are

saved by a creative sincerity.

It takes but a superficial knowledge of French Symbolism to see how

far are such poets as Cruz e Souza and B. Lopez from their Gallic

brethren. Insert Cruz e Souza’s verses, without their author’s name,

among the clamorous output of the Romantics that preceded him, and see

how difficult it is to single many of them out for any qualities that

distinguish them as technique or matter. The African was a spontaneous

rather than an erudite spirit. Verissimo does not even believe that

he was conscious of his gifts. And if, at any time, he pretended to

possess a special theory of esthetics, the noted critic would have it

that the poet’s well-meaning but ill-advised friends instigated him.

He was a “good, sentimental, ignorant” soul “whose shocks against the

social ambient resulted in poetry.” De Carvalho holds a higher opinion:

“He introduced into our letters that _horror of concrete form_ of which

the great Goethe was already complaining at the close of the eighteenth

century. And such a service, in all truth, was not small in a country

where poetry flows more from the finger-tips than from the heart.”

Verissimo, indeed, does Cruz e Souza something less than justice. In

his short life (1863-1898) the ardent Negro poet succeeded in stamping

the impress of his personality upon his age and, for that matter,

upon Brazilian letters. He is incorrect, obscure, voluble,--but he is

contagiously sincere and transmits an impression of fiery exaltation.

His stature will grow, rather than diminish with time. Bernadim do

Costa Lopez (1851-1916) began as a bucolic Romanticist (in _Chromos_),

later veering to a Parnassianism (in _Hellenos_) that contained less

art than imitative artifice.

Among the outstanding spirits of the later poets are the mystical

Emilio de Menezes and the serenely simple Mario Pederneiras. The latter

(1868-1915) seems to have undergone the influence of Francis Jammes; he

is one of the few Brazilians who acquired ease in the manipulation of

free verse. Emilio de Menezes, who like Machado de Assis has translated

Poe’s _The Raven_, is best known for his remarkable trio of religious

sonnets grouped under the title _Os Tres Olhares de Maria_ (The Three

Glances of Mary).[14]

V

Later developments in Brazil, as in Spanish America, reveal no

definite tendencies that may be grouped under any particular “ism.”

Rampant individualism precludes the schools of literary memory.

Aranha’s _Chanaan_ directed attention to the Brazilian melting-pot.

One result of the recent war has been, in Brazil, to strengthen

the national spirit, and in São Paulo, particularly, a young group

headed by the industrious Monteiro Lobato seems to show a partial

return to regionalism. The directing inspiration for the more clearly

regionalistic art came perhaps from Euclydes da Cunha, whose Sertões

brought so poignant a realization that Brazil lived in the interior

as well as on the coast. As a corollary of the aspiration toward

national intellectual autonomy, there is setting in a reaction against

France, in favour of national, even local types and themes. The

literary product, if not at its highest, is upon a respectable level.

The novel is ably represented by Coelho Netto,[15] while the drama,

not so fortunate, plods along a routine path with such purveyors as

Claudio de Souza in the lead. To the São Paulo group I look for the

early emergence of some worth-while talents,--young men of culture

and vision who will bring to Brazil not merely the plethora of poesy

that gluts her eyes and ears, but a firm grasp upon the prose that

is the other half of life. Romero, years ago, said that what Brazil

needed more than anything else was a regimen for its daily life. Only

yesterday, Lobato, in his _Problema Vital_, studied the problem of

what he calls the ailment of an entire country, seeking first of all

to convince the nation that it was ill. And his initial prescription,

like that of Romero, calls for a national hygiene. To this purpose he

subordinates his activities as littérateur.

Thus conditions, though not so bad as when Verissimo studied his

problem of the Brazilian writer some thirty years ago, are still

analagous. He found the literature of his country, at that time, an

unoriginal, pupil-literature, often misunderstanding its masters, yet

endowed with certain undisputed points of originality. “The Brazilian

writer, in his vast majority of cases, does not learn to write; he

learns while writing. And it is doubtless useful to him as well as to

our letters that the critic, at times, should turn instructor. The lack

of a public interested in literary life, and capable of intelligent

choice among works and authors, makes this secondary function of

criticism even more necessary and serviceable.…”

Brazilian literature, as is highly evident, is not one of the major

divisions of world letters. It lacks continuity, it is too largely

derivative, too poor in masterpieces. Yet today, more at least

than when Wolf wrote so enthusiastically in 1863, it is true that

“Brazilian literature may justly claim consideration as being really

national; in this quality it has its place assigned in the ensemble

of the literatures of the civilized world; finally, and above all in

its most recent period, it has developed in all directions, and has

produced in the principal genres works worthy the attention of all

friends of letters.”

The finest fruits of a national literature are the salient

personalities who cross all frontiers and achieve such a measure of

universality as is attainable in this best and worst of all possible

worlds. As the region nurtures the national letters, so the national

nurtures the international. And this internationality is but the most

expansive phase of the individual in whom all art begins and in whom

all art seeks its goal. For art begins and ends in the individual.

A few such personalities Brazil has already produced, notably in

the criticism of José Verissimo, the prose of Machado de Assis, the

intellectuality of Oliveira Lima, the poetry of Olavo Bilac. They are

valuable contributions to Goethe’s idea of a _Weltliteratur_. Such as

they, rather than a roster of “isms,” “ists” and “ologies,” justify the

study of the milieu and the tradition that helped to produce them. But

precisely because they triumph over the milieu, because they shape it

rather than are shaped by it, do they rise above the academic confines

into that small library whose shelves know only one classification:

significant personality.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The so-called Modernist movement (another meaningless name!)

was really not a movement, but a scattered reaction against Spanish

academic domination. It was French in inspiration and chiefly behind

the lead of the Decadents resulted in a species of continental

affirmation. I have tried, in my _Studies in Spanish-American

Literature_, New York, 1920, to show the emergence of this affirmation,

from the romantic predecessors in the New World and the French

background, to such salient personalities as Darío, Rodó, Eguren,

Blanco-Fombona and Chocano.

[2] Oh, immortal century (i. e., the nineteenth), oh, century in which

conquest, war, religions and the ancient monarchies have crumbled to

earth, loathsome as harpies, gloomy as the desert! I bow before thee,

touch my knee to the earth, that I may pray to thine ideal titanic,

starry bust!

[3] You’re not the same, oh flower of _morbidezza_, queen of the

Adriatic! Glittering Jordan of love, where the wandering Musset

drank lustral beauty in waves. Your smile, oh triumphal Venice, is

gone--olympic diamond that was set in the heroic forehead of the lord,

bard and lover, immortally great. Your dark lagoon no longer hears

the plangent strains of the olden serenade,--the sighs of love heaved

by the voluptuous patrician in your gondolas.… There remains but the

yearnful song of San Marco’s moaning pigeons.

[4] Op. Cit P. 301.

[5] Ibid. P. 303.

[6] _Estudos_ 2a serie, P. 283. The book was published in Portugal, in

1872, and was “read and admired here in 1872. The _Miniaturas_, the

poems of which bear dates from 1867, to 1870, mention the poet as a

Brazilian, native of Rio de Janeiro. He was, in fact, such by birth, by

intention, and, what is of more importance, by intuition and sentiment,

genuinely Brazilian. We ought, then, to count this, his first book,

despite the fact that it was conceived and generated abroad, in the

roster of our Parnassianism, and perhaps as one of its principal

factors.” See, however, Afranio Peixoto’s splendid two-volume edition

of the _Obras Completas de Castro Alves_, Rio de Janeiro, 1921, for a

refutation of this opinion. (Page 15.) According to Alberto de Oliveira

there are decided Parnassian leanings in Castro Alves’s _Espumas

Fluctuantes_, 1870, in the sonnets called _Os anjos da meia noite_

(Midnight Angels.)

[7] It exercises over me a gentle tyranny that fills me with pride and

casts me down; there is in this magnetism such power, an electricity

that fascinates me and draws me to the edge of an abyss. And I, inert,

without will power, make no attempt to flee.

[8] Op. Cit. Page 307. The italics are mine.

[9] The first dove, awakened, flies off, then another and another.

Finally they leave the cote by tens, as soon as the fresh, red, dawn

appears. And at evening, when the bitter north-wind blows, fluttering

their wings and shaking their feathers, they all return to the cote in

a flock. So, from our hearts, where they burgeon, our dreams, one by

one, depart in flight like the doves from the cote. They spread their

wings in the azure of youth, and fly off.… But the doves return to the

dovecote, while our dreams return nevermore.

[10] I see that everything loves. And I, I alone, love not. This soil

I tread loves,--the tree against which I lean, this gentle zephyr

that fans my cheek,--these wings that flutter in the air,--this

foliage,--the beasts who, in rut, leave their wild lairs to gaze upon

the light that magnetizes them,--the crags of the desert,--the river,

the forest, the tree-trunks, the children, the bird, the leaf, the

flower, the fruit, the branch.… And I alone love not! I alone love not!

I alone love not!

[11] Oh, nature! O pure, piteous mother! oh, cruel, implacable

assassin! Hand that proffers both poison and balm, and blends smiles

with tears. The cradle, where the infant opens her tiny mouth to smile,

is the miniature, the vague image of a coffin,--the living germ of a

frightful end! Eternal contrast. Birds twittering upon tombs … flowers

floating upon the surface of ugly, putrid waters.… Sadness walks at

the side of joy.… And this your bosom, wherein night is born, is the

selfsame bosom whence is born the day.…

[12] See the chapter devoted to him in Part Two of this book.

[13] See Part Two for a special chapter on Machado de Assis.

[14] See, for a good study of Emilio de Menezes, Elysio de Carvalho’s

_As Modernas Correntes Esthéticas na Literatura Braziléira_. Rio, 1907.

Pp. 62-74.

[15] See Part Two for chapters on Graça Aranha, Monteiro Lobato,

Euclydes da Cunha and Coelho Netto.

PART II

REPRESENTATIVE PERSONALITIES

I

CASTRO ALVES

During the last half of the month of February, 1868, two admirable

letters were exchanged by a pair of notable men, in which both

discerned the budding fame of a twenty-year-old poet. The two notables

were José de Alencar, chief novelist of the “Indianist” school, and

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, not yet at the height of his career.

The poet was Castro Alves. His real “discoverer” was the first of these

two authors, who sent him from Tijuca to Machado de Assis at Rio de

Janeiro. In his letter of the 18th of February, José de Alencar wrote

(I quote only salient passages):

“Yesterday I received a visit from a poet.

“Rio de Janeiro does not yet know him; in a very short while all Brazil

will know him. It is understood, of course, that I speak of that Brazil

which feels; with the heart and not with the rest.

“Sr. Castro Alves is a guest of this great city, for but a few days. He

is going to São Paulo to finish the course that he began at Olinda.

“He was born in Bahia, the region of so many excellent talents; the

Brazilian Athens that does not weary of producing statesmen, orators,

poets and warriors.

“I might add that he is the son of a noted physician. But why? The

genealogy of poets begins with their first poem. And what is the value

of parchments compared with these divine seals?…

“Sr. Castro Alves recalled that I had formerly written for the theatre.

Appraising altogether too highly my experience in this difficult branch

of literature, he wished to read me a drama, the first fruits of his

talent.

“This production has already weathered the test of competent audiences

upon the stage.…

“_Gonzaga_ is the title of the drama, which we read in a short time.

The plot, centered about the revolutionary attempt at Minas,--a great

source of historical poetry as yet little exploited,--has been enriched

by the author with episodes of keen interest.

“Sr. Castro Alves is a disciple of Victor Hugo, in the architecture of

the drama, as in the coloring of the idea. The poem belongs to the same

ideal school; the style has the same brilliant touches.

“To imitate Victor Hugo is given only to capable intelligences. The

Titan of literature possesses a palette that in the hands of a mediocre

colorist barely produces splotches.…

“Nevertheless, beneath this imitation of a sublime model is evidenced

an original inspiration that will later form the literary individuality

of the author. His work throbs with the powerful sentiment of

nationality, that soul of the fatherland which makes great poets as it

makes great citizens.…

“After the reading of his drama, Sr. Castro Alves recited for me some

of his verses. _A Cascata de Paulo Affonso_, _As duas ilhas_ and _A

visão dos mortos_ do not yield to the excellent examples of this genre

in the Portuguese tongue.…

“Be the Virgil to this young Dante; lead him through the untrodden ways

over which one travels to disillusionment, indifference and at length

to glory,--the three vast circles of the _divine comedy_ of talent.”

The reply from Machado de Assis came eleven days later. He found the

newcomer quite as original as José de Alencar had made him out to be.

Castro Alves possessed a genuine “literary vocation, full of life and

vigour and revealing in the magnificence of the present the promise

of the future. I found an original poet. The evil of our contemporary

poetry is that it is imitative--in speech, ideas, imagery.… Castro

Alves’s muse has her own manner. If it may be discerned that his school

is that of Victor Hugo, it is not because he copies him servilely,

but because a related temperament leads him to prefer the poet of the

_Orientales_ to the poet of _Les Méditations_. He is certainly not

attracted to the soft, languishing tints of the elegy; he prefers the

live hues and the vigorous lines of the ode.”

Machado de Assis found in the poet the explanation of the dramatist.

_Gonzaga_, to be sure, is no masterpiece of the theatre, and Castro

Alves quickly returned from that interlude in his labours to the more

potent appeal of resounding verse. If he was fortunate, at the outset,

to find so influential a pair to introduce him into the literary

world, it was his merit alone that won him early prominence. Only a

year ago, signalizing the commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary

of his death, Afranio Peixoto prefaced the two splendid volumes of his

complete works--including much hitherto unpublished material--with a

short essay in which he calls Castro Alves _O Maior Poeta Brasileiro_

(The Greatest of Brazilian Poets). Let the superlative pass. If it is

not important to criticism--and how many superlatives are?--it shows

the lasting esteem in which his countrymen hold him. He is not only the

poet of the slaves; to many, he is the poet of the nation and a poet of

humanity as well.

* * * * *

His talents appeared early; at the Gymnasio Bahiano, by the time he was

twelve--and this was already the mid-point of his short life--he not

only wrote his first verses, but showed marked aptitude for painting.

Long before his twentieth year he had become the rival of Tobias

Barreto, the philosopher of Sergipe, not only in poetry, it seems, but

in theatrical intrigue that centred about the persons of Adelaide do

Amaral and Eugenia Camara. While Barreto, the half-forgotten initiator

of the _condoreiro_ style, led the admirers of the first, Eugenia

Camara exercised a powerful attraction over Castro Alves, in whom

she inspired his earliest lyrics. Perhaps it was because of her that

he aspired to the dramatic eminence which he sought with _Gonzaga_,

produced on September 7, 1867, at the Theatro São João amidst scenes

of tumultuous success. It was directly after this triumph that he came

to José de Alencar. As we see from that writer’s letter, the youth was

intent upon continuing his studies; in São Paulo he rose so quickly to

fame among the students, not alone for his verses but for his gifted

delivery of them and his natural eloquence, that he was shortly hailed

as the foremost Brazilian poet of the day.

But unhappiness lay straight before him. His mistress left him; on

a hunt he accidentally shot his heel and later had to go to Rio to

have the foot amputated; the first symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis

appeared and, in 1869, he returned to Bahia to prepare his _Espumas

Fluctuantes_ for the press. Change of climate was of temporary benefit;

he went back to the capital to be received in triumph; new loves

replaced the old. He was foredoomed, however, and during the next two

years he worked with the feverish haste of one who knows that his end

is near. He died on July 6, 1871.

* * * * *

In the history of Brazilian poetry Castro Alves may be regarded

as a figure characterized by the more easily recognized traits of

romanticism plus the infiltration of social ideas into the sentimental

content. Some would even discover in a few of his products the first

signs of the nascent Parnassianism in Brazil. Long before Carvalho

selected him as the chief exponent of social themes in the romantic

period, Verissimo had indicated that Castro Alves was “our first social

poet, the epic writers excepted. He is the first to have devoted a

considerable part of his labours not to sentimental subjectivism,

which constitutes the greatest and the best part of our poetry, but to

singing or idealizing social feeling, fact and aspiration.”

Hugo is his great god; … “nosso velho Hugo.--mestre do mundo! Sol da

eternidade!” he exclaims in _Sub tegmine fagi_. “Our old Hugo. Master

of the world! Sun of eternity!” Alves, often even in his love poetry,

seems to orate from the mountain tops. “Let us draw these curtains over

us,” he sings in _Boa Noite_ (Good Night); “they are the wings of

the archangel of love.” Or, in the _Adeus de Thereza_, if time passes

by, it must be “centuries of delirium, Divine pleasures … delights of

Elysium.…” His language, as often as not, is the language of poetic

fever; image clashes upon image; antithesis runs rife; verses flow from

him like lava down the sides of a volcano. Nothing human seems alien to

his libertian fervour. He captures the Brazilian imagination by giving

its fondness for eloquence ideas to feed upon.[1] Now he is singing

the glories of the book and education, now upbraiding the assassin of

Lincoln, now glorifying the rebel, now picturing the plight of the

wretched slaves in words that are for all the world like a shower of

sparks. In his quieter moments he can sing love songs as tender as the

cooing of any dove, as in _O Laco de fito_; he can indite the most

graceful and inviting of bucolics as in _Sub tegmine fagi_; and this

softer note is an integral part of his labours.

But what brought fame to Castro Alves was his civic, social note. From

Heine, to whom he is indebted for something of his social aspiration,

he took as epigraph for his collection _Os Escravos_, a sentiment that

reveals his own high purpose. “Flowers, flowers! I would crown my head

with them for the fray. The lyre! Give me, too, the lyre, that I may

chant a song of war.… Words like flaming stars that, falling, set fire

to palaces and bring light to hovels.… Words like glittering arrows

that shoot into the seventh heaven and strike the imposture that has

wormed into the holy of holies.… I am all joy, all enthusiasm; I am

the sword, I am the flame!…” The quotation is almost a description of

Alves’s method. Once again, for the part of _Os Escravos_ that was

published separately five years after his death, we find an epigraph

from Heine prefacing _A Cachoeira de Paulo Affonso_ (The Paulo Affonso

Falls): “I do not really know whether I shall have deserved that some

day a laurel should be placed upon my bier. Poetry, however great be my

love for it, has ever been for me only a means consecrated to a holy

end.… I have never attached too great a value to the fame of my poems,

and it concerns me little whether they be praised or blamed. It should

be a sword that you place upon my tomb, for I have been a brave soldier

in the war of humanity’s deliverance.” This, too, is a description of

Castro Alves. He was a sword rather than a lyre; certainly his verse

shows a far greater preoccupation with purpose than with esthetic

illumination, and just as certainly does he fall far short of both

Hugo and Heine in their frequent triumph over whatever purpose they

professed.

I am not sure that the Brazilians do not confuse their admiration for

Alves’s short life and its noble dedication with the very variable

quality of his poetry. Read by one with no Latin blood in his veins it

seems too often a dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics, freighted

with a few central slogans rather than any depth of idea. I speak

now of the work as a whole and not of the outstanding poems, such as

_As vozes da Africa_ (Voices from Africa), _O Navio Negreiro_ (The

Slave Ship), _Pedro Ivo_. It is in these few exceptions that the poet

will live, but just as surely, it seems to me, will his esthetic

importance shrink to smaller proportions than the national criticism

today accords it. The ever-scrupulous, ever-truthful Verissimo, who

does not join the general chorus of uncritical admiration of Castro

Alves, indicates that even his strongest claim upon us--that of a

singer of the slaves--is injured by an evident exaggeration. What

might be called Alves’s “Africanism” is thus condemned of untruth to

artistic as well as to quotidian reality, in much the same manner as

was the “Indianism” in the poetry of Gonçalves Dias.… “The lack of

objective reality offends us and our taste, habituated as we are to

the reality of life transported to artistic representations. As I have

already had occasion to observe, Castro Alves’s defect as a poet of

the slaves is that he idealized the slave, removing him from reality,

perhaps in greater degree than art permits, making him escape--which

is evidently false--the inevitable degradation of slavery. His slaves

are Spartacuses or belong to the gallery of Hugo’s _Burgaves_. Now,

socially, slavery is hateful chiefly because of its degrading influence

upon the human being reduced to it and by reaction upon the society

that supports it.”

* * * * *

When Castro Alves prepared the _Espumas Fluctuantes_ for publication

he already felt the hand of death upon him. In the short foreword

that he wrote for the book--in a style that is poetry, though written

as prose--he compared his verses to the floating spume of the ocean,

whence the title of the book. “Oh spirits wandering over the earth!

O sails bellying over the main!… You well know how ephemeral you are

… passengers swallowed in dark space, or into dark oblivion.… And

when--actors of the infinite--you disappear into the wings of the

abyss, what is left of you?… A wake of spume … flowers lost amid the

vast indifference of the ocean.--A handful of verses … spume floating

upon the savage back of life!…”

This mood, this language, this outlook, are more than half of the

youngster that was Castro Alves. For the most part he is not original,

either in form or idea; the majority of his verses seem to call for the

rostrum and the madly moved audience. Yet more than fifty years after

his death the numerous editions of his poems provide that rostrum, and

the majority of his literate countrymen form that audience.

When his powers are at their highest, however, he achieves the true

Hugoesque touch, as, for example, in the closing stanzas of the famous

_Voices from Africa_, written in São Paulo on June 11, 1868:

Christo! embalde morreste sobre um monte.…

Teu sangue não lavou da minha fronte

A mancha original.

Ainda hoje são, por fado adverso,

Meus filhos--alimaria do universo,

Eu--pasto universal.

Hoje em meu sangue a America se nutre:

--Condor, que transformara-se em abutre,

Ave de escravidão.

Ella juntou-se ás mais … irmã traidora!

Qual de José os vis irmãos, outr’ora,

Venderam seu irmão!

…

Basta, Senhor! De teu potente braço

Role atravez dos astros e do espaço

Perdão p’ra os crimes meus!

Ha dous mil annos eu soluço um grito.…

Escuta o brado meu lá no infinito,

Meu Deus! Senhor, meu Deus!…[2]

This poem is the _Eli Eli lama sabachthani_ of the black race.

It is matched for passionate eloquence by the lashing lines that form

the finale of _O Navio Negreiro_;

Existe um povo que a bandeira empresta

P’ra cobrir tanta infamia e cobardia!…

E deixa a transformar-se nessa festa

Em manto impuro de bacchante fria!…

Meu Deus! meu Deus! mas que bandeira é esta,

Que impudente na gavéa tripudia?

Silencio, Musa … chora, e chora tanto

Que o pavilhão se lave no teu pranto!…

Auri-verde pendão de minha terra,

Que a briza do Brasil beija e balança,

Estandarte que á luz do sol encerra

As promessas divinas da esperança.…

Tu que, da liberdade apos da guerra,

Foste hastiado dos heroes na lança,

Antes te houvessem roto na batalha,

Que servires a um povo de mortalha!…

Fatalidade atroz que a mente esmaga!

Extingue nesta hora o brigue immundo

O trilho que Colombo abriu nas vagas,

Como um iris no pelago profundo!

Mas é infamia de mais!… Da etherea plaga

Levantai-vos, heroes do Novo Mundo!

Andrade! arranca esse pendão dos ares!

Colombo! fecha a porta dos teus mares![3]

As Napoleon, before the pyramids, told his soldiers that forty centuries

gazed down upon them, so Alves, in the opening poem of _Os Escravos_

called _O Seculo_ (The Century), invoking the names of liberty’s

heroes--Christ, Carnaris, Byron, Kossuth, Juarez, the Gracchi,

Franklin--told the youth of his nation that from the heights of the

Andes, vaster than plains or pyramids, there gazed down upon them “a

thousand centuries.” Even in numbers he is true to the high-flown

conceits of the _condoreiro_ school; the raising of Napoleon’s forty

to the young Brazilian’s thousand is indicative of the febrile passion

that flamed in all his work. Castro Alves was a torch, not a poem.

When he beholds visions of a republic (as in _Pedro Ivo_), man himself

becomes a condor, and liberty, like the poet’s truth, though crushed to

earth will rise again.

Não importa! A liberdade

E como a hydra, o Antheu.

Se no chão rola sem forças,

Mais forte do chão se ergueu.…

São os seus ossos sangrentos

Gladios terriveis, sedentos.…

E da cinza solta aos ventos

Mais um Graccho appareceu!…[4]

This is not poetry that can be read for very long at a time. It is

not poetry to which one returns in quest of mood, evocative beauty,

or surrender to passion. It is the poetry of eloquence, with all the

grandeur of true eloquence and with many of the lesser qualities of

oratory at its less inspiring level. Castro Alves, then, was hardly

a poet of the first order. He sang, in pleasant strains, of love and

longing; he whipped the nation’s conscience with poems every line of

which was a lash; some of his verses rise like a pungent incense from

the altars where liberty’s fire is kept burning; he was a youthful soul

responsive to every noble impulse. But his passion is too often spoiled

by exaggeration,--the exaggeration of a temperament as well as a school

that borrowed chiefly the externals of Hugo’s genius. Nor is it the

exaggeration of feeling; rather is it a forcing of idea and image,

accent and antithesis,--the failings of the orator who sees his hearers

before him and must have visible, audible token of their assent.

So that, when all is said and done, the permanent contribution of Alves

to Brazilian poetry is small, consisting of a few love poems, several

passionate outcries on behalf of a downtrodden race, and a group of

stanzas variously celebrating libertarian ideas. All the rest we can

forget in the intense appeal of the surviving lines. I know that this

does not agree with the current acceptation of the poet in Brazil,

where many look upon him as the national poet, but one can only speak

one’s honest convictions. With reference to Castro Alves, I admire the

man in the poet more than the poet in the man.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “It has already been said,” writes Verissimo, “that the Latins have

no poetry, but rather eloquence; they confound sentimental emotion,

which is the predicate of poetry, with intellectual sensation, which

is the attribute of eloquence. There is in the poetry of the so-called

Latin peoples more rhetoric than spontaneity, more art than nature,

more artifice than simplicity. It is more erudite, more ‘laboured,’

more intellectual, and for that reason less felt, less sincere, less

ingenuous than that of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, for example. I do not

discuss this notion. We Brazilians, who are scarcely half Latin, are

highly sensitive, I know, to poetic rhetoric,--which does not prevent

us, however, from being moved by the sentimentalism of poetry--though

superficially--when it comes in the simple form of popular lyrism and

sings, as that does, with its naïve rhetoric, the sensual passions of

our amorous ardor, which is characteristic of hybrids. Examples of this

are Casimiro de Abreu, Laurindo Rabello, Varella and Gonçalves Dias

himself. When the poets became refined, and wrapped their passion, real

or feigned--and in fact rather feigned than real--in the sightly and

false externals of the Parnassian rhetoric, bending all their efforts

toward meticulous perfection of form, rhyme, metre, sound, they ceased

to move the people, or impressed it only by the outer aspect of their

perfect poems through the sonority of their verses. For at bottom, what

we prefer is form, but form that is rhetorical and eloquent, or what

seems to us such,--_palavrão_ (wordiness), emphasis, beautiful images.…”

[2] Christ! In vain you died upon a mountain.… Your blood did not erase

the original spot upon my forehead. Even today, through adverse fate,

my children are the cattle of the universe, and I--universal pasture.

Today America feeds on my blood.--A condor transformed into a vulture,

bird of slavery. She has joined the rest … treacherous sister! Like

the base brothers of Joseph who in ancient days sold their brother.…

Enough, O Lord. With your powerful arm send through the planets and

through space pardon for my crimes! For two thousand years I have been

wailing a cry.… Hear my call yonder in the infinite, my God, Lord my

God!

[3] There exists a people who lends its flag to cover such infamy and

cowardice!… And allows it to be transformed, in this feast, into the

impure cloak of a heartless bacchante!… My God! my God! but what flag

is this that flutters impudently at the masthead? Silence, Muse …

weep and weep so much that the banner will be bathed in your tears!…

Green-gold banner of my country, kissed and blown by the breezes of

Brazil, standard that enfolds in the light of the sun the divine

promise of hope.… You who, after the war, was flown by the heroes at

the head of their lances, rather had they shattered you in battle than

that you should serve as a race’s shroud!… Horrible fatality that

overwhelms the mind! Let the path that Columbus opened in the waves

like a rainbow in the immense deep, shatter in this hour the polluted

ship! This infamy is too much!… From your ethereal realm, O heroes of

the New World, arise! Andrade! Tear that banner from the sky! Columbus!

shut the fates of your sea!

[4] No matter! Liberty is like the hydra, or like Antheus. If,

exhausted, it rolls in the dust, it rises stronger than ever from the

earth.… Its bleeding members are terrible, thirsting swords, and from

the ashes cast upon the winds a new Gracchus arose!

II

JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS

Had he been born in Europe and written, say, in French, Machado de

Assis would perhaps be more than a name today--if he is that--to

persons outside of his native country. As it is, he has become, but

fourteen years after his death, so much a classic that many of his

countrymen who will soon gaze upon his statue will surely have read

scarcely a line of his work. He was too human a spirit to be prisoned

into a narrow circle of exclusively national interests, whence the cry

from some critics that he was not a national creator; on the other

hand, his peculiar blend of melancholy charm and bitter-sweet irony

have been traced to the mingling of different bloods that makes Brazil

so fertile a field for the study of miscegenation. His work, as we all

may read it, is, from the testimony of the few who knew him intimately,

a perfect mirror of the retiring personality. His life and labours

raised the letters of his nation to a new dignity. Monuments to such as

he are monuments to the loftier aspirations of those who raise them,

for the great need no statues.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 and

died there in 1908; he came of poor parents and was early beset with

difficulties, yet the very nature of the work he was forced to take up

brought him into contact with the persons and the surroundings that

were to suggest his real career. As a typesetter he met literature

in the raw; at the meetings of literary men and in the book shop of

Paulo Brito he began to feel the nature of his true calling. At twenty

he commenced to write with the indifference and the prolixity of the

’prentice hand; comedies, tales, translations, poems--all was grist

that came to his literary mill. His talent, though evident, was slow to

develop; it could be seen that the youth had a gift for understanding

the inner workings of the human soul and that by nature he was an

ironist, yet his poetry, especially, lacked fire--it came from the

head, not the heart. Take the man’s work as a whole, for that matter,

and the same observation holds generally true. He is not of the sort

that dissolves into ecstasies before a wonderful sunset or rises to

the empyrean on the wings of song; for such self-abandonment he is too

critical, too self-conscious. In him, then, as a poet we are not to

seek for passion; in his tales we must not hunt too eagerly for action;

in his novels (let us call them such) we are not to hope for adventure,

intrigue, climax. Machado de Assis is, as far as a man may be, sui

generis, a literary law unto himself. His best productions, which range

over thirty years of mature activity, reveal an eclectic spirit in

whom something of classic repose balances his innate pessimism. It has

been written of him that he was “a man of half tints, of half words,

of half ideas, of half systems.…” Such an estimate, if it be purged

of any derogatory insinuations, is, on the whole, just; if Machado

de Assis seems to miss real greatness, it is because of something

inherently balanced in his make-up; he is never himself carried away,

and therefore neither are we. Yet he belongs to a company none too

numerous, and when Anatole France, some years ago, presided at a

meeting held in France to honour the noted Brazilian, he must have

appeared to more than one in the audience as a peculiarly fitting

symbol of the spirit that informed the departed man’s work.[1]

Not that Machado de Assis was an Anatole France, as some would

insinuate. But he was not unworthy of that master’s companionship;

his outlook was more circumscribed than the Frenchman’s, as was his

environment; his garden, then, was smaller, but he cultivated it; his

glass was little, like that of another famous Frenchman, but he drank

out of his own glass.

* * * * *

The poetry of Machado de Assis appears in four collections, all of

which go to make up a book of moderate size. And, if the truth is to

be told, their worth is about as moderate as their size. If critics

have found him, in his verse, very correct and somewhat cold; if they

have pointed out that he lacked a vivid imagination, suffered from a

limited vocabulary, was indifferent to nature, and thus deficient in

description, they have but spoken what is evident from a reading of

the lines. This is not to say that a poem here and there has not become

part of the national memory--as, for example, the well-known _Circulo

Vicioso_ (Vicious Circle) and _Mosca Azul_ (The Blue Fly)--verses

of a broadly moralistic significance and of little originality. His

_Chrysalides_, the first collection, dates back to 1864; already his

muse appears as a lady desirous of tranquillity (and this at the

age of twenty-five!) while in the poem _Erro_ he makes the telltale

declaration:

Amei-te um dia

Com esse amor passageiro

Que nasce na phantasia

E não chega ao coração.

“I loved you one day with that transient love which is born in the

imagination and does not reach the heart.” There you have the type of

love that appears in his poetry; and there you have one of the reasons

why the man is so much more successful as a psychological ironist in

his novels than as a poet. Yet close study would show that at times

this tranquillity, far from being always the absence of torment, is the

result of neutralizing forces; it is like the revolving disk of primary

hues that seems white in the rapidity of its whirling.

These early poems dwell upon such love; upon a desire for justice, as

revealed in his _Epitaphio do Mexico_ (Mexico’s Epitaph) and _Polonia_

(Poland); upon an elegiac note that seems statement rather than

feeling. “Like a pelican of love,” he writes in one of his poems that

recalls the famous image of de Musset, “I will rend my breast and

nurture my offspring with my own blood; my offspring: desire, chimera,

hope.…” But read through the verses of _Chrysalides_ and it is hard to

find where any red blood flows. The vocabulary is small, the phrases

are trite; his very muse is named _Musa Consolatrix_, bringing solace

rather than agitated emotion.

_Phalenas_ (Moths, 1870) is more varied; the collection shows a

sense of humour, a feeling for the exotic, as in the quasi-Chinese

poems, which are of a delicate pallor. But there is little new in his

admonitions to cull the flower ere it fade, and his love poetry would

insult a sensitive maiden with its self-understanding substratum of

commentary. His reserve is simply too great to permit outbursts and

like the worshipper of whom he speaks in his _Lagrimas de Cera_, he

“did not shed a single tear. She had faith, the flame to burn--but

what she could not do was weep.”[2] He is altogether too frequently

the self-observer rather than the self-giver; nor would this be

objectionable, if out of that autoscopy emerged something vital and

communicable to the introspective spirit in us all. He can sing of

seizing the flower ere it fades away, yet how frequently does he

himself seize it? There is humour in the ninety-seven octaves of

_Pallida Elvira_,--a queer performance, indeed, in which a thin comic

vein blends imperfectly with a trite philosophic plot. Romantic love,

the satiety of Hector, the abandonment of Elvira, the world-wanderings

of the runaway, his vain pursuit of glory and his return too late, to

find a child left by the dead Elvira, the obduracy of grandfather

Antero; such is the scheme. Hector, thus cheated, jumps into the sea,

which he might well have done before the poem began.

More successful is _Uma Oda de Anacreonte_, a one-act play in verse,

in which is portrayed the power of money over the sway of love.

Cleon, confiding, amorous youth that he is, is disillusioned by both

love (Myrto) and friendship (Lysias). There is a didactic tint to

the piece, which is informed with the author’s characteristic irony,

cynicism, brooding reflection and resigned acceptation. Of truly

dramatic value--and by that phrase I mean not so much the conventional

stageworthiness of the drama’s technicians as a captivating reality

born of the people themselves--there is very little.

In _Americanas_ (1875) the poet goes to the native scenes and legends

for inspiration; _Potyra_--recounting the plight of a Christian captive

who, rather than betray her husband by wedding a Tamoyo chief, accepts

death at the heathen’s hands--is a cold, objective presentation,

unwarmed by figures of speech, not illuminated by any inner light;

_Niani_, a Guaycuru legend, is far better stuff, more human, more

vivid, in ballad style as opposed to the halting blank verse of

the former; for the most part, the collection consists of external

narrative--feeling, insight, passion are sacrificed to arid reticence.

Thus _A Christã Nova_ (The Converted Jewess) contains few ideas;

neither colour nor passion, vision nor fire, inhere in it. There is a

sentimental fondness for the vanquished races--a note so common in the

“Indian” age of Brazilian letters, and in analogous writings of the

Spanish-Americans, as to have become a convention. The poem tells the

story of a converted Jewess who is betrothed to a soldier. She is met

by her betrothed after the war, with her father in the toils of the

Inquisition. Rather than remain with her lover, she chooses to die with

her parent; father and daughter go to their end together. Chiefly dry

narrative, and perhaps better than _Potyra_, though that is negative

praise. The poem is commendable for but two poetic cases: one, a very

successful _terza rima_ version of the song of exile in the Bible, “By

the waters of Babylon sat we down and wept …” and the other, a simple

simile:

… o pensamento

E como as aves passageiras: voa

A buscar melhor clima.…

… Thought

Is like a bird of passage, ever winging

In quest of fairer climes.…

It is in the _Occidentaes_ of 1900 that we find more of the real

Machado de Assis than in the series that preceded it. The ripened man

now speaks from a pulsing heart. Not that any of these verses leap

into flame, as in the sonorous, incendiary strophes of Bilac, but at

least the thoughts live in the words that body them forth and technical

skill revels in its power. Here the essence of his attitude toward

life appears--that life which, rather than death, is the corroding

force, the universal and ubiquitous element. The _Mosca Azul_ is almost

an epitome of his outlook, revealing as it does his tender irony,

his human pity, his repressed sensuality, his feeling for form, his

disillusioned comprehension of illusions. His resigned acceptance of

life’s decline is characteristic of the man--part, perhaps, of his

balanced outlook. One misses in him the rebel--the note that lends

greatness to the hero in his foreordained defeat, raising the drama of

surrender to the tragedy of the unconquered victim. But this would be

asking him to be some one else--an inartistic request which we must

withhold.

I give the _Mosca Azul_ entire, because of its central importance to

the poetry of the man, as well as to that more discerning outlook upon

life which is to be found in his prose works.

Era uma mosca azul, azas de ouro e granada,

Filha da China ou da Indostão,

Que entre as folhas brotou de uma rosa encarnada

Em certa noite de verão.

E zumbia e voava, e voava, e zumbia,

Refulgindo ao clarão do sol

E da lua,--melhor do que refulgia

Um brilhante do Grão-Mogol.

Um poléa que a viu, espantado e tristonho,

Um poléa lhe perguntou:

“Mosca, esse refulgir, que mais parece um sonho,

Dize, quem foi que t’o ensinou?”

Então ella, voando, e revoando, disse:

“Eu sou a vida, eu sou a flor

Das graças, o padrão da eterna meninice,

E mais a gloria, e mais o amor.”

E elle deixou-se estar a contemplal-a, mudo,

E tranquillo, como un fakir,

Como alguem que ficou deslumbrado de tudo,

Sem comparar, nem reflectir.

Entre as azas do insecto, a voltear no espaço,

Uma cousa lhe pareceu

Que surdia com todo o resplendor de um paço

E viu um rosto, que era o seu.

Era elle, era um rei, o rei de Cachemira,

Que tinha sobre o collo nú,

Um immenso collar de opala, e uma saphyra

Tirado ao corpo de Vischnu.

Cem mulheres em flor, cem nayras superfinas,

Aos pés delle, no liso chão,

Espreguiçam sorrindo as suas graças finas,

E todo o amor que tem lhe dão.

Mudos, graves, de pé, cem ethiopes feios,

Com grandes leques de avestruz,

Refrescam-lhes de manso os aromados seios,

Voluptuosamente nus.

Vinha a gloria depois--quatorze reis vencidos,

E emfim as pareas triumphaes

De tresentas nacões, e os parabens unidos

Das coroas occidentaes.

Mas o melhor de tudo é que no rosto aberto

Das mulheres e dos varões,

Como em agua que deixa o fundo descuberto,

Via limpos os corações.

Então elle, estendo a mão calloso y tosca,

Affeita a só carpintejar,

Com um gesto pegou na fulgurante mosca,

Curioso de examinar.

Quiz vel-a, quiz saber a causa do mysterio.

E fechando-a na mão, sorriu

De contente, ao pensar que alli tinha um imperio,

E para casa se partiu.

Alvoroçado chega, examina, e parece

Que se houve nessa occupação

Mudamente, como um homem que quizesse

Dissecar a sua illusão.

Dissecou-a, a tal ponte, e com tal arte, que ella,

Rota, baca, nojenta, vil,

Succumbiu; e com isto esvaiu-se-lhe aquella

Visão fantastica e subtil.

Hoje, quando elle ahi vae, de áloe e cardamono,

Na cabeça, com ar taful,

Dizem que ensandeceu, e que não sabe como

Perdeu a sua mosca azul.[3]

As one reads this, a fable comes to mind out of childhood days. What

is this poem of the fly, but the tale of the man who killed the goose

that laid the golden eggs, retold in verses admirable for colour,

freshness,--for everything, indeed, except originality and feeling?

Those critics are right who find in Machado de Assis a certain

homiletic preoccupation; but he is never the preacher, and his light

is cast not upon narrow dogmas, with which he had nothing to do, but

upon the broad ethical implications of every life that seeks to bring

something like order into the chaos we call existence,--a thing without

rhyme or reason, as he would have agreed, but what would you? Every

game has its rules, even the game of hide and seek. And if rules are

made to be broken, part of the game is in the making of them.

Companioning the search for roots of illusion is the theme of eternal

dissatisfaction. This Machado de Assis has put into one of the most

quoted of Brazilian sonnets, which he calls _Circulo Vicioso_ (Vicious

Circle):

Bailando no ar, gemia inquieto vagalume:

--“Quem me dera que fosse aquella loura estrella

Que arde no eterno azul, como una eterna vela!”

Mas a estrella, fitando a lua, com ciume:

--“Pudesse eu copiar o transparente lume,

Que, de grega columna á gothica janella,

Contemplou, suspirosa, a fronte amada e bella!”

Mas a lua, fitando o sol, com azedume:

--“Misera! tivesse eu aquelle enorme, aquella

Claridade immortal, que toda a luz resume!”

Mas o sol, inclinando a rutila capella:

--“Pesa-me esta brilhante aureola de nume.…

Enfara-me esta azul e desmedida umbella.…

Porque não nasci eu um simples vagalume?”[4]

Between the loss of illusion and eternal dissatisfaction lies the

luring desert of introspection; here men ask questions that send back

silence as the wisest answer, or words that are more quiet than silence

and about as informing. The poet’s tribute to Arthur de Oliveira is

really a description--particularly in the closing lines--of himself.

“You will laugh, not with the ancient laughter, long and powerful,--the

laughter of an eternal friendly youth, but with another, a bitter

laughter, like the laughter of an ailing god, who wearies of divinity

and who, too, longs for an end.…” This world-weariness runs all through

Machado de Assis; it is one of the mainsprings of his remarkable prose

works. It is no vain paradox to say that the real poet Machado de

Assis is in his prose, for in his prose alone do the fruits of his

imagination come to maturity; only in his better tales and the strange

books he called novels does his rare personality reach a rounded

fulfilment. Peculiarly enough, the man is in his poetry, the artist in

his prose. The one is as revelatory of his ethical outlook as the other

of his esthetic intuitions. What he thinks, as distinct from what he

feels, is in his verse rather than in his novels or tales.

* * * * *

He was haunted, it seems, by the symbol of a Prometheus wearied of his

immortality of anguish,--by the _tedium vitae_. This world-weariness

appears in the very reticence of his style. He writes, at times, as if

it were one of the vanities of vanities, yet one feels that a certain

inner pride lay behind this outer timidity. His method is the most

leisurely of indirection,--not the involved indirection of a Conrad,

nor the circuitous adumbration of a Hamsun. He has been compared, for

his humourism, to the Englishman Sterne, and there is a basis for the

comparison if we remove all connotation of ribaldry and retain only

the fruitful rambling. Machado de Assis is the essence of charming

sobriety, of slily smiling half-speech. He is something like his own

Ahasverus in the conte _Viver!_, withdrawn from life not so much

because he hated it as because he loved it exceedingly.

In that admirable dialogue, wherein Prometheus appears as a vision

before the Wandering Jew, the tedium of existence is compressed into a

few brief pages.

We have come to the end of time and Ahasverus, seated upon a rock,

gazes for a long while upon the horizon, athwart which wing two eagles,

crossing each other in their path. The day is waning.

AHASVERUS

I have come to the end of time; this is the threshold of

eternity. The earth is deserted; no other man breathes the air

of life. I am the last; I can die. Die! Precious thought! For

centuries I have lived, wearied, mortified, wandering ever, but

now the centuries are coming to an end, and I shall die with

them. Ancient nature, farewell! Azure sky, clouds ever reborn,

roses of a day and of every day, perennial waters, hostile

earth that never would devour my bones, farewell! The eternal

wanderer will wander no longer. God may pardon me if He wishes,

but death will console me. That mountain is as unyielding as my

grief; those eagles that fly yonder must be as famished as my

despair.

Whereupon Prometheus appears and the two great symbols of human

suffering debate upon the life everlasting. The crime of the Wandering

Jew was great, Prometheus admits, but his was a lenient punishment.

Other men read but a chapter of life, while Ahasverus read the whole

book. “What does one chapter know of the other? Nothing. But he who

has read them all, connects them and concludes. Are there melancholy

pages? There are merry and happy ones, too. Tragic convulsion precedes

that of laughter; life burgeons from death; swans and swallows

change climate, without ever abandoning it entirely; and thus all is

harmonized and begun anew.” But Ahasverus, continuing the tale of his

wanderings, expresses the meaninglessness of immortality:

I left Jerusalem. I began my wandering through the ages. I

journeyed everywhere, whatever the race, the creed, the tongue;

suns and snows, barbarous and civilized peoples, islands,

continents; wherever a man breathed, there breathed I. I never

laboured. Labour is a refuge, and that refuge was denied me.

Every morning I found upon me the necessary money for the

day.… See; this is the last apportionment. Go, for I need you

no longer. (_He draws forth the money and throws it away._) I

did not work; I just journeyed, ever and ever, one day after

another, year after year unendingly, century after century.

Eternal justice knew what it was doing: it added idleness

to eternity. One generation bequeathed me to the other. The

languages, as they died, preserved my name like a fossil. With

the passing of time all was forgotten; the heroes faded into

myths, into shadow, and history crumbled to fragments, only two

or three vague, remote characteristics remaining to it. And I

saw them in changing aspect. You spoke of a chapter? Happy are

those who read only one chapter of life. Those who depart at

the birth of empires bear with them the impression of their

perpetuity; those who die at their fall, are buried in the

hope of their restoration; but do you not realize what it is

to see the same things unceasingly,--the same alternation of

prosperity and desolation, desolation and prosperity, eternal

obsequies and eternal halleluiahs, dawn upon dawn, sunset upon

sunset?

PROMETHEUS

But you did not suffer, I believe. It is something not to

suffer.

AHASVERUS

Yes, but I saw other men suffer, and in the end the spectacle

of joy gave me the same sensations as the discourses of an

idiot. Fatalities of flesh and blood, unending strife,--I saw

all pass before my eyes, until night caused me to lose my taste

for day, and now I cannot distinguish flowers from thistles.

Everything is confused in my weary retina.

As Prometheus is but a vision, he is in reality identical with

Ahasverus; and as Ahasverus here speaks, according to our

interpretation, for Machado de Assis, so too does Prometheus.

Particularly when he utters such sentiments as “The description of

life is not worth the sensation of life.” Yet in Machado de Assis,

description and sensation are fairly one; like so many ironists, he

has a mistrust of feeling. The close of the dialogue is a striking

commentary upon the retiring duality of the writer. Ahasverus, in his

vision, is loosening the fetters of Prometheus, and the Greek addresses

him:

Loosen them, new Hercules, last man of the old world, who shall

be the first of the new. Such is your destiny; neither you nor

I,--nobody can alter it. You go farther than your Moses. From

the top of Mount Nebo, at the point of death, he beheld the

land of Jericho, which was to belong to his descendants and the

Lord said unto him: “Thou hast seen with thine eyes, yet shalt

not pass beyond.” _You_ shall pass beyond, Ahasverus; you shall

dwell in Jericho.

AHASVERUS

Place your hand upon my head; look well at me; fill me with the

reality of your prediction; let me breathe a little of the new,

full life … King, did you say?

PROMETHEUS

The chosen king of a chosen people.

AHASVERUS

It is not too much in recompense for the deep ignominy in which

I have dwelt. Where one life heaped mire, another life will

place a halo. Speak, speak on … speak on … (_He continues to

dream. The two eagles draw near._)

FIRST EAGLE

Ay, ay, ay! Alas for this last man; he is dying, yet he dreams

of life.

SECOND EAGLE

Not so much that he hated it as that he loved it so much.[5]

So much for the weariness of the superhuman,--an attitude matched among

us more common mortals by such a delirium as occurs in a famous passage

of Machado de Assis’s _Braz Cubas_, one of the mature works of which

_Dom Casmurro_ is by many held to be the best. What shall we say of the

plots of these novels? In reality, the plots do not exist. They are the

slenderest of strings upon which the master stylist hangs the pearls

of his wisdom. And such a wisdom! Not the maxims of a Solomon, nor the

pompous nothings of the professional moralist. Seeming by-products

of the narrative, they form its essence. To read Machado de Assis’s

central novels for their tale is the vainest of pursuits. He is not

interested in goals; the road is his pleasure, and he pauses wherever

he lists, indulging the most whimsical conceits. For this Brazilian is

a master of the whimsy that is instinct with a sense of man’s futility.

Here, for example, is almost the whole of Chapter XVII of _Dom

Casmurro_. What has it to do with the love story of the hero and

Capitú? Nothing. It could be removed, like any number of passages from

Machado de Assis’s chief labours, without destroying the mere tale. Yet

it is precisely these passages that are the soul of the man’s work.

The chapter is entitled The Worms (_Os Vermes_).

“ … When, later, I came to know that the lance of Achilles also

cured a wound that it inflicted, I conceived certain desires

to write a disquisition upon the subject. I went as far as to

approach old books, dead books, buried books, to open them,

compare them, plumbing the text and the sense, so as to find

the common origin of pagan oracle and Israelite thought. I

seized upon the very worms of the books, that they might tell

me what there was in the texts they gnawed.

“‘My dear sir,’ replied a long, fat bookworm, ‘we know

absolutely nothing about the texts that we gnaw, nor do we

choose what we gnaw, nor do we love or detest what we gnaw; we

simply go on gnawing.’

“And that was all I got out of him. All the others, as if

they had agreed upon it, repeated the same song. Perhaps this

discreet silence upon the texts they gnawed was itself another

manner still of gnawing the gnawed.”

This is more than a commentary upon books; it is, in little, a

philosophical attitude toward life, and, so far as one may judge from

his works, it was Machado de Assis’s attitude. He was a kindly sceptic;

for that matter, look through the history of scepticism, and see

whether, as a lot, the sceptics are not much more kindly than their

supposedly sweeter-tempered brothers who dwell in the everlasting grace

of life’s certainties.

Machado de Assis was not too hopeful of human nature. One of his most

noted tales, _O Infermeiro_ (The Nurse or Attendant) is a miniature

masterpiece of irony in which man’s self-deception in the face of his

own advantages is brought out with that charm-in-power which is not the

least of the Brazilian’s qualities.

A man has hired out as nurse to a testy old invalid, who has changed

one after the other all the attendants he has engaged. The nurse seems

more fortunate than the rest, though matters rapidly approach a climax,

until “on the evening of the 24th of August the colonel had a violent

attack of anger; he struck me, he called me the vilest names, he

threatened to shoot me; finally he threw in my face a plate of porridge

that was too cold for him. The plate struck the wall and broke into a

thousand fragments.

“‘You’ll pay me for it, you thief!’ he bellowed.

“For a long time he grumbled. Towards eleven o’clock he gradually fell

asleep. While he slept I took a book out of my pocket, a translation

of an old d’Alancourt novel which I had found lying about, and began

to read it in his room, at a small distance from his bed. I was to

wake him at midnight to give him his medicine; but, whether it was due

to fatigue or to the influence of the book, I, too, before reaching

the second page, fell asleep. The cries of the colonel awoke me with a

start; in an instant I was up. He, apparently in a delirium, continued

to utter the same cries; finally he seized his water-bottle and threw

it at my face. I could not get out of the way in time; the bottle hit

me in the left cheek, and the pain was so acute that I almost lost

consciousness. With a leap I rushed upon the invalid; I tightened my

hands around his neck; he struggled several moments; I strangled him.

“When I beheld that he no longer breathed, I stepped back in terror. I

cried out; but nobody heard me. Then, approaching the bed once more,

I shook him so as to bring him back to life. It was too late; the

aneurism had burst, and the colonel was dead. I went into the adjoining

room, and for two hours I did not dare to return. It is impossible

for me to express all that I felt during that time. It was intense

stupefaction, a kind of vague and vacant delirium. It seemed to me that

I saw faces grinning on the walls; I heard muffled voices. The cries of

the victim, the cries uttered before the struggle and during its wild

moments continued to reverberate within me, and the air, in whatever

direction I turned, seemed to shake with convulsions. Do not imagine

that I am inventing pictures or aiming at verbal style. I swear to

you that I heard distinctly voices that were crying at me: ‘Murderer;

Murderer!’”

By one of the many ironies of fate, however, the testy colonel has left

the attendant sole heir to his possessions; for the invalid has felt

genuine appreciation, despite the anger to which he was subject. Note

the effect upon the attendant, whose conscience at first has troubled

him acutely:

“Thus, by a strange irony of fate, all the colonel’s wealth

came into my hands. At first I thought of refusing the legacy.

It seemed odious to take a sou of that inheritance; it seemed

worse than the reward of a hired assassin. For three days this

thought obsessed me; but more and more I was thrust against

this consideration: that my refusal would not fail to awake

suspicion. Finally I settled upon a compromise; I would accept

the inheritance and would distribute it in small sums, secretly.

“This was not merely scruple on my part, it was also the desire

to redeem my crime by virtuous deeds; and it seemed the only

way to recover my peace of mind and feel that the accounts were

straight.”

But possession is sweet, and before long the attendant changes his mind.

“Several months had elapsed, and the idea of distributing the

inheritance in charity and pious donations was by no means

so strong as it first had been; it even seemed to me that

this would be sheer affectation. I revised my initial plan; I

gave away several insignificant sums to the poor; I presented

the village church with a few new ornaments; I gave several

thousand francs to the Sacred House of Mercy, etc. I did not

forget to erect a monument upon the colonel’s grave--a very

simple monument, all marble, the work of a Neapolitan sculptor

who remained at Rio until 1866, and who has since died, I

believe, in Paraguay.

“Years have gone by. My memory has become vague and unreliable.

Sometimes I think of the colonel, but without feeling again

the terrors of those early days. All the doctors to whom

I have described his afflictions have been unanimous as

regards the inevitable end in store for the invalid, and were

indeed surprised that he should so long have resisted. It is

just possible that I may have involuntarily exaggerated the

description of his various symptoms; but the truth is that he

was sure of sudden death, even had this fatality not occurred.…

“Good-bye, my dear sir. If you deem these notes not totally

devoid of value reward me for them with a marble tomb, and

place there for my epitaph this variant which I have made of

the divine sermon on the mount:

“‘Blessed are they who possess, for they shall be consoled.’”

I have omitted mention of the earlier novels of Machado de Assis

because they belong to a romantic epoch, and he was not of the stuff

that makes real romantics.[6] How could he be a genuine member of

that school when every trait of his retiring personality rebelled

against the abandonment to outspokenness implied in membership? He is

as wary of extremes, as mistrustful of superlatives, as José Dias in

_Dom Casmurro_ is fond of them. “I wiped my eyes,” relates the hero

of that book, when apprised of his mother’s illness, “since of all

José Dias’s words, but a single one remained in my heart: it was that

_gravissimo_, (very serious). I saw afterward that he had meant to say

only _grave_ (serious), but the use of the superlative makes the mouth

long, and through love of a sonorous sentence José Dias had increased

my sadness. If you should find in this book any words belonging to the

same family, let me know, gentle reader, that I may emend it in the

second edition; there is nothing uglier than giving very long feet to

very short ideas.” If anything, his method follows the reverse order,

that of giving short feet to long ideas. He never strains a thought

or a situation. If he is sad, it is not the loud-mouthed melancholy

of Byronic youth; neither is he the blatant cynic. He does not wave

his hands and beat his breast in deep despair; he seems rather to sit

brooding--not too deeply, for that would imply too great a concern with

the silly world--by the banks of a lake in which the reflection of the

clouds paints fantastic pictures upon the changing waters.

The real Machado de Assis stands apart from all who have written prose

in his country. Senhor Costa, in his admirable book upon the Brazilian

novel, has sought to present his nation’s chief novelist by means of an

imagery drawn from Greek architecture; Aluizio Azevedo thus becomes the

Doric column; Machado de Assis, the sober, elegant Ionian column; Graça

Aranha, the Corinthian and Coelho Netto the composite. Sobriety and

elegance are surely the outstanding qualities of the noted writer. His

art, according to Costa, is the secret of _suggesting_ thoughts; this

is what I have called his indirect method.

* * * * *

Machado de Assis belongs with the original writers of the nineteenth

century. His family is the family of Renan and Anatole France; he is

their younger brother, but his features show the resemblance.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The occasion was the _Fête de l’Intellectualité Brésilenne_,

celebrated on April 3, 1909, at the Sorbonne in the Richelieu

amphitheatre. Anatole France delivered a short, characteristic speech

upon _Le Génie Latin_, emphasizing his disbelief in the idea of race.

“Je dis le génie latin, je dis les peuples latins, parce que l’idée de

race n’est le plus souvent qu’une vision de l’orgueil et de l’erreur,

et parce que la civilization hellénique et romaine, comme la Jérusalem

nouvelle, a vu venir de toutes parts à elle des enfants qu’elle n’avait

point portés dans son sein. Et c’est sa gloire de gagner l’univers.…

Latins des deux mondes, soyons fiers de notre commun heritage. Mais

sachons le partager avec l’univers entier; sachons que la beauté

antique, l’éternelle Hélène, plus auguste, plus chaste d’enlèvement en

enlèvement, a pour destinée de se donner à des ravisseurs étrangers, et

d’enfanter dans toutes les races, sous tous les climats, de nouveaux

Euphorions, toujours plus savants et plus beaux.”

[2] “I do not like tears,” he says, in his last novel, _Memorial de

Ayres_, “even in the eyes of women, whether or not they be pretty; they

are confessions of weakness, and I was born with an abhorrence for the

weak.”

[3] It was a blue fly, with wings of gold and carmine, daughter of

China or of Hindustan, who was born on a certain summer’s night amid

the petals of a red, red rose. And she buzzed and flew, and flew and

buzzed, glittering in the light of the sun and the moon--brighter than

a gem of the Grand Mogul. A humble toiler saw her, and was struck with

amazement and sadness. A humble toiler, asking: “Fly, this glitter that

seems rather a dream, say, who taught it to you?” Then she, flying

around and about, replied: “I am life, I am the flower of grace, the

paragon of earthly youth,--I am glory, I am love.” And he stood there,

contemplating her, wrapt like a fakir, like one utterly dazed beyond

power of comparison or reflection. Between the wings of the insect, as

she flew in space, appeared something that rose with all the splendour

of a palace, and he beheld a face that was his own. It was he,--he

was a king,--the king of Cashmire, who wore upon his bare neck a huge

necklace of opals, and a sapphire taken from the body of Vishnu. One

hundred radiant women, a hundred exquisite _nayras_, smilingly display

their rare graces at his feet upon the polished floor, and all the

love they have they give to him. Mute, gravely on foot, a hundred ugly

Ethiopians, with large ostrich fans, refresh their perfumed breasts,

voluptuously nude. Then came glory,--forty conquered kings, and at

last the triumphal tribute of three hundred nations, and the united

felicitations of western crowns. But best of all is, that in the open

face of the women and the men, as in water that shows the clear bottom,

he saw into their hearts. Then he, extending his callous, rough hand

that was accustomed only to carpentry, seized the glittering fly,

curious to examine it. He wished to see it, to discover the cause of

the mystery, and closing his fist around it, smiled with contentment

to think that he held there an empire. He left for home. He arrives in

excitement, examines and his mute behaviour is that of a man about to

dissect his illusion. He dissected it, to such a point, and with such

art, that the fly, broken, repellent, succumbed; and at this there

vanished that fantastic, subtle vision. Today, when he passes, anointed

with aloes and cardamom, with an affected air, they say that he went

crazy, and that he doesn’t known how he lost his blue fly.

[4] Dancing in the air, a restless glow-worm wailed, “Oh, that I might

be that radiant star which burns in the eternal blue, like a perpetual

candle!” But the star: “Oh, that I might copy the transparent light

that, at the gothic window of a Greek column the beloved, beautiful one

sighingly contemplated!” But the moon, gazing at the sun, peevishly:

“Wretched I! Would that I had that vast, undying refulgence which

resumes all light in itself!” But the sun, bowing its rutilant crown:

“This brilliant heavenly aureole wearies me.… I am burdened by this

vast blue canopy.… Why was I not born a simple glow-worm?”

[5] The excerpts from _Viver!_ and _O Infermeiro_ are taken from my

_Brazilian Tales_, Boston, 1921.

[6] See Part One of this book, Chapter V, § III, for the more romantic

aspects of Machado de Assis.

III

JOSÉ VERISSIMO

It was a favourite attitude of Verissimo’s to treat of the author as

the author appears in his work, rather than as he may be constructed

from his biography and his milieu. Some of the national critics have

referred to this as if it were a defect; it is, on the contrary, in

consonance with the finest work now done in contemporary esthetic

criticism and places Verissimo, in my opinion, at the head of all

critics who have treated in Brazil of Brazilian letters. It is in

precisely such a spirit that I shall try to present him to an alien

audience,--doubly alien, shall I say?--in that criticism itself,

wherever practised, is quite alien to the surroundings in which it is

produced. Verissimo was what the Spaniards call a _raro_; he was as

little Brazilian, in any restrictive sense, as was Machado de Assis. A

conscientious reading of the thousands of pages he left fails to reveal

anything like a hard and fast formula for literary appreciation. He

was an intellectual freeman, truly in a spiritual sense a citizen of

the world. In a country where even the more immediately rewarded types

of creative endeavour were produced under the most adverse conditions,

he exercised the least rewarded of literary professions; in a nation

where the intellectual oligarchy was so small that every writer could

have known his fellow scribe,--where the very language betrays one

into the empty compliment and a meaningless grandiloquence,--he served,

and served with admirable scruple, gentility and wisdom, the cause of

truth and beauty. His manner is, with rare interludes of righteous

indignation, generally serene; his approach is first of all esthetic,

with a certain allowance for social idealism that never degenerates

into hollow optimism; his language, which certain Brazilian have

seen fit to criticize for lack of stylistic amenities, is to one

foreigner, at least, a source of constant charm for its simplicity, its

directness, its usually unlaboured lucidity.

And these various qualities seem but so many facets of the man’s

unostentatious personality. He was not, like Sylvio Romero, a nature

compelled, out of some seeming inner necessity, to quarrel; his pages,

indeed, are restful even when most interesting and most alive with

suggestion and stimulating thought. His Portuguese, surely, is not so

beautiful as the Spanish of his twin-spirit of Uruguay, José Enrique

Rodó, but there is something in both these men that places them apart

from their contemporaries who practised criticism. They were truly

modern in the better sense of that word; they brought no sacrifices to

the altar of novelty, of sensation, of an unreasoned, wholesale dumping

of the past. They did not confuse modernity with up-to-date-ness; they

did not go into ecstasies for the sake of enthusiasm itself. They would

have been “modern” in any age, and perhaps for that very reason a

certain classic repose hovers over their pages. Each knew his classics;

each knew his moderns. But I doubt whether either ever gave himself

much concern over these really futile distinctions,--futile, that

is, when mouthed merely as hard and fast differences, as if restless,

“romantic” spirits did not exist among the ancients, and as if, today,

no serene soul may dwell in his nook apart, watching the world roll

on. Such a serenity lives in the pages of the Uruguayan and of the

Brazilian; like all things born of human effort, they will lose as the

years roll on, but something of permanence is there because Verissimo,

like Rodó, possessed the secret of seizing upon something universal in

whatever he choose to consider.

That Europe, with its ancient culture, its aristocratic intellectual

circles and its concentrated audiences, should have produced great

critics, is not, after all, so much to be wondered at,--surely,

hardly more to be marvelled at than the emergence of the great

playwright, the great novelist. That the United States, in recent

years, reveals the promise of notable criticism, is somewhat more a

cause for congratulation in that here we lack--or up to yesterday,

lacked--inspiring intellectual leaders. But at least we possessed the

paraphernalia, the apparatus, the national wealth. We had publishers,

we had printing-presses, we had a generally literate populace, whatever

the use to which the populace put those capabilities. Our young

writers did not have to seek publishers abroad, whence alone could

come likewise, literary consecration. That a Rodó should arise in

Spanish America--and more than one notable critic had preceded him--or

that a Verissimo should appear in Brazil, is fairly a triumph of mind

over matter. It is true that such an event would have been impossible

without the influence--and the decided influence--of European culture;

but it is a triumph, none the less. And it is the sort of triumph that

comes from the sacrifice of material boons to values less tangible,

yet more lasting. I do not mean that Verissimo went about deploring

the humble position of the artist and the true critic in Brazil; I am

a mite mistrustful of self-analytic martyrs, of whom we are not exempt

in these United States. He exercised a deliberate choice. Much of his

work first appeared in the newspapers, and this alone must stand as a

tribute to the organs that printed his critiques. For the rest, his

life and labours serve to prove that south of the Rio Grande, no less

than north, economic materialism and the life of the spirit are at

everlasting grips with each other, and that there are men (again on

both sides of that stream) who are masters rather than slaves of the

chattels they possess.

He was not religious (remember that I am treating him as he treated

his own subjects--as he is revealed in his writings); he was not

intensely emotional; he looked love and death straight in the eyes,

as much with curiosity as with any inner or outer trembling before

either. He was, in his realm, what Machado de Assis was in his,--a

spirit of the Limbo, shall we say? His motto, if he would have accepted

the static connotation of mottoes, might have been Horace’s _medio

tutissimus ibis_, only that he sought the middle path not so much

through desire of safety as out of a certain philosophical conviction.

But there again I use a word that does not harmonize with Verissimo’s

intellectual elasticity, for words are almost as hard and cold as

the type that prints them, while thoughts rather resemble the air

that takes them into space. And Verissimo is especially sensible to

this permanence-in-transiency. “As to permanence,” he wrote in an

interesting essay on _Que é Literatura_[1] (What is Literature?),

“it might be said, in a sort of paradox, that it is precisely the

transitoriness of the emotion that makes a book of lasting interest.

It is an essential difference between knowledge and emotion that the

first is lasting and the second transitory. A fact learned remains,

is added to the sum of our knowledge. We may forget it, but such

forgetting is not in the nature of things necessary, and the truths

that are contained in a book of science that we have read join our

permanent intellectual acquisitions. The emotions are by very nature

fleeting,--they are not, like the facts we learn, added to and

incorporated into one another; they are a series of experiences that

change constantly. Within a few hours the emotion aroused by the

reading of a poem is extinguished; it cannot endure. It may be renewed,

by the re-reading of the poem or by resorting to memory, and, if it be

a masterpiece, successive readings and recollection will not blunt its

power to move us.”

He commits himself to no definite esthetic system, thus suggesting his

affinities to the French impressionists and to that Jules Lemaître whom

he so much admired. “No meio não está só a virtude, mas a verdade,”

he writes; “not only virtue, but truth, lies in the middle.” This,

as I have said, is not a wish for the Horatian safety of the middle

course, but rather an innate mistrust of extremes. To the ancient

apophthegm that there is nothing new under the sun--and it would be

just as true to say that there is nothing old under it, or that all

things under the sun are new--he composes a variant that might well

stand as the description of the best in our newer criticism: “Nada ha

de definitivo debaixo do Sol”; “there is nothing definitive under the

sun.” In United States criticism there is a lapidary phrase to match

it, and from a spirit who, allowing for all the modifications of time,

space and temperament, is kin to Verissimo. I refer to a brief sentence

that occurs in the Introduction to Ludwig Lewisohn’s _A Modern Book

of Criticism_, in a paragraph devoted to demonstrating the futility

of absolute standards, as represented in the important work of Paul

Elmer More.… “Calmly oblivious of the crumbling of every absolute

ever invented by man,” writes Mr. Lewisohn, “he (i. e., Mr. More)

continues in his fierce and growing isolation to assert that he knows

what human life ought to be and what kind of literature ought to be

permitted to express its character. That a form of art or life exists

and that it engages the whole hearts of men makes little difference

to him. He knows.… And what does he know? Only, at bottom, his own

temperamental tastes and impulses which he seeks to rationalize by

an appeal to carefully selected and isolated tendencies in art and

thought. And, having rationalized them by an artifice so fragile, he

seeks to impose them upon the men and the artists of his own day in the

form of laws. I know his reply so well. It is this, that if you abandon

his method, you sink into universal scepticism and undiscriminate

acceptance. The truth is that I believe far more than he does. For I

love beauty in all its forms and find life tragic and worthy of my

sympathy in every manifestation. I need no hierarchical moral world for

my dwelling-place, because I desire neither to judge nor to condemn.

_Fixed standards are useless to him whose central passion is to have

men free._ Mr. More needs them for the same inner reason--infinitely

rarified and refined, of course,--for which they are necessary to the

inquisitor and the militant patriot. He wants to damn heretics.… I

do not. His last refuge, like that of every absolutist at bay, would

be in the corporate judgment of mankind. Yes, mankind has let the

authoritarians impose upon it only too often. But their day is nearly

over.…”[2]

This is one of the most important passages in contemporary United

States criticism,--doubly so because the men thus ranged against each

other are both accomplished scholars and thus rise to symbols of the

inevitable contest between the intellect that dominates the emotions

and the intellect that has discovered wisdom in guidance rather than

domination. Verissimo was no Lewisohn; he possessed many of that

critic’s signal qualities, but in lesser degree. His language is not

so instinct with human warmth, his culture not so wide nor so deep,

his perceptions not so keen; but he belongs in company of such rare

spirits. He is as unusual amidst the welter of verbose opinions that

passes for criticism in Spanish and Portuguese America as is Lewisohn

amidst our own colder but equally vapid and empty reviewers and as

was Rodó in the milieu that but half understood him. Neither Rodó

nor Verissimo, for that matter, had a firm grasp upon the budding

intellectual life of these States; each died a trifle too early for the

signs of hope that they would have been happy to discern. As it is,

they possessed the somewhat stencilled view of the United States as the

country of the golden calf; a view none too false, more’s the pity, but

too “absolute” in the sense that we have just seen discussed. There is,

for all the truth in Rodó’s famous _Ariel_, a certain half-concealed

condescension that might not have appeared were that essay written

today.[3] The younger Spanish Americans and Brazilians who have come

north to study at our universities and to acquaint themselves with

the newer phases of our culture, have been quick to respond to such

spirits as Van Wyck Brooks, Henry L. Mencken, Ludwig Lewisohn, Joel

Elias Spingarn. During the next decade, as these young men rise to

power in their own intellectual world, their books will doubtless

reveal a different attitude toward the attainments of their Northern

neighbours,--unless--and there is always that unless,--political

happenings should contort their views and our scant spiritual

population should once again suffer, as so often in the past, for the

misdoings of our diplomats.

Verissimo, then, is the critic-artist. The drum-beat of dogma that

pounds over the pages of Sylvio Romero is never heard in his lines.

Though he holds that art is a social function--a form indispensable to

the existence of society--he realizes its individual import, without

carrying his belief to the point of that mystifying esoterism so

beloved of certain latter-day poets and dramatists.

To him, criticism was an art, and, reduced to its essential elements,

is practised by any one who expresses an opinion or a feeling

concerning a work of art. His mind was open to every wind of doctrine

that blew, but this was hospitality rather than indiscrimination.

“Let us not rebel against the new poetic tendencies,” he wrote in a

controversy with Medeiros e Albuquerque, “for we must understand that

they are all natural, the result of poetry’s very evolution. Let us

not, on the other hand, accept them as universal and definitive. There

is nothing definitive under the sun.… Schools, tendencies, fashions,

pass. Poetry remains, invariable in its essence, despite the diversity

of its form.”