It is possible, however, that the conditions under which he wrote

prevented his work from attaining the heights that often it suggests.

His Brazil needed a teacher rather than a critic,--a policeman of the

arts, as it were,--and he had to supply the deficiency. Perhaps it is

one’s imagination that detects in his lines a certain all-pervading

sadness,--a sadness that seems sister to serenity. Only when stirred

to just combat--as in his controversy with Sylvio Romero--does he

abandon his unruffled demeanour, and ever here he is more restrained

than Sylvio could be in his moments of calm. Verissimo,--and again he

suggests Rodó for a similar quality,--is ever a mite melancholy. His

thought and its expression at their best are like a beautiful landscape

seen in the afterglow of sunset; a sort of intellectual twilight,

most natural to one who found truth and virtue in the middle. Yet

is there much Truth and Virtue in Verissimo,--whoever that lady and

gentleman may be? He sought to bring no eternal verities; his aim,

like Rodó’s, was to instil rather the love of truth than any specific

truth itself. He is a dispassionate analyst. Hence his tolerance

(another quality of the middle, it will be noted), his diffidence, his

sincerity. After Verissimo, Brazilian criticism is confronted with

new standards,--flexible, it is true, but all the more exigent. As

Machado de Assis belongs to the company of Anatole France, so Verissimo

belongs with Lemaître. At a proper distance, to be sure, but within the

circle of the elect. He was not deceived by theories, for he looked

to the creation itself; neither was he deceived, and for the same

reason, by men and women. By their works he knew them, as by his work

we know him. It was his attitude as much as his accomplishment that

made of him the national glory he has become. And no little of that

glory is his because his sincerity transcended the narrower claims of

nationalism,--a nationalism in Brazil as elsewhere too often identical

with unthinking pride, puerile boastfulness and the notions of whatever

political party happens to be predominant.

* * * * *

With Sylvio Romero he shares pre-eminence as the foremost modern

Brazilian critic of letters. A passing glance at the controversy

between these contrasting personalities will bring out not only their

divergent qualities, but more than one sidelight on the problems of

Brazilian culture and literature. I give it as it may be seen through

Verissimo’s eyes, because I think that he sums up the case with his

characteristic sincerity and modesty.

Romero’s notable work, _Historia da literatura brasileira_, was first

published, in two volumes, in the year 1888, and brought the history

of the nation’s letters down to the year 1870. A second edition

appeared in 1902-3, revised by the author. It was upon the appearance

of this second edition that Verissimo estimated the qualities of

the work in terms that should meet with the approval of all but the

blindest of partisans. He noted not only its value as research, its

solid qualities, but its contradictions, incoherencies and abuses of

generalization as well. He called it “one of the most original, or

at least personal, most suggestive, most copious (in opinions and

ideas), most interesting” of books and noted, what the most superficial

must note at once, the man’s polemical temper. “The source of our

literary history,” he wrote, “is the Introduction by Varnhagen to his

_Florilegio_ of Brazilian poetry (Lisbon 1850, I and II vols., Madrid,

1853, III). It was he who laid in those pages the corner stone of the

still unfinished edifice of our literature.… Wolf, Norberto Silva,

Fernandes Pinheiro and others merely followed his lead, and if they

improved upon him, it was according to his indications. And, if not by

its philosophic spirit and critical method, Sylvio Romero’s _Historia_

derives in its general design from the _Introduction_ or Varnhagen.…”

The review, short as it was, revealed Verissimo’s intellectual

contrast to Romero. He is calm, even, logical, somewhat cold, clear,

French,--while Romero is the born fighter, impassioned, rambling, eager

to embrace his vast subject, crowding into his history a mass of names

and works wholly without pertinence to the field, lacking in literary

grace.

In 1906 Verissimo was obliged to take up the subject once more, this

time in less dispassionate terms, forced into a distasteful controversy

when further silence would have been tantamount to cowardice. Romero,

in that year, published together with Sr. Dr. João Ribeiro, a

_Compendio de historia da literatura brazileira_ in which Verissimo was

acrimoniously attacked, “not only in my opinions as a critic, which

does not offend me, nor in my qualities as a writer, which it would be

ridiculous to enter the field and defend, but in my literary probity,

which compels me to this refutation.…

“Sylvio Romero cannot suffer--and this is a proof of a certain moral

inferiority--contradiction and criticism, and must have unconditional

admiration.…” The voluminous historian was vain. “It is an absolutely

certain fact, and most easily verified, that in no country, in no

literature, has any author quoted himself so much as (I do not say

more than) Sylvio Romero.… Despite the fact that there was never a

break or even a difference in our relations, which for my part I prized

and which he did not seem to disdain, I felt, despite his praise and

his verbal animation--that of a master toward his pupil--that my poor

literary production contended with his and therefore, in short, I was

not agreeable to him. It was evident to me that there were two things

that my friend could not pardon me for: my small esteem (small in

relation to his) for Tobias Barreto and my great appreciation for a

writer whose highly justified glory has for some time seemingly robbed

the great critic of sleep.”

“I continue to maintain,” wrote Verissimo, “and all the documents

support me, that Varnhagen was the father of our literary history,

principally of that history as it is conceived and realized by Sylvio

Romero in his _Historia da literatura brazileira_, whose inspiration

and economy derive far more from the studies of Varnhagen than from

the generalizations … of Fernand Denis or Norberto Silva … I know

perfectly well … what was accomplished before him by Norberto Silva

and Fernand Denis, Bouterwek and Sismondi, etc.… The oldest of these

writers is the German Bouterwek. But I doubt whether Sylvio Romero

ever read him. In fact this author concerns himself only in passing

fashion with Brazilian literature.…” And in turn Verissimo takes up the

work of Denis, Silva and other predecessors of Varnhagen, rectifying

the position of the investigator whose merits have been so unjustly

slighted by the dogmatic “Pontifex Maximus of Brazilian letters,” as

Romero was called by Eunapio Deiró.[4]

“A disciple of the French through Sainte-Beuve and Brunetière, and

of the English through Macaulay,” says Carvalho in his recent work

upon Brazilian literature, “Verissimo was what might be called an

objective critic. Versed in many literatures, even erudite, he lacked,

in order to be a great writer, a finer taste for beautiful things, and

likewise, the spirit, or rather, the fineness of understanding and

sensibility. His _Historia da Literatura Brazileira_ which is, we will

not say a perfect, but an honest synthesis of our literary evolution,

shows the primordial defect of its method, which was that of seeking

the individual to the detriment of the milieu, the personal work to

the prejudice of the collective. Verissimo, who possessed a direct

observation that could appreciate isolated values keenly, lacked on

the other hand a deep intuition of universal problems; he was content

to point them out in passing; he did not enter into them, he circled

prudently around them.…”[5]

What Carvalho points out as a defect I consider Verissimo’s chief

contribution to Brazilian criticism,--his primary concern with the

individual. True, this may lessen his value as a literary historian,

but it makes of him one of the very few genuine esthetical critics

that have appeared on this side of the Atlantic. It renders him easily

superior to Romero and Carvalho, the latter of whom is much indebted to

both Verissimo and Romero, as is every one who seeks to write of the

nation’s letters.

Verissimo has put into a very short essay his general outlook upon

Brazilian literature. It is instinct with the man’s honesty of outlook,

his directness of statement, his fidelity to fact, his dispassionate

approach. For that reason I translate it almost entire as the best

short commentary available. It is entitled _O Que Falta á Nossa

Literatura_ (What Our Literature Lacks).

“What I know of American literature--and in truth it is

very little--authorizes me to say that ours is perhaps the

oldest of the continent.[6] From the literary standpoint

our nationality seems to have preceded the other American

nations. It is clear that I am not here insisting upon a

strict question of date; it is possible that in Mexico, and

even in Peru,--I haven’t at hand the means for verifying the

facts,--some writers may have arisen earlier than our own,

poets necessarily. Chronology, in literature, however, though

of considerable importance, cannot alone serve to establish

priority. A literature is a grouping, and cannot in fact exist

through a single poet or an isolated book, unless that poet

or that book resume in eminent degree the entire thought or

feeling of a people who is already in some manner conscious of

itself. This is the case of Homer, if that name stands for an

individual.

“Since the XVIIth century we reckon in our midst poets

and prosers. This would prove that the necessity of

reporting oneself, of defining oneself,--which creates

literature,--already existed amongst us, no sooner than we were

born. The work of Gabriel Soares may, and I believe should, be

excluded from a history of Brazilian literature, because such

a history can be only that of literature published and known

in its day,--literature that could have influenced its time

and those who came after. But it comprises part of a history

of the civilization, thought and spiritual progress of Brazil,

showing how already in that century a native of the country,

sequestered upon his plantation in the sertão, not only

possessed sufficient culture to write of matters pertaining to

his country, but felt also the necessity of writing it down.

It is certain that he was inspired likewise by interest and

that his work is a memorial to the Sovereign, seeking personal

concessions. But, on account of the thoroughness and the

breadth with which it is done, and, above all, because of the

general, disinterested spirit in which it is accomplished,--the

variety of its aspects and the national breath that animates

it, it far exceeds the nature of a simple memorial. In the same

position are the _Dialogues upon the Grandeurs of Brazil_ and

their author, whoever he may be. Preoccupation with history

is the surest token of a reflective national consciousness.

This preoccupation awoke early in Brazil, and not only as a

means of information with which the religious orders tried

to instruct themselves concerning the lay of the land and to

glorify themselves by publishing their own deeds, but also in

this same more general, more disinterested spirit. Frei Vicente

do Salvador is thus early a national historian and not a simple

religious chronicler.

“Two things occur to produce this development in Brazilian

literary expression, at the very beginning of civilization in

this country: the vigor of literary expression in Portugal and

the Jesuit _collegios_. Whatever be the value of Portuguese

literature, it is beyond dispute that no literature of the

smaller peoples rivals it in wealth and variety. When Brazil

was discovered, only a small part of Italy, France, Spain

and Portugal possessed a literary life. England was scarcely

emerging into it, with the predecessors of Shakespeare, who

had not yet been born and whose first works date from the end

of the century. Germany, from the literary standpoint, did not

exist.

“Portugal, for already a century, had possessed a language

solidly constructed and policed, and in this respect the labor

of Camões is incomparably less than that of Dante. Portugal

was in its golden age of literature, which already possessed

chroniclers such as Fernão Lopes, novelists like Bernardim

Ribeiro, historians like João de Barros, dramatists like Gil

Vicente, poets such as those of the _cancioneiros_ and a line

of writers of all kinds dating back to the fourteenth century.

Despite the rusticity of the people, Portugal, in the epoch of

Brazil’s colonization, is one of the four countries of Europe

that may be called intellectual. The identification of the

colony of Brazil with the mother-country seems to me one of

the expressive facts of our history, and this identification

rendered easy the influence of Portuguese spiritual life upon

a wild region, so that it was possible to obtain results

which, given other feelings between the court and the colony,

would not have been forthcoming. Since gold was not at once

discovered here, and those mines that were discovered proved

relatively few and poor, Brazilian life soon took on, from

Reconcavo to Pernambuco, where it was first lived, and later

in Rio Janeiro and even--though less--in S. Vicente, a modest

manner,--what today we should call bourgeois,--more favourable

to literary expression, to the leisure needed for writing, than

the agitated, adventurous existence of the colonizers of mine

lands.

“The collegios of the Jesuits, established with higher studies

as early as the XVIth century, and later--in imitation of

them--the convents of the other religious orders, infiltrating

Latin culture into the still half-savage colony, favoured the

transmigration hither of the powerful literary spirit of the

metropolis.

“Soon, then, perhaps sooner than any other American nation,

and certainly sooner than, for example, the largest of them

all, the United States, we had a literature, the written

expression of our collective thought and feeling. Certainly

this literature scarcely merits the name of Brazilian as a

regional designation. It is Portuguese not only in tongue

but in inspiration, sentiment, spirit. There might perhaps

already exist, as in the author of the _Dialogos das grandezas_

or in Gabriel Soares, a regional sentiment, the love of

the native soil, a taste for its traits, but there was no

national sentiment other than the selfsame Portuguese national

sentiment. Even four centuries later, I hesitate to attribute

to our literature the qualification of Brazilian.… For I do

not know whether the existence of an entirely independent

literature is possible without an entirely independent language

as well. Language is the constituent element of literatures,

from the fact that it is itself the expression of what there

is most intimate, most individual, most characteristic in a

people. Only those peoples possess a literature of their own

who possess a language of their own. In this sense, which seems

to me the true one, there is no Austrian literature or Swiss or

Belgian literature, despite the existence in those peoples of a

high culture and notable writers in all fields.[7]

“Therefore I consider Brazilian literature as a branch of

the Portuguese, to which from time to time it returns by the

ineluctable law of atavism, as we may see in the imitations

of the literary movements in Portugal, or better still, in

the eagerness--today almost universal in our writers--to write

Portuguese purely, according to the classic models of the

mother literature. This branch, upon which have been engrafted

other elements, is already distinguished from the central trunk

by certain characteristics, but not in a manner to prevent one

from seeing, at first glance, that it is the same tree slightly

modified by transplantation to other climes. It is possible

that new graftings and the prolonged influence of milieu will

tend to differentiate it even more, but so long as the language

shall remain the same, it will be little more--as happens in

the botanical families--than a variety of the species.

“A variety, however, may be very interesting; it may even be,

in certain respects, more interesting than the principal type,

acquiring in time and space qualities that raise it above the

type. Brazilian literature, or at least poetry, was already

in the XVIIth century superior to Portuguese. It is by no

means patriotic presumption, which I lack completely, to judge

that, with the development of Brazil, its probable politic and

economic greatness in the future will give to the literary

expression of its life supremacy over Portugal, whose historic

rôle seems over and which, from all appearances, will disappear

in an Iberic union. If this country of ours does not come

apart and split up into several others, each a ‘patria’ with a

dialect of its own, we shall prove true to the prophecies of

Camões and Fr. Luiz de Souza, becoming the legitimate heirs

of Portugal’s language and literature. If such a thing should

happen, it would give us an enormous moral superiority to the

United States and the Spanish-American nations, making of us

the only nation in America with a truly national language and

literature.

“But this literature of ours, which, as a branch of the

Portuguese already has existed for four centuries, possesses

neither perfect continuity, cohesion, nor the unity of the

great literatures,--of the Portuguese, for example. The

principal reason, to explain the phenomenon in a single word,

is that it depended ever, in its earliest periods, rather upon

Portugal and later upon Europe, France especially, than upon

Brazil itself. It always lacked the principle of solidarity,

which would seem to reveal lack of national sentiment. It

always has lacked communicability,--that is, its writers,

who were separated by vast distances and extreme difficulty

of communication, remained strangers one to the other. And I

refer not to personal communication, which is of secondary

importance, but to intellectual communication that is

established through books. The various influences that can be

noted in all our important literary movements are all external.

What is called improperly the Mineira School of the XVIIIth

century, and the Maranhão pléiade of the middle of this (the

XIXth) received their inspiration from Portugal, but did not

transmit it. As is said in military tactics, contact was never

established between the writers or between their intellects.

“This lack of contact continues today (Verissimo wrote the

essay toward the end of the XIXth century) and is greater now

than it was for example during the Romantic period. There

was always lacking the transmitting element, the plastic

mediator of national thought, a people sufficiently cultured

to be interested in that thought, or, at least, ready to be

influenced by it. In the construction of a literature the

people plays simultaneously a passive and an active rôle: it

is in the people that the inspiration of poet and thinker has

its source and its goal. Neither the one nor the other can

abstract himself, for both form an integral part of the people.

Perhaps only during our Romantic period, from 1835 to 1860,

may it be said that this condition of communicability existed,

limited to a tiny part of the country. The sentiment of a

new nation co-operated effectively in creating for writers a

sympathetic public, which felt instinctively in their work an

expression of that nationality. Then we learned a great deal of

French, some English and Italian, a smattering of German and

became intellectually denationalized. A success such as that of

Macedo’s _Moreninha_ is fairly inconceivable today. Success in

literature, as in clothing, comes ready made from Paris.

“Do not take me for a nationalist, and less still, for

a nativist. I simply am verifying a fact with the same

indifference with which I should perform the same office in

the domains of geology. I am looking for the explanation of a

phenomenon; I believe I have found it, and I present it.

“So that, from this standpoint, it may be said that it was

the development of our culture that prejudiced our literary

evolution. It seems a paradox, but it is simply a truth.

Defective and faulty as it was, that culture was enough to

reveal to our reading public the inferiority of our writers,

without any longer counterbalancing this feeling by the

patriotic ardor of the period during which the nationality

was being formed. The general cultural deficiency of our

writers of all sorts in Brazil is, then, one of the defects

of our literature. Doing nothing but repeat servilely what

is being done abroad, without any originality of thought or

form, without ideas of their own, with immense gaps in their

learning, and no less defects of instruction that are today

common among men of medium culture in the countries that we try

to imitate and follow, we cannot compete before our readers

with what they receive from the foreign countries at first

hand, by offering them a similar product at second.

“In addition to study, culture, instruction, both general and

thorough, carried on in time and with plenty of time, firm

and substantial, our literature lacks at present sincerity.

The evident decadence of our poetry may have no other cause.

Compare, for example, the poetry of the last ten or even

fifteen years, with that produced during the decade 1850-1860,

by Gonçalves Dias, Casimiro de Abreu, Alvares de Azevedo,

Junqueira Freire, Laurindo Rabello, and you will note that

the sincerity of emotion that overflowed the verses then is

almost completely lacking in today’s poetry. And in all our

literary labors, fiction, history, philosophy, criticism, it is

impossible for the careful reader not to discern the same lack.

Perhaps it is due to a lack of correlation between milieu and

writer.… To aggravate this, there was, moreover, lack of ideas,

lack of thought, which reduced our poetry to a subjectivism

from which exaggerated fondness for form took emotion, the

last quality that remained to it; it reduced our fiction to a

copy of the French novel, which obstructed the existence of a

dramatic literature, which sterilized our philisophic, historic

and critical production. This lack, however, is a consequence

of our lack of culture and study, which do not furnish

to brains already for several reasons naturally poor the

necessary restoratives and tonics. And the worst of it is that,

judging from the direction in which we are moving, this very

culture, as deficient and incomplete as it is, threatens to be

extinguished in a widespread, all-consuming, and, anyway you

look at it, coarse preoccupation with politics and finance.”[8]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Many cultured Brazilians know English literature in the original.

The essay here referred to was suggested to Verissimo by the book of a

United States professor, Winchester, on _Some Principles of Literary

Criticism_.

[2] _A Modern Book of Criticism_, New York, 1919. Page iii. The italics

are mine.

[3] Mr. Havelock Ellis, writing in 1917 upon Rodó, (the article may be

found in his book entitled _The Philosophy of Conflict_), expressed an

opinion that comes pat to our present purpose. “ … Rodó has perhaps

attributed too fixed a character to North American civilization, and

has hardly taken into account those germs of recent expansion which

may well bring the future development of the United States nearer

to his ideals. It must be admitted, however, that if he had lived

a few months longer Rodó might have seen confirmation in the swift

thoroughness, even exceeding that of England, with which the United

States on entering the war sought to suppress that toleration for

freedom of thought and speech that he counted so precious, shouting

with characteristic energy the battle-cry of all the belligerents,

‘Hush! Don’t think, only feel and act!’ with a pathetic faith that

the affectation of external uniformity means inward cohesion.… Still,

Rodó himself recognised that, even as already manifested, the work

of the United States is not entirely lost for what he would call the

‘interests of the soul.’”

[4] For this discussion, which is of primary importance to students of

Brazilian letters, see Verissimo’s _Estudos_, 6a serie, pages 1-14, and

his _Que é Literatura_, Rio de Janeiro, 1907, pages 230-292.

[5] _Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira._ 2a Ed. Revista e

augmentada. Rio, 1922. Pp. 344-345.

[6] This opinion he later rectified.

[7] In _Studies in Spanish-American Literature_ (pages 98-99) I have

discussed briefly this attitude of Verissimo’s. I do not believe the

entire question to be of primary _literary_ importance. It is the

noun _literature_ that is of chief interest; not the adjective of

nationality that precedes it.

[8] Verissimo was born at Belem, Para, on April 8, 1857. He initiated

his career as a public official in his native province, but soon made

his way to the directorship of the Gymnasio Nacional, and then the

Normal School of Rio de Janeiro. For a long time, concurrently with

his scholarly labors, he edited the famous _Revista Brasileira_. His

_Scenes of Life on the Amazon_ have been compared to the pages of

Pierre Loti for their exotic charm. He died in 1918.

IV

OLAVO BILAC

His full name was Olavo Braz Martins dos Guimarães Bilac; he is one

of the most popular poets that Brazil has produced; his surroundings

and his person, like the poetry that brought him his fame, were

exquisite,--somewhat in the tradition of the French dandies and the

Ibero-American versifiers who imitated them--yet in him the note was

not overdone. He passes, in the history of the national letters, for

one of the Parnassian leaders, yet he is one of their most subjective

spirits. Toward the end of his life, as if the feelings that he had

sought so long to dominate in his poetry must at last find vent,

he became a sort of Socialist apostle, preaching the doctrine of

education. “Brazil’s malady,” he averred, “is, above all, illiteracy.”

And like so many of his creative compatriots, he set patiently about

constructing text-books for children. In his early days he found

inspiration in the Romantic Gonçalves Dias and the Parnassian Alberto

de Oliveira; very soon, however, he attained to an idiom quite his

own which lies somewhat between the manner of these two. “He is the

poet of the city,” one critic has written, “as Catullus was of Rome

and as Apuleius was of Carthage.” He has been compared, likewise, to

Lucian of Samosata. Most of all, however, he is the poet of perfumed

passion,--not the heavy, drugged perfumes of D’Annunzio, which weigh

down the votaries until they suffer amidst their pleasures, but--and

again like some of his Spanish-American brothers in the other nations

of the continent--a faun in frock coat, sporting with naiads in silk.

Bilac has his ivory tower, but its doors stand ajar to beauty of body

and of emotion. His is no withdrawal into the inner temple; his eyes

are always peering into the world from which he supposedly stands

aloof, and his heart follows them.

We are not to look to him, then, for either impersonality or

impassivity. Even when he wrote of the Iliad, of Antony, of Carthage,

he had his native Brazil in mind, as he revealed in his final poems.

“We never really had a literature,” he said shortly before his death.

“We have imitations, copies, reflections. Where is the writer that does

not recall some foreigner,--where is the school that we can really call

our own?… There are, for the rest, explanations of this fact. We are a

people in process of formation, in which divers ethnical elements are

struggling for supremacy. There can be no original literature until

this is formed.…”

Again: “We regulate ourselves by France. France has no strife of

schools now, neither have we; France has some extravagant youths, so

have we; it shows now an even stronger tendency,--the humanitarian,

and we begin to write socialistic books.” He spoke of poets as “the

sonorous echo of Hugo’s verse, between heaven and earth, to transmit

to the gods the plaints of mortals,” yet only in the end do any of his

poems ring with such an echo, and the plaints that rise from the poems

of Bilac that his countrymen most love are cries of passion. “Art,”

he said, as if to bely the greater part of his own life’s work, and

with something of repentance in his words, “is not, as some ingenious

visionaries would have it, an assertion and a labor apart, without

filiation to the other preoccupations of existence. All human concerns

are interwoven and blend in an indissoluble manner. The towers of gold

and ivory in which artists sequestered themselves, have toppled over.

The art of today is open and subject to all the influences of the

milieu and the epoch. In order to be the most beautiful representation

of life, it must hear and preserve all the cries, all the complaints,

all the lamentations of the human flock. Only a madman or a monstrous

egoist … could live and labor by himself, locked under seven keys

within his dream, indifferent to all that is happening outside in the

vast field where the passions strive and die, where ambition pants and

despair wails, where are being decided the destinies of peoples and

races.…”

This is, as we shall presently be in position to note, fairly a

recantation of his early poetic profession of faith. Which is

right,--the proclamative self-dedication to Form and Style that

stands at the beginning of his _Poesias_, or this consecration to

humanity? Both. For at each stage of his career, Bilac was sincere and

filled with a vision; in art, for that matter, only insincerity and

inadequacy are ever wrong. And perhaps not in art alone. M. Gsell, who

lately wrote an altogether delightful book made up of notes taken at

Anatole France’s retreat at Villa Saïd, quotes this little tale from

the master, who was reminded of it by a portrait of Paolo Uccello

in Vasari. “This is the painter,” said France, “whose wife gently

reproached him with working too slowly.

“‘I must have time,’ the artist said, ‘to establish the perspective of

my pictures.’

“‘Yes, Paolo,’ the poor woman protested, ‘but you are drawing for us

the perspective of destitution and the grave.’

“She was right,” commented France, “and he was not wrong. The eternal

conflict between the scruples of the artist and harsh reality.”

Bilac’s seeming recantation at the end was the result of just such

a clash between artistry and harsh reality. Had he chosen, in the

beginning, to devote his poetic gifts to humanity, he might have been

remembered longer as a man, but it is doubtful whether he would have

achieved his standing as an artist. And Brazil would have been the

poorer by a number of poems that have doubtless enriched the emotional

life of the nation. I wonder whether, in his later days, Bilac did not

in a manner confuse art with social service. There are souls in whom

the human comedy kindles the fires of song; such as they sing,--they do

not theorize. Bilac was not one of them. There was nothing to prevent

his serving humanity in any of the countless ways in which man may be

more than wolf to man. But he himself, as an artist, was not fashioned

to be a social force. He was the born voluptuary.

“Art,” he said, “is the dome that crowns the edifice of civilization:

and only that people can have an art which is already a people,--which

has already emerged triumphant from all the tests through which the

character of nationalities is purified and defined.…” Here again,

his practice excels his theory. There is in him little Brazilianism,

and even when he uses the native suggestion, as in his brilliant

_O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ (The Emerald-Hunter, an epic episode of

the seventeenth-century sertão) he is, as every poet should be,

first of all himself. “Perhaps in the year 2500 there will exist

diverse literatures in the vast territory now comprising Brazil,”

he prophesied, in disapproval of that sectionalism in letters which

several times has tried to make a definite breach in the national

literature. But is not all literature psychologically sectional? If

the ambient is not filtered through the personality of the individual,

is the product worth much more as art than a county report? In our own

country, of late, there has been much futile talk of Chicago literature

and New York literature, and other such really political chat. “Isms”

within “isms,” which make good “copy” for the newspapers and magazines,

and which, no doubt, may have a certain sociological significance. But

when you or I pick up a book or a poem, what care we, after all, for

the land of its origin or even the life of its author, except as both

are revealed in the work? Was not one of Bilac’s own final admonitions

to his nation’s youth to “Love your art above all things and have

the courage, which I lacked, to die of hunger rather than prostitute

your talent?” And “above all things” means above the unessential

intrusion of petty sectionalism, partisan aim, political purpose, moral

exhortation, national pride. I have no quarrel, then, with Bilac’s

hopes for a national literature, with his aspirations for our common

humanity. But I am happy that he was content to leave that part of him

for public life rather than contriving to press it willy-nilly into

the service of his only half Parnassian muse.

Bilac was, on the whole, less a Parnassian than was Francisca Julia.

She transmuted her passion into cold, yet appealing, symbols; Machado

de Assis’s feelings do not quite fill his glass to the brim; Olavo

Bilac’s passion overflows the banks of his verse. Yet he remained as

true as so warm a nature as his could be to the vows of his _Profissão

de Fe_, with its numerous exclamation points that stand as visible

refutation of his avowed formalism. The very epigraph of the poem--and

the poem itself stands as epigraph to the collection that follows--is

taken from none other than that ardent soul, Victor Hugo, with whom at

first the very opponents of the Romantic movement tried to maintain

relations. So true is it that we retain a little of all things that we

reject.

Le poète est ciseleur,

Le ciseleur est poète.

Bilac’s would-be Parnassian _Profession of Faith_, beginning thus

inconsistently with a citation from the chief of the Romantics (a

citation, it may be added, that is not all consistent with Hugo’s own

characteristic labours) is the herald of his own humanness. Let us

now leave the “isms” to those who love them, and seek in Bilac the

distinctive personality. His _Profissão de Fe_ is a bit dandified,

snobbish, aloof, with a suggestion of a refined sensuality that is

fully borne in his work.

Não quero a Zeus Capitolino,

Herculeo e bello,

Talhar no marmore divino

Com o camartello.

Que outro--não eu!--a pedra córte

Para, brutal,

Erguer de Athene o altivo porte

Descommunal.

Mais que esse vulto extraordinario,

Que assombra a vista,

Seduz-me um leve relicario

De fine artista.

…

Assim procedo. Minha penna,

Segue esta norma,

Por te servir, Deusa serena,

Serena Fórma!

…

Vive! que eu viverei servindo

Teu culto, e, obscuro,

Tuas custodias esculpindo

No ouro mais puro.

Celebrarei o teu officio

No altar: porem,

Se inda é pequeno o sacrificio,

Morra eu tambem!

Caia eu tembem, sem esperanca,

Porém tranquilo,

Inda, ao cahir, vibrando a lança,

Em prol de Estylo![1]

The _Poesias_[2] upon which Bilac’s fame rests constitute but a

book of average size, and consist of the following divisions:

_Panoplias_ (Panoplies); _Via Lactea_ (The Milky Way); _Sarças de

Fogo_ (Fire-Brambles); _Alma Inquieta_ (Restless Soul); _As Viagens_

(Voyages); _O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ (The Emerald-Hunter).

The inspiration of the panoplies derives as much from the past as from

the present; there is verbal coruscation aplenty,--an admirable sense

of colour, imagery, fertility, symbol. Even when reading the Iliad,

Bilac sees in it chiefly a poem of love:

Mais que as armas, porém, mais que a batalha,

Mais que os incendios, brilha o amor que ateia

O odio e entre os povos a discordia espalha:

Esse amor que ora activa, ora asserena

A guerra, e o heroico Paris encadeia

Aos curvos seios da formosa Helena.[3]

In _Delenda Carthago_ there is the clash of rutilant arms and the

sense of war’s and glory’s vanity; this is the typical motif of the

voluptuary, whether of love or of battle. It is not, however, the

sorrowful conclusion of the philosopher facing the inevitable,--“the

path of glory leads but to the grave.” Rather is it the weariness of

the prodded senses. Scipio, victorious, grows mute and sad, and the

tears run down his cheeks.

For, beholding in rapid descent,

Rolling into the abyss of oblivion and annihilation,

Men and traditions, reverses and victories,

Battles and trophies, six centuries of glory

In a fistful of ashes,--the general foresaw

That Rome, the powerful, the unvanquished, so strong in arms,

Would go perforce the selfsame way as Carthage.…

Nearby, the vague and noisy crackling

Of the conflagration, that still roared furiously on,

Rose like the sound of convulsive weeping.

It is perhaps in _Via Lactea_ that the book--and Bilac’s art--reaches

its apex. This is a veritable miniature milky way of sonnet gems; all

claims to objectivity and impersonality have been forgotten in the

man’s restrained, but by no means repressed passion. His love is not

the ivory-tower vapouring of the youthful would-be Maeterlinckian that

infests verse in Spanish and Portuguese America; it is of the earth,

earthy. When he writes of his love he mingles with the idea the thought

of country, and when he writes of his country it is often in terms of

carnal passion. Verissimo has noted the same phenomenon in some of

the poets that preceded Bilac and, of course, it is to be verified

repeatedly in the singers of every land; indeed, is not Liberty always

a woman, as our national coinage proves for the millionth time, and

when soldiers are urged to fight and die _pro patria_, is it not a

beautiful lady that hovers over the fields and trenches? In these

sonnets he becomes the poet-chiseller of Hugo’s distich; into a form

that would seem to have lost all adaptability to new manipulation he

manages to pour something new, something his own. There is, in his

very attitude, a preoccupation with form for its own sake that enables

him to employ the sonnet without loss of effect. His devotion to the

cameo-like structure is not absolute, however. In none of these poems

does one feel that he has cramped his feelings in order to mortise

quatrain into tercet. When, as in _A Alvorada de Amor_, he feels the

need of greater room, he takes it.

He is the lover weeping over gladness:

Quem ama inventa as penas em que vive:

E, em lugar de acalmar as penas, antes

Busca novo pezar com que as avive.

Pois sabei que é por isso que assim ando:

Que e dos loucos sómente e dos amantes

Na maior alegria andar chorando.[4]

He is ill content to feed upon poetic imaginings of kiss and embrace,

or to dream of heavenly beatitudes instead of earthly love:

XXX

Ao coração que soffre, separado

Do teu, no exilio em que a chorar me vejo,

Não basta o affecto simples e sagrado

Com que das desventuras me protejo.

Não me basta saber que sou amado,

Nem só desejo o teu amor: desejo

Ter nos braços teu corpo delicado,

Ter na bocca a doçura do teu beijo.

E as justas ambiçoes que me consomem

Não me envergonham: pois maior baixeza

Não ha que a terra pelo céo trocar;

E mais eleva o coração de um homem

Ser de homem sempre e, na maior pureza,

Ficar na terra e humanamente amar.[5]

So runs the song in his more reflective mood, which is half objection

and half meditation. There are other moments, however, in _Alma

Inquieta_ when a similar passion bursts out beyond control and when, in

his pride of virility, he rejects Paradise and rises superior to the

Lord Himself.

The sonnet that follows this in _Via Lactea_ is notable for its

intermingling of love, country and _saudade_:

XXXI

Longe de ti, se escuto, porventura,

Teu nome, que uma bocca indifferente

Entre outros nomes de mulher murmura,

Sobe-me o pranto aos olhos, de repente.…

Tal aquelle, que, misero, a tortura

Soffre de amargo exilio, e tristemente

A linguagem natal, maviosa e pura,

Ouve falada por estranha gente.…

Porque teu nome é para mim o nome

De uma patria distante e idolatrada,

Cuja saudade ardente me consome:

E ouvil-o é ver a eterna primavera

E a eterna luz da terra abençoada,

Onde, entre flores, teu amor me espera.[6]

_Sarças de Fogo_, as its name would imply, abandons the restraint of

_Via Lactea_. In _O Julgamento de Phryné_ beauty becomes not only

its own excuse for being, but the excuse for wrong as well. Phryne’s

judges, confronted with her unveiled beauty, tremble like lions before

the calm gaze of their tamer, and she appears before the multitude “in

the immortal triumph of Flesh and Beauty.” In _Santania_ a maiden’s

desires rise powerfully to the surface only to take flight in fright

at their own daring. _No Limiar de Morte_ (On The Threshold of Death)

is the voluptuary’s _memento mori_ after his _carpe diem_. There is a

touch of irony borrowed from Machado de Assis in the closing tercets:

You, who loved and suffered, now turn your steps

Toward me. O, weeping soul,

You leave behind the hate of the worldly hell.…

Come! for at last you shall enjoy within my arms

All the wantonness, all the fascinations,

All the delights of eternal rest!

This is impressed in far superior fashion by one of the best sonnets

Bilac ever wrote: _Sahara Vitae_. Here, in the image of life’s desert,

he conveys a haunting sense of helpless futility such as one gets only

rarely, from such sonnets, say, as the great Shelleyan one, _Ozymandias

of Egypt_.

Lá vão! O céo se arqueia

Como um tecto de bronze infindo e quente,

E o sol fuzila e, fuzilando, ardente

Criva de flechas de aço o mar de areia.…

Lá vão, com os olhos onde a sêde ateia

Um fogo estranho, procurando em frente

Esse oasis do amor que, claramente,

Além, bello e falaz, se delineia.

Mas o simun da morte sopra: a tromba

Convulsa envolve-os, prostra-os; e aplacada

Sobre si mesma roda e exhausta tomba.…

E o sol de novo no igneo céo fuzila.…

E sobre a geração exterminada

A areia dorme placida e tranquila.[7]

For the clearness of its imagery, for the perfect progress of a symbol

that is part and parcel of the poetry, this might have come out of

Dante. It is not often that fourteen lines contain so complete, so

devastating a commentary. Side by side with _Beijo Eterno_ (Eternal

Kiss) it occurs in the _Poesias_, as if to reveal its relation as

reverse to the obverse of the poet’s voluptuousness. _Beijo Eterno_,

like _A Alvorada de Amor_, is one of the central poems of Olavo

Bilac. It is the linked sweetness of Catullus long drawn out. It is

the sensuous ardour of the poet inundating all time and all space,

while _Sahara Vitae_ is the languor that follows upon the fulfilment

of ardour. They are both as much a part of the poet as the two sides

are part of the coin. The first and last of the ten stanzas of _Beijo

Eterno_ epitomize the Dionysiac outburst; they are alike:

Quero um beijo sem fim,

Que dure a vida enteira e aplaque a meu desejo!

Ferve-me o sangue. Acalma-o com teu beijo,

Beija-me assim!

O ouvido fecha ao rumor

Do mundo, e beija-me querida!

Vive so para mim, só para a minha vida,

Só para o meu amor![8]

In less amorous mood he can sing a serenade--_A Canção de

Romeu_--(Romeo’s Song) to which any Juliet might well open her window:

As estrellas surgiram

Todas: e o limpio veo

Como lirios alvissimos, cobriram

Do ceo.

De todas a mais bella

Não veio ainda, porem:

Falta uma estrella.… És tu!… Abre a janella,

E vem![9]

And if, in the closing piece of this section--_A Tentação de

Xenocrates_--(The Temptation of Xenocrates) the courtesan’s charms seem

more convincing than the resistance of the victorious philosopher, it

must be because Bilac himself subtly sided with the temptress, and

spoke with her when she protested that she had vowed to tame a man,

not a stone. If, in the manner of the Freudians, we are to look upon

the poem as a wish that the poet could on occasion show such scorn of

feminine blandishments, it is doubly interesting to note that, though

the moral victory lies with Xenocrates, the poet has willy-nilly made

the courtesan’s case the more sympathetic. What, indeed, are the fruits

of a philosophy that denies the embraces of a Laïs?

Just as Olavo Bilac’s voluptuousness brings to him inevitably thoughts

of death, so does his cult of form lead him at times to a sense of the

essential uselessness of all words and all forms. He has expressed this

nowhere so well as in the sonnet _Inania Verba_ from the section _Alma

Inquieta_:

Ah! Quem ha-de exprimir, alma impotente e escrava,

O que a bocca não diz, o que a mão não escreve?

--Ardes, sangras, pregada á tua cruz, e, em breve,

Olhas, desfeito em lodo, o que te deslumbrava.…

O Pensameto erve, e é um turbilhão de lava:

A Fórma, fria e espessa, é um sepulcro de neve.…

E a Palavra pesada abafa a Idéa leve,

Que, perfume e clarão, refulgia e voava.

Quem o molde achara para a expressão de tudo?

Ai! quem ha-de dezir as ansias infinitas

Do sonho? e o céo que foge a mão que se levanta?

E a ira muda? e o asco mudo? e o desespero mudo?

E as palavras de fé que nunca foram ditas?

E as confissões de amor que morrem na garganta?[10]

Alma Inquieta reaches its climax with _A Alvorada de Amor_ (The Dawn

of Love). It is important enough to be quoted in full, as one of the

sincerest and most passionate outbursts of the Brazilian muse, in which

Olavo Bilac’s countrymen find mirrored that sensual part of themselves

which is the product of climate, racial blend and the Adam and Eve in

all of us.

Um horror grande e mudo, um silencio profundo

No dia do Peccado amortalhava o mundo.

E Adão, vendo fechar-se a porta do Eden, vendo

Que Eva olhava o deserto e hesitava tremendo,

Disse:

Chega-te a mim! entra no meu amor,

E á minha carne entrega a tua carne em flor!

Preme contra o meu peito o teu seio agitado,

E aprende a amar o Amor, renovando o peccado!

Abençóo o teu crime, acolho o teu desgosto,

Bebo-te, de uma em uma, as lagrimas do rosto!

Ve! tudo nos repelle! a toda a creação

Sacóde o mesmo horror e a mesma indignação.…

A colera de Deus torce as arvores, cresta

Como um tufão de fogo o seio de floresta,

Abre a terra em vulcões, encrespa a agua do rios;

As estrellas estão cheias de calefrios;

Ruge soturno a mar; turva-se hediondo o céo.…

Vamos! que importa Deus? Desate, como um véo,

Sobre a tua nudez a cabelleira! Vamos!

Arda em chammas o chão; rasguem-te a pelle os ramos;

Morda-te o corpo o sol; inuriem-te os ninhos;

Surjam féras a uivar de todos os caminhos;

E vendo-te a sangrar das urzes atravez,

Se enmaranhem no chão as serpes aos teus pés.…

Que importa? o Amor, botáo apenas entreaberto

Ilumina o degredo e perfume o deserto!

Amo-te! sou feliz! porque do Eden perdido,

Levo tudo, levando o teu corpo querido!

Póde, em redor de ti, tudo se anniquilar:

Tudo renascerá cantando ao teu olhar,

Tudo, mares e céos, arvores e montanhas,

Porque a Vida perpetuo arde em tuas entranhas!

Rosas te brotarão da bocca se cantares!

Rios te correrão dos olhos, se chorares!

E se, em torno ao teu corpo encantador e nú,

Tudo morrer, que importa? A Natureza és tu,

Agora que és mulher, agora que peccaste!

Ah! bemdito o momento em que me revelaste

O amor com o teu peccado, e a vida com a teu crime!

Porque, livre de Deus, redimido e sublime,

Homem fico na terra, á luz dos olhos teus,

--Terra, melhor que o Céo! homem, maior que Deus![11]

So, in _Peccador_ (Sinner) he presents the figure of a proud,

unrepentant sinner--it might be the amorous Don Juan himself,--who

“accepts the enormousness of the punishment with the same countenance

that he wore when formerly he accepted the delight of transgression!”

He is no less sincere, doubtless, when in _Ultima Pagina_ (Final Page)

he exclaims

Carne, que queres mais? Coração, que mais queres?

Passam as estações, e passam as mulheres.…

E eu tenho amado tanto! e não conheço o Amor!

Flesh, what would you more? What would you more, my heart?

The seasons pass and women, too, pass with them.…

And I have loved so much, yet know not what is Love!

_Tedio_ (Ennui) is the voluptuousness of Nirvana after the

voluptuousness of Dionysus; like all sinners, he comes for rest to a

church. “Oh, to cease dreaming of what I cannot behold! To have my

blood freeze and my flesh turn cold! And, veiled in a crepuscular glow,

let my soul sleep without a desire,--ample, funereal, lugubrious, empty

as an abandoned cathedral!…”

The section _As Viagens_ (Voyages) consists chiefly of twelve admirable

sonnets--a form in which Bilac’s blending of intense feeling with

artistic restraint seems as much at home as any modern poet--ranging

from the first migration, through the Phoenicians, the Jews, Alexander,

Cæsar, the Barbarians, the Crusades, the Indies, Brazil, the precursor

of the airplane in Toledo, the Pole, to Death, which is the end of all

voyages. At the risk of overemphasizing a point that has already been

made, I would quote the sonnet on Brazil:

Pára! Uma terra nova ao teu olhar fulgura!

Detem-te! Aqui, de encontro a verdejantes plagas,

Em caricias se muda a inclemencia das vagas.…

Este é o reino da Luz, do Amor e da Fartura!

Treme-te a voz affeita ás blasphemias e as pragas,

Ó nauta! Olha-a, de pé, virgem morena e pura,

Que aos teus beijos entrega, em plena formosura,

--Os dous seios que, ardendo em desejos, afagas.…

Beija-a! O sol tropical deu-lhe a pelle dorada

O barulho do ninho, o perfume da rosa,

A frescura do rio, o esplendor da alvorada.…

Beija-a! é a mais bella flor da Natureza inteira!

E farta-te de amor nesse carne cheirosa,

Ó desvirginador da Terra Brasileira![12]

What is this, indeed? Part of some ardent Song of Songs? Note how

the imagery is exclusively that of burning passion. Brazil becomes

a fascinating virgin who falls to the fortunate discoverer. In that

sonnet, I should say, is concealed about one half the psychology of the

narrower patriotism.

_O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ is a splendid episode in four parts,

containing some forty-six sextets in all, filled with movement, colour,

pervading symbolism and a certain patriotic pantheism. More than a mere

search for emeralds the poem recounts the good that man may work even

in the vile pursuit of precious stones,--the vanity of all material

quest. For sheer artistry it ranks with Bilac’s most successful

accomplishments.

* * * * *

“His inspiration,” wrote Verissimo, considering the verse of Bilac,

“is limited to a few poetic themes, all treated with a virtuosity

perhaps unparalleled amongst us … but without an intensity of feeling

corresponding to the brilliancy of the form, which always is more

important in him. This is the characteristic defect of the Parnassian

esthetics, of which Sr. Bilac is our most illustrious follower, and

to which his poetic genius adjusted itself perfectly and intimately.”

I believe that Verissimo was slightly misled by Bilac’s versified

professions. There is no doubt that Bilac’s temperament, as I have

tried to show, was eminently suited to some such orientation as was

sought by those Parnassians who understood what they were about;

there is as little doubt, in my mind, that his feeling was intense,

though not deep. He may have spoken of the crystalline strophe and

the etcher’s needle--which, indeed, he often employed with the utmost

skill,--but there were moments when nothing but huge marbles and the

sculptor’s chisel would do. It was with such material that he carved _A

Alvorada de Amor_. “If Sr. Machado de Assis was,” continues Verissimo,

“more than twenty years previous to Bilac, our first artist-poet,--if

other contemporaries or immediate predecessors of Bilac also practised

the Parnassian esthetics, none did it with such manifest purpose, and,

above all with such triumphant skill.…”

I am not sure whether Verissimo is right in having asked of Bilac a

more contemporary concern with the currents of poetry. The critic

grants that Bilac is perhaps the most brilliant poet ever produced

by his nation, “but other virtues are lacking in him without which

there can be no truly great poet. I do not know but that I am right in

supposing that, conscious of his excellence, he remained a stranger

to the social, philosophical and esthetic movement that is today

everywhere renewing the sources of poetry. And it is a great pity; for

he was amongst us perhaps one of the most capable of bringing to our

anaemic poetry the new blood which, with more presumption than talent,

some poets--or persons who think themselves such--are trying to inject,

without any of the gifts that abound in him.”

Bilac, as we have seen, did, toward the end of his life, become a more

social spirit. But this was not necessary to his pre-eminence as a

poet. He was, superbly, himself. Rather that he should have given us

so freely of the voluptuary that was in him--voluptuary of feeling, of

charm, of form, of language, of taste--than that, in a mistaken attempt

to be a “complete” man, he should sprawl over the varied currents of

the day and hour. For it is far more certain that each current will

find its masterly spokesman in art, than that each artist will become a

masterly spokesman for all of the currents.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have no wish to chisel the Capitoline Zeus, Herculean and

beautiful, in divine marble. Let another--not I!--cut the stone to

rear, in brutal proportions, the proud figure of Athene. More than by

this extraordinary size that astounds the sight I am fascinated by the

fragile reliquary of a delicate artist. Such is my procedure. My pen,

follow that standard. To serve thee, serene Goddess, serene Form! Live!

For I shall live in the service of thy cult, obscurely sculpturing thy

vessels in the purest of gold. I will celebrate thine office upon the

altar; more, if the sacrifice be too small, I myself will die. Let me,

too, fall, hopeless, yet tranquil. And even as I fall, I’ll raise my

lance in the cause of Style!

[2] Published originally in 1888, and ending, in its first form, with

_Sarças de Fogo_.

[3] More than arms, however, more than battle, more than

conflagrations, it is love that shines here, kindling hatred between

peoples and scattering discord. That love which now incites, now abates

war, and chains the heroic Paris to the curved breasts of Helen the

beautiful.

[4] He who loves invents the pangs in which he lives; and instead of

soothing these griefs, he seeks a new care with which he but rekindles

them. Know, then, that this is the reason why I go about so. Only

madmen and lovers weep in their greatest joy.

[5] For the heart that suffers, severed from you, in this exile that

I weep, the simple and sacred affection with which I shield myself

against all misfortunes is not enough. It is not enough to know that I

am loved; I would have your delicate body in my arms, taste in my mouth

the sweetness of your kiss. Nor am I shamed by the just ambitions that

consume me. For there is no greater baseness than to change the earth

for the sky. It more exalts the heart of a man to be a man ever, and,

in the greatest purity, remain on earth and love like a human being.

[6] Far from you, if peradventure I hear your name, murmured by an

indifferent mouth amidst other women’s names, the tears come suddenly

to my eyes.… Such is he who suffers in bitter exile and sadly, hears

his native tongue, so pure and beautiful, spoken by foreign lips.… For

your name is to me the name of a distant, worshipped fatherland, the

longing for which consumes me. And to hear it is to behold eternal

springtime, and the everlasting light of the blessed land, where,

amidst flowers, your love awaits me.

An excellent example of a similar identification of sweetheart and

fatherland occurs in the sonnet _Desterro_ (Exile), in the section

_Alma Inquieta_, in which his beloved is called “patria do meu desejo”

(land of my desire).

[7] There they go! The sky arches over like an endless burning roof of

bronze, and the sun shoots, and shooting, riddles with arrows of steel

the sea of sand. There they go, with eyes in which thirst has kindled a

strange fire, gazing ahead to that oasis of love which yonder, clearly

rises in its deluding beauty. But now blows the simoon of death: the

shattering whirlwind envelops them, prostrates them; sated, it rolls

upon itself and falls in exhaustion.… And once again the sun shoots in

the fiery sky.… And over the exterminated generation the sand sleeps

its peaceful, tranquil sleep.

[8] I want an endless kiss, that shall last an entire life and sate my

desire! My blood seethes. Slake it with your kiss, kiss me so! Close

your ears to the sound of the world, and kiss me, beloved! Live for me

alone, for my life only, only for my love!

[9] The stars have all come out, and have broidered the pure veil of

heaven with the whitest of lilies. But the most beautiful of all I do

not yet see. One star is missing. It is you!… Open your window and come!

[10] Ah, who can express, enslaved and impotent soul, what the lips do

not speak, what the hand cannot write. Clasping your cross, you burn,

you bleed, only soon to behold in the mire that which had dazzled you.…

Thought seethes; it is a whirlwind of lava: Form, cold and compact,

is a sepulchre of snow.… And the heavy word stifles the fragile Idea

which, like perfume and light, flew glittering about. Who can find

the mould in which to cast expression? Ah! who can speak the infinite

anxieties of our dreams? The heavens that flee from the hand that is

raised? And mute ire? And this wretched world? And voiceless despair?

And the words of faith that were never spoken? And the confessions of

love that die in one’s throat?

[11] A vast, mute horror, a deep silence shrouded the world upon the

day of Sin. And Adam, beholding the gates of Eden close, seeing Eve

gaze in hesitant trembling at the desert, said: “Come to me! Enter

into my love, and surrender to my flesh your own fair flesh! Press

your agitated breast against my bosom and learn to love Love, renewing

sin. I bless your crime, I welcome your misfortune, I drink, one by

one, the tears from your cheeks! Behold! Everything rejects us! All

creation is shaken by the same horror and the same indignation.… The

rage of the Lord twists the trees, ravages the heart of the forest like

a hurricane of flame, splits the earth into volcanoes, curls the water

of the rivers; the stars are aquiver with shudders; the sea mutters

with fury; the sky is dark with anger.… Let us go! What matters God?

Loosen like a veil your tresses over your nakedness! Let us be gone!

Let the earth burn in flames; let the branches rend your skin; let the

sun bite your body; let the nests harm you; let wild beasts rise on all

the roads to howl at you; and seeing you bleed through the brambles,

let the serpents entangle themselves upon the ground at your feet.…

What matters it? Let love, but a half-open bud, illumine our banishment

and perfume the desert! I love you! I am happy! For from the lost Eden

I bear everything, having your beloved body! Let everything crumble

to ruin about you; it will all rise new born before your eyes,--all,

seas and skies, trees and mountains, for perpetual life burns in your

bowels! Roses will burgeon from your mouth if you sing! Rivers will

flow from your eyes, if you weep! And if, about your enchanting, nude

body, all should die, what matters it then? You are Nature, now that

you are woman, now that you have sinned! Ah, blessed the moment in

which you revealed to me love with your sin and life with your crime!

For, free from God, redeemed and sublime, I remain a man upon earth, in

the light of your eyes,--Earth, better than Heaven! Man, greater than

God!”

[12] Hold! A new land shines before your eyes! Stop! Here, before the

green shores, the waves’ inclemency turns to caresses.… This is the

kingdom of Light, of Love and Satiety! Oh, mariner! Let your voice,

accustomed to blasphemies and curses, tremble! Gaze at her standing

there, a dark, pure virgin who surrenders to your kisses, in the

fulness of her beauty, her two breasts which, burning with desire,

you soothe.… Kiss her! The tropical sun gave her that gilded skin,

the nest’s content, the rose’s perfume, the coolness of the river,

the splendour of dawn.… Kiss her! She is the fairest of all Nature’s

flowers! Sate yourself with love in this fragrant flesh, oh first lover

of the Brazilian Land!

V

EUCLYDES DA CUNHA

_Os Sertões_, which first appeared in 1902--a happy year for Brazilian

letters, since it witnessed the publication of Graça Aranha’s _Chanaan_

as well--is one of the outstanding works of modern Portuguese

literature. At once it gave to its ill-fated author a fame to which

he never aspired. His name passed from tongue to tongue, like that

of some new Columbus who with his investigation of the sertão had

discovered Brazil to the Brazilians. His labour quickened interest in

the interior, revealed a new source of legitimate national inspiration

and presented to countrymen a strange work,--disturbing, illuminating,

disordered, almost a fictional forest, written in nervous,

heavily-freighted prose. Yet this is harsh truth itself, stranger than

the fiction of Coelho Netto, wilder than the poetry of Graça Aranha,

though instinct with the imagination of the one and the beauty of the

other. The highly original work struck a deep echo in English letters

and if Englishmen have neglected to read Richard Cunninghame-Graham’s

remarkable book called _A Brazilian Mystic: The Life and Miracles of

Antonio Conselheiro_--a book that would never have been written had not

Euclydes da Cunha toiled away in obscurity to produce _Os Sertões_--it

is their loss rather than their fault. It is a hurried and a harried

world. Who, today, has time for such beauty of thought and phrase as

Richard the wandering Scots sets down almost carelessly in his books

and then sends forth from the press with mildly mocking humour for his

prospective, but none too surely anticipated readers? Yet it is not the

least of Euclydes da Cunha’s glories that he was the prime cause of

Mr. Cunninghame-Graham’s _A Brazilian Mystic_. Not a fault of English

readers, surely; but none the less their loss.

* * * * *

The author of _Os Sertões_ was born on January 20, 1866, in Santa Rita

do Rio Negro, municipality of Cantagallo. Losing his mother when he

was three years old, he went first to Theresopolis to an aunt, and

thence, after two years, to São Fidelis to another aunt, with whom he

remained until his first studies were completed. His father retiring to

Rio de Janeiro in 1876, Euclydes was transported to the capital, where

he attended in due course the _collegios_ called Victorio da Costa,

Anglo-Brasileiro and Aquino. Naturally, he went through his baptism

of verse, preparing a collection called _Ondas_ (Waves); since every

Brazilian early suffers an attack of this literary measles--it would be

almost impolite not to indite one’s obligatory number of sonnets--the

notice is without any importance to a man’s later career. It was at

the Escola Militar da Praia Vermelha, which he entered at the age of

twenty, that he laid the foundations of his scientific studies, and it

is the scientist in Euclydes da Cunha that solidifies _Os Sertões_.

The man--as his mature prose testifies--was of nervous temperament, and

was led into one political scrape after another. At the very beginning

of his career, carried away by the propaganda of Benjamin Constant, he

committed an act of indiscipline against the Minister of War which has

become famous in the annals of Brazilian politics, having required the

benevolent intervention of the Emperor.

His journalistic labours began in 1888; the following year found him at

the Escola Polytechnica of Rio de Janeiro, finishing his course as an

engineer, but the proclamation of the Republic interrupted his studies

and he returned to the army.

The material for his famous book was gathered while in the service

of the important newspaper _Estado de São Paulo_, for which he went

into the wilds to report the government campaign against the fractious

inhabitants of the sertão.

The campaign, as taught in the Brazilian schools, marked another stage

in the establishment, the consolidation, of the Brazilian republic. It

took place during the presidency of Prudente de Moraes (1894-1898) and

brought within the folds of the new régime the rebellious sertanejos,

who had rallied round the leadership of Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel.

Maciel was born circa 1835 in Ceará and had, since 1864, attracted

attention because of his strange religious notions, his queer garb,

his legendary personality. Accused of crime, he was vindicated and

went off toward the interior of Bahia, wandering in every direction

over the sertões and reaching, at last, a tiny hamlet of Itapicuru,

which he christened with the name Bom Jesus (Good Jesus) on November

10, 1886. The Archbishop of Bahia objecting, Maciel was ousted in

1887 as a preacher of subversive doctrines. His followers accompanied

him, however, to Canudos, an old cattle ranch which, in 1890 was an

abandoned site with some fifty ramshackle ruins of cottages. Thither

came flocking an army of devotees and riff-raff, so that, when Maciel

resisted the government that was intent upon collecting its taxes, he

had a respectable number to heed his cry of insurrection.

At first the new republic tried religious methods, sending a Capuchin

friar to win over the rebels to the Church and the Law. The monk

despaired. Then followed four expeditions against the mystical Antonio;

the first in November of 1896, the second during December-January of

1896-1897, the third during February and March of 1897, the last from

April to October of the same year. “The sad chronicle of the tragedy of

Canudos, the most important civil war in the history of the country,”

concludes one popular text-book account,[1] “indicated the immediate

necessity of the unification of the country.… It revealed, furthermore,

the great resources of strength and virility among the sertanejos, who,

though conservative and little disposed to lend themselves easily to

novelty, possess none the less qualities important to the development

of the country, once they are in fact bound to the national life.”

Euclydes da Cunha’s revelatory book opened the doors of the Brazilian

Academy of Letters to him in 1903. He produced other books, one on

the eternal question of Peru versus Bolivia, in which he sides with

Bolivia; he became known for his speeches. The end of his life, which

occurred through assassination on the 15th of August, 1909, was caused

by a sexual snarl in which the corruptors of his domestic happiness

added crime to betrayal.

* * * * *

The plan of _Os Sertões_ is that of a scientific spirit at the same

time endowed with the many-faceted receptivity of the poet. Before

approaching the campaign of Canudos itself, the author studies the land

and the man produced by it; he is here, indeed, as Verissimo early

indicated, the man of science, the geographer, the geologist, the

ethnographer; the man of thought, the philosopher, the sociologist,

the historian; the man of feeling, the poet, the novelist, the artist

who can see and describe. But nowhere the sentimentalist. From one

standpoint, indeed, the book is a cold confirmation of the very law

against whose operative details the author protests:--“the inevitable

crushing of the weak races by the strong.”

Though a sertanejo school of fiction had existed before _Os Sertões_,

the book brought to Brazilians a nearer, more intimate conception of

the inhabitants of those hinterlands.

“The sertanejo,” writes the author in Chapter III of the section

devoted to the man of the sertão, “is first of all a strong man. He

does not possess the exhaustive rachetism of the neurasthenic hybrids

of the coast.

“His appearance, however, at first blush, reveals the contrary. He

lacks the impeccable plasticity, the straightness, the highly correct

structure of athletic organisms.

“He is graceless, seemingly out of joint, crooked. Hercules-Quasimodo,

he reflects in his appearance the typical ugliness of the weak. His

loose gait, curved, almost waddling and tortuous, suggests the

manipulation of unarticulated members. This impression is aggravated

by his normally abject posture, in a manifestation of displeasure that

gives him an appearance of depressing humility. On foot, when standing

still, he invariably leans against the first door-post or wall that he

finds; on horseback, if he reins in the animal to exchange a few words

with a friend, he at once falls upon one of the stirrups, resting upon

the side of the saddle. Jogging along, even at a rapid trot he never

traces a straight, firm line. He advances hastily in a characteristic

zig-zag, of which the meandering tracks of the sertão seem to be the

geometric pattern.…

“He is the everlastingly tired man.…

“Yet all this seeming weariness is an illusion.

“There is nothing more amazing than to see him disappear all of a

sudden.… It takes only the arising of some incident that requires the

unleashing of his dormant energy. The man is transfigured.…”[2]

And it is this same powerful denizen of the Brazilian hinterlands

that is a prey to the most primitive of superstitions, so that it was

an easy matter for his resistance to a distant seat of government to

become coupled in his mind with a resurgence of Sebastianism as newly

incarnated in the person of Antonio Maciel.

“This feeling of uneasiness in regard to the new government,” writes

Cunninghame-Graham, “the mysticism of the people as shown in the

belief in the return to earth of Dom Sebastian, and the fear that

the government meant the destruction of all religion, tended to make

the dwellers in the sertão especially susceptible to any movement,

religious or political alike, during the time between the abdication of

the Emperor and the firm establishment of the new government. Out of

the depths of superstition and violence, Antonio Conselheiro arose to

plunge the whole sertão into an erethism of religious mania and blood.”

As relatively late as 1837 the region had witnessed a veritable orgy

of sacrifice. A fanatic had mounted the so-called _pedra bonita_

(pretty stone) and preached the coming of King Dom Sebastian, “he who

fell at the field of Alcazar-el-Kebir. He foretold that the stone would

be cut into steps; not cut with any earthly tools, but smoothed away by

the shedding of the blood of children. Up these steps, so miraculously

to be prepared, surrounded by his guard of honour, dressed in armour,

the King, who had been dead three hundred years, should ascend and

come into his own again, reigning in Portugal and in Brazil, and

bountifully rewarding those who had been faithful to him and by their

faith contributed to his disenchantment.… A multitude of women, all a

prey to the mysterious agitation … came through the mountain passes,

followed the trails through the virgin forests and assembled to hear

the word preached at the wondrous pulpit made by no earthly hands.

Unluckily they brought their children with them. Then, roused to a

religious frenzy beyond belief, as they stood listening to the words of

the illuminated _cafuz_ or _mamaluco_--for history has not preserved

his name--women strove with one another who should be the first to

offer up her child, so that its blood should split the rock and form

the sacred stair, by which the King, the long lamented Dom Sebastian,

should ascend in glory, bringing back peace and plenty upon earth.… A

common-sense historian (Cunninghame-Graham refers to Araripe Junior’s

_Reino Encantado_) says that for days the rocks ran blood.…”

Further incident is unnecessary to a notion of the sertanejos’ mystic

habit of mind and action. The Brazilian government became in their eyes

a rule of dogs, and their favourite phrase for the republic was _a lei

do cão_ (the law of the dog). In the popular quatrains that Euclydes da

Cunha collected are found merged the hatred of the sertanejos for the

governing class of Brazil, their millenial hope in Dom Sebastian and

their faith in Antonio surnamed Conselheiro (i. e., the Councillor) as

the deliverer from all evil.

O Anti-Christo nasceu

Para o Brazil governar

Mas ahi esta O Conselheiro

Para delle nos livrar.

Antichrist was born

To govern poor Brazil,

But God raised up our Councillor

To save us from that ill.[3]

Garantidos pela lei

Aquelles malvados estão.

Nos temos a lei de Deus

Elles tem a lei do cão.

Protected by the law

Are those wretches in their lairs.

Ours is the law of God,

The law of the dog is theirs.

Visita nos vem fazer

Nosso rei D. Sebastião.

Coitado daquelle pobre

Que estiver na lei do cão!

Our good King D. Sebastian

Comes to visit us.

Pity the poor wretch

Who supports the law of the dog!

Cunninghame-Graham, like Euclydes da Cunha, and like the better of

the Brazilian’s critics, feels a strong sympathy for the man in whom

the new hopes of the sertanejos were centred. It is a sympathy,

moreover, born of the understanding without which all knowledge is as

fruit turned to ashes in the mouth. The Scot, like the Brazilian, is

a psychologist. “Antonio Conselheiro himself did not so much rebel

against authority as against life, perhaps expecting from it more

than it had to give upon the spiritual side, not understanding that a

fine day, with health to enjoy it, is the most spiritual of pleasures

open to mankind,” he writes, in his amiable, worldly-wise (and

heavenly-wise) way. And later: “When all is said, it is impossible not

to sympathize to some extent with the misguided sectaries, for all they

wanted was to live the life they had been accustomed to and sing their

litanies. Clearly Antonio Conselheiro had no views on any subject under

heaven outside his own district. His dreams were fixed upon a better

world, and his chief care was to fit his followers for the change that

he believed was to take place soon.”

It is Verissimo, who, with his almost unerring insight, extracts from

his countryman’s book its central significance. Here is a volume that

is a remarkable commentary upon the formation of all religions,

“without excepting our own Christianity. In another milieu, under other

conditions, Antonio Conselheiro is a Christ, a Mohammed, a Messiah, one

of the many Mahdis, creators of religions in that fecund soil of human

belief which is Asia. In the sertão, friends and enemies and even the

constituted authorities, hold him (i. e., Antonio Maciel, the people’s

councillor) as a good, honest, upright man, despite the legend--and

is it only a legend?--which attributes to a tragic matricide his

transformation from a business man into a religious preacher, his life

as a saint and a missionary of the sertão.”

* * * * *

I find that I have spoken as much of Cunninghame-Graham as of the

Brazilian in whom he found his most important source; that is because

the Scotsman’s book is the best possible revelation in English of the

remarkable account given by Euclydes da Cunha.

_Os Sertões_ stands alone in the nation’s literature; we, in ours, have

no book to parallel it in spirit, purport or accomplishment. Yet even

today there are regions to which a similar method might be applied,

for Verissimo’s words about Asia seem to cover the United States as

well,--in less degree, of course, but for our purpose with equal

patness. More, a close reading of the government’s application of force

to a situation that might have yielded to less warlike methods,--or,

at least, that might have been managed without the necessity of the

final massacre--could teach something to all governmental departments

that are brought into contact with alien or extra-social groups which

must be incorporated into the national entity. _Os Sertões_ is the

best answer to the young Brazilian regionalists who have made the

book a rallying-point. Here is a volume--and a thick, compact volume

it is--dealing in quasi-reportorial spirit with a brief incident in

the most hidden recesses of the national interior; it was not written

with belles-lettres in mind; it is strewn with terms and processes

of thought that baffle the ordinary reader. Yet the man who composed

it was a vibrant personality, and whether knowingly or unwittingly,

he made the book a symbol,--a symbol of uncomprehending persecution,

of human fanaticism, of religious origins, of man’s instinctive

seeking after something higher. It is true that the persecution was

in part necessary, that the aspect of fanaticism here revealed is

most repugnant, that the spectacle of religious origins does not

flatter our unctuous, supposedly civilized, superior souls. But it is

true, likewise, that we must gaze into such depths as these to remind

ourselves occasionally that we dwell in these inferiors. Such is the

wisdom of Euclydes da Cunha, of Richard Cunninghame-Graham, of José

Verissimo.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Resumo da Historia do Brazil._ Maria G. L. de Andrade. Edição

Ampliada, 1920, Pages 277-278.

[2] “This struggle for existence,” writes Cunninghame-Graham in _A

Brazilian Mystic_ (pages 17-18) “amongst plants and animals presents

its counterpart amongst mankind. The climate sees to it that only those

most fitted to resist it arrive at manhood, and the rude life they

subsequently lead has forged a race as hard as the Castilians, the

Turks, the Scythians of old, or as the Mexicans.

“No race in all America is better fitted to cope with the wilderness.

The sertanejo is emphatically what the French call ‘a male.’ His Indian

blood has given him endurance and a superhuman patience in adversity.

From his white forefathers he has derived intelligence, the love of

individual as opposed to general freedom inherent in the Latin races,

good manners, and a sound dose of self-respect. His tinge of negro

blood, although in the sertão it tends to disappear out of the race, at

least in outward characteristics, may perchance have given him whatever

qualities the African can claim. Far from demonstrative, he yet feels

deeply; never forgets a benefit, and cherishes an insult as if it were

a pearl of price, safe to revenge it when the season offers or when the

enemy is off his guard.

“Centaurs before the Lord, the sertanejos do not appear (almost alone

of horsemen) to have that pride in their appearance so noticeable in

the gaucho, the Mexican and in the Arabs of North Africa. Seated in his

short, curved saddle, a modification of the ‘recao’ used on the Pampas

of the Argentine, the sertanejo lounges, sticks his feet forward, and

rides, as goes the saying, all about his horse, using, of course, a

single rein, and the high hand all natural horsemen affect. Yet, when

a bunch of cattle break into a wild stampede, the man is suddenly

transformed. Then he sits upright as a lance, or, bending low over his

horse’s neck, flies at a break-neck pace, dashing through the thick

scrub of the _caatingas_ in a way that must be seen to be believed.

Menacing boughs hang low and threaten him. He throws himself flat on

the horse’s back and passes under them. A tree stands in his way right

in the middle of his headlong career. If his horse, highly trained and

bitted, fails to stop in time, he slips off like a drop of water from a

pane of glass at the last moment, or if there is the smallest chance of

passing on one side, lies low along his horse’s flank after the fashion

of an old-time Apache or Comanche on the war-path.”

[3] I quote the translation of this quatrain from Cunninghame-Graham.

The third quatrain, here given as I find it in _Os Sertões_, 1914,

fifth edition, differs in a single unimportant spelling from that used

by the author of _A Brazilian Mystic_, who translates it: “Our King,

Dom Sebastian, will come to visit us and free us from the reign of the

dog.” I do not think this is correct, as the two final lines are a

threat to the other side.

VI

MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA

Oliveira Lima belongs, more than to the history of Brazilian letters,

to the history of Brazilian culture. He is an integral part of

that culture and his life, coincidentally, runs parallel with the

emergence of Brazil into an honoured position among the nations of the

world. Once, in a happy phrase, the Swedish writer Goran Björkman, a

corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, characterized

him aptly as “Brazil’s intellectual ambassador to the world,” and

the phrase has stuck because it so eminently fitted the modest,

indefatigable personality to whom it was applied. In a sense Oliveira

Lima has been, too, the world’s intellectual ambassador to Brazil; he

has seen service literally in every corner of the globe,--in Argentina

as in the United States, in Japan as in France, Belgium, Sweden and

Germany. Wherever he has come he has torn aside the dense veil of

ignorance that has hidden Brazil from the eyes of none too curious

foreigners; from wherever he has gone he has sent back to his native

land solidly written, well considered volumes upon the civilization of

the old world and the new. In both the physical and the intellectual

sense he has been, largely, Brazil’s point of contact with the rest

of the world. And the nation has been most fortunate in that choice,

for Manoel de Oliveira Lima, most “undiplomatic” of diplomats, is the

most human of men. He is, in the least spectacular sense of the word,

an inspirer, not of words but of deeds. Trace his itinerary during

the past twenty-five years and it is a miniature map of a double

enlightenment. If diplomacy is ever to achieve anything like genuine

internationality, it must travel some such path as this. And I dare say

that Senhor Oliveira Lima is one of the rare precursors of just such a

diplomacy. The example of his career has helped to raise that office

from one of sublimated social hypocrisy to the dignity of lofty human

intercourse.

Manoel de Oliveira Lima was born on December 25th, 1867, in the city

of Recife, Pernambuco,--that state of which Silveira Martins has

strikingly declared that the Brazilian gaucho--indomitable defender

of the nation’s frontiers--was simply a Pernambucan on horseback. He

was sent early to Portugal to complete his education, becoming one of

the favourite students of the noted historian Oliveira Martins; at the

age of twenty-one he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and

Letters from the University of Lisbon and set out, after a couple of

years, upon his career of diplomacy, into which he was initiated by

Carvalho Borges and the Baron de Itajubá.

“Oliveira Lima never wrote verses,” declared Salvador de Mendonça once

in a speech of welcome. “I believe that, with the exception of the

_Lusiads_, all poems are to him like the _Colombo_ of Porto Alegre to

the readers of our literature, an unknown land awaiting some Columbus

to discover it. Like an old philosopher friend of mine, who doesn’t

admit monologues or asides in the theatre because only fools or persons

threatened with madness converse with themselves, so Oliveira Lima

finds it hardly natural for people to write in verse, for the language

of seers was never the spoken tongue. His spirit is positive and

direct; only curved lines are lacking for him to be a geometer. His

characteristic trait is sincerity; he says only what he thinks is true,

and says it without beating about the bush, in the explicit form of his

conviction. I believe that he is but a lukewarm admirer of music, and

prefers, to the contemplation of nature, the study of social phenomena

and the examination of the human beehive.”

For a Brazilian never to have written verses is indeed almost a

violation of the social code, and it may be that Senhor Lima’s

lukewarmness toward music helps to explain a certain lack of musicality

in his clear but compact prose. But lack of poetic appreciation should

not be inferred from his friend’s lines; one has but to go through

one of Lima’s earliest and most solid works, _Aspectos da Litteratura

Colonial Brazileira_, to discover, in this original contribution, a

deep, unostentatious feeling for those beautiful emotions we call

poetry.

His literary career, as we have seen, is closely identified with

his numerous peregrinations. It opened with a historical study of

his birthplace: _Pernambuco, seu Desenvolimento historica_ (1894),

followed two years later by the _Aspectos_. Thereafter is pursued,

rather closely, the travels of Lima, resulting in _Nos Estados Unidos_

(1899), a work of uneven value upon the United States, _No Japão_,

(1903), a more mature volume upon the land of the rising sun, countless

speeches and series of lectures delivered in the universities of both

hemispheres--now at the Sorbonne, now at the University of Louvaine, at

Harvard, Yale, Stanford University and lesser institutions--and always

upon his favourite theme: the history of Brazilian and Latin-American

culture. Out of these lectures have arisen more than one of his books,

some of them originally delivered in English and French; for Lima is

an accomplished linguist, employing English and French with ease and

speaking German, Italian and Spanish as well.

It is history that forms his main interest; even when he makes a single

attempt--and not a highly successful one--at the drama, his _Secretario

d’El Rey_ (The King’s Secretary, 1904) turns upon the historic figure

of Alexandre de Gusmão in the days of 1738. It is worth while noting,

as a commentary upon Lima’s unfanatic patriotism, that he justly

considers this work a Brazilian drama, though the action takes place

in Portugal. For, “in the first place, our historic period anterior

to the Independence necessarily involves so intimate a connection of

the colony with the court that it is almost impossible, treating of

the one, to lose the other from sight. Material communication and

above all moral relations established a sort of territorial continuity

between both sides of the Atlantic, which formed a single fatherland.

Besides, the action of the piece could hardly have been made to take

place in Brazil, since the protagonist of the play, perhaps the most

illustrious Brazilian of the XVIIIth century, and one whose personality

merited, as few others, consecration upon the stage, lived in Europe

from his earliest youth. For identical reasons the action of _O Poeta e

a Inquisção_ (The Poet and the Inquisition) by Domingos de Magalhães,

our first national tragedy, takes place in Lisbon. And finally the

author would remind his reader that the spirit of his piece is entirely

Brazilian, trying to symbolize--and more direct pretension would be

anachronistic--the differentiation which had already begun between the

mother country and its American colony, which was destined to continue

and propagate its historic mission in the new world, and the economic

importance of which was daily becoming more manifest.”

It is in history that, with a few exceptions, Lima’s most enduring

work has been performed. He has recreated the figure of Dom João VI

(_Dom João no Brasil_, 2 vols.); he has thrown light into dark places

of the national narrative, particularly in the period beginning with

the French invasion of Portugal that sent John VI to Brazil in 1808

and thus made the colony a virtual kingdom, and ending with 1821. “Dr.

Lima’s investigations in hitherto unused sources also led to a revision

of judgment,” wrote Professor P. A. Martin, “of many personages

and events of the period; an instance of which is his successful

rehabilitation of the character of Dom John VI. This sovereign, treated

with contempt and contumely by the bulk of the Portuguese historians

who have never forgiven him for deserting his native land, now appears

in a new and deservedly more favorable light. The author makes it

clear that John’s rule in Brazil was as liberal and progressive as was

desirable in a country in which all thorough-going reforms must of

necessity be introduced gradually. And these same reforms, especially

the opening of the chief Brazilian ports to the commerce of all

friendly nations, not only redounded to the immediate benefit of the

country, but what was infinitely more important, paved the way for

ultimate independence.”[1] So well, indeed, that the year following

John’s departure is the year of Brazil’s complete emancipation.

Oliveira Lima’s internationalism--employing that word in a broader

sense than it is usually given in political discussion--is thus at once

territorial and spiritual. He knows his own country too well to glorify

it in the unthinking patriotism of a Rocha Pitta; he knows the rest

of the world too well to harbour faith in the exclusivistic loyalties

that patriotism everywhere connotes. His very books, as if to symbolize

his universal attitude, trace the amplification of his interests and

of his cosmopolitan spirit. He began with a study of his birthplace;

he continued with a study of his nation’s colonial letters; he then

initiated a series dealing with national, historical figures and

events, in conjunction with books upon the four corners of the world.

Latterly, as if to round out the whole, he has completed a _History of

Civilization_, intended chiefly for use in Brazil’s higher centres of

education; but it is far more than a mere text-book. It is the natural

outgrowth of a dignified lifetime,--the work of a man who, early placed

in the diplomatic service, outgrew the confines of that profession

because, in simple words, he was too human for it.

“In fact,” he himself once declared in a speech, “to be a good diplomat

is to be able to deceive wisely.” And Lima has been wiser in goodness

than in deceit.

It is easy enough now, with the distance of a few years between us

and the end of a war that need never have been fought, to proclaim a

humanistic spiritual world-unity. It was not easy for Lima while the

war was going on; perhaps he, as well as any other, recognized the

futility of his efforts to keep at least the western hemisphere of

the world sane during the carnage; perhaps this was but an example of

what one of his youthful disciples has called his “quixotism.” It was,

together with these things, a simple, if striking, example, of the

man’s devotion to the truth he sees.

“Through love of the truth,” he said, at a banquet given to him in

Rio Janeiro in 1917, “I became a diplomat, who did not correspond to

the ideal of the type, despite the remark of a departed friend of

mine who used to say that I had spent my life lying, in Europe, Asia

and America, saying, in foreign countries and to foreign audiences,

that Brazil possesses a dramatic history, a brilliant literature, a

promising economy,--in short--all the characteristics of a civilization

…, of which my friend, apparently, was sceptical.

“Through love of the truth, I am now a journalist who ought to

correspond to the ideal of the type, and if I do not, it is for the

simple reason that in a certain sense, truth is the most burdensome

luggage a person can carry through life, for it is always getting into

our way. I don’t see why it should be inculcated with such arduous

effort--and, paradoxically, a sincere effort--into the souls of

children, since, in their future life it can cause so much trouble to

those of us who continue to invoke and apply what was taught us as a

virtue.”

If Lima has been an undiplomatic diplomat, he is an unjournalistic

journalist. As another paradox in his life, this man of Brazilian

birth, Portuguese education and tri-continental wanderings has settled

down in Washington, D. C., having presented his remarkable library to

the Catholic University. Back from his present home he sends, to be

sure, political chronicle and such chat, but also literary letters that

are read with avidity by a youth whom he is strongly influencing. This

is the stuff out of which a number of his books have grown; it is the

sort of journalism that Bernard Shaw has boasted about, because of its

intimate relation to significant, immediate life.

That he has chosen the United States for his permanent home

sufficiently indicates a predilection early evidenced in his book upon

this country; but that preference is neither blind nor unreasoned, any

more than his Pan-Americanism is the hollow proclamation that deceives

nobody less than alert South Americans. In his attitude to our nation

he is candid, direct, with the reserve of a Martí, a Rodó, a Verissimo,

only that he knows us more intimately than did those sterling spirits.

At the end of a series of lectures dedicated to the then President of

Leland Stanford Junior University, John Casper Branner, “distinguished

scientist, eminent scholar and true friend of Brazil,” and delivered

at that university, as well as others of this country, Lima declared

that “The filiation and evolution of Portuguese America are separate

from those of Spanish America; not infrequently, nay frequently

rather, was this evolution hostile to that of Spanish America; but

today they have common, identical interests, and a desire for a closer

approximation appears so reciprocal that this movement becomes every

day more pronounced and more firmly rooted. For Pan-Americanism to be

complete, it would be necessary for the United States to ally itself

with Latin America, with the importance, the influence, the prestige,

the superiority to which its civilization entitles it--it would not be

human to do otherwise--but without any thought, expressed or reserved,

of direct predominance, which offends the weaker element and renders it

suspicious.

“It is this which those who, like myself, know and esteem the United

States,--and the best way of showing one’s esteem is not by praising

unreservedly,--are hoping will come as the result of the great

university movement which is gradually crystallizing in this country.

Here idealism is a feature of the race (nor would you without it

belong to a superior race), an ideal so noble and elevated as that of

respect for the right of others, as that of human solidarity through

the unification of culture. The great statesman who now presides over

the destinies of the Argentine Republic, proclaimed at the First

Pan-American Conference, at Washington, that America belonged to all

humanity, not to a fraction of it; and indeed America is and will

continue to be more and more the field for the employment of European

capital, of study for European scholars, of commerce for European

merchants, of activity for European immigration. Only thus will the

New World fulfil its historical and social mission and redeem the debt

contracted with Europe, which has given it its civilization.”[2]

This is an example of that “Spirit of peace and concord to which I have

ever subordinated my spiritual activity.”[3]

As an investigator, Lima has always gone to the sources; he has the

born historian’s patience with detail, and if he lacks the music of a

seductive prose, he compensates for this more purely literary grace

with a gift for vivifying the men and events of the past. Thus, if

his sole venture into the historical drama has been unproductive

of dramatic beauty, his historical writings abound in passages of

colourful, dramatic power. Carlos Pereyra, himself a prolific writer

upon American history, has, in his Spanish translation of Lima’s

_Historic Formation of the Brazilian Nationality_, compared him to such

painters of the soul as Frans Hals. “Oliveira Lima paints portraits

in the fashion of Hals. Thus we behold his personages not only in the

ensemble of the canvas and in the external perfection of each figure,

but in that mysterious prolongation that carries us into the intimate

shadows of the personality.…”

Lima’s eclecticism is but the natural result of his residence in many

parts of the world; it is also an aspect of a spiritual tolerance

which is a trait of his personality, and which despite his “historic

Catholicism” evokes, even from an unbeliever, the simple tribute which

in this modest essay I seek to render as much to that personality as

to any of its products.

As for his growing influence upon the youth of Brazil, I will let one

of the most promising of those young men speak for his colleagues.

Writes Senhor Gilberto de Mello Freyre,[4] “This independence of view

and attitude explains the fascination that he exercises over the

intellectual youth of Brazil.… He is generous toward the newcomers,

without for that reason being easy with his praise. On the contrary, he

is discreet. His generosity never reaches the extremes of indulgence.

His intellectual hospitality has been great; he has been a sort of

bachelor uncle to the nation’s ‘enfants terribles.’ He was one of the

first to proclaim the powerful, strange talents of Euclydes da Cunha.

He has sponsored other youthful intellects whose brilliant future he

can foresee, such as Sr. Assis Chateaubriand, Sr. Antonio Carneiro

Leão, Sr. Mario Mello, Sr. Annibal Fernandes.”

There are men whose lives are the best books they have written; to this

company Manoel de Oliveira Lima belongs. He has identified himself so

completely with the cultural history of his nation that, as I said at

the beginning, he is an integral part of it, and if his works were

removed from the national bookshelf, a yawning gap would be left. That

is the better nationalism, to which he has devoted an unchauvinistic

career of the higher patriotism. He has, on the other hand, become

so essentially cosmopolitan as to have earned the rare title of

world-citizen. If more diplomats have not been able to reconcile

these two supposed “opposites,” it is not because such a patriotism

is incompatible with the international mind, but because under their

ceremonial clothes they hide the age-old predatory heart and serve the

age-old predatory interests. Lima has not labelled others, and I am not

going to label him; men, like countries, must remain ever different.

But countries, like men, may bridge the gulf of difference by patient

understanding, and the rivers of blood that flow under those bridges

must be the blood of human tolerance and aid, not the blood of barter

and battle. It would be easy to point out a certain “conservatism” in

Lima, as in more than one other, and yet, if it be possible for us to

live in anything but the present, he is a man of the future, for he

has always dwelt above boundaries, above battles, above most of the

sublimated childishness which we grown-ups pompously call “the serious

business of the world.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Introduction to _The Evolution of Brazil compared with that

of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America_. Stanford University, California,

1914. The introduction, by Professor Percy Alvin Martin, should be read

with care, as it assigns Lima’s year of birth erroneously to the year

1865, and gives wrong dates for the _Aspectos_ (1896, not 1906) and

_Pernambuco_ (1894, not 1895); moreover, it ascribes to Björnstjerne

Björnsen, instead of to Goran Björkman, the bestowal upon Lima of the

epithet “intellectual ambassador of Brazil.”

[2] Lima here refers to Dr. Roque Saenz-Peña, inaugurated 1910. The

citation is from Lecture VI (and last); the series was delivered in

English.

[3] See Preface to his book on Argentina (1920, Spanish version, Buenos

Aires).

[4] In a recent letter to me.

VII

GRAÇA ARANHA

Graça Aranha, like Euclydes da Cunha (from whom in so many other

respects he is so different), is a man virtually of a single book.

And, as _Os Sertões_ in 1902 created so profound an impression upon

Brazilian letters as to suggest a partial reorientation of the national

literature, so, in the same year, did the appearance of Aranha’s

_Chanaan_ work a profound change in the Brazilian novel. Much ink has

been spilled about it and often, if not generally, in that exalted

rhetorical mood for which the Ibero-American critic does not lack

models abroad; upon the strength of _Chanaan_ alone, Senhor Costa (and

not entirely without justice) has created a new phase of the national

novel: the critico-philosophical; Guglielmo Ferrero, the noted Italian

historian, a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters,

made it known to Europe with his fulsome praise of it as the great

American novel,--a term that had already been applied to _María_ (by

the Colombian Jorge Isaacs) and Taunay’s _Innocencia_. There is a

distinct basis for comparison between _Innocencia_ and the more famous

tale from Colombia; between these and _Chanaan_, however, there is

little similarity, if one overlooks the poetic atmosphere that glamours

all three. Aranha’s book is of far broader conception than the other

two; it adds to their lyricism an epic sweep inherent in the subject

and very soon felt in the treatment. It is, in fact, a novel difficult

to classify, impregnated as it is with a noble, Tolstoian idealism,

yet just as undoubtedly streaked with an unrelenting realism so often

coupled with the name of Zola. Yet one does not perceive too plainly an

inept mingling of genres; the style is a mirror of the vast theme--that

moment at which the native and the immigrant strains begin to merge in

the land of the future--the promised land that the protagonists are

destined never to enter, even as Moses himself, upon Mount Nebo in the

land of Moab, beheld Canaan and died in the thrall of the great vision.

Aranha seems truly to have been called to this task rather than to have

chosen it. He is cosmopolitan by culture as well as training. Himself

a descendant of an old family, he has not been hampered by the false

aristocracy of the family, else how could he have composed the epic

of Brazil’s melting-pot? He has served his nation at home and abroad,

having been secretary to Joaquim Nabuco when that diplomat went to

Italy to settle before the king the boundary dispute between Brazil

and Great Britain in the matter of British Guiana; he was Brazilian

minister at Christiania, and later Plenipotentiary for Brazil at The

Hague. He is philosophically, critically inclined; he knows not only

the Latin element of his nation, but the Teutonic as well; his native

exuberance has been tempered by a serenity that is the product of

European influence, in which may be reckoned a tithe of English.

_Chanaan_ is of those novels that centre about an enthralling idea.

The type that devotes much attention to depictions of life and customs,

to discussions of present realities and ultimate purposes, is perhaps

more frequent among Spanish and Portuguese Americans than among our

own readers, who are too apt to be over-insistent in their demands

for swift, visible external action. Yet, in the hands of a master, it

possesses no less interest--for myself, I freely say more--than the

more obvious type of fiction. Ideas possess more life than the persons

who are moved by them.

The idea that carries Milkau from the Old World to the New is an

ideal of human brotherhood, high purpose and dissatisfaction with the

old, degenerate hemisphere. In the State of Espirito Santo, where

the German colonists are dominant, he plans a simple life that shall

drink inspiration in the youth of a new, virgin continent. He falls in

with another German, Lentz, whose outlook upon life is at first the

very opposite to Milkau’s blend of Christianity and a certain liberal

Socialism. The strange milieu breeds in both an intellectual languor

that vents itself in long discussions, in brooding contemplation,

mirages of the spirit. Milkau is gradually struck with something wrong

in the settlement. Little by little it begins to dawn upon him that

attributes akin to the Old-World hypocrisy, fraud and insincerity are

contaminating this supposedly virgin territory. Here he discovers

no paradise à la Rousseau--no natural man untainted by the ills of

civilization. Graft is as rampant as in any district of the world

across the sea; cruelty is as rife. His pity is aroused by the plight

of Mary, a destitute servant who is betrayed by the son of her

employers. Not only does the scamp desert her when she most needs

his protection and acknowledgment, but he is silent when his equally

vicious parents drive her forth to a life of intense hardship. She is

spurned at every door and reduced to beggary. Her child is born under

the most distressing of circumstances and devoured by a pig before her

very eyes, as she gazes helplessly on.

Mary is accused of infanticide, and since she lacks witnesses, is

placed in an extremely difficult position. Moreover, the father of

her child bends every effort to loosen the harshest measures of the

community against her, whereupon Milkau, whose heart is open to the

griefs of the universe, has another opportunity to behold man’s

inhumanity to woman. His pity turns to what pity is akin to; he effects

her release from jail, and together they go forth upon a journey

that ends in the delirium of death. The promised land has proved a

mirage--at least for the present. And it is upon this indecisive note

that the book comes to a close.

Ferrero,[1] in his introduction to the book is substantial and to the

point. It is natural that he should have taken such a liking to the

novel, for Aranha’s work is of intense interest to the reader who

looks for psychological insight, and Ferrero himself is the exponent

of history as psychology rather than as economic materialism. “The

critics,” he says, “will judge the literary merits of this novel. As

a literary amateur, I will point out among its qualities the beauty

of its style and its descriptions, the purity of the psychological

analysis, the depth of the thoughts and the reflections of which the

novel is full, and among its parts a certain disproportion between

the different parts of the book and an ending which is too vague,

indefinite, and unexpected. But its literary qualities seem to me to

be of secondary importance to the profound and incontrovertible idea

that forms the kernel of the book. Here in Europe we say that modern

civilization develops itself in America more freely than in Europe, for

in the former country it has not to surmount the obstacle of an older

society, firmly established as in the case of the latter. Because of

this we call America ‘the country of the young,’ and we consider the

New World as the great force which decomposes the old European social

organization.” That idea is, as Ferrero points out, and as Milkau

discovered for himself, an illusion due to distance. Ferrero points

out, too, that here is everywhere “an old America struggling against

a new one and, what is very curious, the new America, which upsets

traditions, is formed above all by the European immigrants who seek

a place for themselves in the country of their adoption, whereas the

real Americans represent the conservative tendencies. Europe exerts on

American society--through its emigrants--the same dissolving action

which America exerts--through its novelties and its example--on the old

civilization of Europe.” The point is very well taken, and contains

the germ of more than one great novel of the United States. And just

as _Chanaan_ stands by itself in Brazilian literature, so might such a

novel achieve pre-eminence in our own.

“It is probable,” says Milkau to Lentz during one of their numerous

discussions, in words that may have suggested this criticism to Ferrero

and that may be applicable to our own nation,--“it is probable that

our fate will be to transform this country from top to bottom, to

substitute another civilization for all the culture, religion and

traditions of a people. It is a new conquest, slow, dour, peaceful in

its means, but terrible in its ambitious schemes. The substitution must

be so pure and luminous that upon it may not fall the bitter curse of

devastation. In the meantime we are a dissolvent of the race of this

country. We soak into the nation’s clay and soften it; we mix ourselves

with the natives and kill their traditions, and spread confusion among

them.… No one will understand anyone else; there is a confusion of

tongues; men coming from everywhere--bring with them the images of

their several gods; they are all alien to each other; there is no

communion of thought; men and women do not make love to each other in

the same words.… Everything is disintegrating; one civilization falls

and is transformed into an unknown one.… The remodelling of the nation

is being set back. There is tragedy in the soul of a Brazilian when

he feels that his race will not last for evermore. The law of nature

is that like begets like.… And here tradition is broken; the father

will not transmit his own image to his son; the language is dying; the

old aspirations of the race, the deep-rooted desires for a distinct

individuality, will become dumb; the future will not understand the

past.”[2]

Ferrero is quite right in indicating the great non-literary importance

of the novel; indeed, Brazilian criticism, as a whole, has in the

consideration of _Chanaan_ been so dazzled by the language and the

social implications of the novel that it has overlooked or condoned

its structural defects as a work of art. But not all readers will

agree with Ferrero, I imagine, as to the excessive vagueness of the

end. Hardly any other type of ending would have befitted a novel that

treats of transition, of a landscape that enthralls, of possibilities

that founder, not through the malignance of fate so much as through the

stupidity, the cupidity, the crassness of man. There is an epic swirl

to the finale that reminds one of the disappearance of an ancient deity

in a pillar of dust. For an uncommon man like Milkau an uncommon end

was called for.

In this novelized document upon Brazil’s racial problems and popular

customs a certain and facile symbolism seems to inhere. Milkau is, as

we have seen, the blend of Christianity and Socialism,--two concepts

which, for all their recent historic enmity, are closely related,

though by no means identical, in philosophical background. Lentz is

the apostle of Nietzscheanism. Mary is the suffering land, a prey

to the worse elements. The pot that melts the peoples melts their

philosophies. So are they fused in this book, which terminates in a

cloud, as of the first smoke to rise from the crucible.

_Chanaan_ is not, for all its novelty and substantiality, the “splendid

alliance of artistic perfection and moral grandeur” that one of its

countless panegyrists has discovered it to be. Neither does it contain

that mixture of Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Maeterlinck and

Anatole France which was found in it by an editorial writer in the

_Jornal do Commercio_. Even Verissimo, it seems to me, exaggerated the

artistic importance of the novel in his enthusiasm--a rare thing in

Verissimo--over the newness and the social significance of the book.

He speaks of its drama as being “curto, rapido e intenso,” yet surely

there is nothing “brief” or “rapid” in the telling of _Chanaan_,

though intense it undoubtedly is. “New in theme,” he wrote, “new in

inspiration and conception, new in style, _Chanaan_ is the first and

only manifestation worthy of appreciation among the new spiritual and

social currents that are everywhere influencing literature and art.

This novel brought to literature, not only Brazilian but Portuguese as

well, human and social preoccupations, and modern forms of expression.…

It may well be that chronologically some other came before him, but

in art excellency is more important than priority.… This is the first

novel of its kind in Brazil or Portugal. One may note the lack of

action, that is, a more or less complicated plot.… _Chanaan_, then,

belongs in the category of contemporary literature. The intense

drama that animates it is chiefly internal, but the feelings, the

sensations, the ideas vibrate in it like deeds.” Like deeds, in truth,

for feelings, sensations and ideas are the raw material of action;

more, the motive power itself of “action.” Verissimo is not so much

blind to the artistic deficiencies of _Chanaan_ as he is unmindful of

them. He readily grants that “not all the episodes adjust themselves

perfectly to the central action of the novel or even to the general

fact that it presents.… In a detailed analysis of the architecture of

the book perhaps other objections would be possible, but contemplating

the structure as a whole--and this is how a work of art should be

viewed--the impression is one of solid beauty. _Chanaan_ is truly a

work of talent in the most noble acceptation and the rarest application

of that word. With its generous inspiration, its penetrating symbolism

and its moving lyricism … with its wealth of ideas and sensations and

its rare emotional sincerity, what is perhaps most admirable in Graça

Aranha’s novel is the difficult union--intimate and perfect in this

book--of the loftiest idealism and the most inviting realism.”

Costa, as we have seen, has centred a new epoch of the Brazilian novel

around this one work, which he considers to have fixed the moment of

transition that is so eloquently suggested in the passage from Milkau

given above. “The problem of immigration was disquieting,” he writes.

“Moreover, as reaction against French culture,” (a reaction that

is now again to the fore) “the only culture that dominated without

rivalry in Brazil, our men of letters began to read the German authors:

Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. It was a moment of mental

elaboration,--an élan, a great hope, a fertile stirring of ideas, and,

at the same time, there was doubt as to one’s powers of resistance,

incertitude, puerile indecision, vague, formless aspirations,--that

state of semi-lethargy, with acute intermittent crises of vitality,

which characterizes the periods of transition amongst individuals and

nations, the burgeoning of the youthful intelligence of a new people,

the first attempts at independence, the will to learn and to produce,

to affirm and to acquire the consciousness of one’s worth as a nation

amongst the nations. It was in this period that there took place the

most memorable event in the intellectual life of Brazil: the foundation

of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.… Graça Aranha is, perhaps, the

fusion of two different cultures.” This is evident in _Chanaan_, I

may add in passing, without any reference to the known facts of the

man’s life and his education. And though it may be _studied_ in his

book, from him it flowed into the narrative out of his very nature.

He is, again in Costa’s words, “the focal point of two vigorous and

independent Brazilian thinkers: Tobias Barreto and Joaquim Nabuco.

The mysterious power of the race, its abandon, its sensual basis, its

curiosity for learning--revealing a little the rudimentary traits of

the mixed breed--the power of conception, the absolutist tendency, that

make and are the strength of Tobias Barreto, encounter, in the manner

of the law of compensation, a moderating force, a stabilization of

values in the Apollonian genius of Joaquim Nabuco, in the Aryan clarity

of his ideas, the Hellenic grace of his concepts, the brilliancy of his

rhythmic style, so elegant, delicate and noble,--in the loftiness of

his thoughts, in his civilized relativism. There are not in Brazil two

spirits, two esthetics, that are more different from, more antagonistic

to, each other. The first, despite his vast learning, his admiration

for and bedazzlement before European thought, is in every attitude,

every phrase, every gesture, an American, Brazilian, an exuberant son

of the tropics, sensual and barbarous; the second, despite his love

of his native land, despite his devotion … is, in his thought, in

manner, in tastes, in soul, in ideas and affections, in pleasures and

in style, a European, a Latin, a descendant in direct line of Greek

culture. Graça Aranha, by a phenomenon that I discover in his style,

has succeeded,--at the same time retaining complete independence,--in

effecting an alliance between two opposite poles, the harmonious

conjunction of these two different principles, the integration into a

single beautiful and lofty form of these two contradictory esthetics.

He has transformed the sensualism of Tobias Barreto into voluptuousness

and the eloquence of Joaquim Nabuco into poetry.”

Costa has stated the case with tropical luxuriance of phrase and

feeling; perhaps one must be a Brazilian to see all this--_as art_--in

the novel to which it is applied. Take up the book in and for itself,

as a product of a sensitive imagination transmuting the elements

of experience into a new reality, and it contains, surely, all the

qualities that its most intense admirers discover, but in less degree.

Milkau is really the only character in the novel; he is the soloist.

Too many of the beautiful thoughts remain here as isolated by-products

of conversation rather than living emanations of interplay of emotions.

There is a certain hesitancy as to form, which is now the frank

dialogue of the stage, now the exaltation of a nativist hymn in a

manner recalling, though of course not repeating, Rocha Pitta. Milkau

himself, speaking doubtless for Aranha, says that “man is not governed

by ideas; he is governed by feelings,” yet, so like the wise men who

discover that simple truth, continues to expatiate upon the ideas.

Could his sentence, indeed, have originated in one of simple feelings?

The very recognition that feeling dominates us is a token that it has

ceased to dominate entirely. This is another excellent reason for that

indecisive close of the book to which Ferrero objected, for Milkau is

caught in a mesh of indecision. It reveals, in the author, one of the

sources of his own indecision as to form; but in the novel something

of that uncertainty is felt in the telling, and interferes with one’s

complete enjoyment in the epoch-making book. Yet, strangely enough,

out of the weakness of the separate parts is forged a strength of the

whole. Once again, the book becomes the mirror of the folk who people

it, for out of the weakness of the individual would Milkau make the

strength of human solidarity. “My eyes cannot reach the limits of the

Infinite,” he cries at the very end. “My sight is limited to what

surrounds you.… But I tell you, if this is going to end so that the

cycle of existence may be repeated again elsewhere, or if some day

we will be extinguished with the last wave of heat coming from the

maternal bosom of earth, or if we be smashed with it in the Universe

and be scattered like dust on the roads of the heavens, let us not

separate from each other in this attitude of hatred.… I entreat you

and your innumerable descendants, let us reconcile ourselves with each

other before the coming of Death.…”

To sum up the artistic aspect of the case, I would say--with all

admiration for the novel _Chanaan_ and its countless fascinating

moments of speech, attitude and vision--that the book itself is even

in this respect a mirror, a symbol, of its people and its problems: it

is a high promise rather than the perfect fulfilment that so many of

its critics would see in it. It ascends the literary Mount Nebo, gazes

toward the Promised Land, but does not enter. It is one of the peaks of

Brazilian literature, both artistically (for detail) and historically

(as a whole), but I dare say that its artistic importance will diminish

as its historic significance increases. One’s sharper critical

examination of the book is a tribute to its disturbing qualities and

its peculiar individuality among the products of the modern novel.

* * * * *