The Popular Muse—Sixteenth Century Beginnings—Jesuit Influence—Seventeenth Century Nativism—The “Bahian” school—Gregorio de Mattos Guerra—First Half of Eighteenth Century—The Academies—Rocha Pitta—Antonio JosÉ da Silva. IIt is a question whether the people as a mass have really created the poetry and legends which long have been grouped under the designation of folk lore. Here, as in the more rarefied atmosphere of art, it is the gifted individual who originates or formulates the central theme, which is then passed about like a small coin that changes hands frequently; the sharp edges are blunted, the mint-mark is erased, but the coin remains essentially as at first. So that one may agree only halfway with Senhor De Carvalho, The study of the Brazilian popular muse owes much to the investigations of the tireless, ubiquitous Sylvio Romero, whom later writers have largely drawn upon. VocÊ gosta de mim, Eu gosto de vocÊ; Se papa consentir, Oh, meu bem, Eu caso com vocÊ.… AlÊ, alÊ, calunga, Mussunga, mussunga-Ê. Se me dÁ de vestir, Se me dÁ de comer, Se me paga a casa, Ob, meu bem, Eu moro com vocÊ.… AlÊ, alÊ, calunga, Mussunga, mussunga-Ê. On the whole, that same melancholy which is the hallmark of so much Brazilian writing, is discernible in the popular refrain. The themes are the universal ones of love and fate, with now and then a flash of humour and earthy practicality. Romero, with his excessive fondness for categories (a vice which with unconscious humour he was the very first to flagellate), suggested four chief types of popular poetry, (1) the romances and xacaras, (2) the reisados and cheganÇas, (3) the oraÇoes and parlendos, (4) versos geraes or quandrinhas. In the same way the folk tales are referred to Portuguese, native and African origin, with a more recent addition of mestiÇo (hybrid, mestee) material. “The Brazilian Sheherezade,” writes De Carvalho, IIThe sixteenth century, so rich in culture and accomplishment for the Portuguese, is almost barren of literature in Brazil. A few chroniclers, the self-sacrificing Father Anchieta, the poet Bento Teixeiro Pinto,—and the list is fairly exhausted. These are no times for esthetic leisure; an indifferent monarch occupies the throne in JosÉ de Anchieta (1530-1597) is now generally regarded as the earliest of the Brazilian writers. He is, to Romero, the pivot of his century’s letters. For more than fifty years he was the instructor of the population; for his beloved natives he wrote grammars, lexicons, plays, hymns; a gifted polyglot, he employed Portuguese, Spanish, Latin, Tupy; he penned the first autos and mysteries produced in Brazil. His influence, on the whole, however, was more practical than literary; he was not, in the esthetic sense a writer, but rather an admirable Jesuit who performed, amidst the greatest difficulties, a work of elementary civilization. The homage paid to his name during the commemoration of the tercentenary of his death was not only a personal tribute but in part, too, a rectification of the national attitude toward the Jesuit company which he distinguished. It was the Jesuits who early established schools in the nation (in 1543 they opened at Bahia the first institution of “higher education”); it was they who sought to protect the Indians from the cruelty of the over-eager exploiters; Senhor Oliveira Lima has even suggested that it was owing to a grateful recollection of the services rendered to the Next to Anchieta, Bento Teixeira Pinto, who flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century, is Brazil’s most ancient poet. To that same noble personage, governor of Pernambuco, is dedicated the ProsopopÉa, undoubtedly the work of Bento Teixeira, and just as undoubtedly a pedestrian performance in stilted hendecasyllabic verses, ninety-four octaves in all, in due classic form. There is much imitation of CamÕes, who, indeed, entered Brazilian literature as a powerful influence through these prosaic lines of Bento Teixeira. “His poem (i. e., the Lusiads of CamÕes) is henceforth to make our epics, his poetic language will provide the instrument of our poets and his admirable lyrism will influence down to the very present, our own in all that it has and preserves of sorrow, longing, nostalgia and Camonean love melancholy.” In the ProsopopÉa occurs a description of the recife of Pernambuco which has been looked upon as one of the first evidences of the Brazilian fondness for the native scene. The passage is utterly uninspired; Neptune and Argos rub shoulders with the barbaros amid an insipid succession of verses. Verissimo sees, in the entire poem, no “shadow of the influence of the new milieu in which it was conceived and executed.” The earliest genuine manifestation of such nativism in poetry he does not discover until A Ilha da MarÉ, by Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, which, though published in the eighteenth century was, most likely, written in the seventeenth. The chroniclers of the early colonial period present chiefly points of historic, rather than literary, interest. Pero de MagalhÃes Gandavo, with his Historia da Provincia de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil (with a verse-letter by Luiz de CamÕes as preface), published in 1576 in Lisbon, is regarded as the first in the long line of historians; even today he is valuable as a source. Gabriel Soares de Souza, is far better known for his Tractado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587, printed in 1851 by Varnhagen and highly praised by that voluminous investigator for its “profound observation.” … “Neither Dioscorides nor Pliny better explains the plants of the old world than Soares those of the new.… It is astonishing how the attention of a single person could occupy itself with so many things … such as are contained in his work, which treats at the same time, in relation to Brazil, of geography, history, typography, hydrography, intertropical agriculture, Brazilian horticulture, native materia medica, wood for building and for cabinet-work, zoology in all its branches, administrative economy and even mineralogy!” Of less importance is the Jesuit Father FernÃo Cardim (1540-1625), whose work was made known in 1847 by Varnhagen under the geographic title Narrativa epistolar de uma viagem e missÃo jesuitica pela Bahia, Ilheos, Porto Seguro, Pernambuco, Espirito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, etc. It consists of two letters, dated 1583 and addressed to the provincial of the Company in Portugal. There is little profit in listing the men and works of this age and character. According to Romero the chroniclers exhibit thus early the duplex tendency of Brazilian literature,—description of nature and description of the savage. The tendency grows during the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth becomes predominant, so that viewed in this light, Brazilian nativism, far from being the creation of nineteenth century Romanticism, was rather a historic prolongation. IIIThe sporadic evidences of a nascent nativism become in the seventeenth century a conscious affirmation. The struggle against the Dutch in Pernambuco and the French in MaranhÃo compelled a union of the colonial forces and instilled a sort of Brazilian awareness. The economic situation becomes more firm, so that Romero may regard the entire century as the epoch of sugar, even as the succeeding century was to be one of gold, and the nineteenth,—as indeed the twentieth,—one of coffee. Agriculture even before the mines,—as Lima has pointed In Brazilian literature, the century belongs mainly to Bahia, which during the second half became a court in little, with its governor as the center of a luxurious entourage. Spanish influence, as represented in the all-conquering GÓngora, vied with that of the poets of the Italian and Portuguese renaissance; Tasso, Lope de Vega, Gabriel de Castro and a host of others were much read and imitated. And in the background rose a rude civilization reared upon slavery and greed, providing rich The salient chroniclers and preachers of the century may be passed over in rapid review. At their head easily stands Frei Vicente do Salvador, (1564-1636/39) author of the Historia da Custodia do Brasil, which was not published until 1888, more than two hundred and sixty years after it was written (1627). His editor, Capistrano de Abreu, has pointed out his importance as a reagent against the dominant tendency of spiritual servitude to Portugal. “To him Brazil means more than a geographical expression; it is a historical and social term. The XVIIth century is the germination of this idea, as the XVIIIth is its ripening.” The Historia possesses, furthermore, a distinct importance for the study of folk lore. Manoel de Moraes (1586-1651) enjoys what might be called a cenotaphic renown as the author of a Historia da America that has never been found. Little more than names are Diogo Gomes Carneiro and Frei ChristovÃo da Madre de Deus Luz. Of far sterner stuff than his vagrant brother Gregorio was the preacher Eusebio de Mattos (1629-1692) who late in life left the Company of Jesus. There is little in The poets of the century narrow down to two, of whom the first may be dismissed with scant ceremony. Manoel Botelho de Oliveira (1636-1711) was the first Brazilian poet to publish a book of verses. His Musica do Parnaso em quatro coros de rimas portuguezas, castelhanas, italianas e latinas, com seu descante comico reduzido em duas comedias was published at Lisbon in 1705. Yet for all this battery of tongues there is little in the book to commend it, and it would in all likelihood be all but forgotten by today were it not for the descriptive poem A Ilha da MarÉ, in which has been discovered,—as we have seen in our citation from Verissimo,—one of the earliest manifestations of nativism; Botelho de Oliveira’s Brazilianism, as appears from his preface, was a conscious attitude, and the patient, plodding cataloguing of the national fruit-garden precedes by a century the seventh canto of the epic CaramurÚ; but for all this, there are in the three hundred and twenty-odd lines of the poem only some four verses with any claim to poetic illumination. The depths of bathetic prose are reached in a passage oft Tenho explicado as fruitas e os legumes, Que dÃo a Portugal muitos ciumes; Tenho recopilado O que o Brasil contÉm para invejado, E para preferir a toda terra, Em si perfeitos quatro AA encerra. Tem o primeiro A, nos arvoredos Sempre verdes aos olhos, sempre ledos; Tem o segunda A nos ares puros, Na temperie agradaveis e seguros; Tem o terceiro A, nas aguas frias Que refrescam o peito e sÃo sadias, O quarto A, no assucar deleitoso, Que É do mundo o regalo mais mimoso; SÃo, pois, os quatro AA por singuares Arvoredos, assucar, aguas, ares. All of which bears almost the same relation to poetry as the grouping of the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) to musical criticism. Romero found the poet’s nationalism an external affair; “the pen wished to depict Brazil, but the soul belonged to Spanish or Portuguese cultism.” So, too, Carvalho, who would assign the genuine beginnings of Brazilian sentiment to Gregorio de Mattos. Gregorio de Mattos Guerra (1633-1696) is easily the Verissimo, I believe, overstates his case. That Gregorio de Mattos was not an original creative spirit may at once be admitted. But he was an undoubted personality; he aimed his satiric shafts only too well at prominent creatures of flesh and blood and vindictive passions; he paid for his ardour and temerity with harsh exile and in the end would seem even to have evinced a sincere repentance. The motto of his life’s labours, indeed, might be a line from one of his most impertinent poems: “Eu, que me nÃo sei calar” … I, who cannot hold my tongue … Nor did Gregorio de Mattos hold his tongue, whether in the student days at Coimbra—where already he was feared for that wagging lance—or during his later vicissitudes in Brazil. In 1864 he married Maria dos Povos, whose reward for advising him to give up his satiric habits was to be made the butt of his next satire. It would have been a miracle if he were either happy with or faithful to her; he was neither. He slashed right and left about him; argued cases—and won them!—in rhyme; poverty, however, was his constant companion, so that, for other reasons aplenty, his wife soon left him. Now his venom bursts forth all the less restrained. Personal enmities made among the influential were bound Gregorio de Mattos’s satire sought familiar targets: the judge, the client, the abusive potentate, the venal religious. “Perhaps without any intention on his part,” suggests Carvalho, “he was our first newspaper, wherein are registered the petty and great scandals of the epoch, the thefts, crimes, adulteries, and even the processions, anniversaries and births that he so gaily celebrated in his verses.” Que os Brasileiros sÃo bestas, E estÃo sempre a trabalhar Toda a vida por manter Maganos de Portugal. There is a tenderer aspect to the poet, early noted in his sonnets; despite the wild life he led there are accents of sincerity in his poems of penitence; no less sincere, if less lofty, are his poems of passion, in which love is faunesque, sensual, a thing of hot lips and anacreontic abandon. He can turn a pretty (and empty) compliment almost as gracefully as his Spanish models. But it is really too much to institute a serious comparison between him and Verlaine, as Carvalho would do. Some outward resemblance there is in the lives of the men (yet how common after all, are repentance after ribaldry, and connubial I am surprised that no Brazilian has found for Gregorio de Mattos Guerra a parallel spirit much nearer than Verlaine in both time and space. The Peruvian Caviedes was some twenty years younger than his Brazilian contemporary; his life has been likened to a picaresque novel. He was no closet-spirit and his addiction to the flesh, no whit less ardent than Gregorio’s, resulted in the unmentionable affliction. He, too, repented, before marriage rather than after; his wife dying, he surrendered to drink and died four years before the Brazilian, if 1692 is the correct date. As Gregorio de Mattos flayed the luxury of Bahia, so Caviedes guffawed at the sybarites of Lima. He castigated monastic corruption, trounced the physicians, manhandled the priests, and his snickers echoed in the high places. He knew his Quevedo quite as well as did Gregorio and has been called “the first revolutionary, the most illustrious of colonial poets.” Of Gregorio de Mattos I will quote a single sonnet Nasce o Sol; e nÃo dura mais que um dia, Depois da luz, se segue a noite escura, Em tristes sombras morre a formosura, Em continuas tristezas a alegria. PorÉm, se acaba o sol, porque nascia? Se formosa a luz É, porque nÃo dura? Como a belleza assim se trasfigura? Como o gosto, da pena assim se fia? Mas no sol, e na luz, falte a firmeza, Na formosura nÃo se da constancia, E na alegria, sinta-se a tristeza. Comece o mundo, emfim, pela ignorancia; Pois tem qualquer dos bens, por natureza, A firmeza somente na inconstancia. IVThe first half of the eighteenth century, a review of which brings our first period to a close, is the era of the bandeirantes in Brazilian history and of the Academies in the national literature. The external enemies had been fought off the outer boundaries in the preceding century; now had come the time for the conquest of the interior. While the bandeirantes were carrying on the tradition of Portuguese bravery—evidence of a restlessness which Carvalho would find mirrored even today in the “intellectual nomadism” of his countrymen, as well as in their political and cultural instability—the literary folk of the civilized centers were following the tradition of Portuguese imitation. At Bahia and Rio de Janeiro Academies Some wrote in Latin altogether upon Brazilian topics, as witness Prudencio do Amaral’s poem on sugar-manufacture (no less!) entitled De opifichio sacchario; the cultivation of manioc and tobacco were equally represented in these pseudo-Virgilian efforts. It is a barren half century for literature. Outside of the author of the Eustachidos and the two important figures to which we soon come only the brothers Bartholomeu LourenÇo and Alexandre de GusmÃo are remembered, and they do not come properly within the range of literary history. The one was a physicist and mathematician; the other, a statesman. The latter in his Marido Confundido, 1737, wrote a comedy in reply to MoliÈre’s Georges Dandin, much to the delight of the Lisbonese audiences. The two salient figures of the epoch are SebastiÃo da Rocha Pitta (1660-1738) and Antonio JosÉ da Silva (1705-1739). Brazilian critics seem well disposed to forget Rocha Pitta’s mediocre novels and sterile verses; it is for his Historia that he is remembered, and fondly, despite all the extravagances of style that mark the book. Romero regards it as a patriotic hymn, laden with ostentatious learning and undoubted leanings toward Portugal. Oliveira Lima’s view, however, is more scientific and historically dispassionate. One could not well expect of a writer at the beginning of the eighteenth century a nationalistic sentiment, “In no other region,” runs one of the passages best known to Brazilians, “is the sky more serene, nor does dawn glow more beautifully; in no other hemisphere does the sun flaunt such golden rays nor such brilliant nocturnal glints; the stars are more benign and ever joyful; the horizons where the sun is born or where it sinks to rest are always unclouded; the water, whether it be drunk from the springs in the fields or from the town aqueduct, is of the purest; Brazil, in short, is the Terrestrial Paradise discovered at last, wherein the vastest rivers arise and take their course.” I am inclined to question whether Antonio JosÉ da Silva really belongs to the literature of Brazil. Romero would make out a case for him on the ground of birth in the colony, family influences and the nature of his lyrism, which, according to that polemical spirit, was Brazilian. Yet his plays are linked with the history of the Portuguese drama and it is hard to discover, except by excessive reading between the lines, any distinctive Brazilian character. Known to his contemporaries by the sobriquet O Judeu (The Jew), Antonio JosÉ early experienced the martyrdom of his religion at the hands of the Inquisition. At the age of eight he was taken to Portugal by his mother, who was summoned thither to answer Antonio JosÉ da Silva had in him much of the rollicking, roistering, ribald, rhyming rogue. For long, The first phase of Brazilian letters is, then, a tentative groping, reflecting the numerous influences across the ocean and the instability of a nascent civilization at war on the one hand with covetous foreigners and on the other with fractious, indigenous tribes. The chroniclers The latest view of Antonio JosÉ (See Bell’s Portuguese Literature, pages 282-284); whom Southey considered “the best of their drama writers,” is that his plays would in all likelihood have received little “attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had it not been for the tragedy of the author’s life.” This probably overstates the case against O Judeu, but it indicates an important non-literary reason for his popularity. |