Isaac Goldberg

New Currents in Brazilian Poetry—GonÇalves de MagalhÃes, GonÇalves Dias, Alvarez de Azevedo, Castro Alves—Lesser Figures—Beginnings of the Brazilian Novel—Manoel de Macedo, JosÉ de Alencar, Taunay and Others—The Theatre.

I

Though usually associated with French literature, the Romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century, like that later neo-romanticism which nurtured the Symbolist and the Decadent schools of the second half, came originally from Germany, and was in essence a philosophy of self-liberation.[1] In Brazil it is thus in part applied suggestion rather than spontaneous creation. But national creative production thrives on cross-fertilization and self-made literatures are as unthinkable as self-made men. There is marked difference between mere imitation and subjection to valid influence, and few literary phenomena in the history of the new-world literature, north or south of Panama, attest the truth of this better than Brazil’s period of Romanticism; this is the richest—if not the most refined—of its intellectual epochs. Brazilian culture is thrown open to the currents of European thought, as its ports with the advent of JoÃo VI had been thrown open to European commerce, and receives from romanticism, in the words of Wolf, the “ideal consecration” of its nativism. And herein, of course, lies the great distinction between the mere nativism which is so easily taken for a national note, and that nationalism which adds to the exaltation of the milieu the spiritual consciousness of unity and independence. A national literature, in the fuller sense, is now possible because it is the expression not solely of an aspiration but of partial accomplishment, with a historic background in fact. Poetry becomes more varied; the novel takes more definite form; genuine beginnings are made in the theatre, though, despite valiant attempts to prove the contrary, the Brazilian stage is the least of its glories.

Carvalho, selecting the four representative poets of the period, has characterized each by the trait most prominent in his work. Thus GonÇalves de MagalhÃes (1811-1882) stands for the religious phase of Brazilian romanticism; GonÇalves Dias (1823-1864) for the naturistic; Alvarez de Azevedo (1831-1852) for the poetry of doubt, and Castro Alves (1847) for the muse of social reclamation, particularly the abolition of black slavery. This group is but a solo quartet in a veritable chorus of singers that provides a variegated setting. The individual songs resound now more clearly, like so many strains in the polyphonic hymn of national liberation. The salient four are by no means restricted to the style of verse indicated by their classification, but such a grouping helps to emphasize the main currents of the new poetry.

II

In 1832, when MagalhÃes published his first collection, Poesias, he was a conventional worshipper of the Portuguese classics. A visit to Europe in 1833 converted him thoroughly to French Romanticism and when, three years later, he issued the Suspiros poeticos e Saudades (Poetic Sighs and Longings), the very title proclaimed the advent of a new orientation. His invocation to the angel of poesy is in itself a miniature declaration of poetic independence:

The chaste virgins of Greece, as he announces in the lines preceding this virtual, if distinctly minor ars poetica, have fascinated his childhood enough. Farewell Homer; the poet will dream now of his native land and sigh, amid the cypress, a song made of his own griefs and longings. Nature, fatherland and God guiding humanity are the trinity of his emblem. They are his constant thought at home and abroad. “Nothing for me,” he exclaims in his Deos e o Homem, written in the Alps in 1834, “for my fatherland all.” In these Suspiros form becomes fairly free, rhythm alters with change in the thought; it is difficult to point to anything in them that has not already appeared in Brazilian poetry from the earliest days, but the same outward elements of religion, patriotism and subjectivity have been fused into a more personal, more appealing product. Os Mysterios, a funereal canticle in memory of his children, published in Paris in 1858, is in eight cantos that sing the triumph of faith. As he wrote in his philosophical work issued in this same year, Factos de Espiritu Humano: “This world would be a horrible comedy, a causeless illusion, and human existence a jest perpetrated by nothingness,—all would be but a lie, if there were not a just and kind God!… That which is absurd cannot be true. God exists and the human spirit is immortal in that knowledge.” There is the kernel of his poetry. Urania, Vienna 1862, chants love through the symbol of his wife. The epic attempt, A ConfederaÇÃo dos Tamoyos, in ten cantos, is noteworthy not so much for lofty flights as for its evidence of the author’s blending of the patriotic and the religious motives. The attitude toward the Jesuit missionaries is the opposite to the stand taken by Basilio da Gama in the Uruguay; they alone among the Portuguese are worthy; the Indians yield at last to civilization, but they are idealized into defenders of justice against the Portuguese exploiters.

In his epic he underwent the influence of GonÇalves Dias, as did Manoel de Araujo Porto-Alegre (1806-1879) in his Brazilianas (1863). This noted painter was also affected by the free metrical structure of the Suspiros of MagalhÃes, as he revealed in A voz da Natureza of 1835. The boresome epic Colombo, seeking inspiration in the great discoverer, is commendable for imagination rather than truly creative poetry.

GonÇalves Dias is more lyrical in spirit than MagalhÃes, who was rather the meditative worshipper. The poet of nature was the first to reveal to Brazilians in its full significance the pride of nationality, to such an extent, indeed, that his “Americanism” became a blind hostility toward Europe as being only a source of evil to the new continent. In him flowed the blood of all three races that make up the Brazilian blend and he has celebrated each of the strains,—the Indian in Os Tymbiras, Poema Americano, the African in A Escrava, the Portuguese in the Sextilhas de Frei AntÃo. To this blend Carvalho, not without justice, attributes the inner turmoil of the poet’s soul. He is religious in his patriotism, just as MagalhÃes is patriotic in his religion, but if his aversion to Europe is unreasoning, his patriotism is not a blind flag-waving:

It is with the name of GonÇalves Dias that “Indianism” in Brazilian poetry is most closely associated. As we have already seen, Verissimo indicates an important difference between this “second” type and the first that appeared in the epics of the Mineira poets. The native was exalted not so much for his own sake as by intense reaction against the former oppressors of the nation. As early as the date of Brazil’s declaration of Independence (September 7, 1822), numerous families had foresworn their Portuguese patronymics and adopted indigenous names; idealization in actual life could not go much farther. In literature such Indianism, as in the case of GonÇalves Dias, could serve the purpose of providing a highly colourful background for the poetic exploitation of the native scene.

Verissimo would call GonÇalves Dias the greatest Brazilian poet, though the noted critic discovers more genius in Basilio da Gama and in Alvares de Azevedo and even Laurindo Rabello,—more philosophical emotion in Junqueira Freire. And before the national criticism had awarded GonÇalves Dias that place of honour, the people had granted it. “The history of our Romanticism will recognize that the strength of this spiritual movement came not alone from the talent of its chief authors, but from their communion with the milieu, from the sympathy which they found there. Our literature was then for the first time, and perhaps the last, social.” GonÇalves Dias, in his CanÇÃo de Exilio, captured the soul of his people with a simple lyrism that the slightest exaggeration might have betrayed into sentimental doggerel.

These stanzas, set to music, became the property of the nation. “If, like the Hebrews, we were to lose our fatherland, our song of exile would be already to hand in the CanÇÃo of GonÇalves Dias. With it he reached and conquered the people and our women, who are—in all respects—the chief element in the fame and success of poets. And not only the people, but Brazilian literature and poetry. Since that time the poet is rare who does not sing his land.

“‘All chant their fatherland,’ runs a verse by Casimiro de Abreu, whose nostalgia proceeds directly from the CanÇÃo of GonÇalves Dias. Nor does he hide this, calling part of his verses, CanÇÕes do Exilio. And to the name of Casimiro de Abreu we can add, following in the wake of the poet of MaranhÃo, Magalhaes, Porto Alegre, Alvares de Azevedo, Laurindo Rabello, Junqueira Freire and almost all his contemporaries. In all you will find that song, expressed as conscious or disguised imitation. Dominated by the emotion of the Song of Exile, Brazil made of GonÇalves Dias her favorite poet, the elect of her feelings. The nativist instinct, so characteristic of peoples in their infancy, found also a sympathetic echo in his Poesias Americanas, and received as a generous reparation the idealization of our primitive inhabitants and their deeds, without inquiring into what there was in common between them and us, into the fidelity of those pictures and how far they served the cause of a Brazilian literature. His lyrism, of an intensity which then could be compared in our language only to that of Garrett,[5] whose influence is evident in it, found similarly a response in the national feeling.”

Verissimo, somewhat sceptical in the matter of love as experienced by poets, does not even care whether love in GonÇalves Dias was imaginary or real. He counts it the distinguishing trait of the poet that his love poems move the reader with the very breath of authenticity. “I find in them the external theme translated into other words, into another form, perhaps another manner, but with the same lofty generality with which it was sung by the truly great, the human poets. In him love is not the sensual, carnal, morbid desire of Alvares de Azevedo; the wish for caresses, the yearning for pleasure characteristic of Casimiro de Abreu, or the amorous, impotent fury of Junqueira Freire. It it the great powerful feeling purified by idealization,—the love that all men feel,—not the individual passion, the personal, limited case.”

I am not so inclined as Verissimo to accept at full value the statements of poets like GonÇalves Dias that they have never felt love. It is rather that they have never found it as they have visioned it. Indeed, this is just what GonÇalves Dias himself has written:

The poet who wrote the lines that follow, with their refrain,

must have been something more than the man gifted with divination that Verissimo would make of him. I would hazard the guess that Verissimo’s deductions are based on a certain personal passionlessness of the critic himself, whose writings reveal just such an idealizer of love as he would find in GonÇalves Dias.

Yet from GonÇalves Dias to the refined, clamant voluptuousness of Olavo Bilac is a far cry. The reason for the difference is to be sought rather in personal constitution than in poetic creed. Even the Romantics differ markedly from one another, and though the Brazilian muse is an ardent lady (a truth which, as we shall see, rendered anything like a genuine Parnassianism fairly impossible in Brazil) GonÇalves Dias is after all restrained in his expression of a passion which clearly he felt. The passage just quoted, with all deference to Verissimo, is not great poetry, and precisely because it is too general. It is statement, not the unfolding of passion in a form spontaneously created. It proves that GonÇalves Dias loved,—one woman or many,—but it reveals rather a certain incapacity to generalize than a faculty for transposing the particular into the universal.

Alvares de Azevedo is the standard-bearer of the Brazilian Byronists, but he should not be classed offhand as a mere echoer of the Englishman’s strophes. His Lira dos Veinte Annos is exactly what the title announces; the lyre of a twenty-year-old, which, though its strings give forth romantic strains of bitterness and melancholy and imagination that have become associated with Byron, Musset and Leopardi, sounds an individual note as well. The poet died in his twenty-first year; it was a death that he foresaw and that naturally coloured his verses. “Eat, drink and love; what can the rest avail us?” was the epigraph he took from Byron for his Vagabundo. His brief, hectic career had no time for meticulous polishing of lines; if the statue did not come out as at first he desired, he broke it rather than recast the metal. Not a little of his proclamative rhyming is the swagger of his youth, which is capable, at times, of giving to a poem so banal a quadruplicative title as “’Tis she! ’Tis she! ’Tis she! ’Tis she!” With the frustrated ambitions of weakness he longed for illimitable power. In the 12 de Setembro (his birthday) he exclaims:

Like the hero of Aucassin et Nicolette, he prefers hell to heaven for a dwelling-place.

he declares in O Poeta Moribundo.

He is Brazil’s sick child par excellence, ill, like so many after him, with the malady of the century. But one must guard against attributing this to the morbid pose that comes so easy at twenty. Pose there was, and flaunting satanism, but too many of these poets in Brazil, and in the various republics of Spanish-America died young for one to doubt their sincerity altogether. The mood is a common one to youth; in an age that, like the romantic, made a literary fashion of their weakness, they were bound to appear as they appeared once again when Symbolism and the Decadents vanquished for a time the cold formalism of the Parnassian school.

That Alvares de Azevedo, for all his millennial doubts and despairs was a child, is attested by the following pedestrian quatrain from the poem of the quadruplicative title:

Thackeray’s famous parody seems here itself to be parodied. Alvares de Azevedo’s love, if Verissimo was right, was “um amor de cabeÇa,”—of the head rather than the heart, a poet’s love, the “love of love,” without objective reality.… “It is rather a desire to love, the aspiration for a woman ideally beloved, than a true, personal passion. What does it matter, however, if he give us poems such as Anima mea, Vida, EsperanÇas, and all, almost all, that he left us?”

The boy-poet is still an appreciable influence in the national letters, as well he might be among a people inclined to moodiness; for many years he was one of the most widely read poets of the country, in company of his fellow-romantics, GonÇalves Dias and Castro Alves. Among his followers are Laurindo Rabello (1826-1864), Junqueira Freire (1832-1855) and Casimiro de Abreu (1837-1860),—not a long lived generation. Rabello was a vagrant soul whose verses are saved by evident sincerity. “I am not a poet, fellow mortals,” he sings, “and I know it well. My verses, inspired by grief alone, are not verses, but rather the cries of woe exhaled at times involuntarily by my soul.” He is known chiefly as a repentista (improvisator) and himself spread the popularity of his verses by singing them to his own accompaniment upon the violin. He tried to improvise life as well as verses, for he drifted from the cloister to the army, from the army to medicine, with a seeming congenital inability to concentrate. Misfortune tracked his steps, and, as he has told us, wrung his songs from him. Verissimo calls him one of the last troubadours, wandering from city to city singing his sad verses and forcing the laugh that must entertain his varying audiences. The popular mind so confused him with the Portuguese Bocage that, according to the same critic, some of Bocage’s verses have been attributed to the Brazilian.

“My pleasures,” he sings in his autobiographical poem Minha Vida (My Life) “are a banquet of tears! A thousand times you must have seen me, happy amidst the happy, chatting, telling funny stories, laughing and causing laughter. Life’s a drama, eh?” He is, indeed, as his lines reveal, a Brazilian Pagliaccio:

Junqueira Freire is of firmer stuff, though tossed about by inner and external vicissitudes that are mirrored in the changing facets of his verse.

He, too, sought—with as little fundamental sincerity as Laurindo Rabello—solace in the monastery, which he entered at the unmonastic age of twenty as the result of being crossed in love. Of course he thought first of suicide, but “the cell of a monk is also a grave,”—and a grave, moreover, whence the volatile soul of youth may rise in carnal resurrection. Junqueira Freire was the most bookish of children. He read his way through the Scriptures, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid (an unbiblical trio!) and imbibed modern currents through Milton, Klopstock, De Maistre, Herculano, Garrett, Lamartine, Hugo. His prose critiques are really remarkable in so young a person, and one sentence upon philosophy is wiser by far than many a tome penned by the erudite. Philosophy he found to be a “vain poetry, not of description but of ratiocination, nothing true, everything beautiful; rather art than science; rather a cupola than a foundation.” Such a view of philosophy is of course not new, though it is none too current. It is brilliant for a mere youth of Romanticist Brazil—an intuitive forecast, as it were, of Croce’s philosophy of the intuition.

Soon weary of the cloister walls, our poet sang his disillusionment in lines that turn blasphemous, even as the mother in Meu filho no claustro curses the God that “tore from my arms my favorite son.…” “We all illude ourselves!” “We conceive an eternal paradise and when greedily we reach after it, we find an inferno.”

He is, as an artist, distinctly secondary. He is more the poet in his prose than in his poems, and I am inclined to think that his real personality resides there.

Casimiro de Abreu, in Carvalho’s words, “is the most exquisite singer of saudades in the older Brazilian poetry;[11] his work is a cry of love for all that lay far away from him, his country and his family, whom he left when but a child.”

In his study of Casimiro de Abreu Verissimo has some illuminating things to say of love and wistful longing (amor e saudade) in connection with the poet’s patriotism in especial and with love of country in general. “It is under the influence of nostalgia and love, for both in him are really an ailment—that he begins to sing of Brazil. But the Brazil that he sings in such deeply felt verses, the Patria that he weeps … is the land in which were left the things he loves and chiefly that unknown girl to whom he dedicated his book. The longing for his country, together with the charms that this yearning increased or created, is what made him a patriot, if, with this restriction may be applied to him an epithet that from my pen is not a token of praise. His nostalgia is above all the work of love,—not only the beloved woman, but all that this loving nature loved,—the native soil, the paternal house, country life.… Without these two feelings, love and longing, the love of country is anti-esthetic. If Os Lusiadas, with the intense patriotism that overflows it, is the great poem it is, it owes this greatness to them alone. It is love and longing, the anxious nostalgia of the absent poet and the deep grief of a high passion that impart to it its most pathetic accents, its most lyric notes, its most human emotions, such as the speeches of Venus and Jupiter, the sublime episode of D. Ignes de Castro, that of Adamastor, the Isle of Love.…”[13]

In Fagundes Varella (1841-1875) we have a disputed figure of the Romantic period. Verissimo denies him originality except in the Cantico de Calvario, “where paternal love found the most eloquent, most moving, most potent representation that we have ever read in any language,” while Carvalho, championing his cause, yet discovers in him a mixture of Alvares de Azevedo’s Byronic satanism, GonÇalves Dias’s Indianism and the condoreirismo of Castro Alves and Tobias Barreto. He is a lyrist of popular inspiration and appeal, and “one of our best descriptive poets.…” “Varella, then, together with Machado de Assis and Luis GuimarÃes Junior, is a transitional figure between Romanticism and Parnassianism.”

The influence of Victor Hugo’s Les ChÂtiments was great throughout South America and in Brazil brought fruit chiefly in Tobias Barreto and Castro Alves, the salient representatives of the so-called condoreirismo; like the condor their language flew to grandiloquent heights, whence the name, for which in English we have a somewhat less flattering counterpart in the adjective “spread-eagle.” Barreto (1839-1889) belongs rather to the history of Brazilian culture; he was largely responsible for the introduction of modern German thought and exerted a deep influence upon Sylvio Romero. Alves was less educated—his whole life covers but a span of twenty-four years—but what he lacked in learning he made up in sensitivity and imagination. Though he can be tender with the yearnings of a sad youth, he becomes a pillar of fire when he is inspired by the cause of abolition.

Romero, with his customary appetite for a fight, has, despite his denials of preoccupation with mere questions of priority, given himself no little trouble to prove Barreto’s precedence in the founding of the condoreiro school;[14] we shall leave that matter to the historians. Brazilians themselves, as far as concerns the esthetic element involved, have made a choice of Alves. He is one of the national poets. His chief works are three in number: Espumas Fluctuantes, Gonzaga (a play) and O Poema dos Escravos (unfinished). Issued separately, the Poem of the Slaves, is not, as its title would imply, a single hymn to the subjected race; it is a collection of poems centering around the theme of servitude. He does not dwell upon the details of that subjection; he is, fundamentally, the orator. The abolition of slavery did not come until 1888; on September 28, 1871, all persons born in Brazil were declared free by law; it was such poems as Alves’s Vozes d’Africa and O Navio Negreiro that prepared the way for legislation which, for that matter, economic change was already fast rendering inevitable.[15]

III

The Brazilian novel is a product of the Romantic movement. Such precursors as Teixeira e Souza (1812-1861) and Joaquim Noberto de Souza Silva (1820-1891) belong rather to the leisurely investigator of origins. The real beginnings are to be appreciated in the work of Joaquim Manoel de Macedo (1820-1882) and JosÉ de Alencar (1829-1877).

Macedo portrayed the frivolous society of the epoch of Dom Pedro II. He was not so much a leader of taste as a skilful exploiter of it. He has been called “par excellence the novelist of the Brazilian woman”; we need look to him, then, for little in the way of frankness or psychological depth. To the reader of today, who has been tossed high in the waters of the contemporary novel, Macedo and his ilk are tame, naÏve, a mite insipid. Not that some of his pages lack a certain piquancy in their very simplicity. His Rachel, for example, in O MoÇo Louro (The Blond Young Man) can talk like a flapper who has been reading Bernard Shaw, but we know that love is to teach her better in the end. Macedo was a writer for the family hearth; his language, like his ideas, is simple. But our complex civilization has already outdistanced him; it is not at all impossible that in a short while he will join the other precursors and, with the exception of his books Moreninha (The Brunette) and O MoÇo Louro, be but a name to his countrymen and even his countrywomen. The first, published in 1849, made his reputation; it is a tale of the triumph of pure love. The second is after The Brunette, his best-known novel, narrating the hardly original tale of the virginal, dreamy Honorina and the free, mocking Rachel who love the same youth; Honorina’s true love, as we might expect, wins out, for Rachel sacrifices her passion without letting the happy pair realize the extent of her abnegation.

“By no means should I say that he possesses the power of idealization of JosÉ de Alencar, the somewhat prÉcieuse quality of Taunay or the smiling, bitter pessimism of Machado de Assis; if we wish to judge him in comparison with them or with the writers of today, his work pales; his modest creations disappear into an inferior category. But accepting him in the time for which he wrote, when the novel had not yet received the Flaubertian esthetics that ennobled it and had not been enriched by the realistic genius of Zola,—beside his contemporaries Teixeria de Souza, Manoel de Almeida and Bernardo GuimarÃes, he seems to us living, picturesque, colorful, as indeed he is. I esteem him because he has contributed to the development and the wealth of our literature.”[16]

More important to the history and practice of the Brazilian novel is JosÉ de Alencar, famous for his Guarany and Iracema, the first of which, in the form of an opera libretto set to music by the native composer Carlos Gomes, has made the rounds of the operatic world. Alencar is to the novel what GonÇalves Dias is to the poem: the typical Indianist. But Brazilians find his Indianism superior to that of the poet in both sincerity and majesty. “His Indians do not express themselves like doctors from Coimbra; they speak as Nature has taught them, loving, living and dying like the lesser plants and animals of the earth. Their passions are as sudden and as violent as the tempest,—rapid conflagrations that burst forth for an instant, flaring, glaring and soon disappearing.”[17]

At his best Alencar is really a poet who has chosen prose as his medium. He uses the Indian milieu, as GonÇalves Dias in his poetry, for the descriptive opportunities it affords. Brazilians rarely speak of his plots, which are simplicity itself; what fascinates them, even today, is his rich palette, which challenges comparison even with the opulent coloration of Coelho Netto and GraÇa Aranha. Chief among foreign influences were the Frenchmen Chateaubriand, de Vigny, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo. Our own Cooper, himself an “Indianist” contemporaneous with Alencar, influenced the Brazilian innovator, but not in the manner that Brazilian critics have seemed to discern. Alencar himself, in a rare document, has sought to refute those who find his Guarany a novel in Cooper’s style. To him Cooper was, first of all, the “poet of the sea.” As far as concerned American poetry, Alencar’s model (and model is his own word) was Chateaubriand. “But my master was that glorious Nature which surrounds me, and in particular the magnificence of the deserts which I studied in early youth and which were the majestic portals through which I penetrated into my country’s past.… It was from this source, from this vast, secular book that I drew the pages of Guarany and Iracema and many another.… From this source, and not from the works of Chateaubriand, still less from those of Cooper, which were only a copy of the sublime original that I had read within my heart.

“Brazil, like the United States and most other countries of America, has a period of conquest in which the invading race destroys the indigenous. This struggle presents analogous characters because of the similarity of the native tribes. Only in Peru and Mexico do they differ.

“Thus the Brazilian novelist who seeks the plot of his novel in this period of invasion cannot escape a point of contact with the American writer. But this approximation comes from history; it is inevitable and not the result of imitation.

“If neither Chateaubriand nor Cooper had existed, the American novel would have appeared in Brazil in due season.

“Years after having written Guarany” (Alencar wrote the book in his twenty-seventh year, and would have it that the tale occurred to him in his ninth year, as he was crossing the sertÕes of the North on the road from CearÁ to Bahia) “I re-read Cooper in order to verify the observation of the critics, and I was convinced that it is of minor importance. There is not in the Brazilian novel a single personage whose type may be traced to the Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, Ontario, The Sappers and Lionel Lincoln.… Cooper considers the native from the social point of view and was, in the description of indigenous customs, a realist.… In Guarany the savage is an ideal, which the writer tried to poetize, divesting him of the coarse incrustation in which he was swathed by the chroniclers, and rescuing him from the ridicule that the stultified remnants cast upon the almost extinct race.

“But Cooper, say the critics, describes American nature. And what was he to describe if not the scene of his drama? Walter Scott before him had provided the model for these pen landscapes that form part of local color.

“What should be investigated is whether the descriptions of Guarany show any relationship or affinity to Cooper’s descriptions; but this is what the critics fail to do, for it means work and requires thought. In the meantime the comparison serves to show that they resemble each other neither in genre nor style.”[18]

The Brazilian novelist, presenting thus his own case, hits precisely upon those two qualities—sea lore and realism—for which Cooper only yesterday, fifty years after Alencar wrote this piece of auto-criticism, was rediscovered to United States readers by Professor Carl Van Doren. “Not only did he outdo Scott in sheer accuracy,” writes the critic of the United States novel, “but he created a new literary type, the tale of adventure on the sea, in which, though he was to have many followers in almost every modern language, he has not been surpassed for vigour and swift rush of narrative.”[19]

Alencar is no realist nor is he concerned with sheer accuracy. Guarany, the one book by which he is sure to be remembered for many a year, is, as we have seen, a prose poem in which the love of the Indian prince Pery for the white Cecy, daughter of a Portuguese noble, is unfolded against a sumptuous tapestry of the national scene. Alencar wrote other novels, of the cities, but in Brazilian literature he is identified with his peculiar Indianism. From the stylistic standpoint he has been accused of bad writing; like so many of his predecessors—and followers—he plays occasional havoc with syntax, as if the wild regions he depicts demanded an analogous anarchy of language. Yet Costa, granting all this, adds that “before JosÉ de Alencar the Portuguese language as written in Brazil was, without exaggeration, a horrible affair. What man today possesses sufficient courage to brave with light heart that voluminous agglomeration of verses in the ConfederacÃo dos Tamoyos, in Colombo, in CaramurÚ or Uruguay? In prose … but let us rather not speak of it. It is enough to read the novels of Teixeira de Souza and Manoel de Almeida.”[20] This same style is viewed by others as a herald of the nervous prose of another man of the sertÕes, Euclydes da Cunha, who has enshrined them in one of the central works of modern Brazil.

Sertanismo itself, however, was initiated by Bernardo Joaquim da Silva GuimarÃes (1827-1885) in such works as Pelo SertÃo, Mauricio, Escrava Isaura. He was followed in this employment of the sertÃo as material for fiction by Franklin Tavora (1842-1888) and particularly Escragnole Taunay (1843-1899), whose Innocencia, according to Verissimo, is one of the country’s few genuinely original novels. MÉrou, in 1900, called it “the best novel written in South America by a South American,”—a compliment later paid by Guglielmo Ferrero to GraÇa Aranha’s Chanaan. Viscount Taunay’s famous work—one might call it one of the central productions of Brazilian fiction—is but scant fare to the contemporary appetite in fiction, yet it has been twice translated into French, and has been put into English, Italian, German, Danish and even Japanese.

The scene is laid in the deserted Matto Grosso, a favourite background of the author’s. Innocencia, all that her name implies, dwells secluded with her father, a miner, her negress slave Conga and her Caliban-like dwarf Tico, who is in love with Innocencia, the Miranda of this district. Into her life comes the itinerant physician Cirino de Campos, who is called by her father to cure her of the fever. Cirino proves her Ferdinand; they make love in secret, for she is meant by paternal arrangement for a mere brute of a mule-driver, ManecÃo by name. Innocencia vows herself to Cirino, when the mule-driver comes to enforce his prior claim; the father, bound by his word of honour, sides with the primitive lover. Innocencia resists; ManecÃo avenges himself by killing the doctor. A comic figure of a German scientist adds humour and a certain poignant irony to the tale.

Students of Spanish-American letters are acquainted with the Colombian novel Maria by the half-Jew Jorge Isaacs; it has been termed a sister work to Innocencia and if it happens to be, as is my opinion, superior to the Brazilian, a comparison reveals complementary qualities in each. The Spanish-American work is rather an idyll, instinct with poetry; Innocencia, by no means devoid of poetry, is more melodramatic and of stouter texture. Taunay, in Brazilian fiction, is noted for having introduced an element of moderation in passion and characterization, due perhaps to his French provenience. His widely-known account of an episode in the war with Paraguay was, indeed, first written in French.

Manoel Antonio de Almeida (1830-1861) in his Memorias de um Sargento de Milicias had made a premature attempt to introduce the realistic novel; his early death robbed the nation of a most promising figure.

IV

The theatrical literature of Brazil is poor; the origin of the modern drama is generally attributed to MagalhÃes’ tragedy upon Antonio JosÉ, 1838, and to the comedies of Luis Carlos Martins Penna (1815-1848). Of drama there is no lack; all that is needed is the dramatist. Martins Penna stands out easily from the ruck for elementary realism, but he is almost alone. Even today, the plays of Claudio de Souza, for all their success upon the stage, cannot compare with the quality that may be encountered in contemporary poetry, novels and tales.

The Romantic period in Brazil is distinguished as much for activity as for actual accomplishment; historically it is of prime importance in the national development, while esthetically it reveals a certain broadening of interests. The national writer, as a type, has attained his majority; he gazes upon broader horizons. Yet take away Guarany, Iracema, Innocencia, O MoÇo Louro, Moreninha, and what, really, is left in prose? The poets fare better; they are nearer to the sentient heart of things. Yet implacable esthetic criteria would do away with much of their product as well. It is by such tokens as these that one may recognize the secondary importance of the national letters, for, of course, Brazilian letters do not constitute a major literature. Here it is the salient individual that counts, and I, for one, am inclined to think that in art such an individual, as bodied forth in his work, is the only thing that counts. The rest—genres, evolution, periods,—is important in the annals of national development; it is, however, sociology, history, what you will, but not the primary concern of art.

[1] “True Romanticism,” says Wolf, “is nothing other than the expression of a nation’s genius unrestrained by the trammels of convention.” He would derive the name through the same reasoning that called the lingua romana rustica (country Roman speech) Romance, as in the phrase Romance Languages, in opposition to the learned Latin known as the sermo urbanus, or language of the city. Such liberation as Wolf points out, was the work of German criticism. “The Germans avenged themselves for the double servitude, political and literary, with which the French had so long oppressed them, by at last delivering the people from the pseudo-classic fetters.” A service they performed a half-century later, as we have suggested, bringing a new breath to the later pseudo-classicism of the Parnassians. The real contribution of the so-called Romantic movement, then, was one of release from academically organized repression,—repression in form, in thought, in expression, which are but so many aspects of the genetic impulse, and not detachable entities that may be re-arranged at will. The measure of literary repression may be taken as one of the measures of classicism; the measure of release from that repression may be taken as one of the measures of romanticism. To argue in favour of one or the other or to attempt to draw too definite a line between them is a futile implication of the possibility of uniformity and, moreover, is to shift the criteria of art from an esthetic to a moralistic basis. There are really as many “isms” as there are creative individuals; classic and romantic are aspects of all creative endeavour rather than definite and opposing qualities. The observation which I translate herewith from Wolf relates Romanticism to its originally individualistic importance as applied to nations. “The accessory ideas that have been grafted upon that of Romanticism as a result of its decadence,” writes the German critic, “serve only to confuse the etymological and historical truth of this definition. It is for the same reasons that the art of the Middle Ages, proper to modern peoples and opposed to antiquity, has been named Romantic, or rather, Roman. In order to re-establish the continuity of their spontaneous development and to paralyze the modern influence of the humanists, the reformists, classicism and rationalism, these same peoples had to turn back and drink from the ever abundant springs of the Middle Ages,—a brilliant epoch of development which was more in conformity with their genius. This is another reason why the two terms Middle Ages and Romanticism have been confused. But as this poetry and art of the Middle Ages are bigoted, excessively idealistic, taking pleasure in mysticism and the fantastic, these diverse acceptations have been wrongly given to romanticism. Taking the accessory for the central nucleus, modern romanticism has caricatured all this and discredited true romanticism, so that the name in the realms of art has been applied to everything that is subjective, arbitrary, nebulous, capricious and without fixed form.”