I

The later course of Brazilian letters follows practically the same line traced by the reaction in France against the Romantic school. To and fro swings the pendulum of literary change in unceasing oscillation between dominance of the emotions and rule of the intellect. Life, as Havelock Ellis somewhere has shown, is an eternal process of “tumescence and detumescence”; the formula is quite true of literature. Buds and human beings alike swell to maturity in the womb of nature and then follows the inevitable contraction. So, in letters, the age of full expression is succeeded by one of repressed art,—the epoch of a blatant proclamative “ism” by an era of restraint and withdrawal. Who shall, in a priori fashion, pretend to say that this “ism” is right and that one wrong? By their works alone shall ye know them.

If, then, Romanticism in France, as subsequently elsewhere, gave way to a rapid succession of inter-reacting schools or groups, the phenomenon was the familiar one of literary oscillation. The Naturalists, nurtured upon advancing science, looked with scorn upon the emotional extravagances of the Romantics. To excessive preoccupation with the ego and with unreality, they opposed the critical examination and documentation of reality. Milieu, social environment, psychology ceased to be idealized; enthusiasm and exaltation were succeeded by cold scrutiny. The doctrine of “impersonality” (a most inartistic and psychologically impossible creed) was crystallized around the powerful literary personality of Flaubert, and Romantic egolatry looked as silly in the searching day of the new standards as last night’s flowers without the breath of spring and the moonlight that excuse the sweet folly they incite.

In poetry the Parnassians revolted against Romantic self-worship on the one hand and the realistic preoccupation of the naturalists on the other. They, too, believed themselves impersonal, impassive—terms only relative in creative endeavour. They climbed up their ivory towers, away from vulgar mundanity, and substituted for the musical vagaries of their unrepressed predecessors the cult of the clear image and the sculptural line. And fast upon them followed the Symbolist-Decadents,—some of whom, indeed, were nourished upon the milk of Parnassianism,—and who, in their turn, abjured the modern classicism of the Parnassians with their cult of form and clarity, and set up instead a new musicality of method, a new intensity of personalism. Their ivory towers were just as high, but were reared on subtler fancies. Suggestion replaced precision; sculpture melted into music. In a word, already neo-classicism had swung to neo-romanticism; the pendulum, on its everlasting swing, had covered the same distance in far faster time. Yet each seeming return to the old norms is a return with a difference; more and more the basic elements of the reaction are understood by the participants in their relations to society and to the individual. Especially is their psychological significance appreciated and—most important of all and most recent—their nature as complements rather than as antagonists. When DarÍo, in a famous poem, asked “¿Quien quieÑ es no es RomÁntico?” (Who that is, is not a Romantic?) he but stressed the individualism at the bottom of all art. Perhaps the days of well-defined “schools” in art are over; perhaps the days of the label in criticism are gone, or going fast, even in academic circles; all men contain the potentialities of all things and opposites grow out of opposites. Man is thus himself unity in variety,—the old shibboleth of the estheticists,—and the “schools” are but phases of the multiple personality.

The reaction against Romanticism, if varied in France, was even less disciplined in Ibero-America. And here we come upon a curious fact in comparative literature that is deserving of investigation. In the first place, Parnassianism in Brazil (and in Spanish America, for that matter) was hardly ever the frigidly perfect thing it became in the hands of the Frenchman. A certain tropical warmth is bound, in the new-world poets, to glow in the marble veins of their sonnets. In the second,—and this is truly peculiar,—that Symbolism (especially in its Decadent phase) which was responsible for a fundamental renovation of letters in Spanish America and later affected Spain itself, passed over Brazil with but scant influence. Brazil produced some highly interesting Parnassians (with proper reservations made in the use of that term); Bilac, in his realm, is the peer of any Spanish American. But the Portuguese-speaking republic shows no figure approaching the epochal RubÉn DarÍo, whose life and labours fairly sum up the modernist era in Spanish America.[1]

II

The scientific spirit in Brazilian poetry was of short duration, even though Romero, one of its chief exponents, gives himself credit for having initiated in 1870 the reaction against Romanticism with a poetry that sought harmony with the realistic philosophy of the day. He and Martins Junior (whom Carvalho places at the head of the “scientific” poets) are today considered to have troubled the waters of Brazilian lyrism for but a passing moment. In reality, they but hastened the advent of Parnassianism. Brazil for a while was weary of the great Latin weakness,—eloquence. Its poetical condors had too long orated from mountain-tops; it was high time for swans, for towers of ivory. Besides, I believe, this answered a certain need of the national psyche. The sensualist, too, has his moments of refinement, and he becomes the exquisite voluptuary. Science in poetry, as exemplified by the strophes of Martins Junior, is too often but rhymed harangue, even as the early Brazilian versifiers presented us with rhymed fruit-baskets, aviaries and geographies. Note the unscientific worship of science in his lines,—that science which so prosaically he terms “o grande agente altruista,” the great altruistic agent:

The transition from Romanticism to Parnassianism in Brazil may be studied in the poetry of Luiz GuimarÃes and the earlier verses of Machado de Assis. I find it difficult to agree with either Verissimo or Carvalho in his estimate of Machado de Assis’s poetry; Romero has by far the more tenable view. It may be true that the Chrysalidas and the Phalenas of Machado de Assis, like the Sonetos e Rimas of Luiz GuimarÃes, reveal a great refinement of form and elegance of rhyme,—even a wealth of rhythm. But colour and picturesqueness are hardly the distinguishing poetic traits of Machado de Assis, whose real poetry, as I try to show in the chapter dedicated especially to him, is in his prose.

Luiz GuimarÃes was, from one aspect, a Romantic with a more precise technique; his form, in other words, was quite as transitional as his content. In addition to French influence he underwent that of the Italians Stecchetti and Carducci, of whom he made translations into Portuguese. His sonnet on Venice is illustrative of a number of his qualities,—his restrained saudade, his gift of picturesque evocation, his rich rhymes, his vocalic melody:

“Machado de Assis,” writes Carvalho,[4] “was a poet of greater resources and fuller metrical invention than Luiz GuimarÃes. His poetry … reveals a psychological intensity rarely attained in this country. Possessing a firm classical education, a profound knowledge of those humanities which in seventeenth century France were the distinguishing characteristic of the honnÊte homme, Machado succeeded in stamping upon his verses a truly singular impress of subtlety and discretion. His images are, as a rule, of a perfect realism, a clearness worthy of the old masters. His images are veritable parables.…” But, to one foreigner at least,—and, I suspect, to more than one Brazilian, Machado de Assis as a poet is cold, not often achieving artistic communication; he is colourful, maybe, but his colours are seen through a certain diaphanous mist that rubs off their bloom. What Carvalho would find in the man’s verses I discover, strangely enough, in his remarkable prose—his humorism, his pessimism. The themes most certainly inhere in his verse, but they are expressed at their best, most artistically developed, in his prose. Carvalho, seeking to rectify the position of this great figure in the history of Brazilian letters, would even make of him a pioneer. “This feeling of the tragico quotidiano,” he asserts, “which only today is beginning to enter into Brazilian poetry, was first revealed to our literature by Machado de Assis. Although such notes are not frequent nor many in his work, it is none the less true that, before him, they were completely unknown.… Even in his poetry, his poetry that has been so unjustly judged and so pettily understood, Machado de Assis is a pioneer, an originator of the first order. It was natural for his art not to be to the taste of the popular palate; it did not resound with the fireworks and the hoarse cries of Brazil’s most loudly applauded verse-manufacturers.”[5]

Pioneering, however, is not poetry. In art, the idea belongs to him who makes the best use of it. In Machado de Assis, the thought often subjected the emotion; this was characteristic of the man’s peculiar psychology. I would not be understood as denigrating his poetic memory; far from it. But in my opinion (and I can speak for no one else) he is in the conventional sense, only secondarily a poet, and a secondary poet.

At the head of the true Parnassians stand Theophilo Dias, Raymundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira and Olavo Bilac, though Verissimo sees in the Miniaturas of GonÇalves Crespo “the first manifestation of Parnassian poetry published here.”[6] Crespo was not out-and-out Parnassian, however, as was Affonso Celso in his Telas sonantes of 1876. The very title—Sounding Canvases, i. e., pictures that sing their poetry—is in itself a program. Brazilian Parnassianism thus begins, according to Verissimo, in the decade 1880-1890. Sonetos e Rimas, by Luiz GuimarÃes, appears in 1879; Raymundo Correia’s Symphonias are of 1883, his Versos e VersÕes, of 1884; Alberto de Oliveira’s Meridionaes are of 1884, and the Sonetas e poemas of 1886. In the very year that the Nicaraguan, DarÍo, with a tiny volume of prose and poetry called Azul… and published in Chile, was initiating the “modernist” overturn in Spanish America, Bilac was issuing (1888) his Poesias.

Brazilian Parnassianism, as we have seen, is less objective, less impersonal than its French prototype. Poetic tradition and national character were alike opposed to the Gallic finesse, erudition, ultra-refinement. Pick up the many so-called Parnassian poems of Spanish or Portuguese America, remove the names of the authors and the critical excrescences, and see how difficult it is—from the evidence of the poem itself—to apply the historical label.

Theophilo Dias is hardly the self-controlled chiseller of Greek marbles. How “Parnassian,” for example, is such a verse as this, speaking of his lady’s voice?

This is not the kind of thought that produces genuine Parnassian poetry. How “impersonal” is it? How “sculptural”? More than one poem of the “Romanticist” Machado de Assis is far more Parnassian.

And listen to this description, by Carvalho, of Raymundo Correia. How “Parnassian” does it sound? “Anger, friendship, hatred, jealousy, terror, hypocrisy, all the tints and half-tints of human illusion, all that is closest to our innermost heart … he weighed and measured, scrutinized and analysed with the patient care of a naturalist who was, at the same time, a prudent and well-informed psychologist. Nor is this all.… Raymundo is an admirable painter of our landscape, an exquisite impressionist, who reflects, with delicious sentiment, the light and shade of the Brazilian soil.”[8]

There is no denying the beneficial influence of the Parnassians upon the expressive powers of the Brazilian poets. The refinement of style mirrored a refinement of the thought. If I stress the difference between the French and the Brazilian Parnassians it is not alone to emphasize the partial inability of the latter to imitate the foreign models, but to show how genuine personality must triumph over group affiliations. Raymundo Correia was such a personality; his sensibility was too responsive for complete surrender to formula. One of his sonnets long enjoyed the reputation of being the most popular ever penned in his country:

This is the more yearnful voice of Raymundo Correia’s muse, who knows, too, the futility of rebellion against “God, who cruelly creates us for grief; God, who created us and who was not created.” This conception of universal grief is his central theme, and it is significant that when Carvalho seeks spiritual analogies he goes—to Parnassians? No. To Leopardi, to Byron, to Pushkin, to Buddha.

Alberto de Oliveira, genuine artist that he was—and it was the fashion at one time for the Brazilian poets, under Parnassian influence, to call themselves artists rather than poets—maintained his personality through all his labours. Like a true Brazilian, he renders homage to the surrounding scene and even his sadness is several parts softness. In the manner of the day he wrote many a sonnet of pure description, but this represents restraint rather than predilection, for at other times, as in his Volupia, he bursts out in a nostalgia for love that proves his possession of it even at the moment of his denial.

Note how similar are these verses in content to the cries of love denied that rise from GonÇalves Dias and Casimiro de Abreu,—two Romantics of the movement’s height. Carvalho, too, sees that in Alberto de Oliveira there is, in addition to the talent for description, “a subjective poet of genuine value.”

For a long time Olavo Bilac enjoyed the sobriquet “Prince of Brazilian poets.” It matters little that part of his posthumous book, Tarde, reveals a social preoccupation. To the history of Brazilian letters, and to his countrymen, he is first of all the resounding voice of voluptuousness. And, as happens so often with the ultra-refined of his kin, the taste of his ecstasies at times is blunted by the memento mori of weary thought. The world becomes a pendulum swinging between vast contrasts, and it takes both swings to complete the great vibration.

The theme is as common as joy and sorrow; at the very beginning of Brazilian literature we meet it in a coarser sensualist, Gregorio de Mattos Guerra. In Raymundo Correia, in Machado de Assis, such rhymed homilies are common. They illustrate rather the philosophical background of the poets than their more artistic creativeness. Voluptuary that he was, Bilac preferred in poetry the carefully wrought miniature to the Titanic block of marble; at his best he attains a rare effect of eloquent simplicity. He was as Parnassian as a Brazilian may be in verse, yet more than once, as he chiselled his figurines, they leaped to life under his instrument, like diminutive Galateas under the breath of Pygmalion.

“Thus I proceed,” he declares in the poem that opens his Poesias, presenting his particular ars poetica. “My pen follows this standard. To serve you, Serene Goddess, Serene Form!” Yet read the entire poem; note, as an almost insignificant detail, the numerous exclamation points; note, too, that he is making love to that Goddess, that he is promising to die in her service. The words are the words of Parnassianism, but the voice is the voice of passionate personality, romantically dedicated to Style. Indeed, for the epigraph to his entire work one might quote the lines from Musset’s “Rolla”:

Bilac’s passion at its height may replace the Creator of life himself; thus, in A Alvorada do Amor, Adam, before his Eve, cries ecstatically his triumph, despite their lost paradise. He blesses the moment in which she revealed her sin and life with her crime, “For, freed of God, redeemed and sublime, I remain a man upon earth, in the light of thine eyes. Earth, better than Heaven; Man, greater than God!”

All, or almost all, of Bilac, is in this poem, which is thus one of his pivotal creations. De Carvalho has termed him a poet of “pansexualism”; the name might be misleading, as his verses more often reveal the gourmet, rather than the gourmand of eroticism.[12]

The more to show the uncertain nature of Brazilian Parnassianism, we have the figures of Luiz Delfino and Luiz Murat, termed by some Parnassians and by others Romantics. Delfino has been called by Romero (Livro do Centenario, Vol. I, page 71), “for the variety and extent of his work, the best poet of Brazil.” The same critic, some thirty-three pages farther along in the same account, calls Murat deeper and more philosophic than Delfino, and equalled only by Cruz e Souza in the penetration of the human soul. And by the time (page 110, Ibid.) he has reached the last-named of these poets, Cruz e Souza becomes “in many respects the best poet Brazil has produced.”

Yet the effect of the French neo-classicists upon the Brazilian poets was, as Verissimo has shown, threefold: form was perfected, the excessive preoccupation with self was diminished, the themes became more varied. “This same influence, following the example of what had happened in France, restored the sonnet to the national poetry, whence the Romantics had almost banished it, and on the other hand banished blank verse, which is so natural to our tongue and our poetry.… As to form, our Parnassian poets merely completed the evolution led in Portugal and there by two poets who, whatever their merits, had a vast effect upon our poetry, Antonio de Castilho and Thomaz Ribeiro. Machado de Assis evidently and confessedly owes to the first, if not also to the second, the advantages of his metrification and of his poetic form in general over that of some of his contemporaries, such as Castro Alves and Varella. Parnassianism refined this form … with its preoccupations with relief and colour, as in the plastic arts,—with exquisite sonorities, as in music,—with metrical artifices that should heighten mere correctness and make an impression through the feeling of a difficulty conquered,—with the search for rich rhymes and rare rhymes, and, as in prose, for the adjective that was peregrine, and if not exact, surprising. All this our poets did here as a strict imitation of the French, and since it is the externality of things that it is easy and possible to imitate and not that which is their very essence, a great number of them merely reproduced in pale copy the French Parnassians. Thus, for some fifteen years, we were truly inundated with myriads of sonnets describing domestic scenes, landscapes, women, animals, historic events, seascapes, moonlight … a veritable gallery of pictures in verse that pretended to be poetry.”

Here, as everywhere else, the true personalities survive. Chief among the Brazilian Parnassians are the few whom we have here considered.

III

The naturalistic novel in Brazil is, from the artistic standpoint, the work of some four men,—Machado de Assis, Aluizio de Azevedo, Julio Ribeiro and Raul Pompeia. Ribeiro’s Carne (Flesh) and Pompeia’s Atheneu represent, respectively, the influence of Zola upon the natural sensuousness of the Brazilian and the impact of complex modernity upon that sensuousness.

The prose work of Machado de Assis is not exclusively naturalistic; indeed, he should be considered, though of his age, a spirit apart; as he rises above the limitations of Brazilian letters, so he is too big for any circumscribed epoch to contain. With the year 1879 he began a long period of maturity that was to last for thirty years. It was during this fruitful phase that he produced the Memorias Postumas de Braz Cubas, Quincas Borba, Historias Sem Data, Dom Casmurro, Varias Historias, and other notable works. His long fiction, as his short, exhibits the same bitter-sweet philosophy and gracious, yet penetrating irony. In the best of his prose works he penetrates as deep as any of his countrymen into the abyss of the human soul.

The judgment of Verissimo upon Machado de Assis differs somewhat from that of his distinguished compatriots.

“With Varias Historias,” he says in his studies of Brazilian letters, “Sr. Machado de Assis published his fifteenth volume and his fifth collection of tales.… To say that in our literature Machado de Assis is a figure apart, that he stands with good reason first among our writers of fiction, that he possesses a rare faculty of assimilation and evolution which makes him, a writer of the second Romantic generation, always a contemporary, a modern, without on this account having sacrificed anything to the latest literary fashion or copied some brand-new esthetic, above all conserving his own distinct, singular personality … is but to repeat what has been said many times already. All these judgments are confirmed by his latest book, wherein may be noted the same impeccable correctness of language, the same firm grasp upon form, the same abundancy, force and originality of thought that make of him the only thinker among our writers of fiction, the same sad, bitter irony.…

“After that there was published another book by Sr. Machado de Assis, Yaya Garcia. Although this is really a new edition, we may well speak of it here since the first, published long before, is no longer remembered by the public. Moreover, this book has the delightful and honest charm of being in the writer’s first manner.

“But let us understand at once, this reference to Machado de Assis’s first manner. In this author more than once is justified the critical concept of the unity of works displayed by the great writers. All of Machado de Assis is practically present in his early works; in fact, he did not change, he scarcely developed. He is the most individual, the most personal, the most ‘himself’ of our writers; all the germs of this individuality that was to attain in Bras Cubas, in Quincas Borba, in the Papeis Avulsos and in Varias Historias its maximum of virtuosity, may be discovered in his first poems and in his earliest tales. His second manner, then, of which these books are the best example, is only the logical, natural, spontaneous development of his first, or rather, it is the first manner with less of the romantic and more of the critical tendencies.… The distinguishing trait of Machado de Assis is that he is, in our literature, an artist and a philosopher. Up to a short time ago he was the only one answering to such a description. Those who come after him proceed consciously and unconsciously from him, some of them being mere worthless imitators. In this genre, if I am not misemploying that term, he remained without a peer. Add that this philosopher is a pessimist by temperament and by conviction, and you will have as complete a characterization as it is possible to design of so strong and complex a figure as his in two strokes of the pen.

“Yaya Garcia, like ResurreiÇÃo and Helena, is a romantic account, perhaps the most romantic written by the author. Not only the most romantic, but perhaps the most emotional. In the books that followed it is easy to see how the emotion is, one might say, systematically repressed by the sad irony of a disillusioned man’s realism.” Verissimo goes on to imply that such a work as this merits comparison with the humane books of Tolstoi. But this only on the surface. “For at bottom, it contains the author’s misanthropy. A social, amiable misanthropy, curious about everything, interested in everything—what is, in the final analysis, a way of loving mankind without esteeming it.…

“The excellency with which the author of Yaya Garcia writes our language is proverbial.… The highest distinction of the genius of Machado de Assis in Brazilian literature is that he is the only truly universal writer we possess, without ceasing on that account to be really Brazilian.”

When the Brazilian Academy of letters was founded in 1897, Machado de Assis was unanimously elected president and held the position until his death. Oliveira Lima, who lectured at Harvard during the college season of 1915-1916, and who is himself one of the most intellectual forces of contemporary Brazil, has written of Machado de Assis: “By his extraordinary talent as writer, by his profound literary dignity, by the unity of a life that was entirely devoted to the cult of intellectual beauty, and by the prestige exerted about him by his work and by his personality, Machado de Assis succeeded, despite a nature that was averse to acclaim and little inclined to public appearance, in being considered and respected as the first among his country’s men-of-letters: the head, if that word can denote the idea, of a youthful literature which already possesses its traditions and cherishes above all its glories.… His life was one of the most regulated and peaceful after he had given up active journalism, for like so many others, he began his career as a political reporter, paragrapher and dramatic critic.”[13]

With the appearance of O Mulato, 1881, by Aluizio Azevedo (1857-1912), the literature of Brazil, prepared for such a reorientation by the direct influence of the great Portuguese, EÇa de Queiroz and of Emile Zola, was definitely steered toward naturalism. “In Aluizio Azevedo,” says Benedicto Costa, “one finds neither the poetry of JosÉ de Alencar, nor the delicacy,—I should even say, archness,—of Macedo, nor the sentimental preciosity of Taunay, nor the subtle irony of Machado de Assis. His phrase is brittle, lacking lyricism, tenderness, dreaminess, but it is dynamic, energetic, expressive, and, at times sensual to the point of sweet delirium.”

O Mulato, though it was the work of a youth in his early twenties, has been acknowledged as a solid, well-constructed example of Brazilian realism. There is a note of humour, as well as a lesson in criticism, in the author’s anecdote (told in his foreword to the fourth edition) about the provincial editor who advised the youthful author to give up writing and hire himself out on a farm. This was all the notice he received from his native province, MaranhÃo. Yet Azevedo grew to be one of the few Brazilian authors who supported himself by his pen.

Aluizio de Azevedo’s types (O CortiÇo, O Livro de Uma Sogra) are the opposite to Machado de Assis’s; they are coarse, violent, terre-À-terre. They are not so much a different Brazilian than we find in the poetry of Bilac, as a lower stratum of that same intelligence and physical blend.

IV

Symbolism, even more than Parnassianism in Brazil, was a matter of imitation, “in many cases,” as the truthful Verissimo avers, “unintelligent. It most certainly does not correspond to a movement of reaction, mystical, sensualist, individualistic, socialistic, anarchistic and even classic, as in Europe,—to a movement, in short, which is the result, on one side, of a revolt against the social organization, proved incapable of satisfying legitimate aspirations and needs of the individual, and on the other, of the exhaustion of Naturalism and Parnassianism.” In poetry, the school itself centres in Brazil about the personality of Cruz e Souza, an African with a keen sense of the racial injustice visited upon him, and with a pride that could not stifle his outcries. He is often incorrect, and it is true that carping scrutiny could find ample fare in his verses, but they are saved by a creative sincerity.

It takes but a superficial knowledge of French Symbolism to see how far are such poets as Cruz e Souza and B. Lopez from their Gallic brethren. Insert Cruz e Souza’s verses, without their author’s name, among the clamorous output of the Romantics that preceded him, and see how difficult it is to single many of them out for any qualities that distinguish them as technique or matter. The African was a spontaneous rather than an erudite spirit. Verissimo does not even believe that he was conscious of his gifts. And if, at any time, he pretended to possess a special theory of esthetics, the noted critic would have it that the poet’s well-meaning but ill-advised friends instigated him. He was a “good, sentimental, ignorant” soul “whose shocks against the social ambient resulted in poetry.” De Carvalho holds a higher opinion: “He introduced into our letters that horror of concrete form of which the great Goethe was already complaining at the close of the eighteenth century. And such a service, in all truth, was not small in a country where poetry flows more from the finger-tips than from the heart.”

Verissimo, indeed, does Cruz e Souza something less than justice. In his short life (1863-1898) the ardent Negro poet succeeded in stamping the impress of his personality upon his age and, for that matter, upon Brazilian letters. He is incorrect, obscure, voluble,—but he is contagiously sincere and transmits an impression of fiery exaltation. His stature will grow, rather than diminish with time. Bernadim do Costa Lopez (1851-1916) began as a bucolic Romanticist (in Chromos), later veering to a Parnassianism (in Hellenos) that contained less art than imitative artifice.

Among the outstanding spirits of the later poets are the mystical Emilio de Menezes and the serenely simple Mario Pederneiras. The latter (1868-1915) seems to have undergone the influence of Francis Jammes; he is one of the few Brazilians who acquired ease in the manipulation of free verse. Emilio de Menezes, who like Machado de Assis has translated Poe’s The Raven, is best known for his remarkable trio of religious sonnets grouped under the title Os Tres Olhares de Maria (The Three Glances of Mary).[14]

V

Later developments in Brazil, as in Spanish America, reveal no definite tendencies that may be grouped under any particular “ism.” Rampant individualism precludes the schools of literary memory. Aranha’s Chanaan directed attention to the Brazilian melting-pot. One result of the recent war has been, in Brazil, to strengthen the national spirit, and in SÃo Paulo, particularly, a young group headed by the industrious Monteiro Lobato seems to show a partial return to regionalism. The directing inspiration for the more clearly regionalistic art came perhaps from Euclydes da Cunha, whose SertÕes brought so poignant a realization that Brazil lived in the interior as well as on the coast. As a corollary of the aspiration toward national intellectual autonomy, there is setting in a reaction against France, in favour of national, even local types and themes. The literary product, if not at its highest, is upon a respectable level. The novel is ably represented by Coelho Netto,[15] while the drama, not so fortunate, plods along a routine path with such purveyors as Claudio de Souza in the lead. To the SÃo Paulo group I look for the early emergence of some worth-while talents,—young men of culture and vision who will bring to Brazil not merely the plethora of poesy that gluts her eyes and ears, but a firm grasp upon the prose that is the other half of life. Romero, years ago, said that what Brazil needed more than anything else was a regimen for its daily life. Only yesterday, Lobato, in his Problema Vital, studied the problem of what he calls the ailment of an entire country, seeking first of all to convince the nation that it was ill. And his initial prescription, like that of Romero, calls for a national hygiene. To this purpose he subordinates his activities as littÉrateur.

Thus conditions, though not so bad as when Verissimo studied his problem of the Brazilian writer some thirty years ago, are still analagous. He found the literature of his country, at that time, an unoriginal, pupil-literature, often misunderstanding its masters, yet endowed with certain undisputed points of originality. “The Brazilian writer, in his vast majority of cases, does not learn to write; he learns while writing. And it is doubtless useful to him as well as to our letters that the critic, at times, should turn instructor. The lack of a public interested in literary life, and capable of intelligent choice among works and authors, makes this secondary function of criticism even more necessary and serviceable.…”

Brazilian literature, as is highly evident, is not one of the major divisions of world letters. It lacks continuity, it is too largely derivative, too poor in masterpieces. Yet today, more at least than when Wolf wrote so enthusiastically in 1863, it is true that “Brazilian literature may justly claim consideration as being really national; in this quality it has its place assigned in the ensemble of the literatures of the civilized world; finally, and above all in its most recent period, it has developed in all directions, and has produced in the principal genres works worthy the attention of all friends of letters.”

The finest fruits of a national literature are the salient personalities who cross all frontiers and achieve such a measure of universality as is attainable in this best and worst of all possible worlds. As the region nurtures the national letters, so the national nurtures the international. And this internationality is but the most expansive phase of the individual in whom all art begins and in whom all art seeks its goal. For art begins and ends in the individual. A few such personalities Brazil has already produced, notably in the criticism of JosÉ Verissimo, the prose of Machado de Assis, the intellectuality of Oliveira Lima, the poetry of Olavo Bilac. They are valuable contributions to Goethe’s idea of a Weltliteratur. Such as they, rather than a roster of “isms,” “ists” and “ologies,” justify the study of the milieu and the tradition that helped to produce them. But precisely because they triumph over the milieu, because they shape it rather than are shaped by it, do they rise above the academic confines into that small library whose shelves know only one classification: significant personality.

[1] The so-called Modernist movement (another meaningless name!) was really not a movement, but a scattered reaction against Spanish academic domination. It was French in inspiration and chiefly behind the lead of the Decadents resulted in a species of continental affirmation. I have tried, in my Studies in Spanish-American Literature, New York, 1920, to show the emergence of this affirmation, from the romantic predecessors in the New World and the French background, to such salient personalities as DarÍo, RodÓ, Eguren, Blanco-Fombona and Chocano.