Had he been born in Europe and written, say, in French, Machado de Assis would perhaps be more than a name today—if he is that—to persons outside of his native country. As it is, he has become, but fourteen years after his death, so much a classic that many of his countrymen who will soon gaze upon his statue will surely have read scarcely a line of his work. He was too human a spirit to be prisoned into a narrow circle of exclusively national interests, whence the cry from some critics that he was not a national creator; on the other hand, his peculiar blend of melancholy charm and bitter-sweet irony have been traced to the mingling of different bloods that makes Brazil so fertile a field for the study of miscegenation. His work, as we all may read it, is, from the testimony of the few who knew him intimately, a perfect mirror of the retiring personality. His life and labours raised the letters of his nation to a new dignity. Monuments to such as he are monuments to the loftier aspirations of those who raise them, for the great need no statues.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 and died there in 1908; he came of poor parents and was early beset with difficulties, yet the very nature of the work he was forced to take up brought him into contact with the persons and the surroundings that were to suggest his real career. As a typesetter he met literature in the raw; at the meetings of literary men and in the book shop of Paulo Brito he began to feel the nature of his true calling. At twenty he commenced to write with the indifference and the prolixity of the ’prentice hand; comedies, tales, translations, poems—all was grist that came to his literary mill. His talent, though evident, was slow to develop; it could be seen that the youth had a gift for understanding the inner workings of the human soul and that by nature he was an ironist, yet his poetry, especially, lacked fire—it came from the head, not the heart. Take the man’s work as a whole, for that matter, and the same observation holds generally true. He is not of the sort that dissolves into ecstasies before a wonderful sunset or rises to the empyrean on the wings of song; for such self-abandonment he is too critical, too self-conscious. In him, then, as a poet we are not to seek for passion; in his tales we must not hunt too eagerly for action; in his novels (let us call them such) we are not to hope for adventure, intrigue, climax. Machado de Assis is, as far as a man may be, sui generis, a literary law unto himself. His best productions, which range over thirty years of mature activity, reveal an eclectic spirit in whom something of classic repose balances his innate pessimism. It has been written of him that he was “a man of half tints, of half words, of half ideas, of half systems.…” Such an estimate, if it be purged of any derogatory insinuations, is, on the whole, just; if Machado de Assis seems to miss real greatness, it is because of something inherently balanced in his make-up; he is never himself carried away, and therefore neither are we. Yet he belongs to a company none too numerous, and when Anatole France, some years ago, presided at a meeting held in France to honour the noted Brazilian, he must have appeared to more than one in the audience as a peculiarly fitting symbol of the spirit that informed the departed man’s work.[1]

Not that Machado de Assis was an Anatole France, as some would insinuate. But he was not unworthy of that master’s companionship; his outlook was more circumscribed than the Frenchman’s, as was his environment; his garden, then, was smaller, but he cultivated it; his glass was little, like that of another famous Frenchman, but he drank out of his own glass.

The poetry of Machado de Assis appears in four collections, all of which go to make up a book of moderate size. And, if the truth is to be told, their worth is about as moderate as their size. If critics have found him, in his verse, very correct and somewhat cold; if they have pointed out that he lacked a vivid imagination, suffered from a limited vocabulary, was indifferent to nature, and thus deficient in description, they have but spoken what is evident from a reading of the lines. This is not to say that a poem here and there has not become part of the national memory—as, for example, the well-known Circulo Vicioso (Vicious Circle) and Mosca Azul (The Blue Fly)—verses of a broadly moralistic significance and of little originality. His Chrysalides, the first collection, dates back to 1864; already his muse appears as a lady desirous of tranquillity (and this at the age of twenty-five!) while in the poem Erro he makes the telltale declaration:

“I loved you one day with that transient love which is born in the imagination and does not reach the heart.” There you have the type of love that appears in his poetry; and there you have one of the reasons why the man is so much more successful as a psychological ironist in his novels than as a poet. Yet close study would show that at times this tranquillity, far from being always the absence of torment, is the result of neutralizing forces; it is like the revolving disk of primary hues that seems white in the rapidity of its whirling.

These early poems dwell upon such love; upon a desire for justice, as revealed in his Epitaphio do Mexico (Mexico’s Epitaph) and Polonia (Poland); upon an elegiac note that seems statement rather than feeling. “Like a pelican of love,” he writes in one of his poems that recalls the famous image of de Musset, “I will rend my breast and nurture my offspring with my own blood; my offspring: desire, chimera, hope.…” But read through the verses of Chrysalides and it is hard to find where any red blood flows. The vocabulary is small, the phrases are trite; his very muse is named Musa Consolatrix, bringing solace rather than agitated emotion.

Phalenas (Moths, 1870) is more varied; the collection shows a sense of humour, a feeling for the exotic, as in the quasi-Chinese poems, which are of a delicate pallor. But there is little new in his admonitions to cull the flower ere it fade, and his love poetry would insult a sensitive maiden with its self-understanding substratum of commentary. His reserve is simply too great to permit outbursts and like the worshipper of whom he speaks in his Lagrimas de Cera, he “did not shed a single tear. She had faith, the flame to burn—but what she could not do was weep.”[2] He is altogether too frequently the self-observer rather than the self-giver; nor would this be objectionable, if out of that autoscopy emerged something vital and communicable to the introspective spirit in us all. He can sing of seizing the flower ere it fades away, yet how frequently does he himself seize it? There is humour in the ninety-seven octaves of Pallida Elvira,—a queer performance, indeed, in which a thin comic vein blends imperfectly with a trite philosophic plot. Romantic love, the satiety of Hector, the abandonment of Elvira, the world-wanderings of the runaway, his vain pursuit of glory and his return too late, to find a child left by the dead Elvira, the obduracy of grandfather Antero; such is the scheme. Hector, thus cheated, jumps into the sea, which he might well have done before the poem began.

More successful is Uma Oda de Anacreonte, a one-act play in verse, in which is portrayed the power of money over the sway of love. Cleon, confiding, amorous youth that he is, is disillusioned by both love (Myrto) and friendship (Lysias). There is a didactic tint to the piece, which is informed with the author’s characteristic irony, cynicism, brooding reflection and resigned acceptation. Of truly dramatic value—and by that phrase I mean not so much the conventional stageworthiness of the drama’s technicians as a captivating reality born of the people themselves—there is very little.

In Americanas (1875) the poet goes to the native scenes and legends for inspiration; Potyra—recounting the plight of a Christian captive who, rather than betray her husband by wedding a Tamoyo chief, accepts death at the heathen’s hands—is a cold, objective presentation, unwarmed by figures of speech, not illuminated by any inner light; Niani, a Guaycuru legend, is far better stuff, more human, more vivid, in ballad style as opposed to the halting blank verse of the former; for the most part, the collection consists of external narrative—feeling, insight, passion are sacrificed to arid reticence.

Thus A Christà Nova (The Converted Jewess) contains few ideas; neither colour nor passion, vision nor fire, inhere in it. There is a sentimental fondness for the vanquished races—a note so common in the “Indian” age of Brazilian letters, and in analogous writings of the Spanish-Americans, as to have become a convention. The poem tells the story of a converted Jewess who is betrothed to a soldier. She is met by her betrothed after the war, with her father in the toils of the Inquisition. Rather than remain with her lover, she chooses to die with her parent; father and daughter go to their end together. Chiefly dry narrative, and perhaps better than Potyra, though that is negative praise. The poem is commendable for but two poetic cases: one, a very successful terza rima version of the song of exile in the Bible, “By the waters of Babylon sat we down and wept …” and the other, a simple simile:

It is in the Occidentaes of 1900 that we find more of the real Machado de Assis than in the series that preceded it. The ripened man now speaks from a pulsing heart. Not that any of these verses leap into flame, as in the sonorous, incendiary strophes of Bilac, but at least the thoughts live in the words that body them forth and technical skill revels in its power. Here the essence of his attitude toward life appears—that life which, rather than death, is the corroding force, the universal and ubiquitous element. The Mosca Azul is almost an epitome of his outlook, revealing as it does his tender irony, his human pity, his repressed sensuality, his feeling for form, his disillusioned comprehension of illusions. His resigned acceptance of life’s decline is characteristic of the man—part, perhaps, of his balanced outlook. One misses in him the rebel—the note that lends greatness to the hero in his foreordained defeat, raising the drama of surrender to the tragedy of the unconquered victim. But this would be asking him to be some one else—an inartistic request which we must withhold.

I give the Mosca Azul entire, because of its central importance to the poetry of the man, as well as to that more discerning outlook upon life which is to be found in his prose works.

As one reads this, a fable comes to mind out of childhood days. What is this poem of the fly, but the tale of the man who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, retold in verses admirable for colour, freshness,—for everything, indeed, except originality and feeling? Those critics are right who find in Machado de Assis a certain homiletic preoccupation; but he is never the preacher, and his light is cast not upon narrow dogmas, with which he had nothing to do, but upon the broad ethical implications of every life that seeks to bring something like order into the chaos we call existence,—a thing without rhyme or reason, as he would have agreed, but what would you? Every game has its rules, even the game of hide and seek. And if rules are made to be broken, part of the game is in the making of them.

Companioning the search for roots of illusion is the theme of eternal dissatisfaction. This Machado de Assis has put into one of the most quoted of Brazilian sonnets, which he calls Circulo Vicioso (Vicious Circle):

Between the loss of illusion and eternal dissatisfaction lies the luring desert of introspection; here men ask questions that send back silence as the wisest answer, or words that are more quiet than silence and about as informing. The poet’s tribute to Arthur de Oliveira is really a description—particularly in the closing lines—of himself. “You will laugh, not with the ancient laughter, long and powerful,—the laughter of an eternal friendly youth, but with another, a bitter laughter, like the laughter of an ailing god, who wearies of divinity and who, too, longs for an end.…” This world-weariness runs all through Machado de Assis; it is one of the mainsprings of his remarkable prose works. It is no vain paradox to say that the real poet Machado de Assis is in his prose, for in his prose alone do the fruits of his imagination come to maturity; only in his better tales and the strange books he called novels does his rare personality reach a rounded fulfilment. Peculiarly enough, the man is in his poetry, the artist in his prose. The one is as revelatory of his ethical outlook as the other of his esthetic intuitions. What he thinks, as distinct from what he feels, is in his verse rather than in his novels or tales.

He was haunted, it seems, by the symbol of a Prometheus wearied of his immortality of anguish,—by the tedium vitae. This world-weariness appears in the very reticence of his style. He writes, at times, as if it were one of the vanities of vanities, yet one feels that a certain inner pride lay behind this outer timidity. His method is the most leisurely of indirection,—not the involved indirection of a Conrad, nor the circuitous adumbration of a Hamsun. He has been compared, for his humourism, to the Englishman Sterne, and there is a basis for the comparison if we remove all connotation of ribaldry and retain only the fruitful rambling. Machado de Assis is the essence of charming sobriety, of slily smiling half-speech. He is something like his own Ahasverus in the conte Viver!, withdrawn from life not so much because he hated it as because he loved it exceedingly.

In that admirable dialogue, wherein Prometheus appears as a vision before the Wandering Jew, the tedium of existence is compressed into a few brief pages.

We have come to the end of time and Ahasverus, seated upon a rock, gazes for a long while upon the horizon, athwart which wing two eagles, crossing each other in their path. The day is waning.

Whereupon Prometheus appears and the two great symbols of human suffering debate upon the life everlasting. The crime of the Wandering Jew was great, Prometheus admits, but his was a lenient punishment. Other men read but a chapter of life, while Ahasverus read the whole book. “What does one chapter know of the other? Nothing. But he who has read them all, connects them and concludes. Are there melancholy pages? There are merry and happy ones, too. Tragic convulsion precedes that of laughter; life burgeons from death; swans and swallows change climate, without ever abandoning it entirely; and thus all is harmonized and begun anew.” But Ahasverus, continuing the tale of his wanderings, expresses the meaninglessness of immortality:

As Prometheus is but a vision, he is in reality identical with Ahasverus; and as Ahasverus here speaks, according to our interpretation, for Machado de Assis, so too does Prometheus. Particularly when he utters such sentiments as “The description of life is not worth the sensation of life.” Yet in Machado de Assis, description and sensation are fairly one; like so many ironists, he has a mistrust of feeling. The close of the dialogue is a striking commentary upon the retiring duality of the writer. Ahasverus, in his vision, is loosening the fetters of Prometheus, and the Greek addresses him:

So much for the weariness of the superhuman,—an attitude matched among us more common mortals by such a delirium as occurs in a famous passage of Machado de Assis’s Braz Cubas, one of the mature works of which Dom Casmurro is by many held to be the best. What shall we say of the plots of these novels? In reality, the plots do not exist. They are the slenderest of strings upon which the master stylist hangs the pearls of his wisdom. And such a wisdom! Not the maxims of a Solomon, nor the pompous nothings of the professional moralist. Seeming by-products of the narrative, they form its essence. To read Machado de Assis’s central novels for their tale is the vainest of pursuits. He is not interested in goals; the road is his pleasure, and he pauses wherever he lists, indulging the most whimsical conceits. For this Brazilian is a master of the whimsy that is instinct with a sense of man’s futility.

Here, for example, is almost the whole of Chapter XVII of Dom Casmurro. What has it to do with the love story of the hero and CapitÚ? Nothing. It could be removed, like any number of passages from Machado de Assis’s chief labours, without destroying the mere tale. Yet it is precisely these passages that are the soul of the man’s work.

The chapter is entitled The Worms (Os Vermes).

This is more than a commentary upon books; it is, in little, a philosophical attitude toward life, and, so far as one may judge from his works, it was Machado de Assis’s attitude. He was a kindly sceptic; for that matter, look through the history of scepticism, and see whether, as a lot, the sceptics are not much more kindly than their supposedly sweeter-tempered brothers who dwell in the everlasting grace of life’s certainties.

Machado de Assis was not too hopeful of human nature. One of his most noted tales, O Infermeiro (The Nurse or Attendant) is a miniature masterpiece of irony in which man’s self-deception in the face of his own advantages is brought out with that charm-in-power which is not the least of the Brazilian’s qualities.

A man has hired out as nurse to a testy old invalid, who has changed one after the other all the attendants he has engaged. The nurse seems more fortunate than the rest, though matters rapidly approach a climax, until “on the evening of the 24th of August the colonel had a violent attack of anger; he struck me, he called me the vilest names, he threatened to shoot me; finally he threw in my face a plate of porridge that was too cold for him. The plate struck the wall and broke into a thousand fragments.

“‘You’ll pay me for it, you thief!’ he bellowed.

“For a long time he grumbled. Towards eleven o’clock he gradually fell asleep. While he slept I took a book out of my pocket, a translation of an old d’Alancourt novel which I had found lying about, and began to read it in his room, at a small distance from his bed. I was to wake him at midnight to give him his medicine; but, whether it was due to fatigue or to the influence of the book, I, too, before reaching the second page, fell asleep. The cries of the colonel awoke me with a start; in an instant I was up. He, apparently in a delirium, continued to utter the same cries; finally he seized his water-bottle and threw it at my face. I could not get out of the way in time; the bottle hit me in the left cheek, and the pain was so acute that I almost lost consciousness. With a leap I rushed upon the invalid; I tightened my hands around his neck; he struggled several moments; I strangled him.

“When I beheld that he no longer breathed, I stepped back in terror. I cried out; but nobody heard me. Then, approaching the bed once more, I shook him so as to bring him back to life. It was too late; the aneurism had burst, and the colonel was dead. I went into the adjoining room, and for two hours I did not dare to return. It is impossible for me to express all that I felt during that time. It was intense stupefaction, a kind of vague and vacant delirium. It seemed to me that I saw faces grinning on the walls; I heard muffled voices. The cries of the victim, the cries uttered before the struggle and during its wild moments continued to reverberate within me, and the air, in whatever direction I turned, seemed to shake with convulsions. Do not imagine that I am inventing pictures or aiming at verbal style. I swear to you that I heard distinctly voices that were crying at me: ‘Murderer; Murderer!’”

By one of the many ironies of fate, however, the testy colonel has left the attendant sole heir to his possessions; for the invalid has felt genuine appreciation, despite the anger to which he was subject. Note the effect upon the attendant, whose conscience at first has troubled him acutely:

But possession is sweet, and before long the attendant changes his mind.

I have omitted mention of the earlier novels of Machado de Assis because they belong to a romantic epoch, and he was not of the stuff that makes real romantics.[6] How could he be a genuine member of that school when every trait of his retiring personality rebelled against the abandonment to outspokenness implied in membership? He is as wary of extremes, as mistrustful of superlatives, as JosÉ Dias in Dom Casmurro is fond of them. “I wiped my eyes,” relates the hero of that book, when apprised of his mother’s illness, “since of all JosÉ Dias’s words, but a single one remained in my heart: it was that gravissimo, (very serious). I saw afterward that he had meant to say only grave (serious), but the use of the superlative makes the mouth long, and through love of a sonorous sentence JosÉ Dias had increased my sadness. If you should find in this book any words belonging to the same family, let me know, gentle reader, that I may emend it in the second edition; there is nothing uglier than giving very long feet to very short ideas.” If anything, his method follows the reverse order, that of giving short feet to long ideas. He never strains a thought or a situation. If he is sad, it is not the loud-mouthed melancholy of Byronic youth; neither is he the blatant cynic. He does not wave his hands and beat his breast in deep despair; he seems rather to sit brooding—not too deeply, for that would imply too great a concern with the silly world—by the banks of a lake in which the reflection of the clouds paints fantastic pictures upon the changing waters.

The real Machado de Assis stands apart from all who have written prose in his country. Senhor Costa, in his admirable book upon the Brazilian novel, has sought to present his nation’s chief novelist by means of an imagery drawn from Greek architecture; Aluizio Azevedo thus becomes the Doric column; Machado de Assis, the sober, elegant Ionian column; GraÇa Aranha, the Corinthian and Coelho Netto the composite. Sobriety and elegance are surely the outstanding qualities of the noted writer. His art, according to Costa, is the secret of suggesting thoughts; this is what I have called his indirect method.

Machado de Assis belongs with the original writers of the nineteenth century. His family is the family of Renan and Anatole France; he is their younger brother, but his features show the resemblance.