As the purpose of this book is largely introductory, the works listed below have been chosen carefully as a miniature critical library for the student. Numerous other volumes are mentioned in the footnotes of the text. I have not considered it necessary to include here a number of works that possess importance chiefly for the specialist.

FERDINAND DENIS. ResumÉ de l’histoire littÉraire du Portugal, suivi du ResumÉ de l’histoire littÉraire du BrÉsil. Paris, 1826.

The chapters upon Brazilian letters occupy pages 513 to 601 of this 16mo book. The French cleric, with a style inclining toward eloquence, makes highly pleasant reading, and the century that followed upon his work has borne out more than one of his expectations. He realized, thus early, the effect of the racial blend upon the imaginative output, indicating the African for ardour, the Portuguese for chivalry, the Indian native for dreaminess. As a resident upon the spot, he noted the several-month droughts which Buckle, much to Romero’s indignation, later failed to take into account. “America,” wrote Denis, “sparkling with youth, ought to think thoughts as new and energetic as itself; our literary glory cannot always illumine it with a light that grows dim on crossing the seas, and which should vanish completely before the primitive inspiration of a nation vibrant with energy.” Denis, in his prophetic strain, even predicted that America would some day visit Europe as Europe today visits Egypt, to witness the scenes of a departed civilization. In general, he favours a distinctive, national note. He is cursorily informative rather than critical, and susceptible to few aesthetic values.

FERDINAND WOLF. Le BrÉsil LittÉraire. Histoire de la littÉrature brÉsilienne suivie d’un choix de morceaux tires des meilleurs auteurs b(r)Ésiliens. Berlin, 1863.

The quarto volume is dedicated to the Emperor of Brazil. Wolf, of course, was a German; the book was translated into French at the publisher’s request, in order to reach a larger audience. Its author regarded it as “the first and only one to appear in Europe on the subject.” Since Denis’s treatment forms a sort of appendix to his Portuguese section, Wolf’s statement, understood as referring to an independent volume upon Brazil, may be allowed to pass. The book is chiefly one of facts and analyses of works. Of criticism in the higher sense there is little, and what there is, is of the conventional sort. There is a moral, anti-French outlook; a Teutonic preoccupation with data; no glimmer of aesthetic criticism. Wolf’s style is far from the amenable style of Denis.

FRANCISCO ADOLPHO DE VARNHAGEN. Florilegio da Poesia Brasileira. (Vols. I and II, Lisbon, 1850. Vol. III, Madrid, 1853.)

It is the Introduction preceding the first volume of these noted selections, together with the prefatory notes to the selections themselves, that virtually begins the writing of Brazilian literary history. Without this work Ferdinand Wolf could not have written his Le BrÉsil LittÉraire. All later investigators and critics have really built upon Varnhagen’s foundations, tearing a stone away here and there and substituting another, but leaving the structure fundamentally the same.

SYLVIO ROMERO. Historia da Litteratura Brasileira. 2a ediÇÃo, melhorada pelo auctor. Rio Vol. I, 1902, Vol. II, 1903.

Romero is one of the most picturesque literary figures of the nineteenth century. He was a born fighter, with all the traits of the ardent polemist. Throughout a lifetime that was rife with self-contradiction, self-repetition, and self-glorification, he fought for Brazilian independence in the literary, scientific and political fields. He was by no means blind to esthetic beauty, but he insisted overmuch upon the national element and was easily lost in fogs of irrelevancy. He was a great admirer of German methods, and—justly, to my way of thinking—a believer in Anglo-German culture as a complement to Latin. As his life sought to cover almost every field of intellectual activity, so does his History of Brazilian Literature, which was left incompleted, seek to cover altogether too much ground. His book might more properly have been named a history of Brazilian culture. Such, indeed, was his conception of literature, which to him, as he states in his very first chapter, possessed “the amplitude given to it by the critics and historians of Germany. It comprises all the manifestations of a people’s intelligence:—politics, economics, art, popular creations, sciences … and not, as was wont to be supposed, in Brazil, only those entitled belles lettres, which finally came to mean almost exclusively poetry!…” A knowledge of this important work—important despite the list of objections that might be raised against it—is indispensable to the student.

SYLVIO ROMERO and JOAO RIBEIRO. Compendia da Literatura Brasileira. 2a ediÇÃo refundida. Rio, 1909.

A useful compendium and condensation. The authors here consider art “a chapter of sociology,” laying down a belief in the “consciousness of the identity of human destinies,” which is, “in our opinion, the basis of all sociology and morality.”

JOSÉ VERISSIMO. Estudos de Literatura Brazileira. Six series, published at Rio de Janeiro and Paris, between 1901 and 1910. These largely formed the basis for his Historia da Literatura Brazileira, Rio, 1916.

Verissimo, in my opinion, is the leading critic of letters Brazil has thus far produced, and one of the country’s greatest minds. His whole life was a beautiful attitude,—a serene, usually unruffled spirit open to anything that proceeded from creative sincerity. He is, as I have tried to show in the text, the spiritual opposite of Romero. If the student has time only for a limited reading of Brazilian criticism, he should approach Verissimo before he goes any farther. Verissimo had learned, or perhaps had been born with, the secret that beauty owed allegiance to no flag; he was not bogged, as was Romero so often, by extraneous loyalties; he erected no pompous structures of “scientificist” criticism. He was, what every significant critic must be, an artist.

RONALD DE CARVALHO. Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira. Rio, 1919, 1922. The book was awarded a prize by the Brazilian Academy—as was the same author’s book of poetry Poemas e Sonetos—and appeared later in a revised, augmented edition. De Carvalho is a brilliant young man on the sunny side of thirty. His book—as, for that matter, every other recent one upon the subject—is under great debts to Romero and Verissimo, but it reveals an independent personality and an agreeably cosmopolitan conception of literature.

For the facts—as distinguished from opinions—in my own book I have relied largely upon the works of Romero, Verissimo, Lima and Carvalho. The number of lesser books that may be read is far greater than their individual worth. I would suggest, merely as a starting-point for more individual delving, such informative books as the following:

VICTOR ORBAN. Le BrÉsil Litteraire. Paris, no date. An anthology with many illustrations of authors.

M. GARCIA MEROU. El Brasil Intelectual. A highly diverting account by an Argentine who was once Minister to the United States.

ENRIQUE BUSTAMANTE Y BALLIVIAN. Poetas Brasileros. Rio, 1922. A translation into Spanish of a number of poems representing the various movements since (and including) Romanticism. Bustamante is a Peruvian poet of worth and has added short notes to his selections.

LIVRO DO CENTENARIO. Rio, 1900. As part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Brazil’s discovery, the government has sponsored the publication of four tomes, which covered the culture of the nation. Volume I contains a resumÉ of Brazilian literature by the ubiquitous Romero, in which he slashes through the field in characteristic fashion.

Very little has been translated into English from the Brazilian authors, particularly in the United States. As an example of the novel, there is, however, Aranha’s Chanaan, issued as Canaan in Boston, 1919. In Boston, too, 1921, was issued Brazilian Tales, containing short stories from Machado de Assis, Coelho Netto, Medeiros e Albuquerque and Carmen Dolores. Coelho’s fine novel Rei Negro (The Black King), may be procured in a good French translation under the title Macambira.

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