Os SertÕes, which first appeared in 1902—a happy year for Brazilian letters, since it witnessed the publication of GraÇa Aranha’s Chanaan as well—is one of the outstanding works of modern Portuguese literature. At once it gave to its ill-fated author a fame to which he never aspired. His name passed from tongue to tongue, like that of some new Columbus who with his investigation of the sertÃo had discovered Brazil to the Brazilians. His labour quickened interest in the interior, revealed a new source of legitimate national inspiration and presented to countrymen a strange work,—disturbing, illuminating, disordered, almost a fictional forest, written in nervous, heavily-freighted prose. Yet this is harsh truth itself, stranger than the fiction of Coelho Netto, wilder than the poetry of GraÇa Aranha, though instinct with the imagination of the one and the beauty of the other. The highly original work struck a deep echo in English letters and if Englishmen have neglected to read Richard Cunninghame-Graham’s remarkable book called A Brazilian Mystic: The Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro—a book that would never have been written had not Euclydes da Cunha toiled away in obscurity to produce Os SertÕes—it is their loss rather than their fault. It is a hurried and a harried world. Who, today, has time for such beauty of thought and phrase as Richard the wandering Scots sets down almost carelessly in his books and then sends forth from the press with mildly mocking humour for his prospective, but none too surely anticipated readers? Yet it is not the least of Euclydes da Cunha’s glories that he was the prime cause of Mr. Cunninghame-Graham’s A Brazilian Mystic. Not a fault of English readers, surely; but none the less their loss.

The author of Os SertÕes was born on January 20, 1866, in Santa Rita do Rio Negro, municipality of Cantagallo. Losing his mother when he was three years old, he went first to Theresopolis to an aunt, and thence, after two years, to SÃo Fidelis to another aunt, with whom he remained until his first studies were completed. His father retiring to Rio de Janeiro in 1876, Euclydes was transported to the capital, where he attended in due course the collegios called Victorio da Costa, Anglo-Brasileiro and Aquino. Naturally, he went through his baptism of verse, preparing a collection called Ondas (Waves); since every Brazilian early suffers an attack of this literary measles—it would be almost impolite not to indite one’s obligatory number of sonnets—the notice is without any importance to a man’s later career. It was at the Escola Militar da Praia Vermelha, which he entered at the age of twenty, that he laid the foundations of his scientific studies, and it is the scientist in Euclydes da Cunha that solidifies Os SertÕes.

The man—as his mature prose testifies—was of nervous temperament, and was led into one political scrape after another. At the very beginning of his career, carried away by the propaganda of Benjamin Constant, he committed an act of indiscipline against the Minister of War which has become famous in the annals of Brazilian politics, having required the benevolent intervention of the Emperor.

His journalistic labours began in 1888; the following year found him at the Escola Polytechnica of Rio de Janeiro, finishing his course as an engineer, but the proclamation of the Republic interrupted his studies and he returned to the army.

The material for his famous book was gathered while in the service of the important newspaper Estado de SÃo Paulo, for which he went into the wilds to report the government campaign against the fractious inhabitants of the sertÃo.

The campaign, as taught in the Brazilian schools, marked another stage in the establishment, the consolidation, of the Brazilian republic. It took place during the presidency of Prudente de Moraes (1894-1898) and brought within the folds of the new rÉgime the rebellious sertanejos, who had rallied round the leadership of Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel. Maciel was born circa 1835 in CearÁ and had, since 1864, attracted attention because of his strange religious notions, his queer garb, his legendary personality. Accused of crime, he was vindicated and went off toward the interior of Bahia, wandering in every direction over the sertÕes and reaching, at last, a tiny hamlet of Itapicuru, which he christened with the name Bom Jesus (Good Jesus) on November 10, 1886. The Archbishop of Bahia objecting, Maciel was ousted in 1887 as a preacher of subversive doctrines. His followers accompanied him, however, to Canudos, an old cattle ranch which, in 1890 was an abandoned site with some fifty ramshackle ruins of cottages. Thither came flocking an army of devotees and riff-raff, so that, when Maciel resisted the government that was intent upon collecting its taxes, he had a respectable number to heed his cry of insurrection.

At first the new republic tried religious methods, sending a Capuchin friar to win over the rebels to the Church and the Law. The monk despaired. Then followed four expeditions against the mystical Antonio; the first in November of 1896, the second during December-January of 1896-1897, the third during February and March of 1897, the last from April to October of the same year. “The sad chronicle of the tragedy of Canudos, the most important civil war in the history of the country,” concludes one popular text-book account,[1] “indicated the immediate necessity of the unification of the country.… It revealed, furthermore, the great resources of strength and virility among the sertanejos, who, though conservative and little disposed to lend themselves easily to novelty, possess none the less qualities important to the development of the country, once they are in fact bound to the national life.”

Euclydes da Cunha’s revelatory book opened the doors of the Brazilian Academy of Letters to him in 1903. He produced other books, one on the eternal question of Peru versus Bolivia, in which he sides with Bolivia; he became known for his speeches. The end of his life, which occurred through assassination on the 15th of August, 1909, was caused by a sexual snarl in which the corruptors of his domestic happiness added crime to betrayal.

The plan of Os SertÕes is that of a scientific spirit at the same time endowed with the many-faceted receptivity of the poet. Before approaching the campaign of Canudos itself, the author studies the land and the man produced by it; he is here, indeed, as Verissimo early indicated, the man of science, the geographer, the geologist, the ethnographer; the man of thought, the philosopher, the sociologist, the historian; the man of feeling, the poet, the novelist, the artist who can see and describe. But nowhere the sentimentalist. From one standpoint, indeed, the book is a cold confirmation of the very law against whose operative details the author protests:—“the inevitable crushing of the weak races by the strong.”

Though a sertanejo school of fiction had existed before Os SertÕes, the book brought to Brazilians a nearer, more intimate conception of the inhabitants of those hinterlands.

“The sertanejo,” writes the author in Chapter III of the section devoted to the man of the sertÃo, “is first of all a strong man. He does not possess the exhaustive rachetism of the neurasthenic hybrids of the coast.

“His appearance, however, at first blush, reveals the contrary. He lacks the impeccable plasticity, the straightness, the highly correct structure of athletic organisms.

“He is graceless, seemingly out of joint, crooked. Hercules-Quasimodo, he reflects in his appearance the typical ugliness of the weak. His loose gait, curved, almost waddling and tortuous, suggests the manipulation of unarticulated members. This impression is aggravated by his normally abject posture, in a manifestation of displeasure that gives him an appearance of depressing humility. On foot, when standing still, he invariably leans against the first door-post or wall that he finds; on horseback, if he reins in the animal to exchange a few words with a friend, he at once falls upon one of the stirrups, resting upon the side of the saddle. Jogging along, even at a rapid trot he never traces a straight, firm line. He advances hastily in a characteristic zig-zag, of which the meandering tracks of the sertÃo seem to be the geometric pattern.…

“He is the everlastingly tired man.…

“Yet all this seeming weariness is an illusion.

“There is nothing more amazing than to see him disappear all of a sudden.… It takes only the arising of some incident that requires the unleashing of his dormant energy. The man is transfigured.…”[2]

And it is this same powerful denizen of the Brazilian hinterlands that is a prey to the most primitive of superstitions, so that it was an easy matter for his resistance to a distant seat of government to become coupled in his mind with a resurgence of Sebastianism as newly incarnated in the person of Antonio Maciel.

“This feeling of uneasiness in regard to the new government,” writes Cunninghame-Graham, “the mysticism of the people as shown in the belief in the return to earth of Dom Sebastian, and the fear that the government meant the destruction of all religion, tended to make the dwellers in the sertÃo especially susceptible to any movement, religious or political alike, during the time between the abdication of the Emperor and the firm establishment of the new government. Out of the depths of superstition and violence, Antonio Conselheiro arose to plunge the whole sertÃo into an erethism of religious mania and blood.”

As relatively late as 1837 the region had witnessed a veritable orgy of sacrifice. A fanatic had mounted the so-called pedra bonita (pretty stone) and preached the coming of King Dom Sebastian, “he who fell at the field of Alcazar-el-Kebir. He foretold that the stone would be cut into steps; not cut with any earthly tools, but smoothed away by the shedding of the blood of children. Up these steps, so miraculously to be prepared, surrounded by his guard of honour, dressed in armour, the King, who had been dead three hundred years, should ascend and come into his own again, reigning in Portugal and in Brazil, and bountifully rewarding those who had been faithful to him and by their faith contributed to his disenchantment.… A multitude of women, all a prey to the mysterious agitation … came through the mountain passes, followed the trails through the virgin forests and assembled to hear the word preached at the wondrous pulpit made by no earthly hands. Unluckily they brought their children with them. Then, roused to a religious frenzy beyond belief, as they stood listening to the words of the illuminated cafuz or mamaluco—for history has not preserved his name—women strove with one another who should be the first to offer up her child, so that its blood should split the rock and form the sacred stair, by which the King, the long lamented Dom Sebastian, should ascend in glory, bringing back peace and plenty upon earth.… A common-sense historian (Cunninghame-Graham refers to Araripe Junior’s Reino Encantado) says that for days the rocks ran blood.…”

Further incident is unnecessary to a notion of the sertanejos’ mystic habit of mind and action. The Brazilian government became in their eyes a rule of dogs, and their favourite phrase for the republic was a lei do cÃo (the law of the dog). In the popular quatrains that Euclydes da Cunha collected are found merged the hatred of the sertanejos for the governing class of Brazil, their millenial hope in Dom Sebastian and their faith in Antonio surnamed Conselheiro (i. e., the Councillor) as the deliverer from all evil.

Cunninghame-Graham, like Euclydes da Cunha, and like the better of the Brazilian’s critics, feels a strong sympathy for the man in whom the new hopes of the sertanejos were centred. It is a sympathy, moreover, born of the understanding without which all knowledge is as fruit turned to ashes in the mouth. The Scot, like the Brazilian, is a psychologist. “Antonio Conselheiro himself did not so much rebel against authority as against life, perhaps expecting from it more than it had to give upon the spiritual side, not understanding that a fine day, with health to enjoy it, is the most spiritual of pleasures open to mankind,” he writes, in his amiable, worldly-wise (and heavenly-wise) way. And later: “When all is said, it is impossible not to sympathize to some extent with the misguided sectaries, for all they wanted was to live the life they had been accustomed to and sing their litanies. Clearly Antonio Conselheiro had no views on any subject under heaven outside his own district. His dreams were fixed upon a better world, and his chief care was to fit his followers for the change that he believed was to take place soon.”

It is Verissimo, who, with his almost unerring insight, extracts from his countryman’s book its central significance. Here is a volume that is a remarkable commentary upon the formation of all religions, “without excepting our own Christianity. In another milieu, under other conditions, Antonio Conselheiro is a Christ, a Mohammed, a Messiah, one of the many Mahdis, creators of religions in that fecund soil of human belief which is Asia. In the sertÃo, friends and enemies and even the constituted authorities, hold him (i. e., Antonio Maciel, the people’s councillor) as a good, honest, upright man, despite the legend—and is it only a legend?—which attributes to a tragic matricide his transformation from a business man into a religious preacher, his life as a saint and a missionary of the sertÃo.”

I find that I have spoken as much of Cunninghame-Graham as of the Brazilian in whom he found his most important source; that is because the Scotsman’s book is the best possible revelation in English of the remarkable account given by Euclydes da Cunha.

Os SertÕes stands alone in the nation’s literature; we, in ours, have no book to parallel it in spirit, purport or accomplishment. Yet even today there are regions to which a similar method might be applied, for Verissimo’s words about Asia seem to cover the United States as well,—in less degree, of course, but for our purpose with equal patness. More, a close reading of the government’s application of force to a situation that might have yielded to less warlike methods,—or, at least, that might have been managed without the necessity of the final massacre—could teach something to all governmental departments that are brought into contact with alien or extra-social groups which must be incorporated into the national entity. Os SertÕes is the best answer to the young Brazilian regionalists who have made the book a rallying-point. Here is a volume—and a thick, compact volume it is—dealing in quasi-reportorial spirit with a brief incident in the most hidden recesses of the national interior; it was not written with belles-lettres in mind; it is strewn with terms and processes of thought that baffle the ordinary reader. Yet the man who composed it was a vibrant personality, and whether knowingly or unwittingly, he made the book a symbol,—a symbol of uncomprehending persecution, of human fanaticism, of religious origins, of man’s instinctive seeking after something higher. It is true that the persecution was in part necessary, that the aspect of fanaticism here revealed is most repugnant, that the spectacle of religious origins does not flatter our unctuous, supposedly civilized, superior souls. But it is true, likewise, that we must gaze into such depths as these to remind ourselves occasionally that we dwell in these inferiors. Such is the wisdom of Euclydes da Cunha, of Richard Cunninghame-Graham, of JosÉ Verissimo.