GraÇa Aranha, like Euclydes da Cunha (from whom in so many other respects he is so different), is a man virtually of a single book. And, as Os SertÕes in 1902 created so profound an impression upon Brazilian letters as to suggest a partial reorientation of the national literature, so, in the same year, did the appearance of Aranha’s Chanaan work a profound change in the Brazilian novel. Much ink has been spilled about it and often, if not generally, in that exalted rhetorical mood for which the Ibero-American critic does not lack models abroad; upon the strength of Chanaan alone, Senhor Costa (and not entirely without justice) has created a new phase of the national novel: the critico-philosophical; Guglielmo Ferrero, the noted Italian historian, a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, made it known to Europe with his fulsome praise of it as the great American novel,—a term that had already been applied to MarÍa (by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs) and Taunay’s Innocencia. There is a distinct basis for comparison between Innocencia and the more famous tale from Colombia; between these and Chanaan, however, there is little similarity, if one overlooks the poetic atmosphere that glamours all three. Aranha’s book is of far broader conception than the other two; it adds to their lyricism an epic sweep inherent in the subject and very soon felt in the treatment. It is, in fact, a novel difficult to classify, impregnated as it is with a noble, Tolstoian idealism, yet just as undoubtedly streaked with an unrelenting realism so often coupled with the name of Zola. Yet one does not perceive too plainly an inept mingling of genres; the style is a mirror of the vast theme—that moment at which the native and the immigrant strains begin to merge in the land of the future—the promised land that the protagonists are destined never to enter, even as Moses himself, upon Mount Nebo in the land of Moab, beheld Canaan and died in the thrall of the great vision.

Aranha seems truly to have been called to this task rather than to have chosen it. He is cosmopolitan by culture as well as training. Himself a descendant of an old family, he has not been hampered by the false aristocracy of the family, else how could he have composed the epic of Brazil’s melting-pot? He has served his nation at home and abroad, having been secretary to Joaquim Nabuco when that diplomat went to Italy to settle before the king the boundary dispute between Brazil and Great Britain in the matter of British Guiana; he was Brazilian minister at Christiania, and later Plenipotentiary for Brazil at The Hague. He is philosophically, critically inclined; he knows not only the Latin element of his nation, but the Teutonic as well; his native exuberance has been tempered by a serenity that is the product of European influence, in which may be reckoned a tithe of English.

Chanaan is of those novels that centre about an enthralling idea. The type that devotes much attention to depictions of life and customs, to discussions of present realities and ultimate purposes, is perhaps more frequent among Spanish and Portuguese Americans than among our own readers, who are too apt to be over-insistent in their demands for swift, visible external action. Yet, in the hands of a master, it possesses no less interest—for myself, I freely say more—than the more obvious type of fiction. Ideas possess more life than the persons who are moved by them.

The idea that carries Milkau from the Old World to the New is an ideal of human brotherhood, high purpose and dissatisfaction with the old, degenerate hemisphere. In the State of Espirito Santo, where the German colonists are dominant, he plans a simple life that shall drink inspiration in the youth of a new, virgin continent. He falls in with another German, Lentz, whose outlook upon life is at first the very opposite to Milkau’s blend of Christianity and a certain liberal Socialism. The strange milieu breeds in both an intellectual languor that vents itself in long discussions, in brooding contemplation, mirages of the spirit. Milkau is gradually struck with something wrong in the settlement. Little by little it begins to dawn upon him that attributes akin to the Old-World hypocrisy, fraud and insincerity are contaminating this supposedly virgin territory. Here he discovers no paradise À la Rousseau—no natural man untainted by the ills of civilization. Graft is as rampant as in any district of the world across the sea; cruelty is as rife. His pity is aroused by the plight of Mary, a destitute servant who is betrayed by the son of her employers. Not only does the scamp desert her when she most needs his protection and acknowledgment, but he is silent when his equally vicious parents drive her forth to a life of intense hardship. She is spurned at every door and reduced to beggary. Her child is born under the most distressing of circumstances and devoured by a pig before her very eyes, as she gazes helplessly on.

Mary is accused of infanticide, and since she lacks witnesses, is placed in an extremely difficult position. Moreover, the father of her child bends every effort to loosen the harshest measures of the community against her, whereupon Milkau, whose heart is open to the griefs of the universe, has another opportunity to behold man’s inhumanity to woman. His pity turns to what pity is akin to; he effects her release from jail, and together they go forth upon a journey that ends in the delirium of death. The promised land has proved a mirage—at least for the present. And it is upon this indecisive note that the book comes to a close.

Ferrero,[1] in his introduction to the book is substantial and to the point. It is natural that he should have taken such a liking to the novel, for Aranha’s work is of intense interest to the reader who looks for psychological insight, and Ferrero himself is the exponent of history as psychology rather than as economic materialism. “The critics,” he says, “will judge the literary merits of this novel. As a literary amateur, I will point out among its qualities the beauty of its style and its descriptions, the purity of the psychological analysis, the depth of the thoughts and the reflections of which the novel is full, and among its parts a certain disproportion between the different parts of the book and an ending which is too vague, indefinite, and unexpected. But its literary qualities seem to me to be of secondary importance to the profound and incontrovertible idea that forms the kernel of the book. Here in Europe we say that modern civilization develops itself in America more freely than in Europe, for in the former country it has not to surmount the obstacle of an older society, firmly established as in the case of the latter. Because of this we call America ‘the country of the young,’ and we consider the New World as the great force which decomposes the old European social organization.” That idea is, as Ferrero points out, and as Milkau discovered for himself, an illusion due to distance. Ferrero points out, too, that here is everywhere “an old America struggling against a new one and, what is very curious, the new America, which upsets traditions, is formed above all by the European immigrants who seek a place for themselves in the country of their adoption, whereas the real Americans represent the conservative tendencies. Europe exerts on American society—through its emigrants—the same dissolving action which America exerts—through its novelties and its example—on the old civilization of Europe.” The point is very well taken, and contains the germ of more than one great novel of the United States. And just as Chanaan stands by itself in Brazilian literature, so might such a novel achieve pre-eminence in our own.

“It is probable,” says Milkau to Lentz during one of their numerous discussions, in words that may have suggested this criticism to Ferrero and that may be applicable to our own nation,—“it is probable that our fate will be to transform this country from top to bottom, to substitute another civilization for all the culture, religion and traditions of a people. It is a new conquest, slow, dour, peaceful in its means, but terrible in its ambitious schemes. The substitution must be so pure and luminous that upon it may not fall the bitter curse of devastation. In the meantime we are a dissolvent of the race of this country. We soak into the nation’s clay and soften it; we mix ourselves with the natives and kill their traditions, and spread confusion among them.… No one will understand anyone else; there is a confusion of tongues; men coming from everywhere—bring with them the images of their several gods; they are all alien to each other; there is no communion of thought; men and women do not make love to each other in the same words.… Everything is disintegrating; one civilization falls and is transformed into an unknown one.… The remodelling of the nation is being set back. There is tragedy in the soul of a Brazilian when he feels that his race will not last for evermore. The law of nature is that like begets like.… And here tradition is broken; the father will not transmit his own image to his son; the language is dying; the old aspirations of the race, the deep-rooted desires for a distinct individuality, will become dumb; the future will not understand the past.”[2]

Ferrero is quite right in indicating the great non-literary importance of the novel; indeed, Brazilian criticism, as a whole, has in the consideration of Chanaan been so dazzled by the language and the social implications of the novel that it has overlooked or condoned its structural defects as a work of art. But not all readers will agree with Ferrero, I imagine, as to the excessive vagueness of the end. Hardly any other type of ending would have befitted a novel that treats of transition, of a landscape that enthralls, of possibilities that founder, not through the malignance of fate so much as through the stupidity, the cupidity, the crassness of man. There is an epic swirl to the finale that reminds one of the disappearance of an ancient deity in a pillar of dust. For an uncommon man like Milkau an uncommon end was called for.

In this novelized document upon Brazil’s racial problems and popular customs a certain and facile symbolism seems to inhere. Milkau is, as we have seen, the blend of Christianity and Socialism,—two concepts which, for all their recent historic enmity, are closely related, though by no means identical, in philosophical background. Lentz is the apostle of Nietzscheanism. Mary is the suffering land, a prey to the worse elements. The pot that melts the peoples melts their philosophies. So are they fused in this book, which terminates in a cloud, as of the first smoke to rise from the crucible.

Chanaan is not, for all its novelty and substantiality, the “splendid alliance of artistic perfection and moral grandeur” that one of its countless panegyrists has discovered it to be. Neither does it contain that mixture of Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Maeterlinck and Anatole France which was found in it by an editorial writer in the Jornal do Commercio. Even Verissimo, it seems to me, exaggerated the artistic importance of the novel in his enthusiasm—a rare thing in Verissimo—over the newness and the social significance of the book. He speaks of its drama as being “curto, rapido e intenso,” yet surely there is nothing “brief” or “rapid” in the telling of Chanaan, though intense it undoubtedly is. “New in theme,” he wrote, “new in inspiration and conception, new in style, Chanaan is the first and only manifestation worthy of appreciation among the new spiritual and social currents that are everywhere influencing literature and art. This novel brought to literature, not only Brazilian but Portuguese as well, human and social preoccupations, and modern forms of expression.… It may well be that chronologically some other came before him, but in art excellency is more important than priority.… This is the first novel of its kind in Brazil or Portugal. One may note the lack of action, that is, a more or less complicated plot.… Chanaan, then, belongs in the category of contemporary literature. The intense drama that animates it is chiefly internal, but the feelings, the sensations, the ideas vibrate in it like deeds.” Like deeds, in truth, for feelings, sensations and ideas are the raw material of action; more, the motive power itself of “action.” Verissimo is not so much blind to the artistic deficiencies of Chanaan as he is unmindful of them. He readily grants that “not all the episodes adjust themselves perfectly to the central action of the novel or even to the general fact that it presents.… In a detailed analysis of the architecture of the book perhaps other objections would be possible, but contemplating the structure as a whole—and this is how a work of art should be viewed—the impression is one of solid beauty. Chanaan is truly a work of talent in the most noble acceptation and the rarest application of that word. With its generous inspiration, its penetrating symbolism and its moving lyricism … with its wealth of ideas and sensations and its rare emotional sincerity, what is perhaps most admirable in GraÇa Aranha’s novel is the difficult union—intimate and perfect in this book—of the loftiest idealism and the most inviting realism.”

Costa, as we have seen, has centred a new epoch of the Brazilian novel around this one work, which he considers to have fixed the moment of transition that is so eloquently suggested in the passage from Milkau given above. “The problem of immigration was disquieting,” he writes. “Moreover, as reaction against French culture,” (a reaction that is now again to the fore) “the only culture that dominated without rivalry in Brazil, our men of letters began to read the German authors: Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. It was a moment of mental elaboration,—an Élan, a great hope, a fertile stirring of ideas, and, at the same time, there was doubt as to one’s powers of resistance, incertitude, puerile indecision, vague, formless aspirations,—that state of semi-lethargy, with acute intermittent crises of vitality, which characterizes the periods of transition amongst individuals and nations, the burgeoning of the youthful intelligence of a new people, the first attempts at independence, the will to learn and to produce, to affirm and to acquire the consciousness of one’s worth as a nation amongst the nations. It was in this period that there took place the most memorable event in the intellectual life of Brazil: the foundation of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.… GraÇa Aranha is, perhaps, the fusion of two different cultures.” This is evident in Chanaan, I may add in passing, without any reference to the known facts of the man’s life and his education. And though it may be studied in his book, from him it flowed into the narrative out of his very nature. He is, again in Costa’s words, “the focal point of two vigorous and independent Brazilian thinkers: Tobias Barreto and Joaquim Nabuco. The mysterious power of the race, its abandon, its sensual basis, its curiosity for learning—revealing a little the rudimentary traits of the mixed breed—the power of conception, the absolutist tendency, that make and are the strength of Tobias Barreto, encounter, in the manner of the law of compensation, a moderating force, a stabilization of values in the Apollonian genius of Joaquim Nabuco, in the Aryan clarity of his ideas, the Hellenic grace of his concepts, the brilliancy of his rhythmic style, so elegant, delicate and noble,—in the loftiness of his thoughts, in his civilized relativism. There are not in Brazil two spirits, two esthetics, that are more different from, more antagonistic to, each other. The first, despite his vast learning, his admiration for and bedazzlement before European thought, is in every attitude, every phrase, every gesture, an American, Brazilian, an exuberant son of the tropics, sensual and barbarous; the second, despite his love of his native land, despite his devotion … is, in his thought, in manner, in tastes, in soul, in ideas and affections, in pleasures and in style, a European, a Latin, a descendant in direct line of Greek culture. GraÇa Aranha, by a phenomenon that I discover in his style, has succeeded,—at the same time retaining complete independence,—in effecting an alliance between two opposite poles, the harmonious conjunction of these two different principles, the integration into a single beautiful and lofty form of these two contradictory esthetics. He has transformed the sensualism of Tobias Barreto into voluptuousness and the eloquence of Joaquim Nabuco into poetry.”

Costa has stated the case with tropical luxuriance of phrase and feeling; perhaps one must be a Brazilian to see all this—as art—in the novel to which it is applied. Take up the book in and for itself, as a product of a sensitive imagination transmuting the elements of experience into a new reality, and it contains, surely, all the qualities that its most intense admirers discover, but in less degree. Milkau is really the only character in the novel; he is the soloist. Too many of the beautiful thoughts remain here as isolated by-products of conversation rather than living emanations of interplay of emotions. There is a certain hesitancy as to form, which is now the frank dialogue of the stage, now the exaltation of a nativist hymn in a manner recalling, though of course not repeating, Rocha Pitta. Milkau himself, speaking doubtless for Aranha, says that “man is not governed by ideas; he is governed by feelings,” yet, so like the wise men who discover that simple truth, continues to expatiate upon the ideas. Could his sentence, indeed, have originated in one of simple feelings? The very recognition that feeling dominates us is a token that it has ceased to dominate entirely. This is another excellent reason for that indecisive close of the book to which Ferrero objected, for Milkau is caught in a mesh of indecision. It reveals, in the author, one of the sources of his own indecision as to form; but in the novel something of that uncertainty is felt in the telling, and interferes with one’s complete enjoyment in the epoch-making book. Yet, strangely enough, out of the weakness of the separate parts is forged a strength of the whole. Once again, the book becomes the mirror of the folk who people it, for out of the weakness of the individual would Milkau make the strength of human solidarity. “My eyes cannot reach the limits of the Infinite,” he cries at the very end. “My sight is limited to what surrounds you.… But I tell you, if this is going to end so that the cycle of existence may be repeated again elsewhere, or if some day we will be extinguished with the last wave of heat coming from the maternal bosom of earth, or if we be smashed with it in the Universe and be scattered like dust on the roads of the heavens, let us not separate from each other in this attitude of hatred.… I entreat you and your innumerable descendants, let us reconcile ourselves with each other before the coming of Death.…”

To sum up the artistic aspect of the case, I would say—with all admiration for the novel Chanaan and its countless fascinating moments of speech, attitude and vision—that the book itself is even in this respect a mirror, a symbol, of its people and its problems: it is a high promise rather than the perfect fulfilment that so many of its critics would see in it. It ascends the literary Mount Nebo, gazes toward the Promised Land, but does not enter. It is one of the peaks of Brazilian literature, both artistically (for detail) and historically (as a whole), but I dare say that its artistic importance will diminish as its historic significance increases. One’s sharper critical examination of the book is a tribute to its disturbing qualities and its peculiar individuality among the products of the modern novel.

Its historic importance is less to be questioned, though it has not created a school. Costa’s very characterization of it as a critico-philosophical novel contains a criticism, which is further brought out in his short concluding chapter upon his personal theory regarding the Brazilian novel. For here he suggests as the coming type what he calls the esthetico-social novel,—“the theory of art for art’s sake employed in representing the social moment of a people.” I am not concerned with this inartistic theory; inartistic because it would choose the subject for the artist, who alone has the right to select and combine his materials. Neither am I concerned with Costa’s uncomprehending attitude toward the Russian novel, in which he can find only folly, cruelty and delirium! It is a large world, and we must each write what is in ourselves, not what preceptive critics would order to fit in with their clamping theories. But I wish to point out that Costa’s employment of the word esthetic in his term for the novel of Brazil’s future indicates, for all his praise of the Aranha book, a sense of something lacking in Chanaan.

“The philosophy of GraÇa Aranha, … is a philosophy of hope, of intoxication, before the glorious majesty of nature; it is like a magnificent flower of dream, life, desire, aspiration toward happiness, which returns incessantly to the august bosom of the eternal Pan. Man passes on; he is a particle of dust that is blown for a moment across the earth. His whole struggle aims to merge him with nature, through religion, through love, through philosophy. It is this unceasing anxiety to dissolve into something superior to ourselves that produces the great mystics, the great lovers or the great philosophers; yet, at bottom, life in itself is worth what the dust is worth that glitters for an instant in the sun’s rays.… Such surely is the philosophy of GraÇa Aranha; a sunflower gilded by thought, it turns eternally toward fleeting happiness, in a perpetual desire to merge with it and drink in the light through its petals.… Flower of serene, victorious life, but with distant roots in the banks of the Ganges, nurtured by a vague pessimism, in nihilism, in incipient anarchy, in the everlasting beatitude of Nirvana.…”

This is the poetry of criticism, as Chanaan is the poetry of the novel,—a poetry not unlike Alencar’s Guarany, yet as unlike as Alencar was to Aranha. Like Aranha’s novel, so this criticism, for all its preoccupation with Brazilianism, is the result of European culture acting upon the native spirit. It is but another revelation of the literary axiom that renaissance springs from the impact of foreign influences; parthenogenesis is as rare in literature as in life.