Among recent literary currents that present several interesting phases one should not overlook the nationalistic tendencies in Brazil, championed so ardently and with such immediate effect by the most active of the “new” spirits, Monteiro Lobato. Lobato is but little over thirty-five and has at hand for his purpose an influential publishing house in SÃo Paulo; he is thus able to make himself heard and read as well as felt; he seems to be, in the intellectual sense of the word, a born propagandist; certainly he does not lack ink or courage and whatever one may think of his ideas, he makes highly entertaining and instructive reading. First and foremost he is the champion of the national personality. And by that same token he becomes the enemy of undue foreign influence upon the nation. As one reads his numerous short stories, his crisp and vigorous criticisms and his essays, one comes to the realization that, as far as Lobato is concerned, foreign influence is chiefly French and in large measure to be condemned.

The profound effect of French literature upon Spanish and Portuguese America is as undeniable as it is occasionally deleterious, but it is possible to overstate the case against the French influence in Brazil and, as one strikes in Lobato the same protest reiterated time and again, one begins to feel that he is somewhat afflicted with Gallophobia. Yet this is, after all, on his part, the over-emphasis of earnestness rather than an absolute error in values. He is not lacking in appreciation of the great Frenchmen; he does not seem to scorn the use, as epigraph to one of his children’s books, a quotation in French from Anatole France; he does not object to having some of his short stories mentioned in the same breath with de Maupassant and, above all, he recognizes the creative power of imitation, however paradoxical that may sound. “Let us agree,” he writes, in the preface to his stimulating collection of critiques, IdÉas de JÉca TatÚ, “that imitation is, in fact, the greatest of creative forces. He imitates who assimilates processes. Who copies, does not imitate; he steals. Who plagiarizes does not imitate, he apes.” The whole book he presents as “a war-cry in favor of personality.” At the bottom of Lobato’s nationalism is the one valid foundation of art: sincerity. If he occasionally overdoes his protest, he may well be forgiven for the sound basis of it; it is part of his own personality to see things in the primary colors, to play the national zealot not in any chauvinistic sense—he is no blind follower of the administrative powers, no nationalist in the ugly sense of cheap partisan drum-beating—but in the sense that true nationalism is the logical development of the fatherland’s potentialities. A personally independent fellow, then, who would achieve for his nation that same independence.

The beginning of the World War found Monteiro Lobato established upon a fazenda, far from the thoughts and centres of literature. It was by accident that he discovered his gifts as a writer. The story is told that one day, rendered indignant by the custom of setting fire to the fields for cleansing purposes, and thus endangering the bordering inhabitants, he sent a letter of protest to a large daily in SÃo Paulo. It seems that the letter was too important, too well-written, too plainly indicative of natural literary talent, to be relegated to the corner where readers’ jeremiads usually wail, and that, instead, it was “featured” upon the first page. From that day the die was cast. The episode, in my opinion, is far more important than it appears. For, whatever form in which the man’s later writings are published, they are in a more important degree just what this initial venture was: a protest, a means of civic betterment, a national contribution. Turn this letter and its mood into a short story and you have, say, such a tale-message as O Jardineiro Timotheo, in which even a garden may be transformed into a mute, many-hued plea for the native flora; make politics of it, and you get such a genuinely humorous product as A Modern Torture, from that strange collection called UrupÊs. Indeed is not the piece UrupÊs itself a critique and an exposition of the indigenous “cobrizo”?

It was with the collection UrupÊs that Monteiro Lobato definitely established himself. In three years it has reached a sale that for Brazil is truly phenomenal: twenty thousand copies. It has been extravagantly praised by such divergent figures as the uncrowned laureate Olavo Bilac (who might have had more than a few words to say about legitimate French influence upon Brazilian poetry) and the imposing Ruy Barbosa, who instinctively recognized the fundamentally sociological value of Lobato’s labours. For of pure literature there is little in the young Saint-Paulist. I fear that, together with a similar group in Buenos Aires, he underestimates the esthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapoury spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely, is the criticism that may be made against him when his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality and when what was meant to be humour falls away to caricature. From which it may be gathered that Lobato writes—or rather reprints—too much; for plenty of good journalism should be left where it first appeared and not be sent forth between covers. Also, in an appreciable amount of his work, his execution lags behind his intention, owing in no small measure to a lack of self-discipline and an artistically unripe sincerity.

UrupÊs was soon followed by IdÉas de JÉca TatÚ, his JÉca TatÚ being a fisherman of Parahyba, a “cobrizo,” first introduced in the preceding book and symbolizing the inertia of the native. In the second book, however, the ideas are anything but those of inertia; Lobato has got into the skin of the fisherman and produced a series of admirable essays and critiques. Of similar nature are the chapters embodied in Cidades Mortas. Negrinha is a collection of short stories. In addition to being the author of these books, he is the editor of a splendid magazine, Revista do Brazil, the publisher of volumes by the rising generation of literary redeemers, instructor to his nation in hygiene, and his energies flow over into yet other channels. He is also the writer of several books for children. The best known of these is Narizinho Arrebitado or, as who should say Little Snub-Nose, and with an appropriate blush I confess that the little girl’s adventures among the flowers and creatures of her native land were responsible for the theft of some hours from the study of fatter, less childish, tomes. As one who would renovate the letters of his nation, Lobato naturally has much to say, inside of Brazil and outside, of the former and present figures of the country’s literature. His work in every phase is first of all an act of nationalism.

From the exclusive stylistic standpoint Lobato is terse, vigorous, intense, to the point. The chapters devoted to the creation of a style (in JÉca TatÚ) form a valid plea for a genuinely autochthonous art, and it is instructive to see how he treats the question in its relation to architecture. Brazil has native flora, fauna and mythology which its writers are neglecting for the repetition of the hackneyed hosts of Hellas. (Yet Lobato nods betimes and sees the LaocoÖn in a gnarled tree.) He is an “anti-literary” writer, scorning the finer graces, yet, besides betraying acute consciousness of being a writer, he employs situations that have been overdone time and again, and worse still, in plots that are no more Brazilian than they are Magyar or Senegalese. Thus, in O Bugio Moqueado we encounter a tale of a woman forced daily to eat a dish prepared by her vindictive husband from the slain body of her lover. It is characteristic that the Brazilian author heaps the horror generously, without at all adding to the effect of the theme as it appears in Greek mythology or in the lore of old Provence.

The truth would seem to be that at bottom Lobato is not a teller of stories but a critic of men. His vein is distinctly satiric, ironic; he has the gift of the caricaturist, and that is why so often his tales run either into sentimentality or into the macabrous. When he tells a tale of horror, it is not the uncannily graduated art of a Poe, but rather the thing itself that is horrible. His innate didactic tendency reveals itself not only in his frankly didactic labours, but in his habit of prefixing to his tales a philosophical, commentative prelude. Because he is a well-read, cosmopolitan person, his tales and comments often possess that worldly significance which no amount of regional outlook can wholly obscure; but because he is so intent upon sounding the national note he spoils much of his writing by stepping onto the pages in his own person.

At his best he suggests the arrival in Brazilian literature of a fresh, spontaneous, creative power. Tales like A Modern Torture (in which a rural dabbler in politics, weary of his postal delivery “job,” turns traitor to the old party and helps elect the new, only to be “rewarded” with the same old “job”) are rare in any tongue and would not be out of place in a collection by Chekhov or Twain. Here is humour served by—and not in the service of—nation, nature and man. Similarly Choo-Pan! with its humorous opening and gradual progress to the grim close, shows what can be done when a writer becomes the master and not the slave of indigenous legend. A comparison of this tale with a similar one, The Tree That Kills, may bring out the author’s weakness and his strength. In the first, under peculiar circumstances, a man meets his death through a tree that, according to native belief, avenges the hewing down of its fellow. In the second, the Tree That Kills is explained as a sort of preface, then follows a tale of human beings in which a foster-child, like the Tree That Kills, eats his way into the love of a childless pair, only first to betray the husband and then, after wearying of the woman, to attempt her life as well. The first story, besides being well told, is made to appear intimately Brazilian; the death of the man, who is a sot and has so bungled his work that the structure was bound to topple over, is natural, and actual belief in the legend is unnecessary; it colours the tale and lends atmosphere. The Tree That Kills, on the other hand, is merely another tale of the domestic triangle, no more Brazilian than anything else, with a twist of retribution at the end that must have appealed to the preacher hidden in Lobato; the analogy of the foster-son to the tree is not an integral part of the tale; the story, in fact, is added to the explanation of the tree parasite and is itself parasitical.

Lobato’s attitude toward education may be gleaned from his child’s book Little Snub-Nose and the epigraph from Anatole France. He wishes to cultivate the imagination rather than cram the intellect. And even in this second reader for public schools—refreshingly free of the “I-see-a-cat” method—one can catch now and then his intention of instructing and satirizing the elder population.

To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil—the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future—lies in the interior of the country. There he finds the genuine Brazilian, uncontaminated by the “esperanto of ideas and customs” characteristic of the centres that receive immigration from all over the world. There he discovers the raw material for the real national art, as distinguished from cities with their phantasmagoria of foreign importations. And for that art of the interior he has found the great precursor in Euclydes da Cunha—a truly remarkable writer upon whom the wandering Scot, Richard Cunninghame-Graham, drew abundantly, as we have seen, in his rare work upon that Brazilian mystic and fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro. “It was Euclydes da Cunha,” writes Lobato in his IdÉas de JÉca TatÚ, “who opened for us, in his SertÕes, the gates to the interior of the country. The Frenchified Brazilian of the coast cities was astonished. Could there, then, be so many strong, heroic, unpublished, formidable things back there?… He revealed us to ourselves. We saw that Brazil isn’t SÃo Paulo, with its Italian contingent, nor Rio, with its Portuguese. Art beheld new perspectives opened to it.”

To present a notion of Monteiro Lobato’s style and his general outlook, I shall confine myself to translating an excerpt or two from his most pithy volume, IdÉas de JÉca TatÚ.

One of the pivotal essays is that entitled Esthetica Official (Official Esthetics). “The work of art,” it begins, “is indicated by its coefficient of temperament, color and life—the three values that produce its unity, deriving the one from man, the other from milieu, the third from the moment. Art that flees this tripod of categories and that has as its human-factor the heimatlos person (the man of many countries brought into evidence by the war); that has as terroir the world and as epoch all Time, will be a superb creation when volapuk rules over the globe: until then, no!

“Whence we derive a logical conclusion: the artist grows in proportion as he becomes nationalized. The work of art must reveal to the quickest glance its origin, just as the races denote their ethnological group through the individual type.”

Yet note how Lobato, for all his nationalism, in the very paragraph that opens his somewhat uncritical critique, employs a German word, soon followed by a French, and all this a few seconds before ridiculing volapuk! Not that this need necessarily vitiate his argument, which has, to my way of thinking, far stronger points against it. But it does serve to indicate, I believe, that the world has grown too small for the artificial insistence upon a nationalism in literature which only too often proves the disguise of our primitive, unreasoned loyalties. Lobato’s unconscious use of these foreign terms provided, at the very moment he was denying it, a proof of the interpenetration of alien cultures. He has, too strongly for art as we now understand it, the regional outlook; for him Brazil is not the Brazil that we know on the map, or know as a political entity; it is the interior. His very nationalism refers, in this aspect, to but part of his own nation, though, to be fair, it is his theory that sins more seriously than his practice.

“Nietzsche,” he says elsewhere in the book, “served here as a pollen. It is the mission of Nietzsche to fecundate whatever he touches. No one leaves him shaped in the uniformity of a certain mould; he leaves free, he leaves as himself. (The italics are Lobato’s.) His aphorism—Vademecum? Vadetecum!—is the kernel of a liberating philosophy. Would you follow me? Follow yourself!” Now this, allowing for the personal modifications Nietzsche himself concentrates into his crisp question and answer, is the attitude of an Ibsen, a Wagner; in the new world, of a DarÍo, of a RodÓ, and of all true leaders, who would lead their followers to self-leadership. And once again Lobato answers himself with his own citations, for he himself, showing the effect of Nietzsche upon certain of the Brazilian writers—a liberating effect, and one which helped them to a realization of their own personalities—produces the most telling of arguments in favour of legitimate foreign influences.

His characteristic attitude of indignation crops out at every turn. In an essay upon A Estatua do Patriarcha, dedicated to the noble figure of JosÉ Bonifacio de Andrade, he gives a patient summary of the man’s achievements—as patient as his nervous manner and his trenchant language can accomplish. As he approaches his climax, he becomes almost telegraphic:

“He (that is, Bonifacio) works in the dark.

“His strength is faith.

“His arms, suggestion.

“His target, the cry of Ipiranga.

“The work that he is then accomplishing is too intense not to sweep aside all obstacles thrust in his path; his power of suggestion is too strong not to conquer the Prince Regent; his look too firm for the shot not to hit the bull’s eye.

“He conquered.

“The fatherland went into housekeeping for itself and it was he who ordered the arrangement of all the furniture and the standards of a free life.

“This is JosÉ Bonifacio’s zenith. He is the Washington of the South.[1]

“Less fortunate, however, than Washington, he afterwards sees the country take a direction that he foresaw was mistaken.

“He starts a struggle against the radical currents and against evil men.

“He loses the contest.…

“Brought to trial as a conspirator, he was absolved.

“He betook himself to the island of PaquetÁ and in 1838 died in the city of Nitheroy.

“There you have JosÉ Bonifacio.”

There, incidentally, you have Monteiro Lobato, in the quivering vigour of the phrase, in the emotional concentration. But all this has been but the preparation for Lobato’s final coup.

“JosÉ Bonifacio is, beyond dispute, the greatest figure in our history.

“Very well: this man was a Paulist, (i. e., a native of SÃo Paulo). Born in Santos, in 1763. It is already a century since the Paulists were struck with the idea of rearing him a statue. Not that he needs the monument. In a most grandiose manner he reared one to himself in the countless scientific memoirs that he published in Europe, the greater part in German, never translated into his own tongue,—and in his fecund political action in favour of the fiat of nationality.

“It is we who need the monument, for its absence covers us with shame and justifies the curse which from his place of exile he cast upon the evil persons of the day.…”

Now, Monteiro Lobato’s nationalism, as I try to show, is not the narrow cause that his theoretical writings would seem to indicate. It is, as I said at the beginning, really an evidence of his eagerness for the expansion of personality. But it is contaminated—and I believe that is the proper word—by an intense local pride which vents itself, upon occasion, as local scolding. The entire essay upon JosÉ Bonifacio was written for the sake of the final sting. Not so much to exalt the great figure as to glorify SÃo Paulo and at the same time excoriate the forgetful, the negligent Paulistas. It is such writing as this that best reveals Lobato because it best expresses his central passion, which is not the cult of artistic beauty but the criticism of social failings.

This is at once a step backward and a step forward. Forward in the civic sense, because Brazil needs the unflattering testimony of its own more exigent sons and daughters,—and is Brazil alone in this need? Backward in the artistic sense, because it tends to a confusion of values. It vitiates, particularly in Lobato, the tales he tells until it is difficult to say whether the tale points a moral or the moral adorns the tale.

That Lobato is alive to the genuineness of legitimate foreign influence he himself shows as well as any critic can for him, in the essay upon A QuestÃo do Estylo (The Question of Style), in a succinct paragraph upon Olavo Bilac’s poem O CaÇador de Esmeraldas. “The poet … when he composed The Emerald-Hunter, did not take from Corneille a single word, nor from Anatole a single conceit, nor a night from Musset, nor a cock from Rostand, nor frigidity from Leconte, nor an acanthus from Greece, nor a virtue from Rome. But, without wishing it, from the very fact that he was a modern open to all the winds that blow, he took from Corneille the purity of language, from Musset poesy, from Leconte elegance, from Greece the pure line, from Rome fortitude of soul—and with the ancient-rough he made the new-beautiful.”

But what, he asks, shall we say of a poem composed of ill-assimilated suggestions from without,—“in unskilled adaptations of foreign verses, and with types of all the races? The ‘qu’il mourÛt’ of Corneille in the mouth of a JoÃo Fernandez, who slays Ninon, mistress of the colonel JosÉ da Silva e Souza, consul of Honduras in Thibet, because an Egyptian fellah disagreed with Ibsen as to the action of Descartes in the battle of Charleroi?…”

Even such a mixture does Lobato discover in the architecture of latter-day SÃo Paulo. But more to our present point: note how, as long as Lobato sticks to actual example, his nationalism is a reasoned, cautious application. As soon as he deserts fact for theory he steps into caricature; nor is it, perhaps, by mere coincidence that the longest essay in the book is upon Caricature in Brazil.

There can be no question as to the dynamic personality of this young man. There can be little question as to the wholesome influence he is wielding. Thus far, however, he is weakest when in his rÔle as short-story writer—with the important exceptions we have noted—and strongest as a polemical critic. His personal gifts seem destined to make of him a propagandist of the ironical, satirical sort, with a marked inclination for caricature. One may safely hazard the opinion that he has not yet, in the creative sense—that of transforming reality, through imagination, into artistic life—found himself fully. He is much more than a promise; it is only that his fulfilment is not yet clearly defined.[2]

[1] Another “Washington of the South,” according to some Spanish Americans, is Marshal Sucre BolÍvar’s powerful associate. BolÍvar himself has been compared to Washington, perhaps most illuminatingly by the notable Equatorian, Juan Montalvo, in his Siete Tratados.