Brazilian Literature

30

Op. Cit. P. 58.

31

Résumé de l’histoire Littéraire du Portugal suivi du Résumé de l’histoire littéraire du Brésil. Ferdinand Denis. Paris, 1826. The Brazilian section occupies pages 513-601.

32

For an enlightening exposition of the Portuguese popular refrain known as cossantes, see A. F. G. Bell’s Portuguese Literature, London, 1922, pages 22-35. Their salient trait, like that of their Brazilian relative, is a certain wistful sadness.

33

Oliveira Lima. Formación Historica de la Nacionalidad Brasileña. Madrid, 1918. This Spanish version, by Carlos Pereyra, is much easier to procure than the original. Pp. 35-38.

34

See, however, on the matter of priority, José Verissimo’s Estudos de Literatura Brazileira, Quarta Serie. Pp. 25-64.

35

Ibid. P. 54. Also pp. 63-64. “To be the first, the most ancient, the oldest in any pursuit, is a merit… This is the only merit that Bento Teixeira can boast.”

36

Verissimo, always a suggestive commentator, presents an interesting reason for these early national panegyrics. See the essay cited in the preceding notes, pages 50-51. He attributes the swelling chorus of eulogies to what might today be called a national “inferiority complex.” “Having no legitimate cause for glory, – great deeds accomplished or great men produced, – we pride ourselves ingenuously upon our primitive Nature, or upon the opulence, – which we exaggerate – of our soil.”

37

Oliveira Lima, op. cit. pages 45-46, comments interestingly upon Brazil’s lack of a national poet during the sixteenth century. “Brazil did not possess, during the XVIth century a national poet who could express, with all the sincerity of his soul, the passion of the struggle undertaken by culture against nature… And this absence of a representative poet is evidenced throughout our literature, since, after all, the Indianism of the XIXth century was only a poetic convention grafted upon the trunk of the political break with the Portuguese fatherland… The fact is that the exploits of yesterday still await the singer who shall chant them. The Indians were idealized by a Romanticism in quest of elevated souls; the Africans found defenders who rose in audacious flight, but the brave pioneers of the conquest, men of epic stature, have not received even the same measure of sympathy.”

38

Ronald de Carvalho. Op. Cit. P. 87-88.

39

De Carvalho. Op. P. 96-97.

40

“I have explained the fruits and the vegetables that cause so much jealousy on Portugal’s part; I have listed those things for which Brazil may be envied. As title to preference over all the rest of the earth it enfolds four A’s. It has the first A in its arvoredos (trees), ever green and fair to gaze upon; it has the second A in its pure atmosphere (ares), so pleasant and certain in temperature; it has the third A in its cool waters (aguas), that refresh the throat and bring health; the fourth A in its delightful sugar (assucar), which is the fairest gift of all the world. The four A’s then, are arvoredos, assucar, aguas, ares.”

41

Estudos, quarta serie. P. 47-48.

42

Le Brésil Litteraire. Histoire de la Littérature brésilienne suivie d’un choix de morceaux tirés des meilleurs auteurs b(r)ésiliens par Ferdinand Wolf. Berlin, 1863. See, for a discussion of this book, the Selective Critical Bibliography at the back of the present work.

43

Op. Cit. P. 109.

44

The Brazilians are beasts, hard at work their lives long, in order to support Portuguese knaves.

45

For a good résumé of Caviedes’ labours, with valuable biographical indications, see Luis Alberto Sánchez, Historia de la Literatura Peruana, I. Los Poetas de la Colonia, Pp. 186-200.

46

Ibid. P. 190.

47

The sun is born and lasts but a single day; dark night follows upon the light; beauty dies amidst the gloomy shadows and joy amid continued grief. Why, then, if the sun must die, was it born? Why, if light be beautiful, does it not endure? How is beauty thus transfigured? How does pleasure thus trust pain? But let firmness be lacking in sun and light, let permanence flee beauty, and in joy, let there be a note of sadness. Let the world begin, at length, in ignorance; for, whatever the boon, it is by nature constant only in its inconstancy.

48

“The story of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand is but a child’s tale compared with the fearless adventure of our colonial brothers.” Carvalho. Op. Cit. P. 127.

49

Oliveira Lima. Aspectos da Litteratura Colonial Brazileira. Leipzig, 1896. This youthful work of the eminent cosmopolite furnishes valuable as well as entertaining collateral reading upon the entire colonial period in Brazil. The standpoint is often historical rather than literary, yet the proportions are fairly well observed.

50

See, for just such inclusion, B. Gorin’s Die Geshichte vun Yiddishen Theater, New York, 1918, 2 vols. (In Yiddish.) Page 33, Volume I. With reference to the Jew and comic opera, rumours of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s partial Jewish origin still persist.

51

Diminutive of moda, and signifying, literally, a new song. The modinha is the most characteristic of Brazilian popular forms, a transformation of the troubadors’ jácara and the Portuguese fado. It is generally replete with love and the allied feelings.

52

The chief works of Antonio José da Silva are Vida do Grande D. Quixote de la Mancha e do gordo Sancho Pança (1733); Ezopaida ou Vida de Ezopo (1734); Os Encantos de Medea (1735); Amphytrião ou Jupiter e Alcmena (1736); Labyrintho de Creta (1736); Guerras do Alecrim e da Manjerona (1737); a highly amusing Molièresque farce, considered by many his best; As Variedades de Proteu (1737); Precipicio de Faetonte (posthumous).

The latest view of Antonio José (See Bell’s Portuguese Literature, pages 282-284); whom Southey considered “the best of their drama writers,” is that his plays would in all likelihood have received little “attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had it not been for the tragedy of the author’s life.” This probably overstates the case against O Judeu, but it indicates an important non-literary reason for his popularity.

53

The original title was spelled Uraguay. Later writers either retain the first or replace it with the more common u.

54

Estudos. Segunda Serie, pp. 89-129.

55

In Portuguese literature, as Verissimo points out in his interesting parallel between the two epics, it is no easy matter to indicate the exact line between classic and romantic styles. A Frenchman has even spoken of the romanticism of the classics, which is by no means merely a sample of Gallic paradox. The Brazilian critic considers France the only one of the neo-Latin literatures that may be said to possess a genuinely classic period. As I have tried to suggest here and elsewhere, we have need of a change in literary terminology; classic and romantic are hazy terms that should, in time, be supplanted by something more in consonance with the observations of modern psychology. The emphasis, I would say, should be shifted from the subject-matter and external aspects to the psychology of the writer and his intuitive approach. The distinctions have long since lost their significance and should therefore be replaced by a more adequate nomenclature.

56

Long before Verissimo, Wolf (1863) had written in his pioneer work already referred to, “Thus José Basilio da Gama and Durão only prepared the way for Magalhães and Gonçalves Dias.”

57

The natives named him Caramurú, whence the name of the epic. The word has been variously interpreted as signifying “dragon risen out of the sea” (Rocha Pitta) and “son of the thunder” (Durão’s own version), referring in the first instance to the man’s rescue from the wreck and in the second to his arquebuse. Verissimo rejects any such poetic interpretation and makes the topic food for fruitful observation. He considers the Brazilian savage, as any other, of rudimentary and scant imagination, incapable of lofty metaphorical flights. “The Indians, infinitely less poetic than the poets who were to sing them, called Diogo Alvares as they were in the habit of calling themselves, by the name of an animal, tree or something of the sort. They named him Caramurú, the name of a fish on their coast, because they caught him in the sea or coming out of it. And to this name they added nothing marvellous, as our active imagination has pictured.” And “this very sobriquet as well as the epoch in which it was applied, are still swathed in legend.”

58

The light of her eyes is extinguished, she swoons and trembles; her face grows pale, her look is deathly; her hands, now strengthless, let go the rudder and she descends to the bottom of the briny waves. But returning from the depths to the waves of the sea, which quivers in fury, “Oh, cruel Diogo!” she said in grief. And unseen ever after, she was engulfed by the waters.

59

How happy were the world, if, with the remembrance of love and glory lost, the recollection of pleasures would likewise be consumed forever! But worst and saddest grief of all is to find that at no time is this fantastic victory of love transitory, for always it is repeated in remembrance. Lovers, you who burn in this fire, flee Love’s venomous assault that it holds for you there in later days. Let not treacherous contentment deceive you; for this present pleasure, when it has passed, will remain as a tormenting memory.

60

I gaze, comely Marilia, at your tresses; and I behold in your cheeks the jessamine and the rose; I see your beautiful eyes, your pearly teeth and your winsome features. He who created so perfect and entrancing a work, my fairest Marilia, likewise could make the sky and more, if more there be.

61

Estudos. Segunda Serie, pp. 217-218.

62

For Romero’s strenuous attempt to prove the Cartas the work of Alvarenga Peixoto, see his Historia, Volume I, pages 207-211.

63

I loved the liberty and independence of my dear sweet fatherland, which the Portuguese pitilessly oppressed with laughter and scorn. This is my sole crime!

64

The glory of the fatherland is wholly gone. The cry of liberty that once thundered through Brazil now is mute amidst chains and corpses. Over its ruins, far from their fatherland, weep its wandering sons. Because they loved it, they are accused of treason, by an infamous, truckling band.

65

“True Romanticism,” says Wolf, “is nothing other than the expression of a nation’s genius unrestrained by the trammels of convention.” He would derive the name through the same reasoning that called the lingua romana rustica (country Roman speech) Romance, as in the phrase Romance Languages, in opposition to the learned Latin known as the sermo urbanus, or language of the city. Such liberation as Wolf points out, was the work of German criticism. “The Germans avenged themselves for the double servitude, political and literary, with which the French had so long oppressed them, by at last delivering the people from the pseudo-classic fetters.” A service they performed a half-century later, as we have suggested, bringing a new breath to the later pseudo-classicism of the Parnassians. The real contribution of the so-called Romantic movement, then, was one of release from academically organized repression, – repression in form, in thought, in expression, which are but so many aspects of the genetic impulse, and not detachable entities that may be re-arranged at will. The measure of literary repression may be taken as one of the measures of classicism; the measure of release from that repression may be taken as one of the measures of romanticism. To argue in favour of one or the other or to attempt to draw too definite a line between them is a futile implication of the possibility of uniformity and, moreover, is to shift the criteria of art from an esthetic to a moralistic basis. There are really as many “isms” as there are creative individuals; classic and romantic are aspects of all creative endeavour rather than definite and opposing qualities. The observation which I translate herewith from Wolf relates Romanticism to its originally individualistic importance as applied to nations. “The accessory ideas that have been grafted upon that of Romanticism as a result of its decadence,” writes the German critic, “serve only to confuse the etymological and historical truth of this definition. It is for the same reasons that the art of the Middle Ages, proper to modern peoples and opposed to antiquity, has been named Romantic, or rather, Roman. In order to re-establish the continuity of their spontaneous development and to paralyze the modern influence of the humanists, the reformists, classicism and rationalism, these same peoples had to turn back and drink from the ever abundant springs of the Middle Ages, – a brilliant epoch of development which was more in conformity with their genius. This is another reason why the two terms Middle Ages and Romanticism have been confused. But as this poetry and art of the Middle Ages are bigoted, excessively idealistic, taking pleasure in mysticism and the fantastic, these diverse acceptations have been wrongly given to romanticism. Taking the accessory for the central nucleus, modern romanticism has caricatured all this and discredited true romanticism, so that the name in the realms of art has been applied to everything that is subjective, arbitrary, nebulous, capricious and without fixed form.”

66

A new Muse now inspires my song. No more do I grasp the pagan lyre. My soul, imitate nature. Who can surpass her beauty? By day, by night, sing praises to the Lord; chant the wonders of the Creator.

67

Our fatherland is wherever we live a life free of pain and grief; where friendly faces surround us, where we have love; where friendly voices console us in our misfortune and where a few eyes will weep their sorrow over our solitary grave.

68

My land has graceful palm-trees, where sings the sabiá. The birds that warble here (i. e., in Portugal, where he wrote the poem) don’t warble as ours over there.

69

The critic here refers to João Baptista da Silva Leitão Almeida Garrett (1799-1854) who together with Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877) dominated the Portuguese Romantic epoch.

70

Love is life; it is to hold one’s soul, one’s senses, one’s heart, open ever to the great, the beautiful; to be capable of extremes, of lofty virtues and lowest crimes; to understand the infinite, the vastness, Nature and God, to enjoy the fields; the birds, the flowers, solitary murmurs; to seek sadness, solitude, the desert, to fill the heart with laughter and festivity; and to inundate the smiling fête, the laughter of our soul, with fountains of tears; to know pleasure and misfortune at the same time and to be at once the happiest and the most wretched of mortals: This is love, the love of which one dies. To love, and not know, not possess the courage to speak the love we feel within us; to fear lest profane eyes cast their defiling glance into the temple where is concentrated the best portion of our lives; where like misers we conceal this fountain of love, these inexhaustible treasures of flourishing illusions; to feel the presence of the adored one, though she be not seen, to understand, without hearing her speak, her thoughts; to follow her, without being able to gaze into her eyes; to love her without being able to say that we love. And, fearing to brush her garments, to burn to stifle her in a thousand embraces. This is love, the love of which one dies!

71

It were beautiful to feel in one’s brain the soul of Goethe, and to unite in his body Byron, Homer and Dante. To dream in the delirium of a moment that one is the soul of creation and the sound sent forth by the palpitant earth.

72

Hell contains exquisite beauties, Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras; there is where one falls in love in good company. There can’t be a hell with ladies around!

73

But if Werther longed to see Carlotta giving bread and butter to the children and found her thus more beautiful than ever, I adore you all the more when I vision you doing the laundry.

74

Why judge from the face – the face, – that mask of flesh which man received on entering the world, – that which goes on within? Almost always if it is summer on one’s face, it is winter in the soul. I confess before you; hear, contented ones! My laughter is feigned; yes, a thousand times I stifle with it the echoes of a groan that of a sudden rises to my lips; a thousand times upon the tempered strings I play, in accompaniment to my song fall tears. I pretend before you, for in the house of mirth pretence is the sad man’s prudence.

75

The same poet, in Verissimo’s words, is the singer of “love and saudade. These two feelings are the soul of his poetry.” Estudos, II, 47.

76

Oh, Lord, I feel and well you see that I am dying as I breathe this air; let me live, O Lord, let me feel, once again the joys of my native hearth. I would sleep in the shade of the cocoa-trees with their leaves as my canopy; and see whether I could catch the white butterfly that flies in the orchard. I want to sit beside the little stream at the fall of dusk, alone in the twilight filled with dreams of the future. Give me the sweet spots where I romped with the other children, let me see once again the sky of my fatherland, the skies of my Brazil. My grave will be among the mango-trees, bathed in the light of the moon. And there I shall sleep contentedly in the shadow of my hearth. The waterfalls will weep in deep-felt grief because I died so soon, while I in my sepulchre shall dream of my loves, in the land where I was born.

77

With respect to a related subject Verissimo has uttered words quite as wise, in harmony with the esthetic view of nationalism.

“In no other Brazilian poets do I find, together with a banal facility in versification, the eminent qualities of poetry… Another salient quality of these poets (that is, of those whom Verissimo groups into the second Romantic generation, including Gonçalves Dias, Alvares de Azevedo, Casimiro de Abreu, Junqueiro Freire, Laurindo Rabello) is their nationalism. Not that factitious nationalism of duty or erudition, in which intention and process are clearly discernible, but the expression – unconscious, so to say – of the national soul itself, in its feeling, its manner of speech, its still rudimentary thought. They are not national because they speak of bores, tacapes or inubias, or sing the savages that rove these lands. With the exception of Gonçalves Dias, none of them is even ‘Indianist.’ Casimiro de Abreu, upon whom Gonçalves Dias made so great an impression, whose nostalgia derives largely from the Cançõ do Exilio (Song of Exile) no longer sings the Indian. Neither do Alvares de Azevedo, Laurindo or the others.” Estudos, II, Pages 19-20.

78

See Historia da Litteratura Brasileira Vol. II, pages 476-601.

79

See, in Part Two of this book, the chapter devoted to Castro Alves.

80

Benedicto, Costa, Le Roman au Brésil. P. 70.

81

Carvalho, Op. Cit. P. 263. Yet many will refuse to believe that Alencar’s Indians are natural. Indeed, Alencar himself has repudiated any realistic intention.

82

From a document first published by the author’s son, Dr. Mario de Alencar of the Brazilian Academy, in 1893, twenty years after it was written, under the title Como E Porque Sou Romancista (How And Why I Became a Novelist). I have translated these excerpts from the article as reprinted in João Ribeiro’s Auctores Contemporaneos, 6a Edição, Refundida, Rio de Janeiro, 1907.

83

The American Novel, New York, 1921.

84

Op. Cit. Pp. 77-78.

85

The so-called Modernist movement (another meaningless name!) was really not a movement, but a scattered reaction against Spanish academic domination. It was French in inspiration and chiefly behind the lead of the Decadents resulted in a species of continental affirmation. I have tried, in my Studies in Spanish-American Literature, New York, 1920, to show the emergence of this affirmation, from the romantic predecessors in the New World and the French background, to such salient personalities as Darío, Rodó, Eguren, Blanco-Fombona and Chocano.

86

Oh, immortal century (i. e., the nineteenth), oh, century in which conquest, war, religions and the ancient monarchies have crumbled to earth, loathsome as harpies, gloomy as the desert! I bow before thee, touch my knee to the earth, that I may pray to thine ideal titanic, starry bust!

87

You’re not the same, oh flower of morbidezza, queen of the Adriatic! Glittering Jordan of love, where the wandering Musset drank lustral beauty in waves. Your smile, oh triumphal Venice, is gone – olympic diamond that was set in the heroic forehead of the lord, bard and lover, immortally great. Your dark lagoon no longer hears the plangent strains of the olden serenade, – the sighs of love heaved by the voluptuous patrician in your gondolas… There remains but the yearnful song of San Marco’s moaning pigeons.

88

Op. Cit P. 301.

89

Ibid. P. 303.

90

Estudos 2a serie, P. 283. The book was published in Portugal, in 1872, and was “read and admired here in 1872. The Miniaturas, the poems of which bear dates from 1867, to 1870, mention the poet as a Brazilian, native of Rio de Janeiro. He was, in fact, such by birth, by intention, and, what is of more importance, by intuition and sentiment, genuinely Brazilian. We ought, then, to count this, his first book, despite the fact that it was conceived and generated abroad, in the roster of our Parnassianism, and perhaps as one of its principal factors.” See, however, Afranio Peixoto’s splendid two-volume edition of the Obras Completas de Castro Alves, Rio de Janeiro, 1921, for a refutation of this opinion. (Page 15.) According to Alberto de Oliveira there are decided Parnassian leanings in Castro Alves’s Espumas Fluctuantes, 1870, in the sonnets called Os anjos da meia noite (Midnight Angels.)

91

It exercises over me a gentle tyranny that fills me with pride and casts me down; there is in this magnetism such power, an electricity that fascinates me and draws me to the edge of an abyss. And I, inert, without will power, make no attempt to flee.