Brazilian Literature

The two salient figures of the epoch are Sebastião da Rocha Pitta (1660-1738) and Antonio José da Silva (1705-1739).

Brazilian critics seem well disposed to forget Rocha Pitta’s mediocre novels and sterile verses; it is for his Historia that he is remembered, and fondly, despite all the extravagances of style that mark the book. Romero regards it as a patriotic hymn, laden with ostentatious learning and undoubted leanings toward Portugal. Oliveira Lima’s view, however, is more scientific and historically dispassionate. One could not well expect of a writer at the beginning of the eighteenth century a nationalistic sentiment, “which in reality was still of necessity embryonic, hazy, or at least, ill-defined… In our historian, none the less, there reigns a sympathy for all that is of his land.”49 And, indeed, the Historia, as Romero wrote, is more a poem than a chronological narrative, cluttered with saints and warriors, prophets, heroes of antiquity and mediaeval days.

“In no other region,” runs one of the passages best known to Brazilians, “is the sky more serene, nor does dawn glow more beautifully; in no other hemisphere does the sun flaunt such golden rays nor such brilliant nocturnal glints; the stars are more benign and ever joyful; the horizons where the sun is born or where it sinks to rest are always unclouded; the water, whether it be drunk from the springs in the fields or from the town aqueduct, is of the purest; Brazil, in short, is the Terrestrial Paradise discovered at last, wherein the vastest rivers arise and take their course.”

I am inclined to question whether Antonio José da Silva really belongs to the literature of Brazil. Romero would make out a case for him on the ground of birth in the colony, family influences and the nature of his lyrism, which, according to that polemical spirit, was Brazilian. Yet his plays are linked with the history of the Portuguese drama and it is hard to discover, except by excessive reading between the lines, any distinctive Brazilian character. Known to his contemporaries by the sobriquet O Judeu (The Jew), Antonio José early experienced the martyrdom of his religion at the hands of the Inquisition. At the age of eight he was taken to Portugal by his mother, who was summoned thither to answer the charge of Judaism; in 1726 he was compelled to answer to the same charge, but freed; hostile forces were at work against him, however, not alone for his religious beliefs but for his biting satire, and chiefly through the bought depositions of a servant he was finally convicted and burned on October 21st, 1739. The strains of one of his operettas fairly mingled with the crackling of the flames. This fate made of him a national figure in Brazil; the first tragedy written by a Brazilian makes of him the protagonist (O Poeta e a Inquisição, 1839, by Magalhães); the second of Joaquim Norberto de Sousa’s Cantos Epicos is dedicated to him (1861). Still another literature claims Antonio José, who occupies an honoured place in the annals of the Jewish drama.50 And it is not at all impossible that the melancholy which Romero discovers amidst the Jew’s gay compositions is as much a heritage of his race as of the Brazilian modinhas.51 Already Wolf had found in Antonio José’s musical farces a likeness to the opera bouffe of Offenbach, a fellow Jew; the Jew takes naturally to music and to satire, so that his prominence in the history of comic opera may be no mere coincidence. Satire and melancholy, twin sisters with something less than the usual resemblance, inhere in the race of Antonio José.

Antonio José da Silva had in him much of the rollicking, roistering, ribald, rhyming rogue. For long, he was the most popular of the Portuguese dramatists after Gil Vicente. He studied Rotrou, Molière and the libretti of Metastasio to good advantage, and for his musical ideas went to school to the Italians. Sr. Ribeiro has repudiated any connection between these conventionalized airs – the form of the verses is just as conventional – and the distinctive Brazilian modinha; the truth is that Romero, eager to make as good an appearance for the national literature as possible, and realizing that the eighteenth century in Brazil needed all the help it could receive, made an unsuccessful attempt to dragoon Antonio José into the thin ranks.52 As it is, his reputation in Portugal has suffered a decline, merging into the obscurity of the very foibles it sought to castigate. The martyred Jew has had no creative influence upon Brazilian literature.

The first phase of Brazilian letters is, then, a tentative groping, reflecting the numerous influences across the ocean and the instability of a nascent civilization at war on the one hand with covetous foreigners and on the other with fractious, indigenous tribes. The chroniclers are in the main picturesque, informative, rambling rather than artistic; the poets are either vacuous or swollen with the pomp of old-world rhetoric. Even so virile a spirit as Gregorio de Mattos conducts his native satire with the stylistic weapons forged in Europe, and the dawn of a valid nativism is shot through with gleams of spiritual adherence to Portugal and intellectual subjection to the old continent. Yet, as the child is father to the man, so even in these faltering voices may be detected the dominant notes of the later literature, – its imagination, its fondness for rotund expression, its pride of milieu, its Oriental exuberance, its wistful moodiness, its sensual ardor.

CHAPTER III

PERIOD OF AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT (1750-1830)

Stirrings of Revolt – The Inconfidencia – Two Epics: Uraguay and Caramurú– The Lyrists of Minas Geraes: Claudio da Costa, Gonzaga, Alvarenga Peixoto, Silva Alvarenga – Minor figures – Political Satire – Early Nineteenth Century – José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva.

I

Struggle for the territory of Brazil had bred a love for the soil that was bound sooner or later to become spiritualized into an aspiration toward autonomy. The brasileiros were not forever to remain the bestas that the hell-mouth of Bahia had called them, nor provide luxury for the maganos de Portugal. The history of colonial exploitation repeated itself: Spain with Spanish-America, Portugal with Brazil, England with the future United States. Taxes grew, and with them, resentment. Yet, as so often, the articulation of that rebellious spirit came not from the chief sufferers of oppression, but from an idealistic band of poets whose exact motives have not yet been thoroughly clarified by historical investigation. Few less fitted to head a separatist movement than these lyric, idealistic spirits who form part of the Inconfidencia (Disloyalty) group immortalized in Brazilian history through the hanging of Tiradentes and the imprisonment and exile of a number of others. These men were premature in their attempt, and foredoomed to failure, but they lived, as well as wrote, an ideal and thus form at once an epoch in the national history and the nation’s letters. The freedom won by the United States, the foreshadowing of the French revolution, inspired in them ideas of a Brazilian republic; how surely idealistic was such an aim may be realized when we recall that Brazil’s emancipation was initiated with a monarchy (1822) and that, although it has been a republic since 1889, there are a number of serious thinkers who consider the more liberal form of government still less a boon than a disadvantage.

In 1783, Luis da Cunha de Menezes, a vain, pompous fellow, was named Captain-General of the Province of Minas. It was against him that were launched the nine satirical verse letters called Cartas Chilenas and signed by the pseudonym Critillo (1786). Menezes was succeeded by Barbacena (1788) who it was rumoured, meant to exact the payment of 700 arrobas of gold, overdue from the province. It was this that proved the immediate stimulus to an only half-proved case of revolt, which, harshly suppressed, deprived Brazil of a number of its ripest talents.

From the name of the province – Minas Geraes – these poets have been grouped into a so-called Mineira school, which includes the two epicists, Frei José de Santa Rita Durão and José Basilio de Gama, and the four lyrists, Claudio Manoel da Costa, Thomas Antonio Gonzaga, Ignacio José de Alvarenga Peixoto and Manoel Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga.

II

Critics are not agreed upon the relative non-esthetic values of Basilio da Gama’s Uraguay (1769)53 and Santa Rita Durão’s Caramurú (1781). Wolf, with Almeida-Garrett, finds the first a truly national poem; Carvalho calls it “the best and most perfect poem that appeared in Brazil throughout the colonial period”; the early Denis found it not very original, for all its stylistic amenities; Romero, conceding its superiority to Caramurú in style and form, finds it inferior in historical understanding, terming the latter epic “the most Brazilian poem we possess.” Verissimo, who has written an extended comparison of the two poems,54 is, to me, at least, most satisfying of all upon the problems involved and the esthetic considerations implied. In both the epics he discerns the all-pervading influence of Camões, the emulation of whom has seemed to cast upon every succeeding poet the obligation of writing his epic. Thus the chief initiators of Brazilian Romanticism, Porto Alegre and Magalhães, had to indite, respectively, a Colombo and a Confederação dos Tamoyos, and Gonçalves Dias began Os Tymbiras, while José de Alencar, romantic of the Romantics, started a Filhos de Tupan, “which happily for our good and his own, he never completed.” But what renders both the Uruguay and the Caramurú important in the national literature is the fact that they stand out from the ruck of earlier and later Camonean imitations by virtue of a certain spontaneity of origin and an intuitive, historic relation with their day. It is not known whether the authors, though contemporaries, knew each other or read their respective works. Yet both instinctively employed indigenous material and revealed that same “national sentiment which was already stammering, though timorously, in certain poets contemporaneous with them or immediately preceding, such as Alvarenga Peixoto and Silva Alvarenga, with whom there enter into our poetry, mingled with classical images and comparison, names and things of our own. Though like Basilio and Durão, loyal Portuguese, these poets speak already of fatherland with exaltation and love. The idea of the fatherland, the national thought, which in Gregorio de Mattos is as yet a simple movement of bad humour, vagrant spite and the revolt of an undisciplined fellow, becomes in them the tender affection for their native land…”

The Uruguay especially reveals this nascent nationalism as it existed among the loyal Portuguese in the epoch just previous to the Inconfidencia. “We must remember that the work of the Mineira poets” (and here Verissimo includes, of course, the lyrists to which we presently come) “abound in impressions of loyalty to Portugal… Let us not forget José Bonifacio, the so-called patriarch of our Independence, served Portugal devotedly first as scientist in official intellectual commissions and professor at the University of Coimbra, and then as volunteer Major of the Academic Corps against the French of Napoleon, and finally as Intendente Geral, or as we should say today, Chief of Police, of the city of Porto. And José Bonifacio, like Washington, was at first hostile, or at least averse, to independence.”

The Uruguay is certainly less intense than the Caramurú in its patriotism. The author of the first wrote it, as he said, to satisfy a certain curiosity about Uruguay; also, he might have added, to flatter his patron, the then powerful Pombal, who, it will be recalled, at one time harboured the idea of transplanting the Portuguese throne to the colony across the sea. It would be an error, however, to see in the small epic (but five cantos long) a glorification of the native. The real hero, as Verissimo shows, is not Cacambo, but the Portuguese General Gomes Freire de Andrade. The villains, of course, are the Jesuits out of whose fold the author had come, – the helpers of the Indians of Uruguay who revolted against the treaty between Portugal and Spain according to which they were given into the power of the Portuguese. The action, for an epic, is thus restricted in both time and space, let alone significance, yet thus early the liberating genius of Basilio da Gama produced, for Portuguese literature, “its first romantic poem.” Here is the first – or surely one of the first – authentic evidences of what the Spanish-American critics call “literary Americanism,” – all the more interesting because so largely unpremeditated.

The “romanticism” of the Uruguay is worth dwelling upon, if only to help reveal our long-tolerated terminological inadequacy.55 It begins, not with the regular invocation, but with a quasi-Horatian plunge in medias res. It does not employ the outworn octave, but sonorous blank verse. The freedom of its style and the harmony of its verse “announce Garrett, Gonçalves Dias56 and the future admirable modellers of blank verse, in the distribution of the episodes and the novelty of language and simile.” The language is not the Gongoristic extravagance of the Academicians; it is modern, even contemporary, grandiloquent in the Spanish style. The “Indianism” of the poem, in which Basilio da Gama forecasts the later Indianism of the Romantics, is not to be confused with that later type; for it must be recalled that Basilio da Gama did not look upon his Indians with that sentimental veneration characteristic of the nineteenth century Brazilians. As they were secondary to his purpose, so were they in his conception. “Two and distinct are the features of this aspect of our literature. The first Indianism, initiated by Basilio da Gama, continued by Durão and almost limited to the two epics, is hardly more than a poetic artifice; the Indian enters as a necessity of the subject, a simple esthetic or rhetorical means. He is not sung, but is rather an element of the song. In the second Indianism, that of the Romantics, – the loftiest representative of which is Gonçalves Dias, – the Indian advances from the position of an accessory to that of an essential element; he is the subject and the object of the poem. In this first phase of Indianism the sympathy of the poet is transferred only incidentally to the savage… The contrary case obtains in the second phase; the sympathy of the poet is his entirely. So that, in the main, it is the attitude of the poet that distinguished the two Indianisms: indifferent in the first, sympathetic in the second.” And since choices must be made, Verissimo is right when he finds the earlier poets nearer to the sociological truth in preferring Portuguese civilization, with all its defects, to the imaginary charms of indigenous life. Yet sociological error of the Romantic Indianists proved more than poetic truth, for it was fecund “not only for literature, but even for the development of the national sentiment.” … “O Uruguay possesses in Portuguese literature the value of being the first poem of a freer, newer, more spontaneous character after the series of epics derived from Os Lusiadas, and in Brazilian literature that of being the initiator of the movement which, whatever its aberrations, contributed the most to the independence of our letters…”

There is far less artistic pleasure in reading O Caramurú; it may well be, as most agree, that it, rather than O Uruguay, is the national poem, but such a distinction pertains rather to patriotism than to poetry. The better verses of the earlier epic are a balm to the ear and a stimulus to the imagination; those of the later lack communicative essence. Santa Rita Durão, proclaiming in his preface the parity of Brazil with India as the subject of an epic, thus places himself as a rival of Camões; instead, he is an indifferent versifier and an unconscionable imitator; his patriotism, as his purpose, is avowed. The subject of his epic is the half-legendary figure of Diogo Alvares Correa,57 a sort of Brazilian John Smith, who, wrecked upon the coast, so impressed the natives with the seeming magic of his firearms that he was received as their chief. His particular Pocahontas was the maiden Paraguassú, whom he is supposed to have taken with him to France; here she was baptized – as the disproved story goes – and at the marriage of the pair none less than Henry II and Catherine de Medicis stood sponsor to them.

Paragussú’s chief rival is Moema, and the one undisputed passage of the poem is the section in which, together with a group of other lovelorn maidens, she swims after the vessel that is bearing him and his chosen bride off to France. In her dying voice she upbraids him and then sinks beneath the waves.

Perde o lume dos olhos, pasma e treme,Pallida a côr, o aspecto moribundo,Com a mão ja sem vigor soltando o leme,Entre as salsas espumas desce ao fundo;Mas na onda do mar, que irado frema,Tornando a apparecer desde o profundo:“Ah! Diogo cruel!” disse com magua.E sem mais vista ser, sorveu-se n’agua.58

Yet there is a single line in O Uruguay which contains more poetry than this octave and many another of the stanzas in this ten-canto epic. It is that in which is described the end of Cacambo’s sweetheart Lindoya, after she has drunk the fatal potion that reveals to her the destruction of Lisbon and the expulsion of the Jesuits by Pombal, and then commits suicide by letting a serpent bite her.

Tanto ere bella no seu rostro a morte!So beautiful lay death upon her face!

Like O Uruguay, so O Caramurú ends upon a note of spiritual allegiance to Portugal. It is worth while recalling, too, that the Indian of the first is from a Spanish-speaking tribe, and that the Indian of the second is a native Brazilian type.

And Verissimo points out that if the Indian occupies more space in the second, his rôle is really less significant than in O Uruguay.

III

The four lyrists of the Mineira group are Claudio Manoel da Costa (1729-1789); Thomas Antonio Gonzaga (1744-1807-9) the most famous of the quartet; José Ignacio de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744-1793), and Manoel Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga (1749-1814). Examination of their work shows the inaccuracy of terming them a “school,” as some Brazilian critics have loosely done. These men did not of set purpose advance an esthetic theory and seek to exemplify it in their writings; they are children of their day rather than brothers-in-arms. Like the epic poets, so they, in their verses, foreshadow the coming of the Romanticists some fifty years later; the spirits of the old world and the new contend in their lines as in their lives. They are, in a sense, transition figures, chief representatives of the “Arcadian” spirit of the day.

Claudio de Costa, translator of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” was chiefly influenced by the Italians and the French. Romero, in his positive way, has catalogued him with the race of Lamartine and even called him a predecessor of the Brazilian Byronians. A certain subjectivity does appear despite the man’s classical leanings, but there is nothing of him of the Childe Harold or the Don Juan. Indeed, as often as not he is a cold stylist and his influence, today, is looked upon as having been chiefly technical; he was a writer rather than a thinker or a feeler, and one of his sonnets alone has suggested the combined influence of Camões, Petrarch and Dante:

Que feliz fôra o mundo, se perdidaA lembrança de Amor, de Amor e gloria,Igualmente dos gostos a memoriaFicasse para sempre consumida!Mas a pena mais triste, e mais crescidaHe vêr, que em nenhum tempo é transitoriaEsta de Amor fantastica victoria,Que sempre na lembrança é repetida.Amantes, os que ardeis nesse cuidado,Fugi de Amor ao venenozo intento,Que lá para o depois vos tem guardado.Não vos engane a infiel contentamento;Que esse presente bem, quando passado,Sobrará para idéa de tormento.59

The native note appears in his work, as in A Fabula do Riberão do Carmo and in Villa-Rica, but it is neither strong nor constant. He is of the classic pastoralists, “the chief representative,” as Carvalho calls him, of Arcadism in Brazil.

Of more enduring, more appealing stuff is the famous lover Thomas Antonio Gonzaga, termed by Wolf a “modern Petrarch” (for all these Arcadians must have each his Laura) and enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen as the writer of their Song of Songs. For that, in a sense, is what Gonzaga’s poems to Marilia suggest. No other book of love poems has so appealed to the Portuguese reader; the number of editions through which the Marilia de Dirceu has gone is second only to the printings of Os Lusiadas, and has, since the original issue in 1792, reached to thirty-four. Gonzaga’s Marilia (in real life D. Maria Joaquina Dorothea de Seixas Brandão) rises from the verses of these lyras into flesh and blood reality; the poet’s love, however much redolent of Petrarchian conventions, is no imagined passion. His heart, as he told her in one of his most popular stanzas, was vaster than the world and it was her abode. Gonzaga, like Claudio, was one of the Inconfidencia; he fell in love with his lady at the age of forty, when she was eighteen, and sentimental Brazilians have never forgiven her for having lived on to a very ripe old age after her Dirceu, as he was known in Arcadian circles, died in exile. Yet she may have felt the loss deeply, for a story which Verissimo believes authentic tells of D. Maria, once asked how old she was, replying: “When he was arrested, I was eighteen…” It is sweet enough not to be true.

As Antonio José, despite his Brazilian birth, is virtually Portuguese in culture and style, so Gonzaga, despite his Portuguese birth, is Brazilian by virtue of his poetic sources and his peculiar lyrism, – a blend of the classic form with a passion which, though admirably restrained, tends to overleap its barriers. If, as time goes on, he surrenders his sway to the more sensuous lyrics of later poets, he is none the less a fixed star in the poetic constellation. He sings a type of constant love that pleases even amid today’s half maddened and half maddening erotic deliquescence. Some poets’ gods bring them belief in women; his lady brings him a belief in God:

Noto, gentil Marilia, os teus cabellos;E noto as faces de jasmins e rosas:Noto os teus olhos bellos;Os brancos dentes e as feições mimosas:Quem fez uma obra tão perfeita e linda,Minha bella Marilia, tambem pôdeFazer o céo e mais, si ha mais ainda.60

The famous book is divided into two parts, the first written before, the second, after his exile. As might be expected; the first is primaveral, aglow with beauty, love, joy. Too, it lacks the depth of the more sincere second, which is more close to the personal life of the suffering artist. He began in glad hope; he ends in dark doubt. “The fate of all things changes,” runs one of his refrains. “Must only mine not alter?” One unconscious testimony of his sincerity is the frequent change of rhythm in his lines, which achieve now and then a sweet music of thought.

“Marilia de Dirceu,” Verissimo has written, “is of exceptional importance in Brazilian literature. It is the most noble and perfect idealization of love that we possess.” (I believe that the key-word to the critic’s sentence is “idealization.”) “Despite its classicism, it is above all a personal work; it is free of and superior to, the formulas and the rivalries of schools… It is perhaps the book of human passion, such as the many we have now in our literatures that are troubled and tormented by grief, by doubt or despair. It is, none the less, in both our poetry and in that of the Portuguese tongue, the supreme book of love, the noblest, the purest, the most deeply felt, the most beautiful that has been written in that tongue since Bernardim Ribeiro and the sonnets of Camões.”61

Of the work of Alvarenga Peixoto, translator of Maffei’s Merope, author of a score of sonnets, some odes and lyras and the Canto Genethliaco, little need here be said. The Canto Genethliaco is a baptismal offering in verse, written for the Captain-General D. Rodrigo José de Menezes in honour of his son Thomaz; it is recalled mainly for its “nativism,” which, as is the case with the epic-writers, is not inconsistent with loyalty to the crown. There is a certain Brazilianism, too, as Wolf noted, in his Ide to Maria.