Brazilian Literature

As Gonzaga had his Marilia, so the youngest of the Mineira group, Silva Alvarenga, had his Glaura. In him, more than in any other of the lyrists, may be noted the stirrings of the later romanticism. He strove after, and at times achieved a côr americana (“American color”), and although he must introduce mythological figures upon the native scene, he had the seeing eye. Carvalho considers him the link between the Arcadians and the Romantics, “the transitional figure between the seventeenth-century of Claudio and the subjectivism of Gonçalves Dias.” To the reader in search of esthetic pleasure he is not such good company as Gonzaga and Marilia, though he possesses a certain communicative ardour.

IV

The question of the authorship of the Cartas Chilenas, salient among satirical writings of the eighteenth century, has long troubled historical critics. In 1863, when the second edition of the poem appeared, it was signed Gonzaga, and later opinion tends to reinforce that claim. If the query as to authorship is a matter more for history than for literature, so too, one may believe, is the poem itself, which, in the figure of Fanfarrão Minezio travesties the Governor Luis da Cunha Menezes.62

Like Gregorio de Mattos, the author of the Cartas is a spiteful scorpion. But he has a deeper knowledge of things and there is more humanity to his bitterness. “Here the Europeans diverted themselves by going on the hunt for savages, as if hot on the chase of wild beasts through the thickets,” he growls in one part. “There was one who gave his cubs, as their daily food, human flesh; wishing to excuse so grave a crime he alleged that these savages, though resembling us in outward appearance, were not like us in soul.” He flays the loose manners of his day – thankless task of the eternal satirist! – that surrounded the petty, sensuous tyrant. There is, in his lines, the suggestion of reality, but it is a reality that the foreigner, and perhaps the Brazilian himself, must reconstruct with the aid of history, and this diminishes the appeal of the verses. One need not have known Marilia to appreciate her lover’s rhymes; the Cartas Chilenas, on the other hand, require a knowledge of Luiz de Menezes’ epoch.

The lesser poets of the era may be passed over with scant mention. Best of them all is Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1740-1800) known to his New Arcadia as Lereno and author of an uneven collection marred by frequent improvisation. The prose of the century, inferior to the verse, produced no figures that can claim space in so succinct an outline as this.

V

On January 23, 1808, the regent Dom João fled from Napoleon to Brazil, thus making the colony the temporary seat of the Portuguese realm. The psychological effect of this upon the growing spirit of independence was tremendous; so great, indeed, was Dom João’s influence upon the colony that he has been called the founder of the Brazilian nationality. The ports of the land, hitherto restricted to vessels of the Portuguese monarchy, were thrown open to the world; the first newspapers appeared; Brazil, having tasted the power that was bestowed by the mere temporary presence of the monarch upon its soil, could not well relinquish this supremacy after he departed in 1821. The era, moreover, was one of colonial revolt; between 1810 and 1826 the Spanish dependencies of America rose against the motherland and achieved their own freedom; 1822 marks the establishment of the independent Brazilian monarchy.

Now begins a literature that may be properly called national, though even yet it wavered between the moribund classicism and the nascent romanticism, even as the form of government remained monarchial on its slow and dubious way to republicanism. Arcadian imagery still held sway in poetry and there was a decline from the originality of the Mineira group.

Souza Caldas (1762-1814) and São Carlos (1763-1829) represent, together with José Eloy Ottoni (1764-1851), the religious strains of the Brazilian lyre. The first, influenced by Rousseau, is avowedly Christian in purpose but the inner struggle that produced his verses makes of him a significant figure in a generally sterile era, and his Ode ao homen selvagem contains lines of appeal to our own contemporary dubiety. São Carlos’s mystic poem A Assumpção da Santissima Virgem possesses, today, merely the importance of its nativistic naïveté; for the third Canto, describing Paradise, he makes extensive use of the Brazilian flora. There is, too, a long description of Rio de Janeiro which describes very little. José Eloy Ottoni, more estimable for his piety and his patriotism than for his poetry, translated the Book of Job as Souza Caldas did the Psalms, and with great success.

Though these religious poets are of secondary importance to letters, they provided one of the necessary ingredients of the impending Romantic triumph; their Christian outlook, added to nationalism, tended to produce, as Wolf has indicated, a genuinely Brazilian romanticism.

Head and shoulders above these figures stands the patriarchal form of José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva, (1763-1838) one of the most versatile and able men of his day. His scientific accomplishments have found ample chronicling in the proper places; quickly he won a reputation throughout Europe. “The name of José Bonifacio,” wrote Varnhagen, “ … is so interwoven with all that happened in the domains of politics, literature and the sciences that his life encompasses the history of a great period…” His poems, in all truth but a small part of his labours, were published in 1825 under the Arcadian name of Americo Elysio. They are, like himself, a thing of violent passions. In Aos Bahianos he exclaims:

Amei a liberdade e a independenciaDa doce cara patria, a quem o LusoOpprimia sem dó, com risa e mofa:Eis o meu crime todo!63

Yet this is but half the story, for the savant’s political life traced a by no means unwavering line. Two years before the publication of his poems he who so much loved to command fell from power with the dissolution of the Constituinte and he reacted in characteristic violence. Brazilians no longer loved liberty:

Mas de tudo acabou da patria gloria!Da liberdade o brado, que troavaPelo inteiro Brasil, hoje enmudece,Entre grilhoes e mortes.Sobre sus ruinas gemem, choram,Longe da patria os filhos foragidos:Accusa-os de traição, porque o amavam,Servil infame bando.64

A number of other versifiers and prose writers are included by Brazilians in their accounts of the national letters; Romero, indeed, with a conception of literature more approaching that of sociology than of belles lettres, expatiates with untiring gusto upon the work of a formidable succession of mediocrities. We have neither the space nor the patience for them here.

It is during the early part of the period epitomized in this chapter that Brazilian literature, born of the Portuguese, began to be drawn upon by the mother country. “In the last quarter of the eighteenth century,” quotes Verissimo from Theophilo Braga’s Filinto Elysio, “Portuguese poetry receives an impulse of renovation from several Brazilian talents… They call to mind the situation of Rome, when the literary talents of the Gauls, of Spain and of Northern Africa, enrich Latin literature with new creations.”

The period as a whole represents a decided step forward from the inchoate ramblings of the previous epoch. Yet, with few exceptions, it is of interest rather in retrospection, viewed from our knowledge of the romantic movement up to which it was leading.

CHAPTER IV

THE ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION (1830-1870)

New Currents in Brazilian Poetry – Gonçalves de Magalhães, Gonçalves Dias, Alvarez de Azevedo, Castro Alves – Lesser Figures – Beginnings of the Brazilian Novel – Manoel de Macedo, José de Alencar, Taunay and Others – The Theatre.

I

Though usually associated with French literature, the Romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century, like that later neo-romanticism which nurtured the Symbolist and the Decadent schools of the second half, came originally from Germany, and was in essence a philosophy of self-liberation.65 In Brazil it is thus in part applied suggestion rather than spontaneous creation. But national creative production thrives on cross-fertilization and self-made literatures are as unthinkable as self-made men. There is marked difference between mere imitation and subjection to valid influence, and few literary phenomena in the history of the new-world literature, north or south of Panama, attest the truth of this better than Brazil’s period of Romanticism; this is the richest – if not the most refined – of its intellectual epochs. Brazilian culture is thrown open to the currents of European thought, as its ports with the advent of João VI had been thrown open to European commerce, and receives from romanticism, in the words of Wolf, the “ideal consecration” of its nativism. And herein, of course, lies the great distinction between the mere nativism which is so easily taken for a national note, and that nationalism which adds to the exaltation of the milieu the spiritual consciousness of unity and independence. A national literature, in the fuller sense, is now possible because it is the expression not solely of an aspiration but of partial accomplishment, with a historic background in fact. Poetry becomes more varied; the novel takes more definite form; genuine beginnings are made in the theatre, though, despite valiant attempts to prove the contrary, the Brazilian stage is the least of its glories.

Carvalho, selecting the four representative poets of the period, has characterized each by the trait most prominent in his work. Thus Gonçalves de Magalhães (1811-1882) stands for the religious phase of Brazilian romanticism; Gonçalves Dias (1823-1864) for the naturistic; Alvarez de Azevedo (1831-1852) for the poetry of doubt, and Castro Alves (1847) for the muse of social reclamation, particularly the abolition of black slavery. This group is but a solo quartet in a veritable chorus of singers that provides a variegated setting. The individual songs resound now more clearly, like so many strains in the polyphonic hymn of national liberation. The salient four are by no means restricted to the style of verse indicated by their classification, but such a grouping helps to emphasize the main currents of the new poetry.

II

In 1832, when Magalhães published his first collection, Poesias, he was a conventional worshipper of the Portuguese classics. A visit to Europe in 1833 converted him thoroughly to French Romanticism and when, three years later, he issued the Suspiros poeticos e Saudades (Poetic Sighs and Longings), the very title proclaimed the advent of a new orientation. His invocation to the angel of poesy is in itself a miniature declaration of poetic independence:

Ja nova Musameu canto inspira;não mais empunhoprofana lyra.Minha alma, imitaa natureza;quem vencer podesua belleza?De dia, de noiteLouva o Senhor;Canta os prodigiosDo Creador.66

The chaste virgins of Greece, as he announces in the lines preceding this virtual, if distinctly minor ars poetica, have fascinated his childhood enough. Farewell Homer; the poet will dream now of his native land and sigh, amid the cypress, a song made of his own griefs and longings. Nature, fatherland and God guiding humanity are the trinity of his emblem. They are his constant thought at home and abroad. “Nothing for me,” he exclaims in his Deos e o Homem, written in the Alps in 1834, “for my fatherland all.” In these Suspiros form becomes fairly free, rhythm alters with change in the thought; it is difficult to point to anything in them that has not already appeared in Brazilian poetry from the earliest days, but the same outward elements of religion, patriotism and subjectivity have been fused into a more personal, more appealing product. Os Mysterios, a funereal canticle in memory of his children, published in Paris in 1858, is in eight cantos that sing the triumph of faith. As he wrote in his philosophical work issued in this same year, Factos de Espiritu Humano: “This world would be a horrible comedy, a causeless illusion, and human existence a jest perpetrated by nothingness, – all would be but a lie, if there were not a just and kind God!.. That which is absurd cannot be true. God exists and the human spirit is immortal in that knowledge.” There is the kernel of his poetry. Urania, Vienna 1862, chants love through the symbol of his wife. The epic attempt, A Confederação dos Tamoyos, in ten cantos, is noteworthy not so much for lofty flights as for its evidence of the author’s blending of the patriotic and the religious motives. The attitude toward the Jesuit missionaries is the opposite to the stand taken by Basilio da Gama in the Uruguay; they alone among the Portuguese are worthy; the Indians yield at last to civilization, but they are idealized into defenders of justice against the Portuguese exploiters.

In his epic he underwent the influence of Gonçalves Dias, as did Manoel de Araujo Porto-Alegre (1806-1879) in his Brazilianas (1863). This noted painter was also affected by the free metrical structure of the Suspiros of Magalhães, as he revealed in A voz da Natureza of 1835. The boresome epic Colombo, seeking inspiration in the great discoverer, is commendable for imagination rather than truly creative poetry.

Gonçalves Dias is more lyrical in spirit than Magalhães, who was rather the meditative worshipper. The poet of nature was the first to reveal to Brazilians in its full significance the pride of nationality, to such an extent, indeed, that his “Americanism” became a blind hostility toward Europe as being only a source of evil to the new continent. In him flowed the blood of all three races that make up the Brazilian blend and he has celebrated each of the strains, – the Indian in Os Tymbiras, Poema Americano, the African in A Escrava, the Portuguese in the Sextilhas de Frei Antão. To this blend Carvalho, not without justice, attributes the inner turmoil of the poet’s soul. He is religious in his patriotism, just as Magalhães is patriotic in his religion, but if his aversion to Europe is unreasoning, his patriotism is not a blind flag-waving:

A patria é onde quer a vida temosSem penar e sem dor;Onde rostos amigos nos rodeam,Onde temos amor;Onde vozes amigas nos consolam,Na nossa desventura,Onde alguns olhos chorarão doridosNa erma sepultura.67

It is with the name of Gonçalves Dias that “Indianism” in Brazilian poetry is most closely associated. As we have already seen, Verissimo indicates an important difference between this “second” type and the first that appeared in the epics of the Mineira poets. The native was exalted not so much for his own sake as by intense reaction against the former oppressors of the nation. As early as the date of Brazil’s declaration of Independence (September 7, 1822), numerous families had foresworn their Portuguese patronymics and adopted indigenous names; idealization in actual life could not go much farther. In literature such Indianism, as in the case of Gonçalves Dias, could serve the purpose of providing a highly colourful background for the poetic exploitation of the native scene.

Verissimo would call Gonçalves Dias the greatest Brazilian poet, though the noted critic discovers more genius in Basilio da Gama and in Alvares de Azevedo and even Laurindo Rabello, – more philosophical emotion in Junqueira Freire. And before the national criticism had awarded Gonçalves Dias that place of honour, the people had granted it. “The history of our Romanticism will recognize that the strength of this spiritual movement came not alone from the talent of its chief authors, but from their communion with the milieu, from the sympathy which they found there. Our literature was then for the first time, and perhaps the last, social.” Gonçalves Dias, in his Canção de Exilio, captured the soul of his people with a simple lyrism that the slightest exaggeration might have betrayed into sentimental doggerel.

Minha terra tem palmeiras,Onde canta o sabiá;As aves que aqui gorgeam,Não gorgeião como lá.68

These stanzas, set to music, became the property of the nation. “If, like the Hebrews, we were to lose our fatherland, our song of exile would be already to hand in the Canção of Gonçalves Dias. With it he reached and conquered the people and our women, who are – in all respects – the chief element in the fame and success of poets. And not only the people, but Brazilian literature and poetry. Since that time the poet is rare who does not sing his land.

“‘All chant their fatherland,’ runs a verse by Casimiro de Abreu, whose nostalgia proceeds directly from the Canção of Gonçalves Dias. Nor does he hide this, calling part of his verses, Canções do Exilio. And to the name of Casimiro de Abreu we can add, following in the wake of the poet of Maranhão, Magalhaes, Porto Alegre, Alvares de Azevedo, Laurindo Rabello, Junqueira Freire and almost all his contemporaries. In all you will find that song, expressed as conscious or disguised imitation. Dominated by the emotion of the Song of Exile, Brazil made of Gonçalves Dias her favorite poet, the elect of her feelings. The nativist instinct, so characteristic of peoples in their infancy, found also a sympathetic echo in his Poesias Americanas, and received as a generous reparation the idealization of our primitive inhabitants and their deeds, without inquiring into what there was in common between them and us, into the fidelity of those pictures and how far they served the cause of a Brazilian literature. His lyrism, of an intensity which then could be compared in our language only to that of Garrett,69 whose influence is evident in it, found similarly a response in the national feeling.”

Verissimo, somewhat sceptical in the matter of love as experienced by poets, does not even care whether love in Gonçalves Dias was imaginary or real. He counts it the distinguishing trait of the poet that his love poems move the reader with the very breath of authenticity. “I find in them the external theme translated into other words, into another form, perhaps another manner, but with the same lofty generality with which it was sung by the truly great, the human poets. In him love is not the sensual, carnal, morbid desire of Alvares de Azevedo; the wish for caresses, the yearning for pleasure characteristic of Casimiro de Abreu, or the amorous, impotent fury of Junqueira Freire. It it the great powerful feeling purified by idealization, – the love that all men feel, – not the individual passion, the personal, limited case.”

I am not so inclined as Verissimo to accept at full value the statements of poets like Gonçalves Dias that they have never felt love. It is rather that they have never found it as they have visioned it. Indeed, this is just what Gonçalves Dias himself has written:

O amor que eu tanto amava de imo peitoQue nunca pude achar.The love that so much I loved in my innermost heart,And that never I could find.

The poet who wrote the lines that follow, with their refrain,

Isso é amor e desse amor se morreThis is love, the love of which one dies

must have been something more than the man gifted with divination that Verissimo would make of him. I would hazard the guess that Verissimo’s deductions are based on a certain personal passionlessness of the critic himself, whose writings reveal just such an idealizer of love as he would find in Gonçalves Dias.

Amor é vida; é ter constantementeAlma, sentidos, coração – abertosAo grande, ao bello; é ser capaz de extremos,D’altas virtudes, até capaz de crimes;Comprehender o infinito, a immensidade,E a natureza e Deus, gostar des campos;D’aves, flores, murmurios solitarios;Buscar tristeza, a soledade, o ermo,E ter o coração em riso e festa;E á branda festa, ao riso da nossa almaFontes de pranto intercalar sem custo;Conhecer o prazer e a desventuraNo mesmo tempo e ser no mesmo pontoO ditoso, o miserrimo dos entes:Isso é amor e desse amor se morre!Amar, e não saber, não ter coragemPara dizer o amor que em nos sentimos;Temer que olhos profanos nos devassemO templo, onde a melhor porção da vidaSe concentra; onde avaros recatamosEssa fonte de amor, esses thesourosInesgotaveis, de illusoes floridas;Sentir, sem que se veja, a quem se adora,Comprehender, sem lhe ouvir, seus pensamentos,Seguil-a, sem poder fitar seus olhos,Amal-a, sem ousar dizer que amamos,E, temendo roçar os seus vestidos,Arder por afogal-a em mil abraços:Isso é amor e desse amor se morre!70

Yet from Gonçalves Dias to the refined, clamant voluptuousness of Olavo Bilac is a far cry. The reason for the difference is to be sought rather in personal constitution than in poetic creed. Even the Romantics differ markedly from one another, and though the Brazilian muse is an ardent lady (a truth which, as we shall see, rendered anything like a genuine Parnassianism fairly impossible in Brazil) Gonçalves Dias is after all restrained in his expression of a passion which clearly he felt. The passage just quoted, with all deference to Verissimo, is not great poetry, and precisely because it is too general. It is statement, not the unfolding of passion in a form spontaneously created. It proves that Gonçalves Dias loved, – one woman or many, – but it reveals rather a certain incapacity to generalize than a faculty for transposing the particular into the universal.

Alvares de Azevedo is the standard-bearer of the Brazilian Byronists, but he should not be classed offhand as a mere echoer of the Englishman’s strophes. His Lira dos Veinte Annos is exactly what the title announces; the lyre of a twenty-year-old, which, though its strings give forth romantic strains of bitterness and melancholy and imagination that have become associated with Byron, Musset and Leopardi, sounds an individual note as well. The poet died in his twenty-first year; it was a death that he foresaw and that naturally coloured his verses. “Eat, drink and love; what can the rest avail us?” was the epigraph he took from Byron for his Vagabundo. His brief, hectic career had no time for meticulous polishing of lines; if the statue did not come out as at first he desired, he broke it rather than recast the metal. Not a little of his proclamative rhyming is the swagger of his youth, which is capable, at times, of giving to a poem so banal a quadruplicative title as “’Tis she! ’Tis she! ’Tis she! ’Tis she!” With the frustrated ambitions of weakness he longed for illimitable power. In the 12 de Setembro (his birthday) he exclaims:

Fôra bello talvez sentir no craneoA alma de Goethe, e reunir na fibraByron, Homero e Dante;Sonhar-se n’um delirio momentaneoA alma da creação, e som que vibraA terra palpitante.71

Like the hero of Aucassin et Nicolette, he prefers hell to heaven for a dwelling-place.

No inferno estão suavissimas bellezas,Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras;La se namora em boa companhia,Não pode haver inferno com Senhoras!72

he declares in O Poeta Moribundo.

He is Brazil’s sick child par excellence, ill, like so many after him, with the malady of the century. But one must guard against attributing this to the morbid pose that comes so easy at twenty. Pose there was, and flaunting satanism, but too many of these poets in Brazil, and in the various republics of Spanish-America died young for one to doubt their sincerity altogether. The mood is a common one to youth; in an age that, like the romantic, made a literary fashion of their weakness, they were bound to appear as they appeared once again when Symbolism and the Decadents vanquished for a time the cold formalism of the Parnassian school.

That Alvares de Azevedo, for all his millennial doubts and despairs was a child, is attested by the following pedestrian quatrain from the poem of the quadruplicative title:

Mas se Werther morreu por ver CarlottaDando pão com manteiga as criancinhas,Se achou-a assim mais bella, – eu mais te adoroSonhando-te a lavar as camisinhas!73

Thackeray’s famous parody seems here itself to be parodied. Alvares de Azevedo’s love, if Verissimo was right, was “um amor de cabeça,” – of the head rather than the heart, a poet’s love, the “love of love,” without objective reality… “It is rather a desire to love, the aspiration for a woman ideally beloved, than a true, personal passion. What does it matter, however, if he give us poems such as Anima mea, Vida, Esperanças, and all, almost all, that he left us?”