Brazilian Literature

The boy-poet is still an appreciable influence in the national letters, as well he might be among a people inclined to moodiness; for many years he was one of the most widely read poets of the country, in company of his fellow-romantics, Gonçalves Dias and Castro Alves. Among his followers are Laurindo Rabello (1826-1864), Junqueira Freire (1832-1855) and Casimiro de Abreu (1837-1860), – not a long lived generation. Rabello was a vagrant soul whose verses are saved by evident sincerity. “I am not a poet, fellow mortals,” he sings, “and I know it well. My verses, inspired by grief alone, are not verses, but rather the cries of woe exhaled at times involuntarily by my soul.” He is known chiefly as a repentista (improvisator) and himself spread the popularity of his verses by singing them to his own accompaniment upon the violin. He tried to improvise life as well as verses, for he drifted from the cloister to the army, from the army to medicine, with a seeming congenital inability to concentrate. Misfortune tracked his steps, and, as he has told us, wrung his songs from him. Verissimo calls him one of the last troubadours, wandering from city to city singing his sad verses and forcing the laugh that must entertain his varying audiences. The popular mind so confused him with the Portuguese Bocage that, according to the same critic, some of Bocage’s verses have been attributed to the Brazilian.

“My pleasures,” he sings in his autobiographical poem Minha Vida (My Life) “are a banquet of tears! A thousand times you must have seen me, happy amidst the happy, chatting, telling funny stories, laughing and causing laughter. Life’s a drama, eh?” He is, indeed, as his lines reveal, a Brazilian Pagliaccio:

Porque julgar-se do semblante, —Do semblante, essa mascara de carneQue o homem recebeu pr’a entrar no mundo,O que por dentro vai? E quasi sempre,Si ha estio no rosto, inverno na alma.Confesso-me ante vos; ouvi, contentes!O meu riso é fingido; sim, mil vezesCom elle afogo os ecos de un gemidoQue imprevisto me chega a flor dos labios;Mil vezes sobre as cordas afinadasQue tanjo, o canto meu accompanhandoCahe pranto.Eu me finjo ante vos, que o fingimentoÉ no lar do prazer prudenia ao triste.74

Junqueira Freire is of firmer stuff, though tossed about by inner and external vicissitudes that are mirrored in the changing facets of his verse.

He, too, sought – with as little fundamental sincerity as Laurindo Rabello – solace in the monastery, which he entered at the unmonastic age of twenty as the result of being crossed in love. Of course he thought first of suicide, but “the cell of a monk is also a grave,” – and a grave, moreover, whence the volatile soul of youth may rise in carnal resurrection. Junqueira Freire was the most bookish of children. He read his way through the Scriptures, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid (an unbiblical trio!) and imbibed modern currents through Milton, Klopstock, De Maistre, Herculano, Garrett, Lamartine, Hugo. His prose critiques are really remarkable in so young a person, and one sentence upon philosophy is wiser by far than many a tome penned by the erudite. Philosophy he found to be a “vain poetry, not of description but of ratiocination, nothing true, everything beautiful; rather art than science; rather a cupola than a foundation.” Such a view of philosophy is of course not new, though it is none too current. It is brilliant for a mere youth of Romanticist Brazil – an intuitive forecast, as it were, of Croce’s philosophy of the intuition.

Soon weary of the cloister walls, our poet sang his disillusionment in lines that turn blasphemous, even as the mother in Meu filho no claustro curses the God that “tore from my arms my favorite son…” “We all illude ourselves!” “We conceive an eternal paradise and when greedily we reach after it, we find an inferno.”

He is, as an artist, distinctly secondary. He is more the poet in his prose than in his poems, and I am inclined to think that his real personality resides there.

Casimiro de Abreu, in Carvalho’s words, “is the most exquisite singer of saudades in the older Brazilian poetry;75 his work is a cry of love for all that lay far away from him, his country and his family, whom he left when but a child.”

Meu Deus, eu sinto e tu bem ves que eu morroRespirando este ar;Faz que eu viva, Senhor! dá-me de novoOs gozos de meu lar!Quero dormir a sombra dos coqueiros,As folhas por docel:E ver se apanho a borboleta brancaQue voa no vergel!Quero sentar-me a beira do riachoDas tardes ao cahir,E sosinho scismando no crepusculoOs sonhos de porvir!Dá-me os sitios gentis onde eu brincava,Lá na quadra infantil;Da que eu veja uma vez o céu da patriaO céu do meu Brazil!Minha campa será entre as mangueirasBanhada ao luar,Eu contente dormirei tranquilloA sombra do meu lar!As cachoeiras chorarão sentidasPorque cedo morri,E eu sonho ne sepulcro os meus amores,Na terra onde nasci!76

In his study of Casimiro de Abreu Verissimo has some illuminating things to say of love and wistful longing (amor e saudade) in connection with the poet’s patriotism in especial and with love of country in general. “It is under the influence of nostalgia and love, for both in him are really an ailment – that he begins to sing of Brazil. But the Brazil that he sings in such deeply felt verses, the Patria that he weeps … is the land in which were left the things he loves and chiefly that unknown girl to whom he dedicated his book. The longing for his country, together with the charms that this yearning increased or created, is what made him a patriot, if, with this restriction may be applied to him an epithet that from my pen is not a token of praise. His nostalgia is above all the work of love, – not only the beloved woman, but all that this loving nature loved, – the native soil, the paternal house, country life… Without these two feelings, love and longing, the love of country is anti-esthetic. If Os Lusiadas, with the intense patriotism that overflows it, is the great poem it is, it owes this greatness to them alone. It is love and longing, the anxious nostalgia of the absent poet and the deep grief of a high passion that impart to it its most pathetic accents, its most lyric notes, its most human emotions, such as the speeches of Venus and Jupiter, the sublime episode of D. Ignes de Castro, that of Adamastor, the Isle of Love…”77

In Fagundes Varella (1841-1875) we have a disputed figure of the Romantic period. Verissimo denies him originality except in the Cantico de Calvario, “where paternal love found the most eloquent, most moving, most potent representation that we have ever read in any language,” while Carvalho, championing his cause, yet discovers in him a mixture of Alvares de Azevedo’s Byronic satanism, Gonçalves Dias’s Indianism and the condoreirismo of Castro Alves and Tobias Barreto. He is a lyrist of popular inspiration and appeal, and “one of our best descriptive poets…” “Varella, then, together with Machado de Assis and Luis Guimarães Junior, is a transitional figure between Romanticism and Parnassianism.”

The influence of Victor Hugo’s Les Châtiments was great throughout South America and in Brazil brought fruit chiefly in Tobias Barreto and Castro Alves, the salient representatives of the so-called condoreirismo; like the condor their language flew to grandiloquent heights, whence the name, for which in English we have a somewhat less flattering counterpart in the adjective “spread-eagle.” Barreto (1839-1889) belongs rather to the history of Brazilian culture; he was largely responsible for the introduction of modern German thought and exerted a deep influence upon Sylvio Romero. Alves was less educated – his whole life covers but a span of twenty-four years – but what he lacked in learning he made up in sensitivity and imagination. Though he can be tender with the yearnings of a sad youth, he becomes a pillar of fire when he is inspired by the cause of abolition.

Romero, with his customary appetite for a fight, has, despite his denials of preoccupation with mere questions of priority, given himself no little trouble to prove Barreto’s precedence in the founding of the condoreiro school;78 we shall leave that matter to the historians. Brazilians themselves, as far as concerns the esthetic element involved, have made a choice of Alves. He is one of the national poets. His chief works are three in number: Espumas Fluctuantes, Gonzaga (a play) and O Poema dos Escravos (unfinished). Issued separately, the Poem of the Slaves, is not, as its title would imply, a single hymn to the subjected race; it is a collection of poems centering around the theme of servitude. He does not dwell upon the details of that subjection; he is, fundamentally, the orator. The abolition of slavery did not come until 1888; on September 28, 1871, all persons born in Brazil were declared free by law; it was such poems as Alves’s Vozes d’Africa and O Navio Negreiro that prepared the way for legislation which, for that matter, economic change was already fast rendering inevitable.79

III

The Brazilian novel is a product of the Romantic movement. Such precursors as Teixeira e Souza (1812-1861) and Joaquim Noberto de Souza Silva (1820-1891) belong rather to the leisurely investigator of origins. The real beginnings are to be appreciated in the work of Joaquim Manoel de Macedo (1820-1882) and José de Alencar (1829-1877).

Macedo portrayed the frivolous society of the epoch of Dom Pedro II. He was not so much a leader of taste as a skilful exploiter of it. He has been called “par excellence the novelist of the Brazilian woman”; we need look to him, then, for little in the way of frankness or psychological depth. To the reader of today, who has been tossed high in the waters of the contemporary novel, Macedo and his ilk are tame, naïve, a mite insipid. Not that some of his pages lack a certain piquancy in their very simplicity. His Rachel, for example, in O Moço Louro (The Blond Young Man) can talk like a flapper who has been reading Bernard Shaw, but we know that love is to teach her better in the end. Macedo was a writer for the family hearth; his language, like his ideas, is simple. But our complex civilization has already outdistanced him; it is not at all impossible that in a short while he will join the other precursors and, with the exception of his books Moreninha (The Brunette) and O Moço Louro, be but a name to his countrymen and even his countrywomen. The first, published in 1849, made his reputation; it is a tale of the triumph of pure love. The second is after The Brunette, his best-known novel, narrating the hardly original tale of the virginal, dreamy Honorina and the free, mocking Rachel who love the same youth; Honorina’s true love, as we might expect, wins out, for Rachel sacrifices her passion without letting the happy pair realize the extent of her abnegation.

“By no means should I say that he possesses the power of idealization of José de Alencar, the somewhat précieuse quality of Taunay or the smiling, bitter pessimism of Machado de Assis; if we wish to judge him in comparison with them or with the writers of today, his work pales; his modest creations disappear into an inferior category. But accepting him in the time for which he wrote, when the novel had not yet received the Flaubertian esthetics that ennobled it and had not been enriched by the realistic genius of Zola, – beside his contemporaries Teixeria de Souza, Manoel de Almeida and Bernardo Guimarães, he seems to us living, picturesque, colorful, as indeed he is. I esteem him because he has contributed to the development and the wealth of our literature.”80

More important to the history and practice of the Brazilian novel is José de Alencar, famous for his Guarany and Iracema, the first of which, in the form of an opera libretto set to music by the native composer Carlos Gomes, has made the rounds of the operatic world. Alencar is to the novel what Gonçalves Dias is to the poem: the typical Indianist. But Brazilians find his Indianism superior to that of the poet in both sincerity and majesty. “His Indians do not express themselves like doctors from Coimbra; they speak as Nature has taught them, loving, living and dying like the lesser plants and animals of the earth. Their passions are as sudden and as violent as the tempest, – rapid conflagrations that burst forth for an instant, flaring, glaring and soon disappearing.”81

At his best Alencar is really a poet who has chosen prose as his medium. He uses the Indian milieu, as Gonçalves Dias in his poetry, for the descriptive opportunities it affords. Brazilians rarely speak of his plots, which are simplicity itself; what fascinates them, even today, is his rich palette, which challenges comparison even with the opulent coloration of Coelho Netto and Graça Aranha. Chief among foreign influences were the Frenchmen Chateaubriand, de Vigny, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo. Our own Cooper, himself an “Indianist” contemporaneous with Alencar, influenced the Brazilian innovator, but not in the manner that Brazilian critics have seemed to discern. Alencar himself, in a rare document, has sought to refute those who find his Guarany a novel in Cooper’s style. To him Cooper was, first of all, the “poet of the sea.” As far as concerned American poetry, Alencar’s model (and model is his own word) was Chateaubriand. “But my master was that glorious Nature which surrounds me, and in particular the magnificence of the deserts which I studied in early youth and which were the majestic portals through which I penetrated into my country’s past… It was from this source, from this vast, secular book that I drew the pages of Guarany and Iracema and many another… From this source, and not from the works of Chateaubriand, still less from those of Cooper, which were only a copy of the sublime original that I had read within my heart.

“Brazil, like the United States and most other countries of America, has a period of conquest in which the invading race destroys the indigenous. This struggle presents analogous characters because of the similarity of the native tribes. Only in Peru and Mexico do they differ.

“Thus the Brazilian novelist who seeks the plot of his novel in this period of invasion cannot escape a point of contact with the American writer. But this approximation comes from history; it is inevitable and not the result of imitation.

“If neither Chateaubriand nor Cooper had existed, the American novel would have appeared in Brazil in due season.

“Years after having written Guarany” (Alencar wrote the book in his twenty-seventh year, and would have it that the tale occurred to him in his ninth year, as he was crossing the sertões of the North on the road from Ceará to Bahia) “I re-read Cooper in order to verify the observation of the critics, and I was convinced that it is of minor importance. There is not in the Brazilian novel a single personage whose type may be traced to the Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, Ontario, The Sappers and Lionel Lincoln… Cooper considers the native from the social point of view and was, in the description of indigenous customs, a realist… In Guarany the savage is an ideal, which the writer tried to poetize, divesting him of the coarse incrustation in which he was swathed by the chroniclers, and rescuing him from the ridicule that the stultified remnants cast upon the almost extinct race.

“But Cooper, say the critics, describes American nature. And what was he to describe if not the scene of his drama? Walter Scott before him had provided the model for these pen landscapes that form part of local color.

“What should be investigated is whether the descriptions of Guarany show any relationship or affinity to Cooper’s descriptions; but this is what the critics fail to do, for it means work and requires thought. In the meantime the comparison serves to show that they resemble each other neither in genre nor style.”82

The Brazilian novelist, presenting thus his own case, hits precisely upon those two qualities – sea lore and realism – for which Cooper only yesterday, fifty years after Alencar wrote this piece of auto-criticism, was rediscovered to United States readers by Professor Carl Van Doren. “Not only did he outdo Scott in sheer accuracy,” writes the critic of the United States novel, “but he created a new literary type, the tale of adventure on the sea, in which, though he was to have many followers in almost every modern language, he has not been surpassed for vigour and swift rush of narrative.”83

Alencar is no realist nor is he concerned with sheer accuracy. Guarany, the one book by which he is sure to be remembered for many a year, is, as we have seen, a prose poem in which the love of the Indian prince Pery for the white Cecy, daughter of a Portuguese noble, is unfolded against a sumptuous tapestry of the national scene. Alencar wrote other novels, of the cities, but in Brazilian literature he is identified with his peculiar Indianism. From the stylistic standpoint he has been accused of bad writing; like so many of his predecessors – and followers – he plays occasional havoc with syntax, as if the wild regions he depicts demanded an analogous anarchy of language. Yet Costa, granting all this, adds that “before José de Alencar the Portuguese language as written in Brazil was, without exaggeration, a horrible affair. What man today possesses sufficient courage to brave with light heart that voluminous agglomeration of verses in the Confederacão dos Tamoyos, in Colombo, in Caramurú or Uruguay? In prose … but let us rather not speak of it. It is enough to read the novels of Teixeira de Souza and Manoel de Almeida.”84 This same style is viewed by others as a herald of the nervous prose of another man of the sertões, Euclydes da Cunha, who has enshrined them in one of the central works of modern Brazil.

Sertanismo itself, however, was initiated by Bernardo Joaquim da Silva Guimarães (1827-1885) in such works as Pelo Sertão, Mauricio, Escrava Isaura. He was followed in this employment of the sertão as material for fiction by Franklin Tavora (1842-1888) and particularly Escragnole Taunay (1843-1899), whose Innocencia, according to Verissimo, is one of the country’s few genuinely original novels. Mérou, in 1900, called it “the best novel written in South America by a South American,” – a compliment later paid by Guglielmo Ferrero to Graça Aranha’s Chanaan. Viscount Taunay’s famous work – one might call it one of the central productions of Brazilian fiction – is but scant fare to the contemporary appetite in fiction, yet it has been twice translated into French, and has been put into English, Italian, German, Danish and even Japanese.

The scene is laid in the deserted Matto Grosso, a favourite background of the author’s. Innocencia, all that her name implies, dwells secluded with her father, a miner, her negress slave Conga and her Caliban-like dwarf Tico, who is in love with Innocencia, the Miranda of this district. Into her life comes the itinerant physician Cirino de Campos, who is called by her father to cure her of the fever. Cirino proves her Ferdinand; they make love in secret, for she is meant by paternal arrangement for a mere brute of a mule-driver, Manecão by name. Innocencia vows herself to Cirino, when the mule-driver comes to enforce his prior claim; the father, bound by his word of honour, sides with the primitive lover. Innocencia resists; Manecão avenges himself by killing the doctor. A comic figure of a German scientist adds humour and a certain poignant irony to the tale.

Students of Spanish-American letters are acquainted with the Colombian novel Maria by the half-Jew Jorge Isaacs; it has been termed a sister work to Innocencia and if it happens to be, as is my opinion, superior to the Brazilian, a comparison reveals complementary qualities in each. The Spanish-American work is rather an idyll, instinct with poetry; Innocencia, by no means devoid of poetry, is more melodramatic and of stouter texture. Taunay, in Brazilian fiction, is noted for having introduced an element of moderation in passion and characterization, due perhaps to his French provenience. His widely-known account of an episode in the war with Paraguay was, indeed, first written in French.

Manoel Antonio de Almeida (1830-1861) in his Memorias de um Sargento de Milicias had made a premature attempt to introduce the realistic novel; his early death robbed the nation of a most promising figure.

IV

The theatrical literature of Brazil is poor; the origin of the modern drama is generally attributed to Magalhães’ tragedy upon Antonio José, 1838, and to the comedies of Luis Carlos Martins Penna (1815-1848). Of drama there is no lack; all that is needed is the dramatist. Martins Penna stands out easily from the ruck for elementary realism, but he is almost alone. Even today, the plays of Claudio de Souza, for all their success upon the stage, cannot compare with the quality that may be encountered in contemporary poetry, novels and tales.

The Romantic period in Brazil is distinguished as much for activity as for actual accomplishment; historically it is of prime importance in the national development, while esthetically it reveals a certain broadening of interests. The national writer, as a type, has attained his majority; he gazes upon broader horizons. Yet take away Guarany, Iracema, Innocencia, O Moço Louro, Moreninha, and what, really, is left in prose? The poets fare better; they are nearer to the sentient heart of things. Yet implacable esthetic criteria would do away with much of their product as well. It is by such tokens as these that one may recognize the secondary importance of the national letters, for, of course, Brazilian letters do not constitute a major literature. Here it is the salient individual that counts, and I, for one, am inclined to think that in art such an individual, as bodied forth in his work, is the only thing that counts. The rest – genres, evolution, periods, – is important in the annals of national development; it is, however, sociology, history, what you will, but not the primary concern of art.

CHAPTER V

CRITICAL REACTION (1870-1900)

French Background – Naturalists, Parnassians – Theophilo Dias, Raymundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira, Olave Bilac – The Novel – Aluizio de Azevedo, Machado de Assis – The Decadents – Later Developments.

I

The later course of Brazilian letters follows practically the same line traced by the reaction in France against the Romantic school. To and fro swings the pendulum of literary change in unceasing oscillation between dominance of the emotions and rule of the intellect. Life, as Havelock Ellis somewhere has shown, is an eternal process of “tumescence and detumescence”; the formula is quite true of literature. Buds and human beings alike swell to maturity in the womb of nature and then follows the inevitable contraction. So, in letters, the age of full expression is succeeded by one of repressed art, – the epoch of a blatant proclamative “ism” by an era of restraint and withdrawal. Who shall, in a priori fashion, pretend to say that this “ism” is right and that one wrong? By their works alone shall ye know them.

If, then, Romanticism in France, as subsequently elsewhere, gave way to a rapid succession of inter-reacting schools or groups, the phenomenon was the familiar one of literary oscillation. The Naturalists, nurtured upon advancing science, looked with scorn upon the emotional extravagances of the Romantics. To excessive preoccupation with the ego and with unreality, they opposed the critical examination and documentation of reality. Milieu, social environment, psychology ceased to be idealized; enthusiasm and exaltation were succeeded by cold scrutiny. The doctrine of “impersonality” (a most inartistic and psychologically impossible creed) was crystallized around the powerful literary personality of Flaubert, and Romantic egolatry looked as silly in the searching day of the new standards as last night’s flowers without the breath of spring and the moonlight that excuse the sweet folly they incite.

In poetry the Parnassians revolted against Romantic self-worship on the one hand and the realistic preoccupation of the naturalists on the other. They, too, believed themselves impersonal, impassive – terms only relative in creative endeavour. They climbed up their ivory towers, away from vulgar mundanity, and substituted for the musical vagaries of their unrepressed predecessors the cult of the clear image and the sculptural line. And fast upon them followed the Symbolist-Decadents, – some of whom, indeed, were nourished upon the milk of Parnassianism, – and who, in their turn, abjured the modern classicism of the Parnassians with their cult of form and clarity, and set up instead a new musicality of method, a new intensity of personalism. Their ivory towers were just as high, but were reared on subtler fancies. Suggestion replaced precision; sculpture melted into music. In a word, already neo-classicism had swung to neo-romanticism; the pendulum, on its everlasting swing, had covered the same distance in far faster time. Yet each seeming return to the old norms is a return with a difference; more and more the basic elements of the reaction are understood by the participants in their relations to society and to the individual. Especially is their psychological significance appreciated and – most important of all and most recent – their nature as complements rather than as antagonists. When Darío, in a famous poem, asked “¿Quien quieñ es no es Romántico?” (Who that is, is not a Romantic?) he but stressed the individualism at the bottom of all art. Perhaps the days of well-defined “schools” in art are over; perhaps the days of the label in criticism are gone, or going fast, even in academic circles; all men contain the potentialities of all things and opposites grow out of opposites. Man is thus himself unity in variety, – the old shibboleth of the estheticists, – and the “schools” are but phases of the multiple personality.