 Chapter 1. A Little Blue Book, 646. The Spirit of Brazilian Literature. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Little Blue Book, 646. The Spirit of Brazilian Literature, via Isaac Goldberg. 1. Preliminary Considerations. Analogies are dangerous things. They emphasize similarities at the expense of essential differences. Yet it will be highly useful in presenting a survey of Brazilian letters to employ the figure of mother country and daughter nation. However great the changes that adulthood brings, there is always the resemblance, inner or outer, to one's parents. Brazil is one of the children of Imperial Portugal. The Portugal into whose greatness her most glorious poet, Camões, was born, and with whose decline he died. In time when separation of distance grew naturally into separation of spirit, the child reached maturity. It sought independence. So doing at first it revolted against its parents. It even reviled them. That is a phase of development as natural to children as it is to colonies. They're as national as there is individual ambivalence. Today the ancient hatreds that were bred by the struggle for national autonomy have died. The daughter indeed as daughter's will has outgrown mother. The features nonetheless are essentially the same and the filial love has returned. It is a love which is not a surrender but rather a realistic acknowledgement. The language of Brazil is, with those modifications that time and place inevitably work, essentially Portuguese. Brazil is not like Canada, daughter in her mother's house, yet mistress in her own. The division has been clean, complete, and salutary. The history of her separation from Portugal, the history of her internecine strife, have both been agreeably free of those chronic bloodlettings that bespatter the pages of the nations. Blood has been spilled to be sure but not rivers of it. Today Brazil is one of the important nations of the continents. Their importance is likely to grow with the years. A poet has written that the Amazon is the center of the world. Should it so turn out it will not be the first time that, in a practical verse afar, has guessed any truth a century before his more literal-minded fellows have blundered into it. In its simplest outlines, the history of Brazil falls into three obvious divisions. One, the colony, two, independence, and three, the republic. Discovered in the opening year of the 16th century, Brazil remained a colonial dependency until 1822. Her career as a monarchy lasted until 1889 when she became a republic. Behind these dates lies a slow but often interesting evolution from merely physical attachment to spiritual kinship with the land. Something in the Brazilian atmosphere in its very scenery captivated the discoverers from the start, that it should at first have been named the land of the true or holy cross, is in harmony with the religious spirit of the times. The celestial connotation has remained, however, to this very day. When Graças Aranha writes as much read and widely discussed novelistic hymn to his country, he names it Canaan, the promised land. He is thus but the latest in the line that dates back to the earliest days of the discovery. It was Vespucci, after whom the American continents were named, who called Brazil an earthly paradise. Father Anciete in 1585 repeated Vespucci's heavenly compliment. Gabriel Suárez and the chronicler Carjim took up the strain until, by the time it had reached Rocha Pita, it swelled into a chorus of exaggerations. Ioríssimo has told us that gangurism is among the Portuguese a national vice that holds true outside the field of poetry. Milho and racial mixture have made of the Brazilians a creature of the imagination. Physical separation is the first step toward autonomy. In the wild outbursts of admiration which were hymned by these early spirits, we find already what Brazilian critics have termed nativism as distinct from nationalism. Passionate fondness for the land itself is present at the very start. Let that land be coveted by foreigners. Let those foreigners attack the settlers, as Hall and France in England did. Let the settlers thus be forced into a unit of defense against a common possession, and already the seeds of national feeling have been implanted. Let the hazards of European fortunes send the Portuguese monarch in flight from his throne to Brazil, thus converting the country by his mere presence into the virtual monarchy itself, and a deeper feeling has been implanted in the Brazilian heart. Consider, too, the libertarian thoughts and deeds that are filling the air at this time, the successful struggle the United States for independence from England, the 16-year fight of Spanish America versus Spain, the French Revolution. Consider the waning power of the motherland, the series of oppressions visited upon a colony never sufficiently appreciated and ever regarded as a milch cow for the court at Lisbon. These are the circumstances that breed out of a national feeling, aspirations to independence. When the establishment of an independent monarchy in Brazil came about in 1822, it was almost a logical deduction from contemporary events. So, to the founding of the Republic, reproducing in the inner life of the nation those individualistic revolts against central authority that had brought about the separation from Portugal, properly to appreciate the progress of the creative spirit in Brazil, we must have some knowledge of the racial mixture that has produced the national type. In a condensed account of this nature, I must appear dogmatic. While specialists will not agree upon details, it may be shown that the great amount of miscegenation in Brazil has affected the national psychology that, because of the higher rate of race mixture, race prejudice is remarkably less prevalent than in the United States, that there, as here, linguistic cleavage early appeared and has lately been studied with a view to emphasizing the cultural autonomy of the nation. The three ethnic strains that have blended to produce the Brazilian of today are, in the order of their importance, the Portuguese, the native Indian, and the African Negro, first brought in by the Portuguese as a slave. The Portuguese came at the height of the national glory. The 16th century was for the western slice of the Iberian Peninsula, an era of physical and intellectual prowess. It is the day of Camões, of Sao de Maranda, of Bernard de Ibero, of Gil e Sanchi, the natives whom they found and over whom later they went into ecstasies of romantic adoration and adoration which was simply the expression of an exaggerated hatred of Portugal and which saw the indigenous Brazilians through rousseau's spectacles were of a varied cultural stage. Some had attained to a certain skill in the arts of war and peace, others were coarse nomads. The history of the Negro in Brazil runs fairly parallel to that of the black man in the United States, only that interbreeding in Brazil has gone much farther, interbreeding in fact the melting pot that fuses flesh and blood has been so great that any number of ethnic subdivisions have been formed. The Portuguese crosses with the Indian and produces the Mameduco. He crosses with the Negro and produces the Malato. The Indian and the Negro cross and produce the Cafoso. Later with the influx of Italians, Germans, and Slavs, the matter grows more complex. The Indian is fast disappearing for all the fervors that marked the Indianist movement. Traffic in blacks was done away with in 1851 and black slavery itself was abolished in 1888. The predominance of the white seems thus assured, but nonetheless Romero could write that even when the Brazilian is not in blood a mixed breed he is in ideas. This for us is the important phase of the matter. It helps to explain the characteristic Brazilian melancholy as the climate helps to explain the sweeter, softer, more passionate accents of a muse already fervid by inheritance. Brazilian critics find their tongue more musical, more eloquent than Portuguese. Is it strange that time and place should work change in language? Is there not at the bottom of much refusal to see valid differences between the tongue of the United States and that of England, a certain attribute which we might call intellectual colonialism, which has nothing to do with scientific linguistics? So, too, the radical will overemphasize the difference of which the conservative denies the very existence. More to our purpose, of course, is what the Brazilians have done with that language. On both scores José Veríssimo has written words characterized by an intellectual fidelity, only too rare among the scholars of the nations. From the beginning he declares after intensive study of the original documents, men have written in Brazil differently from writers in Portugal. It would be a pure absurdity then to expect the Brazilian, the North American or the Spanish American to write the classic tongue of his mother country. And again closer to our present interest, if we are by language Portuguese, if through that tongue our literature is but a branch of the Portuguese, we have already ceased to be such because our fund of ideas and notions, which were all constituted outside of Portuguese influence. The chief thing is to have something to say and idea to express a thought to transmit. Without this, however deep his grammatical knowledge of the language, however perfectly he apes the classics, no man is a writer. Veríssimo was free of these errors of judgment that are strewn across the pages of his countryman Romero. Romero's besetting sin, and in this respect he is kinsman the world over, was a literary patriotism which blinded him to aesthetic shortcomings. Related to this no doubt was a loose conception of art that could allow him to entertain so anomalous an idea as scientific poetry and were still to write it. Romero has placed all students of Brazilian letters under his everlasting debt If ever a man went out of subject from all sides and with almost fanatic fervor, he was the man. But it is not patriotic devotion that puts men into the pages of literary history. Any more than devotion to one's wife is sufficient to win a man an honored place in the annals of lyric poetry. That patriotism, that devotion must find expression in artistic form before it finds a place in artistic record. Romero, intent upon national themes, his very history of Brazilian literature is an act of patriotism rather than an expression of aesthetic pains and pleasures, proved too lenient with sympathetic souls, too harsh with antipathetic personalities. His conception of literature, moreover, true to his teutonic backgrounds, embraced almost every realm of the written, even the spoken word. Its worst, it flatters an unthinking national taste. It does not too often appeal to that calm aesthetic taste, which was Veríssimo's distinguishing trait. I have an almost personal fondness for that quiet man who lived his uneventful life far removed from the literary centers of the world, who wrote in a simple, unaffected style of a simple, torgid, rarely inspiring yet human literature, and who, as a personality triumphing over his adverse surroundings, refused to lower his standards in the service of a mistaken patriotism. He has in the field of diplomacy a spiritual counterpart in the person of Manuel de Oliveira Lima, who is written voluminously and with penetration upon his country's life in letters. One does not need to agree with everything these men have written in order to admire the universality of their outlook and the independence of their views. They are artists of life, with the right of the artist to his differences and with the essentially aesthetic outlook of the true-born critic. The story of Brazilian letters will deal naturally with the emergence of the national spirit. We must be on our guard, however, against confusing national passions with artistic national expression. We hear much today about a national literature in the United States. We of the North need to guard against the same easy errors into which the Southern critics have fallen. True nationalism in literature sinks its roots, I believe, deep into the writer's unconscious mind. It is a spontaneous manifestation. No American was ever made by Fiat, nor by the simple process of taking out citizenship papers. Neither may an American art be made by Fiat or by the expressed intention of a self-consciously American author. Brazilians like ourselves have gone to the Indians in search of truly indigenous themes as if they were not truly more related to Portugal than to the Indians. Just as we are more truly as a nation related to England than to the Indians, I wonder whether art, though it bear a national face, has a national soul, or whether in some subtle way even the aesthetic attempts to discover a national basis for art are not founded upon an external allegiance to the places which accident has appointed for our birth and breeding. At any rate, at the extreme left lies the danger of the patriotic bias in literature. At the extreme right, the danger of the aesthetic which tends to evaporate into airy nothings with no local habitations and only names. We are safe as I believe in centering our attention on the writer in remembering that he is the result of a personal and a national heredity in a physical and psychic environment. That these circumstances, however, are of importance to us only as they are transmuted into art. It may be a platitude, but it is a platitude of which literary historians are as much in need as are their readers, that the great artist transcends boundaries of race, nation, or time. He is not independent of them, not at all. He simply conquers his dependency by imposing his personality. He expresses himself in terms of the time and the place, so do we all, artists or botchers. Above those terms, however, rises something which we may define only in some elastic word as personality. Shakespeare is not great because he expressed England, or Dante because he expressed Italy, nor Gutta because he expressed Germany. They are great because through England, Italy, and Germany, respectively, they express themselves supremely and through themselves an attribute of the eternal human, that their governments have used them as symbols of patriotism belongs rather to the history and politics. Every national tradition that is worth the carrying on rises from something broader and deeper than political lines and geographical boundaries. Our common ancestry of fundamental emotions derives from a hidden stream of life that flows under all the nations. It's dim past we may call the racial unconscious. It's dim future we may rationalize into an internationalism that shall not destroy the personality of races and countries. Whatever the name, it denotes a common possession of humanity under the earth of the realists and above the clouds of the poets, there are like no boundaries. The study of a nation's letter thus becomes the study of the nation's creative spirits with, for me, the personal spirit more important than the nation. We may follow in this suggestive account something like the general outlines of the national history. Brazilian critics have rarely, if ever, agreed upon literary periods and historical divisions. While they are coming to a decision, let us, rather, select from the welter of writers the significant persons who have identified their spirit with the soul of the nation. If I choose Romero's four divisions, he was an impulsive fellow and later increased them to 16. It is because they avoid the two facile division by centuries and managed to cluster around the outstanding events of the national history. We have then what Romero has called the one period of formation, 1500 through 1750, two, the period of autonomous development, 1750 through 1830, three, the romantic transformation, 1830 through 1870, and the critical naturalistic reaction followed by the Hornasian's symbolists and so on from 1870 down to the opening of the present century. Essentially, this follows the line of evolution in France which has so powerfully influenced the cultural life of the Latin Americans. We become so easily French-ified, said a prominent Peruvian to me, speaking of Latin Americans as a whole. The French nation indeed has often been held up to the youth of Spanish and Portuguese America as a siren who will lure them from their national homes. Capistrano de Abreu, one of the leading historical minds of Brazil, coined the term trans-Oceanism to denote the scorn early developed in the 16th century in the Brazilian territory and the corresponding desire to cross the ocean and get back to civilization. Here we see as a species of territorial ambivalence. The paradisical raptures of the early discoverers, raptures which have not yet ceased, were balanced by an eagerness to get away from this uncouth land that feeling too has persisted into the present. Do we need indeed to go out of the United States to understand what trans-Oceanism is, to grasp the psychology of what I have called intellectual colonialism, or to see examples of a patriotism so intense as to lead one into voluntary exile abroad? Such foreign influence as produces only snobbery or rather as nurtures a snobbery already present should not be confused with that influence which is bound to arise with two alien cultures impinge upon one another. Here lie the seeds of national renaissance. If France indirectly had created in Latin America an upper crust of Aravice and Pauhanous, it has on the other hand, fertilized the intellects of these republics ever since the first turmoil of the Romantics. Whether that fertilization has been thorough or superficial is a muted question. There are Latin Americans who assert that they have not yet produced their real romantic movement. There are North Americans who have said the same in the United States. Thinking in terms of well-defined movements is slowly and fortunately falling out of fashion. Yet behind these assertions lies a conception of Romanticism as genuine national self-consciousness and self-assertion in art. The course we shall follow from Brazilian beginnings to the works of the moderns will traverse the barren fields of early groping and avowed imitation of Portuguese models, the emergence of a national point of view, the gradual insinuation of France as intellectual and cultural guide, the less gradual but nonetheless certain arrival of an eclecticism which leads to a number of truly independent spirits. These are the flower of a literature. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of Little Blue Book 646 The Spirit of Brazilian Literature This is a LibriVox recording. While LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Little Blue Book 646 The Spirit of Brazilian Literature by Isaac Goldberg. Chapter 2. The Formative Period 1500-1750 The 16th century is fairly barren for literature in Brazil. There are the inevitable chroniclers. There are the active versatile father Ancieta, the poet, say, rather, Versifier, Beato Teixeira Pinto, and not much else. At home, which is to say Lisbon, Brazil played a little part in the ambitions of the reigning monarch, whose eyes were covetous as he turned to opulent India. One must build his home before he furnishes it with objects of art. There was a civilization to develop in Brazil. There were races to be fused. There were natural resources to be discovered and exploited. Slowly, but surely, the national feeling must be developed. As we have seen the first form this took was a fondness for the physical land itself, nativism. That was not inconsistent with the legions to Portugal any more than Love of the Soil was inconsistent with the legions of the early North American colonists to England. As to who was really the first Brazilian author we shall not quarrel. Homer would establish Ancieta as the pivot of the centuries' letters. Verissimo has his own opinions upon the subject, inclining to favor Teixeira Pinto. Besides the fact that there is little to choose between, in the matter, the question had better be left to the historians. First in time at any rate is Padre José Giancieta, 1530 to 1597, who, for more than a half a century, was instructor of the natives. The man was remarkable for energy if not for creative imagination. For his beloved charges he wrote grammars and lexicons and plays and hymns. He was a polyglot, writing in Portuguese, Spanish, Latin, and Pupe. He composed the earliest autos and religious plays to be produced in Brazil. His was hardly pioneering. He may stand as a symbol of the better work accomplished by the Jesuits in the early days. The first Jesuits arrived in the fourth decade of the century. At Bahia they opened the earliest school of any loftier pretensions. Their immediate concern was to establish wherever possible institutions for the teaching of writing, reading, arithmetic, Latin grammar, Christian doctrine, and later on rhetoric and scholastic philosophy. They were during the first century as Verissimo has said, Brazil's entire culture, and its vast impulse toward literary expression. The Jesuits served as a buffer between the rapacious settlers and the Indians. Oliver Lima has even suggested that peaceful dignified separation of church and state in Brazil decreed by the Republic in 1890 owed its pacific character to a grateful recollection of the services rendered to the country by the Jesuits. Such opinion is not unanimous, and we may well see the justice of his remarks did not consider the Jesuit influence a happy one as far as concerned the intellectual and aesthetic formation of the nascent nationality. First of the Brazilian poets is Bantu Teixeira Pinto, who flourished in the second half of the 16th century. He was a poet and he flourished only by the grace of a stereotype literary phraseology. It is still doubtful whether he wrote the entertaining dialogue concerning the grandeurs of Brazil or whether he composed the relation of the shipwreck suffered by Jorge de Al Peracuque Coelho, a prose account dealing with an adventure of that noble personage in the year 1565. Undoubtedly his, however, and dedicated to this same noble is the prosopopeia a most uninspiring procession of stilted 11-syllable verses, 94 eight-bind stanzas of them as classic as sterile imitation could make them. Through Bantu Teixeira the influence of Camões entered into Brazilian literature Camões, however, was an influence that was bound to enter and one visions him, but dimly in the pedestrian performance that is the prosopopeia. What saves the poem from an obscurity in which only the vestal services of the literary will not let it repose is a description of the Recifeiro Pernambuco. Here we come upon one of the first evidences of nativism in Brazilian letters, but the passage is as poetry utterly worthless. Veríssimo can detect in it not the slightest sign of influence exercised by the new surroundings amid which it was conceived and executed. In that case it falls both as art and as native word painting. Gabriel J. Sausa is one of the few other writers of the century that need claim or attention. His descriptive treatise of Brazil in 1587 has been praised in generous terms by the voluminous investigator Farnhagen for a profound observation unequaled by either Diascorte or Plini. Neither of these men explains the plants of the old world better than Suarez, those of the new. It is astonishing how the attention of a single person could occupy itself with so many things such as are contained in his work which treats at the same time in relation to Brazil of geography, history, typography, hydrography, intertropical agriculture, Brazilian horticulture, native materia, medica, wood for building, and full cabinet work, zoology in all its branches, administrative economy, and even mineralogy. The Jesuit father Farnal Gargi, 1540 through 1625, seems to have been translated into English as early as 1625. The manuscript dealt with the origin of the Indians in Brazil in their social and religious customs. If we are to follow Homer the chroniclers of the 16th century in their crude work already forecast the duplex tendency of Brazilian literature, description of nature and description of the savage. There is more to Brazilian letters than this just as, on the other hand, literature is elsewhere in America and on the European continent reveals similar traits. This tendency in Brazil grows during the 17th century and in the 18th becomes predominant. Viewed in this light then Brazilian nativism far from being the creation of the 19th century romanticism was rather a historic prolongation in literature as in life the boy may be father to the man. Economically the 17th century in Brazil was the century of sugar as the 18th was the century of gold and the 19th the century of coffee. Aggression of the Dutch in Pernambuco and of the French in Baranão united the colonists against external opposition and gave them a sense of what we might call Brazilianity. A rural aristocracy arose among the prosperous mill owners. This socialism reveals its reverse in a rising hatred of foreigners. As the century advanced Bahia became a veritable court in miniature in its governor the center of a pleasure loving society. In literature the age is fairly the property of the Bahian group. On the other hand were the courtiers well-read in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese letters and qualified to imitate them. On the other hand was a rude civilization pomp concealed upper-class greed and lower-class servitude so that a Gregorio gematos might arise in belches satire largely imitative that too like the hell mouth of Bahia that he was called. The omnipresent chroniclers I shall pass over with a reference to Fred Vincenci de Salvador whose history of the colony written in 1627 and not published until 1888 as earned the sound respect of all commentators. To him in contrary distinction to the spiritual serfs of Portugal Brazil meant already more than a merely geographical expression. It assumed historical and social connotations. His count is of importance for its mind of folklore and technically for its prose that Isimo indeed calls in the only Brazilian prositor of the first phase of our literature. Of the centuries poets we shall know too. The first of these Manoel Botejo de Oliveira 1636 through 1711 was the first Brazilian poet to publish a book versus the second Gregorio de Matos Guerra 1633 through 1696 was the hell mouth whom we have already met rather to the preacher Eusebio de Matos 1629 through 1692 give me the Bohemian rather than the Bons. Botejo de Oliveira was a polyglot after Ancieta's own heart. His book of rhymes contained verses in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Latin and hardly a breath of poetry in any of the four tongues. What saves his line from extinction is what saved Bento Teixeira from oblivion, a descriptive poem the Isle of Mare in which has been discovered one of the earliest manifestations of Brazilianism however as shown by his preface to have been a conscious attitude in the 325 lines of the poem however I've been able to discover about four lines that may acclaim to containing poetry even Homero found the poet's nationalism an external matter the pen he writes is one of his moments of aesthetic insight wished to depict Brazil but this all belonged to Spanish and Portuguese cultism and critics the gifted Panoldo de Carvalho concurs Carvalho would discover the genuine beginnings of Brazilian sentiment in Gregorio de Matos however that may be and much ink has been shared on the subject the arrow-tongued Gregorio is the salient personality of his day his attitude, his language his new world consciousness his blending of the racial traits make of him a virtual precursor Verissimo stands pulls apart from Homero and Carvalho in his attitude towards Gregorio de Matos the first generation of Brazilian poets Gregorio de Matos included is exclusively Portuguese to suppose that there is in Gregorio de Matos any originality of form or content is to show one's ignorance of the Portuguese poetry of the time and of the Spanish which was so close to it in which the Portuguese so much imitated in which he in particular fairly plagiarized true enough and Ferdinand Wolff a half century before had said practically the same thing yet I'm afraid that Verissimo protests somewhat too much for despite the Hellmouth's imitativeness his errant verses grew out of a troubled disgruntled life and led him often into trouble the fellow educated at Coimbra came to Brazil to try cases at law and rhyme and to win them the sort to make personal enemies the sort that may be neither happy with nor faithful to his wife a veritable arsenal of gossip and malice small wonder that he was exiled to the African colony of Angola and that he was permitted to return to Brazil only on the condition that he wrote no more verses he had his tenderer aspect as some of the sonnet show and his passionate abandon becomes a thing of hotlips and anacryonic art horse a intense liver if not a great creator of the older writers he is still of the few who may be read for themselves without the aid of a stiff dose of academic dutifulness the first half of the 18th century produced like the latter half of the 17th but two figures that possess any strong claims upon our consideration Sebastián de Rocha Pita 1660 through 1738 and Antonio José de Silva 1705 through 1739 historically we have reached the epic of the banderances the second army of inland explorers living in epic of colonization with all its attendant cruelties to pioneer and resisting native from the literary standpoint we approach the reign of the academies groups patterned after the like named diversions of the renaissance incubated in the spirit of imitation yet not without effect upon the growing national culture Rocha Pita though the author of tales and verses is remembered now for his history of Portuguese America and a strange rhapsodic thing that is that it should display leanings toward Portugal is surely not to be wondered at as Bolívar Lima has asked in his youthful book upon colonial letters in Brazil how was one to expect in an early 18th century if nationalism was absent however the lack was more than made up by a rampant lyric nativism there is a famous passage from this work which I believe every Brazilian schoolboy must know it is indicative of Rocha Pita's inner and outer stylistic qualities in no other region writes the author is this guy 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 horizon where the sun is born and 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 where in the vastest rivers arise and take their course to such pleasant mouthings as these the sterner spirit of a homero may serve as corrective homero who devoted the third chapter of his voluminous history of Brazilian literature to setting the Englishman Buckel right as to rainfall in Brazil Buckel had based his case upon the excessive rainfall states that far from this being the case the country suffers from serious drought Buckel it seems never having visited Brazil took his gospel truth just such rhetorical exaggerations as we have been sampling in Rocha Pita yet accepting the Amazon the rivers in general are small the mountains are modest the fauna is neither as rich nor as awe inspiring as early report had declared Antonio Jose does not properly belong in the history of Brazilian letters he was born in the colony of Jewish parents he died in Portugal the hands of the Inquisition his work however was done in the mother country wither he had gone as early as his eighth year his tragic end lifted him into a prominence which otherwise he might never have attained well indeed the latest historian of Portuguese literature is of opinion that his dramas would in all likelihood have received little attention in the 19th and 20th centuries had it not been for the tragedy of the author's life it's healthy considers him the best of their drama writers the Brazilian have tried to make him their own as have in fact Portuguese curiously enough Gorin's history of the Yiddish theater in Yiddish claims for him a place in the creative production of the Jews Antonio Jose's pieces were in the nature of what today we call comic opera Wolf has likened his work to that of Offenbach the Jews to this very day are prominent in the writing and the composing of comic operas and by that token as by more than any other part of Antonio Jose may be saved for Jewish cultural history the substance of his work however despite the patriotic case that would make out links him in letters to Portugal it is of interest to recall that the first tragedy written by a Brazilian the poet and the inquisition by Magalhães one of the initiators of Brazilian romanticism was based upon the dramatist's life the first phase of Brazilian literature as I have divided it reveals a literary dependency fairly comparable to the political and economic ties to the mother country the nascent civilization was on the one hand with covetous foreigners and on the other with fractious natives there is not yet love of country as an independent entity but an intense fondness for the soil in the fact of physical separation slumbers the germ of intellectual autonomy the bounding imagination of the Brazilian his pride at place his wistful moodiness that Portugal long before knew as Saldagem his sensual ardor, form of inheritance and racial mixture these are already present more or less developed state the colony has become integrated end of chapter 2 chapter 3 of little blue book 646 the spirit of Brazilian literature this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org little blue book 646 the spirit of Brazilian literature by Isaac Goldberg chapter 3 the trend toward autonomy 1750 to 1830 it is worthwhile recalling for Brazil a phenomenon that is not altogether unknown in the history of that America which speaks Spanish and English the history of colonial exploitation was little different essentially in Brazil from what it was in Spanish America or in the future in the United States the rebellious spirit however stirred most actively in the bosoms not of the lower class victims of oppression but in those of the idealists the part played in the separatist movement by the so-called inconfidencia i.e. disloyalty group is none too clear surely few could have been less fitted to had a revolt against Portugal than were these impractical poets they were premature in their attempt to make a definition of any sort of idealism that they tried to live a poetic ideal may set them down as impractical it writes them down too as men and it gives them a place in their country's history as well as in her literature as the creative spirits of the previous epoch tended to center about the luxurious city of Bahia so do the chief writers of the present era fall into what has been called the mineira group so named from the province of Minas Gerais for those that demand our recognition there are a pair of epic writers and four lyric poets Basilio da Gama published his Uruguay in 1769 Santa Hita Dorao is Caramuru in 1781 the lyricist are Claudio Manuel da Costa 1729 through 1789 Thomas Antonio Gonzaga 1744 through 1807 or perhaps as late as 1809 José G. Alvarenga Peixoto 1744 through 1793 and Manuel Ignacio G. Silva Alvarenga 1749 through 1814 that the epic should reveal the influence of Camões is not to be wondered at to us they are more important for their spontaneity because they possess a certain intuitive historic relation to their times the matter is genuinely indigenous the sentiment despite loyalty to Portugal becomes nationalistic indeed Basilio da Gama in his Uruguay was one of the first to practice whoever on premeditated what Spanish Americans have called literary Americanism the Uruguay was meant largely to excoriate the Jesuits out of whose fold the author himself had come yet what Basilio da Gama did was to create what has been called the first romantic poem in Portuguese literature and this is the place to recall Verísimos valuable distinction between the first and second types of Indianism in his nation's letters such writers as Basilio da Gama and Santa Rita Torão employ the Indian as a poetic artifice the Indian enters as a necessity of the subject a simple esthetic or rhetorical means is not sung but is rather an element of the song in the second Indianism out of the romantics the loftiest representative of which is González Gias the Indian advances from the position of a necessary to that of an essential element 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 though most critics agree that Kata Muru is rather than the Uruguay the national poem such a distinction possesses only a patriotic significance for a number of reasons I find the latter more satisfying it employs a flexible blank verse which is of the other slang which is not the bombastic rhetoric of the academicians as mere tale however Kata Muru is the more interesting it takes a subject the half legendary figure of the Ogo Ávarez Correia a sort of Brazilian John Smith whose Pocahontas is the maiden Paraguasú he was supposed to have taken her to France and after her baptism was said to have married her to a Medici standing sponsor to the pair the pretty story has been disproved Paraguasú's rival Moema provides the best known passage of the epic where she swims after the vessel that is bearing the couple of the France holds out as long as she can and then sinks into the wave abrading the Ogo as long as breath lasts the most famous line of the Uruguay occurs after the passage in which Lin Boya the sweetheart of after having drunk the fatal potion that reveals to her the destruction of Lisbon and the expulsion of the Jesuits commit suicide by letting a serpent bite her so beautiful lay death upon her face I suffer from no Poesque plagiarism complex and I consider myself quite free of the academic flare for resemblances and literary influences but in this case especially in view of the fame that the line has acquired in Portuguese and Brazilian letters and a view of the beauty of the thought itself I must point to a passage in Serrantes which would almost seem to have been in Vassilio the Gama's mind as he wrote the best line in his epic in chapter 69 part 2 of Don Quixote describing the dead damsel upon the tomb Serrantes writes a lot literally translated this reads the corpse of so beautiful a damsel that with her beauty she may death itself appear beautiful as Mouto has rendered it is even closer to the Brazilian line upon the tomb laid the body of a young damsel who though to all appearances dead was yet so beautiful that death itself seemed lovely in her face like the epic poets the Lyris foreshadowed the coming of the Romanticists as the Bahine group was associated with the spirit of the little academy so the Mineta group represents the Arcadianism of the age. Claudia da Costa translated Adam Smith's wealth of nations not a very poetic task it is characteristic of the transitional epic that he was influenced by the Italians in the French he is hardly the pre Byronian that Romero would make of him but is rather of the classic Pasteurless chief representative as Carvalho has called him of Arcadism in Brazil the most appealing because the most human of the group and the least dependent upon the accidents of the day and generation is Thomas Antonio Gonzaga Gonzaga's poems to Marilia for each Arcadian like Petra must have his Laura form the Brazilian song of songs the popularity of Marilia may be gauged from the fact that it has gone through more additions than any other classic in Portuguese with the exception of Camões Os Luciadas alone these are poems that should be better known in English they have been widely translated into other tongues the poets woman whose name and life are authenticated becomes in his verse a flesh and blood reality though garmented in patriarchy and conventions she is no mere the poet's hot fancy his book is divided into two parts the first written before his exile the second after where he is one of the disloyalty group the first part is a springtime of beauty love and joy the second is deeper more sincere saturated with the suffering and longing of exile glad hope was his beginning dark doubt is his end the fate of all things changes must only mine not alter Verissimo not prone to enthusiasm writes of Gonzaga's poems that they form both the Brazilian and the Portuguese collections of poetry the supreme book of love the noblest the purest the most deeply felt the most beautiful which has been written in that tongue since Benarjim Iberro and the sonnets of Camões that is very high praise on the whole that is deserved as Antonio Jose despite his Brazilian birth is virtually Portuguese in style so Gonzaga despite his Portuguese birth is Brazilian by virtue of his poetic sources and his personal lyricism this is not the erotic the liquid sense that a lot will be locked in other moderns may attain in their most passionate moments they lock writing but yesterday of the lost Eden could glory in the sin that cast Adam forth with his mate some poets are brought by their gods to a belief in woman Gonzaga's lady brings to him a belief in God she leads him back to that heaven out of which such love is relax may send men forth into exile from the Lord's Flunder in comparison with the verses of a Gonzaga the lines of an Avarenga Peixoto or a Silva Avarengo black interest to be sure the former contains a certain Brazilianism while the latter strove after and sometimes achieved a core Americana in American or than any other of the Minera Lyrus he shows the stirrings of the later romanticism is Glaura however is not so interesting as Gonzaga's Marivia historically he has been considered as a sort of transitional figure between the 17th century or catism of Claudio da Costa in the 19th century subjectivism of Gonzales Gias the authorship of the Cartas Chilenas important among satirical writings of the age has long troubled critics Gonzaga has been lately credited with it at any rate it is the work of a latter day Gregorio Matos filled with the bayans venom but more human we need not burden the survey with a roster of the ages lesser spirits we've since the pride of presence that filled Brazil on the region Don Juan of Portugal fled in 1807 from Napoleon to Brazil thus converting the colony virtually into the seat of the Portuguese realm the ports of the colony hitherto closed all but vessels of the mother monarchy were thrown open to the world the first newspapers began to appear revolt was in the air just as the government were main monarchial on its flow progress to the republic of 1889 so the new literature wavered between a Moribund classicism and the nascent romanticism in poetry the standard declined from that of the miniatur group but such men as Souza Caldas 1762 to 1814 Sao Carlos 1763 to 1829 and José Eloi Otoni 1764 through 1851 and at the religious note which was natural to anything like a genuinely nationalistic strain I find in Souza Caldas owed to savage man for all his debt to a soul and his avowedly Christian purpose the personal element that is not without appeal to our contemporary religious skepticism as to Souza Carlos's assumption of the holy virgin it is interesting solely for its nativistic naivete when he comes to describe paradise what does he do but turn it into a reproduction of Brazilian flora the Brazilian paradise complex again his description of Rio de Janeiro is as arid as it is long I can work up no enthusiasm for José Eloi Otoni's versified pietre and patriotism he put the book of Job into Portuguese with great success even as Souza Caldas did the Psalms the outstanding figure of this epic however is the versatile libertarian José Linofácio Andrade Silva 1763 through 1838 his poetry represents by no means the largest share of his services to his country he invades the political and the scientific history of his nation in fact as a scientist he won ready recognition in Europe under the Arcadian name of Américo Alicio in 1825 his book of poems appeared they are like himself filled with violent passions let us not forget that Isimo has written that José Bonafácio the so-called patriarch of our independence served Portugal devotedly first as scientist in official intellectual commissions and as professor at the University of Coimbra and then as volunteer major of the academic corps against the French of Napoleon and finally as Intendante Geral or as we should say today chief of police of the city of Porto and José Bonafácio let Washington was at first hostile or at least perverse to independence this political ambivalence is to be found in his verses is either glorifying the freedom of his beloved country or visiting his wrath upon its supine citizens during this period if the national letters show affirms drive forward from the incoate rumblings of the previous epic they are of interest chiefly to me at least as viewed in retrospect with the knowledge of what they were leading to as well as what they were leading from it has been recognized that the beginnings of the period just surveyed provided the first instance of colonial influence upon the writers of the mother country Portuguese poetry wrote the opelo braga some time before he expected ever to be president of a Portuguese republic receives an impulse of renovation from several Brazilian talents they called him on the situation of Rome when the literary talents of the Gauls of Spain and of northern Africa rich Latin literature with new creations and of chapter three chapter four of little blue book six forty six the spirit of Brazilian literature this is a LibriVox recording while LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org little blue book six forty six the spirit of Brazilian literature by Isaac Goldberg chapter four the romantic epoch 1830 to 1870 back of what has been called the romantic movement in European literature and in the literatures of America which were influenced by that stormy widespread awaken was a philosophy of self liberation which has been traced back to the Germans author of one of the first histories of Brazilian letters 1863 wrote of true romanticism that it was nothing other than the impression of a nation's genius unrestrained by the trammels of convention the Germans he tells us avenged themselves for the double servitude political literary with which the French had so long oppressed them by at last delivering the people from the pseudo classic fetters half century later the Germans perform for France a similar literary service when they brought to the pseudo classicism of the Parnasians a new breath of romanticism which the historians have labeled symbolism and decadentism attempting to appreciate the movement not from the standpoint of categories but from that of the artists intuitive approach we may say that the real contribution of the romantic movement was one of release from academically organized repression repression and form and thought in expression which are but so many aspects of the genetic impulse and not detached entities to be rearranged it will thus considered 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 favor of one or the other or to attempt to draw to 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 aesthetic to a moralistic basis there are really as many isms as there are creative individuals classic and romantic are aspects of all creative endeavor rather than definite and opposing qualities we cannot keep this too prominently in mind during all discussions of literary schools Brazilian romanticism of which very similar distinguish two different generations is in part naturally applied suggestion rather than spontaneous creation essential romanticism uses to remain buried in the pages of the literary history I've said that there are Latin American writers who believe their real romanticism to be still in the future the case could be made out for romanticism in the United States is just having begun its natural course the romantic epoch with which we are now dealing in Brazil represents the riches of the national letters just as with the coming of João VI reports that the nation had been thrown open to European commerce so now was its culture thrown open to the currents of European thought nativism and literature now gives way to a valid nationalism the inhabitants now love not only the soil but the soul of the country partial accomplishment has consecrated in co-eight aspirations a historical background has consolidated a tradition there is a budding of personality poetry the chief product becomes more varied the novel tends to crystallize into something like form beginnings are made in the theater Carvalho youngest of the literary historians of his country has chosen four representative poets of this period characterizing each by his salient quality González G. Magalhães 1811 through 1882 thus stands for the religious phase of Brazilian romanticism he is generally connected with being the originator of the epoch González G.S. 1823 through 1864 is one of the most popular writers in the entire Brazilian repertory represents the poet tree of nature Alvarez G. Azevedo 1831 through 1852 is the poet of doubt Castro Alves 1847 through 1871 is the singer of social reclamation the poet of abolition there are others of course whom we cannot even in a survey of this nature overlook entirely Magalhães did not begin far from the beaten path it was a visit to Europe in 1833 that converted him to French romanticism the very title of his new book poetic size and longings as tried as it may sound to us now seem to proclaim the coming of the new orientation the professions of faith in which the works of Latin American poets bound are not always to be taken too seriously Magalhães however really meant it when he declared that the new muse thence force inspired his song and that he was relinquishing the pagan liar for the worship of nature and of nature's creator his poetic trinity becomes nature Fatherland and God not that there is anything exceptionally novel in these poems that religion patriotism and subjectivity have been more closely related to the poet's personality from the formal standpoint the verse is fairly free and there is a refreshing attempt to mirror change of thought in change of rhythm his attempt at an epic the confederation of the tamoyos in ten cantos blends the patriotic and the religious strains of the author the attitude towards the Jesuits is opposite to that adopted by Gigama and his Uruguay the Jesuits alone of all the Portuguese appear in a worthy light while the Indians if they yield at last to civilization are idealized into defenders of justice against the exploiting Portuguese the origin of the modern Brazilian drama has been ascribed to Magalhães tragedy upon the martyred playwright Antonio José yet the play coming from a romanticist is strangely faithful to the formal tenets of classicism Porto Alegre 1806 through 1879 a noted painter showed the influence of Magalhães in his poem The Voice of Nature Porto Alegre's epic Colombo however like his Brasilianas revealed the influence of the man who had stirred Magalhães himself to write the confederation of the tamayos Gonzalez Gias Gias to me is much more interesting than his lines he was a more lyrical spirit Gias Morovo is a physical and psychic blend of the country's ethnic factors in each of these strains has found embodiment in his work in the epic Os Timbifas called by him in an American poem you'll find the Indian in Escrava the slave you will find the African in the Cestillas de Frey on town you will find the Portuguese if this blend as Carvalho is responsible for the poet's inner turmoil it explains also his versatility as Magalhães is patriotic in his religion so is Gonzalez Gias religious in his patriotism as Americanism takes on the guise of a blind hostility to Europe the old continent is only a source of evil to the new yet his patriotism is much more reason than his hatred our fatherland he has written in one of his poems is wherever we live a life free of pain and grief we're friendly faces surround us where we have love we're friendly voices console us in our misfortune where a few eyes will weep their sorrow over our solitary grave the name of Gonzalez Gias is fairly a symbol of the Indianism of Brazilian poetry and Brazilian life the reaction against the mother country had gone so far as early as the date of Brazil's declaration of independence in September 7 1822 numerous families had given up their Portuguese names and adopted native ones this was not so much love of the native as hatred of Portugal at bottom of this idealization of the native and this holds is true for the United States as for Brazil and Spanish America in general is a simple psychological phenomenon that has not been touched upon in the literary histories the former achieved in independence of mind as well as of place they reached an inner self-reliance to revert to the figure with which I open this little book the daughter nation had reached adulthood in the desire to emphasize their cleavage between empire and colony it needed a definite symbol of that break here was the Indian native to the land inhabiting it before it ever swam into European consciousness he was that symbol where upon resilience projected themselves upon the figure of the Indian and idealizing him they were in reality idealizing themselves this too helps to explain the difference between the first and second types of Indianism to which I referred and discussing the epic writers of the Bahian group the Indian at first was merely part of the scenery and often was exterminate with this little compunction as trees are fell when a clearing must be made during the era of independence he was sentimentalized into a literary background the people had made of Gonzales Gilles their favorite poet long before verisimu named in their greatest verisimu also noticed in connection with Gilles a phenomenon that has not been since repeated the history of our romanticism will recognize that the strength of the spiritual movement came not alone from the talent of its chief authors but from their communion with the milieu from sympathy which they found there our literature was then for the first time and perhaps the last social Gonzales Gilles song of exile captured the soul of the Brazilian people and of its poets as well after his simple verses to his fatherland which managed to reveal simplicity without falling into doggerel and to chant sentiment without lapsing into sentimentality there is a flood of rhymed patriotic fervor Casamiro de Abreu Magalhães Porto Alegre Alvárez de Azivedo Lorindo Jabelo Junque Rafrêr also sang the song of exile if verisimu fails to find in Gonzales Gilles' love that has been deeply felt I believe it is because the critic himself has been deceived by a certain personal passionlessness to be sure the poet is restrained he is no Bilac the very voice of selfishness but neither is he a rhyming Munich Alvárez de Azivedo is the chief Brazilian Byronian yet it would be short-sighted to class him offhand with the many echoers of the Englishman his liar of a 20-year-old through the themes of Byron will set and the party sounds an individual note the sincerity of his lines is attested by the early death that he foresaw this was no mere surprising out of his witness he tried and versed fashion omnipotence he is par excellence Brazil's sick child ill with the malady of the century pose there was in 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 morbid affectation comes easily at 20 only old age hesitates to death the romantic era however put a premium upon long fatal the man or woman dog by fate stamped with a seal of haunting mystery it made a literary fashion a personal weakness exit city idiosyncrasy it did not as some college professors imagine create that weakness in that exact city it nurtured the artistic expression of these human traits there have always been classicists there will always be the boy poet exercise in appreciable influence upon his fellows they do not comprise a long live generation lorindo habelo 1826 through 1864 achieved fame as an improvising wanderer who tried to improvise life as well as verses he has been called one of the last of the troubadours is indeed the Brazilian bagliaccio of poetry at a fair 1832 through 1855 tried the seclusion of the monastery as has had habelo but it brought little solace to his heart that had been disappointed in love he enters the place at the unmonastic age of 20 and soon learns that the salatomong is also a grave from such precocious piety he whirls to a blasphemy equally purile I found his prose more artistic than his verse and his real personality may be discovered there casamiro de abrio 1837 through 1860 is the singer of love and saldagi it is under the influence of nostalgia and love writes 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 loved and the unknown girl to whom he dedicated his book the longing for his country together with the charms that this yearning increased or created are 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 the isimo is so simply faithful to his an ostentatious aesthetic point of departure that I cannot resist quoting at this juncture a few lines of his written in the middle of the brazilian romantics among their salient qualities he lists 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 it's still rudimentary thought these are words that might be kept in the united states letters who would usher in a national literature with the same tactics and the same roughshod trampling upon artistic considerations that are to put over a bond drive or prosecute a war Fagundas Varela 1841 through 1875 is a disputed figure together with Machado Gsis and Luis Guimarães he is looked upon as a transitional poet leading from Romanticism to Pornassianism he had something of Gonzales Gsis Indianism of Azevedo's Satanism and of the Condoreismo of Castro Alves and Tobias Pajeto Condoreismo is so called from the condor so too with more derogatory connotations we have the word spread eagle from a sister bird of the condor Magniloquent flights of language the style and usually the thoughts and emotions portrayed fall lower than the verbal attitude Pajeto 1839 through 1889 was largely responsible for the introduction of German culture into Brazil he exercised a deep influence upon Silvio Romero Castro Alves was less educated he lived only to the age of 24 but what he lacked in learning he made up in sensitivity and imagination when he is inspired with the cause of abolition he becomes a pillar of fire is one of the national poets fundamentally I believe he is an orator his language as often as not is the language of poetic fever image clashes upon image antithesis runs rife versus flow like lava down the sides of a volcano nothing human seems alien to his libertarian fervor he captures the Brazilian imagination by giving its fondness for eloquence ideas to feed upon now he is seen the glories of the book in education now he is upgrading the assassin of Lincoln now glorify the rebel now picturing the plight of the slaves in words that are for all the world like a shower of sparks he has his tenderer moments too true to his epigraph from behind he was a sword rather than a liar a purpose more often than a poet it is Castro Alves the man in the poet rather the poet in the man that I admire the Brazilian novels regarded as the product of the romantic movement there were of course precursors among them Teixeira e Sosa 1812 through 1861 and Joaquim Roberto Ge Sosa Silva 1820 through 1891 these must be left to the curious and leisurely investigator of origins the virtual beginnings are to be found in Manuel G. Macedo 1820 and it is written here to 1822 and José G. Alencar 1829 through 1877 there is nothing deep in Macedo he portrayed the frivolous society of the epic of Dom Pedro II and exploited the taste of the day where he wrote like so many of our novelists of today chiefly for women he's been called indeed par excellence the novelist of the Brazilian woman and it is the idealized woman of the lesser novelist that he has in mind frankness or depth of insight or not for him the contemporary reader who has like the little Spanish child been cured of horror finds him tame and sipping his page is possessed by virtue of their very simplicity a certain frequency his reputation was established in 1849 with the publication of Morenina the brunette the only other of his novels that will long occupy his countrymen is Olmoso Lauro the blonde young man the stories might have been issued in our own fireside companion they were meant indeed for the family hearth a far greater importance is José G. Alencar famous for his Guarjani in Irasema the first of these books form the basis of the libretto which set to music by the native composer Carlos Alencar played the rounds of the operatic world the second was translated into English by none other than Sir Francis Burton translator of Camões epic the Luziads and genius wanderer of the globe it is now one of the rarest of the Bertone Ana Alencar is to the novel what Gonzales Gias is to Brazilian poetry the representative Indianist Costa one of the recent historians of the Brazilian novel Alencar the superior of Gonzales Gias in respect of Indianism his Indians do not express themselves like doctors from Coimbra they speak as nature has taught them loving living in 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 as soon disappearing that it seems to me is making out the best case for Alencar by no means always lives up to the tribute at his best he is really a poet employing the medium of prose his plots are of secondary importance it is his background his palette of gorgeous pigments that still win the nation's admiration of the foreign influences that played upon him the obvious ones are Chateau Pion, de Vigny Bolzac, Dumas and Hugo our own Cooper too himself an Indianist contemporaneous with Alencar having effect upon the Brazilian innovator but not in the matter that some of his native critics have tried to discern Alencar himself in a rare document has sought to put his case clearly and show that his Guarani is much more than a novel in the Cooper style Alencar's model that is his own word was Chateau Pion his master however was nature that glorious nature would surrounds me and in particular the magnificence of the deserts which I studied in early youth and which were the majestic portals to which I penetrated into my country's past it was from this source this vast secular book that I drew the pages of Guarani and Irasema and many other from this source and not from the works of Chateau Pion 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 North American writer but this approximation comes from history it is inevitable and not the result of any confrontation if neither Chateau Pion nor Cooper had existed the American novel would have appeared in Brazil in due season years after having written Guarani Alacar wrote the book in his 27th year and would have it that the tale occurred to him in his ninth as he was crossing the sercoins of the north on the road from Sierra to Bahia I re-read Cooper in order to verify the observation of the critics and I noticed that it was 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 the pioneers and Lionel Lincoln Cooper considers the native from the social point of view and was in the description of indigenous customs a realist in Guarani the savage is an ideal which the writer tried to poetize divesting him of the course in crustacean in which in 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 that provided the model for these pen landscapes that form part of global color what should be investigated is whether the descriptions of Guarani show any relationship or affinity to Cooper's descriptions the Brazilian novelist presenting his own case it's precisely upon those two qualities sea lore and realism for which Cooper 50 years after Alan Carr wrote this piece of auto criticism was rediscovered to the United States readers by professor Carl van Doran not only did he out do Scott and 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 many followers in almost every modern language he has not been surpassed for vigor and swift rush of narrative Alan Carr by avowal is no realist nor is he concerned with mere accuracy Guarani is the one book by which he is sure to be remembered for many a year it is a prose poem in which the love of the Indian prince Patti for the white say say daughter of a Portuguese noble is unfolded against a sumptuous tapestry of the national scene there have been quarrels over his style his syntax becomes as wild as the regions of his fiction yet Costa has praised him for rescuing the national prose from the horrors while others find it in his line the herald of that nervous style which is characteristic of Euclides da Cunha revealer of the certain certainism itself however that is the literary exploitation of the inner highlands or toins was initiated by Bernardo Joaquin G. Silva the marines 1827 through 1885 he was followed by Franklin Ta'vorra 1842 through 1888 and particularly Escranole Tony 1843 through 1899 whose innocence is one of the country's few original novels innocence has been twice translated into French and has been translated into English, Italian, German, Danish and even Japanese Manuel Antonio G. Almeda 1830 through 1861 in his Memorias de un sargento de milicias made a premature attempt to introduce the realistic novel his own premature death rob the nation of a promising writer the comedies of Luis Carlos Marcín's Pena 1815 through 1848 represent the only vital contribution of the theater to the epoch he stands almost alone the romantic period in Brazil is one of intense activity historically it is of prime importance aesthetically it reveals a certain broadening of interest yet how much of enduring value did the period produce take away a few salient novels and what is left in prose if the poets fare better how much of their work would withstand the scrutiny of a strict aesthetic criticism we are becoming wiser in our tastes just as the age produces the movement the movement helps to produce the personality or to be more precise the movement provides a background for the personality to exploit or to react against and creative personality is the flower of literature such personalities in Brazilian literature are rare the following decades produce a number the age becomes more eclectic the freedom of the modern spirit a freedom that few may know is upon us it is a groping freedom covered by spiritual allegiances to Europe by wavering strides by hesitancy but out of it gradually emerges as we shall see a new conception of literary independence that shall parallel the political independence end of chapter four chapter five of little blue book 646 the spirit of Brazilian literature this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org little blue book 646 the spirit of Brazilian literature by Isaac Goldberg chapter five the eclectic age 1870 to the present if later Brazilian literature shows a decided eclecticism the phenomenon is largely due to France which became the intellectual guide to the nation today under the leadership of such forceful personalities as Monteiro Lobato and the Sao Paulo group which he has formed there is a market reaction against Gallic influence in the direction of the conscious nationalism whereas we might call it literary Brazilianism 50 years ago however the Brazilian reaction against Romanticism was was part of her intellectual Gallism criticism in France gave way to a secession of interreacting schools or groups in opposition to the self-worship of the Romantics the Parnasians sought impersonality to the Romantic cult of musical vagary the Parnasians opposed the clear image and the sculptural line unrepressed wallowing in emotions was substituted by cold self-contents the Parnasians climbed up in their ivory tower far from the maddening crowd they withdrew upon them however soon followed the symbolist decadence or as who should say in pigeonhole parlance the neo-romanticists now came a new a chase in musicality of method the new intensity of personalism suggestion replaced Parnasian precision sculpture melted into music in a word neoclassicism had swung back to neo-romanticism in all literary evolution we may detect the incessant swinging of the pendulum at each return there is a subtle difference perhaps the days of well-defined schools are over the day of the label too was waning even in academic circles more important still we are coming to recognize that all men contain the potentialities of all things and that opposites may grow out of opposites man is himself unity and variety the shibboleth of the old estheticians and schools are but phases of the multiple formality complementary rather than antagonistic in such a sense then may eclecticism be creative the your action against romanticism was even less disciplined in Brazil than in France Parnasianism in Brazil and for that matter in Spanish America was hardly ever the rigidly perfect thing it became in the hands of the Frenchman the attempt to make scientific poetry did not last long in Brazil to the artistic anomaly was added Romero and Marcin's junior tried it with little success Parnasianism fared better with Luis Guimarães and the earlier Machado de Assis the former was really a transitional figure romantic in content with a fine feeling performed as to Machado de Assis I've tried to show in an essay upon the man that his poetry is chiefly in his rare prose as a poet and here I stand in disagreement with more than one critic whose opinion is worth pondering Machado de Assis is secretary his thoughts subject his emotions at the head of the true Parnasians stand the Apologias Imundo Correia, Alberto G. Oliveira and Olavo Bilac though verissimo would credit Gonzalez Crespo as the first Brazilian Parnasian we shall not quarrel over precedence which belongs not to art but to history the important consideration here is that Brazilian Parnasianism cannot achieve the so-called impersonality of the French prototype impersonality for the rest is a fiction it does not exist in art it hardly rules in science close study of the Parnasians in Brazil shows how little there is in a name there was an undoubted refinement of means in this Machado de Assis was a pioneer for the rest the genuine personalities triumph over group variations I have before suggested an interesting experiment that will hold for many of the foreign literatures as well as for Brazil take a number of poems from all the various schools remove the author's names and evidences of date jumble them together and then read them as they happen to fall pick them out unerringly the romantics from the Parnasians and see how sterile is your victory of the later poets Olavo Bilac is the prince of his work is small but the beauty is deep to read him is to forget labels and to enjoy the outpourings of a passionate lover in whom passion never degenerates into psychopathology is the incarnation of Brazilian voluptuousness yet that art reveals not a gourmand but a gourmet of sex the confusion between romantics and Parnasians in Brazil is typified by the critics quarrel over such figures as Luis Del Fino and Luis Marat Omero went so far as to call Del Fino Brazil's greatest poet Del Fino and Marat have been classed by some as romantics and by others as Parnasians the effect of the French neoclassicism was threefold form was perfected excessive preoccupation with self was modified thematic material became more varied to an eclecticism of spirit corresponded and eclecticism the naturalistic novel in Brazil centers around four men Machado de Assis Aluício de Pasevedo Julio Hibero and Raúl Pompeia as for the symbolist decadent poetry the subtlety of the French type somehow eluded the Brazilian versifiers the imitation as verissimo, plainly of years was in many cases unintelligent the chief Portuguese-American exponent was Cruz Esauza an African with as keen a sense of racial injustice as coursed through the veins of that impassioned libertarian Castro Alves Cruz Esauza, 1863 through 1898 was ignorant incorrect, valuable but likewise an incendiary spirit whose sincerity was contagious there is something in his spontaneity that promises to endure among the later poets Emilio de Menacis who stands out for his mysticism Mario Pedeneras 1868 through 1915 has a serene simplicity that may have been nurtured by Francis James he is one of the few skillful verse Libras in his country Emilio de Menacis like Machado Assis translate opposed the raven into Portuguese is best known for his remarkable trio of sonnets Ostres Olhares de Maria the three glances of Mary the most recent developments in Brazil as in Spanish America defy grouping under any all-embracing isms rampant individualism precludes the schools of literary memory Rasa Rainha's novel Canaan to be had in English hymned the Brazilian melting pot the powerful book by Euclides da Cunha which appeared in the same year 1902 taking the Sertão as its theme provided the nucleus for a new orientation partly regionalistic in character the contemporary novel presided over by Coaio Neto is at least respectable in accomplishment young critics like Alnoldo de Carraio carry on the labors of Homeiro and Veríssimo editors like Elicio de Carraio and Montero Lobato maintain a high standard of journalism and national commentary for young people like Oliver Halima who is a present professor of international law at the Catholic University Washington D.C. create a tradition of sterling courage and intellectual integrity which has influenced a large number of rising youngsters some of these youngsters know the United States they read our newest and most radical critics they have discovered too that the United States they have become more critical of their own country and in their lofty standards of internationality lies the hope of their nation's future of the modern figures that Brazil has produced I should select a few that possess more than national importance among these I place first of all Machado G.S.C. 1839 through 1908 Machado G.S.C. is indeed so generous they find poet a distinctive prositor who belongs to the family of Renan and Anatole France a noble character whose life is an inspiration is the embodiment of the best that Brazil has produced in the field of letters for notable poetry that deserves a world audience I should name Olavo Bila for discerning criticism José Veríssimo 1857 through 1918 broad in studies and deep in intuitions for intellectual internationality, cosmopolitan experience and personal probity Manuel G. Oliveira Lima for a single epical novel more important perhaps ideologically and historically than aesthetically Graça Rainha there are naturally others on the whole it is true today that when Wolf wrote it in 1863 that Brazilian literature may just reclaimed consideration as being really national in this quality it has its place assigned in the ensemble of the literatures of the civilized world finally and above all in its most recent period it had developed in all directions and has produced in the principle genres works worthy the attention of all friends of letters it has done more it has produced a few signalmen worthy of joining that small company which Gutta must have had in mind when he spoke of Wolf Literatur a world literature chapter 5 and a little blue book 646 the spirit of Brazilian literature by Isaac Goldberg