Kitabı oku: «Brazilian Literature», sayfa 3
Of far sterner stuff than his vagrant brother Gregorio was the preacher Eusebio de Mattos (1629-1692) who late in life left the Company of Jesus. There is little in his sermons to fascinate the modern mind or rejoice the soul, and one had rather err in the company of his bohemian brother. As Eusebio was dubbed, in the fashion of the day, a second Orpheus for his playing upon the harp and the viola, so Antonio de Sá (1620-1678) became the “Portuguese Chrysostom.” Yet little gold flowed in his speech, which fairly out-Góngora-ed Góngora himself. “His culture, like that of almost all the Jesuits was false; rhetorical rather than scientific, swollen rather than substantial.”39
The poets of the century narrow down to two, of whom the first may be dismissed with scant ceremony. Manoel Botelho de Oliveira (1636-1711) was the first Brazilian poet to publish a book of verses. His Musica do Parnaso em quatro coros de rimas portuguezas, castelhanas, italianas e latinas, com seu descante comico reduzido em duas comedias was published at Lisbon in 1705. Yet for all this battery of tongues there is little in the book to commend it, and it would in all likelihood be all but forgotten by today were it not for the descriptive poem A Ilha da Maré, in which has been discovered, – as we have seen in our citation from Verissimo, – one of the earliest manifestations of nativism; Botelho de Oliveira’s Brazilianism, as appears from his preface, was a conscious attitude, and the patient, plodding cataloguing of the national fruit-garden precedes by a century the seventh canto of the epic Caramurú; but for all this, there are in the three hundred and twenty-odd lines of the poem only some four verses with any claim to poetic illumination. The depths of bathetic prose are reached in a passage oft quoted by Brazilian writers; it reads like a seed catalogue:
Tenho explicado as fruitas e os legumes,
Que dão a Portugal muitos ciumes;
Tenho recopilado
O que o Brasil contém para invejado,
E para preferir a toda terra,
Em si perfeitos quatro AA encerra.
Tem o primeiro A, nos arvoredos
Sempre verdes aos olhos, sempre ledos;
Tem o segunda A nos ares puros,
Na temperie agradaveis e seguros;
Tem o terceiro A, nas aguas frias
Que refrescam o peito e são sadias,
O quarto A, no assucar deleitoso,
Que é do mundo o regalo mais mimoso;
São, pois, os quatro AA por singuares
Arvoredos, assucar, aguas, ares.40
All of which bears almost the same relation to poetry as the grouping of the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) to musical criticism. Romero found the poet’s nationalism an external affair; “the pen wished to depict Brazil, but the soul belonged to Spanish or Portuguese cultism.” So, too, Carvalho, who would assign the genuine beginnings of Brazilian sentiment to Gregorio de Mattos.
Gregorio de Mattos Guerra (1633-1696) is easily the outstanding figure of his day. Romero, who considered him the pivot of seventeenth-century letters in Brazil, would claim for him, too, the title of creator of that literature, because he was – though educated, like most of the cultured men of his day, at Coimbra – a son of the soil, more nationally minded than Anchieta and in perfect harmony with his milieu. He reveals a Brazilian manner of handling the language; indeed, he “is the document in which we can appreciate the earliest modifications undergone by the Portuguese language in America…” He reveals a consciousness of being something new and distinct from Europe’s consideration of the new-world inhabitants as a species of anima vilis. He represents the tendency of the various races to poke fun at one another. More important still, he betrays a nascent discontent with the mother country’s rule. He is “the genuine imitator of our lyric poetry and of our lyric intuition. His brasileiro was not the caboclo nor the Negro nor the Portuguese; he was already the son of the soil, able to ridicule the separatist pretensions of the three races.” Thus far Romero. Verissimo however – and the case may well be taken as an instance of the unsettled conditions prevailing in Brazilian literary criticism – takes a view antipodally apart. “The first generation of Brazilian poets, Gregorio de Mattos included, is exclusively Portuguese. To suppose that there is in Gregorio de Mattos any originality of form or content is to show one’s ignorance of the Portuguese poetry of his time, and of the Spanish, which was so close to it and which the Portuguese so much imitated, and which he, in particular, fairly plagiarized.”41 Long ago, Ferdinand Wolf, in the first history of Brazilian letters that made any claims to completeness,42 noted the poet’s heavy indebtedness to Lope de Vega and Góngora, and his servile imitation of Quevedo.
Verissimo, I believe, overstates his case. That Gregorio de Mattos was not an original creative spirit may at once be admitted. But he was an undoubted personality; he aimed his satiric shafts only too well at prominent creatures of flesh and blood and vindictive passions; he paid for his ardour and temerity with harsh exile and in the end would seem even to have evinced a sincere repentance. The motto of his life’s labours, indeed, might be a line from one of his most impertinent poems:
“Eu, que me não sei calar” …
I, who cannot hold my tongue …
Nor did Gregorio de Mattos hold his tongue, whether in the student days at Coimbra – where already he was feared for that wagging lance – or during his later vicissitudes in Brazil. In 1864 he married Maria dos Povos, whose reward for advising him to give up his satiric habits was to be made the butt of his next satire. It would have been a miracle if he were either happy with or faithful to her; he was neither. He slashed right and left about him; argued cases – and won them! – in rhyme; poverty, however, was his constant companion, so that, for other reasons aplenty, his wife soon left him. Now his venom bursts forth all the less restrained. Personal enmities made among the influential were bound soon or late to recoil upon him and toward the end of his life he was exiled to the African colony of Angola. Upon his return to Brazil he was prohibited from writing verses and sought solace in his viola, in which he was skilled.
Gregorio de Mattos’s satire sought familiar targets: the judge, the client, the abusive potentate, the venal religious. “Perhaps without any intention on his part,” suggests Carvalho, “he was our first newspaper, wherein are registered the petty and great scandals of the epoch, the thefts, crimes, adulteries, and even the processions, anniversaries and births that he so gaily celebrated in his verses.”43 His own countrymen he likened to stupid beasts of burden:
Que os Brasileiros são bestas,
E estão sempre a trabalhar
Toda a vida por manter
Maganos de Portugal.44
There is a tenderer aspect to the poet, early noted in his sonnets; despite the wild life he led there are accents of sincerity in his poems of penitence; no less sincere, if less lofty, are his poems of passion, in which love is faunesque, sensual, a thing of hot lips and anacreontic abandon. He can turn a pretty (and empty) compliment almost as gracefully as his Spanish models. But it is really too much to institute a serious comparison between him and Verlaine, as Carvalho would do. Some outward resemblance there is in the lives of the men (yet how common after all, are repentance after ribaldry, and connubial infelicity), but Carvalho destroys his own case in the very next paragraph. For, as he indicates, the early Brazilian’s labours “represent in the history of our letters, it is needful to repeat, the revolt of bourgeois common sense against the ridiculousness of the Portuguese nobility.” How far from all this was the nineteenth century Frenchman, with a sensitive soul delicately attuned to life’s finer harmonies!
I am surprised that no Brazilian has found for Gregorio de Mattos Guerra a parallel spirit much nearer than Verlaine in both time and space. The Peruvian Caviedes was some twenty years younger than his Brazilian contemporary; his life has been likened to a picaresque novel. He was no closet-spirit and his addiction to the flesh, no whit less ardent than Gregorio’s, resulted in the unmentionable affliction. He, too, repented, before marriage rather than after; his wife dying, he surrendered to drink and died four years before the Brazilian, if 1692 is the correct date. As Gregorio de Mattos flayed the luxury of Bahia, so Caviedes guffawed at the sybarites of Lima.45
He castigated monastic corruption, trounced the physicians, manhandled the priests, and his snickers echoed in the high places. He knew his Quevedo quite as well as did Gregorio and has been called “the first revolutionary, the most illustrious of colonial poets.”46 And toward his end he makes his peace with the Lord in a sonnet that might have been signed by Gregorio.
Of Gregorio de Mattos I will quote a single sonnet written in one of his more sober moods. There is a pleasant, if somewhat conventional, epigrammatical quality to it, as to more than one of the others, and there is little reason for questioning its sincerity. Every satirist, at bottom, contains an elegiac poet, – the ashes that remain after the fireworks have exploded. If here, as elsewhere, only the feeling belongs to the poet, since both form and content are of the old world whence he drew so many of his topics and so much of his inspiration, there is an undoubted grafting of his salient personality upon the imported plant.
Nasce o Sol; e não dura mais que um dia,
Depois da luz, se segue a noite escura,
Em tristes sombras morre a formosura,
Em continuas tristezas a alegria.
Porém, se acaba o sol, porque nascia?
Se formosa a luz é, porque não dura?
Como a belleza assim se trasfigura?
Como o gosto, da pena assim se fia?
Mas no sol, e na luz, falte a firmeza,
Na formosura não se da constancia,
E na alegria, sinta-se a tristeza.
Comece o mundo, emfim, pela ignorancia;
Pois tem qualquer dos bens, por natureza,
A firmeza somente na inconstancia.47
IV
The first half of the eighteenth century, a review of which brings our first period to a close, is the era of the bandeirantes in Brazilian history and of the Academies in the national literature. The external enemies had been fought off the outer boundaries in the preceding century; now had come the time for the conquest of the interior.48 The bandeirantes were so called from bandeira, signifying a band; the earliest expeditions into the hinterland were called entradas, and it is only when the exploring caravans grew more numerous and organized that the historic name bandeirantes was bestowed. Men and women of all ages, together with the necessary animals, composed these moving outposts of conquest. This was a living epic; the difficulties were all but insurmountable and the heroism truly superhuman. No literature this, – with its law of the jungle which is no law, – with its immitigable cruelty to resisting indigenous tribes, and finally, the internecine strife born of partial failure, envy and vindictiveness.
While the bandeirantes were carrying on the tradition of Portuguese bravery – evidence of a restlessness which Carvalho would find mirrored even today in the “intellectual nomadism” of his countrymen, as well as in their political and cultural instability – the literary folk of the civilized centers were following the tradition of Portuguese imitation. At Bahia and Rio de Janeiro Academies were formed, evidencing some sort of attempt at unifying taste and aping, at a distance, the favourite diversion that the Renaissance had itself copied from the academies of antiquity. The first of these, founded in 1724 by the Viceroy Vasco Fernandez Cezar de Menezes, was christened Academia Brazilica dos Esqueçidos, – that is, the Brazilian Academy of those Forgotten or Overlooked by the Academia de Historia established, 1720, at Lisbon. A sort of “spite” academy, then, this first Brazilian body, but constituting at the same time, in a way, a new-world affirmation. Among the other academies were that of the Felizes 1736 (i. e., happy), the Selectos, 1752, and the Renascidos, 1759, (reborn) none of which continued for long. Although the influence of Góngora was receding, Rocha Pitta’s Historia da America Portugueza is replete with pompous passages, exaggerated estimates and national “boostings” that read betimes like the gorgeous pamphlets issued by a tourist company. Pride in the national literature is already evident. The itch to write epics is rife; it bites João de Brito Lima, who indites a work (Cezaria) in 1300 octaves praising the Viceroy. Gonzalo Soares de França exceeds this record in his Brazilia, adding 500 octaves to the score. Manoel de Santa Maria Itaparica composes a sacred epic, Eustachidos, on the life of St. Eustace, in six cantos, each preceded by an octave summary; the fifth canto contains a quasiprophetic vision in which posterity, in the guise of an old man, requests the author to celebrate his native isle. This section, the Ilha da Itaparica, has rescued the poem from total oblivion. But the passage possesses hardly any transmissive fervor and the native scene is viewed through the glasses of Greek mythology.
Some wrote in Latin altogether upon Brazilian topics, as witness Prudencio do Amaral’s poem on sugar-manufacture (no less!) entitled De opifichio sacchario; the cultivation of manioc and tobacco were equally represented in these pseudo-Virgilian efforts.
It is a barren half century for literature. Outside of the author of the Eustachidos and the two important figures to which we soon come only the brothers Bartholomeu Lourenço and Alexandre de Gusmão are remembered, and they do not come properly within the range of literary history. The one was a physicist and mathematician; the other, a statesman. The latter in his Marido Confundido, 1737, wrote a comedy in reply to Molière’s Georges Dandin, much to the delight of the Lisbonese audiences.
The two salient figures of the epoch are Sebastião da Rocha Pitta (1660-1738) and Antonio José da Silva (1705-1739).
Brazilian critics seem well disposed to forget Rocha Pitta’s mediocre novels and sterile verses; it is for his Historia that he is remembered, and fondly, despite all the extravagances of style that mark the book. Romero regards it as a patriotic hymn, laden with ostentatious learning and undoubted leanings toward Portugal. Oliveira Lima’s view, however, is more scientific and historically dispassionate. One could not well expect of a writer at the beginning of the eighteenth century a nationalistic sentiment, “which in reality was still of necessity embryonic, hazy, or at least, ill-defined… In our historian, none the less, there reigns a sympathy for all that is of his land.”49 And, indeed, the Historia, as Romero wrote, is more a poem than a chronological narrative, cluttered with saints and warriors, prophets, heroes of antiquity and mediaeval days.
“In no other region,” runs one of the passages best known to Brazilians, “is the sky more serene, nor does dawn glow more beautifully; in no other hemisphere does the sun flaunt such golden rays nor such brilliant nocturnal glints; the stars are more benign and ever joyful; the horizons where the sun is born or where it sinks to rest are always unclouded; the water, whether it be drunk from the springs in the fields or from the town aqueduct, is of the purest; Brazil, in short, is the Terrestrial Paradise discovered at last, wherein the vastest rivers arise and take their course.”
I am inclined to question whether Antonio José da Silva really belongs to the literature of Brazil. Romero would make out a case for him on the ground of birth in the colony, family influences and the nature of his lyrism, which, according to that polemical spirit, was Brazilian. Yet his plays are linked with the history of the Portuguese drama and it is hard to discover, except by excessive reading between the lines, any distinctive Brazilian character. Known to his contemporaries by the sobriquet O Judeu (The Jew), Antonio José early experienced the martyrdom of his religion at the hands of the Inquisition. At the age of eight he was taken to Portugal by his mother, who was summoned thither to answer the charge of Judaism; in 1726 he was compelled to answer to the same charge, but freed; hostile forces were at work against him, however, not alone for his religious beliefs but for his biting satire, and chiefly through the bought depositions of a servant he was finally convicted and burned on October 21st, 1739. The strains of one of his operettas fairly mingled with the crackling of the flames. This fate made of him a national figure in Brazil; the first tragedy written by a Brazilian makes of him the protagonist (O Poeta e a Inquisição, 1839, by Magalhães); the second of Joaquim Norberto de Sousa’s Cantos Epicos is dedicated to him (1861). Still another literature claims Antonio José, who occupies an honoured place in the annals of the Jewish drama.50 And it is not at all impossible that the melancholy which Romero discovers amidst the Jew’s gay compositions is as much a heritage of his race as of the Brazilian modinhas.51 Already Wolf had found in Antonio José’s musical farces a likeness to the opera bouffe of Offenbach, a fellow Jew; the Jew takes naturally to music and to satire, so that his prominence in the history of comic opera may be no mere coincidence. Satire and melancholy, twin sisters with something less than the usual resemblance, inhere in the race of Antonio José.
Antonio José da Silva had in him much of the rollicking, roistering, ribald, rhyming rogue. For long, he was the most popular of the Portuguese dramatists after Gil Vicente. He studied Rotrou, Molière and the libretti of Metastasio to good advantage, and for his musical ideas went to school to the Italians. Sr. Ribeiro has repudiated any connection between these conventionalized airs – the form of the verses is just as conventional – and the distinctive Brazilian modinha; the truth is that Romero, eager to make as good an appearance for the national literature as possible, and realizing that the eighteenth century in Brazil needed all the help it could receive, made an unsuccessful attempt to dragoon Antonio José into the thin ranks.52 As it is, his reputation in Portugal has suffered a decline, merging into the obscurity of the very foibles it sought to castigate. The martyred Jew has had no creative influence upon Brazilian literature.
The first phase of Brazilian letters is, then, a tentative groping, reflecting the numerous influences across the ocean and the instability of a nascent civilization at war on the one hand with covetous foreigners and on the other with fractious, indigenous tribes. The chroniclers are in the main picturesque, informative, rambling rather than artistic; the poets are either vacuous or swollen with the pomp of old-world rhetoric. Even so virile a spirit as Gregorio de Mattos conducts his native satire with the stylistic weapons forged in Europe, and the dawn of a valid nativism is shot through with gleams of spiritual adherence to Portugal and intellectual subjection to the old continent. Yet, as the child is father to the man, so even in these faltering voices may be detected the dominant notes of the later literature, – its imagination, its fondness for rotund expression, its pride of milieu, its Oriental exuberance, its wistful moodiness, its sensual ardor.
CHAPTER III
PERIOD OF AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT (1750-1830)
Stirrings of Revolt – The Inconfidencia – Two Epics: Uraguay and Caramurú– The Lyrists of Minas Geraes: Claudio da Costa, Gonzaga, Alvarenga Peixoto, Silva Alvarenga – Minor figures – Political Satire – Early Nineteenth Century – José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva.
I
Struggle for the territory of Brazil had bred a love for the soil that was bound sooner or later to become spiritualized into an aspiration toward autonomy. The brasileiros were not forever to remain the bestas that the hell-mouth of Bahia had called them, nor provide luxury for the maganos de Portugal. The history of colonial exploitation repeated itself: Spain with Spanish-America, Portugal with Brazil, England with the future United States. Taxes grew, and with them, resentment. Yet, as so often, the articulation of that rebellious spirit came not from the chief sufferers of oppression, but from an idealistic band of poets whose exact motives have not yet been thoroughly clarified by historical investigation. Few less fitted to head a separatist movement than these lyric, idealistic spirits who form part of the Inconfidencia (Disloyalty) group immortalized in Brazilian history through the hanging of Tiradentes and the imprisonment and exile of a number of others. These men were premature in their attempt, and foredoomed to failure, but they lived, as well as wrote, an ideal and thus form at once an epoch in the national history and the nation’s letters. The freedom won by the United States, the foreshadowing of the French revolution, inspired in them ideas of a Brazilian republic; how surely idealistic was such an aim may be realized when we recall that Brazil’s emancipation was initiated with a monarchy (1822) and that, although it has been a republic since 1889, there are a number of serious thinkers who consider the more liberal form of government still less a boon than a disadvantage.
In 1783, Luis da Cunha de Menezes, a vain, pompous fellow, was named Captain-General of the Province of Minas. It was against him that were launched the nine satirical verse letters called Cartas Chilenas and signed by the pseudonym Critillo (1786). Menezes was succeeded by Barbacena (1788) who it was rumoured, meant to exact the payment of 700 arrobas of gold, overdue from the province. It was this that proved the immediate stimulus to an only half-proved case of revolt, which, harshly suppressed, deprived Brazil of a number of its ripest talents.
From the name of the province – Minas Geraes – these poets have been grouped into a so-called Mineira school, which includes the two epicists, Frei José de Santa Rita Durão and José Basilio de Gama, and the four lyrists, Claudio Manoel da Costa, Thomas Antonio Gonzaga, Ignacio José de Alvarenga Peixoto and Manoel Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga.
II
Critics are not agreed upon the relative non-esthetic values of Basilio da Gama’s Uraguay (1769)53 and Santa Rita Durão’s Caramurú (1781). Wolf, with Almeida-Garrett, finds the first a truly national poem; Carvalho calls it “the best and most perfect poem that appeared in Brazil throughout the colonial period”; the early Denis found it not very original, for all its stylistic amenities; Romero, conceding its superiority to Caramurú in style and form, finds it inferior in historical understanding, terming the latter epic “the most Brazilian poem we possess.” Verissimo, who has written an extended comparison of the two poems,54 is, to me, at least, most satisfying of all upon the problems involved and the esthetic considerations implied. In both the epics he discerns the all-pervading influence of Camões, the emulation of whom has seemed to cast upon every succeeding poet the obligation of writing his epic. Thus the chief initiators of Brazilian Romanticism, Porto Alegre and Magalhães, had to indite, respectively, a Colombo and a Confederação dos Tamoyos, and Gonçalves Dias began Os Tymbiras, while José de Alencar, romantic of the Romantics, started a Filhos de Tupan, “which happily for our good and his own, he never completed.” But what renders both the Uruguay and the Caramurú important in the national literature is the fact that they stand out from the ruck of earlier and later Camonean imitations by virtue of a certain spontaneity of origin and an intuitive, historic relation with their day. It is not known whether the authors, though contemporaries, knew each other or read their respective works. Yet both instinctively employed indigenous material and revealed that same “national sentiment which was already stammering, though timorously, in certain poets contemporaneous with them or immediately preceding, such as Alvarenga Peixoto and Silva Alvarenga, with whom there enter into our poetry, mingled with classical images and comparison, names and things of our own. Though like Basilio and Durão, loyal Portuguese, these poets speak already of fatherland with exaltation and love. The idea of the fatherland, the national thought, which in Gregorio de Mattos is as yet a simple movement of bad humour, vagrant spite and the revolt of an undisciplined fellow, becomes in them the tender affection for their native land…”
The Uruguay especially reveals this nascent nationalism as it existed among the loyal Portuguese in the epoch just previous to the Inconfidencia. “We must remember that the work of the Mineira poets” (and here Verissimo includes, of course, the lyrists to which we presently come) “abound in impressions of loyalty to Portugal… Let us not forget José Bonifacio, the so-called patriarch of our Independence, served Portugal devotedly first as scientist in official intellectual commissions and professor at the University of Coimbra, and then as volunteer Major of the Academic Corps against the French of Napoleon, and finally as Intendente Geral, or as we should say today, Chief of Police, of the city of Porto. And José Bonifacio, like Washington, was at first hostile, or at least averse, to independence.”
The Uruguay is certainly less intense than the Caramurú in its patriotism. The author of the first wrote it, as he said, to satisfy a certain curiosity about Uruguay; also, he might have added, to flatter his patron, the then powerful Pombal, who, it will be recalled, at one time harboured the idea of transplanting the Portuguese throne to the colony across the sea. It would be an error, however, to see in the small epic (but five cantos long) a glorification of the native. The real hero, as Verissimo shows, is not Cacambo, but the Portuguese General Gomes Freire de Andrade. The villains, of course, are the Jesuits out of whose fold the author had come, – the helpers of the Indians of Uruguay who revolted against the treaty between Portugal and Spain according to which they were given into the power of the Portuguese. The action, for an epic, is thus restricted in both time and space, let alone significance, yet thus early the liberating genius of Basilio da Gama produced, for Portuguese literature, “its first romantic poem.” Here is the first – or surely one of the first – authentic evidences of what the Spanish-American critics call “literary Americanism,” – all the more interesting because so largely unpremeditated.
The “romanticism” of the Uruguay is worth dwelling upon, if only to help reveal our long-tolerated terminological inadequacy.55 It begins, not with the regular invocation, but with a quasi-Horatian plunge in medias res. It does not employ the outworn octave, but sonorous blank verse. The freedom of its style and the harmony of its verse “announce Garrett, Gonçalves Dias56 and the future admirable modellers of blank verse, in the distribution of the episodes and the novelty of language and simile.” The language is not the Gongoristic extravagance of the Academicians; it is modern, even contemporary, grandiloquent in the Spanish style. The “Indianism” of the poem, in which Basilio da Gama forecasts the later Indianism of the Romantics, is not to be confused with that later type; for it must be recalled that Basilio da Gama did not look upon his Indians with that sentimental veneration characteristic of the nineteenth century Brazilians. As they were secondary to his purpose, so were they in his conception. “Two and distinct are the features of this aspect of our literature. The first Indianism, initiated by Basilio da Gama, continued by Durão and almost limited to the two epics, is hardly more than a poetic artifice; the Indian enters as a necessity of the subject, a simple esthetic or rhetorical means. He is not sung, but is rather an element of the song. In the second Indianism, that of the Romantics, – the loftiest representative of which is Gonçalves Dias, – the Indian advances from the position of an accessory to that of an essential element; he is the subject and the object of the poem. In this first phase of Indianism the sympathy of the poet is transferred only incidentally to the savage… The contrary case obtains in the second phase; the sympathy of the poet is his entirely. So that, in the main, it is the attitude of the poet that distinguished the two Indianisms: indifferent in the first, sympathetic in the second.” And since choices must be made, Verissimo is right when he finds the earlier poets nearer to the sociological truth in preferring Portuguese civilization, with all its defects, to the imaginary charms of indigenous life. Yet sociological error of the Romantic Indianists proved more than poetic truth, for it was fecund “not only for literature, but even for the development of the national sentiment.” … “O Uruguay possesses in Portuguese literature the value of being the first poem of a freer, newer, more spontaneous character after the series of epics derived from Os Lusiadas, and in Brazilian literature that of being the initiator of the movement which, whatever its aberrations, contributed the most to the independence of our letters…”
There is far less artistic pleasure in reading O Caramurú; it may well be, as most agree, that it, rather than O Uruguay, is the national poem, but such a distinction pertains rather to patriotism than to poetry. The better verses of the earlier epic are a balm to the ear and a stimulus to the imagination; those of the later lack communicative essence. Santa Rita Durão, proclaiming in his preface the parity of Brazil with India as the subject of an epic, thus places himself as a rival of Camões; instead, he is an indifferent versifier and an unconscionable imitator; his patriotism, as his purpose, is avowed. The subject of his epic is the half-legendary figure of Diogo Alvares Correa,57 a sort of Brazilian John Smith, who, wrecked upon the coast, so impressed the natives with the seeming magic of his firearms that he was received as their chief. His particular Pocahontas was the maiden Paraguassú, whom he is supposed to have taken with him to France; here she was baptized – as the disproved story goes – and at the marriage of the pair none less than Henry II and Catherine de Medicis stood sponsor to them.
The latest view of Antonio José (See Bell’s Portuguese Literature, pages 282-284); whom Southey considered “the best of their drama writers,” is that his plays would in all likelihood have received little “attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had it not been for the tragedy of the author’s life.” This probably overstates the case against O Judeu, but it indicates an important non-literary reason for his popularity.