Kitabı oku: «Brazilian Literature», sayfa 7

It takes but a superficial knowledge of French Symbolism to see how far are such poets as Cruz e Souza and B. Lopez from their Gallic brethren. Insert Cruz e Souza’s verses, without their author’s name, among the clamorous output of the Romantics that preceded him, and see how difficult it is to single many of them out for any qualities that distinguish them as technique or matter. The African was a spontaneous rather than an erudite spirit. Verissimo does not even believe that he was conscious of his gifts. And if, at any time, he pretended to possess a special theory of esthetics, the noted critic would have it that the poet’s well-meaning but ill-advised friends instigated him. He was a “good, sentimental, ignorant” soul “whose shocks against the social ambient resulted in poetry.” De Carvalho holds a higher opinion: “He introduced into our letters that horror of concrete form of which the great Goethe was already complaining at the close of the eighteenth century. And such a service, in all truth, was not small in a country where poetry flows more from the finger-tips than from the heart.”

Verissimo, indeed, does Cruz e Souza something less than justice. In his short life (1863-1898) the ardent Negro poet succeeded in stamping the impress of his personality upon his age and, for that matter, upon Brazilian letters. He is incorrect, obscure, voluble, – but he is contagiously sincere and transmits an impression of fiery exaltation. His stature will grow, rather than diminish with time. Bernadim do Costa Lopez (1851-1916) began as a bucolic Romanticist (in Chromos), later veering to a Parnassianism (in Hellenos) that contained less art than imitative artifice.

Among the outstanding spirits of the later poets are the mystical Emilio de Menezes and the serenely simple Mario Pederneiras. The latter (1868-1915) seems to have undergone the influence of Francis Jammes; he is one of the few Brazilians who acquired ease in the manipulation of free verse. Emilio de Menezes, who like Machado de Assis has translated Poe’s The Raven, is best known for his remarkable trio of religious sonnets grouped under the title Os Tres Olhares de Maria (The Three Glances of Mary).⁹⁸

V

Later developments in Brazil, as in Spanish America, reveal no definite tendencies that may be grouped under any particular “ism.” Rampant individualism precludes the schools of literary memory. Aranha’s Chanaan directed attention to the Brazilian melting-pot. One result of the recent war has been, in Brazil, to strengthen the national spirit, and in São Paulo, particularly, a young group headed by the industrious Monteiro Lobato seems to show a partial return to regionalism. The directing inspiration for the more clearly regionalistic art came perhaps from Euclydes da Cunha, whose Sertões brought so poignant a realization that Brazil lived in the interior as well as on the coast. As a corollary of the aspiration toward national intellectual autonomy, there is setting in a reaction against France, in favour of national, even local types and themes. The literary product, if not at its highest, is upon a respectable level. The novel is ably represented by Coelho Netto,⁹⁹ while the drama, not so fortunate, plods along a routine path with such purveyors as Claudio de Souza in the lead. To the São Paulo group I look for the early emergence of some worth-while talents, – young men of culture and vision who will bring to Brazil not merely the plethora of poesy that gluts her eyes and ears, but a firm grasp upon the prose that is the other half of life. Romero, years ago, said that what Brazil needed more than anything else was a regimen for its daily life. Only yesterday, Lobato, in his Problema Vital, studied the problem of what he calls the ailment of an entire country, seeking first of all to convince the nation that it was ill. And his initial prescription, like that of Romero, calls for a national hygiene. To this purpose he subordinates his activities as littérateur.

Thus conditions, though not so bad as when Verissimo studied his problem of the Brazilian writer some thirty years ago, are still analagous. He found the literature of his country, at that time, an unoriginal, pupil-literature, often misunderstanding its masters, yet endowed with certain undisputed points of originality. “The Brazilian writer, in his vast majority of cases, does not learn to write; he learns while writing. And it is doubtless useful to him as well as to our letters that the critic, at times, should turn instructor. The lack of a public interested in literary life, and capable of intelligent choice among works and authors, makes this secondary function of criticism even more necessary and serviceable…”

Brazilian literature, as is highly evident, is not one of the major divisions of world letters. It lacks continuity, it is too largely derivative, too poor in masterpieces. Yet today, more at least than when Wolf wrote so enthusiastically in 1863, it is true that “Brazilian literature may justly claim 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 has developed in all directions, and has produced in the principal genres works worthy the attention of all friends of letters.”

The finest fruits of a national literature are the salient personalities who cross all frontiers and achieve such a measure of universality as is attainable in this best and worst of all possible worlds. As the region nurtures the national letters, so the national nurtures the international. And this internationality is but the most expansive phase of the individual in whom all art begins and in whom all art seeks its goal. For art begins and ends in the individual. A few such personalities Brazil has already produced, notably in the criticism of José Verissimo, the prose of Machado de Assis, the intellectuality of Oliveira Lima, the poetry of Olavo Bilac. They are valuable contributions to Goethe’s idea of a Weltliteratur. Such as they, rather than a roster of “isms,” “ists” and “ologies,” justify the study of the milieu and the tradition that helped to produce them. But precisely because they triumph over the milieu, because they shape it rather than are shaped by it, do they rise above the academic confines into that small library whose shelves know only one classification: significant personality.

PART II
REPRESENTATIVE PERSONALITIES

I
CASTRO ALVES

During the last half of the month of February, 1868, two admirable letters were exchanged by a pair of notable men, in which both discerned the budding fame of a twenty-year-old poet. The two notables were José de Alencar, chief novelist of the “Indianist” school, and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, not yet at the height of his career. The poet was Castro Alves. His real “discoverer” was the first of these two authors, who sent him from Tijuca to Machado de Assis at Rio de Janeiro. In his letter of the 18th of February, José de Alencar wrote (I quote only salient passages):

“Yesterday I received a visit from a poet.

“Rio de Janeiro does not yet know him; in a very short while all Brazil will know him. It is understood, of course, that I speak of that Brazil which feels; with the heart and not with the rest.

“Sr. Castro Alves is a guest of this great city, for but a few days. He is going to São Paulo to finish the course that he began at Olinda.

“He was born in Bahia, the region of so many excellent talents; the Brazilian Athens that does not weary of producing statesmen, orators, poets and warriors.

“I might add that he is the son of a noted physician. But why? The genealogy of poets begins with their first poem. And what is the value of parchments compared with these divine seals?..

“Sr. Castro Alves recalled that I had formerly written for the theatre. Appraising altogether too highly my experience in this difficult branch of literature, he wished to read me a drama, the first fruits of his talent.

“This production has already weathered the test of competent audiences upon the stage…

“Gonzaga is the title of the drama, which we read in a short time. The plot, centered about the revolutionary attempt at Minas, – a great source of historical poetry as yet little exploited, – has been enriched by the author with episodes of keen interest.

“Sr. Castro Alves is a disciple of Victor Hugo, in the architecture of the drama, as in the coloring of the idea. The poem belongs to the same ideal school; the style has the same brilliant touches.

“To imitate Victor Hugo is given only to capable intelligences. The Titan of literature possesses a palette that in the hands of a mediocre colorist barely produces splotches…

“Nevertheless, beneath this imitation of a sublime model is evidenced an original inspiration that will later form the literary individuality of the author. His work throbs with the powerful sentiment of nationality, that soul of the fatherland which makes great poets as it makes great citizens…

“After the reading of his drama, Sr. Castro Alves recited for me some of his verses. A Cascata de Paulo Affonso, As duas ilhas and A visão dos mortos do not yield to the excellent examples of this genre in the Portuguese tongue…

“Be the Virgil to this young Dante; lead him through the untrodden ways over which one travels to disillusionment, indifference and at length to glory, – the three vast circles of the divine comedy of talent.”

The reply from Machado de Assis came eleven days later. He found the newcomer quite as original as José de Alencar had made him out to be. Castro Alves possessed a genuine “literary vocation, full of life and vigour and revealing in the magnificence of the present the promise of the future. I found an original poet. The evil of our contemporary poetry is that it is imitative – in speech, ideas, imagery… Castro Alves’s muse has her own manner. If it may be discerned that his school is that of Victor Hugo, it is not because he copies him servilely, but because a related temperament leads him to prefer the poet of the Orientales to the poet of Les Méditations. He is certainly not attracted to the soft, languishing tints of the elegy; he prefers the live hues and the vigorous lines of the ode.”

Machado de Assis found in the poet the explanation of the dramatist. Gonzaga, to be sure, is no masterpiece of the theatre, and Castro Alves quickly returned from that interlude in his labours to the more potent appeal of resounding verse. If he was fortunate, at the outset, to find so influential a pair to introduce him into the literary world, it was his merit alone that won him early prominence. Only a year ago, signalizing the commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of his death, Afranio Peixoto prefaced the two splendid volumes of his complete works – including much hitherto unpublished material – with a short essay in which he calls Castro Alves O Maior Poeta Brasileiro (The Greatest of Brazilian Poets). Let the superlative pass. If it is not important to criticism – and how many superlatives are? – it shows the lasting esteem in which his countrymen hold him. He is not only the poet of the slaves; to many, he is the poet of the nation and a poet of humanity as well.

His talents appeared early; at the Gymnasio Bahiano, by the time he was twelve – and this was already the mid-point of his short life – he not only wrote his first verses, but showed marked aptitude for painting. Long before his twentieth year he had become the rival of Tobias Barreto, the philosopher of Sergipe, not only in poetry, it seems, but in theatrical intrigue that centred about the persons of Adelaide do Amaral and Eugenia Camara. While Barreto, the half-forgotten initiator of the condoreiro style, led the admirers of the first, Eugenia Camara exercised a powerful attraction over Castro Alves, in whom she inspired his earliest lyrics. Perhaps it was because of her that he aspired to the dramatic eminence which he sought with Gonzaga, produced on September 7, 1867, at the Theatro São João amidst scenes of tumultuous success. It was directly after this triumph that he came to José de Alencar. As we see from that writer’s letter, the youth was intent upon continuing his studies; in São Paulo he rose so quickly to fame among the students, not alone for his verses but for his gifted delivery of them and his natural eloquence, that he was shortly hailed as the foremost Brazilian poet of the day.

But unhappiness lay straight before him. His mistress left him; on a hunt he accidentally shot his heel and later had to go to Rio to have the foot amputated; the first symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis appeared and, in 1869, he returned to Bahia to prepare his Espumas Fluctuantes for the press. Change of climate was of temporary benefit; he went back to the capital to be received in triumph; new loves replaced the old. He was foredoomed, however, and during the next two years he worked with the feverish haste of one who knows that his end is near. He died on July 6, 1871.

In the history of Brazilian poetry Castro Alves may be regarded as a figure characterized by the more easily recognized traits of romanticism plus the infiltration of social ideas into the sentimental content. Some would even discover in a few of his products the first signs of the nascent Parnassianism in Brazil. Long before Carvalho selected him as the chief exponent of social themes in the romantic period, Verissimo had indicated that Castro Alves was “our first social poet, the epic writers excepted. He is the first to have devoted a considerable part of his labours not to sentimental subjectivism, which constitutes the greatest and the best part of our poetry, but to singing or idealizing social feeling, fact and aspiration.”

Hugo is his great god; … “nosso velho Hugo. – mestre do mundo! Sol da eternidade!” he exclaims in Sub tegmine fagi. “Our old Hugo. Master of the world! Sun of eternity!” Alves, often even in his love poetry, seems to orate from the mountain tops. “Let us draw these curtains over us,” he sings in Boa Noite (Good Night); “they are the wings of the archangel of love.” Or, in the Adeus de Thereza, if time passes by, it must be “centuries of delirium, Divine pleasures … delights of Elysium…” His language, as often as not, is the language of poetic fever; image clashes upon image; antithesis runs rife; verses flow from him like lava down the sides of a volcano. Nothing human seems alien to his libertian fervour. He captures the Brazilian imagination by giving its fondness for eloquence ideas to feed upon.¹⁰⁰ Now he is singing the glories of the book and education, now upbraiding the assassin of Lincoln, now glorifying the rebel, now picturing the plight of the wretched slaves in words that are for all the world like a shower of sparks. In his quieter moments he can sing love songs as tender as the cooing of any dove, as in O Laco de fito; he can indite the most graceful and inviting of bucolics as in Sub tegmine fagi; and this softer note is an integral part of his labours.

But what brought fame to Castro Alves was his civic, social note. From Heine, to whom he is indebted for something of his social aspiration, he took as epigraph for his collection Os Escravos, a sentiment that reveals his own high purpose. “Flowers, flowers! I would crown my head with them for the fray. The lyre! Give me, too, the lyre, that I may chant a song of war… Words like flaming stars that, falling, set fire to palaces and bring light to hovels… Words like glittering arrows that shoot into the seventh heaven and strike the imposture that has wormed into the holy of holies… I am all joy, all enthusiasm; I am the sword, I am the flame!..” The quotation is almost a description of Alves’s method. Once again, for the part of Os Escravos that was published separately five years after his death, we find an epigraph from Heine prefacing A Cachoeira de Paulo Affonso (The Paulo Affonso Falls): “I do not really know whether I shall have deserved that some day a laurel should be placed upon my bier. Poetry, however great be my love for it, has ever been for me only a means consecrated to a holy end… I have never attached too great a value to the fame of my poems, and it concerns me little whether they be praised or blamed. It should be a sword that you place upon my tomb, for I have been a brave soldier in the war of humanity’s deliverance.” This, too, is a description of Castro Alves. He was a sword rather than a lyre; certainly his verse shows a far greater preoccupation with purpose than with esthetic illumination, and just as certainly does he fall far short of both Hugo and Heine in their frequent triumph over whatever purpose they professed.

I am not sure that the Brazilians do not confuse their admiration for Alves’s short life and its noble dedication with the very variable quality of his poetry. Read by one with no Latin blood in his veins it seems too often a dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics, freighted with a few central slogans rather than any depth of idea. I speak now of the work as a whole and not of the outstanding poems, such as As vozes da Africa (Voices from Africa), O Navio Negreiro (The Slave Ship), Pedro Ivo. It is in these few exceptions that the poet will live, but just as surely, it seems to me, will his esthetic importance shrink to smaller proportions than the national criticism today accords it. The ever-scrupulous, ever-truthful Verissimo, who does not join the general chorus of uncritical admiration of Castro Alves, indicates that even his strongest claim upon us – that of a singer of the slaves – is injured by an evident exaggeration. What might be called Alves’s “Africanism” is thus condemned of untruth to artistic as well as to quotidian reality, in much the same manner as was the “Indianism” in the poetry of Gonçalves Dias… “The lack of objective reality offends us and our taste, habituated as we are to the reality of life transported to artistic representations. As I have already had occasion to observe, Castro Alves’s defect as a poet of the slaves is that he idealized the slave, removing him from reality, perhaps in greater degree than art permits, making him escape – which is evidently false – the inevitable degradation of slavery. His slaves are Spartacuses or belong to the gallery of Hugo’s Burgaves. Now, socially, slavery is hateful chiefly because of its degrading influence upon the human being reduced to it and by reaction upon the society that supports it.”

When Castro Alves prepared the Espumas Fluctuantes for publication he already felt the hand of death upon him. In the short foreword that he wrote for the book – in a style that is poetry, though written as prose – he compared his verses to the floating spume of the ocean, whence the title of the book. “Oh spirits wandering over the earth! O sails bellying over the main!.. You well know how ephemeral you are … passengers swallowed in dark space, or into dark oblivion… And when – actors of the infinite – you disappear into the wings of the abyss, what is left of you?.. A wake of spume … flowers lost amid the vast indifference of the ocean. – A handful of verses … spume floating upon the savage back of life!..”

This mood, this language, this outlook, are more than half of the youngster that was Castro Alves. For the most part he is not original, either in form or idea; the majority of his verses seem to call for the rostrum and the madly moved audience. Yet more than fifty years after his death the numerous editions of his poems provide that rostrum, and the majority of his literate countrymen form that audience.

When his powers are at their highest, however, he achieves the true Hugoesque touch, as, for example, in the closing stanzas of the famous Voices from Africa, written in São Paulo on June 11, 1868:

 
Christo! embalde morreste sobre um monte…
Teu sangue não lavou da minha fronte
A mancha original.
Ainda hoje são, por fado adverso,
Meus filhos – alimaria do universo,
Eu – pasto universal.
 
 
Hoje em meu sangue a America se nutre:
– Condor, que transformara-se em abutre,
Ave de escravidão.
Ella juntou-se ás mais … irmã traidora!
Qual de José os vis irmãos, outr’ora,
Venderam seu irmão!
 

…

 
Basta, Senhor! De teu potente braço
Role atravez dos astros e do espaço
Perdão p’ra os crimes meus!
Ha dous mil annos eu soluço um grito…
Escuta o brado meu lá no infinito,
Meu Deus! Senhor, meu Deus!..¹⁰¹
 

This poem is the Eli Eli lama sabachthani of the black race.

It is matched for passionate eloquence by the lashing lines that form the finale of O Navio Negreiro;

 
Existe um povo que a bandeira empresta
P’ra cobrir tanta infamia e cobardia!..
E deixa a transformar-se nessa festa
Em manto impuro de bacchante fria!..
Meu Deus! meu Deus! mas que bandeira é esta,
Que impudente na gavéa tripudia?
Silencio, Musa … chora, e chora tanto
Que o pavilhão se lave no teu pranto!..
 
 
Auri-verde pendão de minha terra,
Que a briza do Brasil beija e balança,
Estandarte que á luz do sol encerra
As promessas divinas da esperança…
Tu que, da liberdade apos da guerra,
Foste hastiado dos heroes na lança,
Antes te houvessem roto na batalha,
Que servires a um povo de mortalha!..
 
 
Fatalidade atroz que a mente esmaga!
Extingue nesta hora o brigue immundo
O trilho que Colombo abriu nas vagas,
Como um iris no pelago profundo!
Mas é infamia de mais!.. Da etherea plaga
Levantai-vos, heroes do Novo Mundo!
Andrade! arranca esse pendão dos ares!
Colombo! fecha a porta dos teus mares!¹⁰²
 

As Napoleon, before the pyramids, told his soldiers that forty centuries gazed down upon them, so Alves, in the opening poem of Os Escravos called O Seculo (The Century), invoking the names of liberty’s heroes – Christ, Carnaris, Byron, Kossuth, Juarez, the Gracchi, Franklin – told the youth of his nation that from the heights of the Andes, vaster than plains or pyramids, there gazed down upon them “a thousand centuries.” Even in numbers he is true to the high-flown conceits of the condoreiro school; the raising of Napoleon’s forty to the young Brazilian’s thousand is indicative of the febrile passion that flamed in all his work. Castro Alves was a torch, not a poem. When he beholds visions of a republic (as in Pedro Ivo), man himself becomes a condor, and liberty, like the poet’s truth, though crushed to earth will rise again.

 
Não importa! A liberdade
E como a hydra, o Antheu.
Se no chão rola sem forças,
Mais forte do chão se ergueu…
São os seus ossos sangrentos
Gladios terriveis, sedentos…
E da cinza solta aos ventos
Mais um Graccho appareceu!..¹⁰³
 

This is not poetry that can be read for very long at a time. It is not poetry to which one returns in quest of mood, evocative beauty, or surrender to passion. It is the poetry of eloquence, with all the grandeur of true eloquence and with many of the lesser qualities of oratory at its less inspiring level. Castro Alves, then, was hardly a poet of the first order. He sang, in pleasant strains, of love and longing; he whipped the nation’s conscience with poems every line of which was a lash; some of his verses rise like a pungent incense from the altars where liberty’s fire is kept burning; he was a youthful soul responsive to every noble impulse. But his passion is too often spoiled by exaggeration, – the exaggeration of a temperament as well as a school that borrowed chiefly the externals of Hugo’s genius. Nor is it the exaggeration of feeling; rather is it a forcing of idea and image, accent and antithesis, – the failings of the orator who sees his hearers before him and must have visible, audible token of their assent.

So that, when all is said and done, the permanent contribution of Alves to Brazilian poetry is small, consisting of a few love poems, several passionate outcries on behalf of a downtrodden race, and a group of stanzas variously celebrating libertarian ideas. All the rest we can forget in the intense appeal of the surviving lines. I know that this does not agree with the current acceptation of the poet in Brazil, where many look upon him as the national poet, but one can only speak one’s honest convictions. With reference to Castro Alves, I admire the man in the poet more than the poet in the man.