Kitabı oku: «Brazilian Literature», sayfa 9

The real Machado de Assis stands apart from all who have written prose in his country. Senhor Costa, in his admirable book upon the Brazilian novel, has sought to present his nation’s chief novelist by means of an imagery drawn from Greek architecture; Aluizio Azevedo thus becomes the Doric column; Machado de Assis, the sober, elegant Ionian column; Graça Aranha, the Corinthian and Coelho Netto the composite. Sobriety and elegance are surely the outstanding qualities of the noted writer. His art, according to Costa, is the secret of suggesting thoughts; this is what I have called his indirect method.

Machado de Assis belongs with the original writers of the nineteenth century. His family is the family of Renan and Anatole France; he is their younger brother, but his features show the resemblance.

III
JOSÉ VERISSIMO

It was a favourite attitude of Verissimo’s to treat of the author as the author appears in his work, rather than as he may be constructed from his biography and his milieu. Some of the national critics have referred to this as if it were a defect; it is, on the contrary, in consonance with the finest work now done in contemporary esthetic criticism and places Verissimo, in my opinion, at the head of all critics who have treated in Brazil of Brazilian letters. It is in precisely such a spirit that I shall try to present him to an alien audience, – doubly alien, shall I say? – in that criticism itself, wherever practised, is quite alien to the surroundings in which it is produced. Verissimo was what the Spaniards call a raro; he was as little Brazilian, in any restrictive sense, as was Machado de Assis. A conscientious reading of the thousands of pages he left fails to reveal anything like a hard and fast formula for literary appreciation. He was an intellectual freeman, truly in a spiritual sense a citizen of the world. In a country where even the more immediately rewarded types of creative endeavour were produced under the most adverse conditions, he exercised the least rewarded of literary professions; in a nation where the intellectual oligarchy was so small that every writer could have known his fellow scribe, – where the very language betrays one into the empty compliment and a meaningless grandiloquence, – he served, and served with admirable scruple, gentility and wisdom, the cause of truth and beauty. His manner is, with rare interludes of righteous indignation, generally serene; his approach is first of all esthetic, with a certain allowance for social idealism that never degenerates into hollow optimism; his language, which certain Brazilian have seen fit to criticize for lack of stylistic amenities, is to one foreigner, at least, a source of constant charm for its simplicity, its directness, its usually unlaboured lucidity.

And these various qualities seem but so many facets of the man’s unostentatious personality. He was not, like Sylvio Romero, a nature compelled, out of some seeming inner necessity, to quarrel; his pages, indeed, are restful even when most interesting and most alive with suggestion and stimulating thought. His Portuguese, surely, is not so beautiful as the Spanish of his twin-spirit of Uruguay, José Enrique Rodó, but there is something in both these men that places them apart from their contemporaries who practised criticism. They were truly modern in the better sense of that word; they brought no sacrifices to the altar of novelty, of sensation, of an unreasoned, wholesale dumping of the past. They did not confuse modernity with up-to-date-ness; they did not go into ecstasies for the sake of enthusiasm itself. They would have been “modern” in any age, and perhaps for that very reason a certain classic repose hovers over their pages. Each knew his classics; each knew his moderns. But I doubt whether either ever gave himself much concern over these really futile distinctions, – futile, that is, when mouthed merely as hard and fast differences, as if restless, “romantic” spirits did not exist among the ancients, and as if, today, no serene soul may dwell in his nook apart, watching the world roll on. Such a serenity lives in the pages of the Uruguayan and of the Brazilian; like all things born of human effort, they will lose as the years roll on, but something of permanence is there because Verissimo, like Rodó, possessed the secret of seizing upon something universal in whatever he choose to consider.

That Europe, with its ancient culture, its aristocratic intellectual circles and its concentrated audiences, should have produced great critics, is not, after all, so much to be wondered at, – surely, hardly more to be marvelled at than the emergence of the great playwright, the great novelist. That the United States, in recent years, reveals the promise of notable criticism, is somewhat more a cause for congratulation in that here we lack – or up to yesterday, lacked – inspiring intellectual leaders. But at least we possessed the paraphernalia, the apparatus, the national wealth. We had publishers, we had printing-presses, we had a generally literate populace, whatever the use to which the populace put those capabilities. Our young writers did not have to seek publishers abroad, whence alone could come likewise, literary consecration. That a Rodó should arise in Spanish America – and more than one notable critic had preceded him – or that a Verissimo should appear in Brazil, is fairly a triumph of mind over matter. It is true that such an event would have been impossible without the influence – and the decided influence – of European culture; but it is a triumph, none the less. And it is the sort of triumph that comes from the sacrifice of material boons to values less tangible, yet more lasting. I do not mean that Verissimo went about deploring the humble position of the artist and the true critic in Brazil; I am a mite mistrustful of self-analytic martyrs, of whom we are not exempt in these United States. He exercised a deliberate choice. Much of his work first appeared in the newspapers, and this alone must stand as a tribute to the organs that printed his critiques. For the rest, his life and labours serve to prove that south of the Rio Grande, no less than north, economic materialism and the life of the spirit are at everlasting grips with each other, and that there are men (again on both sides of that stream) who are masters rather than slaves of the chattels they possess.

He was not religious (remember that I am treating him as he treated his own subjects – as he is revealed in his writings); he was not intensely emotional; he looked love and death straight in the eyes, as much with curiosity as with any inner or outer trembling before either. He was, in his realm, what Machado de Assis was in his, – a spirit of the Limbo, shall we say? His motto, if he would have accepted the static connotation of mottoes, might have been Horace’s medio tutissimus ibis, only that he sought the middle path not so much through desire of safety as out of a certain philosophical conviction. But there again I use a word that does not harmonize with Verissimo’s intellectual elasticity, for words are almost as hard and cold as the type that prints them, while thoughts rather resemble the air that takes them into space. And Verissimo is especially sensible to this permanence-in-transiency. “As to permanence,” he wrote in an interesting essay on Que é Literatura¹¹⁰ (What is Literature?), “it might be said, in a sort of paradox, that it is precisely the transitoriness of the emotion that makes a book of lasting interest. It is an essential difference between knowledge and emotion that the first is lasting and the second transitory. A fact learned remains, is added to the sum of our knowledge. We may forget it, but such forgetting is not in the nature of things necessary, and the truths that are contained in a book of science that we have read join our permanent intellectual acquisitions. The emotions are by very nature fleeting, – they are not, like the facts we learn, added to and incorporated into one another; they are a series of experiences that change constantly. Within a few hours the emotion aroused by the reading of a poem is extinguished; it cannot endure. It may be renewed, by the re-reading of the poem or by resorting to memory, and, if it be a masterpiece, successive readings and recollection will not blunt its power to move us.”

He commits himself to no definite esthetic system, thus suggesting his affinities to the French impressionists and to that Jules Lemaître whom he so much admired. “No meio não está só a virtude, mas a verdade,” he writes; “not only virtue, but truth, lies in the middle.” This, as I have said, is not a wish for the Horatian safety of the middle course, but rather an innate mistrust of extremes. To the ancient apophthegm that there is nothing new under the sun – and it would be just as true to say that there is nothing old under it, or that all things under the sun are new – he composes a variant that might well stand as the description of the best in our newer criticism: “Nada ha de definitivo debaixo do Sol”; “there is nothing definitive under the sun.” In United States criticism there is a lapidary phrase to match it, and from a spirit who, allowing for all the modifications of time, space and temperament, is kin to Verissimo. I refer to a brief sentence that occurs in the Introduction to Ludwig Lewisohn’s A Modern Book of Criticism, in a paragraph devoted to demonstrating the futility of absolute standards, as represented in the important work of Paul Elmer More… “Calmly oblivious of the crumbling of every absolute ever invented by man,” writes Mr. Lewisohn, “he (i. e., Mr. More) continues in his fierce and growing isolation to assert that he knows what human life ought to be and what kind of literature ought to be permitted to express its character. That a form of art or life exists and that it engages the whole hearts of men makes little difference to him. He knows… And what does he know? Only, at bottom, his own temperamental tastes and impulses which he seeks to rationalize by an appeal to carefully selected and isolated tendencies in art and thought. And, having rationalized them by an artifice so fragile, he seeks to impose them upon the men and the artists of his own day in the form of laws. I know his reply so well. It is this, that if you abandon his method, you sink into universal scepticism and undiscriminate acceptance. The truth is that I believe far more than he does. For I love beauty in all its forms and find life tragic and worthy of my sympathy in every manifestation. I need no hierarchical moral world for my dwelling-place, because I desire neither to judge nor to condemn. Fixed standards are useless to him whose central passion is to have men free. Mr. More needs them for the same inner reason – infinitely rarified and refined, of course, – for which they are necessary to the inquisitor and the militant patriot. He wants to damn heretics… I do not. His last refuge, like that of every absolutist at bay, would be in the corporate judgment of mankind. Yes, mankind has let the authoritarians impose upon it only too often. But their day is nearly over…”¹¹¹

This is one of the most important passages in contemporary United States criticism, – doubly so because the men thus ranged against each other are both accomplished scholars and thus rise to symbols of the inevitable contest between the intellect that dominates the emotions and the intellect that has discovered wisdom in guidance rather than domination. Verissimo was no Lewisohn; he possessed many of that critic’s signal qualities, but in lesser degree. His language is not so instinct with human warmth, his culture not so wide nor so deep, his perceptions not so keen; but he belongs in company of such rare spirits. He is as unusual amidst the welter of verbose opinions that passes for criticism in Spanish and Portuguese America as is Lewisohn amidst our own colder but equally vapid and empty reviewers and as was Rodó in the milieu that but half understood him. Neither Rodó nor Verissimo, for that matter, had a firm grasp upon the budding intellectual life of these States; each died a trifle too early for the signs of hope that they would have been happy to discern. As it is, they possessed the somewhat stencilled view of the United States as the country of the golden calf; a view none too false, more’s the pity, but too “absolute” in the sense that we have just seen discussed. There is, for all the truth in Rodó’s famous Ariel, a certain half-concealed condescension that might not have appeared were that essay written today.¹¹² The younger Spanish Americans and Brazilians who have come north to study at our universities and to acquaint themselves with the newer phases of our culture, have been quick to respond to such spirits as Van Wyck Brooks, Henry L. Mencken, Ludwig Lewisohn, Joel Elias Spingarn. During the next decade, as these young men rise to power in their own intellectual world, their books will doubtless reveal a different attitude toward the attainments of their Northern neighbours, – unless – and there is always that unless, – political happenings should contort their views and our scant spiritual population should once again suffer, as so often in the past, for the misdoings of our diplomats.

Verissimo, then, is the critic-artist. The drum-beat of dogma that pounds over the pages of Sylvio Romero is never heard in his lines. Though he holds that art is a social function – a form indispensable to the existence of society – he realizes its individual import, without carrying his belief to the point of that mystifying esoterism so beloved of certain latter-day poets and dramatists.

To him, criticism was an art, and, reduced to its essential elements, is practised by any one who expresses an opinion or a feeling concerning a work of art. His mind was open to every wind of doctrine that blew, but this was hospitality rather than indiscrimination. “Let us not rebel against the new poetic tendencies,” he wrote in a controversy with Medeiros e Albuquerque, “for we must understand that they are all natural, the result of poetry’s very evolution. Let us not, on the other hand, accept them as universal and definitive. There is nothing definitive under the sun… Schools, tendencies, fashions, pass. Poetry remains, invariable in its essence, despite the diversity of its form.”

It is possible, however, that the conditions under which he wrote prevented his work from attaining the heights that often it suggests. His Brazil needed a teacher rather than a critic, – a policeman of the arts, as it were, – and he had to supply the deficiency. Perhaps it is one’s imagination that detects in his lines a certain all-pervading sadness, – a sadness that seems sister to serenity. Only when stirred to just combat – as in his controversy with Sylvio Romero – does he abandon his unruffled demeanour, and ever here he is more restrained than Sylvio could be in his moments of calm. Verissimo, – and again he suggests Rodó for a similar quality, – is ever a mite melancholy. His thought and its expression at their best are like a beautiful landscape seen in the afterglow of sunset; a sort of intellectual twilight, most natural to one who found truth and virtue in the middle. Yet is there much Truth and Virtue in Verissimo, – whoever that lady and gentleman may be? He sought to bring no eternal verities; his aim, like Rodó’s, was to instil rather the love of truth than any specific truth itself. He is a dispassionate analyst. Hence his tolerance (another quality of the middle, it will be noted), his diffidence, his sincerity. After Verissimo, Brazilian criticism is confronted with new standards, – flexible, it is true, but all the more exigent. As Machado de Assis belongs to the company of Anatole France, so Verissimo belongs with Lemaître. At a proper distance, to be sure, but within the circle of the elect. He was not deceived by theories, for he looked to the creation itself; neither was he deceived, and for the same reason, by men and women. By their works he knew them, as by his work we know him. It was his attitude as much as his accomplishment that made of him the national glory he has become. And no little of that glory is his because his sincerity transcended the narrower claims of nationalism, – a nationalism in Brazil as elsewhere too often identical with unthinking pride, puerile boastfulness and the notions of whatever political party happens to be predominant.

With Sylvio Romero he shares pre-eminence as the foremost modern Brazilian critic of letters. A passing glance at the controversy between these contrasting personalities will bring out not only their divergent qualities, but more than one sidelight on the problems of Brazilian culture and literature. I give it as it may be seen through Verissimo’s eyes, because I think that he sums up the case with his characteristic sincerity and modesty.

Romero’s notable work, Historia da literatura brasileira, was first published, in two volumes, in the year 1888, and brought the history of the nation’s letters down to the year 1870. A second edition appeared in 1902-3, revised by the author. It was upon the appearance of this second edition that Verissimo estimated the qualities of the work in terms that should meet with the approval of all but the blindest of partisans. He noted not only its value as research, its solid qualities, but its contradictions, incoherencies and abuses of generalization as well. He called it “one of the most original, or at least personal, most suggestive, most copious (in opinions and ideas), most interesting” of books and noted, what the most superficial must note at once, the man’s polemical temper. “The source of our literary history,” he wrote, “is the Introduction by Varnhagen to his Florilegio of Brazilian poetry (Lisbon 1850, I and II vols., Madrid, 1853, III). It was he who laid in those pages the corner stone of the still unfinished edifice of our literature… Wolf, Norberto Silva, Fernandes Pinheiro and others merely followed his lead, and if they improved upon him, it was according to his indications. And, if not by its philosophic spirit and critical method, Sylvio Romero’s Historia derives in its general design from the Introduction or Varnhagen…”

The review, short as it was, revealed Verissimo’s intellectual contrast to Romero. He is calm, even, logical, somewhat cold, clear, French, – while Romero is the born fighter, impassioned, rambling, eager to embrace his vast subject, crowding into his history a mass of names and works wholly without pertinence to the field, lacking in literary grace.

In 1906 Verissimo was obliged to take up the subject once more, this time in less dispassionate terms, forced into a distasteful controversy when further silence would have been tantamount to cowardice. Romero, in that year, published together with Sr. Dr. João Ribeiro, a Compendio de historia da literatura brazileira in which Verissimo was acrimoniously attacked, “not only in my opinions as a critic, which does not offend me, nor in my qualities as a writer, which it would be ridiculous to enter the field and defend, but in my literary probity, which compels me to this refutation…

“Sylvio Romero cannot suffer – and this is a proof of a certain moral inferiority – contradiction and criticism, and must have unconditional admiration…” The voluminous historian was vain. “It is an absolutely certain fact, and most easily verified, that in no country, in no literature, has any author quoted himself so much as (I do not say more than) Sylvio Romero… Despite the fact that there was never a break or even a difference in our relations, which for my part I prized and which he did not seem to disdain, I felt, despite his praise and his verbal animation – that of a master toward his pupil – that my poor literary production contended with his and therefore, in short, I was not agreeable to him. It was evident to me that there were two things that my friend could not pardon me for: my small esteem (small in relation to his) for Tobias Barreto and my great appreciation for a writer whose highly justified glory has for some time seemingly robbed the great critic of sleep.”

“I continue to maintain,” wrote Verissimo, “and all the documents support me, that Varnhagen was the father of our literary history, principally of that history as it is conceived and realized by Sylvio Romero in his Historia da literatura brazileira, whose inspiration and economy derive far more from the studies of Varnhagen than from the generalizations … of Fernand Denis or Norberto Silva … I know perfectly well … what was accomplished before him by Norberto Silva and Fernand Denis, Bouterwek and Sismondi, etc… The oldest of these writers is the German Bouterwek. But I doubt whether Sylvio Romero ever read him. In fact this author concerns himself only in passing fashion with Brazilian literature…” And in turn Verissimo takes up the work of Denis, Silva and other predecessors of Varnhagen, rectifying the position of the investigator whose merits have been so unjustly slighted by the dogmatic “Pontifex Maximus of Brazilian letters,” as Romero was called by Eunapio Deiró.¹¹³

“A disciple of the French through Sainte-Beuve and Brunetière, and of the English through Macaulay,” says Carvalho in his recent work upon Brazilian literature, “Verissimo was what might be called an objective critic. Versed in many literatures, even erudite, he lacked, in order to be a great writer, a finer taste for beautiful things, and likewise, the spirit, or rather, the fineness of understanding and sensibility. His Historia da Literatura Brazileira which is, we will not say a perfect, but an honest synthesis of our literary evolution, shows the primordial defect of its method, which was that of seeking the individual to the detriment of the milieu, the personal work to the prejudice of the collective. Verissimo, who possessed a direct observation that could appreciate isolated values keenly, lacked on the other hand a deep intuition of universal problems; he was content to point them out in passing; he did not enter into them, he circled prudently around them…”¹¹⁴

What Carvalho points out as a defect I consider Verissimo’s chief contribution to Brazilian criticism, – his primary concern with the individual. True, this may lessen his value as a literary historian, but it makes of him one of the very few genuine esthetical critics that have appeared on this side of the Atlantic. It renders him easily superior to Romero and Carvalho, the latter of whom is much indebted to both Verissimo and Romero, as is every one who seeks to write of the nation’s letters.

Verissimo has put into a very short essay his general outlook upon Brazilian literature. It is instinct with the man’s honesty of outlook, his directness of statement, his fidelity to fact, his dispassionate approach. For that reason I translate it almost entire as the best short commentary available. It is entitled O Que Falta á Nossa Literatura (What Our Literature Lacks).

“What I know of American literature – and in truth it is very little – authorizes me to say that ours is perhaps the oldest of the continent.¹¹⁵ From the literary standpoint our nationality seems to have preceded the other American nations. It is clear that I am not here insisting upon a strict question of date; it is possible that in Mexico, and even in Peru, – I haven’t at hand the means for verifying the facts, – some writers may have arisen earlier than our own, poets necessarily. Chronology, in literature, however, though of considerable importance, cannot alone serve to establish priority. A literature is a grouping, and cannot in fact exist through a single poet or an isolated book, unless that poet or that book resume in eminent degree the entire thought or feeling of a people who is already in some manner conscious of itself. This is the case of Homer, if that name stands for an individual.

“Since the XVIIth century we reckon in our midst poets and prosers. This would prove that the necessity of reporting oneself, of defining oneself, – which creates literature, – already existed amongst us, no sooner than we were born. The work of Gabriel Soares may, and I believe should, be excluded from a history of Brazilian literature, because such a history can be only that of literature published and known in its day, – literature that could have influenced its time and those who came after. But it comprises part of a history of the civilization, thought and spiritual progress of Brazil, showing how already in that century a native of the country, sequestered upon his plantation in the sertão, not only possessed sufficient culture to write of matters pertaining to his country, but felt also the necessity of writing it down. It is certain that he was inspired likewise by interest and that his work is a memorial to the Sovereign, seeking personal concessions. But, on account of the thoroughness and the breadth with which it is done, and, above all, because of the general, disinterested spirit in which it is accomplished, – the variety of its aspects and the national breath that animates it, it far exceeds the nature of a simple memorial. In the same position are the Dialogues upon the Grandeurs of Brazil and their author, whoever he may be. Preoccupation with history is the surest token of a reflective national consciousness. This preoccupation awoke early in Brazil, and not only as a means of information with which the religious orders tried to instruct themselves concerning the lay of the land and to glorify themselves by publishing their own deeds, but also in this same more general, more disinterested spirit. Frei Vicente do Salvador is thus early a national historian and not a simple religious chronicler.

“Two things occur to produce this development in Brazilian literary expression, at the very beginning of civilization in this country: the vigor of literary expression in Portugal and the Jesuit collegios. Whatever be the value of Portuguese literature, it is beyond dispute that no literature of the smaller peoples rivals it in wealth and variety. When Brazil was discovered, only a small part of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal possessed a literary life. England was scarcely emerging into it, with the predecessors of Shakespeare, who had not yet been born and whose first works date from the end of the century. Germany, from the literary standpoint, did not exist.

“Portugal, for already a century, had possessed a language solidly constructed and policed, and in this respect the labor of Camões is incomparably less than that of Dante. Portugal was in its golden age of literature, which already possessed chroniclers such as Fernão Lopes, novelists like Bernardim Ribeiro, historians like João de Barros, dramatists like Gil Vicente, poets such as those of the cancioneiros and a line of writers of all kinds dating back to the fourteenth century. Despite the rusticity of the people, Portugal, in the epoch of Brazil’s colonization, is one of the four countries of Europe that may be called intellectual. The identification of the colony of Brazil with the mother-country seems to me one of the expressive facts of our history, and this identification rendered easy the influence of Portuguese spiritual life upon a wild region, so that it was possible to obtain results which, given other feelings between the court and the colony, would not have been forthcoming. Since gold was not at once discovered here, and those mines that were discovered proved relatively few and poor, Brazilian life soon took on, from Reconcavo to Pernambuco, where it was first lived, and later in Rio Janeiro and even – though less – in S. Vicente, a modest manner, – what today we should call bourgeois, – more favourable to literary expression, to the leisure needed for writing, than the agitated, adventurous existence of the colonizers of mine lands.

“The collegios of the Jesuits, established with higher studies as early as the XVIth century, and later – in imitation of them – the convents of the other religious orders, infiltrating Latin culture into the still half-savage colony, favoured the transmigration hither of the powerful literary spirit of the metropolis.

“Soon, then, perhaps sooner than any other American nation, and certainly sooner than, for example, the largest of them all, the United States, we had a literature, the written expression of our collective thought and feeling. Certainly this literature scarcely merits the name of Brazilian as a regional designation. It is Portuguese not only in tongue but in inspiration, sentiment, spirit. There might perhaps already exist, as in the author of the Dialogos das grandezas or in Gabriel Soares, a regional sentiment, the love of the native soil, a taste for its traits, but there was no national sentiment other than the selfsame Portuguese national sentiment. Even four centuries later, I hesitate to attribute to our literature the qualification of Brazilian… For I do not know whether the existence of an entirely independent literature is possible without an entirely independent language as well. Language is the constituent element of literatures, from the fact that it is itself the expression of what there is most intimate, most individual, most characteristic in a people. Only those peoples possess a literature of their own who possess a language of their own. In this sense, which seems to me the true one, there is no Austrian literature or Swiss or Belgian literature, despite the existence in those peoples of a high culture and notable writers in all fields.¹¹⁶

“Therefore I consider Brazilian literature as a branch of the Portuguese, to which from time to time it returns by the ineluctable law of atavism, as we may see in the imitations of the literary movements in Portugal, or better still, in the eagerness – today almost universal in our writers – to write Portuguese purely, according to the classic models of the mother literature. This branch, upon which have been engrafted other elements, is already distinguished from the central trunk by certain characteristics, but not in a manner to prevent one from seeing, at first glance, that it is the same tree slightly modified by transplantation to other climes. It is possible that new graftings and the prolonged influence of milieu will tend to differentiate it even more, but so long as the language shall remain the same, it will be little more – as happens in the botanical families – than a variety of the species.

“A variety, however, may be very interesting; it may even be, in certain respects, more interesting than the principal type, acquiring in time and space qualities that raise it above the type. Brazilian literature, or at least poetry, was already in the XVIIth century superior to Portuguese. It is by no means patriotic presumption, which I lack completely, to judge that, with the development of Brazil, its probable politic and economic greatness in the future will give to the literary expression of its life supremacy over Portugal, whose historic rôle seems over and which, from all appearances, will disappear in an Iberic union. If this country of ours does not come apart and split up into several others, each a ‘patria’ with a dialect of its own, we shall prove true to the prophecies of Camões and Fr. Luiz de Souza, becoming the legitimate heirs of Portugal’s language and literature. If such a thing should happen, it would give us an enormous moral superiority to the United States and the Spanish-American nations, making of us the only nation in America with a truly national language and literature.

“But this literature of ours, which, as a branch of the Portuguese already has existed for four centuries, possesses neither perfect continuity, cohesion, nor the unity of the great literatures, – of the Portuguese, for example. The principal reason, to explain the phenomenon in a single word, is that it depended ever, in its earliest periods, rather upon Portugal and later upon Europe, France especially, than upon Brazil itself. It always lacked the principle of solidarity, which would seem to reveal lack of national sentiment. It always has lacked communicability, – that is, its writers, who were separated by vast distances and extreme difficulty of communication, remained strangers one to the other. And I refer not to personal communication, which is of secondary importance, but to intellectual communication that is established through books. The various influences that can be noted in all our important literary movements are all external. What is called improperly the Mineira School of the XVIIIth century, and the Maranhão pléiade of the middle of this (the XIXth) received their inspiration from Portugal, but did not transmit it. As is said in military tactics, contact was never established between the writers or between their intellects.

“This lack of contact continues today (Verissimo wrote the essay toward the end of the XIXth century) and is greater now than it was for example during the Romantic period. There was always lacking the transmitting element, the plastic mediator of national thought, a people sufficiently cultured to be interested in that thought, or, at least, ready to be influenced by it. In the construction of a literature the people plays simultaneously a passive and an active rôle: it is in the people that the inspiration of poet and thinker has its source and its goal. Neither the one nor the other can abstract himself, for both form an integral part of the people. Perhaps only during our Romantic period, from 1835 to 1860, may it be said that this condition of communicability existed, limited to a tiny part of the country. The sentiment of a new nation co-operated effectively in creating for writers a sympathetic public, which felt instinctively in their work an expression of that nationality. Then we learned a great deal of French, some English and Italian, a smattering of German and became intellectually denationalized. A success such as that of Macedo’s Moreninha is fairly inconceivable today. Success in literature, as in clothing, comes ready made from Paris.

“Do not take me for a nationalist, and less still, for a nativist. I simply am verifying a fact with the same indifference with which I should perform the same office in the domains of geology. I am looking for the explanation of a phenomenon; I believe I have found it, and I present it.

“So that, from this standpoint, it may be said that it was the development of our culture that prejudiced our literary evolution. It seems a paradox, but it is simply a truth. Defective and faulty as it was, that culture was enough to reveal to our reading public the inferiority of our writers, without any longer counterbalancing this feeling by the patriotic ardor of the period during which the nationality was being formed. The general cultural deficiency of our writers of all sorts in Brazil is, then, one of the defects of our literature. Doing nothing but repeat servilely what is being done abroad, without any originality of thought or form, without ideas of their own, with immense gaps in their learning, and no less defects of instruction that are today common among men of medium culture in the countries that we try to imitate and follow, we cannot compete before our readers with what they receive from the foreign countries at first hand, by offering them a similar product at second.

“In addition to study, culture, instruction, both general and thorough, carried on in time and with plenty of time, firm and substantial, our literature lacks at present sincerity. The evident decadence of our poetry may have no other cause. Compare, for example, the poetry of the last ten or even fifteen years, with that produced during the decade 1850-1860, by Gonçalves Dias, Casimiro de Abreu, Alvares de Azevedo, Junqueira Freire, Laurindo Rabello, and you will note that the sincerity of emotion that overflowed the verses then is almost completely lacking in today’s poetry. And in all our literary labors, fiction, history, philosophy, criticism, it is impossible for the careful reader not to discern the same lack. Perhaps it is due to a lack of correlation between milieu and writer… To aggravate this, there was, moreover, lack of ideas, lack of thought, which reduced our poetry to a subjectivism from which exaggerated fondness for form took emotion, the last quality that remained to it; it reduced our fiction to a copy of the French novel, which obstructed the existence of a dramatic literature, which sterilized our philisophic, historic and critical production. This lack, however, is a consequence of our lack of culture and study, which do not furnish to brains already for several reasons naturally poor the necessary restoratives and tonics. And the worst of it is that, judging from the direction in which we are moving, this very culture, as deficient and incomplete as it is, threatens to be extinguished in a widespread, all-consuming, and, anyway you look at it, coarse preoccupation with politics and finance.”¹¹⁷