Chapter X: Part II: Representative Personalities (1)

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.[1] 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!…[2]

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![3]

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!…[4]

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “It has already been said,” writes Verissimo, “that the Latins have no poetry, but rather eloquence; they confound sentimental emotion, which is the predicate of poetry, with intellectual sensation, which is the attribute of eloquence. There is in the poetry of the so-called Latin peoples more rhetoric than spontaneity, more art than nature, more artifice than simplicity. It is more erudite, more ‘laboured,’ more intellectual, and for that reason less felt, less sincere, less ingenuous than that of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, for example. I do not discuss this notion. We Brazilians, who are scarcely half Latin, are highly sensitive, I know, to poetic rhetoric,--which does not prevent us, however, from being moved by the sentimentalism of poetry--though superficially--when it comes in the simple form of popular lyrism and sings, as that does, with its naïve rhetoric, the sensual passions of our amorous ardor, which is characteristic of hybrids. Examples of this are Casimiro de Abreu, Laurindo Rabello, Varella and Gonçalves Dias himself. When the poets became refined, and wrapped their passion, real or feigned--and in fact rather feigned than real--in the sightly and false externals of the Parnassian rhetoric, bending all their efforts toward meticulous perfection of form, rhyme, metre, sound, they ceased to move the people, or impressed it only by the outer aspect of their perfect poems through the sonority of their verses. For at bottom, what we prefer is form, but form that is rhetorical and eloquent, or what seems to us such,--_palavrão_ (wordiness), emphasis, beautiful images.…”

[2] Christ! In vain you died upon a mountain.… Your blood did not erase the original spot upon my forehead. Even today, through adverse fate, my children are the cattle of the universe, and I--universal pasture. Today America feeds on my blood.--A condor transformed into a vulture, bird of slavery. She has joined the rest … treacherous sister! Like the base brothers of Joseph who in ancient days sold their brother.… Enough, O Lord. With your powerful arm send through the planets and through space pardon for my crimes! For two thousand years I have been wailing a cry.… Hear my call yonder in the infinite, my God, Lord my God!

[3] There exists a people who lends its flag to cover such infamy and cowardice!… And allows it to be transformed, in this feast, into the impure cloak of a heartless bacchante!… My God! my God! but what flag is this that flutters impudently at the masthead? Silence, Muse … weep and weep so much that the banner will be bathed in your tears!… Green-gold banner of my country, kissed and blown by the breezes of Brazil, standard that enfolds in the light of the sun the divine promise of hope.… You who, after the war, was flown by the heroes at the head of their lances, rather had they shattered you in battle than that you should serve as a race’s shroud!… Horrible fatality that overwhelms the mind! Let the path that Columbus opened in the waves like a rainbow in the immense deep, shatter in this hour the polluted ship! This infamy is too much!… From your ethereal realm, O heroes of the New World, arise! Andrade! Tear that banner from the sky! Columbus! shut the fates of your sea!

[4] No matter! Liberty is like the hydra, or like Antheus. If, exhausted, it rolls in the dust, it rises stronger than ever from the earth.… Its bleeding members are terrible, thirsting swords, and from the ashes cast upon the winds a new Gracchus arose!

II

JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS

Had he been born in Europe and written, say, in French, Machado de Assis would perhaps be more than a name today--if he is that--to persons outside of his native country. As it is, he has become, but fourteen years after his death, so much a classic that many of his countrymen who will soon gaze upon his statue will surely have read scarcely a line of his work. He was too human a spirit to be prisoned into a narrow circle of exclusively national interests, whence the cry from some critics that he was not a national creator; on the other hand, his peculiar blend of melancholy charm and bitter-sweet irony have been traced to the mingling of different bloods that makes Brazil so fertile a field for the study of miscegenation. His work, as we all may read it, is, from the testimony of the few who knew him intimately, a perfect mirror of the retiring personality. His life and labours raised the letters of his nation to a new dignity. Monuments to such as he are monuments to the loftier aspirations of those who raise them, for the great need no statues.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 and died there in 1908; he came of poor parents and was early beset with difficulties, yet the very nature of the work he was forced to take up brought him into contact with the persons and the surroundings that were to suggest his real career. As a typesetter he met literature in the raw; at the meetings of literary men and in the book shop of Paulo Brito he began to feel the nature of his true calling. At twenty he commenced to write with the indifference and the prolixity of the ’prentice hand; comedies, tales, translations, poems--all was grist that came to his literary mill. His talent, though evident, was slow to develop; it could be seen that the youth had a gift for understanding the inner workings of the human soul and that by nature he was an ironist, yet his poetry, especially, lacked fire--it came from the head, not the heart. Take the man’s work as a whole, for that matter, and the same observation holds generally true. He is not of the sort that dissolves into ecstasies before a wonderful sunset or rises to the empyrean on the wings of song; for such self-abandonment he is too critical, too self-conscious. In him, then, as a poet we are not to seek for passion; in his tales we must not hunt too eagerly for action; in his novels (let us call them such) we are not to hope for adventure, intrigue, climax. Machado de Assis is, as far as a man may be, sui generis, a literary law unto himself. His best productions, which range over thirty years of mature activity, reveal an eclectic spirit in whom something of classic repose balances his innate pessimism. It has been written of him that he was “a man of half tints, of half words, of half ideas, of half systems.…” Such an estimate, if it be purged of any derogatory insinuations, is, on the whole, just; if Machado de Assis seems to miss real greatness, it is because of something inherently balanced in his make-up; he is never himself carried away, and therefore neither are we. Yet he belongs to a company none too numerous, and when Anatole France, some years ago, presided at a meeting held in France to honour the noted Brazilian, he must have appeared to more than one in the audience as a peculiarly fitting symbol of the spirit that informed the departed man’s work.[1]

Not that Machado de Assis was an Anatole France, as some would insinuate. But he was not unworthy of that master’s companionship; his outlook was more circumscribed than the Frenchman’s, as was his environment; his garden, then, was smaller, but he cultivated it; his glass was little, like that of another famous Frenchman, but he drank out of his own glass.

* * * * *

The poetry of Machado de Assis appears in four collections, all of which go to make up a book of moderate size. And, if the truth is to be told, their worth is about as moderate as their size. If critics have found him, in his verse, very correct and somewhat cold; if they have pointed out that he lacked a vivid imagination, suffered from a limited vocabulary, was indifferent to nature, and thus deficient in description, they have but spoken what is evident from a reading of the lines. This is not to say that a poem here and there has not become part of the national memory--as, for example, the well-known _Circulo Vicioso_ (Vicious Circle) and _Mosca Azul_ (The Blue Fly)--verses of a broadly moralistic significance and of little originality. His _Chrysalides_, the first collection, dates back to 1864; already his muse appears as a lady desirous of tranquillity (and this at the age of twenty-five!) while in the poem _Erro_ he makes the telltale declaration:

Amei-te um dia
Com esse amor passageiro
Que nasce na phantasia
E não chega ao coração.

“I loved you one day with that transient love which is born in the imagination and does not reach the heart.” There you have the type of love that appears in his poetry; and there you have one of the reasons why the man is so much more successful as a psychological ironist in his novels than as a poet. Yet close study would show that at times this tranquillity, far from being always the absence of torment, is the result of neutralizing forces; it is like the revolving disk of primary hues that seems white in the rapidity of its whirling.

These early poems dwell upon such love; upon a desire for justice, as revealed in his _Epitaphio do Mexico_ (Mexico’s Epitaph) and _Polonia_ (Poland); upon an elegiac note that seems statement rather than feeling. “Like a pelican of love,” he writes in one of his poems that recalls the famous image of de Musset, “I will rend my breast and nurture my offspring with my own blood; my offspring: desire, chimera, hope.…” But read through the verses of _Chrysalides_ and it is hard to find where any red blood flows. The vocabulary is small, the phrases are trite; his very muse is named _Musa Consolatrix_, bringing solace rather than agitated emotion.

_Phalenas_ (Moths, 1870) is more varied; the collection shows a sense of humour, a feeling for the exotic, as in the quasi-Chinese poems, which are of a delicate pallor. But there is little new in his admonitions to cull the flower ere it fade, and his love poetry would insult a sensitive maiden with its self-understanding substratum of commentary. His reserve is simply too great to permit outbursts and like the worshipper of whom he speaks in his _Lagrimas de Cera_, he “did not shed a single tear. She had faith, the flame to burn--but what she could not do was weep.”[2] He is altogether too frequently the self-observer rather than the self-giver; nor would this be objectionable, if out of that autoscopy emerged something vital and communicable to the introspective spirit in us all. He can sing of seizing the flower ere it fades away, yet how frequently does he himself seize it? There is humour in the ninety-seven octaves of _Pallida Elvira_,--a queer performance, indeed, in which a thin comic vein blends imperfectly with a trite philosophic plot. Romantic love, the satiety of Hector, the abandonment of Elvira, the world-wanderings of the runaway, his vain pursuit of glory and his return too late, to find a child left by the dead Elvira, the obduracy of grandfather Antero; such is the scheme. Hector, thus cheated, jumps into the sea, which he might well have done before the poem began.

More successful is _Uma Oda de Anacreonte_, a one-act play in verse, in which is portrayed the power of money over the sway of love. Cleon, confiding, amorous youth that he is, is disillusioned by both love (Myrto) and friendship (Lysias). There is a didactic tint to the piece, which is informed with the author’s characteristic irony, cynicism, brooding reflection and resigned acceptation. Of truly dramatic value--and by that phrase I mean not so much the conventional stageworthiness of the drama’s technicians as a captivating reality born of the people themselves--there is very little.

In _Americanas_ (1875) the poet goes to the native scenes and legends for inspiration; _Potyra_--recounting the plight of a Christian captive who, rather than betray her husband by wedding a Tamoyo chief, accepts death at the heathen’s hands--is a cold, objective presentation, unwarmed by figures of speech, not illuminated by any inner light; _Niani_, a Guaycuru legend, is far better stuff, more human, more vivid, in ballad style as opposed to the halting blank verse of the former; for the most part, the collection consists of external narrative--feeling, insight, passion are sacrificed to arid reticence.

Thus _A Christã Nova_ (The Converted Jewess) contains few ideas; neither colour nor passion, vision nor fire, inhere in it. There is a sentimental fondness for the vanquished races--a note so common in the “Indian” age of Brazilian letters, and in analogous writings of the Spanish-Americans, as to have become a convention. The poem tells the story of a converted Jewess who is betrothed to a soldier. She is met by her betrothed after the war, with her father in the toils of the Inquisition. Rather than remain with her lover, she chooses to die with her parent; father and daughter go to their end together. Chiefly dry narrative, and perhaps better than _Potyra_, though that is negative praise. The poem is commendable for but two poetic cases: one, a very successful _terza rima_ version of the song of exile in the Bible, “By the waters of Babylon sat we down and wept …” and the other, a simple simile:

… o pensamento
E como as aves passageiras: voa
A buscar melhor clima.…

… Thought
Is like a bird of passage, ever winging
In quest of fairer climes.…

It is in the _Occidentaes_ of 1900 that we find more of the real Machado de Assis than in the series that preceded it. The ripened man now speaks from a pulsing heart. Not that any of these verses leap into flame, as in the sonorous, incendiary strophes of Bilac, but at least the thoughts live in the words that body them forth and technical skill revels in its power. Here the essence of his attitude toward life appears--that life which, rather than death, is the corroding force, the universal and ubiquitous element. The _Mosca Azul_ is almost an epitome of his outlook, revealing as it does his tender irony, his human pity, his repressed sensuality, his feeling for form, his disillusioned comprehension of illusions. His resigned acceptance of life’s decline is characteristic of the man--part, perhaps, of his balanced outlook. One misses in him the rebel--the note that lends greatness to the hero in his foreordained defeat, raising the drama of surrender to the tragedy of the unconquered victim. But this would be asking him to be some one else--an inartistic request which we must withhold.

I give the _Mosca Azul_ entire, because of its central importance to the poetry of the man, as well as to that more discerning outlook upon life which is to be found in his prose works.

Era uma mosca azul, azas de ouro e granada,
Filha da China ou da Indostão,
Que entre as folhas brotou de uma rosa encarnada
Em certa noite de verão.

E zumbia e voava, e voava, e zumbia,
Refulgindo ao clarão do sol
E da lua,--melhor do que refulgia
Um brilhante do Grão-Mogol.

Um poléa que a viu, espantado e tristonho,
Um poléa lhe perguntou:
“Mosca, esse refulgir, que mais parece um sonho,
Dize, quem foi que t’o ensinou?”

Então ella, voando, e revoando, disse:
“Eu sou a vida, eu sou a flor
Das graças, o padrão da eterna meninice,
E mais a gloria, e mais o amor.”

E elle deixou-se estar a contemplal-a, mudo,
E tranquillo, como un fakir,
Como alguem que ficou deslumbrado de tudo,
Sem comparar, nem reflectir.

Entre as azas do insecto, a voltear no espaço,
Uma cousa lhe pareceu
Que surdia com todo o resplendor de um paço
E viu um rosto, que era o seu.

Era elle, era um rei, o rei de Cachemira,
Que tinha sobre o collo nú,
Um immenso collar de opala, e uma saphyra
Tirado ao corpo de Vischnu.

Cem mulheres em flor, cem nayras superfinas,
Aos pés delle, no liso chão,
Espreguiçam sorrindo as suas graças finas,
E todo o amor que tem lhe dão.

Mudos, graves, de pé, cem ethiopes feios,
Com grandes leques de avestruz,
Refrescam-lhes de manso os aromados seios,
Voluptuosamente nus.

Vinha a gloria depois--quatorze reis vencidos,
E emfim as pareas triumphaes
De tresentas nacões, e os parabens unidos
Das coroas occidentaes.

Mas o melhor de tudo é que no rosto aberto
Das mulheres e dos varões,
Como em agua que deixa o fundo descuberto,
Via limpos os corações.

Então elle, estendo a mão calloso y tosca,
Affeita a só carpintejar,
Com um gesto pegou na fulgurante mosca,
Curioso de examinar.

Quiz vel-a, quiz saber a causa do mysterio.
E fechando-a na mão, sorriu
De contente, ao pensar que alli tinha um imperio,
E para casa se partiu.

Alvoroçado chega, examina, e parece
Que se houve nessa occupação
Mudamente, como um homem que quizesse
Dissecar a sua illusão.

Dissecou-a, a tal ponte, e com tal arte, que ella,
Rota, baca, nojenta, vil,
Succumbiu; e com isto esvaiu-se-lhe aquella
Visão fantastica e subtil.

Hoje, quando elle ahi vae, de áloe e cardamono,
Na cabeça, com ar taful,
Dizem que ensandeceu, e que não sabe como
Perdeu a sua mosca azul.[3]

As one reads this, a fable comes to mind out of childhood days. What is this poem of the fly, but the tale of the man who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, retold in verses admirable for colour, freshness,--for everything, indeed, except originality and feeling? Those critics are right who find in Machado de Assis a certain homiletic preoccupation; but he is never the preacher, and his light is cast not upon narrow dogmas, with which he had nothing to do, but upon the broad ethical implications of every life that seeks to bring something like order into the chaos we call existence,--a thing without rhyme or reason, as he would have agreed, but what would you? Every game has its rules, even the game of hide and seek. And if rules are made to be broken, part of the game is in the making of them.

Companioning the search for roots of illusion is the theme of eternal dissatisfaction. This Machado de Assis has put into one of the most quoted of Brazilian sonnets, which he calls _Circulo Vicioso_ (Vicious Circle):

Bailando no ar, gemia inquieto vagalume:
--“Quem me dera que fosse aquella loura estrella
Que arde no eterno azul, como una eterna vela!”
Mas a estrella, fitando a lua, com ciume:

--“Pudesse eu copiar o transparente lume,
Que, de grega columna á gothica janella,
Contemplou, suspirosa, a fronte amada e bella!”
Mas a lua, fitando o sol, com azedume:

--“Misera! tivesse eu aquelle enorme, aquella
Claridade immortal, que toda a luz resume!”
Mas o sol, inclinando a rutila capella:

--“Pesa-me esta brilhante aureola de nume.…
Enfara-me esta azul e desmedida umbella.…
Porque não nasci eu um simples vagalume?”[4]

Between the loss of illusion and eternal dissatisfaction lies the luring desert of introspection; here men ask questions that send back silence as the wisest answer, or words that are more quiet than silence and about as informing. The poet’s tribute to Arthur de Oliveira is really a description--particularly in the closing lines--of himself. “You will laugh, not with the ancient laughter, long and powerful,--the laughter of an eternal friendly youth, but with another, a bitter laughter, like the laughter of an ailing god, who wearies of divinity and who, too, longs for an end.…” This world-weariness runs all through Machado de Assis; it is one of the mainsprings of his remarkable prose works. It is no vain paradox to say that the real poet Machado de Assis is in his prose, for in his prose alone do the fruits of his imagination come to maturity; only in his better tales and the strange books he called novels does his rare personality reach a rounded fulfilment. Peculiarly enough, the man is in his poetry, the artist in his prose. The one is as revelatory of his ethical outlook as the other of his esthetic intuitions. What he thinks, as distinct from what he feels, is in his verse rather than in his novels or tales.

* * * * *

He was haunted, it seems, by the symbol of a Prometheus wearied of his immortality of anguish,--by the _tedium vitae_. This world-weariness appears in the very reticence of his style. He writes, at times, as if it were one of the vanities of vanities, yet one feels that a certain inner pride lay behind this outer timidity. His method is the most leisurely of indirection,--not the involved indirection of a Conrad, nor the circuitous adumbration of a Hamsun. He has been compared, for his humourism, to the Englishman Sterne, and there is a basis for the comparison if we remove all connotation of ribaldry and retain only the fruitful rambling. Machado de Assis is the essence of charming sobriety, of slily smiling half-speech. He is something like his own Ahasverus in the conte _Viver!_, withdrawn from life not so much because he hated it as because he loved it exceedingly.

In that admirable dialogue, wherein Prometheus appears as a vision before the Wandering Jew, the tedium of existence is compressed into a few brief pages.

We have come to the end of time and Ahasverus, seated upon a rock, gazes for a long while upon the horizon, athwart which wing two eagles, crossing each other in their path. The day is waning.

AHASVERUS

I have come to the end of time; this is the threshold of
eternity. The earth is deserted; no other man breathes the air
of life. I am the last; I can die. Die! Precious thought! For
centuries I have lived, wearied, mortified, wandering ever, but
now the centuries are coming to an end, and I shall die with
them. Ancient nature, farewell! Azure sky, clouds ever reborn,
roses of a day and of every day, perennial waters, hostile
earth that never would devour my bones, farewell! The eternal
wanderer will wander no longer. God may pardon me if He wishes,
but death will console me. That mountain is as unyielding as my
grief; those eagles that fly yonder must be as famished as my
despair.

Whereupon Prometheus appears and the two great symbols of human suffering debate upon the life everlasting. The crime of the Wandering Jew was great, Prometheus admits, but his was a lenient punishment. Other men read but a chapter of life, while Ahasverus read the whole book. “What does one chapter know of the other? Nothing. But he who has read them all, connects them and concludes. Are there melancholy pages? There are merry and happy ones, too. Tragic convulsion precedes that of laughter; life burgeons from death; swans and swallows change climate, without ever abandoning it entirely; and thus all is harmonized and begun anew.” But Ahasverus, continuing the tale of his wanderings, expresses the meaninglessness of immortality:

I left Jerusalem. I began my wandering through the ages. I
journeyed everywhere, whatever the race, the creed, the tongue;
suns and snows, barbarous and civilized peoples, islands,
continents; wherever a man breathed, there breathed I. I never
laboured. Labour is a refuge, and that refuge was denied me.
Every morning I found upon me the necessary money for the
day.… See; this is the last apportionment. Go, for I need you
no longer. (_He draws forth the money and throws it away._) I
did not work; I just journeyed, ever and ever, one day after
another, year after year unendingly, century after century.
Eternal justice knew what it was doing: it added idleness
to eternity. One generation bequeathed me to the other. The
languages, as they died, preserved my name like a fossil. With
the passing of time all was forgotten; the heroes faded into
myths, into shadow, and history crumbled to fragments, only two
or three vague, remote characteristics remaining to it. And I
saw them in changing aspect. You spoke of a chapter? Happy are
those who read only one chapter of life. Those who depart at
the birth of empires bear with them the impression of their
perpetuity; those who die at their fall, are buried in the
hope of their restoration; but do you not realize what it is
to see the same things unceasingly,--the same alternation of
prosperity and desolation, desolation and prosperity, eternal
obsequies and eternal halleluiahs, dawn upon dawn, sunset upon
sunset?

PROMETHEUS

But you did not suffer, I believe. It is something not to
suffer.

AHASVERUS

Yes, but I saw other men suffer, and in the end the spectacle
of joy gave me the same sensations as the discourses of an
idiot. Fatalities of flesh and blood, unending strife,--I saw
all pass before my eyes, until night caused me to lose my taste
for day, and now I cannot distinguish flowers from thistles.
Everything is confused in my weary retina.

As Prometheus is but a vision, he is in reality identical with Ahasverus; and as Ahasverus here speaks, according to our interpretation, for Machado de Assis, so too does Prometheus. Particularly when he utters such sentiments as “The description of life is not worth the sensation of life.” Yet in Machado de Assis, description and sensation are fairly one; like so many ironists, he has a mistrust of feeling. The close of the dialogue is a striking commentary upon the retiring duality of the writer. Ahasverus, in his vision, is loosening the fetters of Prometheus, and the Greek addresses him:

Loosen them, new Hercules, last man of the old world, who shall
be the first of the new. Such is your destiny; neither you nor
I,--nobody can alter it. You go farther than your Moses. From
the top of Mount Nebo, at the point of death, he beheld the
land of Jericho, which was to belong to his descendants and the
Lord said unto him: “Thou hast seen with thine eyes, yet shalt
not pass beyond.” _You_ shall pass beyond, Ahasverus; you shall
dwell in Jericho.

AHASVERUS

Place your hand upon my head; look well at me; fill me with the
reality of your prediction; let me breathe a little of the new,
full life … King, did you say?

PROMETHEUS

The chosen king of a chosen people.

AHASVERUS

It is not too much in recompense for the deep ignominy in which
I have dwelt. Where one life heaped mire, another life will
place a halo. Speak, speak on … speak on … (_He continues to
dream. The two eagles draw near._)

FIRST EAGLE

Ay, ay, ay! Alas for this last man; he is dying, yet he dreams
of life.

SECOND EAGLE

Not so much that he hated it as that he loved it so much.[5]

So much for the weariness of the superhuman,--an attitude matched among us more common mortals by such a delirium as occurs in a famous passage of Machado de Assis’s _Braz Cubas_, one of the mature works of which _Dom Casmurro_ is by many held to be the best. What shall we say of the plots of these novels? In reality, the plots do not exist. They are the slenderest of strings upon which the master stylist hangs the pearls of his wisdom. And such a wisdom! Not the maxims of a Solomon, nor the pompous nothings of the professional moralist. Seeming by-products of the narrative, they form its essence. To read Machado de Assis’s central novels for their tale is the vainest of pursuits. He is not interested in goals; the road is his pleasure, and he pauses wherever he lists, indulging the most whimsical conceits. For this Brazilian is a master of the whimsy that is instinct with a sense of man’s futility.

Here, for example, is almost the whole of Chapter XVII of _Dom Casmurro_. What has it to do with the love story of the hero and Capitú? Nothing. It could be removed, like any number of passages from Machado de Assis’s chief labours, without destroying the mere tale. Yet it is precisely these passages that are the soul of the man’s work.

The chapter is entitled The Worms (_Os Vermes_).

“ … When, later, I came to know that the lance of Achilles also
cured a wound that it inflicted, I conceived certain desires
to write a disquisition upon the subject. I went as far as to
approach old books, dead books, buried books, to open them,
compare them, plumbing the text and the sense, so as to find
the common origin of pagan oracle and Israelite thought. I
seized upon the very worms of the books, that they might tell
me what there was in the texts they gnawed.

“‘My dear sir,’ replied a long, fat bookworm, ‘we know
absolutely nothing about the texts that we gnaw, nor do we
choose what we gnaw, nor do we love or detest what we gnaw; we
simply go on gnawing.’

“And that was all I got out of him. All the others, as if
they had agreed upon it, repeated the same song. Perhaps this
discreet silence upon the texts they gnawed was itself another
manner still of gnawing the gnawed.”

This is more than a commentary upon books; it is, in little, a philosophical attitude toward life, and, so far as one may judge from his works, it was Machado de Assis’s attitude. He was a kindly sceptic; for that matter, look through the history of scepticism, and see whether, as a lot, the sceptics are not much more kindly than their supposedly sweeter-tempered brothers who dwell in the everlasting grace of life’s certainties.

Machado de Assis was not too hopeful of human nature. One of his most noted tales, _O Infermeiro_ (The Nurse or Attendant) is a miniature masterpiece of irony in which man’s self-deception in the face of his own advantages is brought out with that charm-in-power which is not the least of the Brazilian’s qualities.

A man has hired out as nurse to a testy old invalid, who has changed one after the other all the attendants he has engaged. The nurse seems more fortunate than the rest, though matters rapidly approach a climax, until “on the evening of the 24th of August the colonel had a violent attack of anger; he struck me, he called me the vilest names, he threatened to shoot me; finally he threw in my face a plate of porridge that was too cold for him. The plate struck the wall and broke into a thousand fragments.

“‘You’ll pay me for it, you thief!’ he bellowed.

“For a long time he grumbled. Towards eleven o’clock he gradually fell asleep. While he slept I took a book out of my pocket, a translation of an old d’Alancourt novel which I had found lying about, and began to read it in his room, at a small distance from his bed. I was to wake him at midnight to give him his medicine; but, whether it was due to fatigue or to the influence of the book, I, too, before reaching the second page, fell asleep. The cries of the colonel awoke me with a start; in an instant I was up. He, apparently in a delirium, continued to utter the same cries; finally he seized his water-bottle and threw it at my face. I could not get out of the way in time; the bottle hit me in the left cheek, and the pain was so acute that I almost lost consciousness. With a leap I rushed upon the invalid; I tightened my hands around his neck; he struggled several moments; I strangled him.

“When I beheld that he no longer breathed, I stepped back in terror. I cried out; but nobody heard me. Then, approaching the bed once more, I shook him so as to bring him back to life. It was too late; the aneurism had burst, and the colonel was dead. I went into the adjoining room, and for two hours I did not dare to return. It is impossible for me to express all that I felt during that time. It was intense stupefaction, a kind of vague and vacant delirium. It seemed to me that I saw faces grinning on the walls; I heard muffled voices. The cries of the victim, the cries uttered before the struggle and during its wild moments continued to reverberate within me, and the air, in whatever direction I turned, seemed to shake with convulsions. Do not imagine that I am inventing pictures or aiming at verbal style. I swear to you that I heard distinctly voices that were crying at me: ‘Murderer; Murderer!’”

By one of the many ironies of fate, however, the testy colonel has left the attendant sole heir to his possessions; for the invalid has felt genuine appreciation, despite the anger to which he was subject. Note the effect upon the attendant, whose conscience at first has troubled him acutely:

“Thus, by a strange irony of fate, all the colonel’s wealth
came into my hands. At first I thought of refusing the legacy.
It seemed odious to take a sou of that inheritance; it seemed
worse than the reward of a hired assassin. For three days this
thought obsessed me; but more and more I was thrust against
this consideration: that my refusal would not fail to awake
suspicion. Finally I settled upon a compromise; I would accept
the inheritance and would distribute it in small sums, secretly.

“This was not merely scruple on my part, it was also the desire
to redeem my crime by virtuous deeds; and it seemed the only
way to recover my peace of mind and feel that the accounts were
straight.”

But possession is sweet, and before long the attendant changes his mind.

“Several months had elapsed, and the idea of distributing the
inheritance in charity and pious donations was by no means
so strong as it first had been; it even seemed to me that
this would be sheer affectation. I revised my initial plan; I
gave away several insignificant sums to the poor; I presented
the village church with a few new ornaments; I gave several
thousand francs to the Sacred House of Mercy, etc. I did not
forget to erect a monument upon the colonel’s grave--a very
simple monument, all marble, the work of a Neapolitan sculptor
who remained at Rio until 1866, and who has since died, I
believe, in Paraguay.