Chapter XII: Part II: Representative Personalities (3)

“Art,” he said, “is the dome that crowns the edifice of civilization: and only that people can have an art which is already a people,--which has already emerged triumphant from all the tests through which the character of nationalities is purified and defined.…” Here again, his practice excels his theory. There is in him little Brazilianism, and even when he uses the native suggestion, as in his brilliant _O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ (The Emerald-Hunter, an epic episode of the seventeenth-century sertão) he is, as every poet should be, first of all himself. “Perhaps in the year 2500 there will exist diverse literatures in the vast territory now comprising Brazil,” he prophesied, in disapproval of that sectionalism in letters which several times has tried to make a definite breach in the national literature. But is not all literature psychologically sectional? If the ambient is not filtered through the personality of the individual, is the product worth much more as art than a county report? In our own country, of late, there has been much futile talk of Chicago literature and New York literature, and other such really political chat. “Isms” within “isms,” which make good “copy” for the newspapers and magazines, and which, no doubt, may have a certain sociological significance. But when you or I pick up a book or a poem, what care we, after all, for the land of its origin or even the life of its author, except as both are revealed in the work? Was not one of Bilac’s own final admonitions to his nation’s youth to “Love your art above all things and have the courage, which I lacked, to die of hunger rather than prostitute your talent?” And “above all things” means above the unessential intrusion of petty sectionalism, partisan aim, political purpose, moral exhortation, national pride. I have no quarrel, then, with Bilac’s hopes for a national literature, with his aspirations for our common humanity. But I am happy that he was content to leave that part of him for public life rather than contriving to press it willy-nilly into the service of his only half Parnassian muse.

Bilac was, on the whole, less a Parnassian than was Francisca Julia. She transmuted her passion into cold, yet appealing, symbols; Machado de Assis’s feelings do not quite fill his glass to the brim; Olavo Bilac’s passion overflows the banks of his verse. Yet he remained as true as so warm a nature as his could be to the vows of his _Profissão de Fe_, with its numerous exclamation points that stand as visible refutation of his avowed formalism. The very epigraph of the poem--and the poem itself stands as epigraph to the collection that follows--is taken from none other than that ardent soul, Victor Hugo, with whom at first the very opponents of the Romantic movement tried to maintain relations. So true is it that we retain a little of all things that we reject.

Le poète est ciseleur,
Le ciseleur est poète.

Bilac’s would-be Parnassian _Profession of Faith_, beginning thus inconsistently with a citation from the chief of the Romantics (a citation, it may be added, that is not all consistent with Hugo’s own characteristic labours) is the herald of his own humanness. Let us now leave the “isms” to those who love them, and seek in Bilac the distinctive personality. His _Profissão de Fe_ is a bit dandified, snobbish, aloof, with a suggestion of a refined sensuality that is fully borne in his work.

Não quero a Zeus Capitolino,
Herculeo e bello,
Talhar no marmore divino
Com o camartello.

Que outro--não eu!--a pedra córte
Para, brutal,
Erguer de Athene o altivo porte
Descommunal.

Mais que esse vulto extraordinario,
Que assombra a vista,
Seduz-me um leve relicario
De fine artista.

…

Assim procedo. Minha penna,
Segue esta norma,
Por te servir, Deusa serena,
Serena Fórma!

…

Vive! que eu viverei servindo
Teu culto, e, obscuro,
Tuas custodias esculpindo
No ouro mais puro.

Celebrarei o teu officio
No altar: porem,
Se inda é pequeno o sacrificio,
Morra eu tambem!

Caia eu tembem, sem esperanca,
Porém tranquilo,
Inda, ao cahir, vibrando a lança,
Em prol de Estylo![1]

The _Poesias_[2] upon which Bilac’s fame rests constitute but a book of average size, and consist of the following divisions: _Panoplias_ (Panoplies); _Via Lactea_ (The Milky Way); _Sarças de Fogo_ (Fire-Brambles); _Alma Inquieta_ (Restless Soul); _As Viagens_ (Voyages); _O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ (The Emerald-Hunter).

The inspiration of the panoplies derives as much from the past as from the present; there is verbal coruscation aplenty,--an admirable sense of colour, imagery, fertility, symbol. Even when reading the Iliad, Bilac sees in it chiefly a poem of love:

Mais que as armas, porém, mais que a batalha,
Mais que os incendios, brilha o amor que ateia
O odio e entre os povos a discordia espalha:

Esse amor que ora activa, ora asserena
A guerra, e o heroico Paris encadeia
Aos curvos seios da formosa Helena.[3]

In _Delenda Carthago_ there is the clash of rutilant arms and the sense of war’s and glory’s vanity; this is the typical motif of the voluptuary, whether of love or of battle. It is not, however, the sorrowful conclusion of the philosopher facing the inevitable,--“the path of glory leads but to the grave.” Rather is it the weariness of the prodded senses. Scipio, victorious, grows mute and sad, and the tears run down his cheeks.

For, beholding in rapid descent,
Rolling into the abyss of oblivion and annihilation,
Men and traditions, reverses and victories,
Battles and trophies, six centuries of glory
In a fistful of ashes,--the general foresaw
That Rome, the powerful, the unvanquished, so strong in arms,
Would go perforce the selfsame way as Carthage.…
Nearby, the vague and noisy crackling
Of the conflagration, that still roared furiously on,
Rose like the sound of convulsive weeping.

It is perhaps in _Via Lactea_ that the book--and Bilac’s art--reaches its apex. This is a veritable miniature milky way of sonnet gems; all claims to objectivity and impersonality have been forgotten in the man’s restrained, but by no means repressed passion. His love is not the ivory-tower vapouring of the youthful would-be Maeterlinckian that infests verse in Spanish and Portuguese America; it is of the earth, earthy. When he writes of his love he mingles with the idea the thought of country, and when he writes of his country it is often in terms of carnal passion. Verissimo has noted the same phenomenon in some of the poets that preceded Bilac and, of course, it is to be verified repeatedly in the singers of every land; indeed, is not Liberty always a woman, as our national coinage proves for the millionth time, and when soldiers are urged to fight and die _pro patria_, is it not a beautiful lady that hovers over the fields and trenches? In these sonnets he becomes the poet-chiseller of Hugo’s distich; into a form that would seem to have lost all adaptability to new manipulation he manages to pour something new, something his own. There is, in his very attitude, a preoccupation with form for its own sake that enables him to employ the sonnet without loss of effect. His devotion to the cameo-like structure is not absolute, however. In none of these poems does one feel that he has cramped his feelings in order to mortise quatrain into tercet. When, as in _A Alvorada de Amor_, he feels the need of greater room, he takes it.

He is the lover weeping over gladness:

Quem ama inventa as penas em que vive:
E, em lugar de acalmar as penas, antes
Busca novo pezar com que as avive.

Pois sabei que é por isso que assim ando:
Que e dos loucos sómente e dos amantes
Na maior alegria andar chorando.[4]

He is ill content to feed upon poetic imaginings of kiss and embrace, or to dream of heavenly beatitudes instead of earthly love:

XXX

Ao coração que soffre, separado
Do teu, no exilio em que a chorar me vejo,
Não basta o affecto simples e sagrado
Com que das desventuras me protejo.

Não me basta saber que sou amado,
Nem só desejo o teu amor: desejo
Ter nos braços teu corpo delicado,
Ter na bocca a doçura do teu beijo.

E as justas ambiçoes que me consomem
Não me envergonham: pois maior baixeza
Não ha que a terra pelo céo trocar;

E mais eleva o coração de um homem
Ser de homem sempre e, na maior pureza,
Ficar na terra e humanamente amar.[5]

So runs the song in his more reflective mood, which is half objection and half meditation. There are other moments, however, in _Alma Inquieta_ when a similar passion bursts out beyond control and when, in his pride of virility, he rejects Paradise and rises superior to the Lord Himself.

The sonnet that follows this in _Via Lactea_ is notable for its intermingling of love, country and _saudade_:

XXXI

Longe de ti, se escuto, porventura,
Teu nome, que uma bocca indifferente
Entre outros nomes de mulher murmura,
Sobe-me o pranto aos olhos, de repente.…

Tal aquelle, que, misero, a tortura
Soffre de amargo exilio, e tristemente
A linguagem natal, maviosa e pura,
Ouve falada por estranha gente.…

Porque teu nome é para mim o nome
De uma patria distante e idolatrada,
Cuja saudade ardente me consome:
E ouvil-o é ver a eterna primavera
E a eterna luz da terra abençoada,
Onde, entre flores, teu amor me espera.[6]

_Sarças de Fogo_, as its name would imply, abandons the restraint of _Via Lactea_. In _O Julgamento de Phryné_ beauty becomes not only its own excuse for being, but the excuse for wrong as well. Phryne’s judges, confronted with her unveiled beauty, tremble like lions before the calm gaze of their tamer, and she appears before the multitude “in the immortal triumph of Flesh and Beauty.” In _Santania_ a maiden’s desires rise powerfully to the surface only to take flight in fright at their own daring. _No Limiar de Morte_ (On The Threshold of Death) is the voluptuary’s _memento mori_ after his _carpe diem_. There is a touch of irony borrowed from Machado de Assis in the closing tercets:

You, who loved and suffered, now turn your steps
Toward me. O, weeping soul,
You leave behind the hate of the worldly hell.…

Come! for at last you shall enjoy within my arms
All the wantonness, all the fascinations,
All the delights of eternal rest!

This is impressed in far superior fashion by one of the best sonnets Bilac ever wrote: _Sahara Vitae_. Here, in the image of life’s desert, he conveys a haunting sense of helpless futility such as one gets only rarely, from such sonnets, say, as the great Shelleyan one, _Ozymandias of Egypt_.

Lá vão! O céo se arqueia
Como um tecto de bronze infindo e quente,
E o sol fuzila e, fuzilando, ardente
Criva de flechas de aço o mar de areia.…

Lá vão, com os olhos onde a sêde ateia
Um fogo estranho, procurando em frente
Esse oasis do amor que, claramente,
Além, bello e falaz, se delineia.

Mas o simun da morte sopra: a tromba
Convulsa envolve-os, prostra-os; e aplacada
Sobre si mesma roda e exhausta tomba.…

E o sol de novo no igneo céo fuzila.…
E sobre a geração exterminada
A areia dorme placida e tranquila.[7]

For the clearness of its imagery, for the perfect progress of a symbol that is part and parcel of the poetry, this might have come out of Dante. It is not often that fourteen lines contain so complete, so devastating a commentary. Side by side with _Beijo Eterno_ (Eternal Kiss) it occurs in the _Poesias_, as if to reveal its relation as reverse to the obverse of the poet’s voluptuousness. _Beijo Eterno_, like _A Alvorada de Amor_, is one of the central poems of Olavo Bilac. It is the linked sweetness of Catullus long drawn out. It is the sensuous ardour of the poet inundating all time and all space, while _Sahara Vitae_ is the languor that follows upon the fulfilment of ardour. They are both as much a part of the poet as the two sides are part of the coin. The first and last of the ten stanzas of _Beijo Eterno_ epitomize the Dionysiac outburst; they are alike:

Quero um beijo sem fim,
Que dure a vida enteira e aplaque a meu desejo!
Ferve-me o sangue. Acalma-o com teu beijo,
Beija-me assim!
O ouvido fecha ao rumor
Do mundo, e beija-me querida!
Vive so para mim, só para a minha vida,
Só para o meu amor![8]

In less amorous mood he can sing a serenade--_A Canção de Romeu_--(Romeo’s Song) to which any Juliet might well open her window:

As estrellas surgiram
Todas: e o limpio veo
Como lirios alvissimos, cobriram
Do ceo.
De todas a mais bella
Não veio ainda, porem:
Falta uma estrella.… És tu!… Abre a janella,
E vem![9]

And if, in the closing piece of this section--_A Tentação de Xenocrates_--(The Temptation of Xenocrates) the courtesan’s charms seem more convincing than the resistance of the victorious philosopher, it must be because Bilac himself subtly sided with the temptress, and spoke with her when she protested that she had vowed to tame a man, not a stone. If, in the manner of the Freudians, we are to look upon the poem as a wish that the poet could on occasion show such scorn of feminine blandishments, it is doubly interesting to note that, though the moral victory lies with Xenocrates, the poet has willy-nilly made the courtesan’s case the more sympathetic. What, indeed, are the fruits of a philosophy that denies the embraces of a Laïs?

Just as Olavo Bilac’s voluptuousness brings to him inevitably thoughts of death, so does his cult of form lead him at times to a sense of the essential uselessness of all words and all forms. He has expressed this nowhere so well as in the sonnet _Inania Verba_ from the section _Alma Inquieta_:

Ah! Quem ha-de exprimir, alma impotente e escrava,
O que a bocca não diz, o que a mão não escreve?
--Ardes, sangras, pregada á tua cruz, e, em breve,
Olhas, desfeito em lodo, o que te deslumbrava.…
O Pensameto erve, e é um turbilhão de lava:
A Fórma, fria e espessa, é um sepulcro de neve.…
E a Palavra pesada abafa a Idéa leve,
Que, perfume e clarão, refulgia e voava.

Quem o molde achara para a expressão de tudo?
Ai! quem ha-de dezir as ansias infinitas
Do sonho? e o céo que foge a mão que se levanta?

E a ira muda? e o asco mudo? e o desespero mudo?
E as palavras de fé que nunca foram ditas?
E as confissões de amor que morrem na garganta?[10]

Alma Inquieta reaches its climax with _A Alvorada de Amor_ (The Dawn of Love). It is important enough to be quoted in full, as one of the sincerest and most passionate outbursts of the Brazilian muse, in which Olavo Bilac’s countrymen find mirrored that sensual part of themselves which is the product of climate, racial blend and the Adam and Eve in all of us.

Um horror grande e mudo, um silencio profundo
No dia do Peccado amortalhava o mundo.
E Adão, vendo fechar-se a porta do Eden, vendo
Que Eva olhava o deserto e hesitava tremendo,
Disse:
Chega-te a mim! entra no meu amor,
E á minha carne entrega a tua carne em flor!
Preme contra o meu peito o teu seio agitado,
E aprende a amar o Amor, renovando o peccado!
Abençóo o teu crime, acolho o teu desgosto,
Bebo-te, de uma em uma, as lagrimas do rosto!

Ve! tudo nos repelle! a toda a creação
Sacóde o mesmo horror e a mesma indignação.…
A colera de Deus torce as arvores, cresta
Como um tufão de fogo o seio de floresta,
Abre a terra em vulcões, encrespa a agua do rios;
As estrellas estão cheias de calefrios;
Ruge soturno a mar; turva-se hediondo o céo.…

Vamos! que importa Deus? Desate, como um véo,
Sobre a tua nudez a cabelleira! Vamos!
Arda em chammas o chão; rasguem-te a pelle os ramos;
Morda-te o corpo o sol; inuriem-te os ninhos;
Surjam féras a uivar de todos os caminhos;
E vendo-te a sangrar das urzes atravez,
Se enmaranhem no chão as serpes aos teus pés.…
Que importa? o Amor, botáo apenas entreaberto
Ilumina o degredo e perfume o deserto!
Amo-te! sou feliz! porque do Eden perdido,
Levo tudo, levando o teu corpo querido!

Póde, em redor de ti, tudo se anniquilar:
Tudo renascerá cantando ao teu olhar,
Tudo, mares e céos, arvores e montanhas,
Porque a Vida perpetuo arde em tuas entranhas!
Rosas te brotarão da bocca se cantares!
Rios te correrão dos olhos, se chorares!
E se, em torno ao teu corpo encantador e nú,
Tudo morrer, que importa? A Natureza és tu,
Agora que és mulher, agora que peccaste!
Ah! bemdito o momento em que me revelaste
O amor com o teu peccado, e a vida com a teu crime!
Porque, livre de Deus, redimido e sublime,
Homem fico na terra, á luz dos olhos teus,
--Terra, melhor que o Céo! homem, maior que Deus![11]

So, in _Peccador_ (Sinner) he presents the figure of a proud, unrepentant sinner--it might be the amorous Don Juan himself,--who “accepts the enormousness of the punishment with the same countenance that he wore when formerly he accepted the delight of transgression!” He is no less sincere, doubtless, when in _Ultima Pagina_ (Final Page) he exclaims

Carne, que queres mais? Coração, que mais queres?
Passam as estações, e passam as mulheres.…
E eu tenho amado tanto! e não conheço o Amor!

Flesh, what would you more? What would you more, my heart?
The seasons pass and women, too, pass with them.…
And I have loved so much, yet know not what is Love!

_Tedio_ (Ennui) is the voluptuousness of Nirvana after the voluptuousness of Dionysus; like all sinners, he comes for rest to a church. “Oh, to cease dreaming of what I cannot behold! To have my blood freeze and my flesh turn cold! And, veiled in a crepuscular glow, let my soul sleep without a desire,--ample, funereal, lugubrious, empty as an abandoned cathedral!…”

The section _As Viagens_ (Voyages) consists chiefly of twelve admirable sonnets--a form in which Bilac’s blending of intense feeling with artistic restraint seems as much at home as any modern poet--ranging from the first migration, through the Phoenicians, the Jews, Alexander, Cæsar, the Barbarians, the Crusades, the Indies, Brazil, the precursor of the airplane in Toledo, the Pole, to Death, which is the end of all voyages. At the risk of overemphasizing a point that has already been made, I would quote the sonnet on Brazil:

Pára! Uma terra nova ao teu olhar fulgura!
Detem-te! Aqui, de encontro a verdejantes plagas,
Em caricias se muda a inclemencia das vagas.…
Este é o reino da Luz, do Amor e da Fartura!
Treme-te a voz affeita ás blasphemias e as pragas,
Ó nauta! Olha-a, de pé, virgem morena e pura,
Que aos teus beijos entrega, em plena formosura,
--Os dous seios que, ardendo em desejos, afagas.…

Beija-a! O sol tropical deu-lhe a pelle dorada
O barulho do ninho, o perfume da rosa,
A frescura do rio, o esplendor da alvorada.…

Beija-a! é a mais bella flor da Natureza inteira!
E farta-te de amor nesse carne cheirosa,
Ó desvirginador da Terra Brasileira![12]

What is this, indeed? Part of some ardent Song of Songs? Note how the imagery is exclusively that of burning passion. Brazil becomes a fascinating virgin who falls to the fortunate discoverer. In that sonnet, I should say, is concealed about one half the psychology of the narrower patriotism.

_O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ is a splendid episode in four parts, containing some forty-six sextets in all, filled with movement, colour, pervading symbolism and a certain patriotic pantheism. More than a mere search for emeralds the poem recounts the good that man may work even in the vile pursuit of precious stones,--the vanity of all material quest. For sheer artistry it ranks with Bilac’s most successful accomplishments.

* * * * *

“His inspiration,” wrote Verissimo, considering the verse of Bilac, “is limited to a few poetic themes, all treated with a virtuosity perhaps unparalleled amongst us … but without an intensity of feeling corresponding to the brilliancy of the form, which always is more important in him. This is the characteristic defect of the Parnassian esthetics, of which Sr. Bilac is our most illustrious follower, and to which his poetic genius adjusted itself perfectly and intimately.” I believe that Verissimo was slightly misled by Bilac’s versified professions. There is no doubt that Bilac’s temperament, as I have tried to show, was eminently suited to some such orientation as was sought by those Parnassians who understood what they were about; there is as little doubt, in my mind, that his feeling was intense, though not deep. He may have spoken of the crystalline strophe and the etcher’s needle--which, indeed, he often employed with the utmost skill,--but there were moments when nothing but huge marbles and the sculptor’s chisel would do. It was with such material that he carved _A Alvorada de Amor_. “If Sr. Machado de Assis was,” continues Verissimo, “more than twenty years previous to Bilac, our first artist-poet,--if other contemporaries or immediate predecessors of Bilac also practised the Parnassian esthetics, none did it with such manifest purpose, and, above all with such triumphant skill.…”

I am not sure whether Verissimo is right in having asked of Bilac a more contemporary concern with the currents of poetry. The critic grants that Bilac is perhaps the most brilliant poet ever produced by his nation, “but other virtues are lacking in him without which there can be no truly great poet. I do not know but that I am right in supposing that, conscious of his excellence, he remained a stranger to the social, philosophical and esthetic movement that is today everywhere renewing the sources of poetry. And it is a great pity; for he was amongst us perhaps one of the most capable of bringing to our anaemic poetry the new blood which, with more presumption than talent, some poets--or persons who think themselves such--are trying to inject, without any of the gifts that abound in him.”

Bilac, as we have seen, did, toward the end of his life, become a more social spirit. But this was not necessary to his pre-eminence as a poet. He was, superbly, himself. Rather that he should have given us so freely of the voluptuary that was in him--voluptuary of feeling, of charm, of form, of language, of taste--than that, in a mistaken attempt to be a “complete” man, he should sprawl over the varied currents of the day and hour. For it is far more certain that each current will find its masterly spokesman in art, than that each artist will become a masterly spokesman for all of the currents.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have no wish to chisel the Capitoline Zeus, Herculean and beautiful, in divine marble. Let another--not I!--cut the stone to rear, in brutal proportions, the proud figure of Athene. More than by this extraordinary size that astounds the sight I am fascinated by the fragile reliquary of a delicate artist. Such is my procedure. My pen, follow that standard. To serve thee, serene Goddess, serene Form! Live! For I shall live in the service of thy cult, obscurely sculpturing thy vessels in the purest of gold. I will celebrate thine office upon the altar; more, if the sacrifice be too small, I myself will die. Let me, too, fall, hopeless, yet tranquil. And even as I fall, I’ll raise my lance in the cause of Style!

[2] Published originally in 1888, and ending, in its first form, with _Sarças de Fogo_.

[3] More than arms, however, more than battle, more than conflagrations, it is love that shines here, kindling hatred between peoples and scattering discord. That love which now incites, now abates war, and chains the heroic Paris to the curved breasts of Helen the beautiful.

[4] He who loves invents the pangs in which he lives; and instead of soothing these griefs, he seeks a new care with which he but rekindles them. Know, then, that this is the reason why I go about so. Only madmen and lovers weep in their greatest joy.

[5] For the heart that suffers, severed from you, in this exile that I weep, the simple and sacred affection with which I shield myself against all misfortunes is not enough. It is not enough to know that I am loved; I would have your delicate body in my arms, taste in my mouth the sweetness of your kiss. Nor am I shamed by the just ambitions that consume me. For there is no greater baseness than to change the earth for the sky. It more exalts the heart of a man to be a man ever, and, in the greatest purity, remain on earth and love like a human being.

[6] Far from you, if peradventure I hear your name, murmured by an indifferent mouth amidst other women’s names, the tears come suddenly to my eyes.… Such is he who suffers in bitter exile and sadly, hears his native tongue, so pure and beautiful, spoken by foreign lips.… For your name is to me the name of a distant, worshipped fatherland, the longing for which consumes me. And to hear it is to behold eternal springtime, and the everlasting light of the blessed land, where, amidst flowers, your love awaits me.

An excellent example of a similar identification of sweetheart and fatherland occurs in the sonnet _Desterro_ (Exile), in the section _Alma Inquieta_, in which his beloved is called “patria do meu desejo” (land of my desire).

[7] There they go! The sky arches over like an endless burning roof of bronze, and the sun shoots, and shooting, riddles with arrows of steel the sea of sand. There they go, with eyes in which thirst has kindled a strange fire, gazing ahead to that oasis of love which yonder, clearly rises in its deluding beauty. But now blows the simoon of death: the shattering whirlwind envelops them, prostrates them; sated, it rolls upon itself and falls in exhaustion.… And once again the sun shoots in the fiery sky.… And over the exterminated generation the sand sleeps its peaceful, tranquil sleep.

[8] I want an endless kiss, that shall last an entire life and sate my desire! My blood seethes. Slake it with your kiss, kiss me so! Close your ears to the sound of the world, and kiss me, beloved! Live for me alone, for my life only, only for my love!

[9] The stars have all come out, and have broidered the pure veil of heaven with the whitest of lilies. But the most beautiful of all I do not yet see. One star is missing. It is you!… Open your window and come!

[10] Ah, who can express, enslaved and impotent soul, what the lips do not speak, what the hand cannot write. Clasping your cross, you burn, you bleed, only soon to behold in the mire that which had dazzled you.… Thought seethes; it is a whirlwind of lava: Form, cold and compact, is a sepulchre of snow.… And the heavy word stifles the fragile Idea which, like perfume and light, flew glittering about. Who can find the mould in which to cast expression? Ah! who can speak the infinite anxieties of our dreams? The heavens that flee from the hand that is raised? And mute ire? And this wretched world? And voiceless despair? And the words of faith that were never spoken? And the confessions of love that die in one’s throat?

[11] A vast, mute horror, a deep silence shrouded the world upon the day of Sin. And Adam, beholding the gates of Eden close, seeing Eve gaze in hesitant trembling at the desert, said: “Come to me! Enter into my love, and surrender to my flesh your own fair flesh! Press your agitated breast against my bosom and learn to love Love, renewing sin. I bless your crime, I welcome your misfortune, I drink, one by one, the tears from your cheeks! Behold! Everything rejects us! All creation is shaken by the same horror and the same indignation.… The rage of the Lord twists the trees, ravages the heart of the forest like a hurricane of flame, splits the earth into volcanoes, curls the water of the rivers; the stars are aquiver with shudders; the sea mutters with fury; the sky is dark with anger.… Let us go! What matters God? Loosen like a veil your tresses over your nakedness! Let us be gone! Let the earth burn in flames; let the branches rend your skin; let the sun bite your body; let the nests harm you; let wild beasts rise on all the roads to howl at you; and seeing you bleed through the brambles, let the serpents entangle themselves upon the ground at your feet.… What matters it? Let love, but a half-open bud, illumine our banishment and perfume the desert! I love you! I am happy! For from the lost Eden I bear everything, having your beloved body! Let everything crumble to ruin about you; it will all rise new born before your eyes,--all, seas and skies, trees and mountains, for perpetual life burns in your bowels! Roses will burgeon from your mouth if you sing! Rivers will flow from your eyes, if you weep! And if, about your enchanting, nude body, all should die, what matters it then? You are Nature, now that you are woman, now that you have sinned! Ah, blessed the moment in which you revealed to me love with your sin and life with your crime! For, free from God, redeemed and sublime, I remain a man upon earth, in the light of your eyes,--Earth, better than Heaven! Man, greater than God!”

[12] Hold! A new land shines before your eyes! Stop! Here, before the green shores, the waves’ inclemency turns to caresses.… This is the kingdom of Light, of Love and Satiety! Oh, mariner! Let your voice, accustomed to blasphemies and curses, tremble! Gaze at her standing there, a dark, pure virgin who surrenders to your kisses, in the fulness of her beauty, her two breasts which, burning with desire, you soothe.… Kiss her! The tropical sun gave her that gilded skin, the nest’s content, the rose’s perfume, the coolness of the river, the splendour of dawn.… Kiss her! She is the fairest of all Nature’s flowers! Sate yourself with love in this fragrant flesh, oh first lover of the Brazilian Land!

V

EUCLYDES DA CUNHA

_Os Sertões_, which first appeared in 1902--a happy year for Brazilian letters, since it witnessed the publication of Graça Aranha’s _Chanaan_ as well--is one of the outstanding works of modern Portuguese literature. At once it gave to its ill-fated author a fame to which he never aspired. His name passed from tongue to tongue, like that of some new Columbus who with his investigation of the sertão had discovered Brazil to the Brazilians. His labour quickened interest in the interior, revealed a new source of legitimate national inspiration and presented to countrymen a strange work,--disturbing, illuminating, disordered, almost a fictional forest, written in nervous, heavily-freighted prose. Yet this is harsh truth itself, stranger than the fiction of Coelho Netto, wilder than the poetry of Graça Aranha, though instinct with the imagination of the one and the beauty of the other. The highly original work struck a deep echo in English letters and if Englishmen have neglected to read Richard Cunninghame-Graham’s remarkable book called _A Brazilian Mystic: The Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro_--a book that would never have been written had not Euclydes da Cunha toiled away in obscurity to produce _Os Sertões_--it is their loss rather than their fault. It is a hurried and a harried world. Who, today, has time for such beauty of thought and phrase as Richard the wandering Scots sets down almost carelessly in his books and then sends forth from the press with mildly mocking humour for his prospective, but none too surely anticipated readers? Yet it is not the least of Euclydes da Cunha’s glories that he was the prime cause of Mr. Cunninghame-Graham’s _A Brazilian Mystic_. Not a fault of English readers, surely; but none the less their loss.

* * * * *

The author of _Os Sertões_ was born on January 20, 1866, in Santa Rita do Rio Negro, municipality of Cantagallo. Losing his mother when he was three years old, he went first to Theresopolis to an aunt, and thence, after two years, to São Fidelis to another aunt, with whom he remained until his first studies were completed. His father retiring to Rio de Janeiro in 1876, Euclydes was transported to the capital, where he attended in due course the _collegios_ called Victorio da Costa, Anglo-Brasileiro and Aquino. Naturally, he went through his baptism of verse, preparing a collection called _Ondas_ (Waves); since every Brazilian early suffers an attack of this literary measles--it would be almost impolite not to indite one’s obligatory number of sonnets--the notice is without any importance to a man’s later career. It was at the Escola Militar da Praia Vermelha, which he entered at the age of twenty, that he laid the foundations of his scientific studies, and it is the scientist in Euclydes da Cunha that solidifies _Os Sertões_.

The man--as his mature prose testifies--was of nervous temperament, and was led into one political scrape after another. At the very beginning of his career, carried away by the propaganda of Benjamin Constant, he committed an act of indiscipline against the Minister of War which has become famous in the annals of Brazilian politics, having required the benevolent intervention of the Emperor.

His journalistic labours began in 1888; the following year found him at the Escola Polytechnica of Rio de Janeiro, finishing his course as an engineer, but the proclamation of the Republic interrupted his studies and he returned to the army.

The material for his famous book was gathered while in the service of the important newspaper _Estado de São Paulo_, for which he went into the wilds to report the government campaign against the fractious inhabitants of the sertão.

The campaign, as taught in the Brazilian schools, marked another stage in the establishment, the consolidation, of the Brazilian republic. It took place during the presidency of Prudente de Moraes (1894-1898) and brought within the folds of the new régime the rebellious sertanejos, who had rallied round the leadership of Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel. Maciel was born circa 1835 in Ceará and had, since 1864, attracted attention because of his strange religious notions, his queer garb, his legendary personality. Accused of crime, he was vindicated and went off toward the interior of Bahia, wandering in every direction over the sertões and reaching, at last, a tiny hamlet of Itapicuru, which he christened with the name Bom Jesus (Good Jesus) on November 10, 1886. The Archbishop of Bahia objecting, Maciel was ousted in 1887 as a preacher of subversive doctrines. His followers accompanied him, however, to Canudos, an old cattle ranch which, in 1890 was an abandoned site with some fifty ramshackle ruins of cottages. Thither came flocking an army of devotees and riff-raff, so that, when Maciel resisted the government that was intent upon collecting its taxes, he had a respectable number to heed his cry of insurrection.

At first the new republic tried religious methods, sending a Capuchin friar to win over the rebels to the Church and the Law. The monk despaired. Then followed four expeditions against the mystical Antonio; the first in November of 1896, the second during December-January of 1896-1897, the third during February and March of 1897, the last from April to October of the same year. “The sad chronicle of the tragedy of Canudos, the most important civil war in the history of the country,” concludes one popular text-book account,[1] “indicated the immediate necessity of the unification of the country.… It revealed, furthermore, the great resources of strength and virility among the sertanejos, who, though conservative and little disposed to lend themselves easily to novelty, possess none the less qualities important to the development of the country, once they are in fact bound to the national life.”

Euclydes da Cunha’s revelatory book opened the doors of the Brazilian Academy of Letters to him in 1903. He produced other books, one on the eternal question of Peru versus Bolivia, in which he sides with Bolivia; he became known for his speeches. The end of his life, which occurred through assassination on the 15th of August, 1909, was caused by a sexual snarl in which the corruptors of his domestic happiness added crime to betrayal.

* * * * *

The plan of _Os Sertões_ is that of a scientific spirit at the same time endowed with the many-faceted receptivity of the poet. Before approaching the campaign of Canudos itself, the author studies the land and the man produced by it; he is here, indeed, as Verissimo early indicated, the man of science, the geographer, the geologist, the ethnographer; the man of thought, the philosopher, the sociologist, the historian; the man of feeling, the poet, the novelist, the artist who can see and describe. But nowhere the sentimentalist. From one standpoint, indeed, the book is a cold confirmation of the very law against whose operative details the author protests:--“the inevitable crushing of the weak races by the strong.”

Though a sertanejo school of fiction had existed before _Os Sertões_, the book brought to Brazilians a nearer, more intimate conception of the inhabitants of those hinterlands.

“The sertanejo,” writes the author in Chapter III of the section devoted to the man of the sertão, “is first of all a strong man. He does not possess the exhaustive rachetism of the neurasthenic hybrids of the coast.

“His appearance, however, at first blush, reveals the contrary. He lacks the impeccable plasticity, the straightness, the highly correct structure of athletic organisms.

“He is graceless, seemingly out of joint, crooked. Hercules-Quasimodo, he reflects in his appearance the typical ugliness of the weak. His loose gait, curved, almost waddling and tortuous, suggests the manipulation of unarticulated members. This impression is aggravated by his normally abject posture, in a manifestation of displeasure that gives him an appearance of depressing humility. On foot, when standing still, he invariably leans against the first door-post or wall that he finds; on horseback, if he reins in the animal to exchange a few words with a friend, he at once falls upon one of the stirrups, resting upon the side of the saddle. Jogging along, even at a rapid trot he never traces a straight, firm line. He advances hastily in a characteristic zig-zag, of which the meandering tracks of the sertão seem to be the geometric pattern.…

“He is the everlastingly tired man.…

“Yet all this seeming weariness is an illusion.

“There is nothing more amazing than to see him disappear all of a sudden.… It takes only the arising of some incident that requires the unleashing of his dormant energy. The man is transfigured.…”[2]

And it is this same powerful denizen of the Brazilian hinterlands that is a prey to the most primitive of superstitions, so that it was an easy matter for his resistance to a distant seat of government to become coupled in his mind with a resurgence of Sebastianism as newly incarnated in the person of Antonio Maciel.

“This feeling of uneasiness in regard to the new government,” writes Cunninghame-Graham, “the mysticism of the people as shown in the belief in the return to earth of Dom Sebastian, and the fear that the government meant the destruction of all religion, tended to make the dwellers in the sertão especially susceptible to any movement, religious or political alike, during the time between the abdication of the Emperor and the firm establishment of the new government. Out of the depths of superstition and violence, Antonio Conselheiro arose to plunge the whole sertão into an erethism of religious mania and blood.”

As relatively late as 1837 the region had witnessed a veritable orgy of sacrifice. A fanatic had mounted the so-called _pedra bonita_ (pretty stone) and preached the coming of King Dom Sebastian, “he who fell at the field of Alcazar-el-Kebir. He foretold that the stone would be cut into steps; not cut with any earthly tools, but smoothed away by the shedding of the blood of children. Up these steps, so miraculously to be prepared, surrounded by his guard of honour, dressed in armour, the King, who had been dead three hundred years, should ascend and come into his own again, reigning in Portugal and in Brazil, and bountifully rewarding those who had been faithful to him and by their faith contributed to his disenchantment.… A multitude of women, all a prey to the mysterious agitation … came through the mountain passes, followed the trails through the virgin forests and assembled to hear the word preached at the wondrous pulpit made by no earthly hands. Unluckily they brought their children with them. Then, roused to a religious frenzy beyond belief, as they stood listening to the words of the illuminated _cafuz_ or _mamaluco_--for history has not preserved his name--women strove with one another who should be the first to offer up her child, so that its blood should split the rock and form the sacred stair, by which the King, the long lamented Dom Sebastian, should ascend in glory, bringing back peace and plenty upon earth.… A common-sense historian (Cunninghame-Graham refers to Araripe Junior’s _Reino Encantado_) says that for days the rocks ran blood.…”

Further incident is unnecessary to a notion of the sertanejos’ mystic habit of mind and action. The Brazilian government became in their eyes a rule of dogs, and their favourite phrase for the republic was _a lei do cão_ (the law of the dog). In the popular quatrains that Euclydes da Cunha collected are found merged the hatred of the sertanejos for the governing class of Brazil, their millenial hope in Dom Sebastian and their faith in Antonio surnamed Conselheiro (i. e., the Councillor) as the deliverer from all evil.

O Anti-Christo nasceu
Para o Brazil governar
Mas ahi esta O Conselheiro
Para delle nos livrar.

Antichrist was born
To govern poor Brazil,
But God raised up our Councillor
To save us from that ill.[3]

Garantidos pela lei
Aquelles malvados estão.
Nos temos a lei de Deus
Elles tem a lei do cão.

Protected by the law
Are those wretches in their lairs.
Ours is the law of God,
The law of the dog is theirs.

Visita nos vem fazer
Nosso rei D. Sebastião.
Coitado daquelle pobre
Que estiver na lei do cão!

Our good King D. Sebastian
Comes to visit us.
Pity the poor wretch
Who supports the law of the dog!

Cunninghame-Graham, like Euclydes da Cunha, and like the better of the Brazilian’s critics, feels a strong sympathy for the man in whom the new hopes of the sertanejos were centred. It is a sympathy, moreover, born of the understanding without which all knowledge is as fruit turned to ashes in the mouth. The Scot, like the Brazilian, is a psychologist. “Antonio Conselheiro himself did not so much rebel against authority as against life, perhaps expecting from it more than it had to give upon the spiritual side, not understanding that a fine day, with health to enjoy it, is the most spiritual of pleasures open to mankind,” he writes, in his amiable, worldly-wise (and heavenly-wise) way. And later: “When all is said, it is impossible not to sympathize to some extent with the misguided sectaries, for all they wanted was to live the life they had been accustomed to and sing their litanies. Clearly Antonio Conselheiro had no views on any subject under heaven outside his own district. His dreams were fixed upon a better world, and his chief care was to fit his followers for the change that he believed was to take place soon.”

It is Verissimo, who, with his almost unerring insight, extracts from his countryman’s book its central significance. Here is a volume that is a remarkable commentary upon the formation of all religions, “without excepting our own Christianity. In another milieu, under other conditions, Antonio Conselheiro is a Christ, a Mohammed, a Messiah, one of the many Mahdis, creators of religions in that fecund soil of human belief which is Asia. In the sertão, friends and enemies and even the constituted authorities, hold him (i. e., Antonio Maciel, the people’s councillor) as a good, honest, upright man, despite the legend--and is it only a legend?--which attributes to a tragic matricide his transformation from a business man into a religious preacher, his life as a saint and a missionary of the sertão.”

* * * * *

I find that I have spoken as much of Cunninghame-Graham as of the Brazilian in whom he found his most important source; that is because the Scotsman’s book is the best possible revelation in English of the remarkable account given by Euclydes da Cunha.

_Os Sertões_ stands alone in the nation’s literature; we, in ours, have no book to parallel it in spirit, purport or accomplishment. Yet even today there are regions to which a similar method might be applied, for Verissimo’s words about Asia seem to cover the United States as well,--in less degree, of course, but for our purpose with equal patness. More, a close reading of the government’s application of force to a situation that might have yielded to less warlike methods,--or, at least, that might have been managed without the necessity of the final massacre--could teach something to all governmental departments that are brought into contact with alien or extra-social groups which must be incorporated into the national entity. _Os Sertões_ is the best answer to the young Brazilian regionalists who have made the book a rallying-point. Here is a volume--and a thick, compact volume it is--dealing in quasi-reportorial spirit with a brief incident in the most hidden recesses of the national interior; it was not written with belles-lettres in mind; it is strewn with terms and processes of thought that baffle the ordinary reader. Yet the man who composed it was a vibrant personality, and whether knowingly or unwittingly, he made the book a symbol,--a symbol of uncomprehending persecution, of human fanaticism, of religious origins, of man’s instinctive seeking after something higher. It is true that the persecution was in part necessary, that the aspect of fanaticism here revealed is most repugnant, that the spectacle of religious origins does not flatter our unctuous, supposedly civilized, superior souls. But it is true, likewise, that we must gaze into such depths as these to remind ourselves occasionally that we dwell in these inferiors. Such is the wisdom of Euclydes da Cunha, of Richard Cunninghame-Graham, of José Verissimo.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Resumo da Historia do Brazil._ Maria G. L. de Andrade. Edição Ampliada, 1920, Pages 277-278.

[2] “This struggle for existence,” writes Cunninghame-Graham in _A Brazilian Mystic_ (pages 17-18) “amongst plants and animals presents its counterpart amongst mankind. The climate sees to it that only those most fitted to resist it arrive at manhood, and the rude life they subsequently lead has forged a race as hard as the Castilians, the Turks, the Scythians of old, or as the Mexicans.

“No race in all America is better fitted to cope with the wilderness. The sertanejo is emphatically what the French call ‘a male.’ His Indian blood has given him endurance and a superhuman patience in adversity. From his white forefathers he has derived intelligence, the love of individual as opposed to general freedom inherent in the Latin races, good manners, and a sound dose of self-respect. His tinge of negro blood, although in the sertão it tends to disappear out of the race, at least in outward characteristics, may perchance have given him whatever qualities the African can claim. Far from demonstrative, he yet feels deeply; never forgets a benefit, and cherishes an insult as if it were a pearl of price, safe to revenge it when the season offers or when the enemy is off his guard.

“Centaurs before the Lord, the sertanejos do not appear (almost alone of horsemen) to have that pride in their appearance so noticeable in the gaucho, the Mexican and in the Arabs of North Africa. Seated in his short, curved saddle, a modification of the ‘recao’ used on the Pampas of the Argentine, the sertanejo lounges, sticks his feet forward, and rides, as goes the saying, all about his horse, using, of course, a single rein, and the high hand all natural horsemen affect. Yet, when a bunch of cattle break into a wild stampede, the man is suddenly transformed. Then he sits upright as a lance, or, bending low over his horse’s neck, flies at a break-neck pace, dashing through the thick scrub of the _caatingas_ in a way that must be seen to be believed. Menacing boughs hang low and threaten him. He throws himself flat on the horse’s back and passes under them. A tree stands in his way right in the middle of his headlong career. If his horse, highly trained and bitted, fails to stop in time, he slips off like a drop of water from a pane of glass at the last moment, or if there is the smallest chance of passing on one side, lies low along his horse’s flank after the fashion of an old-time Apache or Comanche on the war-path.”

[3] I quote the translation of this quatrain from Cunninghame-Graham. The third quatrain, here given as I find it in _Os Sertões_, 1914, fifth edition, differs in a single unimportant spelling from that used by the author of _A Brazilian Mystic_, who translates it: “Our King, Dom Sebastian, will come to visit us and free us from the reign of the dog.” I do not think this is correct, as the two final lines are a threat to the other side.

VI

MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA

Oliveira Lima belongs, more than to the history of Brazilian letters, to the history of Brazilian culture. He is an integral part of that culture and his life, coincidentally, runs parallel with the emergence of Brazil into an honoured position among the nations of the world. Once, in a happy phrase, the Swedish writer Goran Björkman, a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, characterized him aptly as “Brazil’s intellectual ambassador to the world,” and the phrase has stuck because it so eminently fitted the modest, indefatigable personality to whom it was applied. In a sense Oliveira Lima has been, too, the world’s intellectual ambassador to Brazil; he has seen service literally in every corner of the globe,--in Argentina as in the United States, in Japan as in France, Belgium, Sweden and Germany. Wherever he has come he has torn aside the dense veil of ignorance that has hidden Brazil from the eyes of none too curious foreigners; from wherever he has gone he has sent back to his native land solidly written, well considered volumes upon the civilization of the old world and the new. In both the physical and the intellectual sense he has been, largely, Brazil’s point of contact with the rest of the world. And the nation has been most fortunate in that choice, for Manoel de Oliveira Lima, most “undiplomatic” of diplomats, is the most human of men. He is, in the least spectacular sense of the word, an inspirer, not of words but of deeds. Trace his itinerary during the past twenty-five years and it is a miniature map of a double enlightenment. If diplomacy is ever to achieve anything like genuine internationality, it must travel some such path as this. And I dare say that Senhor Oliveira Lima is one of the rare precursors of just such a diplomacy. The example of his career has helped to raise that office from one of sublimated social hypocrisy to the dignity of lofty human intercourse.

Manoel de Oliveira Lima was born on December 25th, 1867, in the city of Recife, Pernambuco,--that state of which Silveira Martins has strikingly declared that the Brazilian gaucho--indomitable defender of the nation’s frontiers--was simply a Pernambucan on horseback. He was sent early to Portugal to complete his education, becoming one of the favourite students of the noted historian Oliveira Martins; at the age of twenty-one he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Letters from the University of Lisbon and set out, after a couple of years, upon his career of diplomacy, into which he was initiated by Carvalho Borges and the Baron de Itajubá.

“Oliveira Lima never wrote verses,” declared Salvador de Mendonça once in a speech of welcome. “I believe that, with the exception of the _Lusiads_, all poems are to him like the _Colombo_ of Porto Alegre to the readers of our literature, an unknown land awaiting some Columbus to discover it. Like an old philosopher friend of mine, who doesn’t admit monologues or asides in the theatre because only fools or persons threatened with madness converse with themselves, so Oliveira Lima finds it hardly natural for people to write in verse, for the language of seers was never the spoken tongue. His spirit is positive and direct; only curved lines are lacking for him to be a geometer. His characteristic trait is sincerity; he says only what he thinks is true, and says it without beating about the bush, in the explicit form of his conviction. I believe that he is but a lukewarm admirer of music, and prefers, to the contemplation of nature, the study of social phenomena and the examination of the human beehive.”