Chapter XIII: Part II: Representative Personalities (4)

For a Brazilian never to have written verses is indeed almost a violation of the social code, and it may be that Senhor Lima’s lukewarmness toward music helps to explain a certain lack of musicality in his clear but compact prose. But lack of poetic appreciation should not be inferred from his friend’s lines; one has but to go through one of Lima’s earliest and most solid works, _Aspectos da Litteratura Colonial Brazileira_, to discover, in this original contribution, a deep, unostentatious feeling for those beautiful emotions we call poetry.

His literary career, as we have seen, is closely identified with his numerous peregrinations. It opened with a historical study of his birthplace: _Pernambuco, seu Desenvolimento historica_ (1894), followed two years later by the _Aspectos_. Thereafter is pursued, rather closely, the travels of Lima, resulting in _Nos Estados Unidos_ (1899), a work of uneven value upon the United States, _No Japão_, (1903), a more mature volume upon the land of the rising sun, countless speeches and series of lectures delivered in the universities of both hemispheres--now at the Sorbonne, now at the University of Louvaine, at Harvard, Yale, Stanford University and lesser institutions--and always upon his favourite theme: the history of Brazilian and Latin-American culture. Out of these lectures have arisen more than one of his books, some of them originally delivered in English and French; for Lima is an accomplished linguist, employing English and French with ease and speaking German, Italian and Spanish as well.

It is history that forms his main interest; even when he makes a single attempt--and not a highly successful one--at the drama, his _Secretario d’El Rey_ (The King’s Secretary, 1904) turns upon the historic figure of Alexandre de Gusmão in the days of 1738. It is worth while noting, as a commentary upon Lima’s unfanatic patriotism, that he justly considers this work a Brazilian drama, though the action takes place in Portugal. For, “in the first place, our historic period anterior to the Independence necessarily involves so intimate a connection of the colony with the court that it is almost impossible, treating of the one, to lose the other from sight. Material communication and above all moral relations established a sort of territorial continuity between both sides of the Atlantic, which formed a single fatherland. Besides, the action of the piece could hardly have been made to take place in Brazil, since the protagonist of the play, perhaps the most illustrious Brazilian of the XVIIIth century, and one whose personality merited, as few others, consecration upon the stage, lived in Europe from his earliest youth. For identical reasons the action of _O Poeta e a Inquisção_ (The Poet and the Inquisition) by Domingos de Magalhães, our first national tragedy, takes place in Lisbon. And finally the author would remind his reader that the spirit of his piece is entirely Brazilian, trying to symbolize--and more direct pretension would be anachronistic--the differentiation which had already begun between the mother country and its American colony, which was destined to continue and propagate its historic mission in the new world, and the economic importance of which was daily becoming more manifest.”

It is in history that, with a few exceptions, Lima’s most enduring work has been performed. He has recreated the figure of Dom João VI (_Dom João no Brasil_, 2 vols.); he has thrown light into dark places of the national narrative, particularly in the period beginning with the French invasion of Portugal that sent John VI to Brazil in 1808 and thus made the colony a virtual kingdom, and ending with 1821. “Dr. Lima’s investigations in hitherto unused sources also led to a revision of judgment,” wrote Professor P. A. Martin, “of many personages and events of the period; an instance of which is his successful rehabilitation of the character of Dom John VI. This sovereign, treated with contempt and contumely by the bulk of the Portuguese historians who have never forgiven him for deserting his native land, now appears in a new and deservedly more favorable light. The author makes it clear that John’s rule in Brazil was as liberal and progressive as was desirable in a country in which all thorough-going reforms must of necessity be introduced gradually. And these same reforms, especially the opening of the chief Brazilian ports to the commerce of all friendly nations, not only redounded to the immediate benefit of the country, but what was infinitely more important, paved the way for ultimate independence.”[1] So well, indeed, that the year following John’s departure is the year of Brazil’s complete emancipation.

Oliveira Lima’s internationalism--employing that word in a broader sense than it is usually given in political discussion--is thus at once territorial and spiritual. He knows his own country too well to glorify it in the unthinking patriotism of a Rocha Pitta; he knows the rest of the world too well to harbour faith in the exclusivistic loyalties that patriotism everywhere connotes. His very books, as if to symbolize his universal attitude, trace the amplification of his interests and of his cosmopolitan spirit. He began with a study of his birthplace; he continued with a study of his nation’s colonial letters; he then initiated a series dealing with national, historical figures and events, in conjunction with books upon the four corners of the world. Latterly, as if to round out the whole, he has completed a _History of Civilization_, intended chiefly for use in Brazil’s higher centres of education; but it is far more than a mere text-book. It is the natural outgrowth of a dignified lifetime,--the work of a man who, early placed in the diplomatic service, outgrew the confines of that profession because, in simple words, he was too human for it.

“In fact,” he himself once declared in a speech, “to be a good diplomat is to be able to deceive wisely.” And Lima has been wiser in goodness than in deceit.

It is easy enough now, with the distance of a few years between us and the end of a war that need never have been fought, to proclaim a humanistic spiritual world-unity. It was not easy for Lima while the war was going on; perhaps he, as well as any other, recognized the futility of his efforts to keep at least the western hemisphere of the world sane during the carnage; perhaps this was but an example of what one of his youthful disciples has called his “quixotism.” It was, together with these things, a simple, if striking, example, of the man’s devotion to the truth he sees.

“Through love of the truth,” he said, at a banquet given to him in Rio Janeiro in 1917, “I became a diplomat, who did not correspond to the ideal of the type, despite the remark of a departed friend of mine who used to say that I had spent my life lying, in Europe, Asia and America, saying, in foreign countries and to foreign audiences, that Brazil possesses a dramatic history, a brilliant literature, a promising economy,--in short--all the characteristics of a civilization …, of which my friend, apparently, was sceptical.

“Through love of the truth, I am now a journalist who ought to correspond to the ideal of the type, and if I do not, it is for the simple reason that in a certain sense, truth is the most burdensome luggage a person can carry through life, for it is always getting into our way. I don’t see why it should be inculcated with such arduous effort--and, paradoxically, a sincere effort--into the souls of children, since, in their future life it can cause so much trouble to those of us who continue to invoke and apply what was taught us as a virtue.”

If Lima has been an undiplomatic diplomat, he is an unjournalistic journalist. As another paradox in his life, this man of Brazilian birth, Portuguese education and tri-continental wanderings has settled down in Washington, D. C., having presented his remarkable library to the Catholic University. Back from his present home he sends, to be sure, political chronicle and such chat, but also literary letters that are read with avidity by a youth whom he is strongly influencing. This is the stuff out of which a number of his books have grown; it is the sort of journalism that Bernard Shaw has boasted about, because of its intimate relation to significant, immediate life.

That he has chosen the United States for his permanent home sufficiently indicates a predilection early evidenced in his book upon this country; but that preference is neither blind nor unreasoned, any more than his Pan-Americanism is the hollow proclamation that deceives nobody less than alert South Americans. In his attitude to our nation he is candid, direct, with the reserve of a Martí, a Rodó, a Verissimo, only that he knows us more intimately than did those sterling spirits. At the end of a series of lectures dedicated to the then President of Leland Stanford Junior University, John Casper Branner, “distinguished scientist, eminent scholar and true friend of Brazil,” and delivered at that university, as well as others of this country, Lima declared that “The filiation and evolution of Portuguese America are separate from those of Spanish America; not infrequently, nay frequently rather, was this evolution hostile to that of Spanish America; but today they have common, identical interests, and a desire for a closer approximation appears so reciprocal that this movement becomes every day more pronounced and more firmly rooted. For Pan-Americanism to be complete, it would be necessary for the United States to ally itself with Latin America, with the importance, the influence, the prestige, the superiority to which its civilization entitles it--it would not be human to do otherwise--but without any thought, expressed or reserved, of direct predominance, which offends the weaker element and renders it suspicious.

“It is this which those who, like myself, know and esteem the United States,--and the best way of showing one’s esteem is not by praising unreservedly,--are hoping will come as the result of the great university movement which is gradually crystallizing in this country. Here idealism is a feature of the race (nor would you without it belong to a superior race), an ideal so noble and elevated as that of respect for the right of others, as that of human solidarity through the unification of culture. The great statesman who now presides over the destinies of the Argentine Republic, proclaimed at the First Pan-American Conference, at Washington, that America belonged to all humanity, not to a fraction of it; and indeed America is and will continue to be more and more the field for the employment of European capital, of study for European scholars, of commerce for European merchants, of activity for European immigration. Only thus will the New World fulfil its historical and social mission and redeem the debt contracted with Europe, which has given it its civilization.”[2]

This is an example of that “Spirit of peace and concord to which I have ever subordinated my spiritual activity.”[3]

As an investigator, Lima has always gone to the sources; he has the born historian’s patience with detail, and if he lacks the music of a seductive prose, he compensates for this more purely literary grace with a gift for vivifying the men and events of the past. Thus, if his sole venture into the historical drama has been unproductive of dramatic beauty, his historical writings abound in passages of colourful, dramatic power. Carlos Pereyra, himself a prolific writer upon American history, has, in his Spanish translation of Lima’s _Historic Formation of the Brazilian Nationality_, compared him to such painters of the soul as Frans Hals. “Oliveira Lima paints portraits in the fashion of Hals. Thus we behold his personages not only in the ensemble of the canvas and in the external perfection of each figure, but in that mysterious prolongation that carries us into the intimate shadows of the personality.…”

Lima’s eclecticism is but the natural result of his residence in many parts of the world; it is also an aspect of a spiritual tolerance which is a trait of his personality, and which despite his “historic Catholicism” evokes, even from an unbeliever, the simple tribute which in this modest essay I seek to render as much to that personality as to any of its products.

As for his growing influence upon the youth of Brazil, I will let one of the most promising of those young men speak for his colleagues. Writes Senhor Gilberto de Mello Freyre,[4] “This independence of view and attitude explains the fascination that he exercises over the intellectual youth of Brazil.… He is generous toward the newcomers, without for that reason being easy with his praise. On the contrary, he is discreet. His generosity never reaches the extremes of indulgence. His intellectual hospitality has been great; he has been a sort of bachelor uncle to the nation’s ‘enfants terribles.’ He was one of the first to proclaim the powerful, strange talents of Euclydes da Cunha. He has sponsored other youthful intellects whose brilliant future he can foresee, such as Sr. Assis Chateaubriand, Sr. Antonio Carneiro Leão, Sr. Mario Mello, Sr. Annibal Fernandes.”

There are men whose lives are the best books they have written; to this company Manoel de Oliveira Lima belongs. He has identified himself so completely with the cultural history of his nation that, as I said at the beginning, he is an integral part of it, and if his works were removed from the national bookshelf, a yawning gap would be left. That is the better nationalism, to which he has devoted an unchauvinistic career of the higher patriotism. He has, on the other hand, become so essentially cosmopolitan as to have earned the rare title of world-citizen. If more diplomats have not been able to reconcile these two supposed “opposites,” it is not because such a patriotism is incompatible with the international mind, but because under their ceremonial clothes they hide the age-old predatory heart and serve the age-old predatory interests. Lima has not labelled others, and I am not going to label him; men, like countries, must remain ever different. But countries, like men, may bridge the gulf of difference by patient understanding, and the rivers of blood that flow under those bridges must be the blood of human tolerance and aid, not the blood of barter and battle. It would be easy to point out a certain “conservatism” in Lima, as in more than one other, and yet, if it be possible for us to live in anything but the present, he is a man of the future, for he has always dwelt above boundaries, above battles, above most of the sublimated childishness which we grown-ups pompously call “the serious business of the world.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Introduction to _The Evolution of Brazil compared with that of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America_. Stanford University, California, 1914. The introduction, by Professor Percy Alvin Martin, should be read with care, as it assigns Lima’s year of birth erroneously to the year 1865, and gives wrong dates for the _Aspectos_ (1896, not 1906) and _Pernambuco_ (1894, not 1895); moreover, it ascribes to Björnstjerne Björnsen, instead of to Goran Björkman, the bestowal upon Lima of the epithet “intellectual ambassador of Brazil.”

[2] Lima here refers to Dr. Roque Saenz-Peña, inaugurated 1910. The citation is from Lecture VI (and last); the series was delivered in English.

[3] See Preface to his book on Argentina (1920, Spanish version, Buenos Aires).

[4] In a recent letter to me.

VII

GRAÇA ARANHA

Graça Aranha, like Euclydes da Cunha (from whom in so many other respects he is so different), is a man virtually of a single book. And, as _Os Sertões_ in 1902 created so profound an impression upon Brazilian letters as to suggest a partial reorientation of the national literature, so, in the same year, did the appearance of Aranha’s _Chanaan_ work a profound change in the Brazilian novel. Much ink has been spilled about it and often, if not generally, in that exalted rhetorical mood for which the Ibero-American critic does not lack models abroad; upon the strength of _Chanaan_ alone, Senhor Costa (and not entirely without justice) has created a new phase of the national novel: the critico-philosophical; Guglielmo Ferrero, the noted Italian historian, a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, made it known to Europe with his fulsome praise of it as the great American novel,--a term that had already been applied to _María_ (by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs) and Taunay’s _Innocencia_. There is a distinct basis for comparison between _Innocencia_ and the more famous tale from Colombia; between these and _Chanaan_, however, there is little similarity, if one overlooks the poetic atmosphere that glamours all three. Aranha’s book is of far broader conception than the other two; it adds to their lyricism an epic sweep inherent in the subject and very soon felt in the treatment. It is, in fact, a novel difficult to classify, impregnated as it is with a noble, Tolstoian idealism, yet just as undoubtedly streaked with an unrelenting realism so often coupled with the name of Zola. Yet one does not perceive too plainly an inept mingling of genres; the style is a mirror of the vast theme--that moment at which the native and the immigrant strains begin to merge in the land of the future--the promised land that the protagonists are destined never to enter, even as Moses himself, upon Mount Nebo in the land of Moab, beheld Canaan and died in the thrall of the great vision.

Aranha seems truly to have been called to this task rather than to have chosen it. He is cosmopolitan by culture as well as training. Himself a descendant of an old family, he has not been hampered by the false aristocracy of the family, else how could he have composed the epic of Brazil’s melting-pot? He has served his nation at home and abroad, having been secretary to Joaquim Nabuco when that diplomat went to Italy to settle before the king the boundary dispute between Brazil and Great Britain in the matter of British Guiana; he was Brazilian minister at Christiania, and later Plenipotentiary for Brazil at The Hague. He is philosophically, critically inclined; he knows not only the Latin element of his nation, but the Teutonic as well; his native exuberance has been tempered by a serenity that is the product of European influence, in which may be reckoned a tithe of English.

_Chanaan_ is of those novels that centre about an enthralling idea. The type that devotes much attention to depictions of life and customs, to discussions of present realities and ultimate purposes, is perhaps more frequent among Spanish and Portuguese Americans than among our own readers, who are too apt to be over-insistent in their demands for swift, visible external action. Yet, in the hands of a master, it possesses no less interest--for myself, I freely say more--than the more obvious type of fiction. Ideas possess more life than the persons who are moved by them.

The idea that carries Milkau from the Old World to the New is an ideal of human brotherhood, high purpose and dissatisfaction with the old, degenerate hemisphere. In the State of Espirito Santo, where the German colonists are dominant, he plans a simple life that shall drink inspiration in the youth of a new, virgin continent. He falls in with another German, Lentz, whose outlook upon life is at first the very opposite to Milkau’s blend of Christianity and a certain liberal Socialism. The strange milieu breeds in both an intellectual languor that vents itself in long discussions, in brooding contemplation, mirages of the spirit. Milkau is gradually struck with something wrong in the settlement. Little by little it begins to dawn upon him that attributes akin to the Old-World hypocrisy, fraud and insincerity are contaminating this supposedly virgin territory. Here he discovers no paradise à la Rousseau--no natural man untainted by the ills of civilization. Graft is as rampant as in any district of the world across the sea; cruelty is as rife. His pity is aroused by the plight of Mary, a destitute servant who is betrayed by the son of her employers. Not only does the scamp desert her when she most needs his protection and acknowledgment, but he is silent when his equally vicious parents drive her forth to a life of intense hardship. She is spurned at every door and reduced to beggary. Her child is born under the most distressing of circumstances and devoured by a pig before her very eyes, as she gazes helplessly on.

Mary is accused of infanticide, and since she lacks witnesses, is placed in an extremely difficult position. Moreover, the father of her child bends every effort to loosen the harshest measures of the community against her, whereupon Milkau, whose heart is open to the griefs of the universe, has another opportunity to behold man’s inhumanity to woman. His pity turns to what pity is akin to; he effects her release from jail, and together they go forth upon a journey that ends in the delirium of death. The promised land has proved a mirage--at least for the present. And it is upon this indecisive note that the book comes to a close.

Ferrero,[1] in his introduction to the book is substantial and to the point. It is natural that he should have taken such a liking to the novel, for Aranha’s work is of intense interest to the reader who looks for psychological insight, and Ferrero himself is the exponent of history as psychology rather than as economic materialism. “The critics,” he says, “will judge the literary merits of this novel. As a literary amateur, I will point out among its qualities the beauty of its style and its descriptions, the purity of the psychological analysis, the depth of the thoughts and the reflections of which the novel is full, and among its parts a certain disproportion between the different parts of the book and an ending which is too vague, indefinite, and unexpected. But its literary qualities seem to me to be of secondary importance to the profound and incontrovertible idea that forms the kernel of the book. Here in Europe we say that modern civilization develops itself in America more freely than in Europe, for in the former country it has not to surmount the obstacle of an older society, firmly established as in the case of the latter. Because of this we call America ‘the country of the young,’ and we consider the New World as the great force which decomposes the old European social organization.” That idea is, as Ferrero points out, and as Milkau discovered for himself, an illusion due to distance. Ferrero points out, too, that here is everywhere “an old America struggling against a new one and, what is very curious, the new America, which upsets traditions, is formed above all by the European immigrants who seek a place for themselves in the country of their adoption, whereas the real Americans represent the conservative tendencies. Europe exerts on American society--through its emigrants--the same dissolving action which America exerts--through its novelties and its example--on the old civilization of Europe.” The point is very well taken, and contains the germ of more than one great novel of the United States. And just as _Chanaan_ stands by itself in Brazilian literature, so might such a novel achieve pre-eminence in our own.

“It is probable,” says Milkau to Lentz during one of their numerous discussions, in words that may have suggested this criticism to Ferrero and that may be applicable to our own nation,--“it is probable that our fate will be to transform this country from top to bottom, to substitute another civilization for all the culture, religion and traditions of a people. It is a new conquest, slow, dour, peaceful in its means, but terrible in its ambitious schemes. The substitution must be so pure and luminous that upon it may not fall the bitter curse of devastation. In the meantime we are a dissolvent of the race of this country. We soak into the nation’s clay and soften it; we mix ourselves with the natives and kill their traditions, and spread confusion among them.… No one will understand anyone else; there is a confusion of tongues; men coming from everywhere--bring with them the images of their several gods; they are all alien to each other; there is no communion of thought; men and women do not make love to each other in the same words.… Everything is disintegrating; one civilization falls and is transformed into an unknown one.… The remodelling of the nation is being set back. There is tragedy in the soul of a Brazilian when he feels that his race will not last for evermore. The law of nature is that like begets like.… And here tradition is broken; the father will not transmit his own image to his son; the language is dying; the old aspirations of the race, the deep-rooted desires for a distinct individuality, will become dumb; the future will not understand the past.”[2]

Ferrero is quite right in indicating the great non-literary importance of the novel; indeed, Brazilian criticism, as a whole, has in the consideration of _Chanaan_ been so dazzled by the language and the social implications of the novel that it has overlooked or condoned its structural defects as a work of art. But not all readers will agree with Ferrero, I imagine, as to the excessive vagueness of the end. Hardly any other type of ending would have befitted a novel that treats of transition, of a landscape that enthralls, of possibilities that founder, not through the malignance of fate so much as through the stupidity, the cupidity, the crassness of man. There is an epic swirl to the finale that reminds one of the disappearance of an ancient deity in a pillar of dust. For an uncommon man like Milkau an uncommon end was called for.

In this novelized document upon Brazil’s racial problems and popular customs a certain and facile symbolism seems to inhere. Milkau is, as we have seen, the blend of Christianity and Socialism,--two concepts which, for all their recent historic enmity, are closely related, though by no means identical, in philosophical background. Lentz is the apostle of Nietzscheanism. Mary is the suffering land, a prey to the worse elements. The pot that melts the peoples melts their philosophies. So are they fused in this book, which terminates in a cloud, as of the first smoke to rise from the crucible.

_Chanaan_ is not, for all its novelty and substantiality, the “splendid alliance of artistic perfection and moral grandeur” that one of its countless panegyrists has discovered it to be. Neither does it contain that mixture of Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Maeterlinck and Anatole France which was found in it by an editorial writer in the _Jornal do Commercio_. Even Verissimo, it seems to me, exaggerated the artistic importance of the novel in his enthusiasm--a rare thing in Verissimo--over the newness and the social significance of the book. He speaks of its drama as being “curto, rapido e intenso,” yet surely there is nothing “brief” or “rapid” in the telling of _Chanaan_, though intense it undoubtedly is. “New in theme,” he wrote, “new in inspiration and conception, new in style, _Chanaan_ is the first and only manifestation worthy of appreciation among the new spiritual and social currents that are everywhere influencing literature and art. This novel brought to literature, not only Brazilian but Portuguese as well, human and social preoccupations, and modern forms of expression.… It may well be that chronologically some other came before him, but in art excellency is more important than priority.… This is the first novel of its kind in Brazil or Portugal. One may note the lack of action, that is, a more or less complicated plot.… _Chanaan_, then, belongs in the category of contemporary literature. The intense drama that animates it is chiefly internal, but the feelings, the sensations, the ideas vibrate in it like deeds.” Like deeds, in truth, for feelings, sensations and ideas are the raw material of action; more, the motive power itself of “action.” Verissimo is not so much blind to the artistic deficiencies of _Chanaan_ as he is unmindful of them. He readily grants that “not all the episodes adjust themselves perfectly to the central action of the novel or even to the general fact that it presents.… In a detailed analysis of the architecture of the book perhaps other objections would be possible, but contemplating the structure as a whole--and this is how a work of art should be viewed--the impression is one of solid beauty. _Chanaan_ is truly a work of talent in the most noble acceptation and the rarest application of that word. With its generous inspiration, its penetrating symbolism and its moving lyricism … with its wealth of ideas and sensations and its rare emotional sincerity, what is perhaps most admirable in Graça Aranha’s novel is the difficult union--intimate and perfect in this book--of the loftiest idealism and the most inviting realism.”

Costa, as we have seen, has centred a new epoch of the Brazilian novel around this one work, which he considers to have fixed the moment of transition that is so eloquently suggested in the passage from Milkau given above. “The problem of immigration was disquieting,” he writes. “Moreover, as reaction against French culture,” (a reaction that is now again to the fore) “the only culture that dominated without rivalry in Brazil, our men of letters began to read the German authors: Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. It was a moment of mental elaboration,--an élan, a great hope, a fertile stirring of ideas, and, at the same time, there was doubt as to one’s powers of resistance, incertitude, puerile indecision, vague, formless aspirations,--that state of semi-lethargy, with acute intermittent crises of vitality, which characterizes the periods of transition amongst individuals and nations, the burgeoning of the youthful intelligence of a new people, the first attempts at independence, the will to learn and to produce, to affirm and to acquire the consciousness of one’s worth as a nation amongst the nations. It was in this period that there took place the most memorable event in the intellectual life of Brazil: the foundation of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.… Graça Aranha is, perhaps, the fusion of two different cultures.” This is evident in _Chanaan_, I may add in passing, without any reference to the known facts of the man’s life and his education. And though it may be _studied_ in his book, from him it flowed into the narrative out of his very nature. He is, again in Costa’s words, “the focal point of two vigorous and independent Brazilian thinkers: Tobias Barreto and Joaquim Nabuco. The mysterious power of the race, its abandon, its sensual basis, its curiosity for learning--revealing a little the rudimentary traits of the mixed breed--the power of conception, the absolutist tendency, that make and are the strength of Tobias Barreto, encounter, in the manner of the law of compensation, a moderating force, a stabilization of values in the Apollonian genius of Joaquim Nabuco, in the Aryan clarity of his ideas, the Hellenic grace of his concepts, the brilliancy of his rhythmic style, so elegant, delicate and noble,--in the loftiness of his thoughts, in his civilized relativism. There are not in Brazil two spirits, two esthetics, that are more different from, more antagonistic to, each other. The first, despite his vast learning, his admiration for and bedazzlement before European thought, is in every attitude, every phrase, every gesture, an American, Brazilian, an exuberant son of the tropics, sensual and barbarous; the second, despite his love of his native land, despite his devotion … is, in his thought, in manner, in tastes, in soul, in ideas and affections, in pleasures and in style, a European, a Latin, a descendant in direct line of Greek culture. Graça Aranha, by a phenomenon that I discover in his style, has succeeded,--at the same time retaining complete independence,--in effecting an alliance between two opposite poles, the harmonious conjunction of these two different principles, the integration into a single beautiful and lofty form of these two contradictory esthetics. He has transformed the sensualism of Tobias Barreto into voluptuousness and the eloquence of Joaquim Nabuco into poetry.”

Costa has stated the case with tropical luxuriance of phrase and feeling; perhaps one must be a Brazilian to see all this--_as art_--in the novel to which it is applied. Take up the book in and for itself, as a product of a sensitive imagination transmuting the elements of experience into a new reality, and it contains, surely, all the qualities that its most intense admirers discover, but in less degree. Milkau is really the only character in the novel; he is the soloist. Too many of the beautiful thoughts remain here as isolated by-products of conversation rather than living emanations of interplay of emotions. There is a certain hesitancy as to form, which is now the frank dialogue of the stage, now the exaltation of a nativist hymn in a manner recalling, though of course not repeating, Rocha Pitta. Milkau himself, speaking doubtless for Aranha, says that “man is not governed by ideas; he is governed by feelings,” yet, so like the wise men who discover that simple truth, continues to expatiate upon the ideas. Could his sentence, indeed, have originated in one of simple feelings? The very recognition that feeling dominates us is a token that it has ceased to dominate entirely. This is another excellent reason for that indecisive close of the book to which Ferrero objected, for Milkau is caught in a mesh of indecision. It reveals, in the author, one of the sources of his own indecision as to form; but in the novel something of that uncertainty is felt in the telling, and interferes with one’s complete enjoyment in the epoch-making book. Yet, strangely enough, out of the weakness of the separate parts is forged a strength of the whole. Once again, the book becomes the mirror of the folk who people it, for out of the weakness of the individual would Milkau make the strength of human solidarity. “My eyes cannot reach the limits of the Infinite,” he cries at the very end. “My sight is limited to what surrounds you.… But I tell you, if this is going to end so that the cycle of existence may be repeated again elsewhere, or if some day we will be extinguished with the last wave of heat coming from the maternal bosom of earth, or if we be smashed with it in the Universe and be scattered like dust on the roads of the heavens, let us not separate from each other in this attitude of hatred.… I entreat you and your innumerable descendants, let us reconcile ourselves with each other before the coming of Death.…”

To sum up the artistic aspect of the case, I would say--with all admiration for the novel _Chanaan_ and its countless fascinating moments of speech, attitude and vision--that the book itself is even in this respect a mirror, a symbol, of its people and its problems: it is a high promise rather than the perfect fulfilment that so many of its critics would see in it. It ascends the literary Mount Nebo, gazes toward the Promised Land, but does not enter. It is one of the peaks of Brazilian literature, both artistically (for detail) and historically (as a whole), but I dare say that its artistic importance will diminish as its historic significance increases. One’s sharper critical examination of the book is a tribute to its disturbing qualities and its peculiar individuality among the products of the modern novel.

* * * * *

Its historic importance is less to be questioned, though it has not created a school. Costa’s very characterization of it as a critico-philosophical novel contains a criticism, which is further brought out in his short concluding chapter upon his personal theory regarding the Brazilian novel. For here he suggests as the coming type what he calls the _esthetico-social_ novel,--“the theory of art for art’s sake employed in representing the social moment of a people.” I am not concerned with this inartistic theory; inartistic because it would choose the subject for the artist, who alone has the right to select and combine his materials. Neither am I concerned with Costa’s uncomprehending attitude toward the Russian novel, in which he can find only folly, cruelty and delirium! It is a large world, and we must each write what is in ourselves, not what preceptive critics would order to fit in with their clamping theories. But I wish to point out that Costa’s employment of the word _esthetic_ in his term for the novel of Brazil’s future indicates, for all his praise of the Aranha book, a sense of something lacking in _Chanaan_.

“The philosophy of Graça Aranha, … is a philosophy of hope, of intoxication, before the glorious majesty of nature; it is like a magnificent flower of dream, life, desire, aspiration toward happiness, which returns incessantly to the august bosom of the eternal Pan. Man passes on; he is a particle of dust that is blown for a moment across the earth. His whole struggle aims to merge him with nature, through religion, through love, through philosophy. It is this unceasing anxiety to dissolve into something superior to ourselves that produces the great mystics, the great lovers or the great philosophers; yet, at bottom, life in itself is worth what the dust is worth that glitters for an instant in the sun’s rays.… Such surely is the philosophy of Graça Aranha; a sunflower gilded by thought, it turns eternally toward fleeting happiness, in a perpetual desire to merge with it and drink in the light through its petals.… Flower of serene, victorious life, but with distant roots in the banks of the Ganges, nurtured by a vague pessimism, in nihilism, in incipient anarchy, in the everlasting beatitude of Nirvana.…”

This is the poetry of criticism, as _Chanaan_ is the poetry of the novel,--a poetry not unlike Alencar’s _Guarany_, yet as unlike as Alencar was to Aranha. Like Aranha’s novel, so this criticism, for all its preoccupation with Brazilianism, is the result of European culture acting upon the native spirit. It is but another revelation of the literary axiom that renaissance springs from the impact of foreign influences; parthenogenesis is as rare in literature as in life.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See, for citations from Ferrero and _Chanaan_, the English version of the book (Boston, 1920) by M. J. Lorente.

[2] In such passages as these Senhor Aranha seems to fall into the exaggeration of that very imagination which he has sought to interpret to foreigners. Araripe Junior, in a study of Gregorio Mattos, coined the word _obnulation_ to signify the transformation worked upon early settlers by their new surroundings,--a retrogressive subsidence into the savage state. Here Milkau seems at once to fear and prophesy a new “obnulation.”

VIII

COELHO NETTO

As Bilac is the poet of Brazilian voluptuousness, Coelho Netto is its novelist. But there is this essential difference: Bilac etches his lines while Netto splashes the colours over his canvas with unthinking prodigality. Bilac is the silver stream glittering along through the landscape that it reflects with the transmuting touch of its own borrowed silver; Netto is the gushing torrent that sweeps everything along in its path, part and parcel of the surrounding exuberance.

“Our literature lacks original character,” says the talkative Gomes in _A Capital Federal_, one of Netto’s earliest novels (1893),--less a novel, indeed, than a series of impressions in which not the least element is the fairly unceasing chatter of its persons. “It is not really a national literature because, unhappily, nobody concerns himself with the nation. The eyes of our poets scan the constellations of other heavens, the waters of other rivers, the verdure of other forests.” Again: “We are still a people in process of formation,--still at the beginning of life and yet, at the age when Greece was lyrical, in the youthful days in which all men try to compose poems of religion and hope for the shelter of the soul, we despair, we are pessimistic.… By conviction? Because of suffering? Absolutely not. Scarcely by imitation. We lament in the cradle and ask for death, Nirvana. We begin reading with the Book of Job. Show me our Romantic period, which is, so to speak, the adolescence of Art, in its second phase, after the renaissance. We had none. We leaped into naturalism, which is analysis, and already we are headed for the cachexy of decadentism.…” There is much to be said against the plaints of this citation, whether one consider its nationalistic implications or its insinuation that Brazil’s Romantic period lacked genuineness. I quote it, however, to show that at the very beginning of his career Netto intended a conscious reorientation of the Brazilian novel away from the naturalism of Azevedo in the direction of what we may term neo-romanticism. Both men are concerned with what blurred thinking so readily calls the baser passions; both are sensualists, each envisaging life not so much through a different theory as through a different temperament.

Netto is the Anselmo Ribas of his early books, wherein already appears the voluptuary, the creature of extravagant language and unbridled imagination, the weaver of tangled imagery, the wielder of a copious vocabulary that has been estimated at as high as 20,000 words. And that voluptuary appears everywhere, in the images, the narrative, the thoughts. “Amber-hued wine that seems to sing in its glasses a dithyramb of gold,--impatient wine that seethes and foams,--wine that rages like the mighty ocean,--ambrosia of a new era,--live, intelligent wine,--wine with a soul.” Such is the wine that is drunk by Ribas and his friend Gomes, who has his scents for each colour, sound and feeling. When the silks of a lady rustle, the noise is comparable to the sounds “made by the flocks of wild pigeons when they raise their flight on the riverbanks of my native province.” In his work, as in this simile, his sensuousness is mingled with the primitivity of mother earth. He has written much of the city life, and has traveled with his pen through all the forms, but he is strongest when closest to that primitive urge. I prefer him, for short tales, in such an early work as _Sertão_; for the novel, in such a concise miniature masterpiece as _Rei Negro_.

Henrique Maximiano Coelho Netto was born on February 21, 1864, in the city of Caxias, department of Maranhão, of a Portuguese father and an Indian mother. In 1870 the family moved to Rio de Janeiro. From his slave attendant Eva he imbibed a wealth of Brazilian folk lore; from Maria, the Portuguese housekeeper, he drank in (and with what avidity his later work reveals) the common heritage of Oriental tales. Another powerful influence (and this, too, is duly chronicled in _A Capital Federal_) was his uncle Rezende, a book-keeper with a taste for the Portuguese and Latin classics. For the fundamental traits of Netto as a creative spirit one need hardly go farther than these childhood impressions. Here we have his mixed blood, his predilection for the native lore and exotic artistry, his preference for the ancient writers and a fondness for the Portuguese classics that reveals itself in his not infrequently archaic language. Some of his pages, Verissimo has shown, would be better understood in Portugal than in Brazil.

Though his early education lacked method, already at the age of eight he read Cicero; he pursued his studies at various institutions, never remaining through the complete number of years. Like most Brazilians, he began with a sonnet, followed by a number of poems which fortunately, he never issued; his newspaper experience commenced in the _Gazeta da Tarde_, 1887. Unlike most Brazilians he wrested a living from the nation by his pen, and 1892 found him teaching the history of the arts. His restlessness, however, seems to keep him flitting from place to place and from interest to interest. In 1900 he is found in Campinas teaching literature, remaining for three years. In 1909 he is back in Rio at the Gymnasio Nacional, lecturing upon letters. From that year until 1917 he represents the state of Maranhão in the national assembly. Today finds him busily at work revising the long list of his labours and issuing them with as keen an interest as if they were the first fruits of his imagination.

“Even to this day,” he confessed to an interviewer a few years ago, “I feel the influence of the first period of my life in the sertão. It was the histories, the legends, the tales heard in my childhood,--Negro stories filled with fear, legends of _caboclos_ palpitant with sorcery, tales of white men, the phantasy of the sun, the perfume of the forest, the dream of civilized folk.… Never did the mixture of ideas and race cease to predominate, and even now it makes itself felt in my eclecticism.… My imagination is the resultant of the soul of Negro, _caboclo_ and white.” The criticism is born out by a study of his many books, most of which, as the author himself would be the first to agree, will be speedily forgotten in the excellence of the salient few.

Neo-romantic though he be, Netto is no believer in the false Indianism that for a time held sway in the native letters. His affection for the Portuguese tongue, which he considers the most plastic of languages, does not preclude a belief in a Brazilian literature. Asked whether he was religious--and here again reading of his representative books bears witness to his self-knowledge--he replied, “Very. I don’t know whether I believe in Lord Christ, or in Lord Nature, but I believe in the immanent principle of divinity. And perhaps, for this reason, I am one of the rare men who hope.”

“One may say of him,” writes Costa, “what Taine said of Balzac: ‘he is a sort of literary elephant, capable of bearing prodigious burdens, but slow of gait.’” And before Costa, Netto said of himself that he was a “Trappist of labor,--what the French call a _bête de somme_.” Better than any one else Verissimo, upon whom Costa largely draws for his consideration of Netto, has defined the qualities of the prolific polygraph. Netto has tried all the styles; he has from the first revealed that exuberance which makes of him a splashing colourist, a vivid describer of externals, an expert in word pageantry; his prose is often a wild cataract, a tangled forest. He is not a writer of ideas, but of sensations. Erroneously he has termed himself a Hellenist and a primitive, unmindful, as the scrupulous Verissimo has indicated, that these terms in themselves are contradictory. Much of his labour is “literature”; many of the novels are spoiled by their evident origin in the desires of newspaper readers; his fondness for archaisms offends linguistic common sense; even his descriptions, according to the testimony of compatriots, are largely invented, no truer to the native scene than are some of his characters to the native life. His defects, notably carelessness in structure, are the defects of improvisation. And yet--for all that his critics so justly note, he compels the reader with the peculiar fascination that is his own--the attraction of a volcano in eruption, of a beauty whose very exoticism draws even as it repels.

He is that rare flower of the literary life,--a personality. His rôle has been that of a minor Balzac, pouring forth volume after volume in disconcerting and damaging confusion, coupled with that of a Mæcenas-Hugo, encouraging the youth of his nation to ardent effort in the arena of letters. “He reproduced,” says Costa, “unconsciously in his own country what was being practised in France consciously by the neo-romantics, the idealists,--all those who revolted against the ever-increasing asperities of agonizing naturalism.”

* * * * *

Much of what is best in Netto is concentrated in one of his earliest books, _Sertão_, published in 1896 at Rio de Janeiro. This is a collection of some seven tales notable for atmosphere, power, poetry. In _Praga_ (Curse), we are plunged deep into the past of superstition and sensuality that lies in the sertanejo’s breast. Even burning with fever, Raymundo wants Lucinda. In his delirium he recalls how he tried to rob, and murdered, Mãi Dina the year before, the crime being laid to gipsies; the murdered woman visits him in his visions and he has a terrific battle with her; rushing forth from his cabin he encounters a colt and mounting it, makes a mad dash, like a Mazeppa of the sertão, for the salvation that he feels lies in flight. He exhausts his mount and then makes his wandering way to Mãi Dina’s grave; in a frenzy he begins to slash right and left with his knife, when a misdirected blow sends him rolling off into a swamp, where he meets his end. Not her curse but his conscience has wrought retribution. This is a strange mingling of reality with fancy,--a sultry realism sprinkled with scientific terms and heavy with tropical luxuriance of phraseology; but there is poetry, too,--poetry of the indigenous mind, as in the tale that follows: _O Enterro_ (The Burial). This account of the burial of the Indian witch Tecai, a pagan for whom the pious Christians of Itamina refuse even to give a coffin, is really a poem. So too, largely, is _A Tapera_, a tale of mingled legend, wild dream and virgin forest, in which the hermit of Santa Luzia recounts to the teller, the tale of his beautiful wife Leonor. Within a year she proved unfaithful and was discovered by her husband’s black foster-mother Eva. On the night of the discovery she is slain by Eva and together they bury her. The husband goes mad, taking it into his head that a certain tree follows him vengefully about. Under that tree one day he digs her up and morbidly caresses the skull. After hearing the tale, the narrator dashes off on his horse at a mad gallop and is told, three days later, that he must have dreamed all this in a fever. This is strained situation, no doubt, but Netto knows how to produce the Poesque thrill of horror, not merely by accumulation of detail but by adroit manipulation of it. That he may at times achieve simplicity is shown in _Firmin, O Vaqueiro_, in which the aged cattleman dies amidst the songs and the animals that he loved and dominated so well, even as he did the girls of his early hey-day. The song of the story might serve as the epigraph to much of what Netto has written:

No coração de quem ama
Nasce uma flor que envenena.
Morena, essa flor que mata,
Chama-se paixão, morena.

In the heart of him who loves
Is born a flower with poison laden.
Dark-brown maiden, that flower which slays,--
They call it passion, dark-brown maiden.

For sex in Coelho Netto is at once the Fate that snares man and woman and the Furies who pursue them. Take _Céga_ (Blind), one of the best things he has done; it is a powerful tale, instinct with a deep human pity, yet with no trace of preceptiveness. Life here goes and comes with the radiant indifference of the sun that shines over all and of the crickets that shrill their monotonous accompaniment. Anna Rosa, married to Cabiúna, loses her sight at the birth of her child Felicia; then, through the fever of the sertão, she loses her Cabiúna; then she loses Felicia herself, because the maiden has kept her approaching motherhood a secret until it is too late. The grandchild lives on as a token of the continuity of life’s urge, which brooks no restraint of human laws. Rarely does Netto attain such proportion in description, narrative, psychology; here Nature may smile upon her folk, but humour, gladness do not dwell for long amongst them. Even when humour comes, it is the smiling face of fear, as in the account of _Mandoví_, the _caboclo_ whose superstitious fancy was lashed into terror by a forest bird that seemed to be calling his name and by a wraith-like palm-leaf swaying in the moon. Most gruesome of all, yet of undeniable fascination, is the concluding tale, _Os Velhos_, (The Aged Couple),--a study in obsession that is passed on by an old husband to his faithful wife. He suffers from a sort of catalepsy and fears that some day, while in the death-like state, he will be buried alive. At last his final attack slays him, but she, fearing lest he be not really gone, lets him rot in his hut until the stench rises beyond endurance and the village populace take matters into their own hands. It is harrowing, repelling, morbid, but done with something of the skill that a Poe attains in such a piece as _The Fall of the House of Usher_. The motif of the ominous urubus--the black vultures of the southern continent--is most artistically handled, as is that of the contagious obsession as it grows upon the aged husband. Even here we discover evidence of the author’s voluptuousness, inverted to be sure, until it becomes a species of olfactory sadism. Few tales display such an effective treatment of the sense of smell made into an inevitable, primary attribute of the story itself.