Read the book: «Brazilian Literature»

FOREWORD

Brazil is preparing to commemorate worthily the centenary of her independence. The world outside is bidden to the feast, and to beautiful Rio de Janeiro many nations are sending their envoys with felicitations and gifts. Our own country, the United States of North America, is mindful of her duty and her privilege on this occasion, and accredited delegates are bearing her congratulations to her ever-faithful associate in the promoting of peace and fraternity throughout the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps it will not be taken amiss, if the scholar and critic add his testimonial to the expressions of good-will coming from all sides. What more fitting than that a scholar and critic of our United States should join the chorus and voice an honest appreciation of Brazilian letters?

Dr. Goldberg, who has already paid ample tribute to the literary output of Spanish-speaking America, gives proof now of the catholicity of his interest by surveying the whole course of literature in Portuguese-speaking America, the vast land of Brazil, and by analyzing the compositions of certain outstanding figures among the writers of the region. He knows at first hand the authors and the works that he treats; he knows what native and foreign critics have to say about them; he expresses unreservedly his own opinion about them. He gives praise where praise is due, and, in kindly fashion, he puts stricture upon that which calls for stricture. On the whole, his pages contain more laudation than censure; and this is as it should be, for very many of the literary achievements of colonial, imperial and republican Brazil are unquestionably of lasting worth. His laudation, moreover, is uttered without any tinge of that condescension which European critics deem it incumbent upon them to manifest when they pass judgment on the culture of North or South America.

To his fellow-citizens of the United States of North America Dr. Goldberg now presents an opportunity of viewing aspects of the soul of a noble Southern land, their constant ally. Brazil’s political and commercial importance they know well, but her literary significance has not been so evident to them. If, reading his words, they conceive respect for Brazilian effort and accomplishment in the world of letters, his reward will be truly great; and that reward is truly deserved.

J. D. M. Ford.

PREFACE

The plans for this book, as well as for my Studies in Spanish-American Literature, were conceived during the years 1910-1912 while I was engaged in research work under Professor J. D. M. Ford, head of the Department of Romance Languages, Harvard University. It was not merely that text-books were lacking in both the Spanish-American and the Brazilian fields, for my interest is centred upon aesthetic pleasure rather than upon the depersonalized transmission of facts. A yawning gap of ignorance separated us then from the America that does not speak English, nor was the ignorance all on our side. Commercial opportunities, more than cultural curiosity, served to impart an impetus to the study of Spanish and soon we were reading fiction not only from Spain but from Spanish America. In so far as the mercantile spirit was responsible for this broader literary interest, it performed an undoubted service to art by widening our horizons, but one should be wary about overestimating the permanent gain. Unfortunately, the phonographic iteration of diplomatic platitudes brings continents no nearer, unless it be for the mad purposes of war. If, then, we are, as a people, quite as far as ever from Spanish America, what shall we say of our spiritual distance from the United States of Brazil?

I may be pardoned if I indicate, for example, that the language of Brazil is not Spanish, but Portuguese. And should this simple fact come as a surprise to any reader, let him not be unduly overwhelmed, for he errs in distinguished company. Thus, Gustave Le Bon, – he of crowd-psychology fame, speaks of South America in his Lois psychologiques des peuples (p. 131, 12th ed., 1916) as being predominantly of Spanish origin, divided into numerous republics, of which the Brazilian is one. As late as 1899, Vacher de Lapouge, in his book on L’Aryen could describe Brazil as a “vast negro state returning to a state of savagery,” important, like Mexico, only in a numerical way.¹ A small return, it seems, for Brazil’s intellectual adherence to France, yet indicative of inexcusable ignorance not only of Brazil, but of Mexico, where the cultural life, though concentrated, is intense and productive of results that would repay examination. By 1899 Brazil had already produced a fairly respectable array of original creative writers, while Mexican poetry was adding to the wealth of new Spanish verse. Where specialists stray, then, who shall guide the innocent layman? Nor are the Brazilians without their case against the English, as we shall presently note in the discussion of a mooted section of Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, though they owe to more than one earlier Englishman a history of their land. Robert Southey, for notable example, after the collapse of the “pantisocratic” plans harboured by him and Coleridge, found the time to write a History of Brazil that is read today only somewhat less frequently than his poetry.

The history of Brazil, like Cæsar’s unforgettable Gaul, is generally divided into three parts: (1) from the discovery by the Portuguese in 1500 to the Independence in 1822; (2) the independent monarchy, which lasted until 1889; (3) the republic, 1889 to the present. This, then, is the centenary year of Brazilian independence and, as no English book has yet sought to trace the literary history of the nation, the occasion seems propitious for such a modest introductory one as this. The fuller volume which it precedes I hope to have ready in a few years, as a contribution to the study of the creative imagination on this side of the Atlantic.

If, in any part, I seem dogmatic, I can but plead the exigencies of space, which permit of little analytic discussion. I am no believer in clear-cut formulæ as applied to art; where facts are presented, they are given as succinctly as possible, while opinions are meant to be suggestive rather than – ugly word! – definitive. The first part of the book is devoted to an outline history of Brazilian literature; this is meant to provide the background for a proper appreciation of the representative figures treated in the second part. Since the first part deals largely with facts, I have aimed to give the reader not solely a personal view – which belongs more properly among the essays of the second – but also a digest of the few authorities that have treated the subject. It thus forms a reasonably adequate introduction to the deeper study of Brazilian literature that may some day interest a portion of our student body, and will, moreover, be of aid in rounding out the sharp corners of a general knowledge of letters. More important still, it should help to an appreciation of the Brazilian national personality. As to the representative figures chosen for more individual treatment, through one trait or another they emerge from the background as Brazil’s contributions to something more than an exclusively national interest, or else afford striking opportunity for studying phases of the national mind.

Though none of the text as it here appears has been printed elsewhere, some of the matter has formed the substance of articles that have been published, between 1914 and the present, in the Boston Evening Transcript, the Christian Science Monitor, the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, the New York Times, the Bookman, the Stratford Journal and other periodicals, to the management and editors of which I am indebted not only for permission to reprint, but for their readiness to accept such exotic material. For bibliographical aid and other favours I am also thankful to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Carlos de Laet, President; to Manoel de Oliveira Lima, of the Brazilian Academy; Gilberto Freyre; C. J. Babcock, Librarian of the Columbus Memorial Library, Washington, D. C.; C. K. Jones; Prof. H. R. Lang, Yale; Dr. A. C. Potter and the Harvard Library; to Sr. Helio Lobo, Consul General in New York for Brazil; and to my friend Professor J. D. M. Ford of Harvard. For the index I am indebted to my wife.

Isaac Goldberg.

Roxbury, Massachusetts.

PART ONE
AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF BRAZILIAN LITERATURE

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

The Milieu and the Racial Blend – Portuguese Tradition, African and Native Contributions – Linguistic Modification – Nationalism and Literature – Problems of the Future – Phases of Brazilian Literature.

I

Although Brazil was not discovered until the opening year of the sixteenth century, the name had long hovered in the mediaeval consciousness together with that of those other mysterious islands which peopled the maps and the imaginations of the dark, fantastic days. Down from the Greeks had come the legend of an Atlantis, which, through the centuries assumed changing shapes, losing soon its status as continent and becoming an island. Thus, in a map of the Atlas Medicis, dating back to 1351, there is registered a Brazil. The name varied from Braçir, Brazil, Brazylle to O’Brasile, and the position shifted with equal instability; now the mythical island was near the Azores, now near the western coast of the British Isles. Charles Squire, in his The Mythology of the British Islands,² relates that according to legend, the gods having lost their celestial dwelling, deliberated upon some earthly substitute. Into their discussion came a paradise beyond the sea, – a western island variously described as a land of promise, of felicity and of youth, and as the “island of Breasal” or “Hy-Breasail.” It is supposed that some of the early discoverers, imagining that they had come upon the island Eden, named it Brazil in much the same way that Columbus named the Indies, considering his quest for India at last successful.

However this may be, the first name officially given to Brazil was The Land of the True (or Holy) Cross; only later did the name Brazil, said to have been bestowed by King Emanuel of Portugal, replace the pious title. There is something symbolic in the change; brazil³ is the name of the reddish dyewood which became so important commercially that it caused naval combats and Portuguese-French rivalry, leading to the effective occupation of the land by the Portuguese. The beam of the cross yielded to a humbler wood as the national designation, just as the pious pretensions of the early colonizers quickly vanished before their impious greed.

The early reports of the newly discovered land lived up to the paradisical visions that had partly inspired the quest. Truly here was a land of promise, a terrestrial paradise that made men dip their pens in milk and honey when they wrote of its wonders. Vaz de Caminha, in what has been called the nation’s “baptismal certificate,” grew rhapsodical in vain; Vespucci, – he for whom the American continent was named, – actually termed it an earthly paradise, but the Portuguese were slow to value the new possession; the cross was not a cross of gold. Nobrega, in 1549, exaggerated the extent of the new discovery even as others were to exaggerate the variety and magic of its fauna and flora; he considered that it occupied no less than two-thirds of the world’s area. Padre Anchieta, the noble leader of the Jesuits, repeated (1585) Vespucci’s glorification and thought the new land not inferior to Portugal, and thus ran the litany of adoration from the topographical pen of Gabriel Soares to the chronicler Cardim, to the pompous Rocha Pitta, and – now with realistic modifications aplenty – down to our own day, when Graça Aranha, by the very title of his novel Chanaan, reveals his conception of his native country as the Land of Promise. From the very beginning the new discovery had captivated the imaginations of the Europeans; to this day its chief quality is the imagination which Senhor Aranha, in a speech at the Sorbonne (1913) has distinguished from the imagination of other peoples. “In Brazil,” he explained, “the collective trait is the imagination. It is not the faculty of idealization, nor the creation of life through esthetic expression, nor the predominance of thought; it is rather the illusion that comes from the representation of the universe, the state of magic, in which reality is dissipated and is transformed into an image… The distant roots of this imagination may be found in the souls of the various races that met amidst the lavishness of tropical nature. Each people brought to the fusion its own melancholy. Each, having arrived with a spirit full of the terror of several gods, with the anguish of memories of a past forever lost, was possessed by the indefinable uneasiness of the foreign land. Thus was developed that implacable sensibility which magnifies and distorts things, which alternately exalts and depresses the spirits, which translates anxieties and desires; a troubled source of poetry and religion, through which we aspire to the possession of the Infinite, only to lose ourselves at once in the Nirvana of inaction and day-dreaming.” Benedicto Costa⁴ has likened this same imagination to the Brazilian forest, with its “disorder and opulence, its vigour and languor; trees that last for centuries and flowers that bloom but a few moments; lianas that live upon the sap of other growths; the brilliancy of orchids, the voices of birds of iridescent coloration, the heat… There is in the soul of every Brazilian the same contrasts that characterize the tropical forest.”⁵

Brazil, however, is not all forest any more than, intellectually, it is all tropical confusion. There are mountains and valleys and extensive coasts, and each region has a distinguishing influence upon the inhabitant. Thus the climate of the sertão⁶ (interior highlands) is less variable and far more salubrious than that of the littoral. “Man here represents perfectly the traits of the surroundings into which he is born and where he dwells: the sertanejo (i. e., the inhabitant of the sertão) is sombre, thin, mistrustful and superstitious, rarely aggressive, rash in his impulses, as silent as the vast plains that surround him, calm in gesture, laconic in speech, and, above all, sunk in an inexpressible melancholy that is in his eyes, in his mysterious countenance, in all the rough curves of his agile body, which is rather slender than muscular. The man of the coast is nervous, of acute sensibility; he can smile and laugh, he has a brilliant imagination and is a boisterous, turbulent thinker; he is an artist, preferring colored images to abstract ideas; he is slender, of well-proportioned lines, speaks at his best when improvising, discusses affairs with the utmost ease, and at times with daring, and generally respects only his own opinions; he is almost always proud and bold. The man of the sertão, for example, is Euclydes da Cunha; the man of the coast, Joaquim Nabuco.”⁷

It is in connection with the climate of Brazil that her writers have taken Henry Thomas Buckle to task; the passages responsible for the trouble occur in Chapter II of the famous History of Civilization in England, wherein the investigator considers the “influence exercised by physical laws over the organization of society and over the character of individuals.” I quote the original passages from Buckle, and give the refutation, which was originally made by the indefatigable polemist Sylvio Romero.

The trade wind, blowing on the eastern coast of South America, and proceeding from the east, crosses the Atlantic ocean, and therefore reaches the land charged with the vapours accumulated in its passage. These vapours, on touching the shore, are, at periodical intervals, condensed into rain; and as their progress westward is checked by that gigantic chain of the Andes, which they are unable to pass, they pour the whole of their moisture on Brazil, which, in consequence, is often deluged by the most destructive torrents. This abundant supply, being aided by that vast river-system peculiar to the eastern part of America, and being also accompanied by heat, has also stimulated the soil into an activity unequalled in any other part of the world. Brazil, which is nearly as large as the whole of Europe, is covered with a vegetation of incredible profusion. Indeed, so rank and luxuriant is the growth, that Nature seems to riot in the very wantonness of its power… Such is the flow and abundance of life by which Brazil is marked above all other countries of the earth. But, amid this pomp and splendour of Nature, no place is left for Man. He is reduced to insignificance by the majesty with which he is surrounded. The forces that oppose him are so formidable, that he has never been able to make head against them, never able to rally against their accumulated pressure. The whole of Brazil, notwithstanding its immense apparent advantages, has always remained entirely uncivilized, its inhabitants, wandering savages, incompetent to resist these obstacles which the very bounty of Nature had put in their way… The mountains are too high to scale, the rivers are too wide to bridge; everything is contrived to keep back the human mind, and repress its rising ambition. It is thus that the energies of Nature have hampered the spirit of Man. Nowhere else is there so painful a contrast between the grandeur of the external world and the littleness of the internal. And the mind, cowed by this unequal struggle, has not only been unable to advance, but without foreign aid it would undoubtedly have receded. For even at present, with all the improvements constantly introduced from Europe, there are no real signs of progress… These considerations explain why it is, that in the whole of Brazil there are no monuments even of the most imperfect civilization; no evidence that the people had, at any period, raised themselves above the state in which they were found when their country was first discovered.

In his Historia da Litteratura Brasileira,⁸ Romero devotes his third chapter to setting Buckle right. Brazil, he declares, far from suffering excessive rainfall, is subject to calamitous and destructive droughts. The Englishman, who never visited Brazil, errs likewise in his conception of the country’s natural wonders, which he exaggerates in the traditional fashion that was handed down by the earliest comers. Despite the presence of the Amazon, the rivers in general are small, not the largest in the world; the mountains, similarly, far from rearing their crests into unattainable cloudy heights, are of the fourth and fifth order when compared with their fellows of the old world or the new. Neither are the animals in Brazil more gigantic and ferocious than elsewhere. “Our fauna,” writes Romero, “is neither the richest nor the most terrible in the world. We haven’t the elephant, the camel, the hippopotamus, the lion, the tiger, the rhinoceros, the zebra, the giraffe, the buffalo, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the condor and the eagle.” Buckle speaks of Brazil’s unrivalled fertility as an impediment; the truth is that her fertility is not unrivalled, nor is it an impediment. In conclusion, “Buckle is right in the picture he draws of our backwardness, but wrong in the determination of its causes.” According to Romero, three chief reasons are to be adduced; these are (1) natural, (2) ethnic and (3) moral. To the first belongs the excessive heat, in conjunction with the droughts in the major part of the country, as well as the malignant fevers prevalent on the coast. Chief among the second is the “relative incapacity” of the three races that comprise the population. To the last belong the “historic factors called politics, legislation, habits, customs, which are effects that afterward act as causes.”

Ronaldo de Carvalho⁹ considers Romero’s reply somewhat timid, inasmuch as he accepts, erroneously, many of Buckle’s conclusions. Buckle’s passage “is not, as it appeared to the illustrious Brazilian writer, ‘true in a general sense.’ Yet it should ‘be meditated upon by all Brazilians’, that they may see what a dangerous snare it is to rely so much, in our inveterate fondness for things foreign, upon the notions imported from the intellectual markets on the other side of the Atlantic… Buckle’s error consisted in considering the evolution of peoples solely under the influence of physical and geographical factors; more enduring than these are the ethnico-historical factors, which are much more important and far more powerful than the first.” De Carvalho adds little to Romero’s refutation, which, in substance, he repeats. At the time that Buckle’s first volume was originally published (1857), Brazilian literature had long entered upon an autonomous career and was in the throes of Romanticism, which in Brazil was an era of intense and highly fruitful production. He can hardly be blamed for his ignorance on this score, when an authority like Ferdinand Wolf, writing his Le Brésil Litteraire some six years later, is accused by the querulous Romero of setting down many laughable exaggerations.

II

Three ethnic strains have combined to produce the Brazilian of today: (1) the Portuguese, (2) the native Indian, (3) the African Negro, who was brought in as a slave by the Portuguese.

The native element, known as the Brazilian-Guarany, at the time of the discovery knew no metals; they possessed a rudimentary knowledge of weaving, and some of them practised ceramics; their instruments were of polished stone, and their fishing and hunting implements were of the most primitive. The form of organization was rough. “Some spoke a rich language of delicate accents and varied expression; they had traditional customs and were skilful in the arts of war and peace; others, however, were coarse, deficient in culture, roaming in nomadic bands along the coast or amidst the high sertões. Some respected certain rules of morality and religion, in which, for example, the family ties were sacred…”¹⁰ Others dwelt in a certain “embryonic socialism” which permitted free love and the participation of woman in masculine pursuits. Ethnologists are not agreed upon the religious status of the tribes, hovering between the hypotheses of polytheism and anthropomorphic animism; the latter is more likely.

The Portuguese came at the height of their national glory. The sixteenth century, famed among them for its physical prowess, is also the epoch of Camões, Sá de Miranda, Bernardim Ribeiro and Gil Vicente. As to the Negro, his history in Brazil is much the same as that of the black slave in the United States, except that, owing to the proportions of interbreeding, the “color line” is less tightly drawn in the southern republic.

Two chief ethnic periods of formation have been distinguished in Brazil’s development, the first from the XVIth century to the end of the XVIIIth; the second, from the opening of the XIXth century to the present day. In the first period there was, chiefly, a crossing of the Portuguese with the Indian (mameluco), of the Portuguese with the Negro (mulato) and of the Indian with the Negro (cafuso). Later interbreeding becomes more complex, owing to the influx of new immigrants from Europe (Italians and Germans in particular, and Slavs in the south), and to the abolition of black slavery. So that the question has arisen whether the future of the land will be in the hands of the Luso-Brazilian or the Teuto-Italo-Brazilian. Brazilians naturally favour the former eventuality and in order to insure dominance by the Portuguese-Brazilian element propose new systems of colonization as well as immigration zones. Romero reached the conclusion that the Brazilian people did not constitute a race, but rather a fusion. As to whether this was a good or an evil he answered, in his “scientificist” way, that it was a fact, and that this should be sufficient. Since the Indian is fast disappearing and as traffic in blacks was abolished in 1851, and slavery in 1888, white predominance seems assured. “Every Brazilian,” said Romero, “is a mestee, if not in blood, in ideas.” So that white supremacy, never an unmixed blessing, does not, and cannot under the circumstances, imply an unmixed mentality.

III

What of the effect of this milieu and this racial blend upon the nation’s tongue and its creative output? The Brazilian is by nature melancholy, for melancholy is an attribute of each of the three streams that flow in his blood. The peculiar, haunting sadness of the Portuguese lyric muse is summed up in their untranslatable word “saudade”;¹¹ both the conquered native and the subjected black are sad, the first through the bepuzzled contact with superior natural forces, the second through the wretchedness of his economic position. It has been recognized that the climate of Brazil has resulted in a lyrism sweeter, softer and more passionate than that of the Portuguese. “Our language,” says Romero, “is more musical and eloquent, our imagination more opulent.” So, too, De Carvalho: “Brazilian prosody has more delicate accents than the Portuguese and numerous interesting peculiarities.”

In the matter of linguistic modification, as of racial blend and national psychology, we of the North have problems similar to those of the Brazilians, – problems often enough obscured by unscientific, sentimental fixations or political dogma. The simple fact is that life, in language as in biology, is change. Whether we are concerned with the evolution of English in the United States, of Spanish in the cluster of Spanish-American republics, or of Portuguese in Brazil, change is the inevitable law. For the Spanish of Spanish-America, Remy de Gourmont, with his insatiable appetite for novelty, originated the term neo-Spanish. It met with much opposition from the purists, yet it recognizes the ineluctable course of speech. The noted Colombian philologist Rufino Cuervo, in a controversy with the genial conservative Valera, voiced his belief that the Spanish of the new world would grow more and more unlike the parent tongue.¹² In the same spirit, if with most unacademic hilariousness, Mencken has, in The American Language,¹³ indicated the lines of cleavage between English and “American.” Brazilian scholars have naturally assumed a similar attitude toward their own language and have, likewise, met with the opposition of the purists. It does not matter, for the purpose of the present discussion, whether the linguistic cleavage in any of the instances here given will eventually prove so definite as to originate new tongues. Such an outcome is far less probable today than it was, say, in the epoch when Latin, through its vulgar form, was breaking up into the Romance languages. Widespread education and the printing press are conserving influences, acting as a check upon capricious modification.

One of the soundest and most sensible documents upon the Portuguese language in Brazil comes from the pen of the admirable critic José Verissimo.¹⁴ “As a matter of fact,” he writes, “save perhaps in the really Portuguese period of our literature, which merely reproduced in an inferior fashion the ideas, the composition, the style and the language of the Portuguese (already entered upon its decadence), authors never wrote in Brazil as in Portugal; the masters of language abroad never had disciples here to rival them or even emulate them… It would be a pure absurdity, then, to expect the Brazilian, the North American or the Spanish-American to write the classic tongue of his mother country.”

Chaucer wrote “It am I” where we would say “It is I” and where current colloquial usage, perhaps foreshadowing the accepted standard of tomorrow, says “It’s me.” English changes in England; why shall it cease to change in the United States? And justly, Verissimo asks a similar question for Brazil. “I have always felt,” he remarks somewhat farther on, “that the Portuguese tongue never attained the discipline and the relative grammatical and lexical fixity that other languages arrived at. I do not believe that among cultured tongues there is one that has given rise to so many controversial cases, or to so many and so diverse contradictions among its leading writers.” The fight about the collocation of personal pronouns is waged so earnestly in Brazil that it has become as funny, in some of its aspects, as the quarrel of the “lo-istas” and the “le-istas” in Spain. And so true are Verissimo’s words that as late as March, 1921, a writer could complain in the Revista do Brazil¹⁵ that “we are at the very height of linguistic bolshevism”; the very next month, indeed, the editorial board of the same representative intellectual organ found it necessary to comment upon the various systems of orthography employed by its contributors and to designate a choice.¹⁶ Verissimo, in accordance with A. H. Sayce, takes as his standard of grammatical correctness that which is “accepted by the great body of those who speak a language, not what is laid down by a grammarian.” Still more to the point, Verissimo, who was a man of exemplary honesty and fearlessness in a milieu that easily tempts to flattery and the other social amenities, declares that “if we are by language Portuguese, if through that tongue our literature is but a branch of the Portuguese, we have already almost ceased to be such … because of our fund of ideas and notions, which were all constituted outside of Portuguese influence.” The important thing, then, is “to have something to say, an idea to express, a thought to transmit. Without this, however deep his grammatical knowledge of the language, however perfectly he apes the classics, no man is a writer.” Platitudinous, perhaps, but how often some platitudes bear repetition!

The language of Brazil, then, is not the Portuguese of Lisbon. From the phonological viewpoint there is less palatalization of the final s and z than is customary in Portugal; Brazil has a real diphthong ou, which in Lisbonese has become a close o or the diphthong oi. Its pronunciation of the diphthong ei is true, whereas in Lisbon this approximates to ai (with a as in English above, or like the u of cut). Neither is the grammar identical with that of Portugal. “The truth is, that by correcting ourselves we run the danger of mutilating ideas and sentiments that are not merely personal. It is no longer the language that we are purifying; it is our spirit that we are subjecting to inexplicable servility. To speak differently is not to speak incorrectly… To change a word or an inflexion of ours for a different one of Coimbra¹⁷ is to alter the value of both in favor of artificial and deceptive uniformity.”¹⁸