FOOTNOTES:

Bailando no ar, gemia inquieto vagalume:—“Quem me dera que fosse aquella loura estrellaQue arde no eterno azul, como una eterna vela!”Mas a estrella, fitando a lua, com ciume:—“Pudesse eu copiar o transparente lume,Que, de grega columna á gothica janella,Contemplou, suspirosa, a fronte amada e bella!”Mas a lua, fitando o sol, com azedume:—“Misera! tivesse eu aquelle enorme, aquellaClaridade immortal, que toda a luz resume!”Mas o sol, inclinando a rutila capella:—“Pesa-me esta brilhante aureola de nume.…Enfara-me esta azul e desmedida umbella.…Porque não nasci eu um simples vagalume?”[4]

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

Bailando no ar, gemia inquieto vagalume:

—“Quem me dera que fosse aquella loura estrella

Que arde no eterno azul, como una eterna vela!”

Mas a estrella, fitando a lua, com ciume:

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

—“Pudesse eu copiar o transparente lume,

Que, de grega columna á gothica janella,

Contemplou, suspirosa, a fronte amada e bella!”

Mas a lua, fitando o sol, com azedume:

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

—“Misera! tivesse eu aquelle enorme, aquella

Claridade immortal, que toda a luz resume!”

Mas o sol, inclinando a rutila capella:

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

—“Pesa-me esta brilhante aureola de nume.…

Enfara-me esta azul e desmedida umbella.…

Porque não nasci eu um simples vagalume?”[4]

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

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

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

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

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

Ahasverus

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

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

I left Jerusalem. I began my wandering through the ages. I journeyed everywhere, whatever the race, the creed, the tongue; suns and snows, barbarous and civilized peoples, islands, continents; wherever a man breathed, there breathed I. I never laboured. Labour is a refuge, and that refuge was denied me. Every morning I found upon me the necessary money for the day.… See; this is the last apportionment. Go, for I need you no longer. (He draws forth the money and throws it away.) I did not work; I just journeyed, ever and ever, one day after another, year after year unendingly, century after century. Eternal justice knew what it was doing: it added idleness to eternity. One generation bequeathed me to the other. The languages, as they died, preserved my name like a fossil. With the passing of time all was forgotten; the heroes faded into myths, into shadow, and history crumbled to fragments, only two or three vague, remote characteristics remaining to it. And I saw them in changing aspect. You spoke of a chapter? Happy are those who read only one chapter of life. Those who depart at the birth of empires bear with them the impression of their perpetuity; those who die at their fall, are buried in the hope of their restoration; but do you not realize what it is to see the same things unceasingly,—the same alternation of prosperity and desolation, desolation and prosperity, eternal obsequies and eternal halleluiahs, dawn upon dawn, sunset upon sunset?PrometheusBut you did not suffer, I believe. It is something not to suffer.AhasverusYes, but I saw other men suffer, and in the end the spectacle of joy gave me the same sensations as the discourses of an idiot. Fatalities of flesh and blood, unending strife,—I saw all pass before my eyes, until night caused me to lose my taste for day, and now I cannot distinguish flowers from thistles. Everything is confused in my weary retina.

Prometheus

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

Ahasverus

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

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

Loosen them, new Hercules, last man of the old world, who shall be the first of the new. Such is your destiny; neither you nor I,—nobody can alter it. You go farther than your Moses. From the top of Mount Nebo, at the point of death, he beheld the land of Jericho, which was to belong to his descendants and the Lord said unto him: “Thou hast seen with thine eyes, yet shalt not pass beyond.”Youshall pass beyond, Ahasverus; you shall dwell in Jericho.AhasverusPlace your hand upon my head; look well at me; fill me with the reality of your prediction; let me breathe a little of the new, full life … King, did you say?PrometheusThe chosen king of a chosen people.AhasverusIt is not too much in recompense for the deep ignominy in which I have dwelt. Where one life heaped mire, another life will place a halo. Speak, speak on … speak on … (He continues to dream. The two eagles draw near.)First EagleAy, ay, ay! Alas for this last man; he is dying, yet he dreams of life.Second EagleNot so much that he hated it as that he loved it so much.[5]

Ahasverus

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

Prometheus

The chosen king of a chosen people.

Ahasverus

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

First Eagle

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

Second Eagle

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

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

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

The chapter is entitled The Worms (Os Vermes).

“ … When, later, I came to know that the lance of Achilles also cured a wound that it inflicted, I conceived certain desires to write a disquisition upon the subject. I went as far as to approach old books, dead books, buried books, to open them, compare them, plumbing the text and the sense, so as to find the common origin of pagan oracle and Israelite thought. I seized upon the very worms of the books, that they might tell me what there was in the texts they gnawed.“‘My dear sir,’ replied a long, fat bookworm, ‘we know absolutely nothing about the texts that we gnaw, nor do we choose what we gnaw, nor do we love or detest what we gnaw; we simply go on gnawing.’“And that was all I got out of him. All the others, as if they had agreed upon it, repeated the same song. Perhaps this discreet silence upon the texts they gnawed was itself another manner still of gnawing the gnawed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thus, by a strange irony of fate, all the colonel’s wealth came into my hands. At first I thought of refusing the legacy. It seemed odious to take a sou of that inheritance; it seemed worse than the reward of a hired assassin. For three days this thought obsessed me; but more and more I was thrust against this consideration: that my refusal would not fail to awake suspicion. Finally I settled upon a compromise; I would accept the inheritance and would distribute it in small sums, secretly.“This was not merely scruple on my part, it was also the desire to redeem my crime by virtuous deeds; and it seemed the only way to recover my peace of mind and feel that the accounts were straight.”

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

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

“Several months had elapsed, and the idea of distributing the inheritance in charity and pious donations was by no means so strong as it first had been; it even seemed to me that this would be sheer affectation. I revised my initial plan; I gave away several insignificant sums to the poor; I presented the village church with a few new ornaments; I gave several thousand francs to the Sacred House of Mercy, etc. I did not forget to erect a monument upon the colonel’s grave—a very simple monument, all marble, the work of a Neapolitan sculptor who remained at Rio until 1866, and who has since died, I believe, in Paraguay.“Years have gone by. My memory has become vague and unreliable. Sometimes I think of the colonel, but without feeling again the terrors of those early days. All the doctors to whom I have described his afflictions have been unanimous as regards the inevitable end in store for the invalid, and were indeed surprised that he should so long have resisted. It is just possible that I may have involuntarily exaggerated the description of his various symptoms; but the truth is that he was sure of sudden death, even had this fatality not occurred.…“Good-bye, my dear sir. If you deem these notes not totally devoid of value reward me for them with a marble tomb, and place there for my epitaph this variant which I have made of the divine sermon on the mount:“‘Blessed are they who possess, for they shall be consoled.’”

“Years have gone by. My memory has become vague and unreliable. Sometimes I think of the colonel, but without feeling again the terrors of those early days. All the doctors to whom I have described his afflictions have been unanimous as regards the inevitable end in store for the invalid, and were indeed surprised that he should so long have resisted. It is just possible that I may have involuntarily exaggerated the description of his various symptoms; but the truth is that he was sure of sudden death, even had this fatality not occurred.…

“Good-bye, my dear sir. If you deem these notes not totally devoid of value reward me for them with a marble tomb, and place there for my epitaph this variant which I have made of the divine sermon on the mount:

“‘Blessed are they who possess, for they shall be consoled.’”

I have omitted mention of the earlier novels of Machado de Assis because they belong to a romantic epoch, and he was not of the stuff that makes real romantics.[6]How could he be a genuine member of that school when every trait of his retiring personality rebelled against the abandonment to outspokenness implied in membership? He is as wary of extremes, as mistrustful of superlatives, as José Dias inDom Casmurrois fond of them. “I wiped my eyes,” relates the hero of that book, when apprised of his mother’s illness,“since of all José Dias’s words, but a single one remained in my heart: it was thatgravissimo, (very serious). I saw afterward that he had meant to say onlygrave(serious), but the use of the superlative makes the mouth long, and through love of a sonorous sentence José Dias had increased my sadness. If you should find in this book any words belonging to the same family, let me know, gentle reader, that I may emend it in the second edition; there is nothing uglier than giving very long feet to very short ideas.” If anything, his method follows the reverse order, that of giving short feet to long ideas. He never strains a thought or a situation. If he is sad, it is not the loud-mouthed melancholy of Byronic youth; neither is he the blatant cynic. He does not wave his hands and beat his breast in deep despair; he seems rather to sit brooding—not too deeply, for that would imply too great a concern with the silly world—by the banks of a lake in which the reflection of the clouds paints fantastic pictures upon the changing waters.

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

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

FOOTNOTES:[1]The occasion was theFête de l’Intellectualité Brésilenne, celebrated on April 3, 1909, at the Sorbonne in the Richelieu amphitheatre. Anatole France delivered a short, characteristic speech uponLe Génie Latin, emphasizing his disbelief in the idea of race. “Je dis le génie latin, je dis les peuples latins, parce que l’idée de race n’est le plus souvent qu’une vision de l’orgueil et de l’erreur, et parce que la civilization hellénique et romaine, comme la Jérusalem nouvelle, a vu venir de toutes parts à elle des enfants qu’elle n’avait point portés dans son sein. Et c’est sa gloire de gagner l’univers.… Latins des deux mondes, soyons fiers de notre commun heritage. Mais sachons le partager avec l’univers entier; sachons que la beauté antique, l’éternelle Hélène, plus auguste, plus chaste d’enlèvement en enlèvement, a pour destinée de se donner à des ravisseurs étrangers, et d’enfanter dans toutes les races, sous tous les climats, de nouveaux Euphorions, toujours plus savants et plus beaux.”[2]“I do not like tears,” he says, in his last novel,Memorial de Ayres, “even in the eyes of women, whether or not they be pretty; they are confessions of weakness, and I was born with an abhorrence for the weak.”[3]It was a blue fly, with wings of gold and carmine, daughter of China or of Hindustan, who was born on a certain summer’s night amid the petals of a red, red rose. And she buzzed and flew, and flew and buzzed, glittering in the light of the sun and the moon—brighter than a gem of the Grand Mogul. A humble toiler saw her, and was struck with amazement and sadness. A humble toiler, asking: “Fly, this glitter that seems rather a dream, say, who taught it to you?” Then she, flying around and about, replied: “I am life, I am the flower of grace, the paragon of earthly youth,—I am glory, I am love.” And he stood there, contemplating her, wrapt like a fakir, like one utterly dazed beyond power of comparison or reflection. Between the wings of the insect, as she flew in space, appeared something that rose with all the splendour of a palace, and he beheld a face that was his own. It was he,—he was a king,—the king of Cashmire, who wore upon his bare neck a huge necklace of opals, and a sapphire taken from the body of Vishnu. One hundred radiant women, a hundred exquisitenayras, smilingly display their rare graces at his feet upon the polished floor, and all the love they have they give to him. Mute, gravely on foot, a hundred ugly Ethiopians, with large ostrich fans, refresh their perfumed breasts, voluptuously nude. Then came glory,—forty conquered kings, and at last the triumphal tribute of three hundred nations, and the united felicitations of western crowns. But best of all is, that in the open face of the women and the men, as in water that shows the clear bottom, he saw into their hearts. Then he, extending his callous, rough hand that was accustomed only to carpentry, seized the glittering fly, curious to examine it. He wished to see it, to discover the cause of the mystery, and closing his fist around it, smiled with contentment to think that he held there an empire. He left for home. He arrives in excitement, examines and his mute behaviour is that of a man about to dissect his illusion. He dissected it, to such a point, and with such art, that the fly, broken, repellent, succumbed; and at this there vanished that fantastic, subtle vision. Today, when he passes, anointed with aloes and cardamom, with an affected air, they say that he went crazy, and that he doesn’t known how he lost his blue fly.[4]Dancing in the air, a restless glow-worm wailed, “Oh, that I might be that radiant star which burns in the eternal blue, like a perpetual candle!” But the star: “Oh, that I might copy the transparent light that, at the gothic window of a Greek column the beloved, beautiful one sighingly contemplated!” But the moon, gazing at the sun, peevishly: “Wretched I! Would that I had that vast, undying refulgence which resumes all light in itself!” But the sun, bowing its rutilant crown: “This brilliant heavenly aureole wearies me.… I am burdened by this vast blue canopy.… Why was I not born a simple glow-worm?”[5]The excerpts fromViver!andO Infermeiroare taken from myBrazilian Tales, Boston, 1921.[6]See Part One of this book, Chapter V, § III, for the more romantic aspects of Machado de Assis.

[1]The occasion was theFête de l’Intellectualité Brésilenne, celebrated on April 3, 1909, at the Sorbonne in the Richelieu amphitheatre. Anatole France delivered a short, characteristic speech uponLe Génie Latin, emphasizing his disbelief in the idea of race. “Je dis le génie latin, je dis les peuples latins, parce que l’idée de race n’est le plus souvent qu’une vision de l’orgueil et de l’erreur, et parce que la civilization hellénique et romaine, comme la Jérusalem nouvelle, a vu venir de toutes parts à elle des enfants qu’elle n’avait point portés dans son sein. Et c’est sa gloire de gagner l’univers.… Latins des deux mondes, soyons fiers de notre commun heritage. Mais sachons le partager avec l’univers entier; sachons que la beauté antique, l’éternelle Hélène, plus auguste, plus chaste d’enlèvement en enlèvement, a pour destinée de se donner à des ravisseurs étrangers, et d’enfanter dans toutes les races, sous tous les climats, de nouveaux Euphorions, toujours plus savants et plus beaux.”

[2]“I do not like tears,” he says, in his last novel,Memorial de Ayres, “even in the eyes of women, whether or not they be pretty; they are confessions of weakness, and I was born with an abhorrence for the weak.”

[3]It was a blue fly, with wings of gold and carmine, daughter of China or of Hindustan, who was born on a certain summer’s night amid the petals of a red, red rose. And she buzzed and flew, and flew and buzzed, glittering in the light of the sun and the moon—brighter than a gem of the Grand Mogul. A humble toiler saw her, and was struck with amazement and sadness. A humble toiler, asking: “Fly, this glitter that seems rather a dream, say, who taught it to you?” Then she, flying around and about, replied: “I am life, I am the flower of grace, the paragon of earthly youth,—I am glory, I am love.” And he stood there, contemplating her, wrapt like a fakir, like one utterly dazed beyond power of comparison or reflection. Between the wings of the insect, as she flew in space, appeared something that rose with all the splendour of a palace, and he beheld a face that was his own. It was he,—he was a king,—the king of Cashmire, who wore upon his bare neck a huge necklace of opals, and a sapphire taken from the body of Vishnu. One hundred radiant women, a hundred exquisitenayras, smilingly display their rare graces at his feet upon the polished floor, and all the love they have they give to him. Mute, gravely on foot, a hundred ugly Ethiopians, with large ostrich fans, refresh their perfumed breasts, voluptuously nude. Then came glory,—forty conquered kings, and at last the triumphal tribute of three hundred nations, and the united felicitations of western crowns. But best of all is, that in the open face of the women and the men, as in water that shows the clear bottom, he saw into their hearts. Then he, extending his callous, rough hand that was accustomed only to carpentry, seized the glittering fly, curious to examine it. He wished to see it, to discover the cause of the mystery, and closing his fist around it, smiled with contentment to think that he held there an empire. He left for home. He arrives in excitement, examines and his mute behaviour is that of a man about to dissect his illusion. He dissected it, to such a point, and with such art, that the fly, broken, repellent, succumbed; and at this there vanished that fantastic, subtle vision. Today, when he passes, anointed with aloes and cardamom, with an affected air, they say that he went crazy, and that he doesn’t known how he lost his blue fly.

[4]Dancing in the air, a restless glow-worm wailed, “Oh, that I might be that radiant star which burns in the eternal blue, like a perpetual candle!” But the star: “Oh, that I might copy the transparent light that, at the gothic window of a Greek column the beloved, beautiful one sighingly contemplated!” But the moon, gazing at the sun, peevishly: “Wretched I! Would that I had that vast, undying refulgence which resumes all light in itself!” But the sun, bowing its rutilant crown: “This brilliant heavenly aureole wearies me.… I am burdened by this vast blue canopy.… Why was I not born a simple glow-worm?”

[5]The excerpts fromViver!andO Infermeiroare taken from myBrazilian Tales, Boston, 1921.

[6]See Part One of this book, Chapter V, § III, for the more romantic aspects of Machado de Assis.

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

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

That Europe, with its ancient culture, its aristocratic intellectual circles and its concentrated audiences, should have produced great critics, is not, after all, so much to be wondered at,—surely, hardly more to be marvelled at than the emergence of the great playwright, the great novelist. That the United States, in recent years, reveals the promise of notable criticism, is somewhat more a cause for congratulation in that here we lack—or up to yesterday, lacked—inspiring intellectual leaders. But at least we possessed the paraphernalia, the apparatus, the national wealth. We had publishers, we had printing-presses, we had a generally literate populace, whatever the use to which the populace put those capabilities. Our young writers did not have to seek publishers abroad, whence alone could come likewise, literary consecration. That a Rodó should arise in Spanish America—and more than one notable critic had preceded him—or that a Verissimo should appear in Brazil, is fairly a triumph of mind over matter. It is true that such an event would have been impossible without the influence—and the decided influence—of European culture; but it is a triumph, nonethe less. And it is the sort of triumph that comes from the sacrifice of material boons to values less tangible, yet more lasting. I do not mean that Verissimo went about deploring the humble position of the artist and the true critic in Brazil; I am a mite mistrustful of self-analytic martyrs, of whom we are not exempt in these United States. He exercised a deliberate choice. Much of his work first appeared in the newspapers, and this alone must stand as a tribute to the organs that printed his critiques. For the rest, his life and labours serve to prove that south of the Rio Grande, no less than north, economic materialism and the life of the spirit are at everlasting grips with each other, and that there are men (again on both sides of that stream) who are masters rather than slaves of the chattels they possess.

He was not religious (remember that I am treating him as he treated his own subjects—as he is revealed in his writings); he was not intensely emotional; he looked love and death straight in the eyes, as much with curiosity as with any inner or outer trembling before either. He was, in his realm, what Machado de Assis was in his,—a spirit of the Limbo, shall we say? His motto, if he would have accepted the static connotation of mottoes, might have been Horace’smedio tutissimus ibis, only that he sought the middle path not so much through desire of safety as out of a certain philosophical conviction. But there again I use a word that does not harmonize with Verissimo’s intellectual elasticity, for words are almost as hard and cold as the type that prints them, while thoughts rather resemble the air that takes them into space. And Verissimo is especially sensible to this permanence-in-transiency. “As to permanence,” he wrote in an interestingessay onQue é Literatura[1](What is Literature?), “it might be said, in a sort of paradox, that it is precisely the transitoriness of the emotion that makes a book of lasting interest. It is an essential difference between knowledge and emotion that the first is lasting and the second transitory. A fact learned remains, is added to the sum of our knowledge. We may forget it, but such forgetting is not in the nature of things necessary, and the truths that are contained in a book of science that we have read join our permanent intellectual acquisitions. The emotions are by very nature fleeting,—they are not, like the facts we learn, added to and incorporated into one another; they are a series of experiences that change constantly. Within a few hours the emotion aroused by the reading of a poem is extinguished; it cannot endure. It may be renewed, by the re-reading of the poem or by resorting to memory, and, if it be a masterpiece, successive readings and recollection will not blunt its power to move us.”

He commits himself to no definite esthetic system, thus suggesting his affinities to the French impressionists and to that Jules Lemaître whom he so much admired. “No meio não está só a virtude, mas a verdade,” he writes; “not only virtue, but truth, lies in the middle.” This, as I have said, is not a wish for the Horatian safety of the middle course, but rather an innate mistrust of extremes. To the ancient apophthegm that there is nothing new under the sun—and it would be just as true tosay that there is nothing old under it, or that all things under the sun are new—he composes a variant that might well stand as the description of the best in our newer criticism: “Nada ha de definitivo debaixo do Sol”; “there is nothing definitive under the sun.” In United States criticism there is a lapidary phrase to match it, and from a spirit who, allowing for all the modifications of time, space and temperament, is kin to Verissimo. I refer to a brief sentence that occurs in the Introduction to Ludwig Lewisohn’sA Modern Book of Criticism, in a paragraph devoted to demonstrating the futility of absolute standards, as represented in the important work of Paul Elmer More.… “Calmly oblivious of the crumbling of every absolute ever invented by man,” writes Mr. Lewisohn,“he (i. e., Mr. More) continues in his fierce and growing isolation to assert that he knows what human life ought to be and what kind of literature ought to be permitted to express its character. That a form of art or life exists and that it engages the whole hearts of men makes little difference to him. He knows.… And what does he know? Only, at bottom, his own temperamental tastes and impulses which he seeks to rationalize by an appeal to carefully selected and isolated tendencies in art and thought. And, having rationalized them by an artifice so fragile, he seeks to impose them upon the men and the artists of his own day in the form of laws. I know his reply so well. It is this, that if you abandon his method, you sink into universal scepticism and undiscriminate acceptance. The truth is that I believe far more than he does. For I love beauty in all its forms and find life tragic and worthy of my sympathy in every manifestation. I need no hierarchical moral world for my dwelling-place, because I desire neither to judge nor to condemn.Fixed standards are useless to him whose central passion is to have men free.Mr. More needs them for the same inner reason—infinitely rarified and refined, of course,—for which they are necessary to the inquisitor and the militant patriot. He wants to damn heretics.… I do not. His last refuge, like that of every absolutist at bay, would be in the corporate judgment of mankind. Yes, mankind has let the authoritarians impose upon it only too often. But their day is nearly over.…”[2]

This is one of the most important passages in contemporary United States criticism,—doubly so because the men thus ranged against each other are both accomplished scholars and thus rise to symbols of the inevitable contest between the intellect that dominates the emotions and the intellect that has discovered wisdom in guidance rather than domination. Verissimo was no Lewisohn; he possessed many of that critic’s signal qualities, but in lesser degree. His language is not so instinct with human warmth, his culture not so wide nor so deep, his perceptions not so keen; but he belongs in company of such rare spirits. He is as unusual amidst the welter of verbose opinions that passes for criticism in Spanish and Portuguese America as is Lewisohn amidst our own colder but equally vapid and empty reviewers and as was Rodó in the milieu that but half understood him. Neither Rodó nor Verissimo, for that matter, had a firm grasp upon the budding intellectual life of these States; each died a trifle too early for the signs of hope that theywould have been happy to discern. As it is, they possessed the somewhat stencilled view of the United States as the country of the golden calf; a view none too false, more’s the pity, but too “absolute” in the sense that we have just seen discussed. There is, for all the truth in Rodó’s famousAriel, a certain half-concealed condescension that might not have appeared were that essay written today.[3]The younger Spanish Americans and Brazilians who have come north to study at our universities and to acquaint themselves with the newer phases of our culture, have been quick to respond to such spirits as Van Wyck Brooks, Henry L. Mencken, Ludwig Lewisohn, Joel Elias Spingarn. During the next decade, as these young men rise to power in their own intellectual world, their books will doubtless reveal a different attitude toward the attainments of their Northern neighbours,—unless—and there is always that unless,—political happenings should contort their views and our scant spiritual population should once again suffer, as so often in the past, for the misdoings of our diplomats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I continue to maintain,” wrote Verissimo, “and all the documents support me, that Varnhagen was the father of our literary history, principally of that history as it is conceived and realized by Sylvio Romero in hisHistoria da literatura brazileira, whose inspiration and economy derive far more from the studies of Varnhagen than from the generalizations … of Fernand Denis or Norberto Silva … I know perfectly well … what was accomplished before him by Norberto Silva and Fernand Denis, Bouterwek and Sismondi, etc.… The oldest of these writers is the German Bouterwek. But I doubt whether Sylvio Romero ever read him. In fact this author concerns himself only in passing fashion with Brazilian literature.…” And in turn Verissimo takes up the work of Denis, Silva and other predecessors of Varnhagen, rectifying the position of the investigator whose merits have been so unjustly slighted by the dogmatic “Pontifex Maximus of Brazilian letters,” as Romero was called by Eunapio Deiró.[4]

“A disciple of the French through Sainte-Beuve and Brunetière, and of the English through Macaulay,” says Carvalho in his recent work upon Brazilian literature,“Verissimo was what might be called an objective critic. Versed in many literatures, even erudite, he lacked, in order to be a great writer, a finer taste for beautiful things, and likewise, the spirit, or rather, the fineness of understanding and sensibility. HisHistoria da Literatura Brazileirawhich is, we will not say a perfect, but an honest synthesis of our literary evolution, shows the primordial defect of its method, which was that of seeking the individual to the detriment of the milieu, the personal work to the prejudice of the collective. Verissimo, who possessed a direct observation that could appreciate isolated values keenly, lacked on the other hand a deep intuition of universal problems; he was content to point them out in passing; he did not enter into them, he circled prudently around them.…”[5]

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

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

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