FOOTNOTES:

“What I know of American literature—and in truth it is very little—authorizes me to say that ours is perhapsthe oldest of the continent.[6]From the literary standpoint our nationality seems to have preceded the other American nations. It is clear that I am not here insisting upon a strict question of date; it is possible that in Mexico, and even in Peru,—I haven’t at hand the means for verifying the facts,—some writers may have arisen earlier than our own, poets necessarily. Chronology, in literature, however, though of considerable importance, cannot alone serve to establish priority. A literature is a grouping, and cannot in fact exist through a single poet or an isolated book, unless that poet or that book resume in eminent degree the entire thought or feeling of a people who is already in some manner conscious of itself. This is the case of Homer, if that name stands for an individual.“Since the XVIIth century we reckon in our midst poets and prosers. This would prove that the necessity of reporting oneself, of defining oneself,—which creates literature,—already existed amongst us, no sooner than we were born. The work of Gabriel Soares may, and I believe should, be excluded from a history of Brazilian literature, because such a history can be only that of literature published and known in its day,—literature that could have influenced its time and those who came after. But it comprises part of a history of the civilization, thought and spiritual progress of Brazil, showing how already in that century a native of the country, sequestered upon his plantation in the sertão, not only possessed sufficient culture to write of matters pertaining to his country, but felt also the necessity of writing itdown. It is certain that he was inspired likewise by interest and that his work is a memorial to the Sovereign, seeking personal concessions. But, on account of the thoroughness and the breadth with which it is done, and, above all, because of the general, disinterested spirit in which it is accomplished,—the variety of its aspects and the national breath that animates it, it far exceeds the nature of a simple memorial. In the same position are theDialogues upon the Grandeurs of Braziland their author, whoever he may be. Preoccupation with history is the surest token of a reflective national consciousness. This preoccupation awoke early in Brazil, and not only as a means of information with which the religious orders tried to instruct themselves concerning the lay of the land and to glorify themselves by publishing their own deeds, but also in this same more general, more disinterested spirit. Frei Vicente do Salvador is thus early a national historian and not a simple religious chronicler.“Two things occur to produce this development in Brazilian literary expression, at the very beginning of civilization in this country: the vigor of literary expression in Portugal and the Jesuitcollegios. Whatever be the value of Portuguese literature, it is beyond dispute that no literature of the smaller peoples rivals it in wealth and variety. When Brazil was discovered, only a small part of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal possessed a literary life. England was scarcely emerging into it, with the predecessors of Shakespeare, who had not yet been born and whose first works date from the end of the century. Germany, from the literary standpoint, did not exist.“Portugal, for already a century, had possessed alanguage solidly constructed and policed, and in this respect the labor of Camões is incomparably less than that of Dante. Portugal was in its golden age of literature, which already possessed chroniclers such as Fernão Lopes, novelists like Bernardim Ribeiro, historians like João de Barros, dramatists like Gil Vicente, poets such as those of thecancioneirosand a line of writers of all kinds dating back to the fourteenth century. Despite the rusticity of the people, Portugal, in the epoch of Brazil’s colonization, is one of the four countries of Europe that may be called intellectual. The identification of the colony of Brazil with the mother-country seems to me one of the expressive facts of our history, and this identification rendered easy the influence of Portuguese spiritual life upon a wild region, so that it was possible to obtain results which, given other feelings between the court and the colony, would not have been forthcoming. Since gold was not at once discovered here, and those mines that were discovered proved relatively few and poor, Brazilian life soon took on, from Reconcavo to Pernambuco, where it was first lived, and later in Rio Janeiro and even—though less—in S. Vicente, a modest manner,—what today we should call bourgeois,—more favourable to literary expression, to the leisure needed for writing, than the agitated, adventurous existence of the colonizers of mine lands.“The collegios of the Jesuits, established with higher studies as early as the XVIth century, and later—in imitation of them—the convents of the other religious orders, infiltrating Latin culture into the still half-savage colony, favoured the transmigration hither of the powerful literary spirit of the metropolis.“Soon, then, perhaps sooner than any other American nation, and certainly sooner than, for example, the largest of them all, the United States, we had a literature, the written expression of our collective thought and feeling. Certainly this literature scarcely merits the name of Brazilian as a regional designation. It is Portuguese not only in tongue but in inspiration, sentiment, spirit. There might perhaps already exist, as in the author of theDialogos das grandezasor in Gabriel Soares, a regional sentiment, the love of the native soil, a taste for its traits, but there was no national sentiment other than the selfsame Portuguese national sentiment. Even four centuries later, I hesitate to attribute to our literature the qualification of Brazilian.… For I do not know whether the existence of an entirely independent literature is possible without an entirely independent language as well. Language is the constituent element of literatures, from the fact that it is itself the expression of what there is most intimate, most individual, most characteristic in a people. Only those peoples possess a literature of their own who possess a language of their own. In this sense, which seems to me the true one, there is no Austrian literature or Swiss or Belgian literature, despite the existence in those peoples of a high culture and notable writers in all fields.[7]“Therefore I consider Brazilian literature as a branch of the Portuguese, to which from time to time it returns by the ineluctable law of atavism, as we may see in the imitations of the literary movements in Portugal, or betterstill, in the eagerness—today almost universal in our writers—to write Portuguese purely, according to the classic models of the mother literature. This branch, upon which have been engrafted other elements, is already distinguished from the central trunk by certain characteristics, but not in a manner to prevent one from seeing, at first glance, that it is the same tree slightly modified by transplantation to other climes. It is possible that new graftings and the prolonged influence of milieu will tend to differentiate it even more, but so long as the language shall remain the same, it will be little more—as happens in the botanical families—than a variety of the species.“A variety, however, may be very interesting; it may even be, in certain respects, more interesting than the principal type, acquiring in time and space qualities that raise it above the type. Brazilian literature, or at least poetry, was already in the XVIIth century superior to Portuguese. It is by no means patriotic presumption, which I lack completely, to judge that, with the development of Brazil, its probable politic and economic greatness in the future will give to the literary expression of its life supremacy over Portugal, whose historic rôle seems over and which, from all appearances, will disappear in an Iberic union. If this country of ours does not come apart and split up into several others, each a ‘patria’ with a dialect of its own, we shall prove true to the prophecies of Camões and Fr. Luiz de Souza, becoming the legitimate heirs of Portugal’s language and literature. If such a thing should happen, it would give us an enormous moral superiority to the United States and the Spanish-American nations, making of us the onlynation in America with a truly national language and literature.“But this literature of ours, which, as a branch of the Portuguese already has existed for four centuries, possesses neither perfect continuity, cohesion, nor the unity of the great literatures,—of the Portuguese, for example. The principal reason, to explain the phenomenon in a single word, is that it depended ever, in its earliest periods, rather upon Portugal and later upon Europe, France especially, than upon Brazil itself. It always lacked the principle of solidarity, which would seem to reveal lack of national sentiment. It always has lacked communicability,—that is, its writers, who were separated by vast distances and extreme difficulty of communication, remained strangers one to the other. And I refer not to personal communication, which is of secondary importance, but to intellectual communication that is established through books. The various influences that can be noted in all our important literary movements are all external. What is called improperly the Mineira School of the XVIIIth century, and the Maranhão pléiade of the middle of this (the XIXth) received their inspiration from Portugal, but did not transmit it. As is said in military tactics, contact was never established between the writers or between their intellects.“This lack of contact continues today (Verissimo wrote the essay toward the end of the XIXth century) and is greater now than it was for example during the Romantic period. There was always lacking the transmitting element, the plastic mediator of national thought, a people sufficiently cultured to be interested in that thought, or, at least, ready to be influenced by it. In the construction of a literature the people playssimultaneously a passive and an active rôle: it is in the people that the inspiration of poet and thinker has its source and its goal. Neither the one nor the other can abstract himself, for both form an integral part of the people. Perhaps only during our Romantic period, from 1835 to 1860, may it be said that this condition of communicability existed, limited to a tiny part of the country. The sentiment of a new nation co-operated effectively in creating for writers a sympathetic public, which felt instinctively in their work an expression of that nationality. Then we learned a great deal of French, some English and Italian, a smattering of German and became intellectually denationalized. A success such as that of Macedo’sMoreninhais fairly inconceivable today. Success in literature, as in clothing, comes ready made from Paris.“Do not take me for a nationalist, and less still, for a nativist. I simply am verifying a fact with the same indifference with which I should perform the same office in the domains of geology. I am looking for the explanation of a phenomenon; I believe I have found it, and I present it.“So that, from this standpoint, it may be said that it was the development of our culture that prejudiced our literary evolution. It seems a paradox, but it is simply a truth. Defective and faulty as it was, that culture was enough to reveal to our reading public the inferiority of our writers, without any longer counterbalancing this feeling by the patriotic ardor of the period during which the nationality was being formed. The general cultural deficiency of our writers of all sorts in Brazil is, then, one of the defects of our literature.Doing nothing but repeat servilely what is being done abroad, without any originality of thought or form, without ideas of their own, with immense gaps in their learning, and no less defects of instruction that are today common among men of medium culture in the countries that we try to imitate and follow, we cannot compete before our readers with what they receive from the foreign countries at first hand, by offering them a similar product at second.“In addition to study, culture, instruction, both general and thorough, carried on in time and with plenty of time, firm and substantial, our literature lacks at present sincerity. The evident decadence of our poetry may have no other cause. Compare, for example, the poetry of the last ten or even fifteen years, with that produced during the decade 1850-1860, by Gonçalves Dias, Casimiro de Abreu, Alvares de Azevedo, Junqueira Freire, Laurindo Rabello, and you will note that the sincerity of emotion that overflowed the verses then is almost completely lacking in today’s poetry. And in all our literary labors, fiction, history, philosophy, criticism, it is impossible for the careful reader not to discern the same lack. Perhaps it is due to a lack of correlation between milieu and writer.… To aggravate this, there was, moreover, lack of ideas, lack of thought, which reduced our poetry to a subjectivism from which exaggerated fondness for form took emotion, the last quality that remained to it; it reduced our fiction to a copy of the French novel, which obstructed the existence of a dramatic literature, which sterilized our philisophic, historic and critical production. This lack, however, is a consequence of our lack of culture and study, which do not furnish to brains already for several reasons naturally poor the necessary restoratives and tonics. And the worst of it is that, judging from the direction in which we are moving, this very culture, as deficient and incomplete as it is, threatens to be extinguished in a widespread, all-consuming, and, anyway you look at it, coarse preoccupation with politics and finance.”[8]

“Since the XVIIth century we reckon in our midst poets and prosers. This would prove that the necessity of reporting oneself, of defining oneself,—which creates literature,—already existed amongst us, no sooner than we were born. The work of Gabriel Soares may, and I believe should, be excluded from a history of Brazilian literature, because such a history can be only that of literature published and known in its day,—literature that could have influenced its time and those who came after. But it comprises part of a history of the civilization, thought and spiritual progress of Brazil, showing how already in that century a native of the country, sequestered upon his plantation in the sertão, not only possessed sufficient culture to write of matters pertaining to his country, but felt also the necessity of writing itdown. It is certain that he was inspired likewise by interest and that his work is a memorial to the Sovereign, seeking personal concessions. But, on account of the thoroughness and the breadth with which it is done, and, above all, because of the general, disinterested spirit in which it is accomplished,—the variety of its aspects and the national breath that animates it, it far exceeds the nature of a simple memorial. In the same position are theDialogues upon the Grandeurs of Braziland their author, whoever he may be. Preoccupation with history is the surest token of a reflective national consciousness. This preoccupation awoke early in Brazil, and not only as a means of information with which the religious orders tried to instruct themselves concerning the lay of the land and to glorify themselves by publishing their own deeds, but also in this same more general, more disinterested spirit. Frei Vicente do Salvador is thus early a national historian and not a simple religious chronicler.

“Two things occur to produce this development in Brazilian literary expression, at the very beginning of civilization in this country: the vigor of literary expression in Portugal and the Jesuitcollegios. Whatever be the value of Portuguese literature, it is beyond dispute that no literature of the smaller peoples rivals it in wealth and variety. When Brazil was discovered, only a small part of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal possessed a literary life. England was scarcely emerging into it, with the predecessors of Shakespeare, who had not yet been born and whose first works date from the end of the century. Germany, from the literary standpoint, did not exist.

“Portugal, for already a century, had possessed alanguage solidly constructed and policed, and in this respect the labor of Camões is incomparably less than that of Dante. Portugal was in its golden age of literature, which already possessed chroniclers such as Fernão Lopes, novelists like Bernardim Ribeiro, historians like João de Barros, dramatists like Gil Vicente, poets such as those of thecancioneirosand a line of writers of all kinds dating back to the fourteenth century. Despite the rusticity of the people, Portugal, in the epoch of Brazil’s colonization, is one of the four countries of Europe that may be called intellectual. The identification of the colony of Brazil with the mother-country seems to me one of the expressive facts of our history, and this identification rendered easy the influence of Portuguese spiritual life upon a wild region, so that it was possible to obtain results which, given other feelings between the court and the colony, would not have been forthcoming. Since gold was not at once discovered here, and those mines that were discovered proved relatively few and poor, Brazilian life soon took on, from Reconcavo to Pernambuco, where it was first lived, and later in Rio Janeiro and even—though less—in S. Vicente, a modest manner,—what today we should call bourgeois,—more favourable to literary expression, to the leisure needed for writing, than the agitated, adventurous existence of the colonizers of mine lands.

“The collegios of the Jesuits, established with higher studies as early as the XVIth century, and later—in imitation of them—the convents of the other religious orders, infiltrating Latin culture into the still half-savage colony, favoured the transmigration hither of the powerful literary spirit of the metropolis.

“Soon, then, perhaps sooner than any other American nation, and certainly sooner than, for example, the largest of them all, the United States, we had a literature, the written expression of our collective thought and feeling. Certainly this literature scarcely merits the name of Brazilian as a regional designation. It is Portuguese not only in tongue but in inspiration, sentiment, spirit. There might perhaps already exist, as in the author of theDialogos das grandezasor in Gabriel Soares, a regional sentiment, the love of the native soil, a taste for its traits, but there was no national sentiment other than the selfsame Portuguese national sentiment. Even four centuries later, I hesitate to attribute to our literature the qualification of Brazilian.… For I do not know whether the existence of an entirely independent literature is possible without an entirely independent language as well. Language is the constituent element of literatures, from the fact that it is itself the expression of what there is most intimate, most individual, most characteristic in a people. Only those peoples possess a literature of their own who possess a language of their own. In this sense, which seems to me the true one, there is no Austrian literature or Swiss or Belgian literature, despite the existence in those peoples of a high culture and notable writers in all fields.[7]

“Therefore I consider Brazilian literature as a branch of the Portuguese, to which from time to time it returns by the ineluctable law of atavism, as we may see in the imitations of the literary movements in Portugal, or betterstill, in the eagerness—today almost universal in our writers—to write Portuguese purely, according to the classic models of the mother literature. This branch, upon which have been engrafted other elements, is already distinguished from the central trunk by certain characteristics, but not in a manner to prevent one from seeing, at first glance, that it is the same tree slightly modified by transplantation to other climes. It is possible that new graftings and the prolonged influence of milieu will tend to differentiate it even more, but so long as the language shall remain the same, it will be little more—as happens in the botanical families—than a variety of the species.

“A variety, however, may be very interesting; it may even be, in certain respects, more interesting than the principal type, acquiring in time and space qualities that raise it above the type. Brazilian literature, or at least poetry, was already in the XVIIth century superior to Portuguese. It is by no means patriotic presumption, which I lack completely, to judge that, with the development of Brazil, its probable politic and economic greatness in the future will give to the literary expression of its life supremacy over Portugal, whose historic rôle seems over and which, from all appearances, will disappear in an Iberic union. If this country of ours does not come apart and split up into several others, each a ‘patria’ with a dialect of its own, we shall prove true to the prophecies of Camões and Fr. Luiz de Souza, becoming the legitimate heirs of Portugal’s language and literature. If such a thing should happen, it would give us an enormous moral superiority to the United States and the Spanish-American nations, making of us the onlynation in America with a truly national language and literature.

“But this literature of ours, which, as a branch of the Portuguese already has existed for four centuries, possesses neither perfect continuity, cohesion, nor the unity of the great literatures,—of the Portuguese, for example. The principal reason, to explain the phenomenon in a single word, is that it depended ever, in its earliest periods, rather upon Portugal and later upon Europe, France especially, than upon Brazil itself. It always lacked the principle of solidarity, which would seem to reveal lack of national sentiment. It always has lacked communicability,—that is, its writers, who were separated by vast distances and extreme difficulty of communication, remained strangers one to the other. And I refer not to personal communication, which is of secondary importance, but to intellectual communication that is established through books. The various influences that can be noted in all our important literary movements are all external. What is called improperly the Mineira School of the XVIIIth century, and the Maranhão pléiade of the middle of this (the XIXth) received their inspiration from Portugal, but did not transmit it. As is said in military tactics, contact was never established between the writers or between their intellects.

“This lack of contact continues today (Verissimo wrote the essay toward the end of the XIXth century) and is greater now than it was for example during the Romantic period. There was always lacking the transmitting element, the plastic mediator of national thought, a people sufficiently cultured to be interested in that thought, or, at least, ready to be influenced by it. In the construction of a literature the people playssimultaneously a passive and an active rôle: it is in the people that the inspiration of poet and thinker has its source and its goal. Neither the one nor the other can abstract himself, for both form an integral part of the people. Perhaps only during our Romantic period, from 1835 to 1860, may it be said that this condition of communicability existed, limited to a tiny part of the country. The sentiment of a new nation co-operated effectively in creating for writers a sympathetic public, which felt instinctively in their work an expression of that nationality. Then we learned a great deal of French, some English and Italian, a smattering of German and became intellectually denationalized. A success such as that of Macedo’sMoreninhais fairly inconceivable today. Success in literature, as in clothing, comes ready made from Paris.

“Do not take me for a nationalist, and less still, for a nativist. I simply am verifying a fact with the same indifference with which I should perform the same office in the domains of geology. I am looking for the explanation of a phenomenon; I believe I have found it, and I present it.

“So that, from this standpoint, it may be said that it was the development of our culture that prejudiced our literary evolution. It seems a paradox, but it is simply a truth. Defective and faulty as it was, that culture was enough to reveal to our reading public the inferiority of our writers, without any longer counterbalancing this feeling by the patriotic ardor of the period during which the nationality was being formed. The general cultural deficiency of our writers of all sorts in Brazil is, then, one of the defects of our literature.Doing nothing but repeat servilely what is being done abroad, without any originality of thought or form, without ideas of their own, with immense gaps in their learning, and no less defects of instruction that are today common among men of medium culture in the countries that we try to imitate and follow, we cannot compete before our readers with what they receive from the foreign countries at first hand, by offering them a similar product at second.

“In addition to study, culture, instruction, both general and thorough, carried on in time and with plenty of time, firm and substantial, our literature lacks at present sincerity. The evident decadence of our poetry may have no other cause. Compare, for example, the poetry of the last ten or even fifteen years, with that produced during the decade 1850-1860, by Gonçalves Dias, Casimiro de Abreu, Alvares de Azevedo, Junqueira Freire, Laurindo Rabello, and you will note that the sincerity of emotion that overflowed the verses then is almost completely lacking in today’s poetry. And in all our literary labors, fiction, history, philosophy, criticism, it is impossible for the careful reader not to discern the same lack. Perhaps it is due to a lack of correlation between milieu and writer.… To aggravate this, there was, moreover, lack of ideas, lack of thought, which reduced our poetry to a subjectivism from which exaggerated fondness for form took emotion, the last quality that remained to it; it reduced our fiction to a copy of the French novel, which obstructed the existence of a dramatic literature, which sterilized our philisophic, historic and critical production. This lack, however, is a consequence of our lack of culture and study, which do not furnish to brains already for several reasons naturally poor the necessary restoratives and tonics. And the worst of it is that, judging from the direction in which we are moving, this very culture, as deficient and incomplete as it is, threatens to be extinguished in a widespread, all-consuming, and, anyway you look at it, coarse preoccupation with politics and finance.”[8]

FOOTNOTES:[1]Many cultured Brazilians know English literature in the original. The essay here referred to was suggested to Verissimo by the book of a United States professor, Winchester, onSome Principles of Literary Criticism.[2]A Modern Book of Criticism, New York, 1919. Page iii. The italics are mine.[3]Mr. Havelock Ellis, writing in 1917 upon Rodó, (the article may be found in his book entitledThe Philosophy of Conflict), expressed an opinion that comes pat to our present purpose. “ … Rodó has perhaps attributed too fixed a character to North American civilization, and has hardly taken into account those germs of recent expansion which may well bring the future development of the United States nearer to his ideals. It must be admitted, however, that if he had lived a few months longer Rodó might have seen confirmation in the swift thoroughness, even exceeding that of England, with which the United States on entering the war sought to suppress that toleration for freedom of thought and speech that he counted so precious, shouting with characteristic energy the battle-cry of all the belligerents, ‘Hush! Don’t think, only feel and act!’ with a pathetic faith that the affectation of external uniformity means inward cohesion.… Still, Rodó himself recognised that, even as already manifested, the work of the United States is not entirely lost for what he would call the ‘interests of the soul.’”[4]For this discussion, which is of primary importance to students of Brazilian letters, see Verissimo’sEstudos, 6a serie, pages 1-14, and hisQue é Literatura, Rio de Janeiro, 1907, pages 230-292.[5]Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira.2a Ed. Revista e augmentada. Rio, 1922. Pp. 344-345.[6]This opinion he later rectified.[7]InStudies in Spanish-American Literature(pages 98-99) I have discussed briefly this attitude of Verissimo’s. I do not believe the entire question to be of primaryliteraryimportance. It is the nounliteraturethat is of chief interest; not the adjective of nationality that precedes it.[8]Verissimo was born at Belem, Para, on April 8, 1857. He initiated his career as a public official in his native province, but soon made his way to the directorship of the Gymnasio Nacional, and then the Normal School of Rio de Janeiro. For a long time, concurrently with his scholarly labors, he edited the famousRevista Brasileira. HisScenes of Life on the Amazonhave been compared to the pages of Pierre Loti for their exotic charm. He died in 1918.

[1]Many cultured Brazilians know English literature in the original. The essay here referred to was suggested to Verissimo by the book of a United States professor, Winchester, onSome Principles of Literary Criticism.

[2]A Modern Book of Criticism, New York, 1919. Page iii. The italics are mine.

[3]Mr. Havelock Ellis, writing in 1917 upon Rodó, (the article may be found in his book entitledThe Philosophy of Conflict), expressed an opinion that comes pat to our present purpose. “ … Rodó has perhaps attributed too fixed a character to North American civilization, and has hardly taken into account those germs of recent expansion which may well bring the future development of the United States nearer to his ideals. It must be admitted, however, that if he had lived a few months longer Rodó might have seen confirmation in the swift thoroughness, even exceeding that of England, with which the United States on entering the war sought to suppress that toleration for freedom of thought and speech that he counted so precious, shouting with characteristic energy the battle-cry of all the belligerents, ‘Hush! Don’t think, only feel and act!’ with a pathetic faith that the affectation of external uniformity means inward cohesion.… Still, Rodó himself recognised that, even as already manifested, the work of the United States is not entirely lost for what he would call the ‘interests of the soul.’”

[4]For this discussion, which is of primary importance to students of Brazilian letters, see Verissimo’sEstudos, 6a serie, pages 1-14, and hisQue é Literatura, Rio de Janeiro, 1907, pages 230-292.

[5]Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira.2a Ed. Revista e augmentada. Rio, 1922. Pp. 344-345.

[6]This opinion he later rectified.

[7]InStudies in Spanish-American Literature(pages 98-99) I have discussed briefly this attitude of Verissimo’s. I do not believe the entire question to be of primaryliteraryimportance. It is the nounliteraturethat is of chief interest; not the adjective of nationality that precedes it.

[8]Verissimo was born at Belem, Para, on April 8, 1857. He initiated his career as a public official in his native province, but soon made his way to the directorship of the Gymnasio Nacional, and then the Normal School of Rio de Janeiro. For a long time, concurrently with his scholarly labors, he edited the famousRevista Brasileira. HisScenes of Life on the Amazonhave been compared to the pages of Pierre Loti for their exotic charm. He died in 1918.

His full name was Olavo Braz Martins dos Guimarães Bilac; he is one of the most popular poets that Brazil has produced; his surroundings and his person, like the poetry that brought him his fame, were exquisite,—somewhat in the tradition of the French dandies and the Ibero-American versifiers who imitated them—yet in him the note was not overdone. He passes, in the history of the national letters, for one of the Parnassian leaders, yet he is one of their most subjective spirits. Toward the end of his life, as if the feelings that he had sought so long to dominate in his poetry must at last find vent, he became a sort of Socialist apostle, preaching the doctrine of education. “Brazil’s malady,” he averred, “is, above all, illiteracy.” And like so many of his creative compatriots, he set patiently about constructing text-books for children. In his early days he found inspiration in the Romantic Gonçalves Dias and the Parnassian Alberto de Oliveira; very soon, however, he attained to an idiom quite his own which lies somewhat between the manner of these two. “He is the poet of the city,” one critic has written, “as Catullus was of Rome and as Apuleius was of Carthage.” He has been compared, likewise, to Lucian of Samosata. Most of all, however, he is the poet of perfumedpassion,—not the heavy, drugged perfumes of D’Annunzio, which weigh down the votaries until they suffer amidst their pleasures, but—and again like some of his Spanish-American brothers in the other nations of the continent—a faun in frock coat, sporting with naiads in silk. Bilac has his ivory tower, but its doors stand ajar to beauty of body and of emotion. His is no withdrawal into the inner temple; his eyes are always peering into the world from which he supposedly stands aloof, and his heart follows them.

We are not to look to him, then, for either impersonality or impassivity. Even when he wrote of the Iliad, of Antony, of Carthage, he had his native Brazil in mind, as he revealed in his final poems. “We never really had a literature,” he said shortly before his death. “We have imitations, copies, reflections. Where is the writer that does not recall some foreigner,—where is the school that we can really call our own?… There are, for the rest, explanations of this fact. We are a people in process of formation, in which divers ethnical elements are struggling for supremacy. There can be no original literature until this is formed.…”

Again: “We regulate ourselves by France. France has no strife of schools now, neither have we; France has some extravagant youths, so have we; it shows now an even stronger tendency,—the humanitarian, and we begin to write socialistic books.” He spoke of poets as “the sonorous echo of Hugo’s verse, between heaven and earth, to transmit to the gods the plaints of mortals,” yet only in the end do any of his poems ring with such an echo, and the plaints that rise from the poems of Bilac that his countrymen most love are cries ofpassion. “Art,” he said, as if to bely the greater part of his own life’s work, and with something of repentance in his words, “is not, as some ingenious visionaries would have it, an assertion and a labor apart, without filiation to the other preoccupations of existence. All human concerns are interwoven and blend in an indissoluble manner. The towers of gold and ivory in which artists sequestered themselves, have toppled over. The art of today is open and subject to all the influences of the milieu and the epoch. In order to be the most beautiful representation of life, it must hear and preserve all the cries, all the complaints, all the lamentations of the human flock. Only a madman or a monstrous egoist … could live and labor by himself, locked under seven keys within his dream, indifferent to all that is happening outside in the vast field where the passions strive and die, where ambition pants and despair wails, where are being decided the destinies of peoples and races.…”

This is, as we shall presently be in position to note, fairly a recantation of his early poetic profession of faith. Which is right,—the proclamative self-dedication to Form and Style that stands at the beginning of hisPoesias, or this consecration to humanity? Both. For at each stage of his career, Bilac was sincere and filled with a vision; in art, for that matter, only insincerity and inadequacy are ever wrong. And perhaps not in art alone. M. Gsell, who lately wrote an altogether delightful book made up of notes taken at Anatole France’s retreat at Villa Saïd, quotes this little tale from the master, who was reminded of it by a portrait of Paolo Uccello in Vasari. “This is the painter,” saidFrance, “whose wife gently reproached him with working too slowly.

“‘I must have time,’ the artist said, ‘to establish the perspective of my pictures.’

“‘Yes, Paolo,’ the poor woman protested, ‘but you are drawing for us the perspective of destitution and the grave.’

“She was right,” commented France, “and he was not wrong. The eternal conflict between the scruples of the artist and harsh reality.”

Bilac’s seeming recantation at the end was the result of just such a clash between artistry and harsh reality. Had he chosen, in the beginning, to devote his poetic gifts to humanity, he might have been remembered longer as a man, but it is doubtful whether he would have achieved his standing as an artist. And Brazil would have been the poorer by a number of poems that have doubtless enriched the emotional life of the nation. I wonder whether, in his later days, Bilac did not in a manner confuse art with social service. There are souls in whom the human comedy kindles the fires of song; such as they sing,—they do not theorize. Bilac was not one of them. There was nothing to prevent his serving humanity in any of the countless ways in which man may be more than wolf to man. But he himself, as an artist, was not fashioned to be a social force. He was the born voluptuary.

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

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

Le poète est ciseleur,Le ciseleur est poète.

Le poète est ciseleur,

Le ciseleur est poète.

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

Não quero a Zeus Capitolino,Herculeo e bello,Talhar no marmore divinoCom o camartello.Que outro—não eu!—a pedra córtePara, brutal,Erguer de Athene o altivo porteDescommunal.Mais que esse vulto extraordinario,Que assombra a vista,Seduz-me um leve relicarioDe fine artista.…Assim procedo. Minha penna,Segue esta norma,Por te servir, Deusa serena,Serena Fórma!…Vive! que eu viverei servindoTeu culto, e, obscuro,Tuas custodias esculpindoNo ouro mais puro.Celebrarei o teu officioNo altar: porem,Se inda é pequeno o sacrificio,Morra eu tambem!Caia eu tembem, sem esperanca,Porém tranquilo,Inda, ao cahir, vibrando a lança,Em prol de Estylo![1]

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

Não quero a Zeus Capitolino,

Herculeo e bello,

Talhar no marmore divino

Com o camartello.

Que outro—não eu!—a pedra córtePara, brutal,Erguer de Athene o altivo porteDescommunal.

Que outro—não eu!—a pedra córte

Para, brutal,

Erguer de Athene o altivo porte

Descommunal.

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

Mais que esse vulto extraordinario,

Que assombra a vista,

Seduz-me um leve relicario

De fine artista.

…

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

Assim procedo. Minha penna,

Segue esta norma,

Por te servir, Deusa serena,

Serena Fórma!

…

Vive! que eu viverei servindoTeu culto, e, obscuro,Tuas custodias esculpindoNo ouro mais puro.

Vive! que eu viverei servindo

Teu culto, e, obscuro,

Tuas custodias esculpindo

No ouro mais puro.

Celebrarei o teu officioNo altar: porem,Se inda é pequeno o sacrificio,Morra eu tambem!

Celebrarei o teu officio

No altar: porem,

Se inda é pequeno o sacrificio,

Morra eu tambem!

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

Caia eu tembem, sem esperanca,

Porém tranquilo,

Inda, ao cahir, vibrando a lança,

Em prol de Estylo![1]

ThePoesias[2]upon which Bilac’s fame rests constitute but a book of average size, and consist of the following divisions:Panoplias(Panoplies);Via Lactea(The Milky Way);Sarças de Fogo(Fire-Brambles);Alma Inquieta(Restless Soul);As Viagens(Voyages);O Caçador de Esmeraldas(The Emerald-Hunter).

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

Mais que as armas, porém, mais que a batalha,Mais que os incendios, brilha o amor que ateiaO odio e entre os povos a discordia espalha:Esse amor que ora activa, ora asserenaA guerra, e o heroico Paris encadeiaAos curvos seios da formosa Helena.[3]

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

Mais que as armas, porém, mais que a batalha,

Mais que os incendios, brilha o amor que ateia

O odio e entre os povos a discordia espalha:

Esse amor que ora activa, ora asserenaA guerra, e o heroico Paris encadeiaAos curvos seios da formosa Helena.[3]

Esse amor que ora activa, ora asserena

A guerra, e o heroico Paris encadeia

Aos curvos seios da formosa Helena.[3]

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

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

For, beholding in rapid descent,

Rolling into the abyss of oblivion and annihilation,

Men and traditions, reverses and victories,

Battles and trophies, six centuries of glory

In a fistful of ashes,—the general foresaw

That Rome, the powerful, the unvanquished, so strong in arms,

Would go perforce the selfsame way as Carthage.…

Nearby, the vague and noisy crackling

Of the conflagration, that still roared furiously on,

Rose like the sound of convulsive weeping.

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

He is the lover weeping over gladness:

Quem ama inventa as penas em que vive:E, em lugar de acalmar as penas, antesBusca novo pezar com que as avive.Pois sabei que é por isso que assim ando:Que e dos loucos sómente e dos amantesNa maior alegria andar chorando.[4]

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

Quem ama inventa as penas em que vive:

E, em lugar de acalmar as penas, antes

Busca novo pezar com que as avive.

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

Pois sabei que é por isso que assim ando:

Que e dos loucos sómente e dos amantes

Na maior alegria andar chorando.[4]

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

XXXAo coração que soffre, separadoDo teu, no exilio em que a chorar me vejo,Não basta o affecto simples e sagradoCom que das desventuras me protejo.Não me basta saber que sou amado,Nem só desejo o teu amor: desejoTer nos braços teu corpo delicado,Ter na bocca a doçura do teu beijo.E as justas ambiçoes que me consomemNão me envergonham: pois maior baixezaNão ha que a terra pelo céo trocar;E mais eleva o coração de um homemSer de homem sempre e, na maior pureza,Ficar na terra e humanamente amar.[5]

XXX

Ao coração que soffre, separadoDo teu, no exilio em que a chorar me vejo,Não basta o affecto simples e sagradoCom que das desventuras me protejo.

Ao coração que soffre, separado

Do teu, no exilio em que a chorar me vejo,

Não basta o affecto simples e sagrado

Com que das desventuras me protejo.

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

Não me basta saber que sou amado,

Nem só desejo o teu amor: desejo

Ter nos braços teu corpo delicado,

Ter na bocca a doçura do teu beijo.

E as justas ambiçoes que me consomemNão me envergonham: pois maior baixezaNão ha que a terra pelo céo trocar;

E as justas ambiçoes que me consomem

Não me envergonham: pois maior baixeza

Não ha que a terra pelo céo trocar;

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

E mais eleva o coração de um homem

Ser de homem sempre e, na maior pureza,

Ficar na terra e humanamente amar.[5]

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

The sonnet that follows this inVia Lacteais notable for its intermingling of love, country andsaudade:

XXXILonge de ti, se escuto, porventura,Teu nome, que uma bocca indifferenteEntre outros nomes de mulher murmura,Sobe-me o pranto aos olhos, de repente.…Tal aquelle, que, misero, a torturaSoffre de amargo exilio, e tristementeA linguagem natal, maviosa e pura,Ouve falada por estranha gente.…Porque teu nome é para mim o nomeDe uma patria distante e idolatrada,Cuja saudade ardente me consome:E ouvil-o é ver a eterna primaveraE a eterna luz da terra abençoada,Onde, entre flores, teu amor me espera.[6]

XXXI

Longe de ti, se escuto, porventura,Teu nome, que uma bocca indifferenteEntre outros nomes de mulher murmura,Sobe-me o pranto aos olhos, de repente.…Tal aquelle, que, misero, a torturaSoffre de amargo exilio, e tristementeA linguagem natal, maviosa e pura,Ouve falada por estranha gente.…Porque teu nome é para mim o nomeDe uma patria distante e idolatrada,Cuja saudade ardente me consome:E ouvil-o é ver a eterna primaveraE a eterna luz da terra abençoada,Onde, entre flores, teu amor me espera.[6]

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

Longe de ti, se escuto, porventura,

Teu nome, que uma bocca indifferente

Entre outros nomes de mulher murmura,

Sobe-me o pranto aos olhos, de repente.…

Tal aquelle, que, misero, a torturaSoffre de amargo exilio, e tristementeA linguagem natal, maviosa e pura,Ouve falada por estranha gente.…

Tal aquelle, que, misero, a tortura

Soffre de amargo exilio, e tristemente

A linguagem natal, maviosa e pura,

Ouve falada por estranha gente.…

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

Porque teu nome é para mim o nome

De uma patria distante e idolatrada,

Cuja saudade ardente me consome:

E ouvil-o é ver a eterna primavera

E a eterna luz da terra abençoada,

Onde, entre flores, teu amor me espera.[6]

Sarças de Fogo, as its name would imply, abandons the restraint ofVia Lactea. InO Julgamento de Phrynébeauty becomes not only its own excuse for being, but the excuse for wrong as well. Phryne’s judges, confronted with her unveiled beauty, tremble like lions before the calm gaze of their tamer, and she appears before the multitude “in the immortal triumph of Flesh and Beauty.” InSantaniaa maiden’s desires rise powerfully to the surface only to take flight in fright at their own daring.No Limiar de Morte(On The Threshold of Death) is the voluptuary’smemento moriafter hiscarpe diem. There is a touch of irony borrowed from Machado de Assis in the closing tercets:

You, who loved and suffered, now turn your stepsToward me. O, weeping soul,You leave behind the hate of the worldly hell.…Come! for at last you shall enjoy within my armsAll the wantonness, all the fascinations,All the delights of eternal rest!

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

You, who loved and suffered, now turn your steps

Toward me. O, weeping soul,

You leave behind the hate of the worldly hell.…

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

Come! for at last you shall enjoy within my arms

All the wantonness, all the fascinations,

All the delights of eternal rest!

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

Lá vão! O céo se arqueiaComo um tecto de bronze infindo e quente,E o sol fuzila e, fuzilando, ardenteCriva de flechas de aço o mar de areia.…Lá vão, com os olhos onde a sêde ateiaUm fogo estranho, procurando em frenteEsse oasis do amor que, claramente,Além, bello e falaz, se delineia.Mas o simun da morte sopra: a trombaConvulsa envolve-os, prostra-os; e aplacadaSobre si mesma roda e exhausta tomba.…E o sol de novo no igneo céo fuzila.…E sobre a geração exterminadaA areia dorme placida e tranquila.[7]

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

Lá vão! O céo se arqueia

Como um tecto de bronze infindo e quente,

E o sol fuzila e, fuzilando, ardente

Criva de flechas de aço o mar de areia.…

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

Lá vão, com os olhos onde a sêde ateia

Um fogo estranho, procurando em frente

Esse oasis do amor que, claramente,

Além, bello e falaz, se delineia.

Mas o simun da morte sopra: a trombaConvulsa envolve-os, prostra-os; e aplacadaSobre si mesma roda e exhausta tomba.…

Mas o simun da morte sopra: a tromba

Convulsa envolve-os, prostra-os; e aplacada

Sobre si mesma roda e exhausta tomba.…

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

E o sol de novo no igneo céo fuzila.…

E sobre a geração exterminada

A areia dorme placida e tranquila.[7]

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

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

Quero um beijo sem fim,

Que dure a vida enteira e aplaque a meu desejo!

Ferve-me o sangue. Acalma-o com teu beijo,

Beija-me assim!

O ouvido fecha ao rumor

Do mundo, e beija-me querida!

Vive so para mim, só para a minha vida,

Só para o meu amor![8]

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

As estrellas surgiramTodas: e o limpio veoComo lirios alvissimos, cobriramDo ceo.De todas a mais bellaNão veio ainda, porem:Falta uma estrella.… És tu!… Abre a janella,E vem![9]

As estrellas surgiram

Todas: e o limpio veo

Como lirios alvissimos, cobriram

Do ceo.

De todas a mais bella

Não veio ainda, porem:

Falta uma estrella.… És tu!… Abre a janella,

E vem![9]

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

Just as Olavo Bilac’s voluptuousness brings to him inevitably thoughts of death, so does his cult of form lead him at times to a sense of the essential uselessness of all words and all forms. He has expressed this nowhere so well as in the sonnetInania Verbafrom the sectionAlma Inquieta:

Ah! Quem ha-de exprimir, alma impotente e escrava,O que a bocca não diz, o que a mão não escreve?—Ardes, sangras, pregada á tua cruz, e, em breve,Olhas, desfeito em lodo, o que te deslumbrava.…O Pensameto erve, e é um turbilhão de lava:A Fórma, fria e espessa, é um sepulcro de neve.…E a Palavra pesada abafa a Idéa leve,Que, perfume e clarão, refulgia e voava.Quem o molde achara para a expressão de tudo?Ai! quem ha-de dezir as ansias infinitasDo sonho? e o céo que foge a mão que se levanta?E a ira muda? e o asco mudo? e o desespero mudo?E as palavras de fé que nunca foram ditas?E as confissões de amor que morrem na garganta?[10]

Ah! Quem ha-de exprimir, alma impotente e escrava,

O que a bocca não diz, o que a mão não escreve?

—Ardes, sangras, pregada á tua cruz, e, em breve,

Olhas, desfeito em lodo, o que te deslumbrava.…

O Pensameto erve, e é um turbilhão de lava:

A Fórma, fria e espessa, é um sepulcro de neve.…

E a Palavra pesada abafa a Idéa leve,

Que, perfume e clarão, refulgia e voava.

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

Quem o molde achara para a expressão de tudo?

Ai! quem ha-de dezir as ansias infinitas

Do sonho? e o céo que foge a mão que se levanta?

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

E a ira muda? e o asco mudo? e o desespero mudo?

E as palavras de fé que nunca foram ditas?

E as confissões de amor que morrem na garganta?[10]

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

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