IXFRANCISCA JULIA

Juan Lanas, el mozo de la esquina,es absolutamente igualal Emperador de la China:los dos son el mismo animal.

Juan Lanas, el mozo de la esquina,

es absolutamente igual

al Emperador de la China:

los dos son el mismo animal.

“Juan Lanas, the street-corner loafer is on absolute terms of equality with the Emperor of China. They both are the selfsame beast.”

Women have played an interesting, if necessarily minor part in the material and cultural development of the South American republic. The name of the world’s largest river—the Amazon, or, more exactly speaking, the Amazons—is supposed to stand as a lasting tribute to the bravery of the early women whom the explorer Orellana encountered during his conquest of the mighty flood; according to this derivation, by many considered fanciful, he named the river in honour of the tribes’ fighting heroines, though a more likely source would be the Indian word “amassona” (i. e., boat-destroyer, referring to the tidal phenomenon known asboreorproroca, which sometimes uproots trees and sweeps away whole tracts of land). Centuries later, when one by one the dependencies of South America rose to liberate themselves from the Spanish yoke, the women again played a noble part in the various revolutions. The statue in Colombia to Policarpa Salvarieta is but a symbol of South American gratitude to a host of women who fought side by side with their husbands during the crucial days of the early nineteenth century. One of them, Manuela la Tucumana, was even made an officer in the Argentine army.

If women have enshrined themselves in the patrioticannals of the Southern republics, they have shown that they are no less the companions of man in the agreeable arts of peace. When one considers the great percentage of illiteracy that still prevails in Southern America, and the inferior intellectual and social position that has for years been the lot of women particularly in the Spanish and Portuguese nations, it is surprising that woman’s prominence in the literary world should be what it is. Yet the tradition—if tradition it may be called—boasts a remarkable central figure in the person of Santa Teresa, of sixteenth century Spain. “A miracle of genius” was that famous lady, in Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s fulsome words, … “perhaps the greatest woman who ever handled pen, the single one of all her sex who stands beside the world’s most perfect masters.” In the next century, Mexico produced a personality hardly less interesting in Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, (who only yesterday was indicated as her nation’s first folklorist and feminist), blazoned forth to her audience as “la Musa Decima mexicana,”—nothing less than the tenth muse, if you please, who happened then to be residing in Mexico. And we of the North, in the same century, ourselves boasted a tenth muse in the English-born Anne Bradstreet of Massachusetts Colony, whose book of verses was published in London, in 1650 (ten years after the original Massachusetts edition) with the added line, “The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in America.”[1]

The most distinguished Spanish poetess of the nineteenth century, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, was aCuban by birth, going later to Spain, where she was readily received as one of the nation’s leading literary spirits. Her poetry is remarkable for its virile passion; her novel “Sab” is the Spanish “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She was a woman of striking beauty, yet so vigorous in her work and the prosecution of it that one facetious critic was led to exclaim, “This woman is a great deal of a man!” This, too, is in the tradition, for had not Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, as a girl, been so eager for learning that she begged her parents to send her to the University of Mexico in male attire? She was hardly more than eight at the time, to be sure, but the girl is mother to the woman no less than the boy is father to the man.

South America has its native candidate for the title of Spanish “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and this, too, is the work of a woman. Clorinda Matto’sAves Sin Nido(Birds Without a Nest) is by one of Peru’s most talented women, and exposes the conscienceless exploitation of the Indians. In Peru, it would seem, fiction as a whole has been left largely to the pens of women. Such names as Joana Manuele Girriti de Belzu, Clorinda Matto and Mercedes Cabello de Carbonero stand for higher aspiration rather than achievement, but they reveal an unmistakable tendency. The latest addition to their number is the youthful Angélica Palma, daughter of the famous author of theTradiciones Perruanas.

Brazil has not yet produced any woman who has secured the recognition accorded to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz or to Gómez de Avellaneda; it has, however, added some significant names to the Ibero-American roster. To poetry it has given Narcisa Amalia, Adelina Vieira, Julia Lopes d’Almeida, Zalina Rolim, and lastly FranciscaJulia da Silva. They are sisters in a choir that boasts choristers in every nation of the Ibero-American group,—now a civic spirit like the Dominican Salomé Ureña, who belongs to the latter half of the nineteenth century, now such a more passionate continuator as the lady who writes in Puerto Rico under the pseudonym of La Hija del Caribe (The Daughter of the Carribees),—again the Sapphic abandon of Alfonsina Storni of Argentina, the domestic charm of Maria Enriqueta of Mexico, the pallid perfection of the Uruguayan Juana de Ibarbourou, the apostolic intensity of Gabriela Mistral (Lucilla Godoy) of Chile, and the youthful passion of Gilka Machado, youngest of the new Brazilians.

These women do not, as a rule, and despite some too broad assumptions in South America as to the exclusively materialistic spirit of the United States, enjoy the advantages of culture that are possessed by our lady poets. There is no Amy Lowell among them to revel in the smashing of canons and amuse herself with the erection of new ones for others to smash. There is no atmosphere of Bohemianism and night life in metropolitan cafés. Facile analogies might be drawn, but not too much faith should be placed in them. Thus Maria Enriqueta would suggest Sara Teasdale; Alfonsina Storni would similarly suggest Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is indubitably her superior. Over them all, except in the rare and welcome moments of spiritual rebellion, hovers an air of domesticity, as if, upon venturing into the half-forbidden precincts of art,—which means perfect expression and therefore is “unwomanly,”—they carried withthem something of that narrower home and hearth which only now they are abandoning.

“It is not easy,” wrote Verissimo upon the consideration of a volume of poetry by Sra. D. Julia Cortines, “to speak freely of women as authors, since, however much as writers they detach themselves from their sex, the most elementary gallantry requires us to treat them solely as women. I, who am very far from being a feminist (which is perhaps not quite consistent with my social opinions), do not deny absolutely the intellectual capacities of womankind, and, with the same impartiality (at least, so I presume) I cannot discover in them any exceptional qualities of heart or mind.… It may have been for this reason that the Muse, who is a woman, never deigned to endow me with her favors and denied me the gifts of poesy.… Happily, Brazilian poetesses are few in number; unhappily, they are not good poets. Almost all, past and present, are mediocre. There has been none up to this time who might dispute a place with the half dozen of our best poets of the other sex. I could never understand, or I understand it in a manner that could hardly brook explanation, since woman according to current opinion is far richer in matters of feeling than man, she has never given anything really notable or extraordinary in art, which is chiefly feeling.… One of the forces of art is sincerity, and woman, either because her own psychological organism forbids it, or because the social organization that limits her expansion has never consented to it, has never been able to be sincere without endangering her privileges or even declassifying herself.” Love, he continues, being the chiefof lyric themes, and woman prevented by social custom from really expressing herself, the virtual silence of woman in art is inevitable.[2]

Some such reasoning as this explains the domesticity of the women poets. It explains, too, I believe, why Francisca Julia, for whom a number of Brazilian critics would claim a respectable place with the men of her nation, embraced the Parnassian cult during the few years that were vouchsafed her. She was, if her poems tell anything, an ardent spirit; her passions were too great for the routine of civic and domestic verse; she would do something more than merely transfer her “kitchen, church and children” into homiletic poems. Lacking either the courage or the temperament of an Alfonsina Storni, she could express herself through an apparently cold and formal imagery. Her early impassivity may have been the defence reaction of a highly sensitive compassionate nature. Throughout her work she is, if we must use terms, more “Parnassian” than a number of avowed men of that cult, which had reached its crest in Brazil at the time Francisca Julia was emerging from adolescence. She was little more than twenty when her first collection,Marmores, appeared in 1895, and it is common knowledge that she had been writing then for some six years for such organs as theEstado de São Paulo(one of the most important, and the oldest, ofBrazilian newspapers), theCorreio Paulistano, theDiario Popular, theSemana. BetweenMarmoresand the next book,Esphinges, intervened some eight years. Late in 1920 she died, and perhaps the crown of her recognition—for her ability had been recognized with the publication of her first book—was the phrase from the speech by Umberto de Campos in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, on November 4th, several days after her burial. “If the Academy of Letters, upon its establishment, had permitted the entrance of women into its body,” declared the youngest of its members, “it would in this hour be mourning a vacant chair.”[3]

As her poetry was cold imagery of her ardent inner life, so are the titles of Francisca’s two books of verse symbols of her artistic aims.MarmoresandEsphinges: the first, the marble of the statue, external aspect of impassivity; the second, the silent sphinx, symbol of internal passionlessness. She was a vestal tending the eternal flame, but the fire was carved out of stone. Her artistic life traces a curve from religious serenity and impassability to compassion, thence to a sort of indifferentism. All this was inherent in her early paganism, to which in later life she really returns. Her mastery of form is, one feels, a mastery of her emotions; much of her poetry is impassive, chieflya fior di labbra, as the Italians would say,—on the rim of her lips. Not that she is insincere. For, as there is a sincerity of candour, so is there a sincerity of silence. The sphinx, a poetic figure, cannot, from its very muteness, be a poet, though its speechlessness lends itself to poetry. Francisca Julia, howevermuch she would be the sphinx, more than once gives the answers to her own questionings. It is then that she is most at one with her art, producing some of the finest poetry that has come out of modern Brazil.

Herars poeticais summed up in the two sonnets grouped under the titleMusa Impassivel(Impassive Muse) and serving as the motto of the collectionMarmores.

IMusa! um gesto siquer de dor ou de sinceroLucto, jamais te afeie o candido semblante!Deante de um Job, conserva o mesmo orgulho, deanteDe um morto, o mesmo olhar e sobrecenho austero.Em teus olhos não quero a lagrima; não queroEm tua bocca o suave e idyllico descante.Celebra ora um phantasma anguiforma de Dante,Ora o vulto marcial de um guerreiro de Homero.Dá-me o hemistichio de ouro, a imagem attractiva,A rima, cujo som, de uma harmonia crebra,Cante aos ouvidos d’alma; a estrophe limpa e viva;Versos que lembrem, com os seus barbaros ruidos,Ora o aspero rumor de un calháo que se quebra,Ora o surdo rumor de marmores partidos.IIO’ Musa, cujo olhar de pedra, que não chora,Gela o sorriso ao labio e as lagrimas estanca!Dá-me que eu vá comtigo, em liberdade franca,Por esse grande espaço onde o impassivel mora.Leva-me longe, ó Musa impassivel e branca!Longe, acima do mundo, immensidade em fóra,Onde, chammas lançando ao cortejo da aurora,O aureo plaustro do sol nas nuvens solavanca.Transporta-me de vez, numa ascenção ardente,A’ deliciosa paz dos Olympicos-LaresOnde os deuses pagãos vivem eternamente;E onde, num longo olhar, eu possa ver comtigoPassarem, através das brumas seculares,Os Poetas e os Héroes do grande mundo antigo.[4]

Musa! um gesto siquer de dor ou de sinceroLucto, jamais te afeie o candido semblante!Deante de um Job, conserva o mesmo orgulho, deanteDe um morto, o mesmo olhar e sobrecenho austero.

Musa! um gesto siquer de dor ou de sincero

Lucto, jamais te afeie o candido semblante!

Deante de um Job, conserva o mesmo orgulho, deante

De um morto, o mesmo olhar e sobrecenho austero.

Em teus olhos não quero a lagrima; não queroEm tua bocca o suave e idyllico descante.Celebra ora um phantasma anguiforma de Dante,Ora o vulto marcial de um guerreiro de Homero.

Em teus olhos não quero a lagrima; não quero

Em tua bocca o suave e idyllico descante.

Celebra ora um phantasma anguiforma de Dante,

Ora o vulto marcial de um guerreiro de Homero.

Dá-me o hemistichio de ouro, a imagem attractiva,A rima, cujo som, de uma harmonia crebra,Cante aos ouvidos d’alma; a estrophe limpa e viva;

Dá-me o hemistichio de ouro, a imagem attractiva,

A rima, cujo som, de uma harmonia crebra,

Cante aos ouvidos d’alma; a estrophe limpa e viva;

Versos que lembrem, com os seus barbaros ruidos,Ora o aspero rumor de un calháo que se quebra,Ora o surdo rumor de marmores partidos.

Versos que lembrem, com os seus barbaros ruidos,

Ora o aspero rumor de un calháo que se quebra,

Ora o surdo rumor de marmores partidos.

O’ Musa, cujo olhar de pedra, que não chora,Gela o sorriso ao labio e as lagrimas estanca!Dá-me que eu vá comtigo, em liberdade franca,Por esse grande espaço onde o impassivel mora.

O’ Musa, cujo olhar de pedra, que não chora,

Gela o sorriso ao labio e as lagrimas estanca!

Dá-me que eu vá comtigo, em liberdade franca,

Por esse grande espaço onde o impassivel mora.

Leva-me longe, ó Musa impassivel e branca!Longe, acima do mundo, immensidade em fóra,Onde, chammas lançando ao cortejo da aurora,O aureo plaustro do sol nas nuvens solavanca.

Leva-me longe, ó Musa impassivel e branca!

Longe, acima do mundo, immensidade em fóra,

Onde, chammas lançando ao cortejo da aurora,

O aureo plaustro do sol nas nuvens solavanca.

Transporta-me de vez, numa ascenção ardente,A’ deliciosa paz dos Olympicos-LaresOnde os deuses pagãos vivem eternamente;

Transporta-me de vez, numa ascenção ardente,

A’ deliciosa paz dos Olympicos-Lares

Onde os deuses pagãos vivem eternamente;

E onde, num longo olhar, eu possa ver comtigoPassarem, através das brumas seculares,Os Poetas e os Héroes do grande mundo antigo.[4]

E onde, num longo olhar, eu possa ver comtigo

Passarem, através das brumas seculares,

Os Poetas e os Héroes do grande mundo antigo.[4]

This is genuine aristocracy of comportment; it is genuine attitude rather than absence of feeling. Note that the poet’s Muse is not to reveal the sign of her emotions lest they sully the beauty of her countenance; the emotions, however, are there, and tears, at times, fall from the stony eyes. Such emotion, in her finer work, is most artistically blended with the aloofness that Francisca Julia sought. Impassivity is a meaningless word for poets, since it cannot by very nature seek to expressitself, being the antithesis of expression; withdrawal, however, is a legitimate artistic trait, and she exhibits it in as successful a degree as has been attained by any poet of her country. So much a part of her nature is her coyness, that even when conquered by feminine pity she conveys her mood through an imagery none the less effective for its indirection; as inDona Alda:

Hoje Dona Alda madrugou. Ás costasSolta a opulenta cabelleira de ouro,Nos labios um sorriso de alegria,Vae passear ao jardim; as flores, postasEm longa fila, alegremente, em coro,Saúdam-n’a: “Bom dia!”Dona Alda segue … Segue-a uma andorinha:Com seus raios de luz o sol a banha;E Dona Alda caminha.…Uma porção de folhas a acompanha.…Caminha.… Como um fulgido brilhanteO seu olhar fulgura.Mas—que cruel!—ao dar um passo adeante,Emquanto a barra do roupão sofralda,Pisa um cravo gentil de lactea alvura.…E este, sob os seus pés, inda murmura:“Obrigado, Dona Alda.”[5]

Hoje Dona Alda madrugou. Ás costas

Solta a opulenta cabelleira de ouro,

Nos labios um sorriso de alegria,

Vae passear ao jardim; as flores, postas

Em longa fila, alegremente, em coro,

Saúdam-n’a: “Bom dia!”

Dona Alda segue … Segue-a uma andorinha:

Com seus raios de luz o sol a banha;

E Dona Alda caminha.…

Uma porção de folhas a acompanha.…

Caminha.… Como um fulgido brilhante

O seu olhar fulgura.

Mas—que cruel!—ao dar um passo adeante,

Emquanto a barra do roupão sofralda,

Pisa um cravo gentil de lactea alvura.…

E este, sob os seus pés, inda murmura:

“Obrigado, Dona Alda.”[5]

This is not poetry that shakes one to the depths, nor does it come from one who was so shaken; but there is artistry in ivory as well as in marble, and Francisca Julia here has caught the secret of the light touch that stirs the deep response.

There is a remarkable sonnet that opens the collectionEsphinges, and I wonder whether it is not, in symbolized form, the keynote to the woman’s poetic aloofness.

Read for the first time theDança de Centauras(Dance of the Centaurs, and note that these centaurs are females); a sonnet of sculptural, plastic beauty, you are likely to tell yourself, as vivid as a bas-relief come suddenly to life. Read it again, more slowly, and its impassivity seems to melt into concrete emotion; this is virgin modesty hiding behind verse as at other times behind raiment. The poet herself is in the dance of the centaurs and leads them in their flight when Hercules appears. It is worth noting, too, that the poem does not reach its climax until the very last words are spoken; the wild rout is a mystery until the very end. Form and content thus truly become the unity that they are in the artist’s original conception.

DANÇA DE CENTAURASPatas dianteiras no ar, boccas livres dos freios,Núas, em grita, em ludo, entrecruzando as lanças,Eil-as, garbosas vêm, na evolução das dançasRudes, pompeando á luz a brancura dos seios.A noite escuta, fulge o luar, gemem as franças,Mil centauras a rir, em lutas e torneios,Galopam livres, vão e veem, os peitos cheiosDe ar, o cabello solto ao léo das auras mansas.Empallidece o luar, a noite cae, madruga.…A dança hyppica pára e logo atrôa o espaçoO galope infernal das centauras em fuga:E’ que, longe ao clarão do luar que impallidece,Enorme, acceso o olhar, bravo, do heróico braçoPendente a clava argiva, Hercules apparece.[6]

DANÇA DE CENTAURAS

Patas dianteiras no ar, boccas livres dos freios,Núas, em grita, em ludo, entrecruzando as lanças,Eil-as, garbosas vêm, na evolução das dançasRudes, pompeando á luz a brancura dos seios.

Patas dianteiras no ar, boccas livres dos freios,

Núas, em grita, em ludo, entrecruzando as lanças,

Eil-as, garbosas vêm, na evolução das danças

Rudes, pompeando á luz a brancura dos seios.

A noite escuta, fulge o luar, gemem as franças,Mil centauras a rir, em lutas e torneios,Galopam livres, vão e veem, os peitos cheiosDe ar, o cabello solto ao léo das auras mansas.

A noite escuta, fulge o luar, gemem as franças,

Mil centauras a rir, em lutas e torneios,

Galopam livres, vão e veem, os peitos cheios

De ar, o cabello solto ao léo das auras mansas.

Empallidece o luar, a noite cae, madruga.…A dança hyppica pára e logo atrôa o espaçoO galope infernal das centauras em fuga:

Empallidece o luar, a noite cae, madruga.…

A dança hyppica pára e logo atrôa o espaço

O galope infernal das centauras em fuga:

E’ que, longe ao clarão do luar que impallidece,Enorme, acceso o olhar, bravo, do heróico braçoPendente a clava argiva, Hercules apparece.[6]

E’ que, longe ao clarão do luar que impallidece,

Enorme, acceso o olhar, bravo, do heróico braço

Pendente a clava argiva, Hercules apparece.[6]

It is the twilight and the night that bring to her lines their more subjective moods; but even here, rarely do present emotions invade her. It is as if she must feel by indirection, even as she writes—now harking back to a longing, now looking forward unmoved, to the inevitable end. Yet there are moments when the impassive muse forgets her part; she strides down from her pedestal and cries out upon Nature as a “perfidious mother,” creator, in the long succession of days and nights, of so much vanity ever transforming itself. This Parnassianism then, is the mask of pride. And in such a sonnet asAngelusthe mask is thrown off:

Oft, at this hour, when my yearning speaksThrough the lips of night and the droning chimes,Chanting ever of love whose grief o’erwhelms me,I would be the sound, the night, full madly drunkWith darkness,—the quietude, yon melting cloud,—Or merge with the light, dissolving altogether.

Oft, at this hour, when my yearning speaks

Through the lips of night and the droning chimes,

Chanting ever of love whose grief o’erwhelms me,

I would be the sound, the night, full madly drunk

With darkness,—the quietude, yon melting cloud,—

Or merge with the light, dissolving altogether.

This pantheism is paralleled, inVidas Anteriores(Previous Lives) by her consciousness of having lived, in the past, a multiplicity of lives. It may be said, in general, that as a modern pagan she is far more real than as the rhyming Christian she reveals herself in her few attempts at religious poetry.

Shortly before her death she wrote a sonnet calledEsperança(Hope), that is clear presentiment. She did not weaken at its approach; she was, as near as is humanly possible, the impassive muse of her own sonnets:

I know it’s a kindly road and the journey’s brief.

Her didactic works,Livro da Infancia, published in 1899, consisting of prose and verse, andAlma Infantil, written in collaboration with Julio Cesar da Silva, 1912, for school use, do not belong to her major productions. It is significant of the status of the Brazilian text-book, as well as of the varied tasks thrown upon the shoulders of the educated in a continent where the major portion of the population has been thus far condemned to illiteracy, when we see how frequently even the major creative spirits of the country turn to the writing of text-books. Yesterday Olavo Bilac, fellow Parnassian of Francisca Julia, spared time for the labour; today Coelho Netto, Oliveira Lima, Monteiro Lobato do so. Again and again is one reminded what a sacrifice, what a luxury, is the creative life in a land that lacks anything like the creative audience. And how much better off are we, whoare only on the threshold of a truly national literature?

It is not impossible that the fame of Francisca Julia da Silva will grow with the coming years. She will be recognized not only as a gifted woman who was one of the few to carry on, worthily, the difficult perfection of Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Theophile Gautier and their fellows, but as the equal, when at her best, of Brazil’s foremost Parnassians. There are not many sonnets in the poetry of Olavo Bilac, who so generously received her, to match the sheer artistry of herDance of the Centaurs, herArgonauts, herImpassive Muse. Indeed, compare theImpassive Musewith Bilac’s over-ardentProfissão de Fe(Profession of Faith) and see whether the woman has not in the very words and images and tonality of the piece exhibited the inner and outer example of that Parnassianism which Bilac here expresses in words rather than attains in spirit. Bilac, as we have seen, was too passionate a nature not to warm all his statues to life; in Francisca, as João Ribeiro said in his preface toMarmores, we find “ecstasy rather than passion,”—a cold ecstasy, one might add, like the upper regions of the atmosphere, which, though flooded with the sunlight, are little warmed by its passage through them.

The same commentator suggests, as a possible reason for her acute auditive sense, the short-sightedness from which she suffered. Her poetry, indeed, is a hearing poetry, but a seeing one as well. The few superior pieces she has left are among the rare productions of Brazilian verse; they are, in that province, unsurpassed for their blend of the proportion that we usually callclassic with that harmonious sensitivity which is supposedly the trait of refined modernity. If in art it is the individual rather than the literature that counts, and if in that individual’s labour it is only what we consider best that really matters, I should venture the seemingly rash statement that Francisca Julia da Silva is the equal, as a personality in verse, of Machado de Assis. He, too, was a cold poet, even as a Romantic, yet never attained the ecstasy of her salient pieces. He, too, was withdrawn, aloof, and might have signed such a poem as Francisca Julia’sO Ribeirinho(The Streamlet), without any one being the wiser. Yet his aloofness—speaking solely of his work in verse—was on the whole lack of emotion, while hers is suppression, domination, transmutation of it. She can be as banal as Wordsworth, and has written in herInverno(Winter) probably two of the most prosaic lines of verse that Brazilian poetry knows:

Das quatro estaçoes de todas,O inverno é a peor, de certo.Of all the four seasonsWinter’s certainly the worst.

Das quatro estaçoes de todas,O inverno é a peor, de certo.

Das quatro estaçoes de todas,

O inverno é a peor, de certo.

Of all the four seasonsWinter’s certainly the worst.

Of all the four seasons

Winter’s certainly the worst.

She committed her childhood indiscretions, as do we all, though in less abundance. At her best, however, (and neither is this too abundant) she should rank with the few Brazilian creators who have produced a charm that is sister to Keats’s eternal joy. She has no landscapes labelled native; her longing is no mere conventionalsaudade; she formed no preconceived notion of Brazilianism; she simply wrote, amidst her labours, sometwo or more score lines that cannot be omitted from any consideration of Brazilian poetry, because they enriched it with a rare, sincere artistry that may find appreciation wherever the language of men and women is beauty.

FOOTNOTES:[1]These Tenth Muses are relatively common. In Portuguese letters, among others, there are Soror Violante do Ceo (1601-93) and Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda (1595-1644).[2]Mr. Havelock Ellis, with his customary lucidity and serenity, discussesThe Mind of Woman(SeeThe Philosophy of Conflict) in a manner to suggest fruitful pursuit of the problem that Verissimo poses. Had the Brazilian critic been more conversant with the newer poetry by women—I refer to increasing frankness rather than to increasing worth—he might have changed his mind as to the prohibitive influences of social custom. The next fifty years will probably witness some startling changes; among them some salutary ones.[3]At least one Academician in Brazil has argued sensibly in favor of woman’s admission to that body.[4]Muse! Let not ever even a gesture of grief or of sincere feeling spoil your serene countenance! Before a Job, preserve the same pride, before a corpse, the same gaze, the same austere brow. I would have no tears in your eyes; no soft, idyllic song upon your lips. Celebrate now the serpent-like phantasm of a Dante, now the martial figure of a Homeric warrior. Give me the hemistych of gold, the attractive image, rhyme whose sound, like a compact harmony, sings to the ears of the soul; the limpid, living strophe; verses that recall with their barbarous accents now the rasping noise of breaking flint, now the muffled sound of cracking marble.… Oh, Muse, whose stony eye that never weeps freezes the smile upon the lip and stanches the flow of tears! Let me go with you, in utter liberty, through those vast spaces where the Impassive dwells. Take me far, oh white impassive Muse! Far above the world into the immensity where, launching flames at the dawn’s procession, the golden wain of the sun swings through the clouds. Transport me in a flaming ascension, to the delicious peace of the Olympic-Hearth where the pagan gods dwell eternally; and where, in a long look, I may in your company watch pass by across the secular haze the poets and the heroes of the great ancient days.[5]Dona Alda rose early today. Her rich tresses flowed loosely golden over her sides; on her lips a joyful smile; she goes for a walk in the garden. The flowers, ranged in a long row, gleefully in chorus salute her: “Good day!” Dona Alda continues.… A swallow follows her: the sun bathes her in his light; and Dona Alda walks on.… A whirl of leaves accompanies her.… She walks on.… Her glance glitters like a brilliant flash. But—how cruel!—as she steps forward, holding up the hem of her dress, she treads upon a tender carnation of lily whiteness.… Yet the flower, beneath her feet, still murmurs, “Oh, thank you so much, Dona Alda!”[6]With their forefeet raised in the air, their mouths free of reins, naked, interlacing their lances as they shout in their play, here they come in all their beauty, tripping the mazes of their dance, rudely displaying to the light the whiteness of their breasts. The night hearkens, the moonlight shines, the tree-tops moan; a thousand she-centaurs, laughing, playing, struggling, gallop freely on, go and come, their bosoms filled with air, their tresses free to the blowing of the zephyrs. The moonlight pales, night falls, and now dawn comes.… The hyppic dance is stopped, and soon all space thunders with the mad dash of the centaurs in flight; for, from afar, in the light of the moon grown pale,—huge, with his eyes aflame, brave, with Argive club hanging from his heroic arm, Hercules has appeared.

[1]These Tenth Muses are relatively common. In Portuguese letters, among others, there are Soror Violante do Ceo (1601-93) and Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda (1595-1644).

[2]Mr. Havelock Ellis, with his customary lucidity and serenity, discussesThe Mind of Woman(SeeThe Philosophy of Conflict) in a manner to suggest fruitful pursuit of the problem that Verissimo poses. Had the Brazilian critic been more conversant with the newer poetry by women—I refer to increasing frankness rather than to increasing worth—he might have changed his mind as to the prohibitive influences of social custom. The next fifty years will probably witness some startling changes; among them some salutary ones.

[3]At least one Academician in Brazil has argued sensibly in favor of woman’s admission to that body.

[4]Muse! Let not ever even a gesture of grief or of sincere feeling spoil your serene countenance! Before a Job, preserve the same pride, before a corpse, the same gaze, the same austere brow. I would have no tears in your eyes; no soft, idyllic song upon your lips. Celebrate now the serpent-like phantasm of a Dante, now the martial figure of a Homeric warrior. Give me the hemistych of gold, the attractive image, rhyme whose sound, like a compact harmony, sings to the ears of the soul; the limpid, living strophe; verses that recall with their barbarous accents now the rasping noise of breaking flint, now the muffled sound of cracking marble.… Oh, Muse, whose stony eye that never weeps freezes the smile upon the lip and stanches the flow of tears! Let me go with you, in utter liberty, through those vast spaces where the Impassive dwells. Take me far, oh white impassive Muse! Far above the world into the immensity where, launching flames at the dawn’s procession, the golden wain of the sun swings through the clouds. Transport me in a flaming ascension, to the delicious peace of the Olympic-Hearth where the pagan gods dwell eternally; and where, in a long look, I may in your company watch pass by across the secular haze the poets and the heroes of the great ancient days.

[5]Dona Alda rose early today. Her rich tresses flowed loosely golden over her sides; on her lips a joyful smile; she goes for a walk in the garden. The flowers, ranged in a long row, gleefully in chorus salute her: “Good day!” Dona Alda continues.… A swallow follows her: the sun bathes her in his light; and Dona Alda walks on.… A whirl of leaves accompanies her.… She walks on.… Her glance glitters like a brilliant flash. But—how cruel!—as she steps forward, holding up the hem of her dress, she treads upon a tender carnation of lily whiteness.… Yet the flower, beneath her feet, still murmurs, “Oh, thank you so much, Dona Alda!”

[6]With their forefeet raised in the air, their mouths free of reins, naked, interlacing their lances as they shout in their play, here they come in all their beauty, tripping the mazes of their dance, rudely displaying to the light the whiteness of their breasts. The night hearkens, the moonlight shines, the tree-tops moan; a thousand she-centaurs, laughing, playing, struggling, gallop freely on, go and come, their bosoms filled with air, their tresses free to the blowing of the zephyrs. The moonlight pales, night falls, and now dawn comes.… The hyppic dance is stopped, and soon all space thunders with the mad dash of the centaurs in flight; for, from afar, in the light of the moon grown pale,—huge, with his eyes aflame, brave, with Argive club hanging from his heroic arm, Hercules has appeared.

Among recent literary currents that present several interesting phases one should not overlook the nationalistic tendencies in Brazil, championed so ardently and with such immediate effect by the most active of the “new” spirits, Monteiro Lobato. Lobato is but little over thirty-five and has at hand for his purpose an influential publishing house in São Paulo; he is thus able to make himself heard and read as well as felt; he seems to be, in the intellectual sense of the word, a born propagandist; certainly he does not lack ink or courage and whatever one may think of his ideas, he makes highly entertaining and instructive reading. First and foremost he is the champion of the national personality. And by that same token he becomes the enemy of undue foreign influence upon the nation. As one reads his numerous short stories, his crisp and vigorous criticisms and his essays, one comes to the realization that, as far as Lobato is concerned, foreign influence is chiefly French and in large measure to be condemned.

The profound effect of French literature upon Spanish and Portuguese America is as undeniable as it is occasionally deleterious, but it is possible to overstate the case against the French influence in Brazil and, as one strikesin Lobato the same protest reiterated time and again, one begins to feel that he is somewhat afflicted with Gallophobia. Yet this is, after all, on his part, the over-emphasis of earnestness rather than an absolute error in values. He is not lacking in appreciation of the great Frenchmen; he does not seem to scorn the use, as epigraph to one of his children’s books, a quotation in French from Anatole France; he does not object to having some of his short stories mentioned in the same breath with de Maupassant and, above all, he recognizes the creative power of imitation, however paradoxical that may sound. “Let us agree,” he writes, in the preface to his stimulating collection of critiques,Idéas de Jéca Tatú, “that imitation is, in fact, the greatest of creative forces. He imitates who assimilates processes. Who copies, does not imitate; he steals. Who plagiarizes does not imitate, he apes.” The whole book he presents as “a war-cry in favor of personality.” At the bottom of Lobato’s nationalism is the one valid foundation of art: sincerity. If he occasionally overdoes his protest, he may well be forgiven for the sound basis of it; it is part of his own personality to see things in the primary colors, to play the national zealot not in any chauvinistic sense—he is no blind follower of the administrative powers, no nationalist in the ugly sense of cheap partisan drum-beating—but in the sense that true nationalism is the logical development of the fatherland’s potentialities. A personally independent fellow, then, who would achieve for his nation that same independence.

The beginning of the World War found Monteiro Lobato established upon afazenda, far from thethoughts and centres of literature. It was by accident that he discovered his gifts as a writer. The story is told that one day, rendered indignant by the custom of setting fire to the fields for cleansing purposes, and thus endangering the bordering inhabitants, he sent a letter of protest to a large daily in São Paulo. It seems that the letter was too important, too well-written, too plainly indicative of natural literary talent, to be relegated to the corner where readers’ jeremiads usually wail, and that, instead, it was “featured” upon the first page. From that day the die was cast. The episode, in my opinion, is far more important than it appears. For, whatever form in which the man’s later writings are published, they are in a more important degree just what this initial venture was: a protest, a means of civic betterment, a national contribution. Turn this letter and its mood into a short story and you have, say, such a tale-message asO Jardineiro Timotheo, in which even a garden may be transformed into a mute, many-hued plea for the native flora; make politics of it, and you get such a genuinely humorous product asA Modern Torture, from that strange collection calledUrupês. Indeed is not the pieceUrupêsitself a critique and an exposition of the indigenous “cobrizo”?

It was with the collectionUrupêsthat Monteiro Lobato definitely established himself. In three years it has reached a sale that for Brazil is truly phenomenal: twenty thousand copies. It has been extravagantly praised by such divergent figures as the uncrowned laureate Olavo Bilac (who might have had more than a few words to say about legitimate French influence uponBrazilian poetry) and the imposing Ruy Barbosa, who instinctively recognized the fundamentally sociological value of Lobato’s labours. For of pure literature there is little in the young Saint-Paulist. I fear that, together with a similar group in Buenos Aires, he underestimates the esthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapoury spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely, is the criticism that may be made against him when his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality and when what was meant to be humour falls away to caricature. From which it may be gathered that Lobato writes—or rather reprints—too much; for plenty of good journalism should be left where it first appeared and not be sent forth between covers. Also, in an appreciable amount of his work, his execution lags behind his intention, owing in no small measure to a lack of self-discipline and an artistically unripe sincerity.

Urupêswas soon followed byIdéas de Jéca Tatú, his Jéca Tatú being a fisherman of Parahyba, a “cobrizo,” first introduced in the preceding book and symbolizing the inertia of the native. In the second book, however, the ideas are anything but those of inertia; Lobato has got into the skin of the fisherman and produced a series of admirable essays and critiques. Of similar nature are the chapters embodied inCidades Mortas.Negrinhais a collection of short stories. In addition to being the author of these books, he is the editor of a splendidmagazine,Revista do Brazil, the publisher of volumes by the rising generation of literary redeemers, instructor to his nation in hygiene, and his energies flow over into yet other channels. He is also the writer of several books for children. The best known of these isNarizinho Arrebitadoor, as who should sayLittle Snub-Nose, and with an appropriate blush I confess that the little girl’s adventures among the flowers and creatures of her native land were responsible for the theft of some hours from the study of fatter, less childish, tomes. As one who would renovate the letters of his nation, Lobato naturally has much to say, inside of Brazil and outside, of the former and present figures of the country’s literature. His work in every phase is first of all an act of nationalism.

From the exclusive stylistic standpoint Lobato is terse, vigorous, intense, to the point. The chapters devoted to the creation of a style (inJéca Tatú) form a valid plea for a genuinely autochthonous art, and it is instructive to see how he treats the question in its relation to architecture. Brazil has native flora, fauna and mythology which its writers are neglecting for the repetition of the hackneyed hosts of Hellas. (Yet Lobato nods betimes and sees the Laocoön in a gnarled tree.) He is an “anti-literary” writer, scorning the finer graces, yet, besides betraying acute consciousness of being a writer, he employs situations that have been overdone time and again, and worse still, in plots that are no more Brazilian than they are Magyar or Senegalese. Thus, inO Bugio Moqueadowe encounter a tale of a woman forced daily to eat a dish prepared by her vindictive husband from the slain body of her lover. It ischaracteristic that the Brazilian author heaps the horror generously, without at all adding to the effect of the theme as it appears in Greek mythology or in the lore of old Provence.

The truth would seem to be that at bottom Lobato is not a teller of stories but a critic of men. His vein is distinctly satiric, ironic; he has the gift of the caricaturist, and that is why so often his tales run either into sentimentality or into the macabrous. When he tells a tale of horror, it is not the uncannily graduated art of a Poe, but rather the thing itself that is horrible. His innate didactic tendency reveals itself not only in his frankly didactic labours, but in his habit of prefixing to his tales a philosophical, commentative prelude. Because he is a well-read, cosmopolitan person, his tales and comments often possess that worldly significance which no amount of regional outlook can wholly obscure; but because he is so intent upon sounding the national note he spoils much of his writing by stepping onto the pages in his own person.

At his best he suggests the arrival in Brazilian literature of a fresh, spontaneous, creative power. Tales likeA Modern Torture(in which a rural dabbler in politics, weary of his postal delivery “job,” turns traitor to the old party and helps elect the new, only to be “rewarded” with the same old “job”) are rare in any tongue and would not be out of place in a collection by Chekhov or Twain. Here is humour served by—and not in the service of—nation, nature and man. SimilarlyChoo-Pan!with its humorous opening and gradual progress to the grim close, shows what can be done when a writer becomes the master and not theslave of indigenous legend. A comparison of this tale with a similar one,The Tree That Kills, may bring out the author’s weakness and his strength. In the first, under peculiar circumstances, a man meets his death through a tree that, according to native belief, avenges the hewing down of its fellow. In the second, theTree That Killsis explained as a sort of preface, then follows a tale of human beings in which a foster-child, like theTree That Kills, eats his way into the love of a childless pair, only first to betray the husband and then, after wearying of the woman, to attempt her life as well. The first story, besides being well told, is made to appear intimately Brazilian; the death of the man, who is a sot and has so bungled his work that the structure was bound to topple over, is natural, and actual belief in the legend is unnecessary; it colours the tale and lends atmosphere.The Tree That Kills, on the other hand, is merely another tale of the domestic triangle, no more Brazilian than anything else, with a twist of retribution at the end that must have appealed to the preacher hidden in Lobato; the analogy of the foster-son to the tree is not an integral part of the tale; the story, in fact, is added to the explanation of the tree parasite and is itself parasitical.

Lobato’s attitude toward education may be gleaned from his child’s bookLittle Snub-Noseand the epigraph from Anatole France. He wishes to cultivate the imagination rather than cram the intellect. And even in this second reader for public schools—refreshingly free of the “I-see-a-cat” method—one can catch now and then his intention of instructing and satirizing the elder population.

To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil—the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future—lies in the interior of the country. There he finds the genuine Brazilian, uncontaminated by the “esperanto of ideas and customs” characteristic of the centres that receive immigration from all over the world. There he discovers the raw material for the real national art, as distinguished from cities with their phantasmagoria of foreign importations. And for that art of the interior he has found the great precursor in Euclydes da Cunha—a truly remarkable writer upon whom the wandering Scot, Richard Cunninghame-Graham, drew abundantly, as we have seen, in his rare work upon that Brazilian mystic and fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro. “It was Euclydes da Cunha,” writes Lobato in hisIdéas de Jéca Tatú, “who opened for us, in hisSertões, the gates to the interior of the country. The Frenchified Brazilian of the coast cities was astonished. Could there, then, be so many strong, heroic, unpublished, formidable things back there?… He revealed us to ourselves. We saw that Brazil isn’t São Paulo, with its Italian contingent, nor Rio, with its Portuguese. Art beheld new perspectives opened to it.”

To present a notion of Monteiro Lobato’s style and his general outlook, I shall confine myself to translating an excerpt or two from his most pithy volume,Idéas de Jéca Tatú.

One of the pivotal essays is that entitledEsthetica Official(Official Esthetics). “The work of art,” it begins, “is indicated by its coefficient of temperament, color and life—the three values that produce its unity,deriving the one from man, the other from milieu, the third from the moment. Art that flees this tripod of categories and that has as its human-factor theheimatlosperson (the man of many countries brought into evidence by the war); that has asterroirthe world and as epoch all Time, will be a superb creation when volapuk rules over the globe: until then, no!

“Whence we derive a logical conclusion: the artist grows in proportion as he becomes nationalized. The work of art must reveal to the quickest glance its origin, just as the races denote their ethnological group through the individual type.”

Yet note how Lobato, for all his nationalism, in the very paragraph that opens his somewhat uncritical critique, employs a German word, soon followed by a French, and all this a few seconds before ridiculing volapuk! Not that this need necessarily vitiate his argument, which has, to my way of thinking, far stronger points against it. But it does serve to indicate, I believe, that the world has grown too small for the artificial insistence upon a nationalism in literature which only too often proves the disguise of our primitive, unreasoned loyalties. Lobato’s unconscious use of these foreign terms provided, at the very moment he was denying it, a proof of the interpenetration of alien cultures. He has, too strongly for art as we now understand it, the regional outlook; for him Brazil is not the Brazil that we know on the map, or know as a political entity; it is the interior. His very nationalism refers, in this aspect, to but part of his own nation, though, to be fair, it is his theory that sins more seriously than his practice.

“Nietzsche,” he says elsewhere in the book, “served here as a pollen. It is the mission of Nietzsche to fecundate whatever he touches. No one leaves him shaped in the uniformity of a certain mould; he leaves free, he leaves ashimself. (The italics are Lobato’s.) His aphorism—Vademecum? Vadetecum!—is the kernel of a liberating philosophy. Would you follow me? Follow yourself!” Now this, allowing for the personal modifications Nietzsche himself concentrates into his crisp question and answer, is the attitude of an Ibsen, a Wagner; in the new world, of a Darío, of a Rodó, and of all true leaders, who would lead their followers to self-leadership. And once again Lobato answers himself with his own citations, for he himself, showing the effect of Nietzsche upon certain of the Brazilian writers—a liberating effect, and one which helped them to a realization of their own personalities—produces the most telling of arguments in favour of legitimate foreign influences.

His characteristic attitude of indignation crops out at every turn. In an essay uponA Estatua do Patriarcha, dedicated to the noble figure of José Bonifacio de Andrade, he gives a patient summary of the man’s achievements—as patient as his nervous manner and his trenchant language can accomplish. As he approaches his climax, he becomes almost telegraphic:

“He (that is, Bonifacio) works in the dark.

“His strength is faith.

“His arms, suggestion.

“His target, the cry of Ipiranga.

“The work that he is then accomplishing is too intense not to sweep aside all obstacles thrust in his path; hispower of suggestion is too strong not to conquer the Prince Regent; his look too firm for the shot not to hit the bull’s eye.

“He conquered.

“The fatherland went into housekeeping for itself and it was he who ordered the arrangement of all the furniture and the standards of a free life.

“This is José Bonifacio’s zenith. He is the Washington of the South.[1]

“Less fortunate, however, than Washington, he afterwards sees the country take a direction that he foresaw was mistaken.

“He starts a struggle against the radical currents and against evil men.

“He loses the contest.…

“Brought to trial as a conspirator, he was absolved.

“He betook himself to the island of Paquetá and in 1838 died in the city of Nitheroy.

“There you have José Bonifacio.”

There, incidentally, you have Monteiro Lobato, in the quivering vigour of the phrase, in the emotional concentration. But all this has been but the preparation for Lobato’s final coup.

“José Bonifacio is, beyond dispute, the greatest figure in our history.

“Very well: this man was a Paulist, (i. e., a native of São Paulo). Born in Santos, in 1763. It is already a century since the Paulists were struck with the idea of rearing him a statue. Not that he needs the monument.In a most grandiose manner he reared one to himself in the countless scientific memoirs that he published in Europe, the greater part in German, never translated into his own tongue,—and in his fecund political action in favour of thefiatof nationality.

“It is we who need the monument, for its absence covers us with shame and justifies the curse which from his place of exile he cast upon the evil persons of the day.…”

Now, Monteiro Lobato’s nationalism, as I try to show, is not the narrow cause that his theoretical writings would seem to indicate. It is, as I said at the beginning, really an evidence of his eagerness for the expansion of personality. But it is contaminated—and I believe that is the proper word—by an intense local pride which vents itself, upon occasion, as local scolding. The entire essay upon José Bonifacio was written for the sake of the final sting. Not so much to exalt the great figure as to glorify São Paulo and at the same time excoriate the forgetful, the negligent Paulistas. It is such writing as this that best reveals Lobato because it best expresses his central passion, which is not the cult of artistic beauty but the criticism of social failings.

This is at once a step backward and a step forward. Forward in the civic sense, because Brazil needs the unflattering testimony of its own more exigent sons and daughters,—and is Brazil alone in this need? Backward in the artistic sense, because it tends to a confusion of values. It vitiates, particularly in Lobato, the tales he tells until it is difficult to say whether the tale points a moral or the moral adorns the tale.

That Lobato is alive to the genuineness of legitimateforeign influence he himself shows as well as any critic can for him, in the essay uponA Questão do Estylo(The Question of Style), in a succinct paragraph upon Olavo Bilac’s poemO Caçador de Esmeraldas. “The poet … when he composed The Emerald-Hunter, did not take from Corneille a single word, nor from Anatole a single conceit, nor a night from Musset, nor a cock from Rostand, nor frigidity from Leconte, nor an acanthus from Greece, nor a virtue from Rome. But, without wishing it, from the very fact that he was a modern open to all the winds that blow, he took from Corneille the purity of language, from Musset poesy, from Leconte elegance, from Greece the pure line, from Rome fortitude of soul—and with the ancient-rough he made the new-beautiful.”

But what, he asks, shall we say of a poem composed of ill-assimilated suggestions from without,—“in unskilled adaptations of foreign verses, and with types of all the races? The ‘qu’il mourût’ of Corneille in the mouth of a João Fernandez, who slays Ninon, mistress of the colonel José da Silva e Souza, consul of Honduras in Thibet, because an Egyptian fellah disagreed with Ibsen as to the action of Descartes in the battle of Charleroi?…”

Even such a mixture does Lobato discover in the architecture of latter-day São Paulo. But more to our present point: note how, as long as Lobato sticks to actual example, his nationalism is a reasoned, cautious application. As soon as he deserts fact for theory he steps into caricature; nor is it, perhaps, by mere coincidence that the longest essay in the book is upon Caricature in Brazil.

There can be no question as to the dynamic personality of this young man. There can be little question as to the wholesome influence he is wielding. Thus far, however, he is weakest when in his rôle as short-story writer—with the important exceptions we have noted—and strongest as a polemical critic. His personal gifts seem destined to make of him a propagandist of the ironical, satirical sort, with a marked inclination for caricature. One may safely hazard the opinion that he has not yet, in the creative sense—that of transforming reality, through imagination, into artistic life—found himself fully. He is much more than a promise; it is only that his fulfilment is not yet clearly defined.[2]

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