FOOTNOTES:
[1] “True Romanticism,” says Wolf, “is nothing other than the expression of a nation’s genius unrestrained by the trammels of convention.” He would derive the name through the same reasoning that called the lingua romana rustica (country Roman speech) Romance, as in the phrase Romance Languages, in opposition to the learned Latin known as the sermo urbanus, or language of the city. Such liberation as Wolf points out, was the work of German criticism. “The Germans avenged themselves for the double servitude, political and literary, with which the French had so long oppressed them, by at last delivering the people from the pseudo-classic fetters.” A service they performed a half-century later, as we have suggested, bringing a new breath to the later pseudo-classicism of the Parnassians. The real contribution of the so-called Romantic movement, then, was one of release from academically organized repression,—repression in form, in thought, in expression, which are but so many aspects of the genetic impulse, and not detachable entities that may be re-arranged at will. The measure of literary repression may be taken as one of the measures of classicism; the measure of release from that repression may be taken as one of the measures of romanticism. To argue in favour of one or the other or to attempt to draw too definite a line between them is a futile implication of the possibility of uniformity and, moreover, is to shift the criteria of art from an esthetic to a moralistic basis. There are really as many “isms” as there are creative individuals; classic and romantic are aspects of all creative endeavour rather than definite and opposing qualities. The observation which I translate herewith from Wolf relates Romanticism to its originally individualistic importance as applied to nations. “The accessory ideas that have been grafted upon that of Romanticism as a result of its decadence,” writes the German critic, “serve only to confuse the etymological and historical truth of this definition. It is for the same reasons that the art of the Middle Ages, proper to modern peoples and opposed to antiquity, has been named Romantic, or rather, Roman. In order to re-establish the continuity of their spontaneous development and to paralyze the modern influence of the humanists, the reformists, classicism and rationalism, these same peoples had to turn back and drink from the ever abundant springs of the Middle Ages,—a brilliant epoch of development which was more in conformity with their genius. This is another reason why the two terms Middle Ages and Romanticism have been confused. But as this poetry and art of the Middle Ages are bigoted, excessively idealistic, taking pleasure in mysticism and the fantastic, these diverse acceptations have been wrongly given to romanticism. Taking the accessory for the central nucleus, modern romanticism has caricatured all this and discredited true romanticism, so that the name in the realms of art has been applied to everything that is subjective, arbitrary, nebulous, capricious and without fixed form.”
[2] A new Muse now inspires my song. No more do I grasp the pagan lyre. My soul, imitate nature. Who can surpass her beauty? By day, by night, sing praises to the Lord; chant the wonders of the Creator.
[3] Our fatherland is wherever we live a life free of pain and grief; where friendly faces surround us, where we have love; where friendly voices console us in our misfortune and where a few eyes will weep their sorrow over our solitary grave.
[4] My land has graceful palm-trees, where sings the sabiá. The birds that warble here (i. e., in Portugal, where he wrote the poem) don’t warble as ours over there.
[5] The critic here refers to João Baptista da Silva Leitão Almeida Garrett (1799-1854) who together with Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877) dominated the Portuguese Romantic epoch.
[6] Love is life; it is to hold one’s soul, one’s senses, one’s heart, open ever to the great, the beautiful; to be capable of extremes, of lofty virtues and lowest crimes; to understand the infinite, the vastness, Nature and God, to enjoy the fields; the birds, the flowers, solitary murmurs; to seek sadness, solitude, the desert, to fill the heart with laughter and festivity; and to inundate the smiling fête, the laughter of our soul, with fountains of tears; to know pleasure and misfortune at the same time and to be at once the happiest and the most wretched of mortals: This is love, the love of which one dies. To love, and not know, not possess the courage to speak the love we feel within us; to fear lest profane eyes cast their defiling glance into the temple where is concentrated the best portion of our lives; where like misers we conceal this fountain of love, these inexhaustible treasures of flourishing illusions; to feel the presence of the adored one, though she be not seen, to understand, without hearing her speak, her thoughts; to follow her, without being able to gaze into her eyes; to love her without being able to say that we love. And, fearing to brush her garments, to burn to stifle her in a thousand embraces. This is love, the love of which one dies!
[7] It were beautiful to feel in one’s brain the soul of Goethe, and to unite in his body Byron, Homer and Dante. To dream in the delirium of a moment that one is the soul of creation and the sound sent forth by the palpitant earth.
[8] Hell contains exquisite beauties, Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras; there is where one falls in love in good company. There can’t be a hell with ladies around!
[9] But if Werther longed to see Carlotta giving bread and butter to the children and found her thus more beautiful than ever, I adore you all the more when I vision you doing the laundry.
[10] Why judge from the face—the face,—that mask of flesh which man received on entering the world,—that which goes on within? Almost always if it is summer on one’s face, it is winter in the soul. I confess before you; hear, contented ones! My laughter is feigned; yes, a thousand times I stifle with it the echoes of a groan that of a sudden rises to my lips; a thousand times upon the tempered strings I play, in accompaniment to my song fall tears. I pretend before you, for in the house of mirth pretence is the sad man’s prudence.
[11] The same poet, in Verissimo’s words, is the singer of “love and saudade. These two feelings are the soul of his poetry.” Estudos, II, 47.
[12] Oh, Lord, I feel and well you see that I am dying as I breathe this air; let me live, O Lord, let me feel, once again the joys of my native hearth. I would sleep in the shade of the cocoa-trees with their leaves as my canopy; and see whether I could catch the white butterfly that flies in the orchard. I want to sit beside the little stream at the fall of dusk, alone in the twilight filled with dreams of the future. Give me the sweet spots where I romped with the other children, let me see once again the sky of my fatherland, the skies of my Brazil. My grave will be among the mango-trees, bathed in the light of the moon. And there I shall sleep contentedly in the shadow of my hearth. The waterfalls will weep in deep-felt grief because I died so soon, while I in my sepulchre shall dream of my loves, in the land where I was born.
[13] With respect to a related subject Verissimo has uttered words quite as wise, in harmony with the esthetic view of nationalism.
“In no other Brazilian poets do I find, together with a banal facility in versification, the eminent qualities of poetry.… Another salient quality of these poets (that is, of those whom Verissimo groups into the second Romantic generation, including Gonçalves Dias, Alvares de Azevedo, Casimiro de Abreu, Junqueiro Freire, Laurindo Rabello) is their nationalism. Not that factitious nationalism of duty or erudition, in which intention and process are clearly discernible, but the expression—unconscious, so to say—of the national soul itself, in its feeling, its manner of speech, its still rudimentary thought. They are not national because they speak of bores, tacapes or inubias, or sing the savages that rove these lands. With the exception of Gonçalves Dias, none of them is even ‘Indianist.’ Casimiro de Abreu, upon whom Gonçalves Dias made so great an impression, whose nostalgia derives largely from the Cançõ do Exilio (Song of Exile) no longer sings the Indian. Neither do Alvares de Azevedo, Laurindo or the others.” Estudos, II, Pages 19-20.
[14] See Historia da Litteratura Brasileira Vol. II, pages 476-601.
[15] See, in Part Two of this book, the chapter devoted to Castro Alves.
[16] Benedicto, Costa, Le Roman au Brésil. P. 70.
[17] Carvalho, Op. Cit. P. 263. Yet many will refuse to believe that Alencar’s Indians are natural. Indeed, Alencar himself has repudiated any realistic intention.
[18] From a document first published by the author’s son, Dr. Mario de Alencar of the Brazilian Academy, in 1893, twenty years after it was written, under the title Como E Porque Sou Romancista (How And Why I Became a Novelist). I have translated these excerpts from the article as reprinted in João Ribeiro’s Auctores Contemporaneos, 6a Edição, Refundida, Rio de Janeiro, 1907.
[19] The American Novel, New York, 1921.
[20] Op. Cit. Pp. 77-78.
CHAPTER V
CRITICAL REACTION (1870-1900)
French Background—Naturalists, Parnassians—Theophilo Dias, Raymundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira, Olave Bilac—The Novel—Aluizio de Azevedo, Machado de Assis—The Decadents—Later Developments.