Brazilian Literature

by Isaac Goldberg

I

Although Brazil was not discovered until the opening year of the sixteenth century, the name had long hovered in the mediaeval consciousness together with that of those other mysterious islands which peopled the maps and the imaginations of the dark, fantastic days. Down from the Greeks had come the legend of an Atlantis, which, through the centuries assumed changing shapes, losing soon its status as continent and becoming an island. Thus, in a map of the Atlas Medicis, dating back to 1351, there is registered a Brazil. The name varied from Braçir, Brazil, Brazylle to O’Brasile, and the position shifted with equal instability; now the mythical island was near the Azores, now near the western coast of the British Isles. Charles Squire, in his The Mythology of the British Islands,[1] relates that according to legend, the gods having lost their celestial dwelling, deliberated upon some earthly substitute. Into their discussion came a paradise beyond the sea,—a western island variously described as a land of promise, of felicity and of youth, and as the “island of Breasal” or “Hy-Breasail.” It is supposed that some of the early discoverers, imagining that they had come upon the island Eden, named it Brazil in much the same way that Columbus named the Indies, considering his quest for India at last successful.

However this may be, the first name officially given to Brazil was The Land of the True (or Holy) Cross; only later did the name Brazil, said to have been bestowed by King Emanuel of Portugal, replace the pious title. There is something symbolic in the change; brazil[2] is the name of the reddish dyewood which became so important commercially that it caused naval combats and Portuguese-French rivalry, leading to the effective occupation of the land by the Portuguese. The beam of the cross yielded to a humbler wood as the national designation, just as the pious pretensions of the early colonizers quickly vanished before their impious greed.

The early reports of the newly discovered land lived up to the paradisical visions that had partly inspired the quest. Truly here was a land of promise, a terrestrial paradise that made men dip their pens in milk and honey when they wrote of its wonders. Vaz de Caminha, in what has been called the nation’s “baptismal certificate,” grew rhapsodical in vain; Vespucci,—he for whom the American continent was named,—actually termed it an earthly paradise, but the Portuguese were slow to value the new possession; the cross was not a cross of gold. Nobrega, in 1549, exaggerated the extent of the new discovery even as others were to exaggerate the variety and magic of its fauna and flora; he considered that it occupied no less than two-thirds of the world’s area. Padre Anchieta, the noble leader of the Jesuits, repeated (1585) Vespucci’s glorification and thought the new land not inferior to Portugal, and thus ran the litany of adoration from the topographical pen of Gabriel Soares to the chronicler Cardim, to the pompous Rocha Pitta, and—now with realistic modifications aplenty—down to our own day, when Graça Aranha, by the very title of his novel Chanaan, reveals his conception of his native country as the Land of Promise. From the very beginning the new discovery had captivated the imaginations of the Europeans; to this day its chief quality is the imagination which Senhor Aranha, in a speech at the Sorbonne (1913) has distinguished from the imagination of other peoples. “In Brazil,” he explained, “the collective trait is the imagination. It is not the faculty of idealization, nor the creation of life through esthetic expression, nor the predominance of thought; it is rather the illusion that comes from the representation of the universe, the state of magic, in which reality is dissipated and is transformed into an image.… The distant roots of this imagination may be found in the souls of the various races that met amidst the lavishness of tropical nature. Each people brought to the fusion its own melancholy. Each, having arrived with a spirit full of the terror of several gods, with the anguish of memories of a past forever lost, was possessed by the indefinable uneasiness of the foreign land. Thus was developed that implacable sensibility which magnifies and distorts things, which alternately exalts and depresses the spirits, which translates anxieties and desires; a troubled source of poetry and religion, through which we aspire to the possession of the Infinite, only to lose ourselves at once in the Nirvana of inaction and day-dreaming.” Benedicto Costa[3] has likened this same imagination to the Brazilian forest, with its “disorder and opulence, its vigour and languor; trees that last for centuries and flowers that bloom but a few moments; lianas that live upon the sap of other growths; the brilliancy of orchids, the voices of birds of iridescent coloration, the heat.… There is in the soul of every Brazilian the same contrasts that characterize the tropical forest.”[4]

Brazil, however, is not all forest any more than, intellectually, it is all tropical confusion. There are mountains and valleys and extensive coasts, and each region has a distinguishing influence upon the inhabitant. Thus the climate of the sertão[5] (interior highlands) is less variable and far more salubrious than that of the littoral. “Man here represents perfectly the traits of the surroundings into which he is born and where he dwells: the sertanejo (i. e., the inhabitant of the sertão) is sombre, thin, mistrustful and superstitious, rarely aggressive, rash in his impulses, as silent as the vast plains that surround him, calm in gesture, laconic in speech, and, above all, sunk in an inexpressible melancholy that is in his eyes, in his mysterious countenance, in all the rough curves of his agile body, which is rather slender than muscular. The man of the coast is nervous, of acute sensibility; he can smile and laugh, he has a brilliant imagination and is a boisterous, turbulent thinker; he is an artist, preferring colored images to abstract ideas; he is slender, of well-proportioned lines, speaks at his best when improvising, discusses affairs with the utmost ease, and at times with daring, and generally respects only his own opinions; he is almost always proud and bold. The man of the sertão, for example, is Euclydes da Cunha; the man of the coast, Joaquim Nabuco.”[6]

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

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

In his Historia da Litteratura Brasileira,[7] Romero devotes his third chapter to setting Buckle right. Brazil, he declares, far from suffering excessive rainfall, is subject to calamitous and destructive droughts. The Englishman, who never visited Brazil, errs likewise in his conception of the country’s natural wonders, which he exaggerates in the traditional fashion that was handed down by the earliest comers. Despite the presence of the Amazon, the rivers in general are small, not the largest in the world; the mountains, similarly, far from rearing their crests into unattainable cloudy heights, are of the fourth and fifth order when compared with their fellows of the old world or the new. Neither are the animals in Brazil more gigantic and ferocious than elsewhere. “Our fauna,” writes Romero, “is neither the richest nor the most terrible in the world. We haven’t the elephant, the camel, the hippopotamus, the lion, the tiger, the rhinoceros, the zebra, the giraffe, the buffalo, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the condor and the eagle.” Buckle speaks of Brazil’s unrivalled fertility as an impediment; the truth is that her fertility is not unrivalled, nor is it an impediment. In conclusion, “Buckle is right in the picture he draws of our backwardness, but wrong in the determination of its causes.” According to Romero, three chief reasons are to be adduced; these are (1) natural, (2) ethnic and (3) moral. To the first belongs the excessive heat, in conjunction with the droughts in the major part of the country, as well as the malignant fevers prevalent on the coast. Chief among the second is the “relative incapacity” of the three races that comprise the population. To the last belong the “historic factors called politics, legislation, habits, customs, which are effects that afterward act as causes.”

Ronaldo de Carvalho[8] considers Romero’s reply somewhat timid, inasmuch as he accepts, erroneously, many of Buckle’s conclusions. Buckle’s passage “is not, as it appeared to the illustrious Brazilian writer, ‘true in a general sense.’ Yet it should ‘be meditated upon by all Brazilians’, that they may see what a dangerous snare it is to rely so much, in our inveterate fondness for things foreign, upon the notions imported from the intellectual markets on the other side of the Atlantic.… Buckle’s error consisted in considering the evolution of peoples solely under the influence of physical and geographical factors; more enduring than these are the ethnico-historical factors, which are much more important and far more powerful than the first.” De Carvalho adds little to Romero’s refutation, which, in substance, he repeats. At the time that Buckle’s first volume was originally published (1857), Brazilian literature had long entered upon an autonomous career and was in the throes of Romanticism, which in Brazil was an era of intense and highly fruitful production. He can hardly be blamed for his ignorance on this score, when an authority like Ferdinand Wolf, writing his Le Brésil Litteraire some six years later, is accused by the querulous Romero of setting down many laughable exaggerations.