II
In 1832, when Magalhães published his first collection, Poesias, he was a conventional worshipper of the Portuguese classics. A visit to Europe in 1833 converted him thoroughly to French Romanticism and when, three years later, he issued the Suspiros poeticos e Saudades (Poetic Sighs and Longings), the very title proclaimed the advent of a new orientation. His invocation to the angel of poesy is in itself a miniature declaration of poetic independence:
Ja nova Musa
meu canto inspira;
não mais empunho
profana lyra.
Minha alma, imita
a natureza;
quem vencer pode
sua belleza?
De dia, de noite
Louva o Senhor;
Canta os prodigios
Do Creador.[2]
The chaste virgins of Greece, as he announces in the lines preceding this virtual, if distinctly minor ars poetica, have fascinated his childhood enough. Farewell Homer; the poet will dream now of his native land and sigh, amid the cypress, a song made of his own griefs and longings. Nature, fatherland and God guiding humanity are the trinity of his emblem. They are his constant thought at home and abroad. “Nothing for me,” he exclaims in his Deos e o Homem, written in the Alps in 1834, “for my fatherland all.” In these Suspiros form becomes fairly free, rhythm alters with change in the thought; it is difficult to point to anything in them that has not already appeared in Brazilian poetry from the earliest days, but the same outward elements of religion, patriotism and subjectivity have been fused into a more personal, more appealing product. Os Mysterios, a funereal canticle in memory of his children, published in Paris in 1858, is in eight cantos that sing the triumph of faith. As he wrote in his philosophical work issued in this same year, Factos de Espiritu Humano: “This world would be a horrible comedy, a causeless illusion, and human existence a jest perpetrated by nothingness,—all would be but a lie, if there were not a just and kind God!… That which is absurd cannot be true. God exists and the human spirit is immortal in that knowledge.” There is the kernel of his poetry. Urania, Vienna 1862, chants love through the symbol of his wife. The epic attempt, A Confederação dos Tamoyos, in ten cantos, is noteworthy not so much for lofty flights as for its evidence of the author’s blending of the patriotic and the religious motives. The attitude toward the Jesuit missionaries is the opposite to the stand taken by Basilio da Gama in the Uruguay; they alone among the Portuguese are worthy; the Indians yield at last to civilization, but they are idealized into defenders of justice against the Portuguese exploiters.
In his epic he underwent the influence of Gonçalves Dias, as did Manoel de Araujo Porto-Alegre (1806-1879) in his Brazilianas (1863). This noted painter was also affected by the free metrical structure of the Suspiros of Magalhães, as he revealed in A voz da Natureza of 1835. The boresome epic Colombo, seeking inspiration in the great discoverer, is commendable for imagination rather than truly creative poetry.
Gonçalves Dias is more lyrical in spirit than Magalhães, who was rather the meditative worshipper. The poet of nature was the first to reveal to Brazilians in its full significance the pride of nationality, to such an extent, indeed, that his “Americanism” became a blind hostility toward Europe as being only a source of evil to the new continent. In him flowed the blood of all three races that make up the Brazilian blend and he has celebrated each of the strains,—the Indian in Os Tymbiras, Poema Americano, the African in A Escrava, the Portuguese in the Sextilhas de Frei Antão. To this blend Carvalho, not without justice, attributes the inner turmoil of the poet’s soul. He is religious in his patriotism, just as Magalhães is patriotic in his religion, but if his aversion to Europe is unreasoning, his patriotism is not a blind flag-waving:
A patria é onde quer a vida temos
Sem penar e sem dor;
Onde rostos amigos nos rodeam,
Onde temos amor;
Onde vozes amigas nos consolam,
Onde alguns olhos chorarão doridos
Na erma sepultura.[3]
It is with the name of Gonçalves Dias that “Indianism” in Brazilian poetry is most closely associated. As we have already seen, Verissimo indicates an important difference between this “second” type and the first that appeared in the epics of the Mineira poets. The native was exalted not so much for his own sake as by intense reaction against the former oppressors of the nation. As early as the date of Brazil’s declaration of Independence (September 7, 1822), numerous families had foresworn their Portuguese patronymics and adopted indigenous names; idealization in actual life could not go much farther. In literature such Indianism, as in the case of Gonçalves Dias, could serve the purpose of providing a highly colourful background for the poetic exploitation of the native scene.
Verissimo would call Gonçalves Dias the greatest Brazilian poet, though the noted critic discovers more genius in Basilio da Gama and in Alvares de Azevedo and even Laurindo Rabello,—more philosophical emotion in Junqueira Freire. And before the national criticism had awarded Gonçalves Dias that place of honour, the people had granted it. “The history of our Romanticism will recognize that the strength of this spiritual movement came not alone from the talent of its chief authors, but from their communion with the milieu, from the sympathy which they found there. Our literature was then for the first time, and perhaps the last, social.” Gonçalves Dias, in his Canção de Exilio, captured the soul of his people with a simple lyrism that the slightest exaggeration might have betrayed into sentimental doggerel.
Minha terra tem palmeiras,
Onde canta o sabiá;
As aves que aqui gorgeam,
Não gorgeião como lá.[4]
These stanzas, set to music, became the property of the nation. “If, like the Hebrews, we were to lose our fatherland, our song of exile would be already to hand in the Canção of Gonçalves Dias. With it he reached and conquered the people and our women, who are—in all respects—the chief element in the fame and success of poets. And not only the people, but Brazilian literature and poetry. Since that time the poet is rare who does not sing his land.
“‘All chant their fatherland,’ runs a verse by Casimiro de Abreu, whose nostalgia proceeds directly from the Canção of Gonçalves Dias. Nor does he hide this, calling part of his verses, Canções do Exilio. And to the name of Casimiro de Abreu we can add, following in the wake of the poet of Maranhão, Magalhaes, Porto Alegre, Alvares de Azevedo, Laurindo Rabello, Junqueira Freire and almost all his contemporaries. In all you will find that song, expressed as conscious or disguised imitation. Dominated by the emotion of the Song of Exile, Brazil made of Gonçalves Dias her favorite poet, the elect of her feelings. The nativist instinct, so characteristic of peoples in their infancy, found also a sympathetic echo in his Poesias Americanas, and received as a generous reparation the idealization of our primitive inhabitants and their deeds, without inquiring into what there was in common between them and us, into the fidelity of those pictures and how far they served the cause of a Brazilian literature. His lyrism, of an intensity which then could be compared in our language only to that of Garrett,[5] whose influence is evident in it, found similarly a response in the national feeling.”
Verissimo, somewhat sceptical in the matter of love as experienced by poets, does not even care whether love in Gonçalves Dias was imaginary or real. He counts it the distinguishing trait of the poet that his love poems move the reader with the very breath of authenticity. “I find in them the external theme translated into other words, into another form, perhaps another manner, but with the same lofty generality with which it was sung by the truly great, the human poets. In him love is not the sensual, carnal, morbid desire of Alvares de Azevedo; the wish for caresses, the yearning for pleasure characteristic of Casimiro de Abreu, or the amorous, impotent fury of Junqueira Freire. It it the great powerful feeling purified by idealization,—the love that all men feel,—not the individual passion, the personal, limited case.”
I am not so inclined as Verissimo to accept at full value the statements of poets like Gonçalves Dias that they have never felt love. It is rather that they have never found it as they have visioned it. Indeed, this is just what Gonçalves Dias himself has written:
O amor que eu tanto amava de imo peito
Que nunca pude achar.
The love that so much I loved in my innermost heart,
And that never I could find.
The poet who wrote the lines that follow, with their refrain,
Isso é amor e desse amor se morre
This is love, the love of which one dies
must have been something more than the man gifted with divination that Verissimo would make of him. I would hazard the guess that Verissimo’s deductions are based on a certain personal passionlessness of the critic himself, whose writings reveal just such an idealizer of love as he would find in Gonçalves Dias.
Amor é vida; é ter constantemente
Alma, sentidos, coração—abertos
Ao grande, ao bello; é ser capaz de extremos,
D’altas virtudes, até capaz de crimes;
Comprehender o infinito, a immensidade,
E a natureza e Deus, gostar des campos;
D’aves, flores, murmurios solitarios;
Buscar tristeza, a soledade, o ermo,
E ter o coração em riso e festa;
E á branda festa, ao riso da nossa alma
Fontes de pranto intercalar sem custo;
Conhecer o prazer e a desventura
No mesmo tempo e ser no mesmo ponto
O ditoso, o miserrimo dos entes:
Isso é amor e desse amor se morre!
Amar, e não saber, não ter coragem
Para dizer o amor que em nos sentimos;
Temer que olhos profanos nos devassem
O templo, onde a melhor porção da vida
Se concentra; onde avaros recatamos
Essa fonte de amor, esses thesouros
Inesgotaveis, de illusoes floridas;
Sentir, sem que se veja, a quem se adora,
Comprehender, sem lhe ouvir, seus pensamentos,
Seguil-a, sem poder fitar seus olhos,
Amal-a, sem ousar dizer que amamos,
E, temendo roçar os seus vestidos,
Arder por afogal-a em mil abraços:
Isso é amor e desse amor se morre![6]
Yet from Gonçalves Dias to the refined, clamant voluptuousness of Olavo Bilac is a far cry. The reason for the difference is to be sought rather in personal constitution than in poetic creed. Even the Romantics differ markedly from one another, and though the Brazilian muse is an ardent lady (a truth which, as we shall see, rendered anything like a genuine Parnassianism fairly impossible in Brazil) Gonçalves Dias is after all restrained in his expression of a passion which clearly he felt. The passage just quoted, with all deference to Verissimo, is not great poetry, and precisely because it is too general. It is statement, not the unfolding of passion in a form spontaneously created. It proves that Gonçalves Dias loved,—one woman or many,—but it reveals rather a certain incapacity to generalize than a faculty for transposing the particular into the universal.
Alvares de Azevedo is the standard-bearer of the Brazilian Byronists, but he should not be classed offhand as a mere echoer of the Englishman’s strophes. His Lira dos Veinte Annos is exactly what the title announces; the lyre of a twenty-year-old, which, though its strings give forth romantic strains of bitterness and melancholy and imagination that have become associated with Byron, Musset and Leopardi, sounds an individual note as well. The poet died in his twenty-first year; it was a death that he foresaw and that naturally coloured his verses. “Eat, drink and love; what can the rest avail us?” was the epigraph he took from Byron for his Vagabundo. His brief, hectic career had no time for meticulous polishing of lines; if the statue did not come out as at first he desired, he broke it rather than recast the metal. Not a little of his proclamative rhyming is the swagger of his youth, which is capable, at times, of giving to a poem so banal a quadruplicative title as “’Tis she! ’Tis she! ’Tis she! ’Tis she!” With the frustrated ambitions of weakness he longed for illimitable power. In the 12 de Setembro (his birthday) he exclaims:
Fôra bello talvez sentir no craneo
A alma de Goethe, e reunir na fibra
Byron, Homero e Dante;
Sonhar-se n’um delirio momentaneo
A alma da creação, e som que vibra
A terra palpitante.[7]
Like the hero of Aucassin et Nicolette, he prefers hell to heaven for a dwelling-place.
No inferno estão suavissimas bellezas,
Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras;
La se namora em boa companhia,
Não pode haver inferno com Senhoras![8]
he declares in O Poeta Moribundo.
He is Brazil’s sick child par excellence, ill, like so many after him, with the malady of the century. But one must guard against attributing this to the morbid pose that comes so easy at twenty. Pose there was, and flaunting satanism, but too many of these poets in Brazil, and in the various republics of Spanish-America died young for one to doubt their sincerity altogether. The mood is a common one to youth; in an age that, like the romantic, made a literary fashion of their weakness, they were bound to appear as they appeared once again when Symbolism and the Decadents vanquished for a time the cold formalism of the Parnassian school.
That Alvares de Azevedo, for all his millennial doubts and despairs was a child, is attested by the following pedestrian quatrain from the poem of the quadruplicative title:
Mas se Werther morreu por ver Carlotta
Dando pão com manteiga as criancinhas,
Se achou-a assim mais bella,—eu mais te adoro
Sonhando-te a lavar as camisinhas![9]
Thackeray’s famous parody seems here itself to be parodied. Alvares de Azevedo’s love, if Verissimo was right, was “um amor de cabeça,”—of the head rather than the heart, a poet’s love, the “love of love,” without objective reality.… “It is rather a desire to love, the aspiration for a woman ideally beloved, than a true, personal passion. What does it matter, however, if he give us poems such as Anima mea, Vida, Esperanças, and all, almost all, that he left us?”
The boy-poet is still an appreciable influence in the national letters, as well he might be among a people inclined to moodiness; for many years he was one of the most widely read poets of the country, in company of his fellow-romantics, Gonçalves Dias and Castro Alves. Among his followers are Laurindo Rabello (1826-1864), Junqueira Freire (1832-1855) and Casimiro de Abreu (1837-1860),—not a long lived generation. Rabello was a vagrant soul whose verses are saved by evident sincerity. “I am not a poet, fellow mortals,” he sings, “and I know it well. My verses, inspired by grief alone, are not verses, but rather the cries of woe exhaled at times involuntarily by my soul.” He is known chiefly as a repentista (improvisator) and himself spread the popularity of his verses by singing them to his own accompaniment upon the violin. He tried to improvise life as well as verses, for he drifted from the cloister to the army, from the army to medicine, with a seeming congenital inability to concentrate. Misfortune tracked his steps, and, as he has told us, wrung his songs from him. Verissimo calls him one of the last troubadours, wandering from city to city singing his sad verses and forcing the laugh that must entertain his varying audiences. The popular mind so confused him with the Portuguese Bocage that, according to the same critic, some of Bocage’s verses have been attributed to the Brazilian.
“My pleasures,” he sings in his autobiographical poem Minha Vida (My Life) “are a banquet of tears! A thousand times you must have seen me, happy amidst the happy, chatting, telling funny stories, laughing and causing laughter. Life’s a drama, eh?” He is, indeed, as his lines reveal, a Brazilian Pagliaccio:
Porque julgar-se do semblante,—
Do semblante, essa mascara de carne
Que o homem recebeu pr’a entrar no mundo,
O que por dentro vai? E quasi sempre,
Si ha estio no rosto, inverno na alma.
Confesso-me ante vos; ouvi, contentes!
O meu riso é fingido; sim, mil vezes
Com elle afogo os ecos de un gemido
Que imprevisto me chega a flor dos labios;
Mil vezes sobre as cordas afinadas
Que tanjo, o canto meu accompanhando
Cahe pranto.
Eu me finjo ante vos, que o fingimento
É no lar do prazer prudenia ao triste.[10]
Junqueira Freire is of firmer stuff, though tossed about by inner and external vicissitudes that are mirrored in the changing facets of his verse.
He, too, sought—with as little fundamental sincerity as Laurindo Rabello—solace in the monastery, which he entered at the unmonastic age of twenty as the result of being crossed in love. Of course he thought first of suicide, but “the cell of a monk is also a grave,”—and a grave, moreover, whence the volatile soul of youth may rise in carnal resurrection. Junqueira Freire was the most bookish of children. He read his way through the Scriptures, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid (an unbiblical trio!) and imbibed modern currents through Milton, Klopstock, De Maistre, Herculano, Garrett, Lamartine, Hugo. His prose critiques are really remarkable in so young a person, and one sentence upon philosophy is wiser by far than many a tome penned by the erudite. Philosophy he found to be a “vain poetry, not of description but of ratiocination, nothing true, everything beautiful; rather art than science; rather a cupola than a foundation.” Such a view of philosophy is of course not new, though it is none too current. It is brilliant for a mere youth of Romanticist Brazil—an intuitive forecast, as it were, of Croce’s philosophy of the intuition.
Soon weary of the cloister walls, our poet sang his disillusionment in lines that turn blasphemous, even as the mother in Meu filho no claustro curses the God that “tore from my arms my favorite son.…” “We all illude ourselves!” “We conceive an eternal paradise and when greedily we reach after it, we find an inferno.”
He is, as an artist, distinctly secondary. He is more the poet in his prose than in his poems, and I am inclined to think that his real personality resides there.
Casimiro de Abreu, in Carvalho’s words, “is the most exquisite singer of saudades in the older Brazilian poetry;[11] his work is a cry of love for all that lay far away from him, his country and his family, whom he left when but a child.”
Meu Deus, eu sinto e tu bem ves que eu morro
Respirando este ar;
Faz que eu viva, Senhor! dá-me de novo
Os gozos de meu lar!
Quero dormir a sombra dos coqueiros,
As folhas por docel:
E ver se apanho a borboleta branca
Que voa no vergel!
Quero sentar-me a beira do riacho
E sosinho scismando no crepusculo
Os sonhos de porvir!
Dá-me os sitios gentis onde eu brincava,
Lá na quadra infantil;
Da que eu veja uma vez o céu da patria
O céu do meu Brazil!
Minha campa será entre as mangueiras
Banhada ao luar,
Eu contente dormirei tranquillo
A sombra do meu lar!
As cachoeiras chorarão sentidas
Porque cedo morri,
E eu sonho ne sepulcro os meus amores,
Na terra onde nasci![12]
In his study of Casimiro de Abreu Verissimo has some illuminating things to say of love and wistful longing (amor e saudade) in connection with the poet’s patriotism in especial and with love of country in general. “It is under the influence of nostalgia and love, for both in him are really an ailment—that he begins to sing of Brazil. But the Brazil that he sings in such deeply felt verses, the Patria that he weeps … is the land in which were left the things he loves and chiefly that unknown girl to whom he dedicated his book. The longing for his country, together with the charms that this yearning increased or created, is what made him a patriot, if, with this restriction may be applied to him an epithet that from my pen is not a token of praise. His nostalgia is above all the work of love,—not only the beloved woman, but all that this loving nature loved,—the native soil, the paternal house, country life.… Without these two feelings, love and longing, the love of country is anti-esthetic. If Os Lusiadas, with the intense patriotism that overflows it, is the great poem it is, it owes this greatness to them alone. It is love and longing, the anxious nostalgia of the absent poet and the deep grief of a high passion that impart to it its most pathetic accents, its most lyric notes, its most human emotions, such as the speeches of Venus and Jupiter, the sublime episode of D. Ignes de Castro, that of Adamastor, the Isle of Love.…”[13]
In Fagundes Varella (1841-1875) we have a disputed figure of the Romantic period. Verissimo denies him originality except in the Cantico de Calvario, “where paternal love found the most eloquent, most moving, most potent representation that we have ever read in any language,” while Carvalho, championing his cause, yet discovers in him a mixture of Alvares de Azevedo’s Byronic satanism, Gonçalves Dias’s Indianism and the condoreirismo of Castro Alves and Tobias Barreto. He is a lyrist of popular inspiration and appeal, and “one of our best descriptive poets.…” “Varella, then, together with Machado de Assis and Luis Guimarães Junior, is a transitional figure between Romanticism and Parnassianism.”
The influence of Victor Hugo’s Les Châtiments was great throughout South America and in Brazil brought fruit chiefly in Tobias Barreto and Castro Alves, the salient representatives of the so-called condoreirismo; like the condor their language flew to grandiloquent heights, whence the name, for which in English we have a somewhat less flattering counterpart in the adjective “spread-eagle.” Barreto (1839-1889) belongs rather to the history of Brazilian culture; he was largely responsible for the introduction of modern German thought and exerted a deep influence upon Sylvio Romero. Alves was less educated—his whole life covers but a span of twenty-four years—but what he lacked in learning he made up in sensitivity and imagination. Though he can be tender with the yearnings of a sad youth, he becomes a pillar of fire when he is inspired by the cause of abolition.
Romero, with his customary appetite for a fight, has, despite his denials of preoccupation with mere questions of priority, given himself no little trouble to prove Barreto’s precedence in the founding of the condoreiro school;[14] we shall leave that matter to the historians. Brazilians themselves, as far as concerns the esthetic element involved, have made a choice of Alves. He is one of the national poets. His chief works are three in number: Espumas Fluctuantes, Gonzaga (a play) and O Poema dos Escravos (unfinished). Issued separately, the Poem of the Slaves, is not, as its title would imply, a single hymn to the subjected race; it is a collection of poems centering around the theme of servitude. He does not dwell upon the details of that subjection; he is, fundamentally, the orator. The abolition of slavery did not come until 1888; on September 28, 1871, all persons born in Brazil were declared free by law; it was such poems as Alves’s Vozes d’Africa and O Navio Negreiro that prepared the way for legislation which, for that matter, economic change was already fast rendering inevitable.[15]