II
The scientific spirit in Brazilian poetry was of short duration, even though Romero, one of its chief exponents, gives himself credit for having initiated in 1870 the reaction against Romanticism with a poetry that sought harmony with the realistic philosophy of the day. He and Martins Junior (whom Carvalho places at the head of the “scientific” poets) are today considered to have troubled the waters of Brazilian lyrism for but a passing moment. In reality, they but hastened the advent of Parnassianism. Brazil for a while was weary of the great Latin weakness,—eloquence. Its poetical condors had too long orated from mountain-tops; it was high time for swans, for towers of ivory. Besides, I believe, this answered a certain need of the national psyche. The sensualist, too, has his moments of refinement, and he becomes the exquisite voluptuary. Science in poetry, as exemplified by the strophes of Martins Junior, is too often but rhymed harangue, even as the early Brazilian versifiers presented us with rhymed fruit-baskets, aviaries and geographies. Note the unscientific worship of science in his lines,—that science which so prosaically he terms “o grande agente altruista,” the great altruistic agent:
O seculo immortal, ó seculo em que a conquista,
A guerra, as religiões e as velhas monarchias
Tem tombado no chão, nojentas como harpias,
Tristes como o deserto! Eu curvo-me ante ti
E ponho o joelho em terra afim de orar
Ao teu busto ideal, titanico, estrellado!…[2]
The transition from Romanticism to Parnassianism in Brazil may be studied in the poetry of Luiz Guimarães and the earlier verses of Machado de Assis. I find it difficult to agree with either Verissimo or Carvalho in his estimate of Machado de Assis’s poetry; Romero has by far the more tenable view. It may be true that the Chrysalidas and the Phalenas of Machado de Assis, like the Sonetos e Rimas of Luiz Guimarães, reveal a great refinement of form and elegance of rhyme,—even a wealth of rhythm. But colour and picturesqueness are hardly the distinguishing poetic traits of Machado de Assis, whose real poetry, as I try to show in the chapter dedicated especially to him, is in his prose.
Luiz Guimarães was, from one aspect, a Romantic with a more precise technique; his form, in other words, was quite as transitional as his content. In addition to French influence he underwent that of the Italians Stecchetti and Carducci, of whom he made translations into Portuguese. His sonnet on Venice is illustrative of a number of his qualities,—his restrained saudade, his gift of picturesque evocation, his rich rhymes, his vocalic melody:
Não es a mesma, a flor de morbidezza,
Rainha do Adriatico! Brilhante
Jordão de amor, onde Musset errante
Bebeu em ondas a lustral belleza.
Já não possues, ó triumphal Veneza,
O teu sorriso—olympico diamante,
Que se engastou do lord bardo amante
Na fronte heroica de immortal grandeza.
Tua escura laguna ja não sente
Da antiga serenata o som plangente,
E os soluços de amor que nos teus barcos.
Exhalava a patricia voluptuosa.…
Resta-te apenas a canção saudosa
Das gemedoras pombas de São Marcos.[3]
“Machado de Assis,” writes Carvalho,[4] “was a poet of greater resources and fuller metrical invention than Luiz Guimarães. His poetry … reveals a psychological intensity rarely attained in this country. Possessing a firm classical education, a profound knowledge of those humanities which in seventeenth century France were the distinguishing characteristic of the honnête homme, Machado succeeded in stamping upon his verses a truly singular impress of subtlety and discretion. His images are, as a rule, of a perfect realism, a clearness worthy of the old masters. His images are veritable parables.…” But, to one foreigner at least,—and, I suspect, to more than one Brazilian, Machado de Assis as a poet is cold, not often achieving artistic communication; he is colourful, maybe, but his colours are seen through a certain diaphanous mist that rubs off their bloom. What Carvalho would find in the man’s verses I discover, strangely enough, in his remarkable prose—his humorism, his pessimism. The themes most certainly inhere in his verse, but they are expressed at their best, most artistically developed, in his prose. Carvalho, seeking to rectify the position of this great figure in the history of Brazilian letters, would even make of him a pioneer. “This feeling of the tragico quotidiano,” he asserts, “which only today is beginning to enter into Brazilian poetry, was first revealed to our literature by Machado de Assis. Although such notes are not frequent nor many in his work, it is none the less true that, before him, they were completely unknown.… Even in his poetry, his poetry that has been so unjustly judged and so pettily understood, Machado de Assis is a pioneer, an originator of the first order. It was natural for his art not to be to the taste of the popular palate; it did not resound with the fireworks and the hoarse cries of Brazil’s most loudly applauded verse-manufacturers.”[5]
Pioneering, however, is not poetry. In art, the idea belongs to him who makes the best use of it. In Machado de Assis, the thought often subjected the emotion; this was characteristic of the man’s peculiar psychology. I would not be understood as denigrating his poetic memory; far from it. But in my opinion (and I can speak for no one else) he is in the conventional sense, only secondarily a poet, and a secondary poet.
At the head of the true Parnassians stand Theophilo Dias, Raymundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira and Olavo Bilac, though Verissimo sees in the Miniaturas of Gonçalves Crespo “the first manifestation of Parnassian poetry published here.”[6] Crespo was not out-and-out Parnassian, however, as was Affonso Celso in his Telas sonantes of 1876. The very title—Sounding Canvases, i. e., pictures that sing their poetry—is in itself a program. Brazilian Parnassianism thus begins, according to Verissimo, in the decade 1880-1890. Sonetos e Rimas, by Luiz Guimarães, appears in 1879; Raymundo Correia’s Symphonias are of 1883, his Versos e Versões, of 1884; Alberto de Oliveira’s Meridionaes are of 1884, and the Sonetas e poemas of 1886. In the very year that the Nicaraguan, Darío, with a tiny volume of prose and poetry called Azul… and published in Chile, was initiating the “modernist” overturn in Spanish America, Bilac was issuing (1888) his Poesias.
Brazilian Parnassianism, as we have seen, is less objective, less impersonal than its French prototype. Poetic tradition and national character were alike opposed to the Gallic finesse, erudition, ultra-refinement. Pick up the many so-called Parnassian poems of Spanish or Portuguese America, remove the names of the authors and the critical excrescences, and see how difficult it is—from the evidence of the poem itself—to apply the historical label.
Theophilo Dias is hardly the self-controlled chiseller of Greek marbles. How “Parnassian,” for example, is such a verse as this, speaking of his lady’s voice?
Exerce sobre mim um brando despotismo
Que me orgulha, e me abate;—e ha nesse magnetismo
Uma forca tamanha, uma electricidade,
Que me fascina e prende as bordas de um abysmo,
Sem que eu tente fugir,—inerte, sem vontade.[7]
This is not the kind of thought that produces genuine Parnassian poetry. How “impersonal” is it? How “sculptural”? More than one poem of the “Romanticist” Machado de Assis is far more Parnassian.
And listen to this description, by Carvalho, of Raymundo Correia. How “Parnassian” does it sound? “Anger, friendship, hatred, jealousy, terror, hypocrisy, all the tints and half-tints of human illusion, all that is closest to our innermost heart … he weighed and measured, scrutinized and analysed with the patient care of a naturalist who was, at the same time, a prudent and well-informed psychologist. Nor is this all.… Raymundo is an admirable painter of our landscape, an exquisite impressionist, who reflects, with delicious sentiment, the light and shade of the Brazilian soil.”[8]
There is no denying the beneficial influence of the Parnassians upon the expressive powers of the Brazilian poets. The refinement of style mirrored a refinement of the thought. If I stress the difference between the French and the Brazilian Parnassians it is not alone to emphasize the partial inability of the latter to imitate the foreign models, but to show how genuine personality must triumph over group affiliations. Raymundo Correia was such a personality; his sensibility was too responsive for complete surrender to formula. One of his sonnets long enjoyed the reputation of being the most popular ever penned in his country:
AS POMBAS
Vae-se a primeira pomba despertada.…
Vae-se outra mais … mais outra … enfin dezenas
De pombas vão-se dos pombaes, apenas
Raia, sanguinea e fresca, a madrugada.
E á tarde, quando a rigida nortada
Sopra, aos pombaes de novo ellas serenas,
Ruflando as azas, sacudindo as pennas,
Voltam todas em bando e em revoada.
Tambem dos corações, onde, abotoam,
Os sonhos, um por um, celeres vôam,
Como vôam as pombas dos pombaes.
No azul da adolescencia as azas soltam,
Fogem … mas aos pombaes as pombas voltam,
E elles aos corações não voltam mais.…[9]
This is the more yearnful voice of Raymundo Correia’s muse, who knows, too, the futility of rebellion against “God, who cruelly creates us for grief; God, who created us and who was not created.” This conception of universal grief is his central theme, and it is significant that when Carvalho seeks spiritual analogies he goes—to Parnassians? No. To Leopardi, to Byron, to Pushkin, to Buddha.
Alberto de Oliveira, genuine artist that he was—and it was the fashion at one time for the Brazilian poets, under Parnassian influence, to call themselves artists rather than poets—maintained his personality through all his labours. Like a true Brazilian, he renders homage to the surrounding scene and even his sadness is several parts softness. In the manner of the day he wrote many a sonnet of pure description, but this represents restraint rather than predilection, for at other times, as in his Volupia, he bursts out in a nostalgia for love that proves his possession of it even at the moment of his denial.
Fico a ver que tudo ama. E eu não amo, eu sómente!
Ama este chão que piso, a arvore a que me encosto,
Esta aragem subtil que vem roçar-me o rosto,
Estas azas que no ar zumbem, esta folhagem,
As féras que no cio o seu antro selvagem
Deixam por ver a luz que as magnetiza, os broncos
Penhascaes do deserto, o rio, a selva, os troncos,
E os ninhos, e a ave, a folha, e a flor, e o fructo, e o ramo.…
E eu só não amo! eu so não amo! eu so não amo![10]
Note how similar are these verses in content to the cries of love denied that rise from Gonçalves Dias and Casimiro de Abreu,—two Romantics of the movement’s height. Carvalho, too, sees that in Alberto de Oliveira there is, in addition to the talent for description, “a subjective poet of genuine value.”
For a long time Olavo Bilac enjoyed the sobriquet “Prince of Brazilian poets.” It matters little that part of his posthumous book, Tarde, reveals a social preoccupation. To the history of Brazilian letters, and to his countrymen, he is first of all the resounding voice of voluptuousness. And, as happens so often with the ultra-refined of his kin, the taste of his ecstasies at times is blunted by the memento mori of weary thought. The world becomes a pendulum swinging between vast contrasts, and it takes both swings to complete the great vibration.
O Natureza! o mãe piedosa e pura!
O cruel, implacavel assassina!
—Mão, que o veneno e o balsamo propina
E aos sorrisos as lagrimas mistura!
Pois o berço, onde a bocca pequenina
Abre o infante a sorrir, e a miniatura
A vaga imagem de uma sepultura,
O germen vivo de uma atroz ruina?!
Sempre o contraste! Passaros cantando
Sobre tumulos … flores sobre a face
De ascosas aguas putridas boiando.…
Anda a tristeza ao lado de alegria.…
E esse teu seio, de onde a noite nasce,
E o mesmo seio de onde nasce o dia.…[11]
The theme is as common as joy and sorrow; at the very beginning of Brazilian literature we meet it in a coarser sensualist, Gregorio de Mattos Guerra. In Raymundo Correia, in Machado de Assis, such rhymed homilies are common. They illustrate rather the philosophical background of the poets than their more artistic creativeness. Voluptuary that he was, Bilac preferred in poetry the carefully wrought miniature to the Titanic block of marble; at his best he attains a rare effect of eloquent simplicity. He was as Parnassian as a Brazilian may be in verse, yet more than once, as he chiselled his figurines, they leaped to life under his instrument, like diminutive Galateas under the breath of Pygmalion.
Assim procedo, Minha penna
Segue esta norma,
Por te servir, Deusa serena,
Serena Fórma!
“Thus I proceed,” he declares in the poem that opens his Poesias, presenting his particular ars poetica. “My pen follows this standard. To serve you, Serene Goddess, Serene Form!” Yet read the entire poem; note, as an almost insignificant detail, the numerous exclamation points; note, too, that he is making love to that Goddess, that he is promising to die in her service. The words are the words of Parnassianism, but the voice is the voice of passionate personality, romantically dedicated to Style. Indeed, for the epigraph to his entire work one might quote the lines from Musset’s “Rolla”:
J’aime!—voilà le mot que la nature entière
Crie au vent qui l’emporte, à l’oiseau qui le suit!
Sombre et dernier soupir que poussera la terre
Quand elle tombera dans l’eternelle nuit!
Bilac’s passion at its height may replace the Creator of life himself; thus, in A Alvorada do Amor, Adam, before his Eve, cries ecstatically his triumph, despite their lost paradise. He blesses the moment in which she revealed her sin and life with her crime, “For, freed of God, redeemed and sublime, I remain a man upon earth, in the light of thine eyes. Earth, better than Heaven; Man, greater than God!”
All, or almost all, of Bilac, is in this poem, which is thus one of his pivotal creations. De Carvalho has termed him a poet of “pansexualism”; the name might be misleading, as his verses more often reveal the gourmet, rather than the gourmand of eroticism.[12]
The more to show the uncertain nature of Brazilian Parnassianism, we have the figures of Luiz Delfino and Luiz Murat, termed by some Parnassians and by others Romantics. Delfino has been called by Romero (Livro do Centenario, Vol. I, page 71), “for the variety and extent of his work, the best poet of Brazil.” The same critic, some thirty-three pages farther along in the same account, calls Murat deeper and more philosophic than Delfino, and equalled only by Cruz e Souza in the penetration of the human soul. And by the time (page 110, Ibid.) he has reached the last-named of these poets, Cruz e Souza becomes “in many respects the best poet Brazil has produced.”
Yet the effect of the French neo-classicists upon the Brazilian poets was, as Verissimo has shown, threefold: form was perfected, the excessive preoccupation with self was diminished, the themes became more varied. “This same influence, following the example of what had happened in France, restored the sonnet to the national poetry, whence the Romantics had almost banished it, and on the other hand banished blank verse, which is so natural to our tongue and our poetry.… As to form, our Parnassian poets merely completed the evolution led in Portugal and there by two poets who, whatever their merits, had a vast effect upon our poetry, Antonio de Castilho and Thomaz Ribeiro. Machado de Assis evidently and confessedly owes to the first, if not also to the second, the advantages of his metrification and of his poetic form in general over that of some of his contemporaries, such as Castro Alves and Varella. Parnassianism refined this form … with its preoccupations with relief and colour, as in the plastic arts,—with exquisite sonorities, as in music,—with metrical artifices that should heighten mere correctness and make an impression through the feeling of a difficulty conquered,—with the search for rich rhymes and rare rhymes, and, as in prose, for the adjective that was peregrine, and if not exact, surprising. All this our poets did here as a strict imitation of the French, and since it is the externality of things that it is easy and possible to imitate and not that which is their very essence, a great number of them merely reproduced in pale copy the French Parnassians. Thus, for some fifteen years, we were truly inundated with myriads of sonnets describing domestic scenes, landscapes, women, animals, historic events, seascapes, moonlight … a veritable gallery of pictures in verse that pretended to be poetry.”
Here, as everywhere else, the true personalities survive. Chief among the Brazilian Parnassians are the few whom we have here considered.