V
On January 23, 1808, the regent Dom João fled from Napoleon to Brazil, thus making the colony the temporary seat of the Portuguese realm. The psychological effect of this upon the growing spirit of independence was tremendous; so great, indeed, was Dom João’s influence upon the colony that he has been called the founder of the Brazilian nationality. The ports of the land, hitherto restricted to vessels of the Portuguese monarchy, were thrown open to the world; the first newspapers appeared; Brazil, having tasted the power that was bestowed by the mere temporary presence of the monarch upon its soil, could not well relinquish this supremacy after he departed in 1821. The era, moreover, was one of colonial revolt; between 1810 and 1826 the Spanish dependencies of America rose against the motherland and achieved their own freedom; 1822 marks the establishment of the independent Brazilian monarchy.
Now begins a literature that may be properly called national, though even yet it wavered between the moribund classicism and the nascent romanticism, even as the form of government remained monarchial on its slow and dubious way to republicanism. Arcadian imagery still held sway in poetry and there was a decline from the originality of the Mineira group.
Souza Caldas (1762-1814) and São Carlos (1763-1829) represent, together with José Eloy Ottoni (1764-1851), the religious strains of the Brazilian lyre. The first, influenced by Rousseau, is avowedly Christian in purpose but the inner struggle that produced his verses makes of him a significant figure in a generally sterile era, and his Ode ao homen selvagem contains lines of appeal to our own contemporary dubiety. São Carlos’s mystic poem A Assumpção da Santissima Virgem possesses, today, merely the importance of its nativistic naïveté; for the third Canto, describing Paradise, he makes extensive use of the Brazilian flora. There is, too, a long description of Rio de Janeiro which describes very little. José Eloy Ottoni, more estimable for his piety and his patriotism than for his poetry, translated the Book of Job as Souza Caldas did the Psalms, and with great success.
Though these religious poets are of secondary importance to letters, they provided one of the necessary ingredients of the impending Romantic triumph; their Christian outlook, added to nationalism, tended to produce, as Wolf has indicated, a genuinely Brazilian romanticism.
Head and shoulders above these figures stands the patriarchal form of José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva, (1763-1838) one of the most versatile and able men of his day. His scientific accomplishments have found ample chronicling in the proper places; quickly he won a reputation throughout Europe. “The name of José Bonifacio,” wrote Varnhagen, “ … is so interwoven with all that happened in the domains of politics, literature and the sciences that his life encompasses the history of a great period.…” His poems, in all truth but a small part of his labours, were published in 1825 under the Arcadian name of Americo Elysio. They are, like himself, a thing of violent passions. In Aos Bahianos he exclaims:
Amei a liberdade e a independencia
Da doce cara patria, a quem o Luso
Opprimia sem dó, com risa e mofa:
Eis o meu crime todo![11]
Yet this is but half the story, for the savant’s political life traced a by no means unwavering line. Two years before the publication of his poems he who so much loved to command fell from power with the dissolution of the Constituinte and he reacted in characteristic violence. Brazilians no longer loved liberty:
Mas de tudo acabou da patria gloria!
Da liberdade o brado, que troava
Pelo inteiro Brasil, hoje enmudece,
Entre grilhoes e mortes.
Sobre sus ruinas gemem, choram,
Longe da patria os filhos foragidos:
Accusa-os de traição, porque o amavam,
Servil infame bando.[12]
A number of other versifiers and prose writers are included by Brazilians in their accounts of the national letters; Romero, indeed, with a conception of literature more approaching that of sociology than of belles lettres, expatiates with untiring gusto upon the work of a formidable succession of mediocrities. We have neither the space nor the patience for them here.
It is during the early part of the period epitomized in this chapter that Brazilian literature, born of the Portuguese, began to be drawn upon by the mother country. “In the last quarter of the eighteenth century,” quotes Verissimo from Theophilo Braga’s Filinto Elysio, “Portuguese poetry receives an impulse of renovation from several Brazilian talents.… They call to mind the situation of Rome, when the literary talents of the Gauls, of Spain and of Northern Africa, enrich Latin literature with new creations.”
The period as a whole represents a decided step forward from the inchoate ramblings of the previous epoch. Yet, with few exceptions, it is of interest rather in retrospection, viewed from our knowledge of the romantic movement up to which it was leading.