[3] I quote the translation of this quatrain from Cunninghame-Graham. The third quatrain, here given as I find it in Os Sertões, 1914, fifth edition, differs in a single unimportant spelling from that used by the author of A Brazilian Mystic, who translates it: “Our King, Dom Sebastian, will come to visit us and free us from the reign of the dog.” I do not think this is correct, as the two final lines are a threat to the other side.
VI
MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA
Oliveira Lima belongs, more than to the history of Brazilian letters, to the history of Brazilian culture. He is an integral part of that culture and his life, coincidentally, runs parallel with the emergence of Brazil into an honoured position among the nations of the world. Once, in a happy phrase, the Swedish writer Goran Björkman, a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, characterized him aptly as “Brazil’s intellectual ambassador to the world,” and the phrase has stuck because it so eminently fitted the modest, indefatigable personality to whom it was applied. In a sense Oliveira Lima has been, too, the world’s intellectual ambassador to Brazil; he has seen service literally in every corner of the globe,—in Argentina as in the United States, in Japan as in France, Belgium, Sweden and Germany. Wherever he has come he has torn aside the dense veil of ignorance that has hidden Brazil from the eyes of none too curious foreigners; from wherever he has gone he has sent back to his native land solidly written, well considered volumes upon the civilization of the old world and the new. In both the physical and the intellectual sense he has been, largely, Brazil’s point of contact with the rest of the world. And the nation has been most fortunate in that choice, for Manoel de Oliveira Lima, most “undiplomatic” of diplomats, is the most human of men. He is, in the least spectacular sense of the word, an inspirer, not of words but of deeds. Trace his itinerary during the past twenty-five years and it is a miniature map of a double enlightenment. If diplomacy is ever to achieve anything like genuine internationality, it must travel some such path as this. And I dare say that Senhor Oliveira Lima is one of the rare precursors of just such a diplomacy. The example of his career has helped to raise that office from one of sublimated social hypocrisy to the dignity of lofty human intercourse.
Manoel de Oliveira Lima was born on December 25th, 1867, in the city of Recife, Pernambuco,—that state of which Silveira Martins has strikingly declared that the Brazilian gaucho—indomitable defender of the nation’s frontiers—was simply a Pernambucan on horseback. He was sent early to Portugal to complete his education, becoming one of the favourite students of the noted historian Oliveira Martins; at the age of twenty-one he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Letters from the University of Lisbon and set out, after a couple of years, upon his career of diplomacy, into which he was initiated by Carvalho Borges and the Baron de Itajubá.
“Oliveira Lima never wrote verses,” declared Salvador de Mendonça once in a speech of welcome. “I believe that, with the exception of the Lusiads, all poems are to him like the Colombo of Porto Alegre to the readers of our literature, an unknown land awaiting some Columbus to discover it. Like an old philosopher friend of mine, who doesn’t admit monologues or asides in the theatre because only fools or persons threatened with madness converse with themselves, so Oliveira Lima finds it hardly natural for people to write in verse, for the language of seers was never the spoken tongue. His spirit is positive and direct; only curved lines are lacking for him to be a geometer. His characteristic trait is sincerity; he says only what he thinks is true, and says it without beating about the bush, in the explicit form of his conviction. I believe that he is but a lukewarm admirer of music, and prefers, to the contemplation of nature, the study of social phenomena and the examination of the human beehive.”
For a Brazilian never to have written verses is indeed almost a violation of the social code, and it may be that Senhor Lima’s lukewarmness toward music helps to explain a certain lack of musicality in his clear but compact prose. But lack of poetic appreciation should not be inferred from his friend’s lines; one has but to go through one of Lima’s earliest and most solid works, Aspectos da Litteratura Colonial Brazileira, to discover, in this original contribution, a deep, unostentatious feeling for those beautiful emotions we call poetry.
His literary career, as we have seen, is closely identified with his numerous peregrinations. It opened with a historical study of his birthplace: Pernambuco, seu Desenvolimento historica (1894), followed two years later by the Aspectos. Thereafter is pursued, rather closely, the travels of Lima, resulting in Nos Estados Unidos (1899), a work of uneven value upon the United States, No Japão, (1903), a more mature volume upon the land of the rising sun, countless speeches and series of lectures delivered in the universities of both hemispheres—now at the Sorbonne, now at the University of Louvaine, at Harvard, Yale, Stanford University and lesser institutions—and always upon his favourite theme: the history of Brazilian and Latin-American culture. Out of these lectures have arisen more than one of his books, some of them originally delivered in English and French; for Lima is an accomplished linguist, employing English and French with ease and speaking German, Italian and Spanish as well.
It is history that forms his main interest; even when he makes a single attempt—and not a highly successful one—at the drama, his Secretario d’El Rey (The King’s Secretary, 1904) turns upon the historic figure of Alexandre de Gusmão in the days of 1738. It is worth while noting, as a commentary upon Lima’s unfanatic patriotism, that he justly considers this work a Brazilian drama, though the action takes place in Portugal. For, “in the first place, our historic period anterior to the Independence necessarily involves so intimate a connection of the colony with the court that it is almost impossible, treating of the one, to lose the other from sight. Material communication and above all moral relations established a sort of territorial continuity between both sides of the Atlantic, which formed a single fatherland. Besides, the action of the piece could hardly have been made to take place in Brazil, since the protagonist of the play, perhaps the most illustrious Brazilian of the XVIIIth century, and one whose personality merited, as few others, consecration upon the stage, lived in Europe from his earliest youth. For identical reasons the action of O Poeta e a Inquisção (The Poet and the Inquisition) by Domingos de Magalhães, our first national tragedy, takes place in Lisbon. And finally the author would remind his reader that the spirit of his piece is entirely Brazilian, trying to symbolize—and more direct pretension would be anachronistic—the differentiation which had already begun between the mother country and its American colony, which was destined to continue and propagate its historic mission in the new world, and the economic importance of which was daily becoming more manifest.”