Henrique Maximiano Coelho Netto was born on February 21, 1864, in the city of Caxias, department of Maranhão, of a Portuguese father and an Indian mother. In 1870 the family moved to Rio de Janeiro. From his slave attendant Eva he imbibed a wealth of Brazilian folk lore; from Maria, the Portuguese housekeeper, he drank in (and with what avidity his later work reveals) the common heritage of Oriental tales. Another powerful influence (and this, too, is duly chronicled in A Capital Federal) was his uncle Rezende, a book-keeper with a taste for the Portuguese and Latin classics. For the fundamental traits of Netto as a creative spirit one need hardly go farther than these childhood impressions. Here we have his mixed blood, his predilection for the native lore and exotic artistry, his preference for the ancient writers and a fondness for the Portuguese classics that reveals itself in his not infrequently archaic language. Some of his pages, Verissimo has shown, would be better understood in Portugal than in Brazil.
Though his early education lacked method, already at the age of eight he read Cicero; he pursued his studies at various institutions, never remaining through the complete number of years. Like most Brazilians, he began with a sonnet, followed by a number of poems which fortunately, he never issued; his newspaper experience commenced in the Gazeta da Tarde, 1887. Unlike most Brazilians he wrested a living from the nation by his pen, and 1892 found him teaching the history of the arts. His restlessness, however, seems to keep him flitting from place to place and from interest to interest. In 1900 he is found in Campinas teaching literature, remaining for three years. In 1909 he is back in Rio at the Gymnasio Nacional, lecturing upon letters. From that year until 1917 he represents the state of Maranhão in the national assembly. Today finds him busily at work revising the long list of his labours and issuing them with as keen an interest as if they were the first fruits of his imagination.
“Even to this day,” he confessed to an interviewer a few years ago, “I feel the influence of the first period of my life in the sertão. It was the histories, the legends, the tales heard in my childhood,—Negro stories filled with fear, legends of caboclos palpitant with sorcery, tales of white men, the phantasy of the sun, the perfume of the forest, the dream of civilized folk.… Never did the mixture of ideas and race cease to predominate, and even now it makes itself felt in my eclecticism.… My imagination is the resultant of the soul of Negro, caboclo and white.” The criticism is born out by a study of his many books, most of which, as the author himself would be the first to agree, will be speedily forgotten in the excellence of the salient few.
Neo-romantic though he be, Netto is no believer in the false Indianism that for a time held sway in the native letters. His affection for the Portuguese tongue, which he considers the most plastic of languages, does not preclude a belief in a Brazilian literature. Asked whether he was religious—and here again reading of his representative books bears witness to his self-knowledge—he replied, “Very. I don’t know whether I believe in Lord Christ, or in Lord Nature, but I believe in the immanent principle of divinity. And perhaps, for this reason, I am one of the rare men who hope.”
“One may say of him,” writes Costa, “what Taine said of Balzac: ‘he is a sort of literary elephant, capable of bearing prodigious burdens, but slow of gait.’” And before Costa, Netto said of himself that he was a “Trappist of labor,—what the French call a bête de somme.” Better than any one else Verissimo, upon whom Costa largely draws for his consideration of Netto, has defined the qualities of the prolific polygraph. Netto has tried all the styles; he has from the first revealed that exuberance which makes of him a splashing colourist, a vivid describer of externals, an expert in word pageantry; his prose is often a wild cataract, a tangled forest. He is not a writer of ideas, but of sensations. Erroneously he has termed himself a Hellenist and a primitive, unmindful, as the scrupulous Verissimo has indicated, that these terms in themselves are contradictory. Much of his labour is “literature”; many of the novels are spoiled by their evident origin in the desires of newspaper readers; his fondness for archaisms offends linguistic common sense; even his descriptions, according to the testimony of compatriots, are largely invented, no truer to the native scene than are some of his characters to the native life. His defects, notably carelessness in structure, are the defects of improvisation. And yet—for all that his critics so justly note, he compels the reader with the peculiar fascination that is his own—the attraction of a volcano in eruption, of a beauty whose very exoticism draws even as it repels.
He is that rare flower of the literary life,—a personality. His rôle has been that of a minor Balzac, pouring forth volume after volume in disconcerting and damaging confusion, coupled with that of a Mæcenas-Hugo, encouraging the youth of his nation to ardent effort in the arena of letters. “He reproduced,” says Costa, “unconsciously in his own country what was being practised in France consciously by the neo-romantics, the idealists,—all those who revolted against the ever-increasing asperities of agonizing naturalism.”
Much of what is best in Netto is concentrated in one of his earliest books, Sertão, published in 1896 at Rio de Janeiro. This is a collection of some seven tales notable for atmosphere, power, poetry. In Praga (Curse), we are plunged deep into the past of superstition and sensuality that lies in the sertanejo’s breast. Even burning with fever, Raymundo wants Lucinda. In his delirium he recalls how he tried to rob, and murdered, Mãi Dina the year before, the crime being laid to gipsies; the murdered woman visits him in his visions and he has a terrific battle with her; rushing forth from his cabin he encounters a colt and mounting it, makes a mad dash, like a Mazeppa of the sertão, for the salvation that he feels lies in flight. He exhausts his mount and then makes his wandering way to Mãi Dina’s grave; in a frenzy he begins to slash right and left with his knife, when a misdirected blow sends him rolling off into a swamp, where he meets his end. Not her curse but his conscience has wrought retribution. This is a strange mingling of reality with fancy,—a sultry realism sprinkled with scientific terms and heavy with tropical luxuriance of phraseology; but there is poetry, too,—poetry of the indigenous mind, as in the tale that follows: O Enterro (The Burial). This account of the burial of the Indian witch Tecai, a pagan for whom the pious Christians of Itamina refuse even to give a coffin, is really a poem. So too, largely, is A Tapera, a tale of mingled legend, wild dream and virgin forest, in which the hermit of Santa Luzia recounts to the teller, the tale of his beautiful wife Leonor. Within a year she proved unfaithful and was discovered by her husband’s black foster-mother Eva. On the night of the discovery she is slain by Eva and together they bury her. The husband goes mad, taking it into his head that a certain tree follows him vengefully about. Under that tree one day he digs her up and morbidly caresses the skull. After hearing the tale, the narrator dashes off on his horse at a mad gallop and is told, three days later, that he must have dreamed all this in a fever. This is strained situation, no doubt, but Netto knows how to produce the Poesque thrill of horror, not merely by accumulation of detail but by adroit manipulation of it. That he may at times achieve simplicity is shown in Firmin, O Vaqueiro, in which the aged cattleman dies amidst the songs and the animals that he loved and dominated so well, even as he did the girls of his early hey-day. The song of the story might serve as the epigraph to much of what Netto has written:
No coração de quem ama