Alê, alê, calunga,
Mussunga, mussunga-ê.[3]
On the whole, that same melancholy which is the hallmark of so much Brazilian writing, is discernible in the popular refrain. The themes are the universal ones of love and fate, with now and then a flash of humour and earthy practicality.
Romero, with his excessive fondness for categories (a vice which with unconscious humour he was the very first to flagellate), suggested four chief types of popular poetry, (1) the romances and xacaras, (2) the reisados and cheganças, (3) the oraçoes and parlendos, (4) versos geraes or quandrinhas. In the same way the folk tales are referred to Portuguese, native and African origin, with a more recent addition of mestiço (hybrid, mestee) material. “The Brazilian Sheherezade,” writes De Carvalho,[4] “is more thoughtful than opulent, she educates rather than dazzles. In the savage legends Nature dominates man, and, as in the fables of Æsop and La Fontaine, it is the animals who are charged with revealing life’s virtues and deficiencies through their ingenious wiles.… To the native, as is gathered from his most famous tales, skill was surely a better weapon than strength.” Long ago, the enthusiastic Denis, the first to accord to Brazilian letters a treatment independent of those of Portugal,[5] had commented on the blending of the imaginative, ardent African, the chivalrous Portuguese, and the dreamy native, and had observed that “the mameluco is almost always the hero of the poetic tales invented in the country.” For, underneath the crust of this civilization flows a strong current of popular inspiration. At times, as during the Romantic period, this becomes almost dominant. “We all, of the most diverse social classes,” avers De Carvalho, “are a reflection of this great folk soul, fashioned at the same time of melancholy and splendour, of timidity and common sense. Our folk lore serves to show that the Brazilian people, despite its moodiness and sentimentality, retains at bottom a clear comprehension of life and a sound, admirable inner energy that, at the first touch, bursts forth unexpected and indomitable.” This is, perhaps, an example of that very sentimentality of which this engaging critic has been speaking, for the folk lore of most nations reveals precisely these same qualities. For us, the essential point is that Brazilian popular poetry and tale exhibit the characteristic national hybridism; the exotic here feeds upon the exotic.[6]
II
The sixteenth century, so rich in culture and accomplishment for the Portuguese, is almost barren of literature in Brazil. A few chroniclers, the self-sacrificing Father Anchieta, the poet Bento Teixeiro Pinto,—and the list is fairly exhausted. These are no times for esthetic leisure; an indifferent monarch occupies the throne in Lisbon for the first quarter of the century, with eyes turned to India; in the colony the entire unwieldy apparatus of old-world civilization is to be set up, races are to be exterminated or reconciled in fusion, mines lure with the glitter of gold and diamonds; a nationality, however gradually and unwittingly, is to be formed. For, though the majority of Portuguese in Brazil, as was natural, were spiritually inhabitants of their mother country, already there had arisen among some a fondness for a land of so many enchantments.
José de Anchieta (1530-1597) is now generally regarded as the earliest of the Brazilian writers. He is, to Romero, the pivot of his century’s letters. For more than fifty years he was the instructor of the population; for his beloved natives he wrote grammars, lexicons, plays, hymns; a gifted polyglot, he employed Portuguese, Spanish, Latin, Tupy; he penned the first autos and mysteries produced in Brazil. His influence, on the whole, however, was more practical than literary; he was not, in the esthetic sense a writer, but rather an admirable Jesuit who performed, amidst the greatest difficulties, a work of elementary civilization. The homage paid to his name during the commemoration of the tercentenary of his death was not only a personal tribute but in part, too, a rectification of the national attitude toward the Jesuit company which he distinguished. It was the Jesuits who early established schools in the nation (in 1543 they opened at Bahia the first institution of “higher education”); it was they who sought to protect the Indians from the cruelty of the over-eager exploiters; Senhor Oliveira Lima has even suggested that it was owing to a grateful recollection of the services rendered to the country by the Jesuits that the separation between Church and State, decreed by the Republic in 1890, was effected in so dignified and peaceful a manner. Lima quotes Ribeiro to the effect that the province of Brazil already possessed three colegios in Anchieta’s time, and that the Jesuits, by the second half of the sixteenth century had already brought at least 100,000 natives under their guidance.[7] Romero, “scientifist” critic that he was, considered the Jesuit influence “not at all a happy one in the intellectual and esthetic formation of the new nationality.” Of one thing we may be quite certain, in any event: Anchieta’s position as precursor is more secure than his merits as a creative spirit. His chief works are Brasilica Societatis Historia et vita clarorum Patrum qui in Brasilia vixerunt, a Latin series of biographies of his fellow-workers; Arte da grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil, a philological study; his Cartas (letters); and a number of autos and poems.
Next to Anchieta, Bento Teixeira Pinto, who flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century, is Brazil’s most ancient poet.[8] Much ink has been spilled over the question as to whether he was the author of the entertaining Dialogo das Grandezas do Brazil and the scrupulous Varnhagen, who at first denied Bento Teixeira’s authorship of that document, later reversed his position. Similar doubt exists as to the real author of the Relação do Naufragio que passou Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho, vindo do Brasil no anno de 1565, a moving prose account of a shipwreck in which figures the noble personage of the title, but wherein the supposed author nowhere appears.
To that same noble personage, governor of Pernambuco, is dedicated the Prosopopéa, undoubtedly the work of Bento Teixeira, and just as undoubtedly a pedestrian performance in stilted hendecasyllabic verses, ninety-four octaves in all, in due classic form. There is much imitation of Camões, who, indeed, entered Brazilian literature as a powerful influence through these prosaic lines of Bento Teixeira. “His poem (i. e., the Lusiads of Camões) is henceforth to make our epics, his poetic language will provide the instrument of our poets and his admirable lyrism will influence down to the very present, our own in all that it has and preserves of sorrow, longing, nostalgia and Camonean love melancholy.”[9]