[3] At least one Academician in Brazil has argued sensibly in favor of woman’s admission to that body.
[4] Muse! Let not ever even a gesture of grief or of sincere feeling spoil your serene countenance! Before a Job, preserve the same pride, before a corpse, the same gaze, the same austere brow. I would have no tears in your eyes; no soft, idyllic song upon your lips. Celebrate now the serpent-like phantasm of a Dante, now the martial figure of a Homeric warrior. Give me the hemistych of gold, the attractive image, rhyme whose sound, like a compact harmony, sings to the ears of the soul; the limpid, living strophe; verses that recall with their barbarous accents now the rasping noise of breaking flint, now the muffled sound of cracking marble.… Oh, Muse, whose stony eye that never weeps freezes the smile upon the lip and stanches the flow of tears! Let me go with you, in utter liberty, through those vast spaces where the Impassive dwells. Take me far, oh white impassive Muse! Far above the world into the immensity where, launching flames at the dawn’s procession, the golden wain of the sun swings through the clouds. Transport me in a flaming ascension, to the delicious peace of the Olympic-Hearth where the pagan gods dwell eternally; and where, in a long look, I may in your company watch pass by across the secular haze the poets and the heroes of the great ancient days.
[5] Dona Alda rose early today. Her rich tresses flowed loosely golden over her sides; on her lips a joyful smile; she goes for a walk in the garden. The flowers, ranged in a long row, gleefully in chorus salute her: “Good day!” Dona Alda continues.… A swallow follows her: the sun bathes her in his light; and Dona Alda walks on.… A whirl of leaves accompanies her.… She walks on.… Her glance glitters like a brilliant flash. But—how cruel!—as she steps forward, holding up the hem of her dress, she treads upon a tender carnation of lily whiteness.… Yet the flower, beneath her feet, still murmurs, “Oh, thank you so much, Dona Alda!”
[6] With their forefeet raised in the air, their mouths free of reins, naked, interlacing their lances as they shout in their play, here they come in all their beauty, tripping the mazes of their dance, rudely displaying to the light the whiteness of their breasts. The night hearkens, the moonlight shines, the tree-tops moan; a thousand she-centaurs, laughing, playing, struggling, gallop freely on, go and come, their bosoms filled with air, their tresses free to the blowing of the zephyrs. The moonlight pales, night falls, and now dawn comes.… The hyppic dance is stopped, and soon all space thunders with the mad dash of the centaurs in flight; for, from afar, in the light of the moon grown pale,—huge, with his eyes aflame, brave, with Argive club hanging from his heroic arm, Hercules has appeared.
X
MONTEIRO LOBATO
Among recent literary currents that present several interesting phases one should not overlook the nationalistic tendencies in Brazil, championed so ardently and with such immediate effect by the most active of the “new” spirits, Monteiro Lobato. Lobato is but little over thirty-five and has at hand for his purpose an influential publishing house in São Paulo; he is thus able to make himself heard and read as well as felt; he seems to be, in the intellectual sense of the word, a born propagandist; certainly he does not lack ink or courage and whatever one may think of his ideas, he makes highly entertaining and instructive reading. First and foremost he is the champion of the national personality. And by that same token he becomes the enemy of undue foreign influence upon the nation. As one reads his numerous short stories, his crisp and vigorous criticisms and his essays, one comes to the realization that, as far as Lobato is concerned, foreign influence is chiefly French and in large measure to be condemned.
The profound effect of French literature upon Spanish and Portuguese America is as undeniable as it is occasionally deleterious, but it is possible to overstate the case against the French influence in Brazil and, as one strikes in Lobato the same protest reiterated time and again, one begins to feel that he is somewhat afflicted with Gallophobia. Yet this is, after all, on his part, the over-emphasis of earnestness rather than an absolute error in values. He is not lacking in appreciation of the great Frenchmen; he does not seem to scorn the use, as epigraph to one of his children’s books, a quotation in French from Anatole France; he does not object to having some of his short stories mentioned in the same breath with de Maupassant and, above all, he recognizes the creative power of imitation, however paradoxical that may sound. “Let us agree,” he writes, in the preface to his stimulating collection of critiques, Idéas de Jéca Tatú, “that imitation is, in fact, the greatest of creative forces. He imitates who assimilates processes. Who copies, does not imitate; he steals. Who plagiarizes does not imitate, he apes.” The whole book he presents as “a war-cry in favor of personality.” At the bottom of Lobato’s nationalism is the one valid foundation of art: sincerity. If he occasionally overdoes his protest, he may well be forgiven for the sound basis of it; it is part of his own personality to see things in the primary colors, to play the national zealot not in any chauvinistic sense—he is no blind follower of the administrative powers, no nationalist in the ugly sense of cheap partisan drum-beating—but in the sense that true nationalism is the logical development of the fatherland’s potentialities. A personally independent fellow, then, who would achieve for his nation that same independence.