To present a notion of Monteiro Lobato’s style and his general outlook, I shall confine myself to translating an excerpt or two from his most pithy volume, Idéas de Jéca Tatú.
One of the pivotal essays is that entitled Esthetica Official (Official Esthetics). “The work of art,” it begins, “is indicated by its coefficient of temperament, color and life—the three values that produce its unity, deriving the one from man, the other from milieu, the third from the moment. Art that flees this tripod of categories and that has as its human-factor the heimatlos person (the man of many countries brought into evidence by the war); that has as terroir the world and as epoch all Time, will be a superb creation when volapuk rules over the globe: until then, no!
“Whence we derive a logical conclusion: the artist grows in proportion as he becomes nationalized. The work of art must reveal to the quickest glance its origin, just as the races denote their ethnological group through the individual type.”
Yet note how Lobato, for all his nationalism, in the very paragraph that opens his somewhat uncritical critique, employs a German word, soon followed by a French, and all this a few seconds before ridiculing volapuk! Not that this need necessarily vitiate his argument, which has, to my way of thinking, far stronger points against it. But it does serve to indicate, I believe, that the world has grown too small for the artificial insistence upon a nationalism in literature which only too often proves the disguise of our primitive, unreasoned loyalties. Lobato’s unconscious use of these foreign terms provided, at the very moment he was denying it, a proof of the interpenetration of alien cultures. He has, too strongly for art as we now understand it, the regional outlook; for him Brazil is not the Brazil that we know on the map, or know as a political entity; it is the interior. His very nationalism refers, in this aspect, to but part of his own nation, though, to be fair, it is his theory that sins more seriously than his practice.
“Nietzsche,” he says elsewhere in the book, “served here as a pollen. It is the mission of Nietzsche to fecundate whatever he touches. No one leaves him shaped in the uniformity of a certain mould; he leaves free, he leaves as himself. (The italics are Lobato’s.) His aphorism—Vademecum? Vadetecum!—is the kernel of a liberating philosophy. Would you follow me? Follow yourself!” Now this, allowing for the personal modifications Nietzsche himself concentrates into his crisp question and answer, is the attitude of an Ibsen, a Wagner; in the new world, of a Darío, of a Rodó, and of all true leaders, who would lead their followers to self-leadership. And once again Lobato answers himself with his own citations, for he himself, showing the effect of Nietzsche upon certain of the Brazilian writers—a liberating effect, and one which helped them to a realization of their own personalities—produces the most telling of arguments in favour of legitimate foreign influences.
His characteristic attitude of indignation crops out at every turn. In an essay upon A Estatua do Patriarcha, dedicated to the noble figure of José Bonifacio de Andrade, he gives a patient summary of the man’s achievements—as patient as his nervous manner and his trenchant language can accomplish. As he approaches his climax, he becomes almost telegraphic:
“He (that is, Bonifacio) works in the dark.
“His strength is faith.