“He betook himself to the island of Paquetá and in 1838 died in the city of Nitheroy.
“There you have José Bonifacio.”
There, incidentally, you have Monteiro Lobato, in the quivering vigour of the phrase, in the emotional concentration. But all this has been but the preparation for Lobato’s final coup.
“José Bonifacio is, beyond dispute, the greatest figure in our history.
“Very well: this man was a Paulist, (i. e., a native of São Paulo). Born in Santos, in 1763. It is already a century since the Paulists were struck with the idea of rearing him a statue. Not that he needs the monument. In a most grandiose manner he reared one to himself in the countless scientific memoirs that he published in Europe, the greater part in German, never translated into his own tongue,—and in his fecund political action in favour of the fiat of nationality.
“It is we who need the monument, for its absence covers us with shame and justifies the curse which from his place of exile he cast upon the evil persons of the day.…”
Now, Monteiro Lobato’s nationalism, as I try to show, is not the narrow cause that his theoretical writings would seem to indicate. It is, as I said at the beginning, really an evidence of his eagerness for the expansion of personality. But it is contaminated—and I believe that is the proper word—by an intense local pride which vents itself, upon occasion, as local scolding. The entire essay upon José Bonifacio was written for the sake of the final sting. Not so much to exalt the great figure as to glorify São Paulo and at the same time excoriate the forgetful, the negligent Paulistas. It is such writing as this that best reveals Lobato because it best expresses his central passion, which is not the cult of artistic beauty but the criticism of social failings.
This is at once a step backward and a step forward. Forward in the civic sense, because Brazil needs the unflattering testimony of its own more exigent sons and daughters,—and is Brazil alone in this need? Backward in the artistic sense, because it tends to a confusion of values. It vitiates, particularly in Lobato, the tales he tells until it is difficult to say whether the tale points a moral or the moral adorns the tale.
That Lobato is alive to the genuineness of legitimate foreign influence he himself shows as well as any critic can for him, in the essay upon A Questão do Estylo (The Question of Style), in a succinct paragraph upon Olavo Bilac’s poem O Caçador de Esmeraldas. “The poet … when he composed The Emerald-Hunter, did not take from Corneille a single word, nor from Anatole a single conceit, nor a night from Musset, nor a cock from Rostand, nor frigidity from Leconte, nor an acanthus from Greece, nor a virtue from Rome. But, without wishing it, from the very fact that he was a modern open to all the winds that blow, he took from Corneille the purity of language, from Musset poesy, from Leconte elegance, from Greece the pure line, from Rome fortitude of soul—and with the ancient-rough he made the new-beautiful.”
But what, he asks, shall we say of a poem composed of ill-assimilated suggestions from without,—“in unskilled adaptations of foreign verses, and with types of all the races? The ‘qu’il mourût’ of Corneille in the mouth of a João Fernandez, who slays Ninon, mistress of the colonel José da Silva e Souza, consul of Honduras in Thibet, because an Egyptian fellah disagreed with Ibsen as to the action of Descartes in the battle of Charleroi?…”