SYLVIO ROMERO. Historia da Litteratura Brasileira. 2a edição, melhorada pelo auctor. Rio Vol. I, 1902, Vol. II, 1903.
Romero is one of the most picturesque literary figures of the nineteenth century. He was a born fighter, with all the traits of the ardent polemist. Throughout a lifetime that was rife with self-contradiction, self-repetition, and self-glorification, he fought for Brazilian independence in the literary, scientific and political fields. He was by no means blind to esthetic beauty, but he insisted overmuch upon the national element and was easily lost in fogs of irrelevancy. He was a great admirer of German methods, and—justly, to my way of thinking—a believer in Anglo-German culture as a complement to Latin. As his life sought to cover almost every field of intellectual activity, so does his History of Brazilian Literature, which was left incompleted, seek to cover altogether too much ground. His book might more properly have been named a history of Brazilian culture. Such, indeed, was his conception of literature, which to him, as he states in his very first chapter, possessed “the amplitude given to it by the critics and historians of Germany. It comprises all the manifestations of a people’s intelligence:—politics, economics, art, popular creations, sciences … and not, as was wont to be supposed, in Brazil, only those entitled belles lettres, which finally came to mean almost exclusively poetry!…” A knowledge of this important work—important despite the list of objections that might be raised against it—is indispensable to the student.
SYLVIO ROMERO and JOAO RIBEIRO. Compendia da Literatura Brasileira. 2a edição refundida. Rio, 1909.
A useful compendium and condensation. The authors here consider art “a chapter of sociology,” laying down a belief in the “consciousness of the identity of human destinies,” which is, “in our opinion, the basis of all sociology and morality.”
JOSÉ VERISSIMO. Estudos de Literatura Brazileira. Six series, published at Rio de Janeiro and Paris, between 1901 and 1910. These largely formed the basis for his Historia da Literatura Brazileira, Rio, 1916.
Verissimo, in my opinion, is the leading critic of letters Brazil has thus far produced, and one of the country’s greatest minds. His whole life was a beautiful attitude,—a serene, usually unruffled spirit open to anything that proceeded from creative sincerity. He is, as I have tried to show in the text, the spiritual opposite of Romero. If the student has time only for a limited reading of Brazilian criticism, he should approach Verissimo before he goes any farther. Verissimo had learned, or perhaps had been born with, the secret that beauty owed allegiance to no flag; he was not bogged, as was Romero so often, by extraneous loyalties; he erected no pompous structures of “scientificist” criticism. He was, what every significant critic must be, an artist.
RONALD DE CARVALHO. Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira. Rio, 1919, 1922. The book was awarded a prize by the Brazilian Academy—as was the same author’s book of poetry Poemas e Sonetos—and appeared later in a revised, augmented edition. De Carvalho is a brilliant young man on the sunny side of thirty. His book—as, for that matter, every other recent one upon the subject—is under great debts to Romero and Verissimo, but it reveals an independent personality and an agreeably cosmopolitan conception of literature.
For the facts—as distinguished from opinions—in my own book I have relied largely upon the works of Romero, Verissimo, Lima and Carvalho. The number of lesser books that may be read is far greater than their individual worth. I would suggest, merely as a starting-point for more individual delving, such informative books as the following:
VICTOR ORBAN. Le Brésil Litteraire. Paris, no date. An anthology with many illustrations of authors.