Quem fez uma obra tão perfeita e linda,
Minha bella Marilia, tambem pôde
Fazer o céo e mais, si ha mais ainda.[8]
The famous book is divided into two parts, the first written before, the second, after his exile. As might be expected; the first is primaveral, aglow with beauty, love, joy. Too, it lacks the depth of the more sincere second, which is more close to the personal life of the suffering artist. He began in glad hope; he ends in dark doubt. “The fate of all things changes,” runs one of his refrains. “Must only mine not alter?” One unconscious testimony of his sincerity is the frequent change of rhythm in his lines, which achieve now and then a sweet music of thought.
“Marilia de Dirceu,” Verissimo has written, “is of exceptional importance in Brazilian literature. It is the most noble and perfect idealization of love that we possess.” (I believe that the key-word to the critic’s sentence is “idealization.”) “Despite its classicism, it is above all a personal work; it is free of and superior to, the formulas and the rivalries of schools.… It is perhaps the book of human passion, such as the many we have now in our literatures that are troubled and tormented by grief, by doubt or despair. It is, none the less, in both our poetry and in that of the Portuguese tongue, the supreme book of love, the noblest, the purest, the most deeply felt, the most beautiful that has been written in that tongue since Bernardim Ribeiro and the sonnets of Camões.”[9]
Of the work of Alvarenga Peixoto, translator of Maffei’s Merope, author of a score of sonnets, some odes and lyras and the Canto Genethliaco, little need here be said. The Canto Genethliaco is a baptismal offering in verse, written for the Captain-General D. Rodrigo José de Menezes in honour of his son Thomaz; it is recalled mainly for its “nativism,” which, as is the case with the epic-writers, is not inconsistent with loyalty to the crown. There is a certain Brazilianism, too, as Wolf noted, in his Ide to Maria.
As Gonzaga had his Marilia, so the youngest of the Mineira group, Silva Alvarenga, had his Glaura. In him, more than in any other of the lyrists, may be noted the stirrings of the later romanticism. He strove after, and at times achieved a côr americana (“American color”), and although he must introduce mythological figures upon the native scene, he had the seeing eye. Carvalho considers him the link between the Arcadians and the Romantics, “the transitional figure between the seventeenth-century of Claudio and the subjectivism of Gonçalves Dias.” To the reader in search of esthetic pleasure he is not such good company as Gonzaga and Marilia, though he possesses a certain communicative ardour.
IV
The question of the authorship of the Cartas Chilenas, salient among satirical writings of the eighteenth century, has long troubled historical critics. In 1863, when the second edition of the poem appeared, it was signed Gonzaga, and later opinion tends to reinforce that claim. If the query as to authorship is a matter more for history than for literature, so too, one may believe, is the poem itself, which, in the figure of Fanfarrão Minezio travesties the Governor Luis da Cunha Menezes.[10]
Like Gregorio de Mattos, the author of the Cartas is a spiteful scorpion. But he has a deeper knowledge of things and there is more humanity to his bitterness. “Here the Europeans diverted themselves by going on the hunt for savages, as if hot on the chase of wild beasts through the thickets,” he growls in one part. “There was one who gave his cubs, as their daily food, human flesh; wishing to excuse so grave a crime he alleged that these savages, though resembling us in outward appearance, were not like us in soul.” He flays the loose manners of his day—thankless task of the eternal satirist!—that surrounded the petty, sensuous tyrant. There is, in his lines, the suggestion of reality, but it is a reality that the foreigner, and perhaps the Brazilian himself, must reconstruct with the aid of history, and this diminishes the appeal of the verses. One need not have known Marilia to appreciate her lover’s rhymes; the Cartas Chilenas, on the other hand, require a knowledge of Luiz de Menezes’ epoch.