The Brazilian novel is a product of the Romantic movement. Such precursors as Teixeira e Souza (1812-1861) and Joaquim Noberto de Souza Silva (1820-1891) belong rather to the leisurely investigator of origins. The real beginnings are to be appreciated in the work of Joaquim Manoel de Macedo (1820-1882) and José de Alencar (1829-1877).
Macedo portrayed the frivolous society of the epoch of Dom Pedro II. He was not so much a leader of taste as a skilful exploiter of it. He has been called “par excellence the novelist of the Brazilian woman”; we need look to him, then, for little in the way of frankness or psychological depth. To the reader of today, who has been tossed high in the waters of the contemporary novel, Macedo and his ilk are tame, naïve, a mite insipid. Not that some of his pages lack a certain piquancy in their very simplicity. His Rachel, for example, in O Moço Louro (The Blond Young Man) can talk like a flapper who has been reading Bernard Shaw, but we know that love is to teach her better in the end. Macedo was a writer for the family hearth; his language, like his ideas, is simple. But our complex civilization has already outdistanced him; it is not at all impossible that in a short while he will join the other precursors and, with the exception of his books Moreninha (The Brunette) and O Moço Louro, be but a name to his countrymen and even his countrywomen. The first, published in 1849, made his reputation; it is a tale of the triumph of pure love. The second is after The Brunette, his best-known novel, narrating the hardly original tale of the virginal, dreamy Honorina and the free, mocking Rachel who love the same youth; Honorina’s true love, as we might expect, wins out, for Rachel sacrifices her passion without letting the happy pair realize the extent of her abnegation.
“By no means should I say that he possesses the power of idealization of José de Alencar, the somewhat précieuse quality of Taunay or the smiling, bitter pessimism of Machado de Assis; if we wish to judge him in comparison with them or with the writers of today, his work pales; his modest creations disappear into an inferior category. But accepting him in the time for which he wrote, when the novel had not yet received the Flaubertian esthetics that ennobled it and had not been enriched by the realistic genius of Zola,—beside his contemporaries Teixeria de Souza, Manoel de Almeida and Bernardo Guimarães, he seems to us living, picturesque, colorful, as indeed he is. I esteem him because he has contributed to the development and the wealth of our literature.”[16]
More important to the history and practice of the Brazilian novel is José de Alencar, famous for his Guarany and Iracema, the first of which, in the form of an opera libretto set to music by the native composer Carlos Gomes, has made the rounds of the operatic world. Alencar is to the novel what Gonçalves Dias is to the poem: the typical Indianist. But Brazilians find his Indianism superior to that of the poet in both sincerity and majesty. “His Indians do not express themselves like doctors from Coimbra; they speak as Nature has taught them, loving, living and dying like the lesser plants and animals of the earth. Their passions are as sudden and as violent as the tempest,—rapid conflagrations that burst forth for an instant, flaring, glaring and soon disappearing.”[17]
At his best Alencar is really a poet who has chosen prose as his medium. He uses the Indian milieu, as Gonçalves Dias in his poetry, for the descriptive opportunities it affords. Brazilians rarely speak of his plots, which are simplicity itself; what fascinates them, even today, is his rich palette, which challenges comparison even with the opulent coloration of Coelho Netto and Graça Aranha. Chief among foreign influences were the Frenchmen Chateaubriand, de Vigny, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo. Our own Cooper, himself an “Indianist” contemporaneous with Alencar, influenced the Brazilian innovator, but not in the manner that Brazilian critics have seemed to discern. Alencar himself, in a rare document, has sought to refute those who find his Guarany a novel in Cooper’s style. To him Cooper was, first of all, the “poet of the sea.” As far as concerned American poetry, Alencar’s model (and model is his own word) was Chateaubriand. “But my master was that glorious Nature which surrounds me, and in particular the magnificence of the deserts which I studied in early youth and which were the majestic portals through which I penetrated into my country’s past.… It was from this source, from this vast, secular book that I drew the pages of Guarany and Iracema and many another.… From this source, and not from the works of Chateaubriand, still less from those of Cooper, which were only a copy of the sublime original that I had read within my heart.
“Brazil, like the United States and most other countries of America, has a period of conquest in which the invading race destroys the indigenous. This struggle presents analogous characters because of the similarity of the native tribes. Only in Peru and Mexico do they differ.
“Thus the Brazilian novelist who seeks the plot of his novel in this period of invasion cannot escape a point of contact with the American writer. But this approximation comes from history; it is inevitable and not the result of imitation.
“If neither Chateaubriand nor Cooper had existed, the American novel would have appeared in Brazil in due season.
“Years after having written Guarany” (Alencar wrote the book in his twenty-seventh year, and would have it that the tale occurred to him in his ninth year, as he was crossing the sertões of the North on the road from Ceará to Bahia) “I re-read Cooper in order to verify the observation of the critics, and I was convinced that it is of minor importance. There is not in the Brazilian novel a single personage whose type may be traced to the Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, Ontario, The Sappers and Lionel Lincoln.… Cooper considers the native from the social point of view and was, in the description of indigenous customs, a realist.… In Guarany the savage is an ideal, which the writer tried to poetize, divesting him of the coarse incrustation in which he was swathed by the chroniclers, and rescuing him from the ridicule that the stultified remnants cast upon the almost extinct race.