When the Brazilian Academy of letters was founded in 1897, Machado de Assis was unanimously elected president and held the position until his death. Oliveira Lima, who lectured at Harvard during the college season of 1915-1916, and who is himself one of the most intellectual forces of contemporary Brazil, has written of Machado de Assis: “By his extraordinary talent as writer, by his profound literary dignity, by the unity of a life that was entirely devoted to the cult of intellectual beauty, and by the prestige exerted about him by his work and by his personality, Machado de Assis succeeded, despite a nature that was averse to acclaim and little inclined to public appearance, in being considered and respected as the first among his country’s men-of-letters: the head, if that word can denote the idea, of a youthful literature which already possesses its traditions and cherishes above all its glories.… His life was one of the most regulated and peaceful after he had given up active journalism, for like so many others, he began his career as a political reporter, paragrapher and dramatic critic.”[13]
With the appearance of O Mulato, 1881, by Aluizio Azevedo (1857-1912), the literature of Brazil, prepared for such a reorientation by the direct influence of the great Portuguese, Eça de Queiroz and of Emile Zola, was definitely steered toward naturalism. “In Aluizio Azevedo,” says Benedicto Costa, “one finds neither the poetry of José de Alencar, nor the delicacy,—I should even say, archness,—of Macedo, nor the sentimental preciosity of Taunay, nor the subtle irony of Machado de Assis. His phrase is brittle, lacking lyricism, tenderness, dreaminess, but it is dynamic, energetic, expressive, and, at times sensual to the point of sweet delirium.”
O Mulato, though it was the work of a youth in his early twenties, has been acknowledged as a solid, well-constructed example of Brazilian realism. There is a note of humour, as well as a lesson in criticism, in the author’s anecdote (told in his foreword to the fourth edition) about the provincial editor who advised the youthful author to give up writing and hire himself out on a farm. This was all the notice he received from his native province, Maranhão. Yet Azevedo grew to be one of the few Brazilian authors who supported himself by his pen.
Aluizio de Azevedo’s types (O Cortiço, O Livro de Uma Sogra) are the opposite to Machado de Assis’s; they are coarse, violent, terre-à-terre. They are not so much a different Brazilian than we find in the poetry of Bilac, as a lower stratum of that same intelligence and physical blend.
IV
Symbolism, even more than Parnassianism in Brazil, was a matter of imitation, “in many cases,” as the truthful Verissimo avers, “unintelligent. It most certainly does not correspond to a movement of reaction, mystical, sensualist, individualistic, socialistic, anarchistic and even classic, as in Europe,—to a movement, in short, which is the result, on one side, of a revolt against the social organization, proved incapable of satisfying legitimate aspirations and needs of the individual, and on the other, of the exhaustion of Naturalism and Parnassianism.” In poetry, the school itself centres in Brazil about the personality of Cruz e Souza, an African with a keen sense of the racial injustice visited upon him, and with a pride that could not stifle his outcries. He is often incorrect, and it is true that carping scrutiny could find ample fare in his verses, but they are saved by a creative sincerity.
It takes but a superficial knowledge of French Symbolism to see how far are such poets as Cruz e Souza and B. Lopez from their Gallic brethren. Insert Cruz e Souza’s verses, without their author’s name, among the clamorous output of the Romantics that preceded him, and see how difficult it is to single many of them out for any qualities that distinguish them as technique or matter. The African was a spontaneous rather than an erudite spirit. Verissimo does not even believe that he was conscious of his gifts. And if, at any time, he pretended to possess a special theory of esthetics, the noted critic would have it that the poet’s well-meaning but ill-advised friends instigated him. He was a “good, sentimental, ignorant” soul “whose shocks against the social ambient resulted in poetry.” De Carvalho holds a higher opinion: “He introduced into our letters that horror of concrete form of which the great Goethe was already complaining at the close of the eighteenth century. And such a service, in all truth, was not small in a country where poetry flows more from the finger-tips than from the heart.”
Verissimo, indeed, does Cruz e Souza something less than justice. In his short life (1863-1898) the ardent Negro poet succeeded in stamping the impress of his personality upon his age and, for that matter, upon Brazilian letters. He is incorrect, obscure, voluble,—but he is contagiously sincere and transmits an impression of fiery exaltation. His stature will grow, rather than diminish with time. Bernadim do Costa Lopez (1851-1916) began as a bucolic Romanticist (in Chromos), later veering to a Parnassianism (in Hellenos) that contained less art than imitative artifice.
Among the outstanding spirits of the later poets are the mystical Emilio de Menezes and the serenely simple Mario Pederneiras. The latter (1868-1915) seems to have undergone the influence of Francis Jammes; he is one of the few Brazilians who acquired ease in the manipulation of free verse. Emilio de Menezes, who like Machado de Assis has translated Poe’s The Raven, is best known for his remarkable trio of religious sonnets grouped under the title Os Tres Olhares de Maria (The Three Glances of Mary).[14]