“Sylvio Romero cannot suffer—and this is a proof of a certain moral inferiority—contradiction and criticism, and must have unconditional admiration.…” The voluminous historian was vain. “It is an absolutely certain fact, and most easily verified, that in no country, in no literature, has any author quoted himself so much as (I do not say more than) Sylvio Romero.… Despite the fact that there was never a break or even a difference in our relations, which for my part I prized and which he did not seem to disdain, I felt, despite his praise and his verbal animation—that of a master toward his pupil—that my poor literary production contended with his and therefore, in short, I was not agreeable to him. It was evident to me that there were two things that my friend could not pardon me for: my small esteem (small in relation to his) for Tobias Barreto and my great appreciation for a writer whose highly justified glory has for some time seemingly robbed the great critic of sleep.”
“I continue to maintain,” wrote Verissimo, “and all the documents support me, that Varnhagen was the father of our literary history, principally of that history as it is conceived and realized by Sylvio Romero in his Historia da literatura brazileira, whose inspiration and economy derive far more from the studies of Varnhagen than from the generalizations … of Fernand Denis or Norberto Silva … I know perfectly well … what was accomplished before him by Norberto Silva and Fernand Denis, Bouterwek and Sismondi, etc.… The oldest of these writers is the German Bouterwek. But I doubt whether Sylvio Romero ever read him. In fact this author concerns himself only in passing fashion with Brazilian literature.…” And in turn Verissimo takes up the work of Denis, Silva and other predecessors of Varnhagen, rectifying the position of the investigator whose merits have been so unjustly slighted by the dogmatic “Pontifex Maximus of Brazilian letters,” as Romero was called by Eunapio Deiró.[4]
“A disciple of the French through Sainte-Beuve and Brunetière, and of the English through Macaulay,” says Carvalho in his recent work upon Brazilian literature, “Verissimo was what might be called an objective critic. Versed in many literatures, even erudite, he lacked, in order to be a great writer, a finer taste for beautiful things, and likewise, the spirit, or rather, the fineness of understanding and sensibility. His Historia da Literatura Brazileira which is, we will not say a perfect, but an honest synthesis of our literary evolution, shows the primordial defect of its method, which was that of seeking the individual to the detriment of the milieu, the personal work to the prejudice of the collective. Verissimo, who possessed a direct observation that could appreciate isolated values keenly, lacked on the other hand a deep intuition of universal problems; he was content to point them out in passing; he did not enter into them, he circled prudently around them.…”[5]
What Carvalho points out as a defect I consider Verissimo’s chief contribution to Brazilian criticism,—his primary concern with the individual. True, this may lessen his value as a literary historian, but it makes of him one of the very few genuine esthetical critics that have appeared on this side of the Atlantic. It renders him easily superior to Romero and Carvalho, the latter of whom is much indebted to both Verissimo and Romero, as is every one who seeks to write of the nation’s letters.
Verissimo has put into a very short essay his general outlook upon Brazilian literature. It is instinct with the man’s honesty of outlook, his directness of statement, his fidelity to fact, his dispassionate approach. For that reason I translate it almost entire as the best short commentary available. It is entitled O Que Falta á Nossa Literatura (What Our Literature Lacks).
“What I know of American literature—and in truth it is very little—authorizes me to say that ours is perhaps the oldest of the continent.[6] From the literary standpoint our nationality seems to have preceded the other American nations. It is clear that I am not here insisting upon a strict question of date; it is possible that in Mexico, and even in Peru,—I haven’t at hand the means for verifying the facts,—some writers may have arisen earlier than our own, poets necessarily. Chronology, in literature, however, though of considerable importance, cannot alone serve to establish priority. A literature is a grouping, and cannot in fact exist through a single poet or an isolated book, unless that poet or that book resume in eminent degree the entire thought or feeling of a people who is already in some manner conscious of itself. This is the case of Homer, if that name stands for an individual.
“Since the XVIIth century we reckon in our midst poets and prosers. This would prove that the necessity of reporting oneself, of defining oneself,—which creates literature,—already existed amongst us, no sooner than we were born. The work of Gabriel Soares may, and I believe should, be excluded from a history of Brazilian literature, because such a history can be only that of literature published and known in its day,—literature that could have influenced its time and those who came after. But it comprises part of a history of the civilization, thought and spiritual progress of Brazil, showing how already in that century a native of the country, sequestered upon his plantation in the sertão, not only possessed sufficient culture to write of matters pertaining to his country, but felt also the necessity of writing it down. It is certain that he was inspired likewise by interest and that his work is a memorial to the Sovereign, seeking personal concessions. But, on account of the thoroughness and the breadth with which it is done, and, above all, because of the general, disinterested spirit in which it is accomplished,—the variety of its aspects and the national breath that animates it, it far exceeds the nature of a simple memorial. In the same position are the Dialogues upon the Grandeurs of Brazil and their author, whoever he may be. Preoccupation with history is the surest token of a reflective national consciousness. This preoccupation awoke early in Brazil, and not only as a means of information with which the religious orders tried to instruct themselves concerning the lay of the land and to glorify themselves by publishing their own deeds, but also in this same more general, more disinterested spirit. Frei Vicente do Salvador is thus early a national historian and not a simple religious chronicler.
“Two things occur to produce this development in Brazilian literary expression, at the very beginning of civilization in this country: the vigor of literary expression in Portugal and the Jesuit collegios. Whatever be the value of Portuguese literature, it is beyond dispute that no literature of the smaller peoples rivals it in wealth and variety. When Brazil was discovered, only a small part of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal possessed a literary life. England was scarcely emerging into it, with the predecessors of Shakespeare, who had not yet been born and whose first works date from the end of the century. Germany, from the literary standpoint, did not exist.
“Portugal, for already a century, had possessed a language solidly constructed and policed, and in this respect the labor of Camões is incomparably less than that of Dante. Portugal was in its golden age of literature, which already possessed chroniclers such as Fernão Lopes, novelists like Bernardim Ribeiro, historians like João de Barros, dramatists like Gil Vicente, poets such as those of the cancioneiros and a line of writers of all kinds dating back to the fourteenth century. Despite the rusticity of the people, Portugal, in the epoch of Brazil’s colonization, is one of the four countries of Europe that may be called intellectual. The identification of the colony of Brazil with the mother-country seems to me one of the expressive facts of our history, and this identification rendered easy the influence of Portuguese spiritual life upon a wild region, so that it was possible to obtain results which, given other feelings between the court and the colony, would not have been forthcoming. Since gold was not at once discovered here, and those mines that were discovered proved relatively few and poor, Brazilian life soon took on, from Reconcavo to Pernambuco, where it was first lived, and later in Rio Janeiro and even—though less—in S. Vicente, a modest manner,—what today we should call bourgeois,—more favourable to literary expression, to the leisure needed for writing, than the agitated, adventurous existence of the colonizers of mine lands.
“The collegios of the Jesuits, established with higher studies as early as the XVIth century, and later—in imitation of them—the convents of the other religious orders, infiltrating Latin culture into the still half-savage colony, favoured the transmigration hither of the powerful literary spirit of the metropolis.