“Soon, then, perhaps sooner than any other American nation, and certainly sooner than, for example, the largest of them all, the United States, we had a literature, the written expression of our collective thought and feeling. Certainly this literature scarcely merits the name of Brazilian as a regional designation. It is Portuguese not only in tongue but in inspiration, sentiment, spirit. There might perhaps already exist, as in the author of the Dialogos das grandezas or in Gabriel Soares, a regional sentiment, the love of the native soil, a taste for its traits, but there was no national sentiment other than the selfsame Portuguese national sentiment. Even four centuries later, I hesitate to attribute to our literature the qualification of Brazilian.… For I do not know whether the existence of an entirely independent literature is possible without an entirely independent language as well. Language is the constituent element of literatures, from the fact that it is itself the expression of what there is most intimate, most individual, most characteristic in a people. Only those peoples possess a literature of their own who possess a language of their own. In this sense, which seems to me the true one, there is no Austrian literature or Swiss or Belgian literature, despite the existence in those peoples of a high culture and notable writers in all fields.[7]
“Therefore I consider Brazilian literature as a branch of the Portuguese, to which from time to time it returns by the ineluctable law of atavism, as we may see in the imitations of the literary movements in Portugal, or better still, in the eagerness—today almost universal in our writers—to write Portuguese purely, according to the classic models of the mother literature. This branch, upon which have been engrafted other elements, is already distinguished from the central trunk by certain characteristics, but not in a manner to prevent one from seeing, at first glance, that it is the same tree slightly modified by transplantation to other climes. It is possible that new graftings and the prolonged influence of milieu will tend to differentiate it even more, but so long as the language shall remain the same, it will be little more—as happens in the botanical families—than a variety of the species.
“A variety, however, may be very interesting; it may even be, in certain respects, more interesting than the principal type, acquiring in time and space qualities that raise it above the type. Brazilian literature, or at least poetry, was already in the XVIIth century superior to Portuguese. It is by no means patriotic presumption, which I lack completely, to judge that, with the development of Brazil, its probable politic and economic greatness in the future will give to the literary expression of its life supremacy over Portugal, whose historic rôle seems over and which, from all appearances, will disappear in an Iberic union. If this country of ours does not come apart and split up into several others, each a ‘patria’ with a dialect of its own, we shall prove true to the prophecies of Camões and Fr. Luiz de Souza, becoming the legitimate heirs of Portugal’s language and literature. If such a thing should happen, it would give us an enormous moral superiority to the United States and the Spanish-American nations, making of us the only nation in America with a truly national language and literature.
“But this literature of ours, which, as a branch of the Portuguese already has existed for four centuries, possesses neither perfect continuity, cohesion, nor the unity of the great literatures,—of the Portuguese, for example. The principal reason, to explain the phenomenon in a single word, is that it depended ever, in its earliest periods, rather upon Portugal and later upon Europe, France especially, than upon Brazil itself. It always lacked the principle of solidarity, which would seem to reveal lack of national sentiment. It always has lacked communicability,—that is, its writers, who were separated by vast distances and extreme difficulty of communication, remained strangers one to the other. And I refer not to personal communication, which is of secondary importance, but to intellectual communication that is established through books. The various influences that can be noted in all our important literary movements are all external. What is called improperly the Mineira School of the XVIIIth century, and the Maranhão pléiade of the middle of this (the XIXth) received their inspiration from Portugal, but did not transmit it. As is said in military tactics, contact was never established between the writers or between their intellects.
“This lack of contact continues today (Verissimo wrote the essay toward the end of the XIXth century) and is greater now than it was for example during the Romantic period. There was always lacking the transmitting element, the plastic mediator of national thought, a people sufficiently cultured to be interested in that thought, or, at least, ready to be influenced by it. In the construction of a literature the people plays simultaneously a passive and an active rôle: it is in the people that the inspiration of poet and thinker has its source and its goal. Neither the one nor the other can abstract himself, for both form an integral part of the people. Perhaps only during our Romantic period, from 1835 to 1860, may it be said that this condition of communicability existed, limited to a tiny part of the country. The sentiment of a new nation co-operated effectively in creating for writers a sympathetic public, which felt instinctively in their work an expression of that nationality. Then we learned a great deal of French, some English and Italian, a smattering of German and became intellectually denationalized. A success such as that of Macedo’s Moreninha is fairly inconceivable today. Success in literature, as in clothing, comes ready made from Paris.
“Do not take me for a nationalist, and less still, for a nativist. I simply am verifying a fact with the same indifference with which I should perform the same office in the domains of geology. I am looking for the explanation of a phenomenon; I believe I have found it, and I present it.
“So that, from this standpoint, it may be said that it was the development of our culture that prejudiced our literary evolution. It seems a paradox, but it is simply a truth. Defective and faulty as it was, that culture was enough to reveal to our reading public the inferiority of our writers, without any longer counterbalancing this feeling by the patriotic ardor of the period during which the nationality was being formed. The general cultural deficiency of our writers of all sorts in Brazil is, then, one of the defects of our literature. Doing nothing but repeat servilely what is being done abroad, without any originality of thought or form, without ideas of their own, with immense gaps in their learning, and no less defects of instruction that are today common among men of medium culture in the countries that we try to imitate and follow, we cannot compete before our readers with what they receive from the foreign countries at first hand, by offering them a similar product at second.
“In addition to study, culture, instruction, both general and thorough, carried on in time and with plenty of time, firm and substantial, our literature lacks at present sincerity. The evident decadence of our poetry may have no other cause. Compare, for example, the poetry of the last ten or even fifteen years, with that produced during the decade 1850-1860, by Gonçalves Dias, Casimiro de Abreu, Alvares de Azevedo, Junqueira Freire, Laurindo Rabello, and you will note that the sincerity of emotion that overflowed the verses then is almost completely lacking in today’s poetry. And in all our literary labors, fiction, history, philosophy, criticism, it is impossible for the careful reader not to discern the same lack. Perhaps it is due to a lack of correlation between milieu and writer.… To aggravate this, there was, moreover, lack of ideas, lack of thought, which reduced our poetry to a subjectivism from which exaggerated fondness for form took emotion, the last quality that remained to it; it reduced our fiction to a copy of the French novel, which obstructed the existence of a dramatic literature, which sterilized our philisophic, historic and critical production. This lack, however, is a consequence of our lack of culture and study, which do not furnish to brains already for several reasons naturally poor the necessary restoratives and tonics. And the worst of it is that, judging from the direction in which we are moving, this very culture, as deficient and incomplete as it is, threatens to be extinguished in a widespread, all-consuming, and, anyway you look at it, coarse preoccupation with politics and finance.”[8]