Brazilian Literature. Goldberg Isaac
of the Jewish drama.50 And it is not at all impossible that the melancholy which Romero discovers amidst the Jew’s gay compositions is as much a heritage of his race as of the Brazilian modinhas.51 Already Wolf had found in Antonio José’s musical farces a likeness to the opera bouffe of Offenbach, a fellow Jew; the Jew takes naturally to music and to satire, so that his prominence in the history of comic opera may be no mere coincidence. Satire and melancholy, twin sisters with something less than the usual resemblance, inhere in the race of Antonio José.
Antonio José da Silva had in him much of the rollicking, roistering, ribald, rhyming rogue. For long, he was the most popular of the Portuguese dramatists after Gil Vicente. He studied Rotrou, Molière and the libretti of Metastasio to good advantage, and for his musical ideas went to school to the Italians. Sr. Ribeiro has repudiated any connection between these conventionalized airs – the form of the verses is just as conventional – and the distinctive Brazilian modinha; the truth is that Romero, eager to make as good an appearance for the national literature as possible, and realizing that the eighteenth century in Brazil needed all the help it could receive, made an unsuccessful attempt to dragoon Antonio José into the thin ranks.52 As it is, his reputation in Portugal has suffered a decline, merging into the obscurity of the very foibles it sought to castigate. The martyred Jew has had no creative influence upon Brazilian literature.
The first phase of Brazilian letters is, then, a tentative groping, reflecting the numerous influences across the ocean and the instability of a nascent civilization at war on the one hand with covetous foreigners and on the other with fractious, indigenous tribes. The chroniclers are in the main picturesque, informative, rambling rather than artistic; the poets are either vacuous or swollen with the pomp of old-world rhetoric. Even so virile a spirit as Gregorio de Mattos conducts his native satire with the stylistic weapons forged in Europe, and the dawn of a valid nativism is shot through with gleams of spiritual adherence to Portugal and intellectual subjection to the old continent. Yet, as the child is father to the man, so even in these faltering voices may be detected the dominant notes of the later literature, – its imagination, its fondness for rotund expression, its pride of milieu, its Oriental exuberance, its wistful moodiness, its sensual ardor.
CHAPTER III
PERIOD OF AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT (1750-1830)
Stirrings of Revolt – The Inconfidencia – Two Epics: Uraguay and Caramurú– The Lyrists of Minas Geraes: Claudio da Costa, Gonzaga, Alvarenga Peixoto, Silva Alvarenga – Minor figures – Political Satire – Early Nineteenth Century – José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva.
Struggle for the territory of Brazil had bred a love for the soil that was bound sooner or later to become spiritualized into an aspiration toward autonomy. The brasileiros were not forever to remain the bestas that the hell-mouth of Bahia had called them, nor provide luxury for the maganos de Portugal. The history of colonial exploitation repeated itself: Spain with Spanish-America, Portugal with Brazil, England with the future United States. Taxes grew, and with them, resentment. Yet, as so often, the articulation of that rebellious spirit came not from the chief sufferers of oppression, but from an idealistic band of poets whose exact motives have not yet been thoroughly clarified by historical investigation. Few less fitted to head a separatist movement than these lyric, idealistic spirits who form part of the Inconfidencia (Disloyalty) group immortalized in Brazilian history through the hanging of Tiradentes and the imprisonment and exile of a number of others. These men were premature in their attempt, and foredoomed to failure, but they lived, as well as wrote, an ideal and thus form at once an epoch in the national history and the nation’s letters. The freedom won by the United States, the foreshadowing of the French revolution, inspired in them ideas of a Brazilian republic; how surely idealistic was such an aim may be realized when we recall that Brazil’s emancipation was initiated with a monarchy (1822) and that, although it has been a republic since 1889, there are a number of serious thinkers who consider the more liberal form of government still less a boon than a disadvantage.
In 1783, Luis da Cunha de Menezes, a vain, pompous fellow, was named Captain-General of the Province of Minas. It was against him that were launched the nine satirical verse letters called Cartas Chilenas and signed by the pseudonym Critillo (1786). Menezes was succeeded by Barbacena (1788) who it was rumoured, meant to exact the payment of 700 arrobas of gold, overdue from the province. It was this that proved the immediate stimulus to an only half-proved case of revolt, which, harshly suppressed, deprived Brazil of a number of its ripest talents.
From the name of the province – Minas Geraes – these poets have been grouped into a so-called Mineira school, which includes the two epicists, Frei José de Santa Rita Durão and José Basilio de Gama, and the four lyrists, Claudio Manoel da Costa, Thomas Antonio Gonzaga, Ignacio José de Alvarenga Peixoto and Manoel Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga.
Critics are not agreed upon the relative non-esthetic values of Basilio da Gama’s Uraguay (1769)53 and Santa Rita Durão’s Caramurú (1781). Wolf, with Almeida-Garrett, finds the first a truly national poem; Carvalho calls it “the best and most perfect poem that appeared in Brazil throughout the colonial period”; the early Denis found it not very original, for all its stylistic amenities; Romero, conceding its superiority to Caramurú in style and form, finds it inferior in historical understanding, terming the latter epic “the most Brazilian poem we possess.” Verissimo, who has written an extended comparison of the two poems,54 is, to me, at least, most satisfying of all upon the problems involved and the esthetic considerations implied. In both the epics he discerns the all-pervading influence of Camões, the emulation of whom has seemed to cast upon every succeeding poet the obligation of writing his epic. Thus the chief initiators of Brazilian Romanticism, Porto Alegre and Magalhães, had to indite, respectively, a Colombo and a Confederação dos Tamoyos, and Gonçalves Dias began Os Tymbiras, while José de Alencar, romantic of the Romantics, started a Filhos de Tupan, “which happily for our good and his own, he never completed.” But what renders both the Uruguay and the Caramurú important in the national literature is the fact that they stand out from the ruck of earlier and later Camonean imitations by virtue of a certain spontaneity of origin and an intuitive, historic relation with their day. It is not known whether the authors, though contemporaries, knew each other or read their respective works. Yet both instinctively employed indigenous material and revealed that same “national sentiment which was already stammering, though timorously, in certain poets contemporaneous with them or immediately preceding, such as Alvarenga Peixoto and Silva Alvarenga, with whom there enter into our poetry, mingled with classical images and comparison, names and things of our own. Though like Basilio and Durão, loyal Portuguese, these poets speak already of fatherland with exaltation and love. The idea of the fatherland, the national thought, which in Gregorio de Mattos is as yet a simple movement of bad humour, vagrant spite and the revolt of an undisciplined fellow, becomes in them the tender affection for their native land…”
The Uruguay especially reveals this nascent nationalism as it existed among the loyal Portuguese in the epoch just previous to the Inconfidencia. “We must remember that the work of the Mineira poets” (and here Verissimo includes, of course, the lyrists to which we presently come) “abound in impressions of loyalty to Portugal… Let us not forget José Bonifacio, the so-called patriarch of our Independence, served Portugal devotedly first as scientist in official intellectual commissions and professor at the University of Coimbra, and then as volunteer Major of the Academic Corps against the French of Napoleon, and finally as Intendente Geral, or as we should say today, Chief of Police, of the city of Porto. And José Bonifacio, like Washington, was at first hostile, or at least averse, to independence.”
The Uruguay is certainly less intense than the Caramurú in its patriotism. The author of the first wrote it, as he said, to satisfy a certain curiosity about Uruguay; also, he might have added, to flatter his patron, the then powerful Pombal, who, it will be recalled, at one time harboured
See, for just such inclusion, B. Gorin’s
Diminutive of
The chief works of Antonio José da Silva are
The latest view of Antonio José (See Bell’s
The original title was spelled