Brazilian Literature. Goldberg Isaac
manhandled the priests, and his snickers echoed in the high places. He knew his Quevedo quite as well as did Gregorio and has been called “the first revolutionary, the most illustrious of colonial poets.”46 And toward his end he makes his peace with the Lord in a sonnet that might have been signed by Gregorio.
Of Gregorio de Mattos I will quote a single sonnet written in one of his more sober moods. There is a pleasant, if somewhat conventional, epigrammatical quality to it, as to more than one of the others, and there is little reason for questioning its sincerity. Every satirist, at bottom, contains an elegiac poet, – the ashes that remain after the fireworks have exploded. If here, as elsewhere, only the feeling belongs to the poet, since both form and content are of the old world whence he drew so many of his topics and so much of his inspiration, there is an undoubted grafting of his salient personality upon the imported plant.
Nasce o Sol; e não dura mais que um dia,
Depois da luz, se segue a noite escura,
Em tristes sombras morre a formosura,
Em continuas tristezas a alegria.
Porém, se acaba o sol, porque nascia?
Se formosa a luz é, porque não dura?
Como a belleza assim se trasfigura?
Como o gosto, da pena assim se fia?
Mas no sol, e na luz, falte a firmeza,
Na formosura não se da constancia,
E na alegria, sinta-se a tristeza.
Comece o mundo, emfim, pela ignorancia;
Pois tem qualquer dos bens, por natureza,
A firmeza somente na inconstancia.47
The first half of the eighteenth century, a review of which brings our first period to a close, is the era of the bandeirantes in Brazilian history and of the Academies in the national literature. The external enemies had been fought off the outer boundaries in the preceding century; now had come the time for the conquest of the interior.48 The bandeirantes were so called from bandeira, signifying a band; the earliest expeditions into the hinterland were called entradas, and it is only when the exploring caravans grew more numerous and organized that the historic name bandeirantes was bestowed. Men and women of all ages, together with the necessary animals, composed these moving outposts of conquest. This was a living epic; the difficulties were all but insurmountable and the heroism truly superhuman. No literature this, – with its law of the jungle which is no law, – with its immitigable cruelty to resisting indigenous tribes, and finally, the internecine strife born of partial failure, envy and vindictiveness.
While the bandeirantes were carrying on the tradition of Portuguese bravery – evidence of a restlessness which Carvalho would find mirrored even today in the “intellectual nomadism” of his countrymen, as well as in their political and cultural instability – the literary folk of the civilized centers were following the tradition of Portuguese imitation. At Bahia and Rio de Janeiro Academies were formed, evidencing some sort of attempt at unifying taste and aping, at a distance, the favourite diversion that the Renaissance had itself copied from the academies of antiquity. The first of these, founded in 1724 by the Viceroy Vasco Fernandez Cezar de Menezes, was christened Academia Brazilica dos Esqueçidos, – that is, the Brazilian Academy of those Forgotten or Overlooked by the Academia de Historia established, 1720, at Lisbon. A sort of “spite” academy, then, this first Brazilian body, but constituting at the same time, in a way, a new-world affirmation. Among the other academies were that of the Felizes 1736 (i. e., happy), the Selectos, 1752, and the Renascidos, 1759, (reborn) none of which continued for long. Although the influence of Góngora was receding, Rocha Pitta’s Historia da America Portugueza is replete with pompous passages, exaggerated estimates and national “boostings” that read betimes like the gorgeous pamphlets issued by a tourist company. Pride in the national literature is already evident. The itch to write epics is rife; it bites João de Brito Lima, who indites a work (Cezaria) in 1300 octaves praising the Viceroy. Gonzalo Soares de França exceeds this record in his Brazilia, adding 500 octaves to the score. Manoel de Santa Maria Itaparica composes a sacred epic, Eustachidos, on the life of St. Eustace, in six cantos, each preceded by an octave summary; the fifth canto contains a quasiprophetic vision in which posterity, in the guise of an old man, requests the author to celebrate his native isle. This section, the Ilha da Itaparica, has rescued the poem from total oblivion. But the passage possesses hardly any transmissive fervor and the native scene is viewed through the glasses of Greek mythology.
Some wrote in Latin altogether upon Brazilian topics, as witness Prudencio do Amaral’s poem on sugar-manufacture (no less!) entitled De opifichio sacchario; the cultivation of manioc and tobacco were equally represented in these pseudo-Virgilian efforts.
It is a barren half century for literature. Outside of the author of the Eustachidos and the two important figures to which we soon come only the brothers Bartholomeu Lourenço and Alexandre de Gusmão are remembered, and they do not come properly within the range of literary history. The one was a physicist and mathematician; the other, a statesman. The latter in his Marido Confundido, 1737, wrote a comedy in reply to Molière’s Georges Dandin, much to the delight of the Lisbonese audiences.
The two salient figures of the epoch are Sebastião da Rocha Pitta (1660-1738) and Antonio José da Silva (1705-1739).
Brazilian critics seem well disposed to forget Rocha Pitta’s mediocre novels and sterile verses; it is for his Historia that he is remembered, and fondly, despite all the extravagances of style that mark the book. Romero regards it as a patriotic hymn, laden with ostentatious learning and undoubted leanings toward Portugal. Oliveira Lima’s view, however, is more scientific and historically dispassionate. One could not well expect of a writer at the beginning of the eighteenth century a nationalistic sentiment, “which in reality was still of necessity embryonic, hazy, or at least, ill-defined… In our historian, none the less, there reigns a sympathy for all that is of his land.”49 And, indeed, the Historia, as Romero wrote, is more a poem than a chronological narrative, cluttered with saints and warriors, prophets, heroes of antiquity and mediaeval days.
“In no other region,” runs one of the passages best known to Brazilians, “is the sky more serene, nor does dawn glow more beautifully; in no other hemisphere does the sun flaunt such golden rays nor such brilliant nocturnal glints; the stars are more benign and ever joyful; the horizons where the sun is born or where it sinks to rest are always unclouded; the water, whether it be drunk from the springs in the fields or from the town aqueduct, is of the purest; Brazil, in short, is the Terrestrial Paradise discovered at last, wherein the vastest rivers arise and take their course.”
I am inclined to question whether Antonio José da Silva really belongs to the literature of Brazil. Romero would make out a case for him on the ground of birth in the colony, family influences and the nature of his lyrism, which, according to that polemical spirit, was Brazilian. Yet his plays are linked with the history of the Portuguese drama and it is hard to discover, except by excessive reading between the lines, any distinctive Brazilian character. Known to his contemporaries by the sobriquet O Judeu (The Jew), Antonio José early experienced the martyrdom of his religion at the hands of the Inquisition. At the age of eight he was taken to Portugal by his mother, who was summoned thither to answer the charge of Judaism; in 1726 he was compelled to answer to the same charge, but freed; hostile forces were at work against him, however, not alone for his religious beliefs but for his biting satire, and chiefly through the bought depositions of a servant he was finally convicted and burned on October 21st, 1739. The strains of one of his operettas fairly mingled with the crackling of the flames. This fate made of him a national figure in Brazil; the first tragedy written by a Brazilian makes of him the protagonist (O Poeta e a Inquisição, 1839, by Magalhães); the second of Joaquim Norberto de Sousa’s Cantos Epicos is dedicated to him (1861).
Ibid. P. 190.
The sun is born and lasts but a single day; dark night follows upon the light; beauty dies amidst the gloomy shadows and joy amid continued grief. Why, then, if the sun must die, was it born? Why, if light be beautiful, does it not endure? How is beauty thus transfigured? How does pleasure thus trust pain? But let firmness be lacking in sun and light, let permanence flee beauty, and in joy, let there be a note of sadness. Let the world begin, at length, in ignorance; for, whatever the boon, it is by nature constant only in its inconstancy.
“The story of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand is but a child’s tale compared with the fearless adventure of our colonial brothers.” Carvalho. Op. Cit. P. 127.
Oliveira Lima.