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THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPEAN THOUGHT

ON BRAZILIAN LITERATURE.

BY HIS EXCELLENCY SENHOR MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA LIMA, HON. F.R.S.L.

[Read on November 25th, 1914.]

Mr. EDMUND GOSSE, C.B., LL.D., Vice-President, in the Chair.

The Chairman said:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

The Royal Society of Literature enjoys this evening the peculiar advantage of being addressed on the subject of the intellectual life of Brazil by one of the most distinguished of Brazilian writers. It has always been the privilege of this Society to welcome foreigners who have achieved literary distinction, and it did so half a century ago, when public interest was not open in England as fortunately it now is to the peculiar value of the best exotic literature.

It is my good fortune to-night to introduce to you Mr. Oliveira Lima, who has been called, and who deserves to be called, "the intellectual ambassador of Brazil." Mr. Oliveira Lima was for twenty-three years, in the literal sense, a diplomat, and he has forwarded the political and material welfare of his country in Japan, in the United States, in Belgium, in France, and here at the Court of St. James's. He has travelled widely and read much. He has taught

VOL. XXXIII.

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Europe to appreciate the mental advantages and the poetical wealth of his native country.

The language of that native country is, as you know, Portuguese, and when Brazil, in its colonial or semi-colonial development, began to produce writers, those writers competed more or less painfully with their more fortunate brethren in Portugal. But the solidarity of the Brazilians is now acknowledged. I observe in the anthology of the Hundred Best Portuguese Poems' (As cem melhores poesias lyricas), edited by the first of Portuguese writers, Prof. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, that the editor declines to include any American examples, on the ground that "it is plain that the poets of Brazil demand independent representation."* Brazil has been known for four centuries, she has existed as a country for three centuries, yet in her intellectual life she is still young.

Mr. Oliveira Lima will teach us this evening to enjoy the bloom of this youth. I venture to welcome him among us in the words which Victor Hugo on a public occasion addressed to the Brazilians: "You join the light of Europe to the sunshine of America."

SENHOR OLIVEIRA LIMA then read the following paper:

THE Brazilian literature is-and it could not be otherwise the reflection of European thought. The influence of exotic elements-I mean in this case the aboriginal Indian and the imported African

*Claro está que os Poetas Brasileiros requerem representação independente."

negro-is to be reckoned and can even be traced through its evolution, but on a small scale or proportion, rather in a special manner that does not affect the substance of thought, although it has modified or distinguished the literary expression. The intellectual and-what is more important-the moral basis is European, nay, it is Christian; the fundamental ideas are unmistakably Occidental. Brazilian literature is a branch, or, if you prefer, a sub-branch of the Latin tree. The form, the appearance may only betray sometimes-often, perhapscertain peculiar aspects due to the addition or infiltration of those strangely characteristic factors which operate much more by way of blood, as a result of race mixture, than directly, by any kind of cultural suggestion.

In fact, the Portuguese encountered a savage country, whose population was still less advanced than the African tribes, and they carried with them to their colonies in the sixteenth century their own civilisation, shaping accordingly to it the moral development of such overseas dominions which did not offer, like India, the strong resistance of an old and deep-rooted full civilisation. We must remember that the sixteenth century has been the most brilliant period of Portuguese letters, for it was the century in which Camões composed his great epic poem, one of the gems of universal literature, and João de Barros described in an admirable prose the feats of his contemporaries in that legendary East, reached after a century of persistent efforts by the pioneer navigators of the modern world.

Our first poem is, as a matter of fact, a pale,

ungraceful imitation of the "Lusiads," composed by Bento Teixeira Pinto in praise of the feudal lord of Pernambuco, a valiant knight who accompanied King Sebastian in his ill-fated Moroccan expedition, and is credited with having dismounted and given his charger to the sovereign when the latter had his horse killed under him at the climax of the battle.

Our first prose work, entitled 'Dialogues of the Grandeurs of Brazil,' contains the source of the two currents which were to run through the colonial era of our intellectual life: the humanist tendency, specially introduced by the Jesuit Fathers, who were the teachers and the moralisers of the new country, a kind of a varnish under which the spontaneity was to disappear until the surface cracked all over and showed reality again; and the national pride, which began by a lavish admiration of a luxuriant nature, to end with a boastful conception of the abundant resources of the land.

Humanism was the rule in Europe since the Renaissance until the withdrawal of classicism in favour of romanticism. So it happened in Brazil. Sermons, a very copious chapter of Brazilian as well as of Portuguese literature; poetry, a chapter no less replete with conventional ardour; history, framed in academies fit to compete with les précieuses ridicules rather than with l'hôtel de Rambouillet-every writing was done under the suggestion of the classics. Tropical battles recalled but those of the Iliad'; their heroes were all compared to Ajax and Achilles, Hector and Ulysses. Tropical love dared to evoke winter frost and ice as if it feared melting away.

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Good taste, which is responsible for so much tedious literature, forbade every alteration in those artificial comparisons and consecrated rhetorical images. Christmas in Brazil, for instance, means, as you are aware, mid-summer. Some people object to it, as it upsets their idea of things; but we cannot help our winter beginning in June. Yet our poets of the eighteenth century, the Arcadians, the shepherds of a country without sheep, always attached in their sonnets the most frigid adjectives to our hot December.

The influence to be pointed out is more than that of European thought alone: it is the influence even of European sensations. If love sometimes assumed an exotic character, it was because it followed in the wake of European invaders. They are responsible for their irrepressible devotion to dusky beauties and for the lyrics that sprang from this less crystalline source of information. Long before Gonçalves Dias, the greatest of Brazilian poets of the nineteenth century, gave a touching expression to the melancholy of the Indian half-caste virgin, the poor, handsome Marabà, Gregorio de Mattos-a famous satirical poet of the seventeenth century, the so-called father of our literature (a paternity which he claimed as little as any other)-sang with full conviction the charms of the Mulatto girls swarming around him.

I must, however, say that romanticism, owing perhaps to this variety and freedom of love, began earlier in Brazil than in Europe. Our lyrics could not remain for ever insensible to the local environment in its proper and true features, and once it

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