was false; rhetorical rather than scientific, swollen rather than substantial.”39
The poets of the century narrow down to two, of whom the first may be dismissed with scant ceremony. Manoel Botelho de Oliveira (1636-1711) was the first Brazilian poet to publish a book of verses. His Musica do Parnaso em quatro coros de rimas portuguezas, castelhanas, italianas e latinas, com seu descante comico reduzido em duas comedias was published at Lisbon in 1705. Yet for all this battery of tongues there is little in the book to commend it, and it would in all likelihood be all but forgotten by today were it not for the descriptive poem A Ilha da Maré, in which has been discovered, – as we have seen in our citation from Verissimo, – one of the earliest manifestations of nativism; Botelho de Oliveira’s Brazilianism, as appears from his preface, was a conscious attitude, and the patient, plodding cataloguing of the national fruit-garden precedes by a century the seventh canto of the epic Caramurú; but for all this, there are in the three hundred and twenty-odd lines of the poem only some four verses with any claim to poetic illumination. The depths of bathetic prose are reached in a passage oft quoted by Brazilian writers; it reads like a seed catalogue:
Tenho explicado as fruitas e os legumes,
Que dão a Portugal muitos ciumes;
Tenho recopilado
O que o Brasil contém para invejado,
E para preferir a toda terra,
Em si perfeitos quatro AA encerra.
Tem o primeiro A, nos arvoredos
Sempre verdes aos olhos, sempre ledos;
Tem o segunda A nos ares puros,
Na temperie agradaveis e seguros;
Tem o terceiro A, nas aguas frias
Que refrescam o peito e são sadias,
O quarto A, no assucar deleitoso,
Que é do mundo o regalo mais mimoso;
São, pois, os quatro AA por singuares
Arvoredos, assucar, aguas, ares.40
All of which bears almost the same relation to poetry as the grouping of the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) to musical criticism. Romero found the poet’s nationalism an external affair; “the pen wished to depict Brazil, but the soul belonged to Spanish or Portuguese cultism.” So, too, Carvalho, who would assign the genuine beginnings of Brazilian sentiment to Gregorio de Mattos.
Gregorio de Mattos Guerra (1633-1696) is easily the outstanding figure of his day. Romero, who considered him the pivot of seventeenth-century letters in Brazil, would claim for him, too, the title of creator of that literature, because he was – though educated, like most of the cultured men of his day, at Coimbra – a son of the soil, more nationally minded than Anchieta and in perfect harmony with his milieu. He reveals a Brazilian manner of handling the language; indeed, he “is the document in which we can appreciate the earliest modifications undergone by the Portuguese language in America…” He reveals a consciousness of being something new and distinct from Europe’s consideration of the new-world inhabitants as a species of anima vilis. He represents the tendency of the various races to poke fun at one another. More important still, he betrays a nascent discontent with the mother country’s rule. He is “the genuine imitator of our lyric poetry and of our lyric intuition. His brasileiro was not the caboclo nor the Negro nor the Portuguese; he was already the son of the soil, able to ridicule the separatist pretensions of the three races.” Thus far Romero. Verissimo however – and the case may well be taken as an instance of the unsettled conditions prevailing in Brazilian literary criticism – takes a view antipodally apart. “The first generation of Brazilian poets, Gregorio de Mattos included, is exclusively Portuguese. To suppose that there is in Gregorio de Mattos any originality of form or content is to show one’s ignorance of the Portuguese poetry of his time, and of the Spanish, which was so close to it and which the Portuguese so much imitated, and which he, in particular, fairly plagiarized.”41 Long ago, Ferdinand Wolf, in the first history of Brazilian letters that made any claims to completeness,42 noted the poet’s heavy indebtedness to Lope de Vega and Góngora, and his servile imitation of Quevedo.
Verissimo, I believe, overstates his case. That Gregorio de Mattos was not an original creative spirit may at once be admitted. But he was an undoubted personality; he aimed his satiric shafts only too well at prominent creatures of flesh and blood and vindictive passions; he paid for his ardour and temerity with harsh exile and in the end would seem even to have evinced a sincere repentance. The motto of his life’s labours, indeed, might be a line from one of his most impertinent poems:
“Eu, que me não sei calar” …
I, who cannot hold my tongue …
Nor did Gregorio de Mattos hold his tongue, whether in the student days at Coimbra – where already he was feared for that wagging lance – or during his later vicissitudes in Brazil. In 1864 he married Maria dos Povos, whose reward for advising him to give up his satiric habits was to be made the butt of his next satire. It would have been a miracle if he were either happy with or faithful to her; he was neither. He slashed right and left about him; argued cases – and won them! – in rhyme; poverty, however, was his constant companion, so that, for other reasons aplenty, his wife soon left him. Now his venom bursts forth all the less restrained. Personal enmities made among the influential were bound soon or late to recoil upon him and toward the end of his life he was exiled to the African colony of Angola. Upon his return to Brazil he was prohibited from writing verses and sought solace in his viola, in which he was skilled.
Gregorio de Mattos’s satire sought familiar targets: the judge, the client, the abusive potentate, the venal religious. “Perhaps without any intention on his part,” suggests Carvalho, “he was our first newspaper, wherein are registered the petty and great scandals of the epoch, the thefts, crimes, adulteries, and even the processions, anniversaries and births that he so gaily celebrated in his verses.”43 His own countrymen he likened to stupid beasts of burden:
Que os Brasileiros são bestas,
E estão sempre a trabalhar
Toda a vida por manter
Maganos de Portugal.44
There is a tenderer aspect to the poet, early noted in his sonnets; despite the wild life he led there are accents of sincerity in his poems of penitence; no less sincere, if less lofty, are his poems of passion, in which love is faunesque, sensual, a thing of hot lips and anacreontic abandon. He can turn a pretty (and empty) compliment almost as gracefully as his Spanish models. But it is really too much to institute a serious comparison between him and Verlaine, as Carvalho would do. Some outward resemblance there is in the lives of the men (yet how common after all, are repentance after ribaldry, and connubial infelicity), but Carvalho destroys his own case in the very next paragraph. For, as he indicates, the early Brazilian’s labours “represent in the history of our letters, it is needful to repeat, the revolt of bourgeois common sense against the ridiculousness of the Portuguese nobility.” How far from all this was the nineteenth century Frenchman, with a sensitive soul delicately attuned to life’s finer harmonies!
I am surprised that no Brazilian has found for Gregorio de Mattos Guerra a parallel spirit much nearer than Verlaine in both time and space. The Peruvian Caviedes was some twenty years younger than his Brazilian contemporary; his life has been likened to a picaresque novel. He was no closet-spirit and his addiction to the flesh, no whit less ardent than Gregorio’s, resulted in the unmentionable affliction. He, too, repented, before marriage rather than after; his wife dying, he surrendered to drink and died four years before the Brazilian, if 1692 is the correct date. As Gregorio de Mattos flayed the luxury of Bahia, so Caviedes guffawed at the sybarites of Lima.45
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