Brazilian Tales | Page 3

in its idealization of the Indian race. Of the author's other numerous works Iracema alone approaches Guarany in popularity. The dominant note of the author, afterward much repeated in the literary history of his nation, is the essential goodness and self-abnegation of the national character.
Alfred d'Escragnolle Taunay (1843-1899) is among the most important of Brazil's novelists. Born at Rio de Janeiro of noble family he went through a course in letters and science, later engaging in the campaign of Paraguay. He took part in the retreat of La Laguna, an event which he has enshrined in one of his best works, first published in French under the title La Retraite de la Laguna. He served also as secretary to Count d'Eu, who commanded the Brazilian army, and later occupied various political offices, rising to the office of senator in 1886. His list of works is too numerous to mention in a fragmentary introduction of this nature; chief among them stands Innocencia; a sister tale, so to speak, to Isaacs's Mar��a. According to Verissimo, Innocencia is one of the country's few genuinely original novels. It has been called, by M��rou (1900), "the best novel written in South America by a South American," a compliment later paid by Guglielmo Ferrero to Gra?a Aranha's Canaan. Viscount Taunay's famous work has been translated into French twice, once into English, Italian, German, Danish, and even Japanese.
The scene is laid in the deserted Matto Grosso, a favorite background of the author's. Innocencia is all that her name implies, and dwells secluded with her father, who is a miner, her negress slave Conga, and her Caliban-like dwarf Tico, who loves Innocencia, the Miranda of this district. Into Innocencia's life comes the itinerant physician, Cirino de Campos, who is called by her father to cure her of the fever. Cirino is her Ferdinand; they make love in secret, for she is meant by paternal arrangement for a mere brute of a mule driver, Mana?ao by name. Innocencia vows herself to Cirino, when the mule-driver comes to enforce his prior claim; the father, bound by his word of honor, sides with the primitive lover. The tragedy seems foreordained, for Innocencia makes spirited resistance, while Mana?ao avenges himself by killing the doctor. A comic figure of a German scientist adds humor and a certain poignant irony to the tale. Such a bare outline conveys nothing of the mysterious charm of the original, nor of its poetic atmosphere. Comparing Innocencia with what has been termed its sister work, Mar��a, I believe that Mar��a is the better tale of the two, although there is much to be said for both. The point need not be pressed. The heroine of Mar��a is more a woman, less a child than Innocencia, hence the fate of the Spanish girl is tragic where that of the other maiden is merely pitiful. Innocencia, on the other hand, is stouter in texture. In Mar��a there is no love struggle; the struggle is with life and circumstance; in Innocencia there is not only the element of rivalry in love, but in addition there is the rigid parent who sternly, and at last murderously, opposes the natural desires of a child whom he has promised to another. Where Mar��a is idyllic, poetic, flowing smoothing along the current of a realism tempered by sentimentalism, Innocencia (by no means devoid of poetry) is romantic, melodramatic, rushing along turbulently to the outcome in a death as violent as Mar��a's is peaceful. There is in each book a similar importance of the background. In Innocencia the "point of honor" is quite as strong and vindictive as in any play of the Spanish Golden Age. Mar��a shares with Innocencia relieving touches of humor and excellent pages of character description.
Taunay's O Encilhamento is a violent antithesis to the work just considered. Here the politician speaks. In passages of satire that becomes so acrimonious at times as to indicate real personages, the wave of speculation that swept Argentina and Brazil is analyzed and held up to scorn. The novel is really a piece of historical muck-raking and was long an object of resentment in the republic.
Everything from Taunay's pen reveals a close communion with nature, an intimate understanding of the psychology of the vast region's inhabitants. His shorter tales, which I hope later to present to the English-reading public, reveal these powers at their best. Now it is a soldier who goes to war, only, like a military Enoch Arden, to return and find his sweetheart in another's arms; now it is a clergyman, "the vicar of sorrows," who, in the luxuriant environment of his charge suffers the tortures of carnal temptations, with the spirit at last triumphant over the flesh. Whatever of artifice there is in these tales is overcome, one of his most sympathetic critics