Brazilian Tales | Page 5

idea. The
type which devotes much attention to depictions of life and customs, to
discussions upon present realities and ultimate purposes, is perhaps
more frequent among Spanish and Portuguese Americans than among
our own readers who are apt to be overinsistent in their demands for
swift, visible action. Yet, in the hands of a master, it possesses no less
interest than the more obvious type of fiction, for ideas possess more
life than the persons who are moved by them.
The idea that carries Milkau from the Old World to the New is an ideal
of human brotherhood, high purpose and dissatisfaction with the old,
degenerate world. In the State of Espirito Santo, where the German
colonists are dominant, he plans a simple life that shall drink
inspiration in the youth of a new, virgin continent. He falls in with
another German, Lentz, whose outlook upon life is at first the very
opposite to Milkau's blend of Christianity and a certain liberal
socialism. The strange milieu breeds in both an intellectual langour that
vents itself in long discussions, in breeding contemplation, mirages of
the spirit. Milkau is gradually struck with something wrong in the
settlement. Little by little it begins to dawn upon him that something of
the Old-World hypocrisy, fraud and insincerity, is contaminating this
supposedly virgin territory. Here he discovers no paradise à la
Rousseau--no natural man untainted by the ills of civilization. Graft is
as rampant as in any district of the world across the sea; cruelty is as
rife. His pity is aroused by the plight of Mary, a destitute servant who is
betrayed by the son of her employers. Not only does the scamp desert
her when she most needs his protection and acknowledgment, but he is
silent when his equally vicious parents drive her forth to a life of
intense hardship. She is spurned at every door and reduced to beggary.
Her child is born under the most distressing circumstances, and under
conditions that strike the note of horror the infant is slain before her
very eyes while she gazes helplessly on.
Mary is accused of infanticide, and since she lacks witnesses, she is
placed in a very difficult position. Moreover, the father of her child
bends every effort to loosen the harshest measures of the community
against her, whereupon Milkau, whose heart is open to the sufferings of

the universe, has another opportunity to behold man's inhumanity to
woman. His pity turns to what pity is akin to; he effects her release
from jail, and together they go forth upon a journey that ends in the
delirium of death. The promised land had proved a mirage--at least for
the present. And it is upon this indecisive note that the book ends.
Ferrero's introduction, though short, is substantial, and to the point. It is
natural that he should have taken such a liking to the book, for Aranha's
work is of intense interest to the reader who looks for psychological
power, and Ferrero himself is the exponent of history as psychology
rather than as economic materialism. "The critics," he says, "will judge
the literary merits of this novel. As a literary amateur I will point out
among its qualities the beauty of its style and its descriptions, the purity
of the psychological analysis, the depth of the thoughts and the
reflections of which the novel is full, and among its faults a certain
disproportion between the different parts of the book and an ending
which is too vague, indefinite and unexpected. But its literary qualities
seem to me to be of secondary importance to the profound and
incontrovertible idea that forms the kernel of the book. Here in Europe
we are accustomed to say that modern civilization develops itself in
America more freely than in Europe, for in the former country it has
not to surmount the obstacle of an older society, firmly established, as
in the case of the latter. Because of this, we call America 'the country of
the young,' and we consider the New World as the great force which
decomposes the old European social organization." That idea is, as
Ferrero points out, an illusion due to distance. He points out, too, that
here is everywhere "an old America struggling against a new one and,
this is very curious, the new America, which upsets traditions, is
formed above all by the European immigrants who seek a place for
themselves in the country of their adoption, whereas the real Americans
represent the conservative tendencies. Europe exerts on American
society--through its emigrants--the same dissolving action which
America exerts--through its novelties and its example--on the old
civilization of Europe." The point is very well taken, and contains the
germ of a great novel of the United States. And just as Canaan stands
by itself in