Brazilian Tales | Page 7

correct and somewhat
cold in his verse. He took little delight in nature and lacked the
passionate, robust temperament that projects itself upon pages of ardent
beauty. In the best of his prose works, however, he penetrates as deep
as any of his countrymen into the abyss of the human soul.
The judgment of Verissimo upon Machado de Assis differs somewhat
from that of his distinguished compatriots. Both because of the
importance of Machado de Assis to Brazilian literature, and as an
insight into Verissimo's delightful critical style, I translate somewhat at
length from that writer.
"With Varias Historias," he says in his studies of Brazilian letters, "Sr.
Machado de Assis published his fifteenth volume and his fifth
collection of tales ... To say that in our literature Machado de Assis is a
figure apart, that he stands with good reason first among our writers of
fiction, that he possesses a rare faculty of assimilation and evolution
which makes him a writer of the second Romantic generation, always a
contemporary, a modern, without on this account having sacrificed
anything to the latest literary fashion or copied some brand-new
aesthetic, above all conserving his own distinct, singular personality ...
is but to repeat what has been said many times already. All these
judgments are confirmed by his latest book, wherein may be noted the
same impeccable correctness of language, the same firm grasp upon
form, the same abundancy, force and originality of thought that make
of him the only thinker among our writers of fiction, the same sad,
bitter irony ...
"After this there was published another book by Sr. Machado de Assis,
Yayá Garcia. Although this is really a new edition, we may well speak
of it here since the first, published long before, is no longer
remembered by the public. Moreover, this book has the delightful and
honest charm of being in the writer's first manner.
"But let us understand at once, this reference to Machado de Assis's
first manner. In this author more than once is justified the critical
concept of the unity of works displayed by the great writers. All of
Machado de Assis is practically present in his early works; in fact, he

did not change, he scarcely developed. He is the most individual, the
most personal, the most 'himself' of our writers; all the germs of this
individuality that was to attain in Braz Cubas, in Quincas Borbas, in
the Papeis Avulsos and in Varias Historias its maximum of virtuosity,
may be discovered in his first poems and in his earliest tales. His
second manner, then, of which these books are the best example, is
only the logical, natural, spontaneous development of his first, or rather,
it is the first manner with less of the romantic and more of the critical
tendencies ... The distinguishing trait of Machado de Assis is that he is,
in our literature, an artist and a philosopher. Up to a short time ago he
was the only one answering to such a description. Those who come
after him proceed consciously and unconsciously from him, some of
them being mere worthless imitators. In this genre, if I am not
misemploying that term, he remained without a peer. Add that this
philosopher is a pessimist by temperament and by conviction, and you
will have as complete a characterization as it is possible to design of so
strong and complex a figure as his in two strokes of the pen.
"Yayá Garcia, like Resurreiçao and Helena, is a romantic account,
perhaps the most romantic written by the author. Not only the most
romantic, but perhaps the most emotional. In the books that followed it
is easy to see how the emotion is, one might say, systematically
repressed by the sad irony of a disillusioned man's realism." Verissimo
goes on to imply that such a work as this merits comparison with the
humane books of Tolstoi. But this only on the surface. "For at bottom,
it contains the author's misanthropy. A social, amiable misanthropy,
curious about everything, interested in everything,--what is, in the final
analysis, a way of loving mankind without esteeming it...
"The excellency with which the author of Yayá Garcia writes our
language is proverbial ... The highest distinction of the genius of
Machado de Assis in Brazilian literature is that he is the only truly
universal writer we possess, without ceasing on that account to be
really Brazilian."
When the Brazilian Academy of letters was founded in 1897, Machado
de Assis was unanimously elected president and held the position until

his death. Oliveira Lima, who lectured at Harvard during the college
season of 1915-1916, and who is himself one of the great intellectual
forces of contemporary Brazil, has written of Machado de Assis: "By
his extraordinary talent as writer, by his profound literary