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They are not, as so much of Brazilian literature must perforce seem to the stranger's mind, exotic. They belong to the letters of the world by virtue of the human appeal of the subject and the mastery of their treatment. Chief among the writers here represented stands Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Born in Rio de Janeiro of poor parents he was early beset with difficulties.
I went into a familiar one-story adobe house, with its piazza and earthen floor, inhabited by a respectable lower-class family by the name of Machado, and inquired if any of the family remained, when a bright-eyed middle-aged woman recognized me, for she had heard I was on board the steamer, and told me she had married a shipmate of mine, Jack Stewart, who went out as second mate the next voyage, but left the ship and married and settled here.
Patchett good-day. The owner of the Santa Rosa, Senor Jacinto Machado, whom I had not seen before, received me aboard, and apologised for having started without me. He was a white man, a planter, and was now taking his year's production of cacao, about twenty tons, to Para. The canoe was very heavily laden, and I was rather alarmed to see that it was leaking at all points.
The next day, we threaded the Igarape-mirim, and on the 19th descended the Moju. Senor Machado and I by this time had become very good friends. At every interesting spot on the banks of the Moju, he manned the small boat and took me ashore.
Not one of the real leaders of the revolution was arrested. The thoroughness with which the Republican party was organized says much for the practical ability of its leaders. Miguel Bombarda. Simoes Raposo spoke in the name of the Freemasons; the Carbonaria Portugueza, a powerful secret society, was represented by Machado dos Santos, an officer in the navy.
May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be freed? Oh tierras de Alvargonzález, en el corazón de España, tierras pobres, tierras tristes, tan tristes que tienen alma! sings our poet Antonio Machado in his Campos de Castilla. Is the sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon them? Do they not suffer?
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.
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.
One of these, called Machado, when he had learned the Arabic language, went afterwards by land to the straits of the Red Sea, and from thence by Cambaya to Balagarte, and settled with the sabayo or lord of Goa, passing always for a Moor. This man was afterwards very serviceable to Albuquerque, as will be seen hereafter.
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 dignity, by the unity of a life that was entirely devoted to the cult of intellectual beauty, and by the prestige exerted about him by his work and by his personality, Machado de Assis succeeded, despite a nature that was averse to acclaim and little inclined to public appearance, in being considered and respected as the first among his country's men-of-letters: the head, if that word can denote the idea, of a youthful literature which already possesses its traditions and cherishes above all its glories ... His life was one of the most regulated and peaceful after he had given up active journalism, for like so many others, he began his career as a political reporter, paragrapher and dramatic critic."
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