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This same lack of communication was in a sense still true at the time he wrote his essay. What was thus needed and beneficial from the standpoint of national culture prejudiced the interests of national literature, says Verissimo.
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 María. According to Verissimo, Innocencia is one of the country's few genuinely original novels.
The noted Brazilian critic, José Verissimo, in a short but important essay on the deficiencies of his country's letters, has expressed serious doubt as to whether there exists a genuinely Brazilian literature. "I do not know," he writes, "whether the existence of an entirely independent literature is possible without an entirely independent language."
His career has covered the fields of journalism, politics, education and fiction. Although his work is of uneven worth, no doubt because of his unceasing productivity, he is reckoned by so exacting a critic as Verissimo as one of Brazil's most important writers, one of the few, in fact, that will be remembered by posterity.
"Brazilian poetry," says Verissimo in the little essay already referred to, "was already in the seventeenth century superior to Portuguese verse." He foresaw a time when it would outdistance the mother country. In the early days it naturally lacked the solidarity that comes from easy communication between literary centers.
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.
Coelho Netto is considered one of the chief writers of the modern epoch. "He is really an idealist," writes Verissimo, "but an idealist who has drunk deeply of the strong, dangerous milk of French naturalism." He sees nature through his soul rather than his eyes, and has been much influenced by the mystics of Russia, Germany and Scandinavia.
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.
Romanticism, as in other countries, gave way in turn to realism and various other movements current in those turbulent decades. Sometimes the changes came not as a natural phase of literary evolution, but rather as the consequence of pure imitation. Thus, Verissimo tells us, Symbolism, in Brazil, was a matter of intentional parroting, in many cases unintelligent.
He says that he is full of bloodthirstiness against the Jewish idea of God, and believes that since the writings of Hume and Schopenhauer, positive Christianity has become a sheer impossibility, and more of the same import. This is certainly “fortissimo,” but not therefore by any means “verissimo.”
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