Brazilian literature - Cristo Raul

24 BRAZILIAN LITERATURE
this to the realization that Art has no nationality is a forward
step; some day it will be taken. As in the United
States, so in Brazil, side by side with the purists and the
traditionalists a new school is springing up,—native yet
not necessarily national in a narrow sense; a genuine na-
tional personality is being forged, whence will come the
literature of the future.
As to the position of the writer in Brazil and Spanish
America, it is still a very precarious one, not alone from
the economic viewpoint but from the climatological. "In-
tellectual labour in Brazil," wrote Romero, "is torture.
Wherefore we produce little; we quickly weary, age and
soon die. . . . The nation needs a dietetic regimen
. . . more than a sound political one. The Brazilian is
an ill-balanced being, impaired at the very root of exis-
tence; made rather to complain than to invent, contem-
plative rather than thoughtful; more lyrical and fond
of dreams and resounding rhetoric than of scientific,
demonstrable facts." Such a short-lived, handicapped
populace has everything to do with literature, says this
historian. "It explains the precocity of our talents, their
speedy exhaustion, our facility in learning and the super-
ficiality of our inventive faculties."
Should the writer conquer these difficulties, others await
him. The reading public, especially in earlier days, was
always small. "They say that Brazil has a population
of about 13,000,000," comments a character in one of
Coelho Netto's numerous novels. "Of that number
12,800,000 can't read. Of the remaining 200,000,
150,000 read only newspapers, 50,000 read French books,
30,000 read translations. Fifteen thousand others read