Isaac Goldberg

“ Canaan is of those novels that centre about an enthralling 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. ”

“ There is a distinct basis for comparison between Innocencia and the more famous Spanish American tale from Colombia; between these and Canaan, however, there is little similarity, if one overlook the poetic atmosphere that glamours all three. Aranha's masterpiece is of far broader conception than the other two; it adds to their lyricism an epic sweep inherent in the subject and very soon felt in the treatment. It is, in fact, a difficult novel to classify, impregnated as it is with a noble idealism, yet just as undoubtedly streaked with a powerful realism. ”

“ 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 Brazilian literature, so might such a novel achieve preeminence in our own. ”

“ When one considers the great percentage of illiteracy that still prevails in Southern America, and the inferior intellectual position which for years has been the lot of woman particularly in the Spanish and Portuguese nations, it is surprising that woman's prominence in the literary world should be what it is. ”

“ 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 . ”

“ 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. His style is derived chiefly from the Portuguese group of which Eça de Queiroz is the outstanding figure, and his language has been much affected by this attachment to the mother country. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For in nations where education is so limited and illiteracy so prevalent the manifold functions which in more highly developed nations are performed by many are perforce done by a few. Hence the spectacle in the new Spanish and Portuguese world, as in the old, of men and women who are at once journalists, novelists, dramatists, politicians, soldiers, poets and what not else. ”

“ If there be anything lacking in the array of modern writers it is a certain broad variety of subject and treatment to which other literatures have accustomed us.
It is not to be wondered at that in surroundings such as the Amazon affords an "Indian" school of literature should have arisen. We have an analogous type of fiction in United States literature, old and new, produced by similar causes. Brazilian "Indianism" reached its highest point perhaps in José Alencar's famous Guarany, which won for its author national reputation and achieved unprecedented success. ”

“ What was thus needed and beneficial from the standpoint of national culture prejudiced the interests of national literature, says Verissimo. He finds, too, that there is too little originality and culture among Brazilian writers, and that their work lacks sincerity and form (1899) . Poetry was too often reduced to the love of form while fiction was too closely copied from the French, thus operating to stifle the development of a national dramatic literature. ”

“ The author of Canaan has done other things, among which this book, which has long been known in French and Spanish, stands out as a document that marks an epoch in Brazilian history as well as a stage in Brazilian literature. Whether it is "the" great American novel is of interest only to literary politicians and pigeon-holers; it is "a" great novel, whether of America or Europe, and that suffices for the lover of belles lettres. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If women, however, have enshrined themselves in the patriotic annals of the Southern republics, they have shown that they are no less the companions of man in the more or less agreeable arts of peace. ”

“ The novel is really a piece of historical muck-raking and was long an object of resentment in the republic.
Everything from Taunay's pen reveals a close communion with nature, an intimate understanding of the psychology of the vast region's inhabitants. His shorter tales, which I hope later to present to the English-reading public, reveal these powers at their best. Now it is a soldier who goes to war, only, like a military Enoch Arden, to return and find his sweetheart in another's arms ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have singled out, rather arbitrarily it must be admitted, a few of the characteristic works that preceded the appearance of Graça Aranha's Canaan, the novel that was lifted into prominence by Guglielmo Ferrero's fulsome praise of it as the "great American novel." [2] For South America, no less than North, is hunting that literary will o' the wisp. Both Maria and Innocencia have been mentioned for that honor. ”

“ The statue in Colombia to Policarpa Salavarieta is but a symbol of South American gratitude to a host of women who fought side by side with their husbands during the trying days of the early nineteenth century. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Numerous questions are touched upon in the course of the leisurely narrative, everywhere opening up new vistas of thought; for Aranha is philosophically, critically inclined; his training is cosmopolitan, as his life has been ”

“ 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. ”