Page:Brazilian short stories.djvu/10

6BRAZILIAN SHORT STORIES written, too plainly indicative of natural literary talent, to be relegated to the corner where readers' jeremiads usually wail, and that, instead, it was "featured" upon the first page. From that day the die was cast. The episode, in my opinion, is far more important than it appears. For, whatever form in which the man's later writings are published, they are in a more important degree just what this initial venture was: a protest, a means of civic betterment, a national contribution.

It was with the collection named “Urupês”(Fungi) that Lobato definitely established himself. Upon the success of that book he has built a powerful publishing house, a splendid magazine (“Revista do Brasil”—The Brazilian Review), a veritable literary movement. He excels in stinging comment upon current affairs; he writes books for the primary schools; he is a practical nature bent upon visibly altering the national course. As a writer, he is “anti-literary,” scorning the finer graces. Together with a similar group in Buenos Aires he underestimates the aesthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapory spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him, as it does Manuel Gálvez in Argentina, or Upton Sinclair in the United States, injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely is the criticism that may be made against him when-as is characteristic