Page:Brazilian short stories.djvu/11

Rh of such natures—his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality, and when what was meant to be humor falls away to caricature.

Labato's work in every phase is first of all an act of nationalism. To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil—the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future lies in the interior of the country, away from the cosmopolitanism of the littoral. Yet his practise largely belies this implied regionalism.

That he is gifted with the rare faculty of self-criticism may be seen from a letter I received from him some time after I had introduced him to North American readers in a newspaper article.

"I was born,” he wrote, "on the 18th of April, 1883, in Tabaute, State of Sao Paulo, the son of parents who owned a coffee plantation. I began my studies in the city, proceeding later to Sao Paulo, where I matriculated as a law student, being graduated, like everybody else, as a Bachelor of Laws. Fond of literature, I read a great deal in my youth: my favorite authors were Kipling, Maupassant, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Wells, Dickens, Camillo Castello Branco, Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis .... but I never allowed myself to be dominated by any one." (Let me interrupt the letter long enough to quote Labato on literary influences. In his stimulating collection of critiques entitled “Idéas de Jéca Tatu" he has said: “Let us agree that imitation is, in fact, the greatest of creative forces. He imitates who assimilates