Page:Brazilian tales.djvu/26

22, 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.

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. The strange milieu breeds in both an intellectual langour that vents itself in long discussions, in breeding contemplation, mirages of the spirit. Milkau is gradually struck with something wrong in the settlement. Little by little it begins to dawn upon him that something of the Old-World hypocrisy, fraud and insincerity, is contaminating this