“This lack of contact continues today (Verissimo wrote the essay toward the end of the XIXth century) and is greater now than it was for example during the Romantic period. There was always lacking the transmitting element, the plastic mediator of national thought, a people sufficiently cultured to be interested in that thought, or, at least, ready to be influenced by it. In the construction of a literature the people plays simultaneously a passive and an active rôle: it is in the people that the inspiration of poet and thinker has its source and its goal. Neither the one nor the other can abstract himself, for both form an integral part of the people. Perhaps only during our Romantic period, from 1835 to 1860, may it be said that this condition of communicability existed, limited to a tiny part of the country. The sentiment of a new nation co-operated effectively in creating for writers a sympathetic public, which felt instinctively in their work an expression of that nationality. Then we learned a great deal of French, some English and Italian, a smattering of German and became intellectually denationalized. A success such as that of Macedo’s _Moreninha_ is fairly inconceivable today. Success in literature, as in clothing, comes ready made from Paris. “Do not take me for a nationalist, and less still, for a nativist. I simply am verifying a fact with the same indifference with which I should perform the same office in the domains of geology. I am looking for the explanation of a phenomenon; I believe I have found it, and I present it. “So that, from this standpoint, it may be said that it was the development of our culture that prejudiced our literary evolution. It seems a paradox, but it is simply a truth. Defective and faulty as it was, that culture was enough to reveal to our reading public the inferiority of our writers, without any longer counterbalancing this feeling by the patriotic ardor of the period during which the nationality was being formed. The general cultural deficiency of our writers of all sorts in Brazil is, then, one of the defects of our literature. Doing nothing but repeat servilely what is being done abroad, without any originality of thought or form, without ideas of their own, with immense gaps in their learning, and no less defects of instruction that are today common among men of medium culture in the countries that we try to imitate and follow, we cannot compete before our readers with what they receive from the foreign countries at first hand, by offering them a similar product at second.