Bilac’s seeming recantation at the end was the result of just such a clash between artistry and harsh reality. Had he chosen, in the beginning, to devote his poetic gifts to humanity, he might have been remembered longer as a man, but it is doubtful whether he would have achieved his standing as an artist. And Brazil would have been the poorer by a number of poems that have doubtless enriched the emotional life of the nation. I wonder whether, in his later days, Bilac did not in a manner confuse art with social service. There are souls in whom the human comedy kindles the fires of song; such as they sing,--they do not theorize. Bilac was not one of them. There was nothing to prevent his serving humanity in any of the countless ways in which man may be more than wolf to man. But he himself, as an artist, was not fashioned to be a social force. He was the born voluptuary. “Art,” he said, “is the dome that crowns the edifice of civilization: and only that people can have an art which is already a people,--which has already emerged triumphant from all the tests through which the character of nationalities is purified and defined.…” Here again, his practice excels his theory. There is in him little Brazilianism, and even when he uses the native suggestion, as in his brilliant _O Caçador de Esmeraldas_ (The Emerald-Hunter, an epic episode of the seventeenth-century sertão) he is, as every poet should be, first of all himself. “Perhaps in the year 2500 there will exist diverse literatures in the vast territory now comprising Brazil,” he prophesied, in disapproval of that sectionalism in letters which several times has tried to make a definite breach in the national literature. But is not all literature psychologically sectional? If the ambient is not filtered through the personality of the individual, is the product worth much more as art than a county report? In our own country, of late, there has been much futile talk of Chicago literature and New York literature, and other such really political chat. “Isms” within “isms,” which make good “copy” for the newspapers and magazines, and which, no doubt, may have a certain sociological significance. But when you or I pick up a book or a poem, what care we, after all, for the land of its origin or even the life of its author, except as both are revealed in the work? Was not one of Bilac’s own final admonitions to his nation’s youth to “Love your art above all things and have the courage, which I lacked, to die of hunger rather than prostitute your talent?” And “above all things” means above the unessential intrusion of petty sectionalism, partisan aim, political purpose, moral exhortation, national pride. I have no quarrel, then, with Bilac’s hopes for a national literature, with his aspirations for our common humanity. But I am happy that he was content to leave that part of him for public life rather than contriving to press it willy-nilly into the service of his only half Parnassian muse.