“His inspiration,” wrote Verissimo, considering the verse of Bilac, “is limited to a few poetic themes, all treated with a virtuosity perhaps unparalleled amongst us … but without an intensity of feeling corresponding to the brilliancy of the form, which always is more important in him. This is the characteristic defect of the Parnassian esthetics, of which Sr. Bilac is our most illustrious follower, and to which his poetic genius adjusted itself perfectly and intimately.” I believe that Verissimo was slightly misled by Bilac’s versified professions. There is no doubt that Bilac’s temperament, as I have tried to show, was eminently suited to some such orientation as was sought by those Parnassians who understood what they were about; there is as little doubt, in my mind, that his feeling was intense, though not deep. He may have spoken of the crystalline strophe and the etcher’s needle--which, indeed, he often employed with the utmost skill,--but there were moments when nothing but huge marbles and the sculptor’s chisel would do. It was with such material that he carved _A Alvorada de Amor_. “If Sr. Machado de Assis was,” continues Verissimo, “more than twenty years previous to Bilac, our first artist-poet,--if other contemporaries or immediate predecessors of Bilac also practised the Parnassian esthetics, none did it with such manifest purpose, and, above all with such triumphant skill.…” I am not sure whether Verissimo is right in having asked of Bilac a more contemporary concern with the currents of poetry. The critic grants that Bilac is perhaps the most brilliant poet ever produced by his nation, “but other virtues are lacking in him without which there can be no truly great poet. I do not know but that I am right in supposing that, conscious of his excellence, he remained a stranger to the social, philosophical and esthetic movement that is today everywhere renewing the sources of poetry. And it is a great pity; for he was amongst us perhaps one of the most capable of bringing to our anaemic poetry the new blood which, with more presumption than talent, some poets--or persons who think themselves such--are trying to inject, without any of the gifts that abound in him.” Bilac, as we have seen, did, toward the end of his life, become a more social spirit. But this was not necessary to his pre-eminence as a poet. He was, superbly, himself. Rather that he should have given us so freely of the voluptuary that was in him--voluptuary of feeling, of charm, of form, of language, of taste--than that, in a mistaken attempt to be a “complete” man, he should sprawl over the varied currents of the day and hour. For it is far more certain that each current will find its masterly spokesman in art, than that each artist will become a masterly spokesman for all of the currents. FOOTNOTES: