“It is probable,” says Milkau to Lentz during one of their numerous discussions, in words that may have suggested this criticism to Ferrero and that may be applicable to our own nation,--“it is probable that our fate will be to transform this country from top to bottom, to substitute another civilization for all the culture, religion and traditions of a people. It is a new conquest, slow, dour, peaceful in its means, but terrible in its ambitious schemes. The substitution must be so pure and luminous that upon it may not fall the bitter curse of devastation. In the meantime we are a dissolvent of the race of this country. We soak into the nation’s clay and soften it; we mix ourselves with the natives and kill their traditions, and spread confusion among them.… No one will understand anyone else; there is a confusion of tongues; men coming from everywhere--bring with them the images of their several gods; they are all alien to each other; there is no communion of thought; men and women do not make love to each other in the same words.… Everything is disintegrating; one civilization falls and is transformed into an unknown one.… The remodelling of the nation is being set back. There is tragedy in the soul of a Brazilian when he feels that his race will not last for evermore. The law of nature is that like begets like.… And here tradition is broken; the father will not transmit his own image to his son; the language is dying; the old aspirations of the race, the deep-rooted desires for a distinct individuality, will become dumb; the future will not understand the past.”[2] Ferrero is quite right in indicating the great non-literary importance of the novel; indeed, Brazilian criticism, as a whole, has in the consideration of _Chanaan_ been so dazzled by the language and the social implications of the novel that it has overlooked or condoned its structural defects as a work of art. But not all readers will agree with Ferrero, I imagine, as to the excessive vagueness of the end. Hardly any other type of ending would have befitted a novel that treats of transition, of a landscape that enthralls, of possibilities that founder, not through the malignance of fate so much as through the stupidity, the cupidity, the crassness of man. There is an epic swirl to the finale that reminds one of the disappearance of an ancient deity in a pillar of dust. For an uncommon man like Milkau an uncommon end was called for.