In this novelized document upon Brazil’s racial problems and popular customs a certain and facile symbolism seems to inhere. Milkau is, as we have seen, the blend of Christianity and Socialism,--two concepts which, for all their recent historic enmity, are closely related, though by no means identical, in philosophical background. Lentz is the apostle of Nietzscheanism. Mary is the suffering land, a prey to the worse elements. The pot that melts the peoples melts their philosophies. So are they fused in this book, which terminates in a cloud, as of the first smoke to rise from the crucible. _Chanaan_ is not, for all its novelty and substantiality, the “splendid alliance of artistic perfection and moral grandeur” that one of its countless panegyrists has discovered it to be. Neither does it contain that mixture of Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Maeterlinck and Anatole France which was found in it by an editorial writer in the _Jornal do Commercio_. Even Verissimo, it seems to me, exaggerated the artistic importance of the novel in his enthusiasm--a rare thing in Verissimo--over the newness and the social significance of the book. He speaks of its drama as being “curto, rapido e intenso,” yet surely there is nothing “brief” or “rapid” in the telling of _Chanaan_, though intense it undoubtedly is. “New in theme,” he wrote, “new in inspiration and conception, new in style, _Chanaan_ is the first and only manifestation worthy of appreciation among the new spiritual and social currents that are everywhere influencing literature and art. This novel brought to literature, not only Brazilian but Portuguese as well, human and social preoccupations, and modern forms of expression.… It may well be that chronologically some other came before him, but in art excellency is more important than priority.… This is the first novel of its kind in Brazil or Portugal. One may note the lack of action, that is, a more or less complicated plot.… _Chanaan_, then, belongs in the category of contemporary literature. The intense drama that animates it is chiefly internal, but the feelings, the sensations, the ideas vibrate in it like deeds.” Like deeds, in truth, for feelings, sensations and ideas are the raw material of action; more, the motive power itself of “action.” Verissimo is not so much blind to the artistic deficiencies of _Chanaan_ as he is unmindful of them. He readily grants that “not all the episodes adjust themselves perfectly to the central action of the novel or even to the general fact that it presents.… In a detailed analysis of the architecture of the book perhaps other objections would be possible, but contemplating the structure as a whole--and this is how a work of art should be viewed--the impression is one of solid beauty. _Chanaan_ is truly a work of talent in the most noble acceptation and the rarest application of that word. With its generous inspiration, its penetrating symbolism