“Our literature lacks original character,” says the talkative Gomes in _A Capital Federal_, one of Netto’s earliest novels (1893),--less a novel, indeed, than a series of impressions in which not the least element is the fairly unceasing chatter of its persons. “It is not really a national literature because, unhappily, nobody concerns himself with the nation. The eyes of our poets scan the constellations of other heavens, the waters of other rivers, the verdure of other forests.” Again: “We are still a people in process of formation,--still at the beginning of life and yet, at the age when Greece was lyrical, in the youthful days in which all men try to compose poems of religion and hope for the shelter of the soul, we despair, we are pessimistic.… By conviction? Because of suffering? Absolutely not. Scarcely by imitation. We lament in the cradle and ask for death, Nirvana. We begin reading with the Book of Job. Show me our Romantic period, which is, so to speak, the adolescence of Art, in its second phase, after the renaissance. We had none. We leaped into naturalism, which is analysis, and already we are headed for the cachexy of decadentism.…” There is much to be said against the plaints of this citation, whether one consider its nationalistic implications or its insinuation that Brazil’s Romantic period lacked genuineness. I quote it, however, to show that at the very beginning of his career Netto intended a conscious reorientation of the Brazilian novel away from the naturalism of Azevedo in the direction of what we may term neo-romanticism. Both men are concerned with what blurred thinking so readily calls the baser passions; both are sensualists, each envisaging life not so much through a different theory as through a different temperament.