From its early days down to the end of the XVIIIth century, the literature of Brazil is dominated by Portugal; the land, intellectually as well as economically, is a colony. The stirrings of the century reach Brazil around 1750, and the interval from then to 1830, the date of the Romanticist triumph in France, marks what has been termed a transitional epoch. After 1830, letters in Brazil display a decidedly autonomous tendency (long forecast, for that matter, in the previous phases), and exhibit that diversity which has characterized French literature since the Romantics went out of power. For it is France that forms the chief influence over latter-day Brazilian letters. So true is this that Costa, with personal exaggeration, can write: “I consider our present literature, although written in Portuguese, as a transatlantic branch of the marvellous, intoxicating French literature.”[21] There can be no doubt as to the immense influence exercised upon the letters of Spanish and Portuguese America by France. A Spanish cleric,[22] author of an imposing fourteen-volume history of Spanish literature on both shores of the Atlantic, has even made out France as the arch villainess, who with her wiles has always managed to corrupt the normally healthy realism of the Spanish soul. Only yesterday, in Brazil, a similar, if less ingenious, attack was launched against the same country on the score of its denationalizing effect. Yet it is France which was chiefly responsible for that modernism (1888-) which infused new life into the language and art of Spanish America, later (1898) affecting the motherland itself. And if literary currents have since, in Spanish America, veered to a new-world attitude, so are they turning in Brazil. From this to the realization that Art has no nationality is a forward step; some day it will be taken. As in the United States, so in Brazil, side by side with the purists and the traditionalists a new school is springing up,--native yet not necessarily national in a narrow sense; a genuine national personality is being forged, whence will come the literature of the future. As to the position of the writer in Brazil and Spanish America, it is still a very precarious one, not alone from the economic viewpoint but from the climatological. “Intellectual labour in Brazil,” wrote Romero, “is torture. Wherefore we produce little; we quickly weary, age and soon die.… The nation needs a dietetic regimen … more than a sound political one. The Brazilian is an ill-balanced being, impaired at the very root of existence; made rather to complain than to invent, contemplative rather than thoughtful; more lyrical and fond of dreams and resounding rhetoric than of scientific, demonstrable facts.” Such a short-lived, handicapped populace has everything to do with literature, says this historian. “It explains the precocity of our talents, their speedy exhaustion, our facility in learning and the superficiality of our inventive faculties.”