Lobato’s attitude toward education may be gleaned from his child’s book _Little Snub-Nose_ and the epigraph from Anatole France. He wishes to cultivate the imagination rather than cram the intellect. And even in this second reader for public schools--refreshingly free of the “I-see-a-cat” method--one can catch now and then his intention of instructing and satirizing the elder population. To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil--the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future--lies in the interior of the country. There he finds the genuine Brazilian, uncontaminated by the “esperanto of ideas and customs” characteristic of the centres that receive immigration from all over the world. There he discovers the raw material for the real national art, as distinguished from cities with their phantasmagoria of foreign importations. And for that art of the interior he has found the great precursor in Euclydes da Cunha--a truly remarkable writer upon whom the wandering Scot, Richard Cunninghame-Graham, drew abundantly, as we have seen, in his rare work upon that Brazilian mystic and fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro. “It was Euclydes da Cunha,” writes Lobato in his _Idéas de Jéca Tatú_, “who opened for us, in his _Sertões_, the gates to the interior of the country. The Frenchified Brazilian of the coast cities was astonished. Could there, then, be so many strong, heroic, unpublished, formidable things back there?… He revealed us to ourselves. We saw that Brazil isn’t São Paulo, with its Italian contingent, nor Rio, with its Portuguese. Art beheld new perspectives opened to it.” * * * * * To present a notion of Monteiro Lobato’s style and his general outlook, I shall confine myself to translating an excerpt or two from his most pithy volume, _Idéas de Jéca Tatú_. One of the pivotal essays is that entitled _Esthetica Official_ (Official Esthetics). “The work of art,” it begins, “is indicated by its coefficient of temperament, color and life--the three values that produce its unity, deriving the one from man, the other from milieu, the third from the moment. Art that flees this tripod of categories and that has as its human-factor the _heimatlos_ person (the man of many countries brought into evidence by the war); that has as _terroir_ the world and as epoch all Time, will be a superb creation when volapuk rules over the globe: until then, no! “Whence we derive a logical conclusion: the artist grows in proportion as he becomes nationalized. The work of art must reveal to the quickest glance its origin, just as the races denote their ethnological group through the individual type.”