Yet note how Lobato, for all his nationalism, in the very paragraph that opens his somewhat uncritical critique, employs a German word, soon followed by a French, and all this a few seconds before ridiculing volapuk! Not that this need necessarily vitiate his argument, which has, to my way of thinking, far stronger points against it. But it does serve to indicate, I believe, that the world has grown too small for the artificial insistence upon a nationalism in literature which only too often proves the disguise of our primitive, unreasoned loyalties. Lobato’s unconscious use of these foreign terms provided, at the very moment he was denying it, a proof of the interpenetration of alien cultures. He has, too strongly for art as we now understand it, the regional outlook; for him Brazil is not the Brazil that we know on the map, or know as a political entity; it is the interior. His very nationalism refers, in this aspect, to but part of his own nation, though, to be fair, it is his theory that sins more seriously than his practice. “Nietzsche,” he says elsewhere in the book, “served here as a pollen. It is the mission of Nietzsche to fecundate whatever he touches. No one leaves him shaped in the uniformity of a certain mould; he leaves free, he leaves as _himself_. (The italics are Lobato’s.) His aphorism--_Vademecum? Vadetecum!_--is the kernel of a liberating philosophy. Would you follow me? Follow yourself!” Now this, allowing for the personal modifications Nietzsche himself concentrates into his crisp question and answer, is the attitude of an Ibsen, a Wagner; in the new world, of a Darío, of a Rodó, and of all true leaders, who would lead their followers to self-leadership. And once again Lobato answers himself with his own citations, for he himself, showing the effect of Nietzsche upon certain of the Brazilian writers--a liberating effect, and one which helped them to a realization of their own personalities--produces the most telling of arguments in favour of legitimate foreign influences. His characteristic attitude of indignation crops out at every turn. In an essay upon _A Estatua do Patriarcha_, dedicated to the noble figure of José Bonifacio de Andrade, he gives a patient summary of the man’s achievements--as patient as his nervous manner and his trenchant language can accomplish. As he approaches his climax, he becomes almost telegraphic: “He (that is, Bonifacio) works in the dark. “His strength is faith. “His arms, suggestion. “His target, the cry of Ipiranga. “The work that he is then accomplishing is too intense not to sweep aside all obstacles thrust in his path; his power of suggestion is too strong not to conquer the Prince Regent; his look too firm for the shot not to hit the bull’s eye. “He conquered. “The fatherland went into housekeeping for itself and it was he who ordered the arrangement of all the furniture and the standards of a free life.