More important to the history and practice of the Brazilian novel is José de Alencar, famous for his _Guarany_ and _Iracema_, the first of which, in the form of an opera libretto set to music by the native composer Carlos Gomes, has made the rounds of the operatic world. Alencar is to the novel what Gonçalves Dias is to the poem: the typical Indianist. But Brazilians find his Indianism superior to that of the poet in both sincerity and majesty. “His Indians do not express themselves like doctors from Coimbra; they speak as Nature has taught them, loving, living and dying like the lesser plants and animals of the earth. Their passions are as sudden and as violent as the tempest,--rapid conflagrations that burst forth for an instant, flaring, glaring and soon disappearing.”[17] At his best Alencar is really a poet who has chosen prose as his medium. He uses the Indian milieu, as Gonçalves Dias in his poetry, for the descriptive opportunities it affords. Brazilians rarely speak of his plots, which are simplicity itself; what fascinates them, even today, is his rich palette, which challenges comparison even with the opulent coloration of Coelho Netto and Graça Aranha. Chief among foreign influences were the Frenchmen Chateaubriand, de Vigny, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo. Our own Cooper, himself an “Indianist” contemporaneous with Alencar, influenced the Brazilian innovator, but not in the manner that Brazilian critics have seemed to discern. Alencar himself, in a rare document, has sought to refute those who find his _Guarany_ a novel in Cooper’s style. To him Cooper was, first of all, the “poet of the sea.” As far as concerned American poetry, Alencar’s model (and model is his own word) was Chateaubriand. “But my master was that glorious Nature which surrounds me, and in particular the magnificence of the deserts which I studied in early youth and which were the majestic portals through which I penetrated into my country’s past.… It was from this source, from this vast, secular book that I drew the pages of _Guarany_ and _Iracema_ and many another.… From this source, and not from the works of Chateaubriand, still less from those of Cooper, which were only a copy of the sublime original that I had read within my heart. “Brazil, like the United States and most other countries of America, has a period of conquest in which the invading race destroys the indigenous. This struggle presents analogous characters because of the similarity of the native tribes. Only in Peru and Mexico do they differ. “Thus the Brazilian novelist who seeks the plot of his novel in this period of invasion cannot escape a point of contact with the American writer. But this approximation comes from history; it is inevitable and not the result of imitation. “If neither Chateaubriand nor Cooper had existed, the American novel would have appeared in Brazil in due season.