“Years after having written _Guarany_” (Alencar wrote the book in his twenty-seventh year, and would have it that the tale occurred to him in his ninth year, as he was crossing the sertões of the North on the road from Ceará to Bahia) “I re-read Cooper in order to verify the observation of the critics, and I was convinced that it is of minor importance. There is not in the Brazilian novel a single personage whose type may be traced to the _Last of the Mohicans_, _The Spy_, _Ontario_, _The Sappers and Lionel Lincoln_.… Cooper considers the native from the social point of view and was, in the description of indigenous customs, a realist.… In _Guarany_ the savage is an ideal, which the writer tried to poetize, divesting him of the coarse incrustation in which he was swathed by the chroniclers, and rescuing him from the ridicule that the stultified remnants cast upon the almost extinct race. “But Cooper, say the critics, describes American nature. And what was he to describe if not the scene of his drama? Walter Scott before him had provided the model for these pen landscapes that form part of local color. “What should be investigated is whether the descriptions of _Guarany_ show any relationship or affinity to Cooper’s descriptions; but this is what the critics fail to do, for it means work and requires thought. In the meantime the comparison serves to show that they resemble each other neither in genre nor style.”[18] The Brazilian novelist, presenting thus his own case, hits precisely upon those two qualities--sea lore and realism--for which Cooper only yesterday, fifty years after Alencar wrote this piece of auto-criticism, was rediscovered to United States readers by Professor Carl Van Doren. “Not only did he outdo Scott in sheer accuracy,” writes the critic of the United States novel, “but he created a new literary type, the tale of adventure on the sea, in which, though he was to have many followers in almost every modern language, he has not been surpassed for vigour and swift rush of narrative.”[19]