Alencar is no realist nor is he concerned with sheer accuracy. _Guarany_, the one book by which he is sure to be remembered for many a year, is, as we have seen, a prose poem in which the love of the Indian prince Pery for the white Cecy, daughter of a Portuguese noble, is unfolded against a sumptuous tapestry of the national scene. Alencar wrote other novels, of the cities, but in Brazilian literature he is identified with his peculiar Indianism. From the stylistic standpoint he has been accused of bad writing; like so many of his predecessors--and followers--he plays occasional havoc with syntax, as if the wild regions he depicts demanded an analogous anarchy of language. Yet Costa, granting all this, adds that “before José de Alencar the Portuguese language as written in Brazil was, without exaggeration, a horrible affair. What man today possesses sufficient courage to brave with light heart that voluminous agglomeration of verses in the _Confederacão dos Tamoyos_, in _Colombo_, in _Caramurú_ or _Uruguay_? In prose … but let us rather not speak of it. It is enough to read the novels of Teixeira de Souza and Manoel de Almeida.”[20] This same style is viewed by others as a herald of the nervous prose of another man of the sertões, Euclydes da Cunha, who has enshrined them in one of the central works of modern Brazil. _Sertanismo_ itself, however, was initiated by Bernardo Joaquim da Silva Guimarães (1827-1885) in such works as _Pelo Sertão_, _Mauricio_, _Escrava Isaura_. He was followed in this employment of the sertão as material for fiction by Franklin Tavora (1842-1888) and particularly Escragnole Taunay (1843-1899), whose _Innocencia_, according to Verissimo, is one of the country’s few genuinely original novels. Mérou, in 1900, called it “the best novel written in South America by a South American,”--a compliment later paid by Guglielmo Ferrero to Graça Aranha’s _Chanaan_. Viscount Taunay’s famous work--one might call it one of the central productions of Brazilian fiction--is but scant fare to the contemporary appetite in fiction, yet it has been twice translated into French, and has been put into English, Italian, German, Danish and even Japanese.