French Background--Naturalists, Parnassians--Theophilo Dias, Raymundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira, Olave Bilac--The Novel--Aluizio de Azevedo, Machado de Assis--The Decadents--Later Developments. I The later course of Brazilian letters follows practically the same line traced by the reaction in France against the Romantic school. To and fro swings the pendulum of literary change in unceasing oscillation between dominance of the emotions and rule of the intellect. Life, as Havelock Ellis somewhere has shown, is an eternal process of “tumescence and detumescence”; the formula is quite true of literature. Buds and human beings alike swell to maturity in the womb of nature and then follows the inevitable contraction. So, in letters, the age of full expression is succeeded by one of repressed art,--the epoch of a blatant proclamative “ism” by an era of restraint and withdrawal. Who shall, in _a priori_ fashion, pretend to say that this “ism” is right and that one wrong? By their works alone shall ye know them. If, then, Romanticism in France, as subsequently elsewhere, gave way to a rapid succession of inter-reacting schools or groups, the phenomenon was the familiar one of literary oscillation. The Naturalists, nurtured upon advancing science, looked with scorn upon the emotional extravagances of the Romantics. To excessive preoccupation with the ego and with unreality, they opposed the critical examination and documentation of reality. Milieu, social environment, psychology ceased to be idealized; enthusiasm and exaltation were succeeded by cold scrutiny. The doctrine of “impersonality” (a most inartistic and psychologically impossible creed) was crystallized around the powerful literary personality of Flaubert, and Romantic egolatry looked as silly in the searching day of the new standards as last night’s flowers without the breath of spring and the moonlight that excuse the sweet folly they incite.