And these various qualities seem but so many facets
of the man's unostentatious personality. He was not,
like Sylvio Romero, a nature compelled, out of some seem-
ing inner necessity, to quarrel ; his pages, indeed, are rest-
ful even when most interesting and most alive with
suggestion and stimulating thought. His Portuguese,
surely, is not so beautiful as the Spanish of his twin-
spirit of Uruguay, Jose Enrique Rodo, but there is some-
thing in both these men that places them apart from their
contemporaries who practised criticism. They were
truly modern in the better sense of that word; they
brought no sacrifices to the altar of novelty, of sensation,
of an unreasoned, wholesale dumping of the past. They
did not confuse modernity wth up-to-date-ness ; they did
not go into ecstasies for the sake of enthusiasm itself.
They would have been "modern" in any age, and per-
haps for that very reason a certain classic repose hovers
over their pages. Each knew his classics; each knew his
moderns. But I doubt whether either ever gave him-
self much concern over these really futile distinctions, —.
JOS£ VERISSIMO 167

futile, that is, when mouthed merely as hard and fast
differences, as if restless, "romantic" spirits did not
exist among the ancients, and as if, today, no serene
soul may dwell in his nook apart, watching the world roll
on. Such a serenity lives in the pages of the Uruguayan
and of the Brazilian; like all things born of human effort,
they will lose as the years roll on, but something of per-
manence is there because Verissimo, like Rodo, possessed
the secret of seizing upon something universal in what-
ever he chose to consider.
