As for myself, I adore critics: I read them with unction, I write down their observations, I correct myself when their indications seem accurate, I wish to make mine their experience of human things.

It was on the occasion of the appearance of these two books of mine: O crime do Padre Amaro and O Primo Basílio, that people in Portugal began to talk of Realism and of some other institution that they say is called the New Idea. Now my name has been in Portugal and in Brasil, generally connected to that realism and with that other new institution. I call it an institution, because I don't know if it is a new art, a new political party, a new religion or a new philosophy; I do not know even if it might not be a new club or an insurance company. I do not believe that it was born in France, in England or in Germany, the three great thinking nations. I suppose it to be of Portuguese origin and entirely local. I ignore its ends, its program, its methods, if it ever sent forth, as would be its style, its Letter to the Corinthians, and whether it brings us any new conception of the Universe!

However, in the documents that I have before me, I am marked out as "one of its leaders." From which I deduce that there must be others, perhaps seven—as before Thebes! In a book of verse that I have just received, introduced by a learned and loved master, I read on p.2 that "Lisbon welcomed with Hosannas the heralds of the New Idea." I conclude that we had, as others before us, our triumphal entrance in Jerusalem, and I can picture from here our estimable railway station sounding with psalms and green with palms! Anyway, it seems that our day of play and laughter was short, because a recent newspaper tells me to: "Behold them, now, under the blows of this prodigious athlete, prostrated on the ground and biting the dust, the men of the New Idea." I conclude that we were defeated by a solitary monster, a freakish being in the fashion of Polyphemus or the lover of Omphale, and that, of those of the New Idea, as of the wing of the Saxon cavalry after the battle of Hastings, nothing remains but a litter of corpses, over which hover the ravens of Usk!

Such was the short life and tragic death of a national idea that, according to the newspaper's affirmations, cost my life and that of its other leaders!

Well, I am associated to with both these movements, and if I still ignore what could be the New Idea, I know more or less what they call over there the Realist School. I believe that in Portugal and in Brazil they call "realism" — a term that was old in 1840 — the artistic movement that in France and England is known as "naturalism" or "experimental art." Let us then accept "realism," as a familiar and friendly nickname by which Portugal and Brazil know a certain phase in the evolution of art.

This movement met with great hostility in Portugal. In Brazil also (and I am not saying it without some patriotic spite) realism has been combated by superior talent and ideas.