Prophecy in Past Tense
Brazil, Land of the Future. By Stefan Zweig. (Cassell. los. 6d.)
THE practical British reader will be more than a little shocked by the exuberant enthusiasm and candid intuition of Stefan Zweig's last book. It retrains true to its title from the first to the last page, but obviously only in a past tense, as if the author were trying to make the reader feel the future in the four-hundred year history. One would have wished that, instead of prophesying, Zweig had limited himself to a description of the unplanned experiment upon which hangs the fate of the whole subcontinent that is called Brazil and, which he understood so well. If we manage to disentangle our- selves from the mass of adjectives which try to give force to a slightly unconvincing prophecy, we shall probably find more truth about Brazil as a nation in this book than in any other so far written by a foreigner, for the author did not care for hunting or exploring. Even then we should have to overlook the inaccuracies of detail, which are many; for though Zweig himself points out that few people outside America know that Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, many of the words he uses to give local colour have, in the English transla- tion, a distinct Spanish flavour which cannot be attributed only to mis-spelling, and the historic figures of the country are not always found in the .right places, either in space or in time.
After all this preliminary sifting, we shall keep the description of the growth of towns like Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Bahia, an accurate geographical vision of the difficulties which have held back the development of all the wealth which lies hidden beyond a tremendous barrier of mountains and the bare outline of the his- torical and economical surveys. Yet in that outline, divested of the prophetic tone, we shall nevertheless find the prophecy expressed in the general lines of Brazil's progress. The prophecy is implicit in the high degree of indetermination that has surrounded Brazilian affairs from the very beginning, and from the fascination of which the most sceptical reader cannot escape. It is quite a different thing, and rather embarrassing to the sceptical reader, to attempt to prove that this high degree of indetermination is a blessing—the builder of the future, and not the ingredient which has been power- less to arrest a progress which was possibly due to Very different,
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