Chapter II

the Literature of the Young Democracies

Spanish classicism and French romanticism—Their influence in America—Modernism—The work of Ruben Dario—The novel—The conte or short story

The ancient Spanish colonies, freed from the political authority of Spain, still followed her in the matter of literature; republican autonomy and intellectual subjection were not incompatible. Towards 1825 writers in prose and verse were by no means imitating France, although she gave them her declamatory politics and her revolutionary code. Educated in Spain, the best minds were seeking their inspiration in the Spanish literature of the eighteenth century: the works of the classic Quintana, of Moratin, Gallego, Lista, and Jovellanos dominated the American schools.

A lasting divorce, this of a romantic politics and a classic literature. When letters were invaded by romanticism, with its lyric lamentations, a sane realism—the realism of men preoccupied with finances or laborious codifications—struggled against the swamping waves of all this rhetoric. Literary forms, long out of fashion in France and even in Spain, still aroused enthusiasm in America; the American author adopted the realism of the naturalistic novel when the French schools were already given over to symbolism, and at a later date he became first a modernist and then a decadent, while in France a classic restoration had set in. To the real current of European literature South America has preferred ephemeral excesses, and the work of coteries, which she has imitated with enthusiasm. It is barely ten years since South American letters began to reflect—curiously behind the times—the direction taken by French poetry. The literature of the new continent, to-day invaded by books and ideas, follows a path parallel to that followed by French and Spanish letters. Every novelty finds an echo, and the very diversity of imitation ought before long to give rise to a final originality.

Poets, both romantic and classic, threw themselves into the social conflicts of the time; whence that kinship between poetry and eloquence, already recognised by Brunetière in France.[1] In American poetry we find the civic accent, eulogies of liberty, odes to civilisation and the mother-country, rather than elegies or "states of soul." Tyrtæus would be popular there rather than Anacreon; Béranger would be imitated rather than De Musset. Classicism thus takes the form of a civic poetry; calm and mannered, it sings of political subjects, of progress, independence, and the victories of liberty over theocracy.

In Mexico, Ecuador, and the Argentine, the first generation of republican poets were incontestably disciples of the master of the Spanish masters—Quintana, whose grave and virile odes exalted the printing-press, philanthropy, and progress: new deities erected by the French Revolution upon the ancient altars. His emphasis, the movement of his verse, and the breath of oratory which enlivens his stanzas, charmed and subjugated the writers oversea. Liberty, so barely conquered, gave birth to a poetry which sang of heroes and of battles. Ideas and forms were inspired by Quintana; their best eulogy is comparison with their model. Thus Olmedo, the second poet of this classic age, is known as the American Quintana.

Those who acclaimed the Revolution in Mexico also were disciples of the Spanish poet; republican orators in verse, Quintana Roo or Sanchez del Tagle, who describe the heroes of the War of Independence. An eminent poetess, Salome Ureña de Henriquez, of San Domingo, sang of civilisation and the native land with a most austere and noble eloquence.

A political poet again, Juan Cruz, of Argentina, gracefully proclaimed the glory of the Unitarian party and that of the reformer Rivadavia.

The contemporary writers of the Revolution did not forget the instruction received in Spain, in the universities of the eighteenth century, where they studied in Latin and commented upon the classics of Greece and Rome. They read and imitated Horace and Virgil, and were inspired by the ancient democracies, and the heroes of Plutarch; the Isthmus of Panama was compared to that of Corinth. At their birth the Republics appointed consuls and triumvirs. In speeches and proclamations of the time we find numerous classical reminiscences; politicians and poets borrowed their images from Pindar, Horace, Homer, and Virgil.

The influence of the classics and of Quintana is especially to be remarked in Olmedo, the poet of Ecuador, who chanted the victory of Junin and the genius of Bolivar. The movement of his verses is that of a Latin ode, while the eloquence, sonority, and graceful progression of his stanzas recalls the Spanish classics.

The Venezuelan lyrist Bello, a true humanist, was inspired by Virgil, and attained a truly classic perfection.

But Quintana was not alone in serving as model to the lost colonies; others, the fiery Gallego, and Moratin, the author of delightful comedies; a critic, Alberto Lista; Melendez, Cienfugos, and Martinez de la Rosa, cultivators of a correct, elegant, and frigid form, were also imitated, and the imitators could not free themselves from their impoverished classicism. Olmedo (1780) and Bello (1781) were both masters of metre, taste, and harmony. It is not easy in their case to separate the politician from the artist, they themselves considering their art to be a high republican function; Olmedo counsels federation in his Canto à Junin, and José Eusebio Caro attacks the tyrant Lopez in a poem upon liberty, while Felipe Pardo writes political satires. Of the American democracies he says:

"Zar de tres tintas, indio, bianco y negro,
Que rige el continente americano
Y que se llama Pueblo Soberano."[2]

Towards 1840 classicism gave way to romanticism. The Revolution, the protest of individualism against the Spanish rule, disdained the old literary canons, having first condemned the old political system. The poets, still numerous, sought models in Spain. Arolas, Espronceda; Zorilla, the Duke de Rivas; and in France, Victor Hugo, de Musset, and Lamartine. Byron, too, had his disciples. All were romantic in life and work, pilgrims à la Childe Harold, who described Châtiments and were persecuted for liberty. Disorderly, imperfect, dominated by an inward dæmon who produced a continual exaltation, they portrayed the constant restlessness of their spirits. Romanticism in Europe was the triumph of the individual, of liberty, the lyrical poetry of confessions—the melancholy of René or the satanic pride of Manfred—the revenge, in short, of sentiment against reason. In art this stood for liberty, the cult of the exotic, the return to nature, the Gothic restoration, and war upon classic conventions.

Which among these elements could give the new generation in South America that enthusiasm which might evoke a romantic state of mind? Certainly not the national antiquities, remote and misunderstood. Although a few poets wrote Orientales without much sincerity, none sought to renew his lyrical gifts in the Aztec or Quechua traditions. But this imitation of the tendencies of French and Spanish letters was assisted by the lack of discipline found in the American character, which was more attracted by idealism and sentiment than by classic rigidity or reason. All things favoured romanticism; the political conflicts and the anarchy of the time formed Byronic heroes; tropical passion found its food in the sentimentalism of Lamartine and the ardour of De Musset, while the individual was developed by struggling against the tyrants. In the uncertain and barbaric life of these young democracies there was a confusion of rôles; the poet became the vates, the leader of the crowd, only to feel himself exiled among mediocrities, the victim of illiterates. Melancholy, exasperated individualism, the high mission of the poet, and solitude—these are romantic elements which are reflected in American literature.

The Colombian Caro believed in the "consoling mission" of the poet, and this mission, for the Argentine Andrade, was a priesthood and a prophetic gift. The poet appears "when the human caravan changes its route in the desert." But as a result of this mission Nemesis inflicts solitude and suffering. The South American poets abandon the world as a result of their despair:—

"Sufrirás el martirio
Que al nació poeta
Reserva el hado impío,"[3]

sings the Argentine Echeverria.

And Marmol:—

"Yo vivo solamente cuando feliz deliro
Que los terrenos lazos mi corazón rompió.
. . . . .
Venid porque yo gozo yo vivo solamente
Si pienso que he dejado la humanidad detras."[4]

The Peruvian Salaverry contemplates his heart:—

"Cual la ruina de un templo silencioso
Vacío, abandonado, pavoroso,
Sin luz y sin rumor."[5]

José Eusebio Caro, who has sung of liberty in admirable strophe, would hide himself in the forest:—

"Que los hombres ya me niegan
Una tumba en sus ciudades
En mi patria me expulsaron
De la casa de mis padres."[6]

These romantics were not, like Rousseau, inclined toward the simple life by an excess of artificial civilisation. Their melancholy, when it is not an echo of exotic griefs, is the cry of anguish of a noble mind lost in a barbarous republic. This contrast between the man and his surroundings very clearly explains the strong hold obtained by the romantic ideal; the literature of passion, pride, and revolt, it expresses a social condition of inner conflict and solitude.

The Argentine, Marmol, imitates Byron in his Pilgrim. Grandiloquent, passionate, and mournful, he curses the tyranny of Rosas. Echeverria, under a classic mantle, barely hides his romantic subjectivity, full of passion and a vague melancholy. In Venezuela Heriberto Garcia de Quevedo left a legacy of prodigiously long poems.

In Cuba Gertrudis Gomez de Avellanada, wearied and lyrical, exalted love in the accents of De Musset; the mulatto Placido wrote musical descriptive verse; Juan Clemente Zenea, translator of Leopardi and Longfellow, confessed, in musical elegiac verse, his disabused outlook upon life; and greater than any, Hérédia, the singer of Niagara, a fiery, suffering spirit, full of contrasts as his art, tells us of his sorrow and his faith; he sings of love and nature in beautiful imagery, admiring both the divine might and the intoxicating sensuality of the tropics.

In Mexico Espronceda and Lamartine inspired Fernando Calderon and Ignacio Rodriguez Galvan; Zorilla found a disciple in Manuel Flores, the poet of burning sensuality and savage nature. Brazil, as fruitful of romantics as Cuba, produced Gongalvez Diaz, who sang of the melancholy and nostalgia so well expressed by a word in his own tongue—saudades;—of sorrow, deliverance by knowledge, and the consolation of tears:—

"Men Deus, senhor men Deus, o que ha no mundo
        Que não seja soffrir?
O homen nasce, e vive um so instante
        E soffre até morrir!"[7]

In his love poetry there is a very, beautiful sincerity, although we may recognise the influence of many masters—Byron, Zorilla, and the French romantics. Cited by him, this line of Saint-Beuve's:—

"Mon Dieu, fais que je puisse aimer!"[8]

enables us to understand his plaints.

Casimiro de Abrou also essayed romantic subjects: solitude, misery, and exile. Alvares de Azevedo imitated Byron and De Musset, while a poet who did not versify, José de Alencar, expounded in his tales and novels a romantic conception of the Indian, simple and virtuous as one of Rousseau's characters.

We find this conception again in the work of a great poet of Uruguay, Zorilla de San Martin, who in Tabaré sang the struggles of the greedy conquerors and the ingenuous Americans.

Romanticism was not with these men merely a matter of art; their lives were no less troublous and lyrical than their poetry. Rebels and nomads, thirsting for democratic liberty, they were wasted in the struggle with tyrants, or sent early to the scaffold or into exile, as though fate respected the unity of their troubled career. Thus these disciples of Lamartine, imaginative and sensual, vehement and melancholy in their art, gave a sombre yet vivid colouring to a period of American history, the years between 1840 and 1860.

Andrade was conspicuous among all for his sonorous eloquence; he was the greatest by virtue of the oratory, wealth, and ambitious grandeur of his poems, vast compositions which recall the Légende des siècles, the Prometheus of Shelley, or the Ahasuerus of Edgar Quinet. Doubtless he is not the equal of his masters. But devoid of melancholy and restless passion, his rhetoric, his verbal wealth, and his sybilline accents exercised a powerful influence. Repeating the grandiloquent excesses of Hugo, he was the poet of democracy and the Latin race.

His Atlantide is the Latin future; Prometheus the eternal battle of thought and fanaticism. He is full of Spanish arrogance. Marvellously sonorous, his stanzas proclaim, with pomp and majesty, a romantic faith in America and liberty. The soul of Rome "destined to inaugurate history and embrace space," lives again beyond the ocean; Spain was the heir at first, until she choked beneath the "enervating shadow of the Papacy." France,

"Montana en cuya cumbre
Anida el genio humano,"[9]

was now the leading Latin nation, and Napoleon the instrument of the ancient imperial spirit. His sword

"Que sobre el mapa de la Europa absorta
Trazó fronteras, suprimió desiertos
Y que quizás de recibir cansada
El homenaje de los reyes vivos,
Fuá á demandar en el confin remote,
El homenaje de los reyos muertos."[10]

Andrade believed in the sacred rôle of the poet: Hugo, his admired master,

"La voz de trueno del gran profeto hebreo
    La cuerda de agrios tonos
            De Juvenal
Y el rumor de los cantos
            Del viejo Gibelino,"[11]

seemed to him prophet and forerunner, martyr and exile. The poet, seer, and leader of men, is thus

"Hermano de las águilas del Cáucaso
Que secaron piadosas con sus alas
La ensangrentada faz de Prometeo."[12]

Lyric scholars in these troublous republics, the romantics sought to ennoble politics by a generous idealism, to overthrow the tyrants, and realise an impossible democracy.

French naturalism and the Parnassian school had little influence in Latin America. Although Zola enjoyed a strange popularity—which corresponds, in the literary world, to the enthusiasm of the Trans-atlantic universities for materialism and positivism—we meet with few imitations of Germinal or La Terre. The American writers have not assimilated the naturalistic methods, their brutal and minute observation, their study of the crowd, and their intentional pessimism; they have hardly read the masters of the realistic school, Balzac and Flaubert. Only during the last twenty years have Maupassant, the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiros, d'Annunzio, and the great Russian writers interested and disturbed the American reader. The love of the novel is but gradually dislodging the old lyric enthusiasm.

CLÉMENTE PALMA.
Peruvian essayist and novelist.

RICARDO PALMER.

The Parnassian movement, in America, produced the Argentine poet Leopoldo Diaz. He adapted to Spanish verse the sonority, the relief, and the plastic beauty of the French masters. One of his poems is dedicated in homage to the poet of the Sonnets, to his incomparable model, José-Maria de Hérédia. Diaz sought to give his native Spanish, the language of eloquence, a Parnassian inevitability, and to mould its rhetorical abundance to the narrow limits of the sonnet. Les sombras de Hellas invokes the Greek life, sensual and luminous; Les conquistadores the thunderous epic; and all his optimistic songs speak of a Latin renaissance in the overseas democracies.

An absorbing taste for symbolism and the decadents, for "deliquescent" poetry and the work of the small Parisian cliques, has produced an intensely vital intellectual movement—modernism—which, by its wealth of language and ideas and the renewed vitality of its language, signifies a true renaissance. Beside it the old classic and romantic movements seem lukewarm imitations which pale before the exuberance of more modern work.

Modernism is undoubtedly an adequate diet for Transatlantic Latins. But is this decadent renaissance better inspired than the passion and the eloquence of yesterday? Is it also an indication of servitude? By no means; the great poets have retained a robust belief in life, and their master, Ruben Dario, followed his Prosas profanas by his Songs of life and hope.

The younger generation was drawn to this art by purely psychological motives. The Spanish character had become refined by its new environment; weakened, perhaps, but it had gained a keener intelligence and a greater wealth of fantasy. Chiaroscuro and subtle shades, such as the French delight in, delighted the Creole also, partial as he was to finesse, to a delicate Byzantism, and gracefully sceptical of the robust Spanish faith. Then there were hosts of half-castes, in whom the inimical heredities of two races were in painful conflict. The strangest characteristics—the sensuality of the negro and the melancholy of the Indian—gave the new race a spiritual personality full of contradictory characteristics; melancholy but not without optimism; the desires of a faun or a satyr, violent or languid; and a love of the rare and unusual, of verbal music, of complication in the matter of feeling, of carefully chosen language and unfamiliar rhythms. Reading Verlaine, Samain, Laforgue, Moréas, Henri de Régnier, and not as yet forgetting Gautier and Banville; mingling all cults and asking intoxication from every flagon, the poets of America have struck the national chord. Symbolism has been of little assistance; it calls for a lofty conception of the world and a profound sense of mystery. They much prefer decadence in art, because of its musical lyric quality, its exotic images, and its melancholy rhythms. An elective affinity, to use Goethe's phrase, has enabled them to draw an individual music from the foreign instrument.

So new metres and old fashions refurbished, modern images in sonorous and tortuous measures, all that in Europe was the voice of ennui, the tardy fruit of a world grown old, a Baudelairian art, the art of refined scepticism, was made to serve a young generation in love with life for the expression of its ambitions. This reform has reached Spain; the initiate has captivated the initiator, as in the drama of Renan. The recent voices of Spanish poetry follow that of the pontiff of the new school, Ruben Dario. Similarly Brazil has influenced Portuguese poetry, and, according to Theophilo Braga, surpasses it.

German and French romanticism revived the old forgotten chansons de geste, the despised poetry of the Gothic school; they charmed by the rude naturalism of the primitive legends. Similarly the modernists of America have renewed Spanish literature by listening to the ingenuous voice of Berceo and the more melancholy accents of Manrique. The result is that they are more traditionalist than the classic writers of the seventeenth century, whose intolerance so impoverished the language.

This renaissance is of barely twenty years' date. Certain forerunners—Marti and Julien del Casal, both Cubans, one a revolutionary in politics as in poetry, the other a man of tragic life, and Gutierrez Najera in Mexico—revealed the new poetic speech to a continent weary of sentimentalism. New or unfamiliar rhythms and agile metres were the vehicle of a new and intimate lyrical passion. But the note was not as yet decadent: Banville and Gautier, and De Musset, even, had not yet given way to Verlaine, who was as unknown as Mallarmé. A Venezuelan critic, Pedro Emilio Coll, drew attention to the persistent cult among the "American decadents," of the great Theodore, and of the author of Funambulesques. In the Azul of Ruben Dario he noted the influence of Mendès and Loti, even that of Daudet and the realists of his school, rather than the influence of symbolism.[13]

By the vivacity and brilliance of his verse, Manuel Guttierrez Nájera reminds one of Banville. He sings in a new key, at once Creole and exotic, the complicated sensations which are presently to torment Ruben Dario. Spanish verse had never yet held such grace and spirit, nor this sensuality appeased by tears, nor this proud and reserved melancholy. A Cecilia, Vidas Muertas, Castigadas, Mariposas—these contained a new lyric poetry, elegiac and tender, an unknown rhythm, a forgotten manner. He was a forerunner. Who does not know his lines upon the spoiled child whom he loves?

"No hay en el mundo mujer mas linda!
Pié de Andaluza, boca de guinda,
Esprit rociado de Veuve Cliquot,
Talle de avispa, cutis de ala,
Ojos traviesos de colegiala,
Como los ojos de Louise Théo."[14]

He is not always so frivolous. Mystery torments him; he knows the bitterness of vanished illusions; a pessimist, he has a vision of the moths of death "which have such black wings, and encircle us in a funereal round." The monologue of the unbeliever is a lament like that of Sigismond de Calderon upon the vanity of life:—

"Si es castigo ¿ cual pecado,
Sin saberlo, cometimos?
Si premio ¿ porque ganado?
Sin haberlo demandado,
Responded ¿ porqué vivimos?"[15]

Poems and chronicles are filled with a like restlessness and trouble. He writes Odes worthy of an anthology; he translates De Musset and Coppee. His master is Gautier: he shares his love of the light; he sings, in love with ideal whiteness:—

"¿ Qué cosa más blanca que cándido lirio?
¿ Qué cosa más pura que místico cirio?
¿ Que cosa mas casta que tierno azahar?"[16]

The modernism of South America was inspired firstly by the Parnassian school of France, which did not until later give place to the new voice, symbolist or decadent. Verlaine, Samain, and Laforgue were then the chief models; but beneath the current of imitation a movement was forming which was more and more original, a great school of verse, the leading note of which was refinement. "We owe to foreign literatures, and more particularly to the French," says a writer already cited, "the refinement of the organs necessary to the interpretation of beauty; we owe to them our methods of observation and our love of impressions, rather than any kind of co-ordinated æsthetic perspective.... Our eyes have learned from them to see better, and our minds to gather fugitive sensations."

No writer represents this evolution, this progressive refinement, better than Ruben Dario, a poet of Central America (of Nicaragua), the recognised master of the new school and one of the greatest lyric writers of all time in the Spanish language. He is to America what Verlaine and Hugo are to France. His images, his phrases even, excite a servile imitation. A noble band of disciples aspires to continue his immortal work. He denies his disciples: "He who shall slavishly follow my track will lose his treasure, and, whether page or slave, will not be able to hide his livery." But in vain: ardent youth listens and lays its votive offerings at the feet of the great and disdainful artist.

His poetic reform was effectual in the extreme. He renewed the youth of archaic metres, adapted French rhythms to Spanish verse, and modified, with perfect taste, the classic division of the line of verse—the place of the cæsura. With equal mastery he has employed slow and majestic measures to interpret the melancholy of the flesh, or the dancing metres of Banville, or plastic forms of a Hellenic perfection. He seems to make his own the cry of Carducci: Odio l'usata poesia.

Modern Spanish poetry used often to employ verses of eight and eleven syllables, forms to which a certain rhetorical pomp very readily allies itself. An interpreter of new ideas, Dario would not, like the French poet, accept old forms; he employed lines of ten and twelve syllables, adopted the pentameter and hexameter of the classics, and employed verses of fourteen and sixteen syllables.[17] He displaced accents, and wrote admirable vers libres. A revolutionary, in ten years he had transformed Spanish poetry.

Prosas Profanas, published in 1900, is, according to the phrase of his incomparable critic, José Enrique Rodo, "the full tension of his poet's bow." From the paradoxical title to the wealth of metre, all is strange in this delicate piece of work, which opens a new literary cycle, as did Emaux et Camées or Fleurs du mal in France. The originality of the book comes from the poet's prodigious faculty of recognising in each school what is essential to him, and in appropriating it, without, therefore, ceasing to be personal. A lyric unrest carries him to one manner or another, but, archaic or modern, it becomes his own. His grace, suppleness, and learned complexity are unequalled; he will write a Symphony in Gris Majeur like Gautier, or poems in the manner of Verlaine, or a Chant an Centaure in the manner of Maurice de Guerin. His work is not built of imposing granite, but of many coloured marbles, with strange and decadent shades, such as the chiseller of the Camées loved.

RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA (VENEZUELA).
Contemporary poet, novelist, and thinker.

His verse possesses at once the sensuality of a faun, the distinction of a marquis of the Grand Siècle, and the disenchantment of a mystic. No form, no period can arrest his wandering spirit:—

"Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo,
Boton de pensamiento que busca ser la rosa."[18]

In the presence of love, art, and life he experiences an enthusiasm which quickly vanishes; he discovers the final melancholy of all things. He knows, with the Roman, the sadness that lurks in human joys: quod in ipsis floribus angit.

But before singing his autumnal bitterness of heart he sings of nature, of ancient civilisations, of the art of all ages, and of the pageantry of life.

Dario is the leader of a school, but other poets, as great as he, may be regarded as the precursors of literary "modernism": José Asunción Silva, Leopoldo Lugones, Guillermo Valencia, Rufino Blanco Fombana—the latter, like Almafuerte, Chocano, and the Lugones of the "Hills of Gold," seeks to be the poet of the new America. These writers aim at an American art, an art free from rhetorical clichés, innocent of imitation, of declamation, of affected sensibility. Who shall say whether the revolt of this younger generation will lead it? Angel de Estrada is the poet of the exotic in his Alma nomade; Guillermo Valencia, as great as Dario in the exegesis of the legends of Greece and the love of things Hellenic, has a universal curiosity and an astonishingly versatile lyrical capacity. Rufino Blanco Fombana has sung of sensual passion, the hatred of tyrants, and the glories of Bolivar; he has remodelled the lyric, has written verses as finely chiselled as the gems of the Greek anthology, and sonorous lines in which we hear a call to action and to victory. Chocano aspires to become the poet of America: grandiloquent, sonorous, rich in imagery. Lugones is a much admired author of sentimental verse, audacious as to form and vocabulary. José Asuncion Silva was noted for his melancholy, languorous verse: he was a forerunner, a master, like Dario. Ricardo Jaimes Freire employs the more audacious metres; Amado Nervo, equally radical in his love of new forms, exhibits a modernism touched by a breath of Buddhistic pantheism, and sings of "Sister Water" like a modern St. Francis.

Essayists of the English type are numerous in America. They import European ideas, freely discuss the great problems of existence. If they apply themselves to the criticism of letters, they discover general ideas; in place of minute analysis they write artistic commentaries. José Enrique Rodo, of Uruguay, is the master in this department of literature. He has published an essay on Dario, and his two books, Motivos de proteo, a collection of essays of great beauty, and Ariel, a noble address to the youth of South America, have become classics. There are other critics as brilliant: Manuel Ugarte, at once thinker and artist, writer of short stories, poet, ideologist, and the author of a remarkable book dealing with the future of South America; the Colombian, Sanin Cano, who treats of ideas; two Argentines, Emilio Becher, who writes admirable analyses of ideas and books, and Ricardo Rosas, who is, by reason of his nationalism and his wide culture, the master of the rising generation; two Venezuelans, Manuel Diaz Rodriguez and Pedro Emilio Coll, the first a noble idealist and prose artist, the second a dreamer, who has been influenced by the sceptical irony of Renan; the Peruvian, Manuel Gonzala Prada, whose aggressive and sonorous style reveals a lofty moral unrest: in his essay on life and death are pages which Guyau might have signed, and his study of Castelar is a magnificent satire; José de la Riva Agüero, a historian, a critic, and a polemist of unusual vigour; in San Domingo a powerful mind with an extraordinary knowledge of literatures, classic and foreign, Pedro Henriquez Ureña; while in Uruguay, Carlos Reyles has just proved by his book, La Mort da Cygne, his acquaintance with all the new ideas and his ability to make a powerful synthesis of them. Two Brazilian essayists, Oliveira Lima (also a great historian) and José Verissimo have written remarkable studies of civilisations and books.

MANUEL UGARTE (ARGENTINA).
Contemporary poet, novelist, and essayist.

The short story, neglected by the romantics, is being revived. Modernism, having already transformed poetry, has brought to the conte a subtlety in the analysis of the passions and a knowledge of psychology that refuses to take alarm at problems of morbid obscurity, and the indispensable quality of concentration of interest. Machado de Assis is a master of powerful analysis, and a sober and ironical style; his vision of life is melancholy. Diaz Rodriguez has written some superb short stories. An evocation or a symbol places those of Carlos Reyles of Uruguay on a plane far above that of the ordinary romance. Two other writers of the younger generation, Attilio Chiappori and Clemente Palma, hailing respectively from Argentine and Peru, have introduced a new æsthetics into the short story; the latter seems to show the influence of Hoffmann and Poe, but his examples of the macabre are none the less powerfully original; while Chiappori, a physician and alienist, loves the states of twilight phases of a mind which is tottering on the verge of reason. Borderland tells us of this vague territory in a sinuous, and, in America, hitherto unfamiliar style.

A great Peruvian writer, Ricardo Palma, has created a department of literature, that of tradition, which partakes equally of the nature of history, and the romance, and the conte. He has described in a sumptuous style the life of the old Spanish colonies, devout and sensual; the traditions of a cultivated community, the city of Lima. His subtle irony, his joyous and somewhat licentious narrative, often remind us of M. Anatole France and the Italian story-tellers.

In Latin America are published not only exquisite examples of the conte, but also novels in which the study of society and the analysis of the mind are not overlooked. Among others may be cited El Hombre de Hierro, by Rufino Blanco Fombona, a Venezuelan; Canaan, by the Brazilian, Graça Aranha; La Gloria de don Ramiro and Redención, by the Argentine writers Enrique Rodriguez Larreta and Angel de Estrada; Idolos Rotos and Sangre Patricia, by Diaz Rodriguez, whose high talent as a writer of short stories we have already praised; La Raza de Cain, by Carlos Reyles, so remarkable, also, for his essays and his tales.

Blanco Fombona possesses irony, the gift of telling a story, a rich descriptive talent, ease of dialogue, and a power of forcible scene-painting. A novelist by temperament, he has written the biography of a representative Creole, the lamentable type created by environment, for whom love and life reserve their most terrible cruelties. A scrupulous employé, neither strong nor cunning, he is the product of the languorous tropical life; this "man of iron" is the symbol of all the weaknesses. And about this life is all the monotony of a small city, civil war, the secret hatred of Creoles and foreigners, the superannuated grace of the Spanish manner and the Spanish pomp—in short, the whole of a little seething world.

Canaan is the romance of the promised land, of fertile Brazil, where the blonde immigrant and the half-breeds of every shade compete for the bounty of a prodigal Nature. This long struggle is the dramatic interest of the book; its beauty lies in its magnificent descriptions of the tropics; the language of Graça Aranha is full of harmonious poetry. Angel de Estrada is one of the most cultivated spirits of America. Traveller (is not one of his books entitled Ame Nomade?), novelist, and poet, he distils in his books the quintessence of long meditation and infinite reading. His novel Redención is the work of a humanist; civilisations, arts, beliefs, all pass before us, evoked by the hand of a master. A subtle and rich vocabulary serves him to give life to his ideas and resuscitate the life of dead cities.

RICARDO ROJAS (ARGENTINA).
Contemporary poet and essayist.

Enrique Rodriguez Larreta has described in his novel La Gloria de don Ramiro the period of Philip II., bloody, austere, and tyrannical. No American artist has his verbal wealth, his power of evocation, and his meticulous scholarship and genius for reconstruction. This patient and harmonious piece of work surprises us in a literature full of improvisations like that of South America.

La Raza de Cain, by Reyles, is a remarkable romance, in which the author shows us the superman, Nietzsche's man of prey, at grips with the weak and the vanquished; he exalts, in language full of eloquence, the Dionysiac joy of life and domination.

Writer of short stories, a novelist at times, but above all a brilliant chronicler, Gomez Carrillo has had the greatest influence in Latin America. In a nervous, harmonious style, full of delicate shades, he has instructed the younger generation in symbolism, in the elegant paradoxes of Wilde, in the work of D'Annunzio and Verlaine; in short, in the whole of decadent art. Above all, he eulogises Paris: the "charming soul" of the city, the sounding boulevards, its women, and the galante frivolity of its unrest. A master of smiles and subtle irony, he has the taste, the delicate amenity, of Scholl or Fouquier, the art of telling an anecdote, of analysing a comedy, of pouring gentle ridicule upon learned heaviness or conceited solemnity. His books on Japan and Greece, praised by the French critics, have revealed the mystery of exoticism to the American public, and all his work breathes a continual suggestion of France.

Such is the new literature, in which you will find novelists and poets and a truly Florentine love of beauty. He who knows America only by its imperfect social framework, its civil wars, and its persistent barbarism sees only the outer tumult; there is a strange divorce between its turbulent politics and its refined art. If ever Taine's theory of the inevitable correspondence between art and its environment was at fault, it is in respect of these turbulent democracies which produce writers whose literary style is so precious, such refined poets and analysts.

GOMEZ CARRILLO.
Contemporary novelist, essayist, and chroniqueur.

[1] L'Evolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIXe siécle, Paris, 1899, p. 134.

[2] "Tzar of three colours, black, white, and Indian (red)—who governs the American continent—and is called the Sovereign People."

[3] "Thou shalt suffer the martyrdom—that for him who is born a poet—is reserved by impious fate."

[4] "I live only when I dream—that my heart has broken all ties with the world— ... Come, for my life and my joy hardly begin to be—save when I know I have left mankind far behind me."

[5] "Like the ruins of a silent temple,—empty, abandoned, fearful,—without light and without sound."

[6] "Men refuse me a tomb in their cities,—in my country I was expelled from the house of my fathers."

[7] "My God, Lord my God, who is there in the world—that is not sorrow's?—Man is born and lives a moment—and suffers unto death."

[8] "My God, make me able to love!"

[9] "Mountain on whose summit—human genius nests."

[10] "Which on the map of astonished Europe—traced frontiers and suppressed deserts,—and which, weary perhaps with receiving—the homage of living kings,—came at length to demand afar—the homage of dead kings."

[11] "The voice of thunder of the great Hebrew prophet,—the chord of bitter tones—of Juvenal—and the rumour of the songs—of the old Ghibelline."

[12] "Brother to the eagles of the Caucasus—who fanned piously with their wings the bleeding face of Prometheus."

[13] Decadentismo y americanismo, in El castillo de Elsinor. Caracas 1902.

[14] "There is not in the world a prettier woman!—Foot of an Andalusian, mouth of fruit—Sparkling wit of Veuve Cliquot—Waist of wasp, skin like a bird's wing—The roguish eyes of a schoolgirl—Such the eyes of Louise Theo."

[15] "If it is a punishment, what sin—have we without knowing committed?—If it is a reward, how gained?—Without having asked it,—say, why do we live?"

[16] "What whiter than the candid lily?—What purer than the mystic wax?—What more chaste than the tender orange-blossom?"

[17] See the study of these innovations in Horas de estudio, by P. Henriquez Ureña, p. 118 et seq. Paris, Ollendorff.

[18] "I pursue a form which my pen does not find—the bud of an idea which would be the rose."