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.