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.