On the River Plate one must live as the Rio Platenseans do if one’s stay is not to be one continued struggle for unattainable domestic ideals. In the best hotels, in the millionaire’s palace or the peon’s hut the same happy-go-lucky spirit prevails and dominates domestic, as it also does public, life, in especially, perhaps, Argentina. Everything is muddled through somehow. But it is muddled through to desired results, which, after all, is the chief practical desideratum.
There is much of the Spanish seclusion in the better-class home life of both Argentina and Uruguay, which adds to the obstacles in the way of criticism or appreciation by a foreigner.
That the children are almost universally what we should call spoiled is, however, evident from the most superficial experience of that life. The Argentine theories, if they can be termed such, of bringing up are largely controlled by a fear of crushing the individuality of the child especially if he be a boy. The most usual reply of an Argentine child to any order given to it is “No quiero” (I don’t want to), and there the matter ends. The parents smile indulgently, the child does not do what it did not want to do, and woe betide the governess or tutor who is possessed of too strict disciplinary ideas. Thus, from the cradle to the grave the male Argentine is used to his own sweet way, while his sisters are made to feel few trammels of a purely household kind. These apart, however, Argentine women seldom, if ever, show any symptoms of rebellion against the domestic seclusion which is their accepted lot, especially after marriage.
The Argentine woman is seldom disturbed by intellectual aspirations, likes creature comforts and facilities for the standard of dress pertaining to her station, and she is contented and happy in her home with the theatre as a distraction. At the theatre she only favours performances which demand intellectual effort for their appreciation if and when fashion impels her attendance thereat; so that she may see and be seen in the foyer and hold pleasant receptions in her box, receptions not always confined to the extr’actes.
In a word, she is not intellectual and therefore feels no need for troubling her usually handsome head with intellectuality.
She is a wife and a mother and a lady bountiful to all the feudal dependants of her husband’s house. Childishly fond of dress and admiration but with as little desire for liberty of action as she has for deep thought.
As will have been gathered from the foregoing, much of the Moorish civilization in Spain remains reincarnate in the woman of modern Argentina.
A word may very well be said here for the much-criticized Argentine jeunesse dorée. In the author’s humble opinion the real wonder about him is that his sometimes objectionably intrusive boisterousness in public places does not outstep its actually not very wide limitations.
In any other country, if you had a warm-blooded young scion of a sunny land who had grown up under the almost constantly approving smiles of an indulgent father and mother, possessed of great wealth and traditions of spending freely on amusement and outward display and, lastly, a native police which would almost as soon dare to rebel openly against the Government as to lock up for anything short of serious and unconcealable crime any son of a great ruling family, it appears to me more than possible that you would have much more trouble with such a gilded youth, who, moreover, would probably succumb to early physical and financial ruin instead of developing, as has been said, into a grave and reverend señor, capable in either Chamber of Congress or in a ministerial or diplomatic capacity, as the Argentine fils de famille eventually does. That he does so develop and does not succumb, I attribute to his underlying quality of common sense, coupled with his mainly open-air upbringing in the Camp.
Also, the young Argentine may be and often is, exceedingly fond of sowing a vast quantity of wild oats, but he is very seldom ill-natured or fundamentally bad. His very vices are strongly tempered with redeemingly generous qualities.