In colonial times Bogotá won the reputation, if not the actual position, of “literary capital of South America.” Her speech is still the best Castilian of America, with little of that slovenliness of pronunciation so general from the Rio Grande southward. To this day the city has a considerable intellectual life, wider perhaps than it is deep. “Everyone” writes. He is a rare public man who has not published at least a handful of “versos” in his youth. Poets, writers, painters, and musical composers are more numerous than in many a far larger center of civilization. The placid isolation of life in Bogotá, almost completely severed from the feverish distractions of the modern world, makes this natural. There is nothing else to do. Then, too, lack of opportunity to compare their work with that of a wider world no doubt gives the “literatos” of Bogotá a self-complacency that might otherwise be slighter. The cheap local printing-presses pour out a constant flood of five-cent volumes of the local “poets,” those same “cachacos” and “filipichines” in frock-tailed coats who lean with such Parisian grace on their canes at the principal street corners. The youth who sees his smudged likeness appear on the tissue-paper cover of the weekly pamphlet seethes with ill-suppressed joy at his entrance into the glorious, if crowded, ranks of the “intelectuales.” It is chiefly a dilettante literature, rarely of material reward and of no visible connection with life. But a considerable stream of flowery verse, languidly melancholy in its temperament and not overburdened with deep thought, flows constantly, and the boiling down by time has left Bogotá credited with a few works of genuine worth.
A chola, or half-Indian girl of Bogotá, backed by an outcast of the “gente decente” class
A street of Bogotá. The line of flaggings in the center is for the use of Indians and four-footed burden-bearers
A lecture was given one evening at the Jurisprudence Club on the momentous subject of “The Necessity of a Legal Revolution in Colombia.” Hays reneged at the last moment, but I accepted the invitation issued to the “general public.” I was the only foreigner among the hundred present, yet no American audience could have been more universally white of complexion. Indeed, the gathering was strikingly like a similar one in our own country—on a March evening when the furnace had broken down or the janitor gone on strike. All wore overcoats and kept constantly bundled up. The solemn whispering of the audience as it gathered, the unattractiveness of the women, all of whom had long since left youth behind, the staid mien of the men in their frock coats, gave the scene the atmosphere of a meeting of “highbrows” in a corner of far-away New England. But there was superimposed a pompous solemnity and a funereal tone peculiar to the Latin-American, to a race that lays more stress on the correctness of its manner than the weight of its matter. A misstatement or a palpably erroneous fact or conclusion, one felt, might pass muster, but not a slip in the “urbanities” of society or the incorrect knotting of a cravat.
It was a “lecture” in the French sense. When the president had taken his place and all was arranged in faultless Parisian order, the speaker removed his neck-scarf and began solemnly to read from typewritten manuscript. He was a man of forty, wearing glasses, with the perpendicular wrinkles of close study on his brow. A score of countries could have reproduced him ad libitum. He read drearily, monotonously, with constant care never to spill over into the merely human. The discourse based itself on the narrow national patriotism common to Latin-America. Yet at times the speaker talked plainly, admitting that Colombia is 88% illiterate and that half the remainder can barely read and write. The Church he assailed bitterly for its shortcomings, yet never mentioned it directly. In time, as is bound to happen sooner or later in any public meeting in Colombia, he drifted into the great national grievance and whined through several pages on “the wickedness of taking the rebel province of Panama away from us, a weak and helpless people”—here I caught several of the audience gazing fixedly at me, as if they fancied I had taken some active part in that debateable action. Through all the latter part of the lecture the church bells across the way kept up a constant jangling that completely swallowed up whatever conclusions he had gained from his laborious dissertation. It was strangely as if the voice of religion and superstition were trying by din and hubbub to drown out that of reason and reflection, as it has since the first medicine-man danced howling into the circle of elders in conference in the Stone Age.
On the “Panama question” the attitude of the Colombian man in the street is not exactly that of the Government. A well-educated native holding a small post, though clinging to the same convictions on the “taking” of the “rebel province” as the bulk of his countrymen, expressed himself to me as follows:
“We ordinary citizens feel that our country should be paid for the loss of Panama, and the slight to our national honor. But we hope very much that your United States will not pay our government a large sum of money in cash, as contemplated by the proposed treaty. For almost all of it would go into the pockets of the dozen politicians who hold the reins of government. Give us obras hechas,—finished works,—a railway from the coast to Bogotá, or a perfected harbor with docks and modern facilities.”
One day soon after our arrival we strolled over to the Biblioteca Nacional to begin the Colombian reading we had planned. It was wasted effort. We brought up against a heavy colonial door bearing the announcement: “Suspended until further notice, by order of the Ministry of Public Instruction.”