One effect of revolution, however, has been to produce a remarkable shortage of horse flesh throughout the Republic. On the outbreak of an insurrection, the Government used to “commandeer” horses everywhere, and would clean an estancia of all its useful animals, handing over to the owner so much worthless paper, which he was supposed to be able some day to redeem for the loss of his horses. Not only so, but his peones would be pressed in like manner into the Government service, armed with rifles and sent out to fight the revolutionaries. After periodic losses in this manner, the estanciero adopted the policy of breeding and maintaining just as few horses as he could possibly do with. Result: in Uruguay, a country where horses should abound, the cavalry are insufficiently mounted, a very considerable proportion of the Government troops being without mounts. This fact, by the way, is the best comment that can be passed upon Viscount Bryce’s paragraph quoted in the earlier part of this chapter.
We have heard about the warrior spirit of the Uruguayan, but, strangely enough, it does not manifest itself in a warrior nation. There is no system of military service in the Republic, such as that of the Argentine. Nay, until very recently the army was looked down upon by the better-class families as a profession for their sons, and was no more than the happy hunting-ground of all sorts of adventurers, the rank and file being chiefly niggers, Indians, and half-breeds, while many of the officers were themselves either of negro or Indian blood. Even to-day, when men of good family are looking to the army for a career and military training is being organised on European lines, the army is still composed in large part of undesirables and is used entirely as a Government machine. Both political parties have hesitated at compulsory service for fear of each other. The Colorados have carefully nursed the army during their long spell of power as so many paid fighting men to back up their party at such times as the Blancos take arms against it. Here again, it will be seen there is room for improvement in Uruguayan affairs.
I had not intended in these notes to be led into any lengthy discussion of Uruguayan politics, as that is a subject which tempts one into such labyrinthine byways that it is best left alone, and yet it is difficult to say anything about the country in general into which political considerations do not enter. I should have preferred to have enlarged rather on the literary side of the people, which engaged me even more than the politics and the warlike spirit—which, by the way, used to seem to me curiously out of place when I passed the extremely modest little building, about the size of a suburban police station, that does duty for the Uruguayan War Office. But I find it difficult to touch with any satisfaction on all the subjects that occur to me as worthy of note.
The literary activity is certainly remarkable when we bear in mind the extremely limited public to which Uruguayan authors can appeal. Two very stout volumes of a critical survey of Uruguayan literature were published at the end of 1912, and these were but the advance guard of others to follow, the work being designed to occupy several bulky tomes. The roll of Uruguayan authors in poetry and prose is truly a formidable one, though I doubt if more than two names would be known in the United States, and these of living authors whose reputations, but not their works, may be familiar to a small circle of American critics. Juan Zorilla de San Martín is the great poet of the country, and José Enrique Rodó its leading philosophic writer. Both are famous throughout Latin-America and Spain, and both very remarkable men, who have had to look to politics as well as to literature in their struggle for a living.
The Calle San Martín, Mendoza.
A Glimpse of the River Mendoza.
Señor Rodó, who is one of the deputies for Montevideo, is recognised as a master of Spanish style, a great critic of literature, and a philosopher in whom there are many points of contact with Lord Morley, as they belong to the same liberal school of thought. Withal, he is one of the last of the Bohemians, so far as that implies absolute disregard for sartorial display and the unbusinesslike ordering of his daily life. You will meet him at all strange hours of the night wandering about the streets, lonely and contemplative, and if you glance at his shirt cuff when shaking hands you will find it soiled and scribbled over with many pencilled notes. He has all the old-world courtesy of the Spaniard, with the wider outlook of the American mind, and, above all, a profound admiration for English character and Anglo-Saxon civilisation. His opinion is sought on great public questions and on matters of literature from all parts of South America, and I have often thought it strange that this rather shabbily dressed and retiring gentleman whom I used to meet wandering lonely in the dusk up side streets, and with whom I would stop and gossip for five or ten minutes on my way home, was the object of admiration of literary circles wherever Spanish-American men of letters gathered together—el gran Rodó!
Señor Zorilla de San Martín is of a different type, shorter in stature and more pronouncedly Spanish in appearance, with the darting fire and restlessness of the imaginative Oriental rather than the careless repose of his philosophic contemporary. He is essentially a poet, though his signature appears on all the bank notes of Uruguay, by virtue of some official post he used to hold. He has also represented his country at the Court of Spain, and been honoured in many ways by the nation which is justly proud of his poetic achievement, for in Tabaré, his epic of early Spanish life in Uruguay, he has produced one of the modern Castillian classics. I found him a perfervid Shakespearean, also a keen admirer of Carlyle, whose portrait holds the place of honour in his study, although he confessed that it was a struggle to follow the sage of Chelsea in the original, and he most frequently read him in French translations. Neither of these eminent Uruguayans, by the way, though owning indebtedness to our English literature, had acquired a speaking knowledge of our language, French appealing to them, as it does to the great majority of the educated Latin-Americans, more readily than English.