SHOVED off by itself in a corner of Central Park on the top of a wooded hill, where only the people who live in the high apartment-houses at Eighty-first Street can see it, is an equestrian statue. It is odd, bizarre, and inartistic, and suggests in size and pose that equestrian statue to General Jackson which mounts guard before the White House in Washington. It shows a chocolate-cream soldier mastering with one hand a rearing rocking-horse, and with the other pointing his sword towards an imaginary enemy.
Sometimes a “sparrow” policeman saunters up the hill and looks at the statue with unenlightened eyes, and sometimes a nurse-maid seeks its secluded site, and sits on the pedestal below it while the children of this free republic play unconcernedly in its shadow. On the base of this big statue is carved the name of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Venezuela.
Down on the northeastern coast of South America, in Caracas, the capital of the United States of Venezuela, there is a pretty little plaza, called the Plaza Washington. It is not at all an important plaza; it is not floored for hundreds of yards with rare mosaics like the Plaza de Bolivar, nor lit by swinging electric lights, and the president’s band never plays there. But it has a fresh prettiness and restfulness all its own, and the narrow gravel paths are clean and trim, and the grass grows rich and high, and the branches of the trees touch and interlace and form a green roof over all, except in the very centre, where there stands open to the blue sky a statue of Washington, calm, dignified, beneficent, and paternal. It is Washington the statesman, not the soldier. The sun of the tropics beats down upon his shoulders; the palms rustle and whisper pleasantly above his head. From the barred windows of the yellow and blue and pink houses that line the little plaza dark-eyed, dark-skinned women look out sleepily, but understandingly, at the grave face of the North American Bolivar; and even the policeman, with his red blanket and Winchester carbine, comprehends when the gringos stop and take off their hats and make a low bow to the father of their country in his pleasant place of exile.
STATUE OF SIMON BOLIVAR, CARACAS
Other governments than those of the United States of America and the United States of Venezuela have put up statues to their great men in foreign capitals, but the careers of Washington and Bolivar bear so striking a resemblance, and the histories of the two countries of which they are the respective fathers are so much alike, that they might be written in parallel columns. And so it seems especially appropriate that these monuments to these patriots should stand in each of the two continents on either side of the dividing states of Central America.
It will offend no true Venezuelan to-day if it be said of his country that the most interesting man in it is a dead one, for he will allow no one to go further than himself in his admiration for Bolivar; and he has done so much to keep his memory fresh by circulating portraits of him on every coin and stamp of the country, by placing his statue at every corner, and by hanging his picture in every house, that he cannot blame the visitor if his strongest impression of Venezuela is of the young man who began at thirty-three to liberate five republics, and who conquered a territory more than one-third as great as the whole of Europe.
In 1811 Venezuela declared her independence of the mother-country of Spain, and her great men put this declaration in writing and signed it, and the room in which it was signed is still kept sacred, as is the room where our declaration was signed in Independence Hall. But the two men who were to make these declarations worth something more than the parchment upon which they were written were not among the signers. Their work was still to come, and it was much the same kind of work, and carried on in much the same spirit of indomitable energy under the most cruel difficulties, and with a few undrilled troops against an army of veterans. It was marked by brilliant and sudden marches and glorious victories; and where Washington suffered in the snows of Valley Forge, or pushed his way through the floating ice of the Delaware, young Bolivar marched under fierce tropical suns, and cut his path through jungle and swamp-lands, and over the almost impenetrable fastnesses of the Andes.
STATUE OF WASHINGTON DECORATED WITH FLORAL WREATHS BY THE VENEZUELANS