STUDIES IN SPANISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE CHAPTER I THE "MODERNISTA” RENOVATION THE study of that phase of recent Spanish-American letters which has been rather loosely and inexpressively, if popularly, termed "Modernism" forms one of the most interesting adventures in comparative literature. For in its broader implications it is not a phenomenon restricted to Castilian and Ibero-American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but rather an aspect of a spirit that inundated the world of western thought during that era. The English language contributed such influences as Whitman, Rossetti, Swinburne, Stevenson, Wilde, Kipling; in Germany, Sudermann and Hauptmann dominated the stage, while Nietzsche launched forth to subjugate foreign thought under the yoke of his super-philosophy, which was, even more, poetry and vaticination; in Russia, Garshin, Korolenko, Chekhov and Gorki came to the fore; Isben and Bjoernsen spoke in different voices for Scandinavia; from Italy sounded the song of d'Annunzio; above all, from France, through which the Spanish-Americans absorbed so much of the foreign influence, echoed the labors of the Parnassians and the Symbolist-Decadents. And into the subsequent productions of the "modernists," both the mere 1 imitators and the genuine spirits striving for self-expression, filtered something from all the schools and movements of the various nations. It is an age of spiritual unrest; on all sides the word "free" flings its challenge to the breeze. Free verse, free love, free music, free woman; there is a riot of emancipation that crystallizes into the one great freedom, a free self. The quest for that liberty lies over treacherous paths and in its name are committed many crimes, literary as well as political. This, however, does not invalidate the impulse itself; man everywhere seeks to release his mind as well as his body; the true deliverance is discovered to be spiritual as well as material. The spirit of novelty and renovation in the air is but an evidence of the search for self. "Modernism," as applied to Spanish-American letters (and later to the same impulse making its way into Peninsular literature in the year of Spain's defeat by the United States) was not, then, a school. Perhaps the word movement is likewise inadequate to describe the tidal wave of reform and innovation that rose in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and, before it had spent its force, washed away the old rhetoric, the old prose, the old verse, and carried a fresher outlook, a more universal culture, a fuller, more sensitive means of expression to the former colonies of Spain. Modernism was not a school for the simple reason that its divers tendencies were too various to admit of unified grouping. It was decidedly eclectic in character and from the most antagonistic principles managed to select, with more or less confidence, those elements best suited to its purpose, a purpose at first somewhat spontaneous, uncritical, hesitant, but gradually acquiring self reliance, direction, vibrating consciousness. The word movement is for similar reasons not entirely satisfactory. It does not convey the dynamic conception at the bottom of modernism, which, more exactly speaking, is the synthesis of several movements. In the latter sense modernism, far from having run its course, has entered upon a continental phase which promises to bear fruitful and significant results. For the purposes of the present study, however, it will be advantageous to use the term modernism to mean that wave of renovation and innovation to which we have already referred; we must not forget, nevertheless, that human thought possesses a certain continuity which critical labels tend to conceal; the various phases of the modernistic impulse are natural outgrowths of one another; they are all petals of the same flower, with a stem that sinks deep into the fecund soil of modernity. I THE FRENCH BACKGROUND FOR a more than superficial understanding of this important epoch it is necessary to glance at the course of French letters during the last half of the nineteenth century. The study of literature by periods, movements and nations is, after all, an arbitrary method,-necessarily so, since man must classify if he is to master in any degree the achievements of his predecessors and his contemporaries; yet none the less arbitrary, and often leading students and masters alike astray. This is particularly true in the study of literary influences, where too often one man is represented as affecting another, when in reality |