rather than green, is yellow; the same author carried his color impressions into the domain of the orchestra, and in his Traité du Verbe discovers that harps are white, violins blue, the brass instruments red, the flutes yellow, the organ black. “I have found crimson words to paint the color of the rose," says Theodore de Banville in one of his poems. And Baudelaire: "Perfumes, colors and sounds are interrelated. There are perfumes fresh as the flesh of babes, sweet as oboes and green as the prairies."

To judge artistic schools by temporary aberrations of their representatives is to confess an uncritical attitude. Criticism itself, which is an art rather than a science (despite the unbending dogmatism of certain Rhadamanthine personalities) has been affected, as it always will be, by the same forces that have operated upon the creative intellectual world. It tends today to encourage individuality and to become itself more personal, and is gradually abandoning the position as taskmaster, labeller, preceptor and mere castigator; it seeks to interpret, rather than judge; to recreate, rather than embalm.

That modern French poetry which was destined to reform the poetry of Spain through the modernist spirit, which first

4 The question of colored audition and related phenomena forms one of the most interesting phases of modern psychology. There is nothing new in René Ghil's orchestral coloring. Goethe, in his work on Color, says that Leonhard Hoffmann (1786) assigned colors to the tones of various instruments. The violoncello, for example, was indigo-blue, the violin was ultramarine blue, the oboe was rose, the clarinet yellow, the horn purple, the trumpet red, the flageolet violet. Later Germans have toyed with similar concepts. Recent investigations by neuropaths have revealed patients who are sensitive to the temperature and taste of color, as well as to the color of pain, etc. For a full statement of Johann Leonhard Hoffmann's color-sound comparisons, see, in Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre, the part devoted to Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre, under Hoffmann's name.

affected Spanish-America, was itself (in its later phase) influenced by Germanic philosophy. "Just as naturalism derives from the English spirt," avers Cejador y Frauca, "so symbolism comes from the Germanic spirit." Lewi sohn, enlarging upon the same idea, states that "The French Symbolists, . . . drew their doctrine of freedom in life and art partly, at least, from the doctrine of the postKantian idealists. The creative self that projects the vision of the universe stands above it and need not be bound by the shadows it has itself evoked. The inner realities became the supreme realities: Maeterlinck translated the Fragments of Novalis . . . M. Jean de Gourmont is quoted to sustain the thesis that "Symbolism was not, at first, a revolution, but an evolution called forth by the infiltration of new philosophical ideas. The theories of Kant, of Schopenhauer, of Hegel and Hartmann began to spread in France: the poets were fairly intoxicated by them."

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Such, in bare outline, is the background of recent French poetry in so far as it is to affect the more immediate subject of our study. These elements, taking root in a soil prepared for them by politico-economic history (the evidences of which are so remarkably and indissolubly present in such a large body of Spanish-American literature) produce upon modern Castilian verse and prose an effect that has now been all the more exactly analyzed in its numerous manifestations since the wave of "modernism" has receded on both Spanish sides of the Atlantic; or at least, has accomplished its historic mission. Contemporary Spanish-American prose and verse at their best, are remarkable for their 5 Op. cit. Page 28.

Op. cit. Page 8.

lucidity, their ductility, their adaptation to the multifarious hues and humors of latter-day thought. The language can crackle and splutter beneath the fiery pen of a Blanco-Fombona; in the hands of a Darío it acquires Gallic luminosity; Santos Chocano achieves with it new sonorities that well match his volcanic, bi-continental utterances; José Enrique Rodó makes it the vehicle of pregnant essays that at times match those of Macaulay or Emerson.

The French influence, however, was more or less sporadic; or, if sporadic is not quite the right term, uneven and dependent upon particular circumstances. Spanish writers have been wont to chide Spain's former colonies for their intellectual dependence upon France-a phenomenon that is likewise to be observed in Portuguese Brazil—and Hispano-American writers (often with an exaggerated and unphilosophic hostility toward the mother country) have gloried in that same bond of cultural amity.

"Modernism" was, then, an intellectual as well as an artistic reaction, and signalled the definite entrance of Spanish America into European literary currents; from the Parnassians it learned to seek new beauties of line and form; from the Symbolists and Decadents it received the opposite contribution to French letters-a sense of color and nuance, a deeper susceptibility to the musical possibilities of words. To be sure, since Spanish Americans, more ardent than their trans-Atlantic brethren, are born reciting verses, they quickly showed themselves prone to exaggerations quite comparable to the vocalic chromomania of Rambaud and Ghil, and to the recondite, esoteric practises of better known Symbolists. That was to be expected; but it is a wrong attitude (such as is entertained by more than

one Castilian critic) to charge these aberrations to Modernism. Modernism merely incited them, because it happened to be in vogue; bad poetry has always been written; and always will be, and I suppose there will always be critics who will blame the "new" movement rather than the poets themselves, forgetful of the fact that mere imitators will ever imitate, and that original spirits will break through all canons. Schools and movements do not produce poets; the reverse is more near the truth. Similarly, the study of schools and movements is a useful aid to the appreciation of the poet's work, but never a substitute for the poetry itself, which, if it be genuine art, rises above strict classification.

Although the date 1888 (during which year Rubén Darío's volume of prose and poetry called Azul appeared) has been taken as the starting point of the Modernist era, the movement had, like all great historical events, cast its shadows before it. Darío, though the standard-bearer of the reform (self-consciously and progressively so) was not the first of the "modernistas." He had been preceded by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera in Mexico, by José Martí and Julián del Casal in Cuba, perhaps by José Asunción Silva in Colombia, and was ever alive to the new notes being sounded by such personal and outstanding figures as Díaz Mirón of Mexico and Santos Chocano of Peru.

When the new French influence first appeared (chiefly through the Symbolists and the Decadents) it marked what has been called the most important epoch in the history of Spanish-American letters. Speaking in terms of epochs rather than of single writers, this is fairly true. Henceforth Spanish-American letters are destined more and more

to be produced by men with a broad outlook, trained directly or indirectly in the culture of contemporary Europe, endowed with a growing selective power that imbibes from foreign influences that which native needs may best employ and in turn supplies its personal, original contribution to the literature that crosses boundaries.

The beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century found the Spanish-American writers of originality in need of a new expressional medium and eager for new intellectual impulses. While these were received chiefly from France, they came, too, from sources as wide apart as our own Poe (whose Raven was most admirably translated by Pérez Bonalde, the noted Venezuelan "poet of Niagara," so named for an inspirational outburst that rivals the verses of the Cuban Heredia to the same handiwork of Nature) and Heine, rendered into Spanish by the same poet. The transitional period reveals characteristics that are familiarly recurrent in literary history, a pantheistic mysticism, a new return to mother nature, a desire for simplicity coupled with an intense response to contemporary life and a note of query addressed to the enigma of existence.

To Spanish-American modernism there is something more, however; the age is complex and so are its literary manifestations; a writer like Gutiérrez Nájera, coming at an early stage of the new influences, and being, in reality, a transitory figure, appears simple beside the multi-colored poesy of a Darío; I say appears, because at bottom the Mexican is quite as intensely human as the Nicaraguan; moreover, we must view with reserve the statement as to modernist simplicity when we recall some of the symbolistic