CHAPTER III JOSÉ ENRIQUE RODÓ (1872-1917) In many respects the life and labors of José Enrique Rodó, the noted Uruguayan philosopher and litterateur, present a marked contrast to those of Rubén Darío. The Nicaraguan poet was himself a human lyre upon which the passing winds and events played their own subtle songs; he responded in remarkable degree to the varying influences of his time, presenting, in that response, an organic, mental and spiritual growth. Rodó, no less responsive, was of a more Olympian nature; indeed, if we are to use a phraseology that Nietzsche made popular, Darío is the 'Dionysian spirit, Rodó the Apollonian. Yet they are both men of their age; both represent, in varying degree and in most diverse manifestation, the self-expansion that characterizes the times. Despite his static life (which was altered only toward the end by a voyage to Europe during which he died, at Palermo), and his classical serenity, Rodó was one of the most dynamic spirits of his day. More than any other he realized the fluidity of modern thought, the resurgent self that lay at the bottom of the modernist movement and the general overturn in the world of ideas. In his famous study of Darío's Prosas Profanas he proclaimed, as we saw, his own modernism, not in the sense of the word that connotes a prurient curiosity for the new, but in that larger significance which aligns a man with the spirit of the advancing age. Rodó's entire philosophy of unending selfrenewal is, indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the search for self which, in latter days, has often assumed such ludicrous forms. He is the philosopher not only of modernism, but of eternal youth in the realm of thought. His work reveals how complex is that inner self which once seemed so simple to fathom; complex not only in its modernity, but in the heritage of the past and the previsions of the future which lie dormant in every personality, however humble and seemingly sterile. And here we approach Rodó's great service not only to the youth of Spanish America, but to the youth of the world. He realized in most intense degree, as we shall see from a study of his chief works, the infinite possibilities of the human species; while others were, properly and laudably enough, seeking selfexpansion from within outward, he delved from without inward and revealed the immense store of riches there. In such a sense his philosophy (and I dislike to use a word that seems too static for Rodó's dynamic method), is centripetal. "Know thyself," he said, with Socrates; but what a revelation of our inner selves he afforded us! And he was himself the best example of his method. Not until the close of his life did this man, who had preached the necessity of travel as one of the methods of self-renewal, stir from his beloved Montevideo; yet his life was infinitely richer than that of many a globe-trotter. It was a continuous expansion in both directions; it was, both in its daily manifestations and in the thoughts that grew out of it, a splendid example of what I have called creative eclecticism, a harmonious structure of the present built upon solid foundations of the past,-perhaps the only method possible in these days of growing complexity. The only method, because it is in reality no method, but a flexible view that permits of personal variations and continuous change in accordance with new knowledge. There is nothing essentially novel in Rodó's protean philosophy; novelty long ceased to bask in the solar rays. What is refreshing, vitalizing and stimulating in the thoughts of the great Uruguayan, whose intellectual ancestry dates from Plato and in our own day from Taine, Renan and Bergson, is the emphasis upon the necessity of constant self-renewal. "O rinnovarsi ó morire," d'Annunzio had written, Self-renewal or Death—and the flaming line was taken up by the modern spirits in all the Spanish nations. Characteristically enough, however, Rodó, whose thoughts are upon life rather than death, recasts the phrase and transforms it into "Reformarse es vivir"-Self-renewal is Life." That is the idea at the bottom of everything Rodó wrote; that is his great contribution to the Spanish-American renaissance of the previous century in its later phases. That is the spirit which informs his essays upon representative Spanish Americans, his criticism of HispanoAmerican writers, his writings upon a fuller and broader life. Rodó was among the great essayists of his generation; he was, speaking for Hispanic America, the philosopher par excellence of his time, called into being (as are most great men) by the necessity of the epoch. And although his specific ideas may be altered, subtracted from and added to, the basic element of his philosophy, from the very nature of its call for continuous readjustment to a changing environment, will itself long remain unchanged. He erected, not a system that attempted to include all psychological phenomena within the bounds of a rigid dogma and dogma is all the more distasteful and harmful for being philosophic or scientific-but a strangely adaptable structure that from the very pliability of its nature may better resist those social changes that spell the downfall of more rigid systems. I Modern Uruguay presents, in its intellectual development, a spectacle far out of proportion to the diminutive size of the republic. Out of years of strife has emerged a nation which, in the last half of the nineteenth century, produced such a galaxy of important figures as Samuel Blixen and Victor Pérez Petit (representative of the nat uralistic theatre), Carlos Reyles (influential in the field of the naturalistic novel) and Julio Herrera y Reissig, a modernist poet with an involved style quite his own. Rodó is of their generation,—a generation as rich in intellectual struggles as the previous years of the nation had been in the bloodier contest of the battlefield. Everywhere wages hot discussion of literature, politics and philosophy. In the very year of Rodó's birth was founded the University Club, later called the Ateneo (Atheneum) of Uruguay, in which the spirit of free investigation waged combat against cramping mental restrictions. Rodó was born in Montevideo of an old and well-established house. It is significant that he received his edu cation in the first lay school that was established in the country. At home, however, he was brought up in that Catholic faith which is the common emotional and religious background of all Spanish-American youth. It was, as Rodó's friend Barbagelata points out,' an undogmatic, nonclerical Catholicism that young Rodó imbibed from his mother. The future philosopher, however, early abandoned his visits to the church. His college days were so well spent in serious study that he was accounted a prodigy at the age of twenty-one, and unlike prodigies at that age, an unpedantic one. Like most of us, he consumed not a few of his youthful hours in the composition of verse. One of the sonnets of these early days gives us a hint as to his early readings, and as to something more which, strangely enough, his numerous commentators seem to have overlooked. Let us first read the sonnet: De la dichosa edad en los albores Del sol de adolescencia en los ardores Fronda vernal, mis ocios soñadores. Luego el bronce hugoiano arma y escuda 1 Prologo to Cinco Ensayos, by José Enrique Rodó. Madrid. |