99 The ethical aspect of Rodó's work has been succinctly treated by Pedro Henríquez Ureña in a lecture given before the Ateneo de México on August 22, 1910, and since reprinted in several Spanish publications. Señor Henríquez Ureña considers that Rodó's great originality consists "in having joined the cosmological principle of creative evolution to the ideal of a standard of action for life.' Much of Rodó is in Bergson, as it is in Goethe and many before him. This lay mystic is "of the family of Epictetus, and of Plutarch, of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, Luis de León, Raimonde Sebonde, Emerson, Ruskin,—the family over which, sheltering it with one of his archangel's wings, the divine Plato presides." The most searching critique of Rodó's achievement is from the pen of Gonzalo Zaldumbide, in the Revue Hispanique, (XLIII, 103, June, 1918, pp. 205-307). Señor Zaldumbide's discussion is a wholesome corrective for the excessive praise that has been heaped upon the great Uruguayan, although the critic's anxiety not to overestimate Rodó leads him, I believe, to underestimate such a capital work as the Motivos de Proteo. When he says that Rodó brought no new thoughts, and that his work will endure chiefly because of its language, he is on the whole right. But did Rodó aim to bring new thoughts? Was it not the love of truth, not truth, that Rodó aimed to instil? And is not Rodó's insistence upon continuous change new in its implications, and of necessity so? "The book (i.e., Motivos de Proteo) to which he desired to impart above all a dynamic virtue, a guiding impulse, becomes a static book, motionless in its perfection," writes Zaldumbide. But this is little more than a play on words. Rodó's book is dy namic, by virtue of the sense of necessity for continuous growth which it instils. Nor is there any greater value to the critic's objection that only those who do not need that sense in the first place, will be benefited by the dynamic view. For Rodó will penetrate to those who need his dynamic ethics through those others whose sense of the necessity for change has been quickened, if not inculcated, by the Motivos. Rodó was in a very true sense an inspirer, not a dogmatist. "If he proved the necessity and the poetry of an ideal, he imposed no ideal as the true one, to the exclusion of others," objects Zaldumbide. But this would have been opposed to Rodó's cardinal tenet of the self-determination of personality, so to speak. There is more force to Zaldumbide's objection that Rodó "limited the drama of our destiny to the immediate problem of vocation." Yet the Motivos contain the corrective to their own limitations, because of their indubitably dynamic effect. No one who wishes to know the complete Rodó may do with. out Zaldumbide's deeply penetrative study. Radiance, serenity, an insight that is none the less clear for its depth, classic repose combined with a dynamic conception of modernity, eternal intellectual youth-these are the distinguishing attributes of a power whose influence should not be confined to the Spanish tongue. 2 CHAPTER IV JOSÉ SANTOS CHOCANO (1875-) DURING the lifetime of Darío, José Santos Chocano was looked upon by many as his rival; after the death of the great Nicaraguan, the Peruvian was proclaimed his successor, although that distinction is by no means an undisputed one. We may well afford to leave that particular matter to the politics of art. The two men were not rivals; it is enough to read Darío's generous poetic introduction to Santos Chocano's Alma América to dispel that notion. They were, in a great measure, complementary personalities, although one need not go so far (as has been done) as to pronounce Darío the feminine element and Chocano the masculine. In Chocano we find but a trace of the doubt that constantly assailed Darío during his agitated, neurotic career; in him we find nothing at all of the morbidity that consumed the author of Cantos de Vida y Esperanza. In this respect the Peruvian more resembles Martí and BlancoFombona; it would seem that a life of action in rebellion against political and economic institutions did not leave these spirits time for morbid introspection. We shall find in Chocano, too, a certain change of attitude toward the United States, although it is not untempered by fear and veiled threat. He possessed, from the very first, an international outlook that was not limited to 246 mere book readings, and that did not confine itself to artistic channels. If Darío was a vibrant lyre, Chocano is a ringing bell, a blasting trumpet; look over his writings from his earliest protests, which landed him in the regulation fashion behind the prison bars of an unfeeling tyrant, through to the very latest, and you will find a singular predominance of the exclamation point; the fact is symbolic of a large part of his proud, sonorous, arrogant, polyphonic utterances. He is as much bard as poet, as much epic as lyric, as much universal as more restrictedly American in the Spanish sense. And through all his labors, early and late, is evident a strange duality of mood, outlook and expression. He is at once, as we have seen, epic and lyric; he seeks to reconcile the old Spain with its former colonies; to bring about a certain Pan-Americanism that includes the United States (although it is easy to exaggerate this part of his labors, as I believe it has been exaggerated); he is classic and romantic, most sensibly denying adherence to any artistic creed; he is savage and aristocratic; he is the man of nature, in Rousseau's meaning, and the man of refinement; he is at once the past, the present and the future; he combines power with delicacy; he is pantheistic, yet devoutly and publicly a modern believer. The list of attributes might be extended indefinitely; beneath the apparent contradictions lies a contemporaneity no less universal than Darío's, yet expressing itself through an entirely different personality. Like Darío, he feels that he has been born out of his age, yet one feels the plaint more genuine in the case of the former, for Chocano is very much a man of the times; indeed, he came a little too early rather than, as he has complained, much too late; this it was that brought him to the prison cell at the age of eighteen in his native Callao. To paraphrase Patrick Henry's memorable sentence, Blanco-Fombona had his Gómez, Montalvo had his García Moreno, José Marmol had his Rosas, and so, too, did Chocano wage battle against the entire social system. 1. Earliest Productions The earliest productions from Chocano's pen were Iras Santas (1895); En La Aldea (published later in the same year, although the poems were written two years earlier) and Azahares (1896). There is much in these youthful efforts that the author himself has since, with good judgment, repudiated; a study of the verses, however, repays us for the insight they afford into the poet's thoughts and personality, and for the further proof they offer that the poetchild is father to the man-poet. Iras Santas quivers with the holy rage of a passionate, ideally-minded youth against the maladjustments of contemporary society. The youngster had evidently read a great deal; he was familiar with the same Hugo that inspired so much of Darío's earlier efforts; he must, as even the work of his middle period shows, have literally swal lowed not a few volumes of socialistic and anarchistic doctrine. His conception of the poet is that of the proud spirit who must break yokes and sing the redemption, for Siempre al cantar Victor Hugo The poet bids Lazarus arise and Justice be born anew. Not |