STUDIES IN
BPANISH-AMERICAN
LITERATURE
BY
ISAAC GOLDBERG, Ph.D.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
PROF. J. D. M. rORD
Smith Professor of Freorh •nil Spanish Languages
in Harvard UniTrrsitf
NEW YORK
BRENTANO'S
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1920. by
BRENTANO'S
All rights reserved
TO
MY PARENTS
4^.^480
P6
INTRODUCTION
It is only tilt' other day that cultured men in the Spanish
motherland began to manifest any real interest in the litera-
ture ol tlieir one-time eolonies in the Western World.
Hardly at all before Juan Valera, the charming novelist
and discerning critic, wrote his gossipy American Letters,
(1888-1890) did well trained men and much less, of
course, the ordinary reader in the Iberian peninsula re-
alize the ambitious activity of the many writers of the 19th
century-, scattered throughout the countries lying between
the southern bounds of the United States and Tierra del
Fuego; and not until Menendez y Pelayo prepared for the
Spanish Academy his Anthology of Spanish- American
Poets (1893-95) was there any considerable knowledge in
Spain of the great output of Spanish verse in the New
World from the period of settlement down to our own
times.
Genial spirit though he was, Valera was unable to avoid
a certain display of that condescending tolerance of the
European critic for the products of the colonial mind which
we in the United States have been so accustomed to find in
the attitude of the British critics and essayists toward our
own belles lettres. Still, Valera and Menendez y Pelayo
did prompt their Spanish compatriots to look with some
degree of attention at the range of Spanish- American
authorship, and then came the Modernist movement, which,
emanating from the once ignored field of colonial letters,
vil
viU INTRODUCTION
made its way into the Old World Capital, Madrid, and
showed that the American children had something of value
and of their own contrivance to bring back to the Iberian
mother.
What the Modernist Movement means — of course it has
nothing to do with the similarly named theological flurry
of a little while ago — Dr. Goldberg aims to make clear in
the pages of this book, and, doing this, he is also playing
his useful part in the spreading of the evangel of intel-
lectual Pan-Americanism. For w^e, the northern brothers
of the Spanish Americans, have remained even more ob-
livious to the ideals and merits of Spanish-American liter-
ary culture than the Spaniards were until lately, and it is
high time that we rouse ourselves to a sense of our back-
wardness in the case. When we do so and bestir ourselves
to know properly the tendencies and achievements of Span-
ish-American writers — nor should we forget the Portu-
guese-American writers of Brazil in this connection — we
shall perforce begin to conceive a high regard for their
zeal, their motives, and their conscious artistry. Racial
antipathy, if it exist at all, or, at least, racial indifference
will certainly yield to some better feeling, when the think-
ing people of one racial origin are led to an adequate com-
prehension and a favorable estimate of the intellectual per-
formances of a people whose provenience is quite other
than their own. A sermon might well be preached on this
subject, but instead of a sermon a book is now presented
in the hope tliat it will help to break down barriers for the
maintenance of which there is no just excuse of a racial,
political, commercial, cultural or other nature.
J. D. M. Ford.
FOREWORD
The purpose of the present volume is to introduce to Eng-
ish readers a continental culture that they have too long
leglected. Not tliat we have been alone in our neglect;
Spain itself, [\\c mother nation of Spanish America's grow-
ng republics, has until very recently ignored the letters of
ts numerous offspring.
Owing to the meager acquaintance that our reading pub-
ic has with Spanish-American literature, a book of purely
Titical essays is at this time inadvisable; I have, there-
ore, in the following chapters, freely mingled excerpts,
'xposition and a modicum of criticism, in the hope of thus
providing an incentive for further delving into the authors
ind the books commented upon. Whatever criticism I
lave written has been determined by a flexible attitude, —
I have sought to suggest rather than to define.
Not entirely without reason, although in occasionally
exaggerated fashion, Spanish Americans have frequently
expressed suspicion of, and hostility to, the United States.
Yet it is from a North American, Dr. Alfred Coester, that
he first literary history of Spanish America has come
[New York, 1916), and that valuable volume I recommend
nost cordially to any one desirous of securing an adequate
listorical background for studies in Spanish-American
etters.
In later books I plan to present not only other Spanish-
X FOREWORD
American writers of distinction (and there is a host that
might with equal profit have been treated in the present
book), but also Brazilian autliors of note, — such men as
Machado de Assis, Olavo Bilac, Coelho Netto, Jose
Verissimo, — to name but four out of a multitude. The
spirits referred to are of value not only to a study of com-
parative literature, but in themselves.
For the chief impulse in assembling these studies I am
indebted to Prof. J. D. M. Ford of Harvard University, a
pioneer scholar of singularly communicative inspiration.
I alone, however, am responsible for my opinions. I
am glad to record also my thanks to Mr. Burton Kline,
the short-story writer and novelist, who as magazine editor
of the Boston Evening Transcript held his columns always
open to articles upon Spanish and Portuguese American
letters. And I am especially thankful to Miss Alice Stone
Blackwell, the well known editor and suffragist, for nu-
merous versions of tlie work of Spanish-American poets.
Unless otherwise indicated, all verse translations are from
her pen.
In a field so relatively new to this country, and in which
the difficulties of intercommunication are great, (even in
Spanish America), errors are more than likely to appear.
The author may be addressed in care of the publishers
with reference to suggestions that may be incorporated
into a later edition.
Isaac Goldberg.
Roxbury, Mass., 1919.
STUDIES IN
SPANISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
THE "MODERNISTA'* RENOVATION
The study of that phase of recent Spanish-American let-
ters which has been rather loosely and inexpressively, if
popularly, termed '"Modernism" forms one of the most in-
teresting adventures in compara'tive 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 centur)% but rather an aspect of a spirit
tliat inundated the world of western thought during that
era. The English language contributed such influences as
\^1ijtman, 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
Bjoemsen 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 tlie foreign influence, echoed the labors of the
Parnassians and the Symbolist-Decadents. And into the
subsequent productions of the "modernists," both the mere
2 /••fttlJp.^FS'iV SPAN;^SPyV]\lERICAN LITERATURE
imitators and the genuine spirits striving for self-expres-
sion, 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 ever}'where 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 Penin-
sular literature in the year of Spain's defeat by the United
■— J States) wasjToti tlien, a school. Perhaps the word move-
ment 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 car-
ried 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 rea-
son 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 se-
lect, witli more or less confidence, those elements best
suited to its purpose, — a purpose at first somewhat spon-ti
taneous, uncritical, hesitant, but gradually acquiring self
THE "MODERNISTA" RENOVATION 3
rcliaiu-c, direction, vil)raliiig consciousness. The word
Miovcinenl is for similar reasons not entirely satisfactory.
It does not convey tlie ilyiuunic conception at llie bottom
of modernism, which, more exactly si)eaking, is the syn- ^
thesis of several movements. In the latter sense modcrn-
i>m, far from having run its course, has entered upon a con-
tiiuMiIal |)hase which promises to bear fruitful and signifi-
( int 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 outgrowtlis of one an-
other; they are all petals of the same flower, with a stem
tliat sinks deep into the fecund soil of modernity.
THE FRENCH BACKGROUND
For a more than superficial understanding of this im-
portant epoch it is necessary to glance at the course of
French letters during the last half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. 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 contempo-
raries; 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 aff^ecting another, when in reality
4 STUDIES IN SPANISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE j
they are both being acted upon by the same, or similar,
non-literary influences. "A great many sins," says one of
the most penetrating and independent of our younger crit-
ics, "have been committed by the scholarly search for
influences. A saner and more philosophic view of the his-
tory of literature regards the appearance of new sources
of inspiration and new forms of expressions as outgrowths
of those larger spiritual forces that are wont to affect at
the same time or almost at the same time groups of people
that have reached a like stage of development. The mod-
ern emergence of the free personality from the merely
political individual — the voter who in his day succeeded
the tribesman and the slave — accounts for the change in
the passions and the forms of poetry in Goethe and in
Shelley, in Whitman and Henley, in Richard Dehmel
and in Henri de Regnier." ^ It is a platitude that liter-
ature, in common with all art, has its roots in life, yet
how often we forget, or even ignore, that life which indi-
rectly creates it. A more thorough consideration of let-
ters, then, seeks to penetrate beneath merely personal in-
fluences; it seeks to understand those economic and
social forces that underlie artistic manifestations; it seeks
the environment behind the man and the age behind the j
environment, all the time remembering (what many sci-
entific critics forget) that no age, however homogeneous
it appears in the light of history, is a simple attitude, and
that no man, however unified his life may outwardly seem,
is an embodiment of calm logic unruffled by inner conflict.
In a larger sense, literary history is a series of actions
and reactions. That is why it is just as true to say that
1 Ludwig Lewisolm. The Poets of Modern France. New York, 1918.
THE "MODERNISTA" RENOVATION 5
all thinf:;s under the sun are now, or that lUTthing Is; it all
dt'jKMuls upon the point of view. The names we give to the
nrurrent ebb and How suit our purpose with varying de-
cree o[' utility, but all are aliki' harmful if they obscure
the essential fluidity of human ihoughl. Classieism did
not die with llie age to whieh that label is usually applied;
indeed, it never died. Romanticism, likewise, is more than
an epoch in the history of letters; it is a human attitude.
Itider various titles we have designated literary periods
wliieh show as their distinctive traits the one or the other
sjiirit, but no age has lacked examples of both views of
life and art. Later artistic histor)% indeed, reflecting the
growing complexity of modem life, finds the task of
labelling, — once so simple and matter-of-fact, — an in-
creasingly diflicult aff'air. This is but one of the conse-
quences brought on by the resurgence of self in creative
endeavor, by a more personal note (even in so-called im-
personal art), by a life so rich in stimulus as to open up
new worlds within as well as without.
If, then, I speak of literary influenice, and make use of
certain symbols of criticism it is with a strong feeling that
the influence, though literary in manifestation, rests upon
a firm foundation of that group-life out of which the crea-
tive artist must rise, yet from which he may never com-
pletely detach or isolate himself.
The main currents of French poetry of the second half
of the nineteenth century have been variously grouped;
common critical opinion recognizes as distinct manifesta-
tions the Parnassians " and the Symbolist-Decadents.
^ So named from the title of the first anthology of poems by the group —
Pamasse Contemporain (1866), which had been the name of a little review
published by Catulle Mendes and Xavier de Ricard.
6 STUDIES LN SPANISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE
Like all new schools, the Parnassian was a reaction, fi-
nally growing to the proportions of an affirmation. Ro-
manticism, by 1850, had run its cour-^ and the times were
ripe for change. The scientific "' '' *he age, as well
as the oppressive character of the . Napoleon III,
produced a tendency in favor of a lore ca^sic interpreta-
tion of art, — an interpretation that ^'avored sobriety of con-
ception, refuge in the ivory tower of lofty seclusion, an
objective attitude toward life. It was not so much a pre-
conceived program as a common refutation that brought to-
gether such varying spirits as the sombre, Olympic, Leconte
de Lisle and the sympathetic, tender, charming Frangois
Coppee.
The contribution of the Parnassians to French poetry
is well known; in opposition to the intensely personal touch
of the Romanticists (itself a reaction against the imper-
sonality of the classic school), they reintroduced the im-
personal attitude, seeking objective reality and embodying
it in a form of marmoreal beauty. The Symbolists, on the
other hand, with whom the Decadents are frequently
grouped, in turn rebelled against realism and the im-
personality, the sculptural isolation of the Parnassians.
They beheld the necessity of a radical change in both the
form and substance of French poetry, and gatliering a
group of writers who were well-defined personalities rather
than slaves to a formula, they initiated an era of expan-
sion and experiment whose effects have extended into our
own day. For inspiration they turned to such a relatively
"old" poet as Charles Baudelaire, as well as to the vibrat-
ing lyricist Paul Verlaine and the tremulous, vague, enig-
matic Stephane Mallarme.
1
THE -MODEKNISTA" RENOVATION 7
Like tlu* Panuissians, llic Syniholists won* mon* or loss a
reflection of the ilominant attiUitlc ol llic social environ-
ment. The day of self-expression was being definitely
ushereil in; tlie marble Galatea of Pamassianism was ren-
dered j^railually transparent, revealing the pulsing heart
within, the complex soul; man was a universe in himself,
aquiver widi a being new-bom, seeking for self-revelation
means as subtle anil suggestive as possible. The Symbol-
ists turned as naturally to music, — the most subtly suggest-
ive of tlie arts, as some composers of the day turned to the
delicate nuances of symbolistic poetry for inspiration.
More than one writer has commented upon the ill-chosen
name of that group; the word symbolic suggests too much
to suggest anything. The purpose of the Symbolists, how-
over, was clear. They sought to sound tlie well of human
personality, and to accomplish this aim by all the artifices
of suggestion they could master. Where the Parnassians
chiselled for tlie eye, they would chant for the ear. Like
the "Art Poetique" of Verlaine, who for long did not re-
alize the revolution he had brought about in verse, so they
proclaimed
De la musique avant toute chose
Et pour ceia prefere Tlmpair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans I'air
Sans rien en lui qui pese ou qui pose.
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Ou rindecis au Precis se joint
Car nous voulons la Nuance encor.
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!
Prends reloquence et tors-lui son cou!
8 STUDIES IN SPAiNISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE
These few excerpts from the famous poem of Verlaine
give in themselves a fairly adequate summary' of the Sym-
bolist aim. Musical verse, delicate shades rather than
definite color, absence of pompous verbiage, freedom of
structure, independence in matters of rhyme, — which in
the same poem is characterized as a penny trinket ("ce bijou
d'un sou"), — the communication of what has been called
"spiritual reality" (which is by no means a contradiction
in terms), — these are symptomatic of symbolist matter and
manner. Professor Lewisohn, in the compact but stimulat-
ing, suggestive book I have already quoted, rightly relates
the movement as a whole to that "modern striving toward
self -hood" which appears in varied form in all the leading
literatures of the world.
That striving for self-hood, quite naturally, — since in tlie
words of the great German, "man errs the while he strives,"
— vented itself, as it still does today, in fashions strange and
often uncanny. These neo-idealists, as a voluminous
Spanish critic ^ has termed them, early betrayed synaesthes-
iac tendencies. Gautier established a hierarchy of words,
comparing them to precious stones. Mallarme, the elusive
interpreter of suggestion, thought that the name Emil pos-
sessed a green-lapislazuli hue. Arthur Rimbaud's well-
known neurotic sonnet of the vowels sought to reduce the
vowel system to a palette, assigning to A the color black, to
B, the color white; to I, red; to U, green; to 0, blue, and
carrying this fantastic foolery to absurd details. Not to
be outdone, Rene Ghil, likewise an exemplification of the
decadent persuasion, reported a different classification.
To him I is not red, but blue; 0, instead of blue, is red; U,
3 Julio Cejador y Frauca. Historia de La Lengua y Literatura Castellana,
Comprendidos los Autores Hispano-Americanos. Tomo X.
THE "MODERNISTA" RENOVATION 9
rather than green, is yellow; the same author carried his
color impressions into the domain of the orchestra, and in
his Traite dii Vcrbc discovers thai harps arc white, violins
blue, tlie 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 inter-
related. There are perfumes fresh as the flesh of babes,
sweet as oboes and green as the prairies."^
To judge artistic schools by t emporary abe rr ations of \\^
their representatives is to confess an uncritical attitude.^ .^Ic^
Criticism itself, which is an art rather than a science (de- ^^^
spite 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 re-
create, ratlier than embalm.
That modern French poetry which was destined to reform
the poetry of Spain through the modernist spirit, which first
* The question of colored audition and related phenomena forms one of
the most interesting phases of modern psychology. There is nothing new
in Rene Ghil's orchestral coloring. Goethe, in his work on Color, says that
Leonhard Hoffmann (1786) assigned colors to the tones of various instru-
ments. The violoncello, for example, was indigo-blue, the violin was ultra-
marine 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 wlio
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 Material-
ien zur Geschichte dcr Farbenlehre, under Hoffmann's name.
10 STUDIES IN SPANISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE
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 post-
Kantian idealists. The creative self that projects the vision
of die universe stands above it and need not be bound by
the shadows it has itself evoked. The inner realities be-
came die 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 in-
filtration 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."
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 pre-
pared 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 man-
ifestations since the wave of "modernism" has receded on
both Spanish sides of the Atlantic; or at least, has accom-
plished its historic mission. Contemporary Spanish-Amer-
ican prose and verse at their best, are remarkable for their
B Op. cit. Page 28.
8 Op. cit. Page 8.
THE "MODERNISTA" RENOVATION 11
lucidity, tluMr ciiiclility, their adaptation to the nuilliraiious
hues and luimors of latlcrnlay ihouglit. The Uiiigiiagc can
crackle and sphitter beneath the fiery pen of a Blanco-Fom-
liona; in the hands of a Dario it acquires Gallic luminosity;
Santos Chocano achieves with it new sonorities that well
match his volcanic, hi-continental utterances; Jose Enrique
Rodo makes it the vehicle of pregnant essays thafat times
match those of Macaulay or Emerson.
The French inlluence, however, was more or less spor-
adic; or, if sporadic is not quite the right term, uneven and
dependent upon particular circumstances. Spanish writers