Ariel

ARIEL

BY

JOSÉ ENRIQUE RODÓ

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY

F. J. STIMSON (J. S. of Dale)

Late United States Ambassador to Argentina

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1922

Prefatory Essay

O
NE day last year, some three years after his death at Palermo alone and in distress, a Uruguayan ship of war brought home, to his native city of Montevideo, Rodo’s body—to be buried beneath the great monument his nation is now to dedicate to him. The day was made a national holiday, and all Latin America, in sympathy, took part.

Although perhaps the greatest of modern American idealists, and the "London
Times
, the Boston
Transcript
, the New York
Prensa
, devoted pages to his memory, he is still little known in North America.
“Ariel,”
perhaps his greatest work, has much to say of us; it is charged with a spirit that in these post-war days we have largely lost; it brings the best thought of that older, Latin, Roman culture of Amer
ica
of the
South
to the newer, Saxon civilization of the North; it has been therefore a grateful task for a representative of the latter to essay its translation, with a hope of saving something of the beauty of the original. For “Ariel ” is a thing of
beauty
, first of all; its learning, if not its teaching, , might be gleaned from other books.

South America believes, with many of us, that in the ideals of America rest the hope of the world. And in this all-American mission, South America has its share. The Saxon gift to the world’s civilization was liberty; the Roman, was law; the one excels in applied science, the other in the Art of Life; and both, in America, are dreaming of a world where there is no war. But South America, in an age of brute conflict, a time of chemistry and of machines, when the flood of materialism seemed about to overcome the finer work of civilization, has, by its very remoteness, its very backwardness, been held aloof.

Although with a passionate interest greater then than ours, it viewed the war for the most part as a distant planet a burning sun. And before that cataclysm, to which the world’s machine-made industrialism indeed had largely led, its countries, mainly agricultural, were spared that flood of energy for the multiplication of the cheaper things of life, not food for body or the soul, that slavery to machines in the much- vaunted “efficiency,” and “division of labor,’’ that exploitation of man and woman in the operative, which have so much confused our Northern judgment of the higher things in life, and, worse than that, has bred class-conflict, distrust of all government, and passionate enmity between those who should be working together in generous production and fair distribution of even the material things of earth.

John Stuart Mill had
a horrible
phrase:

‘
‘
Utilities, fixed, and embodied, in material objects
'’; and it has lately seemed, in that
world of chemistry and machinery which our modern life has evolved, as if only those utilities which could be fixed and embodied in material objects and multiplied in great quantities for universal demand were deemed of any value. Newspapers instead of books, “process” work for pictures, “movies” for plays, casts for sculpture, moulds of concrete for architecture, and, worst of all, canned food or cold-storage for fresh vegetables, meat, or fish, and ready-bought “delicatessen” replacing the art of cooking; commercial textbooks and state-schedules for the individual teacher; trusts for the private initiative; and everywhere, machinery for handicraft, “applied science ” for the arts, and crowd-imitation or the mob-spirit for the free mind. But Ruskin followed Mill; and he asked humanity to consider what “value ” really means. It is not material, still less mechanical, but the
life-giving
quality of a thing:
valor
—
valere
—that which is
sane,
and well, and makes for the life of man; and that means, in last analysis, the life of his soul. Moving men, or their merchandise, or even their messages, at lightning speed from place to place, does not better humanity nor much improve man’s civilization; nor does the multiplication of brute objects without beauty or value in themselves.
Value
may be defined as that which gives strength to life and elevation to the soul. Beauty does this; and purity of thought; and high knowledge, both of past and present; and these are works of art and of teaching, not of science. And virtue, which is the word
value
as applied to the spirit, is bom of thought and bred to character. And the great thoughts of men are saved for other men mainly by books. Thus we find that it is art and literature which are true value to the soul, as right acting and true thinking make the character of man. Science should be the handmaiden of life, the hewer of wood and the drawer of water; the
Caliban
, in short. But the souls of men will starve as the ideals of men will fail, when they forget their
Ariel.

We live in a time when Caliban seems to have the upper hand. The desires of Caliban, the judgments of Caliban, the hunger and thirst of Caliban, seem now to fill the world. And some of us are losing heart. We feel as if there were no master
Prospero,
no mage to bind and scourge Caliban back to his lair, to plague him with the pains of his own shortcoming, to punish his coarse body with cramps and pains, the retribution, the Nemesis that came in Shakespeare’s
Tempest
to subdue even Caliban once more to his spirit master. The voices that see this and protest aloud are few. There were almost none in Germany. The world of materialism was all that her misguided people saw. Sometimes there did not seem to be many in our own country, where the numbing
stream of sudden wealth had lured man’s coarser nature to self-indulgence, and a luxury to which it was unused had stunted—let us hope, but for the moment—the growth of his soul.

Yet, living is an art, and not a science. “Conduct is three-fourths of life”; 'and conduct in itself is an art; the art of right living. And
value
—that is, what makes for the real welfare of humanity —depends upon the
wholesome
things alone, beginning with healthy food; for man’s first art was the art of cooking; and ending in the art of making a beautiful house, a happy home, "tight teaching and right thinking for the children; and the enlargement of man’s nature in the higher freedom of the soul.It seems to be
a tíme
when the multitude is contemptuous of all this. Hod carriers are paid more than teachers; while as for thinkers, artists, ’poets, the world now seems to have no use for them. For five years it has devoted itself to the manu
facture
of mechanisms to destroy human life; only a tithe of its effort has been devoted even to the raising of food, to the things that have value, that have the power of giving life, life of the body or life of the spirit. And yet men are puzzled! They complain of the high cost of living, when for a lustrum men have not thought of living but of killing; they marvel that those things of real value, which the world has neglected to plant or rear, have grown so scarce. And in North America we do not yet seem to have profited by this lesson. Caliban has there no word for Ariel, and all that Ariel represents. They call him scornfully the “highbrow” ; that is to say, the man who has behind his forehead sight and thought for things that lie above and beyond immediate sensuous enjoyment. Sadly significant is the use of this scornful piece of slang—“highbrow” — for all that stands above what swine may trample with their feet.

Yet there have been voices, and voices since Ruskin, who have spoken in protest of all this. In Italy, Ferrero; in Uruguay,
Rodó; Amado Nervo
in Mexico; the poets of Colombia, and poets and publicists in Argentina. Why is it that so many of these come from South America, and all that I have mentioned are of Latin stock ?

South Americans have sometimes thought themselves unfortunate that they were so far removed from the great material movements of the day; that they spring from an ancient Latin race, not of lusty Northern blood, and that for three centuries since they have kept mainly to themselves by preserving the Spanish traditions of manners and of life. They have valued personal dignity as they have valued courtesy; personal liberty as much as State power; less interested in machinery than in the art of life; they have placed “la
joie
de vi
vre”
above the making wholesale of “utilities fixed and embodied in material objects.” And possibly some of them have repined that they were weak countries, not strong materially, not bristling with navies or great armies. They have not seen—nor does the world yet sec —what a rare role they have to play. Of all the quarters of the world, this alone has been able to keep tranquilly burning the torch of civilization. Here they have had no dream of conquest, and no harsh necessity of protecting themselves. The war has been remote, even in those South American countries which engaged in it; and before the war the very fact that they were not countries of great material prosperity other than that healthy well-being which comes direct from the soil; that they were not dazzled by all the temptations of exploiting the masses in hived industries —enabled them to keep Caliban in his place. It is not a trivial thing that of all countries of the world the Latin-American ones are those where poets are most nu-
merous
and all that poetry stands for is most prized. It is not without significance that South America alone is almost free, so far as Americans are concerned, from the “I Won’t Worker” who would spoliate the labor of others and do without all but the grosser things of this world — and from the legislative meddler and from the Bolshevik. For the same reason, International Law, which is the shield of weak countries against the strong, has its natural home in South America; and many of its leading scholars live there. For if liberty be the great gift to the world of the Saxon civilizations, law is the lesson of the Latin. And bound together and protected by bonds of fraternity which shall forever guard them against foreign aggression, they have been able to keep this lamp burning undimmed. The spirit of Cervantes is still with them, as in that wonderful chapter wherein he talks on war. Long may it be before it is forgotten! The object of war is peace, as the object of life is joy; and joy cannot endure without the love of one’s fellow-men.

This work of
Rodó’s,
when it first appeared, some years since, lay in piles of popular editions in every bookstall in Buenos Aires and other South American cities. One can hardly hope for such a general reading here. But it is a typical message from South America; and, as such, well worth our attention. Spanish scholars will note that (in order to conform their way of writing to ours in English) I have a little simplified the style of
Rodó,
particularly toward the end. Barring this, I hope that it is faithfully reproduced ; and that in the process of translating, not all the beauty of the marvellous Spanish has been lost.

What would
Rodó
have said, had he lived to see our entrance in the great war for world liberty? And how much would he have altered or added to what he says
of the
United States
in
Ariel?
Much, by very much. Indeed for several years before the war there had been noticeable a marked change in the feelings of intelligent South Americans toward their big brother, the erstwhile feared “Colossus of the North.” Although Manuel Ugarte in South America, with Zimmermann of the Berlin Foreign Office, tried vainly to keep it alive in the interests of Germany during the war, this distrust of us had been rapidly disappearing. That very spirit of ideality which
Rodó
in this book finds so largely lacking had shown itself powerful enough to lead us, with motives at least immediately unselfish, into the greatest war of history. For years before, ever since the Spanish War, in fact (which in its inception they had bitterly disapproved), our course, as shown in Cuba, in the Philippines, and, despite all our provocation, as to Mexico; in President Wilson’s Mobile speech; in the treaty
making amends to Colombia; and finally in the reasons given in his address to Congress on declaring war—had met with South American approval. They feared us no longer. And when they read our reasons then given for our entrance into the war, what had been fear became enthusiasm. In Argentina, where up to that time English and German influences, equally strong, had about divided public sentiment, it became, from fifty-fifty “pro-aliado” quite ninety per cent “pro-Americano.” Argentina refused to issue a decree of neutrality as between the United States and Germany, although one had been issued, in 1914, as between Germany and the other powers; and a great mass meeting was held in the largest theater in Buenos Aires to encourage the Government to extend open hospitality to Caperton’s fleet during the war, at which our action was compared to the great heroic epic of South America when, a hundred years before, their great liber
ator, San Martín,
had led an Argentine army across the almost unknown Andes to free Chile and Peru, and then, with the help of Bolivar, all Spanish South America from the yoke of Spain. San Martin’s rifles had been sent him in a Boston ship: and the ladies of Mendoza had sold their jewels to buy the metals of which to cast his cannon. And in the city of Mendoza there is to-day, on a foothill of the Andes, perhaps the greatest of modem monuments, to commemorate this event