Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (36 page)

In Latin America, we had this movement before Castilian Spain, and for reasons of the utmost clarity: our immediate material and spiritual commerce with the many nations of the world, and also because there is, in the new Latin American generation, an immense desire for progress and an intense enthusiasm, which is that generation’s greatest potential and by which, little by little, it is triumphing against the obstacles of tradition, the walls of indifference, and the oceans of mediocrity that confront it at every turn. I have great pride here in showing books by Lugones or Jaimes Freire, among the poets; among the prose writers, such poems as that vast, strange, and complicated trilogy by Sicardi. And I always say: This is not
Modernismo,
but it is
true,
it is the reality of a new life, the certificate of the intense
force vital
of a continent. And other demonstrations of our mental activity—not the activity that is profuse and rhapsodic, the activity of
quantity,
but rather the activity of
quality,
limited, very limited, but that makes a good presentation of itself and, by the criteria of Europe, triumphs indeed: studies in the political and social sciences. I am just as proud of those. And I remember certain words by Juan Valera, speaking of Olegario Andrade—words in which there is a good, and probable, vision of the future. Speaking of Brazilian, South American, Spanish, and North American literature, Valera said that “the literatures of these nations will continue to be English, Portuguese, and Spanish, which does not mean that with time—perhaps even tomorrow—Yankee authors will not emerge who are better than any so far in England, or that in Rio de Janeiro, Penambuco, or Bahía, writers [will not emerge] better than any Portugal has produced, or that in Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City, Bogotá, or Valparaíso, the sciences, letters, and arts may not flourish with more health and freshness, and more loveliness, than in Madrid, Sevilla, or Barcelona.”

Our
Modernismo,
if it can be called that, is beginning to give us a place apart, a place that is independent of Castilian literature, as Rémy de Gourmont says in a letter to the editor of the
American Mercury.
What does it matter that there are so many wits—
grotesques,
if you will, dilettantes, cynics? Those who are truly consecrated know that it is not a matter of schools, formulas, codes.

In France, England, Italy, Russia, and Belgium, those who have triumphed have been writers and poets and artists of energy, of artistic character, and of tremendous culture. The also-rans have sunk, have faded away. If in the
salons
and chapels of Paris there are and have been laughingstocks, it has been, in fact, the
precieux.
Many would be forgiven,
pour l’amour du grec,
if our dear Professor Calandrelli knew them. Today, artists and writers do not produce
Modernismo
—nor have they ever—with simple plays on words and rhythms. Today, the new rhythms imply new melodies that sing the words of magical Leonardo in the depths of every poet:
Cosa bella mortal passa, e non d’arte.
No matter how often the playful, lightsome
wits
and aged, bitter children speak of this movement’s “failure,” the only writer who fails is the writer who does not bravely and with firm step enter the cage of that divine lion Art—which, like that art created by da Vinci for the great king Francisco, has a chest covered with lilies.

There is no such thing as
Modernismo
here, then, save that which is brought to our arts by a proximity to a fashion that is not understood. Neither character nor way of life nor surroundings aid in the consecration of an artistic ideal. People have talked about a theater, which when I first arrived I thought might be feasible, but today think absolutely impossible.

The only “brotherhood” I see is the brotherhood of caricaturists, and if we are talking about poetic music, the only innovators, surely, are the smiling rhymers of the caricature-newspapers.

A very different case arises in the capital of Catalonia. From
L’Avenç
to
Pel y Plom,
which today are sustained by Utrillo and Casas, we have seen that there are elements for exclusively “modern” publication by an artistic and literary
élite. Pel y Plom
is a periodical similar to the more popular
Gil Blas Ilustré,
without losing its thorniness, its “edge,” and on its first page there is always a drawing by Casas, which is applauded by the
crayons
of Munich, London, and Paris. Per Romeu, whom I have spoken about because of his famous café the
Quatre Gats,
has, with the aid of Casas, been publishing a similar periodical of remarkable artistic merit.

In this capital there are none but the graceful, elegant, if tentative, drawings of Marín—whom the great Puvis has been pleased to praise—and of one or two others. In literature, I repeat, nothing that justifies an attack, or even allusions. The rich and elegant procession of beleaguered “modern art” has had but a few vague parodies, if that . . . . Does my reader recall in Apuleius the dream-vision that preceded the entrance of Spring in the festivals of Isis?
⁴
(Met., XI) Well, pay heed.

THE STORY OF MY BOOKS

This bright spring morning I have sat down to leaf through my beloved old book, that firstborn that initiated a mental movement that was to have so many triumphant consequences in the years that followed, and I browse through its pages like a man rereading old love letters—with an affection mixed with melancholy, and a twinge of
saudade
in remembering my distant youth.

It was in Santiago, Chile, where I had landed, from remote Nicaragua, in search of an environment suitable for intellectual study and other such labors. Despite Chile’s having produced until then only statesmen and jurists, grammarians, historians, journalists, and (at the most) rhymers—traditionalists and academics descended directly from the Spanish motherland—I found there a new air for my eager flights, and found, too, a generation of youths filled with desires for beauty and noble enthusiasms.

When I published the first stories and poems (which bubbled up from the usual canonical founts), I was greeted with incomprehension, astonishment, and censure from the professors, but cordial applause from my companions. What was the origin of the novelty? The origin of the novelty was my recent encounter with the French authors of the Parnassus, for at the time the Symbolist struggle was just beginning in France and so was not known abroad, much less in our Americas. Catulle Mendès was my true initiator—and a Mendès translated, at that, for my French was still somewhat raw. Some of his lyrical-erotic stories, one or another poem among those contained in the
Parnasse contemporaine,
were a revelation to me. Later, I read other authors, prior to Mendès and superior—Gautier, the Flaubert of
The Temptation of St. Anthony,
Paul de Saint-Victor—and from them I got a theretofore unknown (to me) and instantly dazzling conception of style. Accustomed as I was to the eternal cliché of the Spanish
Siglo de Oro
and Spain’s indecisive modern poetry, I found in those French writers a mine of literary gold that was there to be explored, and exploited: I applied their way of employing adjectives, certain syntactical habits, a verbal aristocracy, to my Spanish. The rest was given by the character of Spanish itself, and the talent of yours truly. And I, who know Baralt’s
Dictionary of Gallicisms
by heart, realized that not just a well-chosen Gallicism but also certain particularities from other languages might be extremely useful, might even be of incomparable efficacy in a certain type of “transplant.” Thus, my knowledge of English, of Italian, of Latin were to serve later in the pursuit of my literary ends.

But my penetration into the world of the verbal art of France had not actually begun in Chile. Years earlier, in Central America, in the city of San Salvador, and in the company of the fine poet Francisco Gavidia, my adolescent spirit had explored the immense jungle of Victor Hugo and had contemplated his divine ocean, which contained all things.

Why that title,
Azure
. . . ? I had not yet heard or read that Hugo-esque phrase
“l’Art, c’est l’azur,”
although I had read that musical strophe from
“Les châtiments”
:

 

But blue, azure, was for me the color of daydreams, the color of art, a Hellenic, Homeric color, a color oceanic and firmamental, the
coeruleum
which in Pliny is the simple color that resembles the sky, and sapphires. And Ovid had also sung it:

 

Into that celestial color I concentrated the spiritual flowering of my artistic spring. That first book—for one can hardly count the incomplete volume of verses that appeared in Managua under the title
First Notes
—was composed of a handful of stories and poems that might be called “Parnassian.”
Azul . . .
was printed in 1888 in Valparaíso under the auspices of Eduardo Poirier and the poet de la Barra, for the patron to whom the book was dedicated (under the suggestion of the second of these friends) did not even acknowledge receipt of the first copy that I sent him.

The book was not particularly successful in Chile. A few people gave it a look when the great poet Juan Valera took note of its contents in one of his famous “American Letters” for
El Imparcial
’s literary section,
Lunes.
Valera saw much, expressed his surprise and smiling enthusiasm—why are there those who insist on seeing pins in that ducal outstretched hand?—but he did not realize the full breadth and importance of my attempt. For if this little book had some relative personal merit, then from that was to derive all of our future intellectual revolution.

Those who were taken aback by the originality of this new manner thought it strange, indeed, that a person of such impeccable credentials as Juan Valera might note that the work was written “in excellent Spanish.” Other praise was bestowed by “the treasure of the language,” as the Conde de Navas was known at the time, and from that moment onward the book was sought after and talked about in both the Americas and Spain. Valera observed, in particular, the completely French spirit of the volume. “None of the men of letters of the Peninsula that I have known with more cosmopolitan spirit, and that have resided for a longer time in France, and that have spoken French and other foreign languages better, have ever seemed to me so deeply filled with the spirit of France as you, sir: not Galiano, not Eugenio de Ochoa, not Miguel de los Santos Alvarez.” And he added a little later: “It seems that here, a Nicaraguan author who never set foot out of Nicaragua except to go to Chile, and who is an author so
à la mode de Paris
and with such ‘chic’ and distinction, has been able to anticipate fashion and even modify and impose it.”

It is true; a whiff of Paris animated my efforts at that time. But there was also, as Valera himself noted, a great love for classic literatures and a knowledge of “all European modernity.” It was not, then, a limited and exclusive project. There was, above all, youth, a yearning for life, a sensual
frisson,
a certain pagan dewiness—and that, despite my religious education and profession of the Catholic, apostolic, and Roman faith. Certain heterodox notes are explained by certain readings.

As for the style, it was a time when there was a great love of “artistic writing” and elegant dilettantism. In the story titled “The Bourgeois King,” I think I can recognize the influence of Daudet. The symbol is clear, and is summarized in the artist’s eternal protest against the dry, practical man, the dreamer’s chafing against the tyranny of uncultured and uneducated wealth. In “The Fat Satyr,” the procedure is more or less that of Mendès, though there are also echoes of Hugo and Flaubert. The models for “The Nymph” are the Parisian stories of Mendès, Armand Silvestre, Mezeroi, with the superaddition that the setting, the plot, the details, the tone belong to the life of Paris, the literature of Paris. There is no need to note, is there, that I had never voyaged outside my native country, as Valera said, except to go to Chile, and that both subject and composition were what one might in all justice call “bookish”?

In “The Bale,” the then-much-in-vogue Naturalist school triumphed. I had just read certain works by Zola, and the reflection was instant; but as this mode suited neither my temperament nor my fancy, I have never again followed that road. In “Queen Mab’s Veil,” on the other hand, my imagination did find a suitable subject. Shakespearean dazzle possessed me, and for the first time I produced a poem in prose. More than in any of my other attempts, I sought in this story to achieve rhythm and verbal sonority, a transposition of music into words—a feat until then (as everyone acknowledges) unknown in Castilian prose, for the periodic cadences of some classics are another thing. “Gold’s Song,”
El canto del oro,
is also a prose poem, but of another genre. Valera calls it a litany. And here, allow me to insert an anecdote. I sent several Parisian men of letters copies of my book, the moment it came out. Some time later, in Péladan’s
La Panthée,
there appeared a
“Cantique de l’or”
that bore more than a passing resemblance to mine. Coincidence? Perhaps. I hesitated to make anything of the matter, because between the great aesthete and me, there was no clarification possible, and in the long run I would have been, despite the chronology, the author of “Gold’s Song” plagiarized from Péladan.

“The Ruby” is another story in the Parisian manner. A “myth,” Valera calls it. A springtime fantasy, rather, as is “The Palace of the Sun,” where the use of the
leit-motif
may be noted. And then another tale of Paris—lighter, despite its significance to life—“The Azure Bird.” In “White Doves and Dark Herons,” the subject is autobiographical, and the setting is the Central American land in which I was born. Everything in it is true, though gilded with youthful illusion. It is a faithful echo of my lovelorn adolescence, the awakening of my sense and my spirit under the influence of the enigma of universal palpitation. The section of the volume titled “In Chile,” which contains “In Search of Paintings,” “Watercolor,” “Landscape,” “Etching,” “The Virgin of the Dove,” “The Head,” another “Watercolor,” “A Portrait of Watteau,” “Still Life,” “In Charcoal,” “Landscape” [
sic,
original title in English], and “The Ideal” are essays of color and drawing that had no antecedents in our prose. These transpositions of the pictorial into the verbal were to be followed by those of the grand Colombian J. Asunción Silva, and that, chronologically, resolves the doubt expressed by some that the work of the author of “Nocturne” may have been prior to my own. “The Death of the Empress of China”—published recently in French in the collection titled
Les Mille Nouvelles Nouvelles
—is an innocent sort of tale, with little intrigue, and with a slight echo of Daudet. In “To a Star,” a song of passion, a romance, a prose poem, the idea is joined to the musicality of the word.