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

ONE 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 America 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.