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 liberator, 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

“You have,” said one orator of the occasion, referring first to their “Cabildo,” in Buenos Aires, their “cradle of liberty,” and then to their Independence Hall, the old house in the city of Tucumán where their independence was formally declared, “a third great and solemn monument. It stands on the Hill of Glory, and looks Westward to the peaks of the Andes. It bears thousands of figures in bronze and others sculptured from the living rock; and they commemorate the devotion and the abnegation of the Argentine people and the valour of their march across the Andes under San Martin’s leadership. And now we judge your entrance into the great war for the freedom of Europe’s peoples as that great épopée of San Martin guiding us Argentines across the snows of the Andes to liberate the peoples of America. North America is crossing the Atlantic now, as South America crossed the Andes then.”

So the Argentine people; and the Argentine Government answered our note declaring the war on Germany with a note expressing sympathy with our reasons given and recognizing the justice of our cause.

And Uruguay?

Rodó did not live to see it; but when our fleet came down, during the war, and there was question whether it should be permanently received or coldly restricted to its twenty-four hours’ stay permitted a belligerent by international law in a neutral country, Uruguay, in a published decree, refused to be neutral in a war where America was fighting for liberty and right. An original copy of this decree, signed by the Uruguayan President and Cabinet, was presented by him to the translator. This is its translation:

Montevideo, 18 of June of 1917

Considering that in divers communications the Government of Uruguay has proclaimed the principle of American solidarity as controlling its international politics, meaning thereby that any aggression on the rights of one American country should be considered such by all and provoke in all a uniform and common reaction; and that, in the hope that an accord to that effect might be realized among the nations of America which would make possible the practical and efficient realization of this ideal, this Government has adopted an attitude of expectancy as to its action, although expressing its sympathy in each case with such American countries as have been obliged to abandon their neutrality;

Considering that, even while such accord has not been realized, Uruguay cannot, without going against her sentiments and her convictions, treat like belligerents those American countries which in defence of their rights now find themselves engaged in an intercontinental war;

Considering that this judgment meets with the approval of the Honourable Senate;

The President of the Republic in Council General of Ministers

Resolves:

First. To declare that no American country which in defence of its rights finds itself in a state of war with nations of other continents shall be treated as a belligerent.

Second. To decree that no dispositions shall be made contrary to this resolution.

Third. Be this communicated and published, etc.

 

Such was the opinion of Rodo’s country in 1917. It is hardly likely that that of Rodó would have been otherwise.

 

F. J. S.

Buenos Aires, April, 1921


 

 

ARIEL

ON that evening the venerable old master whom we used to call Prospero, after the wise sage of Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” was bidding good-bye to his young scholars, met about him for the last time after a long year of task work.

They had come to the lofty hall of study, where a taste at once refined and austere sought to do honour to the noble presence of books, Prospero’s faithful companions. But the leading note of the hall— like a divinity, serene in its nimbus — was a finely wrought bronze, representing Ariel in “The Tempest.”

It was the manner of the Master to sit close by this bronze statue; and that was why he was called by the name of the magician who in the play is loved and served by the spirit of fancy that the sculptor had sought to embody. But perhaps, as well in the manner of his teaching, or in his character, there were a reason for the nickname, in profounder sense. Ariel, genius of the Air, represents, in the symbolism of Shakespeare, the noble part — the spirit with wings... For Ariel embodies the mastery of reason and of sentiment over the baser impulses of unreason. He is the generous zeal, the lofty and disinterested motive in action, the spirituality of civilization, and the vivacity and grace of the intelligence; — the ideal end to ( which human selection aspires; that superman in whom has disappeared, under the persistent chisel of life, the last stubborn trace of the Caliban, symbol of sensuality and stupidity.

The little statue, a real work of art, reproduced the Spirit of the Air at the moment where, freed by the magic of Prospero, he is about to soar into the sky, there to vanish in a lightning flash.

With spread-out wings, in a loose and floating garment which the caress of the light upon the bronze damascened into gold, his broad forehead lifted up, his lips just opening with a tranquil smile, all of Ariel’s attitude most admirably showed that gracious moment just preceding flight; and, with happy inspiration, the same art which had given the image its sculptured limbs had succeeded in preserving in his face that look of the seraph and the lightness of die ideal.

Prospero passed his hand, thoughtfully, over the head of the little statue; then, gathering a group of young men about him, with a firm voice—the voice of the Master, which, to pass its ideas and grave them deeply in the minds of the disciples, can employ either the clear penetration of a ray of light or the sharp blow of a chisel on the marble, the stroke of the painter’s brush on canvas or the touch of the wave upon the sands to be read in fossils by future genera- tions of men — the Master, as his scholars waited with affectionate attention, began to speak:

Near this statue where you have seen me preside each day over our talks as friends talks which I hope have succeeded in dispelling from the work of teaching any touch of austerity — I have once more to speak to you, that our parting hour may be like the seal stamped upon our agreement both in feeling and in ideas. So I invoke Ariel as my divinity, and I could wish to-day for my lecture the most gentle and persuasive force that ever it has had, for I think that to speak to youth of noble motives, of lofty ideas, whatever they are, is as a kind of sacred oratory. I also think that the spirit of youth is as a generous soil, where the seed of an opportune word may in a short time return the fruits of an immortal harvest. I earnestly wish to cooperate with you in a page of that programme which, in preparing yourselves for the free air of action, you have doubtless formed in your inner thought for the end of your efforts, the object to which each personality shall devote his life. For that intimate, personal programme—which rarely is formulated or written out, but more usually stays within the breast until it is revealed in outer action— fails never in the spirit of those peoples or those persons who are something above the rabble. If, with relation to individual liberty, Goethe could say so profoundly that only he is worthy of liberty and life who can conquer it for himself each day; with much more reason might I say that the honour of every human generation requires that it shall conquer for itself, by the persevering activity of its own thinking, by the effort of its own will, its faith in the determined, the persistent manifestation of the ideal, and the place of the ideal in the evolution of all ideas. And in conquering your own you should begin by recognizing as the first object of faith your own selves. The youth which you love is a power whose application you must work yourselves, and a treasury for the use of which yourselves are responsible. Prize that treasure and that power; see that the lofty consciousness of its possession stay radiant and effective in yourselves. I say to you with Renan: “ Youth is the discovery of that immense horizon which is life.” And the discovery which reveals unknown lands must be made complete with the virile force which shall rule them. No spectacle can be imagined more fit to captivate at once the interest of the thinker and the enthusiasm of the artist, than that which a human generation presents when it goes to meet a future all vibrant with the impatience of action, of lofty front, with a smiling and high disdain for deceit, the soul purified by sweet and distant mirages which wake in it mysterious impulses, like the visions of Cipango and Eldorado in the heroical chronicles of the Conquistadores.

From the rebirth of human hopes; from the promises which ever trust to the future for the reality of a better thing, the soul acquires that beauty which opens at the breath of life; soft and unspeakable beauty, made up, as the dawn was for the poet of the “ Contemplations,” of “the trace of a dream, and the beginning of a thought.”

Humanity, renewing from generation to generation its active hope and its anxious belief in an ideal, across the hard experience of centuries, made Guyau think of the obsession of that poor mad woman whose strange and touching madness consisted in thinking everyday arrived the day of her marriage.