Ariel (2 page)

“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

O
N 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. The toy of her dream, every morning she bound to her pale forehead the nuptial crown and hung from her head the nuptial veil. With a sweet smile she then prepared to receive an imaginary bridegroom, all through the day to

the shadows of the night, which put an end to the vain hope, and brought again disillusion to the heart. Then first her madness took a tint of melancholy; but her ingenuous trust reappeared with each aurora, and with no memory of the disenchantment of the evening, murmuring, “It’s to-day that he comes,” she turned again to bind herself with the nuptial veil and crown, smiling once more with the hope of the promised one.

It is thus, not as with the loss of an ideal that has died, that humanity clothes itself each era with its nuptial dress and expects with renewed faith the realization of the dreamed ideal — a persistent but "Touching folly. And to provoke this renewal, unalterable as the rhythm of nature, has been in all times the function and the work of youth. Of the souls of each human springtime is woven that bridal dress for mankind; and when one tries to suppress that sublime stubbornness of hope
w
hich is bo
rn
all winged from the very breast of delusion, all pessimisms are in vain, as well those which are based on reason as those which come from experience. They have to confess themselves powerless to contravene that lofty
quand m
ê
me
which springs from the depth of human life. There are times in which, by an apparent alteration of the triumphal rhythm, human history crosses generations destined to personify from the very cradle vacillation and disillusion. But these times pass—not perhaps without having had their own ideal like the others, though in negative form and of unconscious love— and again is lit up in the spirit of mankind the hope of the long-desired bridegroom; him whose image, sweet and radiant as in the ivory verses of the mystics, suffices to maintain the interest and content of life, although never to be incarnated in reality.

Youth, which thus signifies, in the soul of individuals and of generations, light,
love, energy, exists and with the same meaning in the evolutionary processes of societies. Among these peoples who feel and look on life as you do, fecundity and force will always be the dominion of the future. Now there was an age when the attributes of man's youth made themselves more than in any other age the attributes of the whole people, the marks of an entire civilization, and in which a breath of youth’s enchantment passed softly and touched the serene front of a whole race. When Greece was
born
, the gods awarded her the secret of youth inextinguishable; Greece is the soul when young. “He who in Delphi contemplates the pointed masses of the pines”—says one of the Homeric hymns—“imagines to himself that they must never grow old.” Greece did mighty things because it had of youth the gaiety which is the atmosphere of action, and the enthusiasm which is the omnipotent lever. The Egyptian priest with whom
Solon spoke in the temple of
Sais,
said to the Athenian legislator, pitying the Greeks for their exuberant volubility: “You are only children.” And Michelet has compared the activity of the Greek soul to a happy game, about which are grouped smiling all other nations on the earth. But of that divine game of children on the beaches of the Archipelago and in the shadow of the olives of Ionia, were bom art, and philosophy, and free thought, and the curiosity of all investigation, and the consciousness of human dignity—all those God-given spurs which are yet our only inspiration and our pride. Absorbed in its hieratic austerity the country of the Egyptian priest represented only old age, old age given but to introspection, as if to practise for the repose of eternity, and waving aside any frivolous dream as with disdainful finger. Grace, inquietude, are proscribed from the attitudes of its soul, as was all action from its images of life. And when posterity
turns its gaze upon Egypt, it meets only the sterile notion of order regulating the growth of a civilization which lived but to weave itself a shroud and build its tombs; the shadow of a sundial reaching out far over the sands of the desert.

The gifts of the youthful spirit—enthusiasm and hope—correspond in the harmonies of history and natural history to movement and to light. Wherever you shall turn your eyes you will find these, the natural atmosphere in which move all things that are strong and beautiful. Lift your eyes to the example most lofty of all, the idea of Christianity, over which even has weighed some accusation of having saddened the earth by proscribing the gaiety of paganism. Christianity itself is essentially an inspiration of youth, or was before it wandered from its cradle. Newborn Christianity was in the interpretation of Renan—which I hold only the more true that it is the more poetic—a picture of
youth unsullied. Of the youth of the soul, or, as is the same thing, of a living dream of grace and purity, is made that divine fragrance which floats over the slow journeying^ of the Master across the Adds of Galilee; over his sermons, which are developed, free of any penitent sadness, near by a lovely lake, in valleys full of fruit; heard by the birds of heaven and the “lilies of the field,” which thus adorn his parables; preaching the happiness of the “Kingdom of God” to a sweetly smiling nature. From that happy picture are far absent the ascetics who accompanied ill his solitude the penitences of John the Baptist. When Jesus speaks of those who follow him, he compares them to the. guests and bridesmaids of a weddings And that is the impression, one still of divine contentment, which, embodied in the essence of the new faith, one feels persist through all the Odyssey of the evangelists ; which sheds a radiant joy about
the spirit of the first Christian communities, an ingenuous joy of living, and which, going to Rome, opened easy passage to the hearts of the ignorant proselytes of the Transtevere. It triumphed by opposing the enchantment of the youth within them — embalsamed, as it were, by the libation of a new wine—to the severity of the Stoics and the decrepitude of the people of the Roman world.

Therefore, be ye conscious possessors of the blessed power you contain within yourselves. But do you never forget that this power is no more exempt than other virtuous impulses from weakening and disappearing if it be not carried into action. The gift of the precious treasure is from Nature; but on your own ideas depend whether it be fruitful or be vainly wasted, so scattered and dispersed among individual consciousnesses as never to appear a beneficent force on the life of human societies in general.

A profound critic has recently called attention in the pages of a novel—that immense surface mirror which seems to reflect the only image of our life these last hundred dizzy years—to the difference that exists between the soul of youth as portrayed in the time of
“René
” of Chateaubriand and the modern French novel. His analysis found a progressive diminution of “internal youth” and energy, between the heroes of romanticism and the enervated in heart and will, as shown in “A Rebours,” or “Le Disciple.”, Yet a slight renascence of animation he hopefully noted in some more recent novels still, as in those of Lemaître, Wizewa, Rod, or even in “David Grieve,” which shows in the title character all the troubles and unquiet ideals of several generations, only to resolve them at last in the supreme disentanglement of a happy love.

Shall this hope in truth be fulfilled? You, who like workmen to the factory are about to pass under the portals of the twentieth century—shall you shed over the arts you study images brighter and more glorious than were left by us who are about to leave you? If that divine age when youthful minds gave model to the dialogues of Plato were only possible in the short springtime of the world; if it is the rule “ not to think on the Gods," as Forquias instructs the choir of captives in the second part of “Faust”—may we not at least dream of the coming of a human generation which shall return to life a sense of the ideal; a grand enthusiasm, when feeling may become a power, and when a vigorous rebirth of will-energy may expel from the bottom of our souls with shouts of victory those moral cowardices which are nurtured in our breasts by disappointment and by doubt? Shall again be youth the reality of our collective life, as it is that of the individuals ?