A RHAPSODIC AGE?
109
proof is in Argentina. Her
gauchos,
firmly placed between the land
and their own fate, lived on the great plains which were at once their
cradle and their grave and which stretched away in every direction
with the sadness which is typical of flat, unpeopled horizons. The
torrent of their songs and dances formed an epic which lacked only
anonymity to be ranked with its ancestors,
Roland
and
The Cid–
this wa<>
Martfn Fierro.
And since then, among other novels and sur–
passing them all, they have had their
Don Segundo Sombra.
They have their
gaucho
in Mexico, too, although his character–
istics are different. He is the
charro-the
same spurs, the same som–
brero (relic.s of the Spanish Conquest which extend as far north as
Arizona and New Mexico, with their cowboy), and the melancholy
which is different from the melancholy of the pampas in that the
latter is pure-white, while the Mexican is mixed with the Indian.
The
charro
has his own polished idiom, which expresses itself in verse
like prose and in prose which sounds like verse; and if it has not
reached the heights of Ar_gentinean literature, it is because the Mex–
ican has neglected the colonial forms in order to investigate his sources
in the pre-Columbian civilization, which is satanically rich and sug–
gestive. The Argentineans, having almost no Indians, have never been
swerved from their colonial tradition, which they accept as the na–
tional origin and foundation.
Three powerful myths challenge the imagination of America,
and all- three are of Spanish origin: the
gaucho,
the
charro
and the
cowboy. The three are brothers.
If
the United States has produced
no great novels about the cowboy- who also has his spurs and his big
sombrero-it is perhaps because the myth is not native to the lan–
guage; its essence is not Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, it does
recover the freshness of its source in the ballads collected by Sandburg,
which recall the ballads of Spain. Certainly there is an American
mythology which is more potent than that of the rancher of the South–
west; but to what extent can it claim to speak in language rising from
the interrelation of man and earth when it is set beside the prejudices
of European culture? To what degree have these characteristic forms
altered the shape of language? It would seem that the American
novel has
in
its time been romantic; then naturalistic; and that it
presents today those qualities of academic perfection or revolutionary
purpose which are peculiar to the cultures of Europe. And this raises
a question which is pertinent to the cultural panorama of the peoples
of South America. May it not be that America, the whole of America,
north and south, is living in the very age of the rhapsodists? May it
