Chapter I · I

Every book that reaches my hands from the Americas excites my interest and awakens my curiosity; but none until today has stirred it so vividly as yours, from the very moment I began to read it.

I confess that at first, despite the gracious dedication with which you sent me a copy, I looked upon the book with indifference... almost with aversion. The title Azul... was to blame.

Victor Hugo says: L’art c’est l’azur; but I can neither agree nor resign myself to the notion that such a saying is profoundly beautiful. To my mind, it is as meaningful to say that art is the blue as to say that it is the green, the yellow, or the red. Why, in this case, must the blue (even if in French it is not bleu but azur, which sounds more poetic) be an emblem, a symbol, and an exalted category encompassing the ideal, the ethereal, the infinite, the serenity of a cloudless sky, diffuse light, and that vague, boundless expanse wherein the stars are born, live, shine, and move? Yet even if all this and more rises from the depths of our being and appears before the eyes of the spirit, summoned by the word blue, what novelty is there in declaring that art is all these things? One might just as well say that art is the imitation of Nature, as Aristotle defined it: the perception of all that exists and all that is possible, and its reappearance or representation by man through signs, letters, sounds, colors, or lines. In short: turn it as I may, I see in that assertion that art is the blue nothing more than an emphatic and empty phrase.

Let art be blue, however, or whatever color one may wish. Provided it is good, color matters least of all. What gave me misgivings was Victor Hugo’s phrase, and the fact that you had chosen the operative word of that phrase as the title of your book. Could this author, I asked myself, be one of the countless souls who everywhere, and especially in Portugal and Spanish America, have been infected by Victor Hugo? The mania for imitating him has wrought true havoc, because daring youth exaggerates his flaws, and because that quality called genius, which causes flaws to be forgiven and perhaps even applauded, cannot be imitated when one does not possess it. In the end, I suspected you were merely a little Victor Hugo, and I let more than a week pass without reading your book.

No sooner had I read it than I formed a very different impression. You are yourself, with a deep reserve of originality, and of a most singular originality at that. If the book, printed in Valparaiso in this year of 1888, were not written in such excellent Castilian, it might just as easily be the work of a French author, an Italian, a Turk, or a Greek. The book is steeped in a cosmopolitan spirit. Even the author’s first and last names, whether authentic or fabricated and assumed, make that cosmopolitanism stand out all the more. Ruben is Judaic, and Darius is Persian; so that by your very names it would seem that you desire to belong, or do belong, to all countries, castes, and tribes.

The book Azul... is not really a book at all; it is a booklet of 132 pages; yet so packed with substance and written in so concise a style that it offers no small amount of food for thought and plenty to read. It is readily apparent that the author is very young: he cannot be more than twenty-five years of age, but he has put those years to marvelous use. He has learned an immense deal, and in all that he knows and expresses he displays singular artistic and poetic talent.

He knows ancient Greek literature with genuine devotion; he knows all of modern European culture. One glimpses, though he makes no boast of it, that he possesses a thorough understanding of the visible world and the human spirit, as that understanding has come to be shaped by the latest body of observations, experiments, hypotheses, and theories. And one also glimpses that all this has entered the author’s mind, I will not say exclusively, but certainly primarily, through French books. What is more: in the contours, the refinements, and the delicacies of the author’s thoughts and feelings, there is so much of the French character that I fashioned an imaginary tale to account for it. I assumed that the author, born in Nicaragua, had traveled to Paris to study medicine or engineering, or some other profession; that he had lived in Paris for six or seven years among artists, writers, scholars, and gay women of the town; and that much of what he knows he had picked up by word of mouth and empirical acquaintance, rubbing shoulders with those people. It seemed impossible to me that an author could be so thoroughly steeped in the latest Parisian spirit without having lived in Paris for years.

Extraordinary was my astonishment when I learned that, as well-informed persons assure me, you have never left Nicaragua except to go to Chile, where you have resided for two years at most. How, without the influence of that environment, have you managed to assimilate all the elements of the French spirit, while preserving the Spanish form that unifies and organizes these elements, transmuting them into your very own substance?

I do not believe that any parallel case has ever occurred with any Peninsular Spaniard. We all possess an underlying Spanishness that no one can tear out of us, not even with five-and-twenty tugs. In the famous Abbé Marchena, for all his long residence in France, the Spaniard remains unmistakable; in Cienfuegos, the cloying sentimentalism after the manner of Rousseau is mere affectation, with the Spaniard lurking beneath. Burgos and Reinoso are Gallicized Spaniards, not Frenchmen. French culture, for better or worse, never penetrates beyond the surface. It is nothing more than a transparent varnish, behind which our Spanish nature is inevitably revealed.

None of the men of letters of the Peninsula whom I have known, however cosmopolitan their spirit, however long their residence in France, and however fluently they spoke French and other foreign tongues, ever seemed to me as thoroughly imbued with the spirit of France as you appear: neither Galiano, nor Don Eugenio de Ochoa, nor Miguel de los Santos Álvarez. In Galiano there spoke a mixture of Anglicism and eighteenth-century French philosophism; yet it was merely superimposed, never blended into the core of his spirit, which remained purely Castilian. Ochoa was and ever remained arch- and ultra-Spanish, notwithstanding his enthusiasm for French matters. And in Álvarez, in whose mind the ideas of our century seethe and who lived for years in Paris, the nature of the Castilian man remains deeply rooted; in his prose the reader is reminded of Cervantes and Quevedo, and in his verse of Garcilaso and Fray Luis de León, though in both verse and prose he always voices ideas more proper to our century than to those gone by. His wit is not French esprit, but the Spanish humor of the picaresque novels and the comic authors of our distinctive literature.

I see, then, that there is no author in the Castilian tongue more French than you, and I say this to state a fact, without either praise or censure. In any case, I intend it rather as praise. Not that I wish authors to lack national character; but I cannot demand of you that you be Nicaraguan, for there is not yet, nor can there be, a literary history, a school, or literary traditions in Nicaragua. Nor can I demand of you that you be literarily Spanish, since you are no longer so politically, and are moreover separated from the mother country by the Atlantic, and farther removed in the republic of your birth from Spanish influence than in other Spanish-American republics. The Gallicism of the mind being thus excused, one must needs bestow lavish praise upon you for the perfection and depth of that Gallicism; because your language remains genuine Spanish, legitimate and of sound coinage, and because if you lack national character, you possess individual character.

To my mind, there exists in you a powerful writer’s individuality, already clearly marked, which, if God grants you the health I wish for you and long life, cannot fail to develop and distinguish itself further with time in works that will be the glory of Spanish-American letters.

Having read the 132 pages of Azul..., the first thing one notices is that you are saturated with all the most sparkling French literature: Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Gautier, Bourget, Sully-Prudhomme, Daudet, Zola, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Catulle Mendès, Rollinat, Goncourt, Flaubert, and all the other poets and novelists have been thoroughly studied and even better understood by you. And you imitate none of them: you are neither romantic, nor naturalist, nor neurotic, nor decadent, nor symbolist, nor Parnassian. You have stirred them all together, set them to boil in the alembic of your brain, and distilled from them a rare quintessence.

The result is a Nicaraguan author who never left Nicaragua except to go to Chile, and who is an author so in the Parisian fashion, endowed with such chic and distinction, that he runs ahead of fashion and might well alter and dictate it.

In the book there are Stories in Prose and six compositions in verse. In the tales as in the poems, everything is chiseled, engraved, wrought to endure, with exquisite care and finesse, as Flaubert or the most meticulous Parnassian might have done. And yet, neither effort, nor the labor of the file, nor the strain of searching for effect is apparent: everything seems spontaneous and easy, dashed off as if from a running pen, without any loss of concision, precision, or consummate elegance. Even the extravagant oddities and lapses in tone, which jar on me but may perhaps find favor with the public, are calculated. Everything in this little volume has been deliberated and scrutinized by the author, without his preliminary or concurrent critical judgment detracting from the passionate vigor and inspiration of creation.