accorded his respect were the Bolivian general Andrés Santa Cruz (âheir to the unifying ideal of BolÃvarâ), the Chilean Diego Portales, and the Mexican Porfirio DÃaz. These were, for him, the representative men of the Latin democracies, superior democracies, democracies of the spirit, not produced through the vulgar process of free elections. The cult of heroes floated in the air of the age. So much so that a young Argentine writer would learn German to read some of the intellectual antecedents of Carlyle. And the youthful Jorge Luis Borges found a famous sentence of the Scottish author to be perfectly reasonable: âDemocracy is chaos furnished with electoral urns.â
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BY 1904, Rodó had become famous and enormously respected throughout the entire continent. But his psychic life was still an unending struggle between desolation and confidence. In that year he would write to Miguel de Unamuno, âI do not regard the immediate future of these countries with the pessimistic criterion many adopt.â But the financial crisis that descended upon him in the âterrible yearâ of 1905 drove him to despair. A severe oscillation of feelings was his burden and he knew it: âEach one of my moments of hope is the upshot of a previous and intricate interior struggle with despair and pessimism. So that the ripened moments I offer of admonition and art are exceptional, not the ordinary moments which, in me as in everyone, involve doubt and sometimes desperation.â
Rodó disapproved of radical actions and movements, both new and old. He criticized the removal of crucifixes from hospitals in Uruguay as a Jacobin abuse, and he feared the rise of working-class socialism, this âgreat roar that is mounting.â His way was one of moderation: religious tolerance and social reforms. But not even politics calmed his inner torment. After he had been elected twice to Congress, his political future played out in a rivalry with the popular president Batlle, who would sometimes treat him with contempt. A portion of his profile, in El Mirador de Próspero , of the Ecuadorian Montalvo, reads like an unconscious personal complaint:
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There remains isolation and spiritual abandonment, which is truly painful; there remains the common lack of understanding: from the moment that the thorns spring up of opposition to superiority, a passion of insignificant democracies, until shoulders are shrugged with an uncouth disdain toward all disinterested labor of style and investigation and, even within such work, there is deafness to the new and personal, a pretension of understanding where there is no understanding . . . ; there remain, finally, these lingering flavors of the village in relation to which, for lofty matters of the spirit, all of Latin America has been, on a greater scale, a solitary back-water hamlet . . .
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With the outbreak of the First World War, Rodó resigned from the board of the newspaper La Razón because of the underlying pro-German sentiments of the newspaper. His personal anguish takes on a universal coloring. He feels the collapse of the western order as a personal assault, the destruction of a world for which he had projected a future that would include Latin America as an equal partner.
Some verbal portraits of the time describe him as more than ever austere and withdrawn: âhis face was like a mask without emotion or intelligence.â An Argentine journalist described a meeting with Rodó: âwe spoke in a small, unlit room; we said good-bye to each other without him crossing to the illuminated vestibule, and I only remember having seen, as if in a dream, among the shadows that blurred the edges of the furniture, a tall stooped figure and two hands moving in the mist.â
The final passage through life of this solitary scholar was, as always for him, tortuous. It would be a final image of âthe volatile soul,â wandering in
Â
BY 1904, Rodó had become famous and enormously respected throughout the entire continent. But his psychic life was still an unending struggle between desolation and confidence. In that year he would write to Miguel de Unamuno, âI do not regard the immediate future of these countries with the pessimistic criterion many adopt.â But the financial crisis that descended upon him in the âterrible yearâ of 1905 drove him to despair. A severe oscillation of feelings was his burden and he knew it: âEach one of my moments of hope is the upshot of a previous and intricate interior struggle with despair and pessimism. So that the ripened moments I offer of admonition and art are exceptional, not the ordinary moments which, in me as in everyone, involve doubt and sometimes desperation.â
Rodó disapproved of radical actions and movements, both new and old. He criticized the removal of crucifixes from hospitals in Uruguay as a Jacobin abuse, and he feared the rise of working-class socialism, this âgreat roar that is mounting.â His way was one of moderation: religious tolerance and social reforms. But not even politics calmed his inner torment. After he had been elected twice to Congress, his political future played out in a rivalry with the popular president Batlle, who would sometimes treat him with contempt. A portion of his profile, in El Mirador de Próspero , of the Ecuadorian Montalvo, reads like an unconscious personal complaint:
Â
There remains isolation and spiritual abandonment, which is truly painful; there remains the common lack of understanding: from the moment that the thorns spring up of opposition to superiority, a passion of insignificant democracies, until shoulders are shrugged with an uncouth disdain toward all disinterested labor of style and investigation and, even within such work, there is deafness to the new and personal, a pretension of understanding where there is no understanding . . . ; there remain, finally, these lingering flavors of the village in relation to which, for lofty matters of the spirit, all of Latin America has been, on a greater scale, a solitary back-water hamlet . . .
Â
With the outbreak of the First World War, Rodó resigned from the board of the newspaper La Razón because of the underlying pro-German sentiments of the newspaper. His personal anguish takes on a universal coloring. He feels the collapse of the western order as a personal assault, the destruction of a world for which he had projected a future that would include Latin America as an equal partner.
Some verbal portraits of the time describe him as more than ever austere and withdrawn: âhis face was like a mask without emotion or intelligence.â An Argentine journalist described a meeting with Rodó: âwe spoke in a small, unlit room; we said good-bye to each other without him crossing to the illuminated vestibule, and I only remember having seen, as if in a dream, among the shadows that blurred the edges of the furniture, a tall stooped figure and two hands moving in the mist.â
The final passage through life of this solitary scholar was, as always for him, tortuous. It would be a final image of âthe volatile soul,â wandering in
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