LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM

...I admire the French in French letters, like Torres Rioseco himself, but there are many Latin American authors in whom that influence does not exist and others in whom it is only a superficial "tic" which harms rather than favors them...

...As such, the book is an excellent introduction to the life of Calhoun and a starting point for further investigation on the part of the reader...

...IN NEW WORLD LITERATURE Torres Rioseco offers a complete and minutely detailed and nuanced panorama of the letters of yesterday and today in Spanish -America and Brazil...

...The scholar and the creative man are almost always two distinct and divorced individuals, and it would not be so bad if the scholar always had his filing cards and his empiricism in order...

...Furthermore, a protective tariff had no constitutional justification...

...Careful and conscientious monographs on the ante-bellum South have made a reihterpretation mandatory...

...And the marvels of lustiness.and fragrance and the lyrical finds of the mediaeval cancioneros...

...Ramon Sender's latest novel is The Sphere...

...By Margaret L. Coit...

...The answer may be found if one observes in Calhoun a tendency common in American history since the Revolutionary War—that of clothing economic aims In constitutional verbiage...

...Others prefer the mythical: "Adamic," "Promethean," "Dionysian," "Pandean," etc., but almost no one explains why a book is absorbing or Promethen and it does not take us long to see that those judgments are emotional reactions and depend more on group politics and vested interests than on the value of the work itself...

...Miss Coit doesn't stress this economic background of Calhoun's philosophy...

...Paul Valery—whom no one imitates in France—has made more victims than poets in Latin America...

...Herrera y Reissig's "verbalism" was prodigiously convincing in Mallarme...

...Laws in themselves tend to be meaningless...

...5.00...

...The inner workings of the human mind are unavailable to the historians...

...These fine-spun theories of Calhoun were concocted to protect the South against acts harmful to the vested interests of that section...

...Valencia, Herrera y Reissig, Cesar Vallejo and so many others is surprising, as he shows what unites them, or separates each of the European or Hispanic American currents of yesterday and of today...

...Reviewed by RAMON SENDER CRITICISM is the poorest literary genre in the Spanish speaking world...

...Her task is most difficult because his career spanned the troubled "middle period" of American history, the first half of the nineteenth century...

...In spite of them his book offers one of the best examples of critical analysis—and of correlativity, as Eliot would say—of our time...

...If Calhoun was really worried about minority rights, why didn't he address himself to the rehabilitation of the Negro, or, if that were Impossible, at least to the plight of the farmers in the backcountry of South Carolina who were grossly under-represented in the state legislature...

...Reliability of information, often first hand, and luminousness of analysis make of this book a unique document on the subject for today...

...It is their enforcement, interpretation, and general acceptance which counts...

...As a scholarly contribution to the study of the man, it is below the standard of other recent biographies...

...A part of Verlaine's lyricism is to be found in the songs disseminated in the seventeenth century theatre—especially Lope de Vega, from whom Lores has taken so much...

...A Spanish professor, author of a recently published "History of Literature," speaks of style with that provincial disorientation according to which writing "a penny" is intolerable vulgarity, since one should write "the hundredth shining and coppery part of the Washingtonian monetary unit " I do not exaggerate...

...The creative attitude and acuteness of interpretation predominate over mere erudition in this book...

...The American Constitution offered no .protection to him...

...Concerning all these issues Calhoun played an important, though shifting, role...

...No one doubts the superiority of the indigenous Lopez Velarde over the other contemporary Mexicans touched by French symbolism...

...He was originally a strong nationalist, then a state rights advocate, and finally a sectionalism On the matter of the proper interpretation of the Constitution, he first maintained that the document should not be scrutinized through the microscope of a logician, yet his later years were spent in devising metaphysical theories concerning the origin and meaning of the Constitution...

...From Menendez Pelayo, who died in 1912, until today, we would hardly mention any and that is why we still have no satisfactory criticism of the work of Valle Inclan, nor of Unamuno or Antonio Maehado...

...On the other hand, the unfavorable picture of Calhoun, common for many years after the Civil War, has been superseded...

...Rarely does an inspired scholar appear...

...These slips of memory limit the horizons of Torres Rioseco...

...Among the latter's works his study of Ruben Dario is the best we have in Spanish letters...

...Was he an opportunist or a statesman...

...This injustice, so the South Carolinians thought, was responsible for the declining position of the stats in respect to the rest of the country...

...This period witnessed the expansion of the Wilson M. Howell Is doing graduate work in History at New York University...

...He was concerned with the protection of South Carolina and the South from the growing political and economic power of the North...

...Economic analysis and readable history rarely take the same path, and tho vaiue of this biography lies in its readability...

...This faith in a constitution as a panacea was rudely shaken in the twentieth century, when the efforts to change the traditions of a people by a document* were easily frustrated...

...Also unhistortcal are the occasional analogies drawn between that period and the present era...

...Inherent in democratic processes is the principle that majority will must eventually prevail...

...Not because I would deny that influence but because before that phenomenon the critic loses his reserve and analytical aptitude and applies himself to singing its praises blindly...

...The Sevlllan Herrera has that Intellectual voluptuousness for words In themselves...

...One would expect the virtues of responsibility and critical rigor to be more plentiful among professors, but when they do exist they usually appear bereft of imagination...

...In the Uruguayan poet it is an affectation that frequently belies itself...

...e MISS COIT follows this general trend of giving Calhoun the benefit of the doubt...

...His theory of nullification would permit a state to nullify an act of Congress, and his doctrine of the concurrent majority would allow a section, such as the South, to veto an act of another section...

...And San Juan de la Crux...

...The study of relative affinities in modern literature is one of the most delicate and arduous—because of the lack of historical perspective—and it Is precisely here that Torres Rioseco reveals his greatest accomplishment...

...Voice of the Ante-Bellum South JOHN C. CALHOUN AMERICAN PORTRAIT...

...593 pp...

...Soil exhaustion, competition from tha lower South, and an inefficient labor system were factors generally ignored...

...The failure of South Carolina in 1833 in her controversy w.ith President Andrew Jackson made the South see the futility of nullification and the necessity for secession...

...Spokesman of the minority South, he saw how the growing preponderance of the North was threatening to destroy the customs and the economy of the South...

...A more serious charge may be leveled at the main thesis of the book—that Calhoun was a genuine champion of minority rights...

...The plan for a concurrent majority was never put into practice...

...United States to the Pacific coast, the bitter conflict between a growing sectionalism and an equally expansive nationalism, and the accentuation of the slavery controversy...

...There is one point on which I differ with Torres Rioseco: his overesteem for French influence...

...This protection appeared absolutely necessary In the case of Sbuth Carolina...

...Selling in a free world market and buying in a protected home market, the South Carolinians were in reality paying a tax to the manufacturing interests of the North...

...The reasons for these shifts are not easy to discover...

...The liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought that the solution could bo found in a written constitution, specifying exactly the responsibilities of government and the areas where governmental power ought not to extend...

...In the abstract, this may be true...

...But as a dispassionate and just humanist, for instance, we prefer the attitude of Alfonso Reyes, whose short physical stature is no obstacle to his contemplating modern literature astride the Pyrenees, with one foot in France and...

...The thing is quite sordid, but so it is, and not only in the Spanish American countries...

...Houghton Mifflin...

...equally inherent is the tonet that there must be some checks to prevent exploitation of dissenters...

...This tendency, coupled, with an incredible amount of personal minutiae, reveals Calhoun in his human frailties, but leaves the importance of his role somewhat blurred and confused...

...Calhoun recognized this fact long before the German constitution of 1919 and the recent Russian constitution made it evident...

...the other in Spain...

...It is doubtful that Calhoun was "one of the earliest advocates of 'One World' " or that Franklin D. Roosevelt in his plans to aid Southern economy was following in the footsteps of the South Carolinian...

...And still earlier, Garcilaso...

...No minority is protected unless that group's position is accepted by the great mass of the people...

...Perhaps a conclusive answer will never be given...

...This does not mean that there is rio occasional literary criticism...

...The bo'.-k with which we are now concerned will also be remembered as or.e of the best critical historical essays...

...It is a desolating spectacle at times...

...To what did he turn...

...Most of the reviews are devoted to kindly divagation with an abuse of pompous adjectives: "admirable," "absorbing," "unforgettable," "powerful," "exquisite," "sublime," "genial...

...Recent biographies of the man attest to this change...

...Rioseco also forgets that the style of romanticism—the soul of romantic action in the theatre and poetry—was given by the Spanish Middle Ages and that more myths have come from Spanish letters than from any other modern literature: the Cid, Don Juan, Don Quixote, Le Celestina, Segismundo, tho generic types of picuron, hidalgos, eonquitladores, etc...

...In Spanish speaking America, from Andres Bello until today, they have had Rodii—although he is too rhetorical and "eloquent"— and today they have Alfonso Reyes and Torres Rioseco...

...The simplicity of means with which he penetrates, analyzes and defines the work of poets as diverse as Marti, L<'>pez Velarde...

...Baudelaire knew very well the value of the symbolist modernity of Gengora...

...He did formulate theories which might protect minorities...

...The main Purpose of Miss Margaret Coit's John C. Cnlhoun is to describe Calhoun's solutions to this problem...

...The biography is extremely well-written and entertaining, due to the author's Inclination to write romanticized Action when the facts are not available...

...Furthermore, the author forgets that many of the discoveries of the French 19th century had already been attained by Spanish poetry...

...He likewise forget3 that the most universal authors of France felt a reverent admiration for Spanish literature, from Montaigne and Corneille to Stendhal and Hugo...

...Reviewed by WILSON M. HOWELL THE PROTECTION of minority rights poses many difficulties in American democratic fhought...