SOURCE: Cussen, Antonio. “Poetry Visits America.” In Bello and Bolívar: Poetry and Politics in the Spanish American Revolution, pp. 96-126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Cussen examines Bello's short-lived but significant Spanish language journal Biblioteca Americana, and provides a close reading of his poems “Alocución” and “Agricultura”—two poems singing the praises of Spanish American history and its heroes.]

Besides, a fate attends on all I write,
That when I aim at praise, they say I bite.

Alexander Pope

The first issue of the Biblioteca Americana, published in July 1823, was a lavish volume of 470 pages with several color plates of scenes of the New World. Opposite the first page is a lithograph showing a woman in classical attire who is visiting an Indian woman with naked breasts and feathers on her head. The Indian woman is surrounded by palm trees and is sitting on a craggy outcropping at the foot of a mountain. In the background one can see a llama. Between the two women three half-naked children are eagerly playing with gifts that seem to have been presented by the classical woman, who stands with her right arm extended. The gifts include a globe, telescope, lyre, book, bust, palette, and brush. Under the lithograph is the dedication of the journal: “Al Pueblo Americano.”

From its very first page, the Biblioteca Americana insists on its americanismo, its Americanness. It announces that it is underwritten by a Society of Americans (“Por una Sociedad de Americanos”), and the prospectus, signed by García del Río, states, “We shall emphasize throughout everything that is related to America.” The editors explain that they will not show a preference for this or that country of the New World; they will address all the inhabitants of the American continent: “We shall not give exclusive consideration to the Colombian, the Argentine, the Peruvian, the Chilean, the Mexican; written for all of them, the Biblioteca will be preeminently American.”

What, we may ask, does the word “América” mean to the editors of the journal? More specifically, what kind of relationship do they envision between Europe and America, between the Old World and the New? The lithograph presents an emblematic answer: Europe, dressed in classical attire, visits America and brings the utensils and objects that mark Western civilization. America's children, in turn, eagerly absorb this culture, as symbolized by their leafing through a printed volume or holding a classical bust. The prospectus of the journal develops this close cultural dependence: the accumulated knowledge of the West must be spread throughout the New World, thus ending three centuries of isolation and ignorance. García del Río, his head filled with the financial transactions that preoccupied him at the time, expresses the relationship between Europe and America as one of creditor and debtor. In the closing paragraph of the prospectus, he elevates the tone of his prose, stating that he foresees a day when rays of truth will shine throughout the New World, when America will traverse with giant steps the roads of the civilized peoples who have advanced before, “until the happy era arrives when America, protected by moderate governments and by enlightened social institutions, rich, flourishing, free, gives back to Europe with interest the wealth of knowledge that she is borrowing today and, fulfilling her lofty destiny, receives the incense of the world.”

The Biblioteca is divided into three sections: the first is devoted to poetry, literature, and philology; the second, to science and technology; and the third, to politics and history, or—to use the term preferred by the editors—“Ideología,” a term borrowed from Destutt de Tracy and the French idéologues.¹ Only the first volume of the journal was published in its entirety. Of the second and last volume, only the section devoted to literature was published, in October 1823.

The first piece in the Biblioteca's inaugural issue is a poem by Bello: “Alocución a la Poesía, en que se introducen las alabanzac de los pueblos e individuos americanos, que más se han distinguido en la guerra de la independencia. (Fragmento de un poema inédito, titulado ‘América.’)” (“Discourse to Poetry, which presents the glories of the peoples and individuals of America who have most distinguished themselves in the war of independence. [Fragment of an unpublished poem entitled ‘America.’]”) In the first volume, Bello published the first 447 lines of the poem. The remaining 387 lines opened the second volume of the journal. The manuscripts of the “Alocución” reveal that Bello completed a large portion of the poem between 1821 and 1823, that is, during the years in which he worked as Irisarri's assistant. Sheets 9, 12, and 18 through 25 (containing some three hundred lines of the poem) all show watermarks of those years. Other manuscripts that contain lines of the “Alocución” have no dates, with the exception of sheet 5, which has a watermark of 1814 (see Appendix).

The poem is divided into two sections, which we may term “georgic” (1-206) and “epic” (207-834). In the georgic section the poet invites the goddess Poetry to visit the New World, and to entice her he describes the continent's luscious vegetation and agricultural potential. But on line 207 the poet interrupts his paean to the peaceful beauty of America and asks Poetry if she prefers to sing instead the deeds of war. The rest of the poem is an evocation of the heroes who have perished in the wars of independence. The “Alocución” is thus a reconstruction of the two stages of poetic composition we have noted in Bello's London years. He first focuses on the natural beauty of America, and then—unable to ignore the theme of war—begins to write about the men who gave their lives for independence. The passage that serves as a pivot between these two sections is one that I have dated around 1815 (sheet 5, watermark of 1814), the year that marked a turning point in Bello's reluctant commitment to the patriots. Lines 207-15, in which Bello asks Poetry if she would rather sing about the “impious war” (la guerra impía), remind the reader that this poem, which ostensibly celebrates the Revolution, is also a denunciation of those wars.

The poem begins in a mood of rustic serenity, as Bello summons “divine Poetry” to abandon cultivated Europe and to visit the world of Columbus:

Divina Poesía,
tú de la soledad habitadora,
a consultar tus cantos enseñada
con el silencio de la selva umbría,
tú a quien la verde gruta fue morada,
y el eco de los montes compañía;
tiempo es que dejes ya la culta Europa,
que tu nativa rustiquez desama,
y dirijas el vuelo adonde te abre
el mundo de Colón su grande escena.

([Andrés Bello, Obras completas, 2nd ed. (Caracas, 1981), hereafter OC] 1: 43, ll. 1-10)

(Divine Poetry, you who live in solitude and are taught to learn your songs in the silence of the shady forest; you whose dwelling was the green grotto and whose company was the mountains' echo; it is time that you now abandon Europe, that cultivated land that no longer appreciates your native rusticity, and direct your flight to a place where the world of Columbus opens its great stage to you.)

Ever since Pedro Henríquez Ureña described Bello's poem as a declaration of the spiritual and intellectual independence of Spanish America, these lines have become the cornerstone of americanismo, a word that expresses the search for cultural autonomy. Henríquez Ureña was not the first to assign this role to Bello; before him, Juan María Gutiérrez had placed Bello's poem as the front piece of the most famous poetry anthology of mid-nineteenth-century Spanish America, América Poética, which was devoted entirely to poetic productions since the Revolution.²

To understand what América means for Bello and the relationship between the New and the Old World in the “Alocución,” we may first look to the context of the published poem. The “Alocución” opens a journal whose guiding hands were two Spanish Americans, Bello and García del Río, who until the eve of publication had advocated inviting a prince of a European royal house to head a monarchy in the New World. The coeditors had earlier embraced Spanish American emancipation in El Censor Americano and La Biblioteca Columbiana, a journal edited by García del Río in Lima in 1821. But their ideal was an emancipation with close political ties to the monarchies of the European continent. By the time the Biblioteca Americana went to press, the monarchic formula was no longer viable, but one still finds testimony to America's dependence on Europe on every page of the journal. The lithograph shows America receiving Europe's gift of accumulated knowledge and glory and America's children promising a new flourishing of the arts and sciences of the West. García del Río's financial metaphor goes even further in suggesting that America is borrowing European culture today and that over the years the New World will repay this loan.

Then comes Bello's “Alocución,” whose americanismo closely fits that of the journal. Poetry and America are the two elements that establish the drama of his poem. Bello invites Poetry to abandon Europe because the Old World can no longer offer her the natural setting she needs to thrive. But Bello's Poetry is in every sense a classical construct, a topic of invocation of Greek, Roman, and British poets. Like the classically attired woman in the frontispiece lithograph, Poetry is the personification of the European spirit in search of a new stage on which to extend the march of civilization.

If the opening of the “Alocución” is the cry of Spanish America's cultural independence, the cornerstone of its spiritual emancipation, Bello defines that autonomy not as a break with Europe, but as an incorporation of the very essence of European culture. America is to be the newest home for a goddess who has earlier visited the different lands of the European continent and the British Isles. In “The Progress of Poesy,” Thomas Gray, a poet praised by Bello in the Biblioteca, similarly shows the route followed by the Muses, who abandon Greece and Italy—which have been enchained by pomp, power, and vice—and arrive on the coast of Britain:

Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant-Power,
And coward Vice, that revels in her chains.
When Latium had her lofty spirit lost,
They sought, oh Albion! next the sea-encircled
          coast.(3)

Gray's lines are unmistakably the direct antecedent of the opening of the “Alocución.” The theme of wandering Poetry, or Poesy, who abandons the tyranny and decadence of the European continent in search of a fresh natural setting, is identical in both poems. The same distance is established between the new setting of the goddess and the previous places she has visited. The opening of the “Alocución” may well be the starting point of americanismo, but for Bello this term implied something essentially akin to Gray's “Englishness,” a kind of rhetorical patriotism, with distinguished classical antecedents, that reasserted the centrality and continuing importance of European civilization.

As in Gray's poem, there is in the “Alocución” a break with Europe, but it is a break with the decrepitude of the European continent. At the beginning of his poem, Bello offers to Poetry a setting that Europe itself can no longer offer her. His strategy will be to entice Poetry to abandon the corrupt courts of continental Europe and settle in the fresh lands across the Atlantic that still preserve the original vigor of Creation (“el vigor guardan genital primero”). Bello thus adopts a topos used by enemies of the ancient régime since the eighteenth century, according to which Europe is an old and tired land and America a land of freshness and freedom:

¿Qué a ti, silvestre ninfa, con las pompas
de dorados alcázares reales?
¿A tributar también irás en ellos,
en medio de la turba cortesana,
el torpe incienso de servil lisonja?

(ll. 24-8)⁴

(What does the pomp of golden royal castles have to offer you, sylvan nymph? Will you also go there and offer, amidst a crowd of courtiers, the dishonest incense of servile flattery?)

The poem proper thus begins with a loud condemnation of the very kind of poetry Bello had practiced in the colonial days, when he set Charles IV amidst clouds of incense. No, he now argues, that is not the setting for Poetry. In the youth of humankind she did not attend luxurious palaces, but simply tried to sing the first laws to the people and their kings. In these lines Bello also calls for “natural” poetry, an aesthetic that will shun the excesses of neoclassicism and return to the models of the Spanish Middle Ages and the Golden Age.⁵

Bello then returns to his attack on the European continent but now he is more specific:

No te detenga, oh diosa,
esta región de luz y de miseria,
en donde tu ambiciosa
rival Filosofía,
que la virtud a cálculo somete,
de los mortales te ha usurpado el culto;
donde la coronada hidra amenaza
traer de nuevo al pensamiento esclavo
la antigua noche de barbarie y crimen;
donde la libertad vano delirio,
fe la servilidad, grandeza el fasto,
la corrupción cultura se apellida.

(ll. 33-43)

(O Goddess, do not linger in this region of light and misery where Philosophy, your ambitious rival who subjects virtue to calculation, has usurped from you the worship of mortals; where the crowned hydra threatens to bring to the enslaved mind the ancient night of barbarity and crime; where liberty is called vain delirium; servility, faith; pomp, greatness; and corruption, culture.)

Arturo Ardao has argued convincingly that the first lines of this passage are an attack against Bentham's “moral arithmetic” and his use of “calculation” in ethics.⁶ Next, Bello assaults the “coronada hidra,” the tyrannical absolute monarchy, personified by the Holy Alliance, which threatens to restore the old order. Bello also criticizes the conditions of Europe, above all those of Spain and France in 1823; these conditions have distorted the meaning of words and exacerbated domestic tensions. And Bello censures equally the liberales for having transformed the meaning of freedom into “vain delirium,” and the serviles for hiding their political backwardness under the mask of religious faith. Here for the first time Bello uses “fe” (faith) to describe the reactionary spirit of the Catholic Church and its backing of the absolutist cause. In Chapter 9 we shall see the significance of this word in the “Agricultura de la zona tórrida.” This entire passage, in short, is a criticism of the political conditions that have existed in Europe, and specifically in Spain, during at least the preceding decade.

Later in the “Alocución” Bello levels a more explicit criticism at both sides of continental politics—the side of the liberales and that of the serviles. In a passage describing the events in Spain since Ferdinand's reconquest, Bentham's “calculations” again appear:

¿Puebla la inquisición sus calabozos
de americanos; o españolas cortes
dan a la servidumbre formas nuevas?
.....Columbia vence; libertad los vanos
cálculos de los déspotas engaña.

(ll. 546-48, 551-2)

(Does the Inquisition populate its dungeons with Americans? Do Spanish Cortes give new forms to servitude? Colombia wins; liberty outwits the vain calculations of the despots.)

The two sides of Spanish politics are presented as simply two different versions of despotism. The old version Bello calls the “inquisición,” his favorite synecdoche for the alliance of Crown and Church; the new version is the liberal Cortes, whose tyranny over the New World is even more absolute.⁷ Poetry, therefore, should leave the regions now dominated by the philosophy of Bentham and servitude to the past.

As an alternative Bello presents to Poetry the attractions of America. She could settle near the clear river of Buenos Aires, where the heroes of Albion were defeated; or in the valleys of Chile, where the innocence and candor of the ancient world are combined with valor and patriotism, or in the city of the Aztec, rich with inexhaustible veins that almost satiated the avarice of Europe; or in Quito, Bogotá, or the valleys of Venezuela. Any of these settings would prove hospitable to Poetry, and the day will come when an American Virgil will sing about the agriculture of the New World:

Tiempo vendrá cuando de ti inspirado
algún Marón americano, ¡oh diosa!
también las mieses, los rebaños cante,
el rico suelo al hombre avasallado,
y las dádivas mil con que la zona
de Febo amada al labrador corona;
donde cándida miel llevan las cañas,
y animado carmín la tuna cría,
donde tremola el algodón su nieve,
y el ananás sazona su ambrosia.

(ll. 189-98)

(A time will come, O Goddess! when some American Maro inspired by you will also sing the fields of grain, the flocks, the rich soil subdued by man, and the thousand gifts with which the zone loved by Phoebus crowns the peasant, where the canes bear white honey and the prickly pear nurtures lively crimson, where cotton waves its snow and the pineapple ripens its ambrosia.)

The “American Maro” is, of course, Bello himself, and these lines are the announcement of his next poem, “Agricultura de la zona tórrida.” But Bello has already begun to sing America's beauty in the first part of the “Alocución”; we have already tasted his georgic passion, his gift for describing nature and human transformation of nature.

Thus far, Bello has defined his americanismo as a rejection of a specific version of European culture, of which the Spain of the 1820s offers the best example. In the first fourth of the poem he has drawn on the contemporary topos of European corruption and American youth, a ubiquitous theme in the post-Napoleonic era, and he has shown the New World's luscious and pure vegetation. Now the “Alocución” moves from geography to history, and the remaining three-fourths of the poem are devoted to the heroes of the wars of independence.

The names of the greatest heroes—Bolívar, San Martín, O'Higgins—however, do not figure in Bello's catalogue. San Martín is briefly mentioned in a periphrasis. Of O'Higgins, who has just fallen from power, nothing is said. And Bolívar is praised in a roundabout recusatio at the end of the poem when Bello says that the deeds of the Libertador will be written by a more skilled pen:

Mas no a mi débil voz la larga suma
de sus victorias numerar compete;
a ingenio más feliz, más docta pluma,
su grata patria encargo tal comete,
pues como aquel samán que siglos cuenta,
de la vecinas gentes venerado,
que vio en torno a su basa corpulenta
el bosque muchas veces renovado,
y vasto espacio cubre con la hojosa
copa, de mil inviernos victoriosa;
así tu gloria al cielo se sublima,
Libertador del pueblo colombiano;
digna de que la lleven dulce rima
y culta historia al tiempo más lejano.

(ll. 821-34)

(But my weak voice is not qualified to enumerate the long account of his victories; his grateful fatherland entrusts such a work to a happier talent, to a more learned pen. For just like that samán of centuries, venerated by the neighboring peoples, which saw the forest renewed many times around its massive base, covers a vast space with its leafy top, victorious over a thousand winters, thus your glory is sublimated to the sky, Liberator of the Colombian people, worthy to be carried to the most distant future by sweet rhyme and erudite history.)

In the “Alocución” Bolívar's glory is enhanced outside the poem. But we have to go back to the poem in order to realize that the American Virgil declines to praise the new Augustus for reasons that have little to do with the poet's “weak voice.” We may then understand why his name is not included in the list of Spanish Americans “who have most distinguished themselves in the wars of independence.”

For his list of heroes Bello was inspired, as noted in Chapter 6, by Anchises' catalogue of heroes in book 6 of the Aeneid. In a passage devoted to Francisco Javier Ustáriz, Bello names the classical heroes who will accompany the new Spanish American heroes in the Elysian fields:

De mártires que dieron por la patria
la vida, el santo coro te rodea:
Régulo, Trásea, Marco Bruto, Decio,
cuantos inmortaliza Atenas libre,
cuantos Esparta y el romano Tibre.

(ll. 653-7)

(The holy choir of martyrs who gave their lives for their fatherland surrounds you: Regulus, Thrasea, Marcus Brutus, Decius, all those whom free Athens, Sparta and the Roman Tiber immortalize.)

Each of these Roman republicans brings to mind Augustus, who, of course, is not named in the poem. The Decii, for example, were favorite heroes of Virgil praised in both the Georgics and the Aeneid. The name symbolizes self-sacrifice: with a purple-edged toga, with a veiled head, and invoking the Roman gods, the first Decius ran to meet his death, causing terror among Rome's enemies. Years later, the same act was imitated by the second Decius. The Decii appear in line 169 of book 2 of the Georgics, one line before Caesar, and again in line 824 of book 6 of the Aeneid, shortly after Anchises has described Augustus to Aeneas (ll. 789-807).

Regulus, the hero immortalized in Horace's Ode 3.5, urged the Roman Senate to reject the unfavorable terms for peace proposed by the Carthaginians, announcing that he would rather be tortured defending the integrity of the Roman republic than yield to its perfidious foes. But Horace praises Regulus in a poem devoted to Augustus—“In honorem Augusti.” In his move from monarchism to republicanism, Bello thus alludes to a poem in which the divinely inspired monarch (“divus Augustus”) is set against a background of republican life. But unlike the Augustan poets, Bello refuses to celebrate any monarchs or would-be monarchs.

If Regulus and Decius suggest positive images of the princeps, Marcus Brutus and Thrasea are renowned for their opposition to absolute monarchy. Brutus, along with Cassius and other leading Roman senators, assassinated Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. He was later defeated by the forces of Antony and Octavian at Philippi, having failed to restore the republic of the optimates. The archenemy of monarchy, Marcus Brutus is placed by Dante in the last circle of hell. Thrasea represents the Stoics who wished to preserve the fortitude of old republican values during a period of imperial oppression. He refused to flatter Nero or to believe in Poppaea's divinity. His unjust death, decreed by that mask of legality that the Senate had become under the Caesars, closes the extant text of the Annals of Tacitus, who was, of course, Augustus's classical foe.

Thus, Augustus is absent from the “Alocución” and his foes are celebrated. The same is true of Bolívar, for a large number of the heroes celebrated in the second part of the poem—Ribas, Castillo, Miranda, Piar—were in some important way at odds with the Libertador. Ribas (ll. 490-509) blamed Bolívar for the disaster of Aragua in 1814 and incarcerated him; Castillo (l. 528) was Bolívar's enemy in the civil war that contributed to the fall of Cartagena. Still more incriminating are the long sections on Miranda (ll. 674-702), in whose fall Bolívar was implicated, and Piar (ll. 736-50), who was executed in 1817 for disobeying the Libertador.

Moreover, a veiled but sharp criticism of Bolívar is implied by the overall charge of perfidy that runs throughout the poem. Bello brandishes this charge against the Church (ll. 605-20), but also against the patriots who acted disloyally. After singing the praises of Miranda, Bello defends his capitulation and assails the treachery of those who handed him over to the Spaniards:

y si, de contratiempos asaltado
que a humanos medios resistir no es dado,
te fue el ceder forzoso, y en cadena
a manos perecer de una perfidia,
tu espíritu no ha muerto, no;

(ll. 694-8)

(and if, assaulted by mishaps that human means are not able to avoid, you were forced to yield, and died in chains at the hands of a treacherous act, your spirit has not died, no;)

Bolívar, as we have seen, played a principal role in the transactions leading to Miranda's imprisonment, and Bello had earlier, in the “Outline,” used a softer word—“ingratitude”—to describe Bolívar's conduct in the matter.

Perfidy also marks the conclusion of the long passage devoted to Morillo (ll. 509-81). The beginning of this passage is straightforward. As in the “Outline,” Morillo is charged with cruelty, particularly in his murderous rampages at Cartagena and Bogotá. The passage continues with what at first appears to be an address to Morillo, who is compared, unfavorably, to Spanish conquerors like Cortés and Pizarro and to the duke of Alba. But the passage ends with accusations that are entirely inappropriate to Morillo:

Quien te pone con Alba en paralelo,
¡oh cuánto yerra! En sangre bañó el suelo
de Batavia el ministro de Felipe;
pero si fue crüel y sanguinario,
bajo no fue; no acomodando al vario
semblante de los tiempos su semblante,
ya desertor del uno,
ya del otro partido,
sólo el de su interés siguió constante;
no alternativamente
fue soldado feroz, patriota falso;
no dio a la inquisición su espada un día,
y por la libertad lidió el siguiente;
ni traficante infame del cadalso,
hizo de los indultos granjería.

(ll. 567-81)

(He who draws a parallel between you and Alba, oh how greatly he errs! Philip's minister soaked the soil of Batavia with blood, but if he was cruel and bloody, he was not base; he did not adjust his appearance to the changing appearance of the times, a deserter now of this, now of the other party; he only followed with constancy the party of his own interest; he was not, alternatively, a ferocious soldier, a false patriot; he did not give his sword to the Inquisition one day, and fight for freedom the next, nor as a shameless dealer of the gallows, did he profit from pardon.)

The subject of these lines cannot possibly be Morillo, who defended the royalist cause with persistence and intransigence. No one could say that he had ever surrendered his sword to the Inquisition. This would imply that at some point Morillo was the enemy of Spain. Nor had Morillo ever struggled for freedom. Until 1820, the year he left Venezuela after being forced to sign an armistice with the patriots, Morillo was a relentless foe of the patriots' cause.

Who, then, is Bello talking about in this passage? Who is this man who one day surrendered to the Spaniards and the next day fought for the cause of freedom? The details suggest episodes in the life of Bolívar, particularly the events surrounding the fall of Miranda. It would seem that Bello has veiled his acute censure of Bolívar in the guise of an attack on Morillo. As we shall see in Chapter 10, Bello's criticism did not escape the sharp eye of Bolívar, who offered a fascinating reading of the “Alocución” in his conversations with Perú de Lacroix.

Bello's feelings toward Bolívar covered the spectrum of human emotion, from admiration to anger. In 1820 Bello still expressed even to close friends his admiration for the Libertador. In one of his letters Irisarri refers to Bello's constant friendship with Bolívar, and Alamiro de Avila has suggested that a very favorable biography of Bolívar, which appeared as an appendix to Irisarri's Carta al Observador de Londres, was written by Bello.⁸ Other documents, especially a letter of November 1826, bear out similar feelings. But in Bello's poetry one detects an undercurrent of sharp criticism of Bolívar, a kind of verbal sneering. In the “Alocución” this criticism is veiled; in other poems—especially the “Carta” to Olmedo of 1827—it becomes explicit.

The reasons for Bello's anger are understandable. By October 1823 details about the Guayaquil negotiations had probably reached London, and it became clear that the real enemy of the monarchists' cause was Bolívar. Bello had little choice but again to redefine his political outlook. Bolívar's continued ascendancy dashed Bello's hopes for establishing in America political and cultural systems modeled on eighteenth-century Britain: in politics, a controlled or limited monarchy; in literature, an emulation of the Roman Augustan aesthetic reshaped by the absence of Augustus.⁹ Like the British Augustans, Bello and the monarchists hoped to fill the center of power with a figure who would preserve the legacy of monarchic institutions and at the same time revoke the absolutist and tyrannical elements those institutions had acquired since the sixteenth century.

In the eyes of the monarchists, the throne could not be entrusted to a Spanish American. The luster of lineage, the almost immemorial ascent to power, gave the royal houses of Europe a privilege and respect that could not be emulated by any upstart. Iturbide was proof of the dangers of any “monarquía criolla.” First the pretense of freedom, then tyranny. The one experiment with a Spanish American monarchy had devolved into absolute power or, as Bello put it, the “yoke of Iturbide” (la coyunda de Iturbide, “Alocución,” l. 286). Now that Bolívar had barred any hope of establishing a European royal house in America, Bello creates a poem that extols Bolívar's enemies and declares that Bolívar will have to look elsewhere for his poet. The closing allusions to the future glory of the Libertador and the closing recusatio are an elegant form of political attack.

Though Bello has broken with Augustus, he preserves a certain nostalgia for the Augustan order, for its pomp and solemnity. The Augustan model of power never became completely distasteful to Bello:

¿Dó está la torre bulliciosa
que pregonar solía,
de antorchas coronadas,
la pompa augusta del solemne día?
Entre las rotas cúpulas que oyeron
sacros ritos ayer, torpes reptiles
anidan, y en la sala que gozosos
banquetes vio y amores, hoy sacude
la grama del erial su infausta espiga.

(ll. 423-31)

(Where is the boisterous tower crowned with torches which used to proclaim the august pomp of the solemn day? Among the shattered domes that only yesterday witnessed sacred rites ugly reptiles make their nests, and in the hall that saw happy banquets and loves, now wild grass shakes its ill-fated spike.)

But the political model of colonial Caracas could no longer survive. Bello was forced, as were the philosophers and poets of the Enlightenment, to find a political model that could replace absolute monarchy. His next choice, a British-style monarchy, was not to be. He then was willing to settle for the model on which limited or constitutional monarchies were often based, that of republican Rome. Like Voltaire, Bello—though probably still believing in the advantages of monarchy—could call himself a republican. Like Montesquieu, he could easily shift his allegiances between British limited monarchy and Roman republicanism. Like Horace and Virgil, he could hail republican heroes.

By 1823 Bello was convinced that the future of Spanish America would be linked to republicanism. His task would be to give shape to this political formula, to adapt it as closely as possible to a model of constitutional monarchy. As for the luster of kingdoms, the glory of empires—these, like Rome, were fallen. To close the literary section of the second volume of the Biblioteca Americana, Bello chose Quevedo's famous poem on what remains of Roman glory. Bello's initials follow the poem, as a signature at the end of his journal, to be sure, but almost as though he has taken an oath of allegiance to Quevedo's theme:

Buscas en Roma a Roma, oh peregrino,
y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas;
Cadáver son las que ostentó murallas,
Y tumba de sí propio el Aventino.
Yace, donde reinaba, el Palatino,
Y limadas del tiempo las medallas
Mas se muestran destrozo a las batallas
De las edades, que blasón latino.
Sólo el Tibre quedó, cuya corriente
Si ciudad la regó, ya sepultura
La llora con funesto son doliente.
¡Oh Roma! en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura
Huyó lo que era firme, y solamente
Lo fugitivo permanece y dura.

(You look for Rome in Rome, O pilgrim! and in Rome itself you do not find Rome. The walls she once flaunted are now a corpse, and the Aventine is its own tomb.

The Palatine lies where it once reigned, and the medals filed down by time resemble more the destruction of the battle of the ages than a Latin coat of arms.

Only the Tiber was left; and if its current irrigated her as a city, as a grave it now mourns her with a sad, aching sound.

O Rome! from your greatness, from your beauty all firmness escaped, and only what is fugitive remains and endures.)

Dans les pays Despotiques, où l'esclave n'ose parler à son maître, la langue prendra un ton allégorique et mystérieux: et c'est là que naîtront les apologues et le style figuré.

Jacques Delille

In 1823 the Revolution was coming to an end, and Spanish Americans were beginning to enjoy peace and international support. While Castlereagh had persisted in a policy of neutrality, Canning was decisively in favor of independence, viewing it as inevitable in the long run and also desirable for British commercial interests. In October Canning obtained from Polignac, the French ambassador to London, a memorandum stating that French troops would not invade Spanish America. The same month Canning sent consuls to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, and Lima, paving the way for full recognition of Spanish American independence. In December President Monroe announced that the United States would oppose any European power that launched an invasion anywhere on the American continent.¹⁰

Despite these unmistakable signs of support, there was the unresolved problem of Peru. As Bello had said in the “Alocución”: “la ciudad que dio a los Incas cuna / Aún gime esclava” (the city that gave birth to the Incas still groans as a slave). The Spaniards still occupied large zones of the Peruvian altiplano, and the patriots were resolved to expel them. There was to be no vestige of imperialism in the New World. On August 9, 1824, cavalry troops from Colombia, Peru, Ireland, and England, under Bolívar's command, defeated the Spaniards in the battle of Junín. Not a shot was fired, and the Spaniards fled after an hour. As Bolívar wrote to Peñalver in one of his rare references to this event: “So great is the reputation of our army that the Spaniards have not dared to fight us. We have made marvelous progress in this country without firing a single rifle shot.”¹¹ Sucre sealed the struggle for independence in December when some five thousand patriots, mostly Colombians, defeated the troops of Viceroy La Serna in Ayacucho.

Meanwhile, Bello had lost his position as secretary of the Chilean mission. After O'Higgins's fall, Freire's new government had sent Mariano Egaña to London, primarily to settle the matter of the Irisarri loan. Egaña did not dismiss Bello from the Chilean mission; not knowing any English, he badly needed his help. But since Bello insisted on defending Irisarri, the tensions between the two men rapidly increased. Bello had already written to Pedro Gual, the secretary of foreign affairs, in August 1824, seeking a position in the Colombian mission. It seems that Bello had first considered the possibility of moving to Chile, but soon dismissed the idea: “The idea of moving to the Antarctic pole and abandoning forever my homeland is unbearable to me” ([Andre's Bello, Obras Completas, hereafter OC], 25: 133).

Bello wrote to Gual again in January 1825 and renewed his petition. He begins the letter by evoking their happy youth as university students and then asks for news of the university: “And how is our ancient and venerable nurse? Has she already discarded the hoop skirt of the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine, and agreed to dress herself for the times? I have no doubt that she has, because the impetus given by the Revolution to new opinions cannot have been favorable to the outmoded fashions that fed pabulum to the imagination rather than the understanding of the Americans” (OC, 25: 142). Again Bello tells Gual that he does not want to end up at the Antarctic pole, and paraphrasing Virgil's first eclogue, he says that he does not wish to die among the Chileans, who are so distant from the rest of the world: “It is painful for me to abandon the country of my birth, and to face death sooner or later at the Antarctic pole among the toto divisos orbe chilenos who will no doubt consider me an intruder.” In both letters Bello expresses the hope that he can still count on Bolívar's support.

Late in 1824 Pedro Gual wrote to Bello naming him secretary to Manuel José Hurtado, the Colombian envoy in London. In January of the following year the British government announced to Spain its intention to recognize Buenos Aires, Mexico, and Colombia. Bello, who assumed his new position on February 7, participated in the negotiations that led to Britain's full diplomatic recognition of Colombia.¹² British recognition was the long-awaited sign that marked the end of the wars of independence; but Spanish America's problems were far from over. The Revolution had left the new states bankrupt. Several countries were borrowing heavily from Great Britain, but only a small fraction of the £21 million in loans was invested in the new countries. For one thing, the loans were discounted by huge margins: Buenos Aires, for example, received £600,000 for a loan of £1,000,000. For another, a large portion of the funds received had been used to finance the wars, against Brazil in the case of Buenos Aires, against Spain in the campaigns of Junín and Ayacucho in the case of Colombia. Finally, a large outflow of capital from Spanish America resulted from consumer purchases. Nor were the new countries capitalized with direct foreign investment. The investments that poured into Spanish America in 1824 and 1825 went mainly into speculative mining ventures that soon became insolvent. In 1825 Chile, Colombia, and Peru stopped payments on their debt, causing the bankruptcy of seven financial institutions in England and a crisis that had repercussions throughout Europe.¹³

In addition to the economic crisis, Spanish America was suffering from the sordid manipulations of the defeated Ferdinand, who in 1824 used his influence with Pope Leo XII to stage a last attempt to recover the colonies. The Pope's encyclical, which urged the Spanish American nations to recognize the Spanish monarch as their legitimate leader, contributed to the instability of the new republics, though it met with solid opposition. Servando Teresa de Mier wrote an impassioned Discurso sobre la encíclica del Papa León XII. His language was scathing: “It is a mere letter of formality written in mystical gibberish, or more exactly: it is an Italian swindle typical of those the Roman court uses to dismiss the straits and bonds in which the crowned heads place her.” He charges the Spaniards with creating divisions among Spanish Americans by means of “a Gothic-ultramontane parchment.” He even dares the Holy Alliance to attack the New World. Let the Holy Alliance come to our coasts, he says. And if the Pope wishes to form part of the expedition, as temporal prince, war will also be waged against him, as in the times of Charles V and Philip II. The friar concludes his diatribe by warning all Mexicans not to be seduced by the maneuvers of Ferdinand VII and Leo XII.¹⁴

The Vatican soon accepted the fact that Spain had lost the Indies, and diplomatic relations were established. As the threat of a new invasion from Spain became less likely, the new nations started to exhibit a frail domestic political equilibrium. Bolívar had once said that he was more afraid of peace than of war, and events would bear out his premonition.

A large part of the postwar debate in Colombia concerned the role of the Church. Government representatives, on the one hand, wished to preserve the regalist primacy of state over church and to encourage religious toleration. The Constitution of Cúcuta allowed foreigners to settle in Colombia and also allowed Masonic and Protestant organizations to publish material in opposition to the supremacy of Rome. The leading figures of the Colombian government, furthermore, took a personal interest in promoting a new air of tolerance. Santander, the vice-president of Colombia, and Restrepo, the minister of the interior, encouraged Masonic organizations and anti-clericalism. And Pedro Gual became the first president of the Colombia chapter of the British Bible Society, a chapter founded by James Thompson during his extensive travels throughout Spanish America.

The ultramontane clergy, who saw the rise of government-sponsored anticlericalism as a direct threat to the monopoly they had enjoyed, were not ready to yield. It was not, however, in the center of Colombian power, in Bogotá, that the confrontation between the clergy and the state was felt most strongly, but in Caracas. Here the Church opposed the distribution of Spanish Bibles and resorted to the familiar tactics of inciting slaves to rebellion. In 1824 the slaves of Petare, a Caracas suburb, rose in defense of Ferdinand; a priest was accused of promoting the insurrection. Other similar incidents followed, and it was suspected that the Church was coordinating the efforts of rebellion with the forces of Spain and France.¹⁵

Buoyed by the diplomatic progress with Great Britain, but disheartened by the religious, economic, and political crises, Bello and García del Río decided to resume publishing a journal. This time, however, they would be more realistic and design a shorter and less expensive format. The title of the new journal was El Repertorio Americano, of which four volumes appeared in 1826 and 1827. Guillermo Guitarte is probably right to argue that García del Río played the leading role in the Biblioteca, but he is incorrect to extend this observation to the Repertorio. As a perusal of the index of the facsimile edition of the Repertorio reveals, Bello signed twenty-nine poems, translations, and articles. In contrast, García del Río signed only thirteen articles.¹⁶

In the Repertorio Bello finally seems comfortable with the radical breach brought about by the Revolution, but he continues emphasizing the need to preserve links with Europe, including Spain, and with classical culture and the Enlightenment. His americanismo is in the tradition of Miranda, marked by a complex weaving of Western tradition and the energy of the emerging nations. In an article on Columbus, Miranda's tutelary figure, Bello tries to settle the issue of the animosity between Spain and Spanish America, which is perhaps the thorniest topic in any discussion of americanismo. Bello says: “We do not have the slightest inclination to vituperate the Conquest. Whether it was atrocious or not, we owe the origin of our rights and our existence to it, and through the Conquest our soil received that part of European civilization that could sift through the prejudice and tyranny of Spain” (OC, 23: 452).

Religious tolerance is another topic often raised in the Repertorio. In the first volume there is a review of Mier's Discurso and one of a favorite work among regalists, Tamburini's Verdadera idea de la Santa Sede, both of which emphasize the division of church and state and the limited power of the papacy. In the second volume an article by James Thompson informs the British Bible Society of the progress of Lancaster's educational reform in Spanish America despite orthodox resistance. An attack on innate ideas and a reliance on experience, origins, and clear language run throughout the journal, especially in the articles on philosophy, orthographic reform, and education. Bello uses inductive reasoning in all his scientific articles and expounds on this method in some detail in the “Introducción a los elementos de física del dr. N. Arnott.” This article, a translation of Arnott's Elements of Physics, originally published in 1825, is a recapitulation of all the advantages of the British Enlightenment and a declaration of faith in scientific progress, economic growth, and free trade.

Many pages of the journal were written by Spanish liberals exiled in London. Vicente Salvá, a philologist and politician, wrote bibliographical notes on classic Spanish texts; Pablo Mendibil, a Basque recommended to Bello by Blanco White, wrote ten articles for the Repertorio, including a review of the British legislative and judiciary bodies, based on a book translated into Spanish by Blanco White. In addition, publications by liberal Spaniards—Mora, Canga Argüelles, and Urcullu—were often reviewed in the journal. The Spanish liberales, who had been the object of Bello's attack since the beginning of the Revolution, are now his friends, denoting the first sign of reconciliation between Spaniards and Spanish Americans after the wars of independence.

As had La Biblioteca Americana, El Repertorio Americano opens with a poem by Bello. The title lines read:

                                                            Silvas Americanas
Silva I. - La Agricultura De La Zona Torrida

In a footnote, Bello writes: “The fragments published in the Biblioteca Americana under the title ‘América’ belong with these silvas. The author thought of recasting them all in a single poem; convinced that this was impossible, he will publish them in their original form, with certain corrections and additions. In this first part, one will find only two or three lines from those fragments.” This explanatory note, the cause of much misunderstanding among Bello scholars, is clarified by an examination of Bello's manuscripts. Shortly before the publication of the “Agricultura” in the Repertorio in October 1826, Bello attempted to merge this poem with the “Alocución” in another text, titled “El campo americano.”¹⁷

So as not to confuse readers who were expecting a continuation of the poem “América,” Bello announces his new project, a series of Silvas americanas, the first one being the “Agricultura.” The fragments published in the Biblioteca now also belong to this collection of silvas. But this new project, like “América” and “El campo americano,” was never completed. Of the Silvas americanas Bello published only the “Agricultura.” The “Alocución” was not republished under the new series title, though Bello's footnote has led most readers to include it with the “Agricultura” as one of the Silvas americanas.

In the “Agricultura” Bello abandons entirely the epic mode and returns to the georgic tone and theme that had been his first inspiration upon arriving in London. After Junín and Ayacucho, the threats of Spanish reconquest had diminished, and thus the focus of the Repertorio shifts from war and independence to the future organization of the Spanish American republics. Like Virgil after Actium, like Pope after Utrecht, Bello turns his attention to a plan for peace. But more significantly, in the “Agricultura” Bello offers a recapitulation of the transformations that the wars of independence have brought about. It is his most profound meditation on the shift from colonial servitude to freedom.

In the first two sections of the poem (ll. 1-63) Bello invokes the natural fecundity of the torrid zone. The first line—“Salve, fecunda zona”—is drawn, as many critics have observed, from line 173 of book 2 of the Georgics—“Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus” (Hail, land of Saturn, great giver of fruits)—which immediately follows the three lines devoted to Octavian in book 2 (ll. 170-2). Bello's opening lines are also inspired by the opening lines of Lucretius's De rerum natura. The Venezuelan poet recalls nostalgically the fertility of the torrid zone, where jasmine and cotton, wheat and grapes grow in abundance. The second section closes with a description of the banana tree, which Bello associates with both slavery and happiness:

y para ti el banano
desmaya al peso de su dulce carga;
el banano, primero
de cuantos concedió bellos presentes
Providencia a las gentes
del ecuador feliz con mano larga.
No ya de humanas artes obligado
el premio rinde opimo;
no es a la podadera, no al arado
deudor de su racimo;
escasa industria bástale, cual puede
hurtar a sus fatigas mano esclava;
crece veloz, y cuando exhausto acaba,
adulta prole en torno le sucede.

(OC, 1: 66-7, ll. 50-63; my emphasis)

(for you [torrid zone] the banana tree faints under the weight of its sweet burden; the banana tree, the first of all the beautiful gifts offered generously by Providence to the people of the happy equatorial region. Unforced by the skill of man, it yields a rich reward; it owes its bunch neither to the pruning knife nor to the plow; it requires only a small amount of effort, such that an enslaved hand can steal from its labors; it grows quickly, and when it dies of exhaustion, a grown progeny succeeds it all around.)

Bello also remarks on the relationship between slavery and a carefree, if not happy, existence in one of his footnotes to the poem. He says that from the banana tree, and with minimal effort, the slaves in the haciendas and plantations derive their nourishment and everything that makes their life tolerable.¹⁸

In Chapter 1 we observed that Bello frequently drew analogies between the colonial period and the golden age. The first two sections of the “Agricultura” elaborate on these similarities. As in the golden age, there is here an abundance of fruits; and almost no labor, no special technique, no “agricultura” is needed for the satisfaction of basic human needs. The inhabitants of the torrid zone live in carefree servitude, in a kind of passable but unenlightened existence. Theirs is a prolongation of life, as Humboldt put it, and not a full exploration of its secrets. It is the New World before the Fall.

In the third section of the poem (ll. 64-132), Bello describes the tensions that underlay the wars of independence. Slavery the infancy of colonialism, cannot be prolonged forever. Minimal effort is no longer a blessing for an undeveloped mass of slaves; rather, indolence hinders the Americans from developing a simple, yet rich life, and Bello launches a tirade against the “indolente labrador” (indolent peasant), who is no longer identified with the slaves but with the privileged few.

Servitude is sweet and happy—provided that no one challenges it. As soon as prospects for growth and development arise, the equilibrium of dependency is destroyed. Each of the two sides of the struggle is an object of Bello's criticism: the Creole aristocracy has abandoned its fields, and the Church, in representing the Crown, has taken over the fields of the elite and promoted civil disorder:

¿Por qué ilusión funesta
aquellos que fortuna hizo señores
de tan dichosa tierra y pingüe y varia,
al cuidado abandonan
y a la fe mercenaria
las patrias heredades,
y en el ciego tumulto se aprisionan
de míseras ciudades,
do la ambición proterva
sopla la llama de civiles bandos,
o al patriotismo la desidia enerva;
do el lujo las costumbres atosiga,
y combaten los vicios
la incauta edad en poderosa liga?

(ll. 75-88)

(By what ill-fated illusion those fortunate owners of such a happy, rich, and variegated land abandon their ancestral properties to the mercenary faith, to its care, and trap themselves in the blind tumult of miserable cities, where perverse ambition fans the flame of civil factions, or patriotism is enervated by laziness; where luxury poisons customs, and the vices, assembled in a powerful league, attack those of unwary age.)

“Fe mercenaria” (mercenary faith) alludes to the Church's role during both the colonial period and the Revolution. During the colonial period, the Church had a virtual monopoly on official credit in the colonies through the system of censos, or mortgage loans. One kind of censo could be redeemed after the capital had been paid in full, while a second type—sometimes called censo perpetuo (mortgage in perpetuity)—was nonredeemable and served a spiritual rather than a temporal function. Under a censo perpetuo the Church would dispense favors (e.g., say a mass on a given date, year after year) in return for interest payments representing 5 percent of the value of the property, which was mortgaged in favor of some parish, chaplaincy, or convent. Established in perpetuity, the censo created an obligation that was passed from generation to generation.¹⁹

A contemporary source illustrates the kind of animosity toward the Church that these mortgages generated during the last years of the war. In a pamphlet published in 1823, José Tomás Sanauria explains that almost all the mortgage loans in Venezuela had been extended by the Church. The holders of these loans, or censualistas, Sanauria charges, have seized and liquidated agricultural property at a time when the disasters of the war have prevented normal repayment. The author blames the Church for the pitiful state of postwar Venezuelan agriculture: “The valleys of Tuy, Caucagua, Guatire, Aragüita, Río Chico, Mamporal, Santa Lucía, and others present the most dreary and horrible effects of the arbitrary foreclosures performed upon the request of the chaplains, trustees, and administrators of churches, for the sake of a miserable sum of past-due interest owed to them.”²⁰ Throughout Spanish America during the years of the Revolution, the Church became a mortgage bank that made loans to landowners. Though the rate of interest was low, the clergy gained considerable influence over its clients.²¹

Bello's specific charge in this section of the “Agricultura” is that the landowners lost their property to the Church and flocked to the city, where they became slaves to the allure of new luxuries. In the city the Church fanned the fires of civil war—a charge Bello made in the letter to the Pope. Similarly, in the “Alocución” Bello accused the clergy of serving as an accomplice of Spanish tyranny. It is possible that in the “Agricultura” Bello is defending the Colombian government's strong stance against orthodox intolerance, a debate that reached its peak in Caracas in March 1826, some seven months before the poem's publication.²²

Bello's criticism of city life continues as he shows the landowners becoming experts in seduction and gambling. His attack on urban life is drawn in part from the closing of book 3 of Virgil's Georgics but more significantly from Tibullus and Jovellanos.²³ Against the image of contemporary city life, Bello evokes the strong government of the ancient Roman republic, when citizens were called from the fields to run the state, long before Rome had tasted the luxuries of empire. Bello is now ready to specify the political ideal of the “Agricultura.” He has had to give up his ideal of a constitutional monarchy, but the powerful executive arm of the first centuries of the Roman republic, the consuls who inherited in part the majesty of kings, is a close substitute. Addressing America's idle urban dwellers, he argues:

No así trató la triunfadora Roma
las artes de la paz y de la guerra;
antes fió las riendas del estado
a la mano robusta
que tostó el sol y encalleció el arado;
y bajo el techo luminoso campesino
los hijos educó, que el conjurado
mundo allanaron al valor latino.

(ll. 125-32)

(Triumphant Rome did not handle the skills of war and peace in this way. Instead, she entrusted the reins of the state to the strong hand which the sun tanned and the plow hardened; and under the luminous ceiling of the countryside she educated her children, who subjected the conspiring world to Latin valor.)

In the fourth section of the “Agricultura” (ll. 133-201) Bello again recalls republican Rome and the virtues of a simple life. This section is based almost entirely on the famous passage of book 2 of the Georgics: “O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint / agricolas …” (How exceedingly happy are the farmers, if they only knew their blessing). In the preceding section of the “Agricultura” Bello associated city life with civil war. He now focuses on a passage in which Virgil associates the countryside with a particular kind of peacefulness. The countryside is distant from civil factions (the “discordibus armis” of Virgil's passage), and Bello tells the landowners, the “afortunados poseedores,” to return to the countryside; there, freedom can be found. In the countryside, Bello says, they will find pure feelings and honest love, and will be free from the machinations of the “ajena mano y fe” (foreign hand and faith) that marries people “por nombre o plata” (for renown or for money)—another attack on the Church's financial ambitions.

The countryside in the aftermath of the Revolution is the setting for the beginning of the poem's fifth section (ll. 202-68). The lands have been abandoned by the war. The jungles are again to be laid low, so that coffee and fruit trees can be planted. Now, for the first time, the word “agricultura” appears in the poem:

Ya dócil a tu voz, agricultura,
nodriza de las gentes, la caterva
servil armada va de corvas hoces.

(ll. 224-6)

(Agriculture, nurse of the people, the servile throng armed with curved sickles now advances obeying your voice.)

The wars of independence have completely altered the terms of existence described at the beginning of the poem, when colonial servitude was associated with the easy sustenance provided by the banana tree. The natural fecundity is now replaced by the toil of agriculture; the happy slaves are now a servile throng. But the Revolution has also created an opportunity for transforming this situation, which is what Bello does in this extraordinary section of the poem. Each member of the servile throng, as he first destroys the jungle and then cultivates the land, is transformed into a “fatigado agricultor” (tired farmer, l. 261).

In the fifth section (ll. 269-350) Bello speaks of “la gente agricultora / del ecuador” (the agricultural people of the equatorial region). This expression concludes the series of transformations from the colonial period to the postwar era, from happy servitude to a new freedom that allows people to change their lives, till their lands, and, as Bello says later in the poem, trade their goods:

lines 54-5: “las gentes del ecuador feliz” (the people of the happy equatorial region)—colonial slavery

lines 224-5: “agricultura, nodriza de las gentes” (agriculture, nurse of the people)—the aftermath of war

lines 271-2: “la gente agricultora del ecuador” (the agricultural people of the equatorial region)—the future period of freedom

On almost all counts the model of Augustan Caracas is now crumbling and the institutions that shaped that order have also fallen, despite the attempt of the Crown and its ecclesiastical branch to regain power. The golden age of peace and easy sustenance is never to be regained. Instead, the sacrifice and the higher challenge of “agricultura” and freedom are the new alternatives.

What is extraordinary about the “Agricultura” is that Bello chose to inscribe the fall of the old order within a Virgilian framework, the very framework that had given legitimacy to that order. And Bello organized the Repertorio Americano in a way that emphasized this framework: immediately after his poem is the article “Estudio sobre Virgilio, por P. F. Tissot,” a translation signed by Bello of a review article originally published in 1826 in the Révue Encyclopédique of Tissot's Virgil studies. The article begins with a condemnation of the eighteenth century for not having paid close attention to the sacred language of the ancients. But the political turmoil of the last decades, it continues, has opened the eyes and expanded the minds of many authors, who have realized that the best way to surpass the moderns is to be as good as the ancients. Tissot, who had been chosen by Jacques Delille—“el primer poeta del siglo”—to take over the chair of classical studies at the Sorbonne, is praised for revealing in this study of Virgil the ancient mysteries of the Muses. After an extensive quotation of Tissot that surveys the whole gallery of Western authors, the article pays tribute to Delille:

And you, illustrious translator of the Georgics, whose friendship honors me, whose selection [of me] caused me such lively restlessness! If from the day of your death I have not let pass a single day without paying homage to your memory; if faithful to the duties of the heart, I have directed all my work to the one who imposed them on me in an adoption that was so dear to me—condescend to accept these studies as the religious offering of a disciple to his master.

Bello surely chose to publish Tissot's tribute to Delille as a way of making his own tribute. Delille, born in 1738, was a proponent of the seemingly contradictory alliance between neoclassical poetry and antiabsolutist politics that surfaced in eighteenth-century Britain and that seemed to have reached a climax in prerevolutionary France. He was a fairly active member of the intellectual opposition, yet at the same time he was almost entirely dedicated to the revival of the Virgilian tradition, both in his original poems—such as “L'homme des champs”—and in his translations of the Aeneid and the Georgics. While in London, Bello had translated two of Delille's long poems under the titles “La luz” and “Los jardines.” But it is in Delille's most famous work, his translation of the Georgics, that we find the most fruitful connection between the two poets and an explanation of the secret meaning of “agricultura.”

In Delille's preface to his translation of the Georgics one can see the coexistence of the georgic vogue and the virulent anti-Augustan tradition that had been brooding throughout the eighteenth century. The preface was both a defense of the Roman republic and an attack on Augustus. Written in 1756, it exemplifies the savage feelings against the princeps in the years that preceded the French Revolution. This is, for instance, Delille's comment on the proem to the Georgics:

There is nothing more pompous and more base than this invocation to Caesar. Two poets after Virgil degraded themselves with less poetic and more base invocations; Lucan lavished the vilest adulations on Nero, and Statius on Domitian. The latter is the guiltiest of the three. Augustus succeeded at the end of his reign, and Nero at the beginning of his; Domitian was always a monster. At any rate, one should not accuse these poets of deifying human beings—the customs of their country allowed such a practice—but of placing assassins who barely deserved to be called human in the ranks of the gods.²⁴

Delille also tells us that one can easily recognize in the Georgics the influence of Maecenas, to whom the ideas and intention of the proem can be attributed. The lamentation at the end of book 1, Delille says, is caused by the decay of agriculture (“la décadence de l'Agriculture”). At the end of book 2, he adds, in his beautiful praise of country life Virgil seems to have assembled all the power and grace of poetry to excite among Romans their ancient love for agriculture. Delille always capitalizes agriculture in the preface, and its figurative meaning becomes clearer in the following sentence: “L'Agriculture a exercé non seulement les plus grand héros, mais encore les plus grands écrivains de l'antiquité” (Agriculture fostered not only the greatest heroes of antiquity but also the greatest writers, p. 4), an echo of the opening of the Histories, where Tacitus says that the best Roman minds vanished after Actium. It is not just the tilling of fields Delille is praising. Rather, “Agriculture” is a code word for the Roman republic. Elsewhere in the preface Delille explains that figurative language arises when writers cannot speak freely.

Whereas Delille views Augustus and Agriculture as enemies, Bello instead organizes his “Agricultura” so as to describe the transformation from a servile model to an order in which freedom prevails. Although Bello sometimes referred to the colonial period as a time of chains and despotism, more often he thought of the colonial era as a stage of civilization in its infancy, dominated, or, as he said in the “Alocución,” “lulled,” by superstition. It was not a world of unbearable oppression, but one deprived of freedom. In the last section of the “Agricultura,” when Bello compares the two orders, he says, “La libertad más dulce que el imperio” (Liberty, sweeter than empire). The liberal model is justified as a higher good.

In the eighteenth century European culture was torn between two world views—in one, power was centralized, symbolized by the figure of Augustus; in the other, freedom predominated and individuals sought to restore the values of republican Rome and to develop the arts and sciences under freedom. Virgil's Georgics became the battleground for these conflicting world views. Depending on which aspects of Virgil one chose or omitted—whether Octavian's apotheosis in book 1 or the simple life in book 2—one was choosing monarchy or republic, obedience to established rules or free inquiry. In his final version of the Georgics Bello has suppressed Augustus and tipped the balance on the side of freedom, the higher challenge—agricultura.

Notes

1. For the influence of the term “idéologie” on Bello, García del Río, and other Spanish Americans see Arturo Ardao, Andrés Bello, filósofo (Caracas, 1986), 58-93, 98-109.

2. Juan María Gutiérrez, América Poética (Valparaíso, 1846), 11-16; Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “El descontento y la promesa,” Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión (Buenos Aires, 1928), and idem, Las corrientes literarias en la América Hispánica (México: 1978 [1st ed. in English, 1945]), esp. 103. For more recent comments on the “Alocución” as a milestone of americanismo see Donald Shaw, “‘Americanness’ in Spanish American Literature,” Comparative Criticism, 8 (1986), 213, and Arturo Ardao, “Primera idea del americanismo literario,” in his forthcoming La inteligencia latinoamericana.

3. Thomas Gray, The Complete Poems, ed. H. W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson (Oxford, 1966), 15.

4. For the significance of this topos in the 1820s see Llorens, Liberales y románticos, 330.

5. Bello shared this aesthetic ideal with such Spanish contemporaries as Blanco White, Mora, and Alcalá Galiano. In a review article on Cienfuegos in the Biblioteca, he expressed this ideal in a memorable line: “Among the ancients [i.e., in the poets and dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] nature prevails, while art prevails among the moderns. In the former we find ease, grace, fire, fecundity, a frequently irregular and even wild exuberance, which carries nevertheless a seal of greatness and daring that is impressive even when it goes astray. Generally speaking, the poets who have flourished since Luzán do not show these traits” (OC [Obras Completes], 9: 199-200). The article on Cienfuegos, incidentally, was the first published writing of Bello's that he signed—but only with his initials, A. B.

6. Arturo Ardao, “La etapa filosófica de Bello en Londres,” in Bello y Londres, [2 vols. (Caracas, 1980-81,] 2: 158.

7. Cf. “Reflexiones sobre la presente constitucíon de España, “El censor Americano, 1 (1820), 33: “If the 1812 Constitution were Permanently ratified (which is, fortunately, very unlikely), the Spanish chains would weigh over us more heavily than ever. A free people has always ruled with an iron hand over its distant possessions. The government of an absolute monarch, surrounded by an opulent nobility and by aging bureaucrats, is naturally less oppressive for the colonies than a popular congress.”

8. OC, 25: 105; Alamiro de Avila Martel, Dos elogios chilenos a Bolívar en 1819 (Santiago, 1976).

9. For the criticism of Augustus among the British poets of the eighteenth century, see [Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 51.]

10. John Lynch, “Great Britain and Latin American Independence, 1810-1830,” in Bello y Londres, 1: 46-7.

11. Cartas del Libertador, 2nd ed., Vicente Lecuna, ed. (Caracas, 1966), 4: 188.

12. [Miguel Luis Amunátegui, Vida de don Andrés Bello (Sahtjags, 1882)] 200; [D. A. G.] Waddell, “Las relaciones británicas con Venezuela, [Nueva Granada y la Gran Columbia, 1810-1829. Primera Parte: en Londres,” in Bello y Londres (Caracas, 1980) 80].

13. [R. A. Humphreys, Liberation in South America, 1806-1827: The Career of James Paroissien (London, 1952)] chap. 9; Lynch, “Great Britain and Latin American Independence,” 75-81; John Ford, “Rudolph Ackermann: Publisher to Latin America,” in Bello y Londres, 1: 204-5. For a more detailed description and analysis of the debt crisis see Jaime Rodríguez, “The Politics of Credit,” The Emergence of Spanish America: Vicente Rocafuerte and Spanish Americanism, 1808-1831 (Berkeley, Calif., 1975), 108-28.

14. Servando Teresa de Mier, Discurso sobre la encíclica del Papa León XII (México, 1825), 4, 14.

15. This description of the rise of anticlericalism in Colombia closely follows Mary Watters, A History of the Church in Venezuela, 1810-1930 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1933).

16. [Guillermo L.] Guitarte, “El papel de Juan García del Río en las revistas de Londres,” 59-73 [Bello y Londres, 2]; El Repertorio Americano, facsimile edition with notes and preface by Pedro Grases (Caracas, 1971). For Bello's role in soliciting material for publication in the Repertorio see the first volume of his correspondence (OC, 25: 203, 213, 261, 270, 279, 310, 341, 343, 345, 350, 364, 377). Bello's leading role in the journal is confirmed by José Joaquín de Mora, who wrote in 1830: “[El] Repertorio Americano, publicado en Londres bajo la dirección de Andrés Bello,” in Alamiro de Avila Martel, Bello y Mora en Chile (Santiago, 1982), 141.

17. “El campo americano” appears in OC, 2: 70-93, ll. 775-1305. The four manuscript sheets (14, 15, 16, 17) of this composite poem have watermarks of 1824 and 1825.

18. For the use of footnotes, especially of a scientific kind, in the poetry of the late Enlightenment see William Powell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1966), 186-7, 191. Many of the poems studied by Jones are descriptions of the nature of the New World.

19. In Los censos en la Iglesia colonial venezolana, a three-volume study published in 1982 (Caracas), Emilia Troconis de Veracoechea revealed the extensive use of the Church's mortgage financing not only during the colonial period, but throughout the wars of independence and beyond.

20. José Tomás Sanauria, Fomento de la agricultura: Discurso canónicolegal sobre la necesidad de una ley que reduzca los censos en Venezuela (Caracas, 1823), 18-19.

21. See Miguel Luis Amunátegui and Diego Barros Arana, La Iglesia frente a la emancipación americana (Havana, 1967), 137.

22. At the center of the turmoil was the publication in Caracas of La serpiente de Moisés, an orthodox pamphlet originally published in Bogotá in 1822 in which religious toleration is assailed. The liberal authorities accused the editors of sedition, and a public trial was held on March 13, 1826, in front of the Church of San Francisco. Objections to La serpiente were made in a number of pamphlets published in Caracas in 1826. In Discurso teológico político sobre la tolerancia en que se acusa y reputa el escrito titulado “La serpiente de Moisés,” José de la Natividad Saldanha charges that without a doubt the work in question promotes rebellion. In Cartas de un alemán a S.E. el Vicepresidente, the anonymous author charges that the clergy has placed the “torch of rebellion in the hands of fanaticism.” La serpiente was defended by its editor, Miguel Santana, in Día que no se contará entre los de Colombia: El 18 de marzo de 1826, en que se comenzó a hollar en Caracas la libertad de imprenta.

23. For the influence of Tibullus on the “Agricultura” see Manuel Briceño Jáuregui, “Andrés Bello, humanista latino,” in Bello y la América Latina (Caracas, 1982), 317-36.

24. Jacques Delille, Les Géorgiques de Virgile, 4th ed. (Paris: Bleuet, 1770), note to the poem.