SOURCE: Torres-Ríoseco, Arturo. “Gaucho Literature.” In The Epic of Latin American Literature, pp. 133-67. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942.

[In the following excerpt from a longer work on Latin American writing, Torres-Ríoseco traces the evolution of Gaucho literature from its folkloric origins to its later incarnations in the novels of the 1920's.]

THE GAUCHO: ORIGINS OF FOLK LITERATURE

Spanish America's literary history, like her history in general, may be viewed as a continuous struggle for independence. That is to say, for ‘literary Americanism.’ This concept does not imply any chauvinistic notions of originality at all costs; it does not suggest that to treat of new topics, Spanish American writers must necessarily abandon the achievements of literary technique and tradition. Rather, it describes the growing effort of a New World to express that which is closest to its soil and truest to its racial temperament. This literary independence has not been achieved either quickly or completely; even today it remains partly a goal. Yet there has been a steady movement towards this end—a development in which folk literature, like that of the gaucho, has played a significant role.

Generally speaking, the trend towards literary Americanism has roughly kept pace with Spanish America's politico-social evolution. The process received its first impulse in the romantic era following the wars of liberation, a period which may be characterized as one of incomplete independence. Writers used American themes and described regional landscapes, but the influences of Hugo, Byron, Scott, and Espronceda were only too obvious in their works. A strange impulse seemed to keep Spanish America constantly turned towards Europe; so, while petty tyrants disguised their despotisms under the name of democracy, poets sang the wonders of American nature in a Byronic tone. Still, the first stage—emancipation from Spain—had been achieved, and the new trend was under way. At first, an ‘aristocracy’ remained dominant in cultural activities, an elite of army men and members of the higher clergy and rich landowners, who could probably boast of a strictly European cultural background. But gradually the levelling force of a pseudo-democracy created a middle class of Creoles and mestizos, which rose to considerable dominance. From this group began to emerge some of the continent's most distinguished writers, bringing with them a more mixed culture and point of view, in which European and American elements were mingled. Finally, there were also lower classes in the cities, and a picturesque rural population, which came in time to occupy more important roles. It then became necessary to democratize literature and to include in its scope the life of men long unnoticed, but who were in many ways the very backbone of the South American nations.

This meant, of course, a descent from pure intellectual art into the more popular regions of poetic folklore. That is precisely what happened in Argentina, a country with a rich and typical rural life, and the first nation of Spanish America to take this literary step. Indeed, the development of the gaucho genre in the Argentine will serve as an excellent example of the origins of Spanish American folk literature. To understand how this new type of American man gave rise to a new form of literary expression, it is necessary first of all to study the gaucho himself.

The gaucho is, above everything else, a product of the pampas. Few people outside the Argentine Republic realize the enormous extent of the territory which composes the pampas region. This vast land stretches from the Atlantic Ocean itself on the east, to the Chilean Andes on the west; and from Bolivia, Paraguay, and the Gran Chaco on the north, to the most southerly point of the continent. The central part of this zone, which extends some six hundred miles from Chile to Buenos Aires, is an immense desert of thorny bushes, broken at times, in the proximity of villages and cities, by woods and verdant pastures. At some future date, irrigation may transform these plains into cultivated fields like those that already delight the eye around Mendoza and San Luis. But today the pampas is still a region of desert-like immensity, much as it has appeared in the descriptions of hundreds of awe-stricken writers since colonial times. Few have surpassed the pages of the modern travellers Robert Cunninghame Graham and W. H. Hudson, two Englishmen whom Argentina claims as her own; or the evocatory passages of Sarmiento, who wrote of the pampas a hundred years ago:

Its own extent is the evil from which Argentina suffers; the desert encompasses it on every side and penetrates its very heart; wastes containing no human dwelling are, generally speaking, the unmistakable boundaries between its several provinces. Immensity is the universal characteristic of the country: the plains, the woods, the rivers, are all immense; and the horizon is always undefined, always lost in haze and delicate vapors which forbid the eye to mark the point in the distant perspective where the land ends and the sky begins … it is the image of the sea upon the land; the earth as it appears upon the map, the earth yet waiting for the command to bring forth every herb yielding seed after its kind.¹

Across these pampas, in pre-Spanish times, roamed the savages who bore the very name Pampas. The Pampa Indians early became an equestrian race, due to the fact that the horses brought by the first conquerors into Buenos Aires, Tucumán, and Chile soon wandered into the central plains and there multiplied abundantly. These mounted Indians attacked the Spanish settlements and wagon-caravans in bloody assaults called malones, killing the men and kidnapping the women. The mixed population of the pampas increased substantially in still other ways.² Many city mestizos and even Creoles voluntarily sought refuge among the plains people:

The mestizos, not so well fitted for being servants in the cities as the Negroes, were replaced by them; and, not finding anything to do because of the lack of industrial activity, they left for the Indian frontier which thus became their natural abode. In this way we have the beginning of that sub-race of transitional people typified by the Gaucho.³

Not a great deal has been discovered about the first appearance of the gaucho type on the pampas. His existence is known about 1775, but the time of change from the Spanish vaquero (cowboy) into the mestizo gaucho is still somewhat vague. For lack of historical knowledge, scholars have offered a philological explanation—which has only served to complicate the problem by giving several dozen etymological derivations for the word gaucho.⁴ Perhaps the most reasonable derivation is from the Araucanian word Guacho which today means ‘motherless,’ ‘illegitimate,’ and ‘orphan.’⁵

These orphans of the pampas formed a new type of society on the Argentine plains, a very primitive society in direct contrast to the refined and easy life of the cities. The gauchos—thriving on the abundance of wild horses and cows, wandering from place to place according to the shifting of the river channels and the migrations of the cattle, leading a semi-savage nomadic existence—had many similarities to the Bedouins. Sir Walter Scott characterized them trenchantly:

The vast plains of Buenos Aires are inhabited only by Christian savages known as Gauchos, whose furniture is chiefly composed of horses' skulls, whose food is raw beef and water, and whose favorite pastime is running horses to death. Unfortunately, they prefer their national independence to our cottons and muslins.⁶

In fact the gauchos not only disdained imported cottons and muslins, but they depended almost exclusively for their necessities upon the horse and the cow. Their means of transportation, their food, part of their dwellings, their beds, their furniture, their boots, their fuel, their lassos, their water buckets, their boats to cross the rivers, and even the strings of their guitars were derived from these two animals. Whenever the gaucho needed ‘luxuries,’ such as adornments for his horse, perfumes for his girl, or liquor, he obtained them by exchanging rawhides or ostrich feathers with the pulpero or storekeeper. More than a cattleman, the gaucho was a hunter and horsebreaker in a primitive happy world that did not know property laws, merchants, industry, formal education, or organized religion.

It is small wonder, then, that the gaucho developed into an extraordinary semi-savage figure, dressed in his characteristic costume: A long poncho served him as cloak, blanket, or even shield in a duel; beneath it he wore a richly embroidered undergarment, and over this a chiripá, a single oblong cloak very much like a Roman skirt; he covered his head with a hat, and wore high horsehide boots with spurs.⁷ And the gaucho was as much of a romantic type as he was a picturesque character. Jealous of his reputation as a brave man, he would fight only with his facón, a double-edged blade that was a cross between a sword and a dagger. He carried this facón in a leather belt, decorated with silver coins, and it was his sole weapon apart from his indispensable saddle equipment. The gaucho, of course, never rode without his lasso or his boleadoras—a primitive hunting device, consisting of three round stones or metal balls covered with hide and attached to leather thongs, and designed to be thrown at the legs of a running animal.

Even the gaucho's sports were closely connected with his pampas environment. Hunting, for ostriches or deer or partridges, was a favorite pastime; so was gaming, whether at cards or at the taba, which was played with the knucklebones of sheep. But the favorite gaucho diversion was horse racing and its related equestrian exercises. One of these was the so-called ‘ring game,’ in which a horseman running at full speed had to pass the point of a lance or long stick through an iron ring hanging from a cord. Another was the epic game called the Duck (El Pato):

For this game hundreds of gauchos would ride several leagues to take part. They divided themselves into lines facing each other; then an old man threw into the air a leather ball equipped with two handles. Inside this ball there was a dead fowl. The horsemen then rushed to seize the ball and the one who arrived first took possession of it and had to hold it outstretched in the air by one handle, offering the other to his enemies. His teammates surrounded him in a protective circle while the enemy force tried to break through to seize the prize, using their horses as battering rams … The winner, or the one who was the final possessor of the trophy, took it to a ranch and cooked it for his lady love.⁸

The very best synthesis of this wild gaucho type, his character and his appearance, is to be found in the impassioned pages of Sarmiento:

These men, Spaniards only in their language and in the confused religious notions preserved among them, must be seen before a correct estimate can be made of the indomitable and haughty character which grows out of this struggle of isolated man with untamed nature, of the rational being with the brute. It is necessary to see their visages bristling with beards, their countenances as grave and serious as those of the Arabs of Asia, to appreciate the pitying scorn with which they look upon the sedentary denizen of the city, who may have read many books, but who cannot overthrow and slay a fierce bull, who cannot provide himself with a horse from the pampas, who has never met a tiger alone, and received him with a dagger in one hand and the poncho rolled up in the other, to be thrust into the animal's mouth while he pierces his heart with his dagger.⁹

Yet for all his semi-savagery, the gaucho was also to produce much poetry. Even Sarmiento, the great enemy of gaucho primitiveness and lethargy, did not fail to see the poetic aspects of gaucho life, and the great possibilities of an original folk literature springing from this rural atmosphere. Indeed, the very setting of the gaucho's existence moved him to express himself in song. The superb natural phenomena, the profound beauty and mystery of the endless plains, were in themselves strong evokers of poetic emotions:

How can such feelings fail to exist, when a black storm-cloud rises, no one knows from whence, in the midst of a calm, pleasant afternoon, and spreads over the sky before a word can be uttered? The traveler shudders as the crushing thunder announces the tempest, and he holds his breath in the fear of bringing upon himself one of the thousand bolts which flash around him. The light is followed by thick darkness; death is on every side; a fearful and irresistible power has instantaneously driven the soul back upon itself, and made it feel its nothingness in the midst of angry nature; made it feel God himself in the terrible magnificence of His works. What other coloring could the brush of fancy need?¹⁰

So it is quite understandable how—from such a natural background, and especially from the human isolation in the presence of such forces—there should have arisen the rich body of gaucho folk literature. This indigenous poetry was of two sorts: the songs and improvisations of the gauchos themselves; and the popular epic poetry composed about them, which, from its acceptance by the gauchos, merits to be classed as folk literature. Later, to be sure, the gaucho found his way into formal literary productions, in the drama, and particularly in the novel. But the beginnings of the gaucho genre are to be seen in the unwritten works of the gauchos themselves—in the song of the troubadour, or gaucho cantor, raising his voice on the limitless prairies.

THE PAYADOR

Gaucho poetry began quite naturally and simply. The man of the pampas was impressed by the incredible natural environment all around him; at the same time, he was moved to express in song the lonesomeness of his own life, his melancholy, the tender side of his nature, his dreams of love. Every good gaucho thus became a singer, and it was a disgrace in the pampas not to play the guitar. Some gauchos of course excelled at this art; and soon there sprang up a veritable class of singing gauchos, modern guitar-playing trovadores, whose verses were heard through the evenings in the solitude of the pampas, under the low-hanging stars. At first the minstrel, or payador as he was also called, sang his own love-laments or improvised lines for the popular dances of his time, the cielito, the vidalita, the triste. He never memorized these songs, but extemporized them according to his own moods, and most of them have unfortunately been lost. Here is one, however, that has been preserved—a vidalita or lyric song sung to the accompaniment of the guitar, while the refrain is repeated by the chorus of bystanders:

The palm-tree is over the grass,
          The sky is over the tree;
I am over my horse,
          My sombrero is over me!
I wish that I had been born
          Wild grass out on the plain;
And never had seen you passing,
          And never had suffered this pain.
Little white dove, Vidalita,
          With a breast of blue,
Say that I suffer, Vidalita,
          Because my love is untrue.
Little white dove, Vidalita,
          With a breast of gold,
Carry my love, Vidalita,
          As much as can be told.
Little white dove, Vidalita,
          With a breast of red,
Say that I weep, Vidalita,
          Because my love is dead.(11)

The gaucho minstrel gradually evolved into something of an institution, not merely a solitary singer but the center of social activity. The payador rode from country store to country store, and he was welcomed in all festivals and gatherings. An eyewitness thus described him:

The Cantor has no fixed abode, he lodges where night surprises him; his fortune is in his verses and his voice. Wherever the wild mazes of the cielito are threaded, wherever there is a glass of wine to drink, the Cantor has his place and his particular part in the festival. The Argentine gaucho only drinks when excited by music and verse, and every country store has its guitar ready for the hands of the Cantor who perceives from afar where the aid of his art is needed by the group of horses about the door.¹²

As was to be expected, the payador was popular with the young ladies and hated by those of his brothers who did not have the gift of song. Since the singer was fond of satire, sometimes the aftermath of a party was a bloody battle with the facón!

Some idea of the life of a payador—with its component elements: the audience, the amorous adventure, and the fight—may be had from this anecdote:

In 1840 a Cantor was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, on the banks of the majestic Paraná, in the midst of a group of gauchos whom he was keeping in eager suspense by the long and animated tale of his labors and adventures. He had already related the abduction of his love, with the difficulties overcome on the occasion; also his misfortune (that is to say, the killing of a man), and the dispute that led it; and was relating his encounter with the soldiery, and the stabs with which he defended himself, when the noisy advance and the shouts of a body of troops made him aware that this time he was surrounded. The troops had in fact closed up in the form of a horseshoe, open toward the Paraná river, the steep banks of which rose twenty yards above the water. The Cantor, undismayed by the outcry, was mounted in an instant, and after casting a searching look at the ring of soldiers and their ready weapons, he wheeled his horse toward the river's bank, covered the animal's eyes with his poncho, and drove his spurs into him. A few moments after, the horse, freed from his bit so that he could swim more easily, emerged from the depths of the Paraná, the minstrel holding him by the tail, and looking back at the scene on the shore which he had quitted, as composedly as if he had been in an eight-oared boat. Some shots fired by the troops did not hinder him from arriving safe and sound at the first island in sight.¹³

This then was the gaucho cantor, the payador of the pampas—a transplantation of the Andalusian popular singer into the New World environment. In his songs or payadas, he used a very picturesque style full of objective images and metaphors, and he sang his verses in a voice warm with pathos and emotion. He employed eight-syllable quatrains, the old ballad form, and his language was the sixteenth-century Spanish spoken by the conquerors and kept intact in certain isolated regions. Possibly the most interesting form of the payada was the one called the Contrapunto, which was performed in the following manner: Two gauchos would sit on the skulls of oxen, tuning their guitars, while bystanders stood around them in a circle and urged them with yells and applause into a singing match. Then one singer would challenge the other to explain, for instance, the origin of time and space; the second singer would improvise half a dozen stanzas and end by asking a question in his turn. In this way they often passed hours, sometimes days, in a sport that was a real tournament of wit, to the great delight of the spectators.

This noble art of the Contrapunto has not yet vanished from the Argentine scene:

Upon rare occasions, if one is lucky, one may hear a payada in the traditional style, with challenge and acceptance, according to rule and canon, and then the song flashing back and forth, criss-cross of question and answer, lunge, parry and riposte, guitar answering guitar, and then the circle of listeners with their bravos and bursts of applause. In the days before the radio, before the opera in Buenos Aires was broadcast on the pampa winds, and Lily Pons was on tap in the pulpería, the contrapunto was an institution in the land. Every country-store had its champion; and travelling singers, often coupling their profession as ranch hands with their noble art of song, roamed here and there, their guitars slung across their shoulders, their ponchos often tattered, but their hearts and lips touched with the fire of poesy, ever ready to make a match with the best, and assured everywhere of a welcome and an audience.¹⁴

The gaucho cantor, however, and the art of contrapunto are already largely things of the past. In general, the payadas have disappeared almost completely, for they were transmitted by word of mouth, and the gaucho was not fond of memorizing. But gaucho poetry developed in still another direction, by means of the written word. From its original lyric chant and dance accompaniment, this folk verse evolved ultimately into more elaborate poetical forms. Indeed, it was as epic poetry that gaucho verse was to acquire its greatest significance and survive permanently.

THE GAUCHO EPIC

Gaucho literature finally reached its maturity in that type of poetry which critics have called ‘epic.’ The transition from sung to written verse came about by degrees. At first, written gaucho poetry remained anonymous, as in the romances or ballads which have survived; later, as in the work of Bartolomé Hidalgo (1788-1823), it crossed the border-line between popular verse and established authorship. In form, too, the change was a gradual one: the payadas evolved into the gaucho narrative, and later into the gaucho epic. These narratives at first oral, then written, told of the achievements of gaucho heroes, fights between Indians and Spaniards, episodes of the Rosas regime, the death of Facundo Quiroga, and daily happenings in the life of the plains. The epics treated similar subjects, but elaborated them with greater care and ambition, and showed a special preference for the life of the outlaw gauchos, some of them men of flesh and blood, others only legendary figures. Three epics have won especial renown in this genre: Ascasubi's Santos Vega, del Campo's Fausto, and that great Argentine classic, Martín Fierro by José Hernández.

Fausto (1870) is the least interesting of these three works, since it is primarily a work of literary artifice. Its author, Estanislao del Campo (1834-80) was a city dweller in Buenos Aires, and ‘the student must be put on his guard against taking for granted that del Campo's poem is a genuine, spontaneous gaucho song.’¹⁵Fausto, indeed, is best described as a tour de force, a parody of Goethe's masterpiece: A gaucho called Anastasio el Pollo goes to Buenos Aires and attends a performance of Faust at the old Colón Theatre; then he relates what he saw to a friend, using his own expressions and ridiculous comparisons. Some Argentine critics have called this poem an imitation of Goethe, which seems far-fetched; for it stands to reason that a gaucho could give only a rude imitation of the plot of Faust, without ever suspecting the philosophical meaning of the German author. Undoubtedly the poem has some lyrical stanzas of great beauty, which have won praise like Menéndez y Pelayo's ‘this is good, wholesome, legitimate poetry’; but this can be considered a negative merit, since such passages reveal the cultured city poet. At best, Fausto is only a very weak mock-epic, in which the romantic temperament of del Campo belies his gaucho psychology.

More ambitious and at the same time more authentic in tone is Santos Vega, or The Twins of La Flor (1851, 1872), a poem of 13,000 lines, in which Hilario Ascasubi (1807-75) relates—in a very innocent manner—the life and deeds of a gaucho bandit and his final repentance and death in the bosom of the Catholic church. Ascasubi himself was primarily a man of action, and a leading foe of the tyrant Rosas, both on the battlefield and with the pen. During the siege of Montevideo, for instance, he published a series of gaucho ballads in pamphlet form, Paulino Lucero, or The Gauchos of the Río de la Plata Singing and Fighting against the Tyrants of the Argentine Republic and the Eastern Republic of Uruguay (1839-51); again, after the defeat of Rosas in 1852, he returned to Buenos Aires and began publishing a periodical under the gauchesque title of Aniceto el Gallo. But Ascasubi's fame rests upon his Santos Vega, which is not so much an epic poem as a series of short stories and descriptive pictures of pampa customs: A payador, Santos Vega, enjoys the hospitality of a gaucho couple; to repay them, he relates the story of twin boys from the estancia of La Flor, one of whom becomes a gaucho outlaw. The work has no unity, little poetic value, and no social or philosophical purpose; but the author's minute descriptions of country life, customs, places, objects, people, all make of this poem a document of rare value. From a literary standpoint, the chief merit of Santos Vega does not lie in any particular intrinsic work, but rather in the way its author enlarged the gaucho genre; for, as Holmes has said: ‘Ascasubi bequeathed to his literary successors the example and stimulus of a lengthy romance on gaucho life, and his expert use of gaucho terminology’—an example and a stimulus that were to bring forth their highest expression in Martín Fierro.

In The Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872), by José Hernández (1834-86), the gauchesque epic reached its climax, and produced one of the classics of Spanish American literature. Hernández himself was something of an epic figure: ‘His luxuriant, Jove-like beard, immense frame, and benign countenance were imposing, while certain details of his costume, such as the gaucho hat and sometimes the top boots, were in no wise ridiculous.’¹⁶ An ardent politician, he was a member of the Federalist party—and a constant opponent of Mitre (the first constitutional President of a united-Argentina) and of Sarmiento (the great educator), against whom he conspired, establishing himself in a Buenos Aires hostel and soliciting men and money for a rebellion. Indeed, Hernández took an active part in the uprising of the last gaucho insurrectionist, López Jordán. For in politics as in his famous epic, Hernández was on the side of the gaucho and the gaucho caudillo against the forces of ‘civilization.’

It is perhaps this siding with the gaucho that gives Martín Fierro its epic proportions, and lends the protagonist heroic stature. Martín is a gaucho persecuted by the Argentine authorities because his views of life do not agree with those of modern society. He recognizes no rights of property. The pampa land, like the sky and the air, has no owner; the only tribunal capable of rendering justice—Martín Fierro's justice—is his own knife, his facón. Judges, mayors, army officers, police corrupt to the core, these are the mortal enemies of the gaucho. Martín Fierro fights this society that tries to displace the old order of things, and he becomes a moral force in Argentine history—the champion of liberty, a truly epic character. Speaking of this quality, Leopoldo Lugones says:

Like all epic poems, Martín Fierro represents the heroic life of the race: it fights for liberty against adversity and injustice. Martín Fierro is a champion of that right which they have taken away from him; he is the Cid Campeador of that heroic cycle made immortal eight centuries before by the Spanish legends; he is a typical knight-errant helping fair maidens in distress. Another characteristic is his flight to the enemy's land when he is persecuted in his own!¹⁷

This kinship to the Spanish epopeya has been noted by other critics. As a matter of fact, Martín Fierro does have two distinctly Spanish antecedents—the Romancero and the picaresque novel. In the case of the former, the Spanish romances or popular ballads were of course the forerunners of the gaucho romances, and Martín the payador is their legitimate inheritor. In the case of the latter, Martín has at times some of the qualities of the rogue, but it is in two characters, in ‘old man Vizcacha’ and in Picardía that one finds ‘all the tricks and philosophy’ of the Spanish pícaros. But over and above all this, the purpose of Martín Fierro was the creation of an epic hero who embodies a national—that is, an Argentine—ideal. Hernández succeeded amply in this aim. All the other aspects of his work—description, narration, landscape—are subordinate to the fundamental one: the personality of his hero. To be sure, this gaucho poem lacks the robustness, the unity, the poetic loftiness, the philosophical import, and the grandeur of the Iliad or the Chanson de Roland; but in its own right, in the personality of Martín and what he stands for, it is a representative national epic.

Hernández has indeed created a very human hero—perhaps too human to be fully heroic—in the person of Martín Fierro, minstrel and outlaw. Martín, like a true payador, tunes his guitar and begins to sing his own story:

I sit me here to sing my song
To the beat of my old guitar;
For the man whose life is a bitter cup,
With a song may yet his heart lift up,
As the lonely bird on the leafless tree
That sings 'neath the gloaming star …(18)

As a good gaucho, Martín rejoices in his liberty and his solitude on the pampas:

And this is my pride: to live as free
As the bird that cleaves the sky;
I build no nest in this careworn earth,
Where sorrow is long, and short is mirth;
And when I am gone none will grieve for me,
And none care where I lie.(19)

Martín begins his history by recalling his happy early days in the estancias: the gauchos setting out to work with the dawn, buckling on their spurs and taking their soft saddleskins; the day's tasks of breaking horses or guiding flocks on the plain; and finally, with nightfall, the merry gathering after supper by the kitchen fire.

But that golden age soon ceased, and the peace of the gaucho's hearth was succeeded by military persecution and frontier garrison duty. Martín goes on to tell of his miseries in the army, Indian fights, corporal punishment, delayed pay, and so on. At length he deserts and returns home to find that:

Only a few bare poles were left.
And the thatch and nothing more;
Christ knows it was a mournful sight,
It withered my heart up like a blight,
And there in the wreck of my ruined home,
To be revenged I swore.

From then on, Martín is an outlaw. The following stanzas give a picture of his existence as a runaway, in pulperías and dance-halls; his first crime, which he considers a ‘legal fight’ for his honor; his wandering over the pampas:

They call him a drunken gaucho beast
If he takes a spot of gin;
If he goes to a dance he's an upstart boor;
If he plays at cards he's a sharper sure;
He's a brawler if he defends himself;
If he doesn't—they do him in.

A hunted man now, Martín passes solitary nights on the desert, tracked by police riders. At length, the constabulary catches up and sets upon him, ten to one. But Martín triumphs in the fight, thanks to the help of Cruz, a former gaucho outlaw turned sergeant. Cruz and Martín become fast friends, companions in misfortune, and finally resolve to go beyond the frontier and join the Indians:

And one day when the sun's first ray
Made the plain like a sheet of gold,
Cruz pointed back where the eye scarce caught
The last ranch stand like a tiny dot.
And as he looked, two burning tears
Down the cheeks of Fierro rolled.

Such was the original poem of Martín Fierro. Seven years later, encouraged by the reception of his work, Hernández published a sequel entitled The Return of Martín Fierro (1879). In this second part, Fierro and Cruz pass several years in an Indian village, until Cruz dies of the small-pox. Fierro then decides to return to civilization, and—after killing a cruel Indian chieftain and rescuing a captive white woman—he makes his way back across the desert. Returned to the settlements, Martín goes from ranch to ranch, seeking his old friends, and learning that the Law is no longer hunting him. Finally, at a gaucho gathering he meets two of his sons, and the boys tell their own stories—the older boy relating his unjust imprisonment, the younger telling of his association with the rascally old Vizcacha. Still another new arrival is then introduced, the young gaucho Picardía, who is none other than the son of Martín's late friend Cruz. By this time, the story has lost its vigor and intensity and Hernández repeats himself. He introduces episodes that have nothing to do with the story, and finally the returned gaucho and the three boys part—the four could never earn a living together—and Martín ends the poem on this sentimental note:

And if life fails me, this I know,
When the news of my death is spread,
The roaming gaucho, far away
In the desert lands, will be sad that day,
And a sudden ache in his heart will wake,
When he knows that I am dead.

Martín Fierro was right. All the gauchos know his story and weep his death, the death of a whole race of gauchos of his type, destroyed by the machinery and wealth that is called ‘civilization.’ His name is even today a symbol of that virile life of the plains in which a gaucho was a free man, not a cog in an economic and social system; and with all his defects, he is a better representative of Americanism than the modern farmhand or the Syrian peddler who crosses the pampas that Martín used to roam. Martín Fierro is well known nowadays not only in the Argentine, but in all of Spanish America and in the Peninsula as well. Even the great Spanish intellectual, Miguel de Unamuno, used to recite the Martín Fierro to his students in the University of Salamanca, along with the Iliad and the Odyssey. The poem has been translated into several languages, and scholars all over the world have shown interest in its gaucho idiom and literary technique.

But perhaps the soundest estimate of its worth is to be found in the humbler homage rendered Hernández by his own compatriots of the Argentine pampas, as it is recorded in this typical scene related by Cunninghame Graham in his A Vanishing Race:

In the long evenings, seated around the fire, passing the maté around, the adventures of Martín were sure to be discussed. The gauchos seemed to take him as the embodiment of themselves and all their troubles, and talked of him as if at any moment he might lift the mare's hide which acted as door and walk into the hut. Those of the company who could read (not the majority) were wont to read aloud to the unlettered from a well-worn, greasy book, printed on flimsy paper in thin and broken type, after extracting the precious book from the recesses of their saddle-bags or from their riding boots. The others got it by heart and then repeated it as a sort of litany.

This, rather than the estimate of any university critic, would seem to be the true measure of Martín Fierro: Deriving from the folk-songs of the payador, this epic has succeeded so thoroughly in creating an embodiment of the gaucho and his struggle, that it is welcomed back by the gauchos themselves into a sort of folk literature.

THE GAUCHO IN FORMAL LITERATURE

Because gaucho folk-songs had reached their climax in the written epic, it need not be supposed that the development of the gauchesque genre ceased at this point. On the contrary, such was the success of Santos Vega, Fausto, and especially Martín Fierro with city audiences that writers soon saw the possibility of exploiting this new kind of literature. It was not long before the gaucho theme passed from poetry, with its reminscences of folk-song, into prose, and the more formal literary mediums of the drama, the short story, and the novel.

Of course, as with the transition from oral to written verse, so here the change from poetry to prose did not take place at any one definite moment. Gaucho poetry continued to be written, notably by Rafael Obligado (1851-1920), who glorified the legend of Santos Vega: the invincible payador who, after years of supremacy in song, is vanquished by an unknown antagonist (really the Devil) and dies brokenhearted.

But the new forms were already supplanting poetry. Gaucho fiction made its first appearance, in a primitive ‘dime novel’ sort of form to be sure, in the works of the Argentine journalist Eduardo Gutiérrez (1853-90). Gutiérrez wrote a few dozen hair-raising novels, more accurately described as ‘thrillers,’ in which bad gauchos stabbed each other to death, kidnapped winsome lassies, and fought single-handed with whole police detachments. His books ranged from gauchesque tales to historical works to out-and-out crime stories; and some of them—like John without Land and Juan Moreira—would have been great ‘box office’ in the American moving pictures of twenty years ago, during the widespread vogue for lurid Western films. Perhaps the least objectionable of his novels is Black Ant (1881), his encounters with the law, his brutal and evil deeds, and his final regeneration in prison. His greatest ‘hit’ was Juan Moreira, which appeared as a newspaper serial in 1880 and which instantly won the heart of the masses. Like Martín Fierro, Juan was a gaucho turned outlaw because of persecution, but in the elaboration of wild and impossible incidents, the novel was journalese rather than gauchesque. Gutiérrez cared more for gruesome plot and melodramatic effect than for authentic psychology; even the language of his gauchos was the corrupt slang of the city suburbs instead of the lusty talk of the real gaucho or the conventional speech of the epic poems.

Gutiérrez' harrowing thrillers were a crude beginning, to be sure. But the popularity of these early efforts at gauchesque fiction attested to the virility of the genre, which soon attracted writers of merit. Before the close of the nineteenth century, distinguished men-of-letters were composing gaucho novels. A movement had been initiated which was to last a half-century and produce a score of novelists, including a number of outstanding figures from Acevedo Díaz to Lynch, and at least one work with a claim to immortality, the gaucho classic Don Segundo Sombra.

In the drama, at the same time, a similar development was under way. Once again, the prolific Gutiérrez must be given credit for initiating a movement of consequence: The stage presentation of his novel Juan Moreira scored a great hit for the Podestá Company in 1884; this performance is generally, though somewhat inaccurately, called the first gaucho drama. As a matter of fact, isolated gaucho plays had been given much earlier; and one anonymous piece, The Romance of the Ranch Girl, bears the surprising date of 1792. But with the dramatization of Juan Moreira, the gaucho was on the boards to stay. Other theatrical presentations followed in short order: an adaptation of the popular favorite Martín Fierro, versions of several novels by Gutiérrez, gaucho pieces composed especially for the stage. At the beginning, scenic arrangements of gaucho novels were introduced in the form of pantomimes in travelling circuses; later, as audiences favored this part of the show, special tents were arranged for these performances alone; and eventually regular theatres were created.

These, too, were rude beginnings, but they led to the flowering of the nationalistic and gauchesque theatre in the River Plate region. Reaching its apogee shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, this teatro rioplatense boasted such names as Martiniano Leguizamón (1858-1935), the author of many gaucho stories and the drama Calandria (1898), and Roberto J. Payró (1867-1928), the gauchesque novelist and playwright. Payró's books, including the rural picaresque tale The Marriage of Laucha (1906) and The Entertaining Adventures of the Grandson of Juan Moreira (1910), were very popular in their day, and are still enjoyable for their unpretentious realism and good humor; and his plays, such as On the Ruins (1904), I Want to Live By Myself (1913), and Fire in the Stubble (1925), are among the most readable of the nationalistic school. But the gaucho drama produced one illustrious figure who entirely overshadows the rest of the teatro rioplatense, and who oddly enough came at the beginning rather than at the culmination of the movement. The most important event in the history of the gaucho drama was the first performance—in Buenos Aires, in 1903—of a gaucho play called My Kid, the Doctor. The author, who until then had struggled in poverty and obscurity, was a young man named Sánchez, destined to be universally recognized as Spanish America's greatest playwright.

FLORENCIO SáNCHEZ

Indeed, Florencio Sánchez (1875-1910) ranks not only as the greatest, but quite literally as the only important dramatist of South America.²⁰ Like many another artist, his life followed the familiar pattern of early misery, fleeting triumph, and untimely death. A native of Uruguay, he went to Buenos Aires while still young, and started to work on a newspaper at the age of fourteen. His life was that of the true Bohemian; he dressed poorly, he ate little, he drank too much, and he struggled desperately to earn a pittance. From time to time he would scrawl off his plays on pads filched from telegraph offices. Then in 1903, when he was twenty-eight, came the production of My Kid, the Doctor, one of the most sensational successes in the history of the Argentine theatre. Sánchez was famous now, and his plays followed in rapid succession, twenty in the next six years, including The ‘Gringa’ (1904), On the Skids (1905), Dead Men (1905), Our Children (1907), The Right to Health (1907), Family Life (1905)—which rank among the best Spanish-language dramas of the Ibsenesque and nationalistic school. But his years of prosperity and success were short indeed. In 1910 he set out to visit Europe, going first to Italy—a land connected by strong bonds to his native Uruguay—only to die there on February 23, at the age of thirty-five.

Sánchez' plays are characterized by great dramatic intensity and completely real characters, and by his poetic feeling for the land of the gauchos, which is on the verge of being destroyed by ‘progress.’ Thus in My Kid, the Doctor, he dramatizes the conflict between a gaucho father and his city-educated son—the battle between the old days and the new. Indeed the spirit of the pampas pervades all his works, whether they deal with rural themes or with urban ones, as in Dead Men. A careful examination of all his plays brings one to the conclusion that such stories, such characters, such conflicts, could never take place in conventionally organized countries, but only in untrammelled, primitive, even barbaric ones. His themes are never those of a ‘soft’ decadent society, but always a product of primitive passions, of fatalistic attitudes, of basic struggles. Naturally, dramas of this sort are directed against many types of modern life: oppressors, parasites, knaves, hypocrites; while Sánchez' heroes, just as naturally, are reformers, moralists, and particularly the victims of social institutions. And all this flagellating realism is turned upon national subject matter, finding its surest theme in the basic problem of the individualist versus convention, the rude gaucho versus the city—the very clash that Sarmiento described as the struggle between civilization and barbarism.

Yet for all the gauchesque and native elements of his theatre, Sánchez' work is closely related to that of European authors. This is perhaps the essential trait of his plays, that they represent the focusing of a skilled Old World technique upon the American scene. For instance, it is possible to trace the strong influence exerted by Ibsen on Sánchez. There are numerous points of similarity in their plays. Sánchez, like Ibsen, applied his best gifts to the drame à thèse: heredity, the rights of woman, social problems, and even madness are themes common to both authors; like the Norwegian, Sánchez is a penetrating interpreter of modern psychology, though his tragedies are perhaps more direct and brutal than those of Ibsen. Another comparison suggests itself between the work of Sánchez and that of the great Spanish novelist Galdós. There is a great parallelism between the two, particularly in their manner of developing the struggle between good and evil, in all its gradations and all its terrible crudeness. One can even point out individual compositions, like Sánchez' Family Life, and Galdós' Glory which bear striking resemblances: In both appears the character of a strong man, who tries to guide his family on the straight path; routine and social conventions strive to destroy the original man; and parasitic relatives play an important part in both works. Similarly, one can find much in common in the writings of Sánchez and the Spanish playwright Echegaray; perhaps the influence of Ibsen is responsible for similar tendencies in the two authors.

Of course, it is not for his Ibsen-inspired stagecraft that Sánchez is most noted, but for his application of this technique to American themes. His plays mark, indeed, the fusion of indigenous subject matter with European literary methods; they exhibit a certain amount of refinement even in the most brutal tragedies. As such, Sánchez' work underlines an important phase in the development of the gauchesque genre. Previously, the man of the pampas, basically a primitive character, had been treated in equally primitive literary forms. But now the gaucho, his life, and feelings were no longer subject matter for verses improvised to the beat of a guitar, or popular epics sold in the pulpería, or harrowing thrillers printed in daily newspaper installments. The gaucho, the orphan of the plains, had become a theme worthy of accomplished writers—a subject that was to find its highest expression in the advanced technique of the modern novel.

THE GAUCHO NOVEL

The earliest development of the gaucho novel—leaving aside the journalistic serials of Gutiérrez—took place not in Argentina as might have been expected, but in the neighboring Oriental Republic of Uruguay.²¹ Even before the close of the nineteenth century, two writers of fiction, Acevedo Díaz and Viana, had produced distinguished works that, in a sense, foreshadowed the whole course of the gaucho novel. In the twentieth century a third, Zavala Muniz, explored in his three chronicles the whole subject of the gaucho's historical evolution, from the old heroic days to the era of outlaws, to the prosy modern times of gaucho farmhands.

The first of these gauchescos, Eduardo Acevedo Díaz (1851-1924), is generally considered the first nationalistic writer of Uruguay. Not only were there no Uruguayan novelists before him, but no subsequent author in his country has been quite able to continue in his footsteps as a writer on national themes. In his own life, Acevedo Díaz played an active (if not always well-rewarded) role in the formation of the new nation: a soldier of the revolutionary armies, he was at different occasions a politician, a diplomat, and an exile. And in his first three books, Ismael (1888), Nativa (1890), and Cry of Glory (1894), he covered the whole period of the Uruguayan Wars for Independence. These works form a trilogy, which their author called ‘a hymn of blood,’ and they still rank as commendable works in the manner of the historical novel.

But Acevedo Díaz' masterpiece was his last book, Soledad (1894), which has had an effect on gaucho novelists to the present time. As a Creole or native novel, Soledad is a model work in its type; it has all the untamed landscape, the rude elemental characters, the epic sweep, the brutality and violence that are so characteristic of the South American scene. Its realism is absolute: the personages of the story, faithful to their simple unlettered natures, express themselves through actions rather than words. Soledad, perhaps because of this realistic nativism, has served as a pattern for numerous gauchesque novels, and later writers have paralleled not only the general form but even the most brilliant scenes of this work. For instance, the episode of the shearing is unusually vivid; its later counterpart is to be found in Zavala Muniz' first Chronicle. Similarly, the pampas fire—with all its details, even the lurid touch of the dead mare that is used to put out the flames—reappears in Lynch's novel, Raquela. Indeed, many of the most celebrated modern works of this genre, The Gaucho Florido, The Chronicle of a Crime, The Romance of a Gaucho, Zogoibi, have all followed in the path of Acevedo Díaz' trail-blazing novel, Soledad.²²

Equally an innovator in his own way was another early Uruguayan gauchesque writer, the noted costumbrista Javier de Viana (1872-1925). Brought up among gauchos, he later went to the cities of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, where he was successively student, politician, and journalist; but his abiding interest remained in the pampas and the changing type of the gaucho. In his volumes of short stories, Yuyos (1912), and Dry Wood (1913), and in his novelettes, Campo (1896) and Guri (1898), he composed extraordinarily realistic scenes of Uruguayan country life at the close of the past century, pictures full of local color and minute observation. The gauchos that he describes so painstakingly, unlike those of his countryman Acevedo Díaz, are no longer primitive and heroic figures. He paints the gaucho as an already half-degenerate being, whom the inroads of progress have transformed from a free nomad into a farm laborer or a bandit. Viana's gauchos still have certain robust qualities, but drink and poverty and illness have reduced them to the state of ‘pariahs of the fields.’

Excellent as these stories are in their way, Viana's most important contribution to the development of gauchesque fiction is his one full-length novel, Gaucha (1899). In this work, the merits and defects of his technique stand out plainly: on the one hand, detailed realism in the description of the Uruguayan rural background, but on the other an artificial use of the naturalistic theories of Zola. This unfortunate combination appears even in the original conception of the book. Starting out with a real person and a fireside tale—a story Viana heard an old gaucho tell to an audience of farmhands drinking mate around the kitchen hearth—the novelist set to work. First he scrupulously explored the region, documenting his pages with details from life; but then he applied Zola's theories of heredity, creating a pathological character, Juana, whose psychological introversion is thoroughly out of keeping with her rustic personality. Despite this flaw, Gaucha remains even today a vigorous novel, written in a style rich with picturesque color and vernacular dialogue—a minor triumph of realistic regionalism.

Pure realism in the gauchesque genre, so auspiciously inaugurated by Acevedo Díaz and Viana, reached perhaps its strongest expression in the works of the contemporary Uruguayan novelist Justino Zavala Muniz (1897-). Zavala Muniz himself is as interesting and representative a character as any he has described; the son of a country storekeeper, and the grandson of a famous rural caudillo, he has repeatedly abandoned his desk for the life of action and his pen for the smoking pistol of the revolutionist. His works, which partake of this same dynamic quality, comprise three chronicles—The Chronicle of Muniz (1921), The Chronicle of a Crime (1926), and The Chronicle of the Country-Store (1930)—each of them analyzing a different period in the evolution of the gaucho, and each exhibiting the artistic progress of the author.

The first Chronicle was composed by Zavala as a life of his celebrated grandfather, the caudillo or military leader Justino Muniz, who defeated the rival caudillo Saravia in countless battles. Impelled by affection for his illustrious forbear and a desire to clear his name from the stigma of treason, young Zavala started at the age of seventeen to collect personal reminiscences of the ‘good old days’—memories and episodes that he finally brought out in The Chronicle of Muniz, a volume replete with the deeds of heroes and the violence of revolutionary action, set against the picturesque background of the beautiful ranch of Bañado de Medina. By way of contrast, the second Chronicle shows Uruguay in a later, less heroic period, when the caudillos have disappeared and the once respected gaucho has turned outlaw. One of these gaucho bandits, ‘The Hawk,’ moves through the pages of the novel like a nightmare-figure of horror and death, his face and hands stained with blood. Zavala Muniz frankly admires the brutal surrender of the gaucho to a life of crime—a point-of-view that lends a strange power to the whole book, though obviously, the reader will find himself surfeited by the excess of blood and brutal violence.

No such complaint can be made of Zavala Muniz' third and most mature book, The Chronicle of the Country-Store. Here, he has turned away from crime and battle to compose a sort of heroic-pastoral intermezzo. The scene is still Cerro Largo near Melo, where the youth Ricardo spends his days as a shopkeeper's assistant, listening to the gauchos who relate stories to pass the winter afternoons. In the tales they tell, the young man glimpses the heroic greatness of this vanished type now converted into a lowly ‘hired hand’; but even in the latterday peace and quiet of the ranch the gaucho reveals his greatness, humbly and nobly, by enduring patiently these dull prosy times, sustaining himself with the memory of a past gaucho glory.

As Zavala Muniz' Chronicles indicate, and as the whole previous course of the gaucho novel had foreshadowed, the gaucho as a type had already begun to disappear by the first quarter of the twentieth century. At the same time, the gauchesque genre in literature was already nearing its end. Countless novels had exploited the subject²³ from every angle, almost invariably following a realistic technique. It remained only for two contemporary Argentine novelists to bring a psychological approach to the problem of the gaucho, a treatment that has produced the very finest novels of this field. One of these writers is Lynch, in whose stories, told with studied simplicity, the gauchesque genre reaches its perfect artistic balance. The other is Güiraldes, who has captured the heroic gauchesque spirit in the transcendent symbolism of Don Segundo Sombra—the non plus ultra of gaucho novels.

Benito Lynch (1885-) has brought a new and refreshing note to gaucho fiction.²⁴ The essential feature of his work is his unaffected naturalness—his ability to paint the gaucho sincerely, in a simple style, and without heroic trappings. This simplicity is equally characteristic of Lynch's own life. Of Irish extraction, he seems far more Anglo-Saxon than Argentinian: a tall rugged man, with a large bony face and bushy eyebrows, and a slow meditative manner of speaking. By preference, Lynch leads a quiet bachelor's existence, entirely apart from the littérateurs of Argentina, in the peaceful university city of La Plata. And just as his life reflects a complete serenity, so his latest literary style reveals the already consummate artist who has chosen voluntarily to limit his range and his ambitions.

This skill in self-limitation—deliberately choosing a simple technique, paying attention to homely details, keeping his characters within the narrow framework of unlettered country-folk who express themselves in few words—is what sets Lynch apart from other writers on the gaucho. His stories are always in keeping with the rustic environment in which they are set, even when this fidelity to the truth mars the artistic merit of a story. Thus, in his first gauchesque novel, The Carrion Hawks (1916-17), he introduces just such a brutal and melodramatic ending as might actually occur in real life. The novel deals with the conflict between two characters who have the traits of the native carancho or carrion hawk: a cruel domineering father, tyrannical master of the ranch ‘La Florida,’ and his impetuous son who returns home after several years of university study in Europe. And Lynch solves the struggle by an unexpected double murder—which seems quite unlikely in the pages of a book, but which is perfectly in accord with the savage milieu of the pampas.

Lynch, with this urge to interpret rural life as it really is, has won renown for his masterful descriptions of country scenes. The kitchen, the fields, the life of farm animals, the casting of a spell according to the directions of an elderly medicine woman—such bits of local color appear constantly in his novels, never detracting from the flow of the story, but so vividly done that they stamp Lynch as Argentina's leading costumbrista. Episodes like the ranch fire in Raquela (1918), to take one example, can safely be ranked, for coloring and movement, among the very finest things that have ever been written in South America. Here, for instance, is one memorable detail—the flight of the wild creatures from the spreading flames:

A veritable army of red partridges began to cross the patio. It was a compact column, hundreds of birds hurrying in the same direction, silently and sadly, stupefied by the danger to such a degree that they seemed like tame chickens.

Not only partridges filed across the patio, fleeing from the menacing fire, but also all sorts of representatives of the lesser fauna … We saw foxes, skunks, prairie rats … and even snakes and vipers. All that heterogeneous population, all that mysterious world that bustles in the straw of the pajonales, and that in ordinary daily life we sense rather than see—all of it was filing through the patio of the ranch, noiselessly and precipitously, just as whole villages flee before the advance of the enemy.²⁵

But Lynch's work is outstanding for still another trait, even more noteworthy than his descriptive talent: his unusual ability to create living characters. This is nowhere better seen than in The Englishman of the Bones (1924), the touching love story of a young English scientist (a ‘bone digger’) and a gaucho girl. The heroine Balbina—a girl of 18, black haired, ingenuous, and untamed, whose feelings change gradually from prankish malice and downright hate to gratitude, fondness, and desperate adoration—is Lynch's best creation. Even the final tragedy, when ‘Mister James’ leaves and Balbina takes her own life, seems the logical and inevitable doing of the characters themselves. Lynch's tendency to let his personages govern their own destinies without interference by the author reaches its climax in The Romance of a Gaucho (1930), a novel written entirely in the gauchesque idiom. Here, he has achieved an extraordinary effect by suppressing all external description and using instead the device of the gaucho jargon itself. This characteristic mode of speech, based on archaic Spanish and full of strange ellipses and virile metaphors, lends itself remarkably to the story: the love of the gaucho Pantaleón for the Señora Julia, a married woman as fine-souled and noble as she is young and pretty. Written as it is in habla gauchesca, this novel, perhaps more than any other, exhibits Lynch's sincerity. A gifted writer and observer, he has personally watched the tragic disappearance of the men of the pampas, and he has dedicated his best efforts to preserving on paper figures of the gauchos as they really were.

For the gaucho is today a vanishing type. The nomadic orphan of the plains is rapidly being supplanted by Spaniards and Turks; and even those gauchos that have survived now trim their beards and work as hired hands on ranches. Perhaps it is for this reason that the greatest of all gaucho novels is not a work of realism—not even of psychological realism like Lynch's—but instead the obviously stylized portrayal of Güiraldes' Don Segundo Sombra. Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1927) died at the early age of thirty-nine, just when his masterpiece was being acclaimed by press and public.²⁶ His brief life is chiefly significant as a background for the composition of his one great book, with its frankly autobiographical elements. Güiraldes' own existence—his many years passed in the ranch of La Porteña coupled with his wide culture and his travels abroad, his change from a gaucho's boyhood to the manhood of a cultivated gentleman—this simple pattern underlies the action (it can hardly be called plot) of Don Segundo Sombra. In this same connection, his earlier books are interesting largely because they contain elements—though only elements—of the traits which were to distinguish his gaucho masterpiece. Thus, Raucho (1915) studies the character of a youth removed from his early rural environment; Tales of Death and Blood (1915) and the posthumous Six Stories (1929) exhibit a strange penetration of native Argentine themes; Xaimaca (1923) reveals elements of nostalgia; and Rosaura (1922) is written in that advanced technique which is such a feature of Güiraldes' work.

But none of these books exhibits any of that dazzling originality which was to make the appearance of Don Segundo Sombra in 1926 an event in the history of Spanish American letters. This unique book has won a permanent place as an Argentine classic, both for its merits as a work of art and for its perfect interpretation of the gaucho. Don Segundo, as Güiraldes has created him, is not so much a human being of flesh and blood, as a myth—the ideal gaucho, the symbol of the pampas. The author himself informs the reader that this character, by his very name, is a sombra, a shadow; and he writes thus in his very first picture of Don Segundo:

Motionless, I watched him move away, the silhouette of man and horse strangely enlarged against the luminous horizon. It seemed to me that I had a phantom, a shadow, something that passes and is more of an idea than a real being; something which drew me with the force of a hidden pool sucking the current of a river into its depths.²⁷

Above everything else, this Don Segundo is a complete man, master of himself in every situation, possessor of his soul. His nobility derives from his concept of liberty, which compels him to lead a life of solitude and anarchic individualism, and to wander ceaselessly across the plains.

Güiraldes has presented his mysterious ideal gaucho in a story that is almost a symbolic tale. A young lad—whose name does not appear in the book, but who is obviously the author himself—is the narrator. The boy lives in the house of his aunts, in an Argentine town, as though in a prison, remembering his happy childhood on his native ranch. But on one memorable day, his whole life is changed: he sees the shadowy figure of Don Segundo, and runs away to follow his hero and become a plainsman. Bruised, rain-soaked, exhausted by the unaccustomed labors of the pampas, the youth is finally ‘adopted’ by Don Segundo. Five years pass, and he becomes a thorough gaucho, travelling the highways with Don Segundo, who not only instructs him in the difficult arts of cowpunching and horsebreaking, but also develops his imagination with tales of witches and devils. The pair wanders constantly, for Don Segundo can never remain still: his feet devour leagues of pampas, his course is always onward, his best conversation is the soliloquy. At length comes the news that the boy's father (whom he never knew as such) has died, leaving him estates to look after; the youth, settled on his ranch, becomes interested in books, and changes gradually from a gaucho to a man of culture. But his foster-father Don Segundo, sure that his protégé is now a man, leaves for the life of the endless horizons. The farewell is heartbreaking; but from this ‘death’ of the gauchito created by Don Segundo emerges the literary Don Segundo Sombra created by Güiraldes.

As a novel, Don Segundo Sombra can perhaps best be compared to Don Quixote. Like Cervantes' immortal work, it belongs to that purely Spanish type of novel in which the chief interest lies in the character portrayed, and the action is hardly more than a series of episodes. Nor does the resemblance end here. For Don Segundo, like Don Quixote, is a knight of the ideal; an ideal of simple manliness and freedom. Here perhaps lies the secret of Güiraldes' work: he has sought to ennoble a historic national character so often caricatured in circus pantomimes and bandit novels—and he has amply succeeded. For the shadowy figure of Don Segundo will forever stretch across the pampas, not as a picture drawn from life, but as a legendary symbol of a heroic type that was.

For the gaucho, another ‘vanishing American,’ has already made his contribution to the life of the New World. Always considered a backward social element, it was nonetheless he who initiated Argentina's commercial greatness, when the first gaucho traded his first cowhide at the pulpería. The gaucho fought the Indian for two hundred years and kept him away from the civilized centers established in the plains; the gaucho was the soldier in the armies of Belgrano and San Martín, which played such an important role in winning independence from Spain. But above all the gaucho gave his native land something greater, a regional literature that has served as a model of spiritual and cultural independence for all of Spanish America. Gaucho literature has given its best: in poetry, Martín Fierro; in the drama, the plays of Florencio Sánchez; and in the novel, Don Segundo Sombra. And as the gaucho has disappeared, so will his literary ascendancy. But the example of the gauchesque genre remains as a rewarding chapter in literary history: an example of those new and native forces that have wrought the transformation from the imitation of European models to that literary Americanism which dominates the contemporary field of Spanish American letters.

Notes

1. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, or Civilization and Barbarism; translated by Mrs. Horace Mann, London, 1868, pp. 1-4.

2. On this subject, cf. Nichols, Madaline, ‘Colonial Tucumán,’ Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, November 1938; ‘The Gaucho,’ Pacific Historical Review, March 1936; ‘The Spanish Horse of the Pampas,’ American Anthropologist, Vol. XLI, No. 1, January-March 1939; ‘El Gaucho Argentino,’ Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1939.

3. Lugones, Leopoldo, El Payador, 1916, p. 43.

4. Cf. Costa Álvarez, Arturo, ‘Las Etimologías de “Gaucho,”’ Nosotros, Buenos Aires, October 1926.

5. From this same word guacho, which in Chile is a contemptuous word much as gaucho was to the citizen of Buenos Aires, comes the Chilean term huaso for the cowboy or peasant. The word huaso also carries the implied meaning of ‘uncultured person.’ Incidentally, society has taken two quite different attitudes towards huasos and gauchos: for the former, scorn at their barbaric ways of living; for the latter, admiration of their courage and virility.

6. Quoted by Sarmiento, op. cit. p. 12.

7. For descriptions in English of gaucho garments, cf. the notes to Walter Owen's translation of Martín Fierro; for this material in Spanish, cf. Eleuterio Tiscornia, Martín Fierro, comentado y anotado, and La Lengua de Martín Fierro.

8. Bunge, C. O., ‘La Literatura Gauchesca,’ Introduction to the 1919 edition of Martín Fierro.

9. Sarmiento, op. cit. p. 21.

10. Ibid. pp. 27-8.

11. Translated by Muna Lee.

12. Sarmiento, op. cit. pp. 42-3.

13. Ibid. pp. 43-4.

14. Owen, Walter, Introduction to The Gaucho Martin Fierro.

15. Holmes, H. A., Martín Fierro, an Epic of the Argentine, New York, 1923, p. 50.

16. Holmes, op. cit. p. 72.

17. Lugones, op. cit. p. 159.

18. Translated by Walter Owen.

19. Translated by Walter Owen. All the subsequent quotations from Martín Fierro are likewise from Owen's admirable English translation of Hernández' epic, The Gaucho Martín Fierro, Oxford, 1935.

20. The reader who desires further acquaintance with Sánchez' work, is referred to the Cervantes edition of his plays, El Teatro del Uruguayo Florencio Sánchez, 3 vols., Barcelona, 1917, which contains an excellent introductory essay by V. A. Salaverri.

21. The relation of the gaucho novel to the Spanish American novel in general is not stressed here; for this relationship, the reader is referred to Torres-Ríoseco, La Novela en la América Hispana, Berkeley, 1939, ‘III. La Novela Criolla,’ pp. 210-43.

22. The works cited are, Zavala Muniz' The Chronicle of Muniz, The Chronicle of a Crime; Lynch's Raquela, The Romance of a Gaucho; Rodríguez Larreta's Zogoibi; and Reyles' The Gaucho Florido.

23. Other gauchesque novelists in Uruguay are A. Montiel Ballesteros (1888-), author of La Raza (1925), and Castigo'e Dios (1930); Vicente Salaverri, with his Este era un País (1920) and El hijo del León (1922); and the extremely promising Francisco Espínola, a writer of powerful gaucho short stories in Raza Ciega (1926).

24. Cf. Torres-Ríoseco, ‘Benito Lynch,’ in Novelistas Contemporáneos de América, Santiago, 1939, pp. 151-210.

25. Lynch, Raquela, edition of 1926, pp. 109-10: translated by A. T.-R.

26. Cf. Torres-Ríoseco, ‘Ricardo Güiraldes,’ in Novelistas Contemporáneos de América, pp. 123-49.

27. Güiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra, edition of 1927, p. 26.

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