[Pedro Prado], … who is also a poet of distinction, has passed most of his days in the peaceful family life of his spacious country villa on the outskirts of Santiago. Here, from 1915 to 1916, he presided over the celebrated group of 'The Ten,' an association of painters, poets, musicians, and architects. Chile's leading stylist, if not the leading stylist of all Spanish America, Prado is known for his essays, parables, and poems in prose, but especially for his novels, of which the most celebrated are A. Rural Judge (1924) and Alsino (1920), and for his prose tragedy Androvar (1925). These books are studies of remarkable characters, but their purpose is less psychological than philosophical, and they stamp Prado as a philosophical novelist of great distinction—a title that can be claimed by few other writers of Spanish America.

In Prado's work one hardly knows which to admire more, the moral elevation of the thought or the limpid perfection of the style. His writing frequently reaches the level of poetry, yet at the same time he is fond of realistic bits of description, which give a strangely Chilean atmosphere to his symbolic stories. In Alsino, for instance, he describes a farmhouse kitchen, sooty and dim with the vapor of cooking food, and smelling of the garlic and onions hung from the rafters.

Yet it is never the background or even the characters themselves that preoccupies Prado; his chief concern is always with ideas and the building of a personal philosophy. Thus in A Rural Judge, Prado analyzes the dilemma that confronted him as a district judge who tried to administer justice by the dictates of his conscience. The judge's decisions are shown as clashing with the rigid legal code; his moral interpretations of justice are wasted on rascals and rogues; he finds it impossible to do individual justice, for if you punish a man for a crime, you punish at the same time his mother, his wife, and his children; to be just, he feels that he should reward good at the same time that he punishes evil. Finally, unable to satisfy his own conscience, he resigns. The problem here is the tantalizing one of human limitations, which Prado has explored still further in Androvar. In a strange combination of fancy and reality, he has created the parable of the master Androvar, his wife, and his disciple Gadel—an extraordinary triangle, in which three souls are super-naturally fused and penetrate the mysteries of death itself.

Prado's masterpiece is Alsino, which some critics have classified as a fairy tale, some as an allegory, and some as a work of transcendent symbolism. Alsino is the simple saga of a Chilean country boy who longs to fly, and by his efforts to do so falls from a tree and becomes a hunchback. In time, however, his hump grows into a real pair of wings; Alsino flies under the blue sky, over valleys, mountains, and rivers; he descends to earth and comes into contact with ugly and cruel reality; he is mistaken for an angel, he is arrested, his wings are clipped and he is exhibited in a cage, and finally he is blinded by a girl who tries to win his love. He starts to fly once more, only to fall wounded into the bottom of a ravine, where he hears the voices of the springs and the trees; the fox comes to lick his wounds, the wild creatures bring flowers, fruits, and meat, and the wild doves lull him to sleep. In his death agony, Alsino feels one last impulse to fly; at a terrific altitude, he folds his wings and his body ignites:

A league before reaching the earth, there remained of Alsino only impalpable ashes. Lacking the weight to continue falling, they floated like snow- flakes till dawn. The breezes at daybreak set about scattering them, and at length they fell—but the slightest wind blew them upwards again. And so, dispersed and imponderable, they have remained for a long time now, and will continue to remain, floating like mist in the invisible air.

The symbolism of Alsino is clear: the little hunchback with wings is man, longing to soar above the ugliness of life into the regions of the infinite, and yet fatally bound to earth.

Alsino is unquestionably the highest expression of the psychological and philosophical trend in Spanish American fiction—a trend which, next to the rural novel, has attracted the greatest number of writers.…