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UR acquaintance, in the United States, with the contemporary literature of Latin America is so restricted that Mr. Stimson's felicitous translation of the "Ariel" of José Enrique Rodó1 is to be regarded as especially auspicious. For it serves to introduce to an English-speaking audience the work of a writer whose influence has extended wherever Spanish is spoken, a philosopher whose ideas found expression in unusual beauty.

Rodó was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, exactly fifty years ago. His youth was spent in an atmosphere of scholarship, and at twenty-six he was Professor of Literature in the university of his native city. Three years later he deserted academic life to enter politics, and for a considerable time was a member of the national Parliament. The sixteen years from 1901 to 1917 were compact with activities at once various and uniform; from every field touched by his interests Rodó drew nourishment for his philosophy of idealism. His personal life was remarkably of a piece with his central doctrine of perpetual and unremitting self-renovation. "Reformase es vivir" (to recreate one's self is to live) are the opening words of his most notable book; like Emerson, he counseled that we should "live ever in a new day." And he put his theories vigorously to the test. Parliamentary debate, miscellaneous journalism, economic investigation, and the criticism of literature and art he successively turned to account in applying his theory of life to divergent spheres of human interest; could any subject be alien to one whose ideal was the complete man? His intellectual concentration was as intense as its expression was various, for his writings reveal a familiarity with foreign literature that might well be envied by a mind devoted exclusively to scholarship. Rodó insistently advocated the necessity of travel as a means of selfrenovation; ironically, he never left Montevideo until 1917, when he was appointed European correspondent by "Caras y Caretas," a Buenos Aires weekly journal of wide influence. He went to Spain, proceeded almost immediately to Italy, and after a brief illness died at Palermo in May, 1917. Three years later, with much ceremony, his body was brought back to Montevideo to be buried beneath a magnificent monument erected by the nation.

"Ariel," his earliest and in some ways his most charming book, is an excellent introduction to those central ideas which he later amplified to their full

1 Ariel. By José Enrique Rodô. Translated, with an Introductory Essay, by F. J. Stimson. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, $1.25.

philosophic implications in the "Motivos de Proteo" (Motives of Proteus). Taking the form of the imaginary valedictory of a spiritual teacher to the students who are about to leave him, it is less a statement of a theory of life than an invitation to formulate one. It is an eloquent summons to the humane life as the Greeks defined it, a poetic defense of the claims of Ariel rather than Caliban to determine the ideals of civilization. Life in Greece, he observes, was held to be noble only when it was founded upon "the concert of all human faculties, in the free and chartered liberty of all energies capable of contributing to the power and glory of mankind." Thus it was that Athens "could exalt at once the feeling for the ideal with the real, reason with instinct, the forces of the body with those of the spirit. It chiseled clear the four sides to the soul." This rational and harmonious development of the multiple forces of personality constituted for Rodó the culture of the humane life.

"The basic principle of your development," he says, ". . . should be to maintain the integrity of your humanity. No one function should ever prevail over that final end. No isolated force can satisfy all reasonable objects of individual existence, as it cannot alone produce the ordered concert of collective existence. And, like deformity or dwarfing to the body, is, to the soul, the result of an exclusive object imposed on individual action and a single manner of culture."

Social evolution, he points out, results in the growing complexity of civilization in a constantly increasing heterogeneity in life. As general culture increases, the field of individual activity tends to be more and more restricted to narrow specialization. But the humane life demands, not the intensive cultivation of a single aptitude, but the balanced exercise of all human capacities; how, then, is the determinism of individual vocation, the tyranny of materialism, to be circumvented? Rodó, like

Emerson, would answer, that to live the life of reason means to share nobly in as many forms of experience as we may: "Shrug not your shoulders before any noble and fecund manifestation of human nature, under the pretext that your own individuality ties you of preference to a different one. Be attentive spectators where you may not be actors." He seems here to foreshadow the theory that Croce, applying to the materials of æsthetics, has contributed toward our understanding of art; that the function of the spectator is to recreate the experience of the artist. So Rodó, counseling the enlargement of the inner life, points a way to vicarious experience.

One of Rodó's most notable contributions to the interpretation of ideas is his sense of the epic significance of the doctrine of evolution. Very largely that doctrine has served modern thought by clarifying our sense of the past, and its distinctive emphasis both in philosophy and literature has been upon the lowly origin of life. But for Rodó its implications in the future are far more valuable. If the present is the sum total, the complete consequence of an infinite past, why should not its chief value be what it portends of the future? Thus he counsels that "every one who devotes himself to propagate and preserve in contemporary America a disinterested ideal of the soul-art, science, ethics, religious belief, a political policy of ideals should educate his belief in the persevering preparation for the future." It is to the interest of this future no less than to the satisfaction of the present that the individual shall cultivate his own capacities to the fullest extent possible. The reason for this, only hinted at in "Ariel," is stated at some length in the "Motivos" in that doctrine of perpetual self-renovation which gave to Rodó's philosophy the name of "proteanism." In every human being, he says, there is an inexhaustible reservoir of spiritual capacities, largely unknown. This reservoir enables us, if we fail in one direction, to seek a new orientation, since the frustration of one power is compensated for by the discovery of another. Every one should therefore be the Columbus of his own personality, since reality and the future, as well as the past, lie within us. Life is a perpetual becoming, and so is truth; it is therefore the duty of the individual constantly to subject his ideas and feelings to the test of new knowledge as it is created. In that way alone is it possible to insure control of experience by the spirit.

"Ariel," which is an invitation to this life of the spirit, is likewise a denunciation of the philosophy of utilitarianism. Rodó finds two causes assigned for the dominion exercised by utilitarian ideals: the tremendous discoveries of natural science and the wide diffusion of democratic ideas. To offset the conception of science as serving only through its practical applications, Rodó recalls to

r minds the ideals of pure science; we ld not, he warns us, confuse the

search for truth with the perfection of mechanical conveniences. Nor does he find in the ideals of democracy any inherent materialism. Can democracy, he asks, meet the tests of culture and civilization? The question is complicated by the fact that in the Western Hemisphere the first hundred years of democratic experiment were largely preoccupied with the conquest of physical natùre. Like science, democracy was under the necessity of being practical. But the final test is not one of materialism: "The civilization of a country acquires its grandeur not by its manifestations of material prosperity and predominance, but by the higher order of thinking and feeling thereby made possible." Democracy begins by leveling unjust superiorities, but the spiritual world, as well as the natural, abhors an absolute equilibrium. By proclaiming the universality and equality of human rights democracy will ultimately proclaim the predominance of mere number unless it carefully maintains some conception of legitimate superiorities, such, for example, as moral excellence. In this, as in other matters, Rodó puts his faith in

FICTION

science, joining to the conception of equality of opportunity the doctrine of natural selection in the moral domain. To that consecration of mediocrity which to him appears to be the mostdamaging perversion of democracy he opposes the ideal of a democracy that is "just and noble, impelled only by the knowledge and sense of true superiorities, in which the supremacy of intelligence and virtue, the only limits to the just equality of man, receives its authority and prestige from liberty."

The work of Rodó has very directly influenced thought both throughout South America and in Spain, not only in its expression in literature, but in the theory and practice of education as well. Like Emerson and Whitman in the United States, like Ruskin and Arnold in England, his concern was to reinterpret for his time the final values discerned by the spirit. He enunciated no definition of the truth-for him truth, like life, is in process of becoming

but rather directed his energy to sowing a disinterested desire for knowledge and beauty as the two paths upon which truth may be met.

CAPPY RICKS RETIRES. By Peter B. Kyne. Illustrated. The Cosmopolitan Press, New York. $2.

Cappy Ricks, our friend of former stories, retires, and not once but several times; and the more he retires, the more he comes back, bubbling over with energy, courage, and generosity. The first part of this book is one of the liveliest sea tales of the war ever written. CLAIR DE LUNE. By Anthony Pryde. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $2.

Mr. Pryde's stories always give the satisfaction of introducing the reader to people who talk and act like intelligent and cultivated persons. He always has a story situation also to which the talk and incidents lead up, so that the interest really does culminate at the climax. The present story certainly is as well written as any of his books, though his two earliest novels were tenser and more vivid.

KINGMAKERS (THE). By Burton E. Stevenson. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $1.90. One of the best of all the many tales that center about revolutions and plots of restoration in imaginary petty kingdoms in the east of Europe. Here the plotting itself takes place in Monte Carlo, and the poor king never does get his crown back. We won't say that this story is as charmingly written as Stevenson's "Prince Otto," but it is as good as or better than "The Prisoner of Zenda."

MYSTERIOUS OFFICE (THE). By Jeannette Lee. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $1.75.

A woman detective, who (as in a former book) unearths criminals on the condition that she shall start them in a straight line if possible, here unravels the queer theft of $25,000 in bills from

the top of a desk. Any one of several people might have taken it; three (we believe) confessed to taking it; none of those three did take it.

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BEGINNINGS. By Illustrated. Henry E. Chambers. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. $4.50. The early history of the Mississippi Valley is told in this well-printed book in a pleasant narrative style that makes easy reading. The settling of this great valley constituted one of the most important phases of America's development, and it deserves the ample and sympathetic treatment here given.

ESSAYS AND CRITICISM NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH. By Owen Wister. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2. Mr. Wister writes with strong feeling and an acute sense of character and human passion about American, French, and English soldiers in the Great War. He segregates individuals and makes them talk and act as real men, not like tin-hatted gods or moral idealists. Incident and talk are selected so as to throw out the reality of the fighting men who certainly should and must henceforth be neighbors.

MISCELLANEOUS EVENING POST (THE). By Allan Nevins. Boni & Liveright, New York. $3.50. Reading the New York "Evening Post" would be an education in itself, if uneducated readers were eager to accept the "Post" as an Alma Mater. But its appeal has always been to the highly educated-to people of scholarly in. stincts, of fastidious tastes, of high intellectual standards. Despite, however, the limited circulation imposed by its quality, the "Evening Post" has for more

than a century of our National history been an influential factor in making that history; and the story of its career and influence is here told in a way that is highly interesting. The book is by no means merely a friendly encomium of a newspaper by one of its editorial staff; it is an independent, virile study and review. Alexander Hamilton, William Cullen Bryant, John Bigelow, and E. L. Godkin, as chiefs of the "Post," made it one of the world's great newspapers and set standards that are loyally followed by its present editors. Every newspaper man, every thoughtful newspaper reader, I would be the better and wiser for be coming familiar with the contents of this book.

TRAVEL AND DESCRIPTION HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH. By Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Illustrated. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York. $2.50. Mr. Stefansson is a first-class writing man as well as a first-class hunter and explorer, and no one, young or old, can take up this book without becoming absorbed in its accounts of Arctic life. The author has many original points of view, and when he takes the reader into his confidence as to these, his pages are most entertaining.

INCA LAND. By Hiram Bingham.

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thing as money with a dissonance of opinion equal to that of the blind men about the elephant it is evident that they have different definitions for money.

The definitions usually given in the textbooks are in support of that statement. Does an exact definition exist in any standard text? If so, does it stand unchallenged? I believe not. Text after text, however, defines the qualities necessary for any commodity to possess in order to serve as Money. And four times out of five, after giving them, the same texts will later call a Federal Reserve note "money" and debate whether or not checks are "money." One chapter will be headed "Money" and the next "Credit." A succeeding chapter lumps them both and treats them alike under guise of currency or circulation or media of exchange.

In my pocketbook at present are four bills: a $20 Federal Reserve note, a $10 gold certificate, a $5 note of the Series of 1890, and a $1 silver certificate. How much money have I?

Starting at the only point upon which all schools of economic thought agree, each bill represents something. If that something has the qualities necessary to serve as money, the bill may be called a title deed to money. In other words, it proves that I have money somewhere. If, however, the something represented has not those qualities, I submit that my possession of the bill is evidence of something entirely different.

Pre

The $20 bill is new and unworn. sumably the 90 or 120 days of maturity of the trade acceptances or other paper behind it are incomplete. This bill, then, at a 4 per cent rediscount rate, really proves, in the last analysis, that I have a prior lien upon $20.84 worth of, say, bolts and nuts, now being unpacked by a retailer; and that I am secured against loss through the sale of those bolts and nuts by the ample margin of about $16 in gold. I do not own that gold. It is merely arrested temporarily and held until the Federal Reserve Bank proves to me that my $20.84 worth of bolts and nuts will really sell for that much. Obviously, my bill does not represent anything which can be used as money except that $16 in gold, and I do not own that. This bill cannot be money.

Now the $10 bill. It states plainly that in the vaults of the Treasury there lie two hundred and thirty-two and twotenths grains of gold; that the gold is mine; and that I can get it if I go and ask for it. This is money without a doubt.

Next, I have a green and black bill stating that the United States will pay me $5. That is all it says. It means that this great country of ours owes me $5 and admits it-nothing else. It is a loan without interest. Five dollars' worth of my work has been paid for with the Government's credit-nothing else. This bill is not money. It is the same sort of promissory note that you and I might issue.

Lastly, another bill offers me "One Silver Dollar"-not "One Dollar in Sil

Building a Greater West

LD prairie trails that once echoed the trotting of stage coach horses are now lively streets pungent with gasoline. The trail blazers have passed to Unknown Lands, leaving to their sons the ability to turn opportunity into results.

The Greater West was only a vision when the rich resources of mine, farm, ranch and fruit lands were first tapped. Even now that it is real, the future looks more golden than ever. And newcomers quickly become as keen Western optimists as the native born!

It is a pleasure for National Shawmut Bank to help keep the West in close touch with the manufacturers of goods that have made New England world-famous. Machinery, tools, rubber, footwear, textiles, paperthese are products of highly specialized skill. The volume of these goods shipped to the West is proof that Western requirements are fully met.

There are many routine banking and also more personal services which this bank can perform particularly well for Western banks and businesses, because of our broad acquaintance with all New England activities.