Writer of short stories, a novelist at times, but above all a brilliant chronicler, Gomez Carrillo has had the greatest influence in Latin America. In a nervous, harmonious style, full of delicate shades, he has instructed the younger generation in symbolism, in the elegant paradoxes of Wilde, in the work of D'Annunzio and Verlaine; in short, in the whole of decadent art. Above all, he eulogises Paris: the "charming soul" of the city, the sounding boulevards, its women, and the _galante_ frivolity of its unrest. A master of smiles and subtle irony, he has the taste, the delicate amenity, of Scholl or Fouquier, the art of telling an anecdote, of analysing a comedy, of pouring gentle ridicule upon learned heaviness or conceited solemnity. His books on Japan and Greece, praised by the French critics, have revealed the mystery of exoticism to the American public, and all his work breathes a continual suggestion of France.
Such is the new literature, in which you will find novelists and poets and a truly Florentine love of beauty. He who knows America only by its imperfect social framework, its civil wars, and its persistent barbarism sees only the outer tumult; there is a strange divorce between its turbulent politics { 270} and its refined art. If ever Taine's theory of the inevitable correspondence between art and its environment was at fault, it is in respect of these turbulent democracies which produce writers whose literary style is so precious, such refined poets and analysts.
[Illustration: GOMEZ CARRILLO. Contemporary novelist, essayist, and chroniqueur.]
[1] _L'Evolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIXe siécle_, Paris, 1899, p. 134.
[2] "Tzar of three colours, black, white, and Indian (red)--who governs the American continent--and is called the Sovereign People."
[3] "Thou shalt suffer the martyrdom--that for him who is born a poet--is reserved by impious fate."
[4] "I live only when I dream--that my heart has broken all ties with the world-- ... Come, for my life and my joy hardly begin to be--save when I know I have left mankind far behind me."
[5] "Like the ruins of a silent temple,--empty, abandoned, fearful,--without light and without sound."
[6] "Men refuse me a tomb in their cities,--in my country I was expelled from the house of my fathers."