[Illustration: MANUEL UGARTE (ARGENTINA). Contemporary poet, novelist, and essayist. To face p. 266.]
The short story, neglected by the romantics, is being revived. Modernism, having already transformed poetry, has brought to the _conte_ a subtlety { 267} in the analysis of the passions and a knowledge of psychology that refuses to take alarm at problems of morbid obscurity, and the indispensable quality of concentration of interest. Machado de Assis is a master of powerful analysis, and a sober and ironical style; his vision of life is melancholy. Diaz Rodriguez has written some superb short stories. An evocation or a symbol places those of Carlos Reyles of Uruguay on a plane far above that of the ordinary romance. Two other writers of the younger generation, Attilio Chiappori and Clemente Palma, hailing respectively from Argentine and Peru, have introduced a new æsthetics into the short story; the latter seems to show the influence of Hoffmann and Poe, but his examples of the _macabre_ are none the less powerfully original; while Chiappori, a physician and alienist, loves the states of twilight phases of a mind which is tottering on the verge of reason. _Borderland_ tells us of this vague territory in a sinuous, and, in America, hitherto unfamiliar style.
A great Peruvian writer, Ricardo Palma, has created a department of literature, that of tradition, which partakes equally of the nature of history, and the romance, and the _conte_. He has described in a sumptuous style the life of the old Spanish colonies, devout and sensual; the traditions of a cultivated community, the city of Lima. His subtle irony, his joyous and somewhat licentious narrative, often remind us of M. Anatole France and the Italian story-tellers.
In Latin America are published not only exquisite examples of the _conte_, but also novels in which the study of society and the analysis of the mind are not overlooked. Among others may be cited _El Hombre de Hierro_, by Rufino Blanco Fombona, a Venezuelan; _Canaan_, by the Brazilian, Graça Aranha; _La Gloria de don Ramiro_ and _Redención_, { 268} by the Argentine writers Enrique Rodriguez Larreta and Angel de Estrada; _Idolos Rotos_ and _Sangre Patricia_, by Diaz Rodriguez, whose high talent as a writer of short stories we have already praised; _La Raza de Cain_, by Carlos Reyles, so remarkable, also, for his essays and his tales.