As editor of HISPANIA, I most earnestly beg of all contributors and advertisers to use always the old, traditional and correct terms, Spanish America, Spanish American. What objections could any one have against this procedure? But a few there are who, although convinced, feel the necessity of differentiating between the Spanish American republics that speak Spanish and those that speak Portuguese. I appreciate fully their point of view, but see no reason why to solve that difficulty we should use terminologies that are wholly false, and would suggest that we differentiate when necessary by using the term Hispanic American in the general sense, to include Brazil, and the term Spanish American either for the whole or for the Spanishspeaking countries exclusively. The Americans are great lovers of truth and justice. The use of the terms Hispanic American and Spanish American with the meanings above suggested has actually been adopted in our country in some instances. We have The Hispanic Society of America, which as Menéndez Pidal says is concerned with the study of Spanish and Portuguese and Catalonian institutions. Sanborn & Company have commenced to publish a formidable series of Spanish and Portuguese textbooks for use in our schools and colleges, under the general editorship of Professor Fitz-Gerald of the University of Illinois, very properly called The Hispanic Series. The Macmillan Company has begun to publish also an important series of Spanish textbooks, under the general editorship of Professor Luquiens of Yale University, and although devoted largely to the Spanish American viewpoint, it is properly called The Macmillan Spanish Series. And lately there has been founded a new historical review, two numbers of which have already appeared this year, devotel to the study of Spanish American history, including Brazil, and supported by the leading American historians in the field, and it is very properly called The Hispanic American Historical Review. AURELIO M. ESPINOSA LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY THE GAUCHO POETRY OF ARGENTINA The most picturesque figure in the social life of Argentina of about fifty years ago, and still the most interesting figure of her traditions, is that of the gaucho, the cowboy of the boundless pampas; and in the development of the country no one played a more important part. During the Colonial period it was the gauchos who opened up to civilization the vast plains of Argentina. During the War of Independence it was the gauchos, unsurpassed in horsemanship, self-reliant, brave to rashness, ready for attack at a moment's notice, who fought valiantly and effectively the Spanish armies in the cause of freedom. In the troubled times following national independence, in the long struggle between the centralists and federalists, they fought as valiantly in a less worthy cause in support of caudillos, the political leaders who were able to gain their respect by physical prowess, expert horsemanship and audacious courage. Later, as the government became more stable and as the industrial development of the cities and the agricultural development of the country put an end to revolutionary wars, the gaucho began to lose prestige as the dominant figure of the pampas. At first he stood out boldly and contemptuously against the ever-advancing forces of modern industry, against the puebleros who became financially interested in the agricultural possibilties of the fertile plains, against the incessant flow of immigration from the older countries; but such opposition to the new industrial and political forces was not of long duration. Because of his lawless and nomadic instincts, because of his unwillingness and inability to conform to the conventional life of present-day civilization, the gaucho, as a distinct type, could find no place in modern Argentina. Some few of them became landowners, the exception to the rule, as few of them were ever able to accumulate more money than was needed for a day's drinking and gambling in a pulpería. The sons of the gauchos of a generation ago are to be found in the army or among the rural mounted police or on the large estancias. It is only in the outlying districts not yet reached by railways and scientific farming that representatives of the gaucho type are still to be found, and it is only in the older books of travel, such as Darwin's "Voyage of a Naturalist," that we are likely to find extensive descriptions of his character and mode of life, his peculiar dress and weapons, the chiripá, lazo, facón, bolas or boleadoras. It is in history and in literature that the gaucho has his definitive place. Even more picturesque than the cowboys of our Western States were those gauchos of the Argentine pampas, more picturesque, and at the same time, more distinct as a class, because of their peculiar origin and history. The first Spaniards to land on the shores of the Rio de la Plata or to cross the Andes from Perú and Chile, Andalusians for the most part, did not meet with the fierce opposition offered by the Araucanians in southern Chile; in the beginning at least, they did not arouse the antagonism of the aboriginal inhabitants of the plains and apparently did not hold the belief of the English settlers of North America, that the only good Indian is a dead one. Although there is considerable diversity of opinion among historians as to the extent to which they took Indian wives, it is certain that there was some intermingling of races; the gauchos were, at least in part, the descendants of the Andalusian pioneers and Indian women. Since the Andalusian had in him a strain of Arab blood, the gauchos inherited from three races characteristics that were further modified by the pastoral life of the pampas. From the Indian ancestors came the love for the free life of the plains, their hatred of restraint, of law and order, their patient acceptance of hardship and physical pain; from the Arabs came their love of the noble companion of their nomadic life and their superb horsemanship, in which they rivaled, if they did not surpass, our own western cowboys. From the Andalusians they inherited their intensity of feeling, their religious superstition, and more particularly, the characteristic that brings us to the main purpose of this study, their fondness for poetry and music. The Andalusians took with them to the new world the tradition of songs sung to the music of the guitar, and in the course of time there developed the profession of the payador, a rustic troubadour, whose business it was to entertain the gauchos in their hours of recreation. The classic description of this payador is to be found in Sarmiento's masterpiece, "Facundo," written about the middle of the last century, when the gaucho was still an important factor in the social and political life of Argentina. Describing the payador, he wrote: "El gaucho cantor es el mismo bardo, el vate, el trovador de la Edad Media, que se mueve en la misma escena, entre las luchas de las ciudades y del feudalismo de los campos, entre la vida que se va y la vida que se acerca. El cantor anda de pago en pago, 'de tapera en galpón,' cantando sus héroes de la pampa perseguidos por la justicia, los llantos de la viuda a quien los indios robaron sus hijos en un malón reciente, la derrota y la muerte del valiente Rauch, la catástrofe de Facundo Quiroga y la suerte que cupo a Santos Pérez. . . . El cantor no tiene residencia fija; su morada está donde la noche lo sorprende; su fortuna en sus versos y en su voz. Dondequiera que el cielito enreda sus parejas sin taza, dondequiera que se apure una copa de vino, el cantor tiene su lugar preferente, su parte escogida en el festin. El gaucho argentino no bebe, si la música y los versos no le excitan, y cada pulpería tiene su guitarra para poner en manos del cantor, a quien el grupo de caballos estacionados en la puerta anuncia a lo lejos donde se necesita el concurso de gaya ciencia. . . . La poesía original del cantor es pesada, monótona, irregular cuando se abandona a la inspiración del momento. Más narrativa que sentimental, llena de imágenes tomadas de la vida campestre, del caballo y las escenas del desierto, que la hacen metafórica y pomposa. Cuando refiere sus proezas o las de algún afamado malévolo, parécese al improvisador napolitano desarreglado, prosaico de ordinario, elevándose a la altura poética por momentos, para caer de nuevo al recitado insipido y casi sin versificación." No festive gathering was complete without a payador and his new repertoire of songs; and if two payadores happened to be present, there then took place a poetic contest according to set rules, a payada, remarkably similar to the tenso and jocs partits of the Provençal troubadours of long ago. The payador lives no longer except in tradition, an interesting type that has passed away along with the social class to which he belonged. As in the case of our own cowboys who were forced ever westward until they have become non-existent as a social class, the gauchos were forced to retreat before the advancing forces of modern civilization, to give place to the more prosaic landowners and farmers. About twenty years ago Rubén Darío lamented in beautiful verses his disappearance from the pampa: De pronto se oye el eco del grito de la pampa, y un espectral jinete, como una sombra, cruza, ¡Yo soy el postrer gaucho que parte para siempre, de nuestra vieja patria llevando el corazón! (Prosas profanas) The only gauchos the traveler is likely to see today in Argentina are those of the theater or vaudeville stage, or those of a fancydress carnival. Sixteen years ago, Ernesto Quesada (El Criollismo en la Literatura Argentina) wrote of the gaucho: "Hoy los empresarios representan escenas de la vida gaucha en los circos populares, y hacen cantar en los teatros a payadores, más o menos de pega; mañana, dentro de un cuarto de siglo quizá, se irá a los museos etnográficos a contemplar gauchos de cera, revestidos con su chiripá, su bota de potro, su calzoncillo cribao y de largo fleco, su chambergo de barbijo, su poncho pampa, su tirador bien plateao y su facón tradicional." The poetry of the gauchos, the productions of illiterate payadores and therefore entirely popular, would have disappeared with them, were it not for certain Argentine poets of high literary ability, who made for it a permanent place in literature. These poets, instead of collecting and publishing the original poems, the vidalitas, cielitos, tristes, payadas, etc., as literary men have sometimes done with the popular poetry of other countries, sought inspiration and material for their own poetic compositions in the life and poetry of the gauchos and produced a body of literature that holds an important place in the literary history of Spanish America. That these poems of gaucho inspiration are well worthy of our attention is proved by the high esteem in which they are held by eminent critics of Spain as well as Spanish-America. To mention only the most eminent, Menéndez y Pelayo (Historia de la poesía hispano-americana, Vol. II, p. 469) speaks of the early gaucho poetry as "el germen de esa peculiar poesía gauchesca que . . . ha producido las obras más originales de la literatura sudamericana." The great poet Núñez de Arce expressed the opinion to Ernesto Quesada (quoted by the latter in his "Criollismo en la Literatura Argentina") that "lo más interesante en toda la literatura americana eran las producciones gauchescas, por su originalidad, su sabor del terruño, el singular vigor de las ideas madres, y lo pintoresco de la forma, a |