Charles Reginald Enock - The Complete Works of Charles Reginald Enock

The Complete Works of C. Reginald Enock

C. Reginald Enock

Shrine of Knowledge

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ISBN 10: 059989542X

ISBN 13: 9780599895423

This collection includes the following:

Spanish America, Its Romance, Reality and Future, Vol. 1

Spanish America, Its Romance, Reality and Future, Vol. 2 (of 2)

Mexico Its Ancient and Modern Civilisation, History, Political Conditions, Topography, Natural Resources, Industries and General Development

Who has not felt at some time the lure of Spanish America, the attraction of those half-mysterious landsPeru or Panama, Mexico or Brazil, and all that galaxy of far-off States, with the remains of their ancient civilization and their picturesque modern settingbeneath the equatorial sun, beyond the Western sea? They drew us in our youth, were it but in the pages of Prescott, when with Cortes and Pizarro the Aztec and Inca Empires lay before us; they draw us even in maturer years.

Yonder lies the Spanish Main, glittering in the sun as when we sailed it firstin that long-foundered pirate craft of boyhood; there stretch the tropic shores of wild Guiana; there the great Andes rears its towering crests, and over golden sands the Orinoco and the Amazon pour down their mighty floods; whilst, in slumberous and mysterious majesty beyond, wide as the sea of Time, the vast Pacific echoes on its boundless [12] shores. And for those, who would seek the true El Dorado of the West the great Sixteenth Century has not closed yet, nor ever will; the days of ocean-chivalry are not dead, the Elizabethan mariners come and go, for their voyages have no end within those spacious days of history.

Spanish America, in fact, is enshrouded in an atmosphere of romance and interest which time does not easily dispel, and remains a land of adventure and enterprise. Its sunny shores, its picturesque folk with their still semi-mediaeval life, despite their advancing civilizationthe great untravelled spaces, the forests, the mountains, the rivers, the plains, and all they contain, the lure and profit of commerce and of traffickingall these are matters we cannot separate from the New World as peopled by Spain and Portugal.

It is, moreover, peculiarly a world of its own, born in an impressionable period, indelibly stamped with the strong individualism of the Iberian people who overcame it, and it remains apart, refusing the hegemony of the commercialistic agea circumstance for which we may be grateful, in a sense. Its future is on the lap of the unknown, offering always the unexpected: geography has everywhere separated it from the Old World; temperament keeps the seclusion.

Whatever be our errand in this new worlderroneously termed "new," for it is old, and had its folk, its Toltecs and pre-Incas, in the apogee of their ancient culture developed a shipbuilding as they did a temple-building art, they might have [13] come sailing around the world and found us here in Britain still "painted savages"; whatever, I say, be our errand there, we shall not understand Spanish America and its people, just as they will never understand us, the people of Anglo-Saxon race. The gulf between us is as deep as the Atlantic, as wide as the Pacific. The incomprehensible Spaniard has added himself to the unfathomable Indian, the red-brown man who sprang from the rugged soil of America (perhaps from some remote Mongolian ancestry), who, inscrutable as a dweller of the moon, is still sullen and secretive as he was and well might beafter the rapine which followed on the white man's keel and sail upon his shores four centuries ago; the white conqueror, who in his adventurous greed destroyed the Egypt and the Chaldea of America and trampled their autochthonous civilization in the dust.

And as to the Spaniards, it is their strong individualism which presents a marked attraction here, though one which may not generally have been put into words: the individualism of nations founded upon historical and geographical bases, as has already been said. We approach here, not a mere United States of Spanish America, not a confederation of vast municipalities or provinces whose borders are imaginary parallels or meridians, but a series of independent nations, each stamped with its own character, bearing its own indelible and romantic name, whose frontiers are rivers and mountain ranges.

[14]

Is there any virtue in these things? In the day when prosaic commercialism, when megalomania and money so sway us, there is a refreshing atmosphere about the refusal to conglomerate of these picturesque communities, whose names fall pleasingly on our ears. Yet there are penalties too. Rugged and difficult of approachthe vulgar gaze may not easily rest upon them by the mere passport of a tourist's ticketas are these vast territories of forest, desert and Cordillera, Nature, though grand and spacious, is ill at ease, and the mood might seem to be impressed upon the people of the land that neither is there peace for them. For they have soaked their land with the blood of their own sons, and we might at times despair of self-government here.

But we need not despair. The malady is but part of one that afflicts the whole world, whose cure awaits the turning of the next page of human evolutiona page which can be turned whenever slothful humanity desires to do it.

Spanish America is really one of the most interesting fields of travel in the world, even if it does not make great pretension of its attractions. From the point of view of the holiday-maker it has remained undeveloped. The traveller who requires luxuriance of travel, of hotel and pleasure-resort, such as the playgrounds of Europe afford, will not find such here, except perhaps in a few of the more advanced cities. It is a continent which, despite its four centuries of discovery, has so far done little more than present its edge to [15] the forcesand pleasuresof modern life. Nature is in her wildest moods: it is an unfinished world; mankind is still plastic. The mountain trail and the horse are more in evidence than the railway and the motor-car; the fonda rather than the hotel. Here, moreover, Don Quixote de la Mancha has taken up his abode, and we may find him often, to our pleasure if we like his company, as some of us do.

But let us dismount. Here are beautiful cities too. A sensitive and developing people, the Spanish American folk would resent any aspersion of their civilization. They have all the machinery of culture to their hand. Here the Parisian toilette rubs shoulders in their streets and plazas with the blanketed and sandalled Indian; the man of fashion and the man of the Stone Age walk the same pavement. Here in these pleasing townssome of them marvels of beauty, some of them in an atmosphere of perpetual spring, some miles above the seaare palaces of justice, art and science. Here are republican kings and plutocrats, rich with the product of the field and mine, here are palms and music, homes of highly cultured folk, speaking their soft Castilian: shops stored with all the luxury of Europe or the United States. Here are streets of quaint colonial architecture, and courteous hosts and hostesses, and damsels of startling beauty in all the elegance of the mode.