Current Literature
With the tentacles of that grim octopus which we call technical progress reaching to the uttermost ends of the habitable earth, the romance of exploration and discovery might be thought to be extinct. But what has really hap- Jelled is that it has been transferred from the physical to the I •
psychological plane. It lives again in the hearts of those whose passion is the penetration of the various continents of the mind, reaping as they do a rich store from the wealth of the world's distinctive culturas. Pre-eminent among these modern explorers is Waldo Frank, a citizen of the United States whose soul has been seared, yet not destroyed but stirred to vigorous action, by the hammer and sickle of his own country's machine- culture. In America Hispana (Seribners, 16s.) he has a subject after his own heart. His rile is here simply that of interpreter to a cultural unit of which, alas ! we in England, for all our trading ties, remain abysmally ignorant, but being himself an emotional creature and an artist in words he transforms the music of the whole American sphere into a crashing symphony. Some readers will fasten on the simple descriptive passages, either of Nature or of individual persons, Bolivar, San Martin, Mariategui, &c., while others will get their enjoyment from the recurrent political theme (the author is, one need hardly say, a doughty champion of Spanish-American federation and cultural renascence in protest against Yankee Imperialism) : others, again, will delight in his sympathetic appreciation of the Indian and mestizo cultures. Hut the whole book, in spite of a certain over-richness, must be accounted an intensely interesting achievement. It is the fruits of a journey through- out Central and South America by a man who really knows what it is to travel intelligently. Mr. Frank has earned the title of godfather to the new America now in its infancy.
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