Читать книгу The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay - J. A. Hammerton - Страница 3

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So many books have been written on South American countries within recent years that the addition of one more to the already formidable list calls for a word of explanation, if not apology.

So far as American writers on the Latin-American Republics are concerned, many of their works are based upon the statistical returns of the respective Governments, or on topographical and historical data, easily obtainable at the public libraries. Others, more popular, but perhaps less valuable, are the hasty records of fleeting visits. These latter are so apt to be informed by a spirit of indiscriminate admiration that they present misleading and untrue notions of the countries described.

The present writer may be stating what is already known to the reader, when he mentions that among both of these classes of books a considerable percentage—perhaps the greater number of those published in the United States and in England—have been subsidised by the governments of the respective republics of which they treat. Many are but glorified advertising pamphlets, put forth in the guise of serious books the better to fulfil their office of propaganda. To look to them for any dispassionate and well-studied view of the countries illustrated in their pages, would be as natural as to expect the advertisement writer of Somebody’s Soap to publish an entirely impartial opinion of the article he had been employed to advertise.

Several French and German authors have written admirable works on the Argentine, entirely free from bias, depicting the country as it is, alive to its merits and its demerits alike; free both from the charge of “log-rolling” and from that of hasty observation. But American or English writers of similar works are not many. Nay, due to the difficulties of ensuring the conditions essential to the impartial and open-minded study of the country, even writers of such international distinction as Viscount Bryce and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, with the best will in the world, are liable to give false impressions. Often have I seen the system at work, whereby “distinguished visitors” to South American capitals are so entirely taken in hand by Government, entertained royally, and shown only such things as Government particularly wish them to see, that it would be expecting too much of human nature to look to them for an unbiased opinion of the country. I have not read Lord Bryce’s book on South America, nor anything that Mr. Roosevelt may have written concerning his tour there, but both these eminent men so suffer from the disability of their eminence, and from the official hospitality showered upon them during their brief sojourns in South America, that, try they never so valiantly to speak nothing but the truth,—and I esteem them, different as they are in many ways, two of the frankest and most honourable of modern statesmen,—their impressions will be coloured by the peculiar conditions under which they were obtained; conditions of official tutelage; and tempered furthermore by reason of the warm hospitality extended to them by the respective Governments. As for the things they see in their rounds of inspection, it is notorious that they are shown only what official discretion would have them see. All this, mark you, in no depreciation of the brilliant work which these, and many less distinguished visitors to South America, are capable of doing, but merely to remind the reader that the conditions in which a work descriptive of any particular country has been evolved ought to be borne in mind in the reading of it.

The chief fault of most writers on the Argentine is the indiscriminate praise they shower around; their fulsome flattery of the country. Only two hours ago I received from Canada a newspaper with most of its front page devoted to an illustrated article entitled “Buenos Ayres—the Paris of the New World.” An estate agent, describing the attractions of some property for sale, would have been beggared for superlatives compared with the writer of this article who lets loose a veritable flood of uncritical “gush” on Buenos Ayres. He may have spent a week in the town, or he may never have seen it, but a more untruthful or misleading account of the city could not have been penned, though it is typical of many that have come to my notice. I feel that the influence of such writings is to create in the minds of the public who do not know the scenes nor the conditions described an impression entirely mischievous.

So thinking, I have set myself in the present work to make “a try at truth.” I have lived long enough on the River Plate to revise and correct my impressions. I mastered the language of the country, so that I came to converse in it as readily as in English. And during the whole of my stay I wrote not a single paragraph of this book, lest I should record impressions and ideas which in the end might be misleading. I deliberately refrained from note-taking, so that when, fully a year later, I came to the writing, I should be able to secure a truer perspective, only the things that mattered disengaging themselves from the multitude of impressions that crowd in on one during a year of active life in a strange land.

I have eschewed statistics, which bulk so largely in most other works on the Argentine, and can be made to prove whatever a writer most wishes to establish. What I have sought for rather, has been the human interest of these great cities of the River Plate; to present an honest picture of the life that is being lived in them to-day, and to convey, in as interesting a manner as I know how, some general notion of the Republics of Argentine and Uruguay as they really are. I carefully avoid the official point of view, having studiously refrained from putting myself at any time under any obligation that might tend to make me echo an official opinion instead of stating that which I had honestly formed from personal and independent study.

J. A. H.