Soledad (1847)

 by Bartolomé Mitre (1821-1906)

Prologue

From the wording of the time

     We begin today to publish in our daily serial novel that we wrote in the little leisure time that drafting of a newspaper allows, and we offer it to the public as the first test we do in a genre of literature as difficult as little cultivated among us.

     South America is the world regions poorest of original novelists. If we tried to investigate the causes of this poverty, we would say that it seems that the novel is the highest expression of people civilization, like those fruits that arises only when the tree is in the fullness of its development.

     The lyrical or dithyrambic literary genres are for people the first articulate sounds are for children. The imagination of primitive men draws inspirations from the torrent noise, the rustling of the leaves, birds singing, the sun, moon, stars, in a word, from sound, light, and movement [II] that animates the universe and that hurts our senses as a great hymn that nature sings to its creator.

     The narrative comes only in a second age. Only then the poet use descriptions, and chroniclers and historians appear. The simple elements, of which society is composed, still can be depicted in this way, still can be explained and reflected as a whole with this genre. 

     When society is completed, civilization develops, the intellectual sphere widens then, and it is essential that a new form that brings together the various elements that make up people's lives when they reach a state of maturity. First comes the drama, and the novel comes later. The first is life in action; the second one is also life in action but explained and analyzed, life subjected to logic. It is a faithful mirror in which people contemplates as themselves, with their vices and such a sight, usually awakens deep meditation or teaches healthy lessons.

     There is no shortage, among us, of severe spirits that consider novels a waywardness of imagination, fictions unworthy to occupy the attention of thinking men. But we will ask them:
Aren´t novels the major works humanity is proud of? What are The Iliad and The Aeneid, but novels in verse? What are the Quixote and Gil Blas? What have Rabelais Rabelais, Rousseau, Cervantes, Richardson, Walter Scott , Cooper, Bulwer, Dickens, written  but novels? Is not their work the first in literature? Don´t their names shine among the first geniuses? Well, the first are novels, and second, novelists. Who will despise one or the other?

     Otherwise we agree that this genre has been mismanaged and degraded, so, it could have inspired boredom, but this is the product of lost and wanderings imagination that should not be attributed to the genre itself. Alongside those thousands of novels that dishonor literature, we have the great works of geniuses to bring honor it.

     That is why we want the novel to sink deep roots in the virgin soil of America. The people ignore their history, their customs recently formed have not been philosophically studied, and the ideas and feelings modified by political and social ways have not been presented in vivacious and animated forms, as copied directly from the society in which we live. The novel would popularize our history making use of the events of the conquest, the colonial period, and the memories of the war of independence. As Cooper in his Puritan and the Mouse did, novel would paint the original and unfamiliar customs of the various peoples of this continent, who are so prone to be poetic, and it would our societies be  known as they have been deeply shaken by misfortune, with so many great virtues and vices, being  interpreted also in the time of transformation, when the chrysalis becomes a bright butterfly. All this would make the novel, and it s the only form in which these various paintings can be presented as full of rich colors and movement.

     What has been stated above is in regard to the novel in general and to South America in particular. Now we will say a few words about our novel, which is like dealing with a grain of sand after talking to the sea.

     Soledad is a faint try that has no other object but encourage young capabilities to explore the rich mine of the American novel. Its action is very simple, and its characters are copied from american society in general. Barely the author could explain the moral idea that has been proposed, but if it is conceded that at the bottom of his work is any truth, it is also clear that there will be morale. He has wanted to rely more on the interplay of passions than in the multiplicity of events, always putting moral man above the physiological man. This was the main idea that guided him in his composition. His characters feel and think, rather than act. So the heroine is a woman who has a heart and feels and thinks; she has an intelligence that seeks happiness in life, she is weak as sometimes women are, her imagination sometimes goes astray as a human creature that she is. This is our story, and such is our heroine.

     By placing the scene in Bolivia, the author wants to make a public demonstration of his gratitude to this country which has welcomed him and where he has found some days of peace, exiled as he is from the place of his birth. [1 ]