Ariel

A book-length essay by the Uruguayan critic, published in Montevideo in 1900 and dedicated to the youth of America. It is framed as the farewell lecture of an old teacher, Prospero, given to his students beside a bronze statue of Ariel, the airy spirit of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Ariel stands for reason, beauty and the higher life of the spirit; Caliban for sensuality and crude material interest. Prospero urges the young to keep their whole personality open, to protect a space of disinterested leisure for thought and art, and to resist a narrowly utilitarian idea of life. He accepts democracy but fears it may level everything to mediocrity unless it selects and honours real merit. His sharpest pages warn against 'nordomanía', the wish to copy the United States, whose energy he admires but whose culture he finds materialist. The essay inspired a movement, arielismo; later critics, notably Roberto Fernández Retamar in Caliban (1971), attacked its elitism and reversed its symbols.

It shows how Latin American intellectuals first defined their culture against the United States, and it remains a clear, elegant case for humanistic education against a purely practical view of life.