One of Fombona’s friends in old Spain, tells us how greatly Fombona is repelled by a commercial, highly mechanized civilization, because such things go against the grain of his exalted subjectivity, his belief in the spiritual elite. He says Fombona hates equally what he calls _Teutonic force_ and prosaic, Yankee-loving money-grubbing. And especially he hates democracies, because they are arbitrary, leveling, destructive of the aristocrat—_and North Americans_. _La Lámpara de Aladino_ might be termed the breviary of his prejudices. Somehow it makes me think—_The Man of Iron_—of youthful books by Turgéniev, such as _Father and Sons_, _Spring Floods_ ... all show drawing without obtruding outline. There is some similar spiritual quality in the minds that were creating. In his two novels, he is the equal of the great Russian. I like the sheer power of the man! His steel-sharp delineations are memorable. And it has some of the same kind of power as Balzac. The companion novel—_Man of Gold_, (_El Hombre de Oro_). The chapter in which the three old ladies take pitiful farewell of the grand home of their ancestors, the rich, many-roomed, ancient colonial mansion, with its courts, with its flowers, is a fine piece of writing. It moved me deeply. Not many see the world we are forced to live in as clearly as Fombona, with all the different parts in reasonable and logical relation, not to mention the fine flashing forth to others, the lifting power of vision, that dazzles, then creates. There is both grandeur and fury in the soul of Fombona. There was a short story writer in Venezuela-Caracas, in the late Eighties, whom I liked. Alejandro Fernandez Garcia. I am still on the watch for the short story of power. Hear this description of music from a story by Garcia. (Again I am translating and quoting from memory.) “They played a _joropo_. From the rough, coarse, toil-worn fingers there spread out across the sensitive chords of the instrument, the flower of Venezuelan music. A flower made of race-blood, old age and its dreams; music that had come from very far away, from the inexplainable melancholy of our Carib Fathers—music, indolent and brutal, love-lustful, and cruel; music dripping through the clear nights of tropic moons like tears down the black faces of fugitive women ... plaintive, filled with rebellion and energy, like flame of hatred across the fragile cane, then again thunderous, a fitting call of bronze for war across the spaces.... In the _joropo_ dwells the soul of our fatherland.... It is a sepulchre to guard the ashes of our dead.”