INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION
Spain founded universities in America, where she exercised a true monopoly of ideas. The Revolution in her colonies was inspired by the doctrines of the French EncyclopÆdists. Since then—that is, during the whole of the nineteenth century—the metropolis has been losing the greater portion of her ancient intellectual privileges. Political and literary ideas, romanticism and liberalism, faith in reason and poetic enthusiasm, all these have been imported from France. It is interesting to study the results of this lasting influence in philosophy and letters.
CHAPTER I
POLITICAL IDEOLOGY
Conservatives and liberals—Lastarria—Bilbao—Echeverria—Montalvo—Vigil—The Revolution of 1848 and its influence in America—English ideas: Bello, Alberdi—The educationists.
The revolutionists of America hastily sought for an ideology which should ratify their victory. By virtue of French ideas they had demolished an ancient organisation, had thrown off the Spanish tyranny, and had exalted anarchy in speech and in verse. To raise future cities in the wilderness they had need of a political gospel.
They founded the Republic, imported institutions from abroad, and granted all the political liberties to an amorphous crowd. The first disputes were already audible between the defenders of the old order and the radicals who sought to destroy it; conservatives and liberals appeared at an identical moment of republican life. Militarism, revolutions, and the warfare of caudillos were in part explained by the profound differences between the champions of tradition and the soldiers of liberty.
Dominated by the need to live, these nations created a political philosophy. They disregarded criticism and analysis; they affirmed and constructed; they required a faith as intolerant as the archaic dogmas. Democracy and liberalism were the essential articles of this secular religion. To the eyes of the new orthodoxy the convictions of the monarchists and absolutists were dangerous heresies: royalists were prosecuted as free-thinkers had been of old. Thought was not divorced from action. It reflected the political unrest; it prepared or justified political transformations. A species of pragmatism was characteristic of American thought. Poetry was rhymed oratory, lyrical declamation; the poet condemned any form of civil autocracy; he execrated tyrants, or evoked ingenuous liberties; he could not conceive of pure thought as divorced from life. Alberdi, an Argentine thinker, wrote: "Philosophy is meant for politics, morality, industry, and history, and if it does not serve them it is a puerile and a trifling science." He condemned the analysis of the eighteenth century, which "dissolves and corrupts everything"; to vain ideology, to the question whether "ideas and sensations, memory and reminiscence are distinct faculties," he preferred "an Argentine philosophy in which are distilled the social and moral needs of our country; a clear, democratic, progressive, and popular philosophy, with ideas like those of Condorcet; human perfectibility, continual progress of the human species; a philosophy which inspires men with the love of country and the love of humanity."
The champions of liberalism defined the principles of the new social state; they were brilliant commentators, their subject being the ideas of French and Spanish philosophy. Their action in a society in which the old colonial prejudices were still triumphant was categorical and magistral. They created institutions and laws, and applied foreign doctrines to the troubles of the time. Sometimes they seemed inspired in the Biblical sense; they prophesied and condemned, as did Bilbao and Echeverria.
Lastarria, Bilbao, Montalvo, Vigil, and Sarmiento were the leading figures of this romantic period; with them intellectual activity was inseparable from politics. Lastarria and Bilbao opposed the authoritarianism of Chili; Montalvo and Vigil respectively, the clericalism of Ecuador and Peru; Sarmiento, the tyranny of Rosas. Their works were pamphlets, their theories were always practical: criticisms of contemporary reality, or constructive sketches of the State of the future.
Lastarria and Bilbao were the professors of liberalism in Chili. The liberalism of the first was tempered by the influence of Comte, and the study of philosophy and history; that of the second, indisciplined and prophetic, was eventually the bitter protest of a misunderstood evangelist.
Lastarria was the great Chilian reformer, as Bello was the prudent master who disciplined youth and defended tradition and the classic ideology. He was, like Bilbao, a pupil of Bello's, but to the conservative doctrines of the latter he opposed a generous liberalism. He was professor of legislation at the National Institute of Santiago from 1841, and from his professorial chair he criticised Chilian laws and prejudices. At first he followed Bentham in his lectures on constitutional law, and then the French liberals. He was influenced by Herder, by Edgar Quinet, a jurist and a disciple of Krause, and by Ahrens. Finally he accepted certain ideas of Comte's—for instance, the theory of the Three Estates—and endeavoured to reconcile his teaching with that of John Stuart Mill, Toqueville, and Laboulaye.
He believed, as did the romantics, in indefinite progress, liberty, universal harmony, and the power of man as against the inevitability of physical laws; in 1846 his political studies won the eulogy of Edgar Quinet. From a liberal standpoint he studied the evolution of Chili from the Conquest to the Republic.
In the defence of his political faith the professor intervened in the struggles of his country; academic dissertations did not satisfy him; he felt the need of action, of parliamentary agitation. As deputy and publicist he opposed the influence of Portales, the representative of the Chilian oligarchy, and the Constitution of 1833, that admirable piece of conservative legislation. "The State," said Lastarria, "has for its object the respect of the rights of the individual: there is the limit of its action." Portales, on the other hand, considered a strong central authority, a stern tutelage, to be a necessity in the South American republics, subject as they were to crises of anarchy. Liberty seemed to him a premature gift where the crowd was concerned. Lastarria opposed the positive work of the dictator by a vague idealism: liberty of conscience, of work, of association; an executive powerless to limit these liberties; municipal government, federation—such were the fundamental items of his propaganda. In the generality of American constitutions he disapproved of the vague definition of individual rights, the attributions of the public powers, the irresponsibility of these latter, and the amalgamation of colonial political forms with the administrative centralisation of the French rÉgime.
Two Presidents, Bulnes and Montt, from 1841 to 1861, continued the despotic system founded by Portales; against them the liberal professor commenced his magnificent campaign. He was exiled in 1850. He travelled, and continued to publish his political writings. He had studied Comte, Mill, and Toqueville, and he now completed his education in certain directions. His next book, Lessons in Positivist Politics (1874), applied the principles of the Positivist school to the evolution of South America and to Chilian history in particular. He studied the organisation of the powers of the State, of society, and government, and abandoned his former radicalism. He recognised the fact that where Catholicism is the religion of the majority (as in Chili) the State may protect the national Church while exercising the moderate supervision that is known as "patronage."
Lastarria influenced the destinies of Chili. At his death the liberals came into power, and politicians like Santa-Maria and Balmaceda, who supported liberal legislation, may be regarded as disciples of the author of Positivist Politics.
Lastarria was a politician, Bilbao an apocalyptic dreamer. He founded the "Society of Equality," which was a democratic club. A generous and radical nature, he criticised, in a celebrated article on Chilian Sociability (1844), "the tradition, the ancient authority, the faith, the servile customs, the national apathy, the dogma of blind obedience, the respect for the established order, the hatred of innovation, and the persecution of the innovator," which he deplored in his native country. He gave a pitiless analysis of Chilian prejudices, and studied the national problems—commerce, education, marriage, taxation, the functions of Church and State—and answered them in a democratic sense. He was accused of immorality, blasphemy, and sedition. He also attacked the Constitution of 1833, and the minister Montt could not forgive him for this liberal campaign. Ten years later Bilbao was exiled for his leanings toward anarchy, and in Paris he became acquainted with Quinet and Lamennais, the evangelists of his democratic faith. In 1880, on his return to Chili, he resumed his inflammatory courses.
Montalvo in Ecuador represented the same liberal effort as Bilbao and Lastarria. But this democrat had read Montaigne and Voltaire; he was a master of satire, irony, and sarcasm. His contradictory nature united Lamartine's faith in democracy with the scepticism of the eighteenth century. He was not a politician merely, but a man of letters. His wide culture was revealed by the multiple forms in which his intellectual activity found an outlet. As an essayist, by his lyrical disorder, he recalled Carlyle. His harsh criticism of the national clergy in La Mercurial Eclesiastica is as lively as an Italian conte. He imitated Cervantes with perfection; he could make a clever pastiche of Don Quixote. He knew his Byron, Milton, Lamartine, Racine, and the Latin and Spanish classics, and would have been the completest type of the humanist which the Latin New World has produced had not his restless spirit yielded too readily to the solicitations of politics.
In contrast to Garcia-Moreno, the Catholic dictator, Montalvo was the liberal free-lance; he could not forgive the caudillo his long tyranny, his intolerant faith, his submission to the Pope as a supreme monarch. The Ecuadorian polemist believed in liberty and the republic; he detested the theocracy implanted by the Christian President.
But his activities were not destructive; Montalvo was a believer in the manner of the revolutionists of 1848. "A sane and pure democracy has need of Jesus Christ," he wrote in his liberal enthusiasm; he loved Christianity because it was the religion of the democracy. Democracy would be the law of the nations "if some day the spirit of the Gospel were to prevail." He eulogised the stoicism and virtue of the Roman Republic, in the image of which he wished to construct the Chilian democracy, and in a magnificent essay he exalted the nobility of these qualities. He was not a radical like Bilbao; a forerunner of pragmatism, he accepted all useful ideas, even Catholicism, so that it did not become a political tyranny. "There is nothing to be gained by attacking certain beliefs," he wrote, "which by virtue of being general and useful to all will eventually become verities, even if the curious and courageous investigation of bygone things could constitute a motive for doubting them."
An American thinker, he applied Latin ideas to the affairs of the continent. In his Seven Treaties, his capital work, are some superb passages upon the heroes of South American emancipation. His cult was that of Carlyle, religious and full of lyrical passion. "In what is he inferior to the great men of antiquity?" he asks of Bolivar. "Only in this, that no long centuries flow between us, for only time, the great master, can distil in his magic laboratory the chrism with which the princes of nature are anointed." He traces a parallel between Bolivar and Napoleon, between Bolivar and Washington. "In Napoleon there is something more than in other men; a sense, a wheel in the mechanism of understanding, a fibre in the heart. He looks across the world from the Apennines to the Pillars of Hercules, from the pyramids of Egypt to the snows of Russia. Kings tremble, pallid, and half-lifeless; thrones crack and crumble; the nations look up and regard him and are afraid, and bend the knee before the giant." Montalvo admires Napoleon, but he judges Bolivar the superior, because the work of the former was destroyed by mankind, while the work of the latter still prospers. "He who realises great and lasting undertakings is greater than he who realises only great and ephemeral things."
Montalvo believed in the American race, in the mestizos, "in the high, lofty spirit and the stout heart which make the aristocracy of South America." His prophetic enthusiasm exalts the future inhabitants of America, "who will be our descendants when the traveller shall sadly seat himself to meditate upon the ruins of the Louvre, the Vatican, or St. Paul's." To his work of criticism of Garcia-Moreno and the clericals we must add this religious Americanism, this tenacious faith in the destinies of the democracy.
Without the lyric fervour of Montalvo, heavy and dusty as an ancient palimpsest, Vigil represents the struggle of Peruvian liberalism against the power of the Church. Born in 1792, he was a priest, and abandoned his calling, but without retaining, like Renan, the unction of the seminarist. A stoic in his life, the champion of liberty in several Congresses, he devoted his riper years to a long campaign against ecclesiastical privilege. His admirable erudition served him in this propaganda. He defended the State against the encroachments of the clergy. An idealist, he preached universal peace, the union of all American nations, and expounded the excellencies of the democracy, in whose Christian virtues he, like Montalvo, firmly believed. He won respect, as did Bilbao, by the austerity of his life and the sincerity of his exhortations: a Socratic master whose life was harmonious as a poem.
An Argentine thinker, genial and tumultuous, Sarmiento represented a liberalism less coherent than that of Echeverria, but as a champion of the ideal and the intellectual life in the democracy tyrannised over by Rosas he deserves to be placed beside Lastarria and Montalvo. Menendez Pelayo called him the gaucho of the Republic of Letters; for his pugnacious individuality, his barbaric impetuosity, and his semi-culture, which was mitigated by admirable intuition, were inimical to all classic order or discipline. Sarmiento was a romantic by temperament; he attacked Spanish culture in the name of French liberalism, and condemned tradition, which led to slavery; he believed in the virtuality of ideas, the mission of education, and the greatness of democracy. He applied to the United States for models of popular education, and for political examples of federal life. He was a teacher, a journalist, a pamphleteer, and a President.
He analysed Argentine life and the American revolutions; in 1845 he published El Facundo, an evocation of the Argentine civil wars, with all the passion and lyrical fervour of a Michelet. Sarmiento was the enemy of Rosas, as Montalvo was the eloquent rival of Garcia-Moreno. In El Facundo are pages of pitiless criticism of the tyranny of the federal caudillo. Exiled, he founded a review in Chili, in 1842, in which he still attacked Rosas, but he did not confine himself to ephemeral journalism. He discovered eternal elements in the battles of the time; he studied the American man and the American soil, as in the prologue to El Facundo. He then studied the racial problem, and in another book described the ideal republic of which he dreamed. His work is profoundly American.
American liberalism, between 1830 and 1860, was inspired by French ideas. One revolution, that of 1789, explained in part the movement for the conquest of political liberty. Another, that of 1848, found echoes even in these distant democracies, and disturbed them by the insinuating eloquence of a new gospel. A curious parallelism may be observed between the claims of French socialism and American radicalism.
In France the Revolution of 1848 had not only a political tendency, but also a social aspect. An extension of electoral capacity was desired, and the right to work was proclaimed; men fought for the sovereignty of the people, and workshops were founded in which the State assured the subsistence of the working-classes. While the republican parties were fighting against the monarchy of Louis Philippe, Icarians and Communists were preparing for the social revolution; the proletariat was rising against the bourgeoisie, as the Third Estate rose against the nobility of old. A note of equalitarian fervour was noticeable in the protest of the crowd. The leaders of the movement against Guizot and his oligarchy of property-owners were socialists: Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux, Blanqui, and Ledru-Rollin; they supplemented their democratic victories by a programme of social reform.
In Latin America the Revolution was chiefly political; it demanded the suffrage, equality before the law, and respect for political rights, and it condemned the excesses of authority. It did not forget to make a social protest, but the conflict of classes was not as yet very violent.
"The Revolution of 1848 was loudly echoed in Chili," wrote the historian VicuÑa-Mackenna. To combat the oligarchy the young Lastarria brothers, Bilbao, the Amunategui, the three Mattas, the three Blests, Santiago Arcos, and Diego Barros-Arana founded the "Society of Equality," a secret club, "to save the people from the shameful tutelage to which it has been subjected."[1]
This tutelage was more especially political; for this reason the club proclaimed democratic principles: the sovereignty of reason, the sovereignty of the people, and universal love and brotherhood. These young men opened schools for the people. Lillo published a translation of The Words of a Believer, by Lamennais, which served the radical circle for their Bible.
But the real master of the new generation in Chili and in the other democracies was Lamartine. "From 1848 to 1858 he was a demi-god, a second Moses," wrote a historian. The "young men" formed a commentary upon the History of the Girondists. They imitated the great figures of the French Revolution: Bilbao was Vergniaud; Santiago Arcos, Marat; Lastarria, Brissot. Societies were formed, congresses were held; one exalted group called itself The Mountain.
In Venezuela, in 1846, a demagogue by the name of Antonio Leocadio Guzman offered the people the abolition of slavery and the repartition of the soil; he led a revolution against society and the Government. In Colombia the liberal Constitution of 1853 was an echo of the French Revolution of 1848, and democratic clubs were formed as in Chili. They ruled the country by means of terror, were predominant in the journals, and propagated socialism and hatred of the oligarchy of property-owners and the omnipotent clergy. The liberals evoked Christ as the first democrat, whence the faction known as Golgotha. Anarchy increased in the provinces. Bishops and conservative notabilities were pursued, the Jesuits were expelled, and in 1851 the slaves were freed. A discontent of long standing was revealed by the activities of these eloquent revolutionaries, who imitated, like the Chilian Girondists, the French politicians of the Revolution.
"Democracy," Lamartine had said in 1848, "is, in principle, the direct reign of God." His ideal was an equalitarian Republic. His political ideas were drawn from the New Testament; he saw in the French Revolution "a Divine and holy thought." Charity, the protection of the disinherited, equality, and fraternity—in short the whole democratic creed—was merely the application of Christian ideas to the world of politics. Lamartine wrote in defence of all the liberties, and wished the Government to be "an instrument of God." We can understand what enthusiasm this eloquence, impregnated as it was with idealism and the love of humanity, must have produced in America; we find the accents of Lamartine echoed in the words of Montalvo as well as Bilbao. Anarchy presently became a sort of mystic rebellion against tyrants. Throughout all South America Lamartine and the Revolution of 1848 inspired men's speech or writings, and engendered revolutions or fresh tyrannies.
The influence of France was sovereign. The influence of Guizot and the doctrinaires must be added to that of Lamartine. English ideas also were prevalent; Bentham was the great authority on political science from the earliest years of the Republic; at his death the Central American Congress, which had followed his teaching, proclaimed a period of mourning. In Colombia General Santander quoted against Bolivar phrases inspired by English radicalism and by Destutt de Tracy. Bentham harshly criticised the Contrat Social of Rousseau, and his pretended "natural rights"; policy he based upon the happiness of the greatest number. Tracy professed a moderate relativism, and utilitarian ideas, like Bentham. Bolivar, unlike these professors of individualism, believed in the benefits of a moral dictatorship.
Bello again represented English thought, not only in his philosophical work, but also in his writings as jurist. He was, like the classic legislators, the creator of the written law. His civil code, promulgated in Chili in 1855, served other nations as a model, and his Law of Nations became the international law of South America. He was born into the world for the purpose of pouring language as well as law into logical moulds. In his legislative work he displayed a severe analysis, a British prudence, and a constant recognition of social realities. He hated the vague and the nebulous, and liked to express his ideas in clear, concrete formulÆ; he brought to the solution of social problems a solid common sense.
Alberdi also adopted British methods and ideas. In France he especially admired Guizot, and distrusted Lamartine. He attacked the sterile intellectualism of his fellow-Americans, and wrote in defence of Protestantism, a religion peculiarly appropriate to republics on a Catholic continent. He believed in the English constitutional monarchy, in the benefits of technical schools, and in the disastrous effects of a parasitical scholarship; he preferred strong governments, like that of Chili, and detested demagogues. "The Republic," he wrote, "has been and is still the bread of Presidents, the trade of soldiers, the industry of lawyers without causes, and journalists without talent; the refuge of the second-rate of every species, and the machine for the amalgamation of all the dross of society." Such was his verdict on the political system of South America.
He called for a monarchy as the only salvation of the country: "thus the Republics might unite themselves to Europe, whence their riches and their civilisation derive, and resist the monopoly of North America." From European influence he hoped to obtain not only culture, but also the consecration of political independence. He begged the Old World for emigrants, for capital, and for princes. In an admirable volume published in 1858 he analysed the "bases" of the Argentine organisation. This book was no Latin gospel; with the "relativity" of an Anglo-Saxon he proposed practical solutions; he ascribed supremacy to population, strong governments, laborious immigrants, and industrial wealth; he disdained the ideology of the revolutionists, and their implacable Jacobinism. His effort may be compared to that of Burke in his criticism of the French Revolution. Amid the sterile enthusiasm of romantic politicians his book stands out, in its gravity, sobriety, common sense, and realism, like a lesson for all time.
Other American conservatives were Lucas Alaman, leader of the Mexican conservatives and author of a fine history of his country; Bartolome Herrera, a follower of Guizot, in Peru; Cecilio Acosta, in Venezuela: these were in agreement with Alberdi upon certain points of his ample doctrine. Like the Argentine, Acosta wished to see more elementary and secondary schools and fewer universities, to find "practical knowledge replacing a parchment scholarship; free speech and thought the fetters of the peripatetic school; and generalisation, casuistry." The jurists obeyed the same tendency; they were positive and analytic spirits; they brought clarity and discipline to an incoherent politics. Among them we may cite, after Bello, Calvo, Garcia Calderon, Velez Sarsfield, and Ambrosio Montt. They opposed the ineffectual Constitutions of the precisians.
Liberal idealism vanquished conservative good sense. Lastarria attracted impetuous youth more than Bello and Alberdi; Guizot had few readers; Lamartine and Benjamin-Constant were popular. Liberalism, radicalism, Jacobinism: these were the various disguises of South American anarchy.
CHAPTER II
THE LITERATURE OF THE YOUNG DEMOCRACIES
Spanish classicism and French romanticism—Their influence in America—Modernism—The work of Ruben Dario—The novel—The conte or short story
The ancient Spanish colonies, freed from the political authority of Spain, still followed her in the matter of literature; republican autonomy and intellectual subjection were not incompatible. Towards 1825 writers in prose and verse were by no means imitating France, although she gave them her declamatory politics and her revolutionary code. Educated in Spain, the best minds were seeking their inspiration in the Spanish literature of the eighteenth century: the works of the classic Quintana, of Moratin, Gallego, Lista, and Jovellanos dominated the American schools.
A lasting divorce, this of a romantic politics and a classic literature. When letters were invaded by romanticism, with its lyric lamentations, a sane realism—the realism of men preoccupied with finances or laborious codifications—struggled against the swamping waves of all this rhetoric. Literary forms, long out of fashion in France and even in Spain, still aroused enthusiasm in America; the American author adopted the realism of the naturalistic novel when the French schools were already given over to symbolism, and at a later date he became first a modernist and then a decadent, while in France a classic restoration had set in. To the real current of European literature South America has preferred ephemeral excesses, and the work of coteries, which she has imitated with enthusiasm. It is barely ten years since South American letters began to reflect—curiously behind the times—the direction taken by French poetry. The literature of the new continent, to-day invaded by books and ideas, follows a path parallel to that followed by French and Spanish letters. Every novelty finds an echo, and the very diversity of imitation ought before long to give rise to a final originality.
Poets, both romantic and classic, threw themselves into the social conflicts of the time; whence that kinship between poetry and eloquence, already recognised by BrunetiÈre in France.[1] In American poetry we find the civic accent, eulogies of liberty, odes to civilisation and the mother-country, rather than elegies or "states of soul." TyrtÆus would be popular there rather than Anacreon; BÉranger would be imitated rather than De Musset. Classicism thus takes the form of a civic poetry; calm and mannered, it sings of political subjects, of progress, independence, and the victories of liberty over theocracy.
In Mexico, Ecuador, and the Argentine, the first generation of republican poets were incontestably disciples of the master of the Spanish masters—Quintana, whose grave and virile odes exalted the printing-press, philanthropy, and progress: new deities erected by the French Revolution upon the ancient altars. His emphasis, the movement of his verse, and the breath of oratory which enlivens his stanzas, charmed and subjugated the writers oversea. Liberty, so barely conquered, gave birth to a poetry which sang of heroes and of battles. Ideas and forms were inspired by Quintana; their best eulogy is comparison with their model. Thus Olmedo, the second poet of this classic age, is known as the American Quintana.
Those who acclaimed the Revolution in Mexico also were disciples of the Spanish poet; republican orators in verse, Quintana Roo or Sanchez del Tagle, who describe the heroes of the War of Independence. An eminent poetess, Salome UreÑa de Henriquez, of San Domingo, sang of civilisation and the native land with a most austere and noble eloquence.
A political poet again, Juan Cruz, of Argentina, gracefully proclaimed the glory of the Unitarian party and that of the reformer Rivadavia.
The contemporary writers of the Revolution did not forget the instruction received in Spain, in the universities of the eighteenth century, where they studied in Latin and commented upon the classics of Greece and Rome. They read and imitated Horace and Virgil, and were inspired by the ancient democracies, and the heroes of Plutarch; the Isthmus of Panama was compared to that of Corinth. At their birth the Republics appointed consuls and triumvirs. In speeches and proclamations of the time we find numerous classical reminiscences; politicians and poets borrowed their images from Pindar, Horace, Homer, and Virgil.
The influence of the classics and of Quintana is especially to be remarked in Olmedo, the poet of Ecuador, who chanted the victory of Junin and the genius of Bolivar. The movement of his verses is that of a Latin ode, while the eloquence, sonority, and graceful progression of his stanzas recalls the Spanish classics.
The Venezuelan lyrist Bello, a true humanist, was inspired by Virgil, and attained a truly classic perfection.
But Quintana was not alone in serving as model to the lost colonies; others, the fiery Gallego, and Moratin, the author of delightful comedies; a critic, Alberto Lista; Melendez, Cienfugos, and Martinez de la Rosa, cultivators of a correct, elegant, and frigid form, were also imitated, and the imitators could not free themselves from their impoverished classicism. Olmedo (1780) and Bello (1781) were both masters of metre, taste, and harmony. It is not easy in their case to separate the politician from the artist, they themselves considering their art to be a high republican function; Olmedo counsels federation in his Canto À Junin, and JosÉ Eusebio Caro attacks the tyrant Lopez in a poem upon liberty, while Felipe Pardo writes political satires. Of the American democracies he says:
"Zar de tres tintas, indio, bianco y negro,
Que rige el continente americano
Y que se llama Pueblo Soberano."[2]
Towards 1840 classicism gave way to romanticism. The Revolution, the protest of individualism against the Spanish rule, disdained the old literary canons, having first condemned the old political system. The poets, still numerous, sought models in Spain. Arolas, Espronceda; Zorilla, the Duke de Rivas; and in France, Victor Hugo, de Musset, and Lamartine. Byron, too, had his disciples. All were romantic in life and work, pilgrims À la Childe Harold, who described ChÂtiments and were persecuted for liberty. Disorderly, imperfect, dominated by an inward dÆmon who produced a continual exaltation, they portrayed the constant restlessness of their spirits. Romanticism in Europe was the triumph of the individual, of liberty, the lyrical poetry of confessions—the melancholy of RenÉ or the satanic pride of Manfred—the revenge, in short, of sentiment against reason. In art this stood for liberty, the cult of the exotic, the return to nature, the Gothic restoration, and war upon classic conventions.
Which among these elements could give the new generation in South America that enthusiasm which might evoke a romantic state of mind? Certainly not the national antiquities, remote and misunderstood. Although a few poets wrote Orientales without much sincerity, none sought to renew his lyrical gifts in the Aztec or Quechua traditions. But this imitation of the tendencies of French and Spanish letters was assisted by the lack of discipline found in the American character, which was more attracted by idealism and sentiment than by classic rigidity or reason. All things favoured romanticism; the political conflicts and the anarchy of the time formed Byronic heroes; tropical passion found its food in the sentimentalism of Lamartine and the ardour of De Musset, while the individual was developed by struggling against the tyrants. In the uncertain and barbaric life of these young democracies there was a confusion of rÔles; the poet became the vates, the leader of the crowd, only to feel himself exiled among mediocrities, the victim of illiterates. Melancholy, exasperated individualism, the high mission of the poet, and solitude—these are romantic elements which are reflected in American literature.
The Colombian Caro believed in the "consoling mission" of the poet, and this mission, for the Argentine Andrade, was a priesthood and a prophetic gift. The poet appears "when the human caravan changes its route in the desert." But as a result of this mission Nemesis inflicts solitude and suffering. The South American poets abandon the world as a result of their despair:—
"SufrirÁs el martirio
Que al naciÓ poeta
Reserva el hado impÍo,"[3]
sings the Argentine Echeverria.
And Marmol:—
"Yo vivo solamente cuando feliz deliro
Que los terrenos lazos mi corazÓn rompiÓ.
. . . . .
Venid porque yo gozo yo vivo solamente
Si pienso que he dejado la humanidad detras."[4]
The Peruvian Salaverry contemplates his heart:—
"Cual la ruina de un templo silencioso
VacÍo, abandonado, pavoroso,
Sin luz y sin rumor."[5]
JosÉ Eusebio Caro, who has sung of liberty in admirable strophe, would hide himself in the forest:—
"Que los hombres ya me niegan
Una tumba en sus ciudades
En mi patria me expulsaron
De la casa de mis padres."[6]
These romantics were not, like Rousseau, inclined toward the simple life by an excess of artificial civilisation. Their melancholy, when it is not an echo of exotic griefs, is the cry of anguish of a noble mind lost in a barbarous republic. This contrast between the man and his surroundings very clearly explains the strong hold obtained by the romantic ideal; the literature of passion, pride, and revolt, it expresses a social condition of inner conflict and solitude.
The Argentine, Marmol, imitates Byron in his Pilgrim. Grandiloquent, passionate, and mournful, he curses the tyranny of Rosas. Echeverria, under a classic mantle, barely hides his romantic subjectivity, full of passion and a vague melancholy. In Venezuela Heriberto Garcia de Quevedo left a legacy of prodigiously long poems.
In Cuba Gertrudis Gomez de Avellanada, wearied and lyrical, exalted love in the accents of De Musset; the mulatto Placido wrote musical descriptive verse; Juan Clemente Zenea, translator of Leopardi and Longfellow, confessed, in musical elegiac verse, his disabused outlook upon life; and greater than any, HÉrÉdia, the singer of Niagara, a fiery, suffering spirit, full of contrasts as his art, tells us of his sorrow and his faith; he sings of love and nature in beautiful imagery, admiring both the divine might and the intoxicating sensuality of the tropics.
In Mexico Espronceda and Lamartine inspired Fernando Calderon and Ignacio Rodriguez Galvan; Zorilla found a disciple in Manuel Flores, the poet of burning sensuality and savage nature. Brazil, as fruitful of romantics as Cuba, produced Gongalvez Diaz, who sang of the melancholy and nostalgia so well expressed by a word in his own tongue—saudades;—of sorrow, deliverance by knowledge, and the consolation of tears:—
"Men Deus, senhor men Deus, o que ha no mundo
Que nÃo seja soffrir?
O homen nasce, e vive um so instante
E soffre atÉ morrir!"[7]
In his love poetry there is a very, beautiful sincerity, although we may recognise the influence of many masters—Byron, Zorilla, and the French romantics. Cited by him, this line of Saint-Beuve's:—
"Mon Dieu, fais que je puisse aimer!"[8]
enables us to understand his plaints.
Casimiro de Abrou also essayed romantic subjects: solitude, misery, and exile. Alvares de Azevedo imitated Byron and De Musset, while a poet who did not versify, JosÉ de Alencar, expounded in his tales and novels a romantic conception of the Indian, simple and virtuous as one of Rousseau's characters.
We find this conception again in the work of a great poet of Uruguay, Zorilla de San Martin, who in TabarÉ sang the struggles of the greedy conquerors and the ingenuous Americans.
Romanticism was not with these men merely a matter of art; their lives were no less troublous and lyrical than their poetry. Rebels and nomads, thirsting for democratic liberty, they were wasted in the struggle with tyrants, or sent early to the scaffold or into exile, as though fate respected the unity of their troubled career. Thus these disciples of Lamartine, imaginative and sensual, vehement and melancholy in their art, gave a sombre yet vivid colouring to a period of American history, the years between 1840 and 1860.
Andrade was conspicuous among all for his sonorous eloquence; he was the greatest by virtue of the oratory, wealth, and ambitious grandeur of his poems, vast compositions which recall the LÉgende des siÈcles, the Prometheus of Shelley, or the Ahasuerus of Edgar Quinet. Doubtless he is not the equal of his masters. But devoid of melancholy and restless passion, his rhetoric, his verbal wealth, and his sybilline accents exercised a powerful influence. Repeating the grandiloquent excesses of Hugo, he was the poet of democracy and the Latin race.
His Atlantide is the Latin future; Prometheus the eternal battle of thought and fanaticism. He is full of Spanish arrogance. Marvellously sonorous, his stanzas proclaim, with pomp and majesty, a romantic faith in America and liberty. The soul of Rome "destined to inaugurate history and embrace space," lives again beyond the ocean; Spain was the heir at first, until she choked beneath the "enervating shadow of the Papacy." France,
"Montana en cuya cumbre
Anida el genio humano,"[9]
was now the leading Latin nation, and Napoleon the instrument of the ancient imperial spirit. His sword
"Que sobre el mapa de la Europa absorta
TrazÓ fronteras, suprimiÓ desiertos
Y que quizÁs de recibir cansada
El homenaje de los reyes vivos,
FuÁ Á demandar en el confin remote,
El homenaje de los reyos muertos."[10]
Andrade believed in the sacred rÔle of the poet: Hugo, his admired master,
"La voz de trueno del gran profeto hebreo
La cuerda de agrios tonos
De Juvenal
Y el rumor de los cantos
Del viejo Gibelino,"[11] seemed to him prophet and forerunner, martyr and exile. The poet, seer, and leader of men, is thus
"Hermano de las Águilas del CÁucaso
Que secaron piadosas con sus alas
La ensangrentada faz de Prometeo."[12]
Lyric scholars in these troublous republics, the romantics sought to ennoble politics by a generous idealism, to overthrow the tyrants, and realise an impossible democracy.
French naturalism and the Parnassian school had little influence in Latin America. Although Zola enjoyed a strange popularity—which corresponds, in the literary world, to the enthusiasm of the Trans-atlantic universities for materialism and positivism—we meet with few imitations of Germinal or La Terre. The American writers have not assimilated the naturalistic methods, their brutal and minute observation, their study of the crowd, and their intentional pessimism; they have hardly read the masters of the realistic school, Balzac and Flaubert. Only during the last twenty years have Maupassant, the Portuguese novelist EÇa de Queiros, d'Annunzio, and the great Russian writers interested and disturbed the American reader. The love of the novel is but gradually dislodging the old lyric enthusiasm.
CLÉMENTE PALMA. Peruvian essayist and novelist. RICARDO PALMER.
CLÉMENTE PALMA.
Peruvian essayist and novelist.
RICARDO PALMER.
The Parnassian movement, in America, produced the Argentine poet Leopoldo Diaz. He adapted to Spanish verse the sonority, the relief, and the plastic beauty of the French masters. One of his poems is dedicated in homage to the poet of the Sonnets, to his incomparable model, JosÉ-Maria de HÉrÉdia. Diaz sought to give his native Spanish, the language of eloquence, a Parnassian inevitability, and to mould its rhetorical abundance to the narrow limits of the sonnet. Les sombras de Hellas invokes the Greek life, sensual and luminous; Les conquistadores the thunderous epic; and all his optimistic songs speak of a Latin renaissance in the overseas democracies.
An absorbing taste for symbolism and the decadents, for "deliquescent" poetry and the work of the small Parisian cliques, has produced an intensely vital intellectual movement—modernism—which, by its wealth of language and ideas and the renewed vitality of its language, signifies a true renaissance. Beside it the old classic and romantic movements seem lukewarm imitations which pale before the exuberance of more modern work.
Modernism is undoubtedly an adequate diet for Transatlantic Latins. But is this decadent renaissance better inspired than the passion and the eloquence of yesterday? Is it also an indication of servitude? By no means; the great poets have retained a robust belief in life, and their master, Ruben Dario, followed his Prosas profanas by his Songs of life and hope.
The younger generation was drawn to this art by purely psychological motives. The Spanish character had become refined by its new environment; weakened, perhaps, but it had gained a keener intelligence and a greater wealth of fantasy. Chiaroscuro and subtle shades, such as the French delight in, delighted the Creole also, partial as he was to finesse, to a delicate Byzantism, and gracefully sceptical of the robust Spanish faith. Then there were hosts of half-castes, in whom the inimical heredities of two races were in painful conflict. The strangest characteristics—the sensuality of the negro and the melancholy of the Indian—gave the new race a spiritual personality full of contradictory characteristics; melancholy but not without optimism; the desires of a faun or a satyr, violent or languid; and a love of the rare and unusual, of verbal music, of complication in the matter of feeling, of carefully chosen language and unfamiliar rhythms. Reading Verlaine, Samain, Laforgue, MorÉas, Henri de RÉgnier, and not as yet forgetting Gautier and Banville; mingling all cults and asking intoxication from every flagon, the poets of America have struck the national chord. Symbolism has been of little assistance; it calls for a lofty conception of the world and a profound sense of mystery. They much prefer decadence in art, because of its musical lyric quality, its exotic images, and its melancholy rhythms. An elective affinity, to use Goethe's phrase, has enabled them to draw an individual music from the foreign instrument.
So new metres and old fashions refurbished, modern images in sonorous and tortuous measures, all that in Europe was the voice of ennui, the tardy fruit of a world grown old, a Baudelairian art, the art of refined scepticism, was made to serve a young generation in love with life for the expression of its ambitions. This reform has reached Spain; the initiate has captivated the initiator, as in the drama of Renan. The recent voices of Spanish poetry follow that of the pontiff of the new school, Ruben Dario. Similarly Brazil has influenced Portuguese poetry, and, according to Theophilo Braga, surpasses it.
German and French romanticism revived the old forgotten chansons de geste, the despised poetry of the Gothic school; they charmed by the rude naturalism of the primitive legends. Similarly the modernists of America have renewed Spanish literature by listening to the ingenuous voice of Berceo and the more melancholy accents of Manrique. The result is that they are more traditionalist than the classic writers of the seventeenth century, whose intolerance so impoverished the language.
This renaissance is of barely twenty years' date. Certain forerunners—Marti and Julien del Casal, both Cubans, one a revolutionary in politics as in poetry, the other a man of tragic life, and Gutierrez Najera in Mexico—revealed the new poetic speech to a continent weary of sentimentalism. New or unfamiliar rhythms and agile metres were the vehicle of a new and intimate lyrical passion. But the note was not as yet decadent: Banville and Gautier, and De Musset, even, had not yet given way to Verlaine, who was as unknown as MallarmÉ. A Venezuelan critic, Pedro Emilio Coll, drew attention to the persistent cult among the "American decadents," of the great Theodore, and of the author of Funambulesques. In the Azul of Ruben Dario he noted the influence of MendÈs and Loti, even that of Daudet and the realists of his school, rather than the influence of symbolism.[13]
By the vivacity and brilliance of his verse, Manuel Guttierrez NÁjera reminds one of Banville. He sings in a new key, at once Creole and exotic, the complicated sensations which are presently to torment Ruben Dario. Spanish verse had never yet held such grace and spirit, nor this sensuality appeased by tears, nor this proud and reserved melancholy. A Cecilia, Vidas Muertas, Castigadas, Mariposas—these contained a new lyric poetry, elegiac and tender, an unknown rhythm, a forgotten manner. He was a forerunner. Who does not know his lines upon the spoiled child whom he loves?
"No hay en el mundo mujer mas linda!
PiÉ de Andaluza, boca de guinda,
Esprit rociado de Veuve Cliquot,
Talle de avispa, cutis de ala,
Ojos traviesos de colegiala,
Como los ojos de Louise ThÉo."[14]
He is not always so frivolous. Mystery torments him; he knows the bitterness of vanished illusions; a pessimist, he has a vision of the moths of death "which have such black wings, and encircle us in a funereal round." The monologue of the unbeliever is a lament like that of Sigismond de Calderon upon the vanity of life:—
"Si es castigo ¿ cual pecado,
Sin saberlo, cometimos?
Si premio ¿ porque ganado?
Sin haberlo demandado,
Responded ¿ porquÉ vivimos?"[15]
Poems and chronicles are filled with a like restlessness and trouble. He writes Odes worthy of an anthology; he translates De Musset and Coppee. His master is Gautier: he shares his love of the light; he sings, in love with ideal whiteness:—
"¿ QuÉ cosa mÁs blanca que cÁndido lirio?
¿ QuÉ cosa mÁs pura que mÍstico cirio?
¿ Que cosa mas casta que tierno azahar?"[16]
The modernism of South America was inspired firstly by the Parnassian school of France, which did not until later give place to the new voice, symbolist or decadent. Verlaine, Samain, and Laforgue were then the chief models; but beneath the current of imitation a movement was forming which was more and more original, a great school of verse, the leading note of which was refinement. "We owe to foreign literatures, and more particularly to the French," says a writer already cited, "the refinement of the organs necessary to the interpretation of beauty; we owe to them our methods of observation and our love of impressions, rather than any kind of co-ordinated Æsthetic perspective.... Our eyes have learned from them to see better, and our minds to gather fugitive sensations."
No writer represents this evolution, this progressive refinement, better than Ruben Dario, a poet of Central America (of Nicaragua), the recognised master of the new school and one of the greatest lyric writers of all time in the Spanish language. He is to America what Verlaine and Hugo are to France. His images, his phrases even, excite a servile imitation. A noble band of disciples aspires to continue his immortal work. He denies his disciples: "He who shall slavishly follow my track will lose his treasure, and, whether page or slave, will not be able to hide his livery." But in vain: ardent youth listens and lays its votive offerings at the feet of the great and disdainful artist.
His poetic reform was effectual in the extreme. He renewed the youth of archaic metres, adapted French rhythms to Spanish verse, and modified, with perfect taste, the classic division of the line of verse—the place of the cÆsura. With equal mastery he has employed slow and majestic measures to interpret the melancholy of the flesh, or the dancing metres of Banville, or plastic forms of a Hellenic perfection. He seems to make his own the cry of Carducci: Odio l'usata poesia.
Modern Spanish poetry used often to employ verses of eight and eleven syllables, forms to which a certain rhetorical pomp very readily allies itself. An interpreter of new ideas, Dario would not, like the French poet, accept old forms; he employed lines of ten and twelve syllables, adopted the pentameter and hexameter of the classics, and employed verses of fourteen and sixteen syllables.[17] He displaced accents, and wrote admirable vers libres. A revolutionary, in ten years he had transformed Spanish poetry.
Prosas Profanas, published in 1900, is, according to the phrase of his incomparable critic, JosÉ Enrique Rodo, "the full tension of his poet's bow." From the paradoxical title to the wealth of metre, all is strange in this delicate piece of work, which opens a new literary cycle, as did Emaux et CamÉes or Fleurs du mal in France. The originality of the book comes from the poet's prodigious faculty of recognising in each school what is essential to him, and in appropriating it, without, therefore, ceasing to be personal. A lyric unrest carries him to one manner or another, but, archaic or modern, it becomes his own. His grace, suppleness, and learned complexity are unequalled; he will write a Symphony in Gris Majeur like Gautier, or poems in the manner of Verlaine, or a Chant an Centaure in the manner of Maurice de Guerin. His work is not built of imposing granite, but of many coloured marbles, with strange and decadent shades, such as the chiseller of the CamÉes loved.
RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA (VENEZUELA). Contemporary poet, novelist, and thinker.
RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA (VENEZUELA).
Contemporary poet, novelist, and thinker.
His verse possesses at once the sensuality of a faun, the distinction of a marquis of the Grand SiÈcle, and the disenchantment of a mystic. No form, no period can arrest his wandering spirit:—
"Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo,
Boton de pensamiento que busca ser la rosa."[18]
In the presence of love, art, and life he experiences an enthusiasm which quickly vanishes; he discovers the final melancholy of all things. He knows, with the Roman, the sadness that lurks in human joys: quod in ipsis floribus angit.
But before singing his autumnal bitterness of heart he sings of nature, of ancient civilisations, of the art of all ages, and of the pageantry of life.
Dario is the leader of a school, but other poets, as great as he, may be regarded as the precursors of literary "modernism": JosÉ AsunciÓn Silva, Leopoldo Lugones, Guillermo Valencia, Rufino Blanco Fombana—the latter, like Almafuerte, Chocano, and the Lugones of the "Hills of Gold," seeks to be the poet of the new America. These writers aim at an American art, an art free from rhetorical clichÉs, innocent of imitation, of declamation, of affected sensibility. Who shall say whether the revolt of this younger generation will lead it? Angel de Estrada is the poet of the exotic in his Alma nomade; Guillermo Valencia, as great as Dario in the exegesis of the legends of Greece and the love of things Hellenic, has a universal curiosity and an astonishingly versatile lyrical capacity. Rufino Blanco Fombana has sung of sensual passion, the hatred of tyrants, and the glories of Bolivar; he has remodelled the lyric, has written verses as finely chiselled as the gems of the Greek anthology, and sonorous lines in which we hear a call to action and to victory. Chocano aspires to become the poet of America: grandiloquent, sonorous, rich in imagery. Lugones is a much admired author of sentimental verse, audacious as to form and vocabulary. JosÉ Asuncion Silva was noted for his melancholy, languorous verse: he was a forerunner, a master, like Dario. Ricardo Jaimes Freire employs the more audacious metres; Amado Nervo, equally radical in his love of new forms, exhibits a modernism touched by a breath of Buddhistic pantheism, and sings of "Sister Water" like a modern St. Francis.
Essayists of the English type are numerous in America. They import European ideas, freely discuss the great problems of existence. If they apply themselves to the criticism of letters, they discover general ideas; in place of minute analysis they write artistic commentaries. JosÉ Enrique Rodo, of Uruguay, is the master in this department of literature. He has published an essay on Dario, and his two books, Motivos de proteo, a collection of essays of great beauty, and Ariel, a noble address to the youth of South America, have become classics. There are other critics as brilliant: Manuel Ugarte, at once thinker and artist, writer of short stories, poet, ideologist, and the author of a remarkable book dealing with the future of South America; the Colombian, Sanin Cano, who treats of ideas; two Argentines, Emilio Becher, who writes admirable analyses of ideas and books, and Ricardo Rosas, who is, by reason of his nationalism and his wide culture, the master of the rising generation; two Venezuelans, Manuel Diaz Rodriguez and Pedro Emilio Coll, the first a noble idealist and prose artist, the second a dreamer, who has been influenced by the sceptical irony of Renan; the Peruvian, Manuel Gonzala Prada, whose aggressive and sonorous style reveals a lofty moral unrest: in his essay on life and death are pages which Guyau might have signed, and his study of Castelar is a magnificent satire; JosÉ de la Riva AgÜero, a historian, a critic, and a polemist of unusual vigour; in San Domingo a powerful mind with an extraordinary knowledge of literatures, classic and foreign, Pedro Henriquez UreÑa; while in Uruguay, Carlos Reyles has just proved by his book, La Mort da Cygne, his acquaintance with all the new ideas and his ability to make a powerful synthesis of them. Two Brazilian essayists, Oliveira Lima (also a great historian) and JosÉ Verissimo have written remarkable studies of civilisations and books.
MANUEL UGARTE (ARGENTINA). Contemporary poet, novelist, and essayist.
MANUEL UGARTE (ARGENTINA).
Contemporary poet, novelist, and essayist.
The short story, neglected by the romantics, is being revived. Modernism, having already transformed poetry, has brought to the conte a subtlety in the analysis of the passions and a knowledge of psychology that refuses to take alarm at problems of morbid obscurity, and the indispensable quality of concentration of interest. Machado de Assis is a master of powerful analysis, and a sober and ironical style; his vision of life is melancholy. Diaz Rodriguez has written some superb short stories. An evocation or a symbol places those of Carlos Reyles of Uruguay on a plane far above that of the ordinary romance. Two other writers of the younger generation, Attilio Chiappori and Clemente Palma, hailing respectively from Argentine and Peru, have introduced a new Æsthetics into the short story; the latter seems to show the influence of Hoffmann and Poe, but his examples of the macabre are none the less powerfully original; while Chiappori, a physician and alienist, loves the states of twilight phases of a mind which is tottering on the verge of reason. Borderland tells us of this vague territory in a sinuous, and, in America, hitherto unfamiliar style.
A great Peruvian writer, Ricardo Palma, has created a department of literature, that of tradition, which partakes equally of the nature of history, and the romance, and the conte. He has described in a sumptuous style the life of the old Spanish colonies, devout and sensual; the traditions of a cultivated community, the city of Lima. His subtle irony, his joyous and somewhat licentious narrative, often remind us of M. Anatole France and the Italian story-tellers.
In Latin America are published not only exquisite examples of the conte, but also novels in which the study of society and the analysis of the mind are not overlooked. Among others may be cited El Hombre de Hierro, by Rufino Blanco Fombona, a Venezuelan; Canaan, by the Brazilian, GraÇa Aranha; La Gloria de don Ramiro and RedenciÓn, by the Argentine writers Enrique Rodriguez Larreta and Angel de Estrada; Idolos Rotos and Sangre Patricia, by Diaz Rodriguez, whose high talent as a writer of short stories we have already praised; La Raza de Cain, by Carlos Reyles, so remarkable, also, for his essays and his tales.
Blanco Fombona possesses irony, the gift of telling a story, a rich descriptive talent, ease of dialogue, and a power of forcible scene-painting. A novelist by temperament, he has written the biography of a representative Creole, the lamentable type created by environment, for whom love and life reserve their most terrible cruelties. A scrupulous employÉ, neither strong nor cunning, he is the product of the languorous tropical life; this "man of iron" is the symbol of all the weaknesses. And about this life is all the monotony of a small city, civil war, the secret hatred of Creoles and foreigners, the superannuated grace of the Spanish manner and the Spanish pomp—in short, the whole of a little seething world.
Canaan is the romance of the promised land, of fertile Brazil, where the blonde immigrant and the half-breeds of every shade compete for the bounty of a prodigal Nature. This long struggle is the dramatic interest of the book; its beauty lies in its magnificent descriptions of the tropics; the language of GraÇa Aranha is full of harmonious poetry. Angel de Estrada is one of the most cultivated spirits of America. Traveller (is not one of his books entitled Ame Nomade?), novelist, and poet, he distils in his books the quintessence of long meditation and infinite reading. His novel RedenciÓn is the work of a humanist; civilisations, arts, beliefs, all pass before us, evoked by the hand of a master. A subtle and rich vocabulary serves him to give life to his ideas and resuscitate the life of dead cities.
RICARDO ROJAS (ARGENTINA). Contemporary poet and essayist.
RICARDO ROJAS (ARGENTINA).
Contemporary poet and essayist.
Enrique Rodriguez Larreta has described in his novel La Gloria de don Ramiro the period of Philip II., bloody, austere, and tyrannical. No American artist has his verbal wealth, his power of evocation, and his meticulous scholarship and genius for reconstruction. This patient and harmonious piece of work surprises us in a literature full of improvisations like that of South America.
La Raza de Cain, by Reyles, is a remarkable romance, in which the author shows us the superman, Nietzsche's man of prey, at grips with the weak and the vanquished; he exalts, in language full of eloquence, the Dionysiac joy of life and domination.
Writer of short stories, a novelist at times, but above all a brilliant chronicler, Gomez Carrillo has had the greatest influence in Latin America. In a nervous, harmonious style, full of delicate shades, he has instructed the younger generation in symbolism, in the elegant paradoxes of Wilde, in the work of D'Annunzio and Verlaine; in short, in the whole of decadent art. Above all, he eulogises Paris: the "charming soul" of the city, the sounding boulevards, its women, and the galante frivolity of its unrest. A master of smiles and subtle irony, he has the taste, the delicate amenity, of Scholl or Fouquier, the art of telling an anecdote, of analysing a comedy, of pouring gentle ridicule upon learned heaviness or conceited solemnity. His books on Japan and Greece, praised by the French critics, have revealed the mystery of exoticism to the American public, and all his work breathes a continual suggestion of France.
Such is the new literature, in which you will find novelists and poets and a truly Florentine love of beauty. He who knows America only by its imperfect social framework, its civil wars, and its persistent barbarism sees only the outer tumult; there is a strange divorce between its turbulent politics and its refined art. If ever Taine's theory of the inevitable correspondence between art and its environment was at fault, it is in respect of these turbulent democracies which produce writers whose literary style is so precious, such refined poets and analysts.
GOMEZ CARRILLO. Contemporary novelist, essayist, and chroniqueur.
GOMEZ CARRILLO.
Contemporary novelist, essayist, and chroniqueur.
CHAPTER III
THE EVOLUTION OF PHILOSOPHY
Bello—Hostos—The influence of England—Positivism—The influence of Spencer and FouillÉe—The sociologists.
The democracies of America have not created new systems of philosophy; they have rather contributed, with Emerson and William James in the United States, to propound the old problems in a new light. Politics and history have been the occupation of intelligent men. To pure speculation they have preferred the patient study of the past, and the impassioned analysis of the conflicts of the day.
Yet they adopted European theories from the earliest years of the Republic: those of the French ideologists, Cabanis and LaromiguiÈre were the predominant influences in some schools, while the influence of England extended from Central America to Chili. With that influence went a moderate utilitarianism, a bold analysis of the doctrines of political and economic liberty. England contributed to the liberty of America in Montevideo as in Colombia; with the English gold which the revolutionaries received the English philosophic radicalism entered the country. Jurists and politicians profited by its lessons, and certain of the thinkers of America freed themselves from the shackles of the peripatetic school under the influence of the Scottish philosophers. Thus Ventura Martin and JosÉ-Joaquin de Mora in Chili and Alcorta in the Argentine. With AndrÈs Bello, poet and legislator, philosopher and philologist, these doctrines acquired a great importance. His Philosophy of the Understanding was inspired by Reid and Hamilton. In England he had known James Mill, and some of his ideas upon the inductive method and causality recall the doctrines of John Stuart Mill, the son of James. Bello was especially noted for the vigour of his logic and his analysis of the phenomena of consciousness, his penetrating psychology, and his positivism, which caused him to disdain anything in the nature of metaphysics. His conservative spirit accepted the Catholic dogmas, while his critical faculty was checked by them; what his implacable analysis destroyed his religious temperament reconstructed. He believed in perception, liberty, and the reality of the external world, and in a first cause; he transformed grammar by his psychological analysis, and by his positivism civil law and the law of nations. His excessive critical faculty sometimes ran to super-fine abstraction, to an intellectual algebra. Bello passed from ideology to positivism, from Destutt de Tracy to Stuart; Mill, by way of the Scottish philosophers. His admirable grammatical and juridical efforts may be attributed to his mastery of English analysis and realism.
After Bello, the most remarkable of South American philosophers was Eugenio de Hostos, who was born in 1839. He did not merely expound European ideas; he had his own system, which he developed in a series of remarkable works; he was a moralist rather than a metaphysician, and whether in San Domingo or Lima or Santiago he never ceased his endeavours to reform education and the law. Problems, social and moral, gave him no rest; he sought to found a new morality and sociology.
Hostos might be called an optimistic rationalist. He believed in an ideal world. Science, according to him, is an efficacious agent of virtue. He thought it possible to discipline the will by teaching what is true. Good is not a metaphysical entity nor duty an imperative; the two together constitute a "natural order." A profound harmony exists between man and the world he lives in, and the moral law is merely the revelation in the consciousness of the geometry of things. For Hostos the world was just, logical, and full of reason; an internal law, lex insita, was manifested in the sidereal harmonies as in virtuous actions.
The moral ideal is therefore merely the adaptation of conduct to the inevitable and harmonious relations of things. Does not this optimism recall the morality of Spencer, the rigorous ethics of Spinoza, and the thought of Cournot, that "the philosophical basis of morality is the idea of conformity to the universal order"?
The founders of the Republic were formed by scholasticism. In the old universities men debated in language bristling with syllogisms. A free philosophic doctrine which accepted all the Catholic verities—immortality, free will, and Providence—and explained them with a fiery eloquence, was the reaction against this school, whose thought was crystallised in variable forms; this philosophy corresponded to the romanticism of the politicians, to their faith in democracy, liberty, and human progress.
In Spanish America French ideas predominated; in Brazil, German thought. Tobias Barreto and Sylvio Romero propagated this culture in the place of a colourless eclecticism; the first was a disciple of the German philosophers, the second popularised Spencer, without neglecting the Germans. In his German studies Barreto adopted the monism of Ludwig NoirÉ: "The universe is composed of atoms, absolutely equal, which are endowed with two properties: the one, which is internal, is sensation; the other, which is external, is movement." This is the metaphysics of the Brazilian thinker, and such was his influence that, according to a critic, "the theories of Comte and NoirÉ explain modern intellectual Brazil." Sylvio Romero expounded the evolutionary theories of Spencer, "a philosophic monument even more important than that of Comte"; but in spite of the efforts of this disciple Spencer is not as popular in Brazil as in other American nations.
Barreto, a monist and philosopher, was a disciple of the judicial finalism of Jhering; Sylvio Romano, a disciple of Spencer, expounded and supported the conclusions of the social science of Demolins; in the scientific ardour of these propagandists doctrines were assembled together which had no mutual affinity. In Brazil all exotic philosophies find their readers and commentators, but the confusion caused by incoherent imitations completely lacks the unity of a national tendency. A psychologist of great value, a free follower of Renan, Joachim Nabuco, in a style full of subtlety, writes essays in philosophy and criticism.
A Spanish philosopher, less rigid than the schoolmen and richer in doctrine than the eclectics, Balmes engrossed many minds which were fatigued by sterile eloquence. He founded no school in America, but he is much read by the conservatives. His penetrating analysis, his British realism, and his rationalism, which seeks to harmonise these faculties with his dogmas, attract many who are repelled by a diffuse spirituality.
These various tendencies—English empiricism, French eclecticism, Benthamism—are not very profound intellectual movements. They have replaced the old scholasticism. A political ideology is wanted which shall be adequate to the needs of those who are struggling for power; metaphysical discussions are relegated to oblivion.
JOSE ENRIQUE RODÓ (URUGUAY). Contemporary critic and essayist.
JOSE ENRIQUE RODÓ (URUGUAY).
Contemporary critic and essayist.
Positivism was the first philosophy to impress men's intellects; it has created great social movements, such as the Reformation in Mexico and the Republic in Brazil. It became an intellectual dictatorship, a new scholasticism. Free-thinkers believe in Comte and Spencer; in the humanitarian religion of the first and the agnosticism of the second.
Comte, to quote Mill, founded a complete system of spiritual despotism. It upholds order and authority as against the abuses of individualism, "the energetic preponderance of the central power"; it condemns "anarchy, and destructive liberalism"; it exalts "the eminently social genius of Catholicism." In nations annihilated by revolution and a romantic freedom these theories are liable to justify dictatorship, as they did in Brazil. There the Comtian phrase "order and progress" has become the national watchword.
Other causes explain the supremacy of positivism; a reaction against theology in the name of science, and against a vague and official philosophy. Minds formed by Catholicism, even if they have lost their faith, demand secular dogmas, and verities organised in a facile system: in short, a new faith, and the Positivist philosophy satisfies this craving. At the same time material progress, based upon scientific development, and the utilitarianism which exaggerates the importance of wealth, find in positivism, which disdains futile ideologies, a system adequate to industrial life.
In Mexico, Brazil, and Chili positivism in its integrity is predominant: the philosophic method and the religion of humanity. In Brazil the positivist school, with Constant, d'Araujo, Bastos, and their disciples, preserves the calendar, the secular saints, and the rites of the founder. It produces teachers and creates political constitutions like that of Rio Grande do Sul, and ardently propagates the doctrines of Comte. In Chili, Juan Enrique Lagarigue preached a generous idealism, and the oblivion of patriotic hatreds; but the democracy did not give ear to this ingenuous apostle. In Mexico Barreda, founder of the Preparatory College, and the leader of intellectual life, was a disciple of Comte in Paris from the year 1867. He revolutionised Mexican education in a positivist direction, but did not accept the religious aspect of the new philosophy. There is still in Mexico a Positivist Review, which has a certain small influence.
Comtism influenced thinkers as a method, as a reaction against theology and metaphysics, and as a goal of pedagogy. But the philosophy of Spencer is that which has sent its roots deepest into the life of the Latin republics; progress, the cardinal idea of the romantics, is succeeded by evolution, a doctrine more agreeable to the positivist intelligence. Since 1880 the theories of Spencer have made converts of two generations; in some universities they constitute an official system. No application has been made of his psychology nor his biology, but his social and moral teaching has been followed with servility. Politicians and journalists employ Spencerian formulÆ: the social organism, the instability of the homogeneous, differentiation, the relativity of consciousness. In 1883 a Colombian politician, Rafael NuÑez, President of his country, expounded the philosophy of Spencer to his fellow-citizens as a remedy for the political dogmatism of his predecessors. American statesmen might readily have asked the philosopher of evolution for scientific suggestions, as did the Japanese.
Under the influence of the English thinker the scientific period was ushered in. The study of social science is beginning; men profess a materialism or a positivism hostile to the older ontological ideas; they believe in science even more than in the sciences, in the rational explanation of all mysteries, in the supremacy of mathematics and physics. Various influences are at work, and the confused result thereof favours the triumph of positivism. The political and social theories of Dr. Gustave Le Bon, the impetuous writings of Max Nordau, the criminology of Lombroso and Ferri, the formulÆ of Taine, the biology and sociology of Letourneau, are studied and commented upon in the universities, the parliaments, and the schools of South America. Eloquence is repudiated as contrary to scientific precision, and romantic faith is disdained by the positivist. A party which has ruled over the evolution of Mexico for the last thirty years has named itself the "Scientific Party."
The significance of these doctrines rapidly acquired an excessive importance; in place of lucid methods and clear ideas we find the teaching of the professors full of the narrowness of dogma. Positivism implants a limited and vulgar rationalism, a new metaphysic which accords an absolute truth to the formulÆ of science; which exalts egoism and practical interests, and the frantic pursuit of wealth in daily life. The tendency of the American mind being undue simplification, this philosophy has not been a discipline of knowledge and action, but has limited the effort of man to the conquest of the useful. The positivists organise plutocratic tyrannies in certain American nations.
Without reigning in the schools as Spencer has done, a French philosopher, M. FouillÉe, has greatly influenced law, politics, and education. In spite of the reign of positivism his flexible doctrine has attracted many Americans, and his works, such as the IdÉe du Droit and the Histoire de la Philosophie, are coming into use as text-books in some universities. The theory of unavoidable ideas is well known; and thinkers and philosophers have been inspired by this "philosophy of hope." By its noble idealism, by its admirable wealth, its serene rationalism, and its essentially Latin character, the harmonious system of M. FouillÉe has won considerable popularity among the youth of America.
We cannot separate his influence from that of the young poet-philosopher whom a premature death has consecrated: Guyau was the professor of idealism to two generations of America. In Ariel JosÉ-Enrique Rodo has enlarged upon his finest metaphors; and a Peruvian thinker, Gonzalez Prada, has popularised the suggestions of this Platonic thinker upon death.
Nietzsche also has disciples and commentators. Translated into Spanish and vulgarised, his doctrines are the Bible of exasperated egoism. Men saw nothing of his stoicism, his worship of heroic life and tragic adventures; "concussionary" ministers and half-breeds aspiring to power believe themselves Nietzschians, because in their immoral advancement they ignore all moral scruples. A generation above good and evil is practising opportunism—what the French call "arrivism"—disorganising philosophy and society, and forgetting the code of human dignity.
FouillÉe, Guyau, and Nietzsche have not supplanted the positivist philosophers; the superstition of science and the hatred of metaphysical construction is still prevalent. All the new doctrines are making their way: pragmatism, Bergsonism, the philosophy of Wundt and Croce, the philosophy of contingency: without, however, creating new tendencies. From this variety of imitations perhaps an American system will arise. To-day every intellectual novelty is passionately received and applied; an Argentine judge has even founded some of his judgments upon the teaching of Tarde.
A reaction is setting in against dogmatic positivism; the present is a period of dissolution and criticism. In accepting influences so various—English, German, and French—the old faith in science, in Comte and Spencer, is evaporating. Two young philosophers, Antonio Caso in Mexico and Henriquez UreÑa in San Domingo, have contributed to this analysis. Inspired by the ideas of M. Emile Boutroux, they attack the narrow interpretation of scientific laws.
Thus after thirty years of influence, positivism is losing its prestige. It is not being replaced in the schools by any rigid system; but in place of an intolerant dogmatism we have a free examination of which we cannot yet foresee the consequences. Some essays of Enrique Varona, in his writings on morality and philosophy; of Carlos Octavio Bunge, in his Psicologia individual y social; of Vaz-Ferreira, in his critique of the problem of liberty; of Deustua, of Lima, in his essays on morality, reveal the fact that the new school is not lacking in a serious philosophical orientation. But originality, the new doctrine, the Ibero-American school—are these shortly to be realities? So long as these nations are still busy at the task of self-organisation in the midst of anarchical unrest, so long as the cult of wealth prevails above all disinterested efforts, so long we shall assuredly have no other philosophy than an adaptation of foreign systems.
But in the new movements philosophical speculation is losing its old simplicity; the study of psychology is developing, analysis is more profound, the old verbal solutions are rejected, and the study of societies is acquiring an extraordinary importance.
Half a century ago books on political science swarmed. The same pragmatic preoccupation—the adaptation of scientific ideas to the uses of social life—prevails to-day.
Many sociologists are inspired by biology, or psychology, or historical materialism. Cornejo, in Peru, is adopting the psychological theories of Wundt, his analysis of language, myth, and custom. Letelier, in Chili, inclines toward the positivism of Comte; Ramos Mejia, in the Argentine, explains social phenomena in a biological sense. His books, La Locura en la Historia, Las Masas Argentinas, reveal this tendency. Ingegnieros has studied the history of the Argentine in relation to the economic factor. His work, De la Barbarie al Imperalismo, is an essay in Marxist sociology.
To sum up; social science preoccupies our thinkers rather than pure philosophy. Neither the great German idealists nor the critics and thinkers are known in America; neither Hume, nor Kant, nor Hegel, although the Spanish orator Emilio Castelar has propagated a Hegelianism ad usum delphini in the new continent. The pessimism of Schopenhauer does not acclimatise itself in the tropics. Eclecticism, positivism, and spiritualism prevail.
ALCIDES ARGUEDAS (BOLIVIA). Novelist and sociologist.
ALCIDES ARGUEDAS (BOLIVIA).
Novelist and sociologist.
