Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

Under the double pressure of Roman Catholicism and legislation, America became Latinised. It learned to respect laws and forms, to submit to a religious as well as a civil discipline. French ideas, added to these influences, first prepared the way for the Revolution, and afterwards dominated the mind of America, from the Declaration of Independence to our own days.

These ideas constituted a new factor of Latin development. France is the modern heir of the genius of Greece and Rome, and in imitating her, even to excess, Ibero-Americans have assimilated the essential elements of the antique culture. We find in the Gallic spirit the sense of taste and harmony, the lucidus ordo of the classics; the love of general ideas, of universal principles, of the rights of man, and a hatred of the mists of the North and the too violent light of the South; rationalism, logical vigour, emotion in the presence of beauty, and the cult of grace. France has been the teacher of social life and letters to the American democracies; her influence is already of no recent date. Voltaire and Rousseau were the theorists of the revolutionary period; Lamartine taught "lyrism" and romantic melancholy; Benjamin-Constant, the theory of politics, and Verlaine the lamentations of decadence.

Either indirectly, through the influence of the thought and literature of Spain and Portugal, or directly, these republics have lived by the light of French ideas.

Thus a general current of thought has arisen on the American continent which is not merely Iberian, but also French and Roman. France has effected a spiritual conquest of these democracies, and has created a new variety of the Latin spirit. This Latin spirit is not a thing apart; it is formed of characteristics common to all the Mediterranean peoples. French, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards find therein the fundamental elements of their national genius, just as in antiquity the Greek women found in Helen the reflection of their own beauty. To this spiritual synthesis Spain contributes her idealism; Italy, the paganism of her children and the eternal suggestion of her marbles; France, her harmonious education.

In the Iberian democracies an inferior Latinity, a Latinity of the decadence prevails; verbal abundance, inflated rhetoric, oratorical exaggeration, just as in Roman Spain. The qualities and defects of the classic spirit are revealed in American life; the persistent idealism, which often disdains the conquests of utility; the ideas of humanity and equality, of universality, despite racial variety; the cult of form; the Latin instability and vivacity; the faith in pure ideas and political dogmas: all are to be found in these lands oversea, together with the brilliant and superficial intelligence, the Jacobinism, and the oratorical facility. Enthusiasm, sociability, and optimism are also American qualities.

These republics are not free from any of the ordinary weaknesses of the Latin races. The State is omnipotent; the liberal professions are excessively developed; the power of the bureaucracy becomes alarming. The character of the average citizen is weak, inferior to his imagination and intelligence; ideas of union and the spirit of solidarity have to contend with the innate indiscipline of the race. These men, dominated by the solicitations of the outer world and the tumult of politics, have no inner life; you will find among them no great mystics, no great lyrical writers. They meet realities with an exasperated individualism.

Indisciplined, superficial, brilliant, the South Americans belong to the great Latin family; they are the children of Spain, Portugal, and Italy by blood and by deep-rooted tradition, and by their general ideas they are the children of France. A French politician, M. Clemenceau, found in Brazil, the Argentine, and Uruguay, "a superabundant Latinism; a Latinism of feeling, a Latinism of thought and action, with all its immediate and superficial advantages, and all its defects of method, its alternatives of energy and failure in the accomplishment of design." This new American spirit is indestructible. Contact with Anglo-Saxon civilisation may partially renew it, but the integral transformation of the spirit proper to the Latin nations will never be accomplished. It would be a racial suicide. Where Yankees and Latin Americans intermingle you may better observe the insoluble contradictions which divide them. The Anglo-Saxons are conquering America commercially and economically, but the traditions, the ideals, and the soul of these republics are hostile to them.

The Ibero-American race should seek to correct its vices without forsaking the framework of tradition which is proper to it. Without losing its originality as a nation, France is to-day triumphant in many departments of sport, and is spending her energy and inventive genius upon the conquest of the air without counting the cost; she has made her own victories which seemed to belong to the Anglo-Saxon. At the same time, if the American democracies are to acquire a practical spirit, a persistent activity, and a virile energy, they must do so without renouncing their language, their religion, and their history.

The defence of the Latin spirit has become a duty of primordial importance. Barrès, an impassioned ideologist, preaches the cult of self as a remedy for barbarism; no foreign tutelage must trouble the spontaneous internal revelation. The republics oversea, wending their way under hostile or indifferent eyes, sous l'oeil des Barbares, must cultivate their spiritual originality in the encounter with inimical forces.

The North American peril, the threat of Germany, the menace of Japan, surround the future of Latin America like those mysterious forces which, in the drama of Maeterlinck, dominate the human stage, and in silence prepare the way for the great human tragedies. To defend the traditions of the Latin continent, it is useful to measure the importance of the influences which threaten it.