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.
[[1]] Za piola, La Sociedad de la Igualdad, Santiago, 1902, p. 8.
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.