BOOK VI

THE LATIN SPIRIT AND THE GERMAN, NORTH
AMERICAN, AND JAPANESE PERILS

From a racial point of view, it is true, one cannot call the South American republics Latin nations. They are rather Indo-African or Africo-Iberian. Latin culture—the ideas and the art of France, the laws and the Catholicism of Rome—have created in South America a mental attitude analogous to that of the great Mediterranean peoples, which is hostile or alien to the civilisation of the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon peoples.

New influences, whether they come from Germany or Anglo-Saxon America, and even more those that come from Japan, are dangerous to the Latin-American nations, if they tend to destroy their traditions.

Chapter I

Are the Ibero-Americans of Latin Race

Spanish and Portuguese heredity—Latin culture—The influence of the Roman laws, of Catholicism, and of French thought—The Latin spirit in America: its qualities and defects.

Contrasting the Imperial Republic of North America with the twenty democracies of South America, we seek the reason of the antagonism which exists between them in the essential element of race. The contrast between Anglo-Saxons and Latins is the contrast between two cultures.

The South American peoples consider themselves Latin by race, just as their brothers of the North are the remote descendants of the Anglo-Saxon Pilgrim Fathers; but although the United States were created largely by the aggregation of austere English emigrants, there has been no intervention of pure Latin elements in the colonisation of the South. Navigators of Latin blood discovered an unknown continent, and Spaniards and Portuguese conquered and colonised it; but there was little Latin blood to be found in the homes formed by the sensuality of the first conquerors of a desolated America.

Emigrants from Estremadura and Galicia, Andalusians and Castilians, many-hued men of Spain and Portugal, were all concerned in the first interbreeding with the vanquished races; they were Iberians, in whom the anthropologists discover moral analogies with the Berbers of North Africa. The Basques, rude and virile, who emigrated from Spain to dominate America, did not come of Latin stock; the Andalusian element, from Seville or Cadiz, was of Oriental origin. A Spain that was half African and half Germanic colonised the vast territories of America; two heredities, Visigoth and Arab, were united in its strange genius.

The French and Italian colonists have not the importance of the Spaniards and Portuguese; they are inferior in numbers and in wealth. The Iberians have jealously defended their racial prerogative in these isolated transatlantic colonies. After three centuries, when once the continent was opened to the outside world and to European commerce, the Italians invaded the rich plains of the Argentine; there they contributed to the formation of a new race, which is more Latin than Spanish.

But we must not forget the innumerable Anglo-Saxons who have founded families in the Argentine and in Chili, and have brought wealth to those countries; nor the Germans in Southern Brazil, nor the Asiatics of the Peruvian seaboard. Iberians, Indians, Latins, Anglo-Saxons, and Orientals all mingle in America; a babel of races, so mixed that it is impossible to discover the definite outlines of the future type.

It is useless to look for unity of race in such a country. And even in the United States the confused invasion of Russian Jews and Southern Italians is little by little undermining the primitive Anglo-Saxon unity.

This confusion of races in the North and the South leaves two traditions, the Anglo-Saxon and the Iberian. By force of assimilation these traditions are transforming the new races. Englishmen and Spaniards disappear, but the two moral inheritances survive.

The Latin tradition is not far to seek in the Americans of the South. They are not exclusively either Spanish or Portuguese; the legacy received from Spain is modified by persistent influences of French and Italian origin.

From Mexico to La Plata, by long continued and extensive action, the Roman laws, Catholicism, and the ideas of France have given a uniform aspect to the American conscience.

Laws of Spanish origin prevail in South America; they have formed the rigid framework of civil life. These laws, in spite of strong feudal elements, are of Roman origin. Under the influence of Roman law Alfonso X. unified Spanish legislation, during the first half of the thirteenth century; three centuries later the Spaniards colonised America. The Partidas, that vast encyclopædia of law and collection of Castilian laws in particular, is a Roman code. It confirmed the individualist sense of property as against the Spanish forms of collectivism; it reinforced the power of the paterfamilias in the austere Iberian family; it consecrated equality, authorising marriage between free men and the serfs formerly banished from the State; and it adopted the Roman formalism.

Politically, after the downfall of the feudal system, ambitious princes, from the time of Alfonso X. to that of the Catholic Kings and of Charles V., enforced their royal authority in the Roman sense. These monarchs were Cæsars; they concentrated all the powers of the State in themselves; they centralised, unified, and legislated. This royal absolutism destroyed privilege and levelled mankind. A vast Spanish democracy was formed, subject to Cæsar, after the manner of the Roman people. The Latin sense of authority and law prevailed in the Spanish colonies; property was individual and absolute; civil equality obtained; in spite of racial differences, Indians and Spaniards were theoretically on the same plane; the family, like the Roman gens, united slaves and children under the gloomy paternal power. The distant monarch was a formidable overlord, to whom viceroys and chapters, courts, judicial and ecclesiastical, addressed themselves to demand laws and regulations, penalties and sanctions.

Catholicism was indissolubly bound up with the Roman authority of the laws; in Spain and America the prince was at the same time the shepherd of the Church. Religion was an instrument of political domination; it was an imperial force, a legacy of the Latin genius. It multiplied forms and rites; it disciplined the colonists, demanding outward obedience and uniformity of belief and manners. "The Roman Church," says Harnack, "is a juridical institution." Catholicism is also a social religion. In America it created the Brazilian nation in opposition to the Dutch peril; it founded republics among Indians inimical to all forms of organised social life; it extended the field of Latin endeavour, and from North to South favoured the constitution of new governments and societies.

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.