Ariel (7 page)

Rationally conceived, democracy always admits that indispensable aristocratic prin
ciple
which shall concede superiority to the better man when recognized and sanctioned by the common consent. It consecrates, as much as aristocracy, the distinction of equality; but it resolves in favour of such qualities as are truly superior — those of mind, character, virtue. It does not immobilize them into a separate class which shall have the execrable privilege of caste, but renews them continually from the living fountain of the people, making justice or affection the reason of their choice. In such wise recognizing, as a necessity for any, progress, the selection and predominance of the best equipped, it avoids that humiliation which in other human contests falls to the lot of the vanquished. “the great law of natural selection will go on functioning in human society only so long as it works more and more on a basis of liberty,” said
Fouillée.
The odious character of traditional aristocracies arose in that they were oppressive in their action and unjust in
their
foundation and so their authority became intolerable. Now we know
that there exists no
other legitimate limit for man's equality
than
that which consists in the dominion
of intelligent and
virtue, freely consented to by all.
But we do know that it is necessary that this limit shall exist. On the other hand, our Christian view of life teaches that those moral superiorities which are the basis of rights really give rise only to duties; and that each superior being owes to others more in proportion to his excess in ability over them. The anti-equality views of Nietzsche, who seems to have ploughed so deep a furrow in our contemporary literature of thought, have brought into his tre
mendous
revindication of what he calls natural rights, implicit in human superiorities, an abominable and reactionary genius. For, in scoffing at all mercy, all fraternity, he places in the heart of the su
perman
he deifies a Satanic disregard of the weak and the disinherited; he legitimizes all privileges of self-will and force to governments of the gibbet and the lash, and with logical resolution comes to his keynote: ‘‘Society does not exist for itself, but for its elect.” Truly it is not this monstrous notion that we oppose as our standard to that false equalitarianism which aims at the
leveling
of all to a common vulgarity. Happily, so long as there shall be in our world the possibility of so disposing two pieces of wood that they form a Cross — which is to say, eternally— so long shall future man persist in thinking that it is Love that is the basis of all stable order; and that the only true hierarchy is that of those who have the highest capacity for love.

The new science — a fountain of inexhaustible moral inspirations — shows, in explaining life’s laws, how the principle of democracy may be reconciled with an
aristocracy of morals or of culture in the organization of human collectivities. On the one hand, as Henri
Bérenger’s
suggestive book has shown, the affirmations of science but contribute to sanction and fortify the idea of democracy in society, revealing how great is the value of collective effort, how valuable the labour even of the smallest hand, how immense the field of action reserved to the anonymous and obscure fellow-workman in any manifestation of our social evolution. It exalts, no less than Christianity, the dignity of the lowly; this new thought, which in nature ascribes to the labour of the infinitely little, the nummulite and the briozo
ӧ
n at the depths of the ocean, the construction of the cements of geology; which derives from the vibration of a formless primitive cell all the elevating impulses of organized life; which shows the great
r
ô
le
that in our psychology we must ascribe to vague and inconspicuous phenomena, even the fugi
t
ive perceptions of our subconscious self; and which, coming to sociology and history, restores to the heroism of the masses, often doubted, the share which was ignored in the glorification of the individual hero; and reveals the slow accumulation of individual research which through many centuries has prepared, in obscure workshops or laboratories of forgotten toilers, the discoveries of genius.

But at the same time that it thus demonstrates the immortal efficacy of collective force, and dignifies the participation of unknown collaborators in the universal work, science shows that it is a necessary condition to all progress that there should be leadership amid the immense mass of persons and of things. Relations of dependence and subordination are a condition of life, between the individual members of society and the elements of individual organization. In fine, there is an inherent necessity for the universal law of imitation
that there be present models, alive and influential, for the making perfect human society, to realize their superiority by the progressive making general of it.

To show how both these universal
les
sons of science can be transformed into action, working together in the organization and spirit of society, we need only insist on our conception of a democracy that is just and noble, impelled only by the knowledge and sense of true superiorities, in which the supremacy of intelligence and virtue, the only limits to the just equality of men, receives its authority and prestige from liberty and sheds over all multitudes the beneficent aura of love. And at the same time that it reconciles these two great lessons, of our observation of the order of nature, such a society will realize the harmony of two historic forces which give our civilization its essential character, its regulative principles of life. From the spirit of Christianity, in fact,
is bo
rn
the sentiment of equality, albeit tainted now with something of the ascetic disdain for culture and selection of the spirit. And from the classic civilizations rises that sense for order, for authority, and the almost religious respect for genius, though tainted with something of aristocratic disdain for the weak and the lowly. The future shall synthesize these two suggestions in immortal formula; then shall Democracy have triumphed definitely. Democracy — which, when threatening an ignoble
leveling
, justifies the lofty protests and the bitter melancholies of those who see sacrificed in her triumph all intellectual distinction, every dream of art, each delicacy of life, — will, now even more than the old aristocracies, extend inviolable guaranties for the cultivation of those flowers of the soul which fade and perish in the surroundings of the vulgar, amid the pitiless tumult of the multitude.

The utilitarian conception as the idea of human destiny, and equality at the
mediocre
as the norm of social proportion, make up the formula which in Europe they call the spirit of Americanism. It is impossible to think on either of these as inspirations for human conduct or society, while contrasting them with those which are opposed to them, without at once conjuring up by association a vision of that formidable and fruitful democracy there in the North, with its manifestations of prosperity and power, as a dazzling example in favour of the efficacy of democratic institutions and the correct aim of its ideas. If one could say of utilitarianism that it is the word of the English spirit, the United States may be considered the incarnation of that word. Its Evangel is spread on every side to teach the material miracles of its triumph. And Spanish America is not wholly to be entitled, in its relation to the United States, as a nation of Gentiles. The mighty confederation is realizing over us a sort of moral conquest. Admiration for its greatness, its strength, is a sentiment that is growing rapidly in the minds of our governing classes, and even more, perhaps, among the multitude, easily impressed with victory or success. And from admiring it is easy to pass to imitating. Admiration and belief are already for the psychologist but the passive mood of imitation. “The imitative tendency of our moral nature,” says Bagehot, “has its seat in that part of the soul where lives belief.” Common sense and experience would suffice of themselves to show this natural relation. We imitate him in whose superiority and prestige-we believe. So it happens that the vision of a voluntarily delatinized America, without compulsion or conquest, and regenerate in the manner of its Northern archetype, floats already through the dreams of many who are sincerely interested in our future, satisfies them with suggestive parallels they find at every step, and appears in constant movements for reform or innovation. We have our
mania for the North.
It is necessary to oppose to it those bounds which both sentiment and reason indicate.

Not that I would make of those limits an absolute negation. I well under
stand that enlightenment, inspiration, great lessons lie in the example of the strongs nor do I fail to realize that intelligent attention to the claims of the material and the study of the useful, directed abroad, is of especially useful result in the case of people in the formative stage, whose nationality is still in the mould. I understand how one must try by persevering education to rectify such traits of a society as need to be made to fit in with new demands of civilization and new opportunities in life, thus by wise innovation counteracting the forces of heredity or custom. But I see-no-good in denaturalizing the character of a people
—
its
personal
genius
—to-impose on it
identity with a foreign model to which they will sacrifice the originality of their genius, that, once lost, can never be replaced; nor in the ingenuous fancy that this result may ever be obtained artificially or by process of imitation. That thoughtless attempt to transplant what is natural and spontaneous in one society into the soil of another where it has no roots, historically or naturally, seemed to Michelet like the attempt to incorporate by mere transference a dead organism in a living body.

In societies, as in art or literature, blind imitation gives but an inferior copy of the model. And in the vain attempt there is also something ignoble; a kind of political snobbery, carefully to copy the ways and acts of the great; as, in Thackeray’s satire, those without rank or fortune ineffectually imitate only the foibles of the mighty. Care for one’s own independence, per
sonality judgment, is a chief form of self- respect. A much-commented passage of Cicero teaches how it is our duty sedulously to preserve our original character; that which differentiates and determines, so far as may wisely be, the primal natural impulses, as they derive from a various distribution of natural gifts and so make up the concert and the order of the world. And even more would this seem to be true as applied to human collectivities. But perhaps you will say that there is no seal, no peculiar and definite thing to mark the quality for whose permanence and integrity we should do battle in the actual organization of our people. Perhaps there lacks in our South American character the definite contour of a personality. But even so, we Latin-Americans have an inheritance of Race, a great ethnic tradition to maintain, a sacred bond which unites us to immortal pages of history and puts us on our honour to preserve this for the future. Tha
t
cosmopolitanism which we have to respect as the irresistible tendency of our development need not exclude that sentiment of fidelity to the past, nor that moulding and directing force of which the genius of our race must avail itself in the fusing of the elements that shall constitute the American of the future.

It has more than once been pointed out that the great epochs of history, its most fertile periods, are always the result of distinct but coexisting forces which by their very agreement to oppose maintain the interest and stimulus of life, which in the quietism of a universal accord might tend to disappear. So the two extremes of Athens, and Sparta revolve on an axle around which circles the race of greatest genius man has known. So America needs at this time to maintain its original duality, which has converted from classic myth to actual history the story of the two eagles, loosed at the same moment from either pole, to arrive at the same moment at each one’s limit of dominion. This difference in genius does not exclude honourable emulation, nor discourage in very many relations agreement or even solidarity. And if one can dimly foresee even a higher concord in the future, that will be due not to a one-sided imitation of one race by the other, but to a reciprocity of influences and a skilful harmonizing of those attributes which make the peculiar glory of either race.

Still, the dispassionate study of that civilization which some would offer to us as a model, affords a reason no less potent than those which are based only on the indignity and unworthiness of mere imitation to temper the enthusiasm of those who propose it as our model.... And now I come to the very theme of my discourse, and the relation to it of this spirit of imitation. Any severe judgment formed upon our neighbours of the North should begin,
like the courteous fencer, by lowering a rapier in salute to them. Easy is this for me. Failure to recognize their faults does not seem to me so insensate as to deny their qualities. Born — to employ Beaudelaire’s paradox — with the innate experience of liberty, they have kept themselves faithful to the law of their birth; and have developed, with the precision and certainty of a mathematical progression, the fundamental principles of their organization. This gives to their history a unity which, even if it has excluded the acquirement of different aptitudes or merits, has at least the intellectual beauty of being logical. The traces of its progress will never be expunged from the annals of human right, because they have been the first to evoke our modern ideal of liberty and to convert it from the uncertainty of experiment and the visions of Utopia into imperishable bronze and living reality. For they have shown by their example the possibility of
extending the immovable authority of a republic over an immense national commonwealth, and, with their federal organization, have revealed — as de Tocqueville felicitously put it — the manner in which the brilliancy and power of great states may be combined with the felicity and peace of little ones....