Free Ariel by Jose Enrique Rodo

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