Free Ariel by Jose Enrique Rodo Page B

wonders in its application to new inventions and made giant strides in its service to utilities; in the steam boiler, the electric dynamo, are now billions of invisible slaves who centuple for their Aladdin the power of the magic lamp. The growth of their greatness and power will astonish future generations. By their marvellous gift for improvisation they have found a spur to time, so that in a few years they conjure, as it were from a desert, the fruitage hitherto the work of centuries.
    And that Puritan liberty which gave them light in the past unites with that light a piety which still endures. Beside the factory and the school it has erected churches whence ascend the prayers of millions of free consciences. They have been able to save from the shipwreck of all the idealities that which is the highest of all, and kept alive the tradition of a religious sentiment which, if it does not uplift on wings of the highest idealism, spirituality, at least maintains over the utilitarian stampede some rein of the moral sense. Also, they have known how to maintain a certain primitive robustness even amidst the refinements of a highly civilized life; they hold to the pagan cult of health, sanity, and strength; they preserve in strong muscles the instrument of a strong will; obliged by their insatiable ambition to employ all human energies, they fit the torso of the athlete over the heart of the free man. And from all this springs a dominant note of optimism, confidence, faith, which makes them face the future with a proud and stubborn assurance; the note of “Excelsior” and the “Psalm of Life,” which their poets have opposed as a balsam to melancholy or bitterness of spirit.
    Thus it is that their Titanic greatness impresses even those made most distrustful by their exaggerations of character and the recent violences of their history; and I, who do not love them, as you see, admire them still. I admire them, fire, for their formidable power of desire; I bow before that ‘‘ school of will and work ” — which Philarete Chasles tells us they have inherited from their forbears.
    In the beginning was Action. With these famous words of Faust the future historian of the great Republic may begin; the Genesis, not yet concluded, of their national existence. Their genius may be defined as the universe of the Dynamists : force in movement. Above all, it has the capacity, the enthusiasm, the fortunate vocation, for doing things; volition is the chisel which has shapen this people from hard rock. Their characteristic points are manifestations of the will-power, originality, and audacity. Their history is above all a very paroxysm of virile activity. Their typical figure should be entitled, not Superman, but He who wants. And if anything saves them collectively from vulgarity, it is that extraordinary verve of energy which they always show and which lends a certain epic character to even the struggles of self-interest and the material life. So Bourget could say, of the speculators of Minneapolis and Chicago that they are of the mould of gladiators, that their fighting power of attack or of defence is as of Napoleon’s soldiers of the Guard. Yet that supreme energy with which the North American seems to cast, as if by hypnotizing, a spell and suggestion over the Fates, is found only in just those things which are presented to us as exceptional, divergent, in their civilization. No one will say that Edgar Poe was not an anomalous individual, rebellious to the influences around him: his chosen spirit represented a particle inassimilable by the national soul, which vainly struggled to express itself to others as from an infinite solitude; yet the fundamental note — Baudelaire has pointed it out — in the character of Poe’s heroes is still the inner shrine, the unconquerable resistance of the will. When he imagined Ligeia, most mysterious and adorable of his creatures, he symbolized in the inextinguishable light of her eyes the hymn of