[Illustration: CLÉMENTE PALMA. Peruvian essayist and novelist. RICARDO PALMER.]
The Parnassian movement, in America, produced the Argentine poet Leopoldo Diaz. He adapted to Spanish verse the sonority, the relief, and the plastic beauty of the French masters. One of his poems is dedicated in homage to the poet of the _Sonnets_, to his incomparable model, José-Maria de Hérédia. Diaz sought to give his native Spanish, the language of eloquence, a Parnassian inevitability, and to mould its rhetorical abundance to the narrow limits of the sonnet. _Les sombras de Hellas_ invokes the Greek { 259} life, sensual and luminous; _Les conquistadores_ the thunderous epic; and all his optimistic songs speak of a Latin renaissance in the overseas democracies.
An absorbing taste for symbolism and the decadents, for "deliquescent" poetry and the work of the small Parisian cliques, has produced an intensely vital intellectual movement--modernism--which, by its wealth of language and ideas and the renewed vitality of its language, signifies a true renaissance. Beside it the old classic and romantic movements seem lukewarm imitations which pale before the exuberance of more modern work.
Modernism is undoubtedly an adequate diet for Transatlantic Latins. But is this decadent renaissance better inspired than the passion and the eloquence of yesterday? Is it also an indication of servitude? By no means; the great poets have retained a robust belief in life, and their master, Ruben Dario, followed his _Prosas profanas_ by his _Songs of life and hope_.
The younger generation was drawn to this art by purely psychological motives. The Spanish character had become refined by its new environment; weakened, perhaps, but it had gained a keener intelligence and a greater wealth of fantasy. Chiaroscuro and subtle shades, such as the French delight in, delighted the Creole also, partial as he was to _finesse_, to a delicate Byzantism, and gracefully sceptical of the robust Spanish faith. Then there were hosts of half-castes, in whom the inimical heredities of two races were in painful conflict. The strangest characteristics--the sensuality of the negro and the melancholy of the Indian--gave the new race a spiritual personality full of contradictory characteristics; melancholy but not without optimism; the desires of a faun or a satyr, violent or languid; and a love of the rare and unusual, of verbal music, of complication in the matter of feeling, of { 260} carefully chosen language and unfamiliar rhythms. Reading Verlaine, Samain, Laforgue, Moréas, Henri de Régnier, and not as yet forgetting Gautier and Banville; mingling all cults and asking intoxication from every flagon, the poets of America have struck the national chord. Symbolism has been of little assistance; it calls for a lofty conception of the world and a profound sense of mystery. They much prefer decadence in art, because of its musical lyric quality, its exotic images, and its melancholy rhythms. An elective affinity, to use Goethe's phrase, has enabled them to draw an individual music from the foreign instrument.
