I. The Savage as Man of Nature 430 J. The American Aborigines 431 K. Contemporary America: America and the "Spirits of Peoples" 433 L. The United States and South America 435 M. The Character of Hegel's Error 438 N. The Thesis Less Vigorous in Hegel Than in Buffon 439 o. The Historicization and Dissolution of the Thesis 440 P. The Chain of Being and the Old Metaphysics 440 8. The Dispute's Trivialization and Obstinate Vitality 442 I. Dislocation of the Terms of the Polemic After Hegel 442 Ii. Friedrich Schlegel: The Zoological and Anthropological Poverty of America 445 iI. Zoologists and Anthropologists: Guano and the Savages 449 Iv. Darwin: The South American Fauna and the Evolution of the Species 454 v. Schopenhauer: America's Animals and Savages as Decadent or Imperfect Forms 456 vi. The Saint-Simonians and Auguste Comte 459 vii. Edgar Quinet: The Insularity of America and the Triumph of the Humblest Creatures 464 viii. British Criticisms of American Society: Frances Wright and Mrs. Trollope 468 Ix. Echoes of Mrs. Trollope: Pro-Americanism and Anti-Americanism in Stendhal and Jacquemont 479 x. Other Critics of the Right: Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hamilton 487 xi. Critics of the Left: Miss Martineau and Captain Marryat 491 xII. Dickens: Nature and Society Equally Putrescent 497 xIii. Reactions in the United States 508 A. Emerson and the Freshness of American Culture 508 B. Lowell and Melville: Messianism and Desperation 513 c. Thoreau: Primitivism Rediscovered 519 D. Walt Whitman: The Athletic Democracy's Emphatic Oracles 529 xiv. The Polemic's Last Metamorphosis: Immigrants and Expatriates 543 xv. The Young World Quite Old 552 xvi. De Pauw's Oblivion and Secret Immortality 556 xvii. The Scientific Revision of the Buffonian Calumny 560 9. Supplements and Digressions 565 I. The Originality of Buffon 565 II. The Tropicalization of the White Man 571 IIi. The Mexicans' Human Sacrifices 576 iv. The Impotence of Nature 579 v. The Quakers, the Marquis, and the Girondist 584 vi. A Latecomer and His Disciple: Drouin de Bercy and Giuseppe Compagnoni 603 Bibliography of Works Cited 631 Suggestions for Further Research 655 viii Contents Index 671 - 4 -wwww&e&e& European Reactions to de Pauw I. REACTIONS IMMEDIATE AND DELAYED DE PAUW'S paradoxical and outrageous theories rapidly produced an angry swarm of replies and counterreplies; he was criticized in general and in detail, obliquely and directly. In Europe the Prussian abb6 found himself facing the defenders of the Noble Savage and Virgin Nature, flanked on one side by the admirers of the ancient pre-Colombian civili- zations and on the other by the paladins of the glory and humanity of Spain; bringing up the rear there was the odd geographer and naturalist armed with his eyewitness account, and finally a host of critics and be- lievers willing to fight to the death to overcome such a pessimistic view of history. Providence, Nature, Progress, the civilizing mission of Chris- tianity, and faith in the miracles of technology, trade, and good govern- ment-all were mobilized in one confused mass to beat back this corro- sive slander threatening their dignity and prestige. When this first violent reaction had subsided (ca. 1768-74), the Recher- ches continued its work but on a deeper level. And a decade after its publication-a decade which saw the arrival in Europe of the Jesuits ejected from Spanish America (1767) and the North American colonists' declaration of independence from England (1776)-the debate reopened, taking a rather loftier and more profitable turn with the contributions of Robertson, Clavigero, Carli, and Herder. While the other hemisphere was producing its first literary retorts, Europe was reaching that supreme stage of self-awareness in which even non-Europe, the rest of the world, was still somehow part and progeny of Europe; and as the romantic trend began to prevail the very foundations of the debate shifted, slipping from the realm of nature and ethnography into the domain of theology and history. De Pauw's first opponents were men of somewhat limited horizons, more given to argument than to reflection; one was a Benedictine abbe, 80 European Reactions to de Pauw Joseph Pernety; another, an obscure soldier and engineer, Zaccaria de Pazzi de Bonneville; and the others, the learned mathematician Paolo Frisi and the scientist Delisle de Sales,' seem to have become involved in the polemic almost accidentally. As for indirect or implied contra- dictions of de Pauw, one could well include all the apologies for the American native, beginning with Marmontel and his ideal Peruvians, Mexicans, and West Indians. But it took the poor Indians some time to recover from the blow de Pauw had dealt them. Although there was no lack of new and zealous defenders, the Indians were to suffer for some considerable time from the effects of de Pauw's degrading accusations. One need only observe how much more often after 1768 the savages are derided, denigrated, or ridiculed, even by authors who have really noth- ing to do with the polemic.2 It is also a great pity that the essay on the Americas written by that most dogmatic and almost demented assertor of man's innate and fun- damental wickedness, the Marquis de Sade, should not have survived. The three volumes of the Recherches were among the few books he still had with him in his cell at the Bastille (ca. 1787), and one can presume that, in the apparent absence of other works on America in this prison library of his, it was de Pauw's work that inspired him to write his "phi- losophical essay on the New World," which according to the Catalogue raisonnd of 1788 was to complete the first volume of the Portefeuille d'un homme de lettres, and according to the publicity announcement prepared by de Sade himself was to be a completely original work, a true product of his own genius. Be that as it may, the concealed effect of de Pauw's Recherches in undermining the idea of the Noble Savage - if only in furnishing ammuni- tion to those who were already disciples of civilization and enemies of nature unadorned-was certainly greater than we can document in the present treatment of the subject. Dr. Johnson, for example, was certainly not the sort of man who needed a de Pauw to strengthen him in his con- victions. In his Rasselas, Prince ofAbyssinia (1759) he had already pro- duced "the classical rebuttal of soft primitivism."4 But one cannot help suspecting that he must have had at least some indirect contact with the Recherches (of 1768) when we find him replying (30 September 1769) to the ever-present Boswell, who had provoked him by expatiating on 1. Some other brief references to de Pauw are listed in Church, op. cit., p. 194, n. 33. 2. Silvio Zavala, in his Amdrica, mentions for example the verdicts of Hornot (1776; pp. 253, 260), Genty (1787; p. 63, but cf. p. 65), Un citoyen (1787; p. 50), Carle (1790; p. 75), Saint-Sauveur (1799; p. 142), Leblond (1813; p. 149), etc. 3. Gilbert Lely, Vie du Marquis de Sade (Paris, 1952-57), II, 253, 280, 283. The Recherches does not appear in the catalogue of his books drawn up in 1784, which would lead one to suppose that he obtained it between 1784 and 1787. 4. B. Smith, op. cit., p. 32. 81 82 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD the happiness of the savages: "Sir, there can be nothing more false. The savages have no bodily advantages beyond those of civilized men. They have not better health; and as to care or mental uneasiness, they are not above it, but below it, like bears."5 And again four years later we find him demonstrating that a London shopkeeper has a better existence than a savage, and the latter is not braver than the former, just less intelligent.6 Here again Johnson was quarreling with the "primitivist" Lord Mon- boddo.7 He saw America as a land of incredibly and incurably ignorant barbarians; when in 1773 he went to visit Monboddo, who outdid even Rousseau with his defense of the simple goodness and quite human tem- perament of monkeys, the conversation came round to the subject of emigration. "To a man of mere animal life," suggested the doctor, "you can urge no argument against going to America. .... But a man of any intellectual enjoyment will not easily go and immerse himself and his posterity for ages in barbarism."' But let us get on to more solid examples. II. PERNETY AND THE AMERICAN GIANTS Pernety is a classic example of that extreme form of illuminism which pursued knowledge so enthusiastically and ingenuously that it finished up by becoming straightforward mysticism, and in some cases what can only be described as occultism. This passionate desire for enlightenment, if it was not held in check by some critical reserve, often ended in a search for the light amidst the thickest gloom; and all the accumulated knowl- edge, deprived of any solid religious or philosophical foundation, pro- duced no more than mystification. The Benedictine Antoine Joseph Per- nety (1716-1801), who as a young man had tried to interpret the Homeric poems as allegories of alchemy,9 had been with Bougainville on his ex- pedition to the Falkland Islands in 1763, as "almoner" or chaplain;10 5. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London, 1906), I, 358; the retort continues with an attack on Lord Monboddo and Rousseau; cf. ibid., I, 464. On Johnson's aversion for the Noble Savage, see Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 323-38; below, pp. 172-73; and B. Smith, op. cit., pp. 70-71, 91 n., 127. Delisle de Sales too denied (1770) that the Missouri savages, in having less needs, were any happier than the Europeans; see Philosophie de la Nature, II, 362-63. 6. James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (New York, 1936), pp. 56, 58 (though he adds that it would be just as easy to take the side of the savage!). Cf. also ibid., p. 210. 7. On "Monboddo and Rousseau," see A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), pp. 38-61; on Johnson, the Hill-Powell edition of Boswell's Life, II, 476-78, and the references (to America, Savages, Indian, Emigration) in the sixth volume (indexes). 8. James Boswell, Tour to the Hebrides, p. 54. 9. Les fables egyptiennes et grecques divoilees et reduites au mi2me principe, avec une explication des hieroglyphes (Paris, 1758); Italian trans.: Bari, 1936. A. Viatte, Les sources occultes du romantisme (Paris, 1928), I, 92-103; II, 279-83, treats only Pernety the "illuminist." 10. The journey was described in a book, Histoire d'un voyage aux Iles Malouines, fait en 1763-4, avec des observations sur le detroit de Magellan et sur les Patagons (Paris, 1770), which was also translated into English, The History of a Voyage to the Malouine (or Falkland) Islands, made in 1764, under the Command of M. de Bougainville, in order to form a settlement there; and of two voyages to European Reactions to de Pauw on his return to Europe he and certain other members of his order had suggested a reform of the Benedictine rule, presumably aimed at "mod- ernizing'" it, adapting it to the new times. When the attempt failed, he threw off the cowl but soon after gained the protection of Frederick II, who made him his librarian and conferred on him the abbey of Biirgel in Thiiringen. His rejection of religion had earned him the approval of the enlightened Voltairian despot, but as time passed his mystic and cabalistic tendencies gained the upper hand once again; he became a follower of Swedenborg and lost Frederick's favor. In 1783 he returned to France, but his reputation as a freethinker forced him to leave Paris and retire to the Midi, where he founded the illuminist sect at Avignon and died at the dawn of the new century. De Pauw's book, with its tone of bitter sarcasm, must have offended Pernety both as a believer in the Noble Savage and Virgin Nature, and as a man of religious and humanitarian inclinations. As an eyewitness ("I had seen with my own eyes most of the things described therein") he believed himself well qualified to demolish it. Already on 7 September 1769 he had read a first rebuttal before the Berlin Academy, and the fol- lowing year he published, once again in Berlin, a complete Dissertation sur l'Amerique et les Amdricains, contre les Recherches philosophiques de Mr. de P * * * . In the last few pages (132-33) of the dissertation he speaks as a Benedictine, or rather ex-Benedictine, defending his order against de Pauw's indiscriminate assaults. But in the whole of the rest of the book he speaks as a Rousseauian," singing the praises of the good- ness, wisdom, moderation, industry, and strength of the American natives. And most of all, speaking as someone who has actually been as far as the Tierra del Fuego, he flaunts before de Pauw that classic and extreme example of robustness, the Patagonian giant, the very model of a rich physical development, a living disproof of every sophism of Ameri- can degeneration.12 Denina writes that no sooner was the Recherches published than "Mr. Pernetty found things in them to object to; and he had remarks to make particularly on the subject of the Patagonians."'3 The existence or nonexistence of giants was one of the oldest argu- ments in the discussion on the properties of the New World. Obviously the Streights of Magellan, with an account of the Patagonians (London, 1771), and which received honorable mention again in Darwin's Voyage of a Naturalist (New York, 1871), I, 252-55; II, 174-75. See L. Hourcade, "Los primeros colonos de las Malvinas: El relato de Dom Pernetty," Argentina Austral (Buenos Aires), 31 (1960), n. 339, pp. 22-24. 11. Pernety too fails to make any explicit mention of Rousseau, who was not popular in Berlin. But on p. 113 he writes: "The primary intention of this union, or Social Contract, was to oblige all the con- tracting parties to lend each other mutual aid," etc. 12. Pp. 50 and ff.; for further details see Reed, op. cit., p. 62. 13. P. Denina, op. cit., III, 152. 83 84 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD creatures of such enormous bulk and such convincing muscles would have been the best proof of the power of nature in America, an almost overwhelming reply to the caviling European critics. And their existence had been stubbornly asserted from earliest times, once it had been es- tablished as a basically believable notion by biblical, classical, and me- dieval tradition.14 Vespucci talks amusingly of American giants of both sexes, but it was actually through Pigafetta's journal (19 May 1520, etc.) that Europe first made the acquaintance of these Patagonians, who were to enjoy such success in literature and philosophy right up to Tasso'5 and Vico and indeed beyond. One of the earliest printed accounts of America says in reference to the Peruvians that "the Indians are strong and bold in matters of war. . . the people of the country are very large and wondrously like giants, and are very valiant in war."16 And the exist- ence of American giants is stoutly defended by Father Acosta: "One should not be amazed nor take it as fable that there are giants."17 These very same comments of Father Acosta were to provoke the scorn of the diminutive abbe Galiani two centuries later; in his unpub- lished treatise, "On Men of Extraordinary Stature and Giants" (1757- 58), Galiani insinuated that the Jesuit had included them simply to please his beloved Americans, who would have been left "in tears" if they too had not had their giants, just like the Old World.'8 But at that time the existence of giants in America was still accepted by Maupertuis, who be- lieved they had been pushed down to the south just as the tiny Lapps had been driven up north,9m and somewhat more hesitantly by Rousseau ("there have been, and perhaps still are, nations of men of gigantic height");20 and Buffon himself was even more firmly convinced of their 14. "The New World must have contained everything extraordinary that the ancient travelers had described," writes Enrique de Gandia, according to whom the legend was reinforced by the tradition of tall men having come from Australia and the discovery (mentioned and discussed by de Pauw too) of fossil remains and bones of prehistoric animals (Historia critica de los mitos de la conquista ameri- cana [Madrid, 1929], p. 38). On the renewed belief in giants during the Renaissance, despite the ad- verse opinion of Augustine, see D. C. Allen, "Donne among the Giants," Modern Language Notes, 61 (April 1946), pp. 257-60. The existence or actual abundance of giants in ancient times and their rarity or absence in present times was one of the arguments frequently adduced by those who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries maintained that all nature was in decline and heading for ultimate ruin; see D. C. Allen, "The Degeneration of Man," pp. 219, 224, and Harris, op. cit., pp. 70-71, 96, 134, 161. On biblical giants as inspirers or legitimizers of the Patagonians, see P. G. Adams, op. cit., pp. 28, 36. 15. "On the shore they see the giant Patagonians, horrible and roaring" (Gerusalemme liberata, XV, 45), one of the stanzas rejected by the author; see Scrittori d'ltalia edition, p. 519. See also Blanke, op. cit., pp. 227-28. 16. Nouvelles certaines des Isles du Peru (Lyon, 1534), reproduced in photogravure (tables 10 and 15) in R. Porras Barrenechea, Las relaciones primitivas de la conquista del Perui (Paris, 1937). 17. Historia natural y moral, VII, 3; ed. cit., p. 457, on the basis of the existence of enormous bones. 18. F. Nicolini, "G. B. Vico e F. Galiani," app. I, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 71 (1918), p. 200; and in Bollettino dell'Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli, no. 4 (31 December 1951). pp. 49-123 (see pp. 114-21); Galiani, Correspondance, I, 317. 19. Oeuvres (Lyon, 1768), II, 99, 129-30, 387-88. Cf. Glass, Forerunners of Darwin, p. 77; P. G. Adams, op. cit., p. 234. 20. Discours sur l'origine et les fondemens de I'inegalit parmi les hommes (1754), note 10. European Reactions to de Pauw existence,"2 as was Voltaire, who was of the opinion that even allow- ing for exaggerations the Patagonians were "the tallest people on earth."22 By 1768, in fact, the very year which saw the appearance of the Recher- ches, "there had accumulated a... formidable body of evidence that the natives of Patagonia were giants."23 Within America itself, the evi- dence provided by Acosta (and others) was subtly used by the Mexican Eguiara y Eguren (1755) to support his curious theory that bodily giants had existed in America when it was ruled by the indios, and now under the government of the Spaniards there were intellectual and cultural giants.24 The natural vitality of America apparently expressed itself first in the physical and later in the spiritual domain! Another Mexican, Father Clavigero, affirms unhesitatingly that there were giants (even if not whole nations of giants) in New Spain and other parts of America, a fact ren- dered even more remarkable if one recalled that there were certainly nei- ther hippopotamuses nor elephants there, nor any other such voluminous quadrupeds!25 In America the animal man reaches greater dimensions than any other zoological species. On the other hand there were many who rejected the notion of Ameri- can giants as sheer fantasy. Apart from de Pauw and Diderot,26 and leav- ing aside Horace Walpole ("Oh, but we have discovered a race of giants! Captain Byron has found a nation of Brobdignacs on the coast of Patagonia"),27 one might mention Wieland, who took exception (1769- 77) to the variously assembled evidence, including Byron's, and reduced the towering Patagonians to mere six-footers,28 and the abb6 Raynal, 21. Oeuvres completes, ed. cit., XII, 418-34; cf. Roger, op. cit., p. 538, n. 58. 22. Essai sur les moeurs (1753-58), chap. 146; London ed. (1770), IV, 376. Muratori too, taking the word of the Jesuit missionaries, believed (1743) the Patagonians to be "peoples of gigantic stature"; II cristianesimo felice nelle missioni de' Padri della Compagnia di Ges' nel Paraguai (Venice, 1752), I, 28, and II, 112; and even G. Leopardi (Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, 1815, Florence ed., 1859, pp. 250-51) quotes various authors from the end of the eighteenth century and is inclined to suspend judgment. Cf. also the ideas of the Jesuit Tomas Falkner, outlined in Guillermo Furlong's Tomas Falkner v su "Acerca de los Patagones" (Buenos Aires, 1954). 23. B. Smith, op. cit., pp. 20-22. 24. Prologos a la Biblioteca mexicana, pp. 172-73, 186. In 1845 Sarmiento paid careful attention to two gigantic Patagonians that he saw in the theater at Santiago de Chile (Raul A. Orgaz, Sarmiento y el naturalismo histdrico [C6rdoba, Argentina, 1940], pp. 119-20). Even today the giants are not without their willing "supporters": see the follower of Bellamy (mentioned above, chap. 3, n. 44); Denis Saurat, L'Atlantide et le regne des geants (Paris, 1954; English trans.: London, 1957); and, in appendix to a new edition of Commodore Byron's Journal (London, 1964), the article "The Patagonian Giants" by Dr. Helen Wallis of the British Museum Map Room. "Dr. Wallis, after reviewing reports by travellers from Magellan's Pigafetta to Charles Darwin, inclines to agree that Patagonian Indians are somewhat above the average human height" (review by C. E. Nowell, in Hispanic American Historical Review, 45, no. 3 [August 1965], p. 484). 25. Historia antigua de Mexico, ed. M. Cuevas (Mexico, 1958), I, 146-47, IV, 51. 26. De Pauw, Recherches, 1768, I, "Discours preliminaire," and I, 281-326; Diderot, Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, 1771, Pl6iade ed., p. 757. 27. Letter to Horace Mann, 22 May 1766, quoted in P. G. Adams, op. cit., p. 38. 28. Beytriige zur geheimen Geschichte der Menschheit, in Siimmtliche Werke, XIV (Leipzig, 1796), pp. 138-39, 229-30. 85 86 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD who on the subject of the famous Patagonians observed coldly that "there are giants and dwarves in all countries.""29 With the elimination of the giants-these men superior to all others- the way was clear for describing the Americans as inferior to the rest of the world. Once their powerful vanguard had been put to flight, the other inhabitants of the continent made a miserably easy target for the slanderers of America. But the defenders of America in their turn, hav- ing lost all hope of counting in their ranks such doughty champions, switched the basis of their defense from the men to the climate, from the peoples to the physical environment of the New World, and thus unin- tentionally strengthened yet further the notion of the absolute primacy of inanimate nature over the afflicted humanity of America. III. PERNETY AGAINST BUFFON: THE COUNTERATTACK ON EUROPE Through de Pauw, Pernety attacks Buffon too; he seems to be referring to Buffon when he criticizes de Pauw for defending unquestioningly "the opinion of an author which he had taken over for himself' (p. 6) slandering the New World and its creatures. But Pernety's reply, even when it is based on sound reasoning and common sense, never comes up to the speculative level of the naturalist's quest for a law to explain and justify the differences between the animals of the Old World and the New. He points out plausibly enough that the abundance of insects and reptiles in America, and their enormous size, is a proof that the "principle of life" in the New World is at least as active and fertile as in the Old (p. 42); and that these accursed and unhappy lands provide the "privi- leged" Europeans with their sugar, cocoa, coffee, cochineal, and precious woods; their Peruvian and West Indian spices; their gold, silver, and pre- cious stones; and the skins and cotton that clothe them (p. 43). It is Eu- rope rather that is poor, and America is the land that is "great and powerful, the rich magnet of the Europeans" who seek to use its riches to make up for the poverty and deficiencies of their own continent.30 Another innovation by Pernety is his defense of the artistic work of the Americans, the Mexicans' feather weaving, the Incas' skill with gold, the fine embroideries of the Chileans, or the Caribbeans' wood carvings.3a But too often he oversteps the mark and simply reverses de Pauw's thesis by slandering the European and idealizing the savage. 29. Op. cit., IV, 207. See below, p. 243: the final derivation of the polemics over the giants is the dis- cussion of the stature of the North Americans. 30. In the later Examen des Recherches (Berlin, 1771), II, 457-58, Pernety wisely limits himself to the observation that one cannot compile two lists of "gifts" offered and received and thus makes a valid criticism of the "bookkeeping" theory of one continent's contributions to the other. But his argument has moral overtones: "There is something ungrateful about boasting of the benefits one has bestowed and concealing or remaining silent about those one has received." 31. Dissertation, pp. 107-11; see also Examen, II, 120-40, 305 ff. European Reactions to de Pauw 87 All American men, says this strange specimen of a Benedictine, are handsome, strong, and well built (p. 112) "and better proportioned for the American women than the Europeans."3" De Pauw was totally un- justified in extending Buffon's thesis on animals and plants (which was unacceptable anyway) to the men of America (p. 66). Europe had al- ready robbed these poor Americans of all but their humanity: "Was it really necessary for Mr. de Pauw to have the final cruelty of trying to strip them of this too?" (p. 131). But the Americans are men, and what men! Nothing but the best! The Peruvians in the south and the Ap- palachians in the north (pp. 22 ff.) have shown themselves capable of building advanced civilizations. If the Peruvians of today are timid and few in number this is due to their cruel maltreatment and oppression at the hands of the Spaniards (p. 77). If the Americans show a complete disinterest in seeing other countries, their motives are patriotic and philosophical (p. 87). They are in fact true "rustic philosophers" (p. 80),33 wisely abstaining from the preoccupations caused by knowledge and ambition (p. 94). And if sometimes they are vicious and violent, "is there anything more cruel than the European Soldier?" (p. 117). In his counterblast against the Europeans, Pernety expresses equal disapproval of people who shave their moustaches and people who do not shave their beards (p. 121); he makes the somewhat indiscreet (for an abb6) discovery about the beautified ladies of Europe that "on close examination one finds the beauty of at least half of them to be quite spurious" (p. 123);34 and finally he declares that the true vileness and 32. "Et mieux proportionnes pour les Americaines, que les Europeans," Dissertation, p. 46. Pernety is obviously repeating Lahontan (the savage men of North America are "mieux proportionnez pour les Ameriquaines, que pour les Europ6ennes," Dialogues curieux entre l'auteur et un sauvage de bon sens, ed. G. Chinard [Paris, 193 1], p. 93), but he gets hopelessly confused over the second term of the com- parison. 33. An echo of the Socrate rustique (1762 and many reprints), the title given by the French translator, J. Frey des Landres, to Hirzel's Die Wirtschaft eines philosophischen Bauers, on which see Paul H. Johnstone, "The Rural Socrates," in Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (April 1944), p. 151-75. Baron Lahontan had already (1703) called the redskins philosophes rustiques (op. cit., p. 99). See also Pernety, Examen, II, 510-11. 34. Already in the sixteenth century Jodelle had written of the savages: "ces barbares marchent tous nuds / Et nous nous marchons incognus, / Fardez, masquez" (quoted by A. A. de Mello Franco, O indio Brasileiro e a Revolugao Francesa [Rio de Janeiro, 1937], p. 158, by John C. Lapp, "The New World in French Poetry of the Sixteenth Century," Studies in Philology, 45, no. 1 [April 1948], p. 154, who brings out the fact that these expressions anticipate Montaigne by twenty years, and by Elizabeth Arm- strong, Ronsard and the Age of Gold [Cambridge, 1968], p. 138). The tirades against lipstick and skin creams are a regular part of the apologies of the savage: for one conspicuous example, see Delisle de Sales, op. cit., VI, 4-36; and, even closer to Pernety, Baron Lahontan, with his savage Adario, who mocks the gilded costumes beneath which it is impossible to distinguish "les hanches et les fesses arti- ficielles d'avec les naturelles" (op. cit., p. 225). On the custom of wearing hairdos "like Congo birds' nests," rouge, etc., see C. F. D. Schubart (1777) in Ernst Fraenkel, Amerika im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens (Cologne and Opladen, 1959), p. 50. De Pauw, of course, attaches no importance at all to the artificial European fashions, including that of having "de gros ventres postiches et de gros culs postiches," as in the France of Francis II's time (Defense, Berlin ed., 1771, p. 221). But in his final Recherches, on the Greeks, he too takes issue with the frivolous and vulgar fashions adopted by the European women "over the last twenty years or so" (Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs [Berlin, 1788], II, 346). 88 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD the real savagery is to be found "in the smoking rooms of England, Hol- land, or Flanders, or in the German, Danish, or Swedish music halls" (pp. 126-27). Pernety devotes only a few pages to the defense of the animals of America. He has no desire to revive the whole polemic with Buffon, but he cannot resist mentioning in passing the enormous bears of North America, the savage creatures of the Brazilian forest, the tigers of Paraguay, which are even larger and more fearsome than those of Africa, and the real American lions, which should not be confused "with an animal of Peru and the frontiers of Chile" which the Peruvians incor- rectly call a lion. As for domestic animals, there may be some that have degenerated, "but Mr. de P. is no less wrong to draw general conclusions from the particular.3" I have seen in Brazil and on the banks of the River Plate, bulls as big and strong as the largest in France" (p. 129), and the same can be said of the goats, sheep, dogs, and horses. IV. DE PAUW'S ANSWER TO PERNETY: DEGENERATION AND PROGRESS De Pauw's reply to Pernety was swift. His Difense des Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains is dated 26 March 1770 and was pub- lished in Berlin that same year. It is almost double the length of Pernety's work, but actually more readable with its format of forty-four short chap- ters, and in content it marks a considerable advance on the position of the Recherches. There are still plenty of personal attacks,36" but the polemic in general operates on a rather higher level. There is less pro- pensity for scandal, almost none of those piquant and scabrous little details, and the overtones of miraculous and terrifying discovery are very much reduced. He is at pains to distinguish between different parts 35. There seems to be an echo of Pernety in the harshly critical review of the German edition of the Recherches (1769), published in the GOttingische Anzeigen von Gelehrten Sachen, 19 February 1770 (year 1770, pp. 177-82). The reviewer says he does not know de Pauw, but he dislikes his haughtiness of tone and the insults he habitually heaps upon his opponents, and in particular the defenders of the giants (p. 177: he is convinced that the Patagonians are at least an inch taller than the English). In de- fense of the intellectual gifts of the Americans, he recalls the great work of the Inca (Garcilaso?), the memory and eloquence of the redskins, the Peruvian roads, the Mexican calendar, etc. In short he would find it easy to show that all de Pauw's statements "are absolutely nothing more than general conclusions from special cases"; a criticism that almost repeats Pernety's words and which was to be repeated later by almost all de Pauw's adversaries. 36. To Pernety's boasts of his personal experience de Pauw replies that in his voyage to the Falkland Islands Pernety could not have seen any Americans, since the islands are uninhabited (p. 34; but Per- nety also landed in Brazil, at Montevideo and by the Rio de la Plata); that he is a facile improviser, while he, de Pauw, worked nine years on the Recherches (pp. 6 and 152; on p. 98 de Pauw recalls that in 1762 he still thought the tapir was a sort of hippopotamus). He accuses Pernety of partiality as a Frenchman and Benedictine (p. 226) and is perhaps hoping to offend him when he refers disparagingly to Guedeville as "this defrocked monk" (p. 170). Other curious polemic expressions are de Pauw's apologies for the prosperity and civilization of Germany, although it took no part in the conquest of America (pp. 151, 224), while Pernety seems to suggest that it is still as barbarous as the American natives (p. 226). European Reactions to de Pauw of the continent, and one is even aware of some effort to reconcile the facts with the theory. De Pauw becomes more tolerant toward the Spaniards too. Although he rivals Pernety's claims to philanthropy when he boasts of having ren- dered the memory of the marauding Spaniards more hateful than ever37 and admits moreover that America could have been civilized "without massacring a single one of its stupid inhabitants" (p. 224), he denies that the depopulation of America can be blamed on the Spanish massacres and concludes lightheartedly as ever that "a greater number of Europeans came over to the West Indies than were natives destroyed there" (p. 25). The natives are still however described as stupid, as we just saw, and extremely cowardly: "When they had to fight, the Peruvians exhibited no trace of courage, and more cowardly men have never been seen in the entire world" (pp. 45-46). And the women of America are all so ugly that "without certain marks" they could not be distinguished from the men: "Thus there is no fair sex there" (1771 ed., p. 16). Small won- der then that they were maltreated by their husbands and that in revenge they welcomed the Spanish like liberators and surrendered to them so freely (ibid., p. 43). It is ridiculous to call savages philosophers when all they are doing is obeying their primal instincts (pp. 131, 218, 242). It is ridiculous to keep on asserting that there are giants in Patagonia (thirty pages refuting this!). And Pernety shows himself doubly ignorant in attacking de Pauw as if he had suggested that man was a recent arrival in America," and in de- luding himself that it will be easy to demolish Buffon's theory. What does he think he can set up against Buffon-facts? de Pauw blithely continues, little realizing that he is loosening the ground beneath his own feet (but unconsciously foreshadowing the statistical theories of natural laws)- facts? ... But a hypothesis can only be contradicted by some other very strong probability "and not by facts; for when nature operates, she operates in silence, and, so to speak, without witnesses" (p. 204). At the beginning of his famous Discours sur l'inegalite" (1754), Rousseau had written: "'Let us begin by setting aside all the facts, for they are quite beside the point.""39 So the admirer and the slanderer of the savage find 37. Defense, p. 9. Elsewhere de Pauw denies that the Europeans in general can be blamed for "the in- famous excesses of a few Spanish thieves" (p. 224). 38. Buffon's thesis, refuted by de Pauw (ibid., pp. 21-22, 201-02), who maintained not "recent organi- zation" but "an ancient destruction." On the recent "organization of matter" in America see a long di- gression by Pernety, Examen, II, 408 ff. 39. Cf. Diderot's even earlier comment (1746): "A single demonstration impresses me more than fifty facts . . . I am more sure of my judgment than of my eyes" (Pensdes philosophiques, sec. 50), and Montesquieu: "It is not impossible to attack a revealed religion, because it exists through particular facts, and facts, by their nature, can be subject to dispute" (letter to W. Warburton, 16 May 1754, in Oeuvres diverses [Paris, 1820], III, 324). These statements (and those of Raynal, below, p. 242) form 89 Translator's Preface THIS English edition of Antonello Gerbi's masterpiece is the delayed sequel to suggestions that began to be heard as soon as the original ver- sion of the work was published in Italy in 1955. Reviewers and readers on both sides of the Atlantic expressed the hope that a work dealing with such a fundamental aspect of American civilization might someday be- come available in English. When I was asked to prepare such a transla- tion I was delighted and flattered, and my subsequent experience con- firmed my initial feeling that it was indeed a rare privilege. Not the least of the pleasures it afforded me was the chance to meet the author and spend some time in his company. From the beginning Dr. Gerbi has fol- lowed the preparation of the English edition of his work with lively in- terest and has been unstinting in his advice and help. The result has been a close and entirely harmonious collaboration, which has contributed more than any other factor, I feel, to the successful completion of the project. I am happy to have this chance to thank Dr. Gerbi for his hos- pitality, courtesy, and patience throughout this period. Every task of translation has its problems, large and small. The most important of these, in my opinion, is the translator's need to recognize that his work must of necessity fall short of perfection. Each language is a unique and separate entity and the very process of translation is in itself a change in expression, quite apart from any alterations in con- notative value that may, or seemingly must, result from the translation. The degree of imperfection, the "imprecision factor," varies with the nature of the text. In a scientific text it may be minimal; in a text where the author's style is an issue it must, regrettably, be somewhat greater. Dr. Gerbi is above all a fine stylist, as more than one reviewer has pointed out. His lightness of touch in dealing with the most abstruse subjects is something quite literally inimitable. In such a case the translator must recognize the limitations inherent in the nature of his undertaking, and attempt the possible; he must endeavor to do justice to each single al- lusion, suggestion, and innuendo, to say no more than the author says, and no less; and to say it in the way the author says it. This then is what ix 90 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD themselves for once in perfect agreement, in their mutual scorn of the humble facts. Anyway, as regards the facts of the degeneration of animals in America, de Pauw simply refers back to Buffon (for example, pp. 76, 90, 93-94, etc.) or rather takes shelter behind the great man (1771 ed., pp. 90, 193), who on this particular point seems to support his thesis that life in Amer- ica is not incipient and incomplete but already decayed and corrupt. He reminds the reader of the sterility of the first species that were trans- planted to America and of the continuing necessity of having large quan- tities of smoked or salted meat sent over from Europe (pp. 79, 81). And moving on from the animal to the vegetable kingdom, he answers Per- nety by pointing out that in America the sugar is not so sweet, nor the coffee so flavorful, nor the wood of the oak so strong as in the Old World (pp. 111, 114, 120). And as for mineral resources he has no trouble showing that gold and silver were as ruinous to Peru as they were to Spain (pp. 115-16). But when he is not getting carried away by his urge to heap insults on the whole of America's nature and history,40 de Pauw perceives the seriousness of the problem much more acutely than does Pernety; he realizes that Europe's ideas on geophysics at the time of the discovery "were totally inadequate to name and classify the new species found in America" (p. 97), and that even in his own time "nothing is more difficult for us to understand than the way in which Nature shared and distributed the animal species over the globe" (p. 94). part of the polemic of Reason against tradition but have a particular significance when used against the testimonials of Revelation; on this aspect, see R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in XVIll Cen- tury France (Princeton, 1939), p. 78. For the sources on which Rousseau relies for almost all his "facts" (by far the most important being the Histoire genrale des voyages), see G. Pire, "Jean-Jacques Rous- seau et les relations de voyages," Revue de I'histoire litteraire de France, 56, no. 3 (July-September 1956), pp. 355-78. 40. And not only American. Anticipating the "slanders" on the Oriental races that he was to develop in his second Recherches, he says that the Chinese have neither astronomers, nor naturalists, nor sculp- tors, nor painters, and announces that he will publish a demonstration of the reasons that prevented the Orientals learning to paint, even in the areas not subjected to Mohammedanism "such as China and Japan, where still today they do not know how to draw correctly" (pp. 218-19n.). Although the accusa- tion was immediately (1771) and vigorously rejected (Examen, II, 449-50) by Pernety, who invited de Pauw to visit the collections in Paris and Holland, the latter repeated it in the Recherches philosophiques sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois, 1773 (Paris ed., III, 1794-95, vols IV and V of the Oeuvres philoso- phiques de Pauw), which in fact give copious illustration of the "ridiculous drawing and frightful daubing of the Chinese" (I, 305), and conclude that "the arts have remained ..,. in most of. . . the peoples of the East, in a sort of eternal infancy" (1, 312; on painting, see also 1, 381-85). Some Japanese succeeded in painting flowers and animals tolerably well; but they too are "quite incapable . . . of touching the land- scape or historical painting." Graded on the famous scale of Roger de Piles almost all the Orientals would receive zero in drawing, zero in composition, zero in expression, and zero in color (I, 333-34). See also Francesco Algarotti: "The mediocrity of the Chinese . . . is manifestly apparent in painting" ("Pensieri diversi," Opere [Livorno, 1764], VII, 194); Pierre-Joseph Andr6 Roubaud, Histoire gene- rale de I'Asie, de I'Afrique et de I'Amerique (Paris, 1770-75), I, 213: the Japanese "were successful in color, but they had no knowledge of drawing, perspective, and the other learned parts," and cf. below, pp. 608-09. European Reactions to de Pauw However the most significant advance lies in the attempted reconcilia- tion of the European doctrine of Progress with the thesis of the degener- ation of America. Developing what had been merely hinted at in the Recherches (I, 25-26), de Pauw now claims that the Americans were degenerate at the moment of discovery, but under the cultural and artistic influence of Europe they have progressed in the three centuries elapsed and will progress further in the future. "After three hundred years America will as little resemble what it is today, as today it is unlike what it was at the time of the discovery."41 Pernety refuses to recognize that the Recherches refers "almost always to the state in which the new conti- nent was found" at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, and not to contemporary America (1771 ed., pp. 63, 65, 101, 103, 109, 189, 211-12, 227). Thus the degeneration of America is no longer seen as the result of some fatal curse laid on the whole continent, as it had been in the Re- cherches; now it becomes instead just one stage in its historical evolution. The lowest point of American decadence is pushed three centuries back into the past, and the new continent, from the time of entering within Europe's orbit, has begun, albeit slowly and hesitantly, to share in Europe's progress. So the discovery of America really was "the greatest and most memo- rable event in history" (1771 ed., p. 141; an echo of Gomara's famous exordium?). Those abrupt causes of the age-old degeneration, the ca- tastrophes, the floods, and volcanic eruptions, which were mentioned somewhat obscurely in the Recherches (and which are still admitted in the Difense), were not repeated. And the slow and constant causes, going under the inclusive title of climate, took a turn for the better. So de Pauw comes back to another idea that had appealed to Buffon (see above, p. 14), an idea already sketched out by Oviedo and applied by Hume to the two Americas,42 and one which contained an undeniable kernel of truth: namely that the work of man, his tilling of the soil and control of the rivers, his raising of cattle and reclaiming of the boggy marshes, can little by little bring about changes in the degree of healthi- ness and even the climate of a given area. Perhaps in two or three cen- turies they will even succeed in producing a wine in America like the wine of Burgundy! (1771 ed., p. 105). De Pauw still maintains that America's present climate weakens the Europeans (pp. 10-11; 1771 ed., p. 60), but he admits that one day the arts and sciences will flourish even 41. Defense, p. 108; cf. also Church, op. cit., p. 196. These two three-century periods call to mind the fact that three hundred years was precisely the period of time necessary, according to Goodman, for ascertaining a decadence or corruption of nature (see Harris, op. cit., p. 29). 42. Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations, in Essays, II, 11; ed. cit., pp. 441-42. 91 92 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD in America; and they will flourish earlier in the north than in the south, because the English colonists work "with an indescribable fervor to break up the terrain, purify the air, and drain away the marshy waters," while the Spanish and Portuguese, with the best provinces in America, have become as lazy as the natives among whom they live.43 De Pauw's new theses, with their alternating suggestions of decadence and civilization on the part of the Americans, bring to mind a curious dialogue written by Vauvenargues (1715-47) about thirty years earlier, but not actually published until 1857. In it the moralist presents an American criticizing, as usual, a European, in this particular case a Portu- guese, for having taught the innocent natives the corrupt arts of civili- zation. But the Portuguese vigorously denies that civilization is a form of corruption or degeneration and proceeds to ask the American if he sees the mind of man as a great tree which with time has borne ripe fruit "but which later degenerated and lost its fertility and strength." The American agrees, saying that the metaphor supports his thesis that the Americans had reached the stage of perfected development, while the Europeans had gone beyond it into decadence. But the Portuguese breaks in tri- umphantly: "But who told you that you had reached this point of maturity in America? Who told you that having reached it, you didn't lose it?"44 And poetic as always like a true Portuguese, he concludes by comparing the arts of Europe to the spring sun that revives the fields after the winter of barbarism. The similarity between this and de Pauw's attitude in his reply to Pern- ety, though accidental of course, is quite clear. Vauvenargues's Portu- guese is attempting to reconcile the old antithesis between nature and civilization by setting it in the context of history. De Pauw, without changing his qualification of America as a degenerate continent, now finds in it some capacity for progress. In fact, while Pernety saw America as existing in a state of immobile and blessed perfection, in a golden "philosophical" state of nature, de Pauw - here at his most genuinely modern and enlightened - describes it 43. Dfense, p. 13; on the modifications of climate, see also pp. 55, 57; the unhealthy climate of Pan- ama, Cartagena, and Portobello is also resistant to improvement: ibid., p. 59. In the second Recherches there is reference (I, 80) to the Egyptians having "much corrected the climate of their country," and the influence of climate in general is very limited (I, 167, 180, 255). Among the many authors who took up and developed this thesis one might note the anti-de Pauwians Jefferson (together with certain of his followers; see Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist [New York, 1952], pp. 139, 143, 204-09, 232) and Volney, in his Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis, 1803, in Oeuvres compltes (Paris, 1846), pp. 630-99, esp. 637, 685-86. The destruction of the forests in particular was discussed as a factor affecting the North American climate: see examples collected and commented on by G. Chinard, "La Foret Americaine," in L'homme contre la nature (Paris, 1949), pp. 85-178; by H. N. Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), pp. 179-83, and with ref- erence to Buffon and John Evelyn (1664), Hanks, op. cit., p. 191. Cf. also Boorstin, Colonial Experience, p. 161. 44. L. Vauvenargues, Oeuvres morales (Paris, 1874), II, 325. European Reactions to de Pauw with the harsh realism of the economist as poor, exploited, and oppressed, because it must get all its manufactured goods from Europe, and because its population is too small. This makes America "politically speaking, the most wretched country in the world, because for this reason it is entirely at the mercy of foreigners." It has an infinitely greater need of Europe than Europe has of America. It is so enslaved to Europe by nature and politics "that its complete independence is something morally impossible; but as time passes it will no longer be so" (p. 124; 1771 ed., pp. 117-18). Already the northern colonies send foodstuffs to the south: "this is the first step toward independence from the mother countries" (1771 ed., p. 115n.). In fact industrialization and the capacity to be self-supporting will be the basis of America's future political independence - an idea one hardly expected to see formulated by the most classic slanderer and denigrator of the New World. V. PERNETY'S SECOND OFFENSIVE: REPETITA MINIME JUVANT Poor Pernety must have been shaken by de Pauw's rejoinder. He was thinking his authoritative eyewitness accounts had demolished the fantasies and exaggerations of the Recherches in one swift blow, and now here was de Pauw again, scornful and arrogant as ever, producing all sorts of new points and remaining completely unrepentant in his basic heresy. His appeal before the Royal Academy of Berlin had failed, and de Pauw's reputation only increased. What higher court was there to hear his case? He had seen the pillars of his argument come tumbling down under the onslaught of de Pauw's sarcasms, but the patient little monk still did not lose heart; he set to work to build an even bigger and more solid edifice than the first. Gathering together a huge mass of authoritative testimony including that of Benjamin Franklin,45 kneading it hastily into an American summa apologetica, he dished up in 1771 his Examen des Recherches philosophiques sur l'Amerique et les Americains et de la Difense de cet ouvrage: two volumes, of small format, true, but contain- ing no less than nine hundred and sixty-two pages. It is a blessing, for us anyway, that de Pauw produced no further reply. But in fact there was no reason to. Pernety presents no new points nor does he open any new perspectives on the problem. And although he was obviously enraged by de Pauw's response, and protests that he had never confused America of 1492 with eighteenth-century America,46 he actually contents himself with one more display of long-winded erudition on the 45. Examen, II, 584, quoted by Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, 1957), p. 30. 46. Op. cit. (Berlin, 1771; there apparently exists another edition of 1773), 1, 28-30, 179; II, 69, etc. 93 94 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD subject of America. By and large, in fact, he treats his adversary with new respect: de Pauw has "conceived a hypothesis, and it takes intelli- gence to do that": the hypothesis may be completely mistaken, but it led him into new fields and produced some very original notions, and it may yet serve "to uncover new truths."47 De Pauw's logical error is that he generalizes,48 but at the root of this error is his perverse delight in argument for its own sake, the pleasure he finds in insulting his enemies, his haughty libertinism,49 and his courtier's complacency. What a pity that this clever man should let himself be guided by a fantasy so lurid and bizarre that from its earliest infancy it sucks on putrid and foul- smelling waters, grows up amidst a filthy slime swarming with reptiles, snakes, and poisonous insects of monstrous proportions, and feeds in- satiably on countless beetles, spiders, and gigantic toads. Its home is a dark and barren land of vertical precipices or marshes and forests, or immense deserts, inhabited only by a few families of animals with human features, idiotlike, dull, a blind prey to their instincts.50 Turning his vengeful sarcasm from the defense of the natives to the defense of the ancient American civilizations, Pernety regrets that the valient Cortes could not count among his followers someone like de Pauw, who with a single stroke of the pen could have made whole fortified cities and armed multitudes disappear-even at the risk of making the great con- quistador seem some sort of don Quixote doing battle with imaginary armies!51 Apart from a few well-aimed barbs of this sort, Pernety's counter- attack pursues a somewhat tedious strategy: against every statement by de Pauw he quotes extracts from chroniclers and travelers, sometimes pages long, saying the opposite; but at no time does he submit them to any sort of critical assessment, preferring to accept literally and quite indiscriminately anything nice they had to say about America. The rapt visions of Columbus, the calculated hyperboles of Cortes, the blithe romances of the pseudo-Vespucci, and the impassioned idealizations of Las Casas-all these are repeated by Pernety as if they had the same value as the carefully assembled information of Martire and Oviedo or the much later scientific reports of people like Condamine or Ulloa. Certainly he succeeds in casting doubt on some of de Pauw's more ex- 47. Op. cit., II, 116; see also ibid., 1, xviii; II, v, 268, etc. 48. De Pauw proceeded like someone giving a picture of Europe based on the steppes of Lapland or the Italian maremme (op. cit., 1, 103): cf. 1, 276-77, 294; II, 157-58, 182, 195n., 203, 209, 286-87, 539, 543, 548-49, 598, and 599. 49. How does de Pauw, "a minister of the Christian religion," dare to call the priests of the European religions our "fakirs"? (ibid., II, 573). Cf. above, n. 35. 50. Ibid., 1, 304-05; de Pauw's portrayal, Pernety continues, would only be acceptable, in part, for certain regions in Brazil: 1, 311-12. 5 1. Ibid., I, 143-45, 305-06; de Pauw knew but deliberately ignored the reports of Cortes: 1, 181. European Reactions to de Pauw treme suggestions; but the unbounded optimism of the overall picture is no more convincing than the gloominess of the portrait it is designed to replace.52 In short, there is little to choose between them, unless one is already convinced of the superiority of Nature over civilized Society, or vice versa. This then is the sole ideological basis of Pernety's Examen-an al- most mystical primitivism with its customary accompaniment of moral- istic prejudices against corrupt European society. It is this approach that allows Pernety to reconcile the two opposing theories that had seen America as either abundantly populated or completely deserted. De Pauw had "historicized" the problem, maintaining that America was thinly populated at the time of its discovery but had later grown in popu- lation as a result of the European migrations (see above, p. 191); Per- nety reverses this idea and uses Las Casas's authority, which also hap- pened to fit in with his own primitivism, to assert that America was swarming with people in 1492 ("the population of certain American countries might perhaps surpass that of Europe and equal that of Asia,""53 no less); but then came the vile Europeans, and America was reduced to a desert by their slaughter and pillage. De Pauw almost comes out of it all a hispanophile, for having exonerated the conquerors of this awful crime!54 Nature is prolific and civilization homicidal. Innocence is destined 52. Pernety writes for example that in Peru the mountains were covered with flocks of vicufla, "and the coca, that precious grass, grows abundantly there" (ibid., I, 282-83). The vicufla was always ex- tremely rare, so that even the Incas protected it against extinction. The "coca" is a leaf, not a grass. Without having read the Examen, Carli judged its extreme philo-Americanism very accurately: "I am told that Pernety too replied to de Pauw with two well-argued volumes. The spirit of America has in- vaded the Europeans" (from Milan, 12 May 1778, in B. Ziliotto, Trecentosessantasei lettere di Gian Rinaldo Carli capodistriano [Trieste, 1909], p. 209). 53. Examen, I, 207-08; cf. also I, 24-25, 190 ff. 54. Ibid., I, 201. Father Nuix, for whom see below, p. 192, was to come back to this argument (1780) in his defense of the humanity of the Spaniards in the Indies. Already in that same year 1771, however, an obscure polygraph and enthusiastic follower of de Pauw had pointed out the contradiction between the New World's supposed lack of inhabitants and the alleged Spanish massacres (Jacques Vin- cent Delacroix, Memoires d'un Americain, avec une description de la Prusse et de l'Isle de Saint Do- mingue, 2 vols. [Lausanne-Paris, 1771]). It was actually after his description of Santo Domingo (op. cit., II, 73-124) and the notes (II, 125-48) that Delacroix would have liked to insert a Discours de- scribing the cruelty of the Spaniards, but "I was forestalled by a philosophe Author" (p. 149); and he then summarizes the de Pauwian theses on the noxious climate of America (p. 159), on the nonexistence of Patagonian giants (pp. 175-86), on the lasciviousness of the native women (p. 163) and the hairless- ness of the men ("a sign of the feebleness of their constitution," p. 167), on the Eskimos, etc. He ad- mits to some doubt about the Creoles degenerating within three generations (in Martinique and Santo Domingo the Creoles manage to "display much intelligence in their affairs," pp. 168-69), but the Re- cherches remains "the best [work] and the most philosophical of those that have appeared on America" (p. 169); of the others, he criticizes Prevost for being more elegant than truthful, Pernety as being over- burdened with minor details and meager in philosophy, and La Condamine, who is among the few who have actually observed the natives (p. 170). J. M. Querard, in La France litteraire, s.v., lists more than thirty works for Delacroix, including some notes on the translation of Adams's Defence (see below, p. 248) and a collection of European and American constitutions of which a copy was owned by Jefferson (Catalogue of the Library, III, 40-41). 95 96 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD for slaughter. If the natives had possessed less "humanity" and had massacred the invaders, de Pauw would not have found them stupid and brutalized at all but rather would have treated them with great respect. "My poor Mexicans, my poor Peruvians," the abbe concludes, why did you content yourselves with following the dictates of nature? "Why did you not go to school with our Machiavellis?"55 Pernety also uses "nature" to defend the Americans against these insidious accusations of scarce erotic inclination. If they are animals, as de Pauw would have it, their animal instincts must fill them with an ardent desire for their females. Indeed, whispers the dewy-eyed sentimentalist mystic, "if beauty's sway and this irresistible attraction which draws the sexes together is an institution of nature," who will be more bound and dedicated to it than those "who have nought but nature as their guide"?56 And furthermore the Indians are robust, bearded, and hirsute, and the women of these countries (attention, you women of Paris!) "are beautiful, intelligent, and of good conduct," and they cover their nakedness; there are some that are pale blonde, some ash-blonde, and some dark, and some that have fairer skins than the women of Europe.57 If they do not particu- larly excite their men, this is because they go around naked, explains Pernety - all forgetful of having just vaunted their custom of modestly veiling themselves-and the men get accustomed to them like that, and ab assuetis non fit passio. A European would be quite aroused by them, but in America nakedness arouses men's passions less than the toilettes and coiffures and rouge do in Europe.58 Poor Europeans, one feels like saying, disturbed as much by clothing as by lack of clothing. The Ameri- cans, on the other hand, may perhaps be unfamiliar with the passion of love, but they know tenderness and virtue: "Yes, the Indians of the new continent are men.""59 And they are not all syphilitic.60 True, they are inclined to laziness. And they do not get much exercise and so obviously could not lift weights like the Europeans. So what? "Not everyone is a porter."'' Besides, if they were or are weak, this 55. Examen, 1, 237-39. 56. Ibid., 1, 262-63. 57. Ibid., II, 15-16. 58. Ibid., II, 90-92. An anonymous seventeenth-century traveler had already said of the women of Brazil that their nudity, far from provoking the men, "seems rather to make them less voluptuous" (quoted in G. Atkinson, Relations de voyages, p. 135). On the nudity of the native women, preferable to Europe's lascivious elegance, see also Blanke, op. cit., pp. 238-39. 59. Examen, II, 54, 93; and there are travelers and missionaries who have described these virtuous Americans as being addicted to lustful pleasures! Ibid., II, 99-102. 60. Ibid., II, 27-28. 61. Ibid., II, 81. And there is included, of course, the usual prolix (pp. 332-407) defense of the Pa- tagonians and Giants of Magellan's Land! (for whom see also 1, 47-48, and passim). Lahontan had writ- ten that the natives could not carry heavy loads, as the Europeans do, up to the age of thirty-five or forty; but after that (by dint of exercise?) they stay stronger than the Europeans up to the age of fifty-five or sixty (op. cit., p. 218). European Reactions to de Pauw shows that they were that much more intelligent and "spiritual" (Las Casas's theme, see above, p. 68); and if de Pauw calls them animals be- cause they are not outstanding in the arts and sciences, what is to be said of the women of Europe? Are they too "a stupid brutalized race?"62 It should also be noted that the Creoles have already produced some very learned men, which is why the European governments have begun to be worried and have tried to suppress their talents with various re- strictions, and why England is already sorry that it allowed them to de- velop. And the mestizos too have produced some excellent artists, like Miguel de Santiago, whose pictures have been admired in places as far away as Spain and even Rome.63 And both Creole and mestizo are long- lived.64 If some Creoles or some of the North American colonists have ruined their health, that's not the fault of the climate-their own "ex- cessive debauchery" brought that about.65 What else? Pernety finds he has left himself one last task-to destroy whatever claims remained that Europe was in some way or other superior. De Pauw was "intoxicated with tenderness" toward his own hemisphere and its inhabitants.66 But in fact it enjoys no special privilege, just as America has no exclusive right to misfortune. Nor is it true that Europe is the mother of the arts and sciences: "The arts and sciences were born in Africa and in Asia, whence they were brought to Europe." Europe fed them and raised them, true, but this only makes her their nurse, not their mother.67 As for behavior, in the taverns and smoke shops of the north there are Europeans behaving worse than savages; and note this, gentle- men-half, yes, half at least of the women of Europe are disguised in whalebone corsets; and goiter, let de Pauw say what he will, disfigures the Tyrolese !68 With de Pauw routed there still remained in the background the im- posing figure of Buffon. Pernety treats Buffon with obsequious humility, noting particularly where the great naturalist differs from de Pauw and agrees with Rousseau (the virtuous savage, the vices of man in society), and quoting long extracts from his history of man; he sticks to man be- cause on the subject of animals Buffon is, as we know, just as pessimistic as de Pauw. But undaunted and, alas, untiring, he comes back in the end to the lions and tigers, repeating on the strength of Martire's evidence 62. Exarnen, II, 79. 63. Ibid., II, 141-84; on Miguel de Santiago, see II, 170 and 306-07, where Ulloa's Journal, p. 229, is quoted. There are mentions of this painter, variously identified as mestizo or indio, in other apolo- gists of America, up to Drouin de Bercy, L'Europe et I'Amerique comparees (Paris, 1818), II, 200. 64. Examen, II, 235 ff. 65. Ibid., II, 163, 245. 66. Ibid., I, vii, 73, etc. 67. Ibid., I1, 440-48. 68. Ibid., 11, 461-69, 479-90, 495-502. On goiter, see de Pauw, Defense, 1771 ed., p. 225. 97 98 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD that they do exist in America. If Mr. de Pauw is pleased to call them something else, let him by all means do so.69 Even if it has no mane, and is of a rather ugly color and somewhat cowardly, the puma is still a lion; and the jaguar is still a tiger, even if not a real tiger!70 Te baptizo carpam.... And if de Pauw is so worried about dimensions, what about the rep- tiles and insects in America? He can hardly deny that they at least are more perfect than their miniature, and therefore presumably degenerate, equivalents in Europe.7" And if he insists that wild animals are the more perfect the fiercer they are, because this is the way Nature likes them, he is bound to conclude that a wild animal in its natural state is more perfect than a domestic one of the same species-an idea accepted by Buffon, but which does not quite fit in with the assertions of degenera- tion in the animal species of America. Nature, transmuted and adulterated in domestic animals, shines out pure and strong in the wild beasts.72 Nor is it true that all the animals which were already domesticated have degenerated in America; the pigs have improved (but Buffon had already conceded this); the quadrupeds in general are very prolific, and the horses - Pernety saw some at Montevideo - have excellent qualities. So they have become heavier? But this is because they were transferred from a dry terrain to a wet terrain; the same thing happens to the horses moved from the Limousin or Spain to the lowlands of Poitou or the lush fields of Normandy or the marshlands of Holland.73 Europe's weaknesses - Pernety seems to be trying to say, as usual - are no less than America's. VI. DE PAUW'S OPINION UNALTERED Pernety's second offensive, with its ineffective ramblings diluted over nearly a thousand pages, was not the sort of thing to cause de Pauw any further worry. The same was true of Pernety's final contribution to the polemic, in which he withdrew still further from the extremism of his attempts to refute de Pauw, abandoning almost completely the fierce Patagonian giants (few, if any, and if Frezier and a number of other travelers are to be trusted) and depicting the native in quite unflattering 69. Examen, I, 68n. 70. Ibid., II, 214-26, correcting his former position, on which see above, p. 88. In the same way Pernety maintains that there is iron in Peru, although it is unserviceable: "This iron is so brittle that whatever was made with it was always extremely breakable" (ibid., II, 302); see above, pp. 57-58. 71. Ibid., II, 526: the argument was already present in the Dissertation: see above, p. 86. 72. Examen, II, 528-32; see above, p. 26. 73. Ibid., II, 191-92; and for the Yucatan, I, 102. Cf. Mazzei, below, p. 273. In one of the famous Tapestries of the Indians (Gobelins, 1687-88), two proud and noble horses in full harness and caparison stare down at a poor little curiously web-footed llama: superiority of the European fauna to the Ameri- can? or proof of its successful acclimatization? European Reactions to de Pauw terms.74 Anyway, de Pauw made no further attempt to defend himself against Pernety, nor in fact against any of his numerous other critics; nor did he write that "other work" that he had announced in the Difense (1771 ed., p. 20), which was to have shown that the savage is a "minor" in relation to civilized man; nor did he ever produce the new edition of the Recherches, which Pernety had fondly hoped would accept many of his criticisms.75 There is only one other work of his devoted to America, and in it he does little more than repeat the ideas of the Recherches, though some- what less vigorously and pugnaciously. This was the long article he wrote for the Suppldment a l'Encyclopedie and which was published in 1776.76 In it the Americans are described as stupid, inert, indolent, physically weak, or at least not as robust as one might expect (partially the result of their laziness and inclination for strong drink); they are incapable of any civil progress whatever, few in number, scattered and unaware of each other's existence. The Creoles are pronounced inferior once again, with the inferiority ascribed in general to the climate, and thus considered a "misfortune" rather than something for which they should be blamed. But it is a misfortune striking all America impartially: in the Recherches he had cruelly derided the University of Lima, and now, perhaps because of the increased popularity in Europe of the North American colonists, he pours out his sarcasms on Harvard University too: "It is not apparent that the professors of the University of Cambridge, in New England, have formed any young Americans to the point where they are able to bring them out into the literary world.""77 74. In the chapter "Des diff6rences dans l'espece humaine" contained (II, 316-24) in the treatise on physiognomy entitled La connaissance de l'homme moral par celle de I'homme physique (Berlin, 1776- 77), where it is repeated (see above, n. 35) without naming de Pauw that certain "particular facts, on which one cannot judge the whole nation or a whole people," are not constant features of the Americans, but it is admitted that these people have a common origin, that they are lazy and idle, although not evil nor stupid, that they have bizarre and whimsical customs, etc. The defense of the native women remains unchanged: "The savage women are fat and very well built. . 75. Examen, II, iv-v. 76. Supplment h i'Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers (Am- sterdam, 1776), 1, 343-54: hereafter cited as "Amerique." (The second part of the article is by the geographer Samuel Engel: see Richard Switzer, "America in the Encyclop6die," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 58 [Transactions of the Second International Congress on the Enlighten- ment, IV], pp. 1481-99, esp. 1487-91.) Among the collaborators the preface lists de Pauw, who sup- posedly furnished "articles on Antiquities, History, and Criticism worthy of the reputation he has earned" (p. iii). But in the four folio volumes of the Supplement I have not been able to find a single article signed or initialed by de Pauw. The Supplement, as is well known, has nothing in common with the famous Encyclopedie beyond the names of two collaborators, D'Alembert and Marmontel; it was a commercial enterprise in which Diderot had no part whatsoever (L. S. Gaudin, Les lettres anglaises dans l'Encyclopedie [New York, 1942], p. i). Thus there seems to be no basis for the conclusions ar- rived at by certain scholars (Church, for example, op. cit., p. 194) regarding the favor de Pauw sup- posedly enjoyed among the "encyclopedists." 77. "Amerique," p. 351; cf. G. Chinard, "Eighteenth Century Theories on America as a Human Habitat," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 91, no. 1 (1947), p. 36. 99 Translator's Preface I have tried to do, and if in so doing I have caught even a respectable proportion of the wit and individuality of the original, I am more than satisfied. Certain other problems are of a more practical nature, but may perhaps be briefly mentioned, if only to satisfy the reader moved to some curiosity about the rationale behind the solutions adopted. The work includes ex- tensive citations from languages other than English or Italian, most notably Spanish, German, and French. The purist or polyglot would perhaps have liked to see these quotations transcribed in their original form; but this did not seem to me necessary, or even desirable, since with rare exceptions (e.g., Goethe) the passages quoted do not contain, or are not considered for, any literary value, but for their cargo of ideas. The interest is more in what is said than in how it is said. Thus all such citations have been put into English (the translations being my own, un- less otherwise indicated). The other more practical problems relate to questions of style, and particularly to italicizing and capitalization. Here the curious reader's demand for a rationale is less easily satisfied, since there is in fact no "reason" why one chooses to put a capital here and italics there. The only guide is custom, an elusive and ephemeral mentor at best. Who can say at what point the philosophe is sufficiently accepted into English to become a philosophe, or the indios linguistically integrated enough to become plain indios? The decisions are subjective, and one can only hope they do not conflict too radically with the reader's. In capitalization the same holds true. It is agreed that it is sometimes acceptable or proper to capitalize terms when they are conceptualized or personified; but who is there to tell one whether a notion is sufficiently specialized for capitals to be required? An open mind is the first essential, and nowhere more so than in the discussions that form the subject of the present work. Every historian or philosopher has met and manipulated the concepts of Prog- ress and Reason, Beauty and Truth, Nature and Society; but he must not now be surprised that a Beard, a Moose, and a Giant can become con- cepts too; they can and do, and indeed without such concepts there would be no Dispute of the New World. J.M. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Thus the substance of his condemnation remains unchanged. But the tone is much less acrid and the frequent references to scabrous subjects have entirely disappeared. Most significantly of all, he abandons almost completely his claims to have discovered a system behind these "facts," and his attempts to produce a scientific (and fatalistic) explanation for them; and thus in turn a large part of his Europeistic complacency too. Some of these alterations are no doubt due to de Pauw himself, who as a sound man of letters knew the difference between a scandalmongering pamphlet and an encyclopedia article; other alterations may have been due to concern for his reputation as a historian, recently refreshed by the success of his second Recherches on the Egyptians and the Chinese, or even to the clamor of his critics; and yet others can perhaps be ascribed to the editors of the Supplement.78 The overall result is disconcerting; this last work of the once bold anti-American winds up pale, weak, and rambling. The inferiority of America is affirmed and reasserted emphatically, but there is no further talk of degeneration or immaturity. Several times he comes back to the indication of 1492 as the moment when this inferiority was most striking,79 and he also recalls the hope that when the earth is tilled the climate will improve.80 But the optimistic historical vision put forward in the D4fense (see above, p. 91), of America's progress as a parabola in reverse, re- ceives no further mention here. In fact, even the glittering prophecies of the economic and political independence of America (see above, p. 93), instead of drawing new strength from the revolt of the British colonies, fade into nothing with his final assessment: "Even today there does not exist in the whole New World an American tribe who are free or who think about instructing themselves in letters."8 His explanations for this all-embracing American inferiority turn out to be equally regressive in comparison to the Dfense. There must have been volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, and other cataclysms, but the true cause "is a secret of nature." All the adverse factors are still explained in terms of the "climate," but it is now said to be unhealthy only "in certain places," and the charge is made with some doubts and reservations: "there could exist in the climate of America particular causes which make certain animal species to be smaller than their counterparts living in our continent," and which bring about the degener- 78. Church, op. cit., p. 184, suspects there was some "censoring" from this source. 79. Columbus found a continent "where everything was in such a great state of desolation that one cannot reflect thereupon without astonishment" (p. 344a); "one can imagine ... what an astonishing difference there was between the two hemispheres of our globe in the fifteenth century" (p. 346b); all the sciences were unknown in America, "so that the human spirit was there more than three thousand years behindhand" (p. 354a). 80. Ibid., p. 35 lb, referring to the new edition of the Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains. 81. "Amerique," p. 354a: the conclusion of the article. 100 European Reactions to de Pauw ation, in the extreme north, of cattle brought over from Europe.82 But is there any part of the globe about which one could not say something of the sort? De Pauw, unwilling to abandon his basic thesis, finds it im- possible to extend his innate unshakable Europeistic optimism to the Americans (or to the whole human race); so that almost unawares he ends up doing precisely the opposite, applying to his precious Europeans some of those highly pessimistic judgments originally formulated to con- demn the Americans. Arguing with the Spanish theologians, de Pauw reminds them that cannibals have been known in every climate, even in our own continent, "because when man is not enlightened by knowledge, when his head and his heart are not governed by laws, he falls every- where into the same excesses."83 And referring to the American Indians' intellectual capacities, whose existence he has just a while back cate- gorically denied, he now observes that one could only demonstrate things for sure if one took them as newborn children and brought them up with all gentleness and philosophy; but the experiment would have to be car- ried out with a large number of children "since even in Europe out of so many children dedicated to study from their tenderest youth, one obtains such a small number of reasonable men, and an even smaller number of enlightened men."84 De Pauw, in short, persists in his condemnation of the Americans, but he had already turned his critical eye on some of the nations of the Old World, the Chinese and the Egyptians, and, after completing his examination of the most noble nations of Asia and Africa, was to con- clude with the most illustrious people of Europe, the Greeks. In these succeeding works de Pauw frequently mentions his first Recherches, quoting its theories as proven fact and occasionally enrich- ing them with odd details. In the book on the Egyptians and the Chinese, he repeats, in passing, his attack on the brutality of the Europeans in America'1 and rather more frequently his slanders on the whole of Ameri- can nature, from the laziness, stupidity, brutality, and misery of the savages, to the robber bands of escaped Negroes (the Republiques de Voleurs like the Brazilian Paulistas), and even to the precious stones of America, which are all "without exception" of inferior quality, soft and not solid, not even the diamonds, "which seems to be the result of the 82. Ibid., pp. 345b, 349-50. Other points on which the polemic is toned down a little: there is iron in America, but the Americans did not know how to forge it: p. 345b; the Americans are not as longeval as some would have it, but one cannot be sure of their age, and in the north at least they live as long as other men: p. 350b. The polemic against Spain, on the other hand, remains intact (Romulo D. Carbia, Historia de Ia leyenda negra hispano-americana [Buenos Aires, 1943], pp. 136-37). 83. "Amerique," p. 354a. Cf. de Maistre, below, p. 578. 84. "Amerique," p. 35 1a. 85. Recherches sur les Egyptiens, I, 143, 304; II, 227. 101 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD flood that the New World suffered in times subsequent to our own cata- clysm."86 In his last Recherches, on the Greeks (1787), he mentions in the very first lines having published other "researches" on "savage and brutalized peoples, such as the Americans," and on nations condemned to eternal mediocrity, like the Egyptians and the Chinese (see also vol. I, p. 103). The passing years and his declining reputation have made him no less abrasive; and by now the polemic on the Americans had well and truly taken hold, thanks to his adversaries and thanks even more to Robertson, who in his famous History of America (1777) had appropriated some of de Pauw's findings: "Dr. Robertson [says de Pauw ambiguously] who has commented in English [sic] on my researches on the Americans .. ."87 VII. THE PHILOSOPHER LA DOUCEUR AND THE NATIVES OF NORTH AMERICA Meanwhile a little-known essayist had come forward to take upon him- self the defense of the ex-Benedictine and to cut the Prussian philoso- pher down to size, which he does with relish. It is not known for sure who produced the monograph Of America and the Americans, or Curious Observations of the Philosopher La Douceur, who traveled this Hemi- sphere during the last war, following the noble trade of killing men with- out eating them,"s but it is clear from the title that the author is or at least wishes to be thought an ex-soldier quite lacking in militaristic spirit but a mite sarcastic on the subject of the philosophes. Internal evidence (pp. 6-7) shows that the author cannot be Pernety himself; it was once custo- mary to attribute the work to the physiocrat Pierre Poivre, author of the Voyage d'un philosophe (1768), but this too seems unlikely for a variety of reasons: in the first place because de Pauw quotes this work with great respect in his Difense (1771 ed., p. 183) and in his second Recherches (II, 6); and then also inasmuch as La Douceur's tirades against monarchs would hardly be fitting for someone like Poivre, a faithful servant of the crown, raised to the nobility and given a pension by the king of France; not to mention the fact that Poivre was never in America.8" Nowadays 86. Ibid., 1, 213; see also I, 19, 153, 166, 173; II, 4, 13, 153, 171, 254. The first Recherches is re- ferred to on the usage of tobacco and the American savages' enamels: I, 170, 282. 87. Recherches sur les Grecs, II, 331-32. Cf., in fact, below, p. 166. 88. Berlin: Pitra, 1771; I have not seen the second edition (Berlin, 1772), which is apparently some thirty pages longer (referred to by Church, op. cit., p. 196, n. 34). The title recalls Vespucci's comment on the Brazilians, who marveled at we Europeans killing our enemies and then not eating them (A. von Humboldt, Examen critique, V, 26-27). Cf. below, p. 210. 89. Poivre, who was an excellent administrator in the French Islands of the Indian Ocean (see Lewis A. Maverick, "Pierre Poivre: Eighteenth Century Explorer of Southeast Asia," The Pacific Historical Review, 10 [ 1941], pp. 165-77), mentioned approvingly also by Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library ed., bk. I, ch. XI, pt. I, p. 156), interests himself mainly, in his Voyage, in questions of agriculture and systems of fiscal imposition. It is curious however that Brissot de Warville too, who 102 European Reactions to de Pauw the book is frequently attributed to Zaccaria de Pazzi de Bonneville, but this is not entirely convincing either. Bonneville is known to history as the eccentric inventor of a weapon called "the Lyonnaise," a sort of scythed war chariot that only needed two men to propel it and was "a thousand times more murderous than gunpowder," a machine he recom- mended for the preservation of the human race, the protection of sovereign states, and the achieving of perpetual peace. His only other claim to fame was as editor of the military writings of Maurice of Saxony. Neither of these activitities would seem to make him easily identifiable with an author who exhibits such limited respect for the noble profession of arms.90 But whoever the author is, the book is lively and good-humored, and the author's flashes of wit and easygoing attitude bring a new touch to the dry polemic. La Douceur-let us call him that-knows nothing at all of biological or cosmographic theories, nor has he read much of what the naturalists and travelers had to say; but he has been in America,91 has made war and made love there, and so feels himself eminently quali- fied to plunge into the discussion and pronounce his opinion, which in fact he does on the very first page - Pernety is right and de Pauw wrong. Admittedly de Pauw is an intelligent man, but it is possible to use one's intelligence wrongly and to be completely mistaken, particularly when one has not seen for oneself what one is writing about. Poor de Pauw has actually proved nothing; he has spent nine years toiling over a book three-quarters of seven-eighths of which (a strange mathematical hyper- bole, corresponding to a mere 67.78125 percent) is mere regurgitation of discussions that have been gone over twenty times. And his Difense "is worth no more than the Recherches; it is a simple repetition thereof" - which, as we have seen, is far from being the case. When Pernety was mentions having read with enthusiasm the Voyage d'un philosophe and visited its author, praises "his observations on the customs and arts of the peoples of America" (Mmoires [Brussels, 1830], II, 206-16). 9(0. It is to be noted however that Bonneville fought effectively against the English in America and wrote a work with the title Esprit des lois de tactique (1762), clearly inspired by Montesquieu, an author whom La Douceur praises as "the least fallible of men," (op. cit., p. 26; but Bonneville takes issue with him right at the very beginning of his Lyonnaises, written in 1764-69, published in Amsterdam, 1771, p. 6). Another possible indication: the demographic concerns, particularly in relation to the remedies for the slaughter of war, already present in the mind of the Mar6chal de Saxe and his editor Bonneville (Les reveries, ou Memoires sur I'art de la guerre [La Haye, 1756], quarto ed., pp. 221-28, 16 mo. ed., 11, 209-23, with notes by Bonneville, also against the idleness of the great; cf. also the Lvonnaises, throughout and below, p. 108, etc.). On the Lyonnaises of that "military patriot" Bonneville see the comment of Carlo Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico, Ragionamento sulla filosofia del secolo XVIII (1778), in Raccolta di operette filosofiche e filologiche scritte nel secolo XVIII (Milan, 1832), II, 79. 91. He has seen North America and part of South America, the Antilles, the coasts of Africa, a little of China ("but when one has seen one Chinese town and its inhabitants, one has seen all of them," p. 11), and a little of India and Persia, from which he traveled overland to Constantinople. Bonneville was also in China (Lyonnaises, p. 217). 103 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD attacking de Pauw he refrained from dealing with certain subjects, per- haps because they touched on matters "somewhat too spicy" for a Bene- dictine. La Douceur for his part feels no such compunction and will say whatever needs to be said to the arrogant de Pauw, with his shameless pretense of "pardoning" Dom Pernety, when it was in fact he himself who provoked him with his "unseeming tirade" against the worthy Bene- dictine. One can almost picture him, this gay globe-trotter, grasping his sword and waiting impatiently to pursue de Pauw through chapter after chapter of his book. In the heat of the chase La Douceur almost forgets Pernety;92 not be- cause the friar, or ex-friar, could not keep up with the soldier, or ex- soldier, but more because Pernety had used his experiences in South America (the expedition to the Falkland Islands) to argue with de Pauw, and La Douceur on the other hand uses his knowledge of North America. So de Pauw's two opponents close in on him from either side. The Re- cherches had slandered all America impartially; now the twin paladins spring up side by side in its defense, one protecting its southern half and the other the northern. Later, as we shall see, every region of the New World and every republic that attained its independence would have its apologist against the slanders of Buffon and de Pauw. But even at the very outset of the polemic their campaign of vilification drew angry retorts on all sides. La Douceur's basic point is that America is not degenerate. The New World really is "new" (p. 78) and thus generally speaking better than the Old. There is nothing decayed or putrefied about it at all. If he wanted to prove that there was, it would be up to de Pauw to show that the men, the plants, and the animals had at one time been larger, stronger, and more beautiful in America-which cannot possibly be proved. Besides, nei- ther the lions nor the tigers can possibly have degenerated in America "because they simply don't exist there"; and the famous pumas "are no more lions than donkeys" (p. 74)-another exaggeration which he ex- tends immediately afterward to jaguars and cougars as compared with tigers, but which actually succeeds merely in reinforcing the negative thesis of Buffon. The wild oxen of America (bison?) are as big as the English oxen, and if the domestic cattle degenerated this was almost certainly the result of continual crossing of the same breed-just the same happens to horses and sheep in Spain. And so what if some European plants degenerated in America-even in the Old World vines degenerate when they are transplanted. And when the time comes that the whole of America is 92. He is mentioned on p. 74, when it is pointed out that he too was mistaken in believing in the exist- ence of lions and tigers in America, on the basis of Zarate and other authors. 104 European Reactions to de Pauw cultivated "one will find there, just as in Europe, areas favoring all sorts of production, even vines" (pp. 1 1-12, 24). But de Pauw had already said the same thing (see above, p. 91); and La Douceur, carried away by his thirst for revenge, goes on to weaken his own thesis yet further by picking a quarrel, heaven knows why, with the Egyptians - oldest of Old Worlds- whom he sees as completely degenerate: compared to what it once was the Egypt of today is a "sewer," and its inhabitants "such stupid, coarse, and evil creatures that I would be ashamed to compare them with the savagest savages of America" (p. 13). The savages of America are not only not degenerate, they are not even fallen; like the Kalmucks and the Negroes, they are not descended from Adam and Eve, do not suffer the consequences of Original Sin, and so have not been redeemed by Christ (pp. 13-17, 77: echoes of the pre- adamites). Their condition is that of "Nature in its infancy," not its decrepitude. One has only to look at them; they are physically well made, and they are very wise to paint their bodies: "So they daub themselves?" The Italians would be obliged to do likewise if they went about naked, be- cause Italy, that promised land of Europe, has as many insects as Amer- ica (p. 35; see below, p. 213). The young men are gay, love dancing, and have a quite special liking for the French with their "light and playful sense of humor" so like their own. As for the old men, "nothing is more admirable than an elderly savage; he is another Epictetus or Carneades." The intellectual gifts and capacities of the savages are more than ade- quate to their needs, and they are perfectly capable of mastering sciences and languages. That geometer-academician who spoke so ill of them saw only the mountains of Peru and the savages of Marafion. Here our author is obviously referring93 to the great geographer La Condamine, who had been in America with the scientific expedition sent to Quito (then Peru) to measure an arc of the meridian for the purpose of establishing the true shape of the earth, and who on his way back had crossed the whole of Amazonia. In his Relation abrege d'un voyage fait dans l'interieur de l'Amdrique mdridionale, depuis la C6te de la Mer du Sud, jusques aux C6tes du Bresil et de la Guiane, en descendant la riviere des Amazones,94 his remarks on the savages are few but very much to the point. The natives differ greatly between one place and an- other, yet they all have "certain features of resemblance to each other ... a same basic character.""5 They all have a fundamental brutishness about them that cannot be attributed to the degrading effect of slavery (as has 93. Op. cit., pp. 10, 76. 94. In Histoire de I'Academie Royale des Sciences, Annee 1745 (Paris, 1749), pp. 391-492. 95. Ibid., pp. 418-19; cf. the same verdict of his companion on the expedition, Ulloa, below, pp. 216, 230, 285-86; Minguet, op. cit., p. 344. 105 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD been said of the modern Greeks) because it is equally apparent in the natives gathered within the missions; it shows "how Man abandoned to raw nature, lacking education and society, differs little from the Beast."" And as for the mestizo, he is "a type of man having only the vices of the nations of which he is a mixture.""97 Such conclusions and his generally skeptical attitude in respect of the myths of the Amazons and the Eldorado98 make La Condamine one of de Pauw's favorite authors. In point of fact, the serious and straight- forward scientist La Condamine did no more than establish an antithesis between civilization and nature in its crude state; it was Algarotti who went on from there to point out, with transparent allusion to La Con- damine's judgment, "what miracles can be performed by legislature," transforming the torpid Peruvians into industrious subjects of the Incas.99 But La Condamine never even mentions any harmful effects deriving from the physical environment nor does the thought of any organic de- generation ever enter his mind; and far from leveling charges at entire continents, he writes enthusiastically of American nature, both vegetable and animal, which latter boasts tigers as big and beautiful and fierce as those of Africa.'00 The puma, no, the puma is no lion even if that's the name they give it: "The male has no mane, and is much smaller than the African Lions. I haven't seen it alive, but only stuffed."101 Despite all this, and even after La Douceur, La Condamine was frequently confused with Buffon's followers and the slanderers of America.102 It is true, La Douceur admits, that no native educated by the Spanish has yet made a name for himself, but then who among the Spanish them- selves ever made a name for himself, apart from Cervantes? All in all, there is no more brutalized, ignorant, savage, and barbarous people than the Spanish (pp. 55-61). Worse even than the Egyptians then, one feels like asking? With the same self-confidence La Douceur takes up the challenge that Pernety had declined and comes down to de Pauw's level to discuss the 96. Op. cit., pp. 418-19 and 432; de Pauw was to say that the indios of the missions were "esclalves fanatiques" rather than men: "Amerique," p. 354. 97. Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi, a l'equateur . .. (Paris, 1751-52), I, 52. 98. Relation, pp. 441-46, 452-54. 99. Saggio sopra l'impero degli Incas, in Opere varie (Venice, 1757), 11, 123, and in Opere (Livorno, 1764), III, 188: an opinion taken over by Paolo Frisi in the preface to the Italian edition of the Colombi- ade of Mme du Boccage (Milan, 1771), p. xiii. 100. Relation. p. 468. 101. Ibid.; Journal du voyage, I, 153. For the birds, see below, p. 161. 102. See also Antonello Gerbi, Viejas polemicas sobre el Nuevo Mundo (Lima, 1946). pp. 263-64; Zavala, America, pp. 187-93; Berveiller, op. cit., pp. 306-07, and, without reference to our topic, Pierre M. Conlon, "La Condamine the Inquisitive," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 55 (Geneva, 1967; Transactions of the Second International Congress on the Enlightenment, I), pp. 361-93. 106 European Reactions to de Pauw "somewhat coarse matters" such as the American's alleged sexual devia- tions and weaknesses. So they indulge in pederasty, "human nature's slip of the pen" (p. 40)? But pederasty is common among the most civil- ized people! The men are milk-bearing? But even in Europe there are many men who have milk; some of them of great erotic vigor. You want an example? The good La Douceur bursts out that he himself "I, who am no gelding nor woman, have had milk for a long time." One thought leads to another, and soon La Douceur finds the argument that will undermine de Pauw's accusations that the Indian women are extremely lascivious: "I recall with pleasure (begging the philosopher's pardon) the delightful moments spent with a native girl of Illinois, who far from being insatiable, as Mr. de Pauw would have it the women of America are, said softly to me: 'Oh my little warrior, you will do yourself harm, and you will not be any use at all for war any more'" (pp. 41-44). After such a delightful touch of brazen honesty the customary counter- accusations of corruption among the Hispano-American women can only seem dull, and just as conventional are the defenses of the Indians' cour- age in war, the exaggerations on the pre-Colombian population (esti- mated at one hundred and eighty million),103 the praises of the fine quali- ties of numerous American products, and the denial of the American origin of syphilis (caused, La Douceur says, by eating the meat of animals killed with poisoned arrows: pp. 45-46). Somewhat more interesting, though by no means original after what Las Casas and Vico had written (below, pp. 577-78), is his explanation of cannibalism: "It is the savages' Te Deum, and each one in the ceremony often has no more than a half ounce of flesh for his share" (p. 47). But perhaps the most curious thing in La Douceur is the way he borrows the ancient myth of a primitive blessed equality to demolish the Europeans' claims to well-being. This well-being, so much vaunted by the phi- losophers, "is concentrated in a very small number of men who enjoy it at the expense of that of the majority." If these same philosophers were to take a look at America and then look again at how the peasants in our own hemisphere live, they would wish them "the happiness and the good cheer of the savages of America" (pp. 30-31). The kings, pace de Pauw, do their best: "I have no reason to love kings, they have never done me aught but evil"; but it is not at all easy to govern "so-called philosophers, who for the most part are no more than arguers," and a turbulent, illogical, 103. This was an indirect proof of both the fruitfulness of the earth and the generative capacity of the men: but elsewhere La Douceur accounts for the meager fecundity of the American savages in terms of the frequency of endotribal interbreeding and astutely explains the higher civilizations of Mexico and Peru by the harshness of the soil of these countries-a real Toynbee-type challenge victoriously over- come. 107 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD capricious people like the Europeans. Furthermore, he continues, all ills derive "from the too unequal distribution of riches" (pp. 68-69). The savages, to their great good fortune, are not "philosophers" and write no books nor pamphlets: this is why they can enjoy a happy life. "But that is a pig's life, someone will say." Yet why? "Three-quarters of our great lords live like that; the difference between them and the savages is only that instead of eating their prisoners they often eat their creditors" (p. 80). And with this final venomous thrust the philosopher La Douceur, who did not even eat the enemies he killed, brings to a close his humanitarian diatribe. VIII. PAOLO FRISI CRITICIZES DE PAUW'S PHYSICOCLIMATIC THESIS De Pauw had found little difficulty in producing answers to Pernety's agitated protests, to his impassioned defense of the Americans and counterattacks on the Europeans; and his thesis was if anything strength- ened in the process. He would have found it even easier to parry the in- solent efforts and ridicule the bizarre notions of the soldier La Douceur. But he would not have found it nearly so easy to defend himself against the few pages in which the Milanese naturalist and mathematician Paolo Frisi demolished the geophysical basis of the Recherches and invalidated simultaneously its anthropological conclusions, all of which he suc- ceeded in doing without for once going into panegyrics over the Indians or lessening one whit the glories of the Europeans. Frisi found the occasion for this brief but careful study in the preface he wrote for the translation into Italian blank verse of Mme du Boccage's Colombiade (Milan, 1771). The French poetess's work is singularly silly. Episodes from the Aeneid reappear translated into this more fashion- able environment: demons weave love spells and angels overcome them, the pious hero is overwhelmed with love for a young savage and becomes in his turn the object of the desperate longing of a West Indian queen. In short, the whole Epic of the Faith Carried to America is colored by the conventional representation of an enchanted world full of naked and innocent young savages and elderly chieftains dripping wisdom and benevolence. The hillsides are richly laden, the forests perfumed, the fields productive without needing to be cultivated: "les animaux, les fruits, les arbres pleins d'encens/ N'ont rien dans leur aspect qui res- semble a nos champs."104 They are so superior that they cannot even be compared! 104. La Colombiade, I; in Recueil des oeuvres de Mme du Boccage (Lyon, 1770), II, 23; cf. ibid., II, 20, 21, 108-09, and passim. Buffon is mentioned in the ninth canto (ibid., II, 209). The most frequently cited source is Charlevoix; others: Garcilaso, Herrera, Solis, Frezier, Acosta, Ulloa. 108 European Reactions to de Pauw 109 Thus in presenting the poem to his Italian readers105 Paolo Frisi could hardly refrain from mentioning de Pauw's recent and highly discordant description of America. So having assured his reader that the poem translated agrees with the most exact reports, he adds obliquely: "There- fore neither the constitution of the country, nor the character of its in- habitants is shown as being so wretched as the author of the recent Philosophical Researches on the Americans believed them to be" (p. vii). He may have written with "abundant erudition" and "great elegance," but (a) he generalized too easily and (b) he ignored certain laws and facts established concerning the physical nature of the globe. America is a very large continent, and it differs from one part to an- other; it does contain marshlands but also vast regions where it never rains, such as Peru. Peru itself, Chile, and Mexico are very beautiful countries, with the people "very well organized," excellent climates, fertile soil, and splendid birds and plants. Among the peoples of America there are some stupid ones and some intelligent ones; one has only to read Garcilaso (who passes on the early legends of Peru just as Ossian once preserved the ancient tales of the Celts!) and the travelers, right up to the most recent times (Lahontan, Juan and Ulloa). Nor were the sub- jects of the Incas and Montezuma lacking in courage: they were easily conquered because they were divided and because their princes were ir- resolute.106 The technical advances of the Americans are attested by all the historians and ethnographers. And in our own day, the learned Frisi 105. "Note that Mme de Boccage's poem was brought to Milan by abb6 Frisi on his return from Paris, and that Verri and his other friends were thereby fired with the idea of translating it" (letter of 6 August 1803 of Anton Francesco Frisi, ms. Braidense AH.X.43, foglio 32; see also pp. 49-50 of the ms. of the Elogio storico di P. Verri, written by Father Isidoro Bianchi); the translation earned Frisi the deep gratitude of Mme du Boccage: see the letter of 7 February 1768, in E. and J. de Goncourt, Portraits intimes du XVII11 siecle (Paris, 1878), pp. 487-88; and those in F. K. Turgeon, "Unpublished Letters of Mme Du Boccage," Modern Philology, 27, no. 3 (February 1930), pp. 332-38, in which she refers to the "brute savages of the New World" and praises Frisi's "good preface" to her Colombiade. A few other details appear in G. Gill-Mark, A. -M. Du Boccage (Paris, 1927), pp. 90, 160-66. A letter of Louis (Auguste?) de Keralio to Paolo Frisi (27 April 1771) speaks of the translation he passed on to Mme Du Boccage, who is to reply shortly "to all your questions" (Silvana Tomani, I manoscrittifiloso- fici di Paolo Frisi [Florence, 1968], p. 167). 106. As Algarotti showed "in his very fine essay on the Empire of the Incas" (p. x). In fact Algarotti says (Saggio, II. 117-37) that the Peruvians were overcome through surprise at the ships and firearms and through the hatefulness of Atahualpa (p. 137). The whole essay, which bears as epigraph Voltaire's line, "we alone are the Barbarians in these climes," is a defense of the political and educational systems of the Incas, "a quality of men between the missionaries and conquistadores," repeatedly compared to the ancient Romans, and put forward as models for we ignorant Europeans who hold them "at most fit to furnish material for our Novelists" (p. 121: a probable allusion to Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Pe;ru 'ienne, published with great success in 1747); but it is certainly no eulogy of the native capacities of the indigenous population: "Those that have lived in America and have been able to see for themselves how slow of mind the Peruvians are by nature, and mostly sluggish, are constrained to admit the miracles that legislature can work" (p. 133: a typical thesis of enlightened despotic reformism). Another evident sign of the Age of Enlightenment is the digression inquiring into whether the Incas did well or badly in preventing the spread of learning. Preface THE author's preface, according to the most authoritative manuals of style, should begin by stating his reasons for undertaking the work. I once had such reasons, of course, but in the subsequent research and the actual process of drafting the work they were so superseded and absorbed that I have some doubt as to whether they are worth mentioning. When I moved to Peru at the end of 1938, to carry out a study in eco- nomic geography, hardly a day passed without my ears being assailed by the eulogy and slander, the panegyric and vituperation of the New World, and, by reaction, the Old. Repeated on every side with disarming candor and unhesitating conviction, these confused expressions of passionate sentiment - consisting for the most part, obviously, of love and hate, apology and polemic -increased by no small amount the already consid- erable difficulty of delving into the problems raised by the vicissitudes and natural environment of the American continent: problems that are already apparent in Columbus's diary and letters, and that rapidly attain a high level of scientific seriousness in Oviedo's history. In essence the basic theme of so many diatribes was, quite simply, the notion of the presumed inferiority of the nature of America, and especially its fauna, including man, in comparison with the Old World's, and the resulting unavoidable decadence and corruption to which the whole Western Hemisphere found itself condemned: a rudimentary theme, clearly, but one that bred prolifically, producing innumerable variations and reverberating with multiple echoes, in philosophy, in anthropology, in the satire of society, in the natural sciences, obviously, and, most surprisingly, in poetry. The pernicious fecundity of the theme should not, however, induce us to extend it too far. This is not a history of the relationships between the two worlds, nor of the many literary, political, scientific, and aesthetic judgments passed by one world on the other. It is the narrative of a partic- ularly successful "heresy" and its various manifestations in the most diverse authors. The underlying motif was not completely new to me: in my first book, xi THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD reminds us, "in Pennsylvania and at Philadelphia all the other glories of Europe have already been emulated, even to controlling the fires of heaven [Franklin's lighting conductor, 1753] and calculating the quantity of matter in comets [John Winthrop of Harvard? Andrew Oliver, Jr., of Massachusetts?]." This positive judgment on the qualities of the American is even more significant when one remembers that as a young man the Barnabite Paolo Frisi had been of very much the same opinion as those Dominicans (see above, p. 65) who had reduced the native almost to the level of animal (it is perhaps indicative that the order of Barnabites came into being under the fervid inspiration of the Dominican Fra Battista da Crema): "For what more do they have than irrational animals [Frisi was asking himself rhetorically in his Lectiones Ethicae of 1756], those feeble and defenseless peoples who were driven into the interior by the ferocity of the ancient Spaniards?"o07 But here already the Las Casian riposte against the ferocity of the Spaniards reveals a more humane touch, some tendency toward a more impartial view of the unfortunate natives-their bodily deformities and monstrosities are almost always artificial'08 -an attitude that ripens as his enlightened rationalism grows stronger (Frisi was always polemically anti-Jesuit and left the order in 1768) and which solidifies once and for all in the face of de Pauw's provocative slanders. But de Pauw is particularly weak, Frisi goes on, in cosmography and meteorology. He is unaware of the studies on the variations of the ecliptic carried out by "a Milanese mathematician."'09 His hypotheses "on the former tendency of waters toward the poles and on their present return to the equator" are untenable, and his conjectures on volcanoes and his ideas concerning the heat of tropical countries are thus without foundation too (pp. xiv-xvi). As for heat and cold, America offers nothing to distinguish it from the old continent, although it is a fact that Peru "on account of the nearness of the sea and the mountains, and the eleva- tion of the land, and for other special causes [one could almost think that Frisi had guessed at the current discovered by Humboldt], it is colder than other countries at the same latitude." Thus it is quite illegiti- mate to deduce skin color from degrees of latitude, as de Pauw does; "in the whole circle of the torrid zone" there are no Negroes except in Africa, 107. Tomani, op. cit., p. 131. On the human sacrifices and cannibalism of the Americans, deprived of Revelation, see the Institutiones metaphysicae of 1754-55, ibid., p. 100. 108. Tomani, op. cit., pp. 10 1-02. 109. Almost certainly Frisi himself, who treated the subject very originally in De motu diurno terrae (1758), and in the second book De gravitate (1768): see P. Verri, Memorie appartenenti alla vita e agli studi del sr. d. Paolo Frisi (Milan, 1787), pp. 35-36, 94. 110 European Reactions to de Pauw "and they keep their dark color in any other climate to which they are transported." Emboldened by his easy victory, Frisi has one last word to say in the defense of the giants: "Various travelers have been in agreement in telling us that the height of the Patagonians is greater than normal" (p. xix); but he does not insist on this point,110 and leaving aside "so many other things" that could be said on the Recherches of de Pauw, he ends the digression and comes back to the subject of the Colombiade. Frisi's contribution to the debate, although brief and incidental, is still significant, both because it shows how widespread de Pauw's notions were and because his attack on de Pauw is scientific in style and content. But for this very reason, perhaps, and also because Frisi never concerned himself with either the new problems of zoological geography or the heated discussions on the Indians and the notion of their perfection or degeneration, his work drew no immediate response, and in time fell into complete oblivion together with the translation which it introduced."' IX. DELISLE DE SALES, DE PAUW'S ADMIRING ADVERSARY Jean Baptiste Claude Isoard, better known by the name Delisle de Sales, that most prolific polygraph, is usually mentioned among the critics of the Recherches, and such indeed he is, but he is also one of de Pauw's most consistent admirers. There is no necessary contradiction between the two attitudes, because for de Sales "greatness of mind" is not in- compatible with "paradoxes" nor erudition with unbridled fantasy; and because in any case all of the ideas he finds in de Pauw, the accurate with the quite erroneous, sink out of sight in the morass of de Sales's long- winded and conventional hodgepodge of ideas. Delisle de Sales is basically a Voltairian. But in natural philosophy he often inclines to Robinet, and his idolization of Nature frequently brings him alongside Rousseau. He approves of Condillac, Helv6tius, and with some hesitation of d'Holbach. As a convinced theist, however, he ful- minates against the atheist La Mettrie; believing firmly in the immortality of the soul, he "demonstrates" it with the story of Richardson's Clarissa, and by way of further proof with a doleful tale of his own, "the pathetic history of Jenny Lille."" 110. In the Institutiones metaphysicae he had said cautiously of the Patagonian giants, "if however they are really to be thought of as being of that height, which several people maintain they have de- duced, from the skulls that have been taken to England and to London" (Tomani, op. cit., p. 101). 111. Nor are they mentioned by P. Verri, Memorie, even in the bibliography of Frisi's writings. They are however referred to by G. R. Carli, Delle lettere americane, 2 vols. (Florence, 1780), I, 19, 105, and Drouin de Bercy, op. cit., II, 91. 112. De la philosophie de la Nature (Amsterdam, vols. I-III, 1770, vols. IV-VI, 1774), II, 317-57. The good Delisle is also the author of that Mdmoire enfaveur de Dieu (Paris, 1802) with which he hoped to combat atheism, but whose title caused it to be generally taken for a work of impious blasphemy! On 111 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD His major works, entitled De la philosophie de la Nature and Histoire philosophique du monde primitif- in six and seven volumes respectively -are confused cosmogonies and histories of the world in mythical and prehistoric times, which stop short, as is only right, at the beginning of "this collection of men's errors and crimes that one [i.e., Voltaire] calls history";1"" at which point they veer off the first into psychology, embry- ogeny, teratology, dissertations on suicide, and hymns in praise of modesty; the second into geology, physical geography, and profuse ac- counts of fantastic islands and famous voyages, and ancient heroes, demigods, and gods, even Almighty Jove himself- all neatly presented in alphabetical order "to relax the reader's mind."1'14 To such a naively cosmic spirit America could hardly present more than passing interest. The problem in question was of no great signifi- cance and presented no real difficulty; a simple formula was all that was needed to provide the answer. The age of a continent is in inverse pro- portion to the height of its mountains. The loftier they are, the less eroded and "degraded," the fresher and younger must those parts of the world be where these mountains rise. Now where are the most lofty peaks? Begin- ning with our own hemisphere, the best known: "We know of no moun- tain, either in Asia or in Africa, that is actually higher than Mont Blanc, and this fact [sic] followed naturally from our principles."""15 Europe is thus the youngest part of the Old World. But "America is infinitely newer than Europe, and if our theory has some justice we shall have to see the Alps themselves lower their proud peaks before the pinnacles of the Cordilleras." And in fact there are in the Andes higher peaks than Mont Blanc. It only remains to be shown that Australia, which is still newer than America, has higher summits than Chimborazo. Unfortunately the navi- gators who discovered it have not yet penetrated into the interior. Thus it is not possible to substitute certain facts for conjecture; "but my his leaning toward mysticism, for which he was derided by Grimm, see Palmer, op. cit., p. 211, and for his influence on Chateaubriand and Fabre d'Olivet, see respectively Leon Cellier, Fabre d'Olivet (Paris, 1953), p. 61, and below, chap. 7, n. 266. On the persecution suffered by the Philosophie de la Nature, Felix Rocquain, L'esprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution (Paris, 1878), pp. 341-42, 363-64, and on Delisle's subsequent insane vanity, Andr6 Monglond, Le prdromantisme fran'ais (Paris, 1966), II, 145-47. 113. Philosophie de la Nature, 1, 320. 114. Histoire philosophique diu monde primitif(Paris, 1780, def. ed., 1795), VII, 36. Montrol, pub- lisher of the Memoires of Brissot (to whom Delisle sent his Histoire philosophique de la Grece, "twelve volumes, with atlas," as a gift) was to try in vain to rescue these treatises "from the disdain they arouse today" (1830! see Brissot's Mmoires, II, 142). 115. Monde primitif, IV, 129; cf. V, 30. The thesis seems to derive from de Maillet's Telliamed. Pernety, on the other hand, says that the oldest peoples must be those that are found on the highest mountains (Examen, II, 408 if.); and Carli (see below, p. 234), analogously, that the oldest lands are the highest ones. 112 European Reactions to de Pauw silence, proof of my frankness," Delisle de Sales boldly concludes, "does not cast the slightest shadow on my doctrine."'16 This doctrine also falls in with Buffon's thesis on the Americas. For Delisle too the American continent is but recently emerged from the waters. A few centuries before its conquest it was still an archipelago formed by the crests of the Cordilleras and the Appalachians. The Old World empires described by history were already formed when America began to take shape as a continent "and added with this other hemis- phere a counterweight to the balance of the globe.""'17 When the Euro- peans arrived there it was still covered with stagnant waters and "Caspian Seas" (the Great Lakes, the Bay of Baffin, even the Gulf of Mexico), and "the fetid emanations from these remainders of the ocean caused epi- demics there every year." Further proof of this very recent and still incomplete drying out is provided by the absence of great quadrupeds and the presence of a mere couple of civilized peoples.118 These theories and their corollaries, explicitly limited by Buffon to the plants and animals, took root in the fertile soil of de Pauw's imagination and in time produced all the clever paradoxes of the Recherches.'19 The author is always referred to as a man of great learning and intelligence; and he is quoted several times as a supporting authority for this or that point of geography or ethnography.'20 De Pauw, declares Delisle, is "one of the scholars that I most like to encounter in my travels, although our principles often tend to separate us,"121 because his erudition is "the most vast and often the best digested."122 So it comes about that Delisle, while inclining to the thesis so vigorously opposed by de Pauw in his second Recherches, of China as an Egyptian colony, and while still 116. Monde primitif, IV, 132; cf. ibid., IV, 139-40. 117. Ibid., V, 145 (a phrase that seems to anticipate Canning's famous statement: "I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old," 12 December 1826); cf. ibid., V, 125, 280-81. 118. Ibid., IV, 302-06; V, 135, 147-48; VI, 26, 374; VII, 4, 31, lxix. Delisle sneers at the Mosaic tradition of the Flood (ibid., II, 206; V, 37, 235, 256-67) and, although he admires him, criticizes "the lugubrious Boulanger" (ibid., IV, 203-04; VI, 326). Note also the extraordinary compression of geologi- cal epochs into periods of a few centuries: a "telescopic" foreshortening which, at the end of the eight- eenth century, is actually more surprising and more mythic than the six "days" of Moses' account. 119. Philosophie de la Nature, V, 231-32; Monde primitif, VII, vi. 120. The Philosophie de la Nature quotes the Defense (IV, 248n.) and the Recherches (V, 149n., 175-76, 280; VI, 60-61, 72-74, 82-83, 87, 88, 98, 238n., 276) of this "ingenious Author." In the Monde primitif de Pauw is also quoted on the subject of the slow drying up of the Baltic Sea (V, 78-79, xvi, quoting the Recherches I, 103n.); on the American peoples "issuing from the mountainsides" (V, xxi-xxii, quoting Recherches I, 198); on the former link between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf (V, 211-13, xliv, quoting Recherches II, 328-29); on the Tartars, first teachers of the human race (VI, 20-22, 28, and VII, ii, iii-vi, quoting Recherches, II, 295, 296-97, 303, 303-04, 319-20, 346, 347-48); on Greenland, on the Chinese, etc. (VII, xi-xii, xlviii, etc., quoting Recherches, I, 257, and Recherches sur les Egyptiens, 1, 15-16), and also, with the complete works in seven volumes, in the final list of au- thors used. 121. Monde primitif, V, 78-79. Elsewhere de Pauw's authority is corroborated by reference to him as "a scholar who has traveled much [sic] in America, and who often strayed from his path" to enlighten us concerning other parts of the globe (ibid., V, 211). 122. Ibid., VI, 20-22. 113 114 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD remaining as enthusiastic as Voltaire in his admiration of the Chinese and Confucius, does not hesitate, at the very point where he is discussing the origin of the Chinese, to describe de Pauw, the bitter critic of these people, as "the scholar who explained best the antiquities of Asia.""12 Thus when he finds he has no choice but to contradict de Pauw, he seems almost embarassed to do so and adopts a tone of great humility. One wonders whether he may not have been intimidated by the compla- cent arrogance of his opponent. It would seem so, because even as he girds himself up to demolish de Pauw's "paradox on the infancy of the peoples of the New World," he begins by describing the Recherches as "a singular work, but full of knowledge," which does not permit "an extended criticism, and even if it demanded it, my adversary being alive, my peace-loving pen would fear to undertake it." So he will limit himself to a few observations, a few respectful observations, "which I submit in advance to the scrutiny of the ingenious writer whom I am constrained to refute."124 The first of these observations, as one might expect from such an enthusiast for Nature, concerns the giants in general, and those of Patagonia in particular, whose existence is defended against the "Pyr- rhonism" of the Recherches. The proofs of their existence, frequent in the sixteenth century, rare in the seventeenth century because the Patagonians, terrified by the Europeans, withdrew into the interior, "reappear in abundance in the eighteenth century"; and one can only be amused at the way in which de Pauw rejects under one pretext or another the evidence of all the explorers, from Pigafetta to Commodore Byron, who have seen and described the giants. The truth of the matter is that the giants would have brought down his whole thesis on the weakness of the nature of America, "and a writer does not willingly adopt a truth which would cost him the sacrifice of three volumes of paradoxes."'25 The large bones found in America cannot be animal bones. It is well known that there are no giraffes nor hippopotamuses nor elephants nor rhinoceroses there: "Nature which maintained her vigor in the reptiles 123. Ibid., V, 295-96, 300; VI, xlviii, quoting Recherches sur les Egyptiens, I, 17 (1773 ed., I, 15-16). For Delisle's sinophilia, see Philosophie de la Nature, IV, xcix-ci; V, 44-45. 124. Philosophie de la Nature, V, 232. Delisle's peace-loving pen did not save him from frequent troubles with the censors: see ibid., VI, 371; Monde primitif, I, v; II, 206; IV, 209, the details s.v. in the Biographie universelle (Michaud) and the curious particulars gathered by J. -P. Belin, op. cit., pp. 301-06. The Philosophie de la Nature was burned in the Place de Greve on 14 December 1775, and its author imprisoned in the ChAtelet in 1777. See also n. 112. 125. Philosophie de la Nature, V, 200-04; in his impetuosity Delisle accuses de Pauw of having said of Corneille de Maye that he "took giants . . . for rocks." De Pauw of course insinuates that, on the contrary, de Maye took a rock for a man (Recherches, I, 298-99): the same criticism occurs in Monde primitif VI, 20-22. On the same subject of the Patagonian giants Delisle had already taken issue with de Pauw, an author who wanted to be "read" but not to "enlighten" the reader, in the "Discours pre- liminaire" inserted by him in the second edition (Paris, 1770, 2 vols.) of the Journey to the Malvine Is- lands written by de Pauw's first antagonist, Pernety. European Reactions to de Pauw is there totally degenerate in the quadrupeds." De Pauw would have it that these carcasses belong to animals that became extinct in that terrible catastrophe which maimed the whole continent. But why do we need these massive unknown beasts, "when one has beneath one's eyes [sic!] such large men, living since time immemorial in the lands of Magellan?"'126 Why, if not to support some malign fixation? In fact, de Pauw is a slan- derer. He slandered the New World when he defined its one hundred and fifty million inhabitants as "children"- they are "children" who form societies, reproduce vigorously, and live to the age of a hundred and fifty!127 - and he slandered Nature in suggesting that the species de- generate in embryo.'28 Worst of all, he repeated the infamous slanders of the Spanish conquerors, who went so far as to cast doubt on the humanity of the American natives. They at least spread these slanders to justify their massacres and wrote history with a calculated treachery, a noir- ceur rcfl chie.129 But was there any good reason for de Pauw to repeat these slanders, "he who wielded a pen of fire in favor of tolerance"?'30 The strong hints of moral criticism in the word "slander" cast an air of injured innocence over those "slandered," endowing them with the virginal purity of "children of nature." In describing the primitive peo- ples Vossius and Garcilaso "slandered the human race; the more savage these people were, the closer they were to Nature."131 Mother Nature was thus the ultimate target of all this calumny. Yet this august progenitor is always right and makes no mistakes. It is Nature, for example, that makes man well; society makes him ill, and to the curse of disease adds the curse of doctors.132 So in America nature has produced smooth- skinned men? All right, but these beardless youths are no less prolific than the Chinese or the most nobly bearded metaphysician.'33 It is true that these virile American men before the Conquest used to nurse their offspring. But why else would the male have mammae, if not to suckle children? Or would someone like to suggest that Nature acted without 126. Philosophie de la Nature, V, 212-13; cf. ibid., IV, 109. 127. Ibid., V, 232-37; VI, 276. 128. Nor does Delisle believe consistently in the degeneration of animals: "The tajacou is America's wild boar. Some naturalists have taken it for a degenerated version of our pig" (Philosophie de la Na- ture, I, 36n.); and contra, above, p. 49. 129. A frequently repeated argument: Philosophie de la Nature, I, 36n.; V, 94, 195, 237, 246-47; VI, 243-44. For Delisle, of course, "the most precise and judicious author perhaps that has written on the New World" is Las Casas; and naturally he repeats Thomas Gage's story of the American women who had abortions to save their offspring from enslavement to the Hispano-Catholics (ibid., II, 49-50; see above, p. 49). 130. Ibid., V, 237. 131. Ibid., I, 40n. Buffon too "slandered nature" with his theory of the epochs of the solar system (Monde primitif, II, 205). 132. Philosophie de la Nature, VI, 190-226, quoting Rousseau, of course. 133. Ibid., VI, 71, 238. Lahontan's savage (1703) was reluctant to become French for fear of growing "hairy and bearded like an animal" and having to shave every three days (op. cit., p. 208); but Lahontan always seems to have his tongue in his cheek. ... 115 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD any aim in mind, or even that she erred, giving men this pseudoorgan? Once he sets out on these arguments, which might seem more at home in Manzoni's heroicomic Don Ferrante, "can you deny that there are stars? Or are you going to try and tell me that they are up there for no purpose whatsoever?"- Delisle de Sales almost reaches the point of lamenting that the massacres, the Inquisition [!], and the frequency of intermarriage have little by little led to the disappearance of this singular "original distinction" of the Americans; and he forgets to inform us whether their breasts were as perfect as those of the divine Aspasia who, he has as- sured us a little earlier, possessed breasts "shaped in the form of a pear, and not in the form of a half apple, as our little mistresses desire them"'34 - and as moreover one imagines the simple Alcibiades preferred them. But let us get back to the native of the New World. Even with his role reduced to that of dry nurse, in his physique he is "the most adroit of creatures" and "relatively to the volume of his body the strongest of creatures."'35 As for moral and intellectual gifts, the inhabitants of Mexico and Peru have shown themselves amply endowed. Nor is it true that the Europeans degenerate in America: just look at La Condamine, or the learned proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, and the unfailing Benjamin Franklin, the "Descartes of Electricity."'136 "Nature then did not go astray in one entire hemisphere. The Americans are men." If the American is still a slave today, this is because he does not dare to think: "But if he thought today, tomorrow he would be free"137 -a prophecy which echoes and enlarges on similar ones of Raynal and de Pauw himself (see above, p. 63). What is de Pauw's error then? It is his "generalizing," his deducing of an absolute law from a single occurrence. This formal failing of the Recherches is well grasped by Delisle de Sales, who had a sort of in- stinctive horror of abstractions, systems (other people's), and general concepts; who admired the empiricist in Buffon as much as he distrusted the systematic in him; who could write of "species": "The word species is a technical term, which we have invented to compensate for our weak- ness of memory and understanding: Nature does not really make species at all, it makes only individuals";'138 who, while admitting the decisive influence of climate on the character of peoples, noted that climate itself could alter with time and natural disasters, with the creative and 134. Philosophie de la Nature, V, 51-52, 74-76, with echoes of Rousseau's defense of the milk- bearing capacities of the mothers (but not the fathers!). 135. Ibid., V, 4-7; VI, 260. See also the conversation (ibid., III, 27-39) between a Parisian and a Caribbean, who has simple tastes and well-developed senses. 136. Ibid., V, 245-46: same title for Franklin, ibid., IV, 52. Linnaeus is "this Descartes of botany" (V, 347n.). 137. Ibid., V, 245. 138. Ibid., IV, xcv n.; cf. IV, 40; V, 86, 138, 334. 116 European Reactions to de Pauw destructive work of man;139 and who finally, in vigorous opposition to the anti-Semites, defended the Jews' right to be adjudged men like all others. 140 But as for the fundamental problems in the American polemic-the ideal and physical relationship pertaining between the two worlds, the concepts of progress and humanity, the values of primitivism and so- called civilization- Delisle de Sales, far from skirting round them, is hardly even aware of them. And for all his familiarity with a number of writers in the famous controversy-from Pernety, whose journey to the Falkland Islands he presented to the public in a new edition, and whose Dissertation sur l'Ameriquel4 he quotes, to Raynal, Molina, and the much respected Carli (whose ideas on Atlantis he rejects however)142- he contributes nothing genuinely his own, nor does he go deeply into a single one of the problems. X. THE ABBE ROUBAUD: AMERICA AND THE PHYSIOCRATS The criticisms directed at de Pauw by another polygraph, the abb6 Roubaud, are equally unoriginal and uninspired; but Roubaud differs from Delisle de Sales in approaching the subject with a heavy-footed methodicality that leads him to produce not just a few incidental com- ments on the Recherches but a formal rebuttal thereof covering some three hundred and fifty pages. It would however be a fruitless quest if one searched the catalogs for it under any title giving an idea of its con- tents; and consequently it remained completely unknown, despite its size, even to the numerous apologists and slanderers of America-a branch of the "dispute" that died without issue. It is not in fact a work in itself but a digression, without even its own subheading, appearing in and disproportionately bloating the thirteenth of the fifteen volumes which comprise the prolific abb6's Histoire generale de I'Asie, de l'Afrique et de l'Am"rique. As soon as it is glimpsed alongside the other volumes and since it is twice as fat, this thirteenth volume immediately betrays some abnormality: the polemical excursus, the only one in the whole Histoire, has grown up in it like a tumor, provoked by the prussic acid of de Pauw's writings; so we have yet another, and voluminous, confirmation of the strength of that powerful irritant. The Recherches was still a recent novelty when Roubaud began the compilation of his history; his first volumes appeared in 1770, and the 139. Ibid., IV, lxv-lxviii and the whole Discours preliminaire sur la morale de t'homme-physique. 140. See the "Apologie des Juifs" in the Philosophie de la Nature, II, 63-122; III, xxiv. 141. See above, n. 10 and if.; n. 125; Philosophie de la Nature, V, 201n.; VI, 267n. 142. On Molina, see Monde primitif, V, 8; on Carli, ibid., I, 28; V, xxvii, lxi, 318-20. 117 118 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD digression against de Pauw, published in 1775, was composed between December 1772 and March 1773.143 It opens, as expected, with protests against the assertions of the American males' impuberty and lactiferous breasts and an ingenious explanation of the latter phenomenon: perhaps some European traveler came across a group of natives in the act of practicing the couvade, and being unaware that this same custom is fairly widespread in Europe too, and even in France (Bearn), he imagined that they were suckling their young.144 But once Roubaud has tasted his opponent's blood he is in no mind to let go and proceeds relentlessly to crush every thesis and every argument. A few years earlier he had used the same tactics against another very gifted dilettante, the abbe Galiani. Roubaud, who was an enthusiastic contributor to the physiocratically inspired economic reviews and who had also published (1769) the Representations aux magistrats sur le commerce des grains, fell on Galiani's glittering "little dialogues" the moment they appeared, refuting them with a minutely detailed and im- placable analysis. Strictly speaking, he says, such a task was not even necessary, since they were "completely refuted in advance" in his Repre- sentations;145 but he had felt like checking them over for errors, and when he satisfied his fancy he found "so many, many mistakes on every page, on every line! .. ." that when he has finished he seems to heave a great sigh of relief: he had completed "this terrible task, the task of clarifying and annotating your large Book page by page and almost sentence by sentence."'46 The same technique is applied to de Pauw's Recherches, so that it would be well to limit ourselves to the basic points of his prolix argument. The Patagonians do exist, although their "giantism" is a matter of a mere foot above the average.47 And the Old World is indeed infinitely 143. Histoire, XIII, 159, 347. The Histoire came out simultaneously in a quarto edition in five vols., which I have not seen; I have also been unable to find Roubaud's first work, with the suggestively Solor- zanesque title Le politique indien (Paris, 1768). 144. Histoire, XIII, 10-11. 145. Recreations economiques, ou Lettres de Ilauteur des Representations aux magistrats, a M. le chevalier Zanobi principal interlocuteur des Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (Amsterdam; but Paris, 1770), p. 96, etc. 146. Ibid., p. 220, 236. On Roubaud the physiocrat, see Leonce de Lavergne, Les dconomistesfran- (ais au XVIIi" siecle (Paris, 1870), pp. 174, 182; some brief comments can be found in the histories of economic thought. On the links between the physiocrats and America, via Franklin, see D. Echeverria, "Roubaud and the Theory of American Degeneration," French-American Review, 3 (1950), pp. 26, 31-32. On the polemic with Galiani, see Galiani, Correspondance, I, 210-13; D'Epinay e Galiani, pp. 74, 89-90, 109-10, 136, and the relevant footnotes; F. Nicolini, Gli ultimi anni della signora d'Epi- nay: Lettere inedite all'abate Galiani, 1773-1782 (Bari, 1933), p. 185; and the correspondence of Grimm ("Roubaud, doctor of the school of the absurd ... is tilting at windmills against the chevalier Zanobi," ed. cit., IX, 83-84). 147. Histoire, XIII, 50-74. Note that before being provoked by de Pauw, Roubaud had expressed doubts (ibid., I, xxiii-xxiv) about the Patagonian giants. It is from this very point that he takes his cue, after some preliminary skirmishing, for a summary exposition of the doctrines of M. de Paff (sic, p. 74), on the completion of which (pp. 75-101) he sets about their systematic destruction. European Reactions to de Pauw superior to the New; but why could de Pauw not be content with reas- serting this obvious truth? Why did he feel he had to demonstrate the universal degeneration of every creature and object of America? And anyway, degeneration as compared to what pristine state or condition?... De Pauw has made no attempt to show that in the past, before the dis- covery, America was in a more flourishing state than after; no more does he suggest that the state of nature is "less unformed" than the state in which the American natives were found. Of the land itself, he does not say that it was barren, but quite the op- posite, that its natural goodness, ungoverned and unexploited by man, ran to waste and decay. The continent was thus quite simply unworked because its peoples were savages, more concerned with hunting and fishing than agriculture: "America was, so to speak, a new land,"148 a sparsely inhabited archipelago, but its inhabitants were not stupid; here and there they tilled the soil, learned the nutritive properties of cereals and roots, tubers and berries, and extracted minerals and precious stones; and all this without a knowledge of iron: "Take iron from our con- tinent and what would it become?"'49 And what would Europe be without the products and techniques in- herited from other continents? "America in the sixteenth century had only what it had produced itself." The fine arts too, which in Europe were developed over thousands of years by an infinite variety of peoples, in Mexico and Peru "were the product of the particular genius of their inhabitants, with only a few bare centuries of experience behind them.'150 The progress of the North American colonists, skipped over so lightly by de Pauw, makes it seem likely that "North America will one day be the capital, if I may put it like that, of the human race."'151 And let it not be said that the environment is unfavorable to such a prodigious increase. If plants are carefully tended they can do well in America too: "Soon perhaps America will be able to stand up to Euro- pean competition in wines, as it can already in grain." Even the poisonous plants can be domesticated and made edible, and the much-maligned maize does not cause either constipation or scabies.'52 The animal species in the New World may indeed be fewer in number, as Buffon would have it, but each one is more numerous in itself, and in any case the surface area of the New World is only two-fifths that of the Old. Nor are all its animals tiny. There are fossil remains of gigantic beasts. How on earth 148. Ibid., XIII, 109, 136. 149. Ibid., p. 115. 150. Ibid., pp. 124-25. 151. Ibid., p. 130. 152. Ibid., pp. 131-39, quoting the passage from Buffon given above, p. 14. 119 published in 1928, I had commented on the savage verdict on the Ameri- can natives pronounced by de Pauw, one of the instigators of the dispute, and some of the responses it provoked. In other works I had touched on the theme of the innocence or innate wickedness of the savage and men- tioned Hegel's flatly negative judgment on the whole American continent. But it was only at the end of 1943 that I published in Lima a first summary version of this study under the title Viejas poldmicas sobre el Nuevo Mundo. The third edition (Lima, 1946) came to some three hundred pages. When I returned to Europe in 1948, I reworked all the material and in 1955 published in Milan La disputa del Nuovo Mondo: Storia di una polemica, a volume of almost eight hundred pages. MEya P3iphXov, iLya KaKOV, "the bigger the book, the bigger the mis- chief." I was so conscious of this, so convinced that I could expect to bring down on my head a storm of criticism, or that I would be accused of heaven-knows-what omissions and lacunae, that almost as a challenge, and half jokingly, I added at the end a "negative bibliography"-a list of books I believed might have some relevance to the topic, but that I had not been able to see for one reason or another. In so doing I was hoping in a way to goad my critics and annihilators and to facilitate their work of denigration. But not even with this device did I achieve what I had hoped for. And the "negative bibliography," included again in the Spanish edition (Mexico, 1960), has been more aptly retitled, in the present English edi- tion, "Suggestions for Further Research," though the reiterated invitation for its use in rectifying errors or filling in insufficiencies of information or opinion remains unchanged. This is, in fact, a typical "concertina" work, expandable (or contract- ible) at the author's whim. In the most unexpected writers one can find still further diatribes, albeit only implicit, on the "inferiority of the Ameri- cas." The theme runs underground from Buffon and de Pauw to our own times, but breaks the surface in the most unlikely places and leaves its mark on the most varied opinions, theories, and sophisms. In each sepa- rate writer it appears, perforce, in a different guise. But unless I am much mistaken it betrays itself in every one through the same utterly simple and fragile paradox. The list of acknowledgments that custom requires would be too long for inclusion in this preface. For almost thirty years I have been a grateful recipient of stimulating suggestions and useful information. Perhaps I may be permitted to epitomize all my thanks by mentioning two names only, at the opposite extremities of my research. My gratitude, which may seem naive, is extended first to that part of the world that gave rise to my aware- ness of the problem, and kept my interest in it alive, so that an episode xii Preface THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD did they become extinct? Roubaud forgoes any attempt at explanation. "That is something one would try in vain to discover."'53 And as for man in America, he is a splendid specimen, vigorous, long- lived and prolific, whether native or shrewd and careful colonist. So the women give birth easily? A proof of their rooust constitutions! And they keep their milk for years on end? They make generous wet nurses, and so much the better for the bairn! "The longer the childhood, the longer and later old age."'54"" The American male is hairless? Maybe, but this does not mean he is weak: the Negroes are smooth skinned, but a Hotten- tot can fell a lion. Nor is the American cowardly and stupid. Roubaud rounds off his apology with disarming naivete: "We shall bring this dis- cussion to a close with a piece of irrefutable testimony; namely what the famous Mr. Franklin said of the Americans" in a letter of June 1772, which Roubaud has seen with his own eyes: "we ourselves have read this testimony";1'5 and to back it up he quotes Mr. Dickinson, "the Demosthenes of the English colonies"; the Philadelphia Academy; the Dissertations milees of J. J. Rambach, Rector of the college of Quedlin- burg; and Fathers Feijoo and Sarmiento, so frivolously derided by de Pauw.56 Of course none of this makes any difference to Europe's primacy, but it is a matter of "an accidental and acquired superiority, not a natural and innate superiority"'7-a fair enough approximative characterization of the "historicity" of European civilization, and a perfectly valid excuse for evading the question of the naturalistic contrast between the two hemispheres. But this novel outlook does not last long with Roubaud, steeped as he is in the historiographical pessimism of his time and ruled by its philanthropic and anticolonial corollaries. When it comes to at- tacking the Spaniards, Roubaud is wholeheartedly in agreement with de Pauw: "The conquest of America is the most terrible calamity suffered by the human race at the hands of man."'"58 And not only for the in- 153. Ibid., p. 142. 154. Ibid., p. 149. For the European colonists, Roubaud repeats Pernety's argument, on which see above, p. 97. 155. Ibid., p. 162. Franklin's letter has apparently been lost. Even Echeverria, "Roubaud," p. 29, has failed to find any trace of it. 156. Histoire, p. 166. Dickinson's Lettres d'un fermier de Penslyvanie had been translated by the physiocrat Du Bourg in 1769 at Franklin's suggestion, and it was Franklin that introduced his physiocrat friends to the Transactions of the Academy of Philadelphia (vol. I, 1771; see Echeverria, "Roubaud," p. 30). 157. Histoire, XIII, 167. 158. Ibid., p. 355. The passage is quoted in extenso in the physiocratic Nouvelles ephe'me'rides co- nomiques (1776), III, 48-76, directed by the abb6 Baudeau, which had already given considerable atten- tion to the second volume of Roubaud's Histoire (1771, VI, 249-60). In the preceding pages Roubaud rejects many particular points of early American history, including Mexican and especially Peruvian items, that de Pauw had maintained. This emphatic disapproval sometimes seems to carry an echo of the sermonizing Raynal (quoted fairly frequently: XIII, 40-47, 396-97, 449-50, 487, 535; XIV, 3, 146-48; 120 European Reactions to de Pauw habitants of the New World. Roubaud's pessimism is displayed in an al- most Blake-like apocalyptic vision: "The Old World has dragged the New into its vortex; but in the impact of these two great bodies the stronger could not crush the weaker without breaking asunder and being shattered itself."159 Hence there is nothing more illusory than the classic notion of an ex- change of useful products between the two hemispheres: "There has been an appalling interchange of evils between Europe and America, and there has been no mutual exchange of benefits at all."160 To support this lethal theory Roubaud vituperates one by one all the so-called gifts of America, with an arrogance worthy of de Pauw. The evil influence of American gold was by then a commonplace in political moralism and the budding science of economics. But in fact there is not a single item either American or just generally exotic that survives his blast: spices burn us, tea dries us up, drugs poison us, and the potato is a sad remedy for hun- ger; arctic furs are an effeminacy in our climate; tobacco, useless and dangerous in itself, has become an instrument of torture in the hands of the revenue authorities; coffee is a "pernicious drink"; cochineal and precious stones are costly and frivolous toys; and sugar-well, sugar could very easily be produced in our own hemisphere, without imposing oppressive monopolies on the other. And here the physiocrat completely forgets the original purpose of his argument and looses the full thunder of his eloquence against trade in general and against colonial trade in particular. "Europe set its glory, its power, and its salvation in far-off, precarious, and useless posses- sions, purchased at great expense, exploited at great expense, main- tained at great expense. The Empires left their bases land stooped down or reached out to lean on rushes."'"61 So has Columbus's discovery been nothing but a source of misfortune? Up till now, yes. But soon it will become a blessing. As soon as the North American colonies are independent, "all the rest of America will soon be free ... then all these peoples will devote themselves to culture and XV, 56, 127, 389, 397, 415, 487, 503, 517). Other noteworthy features are his philo-Quakerism, despite "the theological errors of these sectaries" (XV, 5-10, 537-38), and his hostility toward the greatest Spanish historian of the Indies, "the infamous Oviedo" (XIII, 387). 159. Histoire, XIII, 337. 160. Ibid., p. 336. Roubaud, then, is ready to agree at least once with de Pauw, who for the occasion earns the title of "Philosophe hollandais," because he recognized the exchange of America's syphilis for Europe's plague as the most dismal trading of catastrophes in all history (ibid., pp. 465-66). In the rest of the volume de Pauw is occasionally attacked on the subjects of the enslavement of the Negroes (p. 442), Cortez's companions (pp. 554-55), the exploitation of the colonies (pp. 588-90), and Atahual- pa's wives, who were violated, not prostituted to the conqueror (p. 603). 161. Ibid., p. 341-44 (and cf. pp. 589-90). A little further on Roubaud borrows Voltaire's famous statement: "The ownership of a few acres of snow in the depths of America will be enough to bring about a general conflagration. The loss of Canada has been a relief to France" (pp. 346-47). 121 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD commerce, to the most fruitful arts, all will prosper.... All Europe, freed of all expense, will trade profitably with all America, and with prosperity [sic]."162 Thus what was to have been the defense of a continent against the stigma of physical degeneration winds up as a theorem of political economy. And its author, rapt in these radiant visions, even forgets to trace the picture of the manners and customs of these natives without history that he had formally promised his readers.163 But the poor fel- low's forgetfulness and other faults have been more than expiated by the oblivion he suffered himself; he was forgotten as an opponent of Gal- iani,164 forgotten as a critic (and one of the better ones) of de Pauw,165 forgotten as a lexicographer, despite his important work on synonyms,'66 and so completely forgotten in his old age that when in 1795 the Con- vention awarded him a pension the abbe Pierre Roubaud had already four years earlier passed on to a better life. XI. GALIANI: THE "ROUGHCAST" CONTINENT AND THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE It should not be imagined that de Pauw was forgotten as soon as these immediate reactions to his work had calmed down. On the contrary, the frequent new editions and translations167 of the book and even the chance references to it in the literature of the decade 1770-80 show how the work that had provoked such a clamor of opposition on its first ap- pearance continued to be read and even thought about. Some of the most interesting observations and developments appear in fact in the corre- spondence of the period or in discussions not directly related to the polemic. The current of the debate is enriched by new themes borrowed from the most ancient sources. The whole polemic was to flare up again publicly toward the end of the decade, with Robertson, Carli, Clavigero, and then Jefferson. But one cannot gain a true perspective of this re- 162. Ibid., p. 350: can commerce help, then? ... The final words of the long work echo with this prophecy: "Today or tomorrow the war will begin. . . . In the end English America will be free, and its liberty will soon be that of all America" (ibid., XV, 545). 163. Ibid., XIII, 167. 164. To Galiani's protests Mme d'Epinay replied that there was no point in venting his anger on "this strumpet of an abb6 Roubaud ... he is in oblivion ... nobody in Paris is aware of his existence" etc. D'Epinay e Galiani, p. 89). And Grimm: "These recreations make up a pamphlet which has remained as obscure as the other feats of the economists" (Correspondence, IX, 83-84). 165. He was "rediscovered" by Durand Echeverria; see "Roubaud" and Mirage, pp. 30, 32. 166. The four volumes of his Nouveaux synonymes franCaises (1785), which won an Academy prize, were several times reprinted and finally reshaped into a Dictionnaire des synonymes (1810) by various authors, and were still praised in Larousse (s.v.), and by Guizot (Dictionnaire universel des synonymes de la langue francaise [1864], iv-vii, xxxiv-xxxix, with some reservations about their etymologies: ix, xxxii-xxxiv). 167. Among the editions known are those of Berlin, 1770, 1771, 1772, 1774, and 1777; Cleves, 1772; London, 1771, and 1774; and the translation into German of 1769, and into Dutch of 1771-72. Later editions and translations will be mentioned below. 122 European Reactions to de Pauw kindling of the dispute if one ignores the constant attention that de Pauw's theories received in the meanwhile. In 1773 the publication of his second Recherches was already reminding the public about his first. Pietro Verri found it to be "a book crammed with ideas and well written," and yet "at every turn" it made him laugh: "it seems [sic] to be by the same author as the work on the Americans."'68 These researches on the Americans in their turn did not perhaps move to laughter but did at least "tickle" the wizard of the north, Hamann, who refers to them and the second Recherches in a couple of pronouncements of truly Sibylline obscurity (1773, 1775);169 and writing to his friend Kapellmeister Reichardt in Berlin, he asks after their author with mock solicitude: "Can't you give me any news of Canon Pauw? Where is he living now? May we expect his Philosophical researches on the Germans in the near future?"'70 A rather more explicit reaction is seen on the other hand in the case of another Italian, the abbe Ferdinando Galiani, who followed somewhat more strictly in the Vicoan tradition than either Verri or Frisi. Galiani was always curious about the latest developments in the literary world, and as soon as the Baron D'Holbach wrote to him about the uproar pro- voked by de Pauw's book (3 June 1770) the good abbe replied begging for a copy to be sent to him in Naples. "I should very much like to see the Recherches philosophiques sur les Amdricains. You can quite safely send it to me. The books which come in here are not examined at all- they know that no one will read them."'171 In fact he soon received a copy of the book through Dr. Angelo Gatti and delivered his judgment on it, with his usual sneer, in a letter to his beloved Mme d'Epinay: "I was delighted to see that there are still Saumaises, Casaubons, and Scaligers in our century, and that it is pos- sible, in philosophy just as in the study of antiquity, to search endlessly and find nothing, to produce a whole string of erudite comments and leave them quite unconnected, to glimpse without perceiving, and to set out from no principle and arrive nowhere; that is called piling up stones and thinking you have built something." The Neapolitan's criticism is something new. The book is condemned not for its basic idea but for its poor method: it is a conglomeration of 168. From Milan, 13 October 1773, in E. Greppi and A. Giulini, eds., Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri dal 1766 al 1797, vol. VI (Milan, 1928), lett. CL (493), pp. 126-27. 169. Schriften, ed. F. Roth (Berlin, 1823-24), IV, 271-72 (Hierophantische Briefe, V, quoting both the Recherches); V, 36 (letter to Nicolai, 7 June 1773). Hamann had in his possession the Recherches, Pernety's first reply, and de Pauw's Defense (Simtliche Werke, ed. J. Nadler [Vienna, 1949-57], V, 80), and refers disdainfully to Pernety's travels and works on alchemy and physiognomy (ibid., III, 329). In the same Hierophantische Briefe, III, is cited (ed. cit., IV, 246; cf. ibid., 245 n. 2, and VIIla, 262) Vol- taire's Lettres chinoises, for which see below, p. 153. 170. Letter of 16 December 1776, in Briefwechsel, ed. Ziesemer and Henkel, vol. III (Leipzig, 1957), p. 274. 171. G. Perey and G. Maugras, Correspondance, I, 203. 123 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD undigested erudition, barren and inconclusive. Still half serious and half joking the abbe goes on to promise that one day he will himself provide the real solution to the problem: "I shall show then that America is a roughcast Asia [une Asie ebauchee], because it is much more modem." It is a new land and there are always giants in a new land; but their race is declining and being replaced by a smooth-skinned race, which will give way in its turn "to the bearded race which is the most perfect of all."172 There are two points to note about this reply. The first is the criticism of the climatic theory, implicit in the way he stresses race, whether smooth skinned or hirsute. In another letter of this same year the abb6 insists that everything depends on race and not on education, as Rousseau so mistakenly suggests.'73 And a few years later he was to write, while referring specifically to the Americans, that "everything that has been said about climate is sheer stupidity, a non causa pro causa, the simplest error of logic," and that "everything depends on race." And of all the various races, he was to repeat, the white and bearded race is the only one capable of progress. The native of California, as in general every creature not civilized by the bearded whites, is still really an animal, not even properly speaking a man, but "the sliest, shrewdest, and most mis- chievous of monkeys.""174 When he says "race, not climate" Galiani really means "history, not geography," or "society, not nature." In putting forward such human and historicist criteria of interpretation Galiani had Vico to support him. Already in a work of his more youthful days, in other words of the time when the influence of the Scienza nuova was still fresh in his mind, Galiani had attempted to explain the ancient legends of mythology in terms of the similarities offered by the "stories of modern-day travelers. . . to the new lands." He sought confirmation for the fantasies of the Greeks in the existing natural environment of the Indies and America. "The sirens are those aquatic birds called penguins, which abound nowadays on Magel- 172. Letter of 7 December 1771, ibid., 1, 487-89. In this passage Galiani seems to believe in the American giants (cf. above, p. 84). And his irony on the subject of de Pauw's smooth-skinned savages is obvious. One would say the abb6, in reaction to the Recherches, was inclined to a rehabilitation of the Americans, their stature and piliferous system. His letter crossed with one in which d'Holbach, who three months earlier had written to tell him that it was not so easy to find him the book (the Recherches "is very rare in this country"), adjudged it, like Galiani, a gross compilation "somewhat undiscriminat- ing" and its basic error being to "treat as degeneration what in life is no more than lack of development" - an idea conforming to the rigid ideology of progress, that boiled down to substantially the same defini- tion as Galiani's, of America as a "roughcast continent." D'Holbach was wrong, on the other hand, to say of de Pauw's reply to Pernety, with evident verbal embarrassment, that it "seemed" to him "in truth, a little too systematic" (F. Nicolini, Amici e corrispondentifrancesi dell'abate Galiani [Naples, 1954], pp. 204, 212; letters of 25 August and 1 December 1771). 173. Letter of 19 January 1771, in Correspondance, I, 342. 174. Letter of 12 October 1776, in Correspondance, II, 473-74. Savages too, indeed even cats, can be educated and civilized, but it takes time. Cats must have taken forty or fifty thousand years to learn what they know now. In Asia civilization began twelve thousand years ago. It is therefore right that the Californians and Australians, "who are three or four thousand years old" should still be brute animals. 124 European Reactions to de Pauw lan's coast, and which from afar resemble [sic!] naked women out of water." Somewhat more plausibly he suggested that the harpies would probably be the Guanays, "voracious aquatic birds which nest on de- serted reefs in such great numbers as to make these places almost in- accessible to man." Later he applied this same method of comparative interpretation to the history of the conquest of America, observing that the natives, if they had not learned writing from the Europeans, would certainly have transfigured Columbus and Cortes, Queen Isabel and Charles V, just as the unsophisticated ancient Greeks transformed their primitive warriors and monarchs into gods and heroes: Hercules, Mercury, and Saturn were for them what in twenty centuries the Catholic sovereigns might have become for the Americans. 75 The fluidity of this viewpoint helps us to understand the second ele- ment observable in Galiani's response to de Pauw, which consists of his acceptance of the concept or at least the image of a "roughcast" conti- nent, with its strong suggestions of a progressive evolution. America (he seems to say) has not yet achieved the maturity of the other continents. Will it one day achieve such maturity? Galiani moves on from physical considerations to political considerations and on two separate occasions replies strongly in the affirmative. A few months after she had received Galiani's scornful judgment on de Pauw, Mme d'Epinay sent him another book on the subject of America, the famous Histoire philosophique du commerce dans les Deux Indes by the abbe Raynal, recommending it to him as an excellent book and "in better taste than . . . the Americans."176 But the critical little abbe was not so easily satisfied. Disregarding the panegyrics of his lady friend, Galiani replied that he was very happy about the success of the book, which he thought full of good intentions and elegant writing; but the author's cloying and sentimental humani- tarianism he found quite repulsive. With his customary affectation of cynicism he wrote that in politics he could accept only "the purest Machiavellism, unadulterated, crude, in all its harshness and severity," and concluded: "My opinion is that we should continue our ravages in the Indies just as long as we are successful in so doing, save that we 175. Dell'antichissima storia della navigazione nel Mediterraneo, ca. 1746 (summarized in a note to the 2d ed., 1780, of Della moneta: see Bari ed., 1915, pp. 315-16); and letter to Mme d'Epinay, 24 April 1773 (Correspondance, II, 201-03). Cf. F. Nicolini, "Vico e Galiani," passim and esp. pp. 14-16. See also pp. 61-63 in the later version of this article. 176. Letter of 26 July 1772, in F. Nicolini, D'Epinay e Galiani, p. 273. Already on 22 March 1772 Mme d'Epinay had written to Galiani with glowing praises of Raynal's book (ibid., p. 256), which was simultaneously lauded by the Marchese Caracciolo (letter to Galiani of 24 March 1772), who however added the following annotation on the name of the presumed author, the abbe Raynal: "You know him: a tremendous bore, tiresome, contentious, arrogant, and insolent" (Nicolini, Amici e corrispondenti, p. 42). 125 126 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD should withdraw when we are beaten." The single truly desirable and profitable trade consists in the exchange of thrashings handed out for rupees gathered in.'77 Cruelty is eternal; in Peru the Spaniards had to be cruel, because they were few, greedy, and surrounded by enemies.'78 Before many years passed the North Americans showed the English that they were no longer disposed to take beatings and pay taxes. The English withdrew, as Galiani had suggested; and Galiani, adhering faith- fully to his political philosophy, rejoiced over the triumph of America. For although Galiani professed to know the English well, and hold them in respect, he had little liking for them."'7 Hume had written in 1769 that he could murder Galiani for all the evil he spoke of England.'80 When Spain ceded Florida to England Galiani had been worried because by this purchase and with Canada in the north "the English Empire in America ... will become so solid, well-rounded, strong and compact that I can- not see any way of getting one's teeth into it and biting it. Thus this Em- pire alone will be enough to hold the rest of unwarlike America in sub- jection."'' And in the years that followed he persisted in his belief that the center of gravity of English power was shifting toward the New World. England was becoming depopulated in favor of its American col- onies: "A great quantity of English men and Manufactures have been poured into these colonies, whence they are already casting a baleful eye on their imprudent mother-country.'''82 177. Letter of 5 September 1772 (Correspondance, II, 114-15). Mme d'Epinay and Grimm reacted enthusiastically to Galiani's criticism and economic recipe (Nicolini, D'Epinay e Galiani, pp. 288, 359) -which hit at de Pauw's moralistic counsel too: see above, p. 55. One seems to catch belated echoes of the same advice both in the letter of the sceptical ex-minister Aranda, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, to the incumbent Floridablanca: "while we have it [Spanish America] let us make use of it and help ourselves to whatever nourishment we can get from it, because when the time comes for us to lose it we shall miss that good bit of bacon for our thick soup" (21 July 1785, quoted at second hand by J. R. Spell, Rousseau in the Spanish World before 1833 [Austin, 1938, p. 217]), and in the dedication to the Ge- schlossene Handelstaat (1800) of Fichte, who after pointing out the enormous and unjust profit made by Europe in trading with the rest of the world, and the improbability of such exploitation lasting indefi- nitely, imagines that someone objects: "At least this state of affairs has lasted until now-there still lasts the subjection of the colonies to the mother countries, there is still the slave trade-and we shall not live to see the time when all this will cease. Let us take advantage of it, as long as it lasts"-to which he confesses himself unable to reply. But Galiani even later, when Secretary to the Tribunale del Commercio of the kingdom of Naples, expressed himself (1784) in very cold and almost diffident terms on the subject of commercial exchange between the newborn United States and Naples (see Furio Diaz, "L'abate Galiani consigliere di commercio estero del Regno di Napoli," Rivista storica italiana, 80, no. 4 [1968], pp. 881-84). 178. Letter of D'Alembert, 25 September 1773 (Correspondance, II, 267). Cortes and Pizarro were "two pirates, real buccaneers" (letter to Mme d'Epinay, 29 February 1772, ibid., II, 32). But Charles V was "a gentle despot, as his son was a harsh despot" (letter to d'Epinay, 29 June 1771, ibid., I, 412). 179. See the letter from London of 8 December 1767, in A. Bazzoni, ed., Lettere di Ferdinando Galiani al Marchese Bernardo Tanucci (Florence, 1880), p. 169, and now in Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, Nicolini ed. (1959), pp. 328-29; Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (1770), III, Venice ed., 1791, p. 96; Nicolini ed., pp. 63-64. 180. Letter to abbe Morellet, 10 July 1769, in J. Y. T. Greig, ed., The Letters ofD. Hume (Oxford, 1932), II, 433. 181. Letter to Tanucci, 8 November 1762, op. cit., pp. 56-57. 182. Dialogues, VI, 218 (see below, n. 184). On the advantages and disadvantages of the acquisition of remote colonies, which "properly speaking is not increasing oneself but dismembering oneself," see European Reactions to de Pauw 127 "Within a century," he wrote in 1771, "England will break off from Europe . . . she will join herself to America, of which she will possess the greater part, and control the commerce of the rest."s83 When rela- tions between the colonies and the mother country began to deteriorate rapidly and England found herself with the growing difficulties that he had foreseen as early as 1764,184 Galiani was filled with new optimism and fixed his hopeful gaze on the rebel colonies. He felt no deep attachment for the "American Quakers" (he calls them "the dregs"),'85 but he was uneasy over the glaring and outrageous vices eating away at the roots of ibid., pp. 221-23. Hume, in his History of England (Appendix to the Reign of James I) had mentioned the fears of many Englishmen at the time of the establishment of the earliest colonies in America, that "after draining their mother country of inhabitants, they [the colonies] would soon shake off their yoke and erect an independent government in America," but only to reject these fears from the lesson of ex- perience (quoted in Sumner, op. cit., pp. 129-30). The contrast between the lively and prosperous colo- nies of the ancients and the "passive" establishments in America is underlined by A. von Humboldt, Reise, I, 281-83. John Adams, on the other hand, the future second president of the United States, had based himself (1775) on the demographic progress of the colonies in looking forward to the time a cen- tury hence when the United States would have more inhabitants "than England itself," and "the great seat of empire" would pass from England to America (Sumner, op. cit., p. 52); and he was followed by a number of other observers who judged America's independence to be ripe or proximate: Benjamin Franklin, 1760; Dean Josiah Tucker, 1766 and 1776; minister Choiseul, 1767; John Cartwright, 1774; Adam Smith, 1776; Richard Price, 1776: see Sumner, op. cit., pp. 69-70, 84, 91, 108-09, 111-12; M. Curti, The Roots ofAmerican Loyalty (New York, 1946), p. 6; and Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, IV, 7, iii (Modern Library ed., p. 590), who also uses the expression "the seat of empire," which Gibbon had frequently adopted, and which was then current and remained popular in the United States; for an example from 1808, see H. Bernstein, Origins of Inter-American Interest, 1700-1812 (Philadelphia, 1945), p. 86, and another from 1841, Curti, op. cit., p. 42. Contra, the Englishman Andrew Burnaby, who in his polemic with the Americans judged (1775) as "singular and chimerical" the idea that the seat of dominating nations might migrate toward the West (Bernard Fabian, Alexis de Tocquevilles Amerika- bild [Heidelberg, 1957], p. 91). 183. Letter to Mme d'Epinay, 27 April 1771, in Correspondance, I, 338. In 1766 J. Tucker also dis- cussed the idea that the "seat of empire" should pass to America, and Great Britain be governed by viceroys sent by the Court of Philadelphia or New York: see Sumner, op. cit, p. 86. Even the anglophile and loyalist David Leonard (for whom see V. L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought [New York, 1930], I, 207-13), foresees (1774-75) the time when the king will cross the ocean, and North America and its parliament will govern the British Empire (see H. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism [New York, 1945], p. 282). 184. Letter to Tanucci, 13 August 1764, ed. cit., p. 129: "The English have committed a gross blunder in providing their American colonies with an exit. Within thirty years they will realize it." He is prob- ably referring to the permission to trade with the Antilles, conceded for fiscal purposes in 1764. Cf. similar prophecies by the Marquis d'Argenson (1694-1757), who foresaw the English colonies raising themselves up as independent republics, prospering, growing in population and civilization and within a short time controlling all America, and especially the gold mines (in other words the Spanish domin- ions): see Sumner, op. cit., p. 37; and by Turgot, who compares the colonies in general, and the Ameri- can ones in particular, to fruits which, once ripened, fall from the tree (Discours sur les progres suc- cessifs de l'esprit humain, 1750, in appx. to E. Lerminier, De l'influence de la philosophie du XVIII' siecle, etc. [Paris, 1833], p. 454; cf. ibid., p. 218, and for other comment from 1770 and 1778, Sumner, op. cit., pp. 42-43; B. Fay, L'esprit revolutionnaire en France et aux Etats-Unis a lafin du XVIIF siecle [Paris, 1925], pp. 32, 49-51). The fear that the North American colonies, once independent and united, would swallow the whole continent, was fairly widespread in Europe about 1780 (see Sumner, op. cit., pp. 59-60), and reechoes in the abbe Gr6goire, De la litterature des negres, 1808, p. 283, quoted in Sumner, op. cit., p. 154. 185. Letter to Tanucci, of March or April 1769, ed. cit., p. 219. The Quakers were never much liked by the Italians: for Mazzei, see below, p. 272; for Genovesi, Castiglioni, etc., see D. Visconti, Le origini degli Stati Uniti d'America e I'ltalia (Padua, 1940), pp. 46-48 and the unpublished thesis of A. Violo, Relazioni tra I'ltalia e gli Stati Uniti durante il Settecento (Rome, 1950-51), pp. 67-70. 128 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD France and all Europe186 and rejoiced to see the American colonies rising up and conquering. Almost on the eve of their Declaration of Independ- ence he pronounced his solemn judgment: "The time has come of the total collapse of Europe and the transmigration to America. Here every- thing is falling into decay-religion, laws, arts and sciences; and every- thing will be rebuilt anew in America."'"17 History's greatest revolution will be the one that decides whether America will dominate Europe or vice versa: "I would bet in favor of America, for the quite material rea- son that genius moves in the contrary fashion to our diurnal motion and has been going from East to West for the last five thousand years, with- out exception."'188 The future belongs to the New World. Montaigne, at the end of the sixteenth century, had said something similar. But it hardly needs to be pointed out that the implications behind Montaigne's predictions are quite different. Montaigne sees in America the freshness of Nature, the "infancy" of the savage contrasting with the so-called wisdom of Europe. Galiani, a city and society man par excel- lence, has no such sentimental feeling about the Noble Savage, the good indigen, or the primitive purity of Nature. Galiani is the antithesis of Rousseau in politics, pedagogy, economics, everything.189 When Bougain- ville had come back from the South Sea Islands and published his famous description of the idyllic state of nature there, in which even the teterrima belli causa was an instrument of peace, Galiani had written mockingly of "this Bougainville the Jew of the islands, selling old stuff for new, who says he has discovered Plato's republic in the south," and he suspected him of being one of Minister Choiseul's spies.190 Galiani's enthusiasm for America is in fact entirely on the civil and political plane; it is the enthusiasm of the disciple of Vico and Machiavelli for a young strong state in the midst of its sure and surging rise to future greatness. 186. Letter to Mme d'Epinay, 4 June 1774 (Correspondance, II, 317-18). 187. Letter to Mme d'Epinay, of 18 May 1776 (ibid., II, 443). A few years later Gibbon rejoiced in the thought that if Europe was submerged by an invasion of Tartars, it "would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions" (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XXXVIII, conclusion, ed. J. B. Bury [London, 1896-1900], IV, 166). And Antonio Genovesi saw the (American) colonies becoming the metropolises and the former metropolises becoming colonies (quoted by A. Annoni, L'Europa nel pensiero italiano del Settecento [Milan, 1959], pp. 113- 14). 188. Letter to Mme d'Epinay, 25 July 1778 (Correspondance, II, 553). 189. Cf. ibid., I, 342, 400-01; F. Nicolini, Intorno a F. Galiani (Turin, 1908), p. 30, and idem, G. B. Vico e F. Galiani, pp. 24-25. 190. Letter to Tanucci, of March or April 1769, Correspondance, pp. 218-19. (The Horatian expres- sion was also used by Hume, Essays, XIV, ed. cit., p. 129; and by Kant, Anthropologie, Akad.-Ausgabe, XV, 667). Note the usual spontaneous outburst of political cynicism. Later Galiani requested Bougain- ville's Voyage, "et d'autres voyages veridiques," and read it with interest (letter of 1771, in Corres- pondance, I, 406, 412, 473-74). See also his savage criticism of Voltaire's Alzire (ibid., II, 31-32, 170-71). European Reactions to de Pauw XII. THE GLORIOUS FUTURE OF THE WEST America is Europe's heir. Buffon and de Pauw had never in their wildest moments contributed to this notion or prophecy, nor had those who first set out to refute them. But such announcements and predictions of a new civilization that would flourish beyond the ocean represent an element that simply cannot be ignored in the whole history of the polemic. It is often this very notion which gives that impassioned tone to the apolo- gists' pleadings or which works its way surreptitiously into the defenses of America's nature. Elsewhere, as with Galiani, it serves to straighten out some de Pauwian inaccuracy (the "roughcast" continent replaces the "rotted" continent), or, finally, asserts its absolute authority to cor- rect the excesses of the polemic. Even abb6 Raynal, who had such a low opinion of the Americans, once allowed himself to be seduced by this glowing prophecy: "If any happy revolution comes to the world, it will be through America. Although it was once laid waste this new world will flourish in its time, and perhaps dominate the old; it will be the sanctuary for our peoples suffering under political oppression, or driven out by wars: the savage inhabitants will become civilized, and per- secuted foreigners will there find freedom."191 So even Raynal foresaw America ruling Asia and Europe, grasping the scepter of the world. But although the idea gained a new lease of life with the successful outcome of the American Revolution, its origins are considerably more ancient, going back in fact to the very conquest of the continent. Right from the first decades after Columbus's landing, the Christianiza- tion of the New World had been seen as "compensation" for the con- quests of Islam, and Europe's push toward the far West was understood as the consequence and continuation of the Muslims' thrust out of the East toward the West of Africa and Europe. It was Columbus himself, sailing westward in the hope of discovering in the Indies the means for the last crusade and the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre, who had given the first impulse to this almost symbolic idea, which hails the West Indies as the indemnity offered to Christianity for the injuries suffered at the hands of the nomads emerging from the deserts of Arabia. And Toynbee expresses the same idea in the terminology of today's sociological dialectic when he explains the Iberians' westward expansion as the result of the "Syriac pressure" exerted on the Peninsula by the Moors.'92 There was another idea clearly related to this, already implicit in Alex- ander VI's bull Inter coetera divinae and readily accepted by the Spanish 191. Histoire, VI, 174; my italics. See also above, chap. 3, n. 46. 192. A. J. Toynbee, op. cit., II, 204-06, 363; Max Mittler, Mission und Politik (Zurich, 1951), pp. 17-18. 129 Preface xiii in the history of ideas was transformed into a search for myself, myself as a European marooned in the Americas, anxious to reach a better under- standing and a more critical awareness of the ideal relationship between two worlds (hence the at times "autobiographical" tone and resulting regrettable unevennesses of style and form). The second name, all too obviously, is that of Dr. Jeremy Moyle, who has translated the book with loving care and untiring patience, rendering every expression and every nuance with admirable precision. A.G. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD people, by publicists, pamphleteers, and poets, according to which the Indies were the reward falling to Spain for her eight centuries of fighting the Moors. Here then the Indies are no longer an indemnity for defeat but a trophy of victory. The distinction and the link between the two ideas comes out clearly in the way Levene interprets the pontificial bull, as implying not so much a prize as an investiture, or an invitation to con- tinue overseas the struggle against the infidel, for which Spain was so well prepared by those very centuries of the Reconquest, and for which it thus offered the best assurance of Catholic purity and military valor.193 It was an obvious and very simple doctrine, but at the same time one so malleable that with a little subtlety the other nations of Europe could make it serve their own ends equally well. In 1545 Jacques Cartier pointed out that the holy faith had been born in Palestine, in the East; that from there it had passed into France; and that it was thus logical that from France it should be further propagated westward beyond the seas. Spain, he continued, had already carried the gospel to Central and South America. What was Francis I waiting for to bring the true religion to the savages of the north? And the king, who had already asked acidly if he could see Adam's will to find out whether Spain and Portugal were really the sole heirs of his estate in the Indies (1541), His Most Christian Majesty, convinced by this mixture of apostolic and political considera- tions, furnished him with men and money.'94 Now with all these suggestions of a westward migration of Christian civilization and the awesome political and commercial expansion of Spain in the Western Hemisphere, the ground was prepared for a whole- sale translation into geographical terms (a movement from East to West) of some of the world's oldest historiographical theories. These were the theories, found in the books of Daniel and Polybius and the poetry of Hesiod and Ovid, that had ordered human history according to the schemes of the four monarchies or six ages of the world, and which had provided a full and final explanation for the greatness and decadence and cyclical succession of Empires. Trogus Pompeus, who "combines the notion of translatio imperii with that of Theopompeian universal history and thus lays the foundations for the Christians' universal history . . . maintains that civilization is shifting Westward."'1 A dazzling future was already being foretold for these new territories 193. R. Levene, Introduccion a la historia del derecho indiano (Buenos Aires, 1924), p. 56. An even more hyperbolical and generous concatenation appears in the words of Mazzini, who sees Italy offering Europe a New World just as Europe was about to tear her to pieces and sink her (quoted in F. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896, I, Le premesse [Bari, 1951], p. 196, n. 5). 194. Kennedy, op. cit., pp. 15-16. 195. A. Momigliano, in Rivista storica italiana, 79, no. 1 (1967), p. 215. Other references to the fruit- ful antithesis of East and West in the classical world: Curcio, op. cit., I, 70-72, 75-76. 130 European Reactions to de Pauw 131 acquired for the Faith. Now in the fullness of time the hidden meaning of the words of the prophets, seers, and those absorbed historians of hu- man affairs was becoming clear. Finally one could understand the rhythm they assigned to history, a rhythm of steadily increasing strength from kingdom to kingdom and age to age, culminating in the setting of a seal of inescapable glory on the extreme west. St. Jerome'96 and St. Augustine'97 gave new strength and depth to these age-old geogonies and crude chronographies, and following their appearance in the universal histories of the two Spaniards, Paulus Orosius and Isidore of Seville, they became accepted and widely known notions throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages. Orosius's Moesta Mundi depicted the succession of the four monarchies, and the Chronicon of Isidore outlined the allegory of six epochs corresponding to the six days of the creation. Their fame was long lasting, and still in Dante's Paradise they figure in the garland of the twelve great theologians - "the bold spirit of Isidore" and Paulus Orosius, "the advocate of Christian times," in the incandescent ecstasy of the "glorious wheel" of supreme wisdom.198 And following in the footsteps of Augustine and Orosius, Otto of Freising saw civilization and world monarchy marching from east to west.199 With the maturing of the Renaissance, the sacred texts and classics of the early Middle Ages lost their weight of authority, and the theories of 196. Who attempted to link Nebuchadnezzar's dream (in the Book of Daniel) with the Ptolemaic- Hellenistic conception of the four universal monarchies, thus guaranteeing the duration of the Roman Empire, identified with the "kingdom of iron," until the Day of Judgment-a thesis which of course nullified the importance of the advent of Christ, but which later proved useful to the supporters of the notion of the continuity of the Roman Empire in the German nation and found defenders even in the eighteenth century (H. Spangenberg, "Die Perioden der Weltgeschichte," Historische Zeitschrift, 127 [1923], pp. 7-8; M. Bloch, Apologie pour I'histoire, ou Metier d'historien [Paris, 1949], p. 90). On the probable Persian origin of the myth, see the lecture of Harald Fuchs, "Antike Lehren von der Abfolge der Weltreiche und Weltaltern," summarized in Basler Nachrichten, 23 November 1948; but cf. also J. Gwyn Griffiths, "Archaeology and Hesiod's Five Ages," Journal of the History of Ideas, 17, no. 1 (1956), pp. 109-19. 197. St. Augustine in fact already connects them with the movement of history toward the West: "After the illustrious kingdoms of the East flourished for some considerable time, God willed that one [the Roman] should arise in the West, later in time, but more illustrious for the extent and greatness of its dominion" (De Civitate Dei, V, 13); "Two empires rose to greater heights than all the others, first that of the Assyrians, then that of the Romans, coordinated and distinguished one from the other, regard- ing both time and place. In fact, as the former arose first, so the other arose later; the former in the East, the latter in the West; and the end of the former coincided with the immediate beginning of the latter" (ibid., XVIII, 2). 198. Paradiso, X, 119, 130-34, 145. Cf. G. Falco, La polemica sul Medio Evo (Turin, 1933), pp. 4, 35 and passim; Piero Treves, II mito di Alessandro e la Roma di Augusto (Milan-Naples, 1953), p. 126, with important references. 199. Sverker Arnoldsson, La leyenda negra, estudios sobre sus origenes (Gothenburg, 1960), pp. 46, 168, with reference to the theories of translatio imperii. For Orosius, with the fall of Babylon into the hands of Cyrus and the expulsion of the Tarquinians "then the Empire of the East fell and the Empire of the West arose," see J. Fischer, Oriens-Occidens-Europa, Begrif und Gedanke "Europa" in der spilten Antike und im friihen Mittelalter (Wiesbaden, 1957), p. 26. On the analogy between the theory of the four empires and the ancient theory of the four ages of the world (Gold, Silver, Copper, and Iron) see Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 154-55. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD the four monarchies and the ages of gold and silver crumbled under the onslaught of Bodin's arguments.200 The proud conscience of the age of progress rejected these apologues of decadence, Nature rose up to chal- lenge the Scriptures, and even the history of mankind patterned itself on the greatest phenomenon of the physical world, the succession of dawn and nightfall. Empires and their destinies took their course from the curving path of the sun. The peak of their power coincided with the mobile zenith of the great star. This inspired notion was reinforced and enriched in its turn by an im- pressive array of fact, myth, and mental association. The Orient had always been connected or almost identified with the most remote an- tiquity. The Levant has an almost sacred quality in the visions of Isaiah (27:8; 41:2) and Ezekiel (43:1-4). The Redeemer himself announces to his disciples: "For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:27). Ex Oriente lux.201 And all of ancient civilization fol- lowed in fact in its general course an east-west trajectory, a trajectory which for the Greeks was underlined by the distinctions they proudly observed between themselves and the "barbarians" to the East.202 When the Judeo-Christian tradition merged with the spiritual heritage of Greece the authority of the Bible confirmed that the east had been the source of Revelation and the laws for civilized existence, and of man himself and the Son of Man. For the European the east was represented by Eden and Mt. Sinai, Jerusalem and the land of Canaan. And when Rinaldo went off to the Crusades he was drawn on by "the trumpet heard in the East" (Gerusalemme liberata, 1, 59). Thus in Christian thought the antithesis between east and west slowly took on a new pro- phetic sense or symbolic value. Pope Nicholas I, in his efforts to assert the supremacy of the Roman pontiff over the Byzantine emperor, had recourse to the apostles Peter and Paul, who had come from the East to Italy, to Rome, so that "the west by their presence became the east."203 Toward the year 1000 the monk and chronicler Radulphus Glaber saw in the crucifixion a presage of the solemn destiny of the west; it was the west that unfolded before the eyes of the martyred Christ, while he turned 200. Methode, VII-followed by Hakewill, who mocks "that idle tale and vaine fancie forged by Poets, and taken up by some Historians, and believed by the vulgar of the foure ages of the world," but believes in the "passage of learning from East to West" (see G. Williamson, op. cit., pp. 132, 147). 201. Still further passages in Fischer, op. cit., pp. 60-61, with constant emphasis, however, on the thesis that the East is light, redemption, salvation, while the West is darkness, perdition, ruin, or at least passivity (ibid., p. 73). 202. See M. Rostovzeff, A History of the Ancient World, I, The Orient and Greece (Oxford, 1936), pp. 8, 333. 203. Fischer, op. cit., pp. 54-73. 132 European Reactions to de Pauw his back on the savage peoples of the east.204 It was a grandiose interpre- tation, its suggestiveness irresistible to those who recalled the division of the Roman Empire under Diocletian and the speculations over the translatio imperii "in the person of the great Charles from the Greeks ... to the Germans,'"205 and its echoes were heard again, centuries later, on the eve of the discovery of America, in the jubilation over the resurrec- tion in Italy and Europe of the civilization which had been extinguished in Byzantium. Everything thus combined to impress on men the vision of the path of history moving from east to west, and so to facilitate the inclusion of the recently discovered Americas in this historiographical system. As early as 1512 the notion is becoming fatally interwoven with the ancient topos of the naturae cursus, to give a seal of approval, of metaphysical legiti- macy, to the new lands discovered in the west.206 But its success was even more surely guaranteed on the plane of earthly politics, being so per- fectly suited to the needs of those who upheld the lawful rights of Spain - the extreme west of the Mediterranean world - who could claim that the indigenous monarchies in Mexico and Peru had already reached their maximum development, or even commenced their downward path, when the Spanish arrived to take up the succession.207 It gave emphasis and meaning to the boast of Charles V (or the hyperbole of his courtiers) that his was a kingdom on which the sun never set. And it was taken up again in the praises of the Italian writers who hailed Spain as Rome's 204. "So even then the West stood before His [Christ's] eyes, waiting to be filled with the light of faith" (Radulphus Glaber, Historiarum sui temporis libri V, bk. I, chap. V, in Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 142, p. 626b). Glaber, an industrious pursuer of occult links and meanings, also explains how the faith spread more in the north than in the south because the Lord's right hand stretched out to the north: and, after a few centuries, the Normans became Christians. But he adds that the faith is catholic and welcomes everyone: only divine wisdom knows why some men are more and some less ready for salva- tion. Tasso comes back to the same image, and in the four arms of the cross sees a sign of the four parts of the world: "L'Orto e I'Occaso, I'Aquilone e IAustro" (Mondo creato, II, 556-59; ed. cit., p. 48). 205. Decretal of Innocent III Venerabilem fratrem, 1202 (in Carl Mirbt, Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums and des romischen Katholizismus [Ttibingen, 1924], p. 175). On the translatio imperii, see Werner Goez, Translatio Imperii, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenken and der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in derfrtlhen Neuzeit (Tibingen, 1958), quoted in Arnoldsson, La leyenda negra, p. 168, n. 65, and for its influence on the "Gothic Renaissance" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Samuel Kliger, "The Gothic Revival and the German translatio," Modern Philology, 45, no. 2 (November 1947), pp. 73-103. On the parallel translatio studii from Athens and Rome to Alcuin's Paris, and on the movement of civilization from East to West, see Jacques Le Goff, "Au Moyen Age: Temps de l'Eglise et temps du marchand," Annales, 15, no. 3 (May-June 1960), pp. 423-24, quoting E. Gilson, P. Renucci, and M.-D. Chenu. 206. Hans Galinsky, "Naturae Cursus-Der Weg einer antiken kosmologischen Metapher von der Alten in die Neue Welt- Ein Beitrag zu einer historischen Metaphorik der Weltliteratur," in Arcadia (Berlin), 2 (1967), p. 47. 207. See for example Acosta, Historia natural y moral, VII, 28 (the last chapter of the work) with explicit reference to the prophecy of Daniel (2:31-35) concerning the downfall of Nebuchadnezzar's golden reign, and the arrival of Christ's law "when the Monarchy of Rome had reached its peak." See also Curcio, op. cit., 1, 262-81, 296-97, 438. 133 134 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD westward neighbor and her true heir and continuator;208 and who in the prophecy of the seer Andronica watched the Spaniards, the New Argo- nauts, sailing away westward: E del sole imitando il cammin tondo Ritrovar nuove terre e nuovo mondo.209 Thus already by the end of the sixteenth century it was a commonplace to represent the parabola of universal history as arching over the Atlantic, from the shores of Spain to those of America. Justus Lipsius, ever faithful to Polybius, differed from his contemporary Montaigne in considering the American Indians barbarians. But he still believed, this time with Mon- taigne, or better with Galiani, that America would succeed Europe as empress of the world: "I see arising from the West the sun of some new and unknown Empire." "I know not by what decree of Providence, things and forces go from East. . . to West."210 America as the spiritual and religious heir of Christianity was also a favored notion, almost a commonplace, among the post-Reformation Catholic apologists, who took up the theme of the Indies as compensa- tion for Islamic expansions, and rejoiced at the reparation found by the Roman faith in overseas territories for the losses suffered in northern Europe. Already in 1533 when the licentiate Spinoza was informing Charles V of the great tidings from Peru and of all her riches, he en- couraged him to make use of this gift of Providence "so that with greater vigor and means he might prosecute the holy enterprise and war against the Turk and Lutheran and other enemies of the Faith."211 And a few years later, in 1546, in a formal address to the Council of Trent, the Do- minican Marco Lauri was exhorting the council fathers to tend the wounds of the church: "You see it lifted up and enlarged in the Indies, our antipodes; do not permit it to be ruined in Europe."212 The Dominican 208. Suffice it to mention the opening lines of Campanella's Monarchia di Spagna (written 1600-01; Ist ed., 1620) "Proceeding on its way from East to West, the universal Monarchy ... came in time into the hands of the Spanish" (D'Ancona, ed. [Turin, 1854], II, 85). Charles V, king of Spain, did in fact obtain the crown of the Holy Roman Empire (1519). But as early as 1509 Antonio de Nebrija gave his opinion that the "monarchy" in its march toward the West had arrived in Spain (Amoldsson, La leyenda negra, p. 168). Bodin accuses the Germans of national arrogance in boasting of themselves as heirs of the Roman Empire; the king of Spain possesses considerably vaster and more populous dominions, including the Americas, which are three times the size of Europe; not to mention the Sultan of the Turks, the Prince of Ethiopia, or the Emperor of the Tartars, lord of innumerable and indomitable nations. Proud Germany, in comparison, looks like a fly beside an elephant! (Mithode, pp. 288-89). 209. L. Ariosto, Orlando furioso, XV, 22. 210. De Constantia, I, 16 (Antwerp ed., 1605, pp. 27-28); Admiranda sive de magnitudine Romana, I, 3 (Antwerp, 1605, p. 22). See also G. Williamson, op. cit., p. 133-34, and my study on "Diego de Le6n Pinelo contra Justo Lipsio," in Finix, Lima, nos. 2-3 (1945-46), and in extract, I, 18-20. 211. Document of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, quoted by G. Galasso, "L'opera del Brandi e al- cuni studi recenti su Carlo V," Rivista Storica Italiana, 74, no. 1 (March 1962), p. 114. 212. Fr. Mateos, S.J., "Ecos de Am6rica en Trento," Revista de Indias (Madrid), 22 (1945), p. 571. See also above, p. 77. European Reactions to de Pauw visionary Francisco de la Cruz, who was burned by the Inquisition of Lima in 1578, had envisaged a new church rising in America to replace the one brought to ruin in Europe by Luther and the Turks.213 At the end of the sixteenth century Father Geronimo de Mendieta hails the con- quest as having been willed by God, so that "the Catholic Church might be restored and recompensed, by the conversion of many souls, for the loss and great damage brought about by the accursed Luther in the same season and time in old Christendom."214 And finally the illustrious col- lege De Propaganda Fide had been founded in Rome in 1622 to make good the losses suffered by the true faith in Europe with the spiritual conquest of other continents.215 Again toward the end of the seventeenth century Gabriel Fernandez de Villalobos, Marquis of Varinas, found it very significant that Cortes had been born in the same year as Luther-clear proof that the Lord intended to make up in the New World for what he was about to lose in the Old.216 A little later Father Feijoo repeated: "The Gospel gained much more land in this hemisphere than it lost in Europe - heaven gained more land in this continent than it lost in the other."217 And Father Lafitau echoed his sentiments in 1733 as he wondered at the migrations of the true faith, which even as it languished and fell prey to heresy in Europe found a providential home in faraway lands, both barbarous and civilized, which fell adoring at its feet.218 It is true that as the Spanish monarchy declines these smug simplistic platitudes tend to fade into the background too; just as the sycophantic 213. See Marcel Bataillon, Etudes sur Bartolome de Las Casas (Paris, 1965), pp. 264-67, 309-24, esp. 314-15, and L. Hanke, Aristotle and the Indians, pp. 20-21. 214. Historia eclesiistica indiana, 1596, cited by Sverker Arnoldsson, La conquista espahola de America .. .(Madrid, 1960), p. 17. 215. G. de Santillana, op. cit., p. 311. 216. Mano de relox (1687), IX, in Colecci6n de documentos ineditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organizacion de las antiguas posesiones de Ultramar, 2d ser., vol. XII (Madrid, 1899), p. 359, cited by de Madariaga, op. cit., p. 656. 217. Glorias de Espafia, sec. XXIV, 1730, in Obras escogidas, by D. V. de la Fuente (Madrid, 1863), p. 209a; cf. E. O'Gorman, "Estudio preliminar" to his edition of Acosta (Mexico, 1940), p. xlvii, n. 51. The phrase is repeated almost word for word by Macaulay in his essay on Ranke (1840): Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome (London, 1902), p. 548. On the other hand with the rapid Christianization of the Americas, "Europe ceased to be the only Christian continent and thus lost one of its typical and ex- clusive characteristics" and "the term 'Christians' no longer defined merely the peoples of Europe" (C. Morandi, L'unita politica, pp. 16, 40). The ending of this European privilege (despite the later Nov- alisian identification) did however pave the way for the thesis of the westward movement of the higher values of history. 218. Histoire des ddcouvertes et conquetes des Portugais dans le Nouveau-Monde (Paris, 1733), quoted by Zavala, A merica, pp. 235-50, esp. 248. In the nineteenth century the theme was again taken up and developed by Fr. Joachim Ventura, who in his panegyric of the blessed Martin de Porres of Peru (read in Rome, 5 November 1836) referred to the evangelization of the Americas as the compensation bestowed by Providence to neutralize the damage of the Protestant heresy (La Raison philosophique et la Raison catholique, Conferences [Paris, 1864], IV, 445-534, esp. 451-52: Fr. Ventura quotes Las Casas and de Maistre and argues with the "Protestant" Robertson); while Giuseppe Ferrari, on the other hand, saw in Luther's protest an advantage for Germany "to oppose the world discovered by Christopher Columbus" (La disfatta della Francia, ed. Ugo Guanda [Modena, 1943], pp. 49-50). 135 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD prophecies addressed to the sovereign rulers of the West Indies had eventually spent themselves. But it is significant that the consolations and prophecies begin again in favor of new beneficiaries when other powers are established in America, importing their own religion to rival the Catholic, and their own laws and commerce. Of course there is no more talk about rewards and indemnities for the Lutheran heresy. But in 1589 the Protestant Edward Haie, captaining the flagship on Sir Hum- phrey Gilbert's last expedition, sees as certain "in this last age of the world" the evangelization of the Terranova (i.e., of all America, the "new land" par excellence) since God's word and religion "from the beginning hath moved from the East, toward, and at last unto the West, where it is like to end."''219 And the Puritans of New England, millenarists to a man, console themselves and rejoice in the belief that God, in this extremity of time, has decided to carry his gospel to the west-the gospel, "this great light of the World," which like the sun was born in the East and lit the east with its rays, and which today instead, as the world draws to the end of its day, comes to shine resplendent before nightfall on the last western shores.220 Abraham Cowley, who had once considered emigrating to the colonies of the New World, announced from his retreat in Kent that although America had been ravaged by the Spaniards it still had its "lib- erty" and its natural products, which left it richer than the Spaniard with all his ill-gotten gains; and he saw the time approaching when Europe, "the world's most noble part," corrupted by American gold, would fall into anarchy and ruin, while the new nations of America, strong and virtuous like Republican Rome, would rise to the peak of their power: Meanwhile your rising glory you shall view, Wit, learning, virtue, discipline of war, Shall for protection to your world repair, And fix a long illustrious empire there.221 At about the same time (1692) Burnet, who did not however mention America, saw the course of history in terms of the nations taking turns to dominate, each for an instant imposing its will on the whole universe, 219. Galinsky, op. cit., II, 49-51, with precise references to the historiographical thesis of translatio imperii and citing Augustine. Gilbert's tragic voyage was in 1583, but Haie's account was published in 1589, in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations. 220. New England's First Fruits, cited in D. J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953), p. 51, who comments: "Even the points of the compass took on a theological import." See also the curious examples collected by Blanke, op. cit., pp. 323-24. 221. History of Plants, V: pub. in Latin 1662-78, in English 1705, cited in Summer, op. cit., p. 13. Thomas Browne, on the other hand, in his pamphlet A Prophecy concerning the Future State of Several Nations (pub. 1684) holds a less moralistic and more practical economic opinion of America's gold; and imagines that the inhabitants of the New World, when they have reached a higher level of civilization and political organization, "will no longer suffer their treasure of gold and silver to be sent out to main- tain the luxury of Europe and other parts," but will use it for themselves, and will maybe even attack the Europeans and wage war and piracy against them (Sumner, op. cit., pp. 14-16). 136 European Reactions to de Pauw and then fading away again; and he added: "Learning, like the Sun, began to take its Course from the East, then turned Westward, where we have long rejoiced in its light. Who knows whether, leaving these Seats, it may not yet take a further Progress?" - or even perhaps spread equally over the whole globe?222 When the preacher John Edwards repeated Burnet's words some years later (1699),2"" the notion was no longer a possibility but a certainty, a certainty which became even more gloriously optimistic and emphatic when taken over by George Berkeley. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the future Bishop of Cloyne was suggesting that in America the Reformed Church could regain the territory lost in Europe: "In Europe, the Protestant Religion hath of late years considerably lost ground, and America seems the likeliest place, wherein to make up for what hath been lost in Europe."224 And when he came back from the overseas col- onies, although he had been disappointed in his apostolic projects he expressed in soaring verses his faith "on the prospect of planting Arts and Learning in America, ... not such as Europe breeds in her decay: such as she bred when fresh and young." With religion restored and the arts and sciences growing apace, what else could be hoped for or prom- ised? The prophecy of America's glorious future is crowned by the promise of political power: Westward the Course of Empire takes its way The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; Time's noblest offspring is the last.225 Berkeley's prophecy was to enjoy a most successful career. Its echoes are heard time and again in American literature of the eighteenth cen- tury226 and the English writers of the early nineteenth. Around 1760-63 a Roman improvvisatore was paraphrasing it in honor of Benjamin 222. I have not been able to locate in the Archaeologiae Philosophicae libri duo (Amsterdam, 1699), the passage quoted by E. L. Tuveson, op. cit., p. 166, in the English translation. Toward the end of the eighteenth century Lord Monboddo was of the opinion "that not only all arts and sciences have come from the East, but even the race of man," and with prophetic insight suggested that the very languages we speak come from the East, from Sanskrit (letter of 20 June 1789, to Sir William Jones, the man who revealed Sanskrit to the Europeans, in W. Knight, Lord Monboddo and Some of His Contemporaries [London, 1900], pp. 268-69). 223. Cf. Tuveson, op. cit., p. 139. 224. A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in Our Foreign Plantations ..., 1725, in A Miscellany ... by the Bishop of Cloyne (London, 1752), p. 203. Note how from Radulphus Glaber on- ward it is almost always the Faith that guides the destinies of the world toward the West. 225. The Querist, 1735, in A Miscellany, pp. 186-87. Cf. the acute comments of Galinsky, op. cit., II, 63-70; III, 139 ff. 226. See examples from ca. 1745, from 1760, 1763, 1771, 1773, 1774, 1775, 1782, 1784, in M. Kraus, The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth-Century Origins (Ithaca, N.Y., 1949), p. 73; Sumner, op. cit., pp. 25-27; Fr. Brie, "Die Anflinge des Amerikanismus," Historisches Jahrbuch, 59, nos. 3-4 (1939), p. 358; H. N. Smith, op. cit., pp. 3-12. 137 138 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD West,227 and an 1812 travel guide repeats as a locus communis the fact that "Empire has hitherto rolled westwards."228 In 1834 George Bancroft quoted Berkeley's auspicious words on the cover of the first of the ten volumes of his History of the United States,229 and fifty-six years later, at the ripe age of ninety, he was busy refurbishing the ancient theory as a means of exalting the American West, and somehow extracting from it a prophecy that civilization, by the destiny of history, would find its center on America's Pacific Coast, "the terminal of the great Aryan march," as superior to the Atlantic Coast as America was superior to Europe.230 In 1859 the march of empire to the west was allegorized, portrayed, and summed up in Berkeley's words at the head of the west stairway of the Capitol in Washington. And in 1866, in the Union's extreme west, at the Golden Gateway to the Pacific, the auspicious name of Berkeley was given to the city where there would one day rise the new and now world- famous university.231 We have already seen (above, p. 127) how as early as 1776 Adam Smith was predicting the passage of the "seat of empire" from England to the North American colonies. In the same year Taube in Germany considered it an accomplished fact: England is nothing without America; the colonies are the blood and sap of England's power.232 But eleven years earlier even, in 1765, Ebeling, while still a student at Gottingen, had expressed his opinion on the likelihood of America surpassing Europe in political power and allowed a strong possibility of a trans- atlantic migration of the arts and letters too;233 and Johannes von Mfiller many times gave voice to the same anxious prediction.234 In Italy one might mention the later and easier prophecies of the Neapolitan Filangieri (1780), the Genoese Ceronio (1780), and the Venetian ambassador in Paris, Dolfin (1783).235 In 1791 the very shrewd De Giuliani too warns that industry, the sciences, and the fine arts may emigrate from the more prosperous regions of Europe, but the choice of 227. Van Wyck Brooks, The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760-1915 (New York, 1958), p. 3. 228. J. C. Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy (1812; IV ed. London, 1817), I, 23. 229. Marcus Cunliffe, The Nation Takes Shape: 1789-1837 (Chicago, 1959), p. 195. 230. Quoted by Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York, 1963), p. 142. 231. Galinsky, op. cit., III, 140. In the Capitol the line is modified to become: "Westward the star of Empire takes its way." 232. Geschichte der englischen Handelschaft, Manufacturen, Kolonien und Schiffahrt (Leirzig, 1776), pp. 110-11, quoted by E. E. Doll, "American History as Interpreted by German Historians from 1770 to 1815," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia), n.s., vol. 38, pt. 5 (1948), p. 458. 233. Article in the Hannoverisches Magazin, cited by Doll, op. cit., pp. 437-38; cf. ibid., p. 449. 234. See passages quoted by H. S. King, Echoes of the American Revolution in German Literature (Berkeley, Calif., 1929), pp. 162-70. 235. See A. Pace, Benjamin Franklin and Italy (Philadelphia, 1958), pp. 113, 132, 155, 391. On the "heliodromic" ideas of Genovesi (1766) and Filangeri, cf. ibid., p. 125. European Reactions to de Pauw destination is left to them, whether they prefer to go to Russia, Austria, or the Kingdom of Naples, or "to cross the sea" to the New World, which will thus be "revenged of so many slaughters," and indemnified for the populations destroyed.236 When the new century was still young, Luigi Ornato wrote that "Italy had three great eras of glory, under the Romans it was the strongest country in the world. ... The genius of Rome is now gone to dwell in the lands of America."23 But we must get back to Berkeley. The philosopher, writing in prose, is hardly less emphatic than the prophet in verse. The prosperity and civilization of the English colonies show that a state can flourish even though it possess neither gold nor silver; while the political capacity of the natives is demonstrated by the ancient empires of Mexico and Peru, "in which there appeared a Reach of Politics, and a degree of Art and Politeness, which no European people were ever known to have arrived at without the use of Letters or of Iron, and which some perhaps have fallen short of with both these Advantages."238 The Western Hemisphere is better endowed for politics than ours, Bishop Berkeley seems to say, anticipating abbe Galiani. At the same time Vico was describing how the origins of civilized society could be traced back to the fierce bands of Polyphemes and Patacones, who had "vast bodies," "a very limited understanding, enormous fantasy, and violent passions"; ungainly creatures, maybe, but of "heroic" mind;239 in other words our old friends the Patagonians, those giant paladins of the greatness of the New World. The eighteenth century's enthusiasm for Nature gave new breadth and power to these suggestions of an ideal history of the nations, transforming them even- tually into romanticism's great theme of the primitive peoples with their spontaneous poetry and divine right to freedom. By the end of the cen- tury the radiant myth of young peoples crossed the ocean and set a seal of historical approval on the colonists' and Creoles' first tentative mo- 236. One more "compensation"! See Antonio de Giuliani, La cagione riposta delle decadenze e delle rivoluzioni (Bari, 1934), pp. 27, 101; cf. below, p. 173. 237. Letter of 2 May 1815 to Luigi Provana, in Leone Ottolenghi, Vita, studii e lettere inedite di Luigi Ornato (Turin, 1878), p. 201. 238. The Querist, nn. 251-53 (ed. cit., pp. 146-47) and n. 449 (ibid., p. 168), but the savages exist in squalid poverty: ibid., n. 358, p. 158; A Proposal, pp. 206-07. Cowley on the other hand had looked forward to America's having free and classical-type empires, not ones "like Montezuma's or Guanapaci's [Huayna Capac?] court" (loc. cit.). 239. Scienza nuova, ed. Nicolini, pp. 129, 181, 298, 643; in the final version Vico eliminated the reference to the necessary shrinking of the Patagonians when they became civilized: "They will come to our just statures and human customs" (ibid., p. 1031). On the reduction of man's stature, from the primi- tive giants to we pygmies ("we are dwarves compared with them," Sebastian Verro, 1581), see above, n. 14, and in general all the supporters of the idea of a decadence of the human race from the Edenic or primitive natural state: for example, Lord Monboddo, in an incomplete work on The Degeneracy of Man in a State of Society, has a long digression on his "favourite topic of the decreasing stature of man" (Knight, op. cit., p. 276). 139 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD tions toward independence. The prophecies of Berkeley and Galiani were lit up in the burning glow of revolution and romanticism. The heliodromic theory may have been naively simplistic, but with the support of so much historical evidence, and with its pliability enabling it to embrace even a world so new, it represented a considerable advance, from the inherited parable of the four monarchies to this world vision of universal history; and it is equally clear how superior this dynamic and historicizing (albeit in mythic form) vision is to the static and naturalistic notions of climate and racial character. It dissolves their fixity, frees them to move with the centuries, and at the same time knits together into one single thread the various distinct characteristics of the nations; and finally it allows the reerection of the triumphal arch of universal history on the model of the arc of light traced each day in the skies.240 One could also see in the idea of succession of empires from East to West a crude formulation of the need to bring together geography and history in a com- plete study of the life stories of the states, a need which has been recog- nized in our own day under the emphatic title of geopolitics. It is remarkable then that this radical change in the old historiographi- cal schemes, their actualization of the whole past, this unfolding of the centuries along the meridians and of empires along a terrestrial path, should have received so little attention from the scholars of the time. In this connection Fueter mentions only an obscure professor from Leyden, George Horn (1620-70), who "somewhat confusedly combined the partition according to the four empires with a geographical distribution of the material," but who was first to include the Americans in his his- toriographical scheme and among the first to define the Middle Ages as a distinct period in the history of the world.241 Thus, as often happens, a lesser mind sketched out the first crude formulations of historical schemes and concepts that had been long ages in ripening and which were to be of revolutionary significance. 240. With this quality it has of so effectively undermining the schemes of immobility, the heliodromic theory can be compared with the Buffonian transformism which broke down the systems preaching an invariability of the animal species. Toward the end of his life even Huntington, the most authoritative modern supporter of the climatic theory, seems to have been moving in the direction of an attempted synthesis between his deterministic theories and the heliodromic notions: "He had come to believe in a migration of climates which had carried westward the optimal conditions for the development of civili- zation and power from Egypt ... to the east of the United States." And he went on dauntlessly to con- clude therefrom that it had been easy for Germany to conquer Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in 1938- 41 "because these countries were situated to the southeast, or in a direction of more feeble climate" (Jean Gottmann, "Mer et terre-Esquisse de geographie politique," Annales, IV [1949], n. 1, pp. 20-21). 241. See E. Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (Munich-Berlin, 1936), p. 188, and Falco, op. cit., pp. 86-89, with the reservations of W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, 1948), p. 74. Some other examples are briefly mentioned by Blanke, op. cit., p. 316. 140 European Reactions to de Pauw Horn repeats the theory of the four successive universal monarchies, laboriously entwining it with the story of Noah's three sons each inherit- ing a continent: Ham, Africa and Arabia; Shem, Asia; and Japhet, the rest.242 But when he reaches the end of the ancient world he superim- poses on this hybrid historicogeographical construction a division ac- cording to parts of the world, joining onto the old hemisphere of the East the new Western Hemisphere and the even newer Austral territories.243 At this point however, since records of the past vicissitudes of the New World aborigines are lacking, he decides to fill the "vacuum of times and things" with a description of the customs of the Americans. The history of the world stops short; or rather the insipid chronicle of kingdoms, dynasties, and conquests gives way to a long chapter of highly colorful ethnography.244 The four monarchies still appear in allegorical form in the engraved frontispiece. But in the whole of the last part of the Arca Noae, Horn forgets the Bible and its interpreters and gives a minute and loving por- trayal of the nations and tribes of America, from the savagest to the most civilized.245 It is a fact, however, that up until the middle of the nineteenth century the world's history was still often summed up and explained with a broad arrow sweeping across the globe from right to left. The thesis of America's glowing future fell in very neatly with the theory which saw the rationality and unity of history in a movement and progress from east to west-indeed became almost a particular and par- ticularly eloquent example of that theory, which was to entice some of the very greatest minds of the period. Hegel states bluntly that world history moves from east to west."46 Humboldt refers on a number of occasions to a westward course of civilization.247 The historians of the English "liberal Anglican" school see progress as a movement toward the West.248 Byron, Shelley, and Mme de Stal contribute to the same 242. G. Horn, Arca Noae (Leida-Rotterdam, 1666), p. 35. 243. Ibid., p. 183. 244. Ibid., pp. 455-539, quoting G6mara, Acosta, Garcilaso, etc. On his ideas on the origins of the Americans, see D. C. Allen, The Legend of Noah, pp. 128-29, and various passages in the Arca Noae. 245. Jean Bodin too had criticized and mocked the scheme of the four monarchies (Methode, pp. 287- 93), and although he suggests a progressive movement of history from the peoples of the east to those of the Mediterranean and the north, his emphasis is always on the differences of climate, between warm and cold, in other words south and north, and not east and west. And furthermore, although according to him the south is all in all superior to the north (Methode, p. 108), it is the north that usually conquers the south (ibid., p. 76; cf. above, p. 38). In our own time (1943) J. Huizinga (Lo scempio del mondo [Milan-Rome. 1948], p. 17) is once again surprised to note that the antithesis between north and south (cold and warmth: the basis of the climatic theories) is considerably less striking than that between east and west (dualism of civilization). 246. Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. Lasson, I, 232-33; and cf. below, p. 433. 247. La Nouvelle-Espagne, I, 184; IV, 115. 248. D. Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 83-84. 141 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD historiographical myth.249 The Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier assures us that the march to the West is a "general law" of civilization, with the scepter passing on each time into hands more worthy to wield it;250 and Tocqueville refers quite clearly to the movement of Europe toward America and the Americans toward the Pacific.251 The German poet Augustus von Platen, of liberal and therefore anti- czarist tendencies, has his Columbus tell the exiled and departing Na- poleon: "Sail westward . . for westward flies world history."252 And the English poet Clough concludes his poem "Say not the struggle nought availeth" with the line "But Westward look the land is bright," a line quoted and immortalized in Winston Churchill's historic radio address to the English people on 27 April 1941. A similar image presented itself to Julius Froebel, who in 1849 saw Europe on the threshhold of twilight and darkness, "but in the West a new day dawns already."253 In the first half of the nineteenth century there were repeated prophe- cies from Germans, Tyrolese, and Danes on the coming supremacy of America,254 while Miss Martineau in England and Alexandre Dumas and others in France foresaw the shifting of the center of civilization to North America.255 In Italy, Aleardo Aleardi lifted his hymn of praise to man, the "immortal pilgrim," panting along beneath his burden of glory and grief: .. e par che il suo governi Sul viaggio del Sol. In Oriente Nato, adulto rist6 sulle latine E le celtiche terre; e forse accenna Vecchio, sull'ala di fumanti prue Di valicare un giorno il mansueto 249. For the first two, see below, pp. 346-52. For Mme de Stabl (1809, 1817), see G. Ticknor, Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1909), I, 133, and J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Starl (Indianapolis-New York, 1958), pp. 384, 470. 250. Lettres sur IlAmerique du Nord (Paris, 1836), I, iii; II, 401-05; and again thirty years later, Rapports du Jury International: Exposition Universelle de 1867 a Paris, I, dxiv-dxvi, quoted in Sum- ner, op. cit., in epigraph. 251. On the exploitation of this geographico-historical "law" on the part of the North Americans to justify first the occupation of the West, and then the annexation of even more remote "western" terri- tories, Hawaii, the Philippines (and today quite possibly the intervention in Vietnam), see Weinberg, op. cit., pp. 215-17, 260, 276. The wildest theoretician of this politico-solar myth was (1846) a misguided follower of Humboldt, William Gilpin (see Boorstin, The National Experience, pp. 232-33). 252. Colombos Geist, 1818, in Platens Werke, ed. G. W. Wolff and V. Schweizer (Leipzig-Vienna, n.d., but 1895), I, 13. Platen himself was thinking of emigrating to the United States at this time: ibid., I, xviii-xix. 253. Quoted by Curcio, op. cit., II, 711. 254. See the comments of H. Gollwitzer, Europabild und Europagedanke (Munich, 1951) on E. L. Posselt (1796), p. 81: on August Wilhelm Schlegel (1813), p. 191; on Gervinus (1853), p. 383; on Joseph Ennemoser (ca. 1850), pp. 356, 448, n. 19; and on C. F. von Schmidt-Phiseldeck (1820), pp. 242-44, who thereby earned the praise of the American Quarterly Review (1831) and the mockery of Mrs. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832; New York ed., 1949), pp. 324-25. On Schmidt-Phiseldeck, see also Fabian, op. cit., pp. 94-96. 255. See Rend Remond, Les Etats-Unis devant l'opinion fran(-aise, 1815-52 (Paris, 1962), p. 822, n. 129. 142 European Reactions to de Pauw Atlantico, e posar su le novelle Care al tramonto piagge americane.256 In this same period Gioberti is found attempting to restore but in fact managing only to destroy the ancient thesis with his assertion that "the geographical law governing human civilization . .. consists in the inter- woven dialectics of two mutually opposed forces, one of which is a current from east to west and the other a countercurrent from the latter to the former, like the ebb and flow and the contrasting currents which carry the sea back and forth. We are the east for America, which is our west," and thus "a future Europe, greener and more fruitful than that which is past," which one day perhaps "continuing the westward course of the sun of civilization" will cross "the Chinese rampart and the unwelcoming shores of Japan," to bring "Christianity and Gentility to that great Asiatic world." Then Asia "will become a second Europe through young America." This then is the "current," flowing constantly from east to west. But what of the "countercurrent"? Gioberti produces two examples: the first is "the countercurrent of European civilization toward the countries of the Levant," so that soon Asia "will have to give way to the uncon- trollable tide of two contrary currents from east and west"; the second, a much more interesting case for our purposes, "although less heeded, is the countercurrent of the New toward the Old World; so that one can truthfully say that just as America came out of Europe, so now modern Europe is growing closer to America." The most obvious aspect of this countercurrent is the flow of political ideas, which from America (i.e., the United States) spread to England, France, "and more or less to the other parts" of Europe, heading it irresistibly toward republican forms of government. Just as Franklin and Washington involuntarily promoted and "ratified" the Revolution of '89, so the '48 Revolution was helped along by the writings in praise of American democracy of two such conservatives as Botta and Tocqueville.257 Gioberti's attempts to dialectalize the heliodromic theory is interesting even though (or precisely because) it ends up, as we have already noted, by robbing it of all explicatory or organizational value, and in a certain sense both completes it and nullifies it. But the accent is always on the movement from east to west, on the "current" without which there could 256. ". .. and seems to govern his own steps in accordance with the path of the Sun. Born in the East, reaching adulthood in the Latin and Celtic lands, and in old age perhaps bidding fair to cross the meek Atlantic on the wings of smoking prows and alight on the new American shores beloved of the setting sun": Le prime storie, 1857, ed. Verona, 1858, p. 41. Could the "smoking prows" be steamships? But even for them the Atlantic could hardly be called "meek."... 257. V. Gioberti, Del rinnovamento civile d'ltalia (1815; Bari ed., 1911), II, 248-51; III, 80. On the ideological link between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, cf. also ibid., II, 254; III, 64. 143 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD be no "countercurrent," on the "challenge" that allows the "response." The east is still "the land of origins,"'258 the "cradle of every art both learned and pleasant.'"259And America is almost forgotten when Gioberti fixes his gaze on the relations (still those of "current" and "counter- current") between Europe and the east and pronounces that "in this mutual ebb and flow between two parts of our hemisphere [i.e., the Old World] there resides the progress of civilization from remotest times up to our own day."260 Gioberti's contemporary, Lasaulx, more simplistic in approach and perhaps for that reason more popular than the Italian, repeats that the tide of civilization moves from east to west, like the great tropical cur- rents and like the apparent parabola of the sun, heading for the New World, for America, so that Asia's fate will one day fall to Europe.261 And again in our own time, while an anthropologist is struck by hu- manity's "unconscious belief that the direction of the sun's movement is positive, and the opposite direction negative," and the westward path is the path of "accomplishment," 262 the Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso sees in the heliodromic thesis (1922) an unfailing promise of a new and glorious Latin American civilization,263 and a Latin American soci- ologist discovers (1947) in the timeworn theme the sole possibility of uni- fying world history.264 So the idea certainly bore fruit; but when the heliodromic theory was first formulated in the seventeenth century, and presented in political and utilitarian terms, its immediate barrenness led to its neglect in favor of other more grandiose and more traditional conceptions of the fate of 258. Ibid., III, 165. 259. Ibid., pp. 208-09. 260. Ibid. 261. Ernst von Lasaulx, Neuer Versuch einer alten auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegriindeten Philosophie der Geschichte (1856, rpt. Munich, 1952), pp. 109-10, 169. The mystically inclined La- saulx, as is well known, mixes Hegel and Schelling with Gotrres (but cf. below, chap. 7, n. 407). For him, besides the authors quoted in the 1952 reprint, see Humboldt's letter to Varnhagen von Ense (7 February 1857) and Varnhagen's strongly critical reply (9 February 1857); R. Flint, La philosophie de I'histoire en Allemagne (Paris, 1878), pp. 375-88; Gollwitzer, op. cit., pp. 361-68; and Stephen J. Ton- sor, "The Historical Morphology of Ernst von Lasaulx," Journal of the History of Ideas, 25, no. 3 (July- Sept. 1964), pp. 374-92, esp. 385, 390, with many bibliographical references. His considerable influ- ence on Burckhardt is well known (see Ernst Schulin, Die weltgeschichtliche Erfassung des Orients bei Hegel und Ranke [GOttingen, 1958], p. 298), although Burckhardt rejects him as an empty philosophizer (Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen [1868-71; ed. R. Marx, Leipzig: 1935], pp. 6-7, 330-32). 262. C. Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 102. 263. Juan Hernandez Luna, "Antonio Caso y el Porvenir de America Latina," Cuadernos Ameri- canos (Mexico), 6 (1947), no. 3, pp. 123-30. See above, p. 142, and below, pp. 524-25. 264. V. Domingo Bouilly, "El Camino de Occidente-Proposicidn de un criterio sobre historia uni- versal," Cuadernos Americanos, 6, no. 6 (1947), pp. 116-41. See also the editorial in the Times Literary Supplement of 28 November 1952, and the recent modification (in fact Giobertian trivilization) of the thesis at the hands of C. Northcote Parkinson, who sees in universal history "a cycle of alternating as- cendancy between East and West" producing "a piston drive of decay and expansion" (East and West [New York, 1963]). 144 European Reactions to de Pauw humanity. There is of course no trace of the westward course of empire in the theologian Bossuet. Up to the time of its transformation into the theory of the spirits of peoples, each in turn guiding the fate of humanity, this thesis of the solar course of history remained no more than an embryo -mere expedient oratory. XIII. MLLE PHLIPON AND HER SCHOOLFRIEND Not all of de Pauw's critics expressed their feelings in public, like Pernety and La Douceur. The comments of Mile Phlipon were private and almost confidential, or certainly much more so than Galiani's letter to Mme d'Epinay, but they are of considerable interest, because they show us how de Pauw could arouse readers who were not even particu- larly concerned with the problem of the Americas and who were totally unqualified in the fields of zoology and geophysics. Mlle Manon Phlipon was a young Parisienne, a gay and sensitive soul, pretty and pugnacious. She was to go down in history as Mme Roland, whose stormy political career culminated in heroically borne imprison- ment and eventual execution. But she was only twenty-two when in 1776 she read the Recherches sur les Ame'ricains, and as was her custom wrote to her schoolfriend Mile Henriette Cannet about it, giving a lengthy account of her impressions. These impressions were lively and at first mainly favorable. De Pauw is a "wise" man, cultured, industrious, erudite: "His reasoning seems sound, his conjectures likely,"265 though his love of system may have led him to rather farfetched conclusions. To Manon, for example, it is not totally obvious "that the Americans are as degenerate and brutalized as he claims." But she agrees with him entirely in doubting the existence of giants in Patagonia. And one fact is certain - that the discovery of America revealed a continent "more savage and less inhabited" than all the others; "an unhealthy land, covered with woods and swamps; with enormous reptiles and small quadrupeds"; and but few people, scattered and lacking culture, except the usual Mexicans and Peruvians: "That is what one sees, that is what is shown and what constitutes the phenomenon that demands an explanation." But what explanation? Here too Mlle Manon accepts de Pauw's (or rather Buffon's) reply: "This land had undergone, at some time later than our own con- tinent, a revolution caused by the waters." So what is it that the shy young thing cannot agree with? Why, with de Pauw's suggestions of a physiological explanation of the Americans' degeneration, with this impotence and insensibility that he attributes to the natives of the New World. Not that Mlle Phlipon is shocked. She 265. Other eulogies in the letter of 16 July 1776, Lettres de Madame Roland (ed. Perroud, Paris, 1913-15), I, 440 (passage missing in the Dauban edition). 145 146 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD has read much worse than this and would be more likely to blush at being suspected of a lack of unquenchable curiosity or at having her bold and reckless logic doubted. Now, she says, does not de Pauw write that the American women used on their consorts "certain drugs whose effect was to remedy their natural indolence"?266 Well then, Manon persists, this must mean that the women at least were not so frigid! But how can there possibly be such a difference between the sexes, if men and women live in the same climate? Mile Phlipon wrinkles her nose with learned disap- proval: "I find in this a contradiction which shocks me and makes me be- gin to doubt." De Pauw argued from the feebleness of the men, his gen- teel reader from the eroticism of the women. Arcades ambo, and tarred with the same brush. But the Prussian philosophe can quote an impressive array of support- ing authorities. Where will Manon find hers? Who will be her witnesses when she presents the case against her adversary? By a stroke of good luck-"imagine what joy"-a certain M. de Sainte-Lette was in Paris just then, who was a retired colonial administrator just returned from Pondicherry, but who had previously spent fourteen years in Louisiana and who furthermore was the good friend and mentor of de Pauw's as- piring critic. An atheist and humanitarian, a lover of reform and good literature, Sainte-Lette had acquired great influence over the young Mlle Phlipon.267 And he had had close acquaintance with the savages, had dealt with them, and had had them accompany him in his travels. He was just the person she needed to gag de Pauw. And indeed he told her how the savages in general were good-looking, tall and well built; they were not completely smooth skinned (less hirsute than the Europeans, true, but this was because they removed the hair from their skin out of clean- liness);268 they loved their wives and would not dream of offering them to travelers. The young girls, it is true, did what they wanted: the little 266. Rend Doumic (Etudes sur la littirature frangaise, II [Paris, 1913], p. 81) is struck by the im- modesty of these remarks and does not seem to recognize their origin in de Pauw. See below, chap. 5, n. 365. Baron Lahontan had already (1703) noted without any particular amazement that among the savages of North America "the men are as indifferent as the girls are passionate" (op. cit., pp. 115, 219, 223). But even before Mile Phlipon made use of it the contrast had served as polemical argument for the abbe Roubaud: "Why would the American female be as ardent as M. de P. paints her, if the male were as cold as he imagines?" (Histoire, XIII, 153). 267. At that time she definitely preferred him to M. Roland. On Sainte-Lette, see the Lettres ... de Madame Roland (Mademoiselle Phlipon) aux demoiselles Cannet, ed. C. A. Dauban (Paris, 1867), passim, and esp. I, 326-28, 346-48, 426-28, 431-33, 438, 442-43, or, better, the Perroud edition, I, 378-81, 383-85, etc. (see the index of names); Memoires de Mme Roland, ed. Cl. Perroud (Paris, 1905), II, 4, 226-28, 237-38; M. Clemenceau-Jacquemarie, Vie de Madame Roland (Paris, 1929), I, 42, 44, 52-54; Edith Bernardin, Les iddes religieuses de Madame Roland (Paris, 1933), pp. 41-42, 45-47, 61. 268. Here Mile Phlipon wonders if this habit could over a long period have left them smooth skinned; and she concludes that it could not, because Jews and Arabs circumcise themselves "with the greatest assiduity," and yet continue to be born with prepuces (the argument and the reply were already present in de Pauw, Recherches, I, 40; II, 13i-32). De Pauw's errors derive, she decides, "from having con- cluded from the particular to the general" (Dauban ed., I, 426; Perroud ed., I, 462). European Reactions to de Pauw female savages "enjoy the greatest liberty in the widest meaning of the term; they abandon themselves to whoever they please and this is called walking out" (somewhere beneath the outraged air one seems to detect a hint of envy, and it is quite clear that Sainte-Lette relishes being able to repeat these enormities to his young friend). But what was one to do? "The young men lead them off into the woods, and there they work things out together." Then "after a good walking out" they get married and be- come chaste and reserved. There is even a tribe, Manon repeats with an ambiguous shudder of horror, where adultery is punished by the law of talion, "which is to say that the woman is condemned to be married by all the men of the nation until death should ensue."269 And then in the north there are other savages with such a refined sense of honor that they even punish people who gossip or make fun of others; furthermore they are so intelligent that they can draw topographical maps in charcoal in per- fect scale !270 In the days that followed (August 1776) the conversations continued, sometimes lasting hours at a time. Manon never tired of interrogating the friendly old skeptic who knew the Americans so well- and who like Othello with Desdemona was no doubt delighted to find such an ardent and responsive listener. The cumulative result of his information was the piecemeal destruction of de Pauw's entire picture. Are the American men degenerate?. . . On the contrary, M. de Sainte-Lette saw them and could only conclude that they were "the finest shoots that Nature has produced." Even the native women are fresh and handsome "except that their hips are too wide." They have pale peach complexions, and skin so soft and fine that it betrays the slightest blush. In short even a blind man would fall in love with them, and, Manon insinuates ma- liciously, "I do believe that M. de Sainte-Lette, with his excellent eye- sight, found them very much to his liking." Only the animals are left. It is true that the quadrupeds are smaller and the reptiles and insects enormous. But it is not true that European animals degenerate in the climate of America. Some of them, like the pigs and oxen, actually improve. Nor do dogs lose their bark in America; sometimes the wind makes them a little hoarse, but not for long. And the vigorous bark of the dogs of Santo Domingo still echoes in M. de 269. Dauban ed., I, 427; Perroud ed., I, 462. On the redskins' famous prematrimonial promiscuity, resulting in frequent abortions, and their conjugal chastity, see also J. F. Smith (op. cit., I, 94-95), of whom Jefferson wrote that he "saw every thing thro' the medium of strong prejudice" (letter of 16 Au- gust 1786, in Papers, X, 262-63). See also the travelers' accounts in Blanke, op. cit., pp. 267-68, and Forster, Werke, 1, 207 ("an unmarried girl can favor many lovers ... but as soon as they marry .. ."). 270. Dauban ed., I, 423-28; Perroud ed., I, 460-63; map-making natives (1608) also occur in L. Wright, The Elizabethans' America, p. 185. On the soft and indolent life in the Antilles (slaves, idleness, ignorance, parties), see an earlier letter of 1773, Dauban ed., I, 129-30; Perroud ed., I, 141. 147 148 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Sainte Lette's ears. As for the plants, the subject does not even bear discussion. Louisiana is an earthly paradise.271 So much for de Pauw, it seemed. But some authorities are more easily defeated than forgotten. Reminders of the Recherches sur les Amedricains bob up again in a piece Mile Phlipon wrote that same year (1776) but which actually remained unpublished until 1933.272 And when a few months later, in October, the young lady read the Recherches sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois, her brain began to "boil like molten wax" and the summary she made of it for her friends was so lengthy and wordy - she herself was aware of having "a chatterbox of a pen"- that not even her long-suffering correspondents read it, and the publishers of her letters have thought it best to leave it out completely.273 But there was one unexpected result of her enthusiasm, in that the innocent Henriette in her turn immediately read the Recherches sur les Americains and forthwith confided to her friend that it left her grieved, saddened, and disheartened. Manon seems to feel somewhat responsible for her friend's confusion. She writes to remind Henriette of her reservations and objections. She denies that the savage is necessarily unhappy. But she makes the very fair comment that if she herself still clung to the religious principles to which Henriette paid homage (instead of being, as she was, a total un- believer) de Pauw's suggestion would have been a severe blow to her faith in the goodness of creation and the lofty destiny of man. One must grow "wise," and in so doing submit silently and serenely "to the ir- reversible laws of nature and necessity." But the kindhearted young lady realizes at once how little these high- flown sentiments will be likely to calm Henriette, and she goes on to protest that she has no intention of undermining anyone's faith, adding almost apologetically: "If I had directed your reading I would not have given you M. de Pauw nor anything like him." But now that the harm is done she is quick to offer the remedy. Bossuet, Fenelon? Not any more. Something else is needed: "Since you have reached this point, I invite you to read and meditate on the Discourse of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the origins of inequality among men," the famous discourse which exalts the virtues of the savages. It is an antidote that cannot fail: "It is full of sinew and sap."274 271. Dauban ed., I, 431-33; Perroud ed., I, 381, 440, 456, 460-63. According to Bernardin, op. cit., pp. 73-83, the reading of de Pauw and other describers of exotic customs (Raynal, etc.) acted as a deci- sive anti-Christian influence on the moral and religious ideas of Mile Phlipon. 272. Bernardin, op. cit., pp. 169, 171-72. 273. Dauban ed., I, 456, 463, 466; Perroud ed., I, xiv, n. 3, 515n., 522-23, 525 (and cf. Perroud, in a note to his edition of the Memoires, II, 195). On the "chatterbox of a pen," see Dauban ed., I, 87; Per- roud ed., I, 107. 274. Dauban ed., II, 163-64 ("de feu et de nerf"); Perroud ed., I, 473-74; cf. H. Buffenoir, Le prestige de J. -J. Rousseau (Paris, 1909), pp. 128-29. European Reactions to de Pauw This episode makes it clear that Manon did not find it easy to get de Pauw out of her mind. She read him again in 1781,275 and this reading too must have left a deep impression on her, since there are references to it even in the Memoires she wrote in prison.276 But the most convincing proof of de Pauw's influence on her came a few months later, in January 1777. At that time she was preparing a paper, for the Academy of Besancon, on "How the education of women could contribute to making men better," and in it she included a sentence which was a straight- forward summary of de Pauw. One of the most surprising spectacles of the New World, she says, has been "the misfortune and vices resulting from the brute and stupid indifference of the human race toward those [i.e., the women] who should sweeten it." There were savages who were "more degenerate than the others, . . incapable of virtue because they could not be reached by the sentiment which makes it blossom,"2" and these savages were fierce, cruel, and lazy. In her letters she had denied the frigidity of the savage, and now in her paper she uses it to throw more favorable light on the educative mission of woman. Mme Roland was never too concerned with the internal coherence of her ideas; she was far too easily swayed by first impressions, too easily taken with some shocking paradox, some effective cliche or apparently penetrating objection. Thus she took no particular trouble to reconcile whatever she had borrowed from de Pauw with her unfailing enthusiasm for the North American revolutionaries. In this "new and active" America, she says, the seeds of the most stupendous revolutions are steadily ripening; man, climate, environment, and products offer a thousand "diverse and interesting" pictures.278 In 1777 she looked for- ward to the liberty of America "as a just revenge of Natural law, which has so frequently been violated in this unhappy continent so little suited to such ravages,"279 and again in 1788, when the United States was al- ready victorious and free, she wrote enviously: "Let us bless America."280 275. Letter of 15 November 1781 to Roland, cited by Perroud in his edition of the Memoires, II, 195n. 276. Where she writes that about 1776-77 she was reading the preachers, Bossuet, Fl6chier, Bourda- loue, Massillon: "There was nothing more amusing than seeing them lined up there on my little book- shelves with de Paw, Raynal, and the Systeme de la Nature" (Memoires, II, 195). Again in 1777 she looked forward with ambiguous de Pauwism to the triumph of the insurgents of America, "this unhappy continent so little made for being so" (letter of 4 October 1777, in Lettres, Perroud ed., II, 144). Cf. also Monglond, op. cit., II, 186-97. 277. I have made some small corrections in the obviously corrupt text given by Faug re in the appen- dix to his edition of the Memoires (Paris, 1864, II, 345) and by Dauban in the appendix to the Lettres (II, 463). A little further on Mile Phlipon derides the poets' Golden Age and the philosophers' "state of nature," which perhaps never existed (Faugere, II, 348; Dauban, II, 465)-but which she was using at precisely that time to try to console her friend Henriette. On this discourse see also Lettres, Dauban ed., II, 194, 301-02; Perroud ed., II, 13, 84, 97, 151, 183, 269. 278. 1 July 1777, in Lettres, Dauban ed., II, 126; Perroud ed., II, 92; cf. ibid., Dauban ed., II, 173- 75, 232-33; Perroud ed., II, 132-33, 184. 279. Letter of 4 October 1777: Dauban ed., II, 187; Perroud ed., II, 144: more echoes of de Pauw? 2"80. Letter to Bosc, 1 October 1788, in Lettres, Dauban ed., II, 571. 149 Prologue THERE are several places in Hegel's works where he describes the Americas as an immature or impotent continent, or one that is in some other way "inferior" to the Old World. In expounding these passages the exegetes, even someone like Croce, even Ortega y Gasset, have looked on them as a typical aberration of Hegel's mind, a bizarre relic of his determination to enclose the infinite variety of the world within his scheme of triads. But in fact the thesis was adopted, not invented, by Hegel. And in its brief life-span it has reflected so many tendencies that it is perhaps not altogether idle to inquire into its varying fortunes. The pages that follow attempt to give a first broad outline of such an inquiry. Their beginning with Buffon results not so much from a desire to plunge the reader in medias res as from the fact that in his writings certain ob- servations and judgments and prejudices that up until then had been expressed as curious revelations of distant lands in the descriptions of the early travelers and naturalists in the New World, or as polemic para- doxes and fables in the reports of the missionaries, in the utopias and myths of the noble or evil savage, for the first time assume coherent and scientific form; and particularly because only from Buffon onward does the thesis of the inferiority of the Americas have an uninterrupted history, a precise trajectory passing through de Pauw, touching its vertex with Hegel' and then proceeding on a long decline into the mutual recrimi- nations and childish boasts, the brusque condemnations and confused panegyrics so common still in our own times. The ancient chroniclers of American nature, and in particular the greatest of them, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (1526, 1535), had al- ready commented carefully and perspicaciously on the many physical peculiarities of the New World and the many differences between the animals of America and those of Europe. But even when they noted certain relatively weak aspects, certain specific deficiencies in the 1. Edmundo O'Gorman, "Trayectoria de America," in Fundamentos de la historia de Am rica (Mexico, 1942), pp. 85-134, indicated in Buffon and de Pauw the sources of the Hegelian thesis, but without going into detail, and in fact indulging rather in apologetic considerations. N?Iv THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORI D And finally in 1790 she mentioned with a sigh that she and her husband would already have left for America a while back if he had not been so old; but at least they had less reason to grieve over the "promised land" now that they could hope for a real homeland in France.281 So de Pauw's acid has lost its bite. The "unhealthy land" has turned into a "promised land." The stately figure of George Washington over- shadows the unmanned and cowardly savage. A radiant and star-spangled republic rises upon the infested marshlands. XIV. VOLTAIRE, FREDERICK OF PRUSSIA, AND DE PAUW'S SECOND RECHERCHES Voltaire's reaction to de Pauw was rather more superficial and per- sonal, and therefore of somewhat less import than the replies of Machia- velli's drily witty disciple or the tender and irrepressible Mlle Phlipon. At first Voltaire greeted de Pauw enthusiastically as a "true scholar," who thought with his head and was not too easily seduced by the moderns (for moderns read Rousseau) and who could hold his own against the missionaries and their followers like Pernety.282 But when de Pauw began to criticize the Chinese he soon lost the sympathy of the unshakably sinophile patriarch. The Recherches philosophiques sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois came out five years after the publication of the Recherches sur les Amdricains. The work is in two volumes, and its point of departure is the refutation of the thesis expounded by de Guignes283 suggesting that the Chinese were a "colony" of the ancient Egyptians; however from there it goes on to show that there is no trace whatever of Egyptian influence on the arts, customs, religions, or institutions of China, that in fact one can find abso- 281. Letter to Brissot (early months of 1790) in C. A. de Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes (Paris, 1882), p. 170. Thomas Paine's influence on Mme Roland's ideas is well known. For an analysis of the numerous North American inspirations of the principal Girondists, see Lucy M. Gidney, L'influence des Etats-Unis d'Amerique sur Brissot, Condorcet et Mme Roland (Paris, 1930: emphasis on Brissot). Three days before her execution Mme Roland was still thinking of going to America (see Memoires, Faugbre ed., II, 44). 282. Fragment sur l'histoire gindrale (1773), art. II, De la Chine (in Oeuvres, Beuchot ed., XXIX, 228-30). De Pauw is cited approvingly again a little further on, XXIX, 234. 283. Joseph de Guignes, Memoire dans lequel on prouve que les Chinois sont une colonie Egyptienne (Paris, 1759-60). On the polemic it provoked, see Jurgis BaltruSaitis, La qute d'Isis (Paris, 1967), pp. 226-32. The thesis had been put forward first by Athanasius Kircher (1654), discussed and partially ac- cepted by Horn (Arca Noae, 1666, pp. 53-54), and taken up again about 1700, despite the recurrent confutations, by Thomas Burnet (cf. Tuveson, op. cit., p. 163; a passage I have not been able to find in the Latin edition of the A rchaeologiae) and then by the learned Daniel Huet (1716) and the academician Mairan (1759). It was discussed at length about 1760-70 (see the objections of Delisle de Sales, Phi- losophie de la Nature, I, 115-23n); accepted in substance by the abbe Roubaud (Histoire, I, 329-47); rejected as totally absurd by Forster (Werke, I, 595); fancifully elaborated by Giuseppe Ferrari, who found between Egypt and China a "correlation of contrasts" and a hostile "communication" through the medium of the wars with the peoples in between, the Arabs, Persians, and Tartars (!) (La Chine et I'Europe [Paris, 1867; 2d ed., 1868], see esp. pp. 195-203); and then periodically reexhumed at least up until 1905! (see H. Cordier, Histoire generale de la Chine [Paris, 1920], I, 11-25). 150 European Reactions to de Pauw 151 lutely no point of contact between the two civilizations. But in the course of this quite reasonable argument de Pauw never misses a chance to vent his sarcasm on both these peoples, and particularly the Chinese, so that in the end the work amounts to nothing less than the total demolition of the conventional image of the "virtuous mandarin," who in the political and literary conventions of the century was as cherished a figure as the "noble savage."284 The two works have much in common; they have the same stylistic tricks, they indulge in the same polemics against the missionaries and their overoptimistic reports, and they are further linked by the frequent references to the first in the second work. But what binds them most closely is the common attitude of scornful superiority toward exotic or primitive peoples and civilizations, and the pleasure de Pauw takes in stressing whatever will shock the honest and inexperienced reader. Thus it was inevitable that the Egyptians and Chinese too should be sucked into the polemic on the Americans, and that their defenders, all Euro- peans naturally (while the Americans soon found champions among the fellow citizens of Washington and the scholars of Spanish America), should avail themselves of arguments suited to the deeper demands of the new historiography. The thesis of de Guignes which de Pauw attacked so furiously is doubt- less critically untenable.285 But when one remembers that the ancient 284. "No writer has ever yet spoken so badly of them [the Chinese] as the author of the Recherches philosophiques sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois. He is M. Pauw, to whom we are already indebted for an excellent work on the Americans" (Grimm, Diderot, etc., Correspondance, Tourneux ed. [Paris, 1877- 82], X, 298). For the attacks on the sinophile Raynal, see Feugere, op. cit., XXII, 444. 285. Which no doubt earned de Pauw's second work, so much more learned and less amusing and scandalous than the first, a better acceptance among scholars: Jacobi devoted one of his earliest writings to it, a long review in three Hamann-like letters to the Deutsche Merkur (1773; see the Werke, ed. F. Roth [Leipzig, 1825], VI, 265-344). One can detect in the letters Jacobi's delight in seeing de Pauw demolish one of the idols of the A ufkldirung. Jacobi praises his talents (270-7 1) and style (281-82), notes his agreement with Winckelmann (313-14) and declares that he will abstain from criticisms because they would take too much space, because some of them would be prohibited by the peace-loving Merkur (343-44), and because de Guignes has already produced some and will yet produce more. He, for his part, although he holds the heretical opinion that discord is the salt of the earth, sticks to the favorable judgment expressed in the first letter, which however occasionally became a "prophetic satire" (344; this last letter at least seemed to Jacobi worthy of preservation: Werke, ed. cit., VI, v). Kant himself read and recommended the second Recherches to one of his correspondents (12 August 1777; Brief- iwechsel, Akad.-Ausgabe, X, 210). Later on Herder, for whom see below, chap. 5, n. 560, and C. F. Dupuis, in his lengthy Origine de tous les cultes (1796) quote it frequently; Goethe admires it (see below, pp. 369-70); the penetrating and erudite A. H. L. Heeren, Ideen ueber die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten VOilker der alten Welt, vol. V (GOttingen, 1826), pp. 139, 396, respectfully discusses two conjectures of this "recent writer" on the Egyptians. Even those such as Scherer who took up the task of refuting de Pauw and defending de Guignes describe him as an elegant writer, though insubstantial (Jean Benoit Scherer, Recherches historiques et geographiques sur le Nouveau-Monde [Paris, 1777], pp. xii and 218-65). And even on the obelisk that was erected to his memory at Xanten in 18 11 (see above, chap. 3, n. 1), de Pauw is described as "Author of the Researches on the Egyptians, the Chinese and the Greeks" and only last of all "the Americans." On the relatively meager success of the work with the public, as shown by the small number of reprintings, see G. Beyerhaus, op. cit., pp. 478-87. 152 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Greeks, beginning with Homer himself, had already been hailed as dis- ciples of the Egyptians,"86 it should not seem too surprising that the Chi- nese too, these more recent models of perfect wisdom, were considered to be descended at least spiritually from the Nilotic civilization. And in fact the basic motivation of the thesis-the desire to ensure the con- tinuity of world history and to maintain its Mediterranean center of gravity - was not really so unreasonable. By this system the Chinese took their place in the contemporary historical world of the Europeans. If one could succeed in establishing their descent from a civilization that meshed with the biblicoclassical system, then serious chronological difficulties could be avoided and the notion of the unity of the human race satisfied.287 The idea of "colonies" functioning as "graftings" of civilizations was a familiar one to the scholars and widely used in their attempted syn- theses. One has only to think of Vico's coastal and overseas "heroic colonies," which he saw as the origin of the "transmigration of peo- ples." And had not F6nelon already stated that the peoples of Asia and Egypt were the most ancient and civilized of all peoples? "We have here as it were the source of colonies," he had written, and although he arrived at the final conclusion that China was a colony of the Babylonians, he had still candidly confessed: "The Chinese seem to me to be quite similar to the Egyptians."288 Did de Pauw remember this? The opening and closing words of his book say precisely the opposite: "Never did two peoples have less in common than the Egyptians and the Chinese."289 It was about this same time, 1773-74, that Herder took over F6nelon's unitary approach in his campaign against the Aufklairung, going even so far as to repeat with an air of mystery its summarizing formula: "China is but Egypt's copy; just think about it and reach your own conclu- sions."290 But he never went on to seek out the ancient links of colony and 286. Cf. Tuveson, op. cit., pp. 211-12. "The Athenians were also an Egyptian colony" in the opinion (20 June 1789) of Lord Monboddo, who in his major work, The Origin and Progress of Language (1773-92) maintained that all European culture derived from Egypt (Knight, op. cit., pp. 34, 270). 287. See in fact how de Guignes, op. cit., pp. 78-79, offers his theory in defense of the Pentateuch. On Chinese chronology, used in the eighteenth century in support of Egyptian chronology, and incom- patible with the biblical version, cf. A. Momigliano, "La nuova storia romana di G. B. Vico," Rivista storica italiana, 77 (1965), no. 4, p. 780. 288. Dialogues des Morts, Confucius et Socrate, ed. Lutetia, pp. 170, 176-78. On the problems of colonies, see also above, n. 182, and Annoni, op. cit., pp. 80-94. 289. Recherches sur les Egyptiens, II, 320; cf. the opening: "never was there a more ill-founded supposition" than that of their contact (ibid., I, xiii). 290. Werke, ed. Suphan, V, 489 (quoted in A. Gerbi, La politica del Romanticismo [Bari, 1932], p. 127n.); see also below, p. 285. Hegel (Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. cit., I, 186, 203-04) later stresses the "Asiaticness" of Egypt, a great river valley like those of China and India, and different from every other part of Africa; but without the least reference to any transmission of civilization, in fact "history begins with the empire of China" (ibid., p. 275). For more recent Marxist-type parallels based on the "Oriental" features of modern Egypt and its social structure, see Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Histoire et ideologie: Karl Wittfogel et le concept de 'Mode de production asiatique'," Annales, 19, no. 3 (May-June 1964), pp. 531-49, esp. 547-48. European Reactions to de Pauw influence, preferring instead to follow where his religiosity and innermost organic sense of history led him and to come down decisively on the side of the Near East of the patriarchs at the expense of the far-distant China.291 The Egyptians were marginal to sacred history and thus worth little more than the Confucians. So de Pauw's objections fell on willing ears. Herder quotes the Recherches sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois292 with interest and approval, and again in the Ideen of 1784 he dwells on the comparison between China and Egypt, generally at the expense of the former;293 which does not however prevent him from criticizing and slandering the Egyptians too when in 1787 he reaches the third part of the work.294 Voltaire does not go quite so far. At first (1773) he had agreed with de Pauw's thesis, replying negatively to the question he had set himself of Whether the Egyptians peopled China.295 But on 5 September 1774, he was writing huffily to the Count d'Argental that it was ridiculous to ascribe the Lettres d'un thdologien "to a German called de Pauw, the author of certain rash conjectures on the Americans and the Chinese in an obscure and involved style."296 And the following year he girded himself for the task of disproving de Pauw's theses on the Chinese, the Indians and the Egyptians, although he was (predictably) still willing enough to accept de Pauw's firm denial of any dependence of the first of these on the latter. In a letter to Frederick II he informed him that "I shall shortly be so bold as to place at your feet certain somewhat scien- tific, somewhat ridiculous letters, which I took the liberty of writing to M. Pauw about his Chinese, Egyptians, and Indians." 297 But he feels no animosity toward the king of Prussia's protege and adds cautiously: "I do not know M. Pauw at all. My letters are from a little Benedictine [the Lettres Chinoises, Indiennes et Tartares a M. de Pauw are at- tributed by Voltaire to a Benedictine] quite different from M. Pernetti. I find M. Pauw a very capable man, full of wit and imagination; a little systematic, in truth, but someone capable of amusing and instructing one."298 The "little work of Saint Benedict," which Voltaire was hoping to complete in a month or two, actually came out early in 1776,299 but con- 291. Rouch6, op. cit., p. 43. 292. Werke, ed. Suphan, VI, xx, 368, 395, 525; XIV, 33; Ideen, XI, 5; trans. Tandel, II, 225. 293. See for example Ideen, XI, 1; XII, 5; ed. cit., II, 200-01, 283; cf. also Rouche, op. cit., pp. 276, 344-45, 432, 436-38. 294. Rouch6, op. cit., pp. 408-11, 549. 295. Fragment sur l'histoire gnderale, art. IV (Oeuvres complhtes, ed. Moland, XXIX, 234). 296. Oeuvres, ed. cit., XLIX, 74. The Lettres were by Condorcet, but Voltaire had let it be believed that he was the author (Beyerhaus, op. cit., p. 487). 297. Hamann too refers to these letters as being addressed "to Mr. Pow": Hierophantische Briefe, III, in Siimtliche Werke, ed. cit., III, 143. 298. Letter of 21 December 1775 in Oeuvres, ed. cit., XLIX, 458. 299. Ibid., XXIX, 451-98; cf. XLIX, 545, 559. 153 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD tains scarcely even a passing reference to de Pauw's writings on Amer- ica.3oo On 7 April 1776 Frederick wrote to inform Voltaire that he had read his "curious letters," adding: "Abb6 Pauw is quite proud of having the letters addressed to him." Indeed, the abbe believes he is basically in agreement with Voltaire, since he too admires the Chinese and would criticize only their barbarous custom of exposing their newborn children, their "inveterate roguery," and the atrocious tortures they practice. But de Pauw cannot altogether overcome his belief in European su- periority, and he goes on to say that there are worse abuses in China than in our own continent; and when a Mandarin arrives in Holland and turns out to be ignorant and stupid "abb6 Pauw rejoices at the news." But Frederick shrewdly points out to him that Voltaire is only using the Chinese like Tacitus did the Germans, as models or examples to rebuke the corruptions of Europe: "Make mandarins of your encyclopedists, and you will be well governed."301 These anecdotic minutiae show how limited was Voltaire's real in- terest in the problem of America, and how both de Pauw and Buffon only attracted him for their usefulness in the furtherance of strictly European polemics. XV. BUFFON'S NEW POSITION: AMERICA AS IMMATURE BUT THE AMERICAN STRONG AND HANDSOME Buffon's case is very different. Feeling himself unable to accept de Pauw's slanders on the American continent and, above all, the extrava- gant conclusions he drew therefrom, Buffon modified his original posi- tion, which, as we have already described, oscillated between nature as immature and nature as degenerate. When he saw de Pauw's scandal- loving extremism describing all America as degenerate, Buffon abandoned his own timid suggestions of degeneracy and in the Epoques de la na- ture (1777) repeated emphatically that America was a young world and in many ways immature: "Nature, far from being degenerate through old age there, is on the contrary recently born and has never existed there with the same force, the same active power as in the northern countries."302 The living species and above all the terrestrial animals 300. Ibid., XXIX, 460. 301. Letter of Frederick to Voltaire, in Voltaire, Oeuvres, ed. cit., XLIX, 577-78. "These supposed literati [the mandarins]," de Pauw had written (Recherches sur les Egyptiens, II, 166), "are persons of extreme ignorance." See also de Pauw's "Amerique," p. 344a. Cf. G. Chinard, L'Amerique et le r 'e exotique dans la litterature fran~aise au XVII' et au XVIII' siecle (Paris, 1913), p. 371. Other details of the controversy can be found in the articles of Beyerhaus, op. cit., pp. 478-90, and in Church, op. cit., pp. 181-82. 302. Oeuvres completes, V, 225. De Pauw had attacked Buffon on this point (see above, p. 53), and in the article "Amerique" had repeated (1776): "It is not possible . . . to admit a recent organization of matter in the hemisphere opposite to ours" (p. 347b). 154 European Reactions to de Pauw were established there much later than in the north "and perhaps the difference in time is more than four or five thousand years."303 The continent is still so young that the waters prevail yet in large areas, like Amazonia, Guiana, and Canada: "In casting one's eyes over the map of this country one sees that the waters have spread there on all sides, that there are a great number of lakes and very large rivers, which shows that these lands are new."304 The oldest parts are the mountainous areas, like Peru and Mexico; and in fact, Buffon adds, with a truly amaz- ing compression of geological epochs into historical periods, these are the only regions where men formed societies.3°5 But these same societies prove that the continent was only recently inhabited: because they were numerically small (America "was very sparsely and consequently very recently inhabited at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards");306 because there are very few monuments remaining "of the so-called greatness of these peoples" (an involuntary echo of de Pauw's contempt?); and be- cause the very traditions of these peoples confirm it: "The Peruvians counted only twelve kings, of which the first had begun to civilize them; thus it is a mere three hundred years or less since they ceased to be com- plete savages like the others."307 One might notice in passing that the exaggerations of Buffon's argu- ment- a completely uncivilized pre-Inca Peru - are in precise opposition to de Pauw's equally farfetched suggestion, that of Peru of the Incas being absolutely uncultured and primitive. The two impassioned adver- saries competed in their slanders of one or the other phase of Peru's past. This is not the only example of a country's reputation suffering through the impetuous rivalry of two zealous scholars. Peru has perhaps suffered more than any other country in the bitter and unceasing cam- paign of "defamation" by Spaniards against the indios, by libertadores against godos, by indigenists against Creoles, by everybody against everybody. Before the Incas, then, the Peruvians were "savages," like all the other Americans. ... Yes, savages, says Buffon, but neither weak nor degener- ate. When de Pauw tries to tell us that the Americans were weak and buckled under the slightest weight, is he really unaware that the Caribs, the Iroquois, the Hurons, the Floridians, the Mexicans, the Tlascaltecans, and the Peruvians, etc., were men of nerve and muscle and very coura- 303. Oeulires completes, V, 224. The smallness of this figure is a better proof than any refutation of the fragility of the basis of Buffon's theory. 304. Ibid., I, 285. 305. Ibid. Cf.: "Mexico and Peru can be regarded as the oldest lands of this continent, and the longest populated, since they are the highest, and the only ones where men have been found gathered in society" (ibid., XII, 337). Cf. above, n. 118. 306. Histoire de I'homme, Variete de l'espece humaine, in Oeuvres completes, XII, 333. 307. Ibid. Cf. above, n. 118. 155 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD geous despite the inferiority of their weapons? Is he really unaware that in South America, where all the animals are pygmies, there are men who are giants? "For it cannot be doubted that men have been encountered in South America in great numbers [in this "sparsely populated" conti- nent are only the giants numerous?!] all taller, solider, broader, and stronger than all other men on earth."308 Buffon's insistence on a clear distinction between man and the other animals also derives from and underlines his aversion for all classificatory systems; such systems, in fact, always ended up by setting man too close to the monkey.309 Nothing can stop Buffon once he gets started on his panegyric of the American male: neither the contradictions with his preceding thesis, nor de Pauw's complacency,310 nor even certain unarguable facts which he now quickly relegates to the level of local accidents: It is true that there are certain countries in South America, especially in the lower part of the continent, such as Guiana, the Amazon, the low countries on the isthmus, etc., where the natives of the country seem to be less robust than the Europeans, but this is due to local and particular causes.311 In all the rest of America the men, unlike the animals,2" whatever de Pauw says, have no reason to envy the proud Europeans: In general all the inhabitants of North America and those of the higher countries in South America, such as New Mexico, Peru, Chile, etc., were men perhaps less active but no less robust than the Europeans.313 Previous to de Pauw's onslaught the American native had been de- scribed by Buffon as impotent and feeble. He recovers his powers and his youth-at least his historical if not his physiological youth-only after de Pauw has roundly slandered him. And of his former condition all that remains is a certain contemplative laziness: he is . . . "less active." 308. Oeuivres completes, V, 264; XII, 434. Earlier Buffon had written cautiously of the Patagonians: "If these giants exist, it is in small numbers" (quoted by Pernety, Examen, II, xvi). Is it in reaction to de Pauw that they multiply into a "great number"? 309. J. Piveteau, La pensee religieuse de Buffon, in L. Bertin, Buffon, p. 129. 310. "He (M. Pauw) claims that the Americans in general are degenerate men; that it is not easy to conceive that beings just created can be in a state of decrepitude or caducity, and that that is the state of the Americans" (Oeuvres completes, XII, 436-37). 311. Ibid., p. 438; cf. B. Fay, L'esprit, p. 14. The previous year a German who had read and makes use of Buffon had asserted that the southern colonies were inhabited by a degenerate race, lacking energy and robustness (Christian Leiste, Beschreibung des brittischen Amerika [Wolfenbuttel, 1778], quoted by Doll, op. cit., p. 459). And still toward the end of the century this thesis was maintained by C. Meiners in the Gbttingisches historisches Magazin, under the title "Ueber die Ausartung der Euro- pier in fremden Erdtheilen," with climatic arguments (ibid., pp. 469-70). 312. In this phase of his thought Buffon also returns to his favorite thesis that South America, "re- duced to its own forces, gave birth only to animals feebler and smaller than those which came from the north to people our southern lands" (Oeuvres completes, V, 222-23). 313. Ibid., XII, 439; cf. Villard, op. cit., pp. 334, 391-92, and Minguet, op. cit., pp. 374-75, n. 8, citing the Additions a I'histoire de I'homme, Des Americains. 156 - 5 -&ewe&&ew&e The Second Phase of the Dispute I. THE POLEMIC EXPANDED AND UPLIFTED WITH these refinements and modifications of Buffon's position the first phase of the polemic comes to a close. America and the Americans had found themselves sucked into a maelstrom of debate, trapped in the mid- dle of its endless arguments on problems of zoological geography, eth- nography, climatology, moral theology, and the philosophy of history; and with the coming of de Pauw they were thrust to the very depths of this vortex of doctrine and diatribe. As Europe of the Enlightenment became fully aware of itself as a new civilization with its own distinct character and a universal, no longer quite simply Christian, mission, it realized too the necessity of finding a place in its schemes for the transoceanic world-this world that it had rescued from obscurity, on which it had already begun to set its mark, and which had almost no other connections apart from those with Eu- rope; a world that had disappointed the hopes of its earliest panegyrists in the sixteenth century, but which now once more seemed to exemplify an ideal way of life, to give promise of a splendid future. Such an optimistic vision seemed too good to be true, and this age of keen criticism and sharpened Europeistic self-esteem greeted it with doubt, denigration, and abuse. Crippling attacks were leveled at the entire physical nature of the new continent. But to stem the tide of insult, as it engulfed men and animals, the land, the flora, and the atmosphere, there arose from the depths of time the vision of history marching toward the west; and it was this that guaranteed the future of the New World and barred the way to the prophets of degeneration. It was this same vision again which in its turn enriched the relationship between Europe and America by providing it with its own internal dialectic. America was Europe's offspring (as Asia and Africa obviously were not; as Oceania too would be, but on a so much smaller scale)-it 157 158 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD was both Europe and non-Europe-its geographical, physical, and soon even political antithesis. Thus, as Europe's heir, it could be entrusted with a mission that neither Asia nor Africa had ever been qualified to re- ceive. As the threads of the polemic are slowly disentangled one becomes aware then that its fundamental concern is a search for synthesis, a need to account for all parts of the world, both behind and beyond Europe, to bring within the reach of man's mind and understanding the entire world, and within that world to find Europe the most complete and richest part. Bodin had once given voice to his aspirations in rapt impatient jubilation; with the discovery of the Americas the world is complete: "All men are linked one to another and partake marvelously of the universal Republic, as if they formed but one same city";1 now these very same ideas were reappearing, but this time as a critical notion, as a problem to be solved. Yet it was an angrier and stormier historical climate in which they made their reappearance. The reborn and growing faith of the Europeans in their civilizing task came face to face with the burgeoning reputation of America, where the colonies were becoming restless for independence; and the reflected glow of this fiery political conflict lit up the scientific debate kindled by Buffon, giving it both an impassioned ardor and an interest of immediacy.2 It was at this stage that the dispute began to attract the attention of men of superior intellect and culture, men with practical rather than merely cognitive interests. Never straying too far from its initial starting point, the debate then tackled the most heteroclite subjects, expanding as it passed from country to country and continent to continent, touching on all sorts of ancient and modern manias, pro- voking oblique objections and unexpected doubts, and occasionally lending its support to the most timeworn prejudices. II. ROBERTSON AND THE VASTNESS AND POVERTY OF NATURE IN AMERICA The work which made Buffon's and de Pauw's ideas known and indeed almost commonplace throughout Europe was William Robertson's highly successful History of America (1777). Fluent and elegant in its presenta- tion, and published at a time when interest in America was at its height,3 the book was immediately translated into a number of languages and was repeatedly reprinted right up into the middle of the nineteenth century. Even Humboldt considered it a classic, and in 1827 gave his encourage- 1. Bodin, op. cit., p. 298; cf. Zavala, America, p. 16. 2. See F. Chabod, "L'idea di Europa," pp. 31-32. 3. It was in 1776 that the United States declared its independence; and it was precisely the war follow- ing on that event that persuaded Robertson to publish his still incomplete work dealing with the discovery and the Spanish conquests (see preface). The Second Phase of the Dispute ment to a new edition of it in French.4 In that same year its harsh opinions on the redskins were still a subject of discussion in North America.5 Many of the supporters and even more of the critics of the thesis of the telluric inferiority of America seem to know it only through the work of the Scottish historian. Robertson was a thoroughgoing Voltairian in inspiration, solidly op- posed to the Rousseauian thesis6 and thus highly receptive to de Pauw's naturalistic pessimism. This then was the state of mind in which, having already described the birth of the European society of nations in his famous introduction to the History of the Reign of Charles V, he turned his attention to the overseas acquisitions of that same monarch. The discovery and conquest of the Americas, the character, customs, and institutions of its inhabitants, were arguments that could not be treated as a mere "episode" in the story of the emperor.' Thus the History of America came into being as a digression from the History of Charles V, but his recognition of the far-reaching importance and historical worthi- ness of these regions was already implicit in his decision to make them the subject of an entirely separate work. The first characteristic of the American continent is its vastness, its immense extent, greater than that of Europe, of Africa, and even of Asia.8 Nature there set a huge imprint on everything: "Nature seems here to have carried on her operations with a bolder hand, and to have distinguished the features of this country by a peculiar magnificence." The mountains there are a third higher than the peak of Teneriffe, the highest point (so it was believed) in the Old World. The rivers are like seas and the lakes like landlocked oceans- which makes communications very much easier. However-and here his reservations begin- "what most distinguishes America from other parts of the earth, is the peculiar temperature of her climate.. . cold predominates." America is the cold continent. The latitudes which in other countries produce grapes and figs are here under 4. See the dedication and foreword to the French edition (trans. Suard and Morellet) prepared by De La Roquette and several times reprinted (5th ed., Paris, 1848). This version is filled out with notes taken from Jefferson, Clavigero, Humboldt, etc., intended to correct Robertson's "errors" (mostly anti- American). For other editions-including one in Armenian, Trieste, 1784-see Zavala, Amdrica, p. 233. On its popularity in Germany, see Harold von Hofe, "Jacobi, Wieland and the New World," Monats- hefte (Madison, Wis.), 49, no. 4 (May 1957), p. 187. In the United States Robertson's history was even published in installments, like a popular novel, in one hundred and fifty issues of a Boston weekly (Bernstein, Origins, p. 63, n. 43). 5. Pearce, The Savages, pp. 89-91, who illustrates its derivation from the Scots school but does not go into its judgment on the North American savages. 6. See Fueter, op. cit., p. 368, and Meinecke, op. cit., pp. 255-61, and esp. p. 260, for an analysis of Robertson's attitude, completely unromantic in regard to primitive peoples and the infancy or youth of nations, but carefully attentive to the American Indians as examples of undeniable humanity. 7. See the preface to the History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. 8. Sic, in The History of America (London, 1777-78), I, 248; cf. below, n. 345. 159 Americas, as did Father Acosta (1590), Antonio de Herrera (1601-15), and Father Cobo (1653), among others, they never reached the point of coordinating their observations in a general thesis of the inferiority of American nature (which in fact they admired and illustrated with loving devotion); nor even less did they conceive theories endowing it with a supposed "immaturity" or "degeneration," using concepts that sug- gested a development cut short when barely begun, or an exhaustion through old age. This Buffon did. And under the stimulus of this all-powerful fourfold influence-the strength of Buffon's authority; the formulation of such a dynamic and historicizing concept of nature; the merging of other time- hallowed theories and pseudoscientific tendencies with this new evalua- tion of the men, the animals, the plants, and the very climate of America; and the maturing of a loftier and clearer self-awareness on the part of Europe simultaneously with the birth of an American patriotism and native pride-the polemic of America flared up on various levels, to burn on unquenched for several decades on both sides of the Atlantic. Its threads are mingled and twisted together and are of diverse hue, of varied thickness and length. There are some that go all the way back to Aristotle, and even beyond. But unravel them we must, if we are not to find ourselves caught once again in their tangled skein. From a more general point of view the history of this error has another claim on our interest. The facts on which the theories of the New World's inferiority were based were in many cases real. It is geologically true that America's mountain chains seem relatively recent and not yet com- pletely mature. It is true that an unhealthy humidity prevails in many areas. It is true that the continent hosts a profusion of harmful insects, while lacking not only the great carnivores but many other larger animals. It is true that many of its peoples are beardless, others relatively weak, and yet others apparently incapable of civil progress. And it is true that certain species of animals were never successfully acclimatized there or else became sterile in the second generation. It is also very true that all these debates, however ill founded they were, contributed to the ad- vancement of the science of nature, refining its methods, prying it pain- fully away from old errors, and enriching its material. Why then, when we turn our attention back to it again today, do we call the thesis of the inferiority of the Americas an "error"? For one substantial reason and (if we may be a little pedantic) for three formal reasons. Substantialiter, because the above-mentioned elements of fact lose their validity when they are utilized in support of a thesis. Formaliter, because very often, too often, the single example was generalized into a universal rule, and the weakness of a native, the marshiness of a valley, xvi Prologue THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD snow for six months of the year. A perpetual frost grips the parallels corresponding to the most fertile regions of Europe. Even the tropics are lukewarm, because of cooling fogs and breezes.9 The "rude and indolent" inhabitants have done nothing to improve the land, which has thus become inhospitable and in fact almost everywhere unhealthy for the European, and strangely feeble in all that it produces: The principle of life seems to have been less active and vigorous there, than in the ancient continent. . . the different species of animals peculiar to it are much fewer in proportion, than those of the other hemisphere.... Nature was not only less prolific in the New World, but she appears likewise to have been less vigorous in her productions. The animals originally belonging to this quarter of the globe appear to be of an inferior race, neither so robust, nor so fierce, as those of the other continent. There are no wild beasts-the puma and the jaguar, Robertson assures us, are "inactive and timid animals" - and the animals that have come from Europe, the wolves, foxes, and deer, have become smaller or de- generated.10 These same climatic factors that proved hostile to the "nobler" ani- mals have also favored the multiplication and monstrous development of reptiles and insects. The birds are a category apart. There are many of them, it is true, and some very large ones, like the condor, and some that are very beautiful with their brightly colored plumage, "but nature, satis- fied with clothing them in this gay dress, has denied most of them that melody of sound, and variety of notes, which catch and delight the ear"11 -almost like the producer of some musical comedy so happy with the beautiful costumes and other evident attractions of his chorus girls that he never stops to ask himself whether or not they can sing! The silence of the equatorial forest chills the traveler's heart. 9. Ibid., I, 252, 263 (and referring back to Buffon: I, 449 ff.). He is obviously ignorant of the climatic effects of the great sea currents, both Humboldt's and the Gulf Stream. Robertson explains America's coldness in terms of the absence of seas between the continent and the North Pole, and the east winds that are cooled as they cross the Atlantic and remain so over the forests, marshes, and Andes (ibid., I, 253-55). On the excellent climate and soil of Chile, ibid., II, 333-34. 10. Ibid., I, 259-61. The citations refer back to Buffon and some of the travelers who support his theory. A footnote admits that skeletons apparently belonging to elephants have been found in Ohio. And others in Siberia. But the elephant only lives in the tropics. So then? Robertson wriggles out of it a la de Pauw: "The more we contemplate the face of nature, and consider the variety of her productions, the more we must be satisfied that astonishing changes have been made in the terraqueous globe by convulsions and revolutions, of which no account is preserved in history" (n. xxxiv, ibid., I, 456-57). As for the degeneration of the domestic animals, in the South the cause must be climate, but in the north- ern colonies it seems more probably the result of a lack of proper care and sufficient forage (n. xxxv, ibid., I, 457-58). 11. Ibid., I, 262; for the reptiles, see also 1, 325. On this contrast between "call" and "coloring" (which La Fontaine's crow should have remembered!), see John Robert Moore, "Goldsmith's De- generate Song-birds: An Eighteenth-Century Fallacy in Ornithology," Isis, 96 (Spring 1943), vol. 34, pt. IV, p. 325. See also below, pp. 161 and 276. 160 The Second Phase of the Dispute III. GOLDSMITH'S SONGLESS BIRDS Here again we have conflicting exaggerations. This exaggerated mute- ness was more or less the antithesis of what had been reported by Colum- bus, who thought he heard nightingales on Haiti,2 and Vespucci, who had heard the forests of Brazil resound with whole choirs of brightly colored songsters. And there was even a Peruvian chronicler who had heard the feathered creatures intone their sweet melodies through the via prepostera.t3 Hardly surprising that some people blocked up their ears whenever these birds gave forth. The legend was carried on by the Jesuit missionaries. Again in the mid- dle of the eighteenth century we find Muratori repeating that there exists in Paraguay "a tiny little bird. . . of tuneful song, not unlike the nightin- gale's."14 And a few decades earlier the author of the Relation des voyages de Fran!ois Coreal aux Indes Occidentales (1722) had written of the hummingbird "that its 'melodious song' is 'similar to that of a nightingale,' when actually this little hummingbird's sound is produced by the whirring of its wings."'15 Buffon had already remarked on this melodic deficiency on the part of the American avifauna and explained it as being the result of the cold wet climate, which was harmful to the sexual organs of the birds, and the harsh voices of the savages, which were all that the birds had to imitate, leaving them thus deprived of any more harmonious models and quite unaware of the possibilities of bel canto.'6 There is of course an element of truth in the whole thing, and it must have come as a shock to the European familiar with the nocturnal warblings of every little copse or the magic murmur of the Nibelung forest.17 But at that time it was 12. See L. Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche (Florence, 1937), pp. 11-21. And a recent art historian provides "ear-witness" confirmation: "The present writer heard the nightingale sing outside his window, in November, just as Columbus did" (E. W. Palm, Los monumentos arquitectonicos de la Espahola [Ciudad Trujillo, 1955], I, 11), while H. M. Jones (Strange New World, p. 14) flatly affirms that the nightingale "does not exist in the New World." 13. Jos6 Ignacio de Lecuanda, Descripci6n geografica de la ciudad y partido de Trujillo (cited by R. Vargas Ugarte, Historia del Peru- Fuentes [Lima, 1945], p. 190, as Descripcion de los partidos de la intendencia de Trujillo; see also Ventura Garcia Calderon, Vale un Peru (Brussels, 1939), p. 34. 14. 11 cristitnesimofelice, I, 21. 15. P. G. Adams, op. cit., p. 123; the origin of Lecuanda's fantasy? 16. For Buffon, see the passages quoted by J. Moore, op. cit., p. 326. Reaumur had made the same ob- servation. Linnaeus had adopted vocal emissions as a criterion for the classification of the animals (Daudin, op. cit., p. 72n.) 17. We shall hear the laments of Chateaubriand, Lenau, and Leopardi (see below, pp. 352, 372, and 380). For Sheridan (1775) and Robert Graves (1941) see J. Moore, op. cit., p. 325. In his last novel, II secolo che muore (written ca. 1871, pub. posthumously in 1885) F. D. Guerrazzi introduces a long episode in the United States, between Mississippi and Texas, abounding with birds "gorgeously arrayed in dazzling feathers; but cruel nature had denied them sweetness of song.. . and some mockingly imitated the human voice, whence the name mockingbird" (op. cit., Rome, 1885, IV, 260). Guerrazzi mentions Humboldt and Chateaubriand (ibid., II, 8, 353), treats American nature as "enormous, rather than great; fearful, not beautiful" (ibid., IV, 244) and refers also to "cowardly" leopards (ibid., IV, 318); 161 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD taken as a characteristic mark of the mournful and toneless quality of all American nature, as a poetic symbol of its expressive impotency. Where the lion lost its mane the very least that could happen to a nightin- gale was to become raucous and strident. In 1743 the doctor and botanist Pierre Barrbre lamented that the solemn quiet of the tropical night was broken solely by the shrieks of the wild beasts or the "displeasing noises" of the birds;'8 La Condamine found hardly a single bird that sang pleasantly in all America: "They are remarkable mainly for the brilliance and diversity of color of their plumage."'" The abbe Charles Cesar Robin states: "In these somber forests, I heard no more singing"; and of Virginia's so-called nightingale he says sadly: "Even if Nature has treated it better in the matter of plumage, she has not by any means given it such a melodious voice."20 And Molina mentions that "travelers have generally conceded to the birds of America both beauty and splendor of raiment, but denied them grace and harmony of song. This opinion is commonly accepted by the naturalists," but it is denied by Clavigero for the torrid zone, and con- trary to fact for the southern temperate zone.2 Mme du Boccage too, though overflowing with enthusiasm for the Americas, admitted in 1756 that the splendid birds of those countries had raucous voices: "Their savage song has less flattering sounds / Than the sweet nightingale and the tender thrush."22 Chateaubriand seems to recall these lines when he is arguing with the old explorers who had found the birds multicolored but mute, and writes that there are lots of little birds in America "whose song is as sweet as that of our thrushes."23 And the strange American birds of Heine's Vitzluputzli (1851) are "glowing with color," but at the same time "taciturn."24 Even Thomas Jefferson, the most unshakable champion of a robust but his opinions on the Americas are generically anti-Spanish (see II, 92-93) or anti-Catholic and anti- clerical (IV, 342), and he resorts to sarcasm to tell us that in the past America "was one of the scales of the balance of the universe" (an echo of Canning? see above, chap. 4, n. 117). And only recently a sober Swiss naturalist bewailed the fact that in Peru the natives rarely sang "and from the birds too one fails to hear any sweet voices" (A. Heim, Wunderland Peru, Naturerlebnisse [Berne, 1948], p. 172). 18. Nouvelle relation de la France Equinoxiale (Paris, 1743), quoted by Zavala, America, p. 187. 19. Relation, p. 472. 20. Nouveau voyage dans I'Amerique septentrionale en l'annee 1781 ... (Philadelphia [Paris], 1782), pp. 51-52. 21. Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chile (Bologna, 1782; 2d ed., 1810), p. 214. 22. La Colombiade, canto I; ed. cit., II, 24, on the word of Charlevoix. Clavigero mentions, among the slanderers of the song of the American birds, "two modern Italians, the author of a certain meta- physico-political dissertation on the proportion of talents, and of their use, who committed many blun- ders on America, and the Author of some nice little Indian tales, in one of which he has an American bird discoursing with a nightingale": they reveal themselves to be "as learned in certain speculative matters as they are ignorant in the things of America" (Storia antica del Messico, ed. cit., IV, 135). 23. Voyage en Amerique, ed. Richard Switzer (Paris, 1964), p. 213. 24. Heinrich Heine, Vitzliputzli, Priludium, in Siimtliche Werke, ed. O. Walzel (Leipzig, 1911-15), III, 58-59. 162 The Second Phase of the Dispute American nature, surrendered to the attraction of the ambiguous analogy between the ornithological and lyrical mutism of the New World. Near Vaucluse - echoing with Petrarchan melodies-he hears a chorus of nightingales break out in rich and marvelous song; he finds their voices stronger and fuller than those on the banks of the Seine (in fact see below, n. 406) and though he has only just mentioned the famous mock- ingbirds he pauses in wistful reflection: "It explains to me another circum- stance, why there never was a poet North of the Alps [Heavens! and Shakespeare?] and why there never will be one. A poet is as much the creature of climate as an orange or palm tree. What a bird the nightingale would be in the climates of America! We must colonize him thither," so that America too, he seems to be suggesting, might have poets to rival them!25 But it is one of these longed-for poets himself, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who regrets that "for Americans skylarks and nightingales 'only warble in books'."26 And in our own day G. A. Borgese has de- plored the fact that the nightingale has never been able to acclimatize itself in America and that its "earthbound brothers," the poets, are never really at home there.27 But the dumbness of American avian life is most abundantly illustrated and consequently most widely known, at least in English-speaking countries, through the poetry and prose of the celebrated author of the Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith. In his well-known poem or verse- sermon, The Deserted Village (published in 1769), which describes the depopulation of the countryside and the scourge of luxury, Georgia is portrayed in somber de Pauwian shades: the land is parched and gloomy, infested with deadly scorpions, voiceless bats and rattlesnakes, with ferocious tigers waiting to pounce, and even more ferocious Indians. There is no glimmer of comfort for whosoever should wander into those dense forests, "those matted woods where birds forget to sing." This singular lament is repeated here and there by Goldsmith in his vast History of the Earth and Animated Nature (eight volumes, 1774) which enjoyed such long-lasting and unlikely success.28 In point of fact the good Goldsmith knew nothing about America; in another of his his- tory books he was to include an imaginary battle between Montezuma and Alexander the Great and to amuse his readers with repetitions of the legends of Patagonian giants, preaching monkeys, and fluently talka- tive nightingales. But in this popular treatise on physical geography and 25. Letter to William Short, 21 May 1787; Papers, XI, 372. Cf. Martin, op. cit., p. 60. 26. Quoted in Strout, op. cit., p. 77. 27. "L'usignolo di Pereyra," Corriere della Sera, 26 February 1952. 28. Jefferson, who even admired Goldsmith's History of Greece (letter to P. Carr, 19 August 1785, in Papers, VIII, 407), possessed a copy of the 1795 ed. (Catalogue of the Library, I, 467): cf. below, chap. 8, nn. 285, 349. 163 164 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD descriptive zoology the honest Oliver remained punctiliously faithful to Buffon29 and informed his reader in passing that "the birds of the torrid zone are very bright and vivid in their colors; but they have screaming voices, or are totally silent."30 He attached no particular importance to this item and even less did he trouble himself to set up a general theory of the superiority of the Old World over the New. His concern is purely narrative; he points out some curious detail and passes on. On the same page, for instance, he mentions quite disinterestedly that according to some people the swallows migrate in winter, while according to others they take refuge like bats within hollow trees, "or even sink into the deepest lakes, and find security for the winter season by remaining there in clusters at the bottom."31 Dr. Johnson had paradoxically preferred Goldsmith to Robertson but was still not far from the truth when he con- cluded with one of his savage witticisms: "He is now writing a Natural History, and will make it as entertaining as a Persian Tale."32 Further on Goldsmith relates the marvelous feats of the American mockingbird that can imitate any other creature of the forest from the wolf to the crow (creatures that are hardly celebrated for the melodious- ness of their vocal products) and which as it settles on the chimneys of the American planters' houses continues to pour out throughout the night "the sweetest and most various notes of any bird whatsoever." If this be true, Goldsmith concludes impartially, one must admit that "the deficiency of most other song-birds in that country is made up by 29. Buffon's lasting influence on Goldsmith is well known: see for example Pitman, op. cit., esp. pp. 37, 44, 46; A. L. Sells, Les sources franCaises de Goldsmith (Paris, 1924), p. 177-84; W. Lynskey, "The Scientific Sources of Goldsmith's Animated Nature," Studies in Philology, 40 (1943), pp. 33-57, esp. 35-36, 44, 51-52; the latter, however, who shows Goldsmith's able use not only of other compilers and popularizers but also of first-class scientific sources, excludes from her examination the principal source, Buffon (see p. 35, n. 10). The Englishman utilized the Histoire naturelle as his prime source and derived therefrom, among other items, the thesis that the lesser dimensions of an animal imply its in- feriority, at least in a relative sense. Unaware of the precedents, Lynskey defines the thesis (see above, pp. 15-22) as an "arbitrary ... bold assumption" and notes with a certain wonder that "both Buffon and Goldsmith make it." Another derivation from Buffon is the very singular and privileged position that Goldsmith too concedes to man: see W. Lynskey, "Chain of Being," pp. 363-74, rectified by A. O. Lovejoy, "Goldsmith and the Chain of Being," Journal of the History of Ideas, 7 (1946), pp. 91-98. 30. Op. cit., pt. III, bk. I, chap. 2 (ed. Fullarton, London-Edinburgh, n.d., II, 12). 31. This curious theory, which can be traced back even to Aristotle, was first formulated explicitly by Olaus Magnus (1555), attracted William Harvey, Linnaeus, Pehr Kalm, and Gilbert White, was ac- cepted even by the scornful Samuel Johnson (1768: Life, ed. cit., I, 347: cf. 1773, ibid. I, 478), echoes still in Joseph Priestley (1800) and the great Cuvier (1817), and is perpetuated in the popular belief in the winter lethargy of swallows: see Richard Garnett, "Defoe and the Swallows," Times Literary Sup- plement, 13 February 1969, pp. 161-62; cf. ibid., 20 February 1969, p. 186; 27 February 1969, p. 211; 6 March 1969, p. 242; 3 April 1969; Julian Jaynes, "The Problem of Animate Motion in the XIII Cen- tury," Journal of the History of Ideas, 31, no. 2 (1970), p. 222. 32. 30 April 1773, in Boswell, Life, I, 469-70. See also I, 467-69; II, 119, and the other references, and J. Boswell, London Journal, 1762-63 (London, 1951), p. 285. Goldsmith himself honestly admits that "professed naturalists will, no doubt, find it [the Animated Nature] superficial" (Pitman, op. cit., p. 15). And in fact, again toward the middle of the nineteenth century, its illustrations of whales and narwhals were ridiculed by the experts, who found them more suggestive of a truncated sow and a hip- pogriff(H. Melville, Moby Dick, chap. 55; Modern Library ed., p. 265). The Second Phase of the Dispute this bird alone."33 But in the depths of the woods the profoundest silence reigns, broken if at all only by the echoing hiss of serpents.34 Even the cuckoo, whose unchanging note evokes all the sweetness of summer, and which has also, the facetious naturalist reminds us, "a more ludicrous association ... which, however, we that are bachelors need be in no pain about"- the cuckoo of Brazil succeeds only in making "a most horrible noise in the forests."35 Goldsmith shows no malice toward the Americans, save for the slightly negative feeling which is the corollary of the delight he finds in his own most perfect part of the world,36 nor does he show any desire to solve scientific problems or propound startling paradoxes. His sole aim is to entertain the reader, and if he stresses whatever is surprising it is only to hold the reader's attention, not to turn all his ideas upside down. But in so doing he could not help showering the Americans with a few of the current slanders. He repeated Buffon's derogatory conclu- sions on American quadrupeds.37 He was familiar with Juan and Ulloa, but he also possessed Raynal,"3 and although he gazes longingly on the simplicity of the rustic he was no less scornful than his friend and pro- tector Dr. Johnson of the savages' crudity, their ridiculous superstitions, and their cowardly terror: "What a poor contemptible being is the naked savage !"3 IV. ROBERTSON AND THE AMERICAN NATIVE Robertson's approach is considerably more subtle. When he reaches the American natives he is obviously reluctant to treat them with the same casual disdain as de Pauw. He studies them with great care, de- voting one huge quarto page after another to the examination of their 33. Op. cit.. pt. III, bk. VI, chap. 2 (ed. cit., II, 127). On the artificial contrast between the melodious mockingbird and all the other voiceless or strident birds, see J. Moore, op. cit., p. 325, and Frederika Bremer, La vie de famille dans le Nouveau Monde (1853; Paris ed., n.d.), 1, 282, 313, 368, 380; II, 372, etc. This feathered songster had also been mentioned by the abbe Joseph de Laporte in his Voy- ageurfrangais (1765-95), which earned him (1773) the ridicule of the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (Reed, op. cit., p. 62). It is referred to again as "America's nightingale" by Eugine A. Vail, De la litterature et ties hommes de lettres des Etats-Unis d'Amerique (Paris, 1841), p. 381. And Thoreau (1840) laments its rarity in New England: John Aldrich Christie, Thoreau as World Traveler (New York, 1965), p. 89. 34. Op. cit., pt. III, bk, VI, chap. 1, and pt. III, bk, III, chap. 3 (ed. cit., II, 34, 121). 35. Ibid., pt. III, bk, V, chap. 6 (ed. cit., II, 103-04). 36. Singularly naive comments in Pitman, op. cit., p. 122. 37. Op. cit., pt. II, bk. I, chap. 15 (ed. cit., I, 265). 38. On the former, see Pitman, op. cit., p. 50; on the latter, Sells, op. cit., p. 216. He also owned some Recherches philosophiques, 2 vols., 1773, which Sells identifies with Bonnet's work, Recherches philosophiques sur les preuves du Christianisme (op. cit., p. 212), but which could be de Pauw's. His friend and Robertson's, Edward Gibbon, owned all of de Pauw's works, including two editions of the one on the Egyptians and Chinese (The Library of Edward Gibbon, ed. G. Keynes [London, 1940], p. 215). 39. Cf. Pitman, op. cit., p. 133. On the inconsistency of his "philosophy," see Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 64-69, 329-30. On the savage, see the earlier Letters from a Citizen of the World, 1762, no. CXIV; and on the American, Animated Nature, pt. II, bk. I, chap. 11 (ed. cit., I, 235-36). 165 166 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD origins, their physical and moral qualities, their domestic customs, their arts of peace and war, their religions and customs; and when he has finished he heaves a sigh of relief at having completed this "laborious delineation" of their character.40 He has been prosaic and prolix, he admits, but this is "one of the most important as well as instructive re- searches, which can occupy the philosopher or historian."41 The Greek and Roman philosophers and historians, our teachers in this as in every other field, never had a chance to meet any real savages: "In America, man appears under the rudest form in which we can con- ceive of him to subsist."42 Likewise the early explorers were so ignorant and so prejudiced that they never thought to make any serious study of the natives. Almost two centuries were to pass before the "attention of the philosophers" became focused on them. But these philosophers were too impatient to reach their conclusions and thus confused or neglected the facts. Struck with the appearance of degeneracy in the human species throughout the New World ... some authors of great name [i.e., Buffon] have maintained, that this part of the globe had but lately emerged from the sea.., .and that its in- habitants, lately called into existence, and still at the beginning of their career, were unworthy to be compared with the people of a more ancient and improved continent. Others [de Pauw] have imagined, that, under the influence of an un- kindly climate, which checks and enervates the principle of life, man never at- tained in America the perfection which belongs to his nature, but remained an animal of an inferior order, defective in the vigor of his bodily frame, and destitute of sensibility, as well of force, in the operations of his mind. Yet others (Rousseau) have seen in the savages the most perfect models of the human race. And all these contradictory theories have been put forward with equal conviction and defended with unusual gifts of mind and tongue. The problem is therefore far from easy. One should proceed "with caution."43 And in fact Robertson proceeds with great caution, distinguishing be- tween the savages of the tropics and those of the temperate zones, be- tween primitive tribes and organized monarchies, between the general influence of climate and other factors not reducible to climate. He col- lects and evaluates a large body of testimony and rejects prodigies, mon- sters, and other peculiarities not sufficiently supported by certain and con- cordant proof.44 40. Op. cit.. I, 414. 41. Ibid., p. 281. 42. Ibid., p. 282. 43. Ibid., pp. 286-87. Note that Robertson puts de Pauw on the same level as Rousseau and Buffon. He is however in marked disagreement with de Pauw when he maintains that America was thickly in- habited before the slaughter and cruelty of the Spaniards depopulated it (II, 345-51), but he rejects Las Casas as an "exaggerator" (II, 461; cf. below, n. 91). 44. Thus he denies the existence of the Patagonian giants, citing the careful collection of texts ex- amined and rejected by de Pauw (ibid., I, 304, 465). Robertson also accepts the thesis of the American The Second Phase of the Dispute He prepares questionnaires on the American native (Is he robust and vigorous? Is he naturally beardless? Is he deficient in amorous sentiment, etc.) and the same for the debated points relative to the animals (Have European animals improved or degenerated in America? Of those that are common to both continents, in which continent are they larger in size?), then he despatches these questionnaires to travelers and mis- sionaries, to officials and inhabitants of the colonies, and collects up and stores away their replies.45 But all these excellent intentions and sound principles and diligent interrogations are, alas, not enough. Dr. Robertson is altogether lacking in sympathy for the subject of his researches, and although, as we have seen, he realizes the fundamental importance of the problem of the native, he never succeeds in approaching him with his heart, never feels his de- sires and fears; his interest is always cold, reserved, academic. So that all in all even Oviedo's savage ends up more alive than Robertson's; Oviedo was severe in his judgments, but understanding, a man quite capable of clapping the despised Indian good-naturedly on the shoulder. The same goes for de Pauw - a cruel observer, but amused and occa- sionally, albeit only in deference to fashion, compassionate; whereas Robertson's American is described dispassionately and humorlessly, without scorn, but with no hope either. Was eighteenth-century historiography thus so limited as to be in- capable of recognizing the worthiness of the primitive, trusting blindly instead in the proud myth of Progress? One would think not; for one thing there were other historiographers of the period, most notably Voltaire, Robertson's ideological mentor, who recognized and described in vivid terms certain essential characteristics of the naive and naked savage, of the savage in all of us; and for another the very idea of Progress is almost totally absent from the History of America. Robertson's work shows civilization and barbarism face to face, in blatant opposition, each fixed within its own abstract formulas, with no point of contact, with no gradual transformation from one to the other. Nature makes men equal, and their possibilities of reaching perfection "seem" everywhere the same; but if we study the savage, we must agree "that the intellectual powers of man must be extremely limited in their operations."46 origin of syphilis, enough in itself to counterbalance all America's "benefits" (I, 307). De Pauw is also cited on I, 302, 328, 355, 458, 465. 45. Still unpublished, but examined by R. A. Humphreys, William Robertson and His "History of America" (London, 1954), pp. 6-7n., 20. 46. Op cit., 1, 401-02. The Mexicans and the Peruvians are an exception, and the former are even conceded the quality of being "enterprising" (II, 18), but when compared with the peoples of the Old World "neither ... will be entitled to rank with those nations which merit the name of civilized"; they too have remained in the "infancy of civil life" (II, 268-69). The vaunted works of art of the Mexicans are inferior to the roughest Egyptian sculptures: "the scrawls of children delineate objects almost as 167 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD The crude naivet6 of this conviction of Europe's enormous superiority leads Robertson into a curious disregard for petty details, or what seem petty details to him, and one is reminded of a similar attitude in Buffon. For Robertson it would be "beneath the dignity of history" to give a minutely detailed description of the natives' dwellings, quite apart from being useless for his research!47 As for their ideas on religion, it should suffice to see whether they believe in the existence of God and the immor- tality of the soul; much work has in fact been wasted on this sort of in- quiry: "The article of religion in P. Lafitau's Moeurs des Sauvages, ex- tends to 347 tedious pages in quarto."48 After all, religion "occupies no considerable place in the thoughts of a savage."49 His clearly expressed disdain for detail is not limited to particulars that in fact seem to be of considerable importance, such as questions of the homes and beliefs of the Indian; it is equally evident in many other areas of this "objective" study of the American. Thus it is indeed confirmed that he possesses all the attributes of humanity, but on two occasions he is summarily condemned as "a melancholy animal."5 And though he is abundantly endowed with moral qualities, he lacks the one which ranks as the supreme virtue for an illuminist and a Scotsman: alacrity in his work, or the keen desire to achieve something useful and improve his own lot. The outstanding characteristic of the American is a constitutional apathy, due partly to the climate and partly to the ease with which he may exist without great effort; but it is a quality that is by now innate and in- delible. The Americans are agile rather than robust and incapable under any circumstances of a sustained effort. Las Casas says so (and we know why: see above, p. 70), and what he says is confirmed by many other early chroniclers. Even as animals, then, "they resembled beasts of prey, rather than animals formed for labor."51 True, they had no domestic ani- mals to help them, but that was their fault; they never managed to do- mesticate the animals which would have been adaptable thereto, such as the bison. The savage in his natural state "is the enemy of other animals, not their superior. He wastes and destroys, but knows not how to multiply or to govern them."52 The American natives' real domestic animals were their women, whom accurately" (II, 286-87); and those of the Peruvians, albeit superior, prove that they too "were not advanced beyond the infancy of arts" (II, 322; cf. II, 385-86). 47. Ibid., I, 373. 48. Ibid., pp. 380, 487. 49. Ibid., II, 302, 307. 50. Ibid., I, 398, 408. 51. Ibid., p. 290. In support of his thesis, so different from that offered "by very respectable authors," Robertson cites Bouguer, Juan and Ulloa, and La Condamine (I, 467). 52. Ibid., I, 332-33: confirming his nature of being a beast of prey. Buffon and Raynal are cited (the latter mentioned with high praise also on II, 300, 490-91). On America's lack of typically southern animals, such as camels, cows, horses, etc., see ibid., I, 272. For the llama ("its service... was not very extensive!") and the few animals domesticated by the Mexicans, see ibid., II, 268-69, 318. 168 The Second Phase of the Dispute they treated exactly like beasts of burden, and whom they still humiliate and despise, since these men are quite without any sentiment of love. Apathetic in this realm too, or rather torpid "to an amazing degree," blind to the charms of beauty, deaf to all domestic affection, their frigidity astonished even the austerest missionaries."3 They are smooth skinned, indeed entirely without hair in every part of the body. And "truly [as a femme du monde was to say a century later], truly a man without a moustache is no longer a man."54 This characteristic of meager virile ardor (although the Rev. Dr. Robertson does not linger over such a scabrous subject) reaffirms the judgment passed on the Americans for their meager will to work; they are "like children," and with childlike frivolity they leave the work they have begun, become distracted, and waste time in whimsical pursuits, or fall prey to complete idleness or give themselves up to sports, dancing, games, and drunkenness.55 Even the most civilized of the American natives, those of Peru, have always been and still are weak, unwarlike, and unmanly: "Their feeble spirits, relaxed in lifeless inaction, seem hardly capable of any bold or manly exertion.""56 The Americans are children. For a rationalist, this was a verdict of guilty. Puerile was still a term of abuse in the mouths of those who wor- shiped a newly adult Reason and the steady glow of the lights by now all lit, dispelling all obscurity. But Diderot had already struck another note producing multiple reverberations: "the Tahitian brings us close to the origin of the world and the European to its old age,""' and already the first romantics, Hamann and Herder, had called attention to the primitive, basic, and unshaped powers in all peoples and were thus bringing about a revision or rather complete reversal of that eighteenth-century viewpoint which had seen the primitive as merely imperfect, immature, almost abortive (Buffon), or else, as with de Pauw's paradoxical contradiction, downright degenerate. V. THE EXPLORERS OF POLYNESIA: JAMES COOK AND GEORGE FORSTER, HORACE WALPOLE AND LORD KAMES England was not the most propitious terrain for these new ideas. The revolt of the colonies had led to a certain lingering resentment against the 53. Ibid., 1, 292-93, 405-06, 482. The harsh necessities of his existence apparently prevent the savage, like the wretched laborer of the civilized nations, from cultivating the sentiments and passions of love. But this sociological explanation (I, 295 and II, 293) is contradicted by the observation (I, 326) that the easier it is for them to subsist the lazier and less enterprising the natives are. But in yet an- other place (I, 3 17) he states with despairing and contradictory insistence that the savage becomes more careless about providing for his needs, and more stolid and apathetic, in proportion to the increasing uncertainty and difficulty of the means he can find of satisfying those needs. 54. Guy de Maupassant, "La Moustache," 1883, in Toine (Paris, 1908), p. 60; cf. Robertson, His- tory of America, I, 290. 55. Op. cit., passim, esp. I, 290, 315, 377-78: until the arrival of the Europeans, the women were even denied the satisfaction of getting drunk (I, 399-400). 56. Ibid., II, 324-25. 57. Supplement au Voyage de Bougainiille (1772), ed. cit., p. 758. 169 the unusual appearance of a mountain chain were passed on, as if through the effect of some kind of paralyzing contagion, to all the races and valleys and mountains of the continent. In other cases, moreover, and indeed often in the same cases, those objectively solid facts were hypostatized into value judgments, and to the improper generalization was thus added an improper pejorative quali- fication, with the assumption, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, that the beardless man is inferior to the bearded man, the swamp is worse than the desert, the lack of wild animals or deep geological strata is a stigma of telluric impotence, and the "giraffe" is "good" and the "cock- roach," "bad." And lastly, in the great majority of cases, factual data, particulars of information, and details of geography, zoology, and botany were ille- gitimately polarized, items that were and still are true in themselves, but are neither true nor false when placed in opposition to other data, ele- ments, and details. The very basic antithesis between Old World and New World, the root of all those other single antitheses, has no existence outside the schemes of an impassioned and systematizing abstract and polemic mentality, directed now against the Old World, now against the New. The tiger, the savage, the marsh, and the beard - empirical realities and not concepts - were conceptualized in opposition to other individual phenomena, from which they were certainly distinct: an error born from an abuse of formal logic, and anticipating that corruption of the dialectic that in Hegel himself was to achieve the fatuous splendor of an imma- terial architecture, the symphonic glory of the chimaera bombinans in vacuo. Corruptio optimi pessima. I am afraid the pages that follow will offer more than enough to convince us of this sad fact. As viaticum and critical memento I have nothing better to offer than the ambiguous smile of Father Acosta, great eulogizer of the Indies, historiographer of a robust, mature, and fruitful America, who notes that the plants taken from the new lands to Spain "are few, and do not take well," while those "that have come from Spain are many, and thrive," and adds with gentle sar- casm: "I do not know if we can say that this is brought about by the good- ness of the plants, so as to give the glory to this continent, or if we must say that it is the effect of the soil, and thus the glory of that other con- tinent."'' The glory of one hemisphere or the other, glory of the seed or the sod? Father Acosta's skeptical alternative had already been answered by the sound good sense of Oviedo. The true reason why good vines do not grow 2. Joseph de Acosta, Historia natural v moral de las Indias, 1590, IV, 31; ed. Madrid, 1608, pp. 270-71; cf. ibid., IV, 18; ed. cit., pp. 242-43. Prologue xvii THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Americans, while the industrial revolution convinced the proud citizenry of the "perfection" of their technical civilization. This very same period was also the era of the great voyages of discovery in the South Seas, whose reports were bringing to light savages even savager than the Americans and shifting the attention of the scholars and more learned public toward the tribes of Oceania.58 It was Lord Monboddo who said that after three centuries of communication with the Americans, Europe could no longer hope to find there "people living in the natural state"; they should be sought instead in the barren wastes of the South Seas, still little frequented by European vessels.5" And down there too the animals were smaller than those of the Old World, and the larger wild beasts were lacking completely: the only fierce animal is the native.60 "L'homme est, je vous l'avoue, un mechant animal!"6' The accounts of Captain Cook's travels62 reveal a considerable curiosity and even a certain sympathy with respect to the natives- Maori, Tahitian, Fijian, Vancouver Indian-but no idealization, in fact an emphatically realistic attitude that could only undermine the myth of the Noble Savage. There were of course repeated surreptitious re- vivals of this myth (the savage blessedly content with his natural state) and that of the romantic "primitive" (childishly restless, and destined to tread an eventful path on his progress toward civilization);63 but the mental and figurative attitudes of neoclassicism, although they distort and overrefine the early image of the newfound Antipodes, are in the end themselves crushed beneath the weight of factual evidence, and dissolved in the prevailing current of scientific rigor. Hawkesworth, the first person to describe these journeys, was accused by some of having plagiarized and misunderstood Buffon and de Pauw, and by others of "immoral" crudity in his description of the manners and customs of the aborigines - which latter accusation apparently brought him to an un- timely death!64 Poor Dr. Hawkesworth, so incautious in his pursuit 58. Just as in France the Voyage autour du monde (1771-72) of Bougainville (on whom see above, p. 128) attracted public attention to the Papuans and gave Diderot the stimulus for his famous Sup- pldment, the extreme defense of the sanctity of all the instincts (without explicit reference but with frequent echoes from de Pauw: cf. for example what he says on "infibulation," ed. cit., p. 756, with de Pauw's Recherches, ed. cit., II, 139 ff.). But Bougainville, who spent his life fighting the English and took on board with him as chaplain our Americanophile friend Pernety (see above, p. 86) is much more sympathetically inclined toward the natives than the explorers serving under the orders of His Britannic Majesty. 59. B. Smith, op. cit., p. 91, n. 3. 60. Sic, John Barlow, Encyclopedia Britannica, 6th ed. (1823), s. v. "Australasia," quoted by B. Smith, op. cit., p. 203; cf. p. 253 (absence of animals useful to man). 61. Moliere, Tartuffe, act V, sc. 6. 62. First voyage, 1768-71 (pub. 1773, edited by John Hawkesworth); second voyage, 1772-75 (pub. 1777); third voyage, 1776-80 (pub. 1784). 63. Ample documentation and acute comment in B. Smith, op. cit., esp. pp. 1-7, 251-52. 64. See Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th ed., s. v. "John Hawkesworth"; B. Smith, op. cit., pp. 86-87, 96, 126-27, and The Voyages of Captain James Cook Round the World, ed. Christopher Lloyd (Lon- don, 1949). See below, n. 73. 170 The Second Phase of the Dispute of Buffon and De Pauw that he fell an indirect victim of their thesis! George Forster, a German of Scots origin and Baltic upbringing, shows a much more complex attitude. He accompanied Cook on his second voyage, and in 177765 published a frank and highly colored account of it. In time this same Forster was to become the earliest and most influential teacher of the great Humboldt."6 Later, in the last tragic years of his brief existence, Forster took his place among the most convinced supporters of the French Revolution, but after sacrificing everything to it finished by denying it any moral justification. In very much the same way his first instinctive reaction to the savages of Polynesia was favorable," but in his final judgment he reluctantly found he had to condemn them. The inhabitants of the Society Islands and Tahiti he finds at least classically handsome and happy in their innocence, but the American savages of Tierra del Fuego he con- siders brutalized." He is openly contemptuous of Pernety, whom he describes as a writer with little regard for truth and totally inaccurate;69 while Buffon is always spoken of enthusiastically (he also translated one volume of the Histoire naturelle), and for de Pauw, our "most learned canon," he has only the frankest admiration.0 De Pauw's critical spirit (Priifungsgeist) demolished a number of fantasies about America. Thus Forster eloquently rejects Rousseau's thesis and reaffirms the superiority of life in civilized society over the "natural life" of the savage.71 Not that this prevents him parading the customary humani- 65. George Forster, A Voyage round the world, in His Britannic Majesty's Sloop "Resolution," commanded by Capt. James Cook during the years 1772, 3, 4 and 5, 2 vols. (London, 1777); German translation, Berlin, 1778-80. 66. Forster was attracted to and influenced by Jacobi (ca. 1780), was a friend of William von Hum- boldt, but above all was friend and companion, on a journey through the Low Countries (1790), of Alexander von Humboldt, who always referred to him as his teacher and said that he had opened a new era of scientific travels, giving them the purpose of studying comparative ethnography and geog- raphy. "In George Forster we see in a certain sense the prefiguration of Alexander von Humboldt" (J. L6wenberg, in Alexander von Humboldt, eine w'issenschaftliche Biographie, ed. by K. Bruhns [Leipzig, 1872], 1, 95; cf. ibid., 94-108, 111-12, 382). Cf. Minguet, op. cit., 38n., 48, 71n., 333. On his sympathy for the American Revolution, see King, op. cit., pp. 54-56. On his activity during the French Revolution, see A. Chuquet, "Le revolutionnaire George Forster," in Etudes d'histoire (Paris, n.d.), 1. 149-288; A. Stern, Der Einfluss der Franzdsischen Revolution auf das deutsche Geistesleben (Stuttgart-Berlin, 1928), pp. 36-42; J. Droz, L'Allemagne et la Revolution franVaise (Paris, 1949), pp. 187-216. For a general view, see the classic essay (1843) of Gottfried George Gervinus, J. G. Forster, in Schriften zur Literatur, ed. Gotthard Erler (Berlin, 1962), pp. 317-403, 515-17 (on his relations with Jacobi, pp. 238, 344n., etc.), Hermann Hettner, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1928), IV, 199-211; Doll, op. cit., pp. 471-72, and now Kurt Kersten, Der Weltumsegler, Johann Georg Adam Forster, 1754-1794 (Berne, 1957), esp. pp. 38-42, and B. Smith, op. cit., esp. pp. 38-39, 62, 151. 67. On the Tahitians and the New Zealanders see A Voyage round the World, I, 321, 365-68; II, 109-12, 156-57, 480, etc. 68. Ibid., II, 606; cf. Gervinus, op. cit., p. 334. 69. Op. cit., II, 495, and esp. 515. 70. Ibid., I, 55, 435, 514; II, 412, 562; and in Werke, ed. cit., I, 67, 340, 382, 445-46, 850, 967; II, 122. This admiration for de Pauw on the part of the "great naturalist" Forster surprises and almost shocks Archbishop Moxo (see below, p. 300). 71. Op. cit., II, 503. 171 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD tarianism, quoting Las Casas and denouncing as worse than anything the savages ever did not only the cruelties of the early conquerors72 but also the innumerable outrages of the highly civilized Europeans. Admittedly, the New Zealanders are cannibals, and de Pauw's sugges- tion that they are driven to these excesses by malesuada fames is not very convincing.7" There may be some exceptional cases,74 but the most plausible explanation of this cannibalism seems to be rather an "excess of passion," which is of course the antithesis of all civilization, but not unnatural in itself. Do not the Europeans slit each others' throats by the thousand, "without a single motive, besides the ambition of a prince, or the caprice of his mistress!" Is it not sheer "prejudice" to have a horror of cannibalism when murder does not even arouse remorse? After all, these New Zealanders eat only their enemies killed in battle; they cer- tainly do not devour their relatives, nor anyone who dies a natural death; nor do they take their prisoners to fatten them, "though these circum- stances have been related, with more or less truth, of the American Indians."75 In short, human nature is what it is, in the Old World and the New, and even the newest of all. No continent can claim the right to instruct another or hold it responsible for its problems; nor was syphilis brought from America to Europe; it was born of itself all over.76 Forster's im- partiality foreshadows the sobriety and understanding of Alexander Humboldt's accounts; but it left him open, like Hawkesworth before him and all those who described the customs of the distant savages, to the cold lethal sarcasms of Dr. Johnson. So the explorers have found many new insects? What a splendid achievement! They could as well have stayed at home: there are more than twenty thousand species of insect in England alone." They tell of extraordinary things? "I never knew before how much I was respected by these gentlemen; they told me none of these things."78 Forster grips one's attention and carries one along? 72. Ibid., I, 518; II, 12. 73. Referring to the Recherches sur les Americains, I, 207, and recalling that this suggestion of his too was cribbed by Dr. Hawkesworth. Hawkesworth is frequently mentioned and severely condemned by Forster, because among other things he misunderstood and copied from de Pauw and Buffon without even naming them (ibid., I, 516-17; II, 562n., 602n.); cf. above, n. 64. 74. Ibid., II, 505-06. 75. Ibid., I, 516-18. A similar reflection on the vendettas of the savages and civilized peoples, ibid., II, 466; cf. II, 556; and Kersten, op. cit., pp. 232-33. On the fashions of Europe and those of the South Seas: Werke, I, 405, 484, 827. On the cruelty of the European soldier: Werke, I, 448. Elsewhere Forster tries in some way to justify the infanticides of certain Tahitians and prove the depravation of the civilized peoples with an announcement (1777) from some London midwives offering to procure abortions: ibid., II, 135n. 76. A Voyage, II, 160. Forster's breadth of understanding led him to be considered "among the founders of modern ethnological science" (Enciclopedia Italiana, XIV, 498c). 77. Against Hawkesworth: Boswell, Life, ed. cit., I, 478. 78. Against Hawkesworth: ibid., II, 9. 172 The Second Phase of the Dispute "No, Sir; he does not carry me along with him: he leaves me behind him: or rather indeed, he sets me before him; for he makes me turn over many leaves at a time." 79 And finally the classic reply to Boswell when the latter was enlarging on the abilities of the Tahitians and suggesting that they absolutely could not be considered savages: "Don't cant in defense of Savages."80 At the opposite end of the scale to Dr. Johnson is Horace Walpole, as liberal as Johnson was conservative, but equally skeptical about Amer- ica's future.81 It is true that as the Revolution dawns he looks across the Atlantic with warmly sympathetic gaze and produces one of the by now customary Berkeleyan or Galianian prophecies: The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil in Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's.82 With equally prophetic vision and similar prosopopoeic reference to the great names of antiquity, already in the mid-eighteenth century there had been talk of "Aristotles" and "Platos" in the New World. It was only reasonable to expect that from that immense and unknown land there might one day arrive on Europe's shores "some nation superior in intellect to all of ours, that will reveal to posterity as lunatics those great philosophers we admire today as oracles.""83 Walpole's image, resusci- tated time and again in the poetic vogue for "ruins," the object of gloomy meditation on the caducity of empire (culminating in Volney's classic Ruines),84 appeared once more in a poem by Thomas Lyttelton (who died in 1779), entitled The State of England . .. In a Letter from an Ameri- can Traveller, Dated from the Ruinous Portico of St. Paul's in the Year 2199, to A Friend settled in Boston, published in London in 1780;85 and 79. Against Forster, ibid., II, 132. 80. Ibid., p. 532; cf. also above, chap. 4, n. 5. 81. For Johnson's low opinion of Walpole, see Boswell, Life, ed. cit., II, 536; for Walpole's of John- son, in the correspondence, especially from 1774 onward, there is an almost embarrassingly wide choice: just to give an example: "prejudice, and bigotry, and pride, and presumption, and arrogance, and pedan- try are the hags that brew his ink" (letter of 7 February 1782, in The Letters of H. Walpole, ed. P. Cun- ningham [Edinburgh, 1906], VIII, 150; cf. ibid., VI, 109, 178-79, 302, 311; VII, 171, 484, 508; VIII, 26-27, 74, 361. 538, 557, 571). 82. Letter to Sir Horace Mann, 24 November 1774, ed. cit., VI, 153, quoted also by Brie, "Anfinge des Amerikanismus," pp. 362, n. 15a. For other, more specifically political prophecies, see Sumner, op. cit., pp. 46-51. 83. Sforza Pallavicino, Del bene, 1644, II, chap. 21, in Trattatisti e narratori del Seicento, ed. E. Raimondi (Milan-Naples, 1962), p. 231. 84. "Who knows if on the banks of the Seine, the Thames or the Zuyder Zee ... a traveler like my- self may not one day be seated on dumb ruins" (Volney, Les ruines, ou Meditations sur les revolutions des empires, 1791; ed. Paris, 1797, I, 16). Cf. Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London, 1954), and, for a related atmosphere, van Tieghem, La poesie de la nuit et des tombeaux en Europe au XVIII" siecle (Brussels. 1920). 85. See Oliver Edwards, "The Wicked Lord," The Times (London), 26 July 1956. 173 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD it rapidly became a clich6, a topos in the comparisons between the two hemispheres. We find it paraphrased in a letter from Mme de Tess6 to Jefferson: "When the Richness of its soil and the excellence of its gov- ernment shall have brought North America to the highest degree of Splen- dor, and the south follows its example, and you have half the globe be- neath your care, one will perhaps seek for traces of Paris as today one searches for those of ancient Babylon, and Mr. Jefferson's memoirs will guide travelers in their eager quest for Roman and French antiquities, which will by that time be confused."86 And a few years later it was taken up both by De Giuliani, observing fearfully that "manufactures, sciences, the fine arts . . . are today seeking a different home . .. and, crossing the seas, they threaten to settle in America";87 and, with more symbolic turn of phrase, by the botanist Labillardiere (1799), referring to the South Sea Islands: "The period may arise when New Zealand may produce her Lockes, her Newtons, and her Montesquieus, and when great nations in the immense regions of New Holland may send their navigators, phi- losophers, and antiquaries to contemplate the ruins of ancient London and Paris, and to trace the languid remains of the arts and sciences in this quarter of the globe."88 Dumont d'Urville managed (1826-27) to work it into a philosophy of history hinging on the succession and decline of civilization ("a few centuries hence . . . future members of the academy of New Zealand" etc.),89 and last of all it appeared solemnly paraphrased by Macaulay (1840) in a celebrated passage in his essay on Ranke.90 But for Horace Walpole this awe-inspiring prophecy is little more than a boutade. He immediately goes on to joke about these "horoscopes of empires," and it takes little to make him change his mind. Thus even as in 1780 he is writing to his friend Sir Horace Mann that we live in "an age of abortions" and that England is exhausted, finished, extinct, he begins to suspect that perhaps the whole globe has now grown old. The world was young in Asia, mature in Europe, and even Africa, with Egypt and, momentarily, Carthage, produced a few gleams of light like the other continents. But now there is nothing more to be hoped for. America? ... Yes, "America has begun to announce itself for a successor to old Eu- rope, but I already doubt whether it will replace its predecessors; genius does not seem to make great shoots there." The reason he gives is very significant: "Buffon says, that European animals degenerate across the 86. Letter of 30 March 1787, in Papers, XI, 258. 87. "Saggio politico sopra le vicissitudini inevitabili delle societa civili," 1791, in Illuministi italiani (Milan-Naples, 1958) III, 684. Cf. above, pp. 138-39. 88. Jacques Julien Houton de Labillardiere, Relation de voyage a la recherche de la Perouse, 1799; Eng. trans.: An Account of a Voyage in Search of la Pdrouse (London, 1800), quoted in B. Smith, op. cit., pp. 111-12. 89. B. Smith, op. cit., p. 253. 90. Essays, p. 548. 174 The Second Phase of the Dispute Atlantic; perhaps its migrating inhabitants may be in the same predica- ment"- which is precisely what de Pauw had suggested. And with char- acteristic gloom Walpole concludes: "If my reveries are true, what pity that the world will not retire into itself and enjoy a calm age!"91 The same ideas, quite without any hint of deprecation, crop up again in Henry Hume, Lord Kames, one of eighteenth-century Britain's most interesting writers on aesthetics.92 When Kames had published his famous Elements of Criticism in 1762, at the age of sixty-six, Dr. Johnson, his junior by thirteen years, had greeted it with superior and condescending disdain: "A pretty essay, and [one which] deserves to be held in some estimation, though it is chimerical.""93 But Johnson's lack of esteem was cordially reciprocated by the Scotsman, who in the worthy company of Adam Smith and other learned Caledonians found that there was nothing to Dr. Johnson, "nothing but Heaviness, weakness and affected Ped- antry."94 And one should also remember that the cantankerous lexi- cographer showed a marked antipathy for Scotsmen in general, an antipathy which makes the exception of his benign attachment to Boswell seem almost paradoxical. But this was a trait he shared with Walpole, his enemy in every other field, but like Johnson ever willing to pour scorn on the claims of the Scots to put the forgeries of an Ossian or "creatures" like our Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, and Adam Smith, among others, on the same level as a Milton or an Addison, a Prior or a Gray.95 Here Kames finds himself in noble company indeed; and in fact he was not an insignificant "creature" at all, but a man whose brilliant if bizarre mind left its mark in other disciplines apart from that of aesthetics. Per- 91. Letter to Sir Horace Mann, 13 May 1780, ed. cit., VII, 364-65. Early in 1789 Walpole read de Pauw's work on the Greeks, and agreed completely with its slanders of the Greeks and its demolition of Lycurgus: "Mr. Pauw has proved it very doubtful whether any such personage existed; if there did, he only refined savages into greater barbarism" (letter to the Countess of Ossory, ibid., IX, 167, 171). Walpole admired Robertson, but found his History ofAmerica no more than an able compilation, lacking the acumen and fire of the History of Scotland, and he objected to the irony at the expense of the humani- tarian Las Casas (letter to W. Mason, 10 June 1778; ed. cit., VII, 81; cf. also letter of 23 November 1791, ibid., IX, 361). 92. Cf. Croce's frequent references, particularly Estetica (Bari, 1922), pp. 288-90, 383, 487, 501, 518, 525-26; Problemi di estetica (Bari, 1923), p. 283; Ultimi saggi (Bari, 1935), pp. 139-40, 206; Varieth di storia letteraria e civile, I (Bari, 1935), p. 146. Cf. also G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Drama- turgie, Allg. Bemerk., in Werke, ed. G. Witkowski, Bibl. Inst., V, 396-97; 0. Elton, A Survey of Eng- lish Literature, 1730-1780 (London, 1928), II, 120-22; A. Ralli, A History of Shakespearean Criticism (London, 1932), I, 33-34. 93. Boswell, London Journal, p. 261: quoted also with minor variations by J. W. Krutch, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1945), p. 212. Cf. also Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-69, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1956), p. 153. 94. Related by Boswell, ca. 1762, quoted in Krutch, op. cit., p. 220. Adam Smith had a copy of Kames's Sketches in his library (A Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith, ed. J. Bonar [London, 2d ed., 1932], p. 97); it was Kames who had induced him (1746) to teach literature at Edinburgh (A. Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. John M. Lothian [London, 1963], p. xiii); the Sketches is also referred to in the Wealth of Nations, ed. cit., p. 779. 95. Letter to Rev. William Mason, 5 February 1781, in Correspondence, VII, 111. 175 176 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD haps one should take with a pinch of salt the great admiration that the petulant Boswell always expressed for Lord Kames; Boswell gained help and protection from Kames, accompanied him on a tour of southern Scot- land, aspired to write books "like Lord Kames," addressed a letter to him which is an unlikely mixture of vanity and humility, and even hoped to become his biographer; but at the same time he did not hesitate to fill Kames's ears with praises of Dr. Johnson's intelligence, moral ardor, learning, and manly virtues; nor did he offer any resistance to the ap- proaches of Kames's only daughter Jean, who was no sooner married than she invited the twenty-two-year-old James to the delights of love. (He offered no resistance, but he did permit himself the luxury of some remorse, and resisted quite successfully the temptation to reveal every- thing to her husband; one is thus left in some doubt as to whether this need for confession may not have been motivated to a considerable ex- tent by his customary exhibitionism.)96 Even without Boswell's adulation there remains much that speaks in favor of Lord Kames, such as his weighty volumes on the law and his idea of applying chemistry to agriculture. The latter notion provoked the scorn of certain simple if sarcastic minds, who thought they were making a laughingstock of Kames when they said that he had tasted per- sonally all the manures with his fine philosopher's palate, so as to ex- tract therefrom an essence which would save him the trouble of hauling them down to the fields by the cartload;97 they seem to have been un- aware that in fact they were recognizing his achievement in having fore- seen the possibility of chemical fertilizers. But apart from all this he is deservedly remembered for his fearless opinions, his taste in the great historical and philosophical arguments, and his animated relations, some- times friendly, sometimes (as we have seen) more acrimonious, with the great figures of his time. He was an assiduous correspondent and con- stant admirer of Mrs. Montague, the famous "Queen of the Blues";98 in 1748 he took the twenty-five-year-old Adam Smith under his wing, and in 1771 entertained Benjamin Franklin at his home for five days.99 He earned a reply from Voltaire, and his lasting hostility, with cer- 96. See his Tour to the Hebrides, pp. 65n., 237, 362-63, and his diaries, esp. London Journal, pp. 10, 200, 323, n. 4; Boswell in Holland (New York, 1952), pp. 44, 87; Boswell on the Grand Tour (Lon- don, 1953), pp. 107-09, 164, 229. 97. See in Boswell in Holland, p. 87. The idea interested Jefferson (see Martin, op. cit., p. 10). But Liebig's fundamental theses on chemical fertilizers date from 1840, the earliest "superphosphates" from 1841. For the criticisms by Joseph Townsend (A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 1786) of Lord Kames's optimism on the inexhaustible fertility of the earth, see E. Halevy, Laformation du radicalisme philosophique, II, L'Evolution de la doctrine utilitaire de 1789 a 1815 (Paris, 1901), p. 145. 98. Mrs. Montague, Her Letters ... , ed. R. Blunt (London, n.d.), I, 154-55; II, 129-30 and passim (see index). 99. D. Hume, The Letters, ed. Greig (Oxford, 1932), II, 25 1n. The Second Phase of the Dispute tain charges in the Elements of Criticism.100 He maintained friendly relations with Thomas Reid, who at his request wrote a long critique of Aristotelian logic to insert in one of Lord Kames's works.10' But most notably he was one of the very first correspondents of David Hume, who as early as 1745 considered him "the best friend, in every respect, I ever possest" ;112 the friendship, although it later became noticeably less warm, lasted right up until the death of the great skeptic. 03 In his youth Hume addressed some of his finest letters to Kames, and later on was always ready to praise and advise or defend him and recommend his work to pub- lishers. It is actually from one such letter, to the publisher of the Sketches of the History of Man, that we learn that its author flattered himself that it would be resoundingly successful. Hume, doubting as ever, did not share "the prodigiously sanguine Expectations of the Author," but admitted that he might be mistaken, as he had been mistaken over the success of one of his friend's other books.104 And in fact the Sketches ran into at least five editions105 and are not completely forgotten even today. What does Lord Kames have to say about America and the Americans? It is a long book, some eleven hundred pages, and the New World and its natives are mentioned frequently in it. One entire essay is devoted to the origin and progress of the American peoples, with particular reference to the Mexicans and Peruvians.106 For the most part Lord Kames makes use of the data and examples drawn from America to support his ideas on polygenesis. His prime aim is the demolition of the antihistorical and climatic thesis which claimed that the varieties of the human species, all springing from the single couple Adam and Eve, could be explained in terms of natural factors. In his efforts to combat this thesis, which fixed each race in an unvarying immobility, the shrewd magistrate does not hesitate to trespass into heresy, insisting instead on the original diversity of races and even on the successive creation of the different races coexisting on the earth.107 100. Ibid., I, 436; Boswell, Grand Tour, pp. 108, 264, 273, 294; E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Austin, Tex., 1954), pp. 412, 487-88. 101. Sketches of the History of Man (Dublin, 1779), II, 184-262. 102. Letter of 15 June 1745, in New Letters, ed. R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner (Oxford, 1954), p. 17. 103. Mossner, op. cit., pp. 57-62, 118 (Hume submits his Treatise to Lord Kames), 410-12 and passim. 104. Letters, II, 289-90. For many other passages see the index of names, and, especially on the early years of the long friendship, see D. Hume, New Letters, pp. xiii-xiv, 1-10 and passim. 105. First edition: Edinburgh, 1774; the quotation is taken from the third "considerably improved" edition (Dublin, 1779); there exists a fourth, with additions, Edinburgh, 1788, and a fifth of 1807. Ger- man translation: Leipzig, 1778-83. 106. Op. cit., pp. 80-108. 107. For a prompt American reply (Philadelphia, 1787), see John C. Greene, "The American Debate on the Negro's Place in Nature, 1780-1815," Journal of the History of Ideas, 15, no. 3 (June 1954), 177 178 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD The Americans, in particular, must have been created in those "fertile and delicious plains [sic] of Peru and Mexico," which are found at the center of the continent and which were in fact densely populated when the Spanish arrived.'08 He supports this thesis with a prolix accumulation of trivia, vague probability, and circumstantial evidence, which betray a lifetime on the bench and call to mind the cutting reply he received from Lord Mon- boddo when he asked him if he had read the recently published Elements of Criticism (1762): "No, my Lord!" replied the defender of the orang- utan's humanity, "you write much quicker than I can read."'09 But whenever he is developing some theory of natural history Lord Kames adopts without question the theses of the great and unrivaled Buffon. Thus although he is familiar with Charlevoix and La Condamine, Gumilla and Bougainville, Garcilaso and Acosta and Ulloa, when he comes to the animals and men of America he still accepts the entire series of Buffon's disastrous propositions - that America was the last part of the world to emerge from the flood; that it has neither lions, nor tigers, nor panthers, nor other quadrupeds found in the warmer climate of Asia; that the natives, however brave under torture (passive courage), are lacking in active courage; that "there is not one single hair on the body of any American"; and that the savages are barren because they are frigid, both men and women, and because in particular "the males are feeble in their organs of generation," just as the animals, both indigenous and im- ported, "are of a diminutive size, compared with those of the Old World," while the Creoles surrender to the climate and degenerate irremediably, quickly lose and never regain their strength, their good looks and their agility, and are even soon reduced to speaking in undertones, with long and frequent pauses. South Carolina is the only exception to this rule: "Europeans there die so fast that they have not time to degenerate."'° For a man as capricious as Lord Kames, a man who prided himself on his originality-his friend Hume in 1751 called him "surely the strangest man in the world,""' and William Graham in 1764 described pp. 384-85, n. 2, and William H. Hudnut III, "Samuel Stanhope Smith, Enlightened Conservative," Journal of the History of Ideas, 17, no. 4 (October 1956) esp. pp. 544-45. Kames had already ventured into heresy with his Essays on Morality and Natural Religion (1751), on which see J. M. Robertson, A Short History of Free-Thought (London, 1915), II, 186, the letters of Hume and those of Mrs. Montague, cited above, nn. 98 and 99, and Mossner, op. cit., pp. 336-53. His "heresy," anything but frivolous, was to suggest that free will does not exist, but that the Divinity wisely rooted in man the belief that he was free. 108. Sketches, II, 86. 109. Knight, op. cit., p. 28; for certain of Kames's scientific ideas, cf. ibid., pp. 97-98. 110. This apparently happens especially in the area around "Charlestown," because there is no "sea- breeze to cool the air" (op. cit., I, 12). But Charleston, the only city in South Carolina that Kames can be referring to (Charlestown is in West Virginia), is a well-known seaport. For the other expressions, see I, 26, 28; II, 80-81, 84-85, 88-89. 111. Letters, I, 162; also "the most arrogant Man in the World" and "an iron mind in an iron body" (Mossner, op. cit., pp. 410, 412). The Second Phase of the Dispute him as "the most unequal-tempered man alive"12 -this total acceptance of Buffon may seem quite inexplicable; but it can probably be explained by the simple fact that it was the very paradoxicality of these ideas which led them to be accepted so unquestioningly by the man who had put forward the so much more striking paradox that the Americans, like every other human species, are a race sui generis. VI. TWO SUPPORTERS OF DE PAUW: DANIEL WEBB AND ANTONIO FONTICELLI In England, then, de Pauw's ideas were to fall on fertile ground. There the myth of the Noble Savage had decayed rapidly, and with the outbreak of the Revolution in France even the radicalist Mother Nature was losing ground before the majesty of long-established institutions, the authority of the past, the slow constructive work of history. So de Pauw, in his slander of the savages, had hit on a formula that could not help but find favor among the English, with their traditional hostility for the Span- iards, their recurrent anti-Catholicism, and even their quite recent an- tagonism toward the Americans. True, that inverterate anglophobe, Thomas Jefferson, writing to an English friend in 1788, expressed his pleasure that the calumnies on American nature had not taken root in England: "I must do the justice to those of your country to say they have given less than any others into the lies of Paw, the dreams of Buffon and Raynal, and the well-rounded periods of their echo Robertson."1ll3 But it is none the less true that no British writer took it upon himself to attack de Pauw, that many Englishmen tacitly appropriated his theories for themselves, that the echoes of de Pauw are frequent in the romantic poets like Keats and Moore, and that de Pauw's frankest admirer was in fact an Englishman too, Daniel Webb. Webb, like Lord Kames, is known chiefly for his ideas on aesthetics, and of course for his bizarre derivation of the Greek language from Chi- nese;114 but he also compiled a sort of annotated anthology of de Pauw's Recherches, which he published first in 1789 in a limited edition of a mere fifty copies for his friends, and again in 1795 in a commercial edi- tion."15 His comments are almost always in the form of unrestrained 112. Boswell, Grand Tour, p. 264. 113. Letter to Benjamin Vaughan, 23 July 1788; Papers, XIII, 397. 114. See B. Croce, Estetica, p. 299; Problemi di estetica, p. 390; Elton, English Literature, 1730- 1780, II, 135-36: Cordier, op. cit., I, 26. 1 15. The former is entitled Selections from les Recherches philosophiques sur les Amdricains of M. Pauw, by Mr. W. .... (Bath, 1789); the latter Selections from M. Pauw, with additions by Daniel Webb, Esq. (Bath, 1795). The first has 211 pp., the other, with small additions (introduction, pp. 31-32, 56) has 235. To the latter is sometimes added, with fresh pagination, a Sequel to the Selections from Pauw, in notes; and later Webb also published A general history of the Americans, of their customs, manners and colours. An history of the Patagonians, of the Blafards, and white Negroes. History of Peru. An history of the manners, customs, etc. of the Chinese and Egyptians, selected from M. Pauw by Daniel Webb, esq. (Printed by and for T. Wood, Rochdale, 1806). 179 $19.95 The Dispute of the New World The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 ANTONELLO GERBI Translated by Jeremy Moyle When Hegel described the Americas as an infe- rior continent, he was repeating a thesis that had inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. Originally formulated by the eminent natural scientist Buffon and rapidly expanded by the Prussian encyclopedist Cor- nelius de Pauw, this provocative thesis drew immediate response from politicians and philosophers, publicists and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic, reaching a crescendo in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and reverberating well into the nineteenth, is still far from extinct today. The Dispute of the New World is the defini- tive study of this debate by a specialist in politi- cal and intellectual history. Dr. Gerbi scrutinizes each separate contribution to the debate, unrav- els the complex arguments, and lays bare their inner motivations. As the history of the polemic (Continued on back flap) xviii Prologue in Santo Domingo "is not to be found in the plant, nor in the earth... but in human industry and in the laziness of the men."" It is the device of the slothful to excuse themselves by accusing nature. Nature is not better on this side or that side of the Atlantic. She has no absolute preferences or antipathies, pays no heed to the vaunted claims of the furrow or the grain, and does not stoop to flatter those poor vain hopes of a supremacy whatsoever, the idola tribus and idola fori, puffed up with the eternal boastful arrogance of nations and worlds. 3. FernAndez de Oviedo, Historia general Y natural de las Indias, VIII, 24, ed. Amador de los Rios (Madrid, 1851-55), I, 310a. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD panegyrics. Even when he mentions having doubts or reservations,"' he does so "with the greatest respect for the genius and learning of M. Pauw."117 And in republishing the work this kind of praise is laid on more thickly; he had written before, for instance: "This statement of the subject is ingenious; it is happy.""'1 Now this seems insufficient, and he adds: "Lively and profound; the genius of Pauw could reconcile the an- tithesis, and blend the vivacity of Montesquieu with the depth of Aris- totle. When he seems to play on the surface, he is at the bottom of the subject."""11 As Webb reaches the end of the work he feels he cannot take leave of his author without expressing once more his profound re- spect for de Pauw's intelligence and learning, his critical acumen in mat- ters which are subject to proof and the ingenuity of his conjectures in those which are not.120 One can hardly hope for any useful observations from such an en- thusiast. Even if he repeats the usual parallel between the savages and European soldiers-of Marshal Turenne in the Palatinate: "could a Huron or an Iroquois have done more?"- he still looks on the primitive races as the rejects and victims of Nature. One can only smile at his pronouncements on the subject of cranial deformations, when he states that this is the savage's way of avenging himself for the cruel injustice which Nature has shown him "by defacing the fairest example of her art."' 2 As if the savage's head were not an integral part of that body in which Nature had so misused him! Antonio Fonticelli merits little more than passing mention, but one may refer to him here together with Webb, both because his small volume'22 appeared between the first and second editions of Webb's Selections, and also because he provides the exact Italian counterpart to the Englishman's uncritical compilation. Americologia is an original title, but the promise it contains is not 116. For example, pp. 6, 65-66, 87, 89, 122, 131, 141, etc., of the Ist ed.; some, for example those on p. 6, are suppressed in the 2d ed. 117. ist ed., p. 61. 118. Ibid., p. 108; cf. p. 12. 119. 2d ed., p. 112: a footnote admits the plagiarism of the expression from Voltaire! 120. 1st ed., p. 211, with reference to all de Pauw's works, including the most recent (1787) on the Greeks: cf. pp. 101, 153, 208. 121. 1st ed., p. 49. It is also curious to note the reason he gives for suppressing some pages on the cannibals: "The subject in general [sic!] is uninteresting [!], the details are often disgusting" (1st ed., p. 67). 122. Americologia, ossia osservazioni storiche e fisiologiche sopra gli Americani con un breve rag- guaglio delle ultime scoperte fatte dai Russi nel Mar Pacifico: Compendio di curiose notizie interessanti e scientifiche dato in luce da A, F. dedicato alla Societa Patria (Genoa, 1790). I have not been able to find any biographical details on the author, who was apparently afraid of the censors (pp. 5-6), possibly practiced medicine (pp. 6-7), and flattered himself that his work would run to a second edition (p. 19). No details on this mysterious personage are furnished by G. Rosso, "L'interesse americanista nell'Italia del settecento e i'americologia di Antonio Fonticelli," Bollettino del Civ,ico Istituto Colombiano (Genoa), 1, no. 2 (April-June 1953), pp. 69-73. 180 The Second Phase of the Dispute fulfilled. From the epigraph (" 'studio disposta fideli,' Lucret.") lifted directly from the Recherches philosophiques, right through to the penulti- mate article (the last one deals with the discoveries in the Pacific by the Russians), there is scarcely an article in the Americologia that is not a translation or rehash of the work of de Pauw. Fonticelli makes no secret of this: "My book has nothing whatsoever new about it," he says. But he refrains from spelling out the name of the author whose work he has ransacked. "Many things bear some relation to what may be read in three volumes printed in another language,"123 he continues; here he seems only to be claiming a certain merit for himself as translator, but then one fails to understand why he should call upon the Societa Patria (to whom he also dedicates the work) to provide their protection for his tract against "the slander and satire that are customarily hurled at na- tional productions." The Americologia cannot really be called a national production. Fon- ticelli's own contribution is limited to the insertion of a list of the prin- cipal discoverers and conquerors of America (freely sprinkled with er- rors), a comparative survey of the American colonies and states, a compendium of American imported products and some vegetables "which should be known in Europe," and finally two brief biographies, of Colum- bus and Vespucci (pp. 18-24). Following this there is a jumbled con- glomeration of extracts from here and there in the Recherches, not excluding the most lurid passages, interlarded with occasional unedifying comments from Fonticelli; a section on sailors' tattoos (p. 35); two brief articles on coffee and cocoa (pp. 38-42); a variety of comments of socio- political nature on work and idleness (pp. 67-71); a brief list of the largest and heaviest diamonds known (pp. 106-07); and the work winds up - reiterating the view that the Americans are "stupid, ignorant and brutal" (p. 119), to the extent that they have even remained indifferent to the devoted attention and instruction of the Jesuits- with a typical little sensible savage's sermon, in which the "poor Caribee" gently reprimands the European for his thirst for gold, reminds him of the dangers of long voyages, and offers him Horace's old advice to be content to live out his days quietly at home!124 This incongruous accretion alone would be enough to show how impervious Fonticelli was to the problems and argu- ments of the American dispute; and, by the same token, it reveals his pamphlet for what it really is - a mere exercise in academic or rather journalistic composition. 123. Americologia, p. 5; cf. p. 10. 124. The motto repeated on the frontispiece and the last page is also taken from Horace (Epistolae I, 1, 45): Impiger extremos currit mercator ad Indos-"The eager merchant hastens toward the distant Indies." 181 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD VII. THE LONG-LASTING ANTAGONISM BETWEEN SPANIARD AND CREOLE If de Pauw had no enemies in England, in Spain he found himself without a single friend. This is explained partly by the same causes (his disparagement of the conquistadores, the missionaries, and the continent itself, so great a part of which was known as Spanish) having the op- posite effect, and partly by the way in which other age-old arguments were merging into the dispute, giving it a new and bitterly impassioned tone, and also, by a curious paradox, providing de Pauw with some in- voluntary and reluctant allies, if no actual supporters. In the very earliest decades of Spanish administration in the Indies there had arisen a serious internal conflict, the result of a spontaneous rift within the ranks of the conquerors: the conflict between Creoles and Spaniards (known also as chapetones, gachupines, and godos), or be- tween white men born in the Indies of white parents, and white men who had arrived in the Indies from the mother country. It was this long- standing and constantly rekindled antagonism that finally razed to the ground the entire dilapidated superstructure of the Spanish American empire; the rift was renewed as each generation of Spaniards became Creole, even as a fresh generation of Spaniards was arriving. The viru- lence and bitterness of the dispute only increased as the Creole caste became more firmly established and more strongly unified, at first in stubborn defense of their rights, and later in fighting back against the con- tinuous influx of their compatriots, all anxious to make their fortunes in America, greedy for their share of the rich profits reaped by the earlier colonists, and often disdainful of the character and capabilities of the Creoles. The conflict therefore did not have the fixed and fatalistic quality of a racial clash. Spaniards and Creoles were both white, pure-blooded, of undefiled peninsular lineage. In fact in the matter of nobility the Creoles could often boast of more illustrious ancestors than the Spaniards re- cently arrived from Europe. As for money, it was quite normal for these gentlemen of the Indies to be considerably wealthier than the hidalgos and the royal officials; and for the latter on the other hand to arrive with a more voracious appetite, a conscious desire to get rich, very rich, and quickly; in short to display a harshness and energy considerably in ex- cess of the Creoles, by this time satiated and exhausted, having often intermarried with the natives and become absorbed in the seven blessings of idleness. The distinction then was not ethnic, economic, or social, but geographi- cal. It was based on a negative jus soli, which took precedence over the jus sanguinis. A man born in the Indies, because of this single fact, found 182 The Second Phase of the Dispute himself set apart from and subordinated to his countrymen, with whom he had everything else in common: the color of his skin, his religion, history, and language. If he was an official his chances of reaching the higher levels of the administration were only a fiftieth of those of a Spaniard. If an ec- clesiastic, he might become a curate or rector, but the majority of the bishops and archbishops disembarked from Spain with their miters al- ready on their heads. Solorzano states the case quite plainly: "Despite the many good qualities that they [the Creoles] possessed, they could never hope for more than the crumbs from the table."'25 VIII. THE PRIDE OF THE CREOLES It is not difficult to see how this rift between Spaniard and Creole con- tained the seeds of the polemic that was to reveal itself more clearly and to become more bitterly fought out in the second half of the eighteenth century. The natives of America were considered inferior to those of Europe. And not because they came of inferior stock. There was only one possible way of justifying this inferiority - by attributing it entirely to the Creole's surroundings, the climate, the milk of the Indian nurses, and other such local factors.'26 Many of the "calumnies" of the new continent derive originally from the jealously exclusive attitude of those born in the peninsula, and their consequent "disparagement" of the Creoles, almost as if the Creole's place of birth made him guilty of some crime and robbed him of every privilege he had acquired for himself by conquest or in- heritance. "Climate" was stronger than "race," or as the nineteenth century put it, "geography" overcame "history." The European despised the Creole. But the Creole replied resentfully by showing his passionate enthusiasm for his land. Thus his patriotism was born in the form of legitimate reaction; naturalistic in premise, it revealed itself as an attachment to the "country," to the land itself rather than to any traditions, as pride in the American soil. Mancebos de la tierra, "offspring of the land," the Creoles were once called.127 And the first signs of their independence came with the societies of the A mantes del Pais, "the lovers of the country," societies whose avowed aim was a reverent understanding of their mineral resources, climatic peculiarities, 125. There were 18 Creoles out of 754 viceroys, governors, etc., of Spanish America; 105 Creole bishops (other authorities give 278 or 287) out of 706. 126. The honest Sol6rzano (De Indiarum jure, 1629-39; translated into Spanish under the title Politica indiana, 1648) had already denied the validity of this type of argument, explaining the vices of a few Creoles in terms of a specific inferiority of the Americas (see Madariaga, op. cit., p. 477). See also the reprint of his defense De los criollos y su Calidad y condiciones, y si deben ser tenidos por espahioles, in the Revista de la Faculdad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales (Buenos Aires), 5, 21-22 (1950), pp. 1309- 1414 (summarized in Revista de Historia de America, 32 [1951], p. 357). 127. A. Rosenblat, La poblacidn indigena de A mdrica desde 1492 hasta la actualidad (Buenos Aires, 1945), p. 265. 183 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD and indigenous flora and fauna. On the eve of independence, they already had no hesitation in calling themselves quite simply "American."128 This specific expression of a feeling for the land was so spontaneous that it emerged not only in Spanish America but also in the English col- onies. Pride in being American took shape as men began to boast of the physical blessings of their country, instead of glorying in some historic heritage or mythical antiquity. The Americans could not pride themselves on their past, the colonial past of recent times or the obscure theocracy of the more distant ages of tribal life and the native dynasties, an age anything but progressive or illuminated; a shapeless and lifeless past, in fact, totally out of tune with the new ideologies of humanity, tolerance, and civil liberty. What they could glory in was the richness and vitality of their natural surroundings; in their land Nature was fresh, luxuriant, plentiful in every kingdom, seeming to give abundant promise if not actual guarantee of a future that would know no bounds. The antihistorical elements in eighteenth-century political philosophy favored the ac- ceptance of such a vision in areas relatively lacking in history or else ignorant of their history, as yet untouched and thus ready to be molded according to the new schemes of reason and enlightenment, though still possessed of a firm faith in their own wealth, natural perfection, and most blessed virginity. The acclaim of the unquestionable richness of the New World in precious metals also frequently led on to the defense of the intellectual gifts of the Creoles, their religious virtues and scientific skill, their right to govern themselves and compete with the Europeans. This pro- fusion of gold and silver seemed an irrefutable argument of the generous disposition of the land, a sure sign of its lavish fecundity in every type and quality of intellect, of heroic mind and faith, a promise of abundance in the glorious field of the spirit too. Garcilaso in 1617 found it logical, according to his own optimistic and baroque logic, that "a land so well endowed with rich minerals and precious metals ... should breed veins of noble blood and mines of understanding."'129 Father Oliva (1631) and Father Calancha (1638) presented their biographies of virtuous Jesuits 128. Madariaga, op. cit., pp. 669-70. The Creoles too called themselves espaioles, but in antithesis to europeos (the Spaniards of Spain!). Among the innumerable descriptions of the phenomenon suffice it to mention Juan and Ulloa, Noticias secretas de America (ca. 1750; London, 1826), I1, 329; II, 93-95, and Robertson, History of America (1777), II, 366-67. On the societies of the Amigos del Pai's, see Jean Sarrailh, L'Espagne eclairee de la seconde moitie du XVI11 siecle (Paris, 1954), pp. 223-85; Richard Herr, The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958), pp. 154-63, 355-57; Robert J. Shafer, "Ideas and Work of the Colonial Economic Societies, 1781-1820," Revista de Historia de America, 44 (1957), pp. 331-68. On the telluric pride of the Creoles, see Minguet, op. cit., p. 263. 129. Prologue to the Historia general del Perd (second part of the Comentarios reales, 1617; Buenos Aires ed., 1945), I, 10. 184 The Second Phase of the Dispute and Augustinians of Peru as spiritual treasures in no way inferior to the treasures of gold and silver.'30 Fra Juan de Melendez gave his collected histories of the canonized and beatified Dominican fathers of Peru the al- lusive title Real Treasures of the Indies (1681-82). And Francisco Antonio de Montalvo (1683) stated his positive expectation that Peru would give "more Saints to Heaven, than Silver to the Earth."'3' In time such pious hopes gave way to simple boasting, and the praises of America as a land "no less rich in noble intellects than in precious metals"132 became ever more frequent. One can detect the same sort of ideological-economic linking of metallic treasures and the values of the faith in the apologists of forced labor among the natives, whose arguments went something like this: without mita, no mines; without mines, no silver; without silver, no possi- bility for Spain of defending her overseas possessions or maintaining missionaries there!'33 It was a rough choice for the indios-to commit their mortal bodies to the pits or their eternal souls to hell! Any criticism of the soil, climate, or nature of America thus offended the innermost sensibilities of the Creoles, who had built their newfound faith and all their highest hopes precisely on the power of that same Nature. Every reference to any sort of weakness or insufficiency in the New World seemed to have as its main intent the undermining of their self-esteem, the tightening of the chains that bound them. In every theory that talked of degeneration, the Creole could see only an insult to him- self, a pedantic and provocative sophism designed to convince him of his own inferiority in regard to the European. 130. Anello Oliva, Historia del Perd y varones insignes en santitad de la Cia. de Jesus (1631; Lima ed., 1894), xi, xvi, 137-46. The souls of the natives are the true silver treasures of the Indies, the six- teenth-century missionaries had already said (Hanke, Aristotle and the Indians, p. 20). 131. F. A. Montalvo, El sol del Nuevo Mundo (Rome, 1683), p. 16b; cf. ibid., p. 95a. In much the same way an English preacher had suggested (1610) that the Indians should be converted by barter and trade, by buying from them "the pearles of earth" and selling them "the pearles of heaven" (quoted in H. M. Jones, Strange New World, p. 191). In 1668 Joseph Glanville in his Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of Science since the time of Aristotle (in defense of the Royal Society) considered it likely that science, supported by artillery, would in time "inrich Peru with a more precious Treasure than that of its golden mines" (quoted by Roy S. Wolper, "The Rhetoric of Gunpowder and the Idea of Progress," Journal of the History of Ideas, 31, no. 4 [October-December 1970], p. 597). For other British antitheses (Lowley, 1656) between metallic (American) treasures and spiritual (British) treasures, see Blanke, op. cit., p. 178. 132. Examples from 1674, 1705, 1730, and 1737 are found just in J. J. Eguiara y Eguren, Prdlogos a la Biblioteca mexicana, pp. 133-34, 140, 187, and cf. ibid., p. 113. See also my study on Diego de Le6n Pinelo contra Justo Lipsio, nn. 13, 32, and 61. On the relationship in America between cultural develop- ment and material prosperity, see Bolton and De Gandia, in Do the Americas Have a Common History? ed. Lewis Hanke (New York, 1964), p. 132. The metaphorical equation: metals = treasures (of the spirit) enjoyed considerable success in baroque Europe too: see Mario Boschini, Le Ricche Minere della Pittura Veneziana (Venice, 1664 and 1674; reworked by A. M. Zanetti, Venice, 1733); Boschini was also author of I Giojelli Pittorici, virtuoso ornamento della citta di Vicenza (1676). 133. See K. V. Fox, "Pedro Mudiiz, Dean of Lima, and the Indian Labour Question," Hispanic American Historical Review, 42, no. 1 (February 1962), pp. 63-88, esp. 79-80. 185 186 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD IX. THE DEFENSE OF THE CREOLE: GARCILASO AND FEIJOO Now when even certain brilliant and learned Europeans had rejected and disproved the supposed inferiority, the Creole himself would hear no further mention of it. Garcilaso, the .Peruvian son of a Spanish official and an Inca princess, had begun his Royal Commentaries with the state- ment that one spoke of an Old and a New World only because the latter was discovered by the former "and not because they are two, but all one"; and he dedicated the second part of the work to "the Indians, half breeds, and Creoles," in the hope that thus "the Old and Political World may understand that the New, although barbaric in the opinion of the Old, is not so, nor has it ever been so, except in its lack of culture."134 In these same years Lope de Vega showed his high opinion of the "rare and subtle intellects" of the Americans.'35 And little more than a century later, Garcilaso's "lack of culture" had already been transformed into a highly developed culture, more splendid indeed in America than in Spain. Father Feijoo-known as the Spanish Voltaire or the Spanish Bayle, although he might be more accurately described as the Spanish Fontenelle (and not only because of his longevity)- took issue with the current opinion according to which the Creoles "become senile before they are actually old." He went on from there to an animated defense of "the excellency of American intellects," among which he then found "the intellects of Lima to be most excellent";136 it was in fact this par- ticular apology that brought down on his head the sarcasm and pity of de Pauw.137 In his letters on the Population of Spain, Feij6o repeated with obsequious humility "that the development of every area of the field of letters among those who are not teachers by destiny is more rich in America than in Spain." 38 And again in the Intellectual and Comparative Map of the Nations he returned to this flattering comparison: "Many have observed that the Creoles, or sons of Spaniards born in that land, 134. Pr6logo to the Historia general del Perd, 1617. Note the derogatory use of "political" in op- position to the young and barbarous world. Justus Lipsius had (in 1605) described America as barbarous, because it had no universities: his words were misunderstood and denied (1648) by the chancellor of the University of San Marcos in Lima, Diego de Leon Pinelo. After him the intellectual capacities of the Peruvian Creoles were defended (ca. 1760) by Jos6 Eusebio de Llano Zapata (for whom see my Viejas polemicas, pp. 239-52). Those of the Mexican Creoles had already found champions in the sixteenth century (Juan de Cairdenas), in the seventeenth century (Carlos de Sigiienza y Grngora), and the eight- eenth (Velasquez de Leon). Toward the end of the century Concolorcorvo, having spent forty years studying "the particularities of the intellects of the Creoles," could assert: "I find no difference, in a general comparison, from those of the peninsular" (El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, 1773, ed. Paris, 1938, p. 324). 135. See quotations in M. A. Morinigo, Amdrica en el teatro de Lope de Vega (Buenos Aires, 1946), p. 211. 136. Obras escogidas (Madrid, 1863), pp. 155a, 159b. For the Fontenelle-Feij6o parallel, see Marce- lin Defourneaux, L'lnquisition espagnole et les livres fran!Vais au XVII'" sircle (Paris, 1963), p. 131 and n. 4. 137. Recherches, II, 165-66; "Amerique," I, 351a. 138. Obras escogidas, pp. 594-95. The Second Phase of the Dispute 187 are of greater intellectual vitality and agility than those produced by Spain."'13 And in referring to the natives too, Father Feij6o maintained "that their capacity is not in any matter inferior to ours."'140 In considering these solemn pronouncements of Feij6o one must of course make certain allowances for his constant involvement in the po- lemic against the ignorance, arrogance, and backwardness of his country- men.141 But we can still easily understand the vast reputation and long- lasting popularity of the Benedictine father throughout Spanish America, from Mexico and the Antilles to the River Plate. By 1730 he had re- ceived the praise and thanks of Mexico, and by 1732 the same of the city of Lima.'42 And although from 1759 onward his books were the object of frequent attention from the Mexican Inquisition'43 his ideas influenced the reform of the University of Havana (1761),144 gained the enthusiastic appreciation of ecclesiastics in Guatemala,145 and were studied with last- ing pleasure by one of the foremost apologists of America-the Jesuit Clavigero (see below, pp. 196 ff).146 X. THE EXPULSION OF THE JESUITS One item which received repeated mention was the suggestion that the American mind both matures and declines early in life, a theory which had already been the object of detailed discussion and which continued to be so even after Feij6o found it to be without foundation.147 In 1746 Father Andr6s de Arce y Miranda took up Feij6o's thesis and passed it in to 139. Ibid., p. 90b. 140. Ibid., p. 90a. 141. "Let us not exaggerate the decadence of Spain in order to increase the merit of Feijoo," protests Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos espaiioles (Buenos Aires, 1945), VI, 90. For a balanced judgment see Mario di Pinto, Cultura spagnola nel Settecento (Naples, 1964), pp. 123-73. 142. On his correspondence with Peralta y Barnuevo, see D. Valcarcel, "Fidelismo y Separatismo en el Perdi," Revista de Historia de America, 37-38 (1954), p. 136. On his popularity in Peru, see Pablo Macera, "Bibliotecas Peruanas del Siglo XVIII," Boletin Bibliogrdfico de la Biblioteca de la Uni- versidad de San Marcos, 35, nos. 3-4 (1962), pp. 124-37; in Venezuela, see A. Millares Carlo, review in Revista de Historia deAmerica, 51 (June 1961), p. 210. In the North American colonies too his works were apparently quite widely read: cf. John Francis McDermott, Private Libraries in Creole Saint Louis (Baltimore, 1938), pp. 31-32, 44, etc. 143. M. L. Perez-Marchand, Dos etapas ideol6gicas del siglo XVIII en Mexico (Mexico, 1945), pp. 59-60, 171. Against the slander of those who find him "suspect in the faith," see Menendez y Pel- ayo, op. cit., VI, 104-05. 144. Agustin Millares Carlo, "Feijo en America," Cuadernos Americanos, 3, no. 3 (1944), pp. 157-59, citing J. M. Chac6n y Calvo, Literatura cubana, Ensayo critico (Madrid, 1922), p. 47. 145. H. Corbat6, "Feij6o y los Espafioles Americanos," Revista Iberoamericana, 5, no. 9 (May 1942), pp. 59-70, esp. 68-69. 146. See his biography written by his coreligionist and compatriot Juan Luis Maneiro, De vitis ali- quot mexicanorum (Bologna, 1791-92), III, 33, 39; and the passages cited in the anthology Humanistas del siglo XVIII (Mexico, 1941), pp. 183, 184. Some details of his influence in upper Peru can be found in G. Francovich, Lafilosofia en Bolivia (Buenos Aires, 1945), pp. 49-54. 147. A. Millares Carlo, "Feijdo en America," pp. 151 if.; and the prdlogo to his selection of the Teatro critico universal, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1923-25), I, 5-86 and III, 9-16; and the same to the popular edition of Dos discursos de Feij6o sobre America (Mexico, 1945), pp. xiii-xiv. 188 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Eguiara, corroborating it with further Mexican examples and at the same time defending "the purity of blood of the literate Creoles," who should not really be given that name: "The name Creole... besides being ri- diculous is denigratory and slanderous."'48 In his turn the fiery Aztec Eguiara y Eguren too produced an abundance of examples from Mexico to show that the minds of Americans not only do not decline prematurely but are even more startlingly precocious than Feijo allows.149 The shrewd Peruvian Concolorcorvo lent his support too, expanding (in opposition to Feij6o) the thesis of early maturity, and simultaneously rejecting (this time in agreement with Feij6) the thesis of early onset of old age; on the grounds, he says, that the thick and humid vapors of Lima tend rather to "fortify the brain."150 At most, the Mexican conceded, a certain dullness and laziness in learning "may perhaps be the custom in some part of Peruvian America."'151 The Peruvian, on the other hand, found that it was not altogether impossible to come across a certain de- cadence in, Mexican brains, accounted for by the dry climate of their capital. And not only their climate, alas, "the Mexicans cannot help but weaken themselves greatly with their frequent hot-water baths" !152 Feij6o's arguments against the theory of premature senility in the Creoles153 were taken up in Argentina and in Spain itself, while in the very year that the United States won her independence a doctor of that country took it upon himself to affirm the precocious intellectual develop- ment of children born in South Carolina.154 Even after the New World had begun to produce its own American-born defenders, among the first being the exiled Jesuits in Europe who were so directly opposed to de Pauw, Father Feij6o continued to have considerable influence by reason of his prestige as a European, a man of wide learning, and a man of the church. Thus it was primarily as a result of Feij6o's work that there began to be a reappraisal of the opinions on the degeneration of the Creoles, which might perhaps have led to a more accurate statement of the problem. But this revision of ideas was overwhelmed at its outset by the explosive 148. Efrain Castro Morales, Las primeras bibliografias regionales hispano-americanas-Eguiara y sus corresponsales (Puebla, 1961), pp. 30-33. 149. Eguiara y Eguren, op. cit., pp. 128-29, 134-49. 150. Lazarillo, p. 334. 151. Eguiara y Eguren, op. cit., p. 136. 152. Lazarillo, pp. 353-54. 153. See Ricardo R. Caillet-Bois, Las corrientes ideol6gicas Europeas en el siglo XVIII y el vir- reynato del Rio de la Plata, in Historia de la Nacion Argentina, vol. V (Buenos Aires, 1939), p. 11; and Juan and Ulloa, Relacidn histdrica, I, 4 (ed. Madrid, 1748, I, 47-48). On the falseness of the repu- tation for obscurantism and ignorance given to Spanish America by the philosophes (and combated by Humboldt), see Minguet, op. cit., p. 270. 154. Cited in Kraus, Atlantic Civilization, p. 267. The precocious development of the North Ameri- cans was affirmed again in 1835 by a German immigrant, who attributed it partly to the climate, partly to the greater liberty they enjoyed (A Mirror for Americans, ed. W. S. Tryon [Chicago, 1952], p. 165). The Second Phase of the Dispute force of the Buffon-de Pauw theories, reaffirming with apparent scientific precision the thesis of an inescapable decadence of men and animals in the New World. On the other hand the very year of the publication of the Recherches witnessed an upheaval that was to have a profound effect on the subse- quent course of the polemic: after a short stay in Corsica there were beginning to arrive in Italy, in the States of the Church (which had done everything in its power to avoid having to accept them), the Jesuits who the previous year had been expelled, or rather deported, from Spain and her American possessions; almost all of them were Creoles and among the outstanding representatives of the intellectual development of their native countries. They were men embittered by the harshness of their exile, resentful of the insults they had had to bear, and filled with a real and burning attachment to the lands from which they had been abruptly, even brutally, driven out; an attachment which one could not yet call pa- triotism, but which was certainly an essential element in patriotism, and in some cases even an embryonic form of it (inasmuch as it even included, alas, the seeds of the most narrow-minded nationalism). On their arrival in Europe, the fathers were surprised and aggrieved to find how far the anti-American "calumnies" had spread. These calum- nies offended not only their militant and strongly felt antirationalism but also the affection they felt for the lands where they had grown up and where many of them had taught for so many years. They had been re- duced to a state of wretchedness and exile by an ideology armed with political power, and now they found themselves faced again with the same ideology, this time masquerading as scientific truth and pitilessly, jeeringly disparaging the soil where their young order had won its first claims to glory and the peoples who had been dear to them and to whom the exiles undoubtedly looked back with nostalgia.155 After all, had it not been the Jesuit missionaries themselves who had created and spread abroad the legend of the Noble Savage of America? Had they not made themselves an obvious target for de Pauw's sarcasm for this very reason? It had been through their work, and particularly through their written relations, that the pastoral innocence of the classic idylls and the simple customs of the age of the patriarchs had come to life again in the forests of New France. It was through their work that the tradition of Ronsard 155. On the efforts and attempts of various Jesuits to return to America, see for example R. Vargas Ugarte, Jesuitas peruanos desterrados a Italia (Lima, 1934), passim, esp. pp. 160-62, and the pathetic appeal of four Chilean Jesuits exiled to Imola, failing in health and invoking the need to "breathe their native air" (quoted in Miguel Batllori, El abate Viscardo: Historia y mito de la intervencidn de los jesuitas en la independencia de Hispanoamerica [Rome, 1953], p. 123). But the ban was absolute; and they were even forbidden to communicate by letter with their countries (A. de Saint-Priest, Histoire de la chute des Jesuites au XVIII siecle [Paris, 1844], p. 62). On the recalcitrant patriotism of the Spanish fathers in exile too, see for example P. Hazard, op. cit., II, 246-47. 189 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD W THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD and Montaigne had lived on in the seventeenth century, that there had slowly been forged the "connecting link" between the wild cannibal of the sixteenth century and Rousseau's philanthropic man of nature. The Jesuits in particular had taken it upon themselves to explain the dis- concerting innocence of the savages, and not by suggesting, as others had done, that they were exempt from Original Sin-for which incon- trovertible "proof" had been found in the fact so much proclaimed as to become almost a cliche, that the female savages gave birth painlessly, in other words were exempt from the punishment inflicted on Eve (Genesis 3:16)'156- but by pointing out that the ownership of private property was quite unknown to them, since they lived in tribal communities, like monks in a monastery."57 And in Paraguay the fathers had even attempted, with some success, the synthesis of the monastery and the tribe, of Society and communism. The Jesuits had also provided descriptions of the natural life con- firming the opinion that America did have monstrous and ferocious wild beasts, particularly tigers, and melodious little songbirds too, and a profuse abundance of land that could be cultivated, and furthermore that European domestic animals multiplied prodigiously in America.158 On other occasions however, pushed by the need to glorify their own missionary efforts, they had become de Pauwians ante litteram, exag- gerating the horrors of American nature, the "marshy swamps" and "foul reptiles" that beset their apostolic path."59 Only by bearing in mind this complex of immediate and more distant causes can one fully understand the swiftness and forcefulness of the Jesuits' reaction to de Pauw, Raynal, and Robertson. In their attack on these minor lights of secular encyclopedism they brought to bear all the passion, all the technique of erudition that their order possessed, all the experience of lifetimes spent in America, bolstered by the firm convic- tion that they were fighting for a crucial point in the inseparable interests of truth, religion, and their motherland. These defenses and counterattacks by the Jesuits who had taken refuge 156. See examples in G. Atkinson, Les relations de voyages, pp. 130-33, and cf. below, pp. 243-44, 621-22. The men in turn sometimes figure as exempt from the pain of labor inflicted on Adam (Genesis 3:17). Both male and female, then, are without shame for their nudity, while Adam and Eve blushed with shame after the Sin (Genesis 3:7). On the presumed exemption of America from Original Sin, see R. Remond, op. cit., pp. 491-92, and, for its literary reflections in the nineteenth century, the whole of R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955). 157. G. Chinard, Les refugie's huguenors en Am,rique, "Le mirage americain" (Paris, 1925), pp. xiv-xv; Le reve exotique, passim; introduction to Lahontan, Dialogues curieux (Paris, 1931), p. 46 (the Jesuits as Lahontan's source); Zavala, America, pp. 23, 172; and particularly the cited work of J. H. Kennedy, Jesuit and Savage in New France. 158. See L. Muratori, 11 cristianesimo felice, passim. 159. See examples in Remond, op. cit., pp. 155-56. 190 The Second Phase of the Dispute in Italy had the incidental effect of providing their distant fellow country- men with a whole battery of national traditions and glories; a paradoxical result which Charles III could hardly have foreseen when he signed the expulsion order, and thought that by so doing he could strengthen his despotic and enlightened authority in both hemispheres. But it is a result that agrees well with, or rather parallels (on the doctrinal level), the prac- tical efforts made by a good number of the exiled Jesuits - who conspired even with the Protestant English- to overthrow the Spanish rule in the American colonies, and bring about their independence. When the great revolt of Tupac Amaru broke out in Peru (1781-83) the Jesuits could be seen burning with impatience and hate and making offers to the English to rouse Mexico too into revolt against Spain.160 In 1786 the Venezuelan hero Francisco de Miranda, his mind ever fixed on the idea of emancipa- tion, was busy in Venice and Rome compiling lists of names and ad- dresses of the ex-Jesuits exiled almost twenty years earlier and still living in Bologna and other cities, to show to William Pitt.161 XI. THE SPANISH JESUITS: FATHER NUIX MAKES USE OF DE PAUW There was thus bound to be a divergence of opinion on the subject of America between the Jesuits exiled from Spain and those removed from the overseas territories: the former steadfast in their acclaim of the metropolis, and so quite prepared to accept certain of de Pauw's argu- ments for the use that could be made of them in furthering their own cause, but still attacking the author as an enemy of Spain; the latter de- 160. G. G. Gervinus, Geschichte des XIX Jahrhunderts, vol. III (Leipzig, 1858), p. 38. On the con- tacts established between the British government and the Jesuits already by 1767, see the document published by Saint-Priest, op. cit., pp. 293-97, and Batllori, Viscardo, pp. 75, 77 n. 6, 93, 107-08, 137. It is also known, of course, that protection was offered to them by other non-Catholic sovereigns, such as Catherine II of Russia, and Frederick II, for whom it perhaps contributed to the reputation he earned in Italy as a crypto-Catholic (Goethe, Italienische Reise, 25 October 1786: ed. Leipzig, 1913, I, 115). 161. W. S. Robertson, La vida de Miranda (Buenos Aires, 1938), pp. 73-74, 105, 110-11, 192; Ma- dariaga, op. cit., pp. 774, 845, 869, 1004; and Batllori, Viscardo, p. 103. Menendez y Pelayo also affirms that "the expulsion of the Jesuits helped to accelerate the loss of the American colonies," but only because of the cultural and religious decay resulting in the colonies after their removal (Los hetero- doxos espaiioles, VI, 192-94). On the Jesuits in general as precursors of the Latin American emanci- pation, see for example the Jesuit Vargas Ugarte, Jesuitas peruanos, pp. 124-25, 129-30, and his polemic, centering on the figure of the Peruvian Jesuit Juan Pablo Vizcardo y Gusmin, with the Jesuit Miguel Batllori; while the Peruvian Vargas Ugarte tends to exalt the role of the fathers in the struggle for independence (see La "Carta a los espaiioles americanos" de d. J. P. Vizcardo y Guzmdn [Lima, 1955], esp. pp. xiii, 42-53, 79-82, in which he sees the consequent application of the Company's "democratic" and tendentially "monarchomachic" political theories), his coreligionist Batllori con- siders it a conventional myth, demolishes the figure of the exile Viscardo and denies that he knew, let alone followed, the "populistic" doctrines of Suarez and Mariana (see Viscardo, pp. 82, 147)-one more proof of the inextinguishable vitality of the diatribes whose story we are following. On the Jesuits of New Spain, in whom Mexican patriotism, born with Cortes and Las Casas, supposedly reached ma- ture and conscious form, see H. Corbat6, "La emergencia de la idea de nacionalidad en el M6xico co- lonial," Revista Iberoamericana, 6 (1943), pp. 377-92. On the converging of the cultural international- ism of the Company with the "native" pride of the exiled fathers, see M. Pic6n Salas, De la conquista a la independencia (Mexico, 1944), pp. 166-80, and Batllori, Viscardo,p. 83. 191 192 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD termined to reject the Prussian's slanders in toto and even suspecting the Spaniards of having prompted him to produce them. Such is the frequent fate of writers with the greatest aspirations to originality and paradox- to be taken over regardless by some political movement or other. They find themselves forcibly enrolled in the legions of propaganda, and this punishment of their impertinence is left as an example to posterity. Father Juan Nuix is an outstanding example of the attitude of the first group, the Jesuits exiled from Spain. More than ten years had passed since the publication of the Recherches when, after questioning more than a hundred American Jesuits in Italy,n2 he wrote his lucid but none too impartial Impartial Reflections on the Humanity of the Span- iards in the Indies, against the so-called Philosophers and Politicians, to serve as enlightenment to the histories of Messrs. Raynal and Robert- son (Venice, 1780). In the meantime the poison of de Pauw's thesis had passed into the much more widely known and respected writings of the abbe Raynal and the Rev. Dr. Robertson; but although the Jesuit father aims his attack primarily at these two- with some regard for the Scots- man and none at all for the Frenchman- he does not overlook Marmon- tel, too naive a follower of Las Casas, nor de Pauw, who is indeed ex- plicitly mentioned, among the authors who have recently attempted to besmirch the good name of Spain, by Nuix's brother Jos6, in his preface to the Castilian translation of the Reflections (Cervera, 1783).163 In point of fact Father Nuix's thesis is concerned solely with history and not with physical or geographical problems. The purpose of the en- tire book, right from the title (so redolent of Jesuit urbanity and eight- eenth-century philanthropy), is not only to exculpate the Spaniards from the accusations of cruelty toward the Indians but to show that they were much more humane than the humanitarians of the eighteenth century. They found the indios weak, certainly, but they managed to "give a much more just explanation for this weakness than did some of the recent philosophers":164 they attributed it to their meager and unnourishing 162. Op. cit., pp. 6-7 (Riflessioni imparziali sopra I'umaniti degli Spagnoli nell'lndie contro i pre- tesi Filosofi e Politici, per servire di lume alle storie dei signori Raynal e Robertson [Venice, 1780]. On Nuix, see Ezquerra, op. cit., pp. 232-35. 163. I have quoted some passages from this edition, which followed another (differently translated) edition from Madrid, 1782, with notes by P. Valera and Ulloa, also because it contains additions missing in the Italian edition, in which de Pauw, for example, is never mentioned. On these two translations and the success of the book, which was applauded in Italy and France (French ed., Brussels, 1788) but which in 1783 was still unknown in Spain, see the exchange of letters between Joseph Vega y Sentmonat and Juan Antonio Mayans, 5 and 12 August 1783, in Revista Critica de Historia y Literatura Espaho- las, Portuguesas v Hispanoamericanas, 6 (1901), pp. 103, 105. 164. Riflessioni, p. 131 (Spanish ed., p. 219). For this die-hard Hispanism of his (which includes a good dose of anti-Semitism: Riflessioni, pp. 190-91), Nuix, already called an odious sophist by Hum- boldt (Essai politique sur I'ile de Cuba [Paris, 1826], 1, 153 n. 1), was admired by Menendez y Pelayo, who deplored the fact that his work had fallen into complete oblivion (Obras completas, IX, vol. IV of the Estudios y discursos de critica hist6rica y literaria [Santander, 1942], pp. 29, 90-91; Los hete- rodoxos espaiioles, VI, 190); and redeemed and hailed by J. Juderias, La leyenda negra (Barcelona, The Second Phase of the Dispute 193 diet, not to any irremediable organic inferiority. And they were more humane in their general judgment too: "There has never been heard in Spain that which is calmly suggested in other areas, namely this Infamous comparison of the Savages with the Animals."" So the indios should consider themselves lucky to have been discovered and colonized actually by the Spaniards and not by the philosophers who criticize them so severely: "Oh wretched Americans, if the Spanish too had viewed you as Robertson and other philosophers did!"166 They denied the Americans any intellectual capacity, any moral judgment, leaving them as idiot children, or animals, for whom enslavement was the only right and proper fate. Thus Nuix defends the natives, but not because he has any sympathy for them. Nothing really interests Nuix except his own beloved Castil- ians.167 The natives, "the most cowardly men that have ever been seen in the world," 16 are no more than a mirror in which to reflect more gloriously the virtue and splendor of the kings and captains of Castile.69 It becomes clear then why Nuix is divided in his attitude toward de Pauw. On the one side he castigates him together with the other slanderers of the good name of Spain and wants to refute his "foolhardy" accusation that the dogs who hunted down the natives were in the pay of Spain or his imputations against Sepuilveda of having permitted their enslavement 1917). pp. 312-13. It is true that even an unshakable champion of Spain like Carbia (La leyenda negra, pp. 212-15) finds that Fr. Nuix's "impartiality" leaves much to be desired (on which see ad abundantiam Hanke, "The Requerimiento and Its Interpreters," Revista de Historia de America, 1 [1938], p. 31; Rosenblat, La poblacidn indigena, p. 15, n. 1; M. Batllori, "L'interesse americanista nell'Italia del Settecento. Il contributo spagnolo e portoghese," Quaderni Iberoamericani [Turin] 12 [1952], p. 167); but still in 1944, in the political climate of Francoist Spain, it seemed opportune to republish his book, with the abbreviated title La humanidad de los espaholes en las Indias (2 vols., Madrid, 1944) and a prologue-apology by C. Perez Bustamante (reviewed in Revista de Indias, 17 [1944], pp. 539-44), and again in 1963 the venerable Ram6n Menendez Pidal (El padre Las Casas, su doble personalidad [Ma- drid, 1963]), returned to his arguments to demolish the evidence of the Bishop of Chiapas (see L. Hanke, "More Heat and Some Light on the Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America," Hispanic American Historical Review, 44, no. 3 [August 1964], p. 327). Further proof still of how far from being extinguished are the polemics whose first steps we are here tracing. 165. Riflessioni, p. 298 (Spanish ed., p. 471). 166. Ibid., p. 303. A footnote to the Spanish ed. (p. 479) cites "the author of the Recherches, etc.," in other words, discreetly, de Pauw. 167. But let him not be suspected of exaggerated patriotism! He is a Catalan, and "possibly among all those famous adventurers of the Conquests, there was not a single Catalan" (Riflessioni, p. 4). But Sommervogel (Bibliotheque de la Compagnie de Jesus [Brussels-Paris, 1894], V, 1836), says Nuix was born in Toca, in Old Castile! 168. Riflessioni, p. 82: an echo from Robertson. 169. His thesis was taken up, and quoted (pp. 42-44, 47, 68, 75-76), by another Jesuit deported to Italy, Mariano Llorente, in his Saggio apologetico degli storici e conquistatori Spagnuoli dell'America (Parma, 1804), in polemic with the Vespuccian researches of Francesco Bartolozzi (1789), and his dis- dainful comments on the Spanish historians, but incidentally also with Raynal (pp. 47-48, 61-63), Robertson, Marmontel, and especially Las Casas. Buffon, who was very popular and much respected in Spain (see Sarrailh, op. cit., pp. 459-61) is mentioned for his praise of the missionaries on pp. 81-82. On other Jesuits who undertook to defend Spain, even against their coreligionists (like Clavigero), see Miguel Batllori, "L'interesse americanista," p. 167. 194 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD and extermination.'7" This was also the attitude of the Spanish Inquisition, which first placed de Pauw's book on the Index (31 January 1777) and then pronounced it (28 August 1777) "full of insult to the Spanish na- tion, principally to the conquistadores, treating them and everyone as Barbarians and thieves, cruel and inhuman";"' in other words the In- quisition too condemned its politico-historical ideas, which were not in the least original, and said nothing of its physicogeographical suggestions, whose novelty and extremism were nothing short of scandalous."72 But on other occasions Father Nuix finds it more convenient to make use of de Pauw; either, as we have seen, to show the benignly humane attitude of the Iberians in a better light, by contrasting it with the Prus- sian's cynicism, or else calling upon him to bear witness ex campo ad- verso to the good qualities of the Spaniards or the bad qualities of other colonists.'73 It was thus the incautious Nuix that initiated this use of de Pauw ad majorem Hispaniae gloriam, which in the end was to make him doubly suspect and repellent to the Creoles locked in battle with the mother country. XII. DE PAUW'S FIRST AMERICAN OPPONENT The reactions of the American Jesuits are of course much more signifi- cant. They were almost the avant-garde of Creole culture, and their vindications of America, though usually limited to the region from which each came- Mexico in the case of Father Clavigero, Chile for Father Molina, and the kingdom of Quito (now Ecuador) for Father Velasco- were taken over and repeated throughout the continent when echoes of de Pauw reached America too. But the very first American to react to the Recherches was not one of these at all. Preceding the Jesuits by al- most a decade was a polemicist completely unknown as such, although 170. Riflessioni, Spanish ed., pp. 394, 474. The former charge, abundantly proved by an eyewitness like Oviedo (Historia general y natural, XVII, 23, and XXIX, 3; ed. cit., I, 547, III, 9-10), was repeated by Las Casas and Montaigne (Essais, II, 12; ed. cit., p. 445), taken up in the eighteenth century by Marmontel and Raynal, and admitted and deplored even by a defender of Spain like P. Mox6 (for whom see below pp. 298 ff.), Cartas mexicanas escritas . . . en 1805 (Genova, n.d., but 1837-38), pp. 140-41. At the end of the eighteenth century an admirer of the North American frontiersmen coldly reports that "these Americans have trained English dogs to hunt the savages" (J. P. Brissot de Warville, Nouveau voyage dans les Etats-Unis [Paris, 1791], II, 428n.). Such a hunt seems to have been recommended as early as 1703: Pearce, The Savages, p. 23. 171. Archivo Histdrico Nacional, Madrid, Papeles de Inquisicion, Legajo 4465, no. 4, quoted by Hanke, "The requerimiento," p. 30, n. 7. The Spanish Inquisition condemned it in 1787 (Defourneaux, op. cit., p. 174). In its turn the Mexican Inquisition too censored de Pauw's book (Perez-Marchand, op. cit., p. 170, n. 2); and that of Lima confiscated it (J. Torre Revello, "Libros procedentes de expurgos en poder de la Inquisicion de Lima en 1813," Boletin del Instituto de Investigaciones Hist6ricas [Buenos Aires], 15 [1932], p. 342). Again in our own day Carbia (La leyenda negra, pp. 134-39) treats de Pauw merely as a belated exponent of the accusations made against the Spanish conquerors and colonists. He hardly refers to his thesis of the degeneration of America (p. 134, n. 194). 172. There is an analogous attitude toward Raynal, condemned for anti-Hispanism and tolerantism (Defourneaux, op. cit., p. 113). 173. See for example op. cit., Spanish edition, pp. 345n., 420, 486-87. The Second Phase of the Dispute very well known indeed on other counts. In 1771 Pernety wrote with satisfaction (and with his usual labored style): M. le Comte Orcassidas, a Creole, son of a viceroy of Mexico, majordomo of the king of Spain, at present in Berlin, continuing a journey through all Europe, undertaken for his instruction, having lived some considerable time in the New World, which he has covered almost in its entirety, with the same intention, is a living proof against M. de P. He has read his Recherches philosophiques and the Dtfense; he has declared, and still declares to whoever wishes to hear it, that their author is mistaken in almost all items, particularly on those which he makes the basis of his hypothesis. The count has seen at least a hundred thousand natives, of the north and south, and everywhere he found "the men extremely inclined for sex," and not one with milk at his breast; little hair, true, but this is because they remove their hair; and in short they are strong in body and mind. European fruits are better in America than in Europe. And the animals of like species reach such perfection there that the count's father had sent "several to the king of Spain, to try and breed such a fine race in Europe."'74 And who was this "Count Orcassidas"? He was Juan Vicente- firstborn son of don Francisco de Gue"mes y Horcasitas, Count of Revil- lagigedo, viceroy of Mexico from 1746 to 1755 -who pursued a military career in Spain and was later, from 1789 onward, viceroy of Mexico him- self, indeed "a great viceroy, one of the greatest that New Spain ever had": the same who rebuilt Mexico City, had the Pacific coast explored as far as the Bering Strait, and devoted his unflagging energy to the im- provement of the administration, education, finances, communications, defenses, and economy of his country.175 Is it not almost symbolic that the great Revillagigedo himself, while still traveling and studying in Europe, should have been the first "American" to rise up against the accusations of Buffon and de Pauw? And is there not just a hint of irony in the fact that the cook he brought back with him from Europe, the Frenchman Jean Laussel, should have fallen foul of the Inquisition, which in 1794 confiscated several of his books, among which an "In- teresting Memoir for the human race, with a dissertation on America and the Americans" - indubitably a copy of the notorious Recherches?176 XIII. THE AMERICAN JESUITS: FATHER CLAVIGERO But Count Orcassidas contributed nothing to the debate in writing. It fell to the Jesuit refugees to produce the first published testimony in 174. Dissertation, II, 524-26. 175. Madariaga, op. cit., p. 748; cf. the praises of C. H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York, 1947), p. 129. The father had another son, Antonio Maria, who was made a count in 1781 by Charles III, and pursued a career in the diplomatic service. 176. Spell, op. cit., p. 219. 195 196 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD defense of America."77 The most extensive and detailed of these is the voluminous Storia antica del Messico by Father Francesco Saverio Clavigero, published at Cesena in four large volumes in 1780-81, and quickly reprinted, translated into various languages, and widely read in both hemispheres, to the point that Prescott could later write that de- spite its longwindedness and the fact that it was bristling with Mexican terminology it created almost a "popular interest" in Aztec archeology. "7 The work of the learned Jesuit, who left Mexico with his confreres in 1767 to take up residence in Italy and translated into Italian and in that language published his history - "persuaded . . by certain Italian men of letters, who showed themselves extremely anxious to read it in their own language"79- remained the standard text on the ancient his- tory of Mexico for over half a century. But even later it continued to be one of the most widely known and approved histories relating to the 177. A little later a statesman of no less standing than Revillagigedo, Thomas Jefferson, aligned him- self with the Jesuits and published in Paris the first defense of North America (see below, pp. 252 ff.). And in Mexico, in Puebla de los Angeles, there also appeared the first American work on Rousseau, or rather against Rousseau, produced by a Dominican from Cuba, Christoval Mariano Coriche (Spell, op. cit., pp. 34-36). 178. W. H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, bk. I, ch. 2, conclusion (Mod. Lib. ed., p. 35). Cf. also Jean-Jacques Ampere, Promenade en Amerique (Paris, 1856), II, 316, 364. F. de Miranda (Raynal's critic) bought Clavigero's Storia in Rome to have it translated in England, and in 1787 pre- sented the copy to Prince Potemkine (W. S. Robertson, La vida de Miranda, p. 463). An English edition translated by Charles Cullen (who was helped by Clavigero) appeared in London in 1787, in two quarto volumes, and was reprinted several times also in America (Philadelphia, 1804; then Richmond, Va., 1806; London, 1807; Philadelphia, 1817): see A. La Piana, La cultura americana e 'lItalia (Turin, 1938), p. 162; Bernstein, Origins, pp. 58, 62 n. 40. German trans. (from the English): Leipzig, 1789- 90; Spanish trans.: London, 1826 and various reprints in Mexico (1844, 1853, 1861-62, 1868, 1883, 1917, 1944; on other unpublished Spanish translations, and for the original Spanish version, published in 1945 [2d ed. rev., Mexico, 1958, edited by R. P. Mariano Cuevas], see Revista de Historia de America, 26, p. 534, no. 8278), and C. G. I. (Cavazos Garza Israel), "Autores nuevoleonenses: Lic. Jose Alejandro de Trevifio y Gutierrez," Inter Folia (1959), n. 61, pp. 1-3 (Trevifio "left an unpublished translation of Clavigero's ancient history of Mexico"). In Madrid Clavigero's work could not get published, no doubt because of its "Creole" tendencies and its firm denunciation of the cruelty of the Spaniards-charac- teristics it shared with all the literature produced by the American Jesuits in exile (for its "caustic insults" to the Spaniards, cf. Vargas Ugarte, La "carta," p. 34). But Clavigero also finds a just nemesis in the enslavement of the inhabitants of New Spain. See in particular the conclusion to the Storia, where he points to the wretchedness of the oppressed Mexicans as God's punishment for the sins of their pre-Colombian ancestors, "a fearful example of divine justice and the instability of the kingdoms of the earth" (III, 233-34), apocalyptic in tone and sounding more Augustinian and Jansenistic than Jesuitical. On the question of a French translation, see Maneiro, op. cit., III, 68. Even a Dane wanted to publish it (1787) in his own language! (Maneiro, ibid.). The anonymous author of the preface to the posthumous Storia della California (2 vols., Venice, 1789) says that the Storia antica del Messico was translated into French, German, and English (I, 3). 179. Storia, I, 2. Clavigero already knew Italian, and in 1762 had translated from the Italian a life of St. John of Nepomuk (see Maneiro, op. cit., III, 49, and Sommervogel), but he had his translation checked by an Italian scholar (Maneiro, op. cit., III, 67). On the long travail he endured (including a trip in summer in an open chaise from Bologna to Modena, to consult a book, from which he returned with a split head after being pitched out of the conveyance, but still content, laetus admodum, with his literary expedition) see ibid., III, 63-67. Further biographical data appear in C. V. Callegari "L'abate F. S. Clavigero," Le vie d'ltalia e dell'America latina (July 1931); in Jose Miranda, "Clavigero en la Ilustraci6n mexicana," Cuadernos Americanos (Mexico), 28 (1946), pp. 180-96; and in Batllori, Viscardo, pp. 105-06. On his modernistic scientific ideas and his philosophical eclecticism, ante 1767, see B. Navarro, La introduccidn de la filosofia moderna en Mexico (Mexico, 1948). The Second Phase of the Dispute ancient Aztec monarchy and the conquest of Cortes.180 The learned Icazbalceta, writing sometime around 1852, described Father Clavigero as "the most popular of our writers and the most worthy of so being."'181 A. Fundamental aim of the work, the refutation of de Pauw. It is all the more interesting then that his Storia should have come into being in direct polemic with de Pauw. Clavigero in his preface actually mentions three motives which induced him to write it. But the first-the desire to overcome the boredom and "shameful loafing" of his state of enforced idleness - is somewhat generic and would hold true for any occupation he chose. The second-his yearning to serve his country-is certainly more definite and sincere but coincides substantially with the third, which is precisely the aim of "restoring to its ancient splendor the truth which has been so obscured by an unimaginable swarm of modern writers on America."'182 Love of country is the positive side of that same animus whose negative form is the indulgence in polemics against whoever slanders the motherland. Or rather love of country, we could say, is the sentimental prerequisite which is transformed into acts and writing and becomes concrete and belligerent when enlisted in the fight against these impertinent scribblers in Paris, Berlin, and Edinburgh who dared to diminish the power of nature in Mexico, or the native civilization, or even the whole American race. Clavigero's first biographer relates how he had already gathered a lot of material but not yet begun to write, when behold there began to spread throughout Italy, amidst great uproar, a muddled work entitled Philosophical Investigations on the Americans, by a certain German author from Prussia, whose style is fluent and not inelegant, but who misunderstands everything and errs at every step, even in the things that are clearer than daylight as soon as one sets foot in the New World. And this was what finally impelled Clavigero to ignore the difficulties and set to work, so that the truth might be established and defended and the history of the Mexicans properly portrayed.83 180. Cf. Prescott, op. cit., I, 1 (ed. cit., pp. 18-19), who gave currency to the term Aztec empire, ac- tually introduced by Clavigero, to indicate the ancient Mexican state (L. H. Barlow, "Some Remarks on the term 'Aztec Empire'," The Americas, I [1945], pp. 345-46). The poet Postl drew on Clavigero for a novel he wrote in 1843 (see E. Castle, Der grosse Unbekannte [Vienna, 1952], p. 470). In Italy too his work earned a lasting reputation which continued into the second half of the nineteenth century: see G. Rosa, Storia generale delle storie (1864; 2d ed. Milan, 1873), p. 379. Again in 1880 Carducci turned to it for some Mexican terminology and a few touches of local color for the ode Miramar (Manara Valgimigli, Carducci allegro [Bologna, 1955], p. 50). 181. Historiadores de Mexico, in Opiisculos y biografias (Mexico, 1942), p. 9. 182. Op. cit., I, iv, 1. 183. Maneiro, op. cit., III, 62-63. In a letter from Bologna to Mariano Fernandez de Echeverria y Veytia, of 25 March 1778, Clavigero informed him that his Dissertazioni were written to "rebut the errors of Mr. Buffon, Mr. Pauw, Mr. Raynal, and other celebrated authors" (quoted by O'Gorman, Fundamentos, pp. 118-19), and "to serve my country in as much as I am able" (quoted by J. Le Riverend Brusone, in the preface to the Mexican [ 1944] edition of the Historia, I, 8). Of the Recherches Clavigero knew the London edition of 1771, with Pernety's Dissertation and de Pauw's reply (IV, 8). 197 198 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD It takes no more than a brief glance at the Storia antica del Messico to see the accuracy of this. Of the four volumes that make up the work, the ten books of the history proper occupy the first three. The fourth (1781) and largest (almost 30 percent of the total) is dedicated to Count Gian Rinaldo Carli, another celebrated adversary of de Pauw (see below, pp. 233 ff.), and has nine dissertations on the earth, plants, animals, and inhabitants of Mexico, which constitute a formidable argument against de Pauw and, regarding the animals, Buffon, together with occasional shafts directed at Robertson'84 and Raynal'85 too. This last part in fact repeats in polemical and oratorical form what the first part had expounded in historical and didactic terms. Once he has established his truth in the "history," Clavigero descends to do battle with error in the "disserta- tions."186 De Pauw appears in the very first rank of the army of error. Already near the end of the preface de Pauw is cited together with Marmontel as the archetype of the foreigner who distorts the facts as an excuse "to be even more ferocious toward the Spaniards."187 And in a long note on the supposed circumcision of the Mexicans, Clavigero attacks "the low- minded and sarcastic author" of the Recherches, not only for his blatant errors and his lack of reverence for the Bible but also for "his diligence in the minute description of any subject that has some affinity with the obscene pleasures."'188 Another error to combat, and one that Clavigero finds himself running up against right from the first book of the history, is Buffon's thesis deny- 184. "Among modern writers on American matters the most famous and respected are Signor di Rainal and Dr. Robertson." But the former made "great blunders" about the present and is sceptical about all Mexico's past. The latter is also liable to error and contradiction, he "exaggerates the idiocy of the Conquistadors" and is mistaken in believing all sources to have been lost (I, 19-21). Against Robertson, who is however cited in other places as an authority, see for example I, 29n.; III, 3n., 9n., 17n., 19n., 25n., 38n., 42n., 85n., 128n., 200n.; IV, 185 if., 223-26, 236-38, 269-76, 286-87. In the fifth edition of his History (1788) Robertson replied to the criticisms made by the abbe, whom he had im- mediately (1782) dismissed in a private letter as "a weak and credulous bigot" (Humphreys, op. cit., p. 28). Clavigero had read carefully (potissimo studio) Feijdo (see above, p. 186), and knew Bacon, Des- cartes, and the "Americanum Franklinium" (Maneiro, op. cit., III, 51; and Humanistas del siglo XVIII, ed. Gabriel Mendez Plancarte [Mexico, 1941], p. 191); but he pays scant attention to Feij6o's thesis on how the Americas were populated (IV, 25). Against the chronicler Herrera: IV, 66-67, 103, 201. 185. See for example II, 189-90n.; III, 128n. 186. There are in fact some indications (a greater frequency of references to the former in the latter) suggesting that the Dissertations was written at least in part before the History. 187. Op. cit., I, 18. Of de Pauw's other opponents Clavigero knows and quotes Pernety (IV, 8, 171); mentions with disdain the "rancid" preadamite theories of the "author of a miserable little work entitled Le Philosophe Douceur, printed in Berlin in the year 1775" (IV, 15); quotes Molina with homage (IV, 73n., 96n., 97n.); and admires G. R. Carli, to whom he dedicates the Dissertazioni, but whose Lettere americane (II, 267) is reproved for its anti-Spanish bias. Obviously the viewpoints of the exiled Jesuit and the enlightened encyclopedist, allies though they were in the fight against de Pauw, could hardly coincide. 188. Storia, II, 73n.; cf. IV, 315: "that great Researcher of America's filth." Other incidental at- tacks on the ignorant and insolent "Researcher": II, 132n., 151, 172. De Pauw's obscenity is indubitable, but nobody had remarked on it before the Mexican Jesuit father. Europe of the 1770s was not easily shocked. The Second Phase of the Dispute ing the existence of lions, tigers, and rabbits in America. But his plan is already worked out, and he is not going to change it: this thesis, he says, is one "sufficiently contradicted by us in our dissertations," so that "it is not necessary to interrupt the course of our history to refute it."1 " The prologue of the Dissertations explains in fact that their intention is to dissipate the errors spread abroad by the "modern writers," and he goes on: "How many people, in reading, for example, the work of the Researcher, will not fill their heads with a thousand unseemly ideas and notions contrary to the truth of my history?" There follows a savage por- trait of de Pauw: He is a fashionable Philosopher, and erudite, and especially in certain matters in which he would do better to be ignorant, or at least to refrain from speaking of them [an allusion to his frequent digressions into scabrous topics]. He spices his discourse with buffoonery and gossip, ridiculing whatever should be respected in the Church of God, and sinking his teeth into whoever stands in the path of his inquiries, without regard for truth or innocence. He delivers his arbitrary deci- sions in magisterial tones, quotes the writers on America at every third word, and protests that his work is the fruit of ten years' labor. His aim is to convince the world "that in America nature is completely degenerate in the elements, the plants, the animals, and the men," and thus to put together a monstrous portrait of the continent. Clavigero has chosen de Pauw's work as his target and victim "because like a cesspit or sewer it has gathered in one place all the refuse, that is to say the errors of all the others." Nor will he be moderate in the expression of his disap- proval, since gentleness is out of place when dealing with "a man who slanders the whole New World and the most respected persons of the Old."190 Among other authors he will have to impugn the worthy Buffon, a man of very great qualities, but who sometimes erred, or forgot what he he said earlier, or neglected details, and who bases himself on the sup- posed impossibility of the animals proper to the climates of the Old World passing over to the New.191 In the first dissertation - "on the population of America and particu- larly that of Mexico" - Clavigero does in fact take issue with Buffon, in sustaining the thesis of a formerly existing land link between the New 189.. Op. cit. 1, 69-70. 190. Storia, IV, 5-8. Note that de Pauw, introduced literarily only "as an example," is promoted within the space of two pages to become the summary symbol of all the anti-American literature. Other ponderous witticisms at the expense of de Pauw, "whose brain seems to have a particular or- ganization for understanding things in a contrary fashion to all other men" (IV, 248), are dispatched by Clavigero with a certain schoolmasterly insistence. Cf. "if nothing of what we have said suffices to con- vince Sig. de P., I would charitably advise him to have himself removed to a hospital" (IV, 286); and an- other fleeting polemic allusion occurs when Clavigero shrewdly observes that "the Europeans never did less honor to their own reason than when they doubted the rationality of the Americans" (1, 120). 191. Historia, ed. M. Cuevas, I, 84-85. Cf. below, pp. 567-68. 199 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD World and the Old; and "the extravagant Researcher"192 is mentioned only in passing. In the second dissertation-on the "main eras in the history of Mexico"-he attempts to fix the chronology of its various ethnic strata and ancient sovereigns. But already by the third-"on the land of Mexico"-the polemic can no longer be held in check, and Clavigero bursts out against the thesis of the sodden or ill-dried-out continent, of America as "a completely new country," as Buffon would have it, and, following in his footsteps, de Pauw too ("who largely copies the sentiments of M. de Buffon, and where he does not copy him, multi- plies and enlarges the errors").'93 Against the thesis of the flooding of the continent, an earlier occurrence according to Buffon, and more recent and specific according to de Pauw, and against its dire physiological and psychological corollaries, even up to the "stupidity of the Americans and.., .a thousand other extraordinary phenomena, which he from his study in Berlin has observed better than we, who have spent so many years in America,"'194 Clavigero mobilizes arguments from the fields of geology, natural history, and political history. B. The arguments reversed. One polemical gambit with which Clavi- gero is well acquainted is to take the arguments adduced by the Euro- peans and turn them back either on Europe itself or on the Old World in general. If America had its own little private flood, the Old World had nothing less than the universal flood. How come its animals did not degenerate? How come its soil was not left sterile, and its women too? "Was Europe conceded everything good, and everything evil sent to America?"'9""5 The Europeocentrism of the Buffon-de Pauw theses is laid bare in all its crudity. But Clavigero's polemic never gets to the root of the issue; he plays with corollaries; he falls into the same error as his adversary when he tries to demonstrate the inferiority of the Old World with respect to the New;'96 and he even gives way to almost humorous arguments, like that put forward to refute "the philosophical chimera" of the flood, that if there is one country which would have been able to save itself from Noah's flood, this country is Mexico, since it is situated very high up above sea level, and in fact marine fossils are very rare there.'97 To refute the supposedly harmful effects of the climate, which de Pauw 192. Storia, IV, 21. 193. Ibid., p. 65. 194. Ibid., p. 68. The irony at the expense of the philosopher judging things from afar is repeated several times. 195. Ibid., p. 73. 196. Although he writes that he has no wish to present America as superior to the Old World, these parallels are "too odious," and vaunting one's own country above all others "seems more proper to children fighting than men of letters disputing" (IV, 8). 197. Ibid., p. 77. 200 The Second Phase of the Dispute demonstrated with the diminutiveness of the quadrupeds, the abundance and magnitude of the insects, the feebleness of the men, and so on, Clavi- gero produces quotations from Buffon discrediting the witnesses brought forward by the "Prussian philosopher" or, more often, pointing out equal or worse phenomena in Europe. But although his reasons are good and his argument sound, one is left feeling bored as one always is after hav- ing been subjected to a deliberately and tenaciously pursued apology; nor can one help noticing the tone of legalistic courtroom eloquence, in which the winning of a point prevails over the honest desire to determine the effective reality of things. America, indicted before the tribunal of Reason, and accused by the public prosecutor de Pauw, finds in Clavigero a counsel deeply involved and well prepared, but not overscrupulous in his choice of oratorical weapons. It is difficult to justify, even in terms of reprisal, certain statements whose motivation falls somewhere between a malicious desire to overwhelm with insult and a puerile reaction of wounded vanity: If America had no corn, nor did Europe have maize, which is no less useful or less healthy; if America did not have pomegranates, lemons, etc., at least it has them today; but Europe never had, nor has, nor can have Chirimoye, Ahuacati, Muse, Chicozapoti, etc.198 America is made to look like some little schoolgirl grasping in her fist the orange snatched from her playmate Europe, and spitefully waving in her face her own chicozapote, all hers and hers alone!199 Clavigero's rebuttal sinks all too easily into the grotesque and the ridiculous; in view of this, and its dialectical monotony, not to mention a certain very evident touchiness that has a whiff of provincialism, and his obtuse refusal to consider the historicizing point of view of the DEfense,200 we can ab- breviate our account of the other parts of his reply. The fourth dissertation - "on the animals of Mexico" - combats mainly the Buffonian theses according to which America displayed "a prodigious 198. Ibid., p. 103, where he pursues the line of reasoning: if America has barren parts, the Old World has even more barren and horrible ones (see below, p. 211). Here one notes a revival of the old debate as to whether the Old World's "contributions" to the New did or did not compensate for those the New World gave the Old, an ill-founded discussion possibly originated by Sepulveda (L. Hanke, Aristotle, pp. 52-53, 87), and persisting loquaciously into our own times. It has obvious "structural" analogies on the one hand with the theories that saw America providing compensation for the losses suffered by the Faith in Europe (cf. above, pp. 134 and 136), and on the other with the question so much discussed in the eighteenth century, of whether the discovery of America was a good thing or a bad thing for the Old World: "or qual di voi sta peggio?" (G. Parini, in the sonnet "Ecco la reggia ..." in Poesie e Prose, ed. L. Caretti [Milan-Naples, 1951], p. 402). 199. Cf. also, for the chicozapote, op. cit., I, 51-52. With greater good sense and good humor another Jesuit, Fr. Acosta, had said long ago of the chicozapote that "some Creoles said ... that it exceeded all the fruits of Spain. To me [he added] it does not seem so: as for taste they say that there can be no argument, and even if there were, it is not a worthy argument for writing about" (Historia natural y moral, IV, 25; ed. cit., p. 257). On Clavigero's polemic passion, see J. Le Riverend Brusone, Prefacio, I, 10-12. 200. See, for example, IV, 171. 201 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD scarcity of matter" in the animal species; Clavigero shows that they are neither as few nor as mean or as ugly as Buffon and de Pauw affirm,201 and counters with the objection that such "statements, if the truth be told, are rather a censure of the conduct of the Creator, than of the cli- mate of America."202 Among the birds there are nightingales and at least another twenty-two species of songbirds, including the "far-famed" centzontli, whose song is a miracle of softness and sweetness, harmony and variety of note, and which is known for the "ease with which it learns to express whatever it hears," and because it can imitate perfectly "not only the songs of other birds, but even the different sounds made by the quadrupeds." Even the sparrows, which are mute in Spain, sing quite well in Amer- ica!203 In the New World, in short, the birds sing better too, and they sing more, and they all sing, even those which are not supposed to! And so on. American ostriches have two toes too many?... The unau (the American sloth) boasts the beauty, the superfluous beauty, of forty-six ribs? ... And all of this is supposed to be due to the American climate? Let these animals be brought to Europe, accompanied by their females, and let us see if in twenty generations the number of their toes or ribs is reduced. But if that does not happen, one will have to conclude "that the logic of these Gentlemen is more unhappy than the aforesaid quadruped" (the unau), and one will have to marvel "that in a country where matter was so scarce Nature should have sinned in excess of it in the ribs of the sloths and the toes of the ostriches."204 As for ferocity, the American animals in no way take second place to the animals of Asia, whose aggressiveness and strength have probably been exag- gerated: "I have seen with my own eyes the havoc wrought in my house by an almost-domesticated stag on a poor American girl."205 As for tails, the honor of America's quadrupeds is vindicated in the case of all except six, of which two are doubtful. And if some are ugly, because it is true that they do not all fit in with European ideas on the beauty of beasts, how much uglier are some of the animals of the Old 201. In IV, 118-19, he rejects the thesis of the animals being "one-sixth part smaller," and difficult to draw (see above, p. 55). Clavigero has seen a tiger "killed a few hours previously by nine harquebus shots," which was considerably bigger than the Comte de Buffon would have one believe (IV, 116-17). And that same very erudite Buffon, who counted the teeth and measured the tails of all the quadrupeds, quite simply forgot the very common Mexican coyote (1, 76-77; IV, 110). 202. Storia, IV, 119. True, of course, but the rationalist recognizes the climate and does not recognize the Creator.... On the Mexican bird called the sensiitl, doubtless the same as our centzontli, and its warbling so lively and melodious that it gives singing lessons to the heroine of the vapid story, see al- ready C. M. Wieland, "Koxkox und Kikequetzel," 1769-70, in Simtliche Werke, XIV, ed. cit., p. 65. 203. Op. cit., I, 89; IV, 134-36. The latter boast is actually withdrawn in a footnote but left in the text! 204. Ibid., IV, 120-21, 123. Cf. Molina, below, p. 214. 205. Ibid., p. 131. 202 The Second Phase of the Dispute World, like the elephant for example!206 The camel, finally, recovers the normality of its genital functions, with only some slight qualification: "It is false to say that the camels transported to Peru left no posterity; since Father Acosta, who went there some years later, testifies to having seen them increased, though little."207 C. The defense of the Mexican Indian. The fifth dissertation-on the "physical and moral constitution of the Mexicans"- enters into a full discussion on the thesis of the degeneration of the men. They are all de- generate, according to de Pauw, the indios, the Europeans settled in America, the Europeans born in America (criollos), and the mestizos of various extraction (castas). But Clavigero- after a quick thrust ad per- sonam in the comment that if de Pauw had written his Recherches in America he himself might have been a good example of his own theories - limits his defense to that of the American natives, who are "both the most slandered and the most defenseless." It would have been much easier for him to defend the Creoles-and even more so since, as he writes with typical pride: "We were born of Spanish parents and have absolutely no affinity or consanguinity with the Indians."208 But the defense of the indios is more pressing and proceeds along the lines by now well known. The men of America are neither weak, nor hairless, nor milk-bearing; nor do the women possess those peculiarities so indis- creetly pointed out by de Pauw. As for good looks, let de Pauw consider an African, "a stinking beast, whose skin is as black as ink, his head and face covered with black wool instead of hair, his eyes yellowish or blood- shot, his lips thick and blackish, his nose flattened"; let him look at a Lapp, a Tartar, or a Kalmuck; let him look- continues the intrepid Jesuit - at the Hottentots, who have "that monstrous irregularity of a callous appendage extending down from the pubic bone"; let him consider the 206. Ibid., pp. 128-29, with an animated description of the elephant, "a monster of matter." Even in this slander of the elephant one can detect a hint of reprisal. That particular pachyderm was, according to Buffon, the animal nearest to man in intelligence, "inasmuch at least as matter can approach the spirit" (Morceaux choisis, p. 139). Cf. above, p. 25. Buffon's follower, Oliver Goldsmith (for whom see above, p. 163), had gone further still: as a creature of noble mind and discerning nose, "the elephant gathers flowers with great pleasure and attention; it picks them up one by one, unites them into a nose- gay, and seems charmed with the perfume": and its favorite, among all of them, is the orange blossom! (History of the Earth and Animated Nature, pt. II, bk. IX; ed. cit., I, 499; cf. Pitman, op. cit., p. 114). A veritable ancestor of Dumbo! Among the other animals that Clavigero finds ugly are the camel, the giraffe, and the macaco (ibid.). Molina too finds that "the camel is a monster, to tell the truth, com- pared with these quadrupeds" (auchenia) (Storia naturale, p. 312; Historia natural, p. 294; Storia naturale, 2d ed., p. 257), and Edmund Temple observes likewise that the llama, which "in the words of Buffon 'seems to be a fair diminutive' " of the camel, is in reality considerably more handsome and "without any of the deformity of the camel": Travels in Various Parts of Peru, Including a Year's Residence in Potosi (Philadelphia, 1833), I, 174 (cf. below, p. 297). 207. Op. cit., IV, 140 (my italics; cf. above, chap. 3, n. 18). A little farther on he ridicules the cus- tomary (see above, pp. 56, 147) affirmation that dogs cease to bark (1, 73, and IV, 138-39, 147-49). 208. Op. cit., IV, 160-61. Cf.: "The Mexican language was not that of my Parents, nor did I learn it as a child" (IV, 247). 203 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD tails of the Formosans and Mindorans; and then let him try and tell us, if he dare, that the Americans are ugly.209 The Mexicans, in particular, are handsome, healthy, robust, and immune to many misfortunes and illnesses. And no Mexicans ever have bad breath.210 Suddenly the discussion echoes a note of truth learned by hard ex- perience, as the old priest bursts out: "If M. de Pauw had seen, as I saw, the enormous weights that the Americans carry on their shoulders, he would not have been so bold in taunting them with weakness."211 They till the soil, cut down woods, build roads and houses, dig the mines and "clean up the cities," and perform all the heaviest tasks and offices: "This is what the weak, cowardly and useless Americans do, while the energetic de Pauw and other indefatigable Europeans busy themselves hurling abuse at them."212 And the same note is heard again when he is defending the intellectual gifts of the Indian: I dealt intimately with the Americans: I lived some years in a seminary devoted to their instruction . . . later I had some Indians among my disciples ,. . so that ... I protest to M. de Pauw and to all Europe that the minds of the Americans are not at all inferior to those of the Europeans, that they are capable of all learning, even the most abstract. If they were well taught, "one would find among the Americans Phi- losophers, Mathematicians, and Theologians to rival the most famous in Europe." The obstacle in their path is not natural but social. Not stu- pidity, but poverty: "It is very difficult, not to say impossible, to make great progress in learning in the midst of a wretched and servile life and continued discomforts." Let the haughty Europeans attend one of the meetings in which the indios discuss their affairs, and they will hear "how these satyrs of the New World harangue and declaim."213 When 209. Ibid., p. 164-66. 210. Ibid., I, 118-23. That singular privilege had been attributed (1703) to the savages of North America ("the air which leaves their mouths is as pure as the air they breathe"; Lahontan, Dialogues curieux, p. 93). But it is curious that it should actually be another Mexican, Fr. Mier (who for that matter was familiar with Clavigero's work), that in polemicizing with de Pauw accuses the Europeans of having introduced into America plants like garlic and onions, that befoul the breath: anyone who has eaten them "cannot enter into a decent house" (Jos6 Guerra, pseudonym of S. Teresa de Mier, His- toria de la revoluci6n de Nueva Espaha (London, 1813), II, 734-36; cf. my Viejas poldmicas, pp. 266, 269 n. 4). 211. Storia, IV, 173. On the preceding page, with the usual reductio ad absurdum: "The Swiss are stronger than the Italians, and yet we shall not consider the Italians degenerate, nor shall we blame the climate of Italy" (IV, 172). Shortly after that there are mentioned the great constructions and demanding agricultural labor as proof of the robustness of the indios (in implicit polemic with Las Casas too: see above, p. 68). Defense of the giants: I, 125; IV, 10n., 42n. 212. Storia. IV, 175. Mox6 will say the same thing (see below, p. 299), and Humboldt will write that the appearance of the robust Mexican miners would have made the Raynals and de Pauws, etc., change their minds (Minguet, op. cit., p. 373). And with an analogous polemical gambit Croce vaunts the mus- cles of a porter on the quay at Naples over those of any idealized "German" to reject Montefredini's accusations of a weakness in the "Italic race" (Aneddoti di varia letteratura [Naples, 1942], III, 374). 213. Storia, IV, 190-91. L. Hanke too ("Pope Paul III," 73, n. 18) mentions Clavigero's reply to de Pauw (I, 35-36) on the subject of the alleged Papal declaration that the indios are truly men. Of 204 The Second Phase of the Dispute he remembers his native country, his forlorn peones and his little dis- ciples at the Jesuit college, the exiled father is overcome with emotion, and the polemics and pedantry give way to a hymn of faith in all men. The question of the Indians' aptitude for the study of letters and the sciences already had a copious bibliography, and the capabilities of the Mexicans had been especially defended and exalted (see above, n. 134). What we really have here is in fact a restatement in secular and hu- manistic terms of the ancient question of the conversion of the heathen, of their capacity to receive baptism, and their classification as men or animals.214 The motive force behind these debates was always a com- plete faith in the superiority of civilization (whether religious or scien- tific) over nature, a faith in Progress. They represent in fact the opposite extreme to Rousseau's thesis of the advisability for the savage of not be- coming civilized or constrained in society, and on the harmful conse- quences of the arts and sciences. The Jesuits in particular always exaggerated the natives' capacities for study and mastery of all the arts and sciences. It was on the basis of their reports that Muratori wrote (in 1743) that the Americans might be stupid and lazy, but were no more so than the miserable European peasantry, and since they had excellent memories they could easily attain the highest levels of learning, if- and here the limitation is not poverty, as it was for Clavigero, but politics-"if there were not prudent considerations militating against their further instruction."215 With the same acrid skepticism Muratori absolves America from the charge of having no iron. It is true that "up until now no iron mine has been discovered anywhere in America," but "I would almost be tempted to suspect that European policy has not as yet wished to concern itself with the discovery of such mines in America for various reasons which it is not necessary to relate."''216 In other words even then European co- lonialism kept the natives in ignorance and neglected the natural re- sources of the countries administered! The same ground is covered by Clavigero's comparison between the the indios of Peru and their way of calculating with pebbles, Acosta had written conclusively: "If this is not intelligence and if these men are animals, let any man who wishes be a judge, for what I deem to be certain is that in the things to which they apply themselves they are much superior to us" (Historia natural y moral, VI, 8, ed. cit., p. 412). And in preface to his comments on the Mexicans he had re- marked that among other things these observations would "remove much of the common and stupid scorn, with which the Europeans consider them, believing these peoples not to possess qualities of men of reason and prudence" (ibid., VII, 1; ed. cit., p. 452). 214. On the difficulties that the discovery of the American peoples presented to the theologians al- ready tormented by the ancient problem of the "salvation of the heathen," see Louis Cap'ran, Le prob- lime du salut des infideles (Toulouse, 1934), I, 219-25, 252-58, 288-90, 297-98. 215. 11 cristianesimofelice, II, 94; cf. ibid., I, 142-45. 216. Op. cit., II, 247. 205 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD paganism of the indios and the no less deplorable paganism of the ancient Greeks and Romans: an old and abused apologetic device which Oviedo had already employed frequently. From the religious point of view the Americans were no worse than the august figures of the classical age. The comparison with the Greeks and Romans, arising, as we have just seen, from the formulation of the problem of the salvation of the heathen, had also been common and indeed almost de rigueur in the literature of the missionaries and Jesuits. Father Acosta had prefaced his description of the native civilizations of the Incas and the Aztecs with the warning: "If anyone should marvel at certain of the rites and customs of the indios and scorn them as ignorant and foolish, or abhor them as inhuman and diabolical, he should note that in the Greeks and Romans who ruled the world one finds either the same customs, or others similar, and some- times even worse ones."217 Thus Clavigero takes up again and breathes new life into teachings and aspirations that date back to the sixteenth century. D. Moral vices, religion, and cannibalism. The defense of the In- dians' morals is something that comes far more easily to the missionaries' spiritual heir. De Pauw accuses the Indians of four vices- gluttony, drunkenness, ingratitude, and pederasty. Clavigero denies the first and third; he recognizes the second, but says that it only became widespread with the arrival of the Spaniards; and he is horrified at the vile slander of the fourth accusation, when that vice is so frequent in Asia and Europe.218 However, he admits that in their family relationships "the love that the husbands bear their wives is less than that which the wives bear their husbands." Nevertheless, adds this curious Jesuit, "it is common, if not general, for men to be less interested in their own wives than in other people's."219 In the sixth dissertation - on the "culture of the Mexicans" - Clavigero easily refutes de Pauw's accusation that describes all Americans as "barbarous and savage."220 The Mexicans had money (cocoa), iron and copper, bridges, ships, lime, writing (hieroglyphics), the calendar, civil and military architecture, goldsmithery, and more besides. They had a rich language and wise laws. And what they did not have proves nothing against their mental qualities, nor against the climate, given that 217. Historia natural y moral, 1590, prologue to books V-VII, ed. cit., 302; see also VI, 1: ed. cit., p. 396. On the repeated parallel between the Mexicans and the Graeco-Romans, see the observations of Le Riverend Brusone in the preface, ed. cit., pp. 20-21. 218. Storia, IV, 195-200. 219. Storia, I, 122: on marriage among the Mexicans, see however IV, 255-56. 220. Op. cit., IV, 203. The whole of bk. VII of the Storia (ed. cit., II, 100-228) is devoted to the culture and government of the Mexicans. 206 The Second Phase of the Dispute most inventions "are due more to fortune, necessity, and avarice than to intellect."221 And if their education was in some way inferior to the Greeks' from the intellectual point of view, it was certainly far superior from the point of view of morals and virtue.222 The seventh dissertation too- "on the borders and the population of the kingdoms of Anahuac"-lingers a while to combat "the blunders of M. de Pauw,"223 reaffirming that ancient Mexico was thickly inhabited. But when he comes to the eighth-on the "religion of the Mexicans"- he begins by saying that this time he will not attack de Pauw, since the Prussian recognized clearly the similarity between the ravings of the Americans and those of other nations of the Old World in matters of religion. However, the polemic proves stronger than the polemicist; and it takes him by the hand, setting the patriot against the Jesuit. Father Clavigero soon finds himself defending the paganism of the Mexicans as a religion that is "less superstitious, less unbecoming, less puerile, and less unreasonable than that of the most cultivated nations of ancient Eu- rope,"224 in other words preferable to the classical paganism of the Greeks and Romans. The good Clavigero even manages to defend their practice of human sacrifice, albeit with some uneasiness,225 and only draws back, horrified at the audacity of his own argument, when he comes to the question of cannibalism: "I confess, that in that they were more inhuman than those other nations." But-but even in the Old World and among the most civilized peoples cannibalism was and is known. The argument continues with various examples of cruelty and the rhetorical question asking who was guiltier, the Mexicans who ate their fellowmen for reasons of religion, or the Greeks who (according to Pliny) ate them for medicinal reasons. "But no," he says, as common sense finally triumphs, "I cannot aspire to defend the Mexicans on this point." And he goes on to the ninth and last dissertation - on the "origin of the French disease" - where he finds the Americans not guilty of having transmitted syphilis to the Spaniards, contrary to the opinion of de Pauw and "al- most all Europeans," who, terrorized by the disease, which they looked on almost as a divine and savage punishment for their "sins," had easily convinced themselves that it must be of American origin and had thus made the New World the source of a mysterious and treacherous corrup- 221. Ibid., IV, 239. 222. Ibid., p. 261. 223. Ibid., p. 265. 224. Ibid., p. 288; cf. II, 3. The rites of the Mexicans take up the whole of bk. VI (ed. cit., II, 3-99). This effort of Clavigero's to set the Mexican religion above all the other pagan religions, though below Christianity, of course, is warmly approved, for its Mexicanism and indigenism, by Gabriel Mendez Plancarte (pp. xiii-xiv of his preface to the anthology Humanistas del siglo XVIII). 225. See chap. 9, sec. 3, "The Mexicans' Human Sacrifices." 207 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD tion, even before it became the module of nature totally decadent and rotten.226 Clavigero's main significance in the history of the debate on the "weak- ness" of America lies in the forcefulness of his reaction, i.e., in the rich array of arguments he is moved to produce to counteract de Pauw's foolish accusations. In a half-baked paradox, spiced up with a few scandalous anecdotes, he found the polemic stimulus for the rehabilitation of one of the greatest of the continent's ancient civilizations. E. The precursors of his polemical technique. Clavigero's favorite polemical tactic is the counterattack. His oratorical technique is the one which has been defined as the tu quoque. America is defended by listing in detail the weaknesses of Europe. This process of parry and thrust is so instinctive, so easy, and so flattering in the impression it gives of the arguer setting himself above the contestants and without absolving the one denying the other any right to accuse, that it is still a common debating gambit even today.227 But the origins of this approach go back at least as far as Pietro Martire, with his naked savages giving lessons to the Christians in morals and theology. The Protestant Jean de Lery, mindful of the wars of religion, observed: "These days one no longer feels the same abhorrence for the cruelties of the savage cannibals ..,. for we see the same and even worse and more detestable things in our own midst."228 Montaigne wields the same critical and biting weapon with robust relish. The cannibals con- sume their enemies for revenge, true; but you Europeans devour a man alive with your tortures, you roast him and feed him to the dogs and 226. See John Langdon-Davis, Sex, Sin and Sanctity (London, 1954), pp. 295-96, 326. Almost as a sort of appendix to the Storia antica del Messico Clavigero wrote, in Italian, the Storia della Cali- fornia, which was supposed to appear a few months after the former (Storia antica, I, 110n.), but was actually published only after Clavigero's death (2 vols., Venice, 1789; Spanish trans. by Garcia de San Vicente, Mexico, 1852). Just as in the former the author speaks as a Mexican, in the latter he speaks as a Jesuit, recounting the glories not of the Aztecs but of the missionary fathers of his order (and at the close, referring to the expulsion, he has a few harsh words for the other orders, Franciscan and Dominican, that succeeded them: II, 205). Nevertheless Clavigero is unable to restrain himself from ridiculing, in the preface, those authors who write about America without study and without knowledge, like de Pauw, Robertson, and other Europeans. The Recherches "in a single sheet, given over to the treatment of that peninsula, contains forty-eight falsehoods, which I have patiently enumerated, in- cluding simple errors, formal lies, and bold slanders." He lists only "some of them for demonstration," and refutes them (1, 16-21). He then proceeds to address a few well-chosen words to Robertson (1, 21-22) and Raynal (I, 23) too. Buffon is mentioned on I, 104. The existence of songbirds is reaffirmed, of "nightingales, though few, the famous Centzontli," etc., "who with their sweet and harmonious song bring some relief to those who travel through these arid and melancholy wastes" (I, 99). 227. A recent apologist of America is reproved by the reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement (11 March 1955, p. 143) because "against the sharper cuts at the United States that are habitually made by Europeans he has always the same childlike defence, a tu quoque, which is too often neither accurate nor an answer." 228. Histoire d'un voyagefaict en la terre du Bresil, 1578, ed. P. Gaffarel (Paris, 1876), II, 52, quoted by J. C. Lapp, op. cit., p. 156. 208 The Second Phase of the Dispute swine, "and what is worse, under pretext of piety and religion."229 Nor are examples of ritual and criminal anthropophagy lacking among we proudly civilized Europeans.230 A more refined literary form of this same attitude of penitent reflection and satire was to appear first of all in the seventeenth century, with cer- tain Lucianesque Dialogues of the Dead, in which Fontenelle brings to- gether Cortes and Montezuma, and contrasts the supposed barbarity of the Mexicans with the much-vaunted wisdom of the Athenians and Romans. "You could not reproach me," says the Aztec, "with any folly of our peoples of America, for which I could not find worse in your countries; and I even undertake to consider only the follies of the Greeks or Romans." A little later, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and shifting our field of vision from ancient history to modern geography, the same attitude of critical mockery appears in yet another form in the Lettres persanes, where the prejudices and weaknesses of Europe are laid bare under the steady and ironic scrutiny of an extra-European. The imitations of the Lettres persanes were, as we know, innumerable, and not a few of them availed themselves of the Americans as frank and im- partial though shocked observers of European customs. Typical, at least in its title, was the Letters of an Exiled Savage (to his correspondent in America), containing a Criticism of the Customs of the Century, and some Reflections on Matters of Religion and Politics, which appeared anonymously in 1738.231 Similar criticisms of European society found expression in the utopias, many of which had American settings. Voltaire was to handle the polemical antithesis with exceptional virtuosity, both in novel form (Zadig, for example) and in direct state- ment. Just one example: "We pour scorn on the credulity of the Indians, quite forgetting that more than three hundred thousand copies of al- manacs are sold in Europe every year, which are full of observations that are no less false and ideas no less absurd."232 229. Essais, 1, 31. At the end of the immediately preceding essai (I, 30) Montaigne had lamented, with European and American examples, the idea "of thinking to gratify Heaven and nature by our mas- sacre and homicide, which was universally embraced in all religions." 230. Ibid., 30 and 36. The religious thesis of anthropophagy, which is not actually so far removed from the more recent theories on the magico-religious beliefs of the primitive peoples, goes back to Las Casas (see chap. 9, sec. 3, "The Mexicans' Human Sacrifices"). For its relationship to the liturgy of divine sacrifice, see J. Frazer, The Golden Bough (Mexican example on pp. 488-91 of the abridged ed., New York, 1940). 231. Long attributed to the Marquis d'Argens, author of the Lettresjuives and Lettres chinoises, it is now thought to be by J. Joubert de la Rue. It is an imitation of the Lettres persanes and the stories and dialogues of Lahontan, who in his turn seems to have drawn his inspiration from Lucian (G. Chinard, in the introduction to his edition of the Dialogues curieux, pp. 45-46, 64). Similar polemic tendencies oc- cur in an anonymous work of 1785: An Historic Epistle from Omniah to the Queen of Otaheite: being his remarks on the English Nation, on which see B. Smith, European Vision, pp. 59-60. 232. Essai sur les moeurs, chap. 157; ed. cit., V, 57. 209 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America I. THE ABSENCE OF LARGE WILD ANIMALS THE origins of the thesis of the "weakness" or "immaturity" of the Americas-if one discounts the occasional image in the Elizabethan poets, Donne's "that unripe side of earth,"' or Samuel Daniel's "yet unformed Occident"2 - can be traced back to Buffon in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was one of Buffon's most important discoveries, and one of which he himself was particularly proud," that the animal species of the Old World differed from those of South America. And not only were those of the New World different, but in many cases inferior, weaker. When he is describing the American lion, or puma, he perceives with a sudden flash of intuition that this so-called lion is not a lion at all, but some other beast, peculiar to America, and in no way to be identified with the king of the beasts of the Old World. For a start, it has no mane, and then "it is also much smaller, weaker, and more cowardly than the real lion."4 But 1. "'That unripe side of earth" produces men naked like Adam before he ate the apple ("To the Countesse of Huntingdon," 1597, in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose [London-New York, 1939], p. 149). 2. In Musophilos; containing a Generall Defence of Learning (1599); the phrase is quoted frequently, for example, by C. Sumner in Prophetic Voices Concerning America (Boston, 1874), p. 7; and in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. P. Harvey (Oxford, 1936), s.v. Musophilos. There is of course no lack of comment, particularly in the seventeenth century, on the scarcity or low quality of the animal and vegetable species: see Gustav H. Blanke, Amerika im englischen Schrifttum des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Bochum-Langendreer, 1962), p. 117. 3. See chap. 9, sec. 1, "The Originality of Buffon." 4. Oeuvres de Buffon (ed. in quarto, ed., la Imprimerie Royale), IX, 13, quoted by P. Flourens, His- toire des travaux et des idees de Buffon, 2d ed. (Paris, 1850), pp. 133, 275. In the discourse on "Les Animaux de l'Ancien Continent," which prefaces the description of the individual species, Buffon says: "We shall see in discussing the lion that this animal did not exist at all in America, and that the puma of Peru is an animal of a different species" (Oeuvres completes, ed. Richard [Paris: Delangle, 1824-28], XV, 404). THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Two items in particular in this antithesis deserve mention-the Euro- peans killing their enemies without eating them, and the poverty of European nature compared to the benign generosity of nature in Amer- ica-because Clavigero too found them in his arsenal of possible re- taliatory weapons; he declined to use the first, which was repugnant to his religious humanity, but he used and abused the second. Montaigne, as we have seen, had managed to defend the American cannibals. And the philosopher La Douceur had commented ironically on the Europeans' noble trade of slaughtering men without eating them. Voltaire makes satirical use of the antithesis on more than one occasion. In Candide Cacambo approves of the anthropophagous Oreillons; "it certainly makes more sense to eat one's enemies than to leave the fruit of one's victory to the ravens and crows," as the Europeans do, since they have better things to eat.233 The Lettre de M. Clocpicre a Mr. Eratou, after expressing "some horror" at the story of the hussar who had eaten a Cossack and found him very tough, observes that one should not argue from the particular to the general, that there are Cossacks and Cossacks, and one might perhaps find very tender Cossacks; but it closes with the hussar's words: "Really, gentlemen,... You are very sensitive; two or three hundred thousand men are killed, and everybody finds that good; one Cossack is eaten, and everybody cries out."234 In the article Anthropophages, in the Questions sur l'Encyclopddie,235 Voltaire refers to his interview with a female anthropophagite from Mississippi with whom he had spoken at Fontainebleau in 1725: "We kill our neighbors in pitched battle, or in unpitched battle . .. what does it matter when one has been killed whether one is eaten by a soldier or a crow or a dog?" And the same conversation with the dusky lady-cannibal is related in the Essai sur les moeurs, where Voltaire ends with this "moral": "The real bar- barity is the killing, not the quarreling with the crows and worms over the dead man's body,"236 and gives numerous examples of savage and religious cannibalism from Paris and Holland, from the Bible and the Tartars. Kant condemns the fighting man of Europe in even more coldly ironic terms: The difference between the European savages and those of America lies prin- cipally in this, that whereas many tribes of the latter have been completely con- sumed by their enemies, the former know how to make better use of their enemies 233. Chap. XVI, ed. Pleiade, p. 181; and see above, p. 44. Here one notes the link with the other theme of America's shortage of foodstuffs. 234. Op. cit., in Oeuvres (London, 1772), XXVIII, 111. 235. London ed., 1779, XLVII, 27-29. 236. Chap. 146; ed. cit. IV, 379. 210 The Second Phase of the Dispute than in eating them, and prefer to increase the number of their subjects and thus the quality of material available for yet more widespread wars.217 If the Europeans refrain from eating their enemies, it is because they are more utilitarian than the Americans. In more or less the same way Guerrazzi in the nineteenth century finds the barbarous lynch law pref- erable to the hypocritical civilization of the European governments, "under which murder is sanctified with a seal of legality."238 In modern times Shaw is following precisely in Voltaire's footsteps when in the preface to his Saint Joan he sympathizes sarcastically with the Marquesas Islanders' amazement at Joan being burned and then not eaten: "Why, they ask, should anyone take the trouble to roast a human being except with that object? They cannot conceive its being a pleas- ure. As we have no answer for them that is not shameful to us, let us blush for our more complicated and pretentious savagery.""239 The literature of the Old World does not of course contain so many ex- amples of denigration of European nature as compared to American. Any tendency in that direction is lost in the simple panegyrics of Amer- ica's tropical exuberance, with no barren and insidious comparisons. But it was only very shortly after Clavigero that Andr6 Ch6nier's Inca, recounting the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, described the nature of Europe as "miserly." Europe has no fish in its rivers, nor birds in its forests. It has neither the "juicy acorns" of the cocoa tree, nor cocoanuts, nor bananas! "Leurs champs du beau mais ignorent la moisson i La man- gue leur refuse une douce boisson."240 But the historian is not entitled to poetic license. In Clavigero the quarrel between worlds is totally unbecoming. Yet viewed on a political rather than doctrinal level these moments of childish spite and pique, these reproaches of the Greeks for their pederasty and the Romans for their cruelty, and so on, are seen to contain the first whimperings of that moralistic exaltation of the New World, as polemically opposed to the Old, and corrupt, World, which was just then becoming the inspiration of the publicists of the newborn United States, and which would be taken up again and "propagandized" ad nauseam in the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth. 237. Zum ewigen Frieden, 1795, Zweiter Definitivartikel. 238. Il secolo che muore, IV, 343. 239. Op. cit., ed. Tauchnitz, pp. 53-54. 240. Fragment from the "Amerique," in Oeuvres completes, Plriade ed. (Paris, 1940), p. 418. In North American patriotic literature there are frequent eulogies of the abundance of crops and fruits in the New World (M. Curti, American Loyalty, passim, esp. pp. 30, 40-41, 69). Burke's impassioned words (1776) are well known: "for some time past the old world has been fed by the new," which has offered its aged parent its own swollen breast "with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity" (in Works, ed. World's Classics, II, 182). On the suggested scarcity of foodstuffs in America, see above, pp. 44 (Voltaire), 90 (de Pauw), etc. 211 212 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD XIV. FATHER MOLINA'S NATURAL HISTORY OF CHILE Father Molina, who was a young man just turned twenty-seven when he left Chile for exile in Italy, is not to be compared with the learned and ponderous Clavigero. His main interest is not archeology but natural history. Not even the fierce Arawaks arouse any real passion in him. The patriotic fervor that inflames some of the Mexican's pages is here re- duced to a nostalgic yearning for the beauty of the Chilean landscape and the mildness of its climate; Chile is "the Italy, which is to say the Garden of South America."241 Indeed in his anxiety to convince his reader of the benevolence of the land of Chile, Molina concludes by announcing that the lions, which are few in number and found only in the depths of the forest, "are timid and different from the maned lions of Africa," and have never dared to confront man but "rather flee from all the places that man frequents."242 He also admits that there are only thirty-six indigenous species of quadrupeds in Chile. And although there are numerous in- 241. Giovanni Ignazio Molina, Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chile (Bologna, 1782), pp. 3, 29 and passim. Volney, Oeuvres complhtes, p. 684n., actually took him for an Italian. Molina himself, for that matter, born in Concepci6n, after a long stay in Italy felt himself "more Bolognese than American" (Memorie di storia naturale [Bologna, 1821], I, 7, 56, 196; Clavigero too was taken for an Italian: Catalogue of the Library of Jefferson, IV, 269; Rosa, op. cit., p. 379). Molina published first of all, anonymously, a Compendio della storia geografica, naturale e civile del regno del Chile (Bologna, 1776), which was translated into German by E. J. Jagemann (who attributed it erroneously to Felipe Gomez Vidaurre), and published in Hamburg, 1782; then this Saggio sulla storia naturale (which discreetly recalls the Compendio, p. 7), translated into German, 1786, and immediately quoted by Kant (Akad.-Ausg., XIV, 634); into Spanish by Domingo Joseph de Arquellada y Mendoza (Madrid, 1788), and into French by Gruvel (Paris, 1789); and finally a Saggio sulla storia civile del Chile (Bologna, 1787), translated into German in 1791 and into Spanish (by Nicolas de la Cruz y Baha- monde [Madrid, 1795]; on the possibility of another Spanish translation already in 1788, see Ar- noldsson, La conquista espaiiola, p. 57). "All the cultivated nations of Europe demanded its transla- tion [of the Saggio] into their own language," Storia naturale, 2d ed., p. iii, and Iturri asserts that it was admired by Spallanzani, translated into French, English, German, Russian, and Spanish: "The Letter of Francisco Iturri, S.J. (1789)-Its Importance for Hispanic American Historiography," ed. Jose de Onis, The Americas (Washington D.C., 1951), p. 87. The notes added to this last translation, together with the notes to the French translation, were utilized in the English translation (Middletown, Conn., 1808; London, 1809, 2 vols.) of the two Saggi from the Italian, by Richard Alsop and William Shaler, and entitled The Geographical, Natural and Civil History of Chile. In 1792 Molina asked the king of Spain for an increase in the pension promised to him for his two works on the natural and civil history of Chile (Ricardo Donoso, Fuentes documentales para la historia de la independencia de America, I, Mision de investigacidn en los archivos europeos [Mexico, 1960], p. 93; cf. also 92) and later ardently embraced the cause of independence from the Spanish monarchy (see Vargas Ugarte, La "Carta," p. 52). In 1810, finally, Molina, now seventy years old, published in Bologna a second edition of the Saggio sulla storia naturale: in large format, abundantly "increased" also by inclusion of information taken from Humboldt and the botanists Ruiz and Pav6n, and embellished with a fine portrait of the author, thus bearing all the signs of a definitive edition, it turns out to be con- siderably less involved than the first edition in the polemic with de Pauw and his followers: "Their diatribes [in fact] have today fallen into the oblivion they deserved. The American Revolution has made all their [the Americans'] detractors fall silent" (op. cit., p. 272). De Pauw is still contradicted inci- dentally (for example on pp. 11, 24 and 29), but this is no more than a residuum. Other polemical re- marks, such as that against Fr. Gilij (see below, p. 222), are omitted. But likewise abandoned, in com- pensation, are certain of the boasts of the edition of twenty-eight years earlier, relating to the succulent taste of the meat of the Andean cattle, the dimensions of the horns of the oxen (see below, p. 216), etc. There is also some attenuation in the homage paid to Linnaeus's classificatory system (for example, p. 254). 242. Storia naturale, pp. 51-52, 295-99; cf. Memorie, II, 185. The Second Phase of the Dispute sects there, "nonetheless I am of the opinion, from what I can observe [one can almost see the good Molina scratching himself!] that land in- sects are more numerous in Italy."243 A. The rehabilitation of nature in Chile. Despite this ingenuous reexhumation of the "cowardly lion" and the paucity of the animal spe- cies, Molina too reacts with a vibrant enthusiasm for America when he comes up against de Pauw's slanders, and labors studiously to show that in none of the three kingdoms does the New World give way to the Old. Buffon can deny it as much as he likes. Even a great beast like the hip- popotamus can reputedly be found in the rivers and lakes of Arauco-a hippopotamus with webbed feet "like the seals," and with its skin covered with a soft down "similar in color to the sea wolves'" (i.e., seals'). The cautious Molina never states positively that they exist; but it is "univer- sally believed throughout the country" that they do.244 The preface speaks first of all in general terms of the great interest in America shown by Europe "at the present time"; he expands a little on the meager knowledge of Chile in Europe and presents the plan of the work. Then all of a sudden the anti-de Pauw polemic explodes: "Such of my readers, as are familiar with the Philosophical Researches on the Americans by M. Pauw, will be amazed to find a country of America described differently from what he would have us believe of all parts of that vast continent. But what can I do? Must I betray the truth, so as not to expose myself to the vulgar sarcasms which the author of the said Researches hurls at all those whom he finds opposed to his strange ideas?"245 Pauw has seen nothing of the Americas and for reasons of his own, "which are not difficult to guess,"246 has chosen to overlook any- thing said by any reputable author that might go against his theses, which 243. Storia naturale, p. 196. Cf. above, p. 105. But he cannot swallow that wretched little figure of thirty-six: "I am actually quite convinced that there are more" (ibid., p. 273). In the 2d ed. (1810) he still reaches "barely" thirty-eight species of mammals (ed. cit., pp. 172, 226). As for the insects, it could be mentioned that the illustrious Niebuhr too relates, on the word of an English traveler named Howse, that the Italians are much dirtier than the redskins, who may have lice, but no fleas, nor bedbugs (letter from Rome to M. Jacobi, 30 April 1817, in Lebensnachrichten iiber Barthold Georg Niebuhr aus Briefen desselben und aus Erinnerungen einiger seiner ndchsten Freunde [Hamburg, 1838], II, 309). 244. Storia naturale, p. 274. In the 2d ed. (1810) the sea "wolves" become sea "calves" (vitelli). 245. Storia naturale, p. 12. Note that de Pauw is not even mentioned in the Compendio, Molina's first work, in which, however, it was affirmed that the European animals had been acclimatized in Chile "without degenerating in any way" (p. 91; for the plants, see p. 43). Of the nightingale of Chile, Molina admitted however that "it is smaller than the one over here, and its song is neither so continuous nor so harmonious" (p. 64). Of the lion, which is small and without mane, and attacks cattle but not men, see p. 8n.; cf. pp. 81-82. In the Storia naturale the nightingale disappears, but of the Thenca, a variety of the Centzontlatole (see above, p. 202), it is affirmed, among other wonders, that "its voice is higher, more varied and more melodious than the nightingale's" (p. 252). 246. This truly "Jesuitical" accusation of venality was to be taken up in the nineteenth century by the Peruvian Divila Condemarin (see below, p. 306) and again in our own day by the American Echeverria, who supposes de Pauw agreed to work as an instrument of Frederick II's antiemigration policy (Mirage, pp. 11-12). 213 214 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD proceed from "incongruent premises" to "anti-American conclusions." His descriptions might be applicable to the moon or the selenites. But unfortunately for him America is not the moon; it has been visited by some learned men and studied by others who were moved solely by the love of truth, like Count Gianrinaldo Carli.247 As he develops his argument, which he does in fact somewhat aridly and scholastically, Father Molina's scorn falls impartially on everyone (which would include de Pauw) who thinks that the dogs of the New World could not bark;248 but in particular he loses no chance of holding up to public ridicule that French "philosopher" who denies the Americas the capacity to produce peaches, apricots, cherries, and in general any kernel fruit,249 or high-grade iron,250 or long-lived men;251 the same indi- vidual who confuses the homes of the various tribes of indios,252 and be- lieves that Atacama is in Chile253 and knows nothing of the Chilean lan- guage,254 nor of the climate, which is not at all as de Pauw describes it, because "Nature delights in transgressing laws which men make without consulting the location of the countries on which they try to impose them";255 who, finally, considers the Chilean ostrich degenerate com- pared with the African ostrich "because the latter has two instead of three toes in front,"256 whereas if anything, Molina retorts, the African ostrich would be the "bastard" with his one toe less. 247. Storia naturale, pp. 12-14; Carli is praised again in the closing lines of the Storia civile, p. 308, and in the Memorie, II, 190. Of the other authors that had their say in the polemic, Molina several times quotes Pernety (Storia naturale, pp. 148-49n., 161-62n., 165, 283), Robertson (Storia naturale, pp. 29-30, 322; Storia civile, pp. 73, 308), Raynal (Storia naturale, pp. 39-41, 48, 50, 62-63; Storia civile, pp. 77-78, 101-02, 273, 275-76; Raynal had praised the climate and nature of Chile: cf. above, p. 46) and Clavigero (Storia naturale, p. 270; Memorie, II, 185). He is also familiar with and makes extensive use of Fr. Acosta, Frezier, Feuill6e, and Ulloa. 248. Storia naturale, p. 270; cf. above, pp. 56, 147, n. 207, etc. 249. Ibid., p. 194n. 250. Ibid., pp. 91-92; see also above, p. 57. In fact in his enthusiasm for the minerals of Chile Mo- lina makes a very accurate prophecy on the great riches one day to be derived from the nitrates (ibid., pp. 70, 82, 85-86). But he also maintains as "a constant fact in America" that "when the mines are ex- hausted they are regenerated anew with the passing of time and are refilled as they were before" (Me- morie, I, 181-82)-almost as if they were so many inexhaustible devil's purses. This is, of course, a derivation from the ancient idea, going back to Aristotle, that metals are products of the earth, like vege- tables (see also Gerbi, Viejas polemicas, pp. 241-42). 251. Storia naturale, p. 333; Storia civile, p. 53. On this point Father Molina, who in fact lived to the age of eighty-nine (1740-1829), is particularly insistent. On the much-discussed longevity of the Ameri- cans, see L. Wright, The Elizabethans' America, pp. 69, 161; P. G. Adams, Travelers, p. 11, 183, 186. According to Molina the famous Patagones are none other than the tall and robust Indians of the Chilean Sierra, the Puelches, the "Antarctic Titans" (Storia naturale, pp. 9, 337; Memorie, I, 199-200; but cf. the Compendio, p. 226); and in the region they inhabit there grows the Chilean pine, "the most gigantic tree of the terrestrial globe" (Memorie, ibid.). 252. Storia naturale, p. 27. 253. De Pauw says that the army of Almagro suffered from hunger in Chile. No, replies Molina, "famine afflicted those troops in the desert of Atacama, which never had anything to do with Chile" (Storia naturale, p. 128n.). Is there a single Chilean today willing to renounce Atacama and its nitrates? 254. Storia naturale, p. 334; Storia civile, pp. 305-07. 255. Storia naturale, p. 41; on the extreme humidity of the Americas, cf. however the Memorie, II, 180. 256. Storia naturale, p. 261; cf. Clavigero, above, p. 202. The Second Phase of the Dispute 215 B. Respectful disagreement with Buffon. The tone of this last polemic thrust seems a throwback to Clavigero's technique of petty spitefulness, but its content-the comparing of the lives of animals perfect or degen- erate, large and complete or small and defective - takes us right back into the Buffonian system. Molina is familiar with Buffon; but on his way past he respectfully rejects his authority: "This great man was badly informed on this point [the relationship between the vicuhia and paco] as in many others concerning the natural history of America.'"257 He even claims, does he not, that the South Seas "are incapable of producing Whales." In this ocean he admits only the existence of fish of modest dimensions: "This great man [he bows again], who sometimes gets carried away with his favorite systems, might at least have remembered the monstrous size of the false sea lions of the Juan Fernandez Islands, which he himself describes."258 In another passage Molina takes one of Buffon's own critical weapons - the formula "the names confused the things"- and turns it against one of the Frenchman's followers. All the evils came from the abuse of the names of creatures of the Old Continent by the earliest Conquerors, who applied them whimsically and quite without discernment to the new objects they saw before them, which bore some slight resemblance to objects they had left behind in Europe .... The abuse of nomenclature, which still con- tinues, has been most harmful to the natural history of America: it is the origin of the capricious systems on the degeneration of the quadrupeds in this immense continent, and likewise of the small deer, small boars, small bears, etc., which are cited in support of such systems. . . . A modern, respectable author, who claims that the degeneration of the animals in America is evident,259 fell into the same error. One could easily defend "all the American quad- rupeds, struck down by this arbitrary sentence of degradation."260 Molina's defense is an effective one: American nature is not inferior 257. Storia naturale, p. 313; Storia civile, pp. 9-10. 258. Storia naturale, pp. 230-31. On the whales of the Antarctic, whose existence is denied by Buf- fon through "one of the most indefensible of his strange paradoxes," see also the Compendio, pp. 74-75, and the note on whales in the Memorie, II, 54, 61-63, quoting Pernety, Bougainville, etc. Buffon's false lions are "lamantins" (Phoca elephantina), who are delightfully described fighting furious battles for the females waiting on the sidelines "ready to applaud and follow the victor. Thus the most valorous [like so many broad-bellied pashas!] form themselves numerous seraglios, and accompanied by the sultanas taken from the weaker members travel triumphantly across the vast Ocean" (Storia naturale, p. 282). 259. Referring to Fr. Filippo Salvatore Gilij, for whom see below, p. 222. Against geologists who "through some mistaken analogy" were determined to extend to America's volcanoes the systems mod- eled on those of Europe, see Memorie, I, 26. Against the botanists: Storia naturale, 2d ed., p. 101. 260. Storia naturale, pp. 270-71. Cf. "I have never pretended to say that everything has improved in America. I am by nature opposed to odious comparisons" (Storia civile, p. 99). Thus, for example: "the fine arts in Chile are in a wretched state. The mechanical arts too are still very far from being perfected there" (Storia civile, p. 274; cf. already Compendio, p. 244). Or, to take another example, that of "com- parison of animals," he is willing to "let the Alps have their lammergeyer and the Andes their condor, both champions worthy of entering the lists, and battling for the dominion of the skies" (Storia naturale, 2d ed., p. 225). THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD because it is different. And Molina is quick to note the differences. Even among the Americans of various nations he notices particular traits which make it impossible to classify them as "all the same." Nor can he restrain his scornful laughter at the expense of those who failed to observe them: "I laugh to myself when I read in certain modern writers with reputations as diligent observers, that all Americans look the same, and that when one has seen one of them one has seen all of them" (Storia naturale, p. 336). There is no mistaking the allusion to Antonio de Ulloa's celebrated statement: "Once one has seen an Indian of whatever region, one can say that one has seen all of them, as for color and build; but in the matter of size it is not so, as this varies according to the areas .... Almost the same as has been said for color can be applied to the manners and cus- toms, character, spirit, inclination, and qualities, in some things such similarity being observable as if the most distant territories were one and the same."261 Of the Creoles, on the other hand, Molina writes that they are all equal, from whatever European nation they descend: "The same ideas and the same moral qualities are noticeable in all. This uniformity, deserving of some attention, has never, I believe, been considered by any philosopher in its full extension" (Storia naturale, p. 272n.). The impli- cations are clear: the superiority of climate over race, of geography over history. America produces natives that differ greatly one from another; but it reduces the offspring of the Europeans all to the same level. His counterattack is less effective: nature in America is so good that the species of the Old World which have been brought there have at least maintained their "stature," and the individuals in many cases in- creased it and prospered "in their repeated propagation and long sojourn in this benign climate" (Storia naturale, p. 271). Nor did the oxen of Chile, domestic or wild, "ever have the misfortune to lose their horns, as the denigrators of America would have it believed." If they degenerate, "it is in excess rather than deficiency. Their horns become so large" that people make cups and flasks out of them, as large as eight inches in diameter!262 All the European plants transported to Chile "thrive there as if they were in their native country" (Storia naturale, p. 188). His apology echoes with the old ingenuous enthusiasm of the early chroniclers 261. Noticias americanas, 1772, entretenimiento XVII, ed. Madrid, 1792, p. 253. See analogous comments from La Condamine (above, chap. 4, n. 95), Gilij (below, p. 230), and Smith on the redskins: "The study of one of these nations suffices for forming an exact judgment on the others" (Voyage, I, 173). See also Humboldt (Minguet, op. cit., p. 374), and toward the middle of the nineteenth century Beltrami: "The peoples of the two Americas are all and everywhere of the same physical and moral type" (Notizie e lettere, pub. under the auspices of the Municipio di Bergamo and dedicated to the His- torical Society of Minnesota [Bergamo, 1865], p. 122). 262. Storia naturale, pp. 330-31. The biggest horn of all was presented as a gift (and a very appro- priate one) to Viceroy Manuel Amat, celebrated in literature as the lover of the voluble Perricholi. For Fr. Gilij's reply, see below, pp. 228-29. 216 The Second Phase of the Dispute 217 and ancient historians of the Americas. But whether because of the new polemic tone, or because of the apology's limitation to the earth and skies of Chile, here too one notes a new feeling of attachment to country, some sort of embryonic and minuscule physical patriotism that finds more im- mediate and spontaneous expression in the exile.263 XV. FATHERS VELASCO, JOLIS, AND PERAMAS: QUITO, THE CHACO, AND THE RIVER PLATE Two Jesuits had defended Mexico and Chile against de Pauw. Some years later an Argentinian Jesuit in Rome was to take up his pen to join the battle against the European slanderers (Father Iturri, see below, p. 295). Another father in exile, don Juan de Velasco, from the land which was to become Ecuador, completed in 1789, in Faenza, a History of the Kingdom of Quito, in which he unmasked the glittering and fraudulent works of de Pauw, Robertson, Raynal, Marmontel, and Buffon, whose influence had led to the formation of a veritable "modern sect of anti- American philosophers." De Pauw, the recognized leader of the sect, is politely described as a madman or degenerate himself, ill informed, given to reckless generalizations, and at every step contradicted by the facts. But for all this Velasco still cannot concur with Pernety's defense: "I know better than he does what those American nations [the indios] are. I confess that they have many and great defects," he says, drawing thus a clear dividing line between himself and the primitivists and Rous- seauians; however, he goes on, even the impious Raynal found he could distinguish between the real savages and the civilized Mexicans and Peruvians, and Dr. Robertson too avoided that mistake.264 263. Molina had by this time lost all hope of seeing his native land again: see Storia naturale, p. 7. Giovanni Fabbroni, in his Scritti di pubblica economia (1804), published under the pseudonym of Diego Lopez, already talks of Molina and Clavigero as excellent writers and "celebrated patriots" (Florence ed., 1847, I, 267). And Fr. Encina observes that Clavigero's and Molina's works should be considered not so much as elements of Creole patriotism, but rather as manifestations of the "blossoming, in the two ex-Jesuits, of an intense love for their countries," a love that in its turn acted on the spirit of the Creole and reinforced his "consciousness of his worth" and his desire for emancipation ("Gestaci6n de la Independencia," in Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografia, 89 [1940], pp. 15-16). In the same way Arnoldsson (La conquista espanola, p. 36) sees in Molina and in Clavigero the first defenders of the ancient civilizations of the indios, the first "identification of Indian antiquity with modern Hispano- America." 264. Velasco's work (published in integral form only in 1841-44, in Quito; second part trans. in the Ternaux-Compans collection, vols. 18-19 [Paris, 1840]; rept. of vol. I [Quito, 1940], ed. R. Reyes) has always remained unobtainable to me. Ferd. Denis, librarian of Sainte-Genevieve, describes it (in G. Osculati, Esplorazione delle regioni equatoriali lungo ii Napo e il fiume delle A mazzoni [ 1846-48, Milan, 1854], p. 330) as "precious" and "extremely rare in Europe." See however Jos6 Davila Con- demarin, Bosquejo histdrico de la fiundacidn de la insigne Universidad Mayor de San Marcos de Lima (Lima, 1854), p. 67-69; M. L. Amunaitegui, Los precursores de la independencia de Chile, III (Santiago, 1872), p. 113; M. de Mendiburu, Diccionario histdrico-biogrdfico del Pert (Lima, 1931-34), VIII, 357; Carbia, La levenda negra, p. 134. On Velasco's sources and the success of his work, ample details in N. Zufliiga, Atahualpa o la tragedia de Amerindia (Buenos Aires, 1945), pp. 42-76, and further infor- mation in Donoso, Fuentes documentales, pp. 29-30, 92. 218 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD It was Faenza, and the same year 1789, that saw the publication in octavo of the first volume (which regrettably remained the only one, al- though four were announced) of the Essay on the Natural History of the Province of the Gran Chaco, and on the practices and customs of the Peoples dwelling there, together with three diaries of as many journeys made into the interior lands of those Barbarians, the work of another exiled father, Father Giuseppe Jolis. More than twenty years had passed since the Jesuits' expulsion from America and since the publication of de Pauw's Recherches. But from the very first lines of his preface Jolis says how he was largely spurred into composing his essay by the "pity- ing and unflattering portrait of that whole continent presented by some authors, who describe its climate as so harmful that not just the men degenerate there, but the animals, the plants, and the trees brought over from Europe too: and the same holds true, they claim, for the wild beasts that originate there, and the heathen peoples living there, and finally the criollos, which is to say the sons of Europeans born in America. "265 It is a precise resume and there is no doubt that Jolis is well acquainted not only with Buffon's and de Pauw's writings, but also with those of their main adversaries, such as Pernety, Carli, Clavigero, and Molina.266 Yet his major theme is antiencyclopedism, into which he introduces the de- fense of the regions he visited in America merely as a single episode. "Spanish America," he bursts out impatiently, "has been so badly treated by the Gentlemen of the Encyclopedia that it would have been better served if they had never mentioned it at all."267 It is understandable then that the contempt he lavishes on the denigrators of America em- braces both the greatest of the early naturalists of the New World, Oviedo, suspect perhaps for having furnished material to the newer writers,268 and Buffon's "follower," the serene illuminist historiographer Robertson, "Dr. Robertson, a writer of great merit moreover, and care- ful," who is however rebuked for several blunders.269 And one can under- 265. Op. cit., pp. 3-4 (cf. also 13-15, 19, etc.). The author apparently wanted to dedicate his work to a certain Pignatelli (the pugnacious Jesuit Giuseppe Pignatelli, 1737-1811, beatified in 1933?), who had encouraged him and perhaps helped him to publish it. On the subject of rays (the fish), Jolis invokes the testimony of other brother exiles from his order: "There are living, and at present to be found in this city of Faenza, those who have seen some in those rivers as big as a carriage wheel in circumference" (op. cit., p. 385). 266. Pernety is mentioned on pp. 5-6, 149, 152, 156; Carli on p. 6; Clavigero on pp. 98, 141, 143, 157, 180, 224, 231, 275, 285, 289, 313, 327; Molina on pp. 113, 140, 217-18, 231, 267, 285, 288, 290, 297, 306, 313. Jolis also refers to Muratori's II cristianesimo felice ("his little History of the Missions of Paraguay," p. 156) and Fr. Gilij (pp. 100, 285). 267. Op. cit., p. 59; cf. p. 64. 268. "His History is woven with so many and such great exaggerations and fables that it seems to have been written by someone who never set foot in the New World, and in order to amuse the reader with Romances" (op. cit., p. 198; cf. also 194, 212, 285). On pp. 155 and 540n., Oviedo is suspected of having given rise to the current doubts about the existence of tigers and kernel fruit in America. He is also mentioned on pp. 268 and 275. 269. Op. cit., pp. 477-81; cf. pp. 7, 152, 162, 217, 297. The Second Phase of the Dispute stand why although he is persistently attacking his enemies on the zoologi- cal and naturalistic fronts, so to speak, his interest is in fact wholly in the "nations," in the peoples among whom he has spent his missionary life. When he has completed his review of the plants, quadrupeds, avians, "and other unreasoning beings," his arguments embroidered with the usual polemical forays and decorated with picturesque descriptions a la Buffon, he seems to heave a great sigh: "Freed at last of this tiresome impediment, I will go on to speak of reasoning beings, which is to say the Nations" who inhabited the Chaco in the year 1767, "when by Su- perior disposition I was obliged to leave them."270 And here the polemic ceases, the description becomes detailed and affectionate, Buffon dis- appears over the horizon, and de Pauw only reappears for a couple of hasty visits, in relation to circumcision," fruits with stones,272 or Ameri- ca's episcopal sees.273 A Spaniard, not an American; a missionary, not a professor-Jolis is more a man of action than a scholar. When Petrus Johannes Andreu wanted to send the Good News to the immense unwelcoming regions of the Chaco, he "chose. . . two men of intrepid spirit and staunch en- durance, Roque Gorostiza and Jos6 Jolis, to penetrate to the depths of the Chaco. One can hardly believe and record the dangers and difficulties that beset these two men on the expedition they undertook . . . Jolis took with him a great number of Tobas and some Mataguayos, with whom a settlement was established on the Golden River [the Rio Dorado]."274 At the time of the expulsion Father Jolis had been in America twelve years and was with Father Michele Navaz in the smallest (and one of the most recent and remote) "missions" of the Chaco, that of the Ma- donna della Colonna, in the vernacular Macapillo, in Tucumain, where were gathered some two hundred Pasaini natives, of whom forty-eight were Christians.275 Yet this link, seemingly so tenuous, continued to bind the exiled Jesuit to the boundless expanse of the Chaco, spurred him into entering the debate and drafting an extensive treatise, and re- mained a factor in his life for almost twice as long as the time he spent in America, until his dying day, in fact, because Jolis died in Faenza "for the Chaco and his paper indios," as Diego Gonzales wrote, "since the uncompleted history of the Chaco took his life, and the first vol- ume ["grueso yflaco"] ended up wrapping sardines, for want (by some 270. Ibid., p. 387; note that "leave them": Jolis thinks not about the land but about the people he was obliged to abandon. 271. Ibid., pp. 434-39. 272. Ibid.. pp. 540-41n. 273. Ibid., pp. 564n., 567n. 274. Jos. Emmanuel Peramas, De vita et moribus sex sacerdotum Paraguaycorum (Faenza, 1791), p. 142. 275. See the table giving further precise details, between pp. 528 and 529 of his book. 219 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD the sudden insight that had dawned on him when comparing the puma and the lion is extended in the same breath to cover the whole series of larger mammals. The animals file past him one after another as though they were just coming forth from Noah's ark. One by one the naturalist looks them over, and each in turn is refused American citizenship, jure sanguinis et jure soli. "Elephants belong to the Old Continent and are not found in the New ... one cannot even find there any animal that can be compared to the elephant for size or shape."5 The only animal that bears a remote similar- ity is the tapir of Brazil, but this creature, America's largest, "this ele- phant of the New World," writes Buffon, with heavy irony (as if to say "this ridiculous little miniature elephant of the Americas"), "is the size of a six-month-old calf, or a very small mule."6 It is a newborn calf, a baby mule, a pocket pachyderm. There are no rhinoceroses. Nor hippopotamuses. Camels, drome- daries, giraffes are completely unknown. "There are no real monkeys in America."7 The type of camel known as a llama is an even more wretched creature than the tapir. It looks big "on account of its extended neck and the length of its legs." But even if it stands on stilts and cranes its neck, it remains a small animal: "The pacos is much smaller still."s The com- parisons could be continued. But they all confirm that the biggest Ameri- can animals are "four, six, eight, and ten times" smaller than those of the Old Continent. At the same time the species of quadrupeds are much less numerous in the New World than in the Old. Buffon counts one hundred and thirty in the Old and less than seventy in the New. The latter has therefore a more limited selection of species, and those which it has are generally more puny. The immediate conclusion is unavoidable: "Living nature is thus much less active there, much less varied, and we may even say, less strong."" 5. Oeuvres completes, XV, 402. 6. Ibid., pp. 429-30. And elsewhere, with even more evident contempt: "This tapir, this elephant of the New World, has neither trunk nor defenses and is scarce bigger than a donkey!" ("Des 6poques de la Nature," in Oeuvres completes, V, 224). 7. Cf., contra, Fr. Acosta: "There are innumerable monkeys" (Historia natural y moral, IV, 39; ed. cit., p. 333). The passage is quoted also by Garcilaso, Comentarios reales de los Incas (ed. Rosenblat, Buenos Aires, 1943), VIII, 18. 8. Oeuvres completes, XV, 402-04, 429-30, 435. On the morphological relations between the giraffe, the camel, and the llama, see also XIX, 46. Cf. below, chap. 7, n. 311: the llama, "a fine diminutive" of the camel. 9. Oeuvres completes, XV, 429. This summary verdict is quoted in a footnote by Marmontel, Les Incas (Paris, 1777), p. 22, and paraphrased by Flourens, op. cit., p. 145. As the examples show and, moreover, as he himself sometimes cautions, Buffon nearly always had in mind only South America. In North America there are a few Old World species (the wolf, the reindeer, the fallow deer, certain fur animals)-a fact which causes him serious embarrassment (see H. Daudin, De Linne Jussieu [Paris, 1926], p. 142; also below, n. 103 and chap. 5, n. 434). Even today the problems of the South American THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD way) of someone to take on the task of publishing the second, although the dead man left much residue." Indeed, it seems that the second vol- ume was already prepared for the press, and Jolis was about to leave for or was on his way to Bologna when death overtook him.276 The character of the man, completely devoted to his "paper Indians," explains the curious limitations (and perhaps also the limited reputation) of his work. As a missionary he detests encyclopedism, but Buffon's and de Pauw's extreme anti-Americanist theories leave him intellectually un- moved. He does not begin his counterattack with exalted praises of Amer- ica, not of the parts where he had lived, anyway. He never confronts his opponents directly. But on factual details he remains intransigent. He burns with a continual resentment at the flagrant errors and patent stu- pidity of these presumptuous observers, or rather these armchair scien- tists, these careless sedentary know-it-alls. M. de Buffon, who is "certainly not fond of America," claims that the songbirds of the American forests can be reduced to some half dozen. There are, however, at least twenty-five, Jolis retorts, "and this may serve to show the reader what faith can be attached to this celebrated and re- nowned Naturalist, on the things of America.""277 His conclusion is re- spectful, but cutting: "I revere the much-praised Naturalist, yet I cannot but let the public know what an unsure guide he is in things relating to the savages who inhabit the New World, whom he usually either ignores, or misrepresents in such a way as to make them appear quite other than what they are."278 His manner toward de Pauw is usually less circumspect. The "Cory- phaeus of the anti-Americans''279 is a "modern German writer," or rather "Prussian," with a weakness for the miraculous and the excessive, and thus very fond, in many things, of exaggeration and hyperbole.8 Many of his allegations are simply repudiated as false.281 But on the denial of the existence of tigers - authentic tigers-in America, Jolis gives him a 276. Guillermo Furlong, "Jos6 Jolis, Misionero e Historiador (1728-1790)," Estudios, 46 (1932), pp. 82-91, 178-88, esp. 180, 185. The second volume was to be "considerably more curious [than the first], and more amusing for every sort of person" (Saggio, pp. 9-10). In the same review (Estudios, 18 [1920], pp. 294-302), Furlong published the third of the travel diaries, which were to complete Jolis's Saggio, and to which he often refers the reader for details, as for example on the tapirs, monkeys, and bats (Saggio, p. 221), on the crab lice and cochineals (ibid., p. 376) and on certain indigenous tribes (ibid., p. 471). 277. Saggio, pp. 222-27. The attacks on Buffon are so frequent as to become wearisome: see for ex- ample pp. 45, 138, 147-48, 151-61, 164-69, 173, 179-80, 183-84, 187, 196, 198-99, 207-08, 211, 213-15, 217, 219-21, 229-32, 236, 247, 249-50, 258, 262-70, 273-81, 287, 297, 299-301, 309, 314, 317, 321n., 335. 278. Op. cit., pp. 305-06; cf. p. 13. 279. Ibid., p. 126. 280. Ibid., pp. 320-21, where the same accusations are leveled at another "German," Fr. Martin Dobritzhoffer. 281. Cf. for example: pp. 36n., 100-01, 107-08, 124-25, 148, 150, 161, 167-69, 184, 215, 217, 235, 265, 297n., 322n., 330, 335, 375. 220 The Second Phase of the Dispute regular dressing down, just like some school principal with an impertinent little pupil: "It was thus very necessary, I say, my dear Canon Pavv, that even you should have deigned to study first American Zoography, so as to learn to know those animals, to be able to distinguish their genera and the species; and then to occupy yourself as a Philosopher in researches that were not useless, as so many of yours certainly are." The Jesuit admits to being no scientist: "I willingly and candidly confess that I am not a Naturalist." But he concludes delightfully: "I do not think I am tak- ing too much upon myself if I assert that there are real tigers in America, where I have spent many years, and have had the convenience of seeing some of them, and eating not a few in the missions of the Chaco."282 The table fork rings out its challenge to the goose quill. The outcome of the duel is a foregone conclusion. How dare de Pauw contradict this devourer of wild beasts? . . Come now, what Buffon measured and observed could not have been the proud and fearsome tiger of America: it was "an American tabby cat."283 When Jolis left for America in 1755 he was accompanied by Father Giuseppe Emanuele Peramas, and when he returned from the broad lands of the River Plate to the sleepy provincial life of Faenza in the Papal Romagna, Father Peramas was still his companion. Peramas is more a man of letters than Jolis: he is a good Latinist, and quite at home in aca- demic exercises, such as the one whose Castilian translation has recently revived his reputation along the River Plate-a comparison between the Guaranays and the Republic of Plato, no less.284 But what interests us is that in this brief treatise de Pauw is attacked no less than seven or eight times, usually in relation to subjects completely extraneous to the at- tempted parallel, and with arguments of the most candid empiricism. How can de Pauw claim that the dogs in America no longer have the strength to bark? "In fact I was once almost deafened by the barking of American dogs."28 How can he talk about newborn children being killed because they are deformed, more Lacaedemonio, if in America no im- perfect children are ever born? "I can bear witness to this myself, who have seen no small part of South America."286 But he too is concerned 282. Op. cit., pp. 153-54. "Not a few," he says here, but possibly it is a matter of no more than a couple. Elsewhere, in fact, Jolis says: "In the absence of better food I fed at least twice, and with pleas- ure, on tiger's meat" (op. cit., 166). 283. Op. cit., pp. 158-59. 284. Published as an introduction to his De vita et moribus tredecim virorum Paraguaycorum (Fa- enza, 1793) and translated as La Repliblica de Platdn y los Guaranies, with prologue by G. Furlong (Buenos Aires, 1946). 285. Op. cit., par. 149; ed. cit., p. 74; trans., p. 116. Cf. above, pp. 147-48. 286. Op. cit., par. 96; ed. cit., pp. 53-54; trans., pp. 88-89. 221 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD not so much with the scientific problem as with the defense of the clergy against the canon of Xanten's accusations. While he exalts the American tigers as bigger and fiercer than those of the Old World, he admits that "the lion on the other hand is so timid that any dog puts him to flight; he is small and does not have the majesty of the African lion."287 In short Peramas abandons the lion to de Pauw's sarcasms. But when de Pauw finds fault with the tonsured clerics, as for instance when he writes in the Recherches that natives were burned alive by the Dominican Inquisi- tors,288 Peramas explodes with protest: "O Pauw, O pious Pauw! Here I can only pause, not knowing whether I should have more pity for you or for those Indians whom you pity with such noble clemency. But it is you rather that arouse my pity and my anger, you who have lied so un- ashamedly and erred so crassly in your ignorance, or your anxiety for slander, as is your wont." The Dominicans were never inquisitors. Nor did the Inquisition ever have jurisdiction over the indios. Peramas con- cludes with a solemn anathema: "This I wished to say of de Pauw, so that it might be known what credence one can lend to these impious philosophers, when they rage against the religious, against the sacred authorities, the supreme head of the Church (for not even he is spared by de Pauw), with deliberate and cunning fables, and whether through hate or malice or ignorance of the matters treated, deceive the simple masses." How much wiser they would be to submit to the true faith with sincere humility!289 America fades away once more, and the polemic winds up as a sermon. The most interesting case, however, is that of the exiled Jesuit who un- dertook to describe the Orenoco and the Terraferma, the territory of the present-day republics of Venezuela and Colombia. Father Gilij (a crude Latinization of Giglio or Gilli?) thus rounds off the regional apologetic geography of Spanish America (save for Peru, of which more later); but Father Gilij is something very different from all his fellow Jesuits. He is never mentioned, even in passing, by those who have concerned them- selves with our debate,290 and thus on more than one count deserves some 287. See G. Furlong, J. M. Peramas y su Diario del destierro (1768) (Buenos Aires, 1952), p. 119. The Diario was published in Spanish at Turin, translated into Latin by the author, and also into Italian, French, and German (Ricardo Orta Nadal, Un aspecto de la historiografia y etnologia jesuiticas del Litoral-La idea de cultura en Josd Manuel Peramas [Santa Fe, 1953], p. 18). 288. Op. cit., I, 73. 289. Op. cit., par. 39; ed. cit., pp. 21-22; trans., pp. 45-46. Other attacks on de Pauw in pars. 121 (on the subject of mate), 170 (to refute his estimate of the Guaranay population), 187 and 245 (denying the ferocity of the Guaranays). Pars. 253-74 polemicize against "what the philosophe Raynal thought about Guaranay discipline." But the most curious thing is to see Fr. Peramas invoke in opposition to Buffon, as a witness of the benefits brought to the natives by the missionaries, the apocryphal La Douceur, "the martial philosopher Ladouceur, who turned his sword into stylus and pen, and takes a determined stand on behalf of the Guaranay inhabitants" (par. 251, p. 119; trans., pp. 169-70). 290. Forster does actually mention him in passing, in a review of a work on anthropology (Werke, III, 268), and his disciple, the great Humboldt, knew him well, and in his Reise cites him as an authority at least twenty times (thirty-seven, according to Minguet, op. cit., p. 345, n. 47, certainly not a mere nine, 222 The Second Phase of the Dispute belated recognition of his merits as an observer and of his unusual posi- tion in the polemic. First of all Father Filippo Salvatore Gilij is an Italian, not a Creole; born near Spoleto in 1721, he lived for almost twenty-five years in America (1742-67), at first for six years in Santa F6 de Bogota, which he reached in June 1743 after disembarking at Cartagena and going up the Rio Magdalena, and where he completed his theological studies and was later a teacher of belles lettres; and subsequently in the missions of the Orenoco, until the expulsion of the Jesuits. After his return to the Papal States he held rectorates in Montesanto and Orvieto, and died in Rome in 1789.291 Thus for Gilij it was not a question of exile in the strict sense of the term; he was brought back to his own country, to die where he had been born; the expulsion brought to a close a long overseas inter- lude-"I was not there a short time, nor as a transient, but as one who expected to die there"92- maybe even fulfilling a secret hope, and cer- tainly not meaning, as it did for an American Jesuit, a complete break with his own land, his friends, his disciples. With or without the decree of ex- pulsion, Gilij would probably have returned to Italy. His pages, then, are not stamped with the same warmth of affection and sense of personal and spiritual tragedy as those of Clavigero and Molina. His outlook is al- ways that of a European: if he sets out to describe only the provinces of Terraferma it is because they are the first that one comes to on arriving from Italy.293 Gilij also refers sparingly and quite dispassionately to his quality as a Jesuit. At times he is even a shade ironical about his con- freres: to show how rare and expensive wine is in Bogotai he tells us that as the Register suggests); but he too confuses him, at least once (III, 56), with Fr. Gumilla, when he attributes to Gilij a Storia dell' Orinoco, printed in Rome, which can only be Gumilla's El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido, which when reprinted and translated into French became the Histoire naturelle, civile et gdographique de l'Orenoque.... This book was however printed in Madrid in 1741 and again in 1745 and (at Barcelona) in 1791, while Gilij's Saggio di storia americana was produced in Rome. The error is repeated by Humboldt's biographer, Julius L6wenberg, who mentions in passing "Father Gili's fabulous 'Orenoco Ilustrado' " (A. von Humboldt, I, 390)-in other words attributes to Gilij the book by Father Gumilla, which is in fact a work endowed with a good number of fables (see below, n. 327), as was well known to Humboldt himself, who cites him a dozen times (in particular on his notorious tendency to exaggerate, see Reise, IV, 60). For recent rediscoveries, see below, Suggestions for Further Research, and on recent partial translations into Spanish of the "forgotten" Fr. Gilij, see Hispanic American Historical Review, 48, no. 2 (May 1968), pp. 288-90; Aconcagua (Madrid), 2, no. 4 (4th trim., 1966), p. 510. 291. I am completing and correcting the details given by Sommervogel with the autobiographical material furnished by Gilij himself in his Saggio di storia americana, o sia Storia naturale, civile e sacra de' regni e delle provincie Spagnuole di Terra-ferma nell'A merica meridionale, 4 vols. (Rome, 1780-84): for his journey to and sojourn at Bogoth, see esp. II, xi, 6; IV, iv, 24, 26, 29, 205, 327, 333, 351, 439; on his journey to and sojourn in the Orenoco, passim, but esp. I, xxii, xxvi, xxx-xxxiv, 122; II, xi; IV, 334; on the exile and return to Italy, I, vii, xxiii, 118. A few other details can be found in G. Kratz, S.I., "Gesuiti italiani nelle missioni spagnuole al tempo dell'espulsione (1767-68)," Archivum Historicum Societatis lesu, 11 (Rome, 1942), p. 42. He should not be confused with the botanist and seismologist Filippo Luigi Gigli (1756-1821). 292. Saggio, IV, 131. 293. Ibid., I, xix-xx; cf. below, n. 338. 223 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD "even the Jesuits, whose life was not the hardest in the world" only drank a small cup of wine three or four times a year.294 In consequence, while not a few other Jesuits expelled from America were very bitter toward Spain and quite ready to help England or any other power who might open the doors of their country to them again (see above, p. 191), Gilij remains always a resolute hispanophile. Not only does he defend the reliability of the old Spanish chroniclers and historians-learned men whose nomenclature should not be taken lightly295 - and declare that he will limit himself to the natural history, since the civil history can be read in the Spanish authors;296 not only does he accuse the foreign writers of nationalistic fanaticism in their criticisms of the conduct of the Spaniards, both ancient and modern, in the territories conquered and controlled by them,297 and, on the basis of Solorzano's words, extol the protection and privileges conceded to the natives by the Madrid government, in contrast with the treatment in- flicted on them by other European powers;298 but to top all this he ac- cepts a pension from the same King Charles III who had expelled the Jesuits, as a reward for his history, which had freed the Spanish nation and government "from the calumnies with which the Foreign Writers endeavor to denigrate it."299 His highly original position is backed up by his vast reading among the describers of America, from Pietro Martire and Las Casas to his contem- poraries (Buffon, Robertson, Raynal, Ulloa, La Condamine, Clavigero, and Molina); but more particularly by his own empirical good sense, which keeps him well away from all unilateral systems, whether the anti- Christian fanaticism of Rousseau or the Americanistic fanaticism of the Creole Jesuits, the rigid classifications of the modern naturalist or the arbitrariness of those who would preclude any possibility of comparison or generalization (see below, pp. 228-29). His favorite author is Oviedo, whom he quotes very frequently, and often with fulsome praise: the acute observer and unremitting experimenter, further removed than anybody from erudite constructions and slanderous or apologetic propositions; 294. Ibid., IV, 29. 295. Ibid., p. 89, with reference to Oviedo and the Jesuit Acosta. 296. Ibid., I, xix-xx. 297. Ibid., p. xvii. 298. Ibid., IV, 287, 292-94. 299. Ibid., IV, xi; the award is dated 27 March 1784. Thus he finds himself ideologically close to Fr. Nuix (for whom see above, pp. 191-94), who is not however among the very many authors whom he cites and knows. Sommervogel (sub voce), also, mentions the commencement of a translation into Span- ish of the Saggio di storia americana, but of this a few fragments translated into German in 1785 and 1798 are all that are known (see Kratz, op. cit.). In Rome Gilij held friendly conversations and ex- changed correspondence (in Latin) on the subject of the American languages with the historian August Ludwig Schlbzer, of Gattingen (op. cit., III, 350-54), well known for his Americanistic interests and aversion for the American Revolution (see Doll, op. cit., pp. 441-43). 224 The Second Phase of the Dispute Oviedo, whose intellectual makeup was so quintessentially Italian and realistic. And just as Oviedo, anticipating Ranke's famous formula, had written that his sole intention was to write "what in fact happened," so Gilij announces that he will present America "in its true semblance."300 To do this, he finds that he has to fight on two fronts: against his Euro- pean enemies and against the Creole defenders of the American conti- nent, with which latter he casually groups the idealizers of the savage, who, with "enormous errors" and for the purpose of "using dreams and imaginations to establish the most detestable maxims of Atheism," put forward the Cannibals, Eskimos "and suchlike stolid nations" as our teachers.31 The first group he combats with simple candor bolstered by his firm conviction that they write to entertain the general public, either "in a spirit of novelty, or from some such other reason as I would prefer not to name": 302 they are frivolous or deceitful. This story that they have so often put about in their books "that America is an area freshly dredged up from beneath the waves, and in consequence generally wet, marshy, and almost all lakes and swamps," is an arbitrary and stupid suggestion. There are wet parts and dry parts of America; nor can one argue from the wet parts that it is a question of "new" lands. They are wet because of the rains, the great rivers, and the thick forests that cover the land. And the earth there is usually very fertile. The reason for its not producing more is the indolence of the natives: "If only the cultivators of the earth were as industrious as the earth is rich! To become wealthy America would need no other mines than its fields."303 To gain the maximum yield from the manpower (if we may borrow the economists' jargon) they should switch from an extractive to an agricultural economy. And in fact, insists Father Gilij a little later, even trade brought in more than the mining industry.304 But the basis of his argument is moralistic: even the "economic" con- clusion can really be reduced to a condemnation of idleness, mother of all the vices. Idleness, whether in the native or the Creole, is his bete noire. "Industriousness," productive activity, is on the other hand, for him as for Robertson, the supreme virtue. This also explains his scien- tific utilitarianism: knowledge with no practical application is just so much trifling frivolity. Thus with sublime nonchalance he excuses himself from any discussion 300. Op. cit., I, xix; cf. Oviedo, Historia, XLVII, 8 (ed. cit., IV, 292b); and also ibid., XXII, 1 (ed. cit., II, 156a) and XXXIII, 54 (ed. cit., III, 552b). 301. Op. cit., I, xvi; cf. II, 127. 302. Ibid., xii-xiv; IV, 19. 303. Ibid., IV, 19-22; cf. IV, 381. 304. Ibid., pp. 389-90. 225 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD of the problems raised by Linnaeus and Buffon: "I do not set up any canon of natural history, no classes, no orders, no kinds, no species, no variations, nor other such erudite subtleties of the north" [sic].305 The comparison of American animals with those of the Old World has given rise to involved discussions. "Leaving aside this nonsense, which serves I know not what purpose," Gilij sets out to describe his system, "a sys- tem which is not Buffonian, not Linnaean, but true," true because it is based on twenty-five years of direct, attentive, and untiring experience.306 The essence of his system is simple: the causa causarum is climate. Everything depends on climate: "In a climate different from ours, our plants and our animals will of necessity suffer, weaken, become bastard- ized." Everything, of course, that belongs to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, because "the mineral kingdom is not subject to such varia- tions." Man, however, the lord of the animals, is no exception to the rule; the races vary according to the temperature of their surroundings, and thus the Caldopolitans differ from the Lanigers.307 Not even Father Acosta is spared by the Jesuit of two centuries later: when Acosta extols the fruits and climate of America, Gilij objects that America lacks not only the most delicate of the European fruits, the pears and apples, peaches and apricots, but even the more rustic ones like the chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts. And Acosta's well-known statement on the plants imported from Spain and improved in the Indies is greeted with wary reserve: "I leave aside this assertion, and we shall see in due course whether it is altogether true."308 So although, as we have seen, he rejects Buffon's conceptual construc- tion, Gilij is quite prepared to accept his corollaries and experimental data. His concluding remarks on the fauna of the Orenoco are a precise echo of Buffon's sentences of condemnation. In those American animals that bear a similarity to European ones, their smallness is a noticeable feature. The deer are like Europe's roebuck, the wild boars appear in miniature edition, the bears in reduced format, "and what the naturalists say about this seems evident: namely, that in America nature is not as robust as in our countries." Perhaps it is because of their diet, perhaps because of the great heat they suffer, perhaps even the result of reasons "of which we are unaware." The fact remains that the animals of the Ore- noco are pitiful in appearance. In fact so pitiful that they seem to be "al- 305. Ibid., p. 88. 306. Ibid., p. 90. 307. Ibid., pp. 92-94, 194. Gilij seems to be of the opinion that in minerals, in geology, America is no different from the Old World. A few years later Goethe was to stress the peculiarity of the New World precisely in its geological structure (see below, p. 359). 308. Ibid., pp. 14-15 (and cf. above, pp. xvii-xviii). Further on he discusses whether the meager variety of fruit and vegetables is to be ascribed to the earth or its cultivators (IV, 165 ff.). 226 The Second Phase of the Dispute most of a different type from ours." Except for the fox, "notably en- larged" (like Buffon's pig, the fox is the exception that proves the rule!), they seem "bastardized" in comparison with their European counter- parts. Also, we should note, this is no matter of some passing crisis, nor a recent fact: "This deterioration of Nature must have begun in them as soon as they arrived in America, and perhaps they had the misfortune to shrink, like the plants taken there from Europe." The animals brought from Europe within historical times, on the other hand, seem to resist this evil influence: horses and oxen stay "as fat and vigorous as before." But one cannot be too sure: already the pack mules "seem to have lost some of their original size." Father Gilij stares pensively at these poor little beasts of burden: "Who can say, whether with the passing of the years these animals too will not go into decline, as the first ones that came from the old continent did."309 The sole consolation (but of doubt- ful value and more likely to invalidate the explanations suggested for it) is that in the snakes and reptiles, fish and even birds "nature is perhaps more vigorous and more luxuriant in America."310 On the question of singing birds, however, Gilij stays fairly close to the writers who insisted on the poor quality of their melody-making. His theory is curious: in the warm climates (Orenoco) the birds are either mute or strident, in the cold climates (the plateau) there are "most sur- prisingly" many that sing well, and which must therefore be classed as a group apart, "to the greater glory of America" and the truth. Then as for those in the torrid zone, they may sing less well than the birds of Europe; yet they talk better.311 The parrot has his revenge on the nightingale. In the missionary's version it is not the splendor of their plumage that makes up for their lack of melody, but their instinctive verbal fluency. But why is it that they sing less well? It is because they are large and fat: "Nature, which seems in many things to have fallen off in the living beings of America, in the creatures of the air does not decline at all, but grows," which is precisely what makes their voices less pleasing, as M. Buffon has explained "very eruditely." However, it is not a fact that the small birds too are strident and inharmonious? Yes, of course, Father Gilij admits; and for the explanation refers again to M. Buffon.312 309. Ibid., I, 316-17. Gilij observes at this point that "man's industry does much to preserve them," but further on, beginning to argue with Molina, he changes his thesis: America's beasts of burden are indeed smaller than the European ones, "but it can be said of them that they are so not through altera- tion suffered there with the passing of the years, but by nature and race" (op. cit., IV, 138). On the Euro- pean animals taken to America, see also ibid., III, 52-55. 310. Ibid., I, 317. 311. Ibid., pp. 292, 311-12 (citing the Centzontle); IV, 99-101, 184, 191-94, 196. 312. Ibid., I, 292-93. These voiceless great creatures remind one of Parini's "singing elephant" (the castrato) with his "reedy voice issuing from his great chasm of a mouth" (La musica, ca. 1769). 227 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD It is obvious then why on reading Father Gilij's first volume (1780) Molina became so upset with his brother Jesuit, who appeared to be lending his support to the declared enemies of American nature, and accused him of "stupidly" giving the names "deer" and "boar" to Ameri- can animals which were in fact in classes by themselves.3'3 And it is clear why, although he attacks him as "a modern, reputable author," he never mentions him by name (thus confusing us too, by the way, who in the first Spanish version of this work believed his attack to be aimed at Buffon). When our good friend Gilij on the other hand produces a reply to his Chilean colleague, it turns out to be a maze of hairsplitting sophistry. No, he never said, as Molina accuses him of saying, that the naturalists' law on the smallness of animals "is" evident: he said it "seems" evident. He never said that the American anteater is a "degenerate species" of bear: he said that it is "a degenerate branch of the bear species." And why on earth does Molina relinquish the deer and the wild boar and insist on defending only the American bear, "this blessed bear, which I put in almost as a joke"? Does he think to frighten Gilij by parading this "for- midable puppet"? But Gilij realizes that this bear is a dangerous beast, that his defense is weak; and reverts to his standard means of escape for such cases: "This question will be treated further when we have more time; that is to say when I shall publish my American Anecdotes, in a separate volume." For the moment, suffice it to say that that animal is known as a bear "and in some manner resembles one."314 Yet again (see above, p. 98) we come back to the old question of arbitrary denomina- tions, to the te baptizo carpam, and Adam's lexicological labors when God delegated him to assign names to all the beasts of the earth and air (Genesis 2:19-20). So Gilij parries Molina's frontal assault as best he can, then proceeds to outflank his opponent by rejecting his thesis of "abuse of nomencla- ture" (see above, p. 215). The Chilean Father's long-winded criticisms lead Gilij to suspect "that he really believed I looked on the names im- posed on American things by the Spaniards as if they were final and un- changeable definitions." With all the power of his arrogant empiricism, Gilij delivers what is tantamount to a challenge: this animal that the Span- iards called a lion "was classified by me, without my paying any particu- lar attention to it,315 because I do not play the philosopher too, with the 313. Op. cit., IV, 90. 314. Ibid., pp. 87-88 (cf. I, 250). It need hardly be said that Gilij never published the promised work (cf. also III, 416), nor does it figure among his unpublished works in Sommervogel's bibliography. 315. Gilij discusses the bear "as a joke" and amuses himself with tigers and lions.... 228 The Second Phase of the Dispute tigers; and if need be, I am ready to support my decision with my pen.""16 The whole polemic on the names imposed on things by the early nat- uralists and chroniclers has one single aim of evident apologetic origin: to avoid talking about "small" deer, "small" wild boars and "small" bears in America, and thus to spare the susceptibilities of the Ameri- cans. But Gilij has no intention of sparing them and insists: "Let us add the little porcupines, the shrunken Spanish pumpkins, our bastardized vegetables, and a hundred other American variations which emerge from my history."317 So much for Molina. But he is not dismissed quite yet. Father Gilij seizes on him once more to ridicule his defense of American horns, "in which (and he will permit me to tell him the truth) the learned author of the history of Chile made no small error."318 Molina, who finds everything improved in America, when he comes to the subject of oxen and cows, "adds (I know not to what purpose) this emphatic expression: 'But neither these nor the other domestic (cattle) ever had the misfortune to lose their horns, as the slanderers of America have suggested.' " And yet, in the vastness of America there are indeed cattle that are without horns. "I will say more," Gilij goes on ironically, "in some places there are even some [bovines] without hair. But he should not be afraid that by this America is left de- graded."'319 In less doctoral tones Father Gilij also takes issue with the other great Jesuit apologist, Father Clavigero, whose superior authority he seems to accept implicitly. However, to stay for a moment with the horned cattle, when Clavigero asserts that bulls multiplied in Mexico, Paraguay, and other parts of America "more than in richly cattled Italy," Gilij counters with elaborate arguments about the more limited availability of pasture and the greater population of Italy and the fact, proved by the customs statistics of the city of Rome, that proportionately more meat is eaten in Italy than in America.320 And when the Mexican Father enlarges on the physical bulk of the danta, one of the great beasts found in these climes, 316. Op. cit., IV, 89. Gilij had written that there were numerous ferocious tigers in the Orenoco (ibid., I, 242-43), in disagreement with the "distinguished" Dr. Robertson too, who charges them with being inert and timid (ibid., p. 314); Robertson is also mentioned in I, 7; II, 240-41, 379. 317. Ibid., IV, 89-90. Elsewhere, however, in the course of a lengthy discussion (IV, 113-143) on the animals imported from Europe, Gilij calmly discusses the opposing theories of those "who believe everything of ours to have deteriorated in America" and those who instead consider "its worth . . . to have increased enormously there" (IV, 127). 318. Molina is mentioned explicitly in a note. 319. Op. cit., IV, 139, following which he cites his authorities, transcribing entire letters (IV, 139- 43); cf. above, p. 216. Elsewhere too Gilij observes that America should no longer be looked down on by the scholars for some of its defective products, since careful distinctions should always be made be- tween different places and climates: op. cit., IV, 194. 320. Ibid., IV, 130-35; conclusions on the oxen, pigs, etc., ibid., IV, 137-38n. 229 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America II. THE DETERIORATION OF THE DOMESTIC ANIMALS This weakness of nature is confirmed by the fate of such domestic animals as were introduced into America by the Europeans. It is one long story of failure. In the new continent all of them dwindled, shrank, be- came reduced to dwarves, caricatures in miniature of their prototypes: The horses, donkeys, oxen, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, all these animals, I say, be- came smaller there; and . .. those which were not transported there, and which went there of their own accord, those, in short, common to both worlds, such as wolves, foxes, deer, roebuck, and moose, are likewise considerably smaller in America than in Europe, and that without exception.'" Sheep and goats were successfully acclimatized in America, but "they are generally thinner." The rams "in general are of less tender and less succulent flesh than in Europe." And to sum up -but always "in general" - one may say that "of all the domestic animals transported from Europe to America the pig is the one which has had the best and most general success."" III. THE HOSTILITY OF NATURE The argument can thus take a step forward. Indigenous animals are few and small. Imported animals have become smaller and less appetiz- ing (with the exception of the pig). Thus the environment or nature of America is hostile to the development of animals. The purely geographi- cal comparison is succeeded by a genetic criterion, and in this direction Buffon forges fearlessly ahead to extend his observations on quadrupeds to all "living nature": There is thus, in the combination of the elements and other physical causes, something antagonistic to the increase of living nature in this new world: there are obstacles to the development and perhaps even to the formation of the great seeds; those very seeds which have received their fullest form, their most com- plete extension, under the beneficial influence of another climate, are here re- duced, shrunken beneath this ungenerous sky and in this empty land, where man, scarce in number, was thinly spread, a wanderer, where far from making himself master of this territory as his own domain, he ruled over nothing; where having never subjugated either animals or the elements, nor tamed the waters, nor gov- erned the rivers, nor worked the earth, he was himself no more than an animal fauna remain largely unsolved; see the provocative observations of H. Krieg, "Tiergeographische und ikologische Beobachtungen und Probleme in Siidamerika," in Tier und Umwelt in Siidamerika (Ham- burg, 1940), pp. 1-34. 10. Oeuvres completes, XV, 444. Cf. J. Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensee frangaise du XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1963), pp. 574-75. There may be an element of truth in this thesis. In America the art of stockbreeding remained for a long time in arrears of the more advanced European techniques (cf. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience [New York, 1966], p. 261). And the nat- ural pastures of America were inferior in nutritive value to those of the Old World (Franklin J. Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement [Princeton, 1940], pp. 50-51). II. Oeuvres completes, XV, 412, 414. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Gilij observes obliquely that one should distrust what the American writers say about the size of their animals: this danta, for example, "what varied shapes it assumes in the histories of the New World! Some say it is the biggest quadruped in the kingdom of Mexico."321 Others call it the ourignac and have it the size of a horse. "To me," Father Gilij concludes, "it seems more like a donkey, and I would not even go so far as to say a large donkey."322 In dealing with the plants and animals Gilij uses his common sense and manages to keep well away from either of the conflicting exaggera- tions; but he never transcends them, nor does he grasp their fundamental motivations. When he comes to the men, on the other hand, he has a number of very sensible things to say, and gives us a vivid and accu- rate picture of both the Indian and the Creole. It is one of his basic points, not of course discovered by him but frequently forgotten by the apologists and detractors of America, that there is not one America, but two, widely different from each other; the savage one, where there are only natives, and the civilized one, where the Indians live together with the Spaniards. Two separate worlds, and thus two quite separate subjects, "frequently confused in books and only skimpily treated up till now," that he will have to discuss: the savage Orenoco and the civilized Terra- ferma.323 Of the Indians he offers us a detailed, carefully considered, and very humane portrayal. One can feel how every page grows out of his long and close association with his subject and is imbued with a healthy distrust of all forcibly one-sided schemes. He is skeptical about the fantastic estimates of the original size of the native population, even though the figures were confirmed by such authorities as Oviedo and G6mara, and he puts forward good reasons for believing that all in all the Indian population has perhaps shrunk a little or else remained the same as it was, namely not very large, at the time of the Conquest.324 In appearance and customs this native population is very homogeneous: Ulloa was right to say that when one has seen one Indian one has seen all of them, and Molina was wrong once again to reject and ridicule that statement.325 The indios are more similar to each other than members of the same na- tion; they are as similar as members of the same family, and yet there is the inexplicable enigma of the fact that they speak very different lan- 321. And here the footnote refers to Clavigero, I, sec. 10, p. 75. Clavigero is also cited in II, v, 272, 331; III, 31; 281; IV, 130 ff., 195. 322. Op. cit., IV, 195. The "Dantas, o Gran Bestias" are also mentioned by Juan and Ulloa, in the Relaci6n hist6rica del viaje a la America meridional, VI, 4 (Madrid ed., 1748, II, 491), a work known to Father Gilij. However the danta is not to be confused with the ourtgnac. 323. Op. cit., I, xxi-xxii; IV, vii. 324. Ibid., I, xiv; IV, 259-63, 322-23, 408-09. 325. Ibid., IV, 253-55; cf. above, p. 216. 230 The Second Phase of the Dispute 231 guages, which do not even belong to the same type.26 Tomais Ortiz (see above, p. 65) was too hard on them, and Las Casas overidealized them. Even Father Gumilla, his predecessor in describing the Orenoco, was unnecessarily harsh in his judgment.27 Nearer the mark was La Condamine, for whom their basic characteristic was insensibility. "How- ever," the careful missionary is quick to add, "I could never be quite sure that the quality in the Indians, that people call insensibility, was not rather either suffering or pride."328 To tell the truth it is difficult to understand them, because they have no spokesmen of their own; Garcilaso only talks about the Incas, and "in his native arrogance" ignores the other races. Their unofficial defenders with their misguided zeal often suc- ceeded only in vilifying them. Marmontel slanders them329 and Robertson dehumanizes them, calling them even "very chaste . . and I would almost say, without incentive," while "the weak constitution of their bodies, their imagined coldness and indifference toward the fair sex, are things contradicted by the Spaniards and missionaries of the Orenoco, who held the Indians to be very libidinous." It is true that they are neither tender, nor gallant, nor courteous. But with this habit of theirs of going about naked and bathing together, they have plenty of chances of "trans- gressing."30 So Gilij gives back the Indians their erotic vigor and definitively dis- 326. Ibid., IV, 257-58. Cieza de Le6n had already observed of the indios that "although they are all dark-skinned and glabrous and resemble one another in so many things, there is such a multitude of lan- guages between them that at almost every league and every part there are new languages" (Chr6nica del Perti, 1, ca. 1550, quoted by Leopardi, Zibaldone, ed. cit., II, 660; cf. II, 968. Cf. also Muratori, II cristianesimo felice, I, 37, 216, and Humboldt, Reise, II, 9, 29). Gilij collected abundant and detailed information on the languages of the Americans, making use of some fairly unreliable authors too, like Lahontan (op. cit., III, 265; Lahontan is cited also on I, 281, 310-11, 402-05; III, 280, 310-11, 403- 05), but drawing mainly on the knowledge of other exiled Jesuits, including Molina (cf. III, 234 ff.); and he "left grammatical and lexical manuscripts of the Maipur and Tamanaca languages" (Kratz, loc. cit.). A parallel contradiction to the one quoted from Gilij in. the text can be found in his assertion that the plants, wild animals, customs, errors, and ways "are more similar one to another (from one end to the other of America) than in any other part of the world" (op. cit., III, vi) and the flowing prose in which he describes the prodigious variety of the landscape, the fauna and flora of America (ibid., IV, 91), or in- forms his reader that in America, as in every other part of the world, there is good and bad, "healthy and sick lands" (ibid., I, xviii-xix). 327. The ecclesiastical reviser says (I, xi) that Gilij corrects and completes Gumilla, who was also a personal friend of his, and admired by Gilij even when he criticized him (op. cit., I, xxv-xxvi; II, ix, 302). 328. Op. cit., II, viii-x; cf. IV, 8. La Condamine, one of the authors most frequently quoted by Gilij, had written in much the same way: "Insensibility is the basis of it [the character of the indio]. I leave the decision open, as to whether one should honor it with the name of apathy, or degrade it with the name of stupidity" (Relation, pp. 418-19). 329. Saggio, II, 240-41, referring to his Incas; see however the criticism of his eulogy of the state of nature, ibid., II, 371-76. 330. Ibid., II, 240-41, 379-80 (also rejecting Robertson's theory-for which see above, n. 53-that the comfortable and civilized life and liberty of conversation provoke and facilitate amorous relations). The Indian women are also "warmer." Fr. Gilij relates several quite amusing anecdotes about his effort to persuade them to dress (ibid., II, 47-49), and brings down on himself the irony of his admirer Hum- boldt for the way he boasts ingenuously of knowing "the secrets of the married women" (Reise, III, 156). THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD sociates himself from the Buffonian thesis. But this does not mean he con- siders them any more forceful or robust in their other day-to-day activi- ties. Indeed he seems to be in complete agreement with the biblical Samsonian equation of hirsuteness and bodily strength. The Indians are either hairless or depilated. Now, "from beardless nations such as the Orenocoans what strength could possibly be expected? None, or very little. In fact, there is perhaps no other nation in the world which is gen- tler, weaker, or less robust than the Indians." These same Venezuelan savages, described by a terrified Vespucci, after his encounter with them on an offshore island, as brawny and gigantic cannibals, now to the good Jesuit "seem like flowers, that languish as soon as they are picked."33 In short Father Gilij considers the natives an uncultured but not ugly race, possessed of some strange habits, cruel, fickle, but "easily in- structed" in the religion and customs of civilized life; a people who have not made great progress, "but who are capable of so doing, once they overcome their laziness.""332 What the missionary lacks of course is any sort of intellectual sympathy for the rites and customs of the savages. His skepticism is unshakable: "I have never watched the Indian dances without suspicion."333 In more than one way they call to mind the rustic peoples of Europe: "I have frequently compared the Americans to our own peasants," especially as regards their dwelling places.334 Their "cities" and "missions" could be called beautiful relatively speaking, but not in themselves: they are mere conglomerations of huts. But "their churches are really beautiful; they are rich, and are made no differently from those of the Spaniards."335 Then those of the Spaniards (and so we come to the Creoles)336 are real works of art: the churches of Bogoti "would not be scorned in our own Italy."337 Thus there is no decadence or precocious senility in the Spaniards of the New World. And they lack nothing to make life comfort- able: everything is easily available there, "and in this respect America, provided one has money in one's pocket, is not perhaps inferior to Italy."338 To close, Gilij pays glowing compliments to America's seats of 331. Saggio, II, 37-39, modified by a footnote that considerably attenuates the condemnation in the text, explaining that this weakness is due mainly to the lack of exercise (ibid., II, 365-66). But the thesis seems to be a belated echo of Las Casas's apologetic descriptions (see above, pp. 68-70). 332. Op. cit., II, xi. 333. Ibid., II, 289. He is also suspicious of the witch doctors who come in person early in the morning to bring their female patients the necessary potions for making them fruitful: "there must, as anyone can see, be something very evil beneath it all" (ibid., II, 99). 334. Ibid., IV, 278. 335. Ibid., p. 280. 336. Whom we shall discuss only briefly, because this subject is treated with greater knowledge and passion by the American Jesuits. 337. Op. cit., IV, 327; for the architecture, sculpture, and painting of the Creoles, ibid., pp. 362-65. 338. Ibid., p. 391. Note the continuous reference to the paradigm Italy. 232 The Second Phase of the Dispute 233 learning, so despised by de Pauw: "Their universities are full of men of consummate wisdom."339 Of his former disciples he speaks with unre- strained praise and pleasure. And even though neither of the universities in Bogota teach medicine, this art and science of healing flourishes in Lima and Mexico.340 Thus the Jesuit exile from the forests of the Orenoco extends his eulogy to the illustrious capitals of the major viceroyalties, and in so doing com- pensates partly for the lack of defenders of Peru. XVI. CARLI'S AMERICAN LETTERS In fact one cannot but be surprised at the absence of Peruvian Jesuits in the polemics pursued with such ardor and persistence by fellow mem- bers of their order from almost every part of Spanish America.341 This may well be one more sign of the cultural decadence of the Peruvian province of the order, which is frankly admitted by Father Vargas Ugarte and Father Miguel Batllori, and which resulted in an almost com- plete literary sterility, in every field, on the part of the Peruvian exiles.342 It was actually left to an Italian to undertake the defense of Peru against 339. Ibid., p. 312. 340. Ibid., pp. 353-56, with anecdotes on the great fame of the French doctors in those parts. 341. Fr. Jose Sinchez Labrador wrote twenty volumes on the natural, civil, and religious history of Paraguay, but they are still unpublished, in Holland. Some extracts, referring to medicinal products, were published (in 1948) by a professor of the University of Tucuman, Anibal Ruiz Moreno (see Re- vista de Historia de America, 30 [December 1950], pp. 533-35). Nor have I found anti-Buffonian ref- erences in the writings of the Jesuits expelled from Brazil (of which the most significant is Jose Rodrigues de Melo, De Rusticis Brasiliae Rebus Carminum Libri IV (Rome, 1781), possibly because they were removed several years before (1760) the explosion of the polemic (cf. M. Batllori, S.I., "L'opera dei gesuiti nel Brasile e il contributo italiano nella Historia del P. Serafim Leite," La civilta cattolica, 102, no. 3 [July 195 1], pp. 193-202). As a matter of fact the traces of anti-de Pauwian polemics are also very rare in Brazil, and for the most part confused with the general polemic against the "climatic" theory, according to which the inhabitants of the tropics are inferior men. Thus Azeredo Coutinho attacks (1794) Montesquieu "and the supporters of his climatic system," for whom the inhabitants of the torrid zone are weak, incapable of serving in the navy, etc. (E. Bradford Bums, "The Role of Azeredo Coutinho in the Enlightenment of Brazil," Hispanic American Historical Review, 44, no. 2 [May 1964], p. 151). But Buffon and Robertson (History of America) at least were found in Brazilian libraries at the end of the eighteenth century (E. Bradford Bums, "The Enlightenment in Two Colonial Brazilian Libraries," Journal of the History of Ideas, 25, no. 3 [July-September 1964], pp. 434-35). On other works (some unpublished) by Jesuits from Brazil, New Granada, Guatemala, the River Plate and Paraguay, all "im- plicitly, and even at times explicitly" in polemic with Buffon, de Pauw and Raynal, see references in M. Batllori, "L'interesse americanista," p. 169; Viscardo, pp. 168-69. 342. Runen Vargas Ugarte, Jesuitas peruanos, passim, and esp. pp. 96-97; and the "Carta," pp. 55- 56; M. Batllori, Viscardo, pp. 26-27. The only exception would be that of the Trujillan Fr. Marcos Vega - author of a work on the origin of the Americans and of dialogues between a Spaniard and an American, works that are now lost - who however belonged to the province of Quito (Jesuitas peruanos, pp. 121 - 22; La "Carta," pp. 60-61). Nor strictly speaking can Fr. Juan (Giancelidonio) Arteta (1741-96) be called a Peruvian, since he was born at Guayaquil; Arteta was exiled to Italy and wrote there sometime before 1780 (date of the ecclesiastical approval) a Difesa della Spagna e della sua America meridionale ... contro i falsi pregiudizi, e filosofico-politici ragionamenti d'un moderno storico (Raynal), as yet un- published (cf. R. Altamira, "Los cedularios como fuente hist6rica de la legislaci6n indiana," Revista de Historia de America, 19 [1945], pp. 91, 93). An incomplete Noticia of this work, drafted by the author himself, was published (from the manuscript in the Library of the Royal Palace in Madrid) by Jaime Delgado, "El padre Juan Arteta, impugnador de Raynal," Boletin Americanista (Universidad de Barcelona), 1 (1959), 3, 161-70. 234 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD de Pauw's slander, the illustrious Gian Rinaldo Carli, who did however use archeological and linguistic information given to him by an unidenti- fied Peruvian ex-Jesuit. In the Italian economist and administrator's American Letters the debate rises to a veritable panegyric of the Inca government and its institutions, including its religion, such as could hardly have been produced by the Jesuit Fathers, even if they were more "patriotic" than Clavigero.343 On the other hand Carli could not feel that same attachment to American nature that the exiled Jesuits felt, and his intellectual leanings are rather more historical and political than zoologi- cal and geophysical. This may account for the noticeable slant he gives to the polemic, and also, perhaps, to some extent, for the immense success enjoyed by the American Letters, so much more "human" and so much less anthropological. Carli does not even bother to consider the problem of the inferiority or degeneration of the Americas. He simply does not believe in it, and for him it takes no more than the existence of the usual Patagonian giants to prove that nature in America, far from being degraded and "only produc- ing weak, sickly, and delicate animals and men, in no way comparable to ourselves, is instead more generous than with us."344 And if one wants to take a leaf out of Buffon's book and distinguish between old and new lands, "certainly America is an old country, as old as our own hemi- sphere, if not older." The height of the mountains of Peru would seem in fact to show "that America is the oldest country in the world."345 The animals are never mentioned, and of the plants Carli observes that America has furnished Europe with a large number of plants that have proved either medicinally or nutritionally very valuable. Is it not true that the "health-giving" cocoa makes a "delicious drink"? "Thus every morning we have the occasion to remember poor America."346 What really concerns him is man: and at the very outset he announces that "lit- tle by little we shall see that the Americans were substantially men like other men," and that "the human race and the organized nature of America had the same seed and the same development in parallel progress with 343. Fr. Arteta (see preceding footnote) praises the gentleness and humanity of the Incas, but scorns the pre-Hispanic civilization of Peri, and defends Father Valverde (cf. F. Mateos, S.J., "Una versi6n inedita de la conquista del Peru," Revista de Indias [Madrid], 17 [1944], pp. 389-442), the same Valverde that Carli (see below, p. 237) sees reincarnated in de Pauw! He cannot have been Carli's in- formant, since his ex-Jesuit was born in Lima, descended on his mother's side from Orellana and had lived many years in Cuzco: Lettere americane, ed. cit., I, 60-61, 198. Fr. Vargas Ugarte guesses it was Miguel de Soto of Huaura (La "Carta," pp. 60-62). 344. Lettere americane, ed. cit., I, 262-64. America's Amazons too enjoyed an advantage over those of classic times: they had "both breasts" (ibid., I, 271). 345. Ibid., I, 16; II, 78-79 (see contra above, pp. 112-13). The weakness of Carli's geographical knowledge becomes apparent when he describes America as "a vast continent, which is to say at least as large as Asia and Africa put together" (I, 33). Cf. above, n. 8. 346. Lettere americane, I, 209. Cf. G. Parini, II Mattino, lines 134-36, 144-57. The Second Phase of the Dispute us."347 Their weapons were similar, their customs, their beliefs, and so on. If the Americans were less industrious and cultured than the more illustrious nations of the Old World, the other inhabitants of Africa, Asia, "and Europe itself have given us, both in ancient and in modern times, little enough reason to be proud of ourselves."348 With the substantial identity of earth, men, and their prehistory in the two hemispheres thus established, and having mentioned some of the earlier critics of de Pauw, such as Pernety and his friend Paolo Frisi,349 Carli, with truly Vicoan confidence in the parallel paths of nations, pro- ceeds to forget the savage and concentrate all his exuberance and wisdom on the defense of the ancient civilizations of America. Enthusiasm for the savage could not really be expected from someone who had made it his life's work to combat the theses of Jean-Jacques, who while still young had authored the Andropologia, a brief poem on the happiness that can only be found in society; who almost simultaneously with the American Letters (1776) was writing L'uomo libero, "The Free Man," a refutation of the Social Contract, "that most fatal of all books"; and who with the revolution in full swing (1792) was to publish his pam- phlet On Physical, Moral and Civil Inequality among Men. No, the sav- ages, "the truly and positively savage peoples," Carli abandons to de Pauw's scathing condemnations.350 When he receives Robertson's His- tory he does find that their illustrious author, "currying favor with de Pauw," dwells unnecessarily on "the nature and weakness of the savage peoples," but he contents himself with objecting that similar savages abound throughout Africa, in a great part of Asia, and even in Europe.351 So Carli declines to defend the innocent primitives, but for the Mexi- cans and the Peruvians he will claim the highest level of civilization and administrative wisdom. He will make them giants in the art of govern- ment, the "Patagonians" of politics. What provokes Carli's response is only an incidental element in de Pauw's slanders. The denial of the great- ness of ancient pre-Colombian civilizations spurs him into becoming their apologist. In the field of archeology he feels capable of meeting and 347. Lettere americane, I, 12, 20. His prime aim was to establish the prehistoric links between the Americans and the inhabitants of our hemisphere (letter of 27 November 1776, in Ziliotto, op. cit., p. 191), which he attempts in the second and third volumes with the help of the Atlantis hypothesis. The objection to such a hypothesis, based on America's lack of European animals, is rapidly discussed by Carli (op. cit., II, 210-11), but considerably more thoroughly by the French translator (Lettres ameri- caines [Boston and Paris, 1788], II, 261-62), who mentions Pernety in a footnote. 348. Op. cit., 1, 12. 349. On Pernety, I, 19 and II, 299 (allusion to Pernety's Examen, which the French translator con- fuses with the Dissertation: I, 423n.; cf. II, 262n.); on Frisi, ibid., I, 19, 105. 350. Lettere americane, I, 42, 233; on the Andropologia, cf. L. Bossi, Elogio storico del Conte Comm. GR.R. Carli (Venice, 1797), pp. 86-88. 351. Op. cit., II, 279, 286-87. There is a warning, however, from "the Printers to the reader," para- phrasing Carli, that de Pauw's work overawed even "writers of the first rank, like abb6 Raynal and M. Robertson" (I, 3). 235 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD overcoming his arrogant opponent. At first he is simply "terrified" of de Pauw. He treats him with almost reverent admiration: The immense labor that this learned German has expended in scouring the ac- counts of travels, the clarity of his judgments, his skill in sustaining a system without appearing to be systematic, the eloquence with which he beautifies and strengthens each of his propositions-these are the particular gifts of a work which seduces and delights."352 His argument is limited in another way too. Although he speaks for both the Mexican and the Peruvian civilizations, in reality he concerns himself predominantly with the latter. The elective and feudal monarchy of Mexico in fact occupies hardly one full letter (the eleventh), and even that one closes by announcing that he will go on to speak of the adjacent republics, like Tlascala (to which he devotes the twelfth letter), "and then of the most regular and paternal of all the Empires of the world that have ever been or ever will be, namely that of Peru.""353 And referring to this point of the text there is a note in the accompanying letters, which he sent to Gravisi with each of the American Letters, telling his cousin: "Now we begin on a much more important subject . .. now we are be- ginning to get to the heart of the matter."354 In fact all the rest of the book, which the author himself describes as badly and hurriedly put together (he dictated a letter a week to his secretary, in great haste, and sent it off to his cousin without even having it recopied, sometimes without even rereading it),355 is given over to the study and panegyric of the empire of the Incas. Carli is familiar with the recent historians of the Inca empire: Ulloa (in fact the American Letters was thought to be a "continuation" of Ulloa's Cartas americanas!),356 Algarotti, de Pauw, Raynal, and "the incomparable painter of the human passions," Marmontel. But the first two "stay too much on the level of generalities"; de Pauw "writes with a pen poisoned by the black bile of a Cannibal" (a baroque expression which was to enjoy considerable success);357 Raynal is "too succinct and too deferential to Pauw,"358 and Marmontel too fanciful. The best 352. Op. cit., I, 2. Carli also knows the second Recherches and agrees with Voltaire's praises of de Pauw (ibid., II, 50-51). 353. Lettere americane, I, 113. 354. Ziliotto, op. cit., pp. 196n., 198. 355. Cf. Ziliotto, op. cit., pp. 194-95, 201-02 ("as fast as the pen would write," ibid., p. 225): Carli was in Milan, his cousin in Capodistria. The letters were however revised and corrected before publica- tion: ibid., pp. 206-07. 356. Spell, Rousseau, p. 110, quoting a Spanish review of 1789. In fact in the French ed. (Boston and Paris, 1788) of Carli's Lettres americaines it is said that it can "serve as a sequel to d. Ullua's Mem- oires." 357. "This expression is violent," notes the French translator, J. B. Le Febure de Villebrune (who also translated Ulloa), "but it is pure truth" (op. cit., I, 195n.). Cf. below, p. 314. 358. Carli had however the greatest admiration for Raynal's Histoire: see Lettere americane, I, 60; and Ziliotto, op. cit., p. 225. 236 The Second Phase of the Dispute thing is to go right back to the earliest sources, or rather to the one su- preme and purest source: "I cannot deny my esteem and faith in Gar- cilaso de la Vega."359 Following in Garcilaso's footsteps, Carli describes in minute detail the system of government of the Incas, whose fundamental aim was "to oblige all their subjects to be happy. No empire ever attained an end so worthy and so useful to humanity."360 De Pauw, who refuses to believe in anything we are told about the Incas, must "through some extravagant metempsychosis" have inherited the soul of Valverde. But Carli repeats that it was "certainly the best of all the political systems that have been imagined or followed in the whole of our hemisphere," because in it "men not only should have been happy, but it was such that they could not, even if they so wished, be anything but happy."36' He goes on, letter after letter, lauding everything, until at the beginning of the nineteenth he comes tumbling out with this confession-cum-aspiration: "I am so full of the idea of the ancient government of Peru, that I feel like a Peru- vian, or at least I seem to wish that in some other part of our globe a simi- lar system could be designed, so that I might go there and enjoy full happi- ness in this part of my life which remains to me."362 De Pauw is by now almost forgotten, and the occasional generic barb launched in his direction is aimed more at the arrogance of the man - who writes "from the depths of a German province" and "thinks every- thing outside of Breslau and Berlin barbaric and savage," and drinks beer, and perhaps, horror of horrors, is quaffing beer "at this very moment when I write"363 - than at refuting his specific theses. In the end Carli himself seems to grow tired of sparring with this tailor's dummy, and on the famous subject of beards (the Americans') bursts out: "And do you think I have no other aim than to do battle with Pauw? I am certainly not so ambitious that I feel I need to seek out illustrious literary opponents to make my reputation";364 but yet he cannot resist getting drawn into the debate and cites the smooth-skinned peoples of the Old World and hairy caciques in the New - the bearded cacique of Catarapa even had a hairy wife - and counts the hairs in the beard that adorned the chin of Monte- zuma.365 359. Lettere americane, I, 121; cf. ibid., I, 78, 81, 95. 360. Ibid., I, 125. 361. Ibid., I, 146. 362. Ibid., p. 182. 363. Ibid., I. 197, 207; II, 16. 364. Ibid., I, 251. 365. Were they six in number, or does Gomara mean that they were sparse? (op. cit., I, 253). Among the errors of de Pauw that Carli submits to particular criticism is this: the Prussian repeats Vespucci's statement that the American women "in order to remedy the organic defect" of the weakness of their men, "were accustomed to put an ointment on their virile member composed of spices and caustic in- sects, causing it to swell up enormously, and the men to become thus more capable of satisfying them," 237 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD The reasons for this long eulogy of the Inca empire are clear enough. Carli himself recognized that his work deserved "no other name than the one which considering all aspects I gave it myself, which is to say that of a dream," the very same epithet that he applies several times to de Pauw's Recherches.366 What Carli in fact saw in the government of the ancient Peruvians, as described in the most romantic of the chroniclers, was the perfect realization of his political ideas and aspirations. The philanthropic and paternalistic despotism of the ancient Incas coincided only too well with the ideology of the erudite encyclopedist and zealous servant of Maria Theresa, the man protected and promoted by Joseph II, the fervent supporter of Peter Leopold of Tuscany's re- forms, and author himself of important economic reforms in the Duchy of Milan, the student of censuses and statistics, and believer in a regulated economy and a state devoted to the economic welfare and increase of the population. One cannot quite say that Carli's Peru is a mere utopian projection of his own unsatisfied reforming zeal. But the enlightened minister, the firm believer in the beatific efficacy of well-organized insti- tutions, often takes the archeologist by the hand, and pushes him into eulogizing that "menagerie of happy men," Inca Peru, and consequently into reviling equally the fanaticism of the ancient conquistadores and the modern philosophes. In suspecting de Pauw of having inherited the soul of Valverde, Carli sets up a continuum of hostility between the sixteenth- century enemy of Atahualpa and the eighteenth-century enemy of the ancient American civilizations, between the fanatical friar and the fanati- cal illuminist. And in so doing he also indirectly reaffirms the ideological link between the hispanophobe de Pauw and the most extreme hispano- philes; just as later the Americans were to accuse de Pauw's work of and affirms that the latter prescription is lacking in Ramusio's Italian version (Recherches, I, 63-64). Carli replies, text in hand, that Ramusio too mentions the poisonous animals (Lettere americane, I, 14-16); but he does not bother to discuss either the truth of the fact nor the facile and extreme deduc- tions that de Pauw extracts therefrom. Those peculiar "well-known drugs of the Americans" are also mentioned with horror by T. Porcacchi (L'Isole pifamose del Mondo [Venice, 1572]), and with amuse- ment by G. de Gamerra (La Corneide [Livorno, 1781]), II, 154 and 188, who quotes "Les Amdric. observ." (cited also in V. 363); but a little further on he quotes de Pauw too: II, 225, nn. 5 and 8; III, 346-47, nn. 5 and 6. They are also discussed, with mention of both Vespucci and de Pauw, by De Lignac (De i'Homme et de la Femme consideres physiquement dans l'etat du Mariage [Lille, 1773- 74], I, 401-02; II, 160), who several other times, and on topics no less scabrous, cites de Pauw as a respectable authority (op. cit., I, 395, 398, 456-57; II, 106, 110, 162, 248, 282, 347, 349, 352). See above, p. 146. 366. Letter of 25 March 1778. in Ziliotto, op. cit., p. 206 (cf. "a bundle of dreams," ibid., p. 194; "legend," ibid., p. 200; "trifles," ibid., p. 296); cf. Lettere americane, I, 38-39 and Isidoro Bianchi, in the Cremona edition, I, v. In fact the Lettere americane is not considered in any way authoritative as a work of history. It is significant that Prescott refers to it in his Conquest of Mexico (1843), and almost always as the work of an "enthusiastic" writer or a person of "lively imagination," but he does not men- tion it once in the following Conquest of Peru (1847), although it is a continuous apology of the Incas. Rota (Enciclopedia Italiana, IX, 30b) describes it as "a somewhat fanciful work." Baudin, who actually interprets the Inca Empire in very much the same way, writes that Carli "traces a cheerful outline of Peru, a gross deformation of reality" (L'empire socialiste des Incas, p. 252). 238 The Second Phase of the Dispute helping to serve the political ends of the supporters of Spain (for which, see below, p. 315). Carli, on the other hand, is a convinced hispanophobe;367 and although educated by a priest and himself a practicing Catholic, he never evinced any great love for ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and actively encouraged the suppression of the Tribunal of the Inquisition; but this did not mean he was anticlerical, nor even antireligious, in the fashion of the Paris or Berlin philosophes. On the contrary, with that intellectual background, his assiduous study of the ancient civilizations, and the Italianate histori- cism of his ideas, Carli naturally places great emphasis on religion as a measure of a people's civilization. The Americans were inferior to the Europeans in many techniques and arts, but they had the most elaborate religious systems and rites and cults. And this is what counts, morality and the fear of God, not mechanical tools or the perfection of luxury. De Pauw would have us believe that they were savages, because they had neither money, nor iron nor writing. But in that case the Spartans too were barbarous savages, and the Romans before the defeat of Pyrrhus, and the Muscovites until 1440; while Xerxes' effeminate Persians would be called civilized."68 The American Letters, written in 1777-78, and published in 1780, was sensationally successful. Clavigero's Storia antica del Messico came out in the same year, and the two authors exchanged profuse compliments. Already in the second edition of the Letters (Cremona, 1781-83), there are numerous references to the work of the learned Mexican; while the latter, having received the American Letters just as the last few pages of his second volume were coming off the press, praised the "very new and very erudite work" which gave "a true, although incomplete, idea of the culture of the Mexicans"369 and went on to dedicate his anti-de Pauwian Dissertations (see above, p. 198) to Carli, with all due pomp and solem- nity; he does so to thank him "in the name of the Americans," who are obliged to him for providing them with a champion of noble breed, re- nowned for the high offices he has filled "and above all famed for the brilliance of his writings," a man who "has had the courage to defend those maligned Nations against the many celebrated Europeans that re- vealed themselves to be their enemies and persecutors."370 367. Among his favorite authors is Correal, "the most diligent and patient of all travelers" (Lettere americane, I, 174, 180, 190), one of the classics of the leyenda negra. 368. Op. cit., I, 70-71, 107. 369. Storia antica del Messico, II, 267. Clavigero notes a few errors in Carli: "Sometimes a city is mistaken for a king" and "almost all the Mexican names appear in altered form, and some so disfigured, that not even I, so familiar with the language and history of Mexico, can recognize them" (ibid.); the same charge is extended to include all the European authors (ibid., IV, 146); but after discussing some details (II, 267-70), Clavigero refers back to the Dissertations. 370. Storia antica del Messico, IV, 4. Cf. ibid., p. 31 (Atlantis, defended by Carli "with an abund- ance of erudition"), 39n., 240. 239 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD of the first order, existing within nature as a creature without significance, a sort of helpless automaton, powerless to change nature or assist her. And she, Nature, had treated him less as mother than as stepmother, withholding from him the sentiment of love or the strong desire to multiply. For although the savage of the New World is of almost the same stature as the men of our world, that does not suffice for him to be an exception to the general rule of the reduction of living nature in the whole continent. The savage is feeble and small in his organs of generation; he has neither body hair nor beard, and no ardor for the female of his kind. Although lighter than the European, on account of his habit of running more, he is nevertheless much less strong in body: he is also much less sensitive, and yet more fearful and more cowardly; he lacks vivacity, and is lifeless in his soul; the activity of his body is less an exercise or voluntary movement than an auto- matic reaction to his needs; take from him hunger and thirst, and you will destroy at the same time the active cause of all his movements; he will remain either standing there stupidly or recumbent for days at a time.12 IV. THE IMPOTENCE OF THE SAVAGE The passage is important above all for the function that it assigns to man. Being few in number and weak, the men of the New World were unable to tame a hostile nature, to conquer and subjugate her virgin power and turn it to their own profit. Instead of collaborating in the development of the animal species and the improvement of domestic types, man him- self remained subject to the "control" of nature, a passive element in nature, an animal like the rest-hardly primus inter pares. Unwittingly Buffon lets himself be drawn on by the thread of his own argument and extends his negative verdict on the quadrupeds to the American savage. Man is no exception. In fact, he is rather worse off than the other animals on account of this sexual frigidity of his: "Nature, refusing him the powers of love, has maltreated and belittled him more than any other animal."13 The particular connection between the impotence of the savage and the absence of large wild beasts - an idea typical of that subtly scabrous eroticism of the eighteenth century - seems to suggest to Buffon another great step forward in his argument. The savage is cold. The snake is cold. Cold-blooded animals are cold. In America reptiles and insects abound 12. Ibid., pp. 443-46; cf. Roger, op. cit., p. 562. The loss of stature as a sign of degeneration, as well as the explanation of this by means of the obstacles to the grands germes, can be traced back to Pliny, who saw the human race "in the future becoming less rich in seed on account of its progressive drying- out through use" (Naturalis Historia, VII, 15, quoted by A. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Re- lated Ideas in Antiquity [Baltimore, 1935], pp. 101-02). The absence of hair, which was to give rise to so much discussion, can be traced back, among modern authors, to de Maillet, who had noted in the Telliamed (1748), in words identical to those of Buffon, that "the Americans ... have neither body hair nor beard" (Telliamed, ou entretiens d'un philosophe indien ..., 2d ed. [Paris, 1755], II, 215; but already the editor of this "new edition" noted that "Telliamed is mistaken" because the savages re- move the hair they have by plucking it and use depilatories!). 13. Oeuvres compl&tes, XV, 446-47; and L. Bertin et al., Buffon (collection Les Grands Naturalistes Franqais [Paris, 1952]), p. 80. On the other hand Rousseau (Discours sur l'indgalitd [Paris, 1839], pp. 549-50) naturally praised the erotic moderation of the savage as proof of his placid obedience to natural instinct, being excited neither by murky fantasies, nor female wiles, nor absurd jealousies. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD XVII. FRANKLIN AND THE NORTH AMERICANS' STATURE The Istrian polygraph's Letters was reprinted and translated, and soon became known throughout Europe.37 It was used, as we have seen, by Molina, who like Clavigero dedicated his Storia naturale to Carli, and by other exiled Jesuits too. Among those who later appealed to its authority were men like de Maistre, Humboldt, Tommaseo, and Leopardi.372 But its most particular significance lies in the fact that it was the first com- position in the polemic to attract the attention of a North American; and not just any North American either, but Benjamin Franklin.373 The second (and first complete) edition of the American Letters was offered to Franklin by the publisher, Father Isidoro Bianchi of Cremona, as the work of "another illustrious author" (after de Pauw, La Conda- mine, Raynal, Robertson, Bailly, and Buffon) who was the first "in Italy ... to give us a more grandiose and adequate idea of that great continent, wherein you must be justifiably proud to have been born." The Romans are no more; no longer does one hear the solemn boast: civis romanus sum. "But every American will always and with more justification be able to say to the inhabitants of the other three parts of the universe: I am a citizen ofAmerica."374 Carli is an admirer of the learned American and has spared no pains to illustrate the history of Franklin's fatherland [sic!]. Franklin alone, then, "the glory of the Philosophers' Republic," can be "the competent judge of the merit of this Book." Benjamin Franklin did in fact deliver his judgment in a letter to the Cremonese printer, in which he begged him to thank Carli "for his skilful defense against the attacks of that ill-informed and evil-minded Writer, who certainly never has a good word for anybody without regretting it immediately and retracting it soon after."375 Already two years before 371. After the third Italian edition (Milan, 1785) it was included in the collections of Carli's complete works. German translation, Gera, 1785; French translation, Boston (actually Paris), 1788, and Paris, 1792; possible English translation, see Bossi, op. cit., p. 171, and Bartolome Gamba, Serie dei testi di lingua italiana (Venice, 1828), no. 1848; Spanish translation, Mexico, 1821-22 (on which see C. Radi- cati di Primeglio, J. R. Carli, economista y americanista del siglo XVIII [Lima, 1944], pp. 27-29). Still in our own time it is the subject of various monographs, such as that of Y. Abeniacar, Sulle "Lettere americane" di G. R. Carli (Milan, 1911), and of Radicati di Primeglio, cited above, and "J. R. Carli, el iniciador del estudio cientifico del problema de la Atlintida," Documentos (Lima), 1 (1948), pp. 44- 72. Cf. also Franco Venturi in Illuministi italiani, III (Milan-Naples, 1958), pp. 419-57, and Ada An- noni, L'Europa, pp. 75-79, 505-09. Thus I would not really say that Carli the Americanist is "a forgotten man," as is suggested by E. Sestan, who devotes several good pages to him (Europa settecentesca ed altri saggi [Milan-Naples, 1951], pp. 138-43). 372. J. de Maistre, Soirees de St. Pdtersbourg, ed. cit., II, 69, 118, 287 (criticizing the French trans. and its footnotes); A. Humboldt, Vue des Cordilleres (Paris, 1810); Leopardi, Dialogo della Terra e della Luna. For Tommaseo, see F. De Stefano, G. R. Carli (Modena, 1942), pp. 212-13, 230. 373. Jefferson too owned a copy of them (Catalogue, IV, 165). 374. Lettere americane (Cremona, 1781-83), dedication. In 1940 Congress passed a law instituting the official observation of "I am an American citizen" Day, on the third Sunday in May. 375. From Passy, 19 November 1784. The letter is reproduced at the beginning of the second of the four vols. of the Lettere americane in the ed. of Milan, 1786, referred to by Bossi, op. cit., pp. 193-94, and republished by C. R. D. Miller in Modern Philology, 27, no. 3 (February 1930), pp. 359-60. On the 240 The Second Phase of the Dispute that, in 1782, he had listed among Raynal's errors the notion "that Euro- pean Animals degenerate in America. That men are shorter liv'd,"376 etc., in other words typically de Pauwian theses, and one of his Italian reviewers had already commented (1774) that Franklin by his very exist- ence, with his sharpness of mind and universally recognized wisdom, "gave the lie" to de Pauw's theory.377 Franklin had represented the United States in Paris since 1776. But in 1782 the office passed to Jefferson, who in the same year in which Franklin addressed himself to Carli, 1784, produced in Paris his Notes on Virginia. So once again the first response to the slanders of America came from Americans in Europe, in direct contact with the "denigrators," from men who had made their mark in various fields and were particularly sensitive to the accusation of inferiority. We have already seen how, while the Hispano-Americans resented above all de Pauw's suggestions of their ignorance and mental inertia, the Anglo-Saxon colonists reacted primarily against the insinuation of some organic inferiority in the natural environment of the New World. Thus they have no hesitation in going beyond de Pauw to assail the great Buffon. And they very often build on empirical arguments, on "practical examples," as indeed behoves a dis- cussion based on measurements and dimensions and quantity, on ques- tions of more and less - and not on the excellence of an ancient civiliza- tion, the attractions of an ideal political regime, or the refinement of some highly developed culture. It is a fact that, up until independence, the cul- ture of the Hispano-American cities had maintained a superior level to that of the Anglo-American centers."8 In the latter the libraries contained scarcely anything but works of theology and patristics, usually in the shape of Bible commentaries. In the Spanish colonies the Castilian clas- sics were readily available, nor was there any lack of French books or European books in general, even on forbidden subjects.379 But the in- masonic brotherhood between Franklin, Fr. Bianchi, and the printer Manini (who published the Lettere americane), see Visconti, op. cit., p. 116, and Pace, op. cit., pp. 138-40. For his part Carli thought he had outlined a theory on lightning before becoming acquainted with Franklin's famous experiments (see De Stefano, op. cit., p. 14). 376. Max Hall, B. Franklin and Polly Baker (Williamsburg, 1960), p. 124. 377. Pace, op. cit., p. 124. 378. A. de Humboldt, La Nouvelle-Espagne, II, 10-11 (and his North American reviewer, 1811, quoted by Bernstein, Origins, pp. 64-65); M. de Oliveira Lima, La evolucidn hist6rica de la America Latina (Madrid, n.d., but ca. 1913), p. 67; P. Henriquez Urefia, Literary Currents in Hispanic America (Cambridge, 1941), p. 232, n. 41, quoting Humboldt. 379. See B. Fay, L'esprit, pp. 25-28, showing how French culture began to be known in the thirteen colonies only after 1750, and was even then treated with reserve and distrust. Cf. Bernstein, Origins, pp. 52-60, for the somewhat paltry and monotonous list of books on Latin America possessed by North American libraries, as compared to the inventories of those of Latin America at the same period, for example the collection of Jos6 Manuel Divalos (see below, pp. 291-92), and the lists of books con- fiscated by the Inquisition. For the early period of Spanish colonization, see also the important re- 241 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD habitants of New England were a more impatient and energetic nation, prouder of their strength, confirmed once more by the success of their recent revolt. The anti-American slanders provoked replies from the two largest groups of Americans of European stock, each reacting with particular vehemence to the libels on its own most cared for, most visible and tangible qualities. When the Latin American protested that his land was "great," he meant great in the glories of the past, in the letters and sciences, great in faith and perhaps even in opulence. When the North American said the same thing, he meant that his land was boundless and the Anglo-Americans tall in stature. The "purchase" of Louisiana had barely been completed when the Americans began to "measure their future grandeur by the extent of their vast territory."380 As for the men, the ironic Franklin was one day entertaining the abbe Raynal to dinner, together with a number of other Frenchmen and Ameri- cans. The abb6 set off on one of his usual oratorical tirades on the de- generation of men and animals in America. The host, good-humored as ever, suggested that the matter be tested empirically: "Let us try this question by the fact before us." He asked his guests to stand up, and it turned out that all the Americans were tall and well built, and all the Frenchmen singularly tiny: the abb6 himself was "a mere shrimp." Ray- nal defended himself with flattering references to "exceptions," and, ac- cording to another not improbable version, by objecting that facts and examples count little in philosophy, where only concepts and ideas are valid: almost as if the Buffon-de Pauwian thesis had by then become a logical necessity serving to impose coherence on the world, and thus an article of faith, against which mere real facts were of little avail.381 searches of I. A. Leonard, gathered together in Books of the Brave (Cambridge, Mass., 1949). On the literary ignorance of New England, see M. F. Heiser, "Cervantes in the United States," Hispanic Re- view, 15 (1947), p. 409, quoting E. C. Cook, Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750 (New York, 1912), p. 2; and T. G. Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620-1730 (New Haven, 1920). 380. F61ix de Beaujour, Sketch of the United States of North America, trans. William Walton (Lon- don, 1814), p. 284, quoted by Weinberg, op. cit., p. 48. 381. Raynal's thesis is very similar to those we have already seen in de Pauw (see above, pp. 89- 90). The anecdote was apparently recounted to Jefferson by Franklin himself: cf. "Anecdotes of Ben- jamin Franklin" in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1944), p. 179, and in Works, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York-London, 1904), III, 458n. Another version of the incident occurs in a letter to Jefferson from William Carmichael: "I do not know whether Dr. Franklin ever mentioned to you what passed at a Dinner at Paris at which I was present, on that contested point. I think the Company consisted of 14 or 15 persons. At Table some one of the Company asked the Doctor what were his Sentiments on the remarks made by the Author of the Recherches sur l'Amerique. We were five Americans at Table. The Venerable Doctor regarded the Company and then desired the Gen- tleman who put the question to remark and to Judge whether the human race had degenerated by being transplanted to another section of the Globe. In fact there was not one American present who could not have tost out of the Windows any one or perhaps two of the rest of the Company, if this Effort de- pended merely on muscular force. We heard nothing more of Mr. P.'s work and after yours I think we shall hear nothing more of the opinions of Monsr. Buffon or the Abbe Raynal on this subject" (letter from Wm. Carmichael, Madrid, 15 October 1787; Papers, XII, 240-41). The episode was also used, 242 The Second Phase of the Dispute 243 Franklin was tall, and his blow, passing over the head of the dwarf Raynal, caught the tall Buffon, who was so proud of his stature and noble bearing. For a moment the war of the worlds seems to shrink to the con- test between the two venerable naturalists, as they stalk up to one an- other, arch their chests, draw back their shoulders, and exchange looks of bitter hatred. In the background lurk the sardonic shadows of the towering Patagonians.... And not just their shadows. The north had its own Patagonians, the redskins. It is remarkable how frequently the Americans of the United States delight in recalling the Indians' tall stature and bold features, and how easily they go on to apply the redskins' physical attributes to them- selves. In 1818 Lieutenant Francis Hall mentions again what "a consider- able stumbling block" these brawny giants are to Raynal's thesis.382 Men and women of European descent were generously made partakers in the gymnastic and genesic powers of the natives, both their real ones and those ascribed to the Noble Savage.383 The Anglo-Saxon Creole does not merely, like the Spaniard, reject the accusations of degeneracy, but pro- ceeds to claim for himself the physical and moral virtues of the Indians, who are immune from so many European diseases, whose beauty is the and embellished with sarcasms at the expense of Europe, by John Bristed (Resources of the United States of America, 1818), who contrasts the "stout, well-proportioned, tall, handsome" Americans with the ridiculous Frenchmen, "all little, lank, yellow, shrivelled personages, resembling Java monkeys" (quoted in Martin, op. cit., pp. 210-11; cf. 190-91). On the importance of tallness also in the political life of the North America of those times and ours, see Andre Siegfried, Tableau des Etats-Unis (Paris, 1954), pp. 250-51, and Frank Thistlewaite, The Great Experiment (Cambridge, 1955), p. 110. On Franklin's anecdote, see also C. Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (Garden City, 1941), p. 721; B. Fay, Civilisation americaine (Paris, 1939), pp. 54-55; G. Chinard, "America as a Human Habitat," pp. 40-41, who observes that there is nothing to prove that before Franklin went to Paris he was "particu- larly disturbed by the aspersions thrown by Buffon on the climate of America": another sign that the polemic, though intercontinental by definition, exploded in the tense climate of Europe. And it was here that it sprang to life again, in almost exactly the same terms, a couple of centuries later: "Here is Ken- nedy in Vienna, annoyed by Nikita Krushchev's description of the Soviet Union as a young nation and the U.S. as an old one, and replying, 'If you'll look across the table, you'll see that we're not so old' " (Time, 17 December 1965, p. 50). 382. M. Hall, B. Franklin, p. 134. 383. Kraus, op. cit., pp. 217-18, 254, 267; Martin, op. cit., p. 196; Chinard, "Le mirage americain," in Les refugies huguenots, pp. xix-xx; cf. B. Franklin, Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, 1783-84 (which are not, however, according to Pearce, The Savages, pp. 138-39, to be taken seriously). Any denigration of the savage only served to undermine this patriotic pride. Thus all re- formers and pedagogues defended the Indians, "whatever may have been advanced by European writers to the contrary," as healthier, happier, and more moral than the Europeans (R. Coram, Political En- quiries, 1791, quoted in C. and M. Beard, The American Spirit [New York, 1942], pp. 126-37). The "Indian constitutions" were taken as models by the rebelling colonists (see Blanke, op. cit., p. 263). "No such animal was ever seen in America, as the Indian M. de Buffon described in Paris" (Samuel Williams, 1794, quoted in Martin, op. cit., pp. 196-97; cf. Pearce, The Savages, p. 161). But when the great march westward began there was no lack of arguments to justify the extermination of the "savage" and "degenerate" Indians (see examples from 1810-11 and 1859 in Tryon, op. cit., pp. 492, 721-24). The history of the attitudes of the North Americans toward the redskins between 1609 and 1851 has been outlined with attention to every nuance and subtle, occasionally too subtle, consideration by the above-mentioned R. H. Pearce, The Savages. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD "Greek" ideal, whose men have such a firm attachment to liberty and whose women such an enviable facility in giving birth.384 Thus the colonists of New England derive an indirect benefit from the Europeans' exaltation of the primitive and the savage. Already by 1803 Volney could observe that most North American writers seemed ob- sessed with the notion of refuting the Europeans, "as if by some bizarre fiction they set themselves up as the representatives and avengers of the natives, their predecessors."385 And in fact the Englishman Hall, amazed at the extraordinary stature of the members of Congress from the western states, found that the only persons to whom he could compare these "Goliaths of the West" were six muscular and gigantic Indian chiefs, who reminded him of the mighty Greek heroes who had stood alone against the Trojan hordes and thrown them back." The Americans of the west were already a match for the fierce Indians in physical prowess. In the novels of Fenimore Cooper, Chasles wonderingly noted, "the red savage and the 'squatter' meet, or rather merge," almost as if the North American climate had influenced the Puritans' descendants to the point where they were no different from the native population.387 The next easy step was taken a few decades later, when toward the middle of the nineteenth century the Atlantic coast community became unequivocally urban, industrial, and commercial and lost all further pos- sibility of decking itself in the redskin's feathers. The attributes of the Noble Savage, dusted up for the occasion, were then transferred en bloc to the westerner. The "frontier" inherited the mythic prestige of the for- est. Mark Twain's "innocents" trace their ancestry all the way back to that remote legend,38 and the line of development continues unbroken 384. Cf., for example, among the earlier writers, Lahontan, op. cit., pp. 120, 131; and among the con- temporaries Perrin du Lac, Voyage dans les deux Louisianes (Paris, 1805), p. 353. On the other hand the colonists inherited the "slanders" of the savages too. Talleyrand, raging against the ethical disposition of the inhabitants of Maine, writes that they are "lazy and greedy, poor but without needs, still too much like the natives they supplanted" (Talleyrand in America as a Financial Promoter, 1794-96, ed. H. Huth and W. J. Pugh [Washington, D.C., 1942], p. 82). See also Castiglioni (below, p. 276), Hilliard d'Auberteuil (below, p. 250), KUirnberger and Bremer, who suppose the strident shouting of the North Americans to be derived from the redskins' war cries (Der Amerikamiide, 1855, ed. Die BrUcke, n.d., p. 384; Vie de famille, II, 290). And Mrs. Trollope, finally, was to explain the vanity of adornment and propensity for alcoholic drinks shown by the "yankees" in terms of the identical tendencies of the red- skin and Negro (Domestic Manners, 1832; ed. cit., p. 423). 385. Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis, in Oeuvres completes, ed. cit., p. 632b; cf. Chinard, L'exotisme americain dans I'oeunre de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1918), p. 20; Pearce, The Savages, pp. 49, 54; Visconti, op. cit., pp. 43-45. 386. Viaggio nel Canadi e negli Stati Uniti, 1816-17, passage translated and reprinted in the Rac- coglitore of Milan, 1818, and transcribed by Leopardi, Opere, ed. Gregoriana, p. 1153. The tallness of the New Englanders was eulogized (1812) by the chancellor of Yale, Timothy Dwight (Tryon, op. cit., p. 39). On the Jesuit precedents of this idealization of the redskins, see above, p. 64. 387. Philarete Chasles, Etudes sur la litterature et les moeurs des Anglo-Americains (Paris, 1851), p. 271. 388. H. N. Smith, "Origins of a Native American Literary Tradition," in The American Writer and the European Tradition, ed. M. Denny and W. H. Gilman (Minneapolis, 1950), pp. 67-70. 244 The Second Phase of the Dispute from the Good Huron and Leatherstocking to Buffalo Bill and Hopalong Cassidy. XVIII. PAINE: THE PROMISE OF GREATNESS IN AMERICA'S NATURE The eighteenth-century mind did not have far to go for the explanation of this dual and commingled excellence of native and immigrant, of red- skin and Creole: it was the climate, this wonderfully healthy forest air, a third excellence corroborating and absorbing the others.389 Closely linked to the Americans' satisfaction over the (qualitative) generosity of Nature was the rejoicing in her (quantitative) abundance and vastness. The immense area of the continent was compared to that of the minuscule and shrunken Europe,39° and a simple pseudological rule of three led to the conclusion that the animal species too must there be larger and heavier than in the Old World. An even more agile leap, from geodesy and zootechny to the philosophy of history, led to the corollary that a magnificent future must surely be in store for a land so spacious, fruitful, and imposing. The environment was a sure promise of glory. This romanticizing type of landscape nationalism has been noted and commented on more than once, with reference both to literature"39 and the fine arts.392 It followed and reacted against the lament of the early New England writers and poets - a lament still found in the young Haw- thorne-about the "prosaicness" or dumbness of the American land- scape, lacking historical associations, shadows from the past, "romantic" apparitions.393 The later and polemical but no less "romantic" enthusiasm for Amer- ica's virgin and potent nature emerges already in the propagandistic 389. See Samuel S. Smith's thesis concerning the influence of the American climate and way of life on the Europeans' descendants, who "had changed in complexion and hair texture . . . whites who lived like Indians began to look like them" (Kraus, op. cit., p. 181). 390. Examples are given in M. Curti, American Loyalty, pp. 4, 32 ff., 40 ff., etc. This theme is almost completely lacking in the early Latin American "nationalists." Later, and still in our own day, the posi- tion was reversed. The United States completed the occupation of its territory, and the Latin American republics "discovered" the vast regions of Amazonia, the Pampa, the Llanos, etc. Pride in spatial vast- ness is now no more than a secondary element in North American patriotism; in that of South America it is the primary and active element. 391. H. M. Jones, Ideas in America, p. 112; idem, The Theory ofAmerican Literature (Ithaca, 1948), pp. 72-73, 153, 191-92; and in general the whole of the above-mentioned large work by E. Vail, which aims to refute the widespread assertion "that poetry was a plant rejected by America's climate": see esp. op. cit., pp. 610, 612; C. and M. Beard, op. cit., pp. 165-66; C. L. Griffin, "Native Indian Culture," in Concerning Latin American Culture (New York, 1949), pp. 117-18; and with a greater wealth of precedents and development, Boorstin, Genius, pp. 23-27. See also the profound observations by Perry Miller, "Nature and the National Ego," now in his Errand into the Wilderness, pp. 204-16, and the criticisms by I. Lowenstern, Les Etats Unis et la Havane-Souvenir d'un voyageur (Paris-Leipzig, 1842), p. 20, of this vain boast of the North Americans. 392. S. Isham, The History of American Painting (New York, 1927), quoted in Jones, Ideas in America, p. 196; cf. also, for later examples, F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 598. 393. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York, 1941), p. 47. 245 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD writings of the first Puritan colonists,394 and in the early 1780s was being more and more vigorously asserted. In 1783 Webster demanded that America should make itself "as independent in literature as in politics," and in 1786 there were already critics (belated and unconscious initiates into the aesthetic of the imitatio naturae) upbraiding American writers for following European models instead of seeking their inspiration in the luxuriant, sublime, all-powerful nature of their own vast country (once more, nature against classical heritage, geography against history).3"5 At the same time Andre Chenier too was extolling the educative power of America's unbridled nature: "et l'ime qui s'embrase h cet ardent mo- dele I Devient independante et sublime comme elle."3"6 On the political plane the argument is already exploited ad nauseam in Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776). It is unnatural that a continent should be governed by an island. The satellite cannot rule a planet larger than itself. America is an eighth of the inhabitable earth, while England is closed within the "narrow limits of 360 miles." If America is young (and here we see the first signs of a reversal in rebus politicis of the thesis of the "new" and still sodden continent), if it is childlike, so much the better: "The infant state of the colonies as it is called . . . is an argument in favor of independence.""397 In the Rights of Man (1792) the same prophecy is even more explicit, even more closely linked to telluric environment. America was predes- tined to be the cradle of the new liberty: "An assemblage of circum- stances conspired not only to give birth but to add gigantic maturity to its principles. The scene which that country presents to the eye of the spectator has something in it which generates and enlarges great ideas. Nature appears to him in magnitude." The theater inspires the actors and lifts them to ever sublimer heights. The very "wilderness" stimulates the development of a totally human and brotherly society, without historical quarrels and political intrigues. If the governments of Asia, Africa, and Europe had been developed on the same principles, the oft imagined visitor from another world, igno- rant of history, "would take a great part of the old world to be new, just struggling with the difficulties and hardships of an infant settlement.""98 394. Boorstin, Genius, pp. 23-27. 395. Henriquez Urefia, op. cit., p. 237 n. 8; Kraus, op. cit., p. 283; Jones, American Literature, passim, esp. pp. 48-71. 396. Andr6 Ch6nier, Fragments de IAmerique (Pleiade ed.), p. 416. 397. T. Paine, Representative Selections, ed. H. H. Clark (New York, 1944), pp. 39-40. Common Sense, "an excellent work," made its author famous in America and all Europe (Marquis de Chastellux, Voyage dans I'Amerique septentrionale [Paris, 1788], I, 263-65). On Raynal's plagiarism of Common Sense and Paine's polemic against Raynal, see Feug6re, op. cit., XXII, 416-19. 398. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, pt. II, Introd.; Conway edition (New York, London, 1906), II, 402-03 (Representative Selections, pp. 173-74). This second part is in particular polemic against 246 The Second Phase of the Dispute He would find widespread and incurable poverty, corrupt governments, and the inexorable grasping hand of the tax collector. The Old World is the "new" one, the imperfect, backward one. It is "childish," and in the worst sense, through having grown too old. It is decadent and incapable of meeting the needs of the new times. Only in America do nature and reason work in harmony to fix the rules and forms of a truer and more humane civilization, only there does virtue inimitable flourish, along with the promise of unlimited progress. Unlimited for a thousand years, maybe. Then America will degenerate like Europe. But while the collapse of the ancient empires left us only the "mouldering ruins of pompous palaces, magnificent museums, lofty pyramids and walls and towers of the most costly workmanship," when "the empire of America shall fall," there will be seen a much sadder spectacle: the ruin of the most noble work of human wisdom, the most majestic scene of human glory, the sublime cause of liberty.399 The Rights of Man was drafted as a reply to Burke's famous Reflec- tions, the most vigorous and impassioned defense of the values of tradi- tion and history. The exaltation of nature unadorned formed part of the attack on the banner-decked ramparts of the past. Thus America as a political concept came into being as antihistory, as the power of nature - in spite of all the European Thersiteses - reaching out toward the future and already proud of its titanic primitivism. If Spanish America had boasted of its bands of saints, the jeweled and glittering trophies of reli- gion, the abundant celestial gifts of grace, Anglo-Saxon America gloried in the mirage of the virgin purity, the boundless possibilities of its land. This delight the North Americans take in being so virtuous, and thus spe- cially favored by God, and thus prosperous and happy, can of course be explained to some extent by Puritan impulses of universal validity. In The Scarlet Letter the tormented Reverend Dimmesdale, in his last ser- mon, rejoices in the conviction that his mission, unlike that of the proph- ets of Israel, is to "foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord."400 But the specifically American form of that conceit was nourished on beliefs and arguments developed in Europe and now boldly turned back on their birthplace. The theme that proved its fecundity over three centuries, from Las Casas to the romantics-of the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, published by Burke in 1791, and is thus under the immediate suggestion of the antithesis between old and new (cf., for example, "though it might be proved that the system of government now called the new is the most ancient in principle," ed. cit., p. 414; Representa- tive Selections, p. 184). 399. Representative Selections, pp. 390-91. On Paine see also Brie, op. cit., pp. 364-66; and for his polemics against Raynal, Villard, op. cit., pp. 333-34, 391. 400. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Books Inc., n.d.), p. 206. 247 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD America the rich in gold and guilt,401 or of Europe's wronging of the inno- cent Americans and its ensuing punishment with mysterious and irre- mediable disasters, of Europe burdened with crime and misfortune - now blossomed among the ingenuous patriots of the United States. One such patriot drew his readers' attention (1794) to "this glad world remote from every foe, I From Europe's mischiefs, and from Europe's woe"; another enumerated (1813) the abundant blessings of (North Ameri- can) providence "while discord is tearing old Europe to pieces"; and yet others suspected Europe's luxury goods of being bearers of moral corrup- tion, as well as unwelcome competition for those produced by the austere republicans across the Atlantic.402 The best and worst in modem Western thought-its scruples of conscience in the face of conquest and exploita- tion, its anxious insistence of its own pride of place in the world, and its right to pass judgment on the rest - reappear, mixed together by the vicis- situdes of the polemic, in the turbid and mystic nationalism of the doctrine of the Manifest Destiny.403 The thesis of the New World's degeneration and impotence, on the other hand, could hardly be made to fit in with any illusion of superiority, indeed actively undermined such a notion. And almost all the Founding Fathers of the United States loosed a few shafts in the direction of Buf- fon and de Pauw. Paine's and Franklin's comments have already been de- scribed. Thomas Jefferson actually attempted a formal refutation.404 John Adams, while still ambassador in London, mentioned in passing, in the preface to his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States (1786), how pleased he was that Paine had demolished "the mistakes of Raynal, and Jefferson those of Buffon, so unphilosophically borrowed 401. V. Monti, llfanatismo, 1797, in Poesie liriche (Florence, 1858), p. 363. The gold is American, and the guilt European, of course. The theme reappears further complicated in Zacharias Werner's Die vierundzwanzigste Februar (18 i0), where the gold, honestly earned in the New World, should serve to wash away and redeem the crimes committed in the Old, but instead releases new and even more hor- rendous ones (Reclam ed., pp. 32, 39, 42). 402. See M. Curti, op. cit., pp. 30, 49, 100, and passim; and also the frank statements of two young French officers, the Prince de Broglie and the Count de S6gur, who went (1782) to serve in the army of Rochambeau (for whom see also Fay, op. cit., p. 122): Deux Fran ais aux Etats- Unis ..., in Milanges de la Societe des Bibliophiles Franvais (Paris, 1903), n. 6, passim, and esp. pp. 169-71, 183, 185. For other copious literary manifestations of faith in the sublime destiny of the United States and its universal mission of redemption, see the above-mentioned early work by Sumner and the more recent cited work by Friedrich Brie. 403. On the Darwinian-chauvinistic origins and racialist tendencies of this myth, see Weinberg's classic Manifest Destiny and H. Wish, Society and Thought in Modern America (New York, 1952), pp. 268, 390, 598; on its "Anglo-Saxon" and Puritan character, see L. B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Bloomington, 1955), pp. 92-95, 104; on the "messianism" of the young United States, Wein- berg, op. cit., pp. 39-40, and R. Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (London, 1952), pp. 21-26, 40, 59-62: and in fact of the colonies even before the Revolution, A. Nevins and H. S. Commager, America: The Story of a Free People (Oxford, 1943), p. 50. 404. In the same work, the Notes on Virginia (for which see below, pp. 252 ff.), he formulated his political philosophy and outlined the destiny awaiting the United States (see G. Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism [Boston, 1944], pp. 118-36). 248 The Second Phase of the Dispute from the despicable dreams of de Pauw."405 And his wife, the pugnacious Abigail, while admitting Europe's superiority in the arts and sciences, claimed that America had a more widespread culture and more virtuous and more beautiful women (in London she finds only one girl of truly divine beauty and immediately points out that her father is an American and a very handsome man!), and went straight over to the counterattack, to the usual ritual slanderous counterattack on Europe's nature and society: "Do you know," she wrote in a letter to her sister in 1786, "That European birds have not half the melody of ours? Nor is their fruit half so sweet, nor their flowers half so fragrant, nor their manners half so pure, nor their people half so virtuous."406 The same year saw the publication of the Anarchiad, a political satire composed by Barlow, the author of The Vision of Columbus, and Freneau, the future Jacobin, in which de Pauw is shown rejoicing over his invention of a telescope that makes things appear smaller the further away they are. With this mirac- ulous instrument-a caricature embodying both the indictment of the "philosopher who judges from afar" and their own annoyance at being judged of minuscule stature - all the creatures of America are seen to be infinitely smaller than those in Europe.407 It was the same Barlow who shortly thereafter read Jefferson's apologetic Notes on Virginia and has- tened to congratulate him: "We are flattered with the idea of seeing our- selves vindicated from those despicable aspersions which have long been thrown upon us and echoed from one ignorant Scribbler to another in all the languages of Europe."408 The exaggeration is clearly rhetorical- de Pauw's theses were not echoed in all the languages of Europe-but is obviously dictated by an irrepressible anger. In its indiscriminate outbursts of indignation the Anarchiad inveighs 405. A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, against the Attack of M. Turgot, in His Letter to Dr. Price, Dated the Twenty-second Day of March, 1778 (London ed., 1787; in Works, ed. C. F. Adams [Boston, 1851 ]), IV, 293. Adams reverses the order of the dreams: de Pauw derives from Buffon, and not vice versa. Jefferson, in his turn, read Adams's book "with infinite satisfaction and improvement" (letter to John Adams, 23 February 1787, in Papers, XI, 177; cf. ibid., XI, 189, 239-40). Cf. also a letter from Adams in 1755, in Brie, op. cit., p. 358. 406. "But keep to yourself," she added, "or I shall be thought more than half deficient in understand- ing and taste" (letter to Mrs. Shaw, London, 21 November 1786, in Letters of Mrs. Adams ... [Boston, 1840], pp. 358-59; cf. also 305, 315-17, 387-88). The observation might have come to her from Jef- ferson, who on 21 June 1785 had written to her: "I heard ... the Nightingale in all its perfection: and I do not hesitate to pronounce that in America it would be deemed a bird of the third rank only, our mocking-bird, and fox-coloured thrush being unquestionably superior to it" (Papers, VIII, 241). But Jefferson still tried to acclimatize the "delicious" European nightingale in America (E. Martin, op. cit., p. 60). 407. B. Fay, Esprit, pp. 145-46 (and on the prompt reception of de Pauw's and Raynal's books in the American colonies, ibid., p. 27). The same image of the reversed telescope is used in that same year 1786 by Mazzei to ridicule abbe Mably (Recherches sur les Etats-Unis [Colle, 1788], II, 23). On the precocious Americanism of Freneau (1771), and Barlow (1778), who had read Robertson's recent His- tory of America (1777), but took the idealization of the pre-Columbian civilizations considerably fur- ther, see Brie, op. cit., pp. 359, 371-72, 375n., 378; and Pearce, The Savages, pp. 178-79. 408. Letter of 15 June 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XI, 473. 249 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America and often in gigantic size. There is no part of the world where the insects are so large as in America. "Toads, frogs, and other beasts of this kind are also very sizable in America."'4 Half the animal kingdom swells, while the other half shrinks. What is required is one explanation that can account for the two phenomena: Let us now see why there are found in this new world such large reptiles, such big insects, such small quadrupeds, and such cold men. This is accounted for by the quality of the earth, the condition of the sky, the degree of warmth and hu- midity, the situation, the elevation of the mountains, the quantity of running or stagnant waters, the extent of the forests, and above all the crude state in which nature is found.15 Et voili pourquoi votre fille est malade! V. THE COLD AND HUMIDITY OF THE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENT But this confused compendium of causes brings to the fore two very relevant features: the crude state of nature and the marshy aspect of the country. Oviedo had already repeated almost to the point of excess that "these Indies are a very wet land," that "this land is very wet," etc.,'16 and Father Acosta had gone so far as to say (1590) that in fact "the greater part of America, on account of this excess of water, is not fit for habitation.""'7 And the reason? The great strength of the sun which draws up the vapors of the ocean and in the cool of the afternoon brings about their condensation into rain'8 - an incomplete meteorological explanation, but more rational than that of a flood or an imperfect drying out. Buffon in his turn portrays the miry continent with all the magic of his descriptive style, giving us a profuse foretaste of Victor Hugo's poetic land "still soft and sodden from the flood" where man makes the dis- turbing discovery of the giants' footprints (Booz endormi), and of that un- formed Brazil where "the land has still the softness of the earliest times."'9 The naturalist describes in vivid colors the warm soft climate, with its moist unhealthy vapors which promote the dense growth of a suffocating vegetation, and he concludes: In this state of abandon, everything languishes, decays, stifles. The air and the earth, weighed down by the moist and poisonous vapors, cannot purify them- selves nor profit from the influence of the star of life. The sun vainly pours down its liveliest rays on this cold mass, which is incapable of responding to its warmth; 14. Oeuvres completes, XV, 447-48. On the hyperbolic dimensions attributed to American frogs, see P. G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (Berkeley, Calif., 1962), p. 233, and see below, p. 300. 15. Oeuvres completes, XV, 448. 16. Historia general y natural, I, 268b, 289b, 383a, 457b, etc. 17. Historia natural y moral, 11, 6; ed. cit., p. 103. 18. Ibid., II, 7; ed. cit., p. 107. 19. C. L6vi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris, 1955), p. 178. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD against another writer, who was not only anything but a follower of de Pauw-indeed who admired the innocence and felicity of the savages, the fertility of the American soil, and the vast herds of cattle it supported409- but who had actually taken up the defense of the "Anglo-Americans" against the slanders of the English, who called the American troops cow- ardly and undisciplined. The trouble (for the Americans) was that this European publicist, however well intentioned-perhaps also because he was in the pay of the French government- appeared to be very familiar at least with Buffon's slanders; in fact his apology was too lenient toward America's enemies, and at the same time he let himself be led into at- tributing to the colonists not only the positive qualities commonly attrib- uted to the savages, but the negative ones too: While the Anglo-Americans [he wrote] are less robust than most European peoples, and the humid climate seems to weaken them, they do have more bold- ness, are less sensitive to wounds than the Europeans, and recover from them more easily. Although less ardent, less passionate, less spiritual than the Creoles of the Antilles, they are quick-witted in their youth . . . are fluent of speech, but are little capable of reflection, and cannot meditate a long while over some- thing, and are in this quite the opposite of the English in Europe. They are fully formed at twenty and old men at fifty,410 and so on, with more ambiguous and qualified praise. XIX. HAMILTON AND CREVECOEUR But already in the year following the publication of the Anarchiad the polemic and its retortions had been taken up by a much more authorita- tive figure and in a manifestly political arena. In The Federalist Alexan- der Hamilton scoffed at Europe's arrogance: Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America,- that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere. 409. Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Essais historiques et politiques sur les Anglo-Am ricains (Bruxelles, 1781-82; rpt. and expanded, Paris, 1783), 1, 13, 31, 48; 11, 394-96 (with polemic against Raynal, who limited the population of the United States to seven or eight million). See his letter to Jefferson (17 Febru- ary 1786) in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, IX, 288-89, and his reply (20 February 1786), ibid., pp. 290- 91. 410. Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Essais, I, 279-80. Cf. Fay, Esprit, pp. 102-04 (who suspects Hilliard of drawing on de Pauw; it is actually quite clear that his source is Peter Kalm: see the extracts from his Voyage dans I'Amerique du Nord [1753-61], in This Was America, ed. O. Handlin [Cambridge, Mass., 1949], p. 15; cf. below, n. 557), 128 (use of Chastellux), 146; Bibliographie critique des ouvragesfran- (-ais relatifs aux Etats-Unis, 1770-1800 (Paris, 1925), p. 55; Villard, op. cit., pp. 327-28. The German translation was harshly criticized (1783) by the Gittingische Gelehrte Anzeigen as littered with errors (Doll, op. cit., pp. 446-47). And Jefferson too, who owned two copies of the Essais, one of which was presented to him by the author, considered it unreliable as a historical source (Catalogue of the Library, I, 203-04, 220). Further scornful comments appear in Papers, X, 10, 580 (cf. X, 4, 10, 582-83); XI, 80; XII, 62. 250 The Second Phase of the Dispute And in a footnote, just to make sure, "Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains."411 In his famous Letters from an American Farmer (1782) Crevecoeur does not explicitly combat de Pauw's slanders, but they are candidly and passionately refuted by the whole book. In the very first letter he vin- dicates the strength and energy of the seeds of American nature: "We are possessed with strong vegetative embryos" from which there grow luxuri- ant wild plants, "which an European scholar may probably think ill placed and useless."42 Nor are the natives any less well endowed: "Let us say what we will of them, of their inferior organs, of their want of bread, etc. They are as stout and as well-made as the Europeans."413 In fact Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's providential benignness of nature is extended in full to the blessed American continent: the high tide facilitates navigation on the estuaries of the great rivers, the low tide makes it pos- sible to go down to the beach and gather "that variety of shell fish which is the support of the poor."414 America is devoid of history, true, but history is one long series of crimes and acts of violence.415 America is intact and uncontaminated: it has neither courts nor aristocracy, neither kings nor bishops, and no great industries - "no great manufacturers employing thousands"416 - no hos- tile castles nor ancient monuments nor cathedrals nor gilded palaces nor soaring spires.4" Thus the prophetic and auspicious corollary: America will be the home in exile of Europe's poor and oppressed, the salvation of her hungry and her unemployed, the workers' fatherland, the general refuge for the whole world.418 411. The Federalist, no. 11, 23 November 1787, ed. E. M. Earle (New York, 1941), p. 69. On the voiceless dog, see above, pp. 56, 147, n. 207, p. 214, etc., and Robin, Nouveau voyage, p. 42. The as- sertion can be traced back to Oviedo: see Enrique Alvarez Lopez, "El perro mudo americano," Boletin de la Real Sociedad Espanola de Historia Natural, XL (1942), pp. 411-17. Still in our own day D. W. Jeffreys has used the nonbarking dogs of the New World to support his thesis that the Arabs carried Negro slaves to America considerably before 1492 ("Pre-Columbian Negroes in America," Scientia, 88 [July-August 1953], pp. 202-18). 412. Letters from an American Farmer (Dolphin Books ed., Garden City, N.Y.), pp. 21-22. But Crevecoeur's enthusiasm does not stretch to the tropics: below the equator everything is putrid, poison- ous, and pestilential: ibid., letter IX, ed. cit., p. 174. On Cr vecoeur see D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City, N.Y., 1953), pp. 31-43; Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, IV, 199-201; V. L. Parrington, op. cit., 1, 140-47; Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven-London, 1966), pp. 159-67. 413. Op. cit., letter XII, ed. cit., p. 220. Cf. letter VIII, p. 156, for the trees which would have been able to grow and thrive in Nantucket, if the inhabitants were not entirely devoted to fishing, et alibi. 414. Ibid., letter VIII, ed. cit., p. 159. 415. Ibid., letter IX, ed. cit., p. 171: of obvious derivation from Voltaire. 416. In that same year 1782 Mazzei prophesied a great industrial future for the United States (see below, p. 269), but Crevecoeur was under the dual influence of his unwavering physiocrat agrarianism (much like Jefferson's, come to that) and his horror of the incipient industrial revolution in Europe. 417. Op. cit., letters III, IV, VIII, ed. cit., pp. 46, 70, 98, 161. 418. Ibid., letters III, IV, VIII, XI, ed. cit., pp. 63, 71, 93, 161, 194. A swift echo in Talleyrand (1794): "Is not every man who chooses a fatherland already an American in advance?" (in Michel Ponia- towski, Talleyrand aux Etats-Unis, 1794-1796 [Paris, 1967]), p. 207. See below, p. 550. 251 252 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Free from ancestral ties, from age-old nationalistic disputes and the must of prejudice, the American is the new citizen of this earth, and as such carries on and at the same time rejects the whole heritage of the Old World. Once again the heliodromic theme blares out: "Americans are the Western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east: they will finish the great circle."419 XX. THOMAS JEFFERSON'S NOTES ON VIRGINIA Of all these replies, however, by far the most important is Thomas Jefferson's, both on account of his thorough treatment of the problem, and because the Notes on Virginia was widely read in both Europe and America.420 The Secretary of the French Legation in Philadelphia, FranCois Mar- bois (later the Marquis de Barb6-Marbois),421 had presented Jefferson with a comprehensive questionnaire on the geography, the products, the social and political institutions, the religion, and the finances of Virginia. Finding himself with time on his hands after his resignation from the gov- ernorship of that state, and obliged to be idle after a fall from his horse, he took advantage of the circumstances to draft detailed answers to the 419. Op. cit., letter III, ed. cit., p. 49. 420. A private edition was produced in Paris in 1785 (falsely dated 1782); a French trans. was pub- lished in 1786, an English ed. in London, 1787, rpt. Philadelphia, 1788; a German trans., Leipzig, 1789 (see also Doll, art. cit., p. 464). There are innumerable other American editions. And already by 1791 the Notes was cited in support of a sermon on The Blessings of America! (Catalogue of the Library, II, 166). "The true history of that publication" is recounted by Jefferson in his Autobiography (in Works, ed. cit., I, 93-95; unless otherwise indicated all our citations will refer to this edition, which reproduces the Notes on Virginia in III, 349-517) and in a letter to John Page (4 May 1786; ibid., V, 98; cf. ibid., IV, 412-13; V, 301, 304). Further details and previously unpublished passages can be found in the recent edition by William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1955); cf. also Catalogue of the Library, IV, 301-30. On the history of the work and its editions, see also Ford in ed. cit., III, 313-45, and Papers, VII, 546, 563 (Jefferson could not get it printed in Philadelphia). On its distribution and diffusion in France, Holland, England, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States, see numerous passages in the Papers, vols. IX-XIII, and especially Papers, VIII, 147-48, 161, 169-70, 174-75, 184-86, 258, 260-61, 263-64, 324, 358, 462, 502-03, 562, 566, 631-32. On Morellet's French trans. (Jefferson, Works, III, 322 ff.; Papers, IX, 133; Catalogue of the Library, III, 357; F. Mazzei, Lettere alla corte di Polonia, ed. R. Ciampini [Bologna, 1937], p. 9). See also D. Barros Arana, Notas para una bibliografia de obras andni- mas y seud6nimas, sobre la historia, la geografia y la literatura de America, 1882, in Obras completas, VI (Santiago, 1909), p. 469, n. 375. Cf. finally Alcuni libri piuttosto interessanti (Florence, Sansoni, 1950), nn. 18-19, and below, chap. 9, sec. 5, "The Quakers, the Marquis, and the Girondist." 421. Barbe-Marbois, after a stormy career during the Revolution, became one of Napoleon's favorite ministers, and died a marquis and peer of France. By a singular coincidence it was actually to him, as Minister of the Treasury, that there fell the task of negotiating the famous sale of Louisiana to the United States, of which Jefferson was then president. The man who had furnished Jefferson with the occasion for the most powerful polemic in defense of the North American territory was an essential instrument of its greatest spatial and economic enlargement, realized by Jefferson himself. Jefferson wrote to him again thirty-seven years after receiving his questionnaire (14 June 1817, in The Life and Writings, ed. cit., pp. 681-82) reaffirming his faith in the future of the United States. The Britannica says that Barbe- Marbois served six governments "and all with servility"; the Dictionnaire des Girouettes (3rd ed., Paris, 1815) already assigned him no less than four weathercocks. See also R. Remond, op. cit., pp. 238, 318. The Second Phase of the Dispute diplomat's queries (1781-82), based on notes that he had made some time earlier. Virginia, which the Elizabethans, in a frenzy of courtly admiration for the Virgin Queen, had already hailed as a new Eden,422 was not for Jefferson just a state like any other: it was in his own warmly affectionate phrase, "my native country,"423 and extended as far west as the Ohio and the Mississippi, taking in all of Kentucky. "Virginia was by far the largest state in Confederation -claiming ter- ritory now comprising numerous states and embracing perhaps a third of the Continent," which leads him to identify it with all America.424 In the heart of Virginia lay his house and his land: Monticello, truly, praeter omnes ridet; and as he boasts of its charms he finds himself instinctively repudiating the well-known calumnies of the European scholars, and in fact hurling them back against Europe: "Indeed, madam," he wrote to Angelica Schuyler Church, "I know nothing so charming as our own country. The learned say it is a new creation; and I believe them; not for their reasons, but because it is made on an improved plan. Europe is a first idea, a crude production, before the Maker knew his trade, or had made up his mind as to what he wanted."425 America is creation's master- piece. And Virginia, his Virginia, is an exhaustive compendium of all the United States, a representative section of the whole of North America. As the Virginian Colonel Byrd had biblically put it: "In the beginning, All America was Virginia."426 One of the very earliest readers of the Notes in fact wrote to Jefferson saying: "I consider it a most excellent Natural history not merely of Virginia but of No. America and possibly equal if not superior to that of any Country yet published."427 In describing Virginia, Jefferson thus found himself pushed into writing what was to be the only complete and formal book passed on to posterity by that prolific correspondent, orator, and publicist. And among the very few examples of American literature admitted by the disdainful Sydney Smith (1818) we find indeed "a small account of Virginia by Jefferson."428 Directed at a French audience, and first published in Paris, the book was bound to examine the famous theories of Buffon, to whom 422. L. B. Wright, The Elizabethans' America, pp. 109, 161, 167, 205 and passim. 423. On the ambiguity of this expression, see Curti, American Loyalty, pp. 22-23; Boorstin, Genius, pp. 73-74; idem, The Americans: The National Experience (London, 1966), p. 402. 424. Peden, in ed. cit., xxi-xxii. 425. Letter of 17 February 1788; Papers, XII, 601. 426. William Byrd (1674-1744), quoted in Boorstin, Colonial Experience, p. 97. 427. Letter of Charles Thomson (secretary of the Continental Congress), 6 March 1785, in Papers, VIII, 16. 428. Article in the Edinburgh Review (December 1818), cited in Cunliffe, Literature, p. 44. It is not literature, but statistics, a recent biographer suggests, on the other hand; see Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960), p. 406. 253 254 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD one of the very first copies was delivered at Jefferson's personal re- quest.429 A. The mammoth and America's humidity. Here again the point of departure is the size of America's animals. After brief reference to the minerals and plants of Virginia, Jefferson begins on the description of the quadrupeds,430 introducing us proudly to the mammoth or great buffalo, without doubt the largest of all (p. 408), a great brute whose "cubic vol- ume" was six or seven times that of the elephant, as Buffon himself has admitted (p. 412). Once having established its existence on the basis of fossil remains, and thus assured an overwhelming supremacy of the cold and temperate zones of the new continent over tropical Asia and Africa, which can barely support the minuscule elephant, Jefferson uses this hairy and puissant pachyderm as a lever, so to speak, to pry open and demolish the Buffonian thesis of America's zoological inferiority:431 It is certain such a one [such an animal] has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence in the conception and nourishment of animal life on a large scale; to have stifled, in its birth, the opinion of a writer, the most learned, too, of all others in the science of animal history, that in the new world, "living nature is less active, much less strong." (p. 415) The moment Buffon is quoted, before his ideas have even been properly outlined, Jefferson falls upon them and pronounces them downright ab- 429. Letter to Chastellux, 7 June 1785, in Jefferson, Works, III, 319. And Mazzei, Jefferson's friend, always talks of Virginia as the richest and most authoritative of the thirteen ex-colonies. But he is mis- taken, or at least exaggerating, when he says that "the real reason" why Jefferson wrote the Notes was to fulfill his promise to furnish a reply to the written questions, "provided. . . they were restricted to the state of Virginia alone," which might be put to him by his friend the Duc de La Rochefoucauld (F. Mazzei, Memorie della vita e delle peregrinazioni [Lugano, 1845-46], I, 533-34). But Mazzei knows that the Notes had been drafted before Jefferson's arrival in France (see his Recherches historiques et politiques sur les Etats-Unis... [Colle, 1788], II, 115). Another Italian, Luigi Castiglioni, Viaggio negli Stati Uniti dellAmerica settentrionale (Milan, 1790), I, 355, recalls that Jefferson did not want to make his Notes public. Its true purpose - Vail says in fact - was to "refute the inconceivable supposition advanced by Buffon and abbe Raynal, that in America the animal species, including the human family, were, in comparison with Europe, reduced" (op. cit., p. 15). 430. Birds, fish, and insects are treated somewhat summarily, on pp. 462-69, since these creatures do not present any polemic interest like the quadrupeds. 431. Buffon (see above, pp. 15-16) was quick to catch the danger of Jefferson's argument. And his first reaction, on receiving the Notes on Virginia, was to reaffirm that the mammoth and the elephant were the same creature (letter from Jefferson to Hogendorp, 13 October 1785, in Works, III, 415n., and IV, 466-67, and in Papers, VIII, 631-32; and the exchange of letters with John Rutledge, Jr., 4 September and 9 September 1788, in Papers, XIII, 568, 592-93; but on the subject of the mammoth and against Buffon see already the correspondence from 1784 with Ezra Stiles in Papers, VII, 304-05, 312-17, 364-65; Martin, op. cit., pp. 62, 111-15, and passim, and below, p. 403); he was seeking in fact to remove the fulcrum of Jefferson's lever. On the American mammoth admitted also by Buffon, see already Clavigero, Storia antica del Messico, IV, 42n., 115 and the enormous monstrous dimen- sions he gives for it, and Pictet, op. cit., I, 150-52, who follows Jefferson. But Castiglioni was already dubious about this gigantic "unknown animal": op. cit., I, 387-88; II, 155. De Pauw, naturally, had made fun of the mammoth, "an individual more worthy of appearing in the mythology of the North than in the nomenclatures of natural history" ("Amerique," I, 348a). The Second Phase of the Dispute surd: "as if both sides [of the earth] were not warmed by the same genial sun"; as if the earth of America had a different chemical composition; and as if this earth and sun gave birth to fruit or grain that was less nourishing or that brought about a premature surcease in the process of growth. No, the size of the animals is not dependent on their diet. The pygmy and the giant, the mouse and the mammoth soak up the same nutritive juices. The difference in growth depends on circumstances that remain impenetra- ble to creatures of our limited capacity: Every race of animals seems to have received from their Maker certain laws of extension at the time of their formation. Their elaborate organs were formed to produce this, while proper obstacles were opposed to its further progress. Below these limits they cannot fall, nor rise above them. The differences in climate, earth, food, and upbringing can influence the size of individuals, but always within the fixed limits of the species. Every species has its own dimensions, fixed ab aeterno. All the manna the heav- ens could provide would not suffice to make a mouse grow into a mam- moth (p. 416). Twenty-five years later Goethe repeated the same notion, ignoring any necessity of reconciling it with his transformism, and indeed took it a step further in setting Nature alongside the Maker, or God himself: Zweck sein selbst ist jegliches Tier, vollkommen entspringt es Aus dem Schoss der Natur und zeugt vollkommene Kinder ... Doch im Innern befindet die Kraft der edlern Geschopfe Sich im heiligen Kreise lebendiger Bildung beschlossen. Diese Grenze erweitert kein Gott, es ehrt die Natur sie: Denn nur also beschrinkt war je das Vollkommene miglich.432 Thus Jefferson denies a priori any validity whatsoever to comparisons of stature, but having done so proceeds nevertheless to analyze the fraorile basis of Buffon's "opinions." According to the latter, the inferiority of America is due (Jefferson simplifies somewhat) to a lack of warmth and an excess of humidity. But is America really wetter? Adequate statistics 432. "Every animal is an end to itself, springing forth perfect out of Nature's womb and begetting perfect progeny. ... But the power of the nobler creatures is intimately limited within the holy circle of its living form. No God can extend these limits; Nature respects them: for only through such limitation is perfection possible." The harmony deriving from the proportion of parts to the whole, the perfection of balance, which Goethe here assigns to the animal species, is notoriously one of the fundamental con- cepts of his view of the world. Nature itself, Goethe writes elsewhere, cannot create monsters, like horned lions. He quite likely had in mind a celebrated passage where Kant admires the unity of the ani- mal scheme in the innumerable variety of forms "through the shortening of one and the lengthening of another, through the wrapping up of this part and the unwrapping of that" (Kritik der Urteilskraft, pt. II, sec. 80; ed. Insel [Leipzig, 1921], VI, 316-17). Cf. also J. P. Eckermann's Gespriche mit Goethe (Zurich, 1948), 6 May 1827; E. Caro, La philosophie de Goethe (Paris, 1880), pp. 127-31, 388-90; W. Jablonski, Goethe e le scienze naturali (Bari, 1938), pp. 152-53, 160-61; and Lovejoy, Chain of Being, p. 369, n. 76. Haldane repeats and develops Goethe's thesis that "for every type of animal there is an optimum size" (op. cit., p. 25). 255 256 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD on this point are unavailable.433 And is it really true that humidity is hos- tile to the growth of the animal species? There is no good reason to sup- pose so, and experience indicates the opposite. The more humid a land is, the more luxuriant its vegetation, and "vegetables are mediately or im- mediately the food of every animal; and in proportion to the quantity of food, we see animals not only multiplied in their numbers, but improved in their bulk, as far as the laws of their nature will admit."434 Thus in the overall comparison of the two continents, America and Europe, America is certainly found to be warmer (a positive factor) and wetter (a negative factor) than Europe: they are thus "equally adapted. . . to animal pro- ductions" (p. 419). And in any case, Jefferson adds in a letter, perhaps one cannot even really say that America is wetter: did not Dr. Franklin find London and Paris wetter than Philadelphia? ...435 But in the Notes 433. In 1805 (8 February), writing to Volney, Jefferson compared the climates of Europe and America, and preferred the American, one of the reasons being that "though we have double the rain it falls in half the time" (Modern Library ed., p. 577; cf. Martin, op. cit., pp. 131-47). Virginia's climate, in particular, after having enjoyed for some time a legendary renown (cf. Spenser, Fairie Queen, I, "fruitfullest Vir- ginia" [ 1589]; Michael Drayton, To the Virginian Voyage: "Virginia, Earth's only Paradise"; P. Chaunu, op. cit., p. 115; Blanke, op. cit., pp. 86, 101-03, 114, 117, 119-20, 141), had inexplicably (or through lack of the hoped-for gold?) acquired a terrible reputation. Some find it intolerably hot, others profess themselves bitterly disappointed in it, others still scorn and ridicule it (Blanke, op. cit., pp. 128, 157, 300). Thomas Burnet, after ascribing the longevity of the inhabitants of the Bermudas to the tradi- tional mildness of its climate (see the famous poem by Andrew Marvell, "Bermudas," ca. 1653), contin- ues: "And on the contrary in Virginia, as they call it, which is not far away, they are very short-lived and sickly, on account of the extremely intemperate climate" (Telluris theoria sacra [1681], II, 3; Amster- dam ed., 1699, p. 90). Jefferson owned a copy of this work, but despised its geological theories, and especially the inquiries into the antiquity and vicissitudes of the globe. 434. This thesis, that animal life thrives better in a thriving plant life, had already been put forward with precise reference to the Americas, by Pietro Martire (Decades de Orbe Novo, I, 10; III, 6, 7), but discussed and denied by Darwin, with the examples of the formidable fauna of arid South Africa and the mediocre animals of verdant tropical America (cf. below, pp. 448-49). Jefferson cites in support of his thesis an example given by Buffon, of a race of animals, the oxen, who prosper more the colder and more humid their surroundings are; and the thesis, likewise Buffonian, that "everything colossal and great in nature was formed in the northern lands" (p. 418n., citing Epoques de la Nature, pp. 255-63; and again in Notes, p. 458n.). In this phase of the polemic the separation between the two points of view comes out quite clearly. Buffon, when he spoke of American species, always had in mind those of South America and the Tropics (see above, chap. 1, n. 9). Jefferson was thinking first and foremost about the animals of North America, and took comfort in Buffon's thesis about arctic fauna in general. And his friend Madison reminded him that Buffon, in polemic with de Pauw, had already limited his denigration of the American fauna to that of South America (letter of 20 June 1786, in Papers, IX, 665). 435. Letter to Chastellux, 7 June 1785 (Works, III, 420n., and in Papers, VIII, 184-86), which con- cludes by bewailing the fact that the problem cannot yet be resolved, as the data is lacking: "in the mean- time, doubt is wisdom." And a few years later: "I verily believe it will turn out in event that the atmos, phere of our part of America is less humid than that of this part of Europe," which helps to refute Buf- fon, de Pauw, Raynal, and Robertson (letter to Benjamin Vaughan, 23 July 1788, Papers, XIII, 397; and cf. Vaughan's reply, 2 August 1788, ibid., XIII, 460). In the Notes on Virginia the climate (humid- ity, p. 472) is discussed in the course of a reply to the question: "A notice of all that can increase the progress of Human Knowledge?" (pp. 470-84). On Franklin's experiments, and their anti-Buffonian implications, see Chinard, "America as a Human Habitat," p. 41, and Martin, op. cit., pp. 176-77. On the defense of the climate of Pennsylvania undertaken by Dr. Rush, see already Brissot, Nouveau voy- age, II, 118-29. The thrust of Jefferson's polemic is to deny any natural diversity between the two hemispheres (and, secondarily, to insist on the superiority of the American hemisphere in such dif- ferences as do exist), but later he seems to acknowledge it as an evident fact: "Nor is it in physics alone that we shall be found to differ from the other hemisphere. I strongly suspect that our geographical peculiarities may call for a different code of natural law" (letter to Dr. Mitchell, quoted in Weinberg, op. cit., p. 29). The Second Phase of the Dispute on Virginia Jefferson points out somewhat more shrewdly that, in reality, the supposed wetness of South America is perhaps explained by the fact that it was visited and described almost exclusively by Spaniards and Portuguese, who came from countries that were among the driest in the world. An Irishman, a Swede, or a Finn would probably have found South America a dry and arid land.436 B. The animals compared by volume. We come next to the volumet- ric comparison of the European and American quadrupeds. Jefferson gives statistical tables of the animals common to the two continents, of those found only in one, and of those that have been raised domestically in both: all set out in order of volume, the biggest first, the tiniest at the very foot of each table, and beside each animal a note of its weight in pounds and ounces. Not all the weights are equally certain. Some refer to specimens of exceptional size. For Jefferson it is enough however to show that the law which Buffon maintained was valid "without excep- tion" is unacceptable. But then Jefferson gets carried away with enthusiasm at seeing so many of his champions, his reindeer and bears and wolves, defeating or at least equaling in weight the European champions; he is determined to rout his opponent completely, and onto the metaphorical scales he throws the vast American mammoth, bringing the balance crashing down on the side of the New World. And to objections that the mammoth is extinct he replies no, Nature never let a species become extinct,437 and very prob- ably the mammoth can still be found wandering somewhere in some re- mote part of the continent. There are a number of other worthy animals of which we know too little. Buffon certainly never saw them or weighed them. He based him- self on the tales of travelers, who described them as smaller than their European counterparts. But were these travelers qualified to judge? "Have they not been men of a very different description from those who 436. Op. cit., pp. 461-62n.; compare above, pp. 7-8. The argument was taken up and developed by Jefferson's friend Volney, in his Tableau du climat (1803), pp. 697-98. And it is found again, in its naive form, so to speak, in the diary of a young American diplomat, journeying (1826) down to the Rio Magdalena: "In observing the rich luxuriance of the forests on this river and in different parts of America, we may well believe that the minds of the European discoverers were impressed with admiration. One who has seen only the sterility or at most stunted trees of many parts of Europe [where the author had never been] might well feel and express admiration at what is presented here" (E. T. Parks and A. Tis- chendorf, "Cartagena to Bogoth, 1825-26: The Diary of Richard Clough Anderson, Jr.," Hispanic- American Historical Review, 42, no. 2 [May 1962], pp. 217-31, esp. 227). 437. "Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct" (p. 427). Jefferson was unwilling to believe in the possible extinction of any species "since it would imply that the Creator had abandoned some of his creations" (Times Literary Supplement, 19 September 1968). It is the customary argument ad absurdum in defense of nature, that it cannot be so weak or impotent as to allow one of its creatures to be destroyed or can- celed from the face of the earth. On Jefferson's interest, about this same period, in gigantic fossil car- casses and the mastodon, in polemic with Buffon's geological theories, see the Princeton edition of the Papers, VI; IX, 260-61, 476-78; XIII, 568, 593. 257 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD have laid open to us the other three quarters of the world?"438 Did they measure or weigh the animals they wrote about? Did they in fact even see them? And did they really know the animals of their own countries? They were often such ignorant men that they even confused the species.439 Their evidence must be rejected. In the tables drawn up by Jefferson, based almost exclusively on Buf- fon440 but completed by the Virginian with most deliberate and particular care,441 the quadrupeds peculiar to America turn out to be four times more numerous and not a whit smaller than those of Europe (pp. 432, 436). Thus one more of Buffon's theses is shattered. The animals domesti- cated in both hemispheres are larger wherever they have been fed and raised better, and there is absolutely no call to conjure up some "imbecil- ity or want of uniformity in the operations of nature" (p. 433); so that the third Buffonian thesis too "is as probably wrong as the first and second were certainly so" (p. 435). C. The indios and the redskins. But worst of all, Jefferson continues, is the fact that Buffon extended his "hypothesis" to take in the men of America too. Fortunately his description (summarized above, pp. 6-7; Buffon, XV, 446-47) does not correspond to the facts. Of the South American Indian, Jefferson knows only what little he has read, which he finds as improbable as one of Aesop's fables. Of the North American native, he knows considerably more, through personal experience too, and he can vouch for his being quite the opposite of the way he is repre- sented by the Europeans. "He is neither more defective in ardor, nor more impotent with his female, than the white reduced to the same diet and exercise."442 The redskin is brave, shrewd, very much attached to 438. Op. cit., p. 428. Jefferson seems to want to imply that the traders' and adventurers' and mission- aries' American tales cannot be accepted as being as valid as the exact geographical descriptions of the Old World (see below, n. 449). In a letter written some years later to the president of Harvard, Dr. Willard, Jefferson wrote: "The Botany of America is far from being exhausted, its Mineralogy is un- touched, and its Natural History or Zoology, totally mistaken and misrepresented. As far as I have seen, there is not a single species of terrestrial birds common to Europe and America, and I question if there be a single species of quadrupeds (Domestic animals are to be excepted)" (Letter from Paris, 24 March 1789, in Life and Writings, pp. 467-68). 439. A note to the 1853 ed. comments: "Even Amerigo Vespucci says he saw lions and wild bears in America" (p. 428n.). As already with Molina (see above, p. 215), who was well known to Jefferson (Catalogue of the Library, IV, 293), the Buffonian (or rather Oviedian) argument of the "names" having confused the "things" (equally well known to Jefferson, ibid., p. 43 In.) is turned against Buffon himself. The criticism of the travelers as inexperienced or naive seems to be an echo of similar expressions in J. J. Rousseau, Discours sur I'inegalite (1754), note 8; ed. cit., pp. 128-31. 440. Clavigero too (praised by Jefferson for correcting the errors of Robertson: Catalogue of the Library, IV, 269; Martin. op. cit., p. 56; cf. above, n. 184) had drawn up tables of the American quad- rupeds "recognized and admitted" by Buffon, confused by him with other species and ignored by him or "wrongly denied," to conclude that America, a third of the globe, had at least one hundred and fifty-two species against two hundred or three hundred at most counted by Buffon in the whole globe (Storia an- tica del Messico, IV, 151-59). 441. Letter of 25 September 1783 to Thomas Walker, Catalogue of the Library, IV, 304. 442. In the 1853 ed. (p. 438n.) the thesis of the eroticism of the savage is supported by the testimony (they are "immoderately lascivious") of that same Vespucci who a little earlier had been cited as the archetype of the unreliable traveler. Vespucci is cited several times in the following pages. 258 The Second Phase of the Dispute 259 his children, loyal to his friends, alert and intelligent, and, like the white man, devoted to hunting and gambling. His shortcomings and those of his womenfolk, held to be less fruitful,443 are due solely to his circum- stances, not to nature. They are caused by his way of life, with its fre- quent hunger, constant danger, and backbreaking work. And as for their being smooth skinned, that is because they shave their skin . . . The traders who married Indian women and succeeded in persuading them to abandon the habit "say [delightedly?!] that nature is the same with them as with the whites."444 It is really not so surprising that a few years later (1797) one of Jefferson's critics ridiculed him for his zeal in "examining minutely every part of [the Indian's] frame," and thus ascertaining that even if his hand was smaller than the European's his genital organs were neither smaller nor less efficient.445 Nor are the redskins mentally inferior. Oratory is their strong point. Neither Demosthenes nor Cicero, nor any other of Europe's most famous orators, whoever he might have been, ever made a better speech than the Mingo Chief Logan's address to the governor of Virginia, Lord Dun- more, in 1774 (pp. 41 16).446 Jefferson never doubts its authenticity and 443. At one time Jefferson had seemed to accept the thesis of the meager fecundity of the redskin women, but later corrected the manuscript, referring only in general terms to "obstacles" to prolifera- tion (see Peden ed., pp. 96, 281 n. 3). 444. Notes, p. 443. But not even if they were naturally glabrous, Jefferson concludes paraphrastically, "is the consequence necessary which has been drawn from it" (ibid.). Montaigne already knew that the Mexican women "remove their hair from their whole body" except their foreheads (Essais, II, 12; Pleiade ed., p. 461), certainly on the word of Lopez de G6mara ("They all remove their hair and anoint themselves, so as not to have any hair except on the head and brows": La conquista de Mexico, chap. 223; Mexico ed., 1943, II, 245). Brereton gives a delightful story (1602) of Indians making false beards with animal hair, "and one of them offered a beard of their making to one of our sailors for this that grew on his face" (L. B. Wright, The Elizabethans' America, p. 143). "No beards" is also the comment of an- other English traveler of 1612 (A. L. Rowse, The Elizabethans and America [London, 1959], p. 167; Wright, The Elizabethans' America, p. 216). The Mexicans have almost no beard (C. M. Wieland, "Kox- kox und Kikequetzel," p. 70). "The Indians are generally glabrous" (Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 244; they painstakingly remove their hair, ibid., p. 296). And "the Indians [redskins] are supposed to have been beardless" (Edmund Wilson, op. cit., p. 66). And Humboldt (Reise, II, 22) and innumerable others. See also above, p. 124, and below, n. 500. On the lack of Indian monuments and also of such public works as irrigation ditches, Jefferson expresses himself quite frankly on p. 500; on their reluctant acceptance of civilization, in the Second Inaugural A ddress (1805), in X, 131-33; on his attitude in gen- eral, see Pearce, The Savages, pp. 91-96, and the bibliography in Martin, op. cit., pp. 279-80. 445. Quoted in Martin, op. cit., p. 224. B. Rush, in his Autobiography, ed. G. W. Corner (Princeton, 1948), manages to trace a curious parallel between the redskins and the French, "the most civilized of any nation in the world." 446. This famous speech, published in America in 1775, was already brought to the Europeans' notice by Raynal, in the 3rd ed. of his Histoire (1780); by Pictet, op. cit., I, 191; by abbe Robin, Nouveau voyage, pp. 147-48; and by Ferdinand M. Bayard, Voyage dans l'interieur des Etats-Unis . . . pendant l'ete de 1791 (1797; 2d ed., Paris, 1798), pp. 217-18. See also E. D. Seeber, "Diderot and Chief Logan's Speech," Modern Language Notes, 60, no. 5 (March 1945), pp. 176-78; idem, "Chief Logan's Speech in France," Modern Language Notes, 61 (June 1946), pp. 412-16; F. Mazzei, Recherches historiques, IV, 153-55; and the long notes and appendices in Jefferson, Works, III, 444-55, in the Peden ed. of the Notes, pp. xxiv n., 226-58, in the Catalogue of the Library, IV, 214, 224-27; V, 209, 210, and in H. Melville, Mobv Dick, ed. L. S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York, 1952), pp. 680-81. The redskins' eloquence was proverbial, on the reliable evidence of those masters of eloquence, the Jesuits (see Kennedy, op. cit., pp. 138-39; E. A. Vail, "Orateurs Indiens," in op. cit., pp. 467-76; Wright, The Elizabethans' America, p. 185) and Diderot too had recognized "the eloquence of those people" (Voyage de Bougainville, p. 759). But this characteristic too seems to be of classical derivation: the fiery elo- THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD it will never produce anything but humid creatures, plants, reptiles, and insects; and cold men and feeble animals are all that it will ever nurture.20 So we come back to the point of departure, according to which nature in America is weak because man has not tamed it, and man has not tamed it because he in his turn is cold in love and more similar to the cold- blooded animals, closer to the watery putrescent character of the con- tinent. And the erotic-hydraulic explanation of the singularity of Ameri- can nature goes round and round in this same vicious circle: It is thus principally because there were few men in America and because the majority of these men, leading an animal-like existence, left nature in its wild state and neglected the earth, that it has remained cold, incapable of producing active principles, developing the seeds of the great quadrupeds, for whose growth and multiplication there are required all the warmth and activity that the sun can give to a loving earth; and it is for the contrary reason that the insects and rep- tiles, and all the species of animal that crawl in the mud, whose blood is water, and who flourish in putrescence, are more numerous and larger in the low wet marshy lands of this new continent.21 The "loving earth" on the one hand and these animals that have water instead of blood in their veins on the other sum up in two vivid images the very nucleus of Buffon's theory. VI. PUTRESCENCE AND GENERATION -WATER AND LIFE But what is the origin of this theory linking the humidity of the sur- roundings with the abundance of insects and snakes? Everything points to its being a leftover of the protracted seventeenth-century debate on the spontaneous generation of worms and vipers from putrefying bodies or sodden earth. Father Kircher was satirized by Redi for his claims to have known snakes to be burned, crumbled to pieces, buried in earth sprinkled with rainwater, and then after eight days to produce "little worms" which when fed on milk and water became "perfectly shaped snakes."'22 Buffon's cold animals "which abound in putrescence" are descended from these "snakes breeding from putrescent matter" against which Redi argued. 20. Oeuvres completes, XV, 452. See also the famous description of the "savannahs of South America ... peopled with unspeakable animals.., .the cesspools of nature.., .impassable regions, still un- formed," swarming with an "impure race" of reptiles and insects "swollen by the humid heat" (in Morceaux choisis de Buffon [Paris, 1829], p. 83). 21. Oeuvres completes, XV, 452-54. On the connection Buffon makes between cold and humidity, on the one hand, and weakness, sterility, and death on the other, see Lesley Hanks, Buffon avant 1' "His- toire naturelle" (Paris, 1966), pp. 173-74, 191. The example used is precisely that of the American forests, although by Buffon's time climatologists had already refuted that ancient theory. Cf. also Bertin, op. cit., p. 71. 22. Esperienze intorno alla generazione degli insetti (1668; ed. Florence, 1688), pp. 63-64. Father Kircher also maintained that Noah did not need to take reptiles and insects into the ark, because these animals are born spontaneously from putrefaction (see D. C. Allen, The Legend of Noah [Urbana, Ill., THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD chooses it, deliberately, to combat "the contumacious theory of certain writers... that our country from the combined effects of soil and cli- mate, degenerated animal nature, in the general, and particularly the moral faculties of man," because he knew that it had been suggested by some that he had made it up himself "to support an argument against Buffon."447 No, the speech is genuine, and Logan the savage is a master of eloquence. The oratorical invention ascribed to Jefferson recalls the case of Polly Baker, whose speech was almost certainly the work of Benjamin Frank- lin. Polly's fictitious defense, when she went on trial for having brought five bastards into the world, had been an attempt to convince her judges of her "merit" in having increased the colony's population; thus it repre- sented a counterattack in the name of natural law (supported by eco- nomic law) against society and its false and hypocritical laws, and had been utilized as such by publicists and philosophes, including even Ray- nal, Diderot, and Brissot.448 The redskin chief and the little Connecticut strumpet spoke out with one voice in favor of a simpler, more human, more acceptable justice than the one codified in Europe's laws. This indignatio created new myths and new characters, which were immedi- ately accepted as authentic and reliable. Thus there is a solid core of truth to back up Jefferson's more sophistic arguments, as he advances fearlessly to the reduction of Europe's arro- gance. The barbarians of northern Europe, so much more numerous than the scattered Indians, did not produce a single genius; and then it took six- teen centuries to form an Isaac Newton. Certainly there are differences among men: some races are stronger and more intelligent than others. But what has which side of the Atlantic one is born on got to do with it? quence of the Scythians and other barbarous peoples was a commonplace among the ancients: see Love- joy and Boas, op. cit., pp. 336-40; and, sarcastically, Voltaire, "Discours preliminaire," Essai sur les moeurs (the section "Des Scythes, et des Gomerites"), I, 64. On the humanitarian facundity of the Brahmins, Calanus and Dindymus, see Bernheimer, op. cit., pp. 107-10. From the time of Las Casas, for that matter, the natives had been put on a level with the Greeks and Romans, or if anything a little higher (cf. Hanke, Aristotle and the Indians, p. 54; Romeo, op. cit., p. 52). For Lafitau, cf. P. G. Adams, op. cit., pp. 187, 199. Classicistic representations of the redskins are frequent in Beltrami (1823): Alle sorgenti del Mississippi, pp. 32, 52, 76, 79, 81 (oratory), 89, 104, 141, 203. Tocqueville too comments on the "Spartan" natural eloquence of the Redskins (Voyages en Sicile et aux Etats-Unis [Paris, 1957], p. 73), and Ampere (op. cit., I, 188) goes into ecstasies over their "veritable eloquence." On the Spartan eloquence of the pioneers of the West ("which will remind you of the orators of antiquity") see Thoreau, in Lawrence Willson, "The Transcendentalist View of the West," Western Humanities Review, 14 (1960), p. 190. For the natives of the South Seas and Australia, who were likewise compared to the ancient Greeks and Romans, see B. Smith, op. cit., pp. 24, 26, 127, 251, 255. 447. On this curious controversy, ample details in Catalogue of the Library, III, 308-15, 357. Cf. also Pearce, The Savages, pp. 78-80, 94. 448. The history of this humorous invention has been wittily told by Max Hall, op. cit. (cf. also G. Spini, in Rivista storica italiana, 73, no. 2 [1961], pp. 331-32), and Wolpe, op. cit., pp. 93, 164). 260 The Second Phase of the Dispute 261 Is it seriously suggested that nature "has enlisted herself as a Cis or Trans Atlantic partisan?" Come now, let us admit it; Buffon may be an eminent and inspired zoologist, but here he let reason give in to a ready tongue, a lively imagination, and his magic style (p. 455). Coming back to the subject in a letter of 1785, Jefferson observes that the only respectable author ever to affirm the inferiority of the indios was "Don Ulloa." Robertson is a mere copyist, a translator of Buffon. And "Pauw, the beginner of this charge, was a compiler from the works of others, and of the most unlucky description."449 And Ulloa may have had direct experience with the Indians, but only those of South America, and after ten generations of humiliating slavery. The pre-Colombian indios, and the redskins, are quite another matter. "I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man."450 449. In fact "he seems to have read the writings of travellers only to collect and republish their lies. It is really remarkable that in three volumes in 12mo of small print it is scarcely possible to find one truth, and yet that the author should be able to produce authority for every fact he states, as he says he can" (letter to Chastellux, 7 June 1785, in Works, III, 418n., and in Papers, VIII, 184-86; Raynal too, Jefferson recounts, was quick to put forward an "unquestionable authority" for each of his American fairy tales: see Catalogue of the Library, I, 215; and cf., against Raynal, Papers, X, 299, 302). Jefferson was very familiar with the Recherches. In 1783-84, at Annapolis, he talked of it to a Dutch merchant, G. K. van Hogendorp, who, on returning home, obtained a copy for himself, but never managed to get through more than a third, as it seemed to him so absurd, and contradictory to everything he had seen in America (and anyway, he protested: "Why is nature smaller, or rather less great, in the forming of one animal than of another?" [letter to Jefferson of 8 September 1785, in Papers, VIII, 502]). On 10 May 1784 Jefferson sold his copy of the Recherches, in 3 volumes, to James Monroe, for sixteen shillings (ibid., VII, 240). He bought another copy in 1788 (Catalogue of the Library, IV, 164-65). Later he became familiar with Clavigero's reply. But it seems that he too is unwilling to cite de Pauw in a work destined for the public; and even when writing to his friend Rutledge he resorts to a periphrasis: one must do as de Saussure (who was to be praised by Cuvier precisely for his resistance to the temptation to formulate a "system"), or first of all ascertain the facts, and then construct the theories: "the con- trary disposition in those who call themselves philosophers in this country classes them in fact with the writers of romance" (letter of 9 September 1788; Papers, XIII, 594; cf. contra, above, p. 89). 450. Notes, III, 420n.; cf. p. 439n., and 443 (and now Papers, VIII, 174-75, and in the Peden ed., p. 273). The Negro is inferior, but if he were educated he would perhaps, after several generations, be the equal of the white man. And although the Negroes are by nature less hairy than the whites, "yet they are more ardent" (p. 443; see also Greene, op. cit., pp. 386-87, and Donald J. D'Elia, "Dr. Benja- min Rush and the Negro," Journal of the History of Ideas, 30, no. 3 [1969], pp. 413-22). David Ram- say, when he read the Notes, although he congratulated Jefferson on his antislavery, wrote to him that he had "depressed the negroes too low. I believe all mankind to be originally the same and only diversi- fied by accidental circumstances. I flatter myself that in a few centuries the negroes will lose their black color" (letter of 3 May 1786, which continues however: "You have given M. Buffon a decent but a merited correction. Europeans affect to under value Americans," while their inferiority is due to "the state of society": Papers, IX, 441). With their expressions of antislavery sentiment Jefferson feared that the Notes would be badly received in Virginia; and he limited its distribution to one or two trusted friends, men like James Madison or James Monroe (whose opinion he solicited: see letter to Madison, 11 May 1785, Papers, VIII, 147; to Chastellux, 7 June 1785, ibid., p. 184; and to James Monroe, 17 June 1785, ibid., p. 229; for other signs of his timidity on the slavery question, see Fay, Esprit, p. 159, and Peterson, op. cit., pp. 177 ff.). Madison reassured him, and Jefferson then distributed in America all the copies he had left (letter of 8 February 1786, Works, V, 79; letter of 13 August 1786, V, 151); see also copious details in Coolie Verner, Mr. Jefferson Distributes His Notes (New York, 1952). He also expressed a desire (letter to William Carmichael, 15 December 1787, Papers, XII, 426), that the book should be read by Ulloa, if still alive: "a person so well acquainted with the Southern part of our world, and who has given such excellent information on it, would perhaps be willing to know something of the Northern part." (Note that Jefferson once again implicitly denies that Ulloa's criticisms could refer to the North American Indian.) THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD D. The white man in America. With the thesis of the American na- tive's degeneracy thus successfully rejected, Jefferson drops Buffon and turns abruptly on Raynal, whom he considers responsible for the thesis of the degeneration of the white man in America.451 Buffon never stated outright that the European degenerates in America: "He goes in- deed within one step of it, but he stops there. The abb6 Raynal alone has taken that step."452 The accusation is unfounded. Despite its extreme youth, America has already given the world a Washington, a Franklin, and a Ritten- house.453 To the geniuses of the time "America contributes its full share." And America has only three million inhabitants. France, which has twenty million, Jefferson goes on, as precise as a bookkeeper balancing his books, should therefore have eighteen. A quick mental calculation- Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, Buffon, Raynal himself- and France is ap- proved: "We ... have reason to believe she can produce her full quota of genius." England-ten million inhabitants and nine geniuses short- England, no. Her "philosophy" has emigrated to France, her liberty to America. "The sun of her glory is fast descending to the horizon" (p. 461). She is on the brink of a fearful ruin.... After offering us so many shrewd observations on the animals and the redskins, Jefferson concludes by indulging in just these contagious com- parisons and parallels that he had shortly before condemned. And we would be tempted to smile ironically and call tu quoque, if we did not know that when he did this he was merely picking up and continuing the American colonists' lofty and almost messianic expectations of becoming heirs designate of Britain's fast-fading genius- the prophets in prose and verse had already looked forward to the birth of a Newton or a Shake- 451. Cf. in fact his Histoire philosophique et politique, bk. XVIII (Geneva ed., 1775), III, 410. But Raynal does not always support the thesis (see above, p. 46, and cf. for another retraction on Raynal's part, M. Hall, op. cit., p. 77), and even the passage quoted by Jefferson (and transcribed by Brie, op. cit., p. 357, in Chinard, "America as a Human Habitat," pp. 37-38, etc.) notes mainly the lack of geniuses, and is followed by optimistic hopes, reinforced in the successive editions and translations. However a note of Jefferson's recognizes that Raynal withdrew his censure of the "Federo-Americans," while sticking to it for the South Americans (cf. Catalogue of the Library, III, 203). But the latter groan beneath their burden of slavery, superstition, and ignorance. Whenever they succeed in gaining their freedom "they will probably show they are like the rest of the world." Still in 1798 Washington recalled and repudiated Raynal's thesis on the lack of geniuses in America (see M. Hall, op. cit., pp. 77-78). A recent renewed proof of the passionate feeling in such methods: the same computation of "geniuses" in relation to population, as index of civilization, attempted with anti-German intent by Rom Landau, We Have Seen Evil (London, 1941), pp. 78-79. 452. Letter to Chastellux, 7 June 1785, in Works, III, 418n., and in Papers, VIII, 185. Jefferson also owned some of the works of Delisle de Sales (Catalogue of the Library, II, 15, 49), Boulanger (ibid., II, 18-19, 88), Horn (ibid., III, 35), etc. 453. The famous self-taught astronomer who thanked Jefferson (28 September 1785) enthusiastically for the gift of the Notes: "an inestimable Treasure" (Papers, VIII, 566). On Rittenhouse, see Boorstin, Colonial Experience, pp. 246-51, 407. John Adams wrote to Jefferson with amiable flattery: "Your Argument in favour of American Genius, would have been much Strengthened, if a Jefferson had been Added to a Washington, a Franklin and a Rittenhouse" (letter of 16 July 1786, in Papers, X, 140). 262 The Second Phase of the Dispute 263 speare "on the shores of Ontario," and the landing of the nine muses in Connecticut454 - if his political hatred of Britain was not all too appar- ent,455 and finally if we failed to remember that the Notes on Virginia was addressed to a French diplomat. E. Buffon, the panther, and the elk. On his arrival in Paris, Jefferson immediately sent a copy of the Notes, through Chastellux, to Buffon,456 and as soon as the latter returned to the capital formed "a particular acquaintance" with his erstwhile adversary in polemic.457 Their first meet- ing seems actually to have been somewhat cool. The American was intro- duced to Buffon as "Mr. Jefferson, who, in some notes on Virginia, had combated some of his opinions." Buffon's only reply was to present his transatlantic critic with a copy of his own latest work, with the observa- tion that "when Mr. Jefferson shall have read this, he will be perfectly satisfied that I am right." Jefferson, to convince him that he had confused the panther with the jaguar, showed him "an uncommonly large panther skin" which he had purchased for sixteen dollars shortly before leaving America, and assures us that with this fine piece of work he managed to make Buffon reconsider his opinion.458 But when he tried to exploit his 454. See examples in Jones, American Literature, pp. 34-38. Chastellux, writing to Jefferson (2 June 1785, Papers, VIII, 175), confessed himself totally convinced that America had produced and would produce "in every field more great men, in proportion, than the other parts of the world." 455. An Englishman in fact protested, and Jefferson produced a dignified apology: "The passage relative to the English, which has excited disagreeable sensations in your mind, is accounted for by ob- serving that it was written during the war, while they were committing depredations in my own country and on my own property never practised by a civilized nation" (letter to Francis Kinloch, 26 November 1790, Works, VI, 152). See also his letters on returning from London, in 1786 ("that nation hates us, their ministers hate us, and their king more than all other men. .... We are young, and can survive them; but their rotten machine must crush under the trial," Papers, IX, 446, 462-63, 474; and again Papers, X, 201, 370, 447; XI, 90, 143; XII, 193). 456. Letter from Chastellux, 2 June 1785 (Papers, VIII, 174-75; cf. ibid., p. 184), who optimistically adds that Buffon "will certainly not be surprised that your opinion is different from his and he will equally approve both the reasons that you use for support and the honest and philosophical manner in which you advance them." Hogendorp too confessed himself convinced (8 September 1785) that Buf- fon would retract: "Did you, Sir, ever talk on that subject with Count Buffon, or any one of his Dis- ciples? I should be very happy if You would inform me of the success of Your reasonings, and whether You expect a palinodia in a future edition of the great natural Historian's immortal works" (ibid., VIII, 502-03). Jefferson replied that he had not yet seen Buffon, but that he had heard it said that on at least one point, the identity of the mammoth with the elephant, he persisted in his opinion (see above, pp. 254-55, and below, p. 266). 457. Letter to Archibald Stuart, 25 January 1786, in Works, V, 75. 458. Buffon, instead, had written to him, thanking him certainly, but adding: "This Pennsylvania Cougar does not differ from the one described by M. Colinson except for the fact of its shorter body, more or less in the proportion of 13 to 16. It also has a longer tail, and in the matter of size seems to be intermediate between Colinson's Cougar and the South American one" (letter of 31 October 1785, in Papers, IX, 130-31); in other words he persisted in his opinion. Jefferson tried to get him other American animals (ibid., IX, 148-49) and Madison, while doubting that "the fallow and Roe-deer" could be numbered "among the native quadrupeds of America," as Jefferson had done in his Notes, wrote to him sophistically: "As Buffon has admitted the fact, it was, whether true or erroneous, a good argument no doubt against him" (letter of 12 May 1786, in Papers, IX, 520), promised to send him other animals, and from the detailed comparison between the European marmot and the American monax, between the American weasel and Europe's belette and hermine, and the moles of both hemispheres, extracted other arguments against Buffon (ibid., p. 521-22; letter of 19 June 1786; ibid., IX, 661), and in particular against his "assertion that of the animals common to the two continents, those of the new are in every instance smaller than those of the old" (ibid., pp. 664-65). THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD initial advantage, to broaden the scope of the argument and convince Buffon of the respectable dimensions of the American deer (or elk or mouse deer) too, telling him that a European reindeer could walk under- neath an elk's belly, and its head was adorned with antlers two feet long, the Frenchman "replied with warmth, that if I could produce a single specimen, with horns one foot long, he would give up the question."459 Even before he left America (1783-84) Jefferson had been interested in finding out the measurements, habits, etc., of the moose, and the ways in which it differed from the elk and the orignal, and had been told that it could reach a height of six feet and more and that its antlers were so big they were used as cradles for children;460 convinced he was on to a sure thing, Jefferson immediately sent off for the antlers, skeleton, and pelt of the finest elk that could be found in America: "I have a great desire," he wrote to his friend Stuart, "to give him [Buffon] the best idea I can of our elk."461 It was a rash agreement. Half a century earlier William Byrd had praised the goodness of the meat of the elk, but had had to admit: "They are however not quite as large as the European ones."462 But Jefferson stubbornly refuses to give up hope. He had already written to Archibald Cary, and after explaining to him that Buffon was quite ignorant about the elk and the American deer had asked him: "Will you take the trouble to procure for me the largest pair of bucks horns you can," or better still, a whole stuffed buck? "With respect to the Elk, I despair of your being able to get for me anything but the horns of it. David Ross I know has a pair; perhaps he would give them to us"; and if one could get the skin and skeleton too, "they would be most desirable."463 And again the very same day he addressed the same urgent request to John Sullivan and William Whipple: skins, skeletons, and horns of the moose, caribou, and elk "would be an acquisition here, more precious than you can im- agine."464 But all these requests produced no immediate effect, and Jefferson complained of the fact in a letter to Hopkinson, who had written to ask if 459. "Anecdotes from Mr. Jefferson's conversation," in Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, I, 364, rpt. in Works, XII, 391n. Pernety too had vaunted the "Mouse-deer," a gigantic American stag (Dissertation, II, 526-27). 460. See Papers, VII, 21-24, 28-30, 317-20. 461. Letter to Archibald Stuart, 25 January 1786, Papers, IX, 218; and letter to Buffon, 1 October 1787, Works, V, 352-54, accompanying the gift; cf. Jameson, op. cit., pp. 50-51. H. F. Osborn, Cope: Master Naturalist (Princeton, 1931), pp. 11-12 (cited in Smallwood, op. cit., p. 125) tells how Jefferson "sent to Vermont for the skeleton of a moose. This was hunted down by Jefferson's friends [and] shipped to him at a cost of Lg. 50" (the yankee's arguments are always rounded off to the nearest [higher] figure: the exact cost was £ 46.7.10'/2). 462. Quoted in Boorstin, Colonial Experience, p. 104. 463. Letter of 7 January 1786, Papers, IX, 158. 464. Ibid., pp. 160, 161-62. 264 The Second Phase of the Dispute he should send Jefferson a foot and a feather from a strange bird that might however be known to a great naturalist like Buffon: "You must not presume too strongly that your comb-footed bird is known to M. de Buf- fon. He did not know our panther. I gave him the stuffed skin of one I bought in Philadelphia and it presents him a new species, which will appear in his next volumes. I have convinced him that our deer is not a chevreuil: and would you believe that many letters to different acquaint- ances in Virginia, where this animal is so common, have never enabled me to present him with a large pair of their horns, a blue and a red skin stuffed, to show him their colours at different seasons. He has never seen the horns of what we call the elk. This would decide whether it be an elk or a deer."465 Sullivan on the other hand was writing back reassuringly; he paints an almost surrealistic picture of the "whole Skeleton" of a moose waiting on the Connecticut River to be loaded onto a sled and transported over the snow to Portsmouth as soon as the roads become passable;466 except that when it finally arrives, with a huge bill for carriage and without the bones of the head, it is half rotten. Sullivan thought it could be patched up with other horns ad libitum: "The Horns of the Deer, the Elk and the Caribou I also send. They are not the Horns of this Moose but may be fixed on at pleasure," even if they have not reached their full size and if one of the horns of the elk has been cut away.467 It is understandable then that when Jefferson at last found himself in possession of the zoological remains he felt some doubt about the im- pression they would make. And in particular the antlers of the elk sent from Virginia, the antlers on which the whole argument hinged, seem to have left him a little disappointed. They hardly appeared big enough to im- press Buffon, and when sending him the specimen with assurances of his deep esteem and respect, he wrote almost apologetically: "The horns of the elk are remarkably small. I have certainly seen of them which would have weighed five or six times as much."468 Worse still, the deer 465. Letter to Francis Hopkinson, 23 December 1786, in Papers, X, 625. On the bird, see Papers, X, 78. It finally arrived, "but the comb which you mentioned as annexed to the foot has totally disappeared," perhaps as "the effect of it's drying": letter of 1 August 1787, Papers, XI, 656. 466. Letter of 26 January 1787, Papers, XI, 68. 467. Letter of 16 April 1787, Papers, XI, 295-96; and of 26 April 1787, ibid., IX, 320-21; cf. also ibid., XI, 326, 328, 359, 384; XIII, 41, 194-95, 197, 287-88, 333. 468. Letter to Buffon, 1 October 1787, Papers, XII, 194-95 (and Martin, op. cit., pp. 183-86). Ac- cording to Webster's version, Jefferson was on the other hand quite satisfied with the stag, "a very good specimen," with horns 4 feet long. Buffon was supposedly persuaded, and promised a correction, "but he died directly afterwards" (XII, 393-94; Buffon actually died on 15 April 1788). In point of fact Jefferson complained to Sullivan too: "Unluckily, the horns of them [the elk and deer] now received are remarkably small," and asked him whether he could not perchance procure him some bigger ones, especially of the Moose, "for I understand they are sometimes enormously large indeed" (letter of 5 October 1787; Papers, XII, 208-09). On returning to America Jefferson repeated to Benjamin Rush (17 March 1790) that he had convinced Buffon "that most of the animals in Europe were of different 265 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD antlers too turned out to be unsatisfactory in size: "I must observe also that the horns of the Deer, which accompany these spoils, are not of the fifth or sixth part of the weight of some that I have seen," and Jefferson almost begins to sound like a racehorse trainer trying to scratch his colts before the race begins. He mentions that he has asked for further samples "and therefore beg of you [Buffon] not to consider those now sent as furnishing a specimen of their ordinary size."469 This was not however the end of the Moose's adventures in Europe. Young John Rutledge noticed its huge skin in Jefferson's house in Paris, and the following year, finding himself at Geneva, mentioned it to the famous naturalist and traveler Horace-Benedict de Saussure, the climber of Vesuvius, Etna, Mont Blanc, and the Monte Rosa, whereupon the latter, his curiosity aroused, sent off to Jefferson for more details.470 And Jefferson replied immediately that the skin was indeed that of the Moose shown to M. de Buffon; adding that it was seven feet tall, although at times they reached ten feet; and complaining once again about the huge amount of money it had cost him.471 But Jefferson continued to interest himself in the problem. His Notes, he wrote in 1788, "are very light sketches on a subject, which fully de- tailed would have filled volumes."472 Alongside the weapons and Indian relics in the entrance hall of his home hung the antlers and head of an elk and the skull of a mammoth.473 In 1789 he wrote to President Willard of Harvard exhorting him to encourage the study of the natural history of America, "to do justice to our country, its productions and its genius."474 On the basis of some fossil remains found in Virginia, probably belonging to a prehistoric anteater, he invented (1796-97) an American super-lion or super-tiger, three times bigger than the African lion, and thus as superior to these Old World felines as the mammoth to the elephant. He baptized and presented it to the scientific world as the Megalonyx, "the Great Claw," which must have existed, indeed must still exist, in some part of the United States, if for no other reason than to intimidate and reduce to silence those who denied the existence of great carnivores in species from the same [sic] animals in this country . .. particularly the Buck and doe. The American Buck has horns three feet long, and the French or European Buck only one foot" (B. Rush, Autobiog- raphy, p. 181). 469. Letterof 1 October 1787, Papers, XII, 194-95. 470. Letter to Jefferson from John Rutledge, Jr., 4 September 1788; Papers, XIII, 567-68. 471. "The experiment was expensive to me, having cost me hunting, curing and transporting, 60 guineas": letter of 9 September 1788; Papers, XIII, 593. Cf. however above, n. 461. 472. Letter to La Blancherie, 28 April 1788, Papers, XIII, 112. 473. Ticknor, op. cit., I, 28; Howard C. Rice, Jr., "Jefferson's Gift of Fossils to the Museum of Na- tural History in Paris," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 95, no. 6 (1951), p. 610. On Jefferson's interest in America's large fossil skeletons, see also Papers, IX, 260-61, 476-78. 474. C. A. Browne, "Thomas Jefferson and the Scientific Trends of His Time," Chronica Botanica, 8 (November 1943), p. 23, quoted by Kraus, Atlantic Civilization, p. 278. 266 The Second Phase of the Dispute the New World.475 He continued to work ceaselessly to amass material supporting his points of view, sent mastodon fossils to the naturalists of Paris (1808), and still in 1809 was planning a new edition of the Notes, though he doubted that the rest of his life would suffice to complete it.476 And in fact, though he lived another seventeen years, he never managed to publish it. Among the favorable reactions to the Notes on Virginia one should mention that of the Englishman (though of partly American descent) Benjamin Vaughan, the first publisher of Franklin's works, and editor of the English version of the Rural Socrates (for which see above, chap. 4, n. 33);477 his comments appeared only in a private letter but are note- worthy since they cover several general points. Vaughan in fact wrote to Jefferson that "many mistakes respecting the animal and vegetable productions of America have arisen from the precipitancy of European philosophers in deciding upon slight evidence; as well as from the pro- pensity of mankind to extend partial into general conclusions," and con- cluded: "Your notes on Virginia furnish ample proofs of this." Europe itself received animals from other climates. The English do not have a single edible plant that is indigenous to their islands. If the eastern part of North America had been populated and civilized a few centuries before Christ and had thus had time to acclimatize the animals and plants of the rest of the continent, and maybe even those of China and Japan, and had then discovered Western Europe, its philosophers would probably have made the same critical comments "on the rude and ill provided condition of the New World (as our part of it would then have been called)." And a contemporary Chinese philosopher might well say the same of the western part of North America. Certainly - and thus Vaughan sums up and reasserts his comparativist and historicizing 475. Martin, op. cit., pp. 107-11, 113; and in this connection he resumed the polemic with Buffon, who had denied the existence of large animals in America, and reduced the mammoth to an elephant: ibid., pp. 188-89 (cf. also Papers, XIII, 568, 593). But in reality he was following in the footsteps of Buffon, who had preferred large animals to small ones; and just as Buffon had been unaware (see above, pp. 16-19) of the ancient and more recent assertion that divine power shone forth in the most minuscule creatures, Benjamin Rush extolled (1811) in a letter to Jefferson the "wondrous skill and power" of the Creator in forming creatures of the size of the mammoth and "megalonyx": "This animal is an astonish- ing effect of God's power. He seems to have produced him merely to show what he could do..." (quoted in Martin, op. cit., p. 236). But in precise retribution his theories on the megalonyx have re- cently been judged "just as fantastic as any which Buffon had offered" (N. Schachner, Jefferson, I, 227, quoted by Peden, p. 270, n. 56). Humboldt had already spoken doubtingly of the "Megalonyx" (Reise, I, 324, 367), but Darwin believed in it (A. Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle [London, 1969], p. 83). See G. Forster, Werke, II, 712; Ampere, op. cit., I, 98-99, 256, and the picture by Charles W. Peale of the megatherium found near Buenos Aires in 1789. 476. Letter to John W. Campbell, 3 September 1809, Works, XI, 115; cf. Martin, op. cit., pp. 114-15 and passim, and Peden, op. cit., pp. xx-xxi; Catalogue of the Library, IV, 324-29. On the gift of fossils see abundant details in Rice, op. cit., pp. 597-627. On Jefferson as "father of American paleontology," see Peterson, op. cit., pp. 403 (with references to Buffon), 515-16. 477. Catalogue of the Library, I, 331. 267 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD view of the varying civilizations - certainly "Europeans in general do not at present think worse of America than some of the Greeks and Romans formerly thought of those parts of Europe, which now make the most brilliant figure of any countries upon the globe." Climates can vary, and considerably, but the so-called humidity of America is almost certainly a mistake, and in fact "there is nothing peculiar and ill-fated in your own climate and soil, compared with that of the globe at large." Thus Jefferson did well to combat "the opinions of certain European philosophers on some of these subjects regarding Eastern America." "Certain" European philosophers?... In the rest of the sentence he drops the generalizations and comes out bluntly with the names of the leader and his disciples: "I think the Recherches sur Les Amdricains contain nearly three volumes of error, believed in Europe because boldly asserted, and till lately never controversed [which is certainly not true]. Monsr. de Buffon and the abbe Raynal in particular among the French, and Dr. Robertson and others with us, have largely imbibed these errors [which is even less true, for Buffon]; but the time has arrived when science, industry and art on your side of the water, will soon furnish materials to overthrow the whole of them, and even to ef- face their memory [which is instead a fairly accurate forecast of things to come]."47 XXI. FILIPPO MAZZEI: EXPERIENCE AGAINST IDEALIZATION AND CALUMNY Filippo Mazzei's four volumes defending the United States against the European slanders are an obvious derivative, an appendix almost, of the Notes on Virginia, but still fail to provide what Jefferson had so much wished for, the resumption of the war against Buffon. Mazzei- devoted friend of Jefferson; citizen and diplomatic agent of the state of Virginia; the adventurous Florentine who lived at one time or another in Con- stantinople, Smyrna, London (where he apparently gave Italian lessons to Edward Gibbon, who was trying to read Machiavelli),479 in the depths of Virginia, in France, Amsterdam, and Warsaw; who in 1793 was look- ing for a house in Pisa for Vittorio Alfieri; and who at the ripe age of seventy-two traveled from Pisa to St. Petersburg480 - in 1785 found him- 478. Letter of 26 January 1787, Papers, XI, 69-72; cf. above p. 179. Yet another correspondent, Wm. Carmichael, wrote to him from Madrid: "I think you have victoriously combatted Buffon, Monsr. de P. and the Abbe Raynal" (letter of 15 October 1787, Papers, XII, 240). 479. S. Rotta, "I1 viaggio in Italia di Gibbon," Rivista storica italiana, 74, no. 2 (June 1962), p. 330. 480. The principle source for his life is his autobiography: Memorie della vita e delle peregrinazioni del fiorentino Filippo Mazzei, con documenti storici sulle sue missioni politiche come agente degli Stati Uniti d'America, e del re Stanislao di Polonia, 2 vols. (Lugano, 1845-46; on which see B. Croce, A ned- doti, II, 323-31), supplemented by the unpublished letters and reports contained in F. Massai, who came into possession of a part of the Mazzei archives and prepared a new edition of the Memorie: "Un 268 The Second Phase of the Dispute self in Paris without employment and without a penny to his name. Luckily for him Jefferson had arrived shortly before, as representative of the United States, succeeding Franklin; Mazzei had known Franklin too and had at one time been on very good terms with him, but the two had later fallen out and some ill feeling remained between them.481 So it was to Jefferson that Mazzei turned immediately for help, and it was Jefferson who suggested he write a reply to Mably's criticisms of the American constitution. A man of proven and unshakable attachment to the cause of the United States, already author of several propagandistic and polemical pamphlets, and a man who at that particular time could ill afford to lose what friends he had, Mazzei set to work with aggressive enthusiasm. He had been attracted to the New World ever since he was young, and before moving to Turkey had seriously considered seeking his fortune in South America. Of North America he had known the very best it could offer in both men and nature. He had been friendly with Franklin, Thomas and John Adams, Madison, and Monroe, had been close to George Washington, and had had Jefferson's help and advice in his at- tempts to establish vines, olives, and silkworms in Virginia (which as a matter of fact had already been done a century and a half earlier).48a The success of his vineyards and other agrarian enterprises had convinced him of the goodness of the soil and climate of the state. "America produces everything," he wrote prophetically in 1782, "and could manufacture everything with ease," should its farmers decide to devote themselves to industry.483 So the champion that descended into the lists to do battle with the pedantic old abbe Mably was well accoutered, clad in the in- vincible armor of experience and firm convictions. dimenticato: (iuseppe Timpanari," Rassegna Nazionale, yr. 42, 2d ser., vol. 29 (1920), p. 284-97; "Due autografi inediti di Vittorio Alfieri," Nuova Antologia, 6th ser., vol. 210 (1921), pp. 371-74; in R. C. Garlick, Philip Mazzei, Friend of Jefferson: His Life and Letters (Baltimore, Md., 1933); in How- ard R. Marraro, ed., Philip Mazzei, Virginia's Agent in Europe. The Story of His Mission as Related in His Own Dispatches and Other Documents (New York, 1935); Marraro has also translated the Memoirs (New York, 1942, furnishing it with a preface and copious bibliography); in R. Ciampini, ed., Lettere di F. Mazzei alla corte di Polonia, 1788-92 (Bologna, 1937; first and only volume published, covering the period up to March 1790, and incorporating almost all the letters formerly included in idem, Un osservatore italiano della rivoluzione francese [Florence, 1934]; and in the cited vols. of the Papers). See also E. Bonora, in Letterati, memorialisti e viaggiatori del '700 (Milan-Naples, 1951), pp. 761-68; Sara Tognetti Burigana, Tra riformismo illuminato e dispotismo napoleonico: Esperienze del "cit- tadino americano" Filippo Mazzei (Rome, 1965); Carlo Bernari, "Filippo Mazzei, un toscano fra due rivoluzioni," Letteratura, 29, nos. 76-77 (July-September 1965), pp. 3-15; the notes in Visconti, op. cit., pp. 68-75, 133-34, 142, and in the cited unpublished thesis of A. Violo, esp. pp. 114-29. 481. On the causes of the quarrel see below, n. 502; M. Hall, op. cit., p. 130; and especially Pace, op. cit., pp. 3-4, 104-09, 358-88, who reveals Franklin's faults; Tognetti Burigana, op. cit., p. 30, n. 59. 482. King James Told How to Ensure Prosperity in America (1622), in Wright, Elizabethans' Amer- ica. pp. 254-58. 483. Memorie, II, 260; the prophecy was repeated half a century later by Miss Martineau (see below, pp. 492-93). 269 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America 9 But in searching for the antecedents of the thesis of spontaneous gen- eration from putrescent matter, one can go all the way back to Aristotle, for whom it explained the appearance of flies and mosquitoes (in accord- ance with his general theory of the four elements, in which the corruption of one is the generation of the next). It was reaffirmed specifically for snakes by Pliny, and taken up in modern times as an antiascetic motif by Le Roy (1579), by Vanini (1616),23 in an apologetic and Catholic function by Tasso (1607),24 and only defeated and demolished by Pasteur's famous experiments on fermentation. And not even then definitively: in his last treatise Claude Bernard discusses (and does not actually reject) the thesis that "life is a putrefaction . . . life is no more than decay"25- a statement with a peculiarly preexistentialist flavor about it. Buffon, in order to avoid the dogmas of creationism and the theories of preformation, had adopted an expanded theory of "spontaneous genera- tion," based on the incorrect observations (1745-48) of his friend Need- ham, the microscopist, who had observed swarms of infusorians pullulat- ing in the warm broth of his faultily sealed test tubes.26 Buffon then was convinced by the idea of inferior forms of life springing from humidity and decayed matter. The decayed, the wet, the newborn thus came to be for him related aspects of a single reality --which helps to explain how his ideas on American nature wavered between "immaturity" and "deca- dence," between a world in embryo and a world already rotting. Perhaps Buffon also had in mind the widespread popular belief that toads are born from water or sodden earth. St. Augustine had already mentioned, for example, that "frogs are born from the earth.""27 Father Bartoli repeated that frogs "are formed instantaneously when in summer a 23. For Le Roy, see D. C. Allen, "The Degeneration of Man and Renaissance Pessimism," Studies in Philology, 35, no. 2 (April 1938), pp. 225-26. For Vanini, who apparently elaborated the ancient atomistic hypothesis of Epicurus, see G. Spini, Ricerca dei libertini (Rome, 1950), p. 130. 24. Monsters and birds of the air that "her extinct body produced from putrid limbs; or seedless and fatherless the ancient mother still produces and bears from her warmed and humid womb" (11 mondo creato, VI, 1244-47, ed. Petrocchi [Florence, 1951], p. 251). 25. Le'ons sur les phenomenes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux vegetaux (Paris, 1878), pp. 156, 176-77. For the history of this thesis, see E. Guy6not, Les sciences de la vie aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1941), pp. 209 ff. The connection between decay and life was also theorized in reverse (i.e., by making the former an effect of the latter) by certain seventeenth-century theologians who, go- ing beyond the fearful Augustinian doctrine of the massa damnata, insisted on seeing in every genera- tion an element or principle of corruption, a step which widened irrevocably the distance from the origi- nal perfection of Adam ante peccatum; see V. Harris, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949), pp. 187-88. 26. On Needham, see, for example, Delisle de Sales, De la philosophie de la Nature (Amsterdam, 1770-74), IV, 114-20, 241-42n.; and more recently, E. Nordenskibld, The History of Biology (New York. 1936), pp. 225-26, 430; Guyenot, op. cit., pp. 194-95, 220-26; T. Monod, "En relisant Mon- sieur de Buffon," in L'hippopotame et le philosophe (Paris, 1946), p. 424; Paul Hazard, La pensde europeenne au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1946), I, 183-84, 192; Roger, op. cit., pp. 494-520. On Buffon, see E. Genet-Varcin, "La g6n6ration des etres vivants d'apr s Buffon," in Bertin, op. cit., pp. 149-50. 27. De Civitate Dei, XVI, 7. But see even earlier Genesis 1:20: "Producant aquae reptile animae viventis," and St. Basil, Hexaemeron, VII, followed by Tasso: "Let the waters now bring forth ... THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD The first essays in his rebuttal, somewhat lighthearted in tone, earned the approval of Marmontel, who begged Mazzei to go into the matter properly. Others insisted - Pitobie, a translator of Homer; Short, Jef- ferson's secretary; and Morellet, though the latter disapproved of the notes on general matters that Mazzei added in an attempt to make his work "less arid."484 But up to this point the argument was restricted to constitutional questions; the discussion revolved around the mechanisms established by a political document, with no reference to the reality of America and the Americans. A first amplification of perspective was due to the abbe Raynal. While still in Virginia, Mazzei had heard of the "great uproar" the Histoire philosophique was causing in Europe "especially on account of its pompous title," and having chanced to meet the author in Paris, Mazzei addressed himself to Raynal in person to obtain a copy of the new edi- tion. When he received it he confined his reading to the parts about North America, and horrorstruck at finding so many mistakes and lies decided to "unmask him" and print a simultaneous "refutation of both abbes," together with some additional notes agreed on with Jefferson.485 So the polemic expands its horizons but remains linked to the authors under attack; it is still an attempted rectification or retort, a work inspired by the occasion. The final step was taken on the advice of the illustrious Condorcet, who-as Mazzei writes to Madison-"said that I did too much honor to the two abbes in making them the Heroes of my Poem" and recommended that the book be enlarged so as to become a complete description of the United States and a defense of its revolution. "So the rebuttal is no longer principal but accessory," and the work is doubled, but all his friends, Condorcet, La Rochefoucald, Lafayette, are en- thusiastic about the idea;486 Jefferson puts at his disposal the notes and materials collected for the Notes on Virginia and writes repeatedly to his American and European friends with anticipated praise and recommenda- tions of the book that Mazzei is writing; from New York and Philadelphia come some "very wise and prudent reflections" and observations on the part of Madison;487 the republicanistic Mme de Tesse, Lafayette's aunt, reads him a letter just received from Jefferson (then at Nimes) "as no 484. Memorie, I, 528-29; Garlick, op. cit., pp. 97-100; cf. the comment in G. Procacci, "L'abate Mably nell'illuminismo," Rivista storica italiana, 63, no. 2 (1951), p. 220. 485. Op. cit., pp. 532-33; and the introduction to the Recherches. His friend John Adams wrote to him already in 1785 (15 December) to defend abbe Mably, "as honest a Man and as Independent a Spirit as you will find among them [the French writers]": Jefferson, Papers, VIII, 679n. Later on some of his pungent criticisms of the "dotard" Raynal earned him a gentle correction from the abb6 Scipione Piattoli (included in A. D'Ancona, Scipione Piattoli e la Polonia [Florence, 1915], pp. 258-60). But for Mazzei, Mably remained an ignorant bungler and Raynal "a willful lyer" (Papers, ibid.). 486. Op. cit., I, 535; letter of 14 August 1786 in Garlick, op. cit., pp. 104-06. 487. Letter of 21 December 1787, in Garlick, op. cit., pp. 113-14; cf. Ciampini, Lettere, p. 252. On Jefferson's contributions, see Garlick, op. cit., pp. 100, 102, 104-05, and Papers, IX, 67-72. 270 The Second Phase of the Dispute doubt the apostles' letters were once read to the assembled early Chris- tians";488 and already there is talk of three editions, in Italian, French, and English. Meanwhile the French translation is checked by Morellet, Dupont de Nemours, and others too: the beautiful Marquise de Con- dorcet is not happy with it and would like her husband to redo it, but he does not have the time, and finally she does the translation of one chapter and her husband the next ("You will see in one the style of a truly sensi- tive soul," writes Mazzei delightedly, "and in the other the living voice of geometry").4S9 Jefferson solemnly announces to his friend Hogendorp: "There will be another good work, a very good one, published here soon by a Mr. Mazzei who has been many years a resident of Virginia; is well informed, and possesses a masculine understanding."49 In short the whole Americanophile coterie joins in the work, as if collaborating on the construction of some massive weapon of war. When the book is still at the press Jefferson announces it to a corre- spondent in Milan, adding that it will also be translated into Italian and published in Florence.491 Printing begins in April 1787,492 and January 1788 finally sees the appearance of the four volumes of the Recherches historiques et politiques sur les Etats-Unis de l'Amerique septentrion- ale.493 The first is given over to a historical-constitutional study of the United States, the second to refuting Mably, the third to the rebuttal of Raynal, and the fourth to the treatment of a number of individual subjects such as the redskins, slavery, emigration, and especially the economic situation in North America: in all over thirteen hundred pages, a "large work" in truth, even an "enormous work," as it was called by a recent bibliographer, who however seems to have been overawed by its bulk and adjudges it a boring, solemn, overprecise, and quite unreadable com- pendium of assorted information on the United States.494 488. Letter of 30 March 1787, in Papers, XI, 258; G. Chinard, Trois amities fran(-aises de Jefferson (Paris, 1927), pp. 100-01. 489. Op. cit., I, 538; the two chapters are VIII and IX of the fourth part (ed. cit., IV, 102-26). Maz- zei first thought of Marmontel as translator (see Jefferson's Papers, VIII. 475n.) 490. Letter of 25 August 1786, in Papers, X, 209, which goes on: "I should rather have said it will be published in Holland, for I believe it cannot be printed here." 491. Papers, XII, 39. 492. "M. will be satisfied if he is finished in August" (Papers, XI, 298). 493. A title which calls to mind Hilliard d'Auberteuil's above-mentioned Essais historiques et politiques sur les Anglo-A mericains, against which Mazzei too breaks a few lances (Recherches, I, vii- viii) and for which see above, pp. 249-50. As place of publication the Recherches bears the legend "at Colle," a press location unknown to all the bibliographers, who have therefore never asked themselves the relevant question: Colle was the name of Mazzei's property in Virginia, near Jefferson's famous Monticello (see also Ciampini, Lettere, p. 256). 494. B. Fay, Bibliographie critique des ouvrages fran(ais relatifs aux Etats-Unis (Paris, 1925), pp. 24-25, 64-65; cf. the same author's Esprit, p. 136 ("an almost unreadable work," though the fourth volume is "very interesting"), pp. 161-62. "Superficial and disconnected," written too hastily, "of no great importance or usefulness," in Ciampini's opinion, Lettere, p. xviii; "superficial, badly planned and poorly constructed," according to Marraro, in the preface to the Memoirs, p. xiii. Cf. also Tognetti Burigana, op. cit., pp. 34-35. 271 272 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD It did not in fact all come from Mazzei's pen; apart from other people's notes and the many passages transcribed in extenso from the authors refuted and from historical documents, the Recherches includes Frank- lin's observations on the redskins and his advice to emigrants,495 and an essay by Turgot496 and two by Condorcet497- inserted to boost the ex- plosive charge for his "broadside" - which add up to a total of two hun- dred and forty-three pages. What remains is however still sufficient to reveal the anonymous author, "a citizen of Virginia," as a man full of good sense, careful, assured, and as alien to the idealization of America as he is critical of the continent's slanderers. His source is not of course the Jesuit missionaries, nor the armchair naturalists, but the years spent in working the earth of Virginia, arranging exchanges of products and supporting the cause of the insurgents, finding money to lend to and men to work for the United States. So that whether he is lavishing sound advice on immigrants and removing their naive il- lusions,498 or showing up the exaggerations in the descriptions of Penn- sylvania or Virginia as "promised lands,"499 or portraying the natives sympathetically but without indulgence, admitting their "insurmountable aversion for work," their shrewdness and irascibility, and that they are undeniably on occasion cannibals too;500 or following in Jefferson's foot- steps and discussing the sad and shameful problem of slavery,50' or re- moving the aura of sanctity from Penn and his Quakers;502 or defending 495. Recherches, IV, 76-92, 171-83. Jefferson wanted Mazzei to run him off three hundred copies of the chapter on the emigrants, to help him to get rid of people pestering him (Ciampini, Lettere, p. 279). 496. Reflections . . . sur la maniere dont la France et I'Espagne doivent envisager les suites de la querelle entre la Grande-Bretagne et ses colonies (Recherches, III, 109n., 217-82), an important memoir (1776) that Fay (Esprit, pp. 32, 44, 49-50, 70, 106, 108) knows only at second hand. 497. The first is composed of the four Lettres d'un bourgeois de New-Heaven [sic] (Condorcet was an honorary citizen of New Haven in Connecticut: Fay, Esprit, p. 139) sur I'unite de la legislation (Recherches, I, 267-71; Fay, Esprit, pp. 161-62) in favor of the one-chamber principle; the second, considerably more interesting, is the essay Influence de la revolution de I'Am rique sur I'Europe (Re- cherches, IV, 237-83) sent (under the pseudonym P. B. Godard) to the famous competition of the Lyon Academy, and which, already rare in Mazzei's time ("it is impossible to find it," Recherches, IV, 213), is considerably more so today: "quite rare," Fay calls it (Bibliographie critique, p. 66), and Zavala, America, p. 20, failed to find and read it. It is however known to Morandi, L'unita politica, p. 41, n. 3, and Echeverria, Mirage, pp. 153-54. Cf. also F. Acomb, Anglophobia in France, 1763-89 (Durham, N.C., 1950), pp. 102-04. 498. Recherches, IV, 76-102 (esp. 98); cf. Echeverria, Mirage, p. 146. 499. Recherches, III, 40, 85-89. 500. Ibid., II, 183-84; 111, 19-21; IV, esp. 150, 153, 170-71; but they are not glabrous, as was thought by "some careless writers and travelers": they simply remove their hair (ibid., pp. 162-63). This facile defense is used, before and after Mazzei, on innumerable occasions (see above, p. 259), at least up until the times of the explorer of the Mississippi, the ingenuous Giacomo Costantino Beltrami: La dicouverte des sources du Mississippi (New Orleans, 1824); Italian trans.: Alle sorgenti del Mississippi, ed. Luciano Gallina (Novara 1965), p. 30. 501. Recherches, IV, 127-40. 502. Ibid., I, 72-84, 223-45; III, 49-71 ("the principal merit of the Quakers consists in economy and their devotion to business," but as for hypocrisy "they are unrivalled, and in the matter of commerce, delicacy and equity are not their favorite virtues": III, 63). These opinions, which certainly also reveal his irreligious fervor, caused Mazzei to be sharply attacked by Brissot de Warville (Memorie, I, 538-39; II, 277-78; Garlick, op. cit., p. 115; and chap. 9, sec. 5, "The Quakers, the Marquis, and the Girondist"). Reciprocal distrust led to very strained relations between Mazzei and Franklin, who appeared to the Europeafts as the prototype of the Quakers (Fay, Esprit, p. 94; Visconti, op. cit., pp. 133-34, 142). The Second Phase of the Dispute almost, in the face of Raynal's hyperbole and eulogies, the architectural mediocrity of Virginia's buildings503 - Mazzei shows himself so averse to any Americanistic fanaticism that his own position becomes correspond- ingly stronger, both in arguing with the critics of the newborn United States and (what concerns us more) with those of the physical nature of the American continent. For Buffon Mazzei has all the respect and admiration he deserves,504 and when he comes up against his theories on the inferiority of the animals in America he refers back to Jefferson's Notes, which unmasked the error fallen into by "certain writers, including M. de Buffon himself.. . this celebrated naturalist."505 But on the basic point he refuses to budge. The explanations of America's peculiarities in terms of "climate" and "soil" leave him totally unconvinced: "The difference is moral, not physical."506 America's climate is not much better or much worse than any other. Nature, by and large, has showed no favoritism. And to demolish the numerous romantic (romanesque) theories on degeneration in plants and animals, it will be enough "to tell things as they are." The European animals degenerated wherever they were not carefully raised; and "the contrary occurred where they were tended properly": the Rhode Island cattle and Virginia horses have won great renown, the pigs have thrived on the abundance of acorns, and the sheep on the rich variety of available pasture. As for edible plants, Mazzei has come across almost all of them in America and has found some to have done better than in Europe, and none worse. Should one then conclude that America is a favored land? Not a bit of it: "This does not show any superiority of soil and climate; the same thing happened to several [of the plants] that I sent from America to Europe." It is a known fact that a change of environment is generally beneficial to plants and animals. It would help farmers every- where if instead of using the seed from their own crops they exchanged it for seed from some distant area.50' So what the Poggio a Caiano agri- culturalist derives from the comparison of two worlds is no corollary of telluric superiority but a lesson in the benefits of crossbreeding. Here however, even though he has just got through writing that a 503. Recherches, III, 34; these modest disclaimers probably derive at least in part from the scruples of "republican simplicity." 504. Memorie, II, 46-47; on a curious dialogue with Buffon, see Papers, VII, 123. 505. Recherches, III, 92 (my italics); IV, 209n. Buffon, he writes to John Adams (23 January 1786), "has been unwillingly induced into error," but Jefferson showed him his error "most masterly and com- pletely" (Jefferson, Papers, VIII, 679n.). 506. Recherches, II, 32; cf. I, 118; see also Chinard, "America as a Human Habitat," p. 44. 507. Recherches, III, 84-95; the plants of any country degenerate in any other country if one neglects to study the terrain and climate most suited to them: "If laziness or ignorance take the place of intelli- gence and attention, a very considerable deterioration will certainly result therefrom" (III, 95). Roubaud, to justify the degeneration of European plants in America, in the face of de Pauw's accusations, asserts: "It is the customary result of transplanting" (Histoire, XIII, 131). On the "ancient practice" of the "change of seed," see Enciclopedia Italiana, XXXI, 344b. 273 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD simple outline of the true facts will be enough to refute all these ill- informed writers, and despite his intention, stated at the outset, of ignor- ing the criticisms of writers less known than the two abbes,508 Mazzei passes rapidly over Buffon and Raynal and commences an explicit attack on Monsieur de Pauw-de Pauw, who outdoes even Raynal with his blunders and who has managed to beget three volumes with hardly a word of truth between them, "although almost everything in them is based on some authority." It must certainly have cost him a considerable effort, and in a way it constitutes something of an achievement on his part to have put together such an indictment of every creature and object of America-even if most of his information was drawn from the most ignorant scribblers and travelers. Mazzei follows this shrewd summing up of de Pauw's work509 with a surprising piece of information: "I have learned that M. Pauw finally became aware of his error, and as I have this from someone whose word I cannot doubt, and who assured me that the words were addressed to none other than himself, one may hope that the author will use the same frankness toward the public."510 Alas, that selfsame year, 1788, saw the publication of his latest Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, whose very first page reiterated his remarks of twenty years earlier on those brutalized savages, the Americans. Mazzei's hopes were disappointed. Similarly disappointed were the general expectations of a great success for his book, although Jefferson recommended it to his French friends and almost one might say thrust it down their throats ("a good work ... one can rely on his facts with absolute confidence").51' In France it got just one review; in America, where Jefferson thought it would sell at least one hundred and seventy-five copies, it seems that ten years later it had not even sold one;512 a single copy sent to one of Jefferson's friends in England apparently went astray,53 and fifteen hundred copies, which 508. Recherches, I, xiv. 509. Deriving from Jefferson, however: cf. above, n. 449. 510. Ibid., III, 93-94. For a similar illusion of Pernety's, see above, p. 99. 511. Papers, XIII, 631: letter of 27 February 1787 to Lormerie. 512. See letters in Garlick, op. cit., pp. 116-17, 121, 125 (a few copies sold in Virginia?) n. 70 on pp. 125-26 and p. 146. Jefferson, who owned various of his friend's works, bought his copy in Paris for 12 livres (Catalogue of the Library, III, 221; cf. ibid., 54-55, 86, 137, 170, 326-27). One copy is found in one of the Private Libraries in Creole Saint Louis, for which see McDermott, op. cit., p. 123. A valid' reason and almost an excuse for the meager success of the work can be found in the remark of Brissot de Warville, Mazzei's bitter adversary, about the goods importable into the United States: "French books: The best will not be a success here. There are very few people familiar with the French language" (Nouveau voyage, II, 376; see also Memoires, III, 53, and H. M. Jones, America and French Culture, 1750-1848 [Chapel Hill, 1927], pp. 186-200, 572). And in fact James Madison wrote immediately to Jefferson: "Tell him [Mazzei] I have received his books and shall attempt to get them disposed of. I fear his calculations will not be fulfilled by the demand for them here in the French language" [sic] (letter of 10 August 1788: Papers, XIII, 499). 513. Papers, XII, 602-21. By 1837 Mazzei was almost forgotten: see Ticknor, op. cit., II, 93. 274 The Second Phase of the Dispute 275 the author left in Paris in 1791, were eventually lost.514 Mazzei remained as poor as ever. The only indirect benefit he derived from the book was that it served to bring him to the attention of King Stanislas of Poland,515 who a few months after its publication (July 1788) named him his corre- spondent in Paris, and later called him to his court in Warsaw. XXII. THE BOTANIST CASTIGLIONI AND THE LASCIVIOUS NORTH AMERICAN COLONISTS Mazzei had devoted his efforts to introducing olives, vines, and silk- worms in his adopted country, and in 1785-87 another Italian, Luigi Castiglioni, traveled across the whole of North America in search of nutritive, decorative, and officinal plants to acclimatize in Lombardy. Though at first sight they appear contradictory, the intentions of the Florentine and the Milanese in fact coincided: fundamental to their com- plementary efforts was a firm belief in the substantial identity of nature and climate in the two hemispheres. They were equally critical of the writers who assumed a radical dif- ference between one world and the other, and even more so when from this difference they went on to deduce an absolute superiority of the Old World over the New. Castiglioni waits almost until the closing pages of his work516 before discussing briefly the current opinions on the Amer- 514. Garlick, op. cit., p. 141, and Tognetti Burigana, op. cit., p. 39, n. 81: which may explain the book's rarity; though four years after its publication the author still hadso many copies left. It was how- ever analyzed in the Correspondance of Grimm, Diderot, etc. (Tourneux ed., XV, 251-53), and con- sulted by Botta for his Storia della guerra della indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d'America (1809). See G. Mira, "Un italiano del Settecento collaboratore dell'indipendenza americana," Nuova Antologia, 6th ser., vol. 192 (1917), p. 235. 515. Stanislas had not read it however; at least four times, after being named correspondent, Mazzei offered it to him in homage (Lettere, Ciampini ed., pp. 9, 42, 64, 121), and then suggested to him (ibid., p. 252) that he should "make public" in Poland a discussion by Madison on freedom of worship, which was included in the work (II, 239-52), and read what was said there (IV, 141, 165-66) on the goodness of the savages, even though they did not believe in an afterlife (Lettere, pp. 252-53), or Franklin's advice to immigrants (ibid., p. 279). Stanislas instead had pp. 372-73 of the first volume translated into Polish (dealing with a permanent committee of six people which would prepare the agenda for legislative as- semblies), and replied to Mazzei that his comments on the savages would provide material for a "theo- logical discussion" between the two of them, whenever Mazzei came to Warsaw (Memorie, II, 50, 83, 323). On his relations with Stanislas, see copious details in J. Fabre, Stanislas Auguste Poniatowski et I'Europe des Lumires (Strasbourg, 1952), pp. 507-22 and relevant notes. Jefferson tells Madison what really happened: King Stanislas sent a trusted secretary (Grimm perhaps? see Tognetti Burigana, op. cit., p. 41) to Paris to find him a correspondent: "A happy hazard threw Mazzei in his way. He recom- mended him, and he is appointed. He has no diplomatic character whatever, but is to receive Eight thousand livres a year as an intelligencer. I hope this employment may have some permanence. The danger is that he will over-act his part" (letter of 31 July 1788; Papers, XIII, 441). 516. Viaggio ,egli Stati Uniti dell'America settentrionale fatto negli anni 1785, 1786 e 1787, 2 vols. (Milan, 1790); German trans., Memmingen, 1793. See Doll, op. cit., pp. 471, 500. The actual journey terminates on p. 168 of the 2d vol.; pp. 169-402 contain an alphabetical listing of "Observations on the most useful Plants of the United States." The author (1765-1832) describes himself as Patrician of Milan, knight of the Order of St. Stephen Protomartyr, Member of the Philosophical Society of Phila- delphia and the Patriotic Society of Milan (of which he was also President); he was later director of the Royal Printing House (1807), President of the Academy of Fine Arts, and holder of the Order of the Iron Crown. It was he that introduced the American locust tree into Lombardy. His book was still being THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD icas: he admits that the climate in the United States is more severe than in the corresponding latitudes in Europe, but he accepts Carli's explana- tion of the fact,"1 and the "hypothesis of the degeneration of the animals in America, adopted by the Count de Buffon and exaggerated by M. Pauw and other writers," is dismissed with the simple assertion that "it has been sufficiently disproved in the fine work of Mr. Jefferson."518 In passing, Castiglioni pauses to explain certain other peculiarities of American nature which had been pointed out as marks of degeneration, as for example the lack of deep roots to the trees- which as a result are easily knocked down or even fall over by themselves519-and the well- known lack of songbirds; he himself has seen plenty of black and yellow sparrows flittering about, who sing "very melodiously" in captivity, and he describes the appearance and the habits of the mockingbirds, and the excessive prices they command for their excellence of song;520 but he recognizes that in general the American birds "while they are not com- monly endowed with sweetness of song, are on the other hand dressed in feathers of the most beautiful colors"521 (the usual dumb technicolor!). More original is his attitude toward the inhabitants of the United States. Castiglioni (like so many others) praises the courage and intelli- gence of the redskins and considers them very superior morally to the so- called civilized men,522 but he does not limit himself to this clich6: he draws the due corollaries therefrom, and just as the North American had arrogated the inimitable virtues and prowess of the redskin (see above, pp. 243-44), so Castiglioni transfers to the colonists, these progressive New England colonists, the insinuations and accusations once applied to the natives. The latter, as we have seen, were found to be both frigid and lustful at the same time. And this is exactly the way Castiglioni repre- sents the North Americans in some of his pages on their sexual behavior that could almost qualify as an early version of the Kinsey report. sought out in 1844 by Alessandro Manzoni, Lettere, ed. Cesare Arieti (Milan, 1970), 1I, 326. On his re- lationship with Franklin, to whom he was recommended by Paolo Frisi, see Pace, op. cit., pp. 35, 88, 143, 371, according to whom "the whole of Castiglioni's journey, even its scientific aspect, can be interpreted politically in a way in which Franklin himself probably envisioned - namely, as a rebuttal of Pauw's perverted views on America," ibid., pp. 134-35. See also Visconti, op. cit., pp. 59-60, 75, 117, and the previously cited unpublished thesis by Violo, esp. pp. 91-93. 517. Op. cit., II, 154-55. Carli and Clavigero are also cited on the subject of the Mexican pyramids, ibid., I, 391n. 518. Op. cit., I1, 155: Robertson and Carli "proved the same with great clarity." On the writers who not only wanted to find the human race and the animals degenerate in America, "but strove to discredit even the fruitfulness of its earth" (which like any other after a few years needs fertilizing or fallow pe- riods), see Viaggio, II, 167n. Buffon is also cited in I, 150n., 154n., 171, 285n., 334n.; II, 156, etc. Castiglioni admits (op. cit., I,'yii-viii) to not having studied either zoology or mineralogy. 519. Op. cit., 1, 116-17; cf. already Oviedo, above, p. 40, and abb6 Robin, Nouveau voyage, p. 44. 520. Op. cit., I, 44, 357. 521. Ibid., II, 156. 522. On the valor of the savages and the wrongs they suffered: ibid., I, 87-88; II, 48, etc. 276 The Second Phase of the Dispute After so many agonized Quaker and Puritan sermons on the corrupt ways and senile debauchery of an enfeebled Europe, it is nice to learn from an eyewitness, and a friendly one at that, that love in United-America. .. is neither so vivacious nor so refined as in most of Europe. Abominable vices weaken the power of amorous passion in the maidens, and the young men purchase elsewhere the daily satisfaction of their appetites. From which there results either a total indifference, or else a brutal eagerness in seeking the most delicate proofs of love. The women, rendered almost in- sensitive, present themselves like statues at the court of Cupid, and make modesty and virtue to consist in receiving with indifference the most lively proofs of affection.523 What Buffon, de Pauw, and Raynal had said of the savage, of his stupid inertia and cold insensibility, is now repeated with vengeful precision of the exterminators of the redskins, the compatriots of Washington and Franklin. Castiglioni dwells in particular on the widespread practise of "bundling"- the custom among young people of opposite sex of "passing the night together and even sleeping in the same bed," with her un- dressing "down to her petticoat," and him keeping only his undershirt and breeches, and "everything being permitted, which cannot have con- sequences" (tout, mais pas (a). As for the origins of this "strange cus- tom," which to him seemed hardly to be believed, especially "in a people otherwise so rigid," until he had "the occasion to see incontrovertible proof thereof," Castiglioni is quite at a loss, "unless we were to attribute it to the imitation of the savages" (thus revealing that he notices at least a certain mental link between what he actually saw among the citizens of Connecticut and the squalid physiology attributed to the natives) "or to the necessity in which the earliest colonists found themselves of inviting their young people to marry early and augment the population of the colony." The trouble with this latter explanation is precisely in its demographic ends: they lead Castiglioni on to further explanations that leave us in some doubt as to the rigorous observation of the rule of tout, mais pas Ca. It happens in fact that "when the promises of marriage are broken off on account of some accident, the girls are often obliged to retire into the countryside to leave the anticipated fruit of their loves."524 It is far from easy to trace the origins and history of this prurient cus- tom. The clues that emerge from the shadowy alcoves are few and un- certain. On the one hand a certain form of bundling is already found 523. Ibid., II, 92-93. The ladies of Virginia, with their mincing and wheedling ways and their naked breasts, are described (1791) with republican outrage by Brissot, who visited the United States in 1788 (see chap. 9, sec. 5, "The Quakers, the Marquis, and the Girondist"), and Moreau de Saint-Mery (in E. S. Turner, A History of Courting [London, 1954], p. 186; see below, pp. 280-81). 524. Viaggio, II, 92-94. 277 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD among Lahontan's Hurons, who practiced it with the girl savages wrapped in chemises from the neck to the "calf of the leg";525 and this indigenous derivation is reconfirmed by Barbe-Marbois (for whom see above, pp. 252-53) in certain letters of his (1779-85) where bundling is described "as borrowed from the Indians," widespread in Connecticut, and after its abolition in that state, persisting in Boston and New York.526 On the other hand there is no lack of indiscreet testimony on the diffusion of the custom in old England, in warm-blooded Wales, and in most Puritan Scotland itself. Our own Lord Kames discourses on the chaste promis- cuity common (about 1770) "among the temperate Highlanders of Scot- land; and it is not quite worn out in New England."527 And the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary mentions under the date 1781 that bundling "once was customary with persons of opposite sexes, in Wales and New England."'528 In any case it is certain that New England in the period we are discuss- ing witnessed the golden age of bundling, that ambiguous confirmation- cum-denial of the notion of the North Americans' scarce virility. The examples multiply and reinforce each other. Bundling is mentioned as a current practice in 1747 among the people of the lower classes in Massa- chusetts and Connecticut.529 A generation later Berthier, Rochambeau's historiographer, records with amazement (ca. 1780) that it was cus- tomary for two lovers to lie together for hours in bed taking of their happiness, without anything at all incorrect happening:530 a record for continence that outdoes even the abb6 Robert d'Arbrisselle, a second (but voluntary) Tantalus, who spent his nights caressing two provocative little nuns, "and all without sinning. "531 The abbe Robin relates with candid admiration that "the Americans are very hospitable; they have only one bed; the chaste wife, should she be alone, shares it with her guest without fear and without remorse"; 32 525. Dialogues curieux, pp. 35-36, 230. 526. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 201, who is however inclined toward a Dutch origin: cf. below, n. 536. 527. Sketches, 1, 328. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (15 June 1967), discussing Gerald Carson's book, The Polite American (London, 1967), repeats that "'bundling' was practised enthusiastically in Old England before it was transported to New England." 528. Sub voce. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "formerly" common in Wales and New England, and produces examples from 1781 (Connecticut), 1807 (New England), 1809 (Washington Irving) and still in 1842 (Wales) and 1878 (Celtic peoples). On the extreme lasciviousness of the Welsh and their "trial nights," see comments in Eugen Diihren (pseudonym of Iwan Bloch) Das Geschlechts- leben in England mit besonderer Beziehung auf London (Charlottenburg-Berlin, 1901-03), III, 230-32. 529. M. Hall, op. cit., pp. 35, 37. 530. "Journal de la Campagne d'Amerique," in Bulletin de 'lInstitut Fran(ais de Washington, new ser., n. 1 (1951) quoted by Echeverria, Mirage, p. 105. 531. Voltaire, La Pucelle d'Orleans, IV, who took the edifying anecdote from Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, s.v. "Fontevraud" (6th ed. [Basle, 1741], II, 479-85, with detailed "casuistics"), who had already mentioned it in the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, April 1686 (in Oeuvres diverses [the Hague, 1737], I, 529-33). Cf. also Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 170, 184. 532. Nouveau voyage, p. 42. 278 The Second Phase of the Dispute thus letting himself be wrongly numbered among the contented witnesses of that interrupted embrace.533 But not always interrupted. Castiglioni's scepticism seems to be con- firmed by a ballad of 1785 describing a pair of bundlers who took all the ritual and required precautions, but "so provoked was the wretch / That she of him a bastard catch'd."1534 Thus it surprises one somewhat to learn that even the rigorist John Adams was willing to allow bundling as the lesser of two evils, in the matter of excessive amorous passion: ". . . yet, on considering the whole of the Argument on each side, I cannot wholly disapprove of bundling."""535 And even Washington Irving (1809) finds a place for this "superstitious rite" among the healthy customs of Connecti- cut and holds it partially responsible for the extraordinary increase of the Yankee race.," A further "semibundling" among Canada's youth is recorded by Head (ca. 1820),537 and yet another, in Ohio (1821), gives rise to shocked comment on the part of Zerah Hawley,538 while a few years later (ca. 1832) the Perfectionists adopted a religious form of bundling "permitting unmarried couples to do their courting in the wall- bed with the lower parts of their bodies secured in sacks."539 And so it continues, at least up to the "California caress"-"coition without consummation" - of the end of the nineteenth century540 and the petting of our own day. The reference to the Kinsey report (p. 276) was not accidental. In his inquiry into The Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953) the biologist Kinsey in person informs us that petting, apparently indulged in by the whole of the American youth of today, is nothing but a variant of the ancient practice of bundling.541 Castiglioni is proved right, and what started as scandalized gossip is confirmed by the voice of Science. It is curious however that it should be precisely and solely the sexual 533. Fay, Esprit, p. 121; cf., contra, Fanny Varnum, Un philosophe cosmopolite du XVIII' siecle: Le Chevalier de Chastellux (Paris, 1936), pp. 187-88. 534. H. L. Mencken, The American Language, Supplement One, ed. cit., pp. 211-14, with further bibliography. More little rhymes are carried by L. L. Matthias, Die Entdeckung Amerikas anno 1953 oder das geordnete Chaos, trans. into French with the title Autopsie des Etats-Unis (Paris, 1955), pp. 237-38n. On the other hand J. F. Smith recounts (1784) a "tender and respectful" love growing out of a promiscuous environment, op. cit., I, 125-27, 131, 135-37. 535. Quoted in the Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 1962, under The Adams Family. 536. In A History of New York, in An American Reader, ed. B. Rascoe (New York, 1938), pp. 279- 80. But the custom becomes "hideous" a few pages further on (p. 283), and Irving accuses the yankees of having spread it among the good Dutch boys of Connecticut. 537. George Head, Forest Scenes and Incidents in the Wilds of North America (1829; London ed., 1838), pp. 240-41. 538. Tryon, op. cit., p. 504. 539. Taylor, op. cit., p. 278. 540. Langdon-Davis, op. cit., p. 183. 541. Time (Atlantic ed.), 24 August 1953, p. 36. Other details in M. Hall, op. cit., pp. 43-46 (with bibliography); Turner, op. cit., pp. 122-27; Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 185-210; E. J. Dingwall, The Ameri- can Woman: A Historical Study (London, 1956), p. 40; Wish, op. cit., pp. 132, 234. 279 'THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD b 10 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD drop of water falls from the clouds into the dry dust.""28 And the great Vico records it as a well-known fact that "frogs are born from the earth, with the summer rains."'" Juan and Ulloa, actually referring to the Ameri- can Portobello, had said that "the great number that there are of them [toads], and the fact that they all appear after a cloudburst, has led some people to believe that each drop of water is converted into a toad."30 Buffon must, no doubt, have taken these abundant rainy embryologies as particular instances providing just the confirmation he wanted for what he himself had arrived at by intuition: -a notion of awe-inspiring pessi- mism, a truly tragic viewpoint, according to which the meanest, most abject, most minuscule species are at the same time those which multiply with the most terrifying fertility. It is this morbid fecundity of the lower forms which assures their survival, while in the superior species, the larger, more beautiful and powerful animals, it is their noble courage and serene strength which enables them to protect themselves.3" The ele- phant and the lion hold sway over the shapeless rabble of the unnumbered insects. Their trumpetings and roarings drown the feeble croaking of the myriads of batrachians. America, the moist, prolific mother of these minute and evil little animals, devoid of the great wild beasts, must have seemed to Buffon's eyes to be marked with the indelible stigma of some repugnant organic weakness. Some years later Oliver Goldsmith was quick to accept Buffon's thesis that "the smallest animals multiply the fastest,"32 an idea that turned up- side down the apologetic pleadings of the theologians, who had shown themselves quite willing to defend the usefulness of the insects, their lawful worthiness, their value as instruments of divine justice, and even the meager fecundity of their more harmful species!33 Over the years the idea of prolificity as a passive defense of the lower 28. La ricreazione del savio, 1659, in Ezio Raimondi, ed., Trattatisti e narratori del Seicento (Milan- Naples, 1960), p. 520. 29. Scienza nuova, ed. F. Nicolini (Bari, 1911-16), p. 279; cf. F. Nicolini, Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova (Rome, 1949-50), I, 39, 115-16, 233-34; II, 234. 30. Relacidn hist6rica, II, 5, ed. Madrid, 1748, I, 137; cf. earlier F. Carletti, Ragionamenti (1594; ed. Milan, 1926), pp. 26-27. 31. See the passages quoted and discussed by W. Lynskey, "Goldsmith and the Chain of Being," Journal of the History of Ideas, 6 (1945), pp. 366-67; and Bertin, op. cit., p. 73. Already Tasso, still following St. Basil, had stressed the meager fecundity of the "savage and untamed beasts" in contrast with the providential fertility of the tame and domesticated animals, which otherwise would have been devoured by the wild ones and made extinct (Mondo creato, IV, 738-40; ed. cit., pp. 137-38; and VI, 989-1015; ed. cit., p. 244). 32. A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, pt. II, bk. II, chap. 15 (London-Edinburgh ed., Fullarton and Co., n.d., I, 265); cf. J. H. Pitman, Goldsmith's "Animated Nature" (New Haven, 1924), p. 130. 33. F. C. Lesser, Theologie des insectes, ou Demonstration des perfections de Dieu dans tout ce qui concerne les insectes (trans. from the German with remarks by P. Lyonnet [the Hague, 1742]), I, 122- 23; II, 256-59; cf, P. Hazard, op. cit., I, 125. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD life of the colonists that persuades Castiglioni to join hands with the slanderers of the New World, who were always such careful and scepti- cal measurers of the Americans' virile capacities; curious both because Castiglioni in his conclusion emphatically rejects the thesis of the New Englanders' precocious senility and intellectual sterility,542 and also be- cause when all is said and done his basic interest is not in the human race but in the plants, trees, bushes, herbs, and other "useful vegetables." Another writer to discuss the sexual mores of the American men, and even more the women, was Moreau de Saint-Mery, who found himself in complete agreement with the Milanese botanist. Moreau lived in the United States some ten years later (1794-98), and his bookshop and printing house in Philadelphia became a meetingplace for a number of 6migr6s and refugees, most notably Talleyrand.543 In summing up his transatlantic experiences, Moreau tells us that the young ladies of America, and in particular those of Quaker Pennsylvania, are anything but chaste and well behaved, and it is not out of any burning love-"for the American women are not tender"-but so as to have a few more trinkets and baubles that they allow themselves liberties, or rather "digressions," on which their parents close both eyes. Frigid and without passion, they submit for hours on end, in total impassivity, as if they were doing sums, to intemperances which could be forgiven only in moments of unbridled frenzy. Worse yet, they masturbate at a very early age and are not unfamiliar with the base pleasures of Lesbos. As soon as they marry they immediately become model wives, although they still remain rather dirty and unkempt. And in any case after the age of eighteen they lose their charms and shrivel up: "Their newborn bosom has already disappeared."544 542. Op. cit., II, 160-64, esp. against Raynal, with Jefferson's arguments: but of the inhabitants of Massachussetts, both men and women, he had said that they age more quickly than the Europeans (ibid., 1, 92). 543. Moreau de Saint-Mery, a native of Martinique and related to Josephine Beauharnais, a man re- nowned in France as jurist and lawyer (later Napoleon entrusted him with the administration of the Duchy of Parma, 1802-06) took an active part in the early phases of the Revolution; but to flee the enmity of Robespierre he found himself obliged, toward the end of 1793, to embark for the United States, where he remained until August 1798: see his Voyage aux Etats-Unis de I'Amerique, 1793- 1798, ed. St. L. Mims (New Haven, 1913); Fay, Esprit, pp. 269-70; Remond, op. cit., p. 82; Poniatow- ski, op. cit., pp. 79, 164, 316, 333; and Turner, op. cit., pp. 186-87. On his time in Parma, see abundant details (and bibliographical references) in A. Levi, "Spigolature romagnosiane: Moreau de Saint-Mery e Romagnosi," A urea Parma, 19, nos. 4-5 (1935). 544. Voyage, pp. 304-10, 334. and Poniatowski, op. cit., p. 164; and the Pulszkys, who (1853) re- ject the "prejudice that the bloom of American ladies is but short," in Handlin, ed., This was America, p. 236. Moreau also comments occasionally on bundling, op. cit., pp. 335-39, more frequently on pros- titution (on which see also his friend Talleyrand, in Huth and Pugh, Talleyrand in America, p. 82) and the free customs of the Quakers and Quakeresses. Still in our own time his references to the dirtiness of American women are mentioned and used (together with Simone de Beauvoir's criticisms, L'Amerique au jour le jour [Paris, 1948]) by Matthias, op. cit., p. 248n. 280 The Second Phase of the Dispute The males are certainly no better off. The climate enervates the do- mestic animals: "The horse has less vigor, the bull less of the impetuosity that he commonly exhibits in his lovemaking and fighting." The dog is without generosity and chivalry, bites and beats [sic] his mate, and is subject to syphilis. The cat is extraordinarily meek. And finally "man also receives from this climate an impression which robs him of part of his energy, and which disposes him to indolence."545 Spineless men and shameless women-the picture is complete. The French jurist from Leeward America fails to reject the current climatic-degenerative theories; and the de facto morality prevailing in the de jure prudish Philadelphia appears in even darker hues than in the portrayal of the learned Milanese naturalist. XXIII. THE VINDICATION OF AMERICA'S YOUTH The emergence of the United States, of an America unquestionably new-new politically speaking, though with an ideology rooted in the untamed vastness of the continent, and thus confirming America's titanic adolescence-was accompanied in Europe by a revolution in attitudes toward primitivity and young races. The Sturm und Drang raged against rules, traditions, and hierarchies, inherited laws and conventional idol- atries. Its antihistorical and abstractly revolutionary spirit prevented it from absorbing the heliodromic theories, although they concurred in the prophetic exaltation of "young" lands and peoples. America, the Western Hemisphere, is never particularly stressed in the Sturm und Drang (or in the early Goethe) as Europe's heir apparent. But the Sturm did however take up Rousseau's glorification of nature and the savage, his disdain of the Enlightenment, and his faith in immediate sentiment. Thus the naturalists' and historiographers' maledictions lost their mean- ing or even provided the impatient new generation with the basis for their panegyrics. Childish, immature, incomplete, still sodden? . . . The slanders, repeated word for word, were converted into hymns of praise. Buffon and de Pauw found themselves on Balaam's ass. The American continent, with all its animals and nations, was merely a "particular instance" of the vindication of nature over history, of the "virgin" and "pure" over the formed and traditional, a process char- acteristic of early romanticism, and preparatory to that synthesis of his- tory and nature, of man and world, which was proper to mature ro- manticism. Montaigne's rapt and spontaneous enthusiasm rose again, enriched by two centuries of polemics: 545. The same picture of spineless and lethargic Americans appears in Claude C. Robin, Voyage dans linterieur de la Louisiane (Paris, 1807) (quoted by Echeverria, Mirage, p. 250). 281 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Our world has just found another. . . so new and so young that it is still being taught its alphabet: less than fifty years ago it knew neither letters nor weights, nor measures, nor clothes, nor wheat, nor vines. It was still naked in its mother's lap and lived only on its mother's nourishment. If we conclude rightly of our own end, and that poet [Lucretius] of the youth of his own age, this other world will only enter into light when our world leaves it. The universe will fall into a paraly- sis: one member will be crippled, the other in full vigor. There was heard again, though more bitterly now, his sorrow at the cor- ruption or rather contagion brought to this world by the cultured Euro- peans: "It was an infant world."546 And there rose again, more fervent, more ardently religious, his yearning for young and unspoiled lands; for "these new lands," Montaigne had written, "discovered in our time, still pure and virgin in comparison with ours.""547 In 1754 Rousseau had bewailed the sad lot of the human race, that once having lifted itself from absolute primitivism to the civilization of the savages had not halted at that point. That was "the true youth of the world," and all further progress had carried the individual nearer to an apparent perfection, but the species to a veritable decrepitude. For Jean- Jacques that was our species' Golden Age; not (as it often thought) the merely natural state in which the centuries ran by uselessly and "the species was already old, and man still remained a child."548 The good savage is clearly distinguished from the primitive brute, and as serenely superior to his crude ancestor as he is to his corrupt descendants. In this new climate of opinion a simple follower of Rousseau like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, an ecstatic naturalist, could infuse Buffon's pessimistic theory with new and more hopeful possibilities. Bernardin saw the four parts of the world as "harmonically" representing the four ages of man: Asia his old age, Europe his manhood, Africa his efferves- cent youth, and America, of course, his infancy: "Nature appears to have assigned the character of infancy to America. She has given it in general a mild and humid temperature, like that of children." Here Montaigne's imposing "child-world" becomes a "children's world," or a "childish world." Nature has provided the inhabitants of 546. Essais, III, chap. vi (Pleiade ed., pp. 874-75). Montaigne speaks of the infancy of the American civilizations, not the lands, nor the ethnic stocks. Further on he speaks of "souls so new, so hungry to learn" and of their "ignorance and inexperience" (ibid., p. 876). But later he seems quite simply to renounce even this limited infantility, when having described the wise and courageous reply of the natives he adds: "Here is an example of the babbling of this infancy" (ibid., p. 877). 547. Ibid., I, chap. XXX, ed. cit., p. 209. But there had already been so much talk of these "new lands" that one of Montaigne's contemporaries could jokingly observe that "the New World is not new now, but old, considering how much has been said and written about it" (Acosta, op. cit., Proemio, p. I 1). On some precursors of Montaigne's attitude (Andre Thevet, Jean de L6ry, Jodelle, Ronsard) see Lapp., op. cit., and P. Henriquez Urefia, op. cit., pp. 22-23. Still in the nineteenth century Cesare Correnti discussed the various meanings of the New World, which from new by nature becomes the new world of humanity (Pace, op. cit., p. 169). 548. Discours sur l'inegalite, pp. 61,75; cf. Lovejoy, Essays, pp. 14-37. 282 The Second Phase of the Dispute America with a food that is easily gathered and well protected against bad weather and birds, the manioc tubers, and potatoes; she has given them clothing, with the cotton plant; and furniture and dishes with the calabash gourds, "from which one can make any sort of vessel"; and shelter too, "under the porticoes of the prickly pear." Dangerous animals are rare; on the other hand there are plenty of monkeys, "which give themselves up to a thousand innocent games," and multicolored birds of sweetest song. . . . In Bernardin's extreme anthropocentrism the "imperfection" that Buf- fon wrote of is diluted into a maternal tenderness of Nature toward her creatures. The continent's "weakness" is not now objective, so to speak, but subjective, the "weakness" of a mother for her children: "These vast and peaceful countries seem reserved for the infancy of the world."549 America is still characterized by a physiological incompleteness, but this is then allegorized, and no longer has any deprecatory implications. De Pauw had thought to ridicule the vaunted happiness of the savage by describing it as being like that "enjoyed among us by children, who are savages in the midst of society, until such time as their reason develops and instruction enlightens them."550 Now this ignorant happiness of the child is precisely what is yearned after as preferable by far to the maturity of instructed and enlightened reason. The reversal of opinions about the continent was facilitated by a parallel revolution in attitudes toward the savage. The question of whether he shared in Original Sin- which cropped up in various guises, for example whether he was pure like Virgin Nature or, like Nature lack- ing Grace, decadent and degenerate, or whether he was "inferior" be- cause unredeemed or "superior" because without guilt, whether he was pagan like the Infidel or innocent like the newborn child - was eliminated with the progressive dissolution of the dogma of Sin. The early romantics had opposed the current dogma of Original Sin with the popular myth of the sin of Adam and Eve551 and had looked on the biblical "Fall" as the source of history and progress. The savage, con- sequently, could also be "fallen,"552 without being decadent or degenerate or corrupt. Far removed from our level of civilization, he could figure 549. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Harmonies de la nature, 1796, bk. VI, Science des enfants, in Oeu- vres posthumes (Paris, 1833), pp. 294-95. On the extremely varied usefulness of the plants of America, cf. ibid., pp. 69-70, and the Fragments de I'Amazone, ibid., p. 517. 550. Recherches, I, 128; on the radical change of opinion about infancy, see first my Politica del Settecento (Bari, 1928), p. 46, and E. Male, L'art religieux apres le Concile de Trente (Paris, 1932), p. 327; then my Romanticismo, pp. 160-61. 551. See my Romanticismo, and II Peccato di Adamo ed Eva (Milan, 1933). 552. This dissolving of the dogma of sin anticipated the undermining of the thesis of the savage as degenerate, as nature abandoned to itself after sin, that would later be developed by de Maistre (see below, pp. 389-90). 283 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD equally well as Adam, in his youthful innocence before the coming of sin, or as Adam immediately after sin, naked and lost on the earth stretching out endlessly before his gaze, outside the Garden of Eden. Sin no longer counted. Before or after "sin" the human condition remained the same, and the spiritual value of the savage-Adam the same too. Sin, in fact, no longer existed, no longer weighed on the conscience of Europe. And in a sudden burst of affection and sympathy the weakness or childishness of the Americans finished by becoming desirable in itself, without reference to a previous state of divine grace, and no longer compared either favor- ably or unfavorably with the cultivated and learned society of Europe. XXIV. HERDER AND THE AMERICAN PROBLEM The preromantic theories found their most eloquent defender in Herder. In many ways he is the antithesis of de Pauw. He believes in the unity of the human race, in the providential course of history, in the virgin genius of the primitive. He detests the fatuous complacency of the Age of En- lightenment, its blatant frivolity, and its unquenchable optimism. In a passage that seems to contain an echo of the ill-famed Recherches, Herder even denies illuminism's boast of having promoted liberty, point- ing out that European trade-that worldwide trade so enthusiastically approved by Voltaire and Raynal-in fact enslaves the other three con- tinents and "civilizes" them by corrupting and poisoning their inhabit- ants, to get in exchange their "silver and precious stones, spices, sugar- and hidden maladies." These days, the young Herder goes on, the "peo- ples' pastors" are known as "monopolists."553 These are variations on themes by Rousseau, to be sure. And Herder's tone too, always so fiery and agitated and sermonizing, takes us back to the spiritual climate of Jean-Jacques. Yet Herder, unlike Jean-Jacques, believes in Society, and even more in Progress: the progress of all man- kind, excluding and favoring no one, and with but few occasions of local and accidental decadence. What counts for him is not, as it was for the impassioned Genevan, the earthly happiness of the individual, but the lasting improvement of the human race.554 The individual may suffer and perish, but the species' upward progress is inflexible, unswerving, and infinite. If despite these sentiments Herder never made any direct assault on de Pauw, it is possibly because he did not consider him a worthy adver- 553. Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, in Gerbi, Romanticismo, p. 123. In this fundamental work of his, Herder, who had already broken with Nicolai, reacts against the Aufkliirung (which was suspicious of primitivism) represented by Isaak Iselin's Geschichte der Menschheit (1764; see Reed, op. cit., p. 65). 554. On the new sense of "Gliickseligkeit" in Herder, as "realization of the ideals and aspirations of man," see the acute observations of Meinecke, Historismus, pp. 438-39. 284 The Second Phase of the Dispute sary; or more probably because Herder in turn, in the grip of his unitary vision of universal history, represents it as a single strand, from the patriarchs of Israel to the philosophers of Paris, ignoring, or worse, both the Islamic and Far Eastern civilizations, and those of America. To justify his exclusion of China Herder makes it a simple reflection of Egypt, the latter on the other hand being included in his providential plan;555 and America serves him merely as a paradigm of primitivism, curious in itself, but contributing nothing to the incomparable European civilizations. The Patagonian savages and the New Zealand savages are dry and barren branches of the tree of life.556 America is raw nature, not organized society. In Herder's major work the striking ideas sketched out in his youth are forced into a system and diluted with moralism. The famous Ideas of a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-9 1) do, of course, include a whole chapter, the sixth of the sixth book, on the Americans.557 But Herder contents himself with describing the present condition of the na- tives. He tells us that according to many reports the most advanced American nations are those of the northern part of the Continent. The ancient Mexican empire is mentioned only to inform us that it had ten times more inhabitants than the corresponding Spanish viceroyalty, and that the oppressed peoples are seething with hatred under that "iniquitous tyranny." The Peruvians, "these sweet children of Nature, once so happy under their Incas," are likewise afflicted and boiling with resentment. And Herder's heartfelt eulogy goes to those Americans and other natives of the interior who managed to keep themselves barbarous and free.558 Despite these differences between the various peoples of America, and although he recognizes that the continent includes widely divergent 555. According to Schulin, op. cit., p. 69, n. 104, Herder derived his negative opinion on China from P. Sonnerat, Reise nach Ostindien and China (German trans., Zurich, 1783). 556. Ideen, IV, 4, trans. cit., I, 186. 557. Ed. cit., I, 291-301. A little further on (VII, 5) Herder discusses the influence of climate and accepts the observations of Pehr Kalm (En resa til Norra Amerika [Stockholm, 1753-61], II, 233-35; cf. also III, 240-41) on the premature maturity and senility of the Europeans in America and the Creoles in comparison with the vigorous and long-lived natives: "It is incorrect to attribute that to the un- healthy climate of America; it is only to foreigners that it has shown itself unkind" (I, 342). Which gives rise to a suggestive quandary: could the weakness of the present inhabitants of Mexico, Peru, etc., derive in part "from the fact that one has changed their country and way of life, without being able or wanting to give them that of Europeans?" (1, 343). On the breadth of the concept of climate in Herder, see H. A. Korff, Voltaire im literarischen Deutschland des XVIII Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1917), pp. 368-69; Rouche, op. cit., pp. 23-24, 268. 558. The Spanish found themselves obliged to "honor" them with the title of bravos! (Ideen, I, 6; ed. cit., I, 53). A further passionate apology of the "barbarian" peoples' rights of self-defense (with invocation to Las Casas and other numerous references to America) in Briefe zur Befirderung der Humanitiit, Zehnte Sammlung, no. 115 (Frankfurt-Leipzig ed., 1798), pp. 29-34 (on which see Robert T. Clark Jr., "The Noble Savage and the Idea of Tolerance in Herder's Briefe sur Befirderung der Humanitit," The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 33, no. 1 [January 1934], pp. 46-56). "In a young people, fighting for freedom, he [Herder] also condoned resorting to power politics" (Meinecke, op. cit., p. 456). 285 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD climatic zones, nations of giants and nations of pygmies, warlike tribes and peace-loving tribes, and so on, Herder reaffirms the substantial affinity of all Americans, an affinity even greater than that observable among the Negroes; an affinity which he proves with quotations from Ulloa and other travelers and from which he manages to deduce the un- alloyed purity and single remote Asiatic origin of all the tribes of the hemisphere. Which is all very well, but what exactly is this "general character" of the American? It is an "almost childish goodness and innocence." Childish - the very adjective used by Montaigne and shortly to be taken up again by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; but which with Herder contains a promise of development, of adulthood and maturity to come, while Montaigne had yearned after this innocence qua talis, as the antithesis of civilization's decadence, and Bernardin's tenderhearted picture of America would be more like some scene of cherubs romping in cloud- cuckoo-land. Herder instead, his acute mind aimed ever in the same di- rection, points out that these peoples' greatest claim to our attention is in the spectacle they offer us of a civilization which took its first steps alone, without any help from the rest of the world, and whose fragile debut can thus show us a rich and instructive aspect of human nature. Naive and ill informed as it may be, this sympathy is certainly superior to Robertson's cold analysis and de Pauw's erudite disdain. In the essay of 1774 Herder had ridiculed Robertson along with the other historiogra- phers of the Enlightenment, but in later works he came to recognize the Scotsman, together with Voltaire and even Gibbon, as his companions- in-arms in the defense and vindication of Humanity, and was warm and lavish in his praise of them.559 The venomous and mediocre de Pauw, on the other hand, is never explicitly mentioned by Herder. But to our now practiced ear there is no mistaking the target of a number of barbed com- ments delivered in passing, even though no names are given: And these are the men that are supposed to be a race of weaklings, of veritable abortions? ... I believe the reader will decide to reject that prejudice according to which the indios are weak and good for nothing . .. neither they [the Tupinam- bas] nor their valiant neighbors can be considered bastardized creatures, and so on.560 559. Meinecke, op. cit., pp. 448, 476-77. 560. De Pauw is cited by name only for his theories and "bold hypotheses" on China and Egypt (see Ideen, XI, 5; Suphan ed., XIV, 33; French trans., ed. cit., II, 225) concerning which Hamann wrote to him already in 1774, expressing his hearty agreement (letter of 2 April 1774, in Briefvwechsel, ed. cit., III, 79). But there is no shortage of probable references to the Recherches sur les Americains. Apart from the current clich6 of syphilis as the recompense of the conquest (cf. de Pauw's "Discours preliminaire"), see Herder's discussion of the insensibility of the Americans (Ideen, VIII, 1; trans. cit., II, 9-10), in implicit polemic with the Recherches, 1, 72-74 (only mentioning Robertson and UI- loa, true; but de Pauw too cites Ulloa in the passage mentioned). And cf. de Pauw: "Until now we have only had false notions on the northernmost peoples of America" ("Discours preliminaire") with Her- 286 The Second Phase of the Dispute Yet when Herder has to make up his mind which part of the earth may claim the supreme honor of having been the cradle of man, America is immediately set aside, and precisely because of a series of "Buffon-de Pauwian" deficiencies: because its mountains are precipitous and in- hospitable, its volcanoes active, its plains humid, its fauna inferior to that of the Old World, and its indigenous societies "formless outlines" of governments. The comparison of one hemisphere with the other "poses a serious problem for the philosopher." But the philosopher Herder evades the problem by repeating ambiguously that the human race cannot have been born "in the rich valley of Quito" (Western Hemisphere) nor yet "in the Mountains of the Moon, in Africa" (Eastern Hemisphere).561 And unwilling to abandon the biblical thesis of Adam's single progeny he resigns himself to treating all the other races as degenerate varieties of the white race. Taken all in all, the significance of these "critical exertions" is mainly symptomatic. They reveal the rapid maturing of a problem that was al- ready implicit in the polemic between the budding historicism and the rationalism of the age, but which was becoming ever more alive and im- mediate in the image of the Americas: the problem of the relationship between history and nature, between civilization and innateness, tradi- tion and spontaneity. To prevail decisively over the philosophy of the Enlightenment it was necessary to revive a feeling for the past, the whole past, even the remotest past back to the age of primitivism, and at the same time to eliminate the idea of humanity as invariable and identical in all places at all times. Herder energetically supported each of the two tendencies, without bothering to reconcile them, indeed almost without noticing any antithesis between the idolization of the primitive and an enthusiasm for progress.562 His discoveries, and still more his weaknesses, make Herder the most typical exponent of this radical conflict. On one side he is the most der: "'We only know these peoples [of the North] ... through imaginary accounts." See also the con- demnation of the authors that feed Europe's pride by slandering the savages: Briefe, loc. cit., p. 34. A methodical survey would, I think, reveal other textual traces. 561. Ideen, X, 2; trans. cit., II, 141. Cf. the Buffonian-sounding eulogy of the majestic elephant and the noble lion, in contrast with the inert and shapeless unau (Bradypus or American Poltroon) of Amer- ica (III, 3; ibid., I, 119-24); the deploring of the American fauna, poor in large animals, and rich in bats, mice, insects, toads, etc., with sad consequences for the history of man (II, 3; ibid., I, 87-88); the in- genious explanation of America's weakness and inferiority, at the moment of discovery, by the fact that it possessed almost no domestic animals (VIII, 3; ibid., II, 37-39; X, 3; ibid., II, 147, an idea which would also seem to come from Buffon and Reimarus: Rouch6, op. cit., p. 290). A series of no less than eighteen derivations of Herderian theses from Buffon (including those referring to the American fauna) can be found in E. Sauter, Herder und Buffon (Rixheim, 1910), summarized in Rouch6, op. cit., pp. 207-08n., 219 n., 2, 669. On Herder's relationship with the geographical and naturalistic theories of the century, in general, see Meinecke, op. cit., p. 462 and Rouch6, op. cit., pp. 276-77, quoting Grund- mann, Die geographische und viilkerkundliche Quellen und Anschauungen in Herders Ideen (Berlin, 1900). 562. R. G. Collingwood, History, pp. 86-87; A. O. Lovejoy, "Herder and the Philosophy of His- tory," in Essays, pp. 167, 181. 287 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD ardent defender of primitivism, on the other the most effective promoter of the idea of development in history. He stresses even more than Montesquieu the importance of physical and climatic factors, the link between man and nature, but assigns a religious value and a transcenden- tal end to the evolution of the human race. America was the reagent that revealed these strident contradictions. Although Herder's gaze is always turned toward the East, toward bibli- cal antiquity and the peoples of Asia, he finds himself unable to shake off these nagging doubts and unanswerable questions presented by the ex- treme West. The epithet "childish," used by Herder to describe the Americans, had served him once already and would do so again, to desig- nate the most ancient East, "the infancy of the human race." The New World deluges him with claims and queries which leave him troubled and unhappy. Thus one moment he is repeating Berkeley's famous proph- ecy and seeing Europe's moribund learning born again in the Anglo- American colonies (1780),563 and a moment later going on to reject it and reply to the "good bishop" that Europe is not yet at the fourth act, but barely at the third, and may yet recover her youth, revive and not abdi- cate.564 Poor Herder! If he silences the American "barbarians" he is denying his optimistic exaltation of young and ingenuous nations. If he admits them plenis titulis into the course of human history, he sees the ruin of all his hopes of having shown a uniform meaning, a universal value, in the passing of the centuries. De Pauw's charges aggravate the problem by offering a paradoxical solutionthat is doubly unacceptable for Herder. A "degenerate" Ameri- can has no place either among the child-races or among the educated na- tions. His instinctive reaction is thus to rehabilitate the native, to bring out the qualities in the Americans which had already appealed to his Rousseauian admiration of the pure and natural-a feeling reinforced in this case (and here he agrees with de Pauw) by the contrast with the hypocritical violence wrought on these peoples by the Europeans - which was in constant danger of being swallowed up and submerged in the Eu- ropeocentric maelstrom of his system or carried off and likewise drowned in the impetuous and uniform current of his mystical Progress. Herder cannot bear to give in to the cynic de Pauw, and lingers a moment to put in a good word for the Americans. He agrees, albeit unwillingly and un- productively, to discuss their theoretical case. And thus, in passing, with absentminded benevolence, he bestows on them too the blessing of hu- manity's muddled theologian. 563. Vom Einfluss der Regierungen auf die Wissenschaften und der Wissenschaften auf die Regie- rungen (1780). 564. Texts (1780, 1792) in King, op. cit., pp. 68-70. 288 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America I. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LATIN AMERICAN REACTION TO THE EUROPEAN SLANDERS THERE are several good reasons why we can speak of reaction to de Pauw in Latin America, rather than a "polemic" on his theses. Polemic implies a dialogue: maybe even with someone already dead, but still a dialogue, the opposition of two theories, a dispute-which may suggest violent controversy, but does mean a colloquy too. It was a dispute that involved the exiled Jesuits and the American founding fathers. The Latin American authors, writing on the eve of and immediately after the liberation of their countries, react belligerently, angrily, and resent- fully to Buffon's and de Pauw's notions, but without producing any organic corpus of argument and factual data to oppose them. They reply to the all-embracing condemnations with disjointed dithyrambs. To the serious problems raised by Buffon they make no reference at all, and de Pauw is only mentioned for his more scandalous aspects and wilder exaggerations. The "Prussian" was classed quite simply as an enemy of America and the Americans, an enemy to be showered with abuse whenever the occasion offered. If Voltaire accuses the Americans of being unindustrious, the fiery Vidaurre protests that "this is a greater insult than those thought up by the imbecile de Pauw." De Pauw had once been the focal point of so many of the discussions, but now these same conspicuous exaggerations of his relegate him to the rank of convenient and unmistakable target. The essence of his theories was not even examined, but the glories of America shone out more re- splendent in contrast to his black insinuations. The fundamental ques- tion, so richly suggestive as originally formulated, faded and dwindled on reaching the cultural environment of the overseas colonies, so much I. Manuel de Vidaurre, Suplemento a las Cartas americanas (Lima, 1827), p. 13 (ibid., p. 117, a dubious allusion to the second Recherches). 289 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America species had an eventful history: it was supported by Bonnet too (1764);34 revived by de Pauw;35 justified by Herder as an instrument of providence for the evolution of the nobler and less numerous species, with man as the peak of this "pyramid of creatures";16 twisted by Brissot into the theory of the continuous and providential extermination of the overproductive species, whether useful or harmful;37 welcomed by Father Molina;38 redis- covered by the naively surprised Leopardi;39 and in time endowed with almost proverbial standing.40 But its ultimate destiny was to be taken over by representatives of the opposite extreme, so to speak, by much later biologists and ecologists with their idea of the "pyramid of numbers": "Every animal feeding on another species that is lower in the food chain must select a species that is much more numerous and usually one that is smaller"''41 - a theory as close to the banality of the big eating the little as it is removed from the inspired and impassioned visions of both Buffon and Bonnet. Buffon's "application" of these ideas to the New World is too facile. But already a century and a half earlier (1616) Goodman, in his efforts to demonstrate the universal decadence and corruption of the cosmos, had ascribed this same feebleness and misfortune in maternal capacity to the whole earth: "Not able to produce couragious Lions, brave Uni- comes, fierce Tigers, stout Elephants, shee makes it her taske and imploy- ment to be the mother, the midwife of wormes, of gnats, and of butter- flies."42 And in the following century a poet who had read Buffon (see below, p. 375) was to come back, half in jest and half in desperation, to the theory of multiplication of insects as a sign of the imminent end of the world: 34. C. Bonnet: "The fruitfulness of the species is always proportional to the dangers which menace the individuals" (quoted by Daudin, op. cit., p. 175n.). 35. "Nature ... has, as one knows, increased the degree of fecundity in proportion to the smallness of the animals" (Defense des Recherches philosophiques sur les A mericains [Berlin, 1771 ], p. 97). 36. Ideen, X, 2; Idees sur la philosophie de I'histoire de l'humanite, trans. E. Quinet (Paris, 1827- 28), II, 221-25; cf. Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, ed. B. Glass, D. Temkin, W. C. Strauss, Jr. (Baltimore, 1959), p. 209. 37. Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de propriete et sur le vol (Paris, 1782), pp. 312 ff.; W. Stark, America: Ideal and Reality (London, 1947), pp. 84-85. 38. G. 1. Molina, Memorie di storia naturale (Bologna, 1821), 11, 49: "The species of bigger [animals] ... are less abundant in individuals." 39. "1 believe that the absolute multitude of each species of animals is in direct relation to their small- ness . . . look up the naturalists and see if any of them have made this observation" (Zibaldone, ed. Flora [Milan, 1938], I, 102). 40. For example: "Like all the lower organisms, poor books multiply prodigiously, though the total number is kept down by a corresponding mortality" (Samuel M. Crothers, "The Hundred Best Books," in Among Friends [Boston-New York, 1910], p. 69). 41. W. Vogt, The Road to Survival (New York, 1948), p. 91. 42. Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature (London, 1616), pp. 16, 19, quoted by Harris, op. cit., p. 44. His ideas also influenced some of the earliest writers investigating the raw state of nature in Australia: Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850 (Oxford, 1960), p. 172. 11 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD poorer in scientific tradition and interest; but at the same time it became more bitter too, as the political aspect rose to preeminence. Sometimes its opponents are content to refer back to the defenses of America published in Europe, as more authoritative and "impartial." And usually, as we have seen, their susceptibilities seem more sensitive to the slanders on their intellectual capacities than the denigration of the Americans' physical prowess. But their logical pattern is still that of later rationalism and shows almost no trace of the new concepts elabo- rated by historical thought and romanticism. All one notes-and this confirms rather than invalidates these writers' immaturity-is an un- sparing and disorganized use of the boasts of youth, newness, and vigor on the part of their lands and nations. In other words their replies are belated, often incidental, and for the most part no longer relevant, in- capable of producing any useful result, and spoiled among other things by a characteristic limitation of outlook. And yet they are not by any means without interest, either in them- selves, or in the history of the polemic: not in themselves, because they are almost always the work of men of wit, learning, and eloquence, men who were among the finest minds in their respective countries; and not in the history of the dispute because these replies brought about the ac- ceptance throughout Latin America of the anti-Buffon anti-de Pauw thesis that is still valid and triumphant today-the thesis or rather article of faith establishing the excellence of the American continent and its mis- sion in the vanguard of humanity. Each viceroyalty and captaincy gen- eral of the Spanish Empire, each of the future republics raises at least one voice to rebuff the "Prussian's" vituperation and to announce pres- ent and future glories, virtues of unimagined splendor and destinies of unmeasurable greatness. In the Old World, the Revolution's roar and shriek drowned out the erudite squabbles of abb6s and adventurers, and two decades of war were refocusing the world's attention on the strug- gles and aspirations of fever-ridden Europe; Napoleon was selling Louisiana, and the whole continent, from California and Florida to the Straits of Magellan, was slipping from Spain's grip. But in America the accusations of inferiority were becoming ever more widely known, and matched by a growing patriotic anger that went hand in hand with the political revolt and merged with the resentment of the Creoles against the Godos. Up until the close of the century the protests come from Americans who have been or still are in Europe, and thus continue the Jesuits' polemic. But from 1800 onward the voices of the Americans of America are more and more frequently heard. 290 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America 291 II. DAVALOS AND THE CLIMATE OF PERU Jose Manuel Davalos was a doctor from Lima, a rich mulatto with a restless turn of mind who had been unsatisfied with what he had learned in his homeland, had betaken himself to France, and in Paris and at the illustrious university of Montpellier had spent several years (1784-88) in the untiring study of botany, chemistry, and anatomy, graduating from the "Augustissimo Ludoviceo Monspeliensi" on March 5, 1787, with a dissertation (or specimen academicum) De morbis nonnullis Limae gras- santibus ipsorumque therapeia (Monspelii, 1787).2 The work is devoted to the city of Lima, in Peruvia, and from its very first lines Davalos protests against the writers who were pleased to "defile thee [Lima] with poisonous slanders." A note follows immediately ex- plaining that these ill-intentioned writers can be reduced to de Pauw, who slandered the University of San Marcos, and dared to write that the math- ematician Godin found not a single student there who could understand him." Thus Davalos's first polemical objective is the vindication of the scientific glories of Lima: Herrera, Peralta, Olavide, Bravo del Castillo, Joseph Baquijano, and many others. But a more far-reaching anti-de Pauwian criticism is implicit in the prin- cipal thesis of his little work ("a creditable little work," Unanue called it, somewhat condescendingly).4 He maintains in fact that the climate of 2. On DAvalos, see Mendiburu, op. cit., VIII, 357; cf. ibid., IV, 351; Medina, Biblioteca Hispano- Americana (Santiago, 1898-1907), V, 239-40 (see also La imprenta en Lima [Santiago, 1904-07], 11I, 184; IV, 177); H. Valdizan, Apuntes para la bibliografia mddica peruana (Lima, 1928), pp. vi-vii, 213-21, 223, 235-36; Juan B. Lastres, "El doctor Jose Manuel Ddvalos (1758-1821)," Documentos (Lima), 3, no. 1 (1951-55), pp. 155-82. Of some interest is the catalogue of his well-stocked library (which includes neither de Pauw nor any of his contradictors), published by Fr. R. Vargas Ugarte in the Cuadernos de Estudios of the Instituto de Investigaciones Hist6ricas de la Universidad Catlica del Peri, 2, no. 5 (Lima, 1943), pp. 324-42. The difficulties put in front of the mulattoes who wanted to study medicine in Lima (on which see Rosenblat, op. cit., pp. 274-76) "had the curious effect of driving some of the most independent mulattoes abroad, especially to Montpellier, to study medicine," and of thus bringing it about that on their return to their native country they contributed to the progress of Peruvian medicine ("The Case of Jose Ponseano de Ayarza: A Document on the Negro in Higher Edu- cation," The Hispanic American Historical Review, 24, no. 3 (August 1944), p. 433; cf. ibid., p. 557). The fact was mentioned already in a speech printed in Lima in 1812, and was quoted the following year by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (fictitious name: Jos6 Guerra) in his Historia de la revolucibn, II, 599, 665, actually mentioning a mulatto from Lima earning his doctorate in Montpellier, almost certainly our Davalos. 3. De morbis, pp. iv-v. This savage insinuation by de Pauw which, as we shall see, was to offend Unanue too (below, p. 304) and Jose Maria de Salazar (below, n. 58), angered another doctor from Lima, Jose Pastor Larriiaga, who in the Prologo to his Apologia de los cirujanos del Peril (Granada, 1793), rejected the assertion of "Mr. Pauw in his Averiguaciones filos6ficas sobre los Americanos del Per L" (sic, quoted in Valdizan, Apuntes, p. 301). 4. The relations between Unanue and Daivalos do not always seem to have been wholly cordial. Medina, op. cit., V, 239-40, mentions a curious begging letter from Davalos, in which he modestly writes that in Lima "if I am not the first doctor, I am one of the first," and complains about having ap- plied for a chair in medicine, which "the viceroy, exerting his authority and disregarding the laws and constitutions, gave to D. D. Hip61lito Unanue." Unanue was also "honorary doctor" to the royal house- hold, the precise position sought by Diivalos in his letter. And, an apparently even more serious indica- tion of academic or professional rivalry, Unanue does not even mention his colleague's dissertation in THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Lima, and of Peru in general, is extremely healthy, and cannot in any way be blamed for the sicknesses of the inhabitants of the city. These in- firmities are due, he says, to their diet of oily, sticky, heavy foods, and to the fact that they eat too much and badly, and stuff themselves with pork, potatoes (which Daivalos suspects of containing some harmful element), yucca (which is poisonous in its raw state), and pungent spices and sea- sonings.5 But about the air and climate in general, on the other hand, Divalos is enthusiastic. The soothing breezes of Miraflores are enough in themselves to cure both tertian fever and pulmonary disorders. Tetanus is completely unknown there.6 A simple note goes on to furnish the ex- traordinary information that "there is in Peru a place by the name of Piura, where syphilis is remedied solely by the healthy influence of the climate" (p. 105, n. 1). A few years later the satirical Esteban de Terralla y Landa, writing un- der his pseudonym of Sim6n Ayanque, published his savage poem Lima por dentro y fuera (1792), and he too wrote of Piura: "City that looks like a village, / Good only for curing venereal disease."' But it is surpris- ing to find that Piura's antiluetic reputation has lasted almost into our own times:" maybe an ideological reprisal for those ancient charges accusing America of having given Europe venereal disease? III. SALAS AND THE HAPPY EARTH OF CHILE The Chilean economist and patriot Manuel de Salas likewise defended his country on the climatic plane. As early as 1796 Salas had been implicitly quarreling if not with his own major work, despite the close relevance of its subject. Later, however, Unanue had Daivalos named professor of medicine, which should suffice to relieve him of the accusation made against him "of having been a bitter enemy of D. J. M. Daivalos (L. Avendafio, Discurso por el centenario de la Escuela de Medicina; H. ValdizAn, La Escuela de Medicina, in Obras cientificas y literarias de Un6nue [Barcelona, 1914], II, 450, 482; cf. Lastres, op. cit., pp. 160-61). Further indication of Davalos's difficult character: when another Lima mulatto, Jos6 Manuel Vald6s, presented himself for the degree of bachelor (1807), Jos6 Manuel Divalos, who was on the jury, told him that without the Sovereign's grace, "for the half-breed Jos6 Manuel Valdes ... the doors of this school would always have been of bronze," to which Valdes replied with an allusion to Divalos's being a mulatto too (J. A. de Lavalle, "El doctor, don Jos6 Manuel Vald6s," 1858-86, in Estudios Historicos [Lima, 1935], 443-81, see pp. 450-51). 5. De morbis, pp. 11-12. Other factors responsible for the disease rate are guarapo and brandy, and the cemeteries and hospitals in the middle of the city. The toxicity of the yucca is mentioned already by the earliest chroniclers of America, such as Pietro Martire; and the potato, whose genus, Solanum, in- cludes various highly toxic plants, was still suspected of being poisonous in the second half of the seven- teenth century. 6. Op. cit., p. 118; cf. p. 9. 7. Paris ed. (1924), p. 12; and in a footnote, p. 196, which seems to have been added to the 1834 edi- tion: "[Piura] is such an excellent place for those who fall ill from this malady, that there are very few who die from it, despite the multitude of people who go there for the cure from many parts of the repub- lic." 8. The climate of Piura provides a "radical cure" for rheumatics and syphilitics, we are assured by C. B. Cisneros and R. E. Garcia, El Peru en Europa (Lima, 1900), p. 19, a little book which also informs the reader that the ostrich ("avestruz," p. 14) lives on the puna together with the llama and the vicuiia! 292 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America Buffon, whom he always mentions with great respect,9 at least with his version of American nature. Chile is a privileged land, the American country "most adequate for human happiness . . capable of all the products and animals of Europe, of which none have degenerated and some improved, where wild beasts are not known, nor insects, nor poisonous reptiles." And going on to the men he echoed Father Feijdo's defense: "The weakness and effeminacy attributed to these peoples is a mistake."'0 Again a few years later (1801) he protested vehemently against the thesis that the Americans were inferior and incapable of raising them- selves to the level of the exact sciences. Against the slanders of Sepilveda and de Pauw he mentioned men like Peralta, Franklin, and Molina, and their achievements in the fields of astronomy, electricity, and history. To combat the thesis of decadence he returned to Garcilaso's favorite motif and flaunted the youthfulness of the New World, whose continental civilization could now exist independently of that of tired old Europe."' Again in 1815, when confined by the Spaniards on the Isle of Juan Fer- nandez, Salas described how the captain of the frigate taking him there had praised the richness of that island, which bred (among other things) "oxen of such a size that they cannot be included in the proofs of the degradation of all America's species, so boldly asserted by the frivolous and caustic Mr. Pauw, in his Investigations."'2 IV. ITURRI AND MUNOZ'S HISTORY We find a more complicated reaction in the Carta written in Rome in 1797 by the former Santa Fe Jesuit, Francisco Iturri, exiled to Italy along with his confreres: an opuscule that gained a certain political notoriety when, with independence won, the American nations were intent on vaunting their homegrown glories, but which for the most part consists of a sustained attack on Robertson and de Pauw, as plagiarized, accord- ing to Iturri, in the Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793) of Juan Bautista Mufioz, the apparent target of the diatribe. 9. M. de Salas, Escritos . . . y documentos relativos a e yl v a su familia, 3 vols. (Santiago, 1910-14), 1, 249; 1I, 162; III, 41; and in M. L. Amunategui, Don Manuel de Salas (Santiago, 1895), I, 258; II, 213; III. 194. This work fills out the pages devoted to Salas in Los precursores de la independencia de Chile, III, 343-457. 10. Representacion sobre el estado de la agricultura, industria y comercio del reino de Chile, 1796, cited in Salas, Escritos, I, 152-53, and Amunategui, op. cit., I, 118-21. Similar expressions: Salas, op. cit., 1, 190-91; II, 320, 366-67; Amunategui, op. cit., I, 126, 240; II, 107 (1796) and passim. II1. H. Bernstein, "Some Inter-American Aspects of the Enlightenment," in Latin America and the Enlightenment, ed. A. P. Whitaker (New York, 1942), pp. 55-56; and Origins, pp. 56n., 65. 12. Salas, Escritos, II, 207; Amunategui, II, 206-07. De Pauw's geological theories are also cited in a work mentioned by Salas, op. cit., II, 162, and in Amunategui, op. cit., II, 213. The Chilean scholar was a great admirer of the wisdom and simplicity of Galiani's Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (see ibid., II, 196). 293 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Robertson's History of America had had a singular reception in Spain. First of all the Academia de la Historia named the Scotsman a corre- sponding member (8 August 1777), and at the suggestion of its president, the renowned Campomanes, entrusted one of its members, Ram6n de Guevara, with translating the work into Castilian. But as soon as they became aware of its anti-Spanish tendencies their attitude changed rapidly from favor into persecution. The Inquisition put it on the Index (although we are assured by Menendez y Pelayo that this was "merely a for- mality");13 subsequent royal edicts banned it in Spain and in the Indies, in the original version (23 December 1778) and in the French transla- tion (20 December 1782),14 and the king himself, ignoring the opposi- tion in the Academia de la Historia,15 on 17 June 1779 charged Juan Bautista Mufioz with the task of using original documents to write the Historia del Nuevo Mundo, whose first and only volume in fact ap- peared fourteen years later. The Academia in its turn, recognizing "the necessity for a General History of the Indies to be drafted by some au- thorized person from Spain, using sure and incontestable documents," took steps leading to the establishment of the invaluable Archivo Gen- eral de Indiasl6 -another beneficial and lasting scientific result, like the reappraisal of Mexican history in the wake of Clavigero's work, of the often frivolous and incoherent discussions we are here narrating. The purpose of Mufioz's work, in the intentions of his sponsors, was to correct the anti-Spanish rather than the anti-American errors of Robert- son. Thus his Historia, as an official undertaking, could not satisfy the Americans, like Iturri, for whom the defense of Spain mattered little (even though he proclaimed himself a faithful subject and boasted of being Spanish), while the defense of their native countries mattered very con- siderably. And Mufioz did in fact go on undaunted to repeat that "the great quadrupeds of the old continent were not found in the new; but in return [sic!] they have an infinity of insects and vermin."" 13. De los historiadores de Col6n, 1892, in Estudios v discursos de critica historica y literaria, VII (XII of the Obras completas, Santander, 1940-), pp. 100-02. In Guatemala however it was confiscated by the Inquisition: Ernesto Chinchilla Aguilar, La Inquisicion en Guatemala, (Guatemala, 1953: Revista de Historia de America, nos. 35-36, 1953), p. 246. 14. I. A. Leonard, Hispanic American Historical Review, 23 (1943), p. 30, n. 18; Defourneaux, op. cit., p. 188; cf. ibid., pp. 113n., 148. 15. "Not without strong opposition from the Academy of History, determined to uphold its prime claim to be chronicler of the Indies": on the ensuing polemic, see R'mulo D. Carbia, La Crdnica oficial de las Indias occidentales (La Plata, 1934), pp. 240-65, and Historia de la levyenda negra, p. 211. 16. J. Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta 'y el periodismo en A mdrica diurante la dominacion espahola (Buenos Aires, 1940), pp. 85, clxxxiii-clxxxvi; and the ample study by A. Ballesteros Beretta, "J. B. Mufioz: La creaci6n del Archivo de Indias," Revista de Indias, 2, no. 4 (1941), pp. 55-95, followed by others, in the same review, on Muiioz and his researches. Cf. also Carbia, La Cr6nica oficial, p. 109 and n., 113-15, and Humphreys, op. cit., pp. 26-27 and nn. 17. J. B. Muiioz, Historia del Nueto Mundo, I (only volume published; Madrid, 1793), p. 10, etc. See also Richard Konetzke, "A. von Humboldt als Geschichtsschreiber Amerikas," in Historische Zeitschrift, 188, no. 3 (December 1959), pp. 551-52. 294 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America 295 But this is still no reason to suppose, as some have done, that Iturri wrote his Carta critica sobre la Historia de Amdrica [sic] del Sr. Juan Bautista Muhoz- completed in Rome on 20 August 1797, and printed in Madrid in 1798- at the instigation of Campomanes (a jealous and bitter enemy of Muioz),'8 or that he was prompted by spite and vexation that the eminent official cosmographer and historian had dealt with a topic which he had been thinking of discussing himself.'9 One need only remember that embryonic patriotism characteristic of the exiled Jesuits. In fact the same polemical position (arguing against Robertson, Raynal, de Pauw, Marmontel, Buffon, and La Condamine) and the same en- thusiasm for Father Molina appear already in his letter to Alcedo of 1789;20 and Iturri's Carta (like other apologetic writings of exiled Jesuits) -a work which was probably never intended for publication, and which certainly did not bring about the interruption of Mufioz's Historia21 - was republished in Buenos Aires in 1818, and in Mexico, at Puebla de los Angeles, in 1821, as a manifesto of Americanism, a posthumous chastise- ment of the godo Mufioz. And the Mexican Mier, although a friend and admirer of Mufioz, mentioned delightedly that Iturri, another friend of his, and "an American of Paraguay... gave Mufioz a real hiding, for including various of de Pauw's, Raynal's, and Robertson's idiocies in his historical outline."22 18. See Carbia. La Cr6nica oficial, p. 25 In. So it would seem from two manuscript notes of Dr. So- loaga, one transcribed by Carbia, op. cit., p. 262; the other almost identical, by Jorge M. Furt, "De arte historica," in Contribuciones para el estudio de la historia de Amdrica: homenaje al dr. Ravignani (Buenos Aires. 1941), p. 274n. Campomanes is cited with hyperbolic praise in the Carta, pp. 83 and 90-92. The notorious anti-Jesuitism of the encyclopedist Campomanes raises some doubt; but does not Iturri himself mention the Encyclopedie as a work of unquestionable value (p. 31)? 19. There is considerable doubt about the existence of the Historia natural, eclesiastica y civil del virreynato del Plata which Iturri (according to the Enciclopedia Espasa; see also Sommervogel, sub voce) wrote in 1798 in collaboration with Gaspar Juarez, in three folio volumes supposedly kept in the Archives at Pisa. Carbia, op. cit., pp. 256-57n., believes it lost. It is certain that Iturri was writing a defense of America's glory in the arts and sciences. "My work," he writes in the Carta, p. 116, "will pass in review all the objects of the Human Sciences." He alludes to the same work on p. 56. And on p. 5 he gives the title of the same [?] work: "The damage that must come to Spain through the liberty with which her colonies are slandered." But note that hispanophilia is conspicuously absent from all the rest of the letter. 20. "The Letter of Francisco Iturri, S.J.," pp. 87-88. 21. This is affirmed by Iturri himself, and repeated in the manuscript notes quoted above, n. 18. But see Carbia, op. cit., p. 264. When Muhoz's Historia was presented to the Academia de la Historia for the required examination before printing permission was granted "there were varying opinions" (Ricardo Donoso, Fuentes documentales, p. 30). Several chapters at least of the second volume of the Historia del Nuevo Mundo were completed when Muhioz was struck down by apoplexy, in 1799. There is a copy in the New York Public Library (J. de Onis, "Alcedo's Bibliotheca Americana," Hispanic American Historical Review, 31, no. 3 [August 1951], p. 356, n. 24). And in the Boletin delArchivo General de la Naci6n. Ciudad de Trujillo (Santo Domingo), 3, n. 11 (31 May 1940), pp. 169-220, there appeared the unpublished part relating to Santo Domingo (J. Torre Revello, La expedici6n de Don Pedro de Mendoza y las fuentes informativas de ... Herrera, in Furt, Contribuciones, p. 606, n. 1). Mufioz did actually reply to Iturri with a Satisfaccidn a la Carta critica sobre la Historia del Nuevo Mundo (Valencia, 1798). which Iturri in his turn countered with the Vicios de la Satisfacci6n a la Carta critica (unpublished, Academia de la Historia, Madrid): Carbia, op. cit., p. 262, and n. 1. 22. Memorias (1818; Madrid, n.d., Biblioteca Ayacucho), p. 318, with evident allusion to Iturri's Carta. This "plagiarism" by Mufioz "stirred up the bile of my very dear friend the American ex-Jesuit THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD In point of fact the defense of the American peoples, and in particular of the Mexicans and Peruvians, takes up only a few pages toward the end of the Carta (pp. 110-16), following one of the usual "retaliations" enumerating the vices and barbarities of numerous races of the Old World (pp. 96-110). The major part of the pamphlet is a polemic against Mufoz, accusing him of having defamed the old historiographers of America, Fernando Colon, Las Casas, and particularly Herrera, and finally of having been an undiscerning plagiarist of Robertson and the "liar" de Pauw, for everything regarding the soil of America and its inhabitants. Even Mufioz's criticism of earlier Spanish historiographers is found to be a plagiarism of de Pauw (p. 33). Mufioz's history, Iturri repeats twenty times, consists of slavish translation from an Englishman's history and a Prussian's investigations. His insistence is significant, if for no other reason because it shows how easy it was to assimilate Robertson's theses to the so much more radical and outrageous suggestions of de Pauw. It may be only a polemical convenience, but Iturri, who was familiar with the works of almost all the principal critics and defenders of America, be- ginning with the "great" Buffon (p. 52), the first to reduce the slanderous notions to a system,23 sums up all the opinions on the inferiority of America in terms of the de Pauw-Robertson binomial, the former more rabid and mendacious, the latter more popular and widely known.24 He barely considers the substance of the accusations. And he never deigns to discuss the details: "Let it suffice us to know that his [Mun6z's] picture of the Americans is a servile copy of de Pauw and Robertson. That is enough to discredit it and set it among the fables" (p. 80). Iturri's only attempt to refute these accusations consists in the quota- tion of extracts from historians and naturalists that speak enthusiastically of the New World. Don Bernardo Ibafiez (Reynojesuitico del Paraguay, quoted on pp. 55 and 69-70) tells us that "all animal and vegetable nature manifests itself there with greater strength and size." Is not this testi- mony enough "to discredit a million de Pauws, Robertsons, their trans- Iturri; who loosed off a fiery letter against it," but Mufioz was quite capable of defending himself: S. T. de Mier, Escritos ineditos, ed. J. M. Miguel Verges and Hugo Diaz-Thome (Mexico, 1944), p. 148. On this question see also G. Furlong, S.J., Francisco Javier Iturri y su "Carta critica," 1797 (Buenos Aires, 1955). 23. P. 45. For Pernety, p. 69; La Douceur, p. 35; La Condamine, p. 45; Jefferson, p. 44; Carli, p. 39; Raynal, pp. 102, 110. Ulloa too is quoted several times. 24. Carli had already attacked de Pauw and Robertson together. Iturri insinuates that Muhoz could not even be original: "but he knew that Pauw had done it in French, and that since that language was little known in Spain, his translation could seem new" (p. 118). Elsewhere he reduces Mufioz's plagia- rism to his physical description of the New World (bk. I); the rest would then be compilation and pla- giarism from the Spanish historiographers, often in open contradiction with the slanderous assertions of that first book. 296 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America lators and imitators"?25 The ex-Jesuit's sole argument is the by now fa- miliar gambit of the counterattack. America is new? Europe and parts of Africa and Asia are a lot newer. It is marshy and swampy? There are bigger lakes in Prussia alone. It is a sandy desert? The Old World has the Arabian desert, and (rather more curious examples) the "vast sands" of Bordeaux and the shifting dunes of Mont Saint-Michel (p. 60). America has no great quadrupeds? But fortunately nor has Europe, nor in many other parts of the Old World do we find "those hideous great mountains of flesh," such as elephants, camels, and dromedaries (pp. 65-66: echoes of Clavigero, see above, p. 202). As for plants and their degeneration, finally, is it not remarkable that all American fruits, except the prickly pear, degenerate "while all European fruits flourish over there" (p. 72: echoes of Acosta, see above, pp. xvii-xviii)? Whose soil is more decadent and corrupt?... So Iturri too puts himself on his opponent's ground: and the supremacy of America, of her fertility, beauty, and vastness, her physical elevation and temporal antiquity, is for him an article of faith. Thus his position ends up as a double anachronism: for its unwaveringly eulogistic apoth- eosis of the continent, quite out of place alongside the already devel- oping scientific approach to the problem of America, and for the anti- quated character of most of its arguments. Iturri was still defending and boasting of the venerable age of the Americas when others were already exalting the youthfulness of the continent as its supreme virtue. One curious feature remains-the direction of his attack. Iturri is a typical example of the Creole who sees in de Pauw the ideological in- strument of the Bourbon monarchy, and he reveals an equal aversion for the writer who had slandered his country and the government that held it in subjection. When de Pauw states that the Creoles are degenerate, he is providing ammunition for the mother country. In fact, the Ameri- cans go on, de Pauw did not even invent his "insults"; they were sug- gested to him by the Spaniards, and he contented himself with sum- marizing them. And this same de Pauw-who a few years earlier had been held up by Nuix as a sworn enemy of Spain, and whom the same Father Nuix had still sought to utilize, malgr" lui, to defend Spain against the illuminists, the leaders of the current to which de Pauw in- dubitably belonged-was now "accused" of helping Spain to maintain her transatlantic dominion, and of being one of the favorite authors of the godos. 25. On p. 64 Ibafiez is said to be superior "to millions of de Pauws." Don Gregorio Mayans "is worth more than a hundred million de Pauws, Robertsons, and their Translators" (p. 116). 297 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD The pugnacious Mexican polemicist, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, could write in 1813: Ever since the Prussian Pauw worked for nine or ten years, like a beetle con- cocting his pellet of dirt, collecting together everything bad their rulers had said about America and its inhabitants, the Spaniards have persisted in making merry with this putrefaction, and throwing it in our faces as if we were the indios of old.26 First, it seems, de Pauw plagiarized the Spanish slanderers of America. And then the Spaniards exploited de Pauw's theories to make political capital. V. MOXO: MEXICO DEFENDED BY A SPANIARD Father Moxo is a special case; he was not American by birth, but a willing defender of Mexico and the Mexicans against de Pauw and his followers. The Cartas mexicanas of the Catalan27 Benito Maria de Moxo, future Archbishop of Chuquisaca, was written in Mexico City shortly before the author's departure for Peru (p. 253) and attempt the rehabilitation of the climate and the physical and spiritual qualities of the Mexicans, but most particularly the civilizing virtues of the Spaniards, in the face of the slanderous attacks on everything American. Father Mox6 is de- cidedly more hispanophile than Americanophile; and his apology, though following on in a direct line from Father Nuix and Clavigero (the two of them are mentioned conjointly on p. 38), leans particularly on the argu- ments of the former, which are often quoted verbatim. Moxo6's sole criti- cism of Father Nuix is that he did not make use of Garcilaso de la Vega 26. Fr. S. T. de Mier, Historia, "Pr6logo," 1, xv. On his ideas, a distortion and residuum of these polemics, see the study in appendix to Gerbi, Viejas poldmicas, and below, pp. 312-15. 27. With evident pride Mox6, born at Cervera, calls Father Nuix "my famous compatriot" (Cartas mexicanas, p. 38), and writes: "my country Catalonia" (ibid., p. 311). On his life see R. Vargas Ugarte, D. Benito Maria de Mox6 y de Francoli arzobispo de Charcas (Buenos Aires, 193 1; Facultad de Filo- sofia y Letras, Publicaciones del Instituto de Investigaciones Hist6ricas, LVI); see also Ezquerra, op. cit., pp. 265-66. The Cartas mexicanas is dated from Mexico, between August and October of 1805, where Mox6, already elected (1 January 1805) to the archbishopric of Charcas, was impatiently awaiting a chance to get there. Having finally left on 23 December 1805 (though on 16 February 1806 he dated a letter from Mexico, Cartas, p. 348) he landed at Tumbez (Cartas, 2d ed., p. 398) and, arriving in Lima on 8 May 1806 a few days later (20 June 1806), despatched the manuscript from that city to Madrid to have it printed there (Vargas Ugarte, Moxo pp. 53-54). But the work remained unpublished (and the origi- nal has possibly been lost) until another copy of the manuscript was taken from Bolivia to Europe in 1836 by the Spaniard Father F. Andres Herrero, where it was printed in Genoa, at the expense of the Genoese Don Juan Bautista Jordain, between 1837 and 1838 (the license is dated 16 September 1837). But of this edition "almost all the copies" were "sent to America" (translator's preface to the Italian edition, Genoa, n.d., p. ii). A second Spanish edition was printed in Genoa at the end of 1839 (license dated 4 December 1839) and the Italian translation "by S. B." also appeared about that same time. One last event was to befall the adventurous little book. A nephew of Mox6, Don Luis Maria de Mox6 y de Lopez, published a counterfeit edition of it in Barcelona in 1838, with the picturesque title of Entrete- nimientos de un prisionero en las provincias del Rio de la Plata: por el Bar6n de Juras Reales siendo Fiscal de S. M. en el Reino de Chile (Vargas Ugarte, Mox6, pp. 69-70). 298 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America in his defense;28 Clavigero on the other hand is rebuked for various er- rors, resulting mainly from his immoderate Creole patriotism.29 The criticisms of Robertson come from Father Nuix; but it is of course Clavigero who provides Moxo with the bulk of his arguments against de Pauw. Out of the twenty almost two entire letters-the fourth and fifth-are aimed at the Prussian philosopher. As always, when the Spaniard girds himself up to deal with the philosophers that defame his country, he sees them in an enormous Babelic throng: "An almost infinite number of French, Dutch, German, and English writers appear before my mind at this moment. . . ." But de Pauw is once again their most representative exponent. "Be so good ... as to open the celebrated book of the philo- sophical investigations on the Americans written by Mr. Pauw" (p. 25): at whatever page it is opened, one finds some abuse of the Americans. Moxo does not however waste his time repudiating those insults one by one. Nor, one need hardly say, does he go into the really essential problem of the degeneration of the continent and its natural species. To de Pauw's assertions of the physical weakness of the natives he is con- tent to reply, "a la Clavigero (see above, p. 204), that he has seen them, these indios, "bearing enormous weights over very great distaljces." He has seen them, and can still see them: "As I write these lines an Indian is passing below my window, his shoulders bent under a great load of firewood he is going to sell" (p. 26). From this same panoramic balcony Father Moxo sees another living disproof of de Pauw's words. The Prussian had written that corn grows only in a few corners of North America;30 but "from one of the windows of the study where I am now writing this letter, I can detect a cotnsider- able piece of ground covered entirely" with corn (p. 32, and see above, chap. 5, n. 240). The fragility of this line of reasoning, empirical almost to the point of puerility, reveals how little effort Moxo made to under- stand the deeper motivations of the de Pauwian polemic. Equally unconvincing is his reply to de Pauw's substantially accurate assertion that what little progress agriculture in general has made in America has been due to Europeans and Africans,"' not to the Americans themselves: "Anyone," Moxo replies with sincere but misplaced fervor, 28. Cartas, p. 128; see also pp. 151, 162, etc. 29. Ibid., pp. 2, 33, etc.; on Mox6's criticisms of Clavigero, see J. Le Riverend Brusone, preface, pp. 23-24. 30. Mox6 talks of "corners." But de Pauw: "Our rye and our wheat have not taken hold, except in some areas in the north" (op. cit., I, 14). And in the D4fense he is in fact even more moderate, recog- nizing that "wheat and rye ... in the northern provinces ... have produced quite good crops" (op. cit., p. 108). 31. De Pauw does actually say something like this in the Defense, p. 53. 299 12 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD The scientists say that our planet is growing old, and it is therefore quite possible that the multiplication of insects, more and more noticeable with each passing year, is a festering symptom of the approaching death of the world. O tragic end to the world-to be consumed by lice! Phthiriasis universalis, one enormous swarm of lice! Ugh!43 But already in the eighteenth century, for that matter, the earliest stu- dents of the population problem had been pointing with either dismay or satisfaction to the sterility of the aristocracy and the unbridled fertility of the poorer classes, and the theory of extreme productivity among the lowest orders of humanity was taken up again after Malthus and Hum- boldt44 by a whole host of philosophizing sociologists and racist demog- raphers; particularly popular at that time were the speculations about a possible "fecundity differential" in the human race, an idea persisting here and there even today. According to this notion the socially and an- thropologically "inferior" elements, such as the peasants in the south of Italy, the proletariat of the city slums, or the simple country people of India and China, multiply more rapidly than the "superior" classes: a theory that paves the way for Fra Melitone's grotesque and horror-struck pronouncement: "But such beggars are of a truly terrifying fecundity."45 Thus these misguided statisticians took what had been originally a hy- pothetical consequence of Original Sin and succeeded in extracting from it a corollary demonstrating the scientific necessity of poverty.46 43. N. Lenau, in a letter of 17 May 1844, in Sdmtliche Werke, ed. Castle (Leipzig, 1913), V, 184. Lenau's anxiety is repeated in the contemporary scientists who have expressed their fear of the ruinous consequences that may result from the indiscriminate use of insecticides and pesticides. Insects are not only prolific and have a rapid reproductive cycle, but mithridatize themselves and become immune to chemical poisons. This is not the case with the higher animals-birds and mammals-whose species are much less numerous and whose reproductive cycles are slower. An unchecked use of insecticides over vast areas of the globe "might well result in the final extinction of many species of song-birds and innumerable other kinds of life which we value, leaving a population of insects which is completely re- sistant!" (W. H. Thorpe, Professor of Zoology at Cambridge, in a review of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, in the Observer, 17 February 1963); cf. also Kenneth Mellanby, Pesticides and Pollution (Lon- don, 1967), reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 1967. 44. Charles Minguet, Alexandre de Humboldt, historien et geographe de I'Amerique espagnole, 1799-1804 (Paris, 1969), p. 511. 45. F. M. Piave, Laforza del destino (1861), act 4, sc. 2: "Ma tai pezzenti sono di una fecondita / Dav- vero spaventosa." 46. See D. E. C. Eversley, Social Theories of Fertility and the Malthusian Debate (Oxford, 1959), passim, but especially pp. 51-58 ("poverty breeds men"), 116, 123, 135, 151 (illiteracy and fertility), 159, 166, 169, 172 (hunger and fertility), 178, 187 (fecundity of the lower animals and of the poorer people), 189, 195. Cf. also The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends (United Nations Population Studies, no. 17), pp. 74, 80-81, etc. One of the most recent students of the problem, Colin Clark, finds that the thesis of the fecundity of the lowest classes, as expounded in the 1930s, was approxi- mately true in the nineteenth century, but is no longer so in the twentieth: "the larger families, so said the writers of those days (and some do still, in spite of the evidence to the contrary), are to be found among rural rather than urban population, among uneducated rather than educated, among poor rather than rich; and so, as a country becomes urbanized, better educated, wealthier, its productivity is bound to decline. These generalizations were on the whole true in the nineteenth century; but this was only a transitory phase": in the most recent decades in France, England, Sweden, and the United States, it is the wealthier, better-educated, and urbanized families that have shown themselves more prolific (C. Clark, "Do Population and Freedom Grow Together?," Fortune, 62, no. 6 [December 1960], pp. 137- 38; cf. Eversley, op. cit., pp. 267-58). THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD "who like me has watched the dedication of these poor Indians; anyone who has seen them, as I have, laboring almost all day to tickle the palates of the Europeans and Creoles," while "for themselves they are content with the crude juice extracted from the agave or pita, and a few tor- tillas" cannot restrain his scorn when he reads the slanders of a philos- opher against "a nation whose industry, patience, and carefulness have been and still are so useful to Europe" (pp. 30-31). As if the not always spontaneous sobriety of the Mexican Indian and the usefulness of his labors were arguments against the technical superiority of Europe's agriculture! Some of de Pauw's other characteristic and by now almost proverbial "calumnies" are more swiftly despatched; the suggestion that the in- dios are much subject to baldness, that the American men have milk at their breasts, that there are no fossil shells in America; that the meat of the iguana causes syphilis, or that there are frogs which "roar like heifers" (pp. 33-34).32 He justifies his delaying so long over these fairy tales by the fact that "Forster, although such a great naturalist, often refers to the philosophical investigations as a very sound and exact book";33 and the letter concludes by agreeing with Buffon's severe but respectful judgment on de Pauw. The following letter, the fifth, revives the polemic that seemed already dead. Mox6 summarily denounces the "specious and ridiculous system of the degeneration of the Americans," which he attributes to de Pauw's antireligions fanaticism, refutes his interpretation of Pope Paul III's 32. De Pauw, following Oviedo and G6mara, says (op. cit., I, 17) that the meat of the iguana is harm- ful to anyone who already had syphilis, in overt or latent form. He affirms the existence of fossils (I, 23-24). He says that the Americans are hairless, not bald (I, 37-38). For the milk in their breasts, see I, 43-44. One would actually think Father Moxo had not read more than thirty or forty pages of de Pauw's book. The inventory of his library (in Vargas Ugarte, op. cit., xxix-li) includes the works of Nuix, Cla- vigero, and Molina, and others referring to America, but not de Pauw's book. And lastly as for the "frogs ... whose cry imitates the lowing of bullocks," see de Pauw, op. cit., I, 8, quoting Dumont, Memoires sur la Louisiane, 1753 (a sentence, I, 103, transcribed by Church too, op. cit., p. 185). De Pauw (and Pernety, who agrees with him on this point of fact: Dissertation, p. 42) had already been contradicted by Clavigero, Storia antica, IV, 83. But even in 1697-1698 a Bostonian had written about a fat local frog crying "exactly like a Bull" (Kraus, Atlantic Civilization, p. 175). In 1773 the German translation of Le voyageur francais (Reisen eines Franzosen, the collection of the Abb6 de la Porte, for whom see J. M. Quirard, La France litteraire, sub voce, IV, 2, 551), comes back to the frogs as big as young goats (see Reed, art. cit., p. 62). Smith assures us that the bullfrog "emits the most terrible bellows, stronger than the roaring of the bull" (J. F. Smith, Voyage, I, 19, 32). And an attentive observer like Casti- glioni repeats that near Lake George (now Horicon Lake, New York) he heard croaking among the thousands of frogs "that one peculiar to America called the Rana Bovina (Linnaeus: Rana boans; Bull- frog in English), which ... with its cry imitates very closely the roaring of an ox" (Viaggio negli Stati Uniti. I, 159). See also Kant, Reflexionen zur physischen Geographie. Akad.-Ausg., XIV, 634-35; Chateaubriand, Les Natchez, in Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1826), XX, 149; Voyage en Amdrique, and "A. Mackenzie," in Melanges litteraires (ed. Paris, 1859), pp. 78, 412; E. Quinet, La Crdation, in Oeuvres completes, XXII-XXIII (Paris, n.d.), I, 142. On the bullfrogs imported into the Bassa Manto- vana from Brazil in 1930, and thought by the terrified peasants of the Ferrarese to be some fearful monsters, see Corriere della Sera, 21-22 May 1957, and 30-31 July 1964. 33. Cartas, p. 34; cf. above, p. 171. 300 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America bull (pp. 36-37), and passes on to other matters, without however for- getting the vexatious Prussian philosopher.34 The remainder of the book discloses the real aim of his apology and the incidental character of his quarrel with de Pauw. Mox6 maintains that the ancient Mexicans, and the Americans in general, attained a high level of civilization and social organization; that they are neither inferior to the Europeans, nor degenerate, nor forced to live on a dry and barren soil-and this is where he takes issue with the slanderers of America. But despite all these natural advantages, or at least equivalencies, they were addicted to bloody human sacrifices, cannibalism, and anthro- pophagy. (In his twelfth letter Mox6 gives a curious analysis of "four classes into which anthropophagy can conveniently be divided," in the third of which, religious anthropophagy, he includes the Mexicans). What did they lack then? The answer is obvious: Christian religiosity, and Spanish arms to enforce it.35 The uncertainty of Mox6's position, defending Spain one minute and the indios the next," in a frank attempt to reconcile his patriotic feelings for his country with his pastoral feelings for his flock, comes out clearly in an item of biographical detail. In 1806, when he sent the Cartas mexi- canas to the still all-powerful minister Godoy, Moxo wrote: "My love for our country.., .made me take up my pen .. but I was inspired above all by my anxious desire to assure our Sovereign, in the only way I have yet been able to, of my undying gratitude."37 The Cartas was a homage to Spain and the king. Nine years later, in May 1815, the Argentinian general Rondeau suc- cessfully invaded Upper Peru, and ordered the arrest and deportation of the loyalist Archbishop Mox6. On his enforced journey to Salta, Mox6 drafted (18 September 1815) an impassioned "letter to the Americans, written on the road to exile," reminding them of his many services and his constant affection for America, "my second and sweet fatherland."38 34. In fact he still quotes him frequently, on the subject of Robertson, p. 52; the Mexicans' writing, p. 57; and on pp. 60-63, 69, 75, 173, 181, 216, etc. Mox6 also mentions Humboldt's arrival in Mexico in 1803; but he expresses some doubt about what this other Prussian will manage to write (p. 6). The con- trast between the good Prussian Humboldt and the bad Prussian de Pauw can be seen in Caldas, Valle, and other Americans. 35. Elsewhere (p. 298), Mox6 inconsistently defends the human sacrifices of the Americans by re- calling those practiced by the illustrious nations of the Old World, which should make us excuse "some poor savages dwelling in the furthest corners of the world," if they did the same. Cf. below, chap. 9, sec. 3, "The Mexicans' Human Sacrifices." 36. But after being in Peru he characterized the indios-with further and even more flagrant incon- sistency -as being weak in body (those once robust porters passing below his balcony!), melancholy, timid, sluggish, in fact downright lazy, apathetic, and puerile (Cartas, 2d ed., pp. 384, 398-99, 400). 37. Vargas Ugarte, Moxb, pp. 53-54. 38. Cartas, p. xxii. A little further on, in fact, his second fatherland actually becomes his first: "My country Catalonia can surely not be offended if I give to this soil and to you a preference dictated by reason, ordained by Religion and demanded by gratitude and honor" (ibid., p. xxvi). Moxo is praised as a "victim of Spanish loyalty" by Menendez y Pelayo, Los heterodoxos espaholes, VI, 447n. 301 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Foremost among the services rendered, the Archbishop mentions his Cartas mexicanas. No sooner had he arrived in America than he saw that it suffered "great and cruel hardships. Then I took up my pen in its defense, and spent many days and nights composing the two thick volumes of the Cartas mexicanas." Not a word about his defense of Spain and the king. Instead, with pardonable opportunism, the patriots' prisoner-archbishop writes: "Love and zeal for the interests of America overcame all considerations of flesh and blood, in an age when because of the intrigues and colossal power of the favorite Godoy, the whole monarchy shook constantly with the destructive tremors of arbitrari- ness." In further equally orotund phrases Moxo goes on to assert that it was his writing which lifted the veil that for many years had kept hidden a long and oppressive series of disorders, political errors, repeated in- sults and misdeeds; it was he who restored the true and sacred rights of man, described the wretched state of the agriculture, industry, and trade, and invoked liberty and equality for the Americans; and who from Lima, having signed the work "with my own hand," sent it "to the Court of Madrid with a fat letter of credit" and firm instructions to his procurator to get it printed as soon as possible. The manuscript, still unpublished, which in 1805 had been offered to Godoy as a reply to the foreigners who had dared to criticize Spain's work "both in the matter of the conquest of those vast colonies, and in the matter of her new policy and government" (pp. 53-54), now becomes a denunciation of the evils of the Spanish administration, and an invitation to recognize the fact "that America was not a colony, but an integral part of the kingdom.""39 The archbishop died barely six months later. Thus the letter to the Americans should be read as an apology in extremis. Its inconsistencies are to be ascribed more to the loose thinking and occasional straight- forward shallowness of the writer than to any improbity on the part of the man, who in many other accounts is seen as a pious, charitable, and honorable person. VI. UNANUE: LIMA'S CLIMATE AND HER COLLEGIANS' ERUDITION At the same time that Moxo was composing his Cartas, a distinguished doctor and patriot of Lima, Hipolito Unainue, a colleague and rival of Jose Daivalos, was putting the finishing touches to his classic Observa- tions on the Climate of Lima and Its Influence on Organic Beings, 39. Op. cit., pp. xxii-xxiii; my italics. On Mox6's pusillanimous ambiguity, see G. Rene-Moreno, Bolivia y Per-M Mds notas histdricas y bibliogrficas (Santiago, 1905), pp. 173-88. His first editor, Andres Herrero, in his turn rejects the leyenda negra, recalling the "horrific crimes" committed by the rebellious Creoles, not against "savage Indians," but against the Spanish, "very worthy persons, and related by flesh and blood" (prologue to the Genoa edition, 1837, s.p.). 302 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America Especially Men, which was published in that same city in the following year, 1806.40 Unanue in general does not believe in the decisive influence of climate: even if in warm climates there are physical factors tending to induce laziness and inertia, there are moral factors in man which are enough not just to counterbalance them, but to nullify them completely. And with an ingenious transposition of Montesquieu's thesis (see above, chap. 2, n. 27), he goes on to tell us that it is not climate that enslaves men, but slavery that makes them cowardly and idle.4' In the case in point, however, Peru's climate is not tropical, but tem- perate and benign. Buffon's and de Pauw's theories have no possible application to Peru. Unainue, who has read the Italian Gian Rinaldo Carli's American Letters (pp. 19, 73, 78) and the North American Jef- ferson's Notes on Virginia (pp. 54, 65, 77), is firmly opposed to the French naturalist, and has nothing but scorn and contempt for the German abbe. The cold which according to de Pauw42 destroys American vege- tation "is one of those deductions born of prejudice and ignorance" (p. 49). And to the "farfetched imagination of certain overseas Philosophers" who dipped their brushes in "black and acrid shades" to portray these areas as an accursed land, a "dismal refuge of snakes, crocodiles, and other poisonous monsters," the wise physician does not even deign to reply: his irony is satisfied when he annotates the thesis with a quotation from Horace: "Quale portentum neque militaris / Daunias latis alit aesculetis / Nec Jubae tellus generat, leonum / Arida nutrix" (p. 54).43 Buffon's theories are summarized and discarded in the same page. But a little further on Unainue accepts Humboldt's word for it that in America the domestic animals too, the dogs for example, are "of more tractable disposition, or even possibly more cowardly than those of Europe" (p. 40). Which is commented on and justified with one of his wry poetic reminiscences, the well-known couplet from the Gerusalemme liberata (1, 62): "The soft and happy and delightful earth, I Produces inhabitants 40. I am quoting from the edition of Barcelona, 1914 (vol. I of the Obras cientificas y literarias). A further edition, prepared by C. E. Paz Soldan, and based on the 2d ed. (Madrid, 1815), appeared in Lima in 1940. Mox6 read it as soon as it was published and mentions it with glowing praise in one of the appendices of the Cartas, 2d ed., pp. 387-88. 41. Observaciones, I, 68; Discurso sobre si el clima influye o no en las costumbres de los habitantes, ibid., II, 53-55. 42. See in fact the Recherches, I, 9. 43. Observaciones, p. 54; Horace, Carmina, I, 22, lines 13-16: "Such a beast as neither warlike Apulia / Nourishes in forests of oak trees spreading i Nor the land of Juba has ever borne, that I Dry nurse of lions" (trans. H. R. Henze). But the quotation is hardly appropriate: Buffon specifically denies that America is "dry," and even more that it is the "nurse of lions." Buffon is quoted also in various other writings: see Obras, II, 159, 173, 283, 285. Unanue mentions Raynal in passing (I, 78; II, 230- 31) and knows A. de Ulloa's Entretenimientos well (I, 18, 92, 115, 137; II, 8-9, 12, 16, 109-10, 156, 186, 282-83, 287, 291). 303 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD like unto itself," applied to the dogs!- the usual melodious resolution of his scientific arguments. Metastasio's heroes had the same habit of winding up their recitatives, mixtures of septenaries and hendecasyllables, with a musical ditty in octosyllables. These aphoristic little verses rob the dramatic tirade of all forcefulness, and dissolve the rhetoric in a proverb. Unanue's lines are one more proof of the traditional familiarity of Aesculapius with the Muses, and reveal the good man of letters beneath the doctor's cloak, the humanist's elegance waiting to seep through between the cracks in the physicoclinical dissertation. In a work written a few years before the Observations, Unanue had described the great Inca highways and noted sarcastically how "Mister [sic] Pauw and certain others denied the existence of these roads";44 to refute them, he reverted to the usual tactic of rhyme: Pero quien podra convencer Las testas en que el tino Perdieron, de tal modo, Que acaso restaurarle no podria El el6boro todo Que en tres islas Anticirias se creia?45 Yet Unanue recognizes a singular virtue in de Pauw: that of having so provoked the susceptibilities of the Peruvians with his attacks that he brought about a remarkable improvement in the study of the exact sci- ences in Lima: "De Pauw took it into his mind, among his many errors, that Godin did not find a single person in Lima who could understand a lesson in Mathematics" (p. 123; see above, p. 291). This is indeed what de Pauw says (Recherches, II, 166). But the accusation cannot have been altogether undeserved. Already in 1689 the viceroy Duke de la Palata was bewailing the fact that the chair of mathematics in the Uni- versity of San Marcos did not have a single student, so that "the incum- bent cannot comply with his obligation to read [mathematics] because he has no one to read it to."46 Scarcely two months before the publication of de Pauw's Recherches a prominent Liman, Jos6 Eusebio de Llano Zapata, was lamenting that mathematics, 44. De Pauw denies all Garcilaso's assertions en bloc (op. cit., II1, 176-77), but I do not believe he ever speaks of the undeniable Inca roads. 45. Discurso hist6rico sobre el nuevo camino del Callao, aio de 1801, in Obras, II, 186n. 2. The lines are attributed to "Iriarte A. P." (Toms de Iriarte, author [1777] of a famous paraphrase of Horace's Poetic Art: cf. Ars Poetica, line 300). For further defense of the Inca roads against the deni- grations of encyclopedists and lying cosmopolitan philosophers, see the Idea general de los monumentos del antiguo Peri, in Obras, II, 197, n. 2. And on the false descriptions of Peru produced in Paris or London, see Una idea general del Peru, ibid., II, 291-92. But Unanue is an admirer of that "philosopher worthy of this title," Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and quotes a typical passage from his Etudes de la Nature, referring to the evils brought to Asia and America by the Europeans (II, 324-25). 46. F. Barreda Laos, "Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perui," Historia de la naci6n argentina, ed R. Levene, vol. 3 (Buenos Aires, 1937), pp. 142-43. 304 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America that science so useful to the military, has there [in Peru] been not only ignored, but actually unknown. Our people have contented themselves with a slight smat- tering of astrology, which has been enough for them to obtain the chair of mathe- matics. There has never been any competition for it, the first person to present himself with letters of recommendation gaining it on his own word.47 And again in 1794 and 1795 the Rector of the College of San Carlos, Dr. Toribio Rodriguez Mendoza, addressed himself repeatedly to the king of Spain and the viceroy Taboada y Lemos to deplore the fact that the study of mathematics was once again completely neglected; that "there have never been rival candidates presenting themselves to compete" for the chair in question; that the students had looked on mathematics with "boredom and disdain," so that its teaching had been abandoned "for lack of listeners"; and to request finally, as a remedy to such a "shameful experience" and a stimulus to useful discoveries ("the American soil is very fertile, and contains an immense unknown treasure"), that a new chair might be endowed in the Caroline College.48 But Unanue claims that on becoming aware of these charges of ig- norance, "the honor of Peru was roused, and to give proof of the contrary it embraced this study with much diligence. It is amazing to see the children of the Caroline College present themselves for the examinations in Mathematics and Physics, proficient in an incredible number of prop- ositions, even the most difficult ones."''49 And so the debate continues, from Buffon's tragic deductions trampling underfoot the whole animal kingdom, and de Pauw's terrifying sentences of degeneration oppressing and dragging down all America, all the way to these infant prodigies, these little pupils so well prepared that no exam worries them, from cowardly lions to prize classroom grinds-and another subtly humorous contrast emerges from the successive stages of the polemic's progress. VII. DAVILA CONDEMARIN: A BELATED APOLOGY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SAN MARCOS Here we must digress and momentarily disregard chronology to con- sider a sort of postscript to Unainue, as expressed in the writing of another 47. Letter of 16 December 1766 to Don Jos6 Perfecto de Salas in Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografia, 92 (1942), pp. 214-15. 48. See the curious documents published in Anales de la Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, n. 2 (1950), pp. 12-25. In 1802 Humboldt is still found complaining that very few natives take an interest in the sciences (Minguet, op. cit., p. 175). 49. Op. cit., p. 123. This paragraph too closes poetically with the white swans rescuing from oblivion "the worthy names, which lasting praise should gain" (Orlando furioso, XXV, 14). In a letter to Jeremy Robinson (1818?) Uninue again defends the scientific worthiness of the American territories "once held to be barbarous" '(letter in R. Vargas Ugarte, Manuscritos peruanos en las bibliotecas de America [Buenos Aires, 1945], p. 321). On the brilliance of the young Carolingians, which apparently astounded Malaspina and various European professors, see also the other Informe of the above-mentioned Rodri- guez de Mendoza, quoted by R. Porras Barrenechea in Revista Histdrica (Lima), 17, p. 217 (cited in the Anales, loc. cit., p. 13). 305 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD learned Peruvian who resumed and continued the defense of Liman cul- ture in the middle of the nineteenth century. There is in fact a clear if belated echo of these academic reactions, these polemics revolving round the prestige of an institution rather than the truth of an assertion, in the historical eulogy of the University of San Marcos composed by its rector, Jos6 Davila Condemarin, immedi- ately after his election, for the purpose of interesting public opinion in the reform of the atheneum, which by then was in a state of decay and impoverishment.50 No sooner has Daivila Condemarin completed his listing of its scientific glories than he reminds his readers that in spite of everything there were "foreign writers" who sought to obscure them. And as usual these many or few "foreign writers" are quickly reduced to "one of them, the Prus- sian Mr. Pauw," on whom the Peruvian unleashes his full fury. Davila Condemarin is aware that Pauw bases his theories "on the physical con- stitution of the earth of America," and its climate which favors only poisonous snakes and animals (p. 16). But he concentrates his attack on two of the Prussian's charges: that San Marcos never produced anyone capable of writing even a bad book, and that Godin found no students there capable of following him. To these charges he replies with facts, examples, and quotations from numerous other adversaries of de Pauw, and also with the surprising insinuation, attributed admittedly to "an erudite Mexican," that de Pauw's hatred for the Americans was only equaled by his love for America's pesos and doubloons (p. 17). Davila Condemarin's work is singularly well documented. He knows the details of de Pauw's life and recognizes his talent. But de Pauw mis- used this talent with his calculations and conjectures on the physical and moral characteristics of the Americans, in which he disregarded his- torians and eyewitnesses and insisted "on using only his own bad judg- ment" (p. 66). But his ideas certainly did not go unopposed or uncriti- cized! Divila has read the replies of abb6 "Crocier" (sic, for Croizier, p. 18), of Unanue (pp. 18-19), Carli (p. 20), Pernety (p. 66), and Jose Manuel Daivalos (p. 66). But de Pauw's notions still rankle with him. When he has completed his polemic note, a friend brings to his attention "the curious History of the Kingdom of Quito," by Juan de Velasco, and he happily proceeds to copy out from it a number of vigorously anti- de Pauwian passages (pp. 67-69). He finally decides that that must terminate his digression, particularly since "this is not the main object of this work"; but immediately after- ward he returns to the attack with the observation that if de Pauw had 50. J. Ddvila Condemarin, Bosquejo hist6rico de lafundaci6n (y'progresos) de la insigne Universidad Mayor de San Marcos de Lima ... (Lima, 1854). 306 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America lived longer he would have changed his mind, inasmuch as "in these last years" the Europeans have come to realize "that divine providence lavished every sort of benefit on the soil of America."51 Then as for spiritual goods, or the literary productions of the learned men of Lima, Davila Condemarin unloads on the unfortunate de Pauw nothing less than the entire works of Peralta y Barnuevo, nineteen of them already printed and some twenty more, mostly treatises on mathematics and law, as yet unpublished. The Prussian disappears from sight beneath this avalanche of folios: "What answers will de Pauw be able to find," Davila Conde- marin concludes with a sneer, "when he sees the large preceding list, which includes the works written only by the Peruvian Peralta?" (p. 71). If perchance he should have anything else to add, the Chancellor is ready with a long list of other authors, some of them no less prolific than Peralta,52 one final thrust in the form of a couple of anti-de Pauw quota- tions, and as the coup de grace Juan and Ulloa's eulogy of the Creoles' in- telligence. This time the note really is finished. But the insuppressible polemic crops up again in the following note, which speaks of a sort of solemn ritual of exorcism of de Pauw's slanders, celebrated in Lima in 1793:53 and further on again, with the explicitly anti-de Pauwian references in the praises heaped on the culture of Lima by the Frenchman Vanieri,54 and an English journalist in 1826. Enough? Not yet. "Lastly, to corroborate what has been said to im- pugn de Pauw's falsehoods," the Chancellor of San Marcos invokes other authorities: Le6n Pinelo's bibliographical Epitome, the "Diccionario de America de Salcedo" (more properly Alcedo, or rather Antonio de Al- cedo Herrera), a sort of antique Reader's Digest: "The Essence of the Best Papers,""55 and last of all d'Orbigny's L'Homme americain (pp. 84-85). So eighty-six years after its publication de Pauw's Recherches still 51. Ibid., p. 70: an allusion to Peruvian guano, or Californian gold? In 1854 de Pauw could have been even more savage than in 1768! Daivila forgets that he himself had bewailed the University's decline in prestige and wealth with the coming of Independence (op. cit., pp. 26-28). 52. Ibid., pp. 72-75. The list seems to be derived from Montalvo: it includes only authors of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, among whom are Juan de Castellanos, Garcilaso, Calancha, Antonio de Le6n Pinelo, etc., to which he adds Olavide, but no contemporary authors (ibid., p. 75). 53. "The Seminary of San Carlos dedicated to the University in the year 1793 a public act of philoso- phy and mathematics under the presidency of the immortal Sehor Moreno (Jos6 Ignacio Moreno).... In the dedication, after praising the vast erudition in the sciences of which the academy could boast in all times, he limits himself to the refutation of Pauw and particularly his proposition concerning Mr. Goudin, giving also an idea of the state of advancement in which the sciences are found in the country. See the Mercurio Peruano, VIII, 280 ff., in which notice is given of this literary ceremony" (op. cit., p. 76). 54. In other words the Jesuit Jacques Vaniere, author of the Praedium rusticum (1730), already cited for this eulogy of the culture of Lima by Eguiara y Eguren too. Prologos, pp. 140-41. 55. On this review, which lasted until 1791, and its diffusion in America, see S. de Madariaga, Cuadro historico, pp. 198, 804, 813; R. Herr, op. cit., pp. 190-98. 307 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD had its venom, and could still provoke replies aimed personally and di- rectly at its author, though no longer with the same air of anger and out- rage. But we must get back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. VIII. CALDAS AND THE COLD IN NEW GRANADA Two years after Unainue had brought out his shrewd Observations on the Climate of Lima the eminent naturalist Jose Francisco de Caldas, astronomer and botanist, disciple and continuator of the great Mutis, and in Quito companion of Humboldt56 (whom he tried desperately but vainly to follow on his travels to Peru and Mexico), began publication in Bogota of his Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1808), in whose first number he included an apologetic description of its physical and economic geography. In contrast to the other American naturalists Caldas fully accepts Buffon's zoological theories. Interested primarily in the New World's physical nature and flora, he makes no attempt to defend its fauna. His memorandum On the importance of naturalizing the vicuha of Peru and Chile in the kingdom (1810) begins: "When we compare the animals of the old Continent with those of the New, we have to agree with Buffon that ours are dwarves, mutilated, weak.... The llama, the alpaca, and the vicufia show us the dromedary and the camel in miniature." How- ever, the practical-minded naturalist goes on, this is no reason why we should neglect these auchenia, which are so useful for transportation, food, and in the case of the vicufia, for very fine wool, "the silk of the new Continent." "Yes, the vicufia is a treasure," Caldas repeats, and goes on to examine ways of acclimatizing it in the New Granadan sier- ras of Santa Marta and Sante Fe.57 But when he comes to the description of his country the patriot Cal- das-who died before a Spanish firing squad in 1816-finds there is plenty to content him. In more than one place the report becomes a plain panegyric. In particular the geographical position of New Granada (present-day Colombia) arouses the publicist's enthusiasm. It "occupies the center of the new continent," so that it seems destined to have "all the world's trade." The mineral riches of Peru and Mexico are equaled by those of the Granadan Andes. And how can Peru "tucked away on a barren part of the Pacific coast," and Mexico, which is a little better placed between the tropic and the temperate zone, hope to compete with 56. On Humboldt and Mutis, see Revista de Historia de Amdrica, 48 (December 1959), pp. 488-505; on Mutis, J. Sarrailh, op. cit., p. 443, etc. On Humboldt and his brouille with Caldas, see Minguet, op. cit., pp. 169, 268-69. 57. Obras de Caldas, ed. Eduardo Posada (Bogoth, 1912), pp. 481-93. But see below, p. 311. On the recent attempts to acclimatize the auchenia in Colombia, see W. Hellmich, "Die Bedeutung des Anden- raumes im biogeographischen Bilde Siidamerikas," in Tier und Umwelt in Siidamerika, esp. p. 89. 308 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America the situation and the hydrographic system of the most blessed vice- royalty of Sante Fe? "We have to agree: there is nowhere in the old or the new World better situated than New Granada."58 As for climate, Caldas insists especially on the diversity of zones and their products: from the fertile torrid zone, where man "acquires gigantic stature," but is slow-moving and weak, to the Andean areas with their robust inhabitants and beautiful, fine-complexioned women," to the barren and frozen plateaus. And this variety shows him yet another singu- lar privilege of his country: "There are few points on the surface of the globe more advantageous for observing, and one might say touching, the influence of climate and diet on the physical constitution of man, his character, his virtues, and his vices" (p. 7). This decisive influence attributed to climate aroused the displeasure of one of Caldas's compatriots, don Diego Martin Tanco, who hastened to write him a clever and lively letter (10 February 1808), showing that climate has no influence on either the moral or the physical growth of man: everything depends on man's beliefs and upbringing. Instead of laboring to demonstrate that America's climate is not harmful to man, as was suggested by de Pauw and the slanderers of the continent, or even-that it is favorable and beneficial, as maintained by her defenders, Tanco cuts short the argument at the outset by insisting, in open con- tradiction of Montesquieu, but leaning to some extent on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, that the climate, whether of America or the Old World, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with character. Extreme heat and extreme cold are equally capable of stimulating great passion. But the effect of heat, which is real enough on the generation and development of animals and plants, is nonexistent for man. In any part of the world, whatever the reading on the thermometer, women take nine months to produce their young. In rebus politicis, there is no foundation for the thesis that ferocity dwells in the north, or liberty in the high mountains. There are "mon- archical mountains" (Savoy, parts of the Alps, etc.) and republics in the 58. Semanario de la Nueva Granada (Paris, 1849), pp. 7-8. And again toward the end of the essay: "We can unite in one point the attractions and riches of all the dwelling places of this vast continent" (p. 29). With similar patriotic devotion Mutis defended the superiority of the New Granada's quina over Peru's, and argued fiercely with the findings of the Spanish botanists Ruiz and Pav6n (review of Arthur Robert Steele, Flowers for the King: The Expedition of Ruiz and Pavdn and the Flora of Peru [Dur- ham, N.C., 1964], in Hispanic American Historical Review, 45, no. 3 [August 1965], p. 486). Another contributor to the Semanario, Jose Maria de Salazar, who published therein his Memoria descriptiva del pais de Santa Fe de Bogotd, complained instead that the position of New Granada was not propitious for civil progress, "since we are separated by an immense sea from Europe and have to exist in obscur- ity." But he added immediately, as if to reject a damaging suspicion: "This does not mean that we accept the paradox of the Prussian Pauw, who makes us incapable of reason and finds not a single person among us able to compose a book" (cf. in fact the Recherches, II, 166-67). Indeed the genius of America will one day offer the world "works of the spirit as admirable as thoge of nature" (Semanario, p. 407). Cf. above, pp. 184-85. 309 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America But Buffon, with his distinctions and comparisons, had already removed the discussion from the level of tired and wilting theology to a plane that was at least embryonically scientific. His objective was not the contrition of the faithful but a better understanding of how our world is made. Later on Hegel, arguing against the idea that nature lives and develops in time, be it centuries or millennia (and thus moving away from the be- ginnings of historicism already at work in Buffon), was to pour out his scorn on the "nebulous" fantasies of animals and plants being born from water.47 But if we try to place these beliefs in the context of the remote past to which they belong, we are forced to recognize that the derivation of life from water is perhaps the most ancient of the scientific explana- tions, and one of humanity's remotest myths. In historical times one can go back at least as far as the first Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, who-in Vico's satirical words-"began from too insipid a principle, water; perhaps because he had seen pumpkins grow with water." As for prehistoric times, Frazer has conjured up pictures of spring storms whose torrential rains revive the animal and vegetable life, and the Wizard Kings whose magic can release the cataracts of the heavens. The Bible teaches us in its very first lines that God created the water before the land and the animals and the plants.48 And the lively imagination of the Middle Ages associated life with water in the legends of the fountain of youth and the immortal "Rhine maidens." To even the dullest mind, water suggests the unceasing flow of life - fresh, agile, fugitive. "Water, that is life begun anew."49 Even the learned Florentines who gathered in academy in 1540 called themselves gli Umidi, "the wet ones," hoping thus for "strength and sustenance, just as created things grow and are maintained with the assistance of humidity."50 But a knowledgeable and inquisitive naturalist like Buffon was certainly aware of the bold conjectures of de Maillet (1735, 1748) for whom life derived from the ocean, and all animals and man himself were descended from corresponding marine species, when the sea slowly withdrew from the mountaintops, leaving the valleys and the plains dry.51 And he must certainly have been familiar with that "well-known" fact, that without water the greater organisms die once and for all, "while for the smaller, lesser organisms the withdrawal of water only suspends life," and that 47. Enzyklopiidie, sec. 249. Cf. below, pp. 420-21. 48. Genesis, 1:2; see F. E. Jacobi, Sulla dottrina dello Spinoza (Bari, 1914), pp. 163-64, following G. Bruno, "De la Causa, Principio ed Uno," in Dialoghi metafisici (Bari, 1925), p. 242. 49. J. Michelet, La Montagne (Paris, 1868), p. 44. 50. J. Rilli, Notizie ... dell'Accademia Fiorentina (Venice, 1700); quoted by Croce in a note (Critica, XL, 232) in which the "dry" is reciprocally characterized as "the death of all physical and spiritual life." 51. B. de Maillet, op. cit., see especially the sixth Entretien, which concludes ritually with the sec- tion: "The conformity of this system with Genesis." On de Maillet see among others, Roger, op. cit., pp. 520-26. 13 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD lowlands of Holland, Poland, the Venetian lagoons, and (New?) England. And all these territories, moreover, whether lofty or low-lying, have known a succession of liberal and despotic governments. "Neither cold nor heat give men the strong desire for liberty, and even less the unjust ambition to rob others of theirs." The same can be said for amorous passion, which the "climatist philosophers" distribute among the various peoples-but always reserving for their own nation the qualities of war- like valor and erotic vigor."9 The truth is that "in all countries love is a torrid zone for the heart of man"! And not only that: in the same climate there are actors and anchorites, who are certainly more different from each other than a Swede and a Chinese. Also, Tanco continues astutely, with an even more surprising antithesis: "What an enormous difference we find between the Greeks of our day, full of wind, flattery, and trickery, and such lovers of life, and their masters the Turks, so silent, proud, sincere, and ever ready to face death!"60 Yet for centuries they have been living in the same climate and eating the same food. To those who would suggest that the explanation lies in race, Tanco replies by resolutely denying that blood has any more significance than climate. Those formidable Turks are usually Janissaries of pure Hellenic stock. The bayadkres and the ascetics of India belong to the same race. And every criminal or tyrant is the brother or son of a philanthropist or philosopher. Man is always free to lean toward vice or virtue. Both reason and moral sense demand as much.61 In reply to Tanco's extreme objections, Caldas composed what is per- haps his best-known work, On the Influence of Climate on Organic Beings, in which he looks for a middle way between those who "concede 59. Robertson too had held that "cold and temperate countries appear to be the favourite seat of free- dom and independence" (History of America, I, 343) and de Maistre had repeated that "it is in the midst of the forests and the ice of the North that our governments were born" (Etude sur la souverainetd, in Oeuvres inddites [Paris, 1870], p. 319). And Melville too was to return to the same theme (1849) with his assertion that "freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains," while the plains favored slavery: Mardi, CLXI, in Romances (New York, 1931), p. 667. But Tanco comes back to Hume's criti- cism (see above, pp. 41-42), in fact in a way completes it by pointing out the occult political motive of so many pseudoclimatic theories. Aristotle had already deduced from Greece's climatic position, in a temperate zone, its capacity to live in liberty and also "dominate all others, as soon as it was joined to- gether in a single state" (Politics, 1327b). The Spaniards easily persuaded themselves that the climate of the West Indies predisposed its inhabitants to be enslaved to the Iberians (see above, pp. 74-75), and later they held firmly to the belief that even the descendants of Spaniards, the Creoles, enfeebled by the climate, were less capable of governing than the peninsulars (see above, pp. 182-83). 60. Cf.: "The Greeks, their enemies tell us, are lying, perfidious, miserly, cowardly, and skulking; and in contrast with this picture we are shown ... that of the good faith of the Turks, and their singular virtues" (Chateaubriand, Itinraire de Paris a Jerusalem, Avant-Propos [ed. Paris, 1854], I, 22). The idealization of the Muslims, that had come into vogue at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is quite evident in these passages (Henri Baudet, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man [New Haven, 1965], pp. 47-48, 50). 61. Semanario, pp. 49-55. Cf. Dante, Paradiso, VIII, 130-33. 310 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America nothing to climate" and those who give it "an unlimited power."62 Climate influences man's physical development, quite obviously, and thereby contributes to his moral character. The human will is still free to choose between good and evil. Race exists too, without a doubt: common physi- cal and moral features characterize many families; but on this point, which he did not cover in his original work, Caldas feels he is under no obliga- tion to reply.63 He dwells instead on the matter of heat and cold, which "are what separated out all the animals on the earth," and modified their qualities. "What is the American leopard or lion compared with the animals that bear these same names in the old continent?" The plants are likewise subject "to the imperious laws of heat and cold" (pp. 121-22). Only man lives and rules in all corners of the earth. The Buffonian original of this rigorous exclusion of man is unmis- takable: the French naturalist is frequently and lavishly praised, there are verbal coincidences,"4 and finally, in the passage immediately follow- ing, de Pauw- the writer who first extended Buffon's climatic degenera- tion to man - is assailed with a ferocity quite out of proportion to the point under discussion, a quite incidental and unimportant one. Caldas points out that the annual temperature range in the higher regions of New Granada is considerably smaller than in the Old World. But after these precise thermometric observations he bursts out with this sudden tirade: We do not wish to infer from this, as does de Pauw, that obstinate enemy of all things good in America, that the cold of this vast continent is extraordinary, that it has caused the extinction of the larger animal species, that it has so weakened man that he has lost his beard and all interest in the propagation of his kind, that lactation lasts ten years, and finally, that the native of these regions, ever stupid, in every way insensitive, never sheds a tear, never heaves a sigh even amidst the most cruel torments. We shall never subscribe to these ravings of the Prussian philosopher. New Granada may not be equatorial Africa; but it is still a lot warmer than Europe. Let de Pauw measure the difference, "and tell us whether New Granada is colder than Prussia, Germany, and all those countries in 62. Semanario, p. 11; cf. A. P. Whitaker, "The Americas in the Atlantic Triangle," in Hanke, ed., Common History, pp. 148-49, and Andres Soriano Lleras, "F. J. de Caldas y la medicina," Boletin Cultural y Bibliogrifico (Bogota, Banco de la Repdblica), 9, no. 10 (1966), pp. 1953-55. 63. Semanario, p. 1 15n. Thus one is amazed to see attributed to Caldas the paternity of "the theory of the formation of the human races under the influence of the earth, the climate and atmospheric pressure, which has become one of the commonplaces of contemporary ethnology and philosophy" (J. Mancini, Bolivar et I'e'mancipation des colonies espagnoles des origines a 1815 [Paris, 1912], p. 21n., which quotes M. Vergara y Vergara, Historia de la literatura en Nueva Granada, 1867, pt. I, p. 393). 64. Cf. Buffon, in passage quoted above, chap. 1, n. 55, and Caldas: "Black below the line, olive-col- ored in Mauretania and Egypt, dark in Italy ... the color of his face has a constant relationship to the latitude" (ibid., pp. 123-24). And cf. Buffon on the decadence of the domestic animals, and the resulting variability of their coloring (cf. also above, p. 26), with Caldas: "The domestic animals . . . have be- come corrupted in their natural qualities .... Their skin colors have varied remarkably, and they have lost the simple and uniform clothing that nature gave them" (ibid., pp. 153-54). In Caldas there is how- ever no deploring of this variability. 311 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD which man has reached perfection; whether here the cold can produce the dreams and fancies he invented, without warrant or knowledge, about the most beautiful and fruitful country in the world" (pp. 126-27). Now as a matter of fact de Pauw does indeed write that "it is readily noticeable that the air in the New World is less warm than in the old con- tinent," but from this observation, which appears at the very beginning of the Recherches,65 he does not actually derive the series of conse- quences mentioned by Caldas, which come instead, as we know, from a whole theory of humidity, putrefaction, and fermentation, in which "the heat of the sun""66 is implicitly an essential factor. So we have one more confirmation of the fact that de Pauw was considerably more famed as a typical slanderer of America than he was ever actually read and studied. At the mere mention of his name the learned Creole was overcome with rage, and drawn, regardless of relevance, into unburdening himself of his patriotic ire at the expense of the chosen sacrificial victim. Buffon's distinguished profile had seemed hardly a fitting target, so it was on the Prussian's head that the rain of missiles fell." The transformation of the polemic is complete: it is no longer a scientific debate but a symbolic execution in effigy. IX. THE MEXICAN S. T. DE MIER AND DE PAUW IN THE CORTES OF CADIZ Another resounding symbolic execution was the one performed by Mier, the Mexican patriot and sworn enemy of the Spaniards, who main- 65. Op. cit., 1, 11. For the reference to large animals, see ibid., I, 4, 12; for beards, etc., I, 37; for decennial lactation, I, 54. The passage on the insensibility of the savages seems to derive from the Recherches, I, 71-72. On this latter subject note that Caldas himself avoids describing the habits and customs, virtues and vices of the inhabitants of New Granada: "This object ... would bring down on us the odium and indignation of our compatriots" (Semanario, p. 128); and that in a work of 1803 he won- dered what "sad causes and what influences contrary to our happiness" accounted for the demographic decline of the indios (Viaje de Quito a las costas del Oceano Pacifico, in D. Mendoza, Expedicion bo- tdnica de J. C. Mutis al Nuevo Reino de Granada y Memorias ineditas de F. J. de Caldas [Madrid, 1909], II, 62). 66. Recherches, I, 5; cf. ibid., I, 184-85, 190, etc. Caldas also mentions Carli ("what sort of upset would [the archeological exploration of America] bring about in Carli's ideas?" Semanario, p. 547); Saint-Pierre, whom he considers very inferior to the "French Pliny," or Buffon (although, as an Ameri- can, Caldas should have sympathized, like Uninue, rather with the former than the latter); Mufioz (ibid., p. 547) and UnAnue (p. 482, 501-02); and even Raynal (ibid., p. 115n.; quoted also by Salazar, ibid., p. 396n.) for the passage quoted above, chap. 2, n. 51. As early as 1782 an official of Victoria (in present- day Venezuela) was asking a French officer to get him the abbe Raynal's famous work (Journal de voyage du Prince de Broglie ..., in Melanges publids par la Socidtd des Bibliophiles Fran(ais [Paris, 1903], p. 140, n. 6). 67. Cf. Moxr, pp. 327-30n. Buffon had been well known in America for decades. And if he was in general much respected there were not infrequent reservations, from the point of view of orthodoxy. In a curious letter (anonymous; the letter is signed: "The doctor who is the same forward as backward," followed by a flourish), addressed to Don Mariano loseph de Alcozer, and dated Lima 24 March 1772, there are cited "the works of Monsieur Buffon, which are very common, and which contain fourteen propositions, for which he was justly condemned by the theological faculty at Paris, for having over- reached himself in matters outside of his own domain, as usually happens with these fashionable charla- tans" (p. 7 of the autograph in a miscellany of manuscripts and prints of the eighteenth century, in the Archives of the University of San Marcos). 312 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America 313 tained that Christianity was already known to the Americans before Columbus,6" and thus they owed nothing to Spain and the Old World. With Mier we are of course a long way from the discussions of zoologi- cal species and the races of the continent (and even further from any enthusiasm for the young world, to be shaped ex novo). But de Pauw was so much read and his thesis so subtly corrosive that more than once Mier reveals at least an indirect knowledge of his work, acquired most probably through the replies of Carli and numerous other critics, whom Mier mentions and often quotes directly.69 Count Carli, we may remember, finding de Pauw so scornful of all the achievements of the ancient Incas, had suspected him of being the rein- carnation of Fray Vicente de Valverde. Fray Servando, quoting Carli, says several times that de Pauw relied on a Spanish correspondent, or wrote at the suggestion of a Spaniard,70 or quite simply at the dictation of the Spaniards. In his major work, after mentioning how grateful the Spaniards are to de Pauw for collecting together all their calumnies on America,7 Mier sums up: 68. Chapman (1613) had already supposed that the American natives were acquainted with the Gos- pel (A. L. Rowse, The Elizabethans and America, pp. 201-02) and today again Prof. Corrado Gini, following in Heyerdahl's footsteps, writes of the mythical Quetzalcoatl: "Everything leads one to be- lieve that he was an Irish monk" (art. cit., p. 1407). On the question of the Cross being known in Mexico before "Christopher" Columbus, see Frances Calder6n de la Barca, Life in Mexico (Garden City, N.Y., n.d.), pp. 364-65. Mier's thesis (for which see Gerbi, V'iejas polemicas, pp. 275-78) came back, after a century's interval, to those of the seventeenth-century apologists who had affirmed that the religion of the Chinese (Confucianism) coincided with Christianity. Thus already Matteo Ricci and "Pre Louis Lecomte, in his M6moires sur la Chine, one of the most bitterly attacked works of Jesuit sinophile propa- ganda, declared in 1686 that for five thousand years the Chinese had had a knowledge of the true God" (Arnold H. Rowbotham, "The Jesuit Figurists and Eighteenth-Century Religious Thought," Journal of the History of Ideas, 17, no. 4 [October 1956], p. 473). Lafitau had already tried "to do for America what the Figurists had tried to do for China, that is to say, to bring the country, historically, within the circle of Judaico-Christian tradition" (ibid., pp. 482-83). The originality of Mier consists in having tried to utilize the obviously apologetic and historiographical thesis for patriotic and nationalistic ends. 69. Mier was acquainted with and calls himself a friend of Iturri (Memorias, p. 318; Historia de la revolucidn de Nueva Espaha ..., II, 726), of Hervis y Panduro (Memorias, p. 318; Historia, II, 732, 773; App., xxix; Escritos indditos, p. 252) and Mufioz (Memorias, pp. 14, 148, 182, 196-98, 220, 222, 224-25: "my protector"; p. 376; Historia, I, 146, 150, 578n.; App., xix). Besides the authors already cited he knows Feij6o (Escritos ineditos, p. 265), Buffon (Historia, I, 149; Escritos intditos, pp. 273, 346) whose "dreams" on the poverty of American fauna were refuted by Azara (Historia, 11, 733; cf. in fact E. Cardozo, Historiografia paraguaya [Mexico, 1959], pp. 424-25; and on Azara in general, ibid., pp. 401-35), Montesquieu (Historia, II, 746: America more important than Spain) and Rousseau (His- toria, II, 566, or the Social Contract; cf. Escritos ineditos, p. 214), and, among the other characters in our polemic, Marmontel (Historia, I, 342n.), Father Molina (Historia, II, 619, 726, 730, 734); Jefferson (Historia, II, 726, 730), abbe Raynal (Historia, II, 742-44; Escritos indditos, pp. 100, 199, 312), Rob- ertson (Historia, 1. 151 ff.; II, App., p. vii), Thomas Paine (Historia, II, 743n.; Escritos indditos, p. 359), Uninue (Historia, II, 622, for an article in the Mercurio peruano, and Escritos ineditos, pp. 330, 337, for the Observaciones); and various minor figures. For the bibliography, see Gerbi, Viejas poldmi- cas, p. 266n.; and also A. Reyes, "Fray Servando Teresa de Mier," in Obras completas, III (Mexico, 1956), pp. 433-42. 70. Memorias, p. 99. 71. Historia, 1, xv; the passage quoted below, p. 314. The Historia is Mier's greatest literary and theoretical effort, and he was particularly pleased with its fourteenth book (see ibid., II, 563; Escritos ineditos, pp. 63, 132, 234n., 249, and 272). But one cannot disagree with Gervinus, who called it a "'prolix and clumsy polemic" (Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, III, 69), nor with the Mexican Lorenzo de Zavala, who described it as "an indigestible work" (quoted by O'Gorman, "Pr6logo" to his anthology of S. T. de Mier [Mexico, 1945], p. xiv). THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD It is impossible to imitate the picture they paint of them [the Americans] with their pens dipped in cannibals' blood, piling up against America and its natives all the idiocies and insults dictated to de Pauw by these same Spaniards.72 It is therefore "necessary to take a broom to this obnoxious beetle, to crush them in their own filth, and provide my compatriots with a little manual of exorcisms against such antuerpias [sic]."73 So what did he actually say, this accursed de Pauw? Ever picturesque rather than precise, Mier tells us: "He said that America is a continent but lately emerged from the waters, and therefore full of foul-smelling and deadly swamps and lagoons" and that "from its putrid marshes have sprung a breed of frogs called indios." But these, he concludes impa- tiently, are "ravings worthy of the padded cell."'74 Thus whoever attacks de Pauw, the archenemy of the Americans, is greeted enthusiastically by Mier; and whoever defends him or carries on his thesis is Mier's personal archenemy. Fray Servando never tires of expressing his admiration for the most learned philosopher Carli.75 Al- though he professes himself ever the devoted friend and admirer of Mufioz, he takes pleasure in referring to Iturri's polemic Carta. And when Pedro de Estala compiled his Universal Traveler and "copied down all the absurdities and inaccuracies against America and particularly Mexico produced by de Pauw and his successors Raynal, Robertson, and Laharpe," Mier could, of course, no longer contain himself, and assailed him with the sarcasms that were to reopen his long history of trouble with the law.76 But the culminating episode in this mortal struggle came in 1811 when the Mexican Consulado suggested to the Cortes of Cadiz that the parlia- mentary representation of New Spain should be cut down, since out of its six million inhabitants, three were indios, two were mestizos, and half of the million whites were unworthy of political privileges; and be- cause Mexico was "pervaded by a mood or spirit of indolence and sen- suality" and the natives were generally "base and stupid." Enraged at this sudden stab in the back, Mier stepped forward as echo or rather 72. Historia, I, 285; Escritos indditos, p. 341. 73. Historia, p. xvi. Pauw is "the Prussian beetle" also in Escritos ineditos, p. 297. "The Antuerpia is a marine boar of which one specimen was seen in '37" (1537: A. de Torquemada, Jardin deflores curiosas [Salamanca, 1570], quoted by A. Reyes, "De un autor censurado en el 'Quijote' (Torque- mada)," Cuadernos Americanos, 6, no. 6 [1947], p. 219). 74. Memorias, pp. 99-100. I am omitting some expressions that are repeated identically in the passage quoted below. 75. Memorias, pp. 100, 258; Historia, II, 726, 730 ("such a great philosopher as Carli"), 737; App., p. xxi, and half a dozen times in the Escritos indditos. Other Italians of his age are mentioned approv- ingly: Muratori (Escritos inditos, p. 146), Filangeri (Historia, II, 629; Escritos ineditos, p. 113) and the Italian who wrote on the quipus (Historia, II, App., p. xviii), i.e., the Conte di San Severo, the anony- mous author of the Lettera apologetica (Naples, 1750)- while he practically ignores Humboldt (Min- guet, op. cit., p. 215n.). 76. Memorias, ix, 375-76. 314 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America amplifier of the American delegates' indignation, and with his usual vehemence and pertinacity accused the spokesman of the Consulado, Francisco Javier Lambarri, of having taken over de Pauw's worst slan- ders to justify the subjugation of the Americans. What happened at Cadiz, "that dark and dismal scene," writes Mier, who watched it from up in the tumultuous galleries of the assembly, "de- serves a detailed and thorough description." And the description fol- lows, with a new paragraph of its own, and an almost classical fairy-tale opening: "There was once an incredulous man called Pauw, who hailed from Prussia .. " But he must have written his book somewhere "be- yond the polar circles," such is the "abysmal and absolute" ignorance he demonstrates on the subject of America and things American. In the Prussian's fertile mind America was in effect a new continent, recently emerged from the waters of the ocean; and being consequently still only half dried out and impregnated with its salts, it was incapable of producing wood or of bringing any fruit to ripeness. All that could be found in it were rushes, fungi, thorn trees, and reptiles. And from its miry ponds and swamps which filled the land crawled forth a species of frogs called indios, who managed to speak some rude gibberish, and were thus to be placed in some intermediate position between men and the orangutan apes. Here again the final conclusion is that Pauw should be put away in an asylum. Yet such was the ungodly frivolity of the age that Voltaire praised the sceptical spirit of that "philosopher"; and furthermore Robert- son and Raynal, "two such elegant writers," wrote "at de Pauw's direc- tion." True, there were others that came forward to combat him, men like Carli, Clavigero "in the dissertations attached to his Historia de Megico Antiguo," Molina, "Madisson in The [History] of Virginia,"77 Iturri, Valverde,78 "and many others." And it is likewise true that a Berlin academic, "M. Pelletier,"79 twice entered the lists against de Pauw, and the second time forced him to defend himself with the plea "that his Spanish correspondent had misled him." Spanish? Fray Servando smirks contentedly, like a judge who has finally extorted the desired confession: "I had already been thinking that only under such influence could a foreigner write against the Americans, with a pen, as Carli put it, soaked in cannibals' blood."80 77. Sic, but there is no work by James Madison corresponding to this reference. It seems probable that Mier, who was always confusing things, wrote Madison (who for that matter did collaborate on the Federalist, for which see above, p. 250) for Jefferson, the author of the Notes on Virginia. 78. On Antonio Sinchez Valverde (Idea del valor de la Isla Espan5la ... , 1785; Disertacidn sobre el origen del morbo gdlico, polemicizing with de Pauw: see Escritos indditos, p. 316) see also Historia, II, 734, 744. 79. This again seems to be a slip on Mier's part: Pelletier for Pernety. 80. The same metaphor is used by Mier in the Historia too, I, 285 (passage quoted above, p. 314) and in the Memorias, p. 99. The topos of the pen dipped in blood (which Mier gets from Carli; see above, 315 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD X. OTHER REACTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA: THE YOUTHFULNESS OF THE NEW WORLD Among the patriots of the River Plate, men less rich in cultural tradi- tions, less involved in theological controversies, less sensitive to slanders of their climate, the reactions to the Europeans' calumnies came mainly in the form of eulogies of the American nations' dynamic youthfulness. In 1810 Mariano Moreno, a fervent disciple of Rousseau,81 republished in the Gaceta de Buenos Aires Jefferson's defense of all Americans as a lusty and energetic race.82 The Creoles were not the Spaniards' in- feriors. The Creoles are not the "yankees' " inferiors. In the Lira Argentina, the 1824 collection of poetic and patriotic com- positions dating from 1810 onward, published in Buenos Aires, the New World-Old World antithesis is repeated with tedious insistence, with all the facile unquestioning monotony of the timeworn clich6. The New World figures as humanity's refuge and hope, its supreme citadel. The same concept appears in Venezuela and Peru, tinged with equivocal Rousseauian sophisms. Bolivar's teacher, for example, managed to con- vert Rousseau's axiom on the ethical superiority of the state of nature over corrupt society into a seal of approval of the continental destiny of the Americas, as innocent and pure and deserving of independence as Europe was civilized and therefore decadent.83 Once independence had been won the publicists of the new republics were more than ever convinced of their state of virginal purity. For these men, nurtured on Rousseau's schemes, the severing of the political link with Spain represented a sort of resolution of the "social contract," a sort of restitutio in pristinum, "a return to primal innocence." In 1826 the Peruvian Vidaurre, exaggerating as usual, wrote: "The inhabitants of those Americas which used to be Spanish ... restored to the state of nature, free and independent ... are more perfect than in the days near p. 236) was current, and usually referred to Draco. In the prologue to the Jew of Malta, Marlowe has Machiavelli say: "Laws were then most sure, when like the Draco's, they were writ in blood." A Spanish paper of 1765, in mentioning the projected constitution for Corsica prepared by Rousseau, said it was sure that "Sefior Rousseau will not have dipped his pen in blood as Draco did" (Spell, op. cit., pp. 43-44). Note the deformation of the image on the part of the furious Mier, at first an enemy and then a follower of Rousseau (ibid., pp. 218, 244-45). 81. Spell, op. cit., pp. 235-38. 82. H. Bernstein, "Some Inter American Aspects of the Enlightenment," in Latin America and the Enlightenment, p. 64. Cf. above, pp. 187-88. 83. Mariano Pic6n Salas, Rousseau en Venezuela, communication to the First Interamerican Con- ference of Philosophy (1943), reviewed by M. Bunge in Minerva, 2 (1944), pp. 163-64. Following the same ideological line in Europe the Hegelian Michelet saw "the final future of the human race, the ex- treme development of democratic self-government" precisely in the islands between America and Oceania, which Hegel had already branded as "immature" (see Croce, Saggio sullo Hegel, p. 140). 316 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America the creation."84 They are like Adam, with experience added. They are like Emile, grown-up, victorious, his own lawmaker. This rhetorical transfiguration of course did little to justify the claims of the Americans, whether of North or South, whether Protestant col- onists or Catholic Creoles, that they had a right to be left alone to govern themselves, to try and make their own civilization. But it did give their demands that same absurd half-physiological half-goliardic justification, by which the "young" have greater rights than the "aged," and the as- sault of the "new" is more legitimate than the resistance of the "old." This same ardent frenzy had already been satirized by Goethe, in gen- eral terms, in the scene of the Baccalaureus (1826-30). And the philoso- phers teach us that "history . . . knows not old age and youth of peoples nor of individuals in the physiological sense."8" But the episode is in- teresting and significant precisely because of its illogicality. So vain and meaningless is the epithet of an age of life applied to a nation or a conti- nent, that in the case of America the same factual data were used to de- duce without difficulty both its "youth" and its "decrepitude"; and contradictory corollaries - a glorious future before it or an incurable im- maturity and total incapacity for progress-were extracted with equal ease from its supposed "infancy." It was the same ambiguity in this latter term, with its possibility of interpretation as a synonym either of divine innocence or of precocious senility, or dotage, that lent itself to the alter- natives in the polemic and the variations of myth, and which continued for some time to stand in the way of a more exact understanding of Amer- ica and the Americans. XI. THE HONDURAN J. C. DEL VALLE AND THE MISSION OF AMERICA These polemics were followed, chronologically though not ideologi- cally, by the criticisms of de Pauw which blossomed in Central America 84. M. de Vidaurre, "Discurso a la Asamblea de Panama" (22 June 1826), in Suplemento a las Cartas Americanas, p. 144. 85. B. Croce, "False lezioni attribuite alla storia," 11 carattere della filosofia moderna, p. 231; Frede- ric Le Play, Economie sociale, ed. F. Auburtin (Paris, 1891), pp. 24-27; R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (Oxford, 1942), pp. 158-59. "There are no such things as old countries and young countries," repeats Luigi Einaudi in 1948 (Lo scrittoio del presidente [Turin, 1956], p. 39). On the anguished doubt of the Italians, on reaching the status of nationhood, as to whether they were old or young, see F. Chabod, Politica estera, pp. 25 n. 6, 528, 637 n. 2, 642. In particular "the notions of old Europe and young Amer- ica are a permanent source of error" (J. B. Terin, La salud de la America Espahola [Paris, 1926], p. 170). And L. Romier (Qui ser la la maitre, I'Europe ou l'Amerique? 1927) sets out from the principle that "a people is neither young nor old" (quoted by W. T. Spoerri, The Old World and the New [ZUrich- Leipzig, 1937], p. 131); a thesis taken up again, in polemic with the Europeans, by the American Mal- colm Cowley (New York Times Book Review, 24 February 1946). But another North American seer had already written: "Those who say, Dominora [i.e., England] is old and worn out, may very possibly err. For if, as a nation, Dominora be old-her present generation is full as young as the youths in any land under the sun" (H. Melville, Mardi, 1849, CLIX; ed. cit., p. 663). 317 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD as the movement toward independence gathered force. Even if they have read Humboldt, these writers still live in the intellectual atmosphere of the eighteenth century; with them it is a sense of patriotism, not the new scientific spirit, which reacts to the Prussian slanders. Their arguments are thus still those which had served de Pauw's very first opponents, oc- casionally enlivened by the heated oratory and that greater fervor of the apologist pro domo sua. They are tropical and politically impassioned echoes of the diatribes of a previous generation; and they completely ignore the developments and revisions of the original thesis. When the Creole empire of Agustin Iturbide was established in New Spain, the rector of the University of Mexico, Agustin Pomposo Fer- nandez, brought out a translation of Carli's American Letters. The Ital- ian's defense, by then almost half a century old, still served for the "re- habilitation" of America. The secretary of state for foreign affairs in this same Mexican Empire (1823), the Honduran Jos6 Cecilio del Valle-famous for having drafted Central America's Declaration of Independence (15 September 1821), and after his opposition to the incorporation of Central America into Mexico elected president of the new Central American Republic, and thus one of the most distinguished of the "founding fathers" of the New World-is still more typical in his refutation of de Pauw and other Old World writers. A widely read man, politically a conservative up until independence, and thereafter almost a utopian, a publicist of lively wit, ever eloquent and persuasive with his air of moderation and sweet reason learned from the study of French models, Valle is a perfect disciple of the illuminists. There is no reference in him either to the romantic "youthfulness" of America;86 no enthusiasm, ever, for revolutions. Everything could be brought about by gradual reform and the wise actions of the authorities.87 No less typical than his preromantic ideology is his glorification of the mathematical sciences, for their usefulness and (let the dmes sensibles rejoice) for their humane and philanthropic tendencies. So much blood has been spilled in America because the masses "have not been guided by the spirit of mathematics," which (who would have guessed it?) "are eminently sensitive to all the [ills] suffered by our species. Wherever there are tears, there stands mathematics, meditating and calculating to 86. "Youthfulness" is still for him (as for the philosophes) a negative quality. See for example the wish (1831) that "this age of youthfulness, volubility, exaltation and commotion may be succeeded by one of maturity, experience, fixity and tranquillity" (Obras of Jos6 Cecilio del Valle [Guatemala, 1929-30], I, 220). 87. Prudence, circumspection, and caution are repeatedly recommended to Governments as highly necessary qualities: see the example that is given in Obras, 1, 37 (1824); I, 47 (1824-25); I, 102 (1825). 318 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America 319 reduce their number," masterminding the strategy and tactics, deciding the battles scientifically, etc.88 His study of political economy, of Adam Smith, of Ricardo and Jean- Baptiste Say, widened his intellectual horizons and gave him a certain realism in his view of the "poverty" of the American nations in the midst of the "richness" of their natural surroundings. But the doctrines of his revered master and friend, and regular correspondent, Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher of utilitarianism, reinforced his fundamental belief in the sovereign power of Reason as illuminator of the world, dissipating evil and promoting the progress of all peoples along an undeviating path to- ward infinity.89 Wise institutions, well-conceived laws, and the paternal administration of government-these are the things that assure the hap- piness and greatness of peoples. To religion Valle pays the lukewarm re- spects of the deist; and clerical obscurantism he abhors above all things. America's nature is paradisiacal. But Spain's political system was wicked. And human laws act like the laws of nature. The errors in human laws destroy the benefits of nature's laws.90 This is why America is so 88. Obras, I, 220. Cf. Gerbi, 11 Settecento, pp. 97-98. The idea that scientific warfare is more human and less bloody is already suggested by Donne (Sermon XXXVI, ed. cit., p. 710), greeted with irony by Thomas Bastard (1598) and La Bruy re (Des jugements, sec. 119, in P16iade ed., p. 403), taken up again by Montesquieu (Lettres persanes, CVI) and Helv6tius (Epitre sur les arts, ed. of the Poesies, 1781, p. 93), contested by Bonneville (Les Lyonnaises, pp. 6, 208-09, 249) and again in Valle's time upheld by Louis Napoleon, who wrote (1835). "The more the art of war has been perfected the less bloody the battles have become" (P. E. Schazmann, "Napol6on III pr6curseur de la Soci6t6 des Nations," Revue historique, 179 [1937], pp. 368-71). A related idea, that was current toward the middle of the seven- teenth century, was the defense of firearms on the grounds that they represented an "advance" since they lessened the savagery of war and saved human lives! (Wolper, art. cit., pp. 593-98, with con- temporary references to chemical and biological warfare, and the claims that they too would "save" human lives!). 89. On Bentham's singular popularity in Spanish America, see E. Hal6vy, La formation du radica- lisme philosophique, II, L'dvolution de la doctrine utilitaire de 1789 a 1815, pp. 277-78, 364-65; R. H. Valle, "J. Bentham en el pensamiento americano," La Prensa (Buenos Aires), 25 May 1947; A. Rojas, "La Batalla de Bentham en Colombia," Revista de Historia de America (Mexico), 29 (June 1950), pp. 37-66. On his interest in the United States, see Chilton Williamson, "Bentham Looks at America," Political Science Quarterly, 70, no. 4 (December 1955), pp. 543-51; and Boorstin, National Experience, p. 36. Ballanche had already noted that for the Americas Montesquieu was an ancient author: "He is their Aristotle: Delolme and Bentham are their Justinian" (Palingdndsie sociale, Proldgomenes, etc., pt. II, sec. 5: Paris ed., 1830, III, 27, 224). In Guatemala his works, like other books in Valle's posses- sion, were prohibited and confiscated by the Inquisition (E. Chinchilla Aguilar, La Inquisici6n en Guate- mala, p. 247). Bolivar had them in Peru (ca. 1825): M. Perez Vila, La biblioteca del Libertador (Caracas, 1960), pp. 19-20. On his influence in Mexico, particularly on J. M. L. Mora, see Charles A. Hale, "J. M. L. Mora and the Structure of Mexican Liberalism," Hispanic American Historical Review, 45, no. 2 (May 1965), p. 206. 90. "The consequences of such a sad system were as necessary as the effects produced by the laws of nature" (article of 1822 in Obras, II, 166). There is no complete collection of Valle's numerous articles, studies, discourses, and letters. Thompson, who visited him in 1826, reports: "He had all the mania of authorship about him: proofs and revises and lumps of manuscript, folios and quartos and octavos, opened or interlarded with scraps of memoranda, were scattered, in profusion, over the table: it was as though he were inordinate in his requisitions at the feast of intellect" (G. A. Thompson, Narrative of an Official Visit to Guatemala from Mexico [London, 1829], pp. 209-10). In 1881 the government of Honduras promoted an edition of his works that was to be in three volumes, but only the first ever ap- peared, published in Tegucigalpa in 1913, though printing had begun in 1906 (the date that figures on the frontispiece). Valle's descendants began another collection, which was to be in four volumes, two of 14 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD one only has to sprinkle with fresh moisture the dried-out tissues of rotifers, tardigrades, or maggots taken from blighted corn to see these miniscule and almost always harmful little animals revive and begin to move.52 The life that lies latent within them can be reawakened with a few drops of the nearest available dew. The dampness of the New World meant that it was predisposed if not predestined to succor an unending swarm of insects, snakes, and amphibians. In fact, it was easier for Redi in the seventeenth century to laugh at Father Kircher's "blessed little handmade serpents" than for Buffon in the eighteenth century to free him- self from the recent and ancient mental association of the liquid with the living. VII. AMERICA AS A NEW CONTINENT Another noteworthy fact in the last passage quoted from Buffon is the reemergence of a genetic explanation, at first on the physical level, and immediately afterward in reference to the humanity of America, much like the ideas we have just been admiring. Physically America is a new world, or at least considerably newer than the old, a world that remained a longer time beneath the waters of the sea, that in fact only recently emerged and is not yet properly dried out. On the human level, America is a continent still intact, as yet unpossessed by man and therefore unhealthy for civi- lized peoples or superior animals. After recalling how recent the historical records of the Mexican and Peruvian dynasties are, how little of the past is penetrated by the chronicles of the Americas, Buffon leaps from history to prehistory: Everything then seems to indicate that the Americans were new men, or, to be more accurate, men who had left their homeland so long ago as to have lost all notion of it, all idea of the world from which they had issued.53 All the evidence seems to point toward the greater part of the American continent being a new land, still untouched by men, in which nature had not had time to carry out all her plans, to develop herself to the full; the men are cold and the animals small, because the ardor of the men and the size of the animals are dependent on the healthiness and the warmth of the air; in several centuries, when the earth has been tilled, the forests cut down, the rivers controlled and the waters contained, this same land will become the most fruitful, healthy, and rich of all, as it is seen to be already in the parts that man has cultivated.54 52. C. Bernard, Introduction ( I' tude de la medecine experimentale (Paris, 1865), p. 207. The knowl- edge of these phenomena at the time of Buffon is evident from Littr6's examples alone. In 1701 Leeuwen- hoek made experiments on tardigrades and saw them pullulate as soon as he wet them and "these facts have had a great reverberation" (C. Bernard, Leons sur les phenomenes de la vie, p. 85). 53. An incidental reaffirmation of the Buffonian thesis of the unity of the human race. 54. Oeuvres completes, XV, 455-56. Cf. Bertin, op. cit., pp. 81-82 (giving examples of rapid im- provement of animal and vegetable species), and below, p. 91. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD backward, despite its physical advantages. It is poor and undeveloped, though very beautiful. The alternative in Filicaia's famous line in the sonnet to Italy (1690), "Deh fossi tu men bella, o almen pii forte" -"Oh that thou wert less fair, or at least more strong"- would hardly have pleased the Honduran. For his America, Valle wants strength and beauty together: "What we desire is that this half of the globe should be as noble politically as it is physically."91 This gives rise to a double polemic: against America's real political de- ficiencies, and against her supposed physical deficiencies. The first can be remedied, as we know, with wise laws: the intellectual and paternalist Valle dreams again the ancient Platonic dream of the philosopher-king, though with some doubts as to whether this ideal is compatible with those other ideals, of liberty and democracy, on which the recent independence of America was based.92 But the others, the physical deficiencies, simply do not exist. Central America is a land blessed of the Lord. Considered from any point of view, Guatemala (the former Audiencia, which comprised the territory of the five present-day republics situated between Mexico and Panama) is the pearl of the continent: "It is its fair center; it is its most distin- guished portion."'" Thus when Valle runs into de Pauw he has no difficulty in recognizing the Enemy. Right from the first issue of his paper El Amigo de la Patria, he personifies the scientist, "el sabio," in the figure of Humboldt, who visited the two Americas, to his great pain and peril, "to give the lie to those who composed horrifying pictures of that fair half of the earth, to defend us from the insults of de Pauw and those who said that we Ameri- cans are condemned to ignorance by the influence of the climate.""94 which were published in Guatemala, 1929-30. See also Rafael Heliodoro Valle, Bibliografia de d. Jose Cecilio del Valle (Mexico, 1934); and an article by the same author in Revista Mexicana de Sociologia, 6 (1944), pp. 7-18; the old biography by Ram6n Rosa (1882) which prefaces both the modem editions (and was reprinted in Tegucigalpa in 1943 and 1948); the study by Virgilio Rodriguez Beteta, El Amigo de la America, 1917, reprinted in Obras, II, v-xxxi; and F. D. Parker "J. C. del Valle: Scholar [?] and Patriot" [deals only with his political activity], Hispanic American Historical Review, 32, no. 4 (Nov- ember 1952), pp. 516-39. 91. Obras, II, 189 (article of 1820). Among the means proposed one might mention the opening of the Nicaragua Canal, from which Valle expected portentous results ("the population of the world would double or triple"), but which he considered premature in 1826, on account of Nicaragua's political weak- ness (op. cit., I, 134, 138). 92. "I dare to forecast it. If Europe's civilization continues in the present direction the wise men or kings that are wise will in the end hold the scepters, and the nations will be less unhappy .... America is in a different position from Europe. What will be its destiny, in view of the step that it has taken?" (ibid., II, 329n.; a study of 1830). In the delirium of the illness that was to bring him to his deathbed Valle repeated his plans for the Presidency: "I shall surround myself with wise men from Europe, my friends, whom I shall bring here to ensure the well-being of our country" (Rosa's biography, I, xcv- xcvi). And see the explicit quotation of the famous passage from Plato's Republic: I, 187 (1829). 93. Obras, II, 88 (1821). Cf. Thompson, op. cit., p. 295, on Guatemala's boast of "centrality." 94. Ibid., p. 9 (1820). 320 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America Among all the Europeans who wrote of the New World, de Pauw is chosen as the typical exponent of that senseless phobia: "Casas wept, and de Pauw raved.""95 Jose del Valle, then, plants himself squarely in de Pauw's path, prepared to defend (as Caldas for New Granada) the geographical situation of Guatemala, which he claims to be preferable to that of France and Spain, and in value "superior to that of Europe's mightiest kingdoms." Men who were unfamiliar with the torrid zone dis- paraged it out of vain pride and wicked ignorance. Muhoz called its soil "barren, debased and poor," Buffon found it had few regions that could be tilled, and de Pauw saw in it "a degraded nature. . . rich only in harm- ful animals, in insects and mosquitoes, in snakes and vermin. It is the land of putrefaction, writes another," of sweat and ulcers, of diarrhea and putrid fevers." Valle replies that the European "lives blithely content in the land of horror and death . . . he raises cattle in the land of serpents"; and that Humboldt, the most distinguished and modern of the great naturalists, never tires of admiring the majesty and noble vigor of American nature.97 The soil of the continent is prodigiously fertile. All (or almost all) the plants of the Old World have prospered splendidly in America. "There were writers who scandalized the world saying that these lands, the most fertile that God's power ever created, are unproductive. Pauw, the slan- derer of America, a man of systems and never of reason, dared to assert that our soil is sterile.""98 But these insults are proved false in a lengthy enumeration of the rich and varied products of the most prolific and blessed of continents. "Let us remember it with pure joy: America is the country that has most expanded the boundaries of Botany." All the greatest naturalists of Europe came to collect plants and press 95. Ibid., p. 58. Also: "There are shameful errors in them [the works written about America]." 96. In a footnote Valle cites "Wilson, Observaciones relativas al influjo del clima," by which he probably means the work of Alexander Wilson, referred to with the title Influencia del clima en los cuer- pos animados in a thesis defended by the Bachelor Micael Benegas, a disciple of UnAnue, concerning the influence of the moon on diseases (Lima, 1798). On his return from Mexico Valle brought with him, among other books, "Williamson, Hugh, Observaciones sobre el clima en diferentes partes de America, comparado con el clima de las partes correspondientes del otro continente" (op. cit., I, 85), in other words the memorandum "An Attempt to account for the change of climate which has been observed in the Middle Colonies of North America," presented to the Philosophical Society in 1770, which was highly optimistic about the benign influence of the North American climate, whose improvement it attributed to the more intense cultivation of the land (Chinard, art. cit., 1947, p. 45; cf. Martin, op. cit., p. 207). Herder (Ideen, VII, 5, Fr. trans. cit., I, 344) cites both "Williamson, Essai sur les causes du changement de climat, Recueil de Berlin, vol. VII," and (ibid., VIII, I; ed. cit., II, 14) "Wilson, Ob- servations sur l'influence des climats." 97. Op. cit., II, 80 (article of 1821). Besides the authors cited in the text Valle is familiar with the works of other defenders or denigrators of America: among the ancients, Fr. Acosta, Garcilaso, Fr. Cobo; among the modems, Raynal, Ulloa, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Fr. Clavigero (I, 112), Fr. Molina and Fr. Iturri (II, 94). 98. Obras, II, 112 (1821). Elsewhere too Valle opposes "system" or "prejudice" to "reason"; on the subject of de Pauw he writes: "The systematic spirit of Europe can still be found in the books of the philosophers" (II, 58). 321 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD flowers in this "inexhaustible" continent. Valle, "the plants' constant friend,""99 names these visitors one by one "with pure joy," and parades them before us with their herbariums, their boxes of seeds, and their specimen cases over their shoulders. Today America possesses plants from all parts of the world; and among them those most useful to an af- flicted humanity. "The human race suffers less as a result of America's products and her children's labors."100 When the English diplomat G. A. Thompson was about to leave Guate- mala, Valle, who had become friendly with him, suggested that he take with him "specimens of the different woods of the country," and gathered together no less than thirty-seven of them; the Englishman ordered a case to put them in; but the carpenter regretted he did not have the time: he was busy building a new pulpit.. . and Thompson left without the precious samples.'01 Valle's defense of the mineral riches of America is somewhat more succinct, either because the abundance of precious metals was undisputed and almost proverbial ("let it be said with sweet satisfaction: Gold, silver, America, are words that mean one and the same thing");102 or else be- cause some of the insinuations about the useful metals were quite simply ridiculous, as for example the notion that America's iron was less hard than Europe's: "metal is one in all of nature."'03 Only the animals and wild beasts of America are left undefended; and these Valle seems never to have bothered about. The reason for this omission may have been the difficulty of presenting a richness in the animal kingdom comparable to the abundance of min- erals and the opulent generosity of the soil, in other words in terms of an enormous potential wealth at the disposition of the Central American peoples (once they establish sound laws), and described delightedly by Valle in an unceasing display of colorful and prophetic detail. 99. Op. cit., I, 167 (1826). 100. Ibid., II, 105; cf. the preceding pages. The economist and patriot does not miss the chance of advising his fellow citizens to treat themselves with homegrown simples, instead of enriching the Euro- pean pharmacists by buying their specifics (or patent medicines) which are already old and lacking in any therapeutic value by the time they reach America! 101. Thompson, op. cit., p. 352. Thompson translated into English and considerably enriched the Diccionario geogrdfico-histrrico de las Indias Occidentales i, America of Antonio de Alcedo (Span. ed.: Madrid, 1786-89; English ed.: London, 1812-15). On Valle, see also op. cit., pp. 184-86 ("Valle is ... passionately addicted to literature, and is a great patron of science"), pp. 208-11 (the visit to the study of Valle, this "Cicero of the Andes," which is "so completely filled with books, in large masses, not only around the walls but on the floor, that it was with difficulty we could pick a way through the apart- ment," and how Valle deluged him with documents and memoranda), pp. 215, 222, 319, 321 (Valle out- lines the boundaries of the five Central American states on a map brought to him by Thompson: the map is reproduced in Thompson's book), pp. 324-25, (he declines a diplomatic mission to England), p. 450. 102. Obras, II, 95 (1821); cf. ibid., pp. 72-74 (1821). 103. Ibid., p. 100 (1821); cf. above, pp. 57-58. 322 The Reaction to de Pauw in Spanish America Unlike so many other figures in the polemic, driven by their annoyance with de Pauw to denigrate Europe, Valle, faithful to his intellectual up- bringing, has nothing but enthusiasm for old Europe's civilization, her inexhaustible spiritual wealth and unrelenting progress. How long will it take, he wonders, for America to be as "enlightened" as Europe?104 But the political situation in Europe, under the yoke of the Holy Alliance, terrifies the free American. The intervention of absolutist powers to put down insurrections and abolish constitutions prompts Valle to the dire prophecy: "If some states want to meddle in the administration of others, America will be like Europe, a chaos of blood, death, and horror."105 Valle, as a republican and illuminist, has no sympathy whatsoever for the great empires, nor for political enterprises. He quotes Machiavelli with apparent disapproval, and with the customary reservation that per- haps "he intended to render tyranny hateful by revealing its horrors."''6 Of Russia he says that "it will be ill administered as long as it continues to be huge";107 of the British Empire, that Guatemala will one day domi- nate the oceans and seize "from the Britons the scepter with which they ruled the seas,"'08 not so differently from Gabriel Pepe who in the Nuova Antologia (1830) predicted "that Montezuma's ancient empire will in the future be the Tyre and Great Britain of the new continent."'09 Valle is also a biting critic of the Roman Empire: the city was "the fatherland of the tyrants who in the darkness of the night, in the midst of the storms, calmly shared out among themselves the whole expanse of the earth."" But he is also capable of acute observations on the rela- tionships between the geography of a country, its politico-economic organization and its history, for which he might well be included among the precursors of "geopolitics,""' and he is convinced that economics is the basis of politics, and that the best way for the American republics to make themselves really independent, free, and sovereign, will be for them to get rich.112 Indeed, if America will but answer her vocation, and make herself more and more united and independent- Valle invoked an American federation at the same time as Bolivar, and the principle of the exclusion of the European powers from American affairs before Mon- 104. Ibid., p. 120 (1821); cf. ibid., p. 51 (1821). And again: "Europe is the most beautiful ornament of the civilized world" (I, 171 [1829]; cf. I, 174 and 212-13 [1831]). 105. Ibid., II, 360 (1823); on the principle of nonintervention, cf. also I, 126-30 (1826). 106. Ibid., I, 245-46; II, 293n. (1824). 107. Ibid., II, 85 (1821). 108. Ibid., p. 81 (1821). 109. See N. Tommaseo, Di Giampietro Vieusseux e dell'andamento della civilta italiana in un quarto di secolo, in Ricordi storici intorno a Giampietro Vieusseux e il tempo nostro (Florence, 1869), p. 106. 110. Op. cit., II, 160 (1822). 111. See for example ibid., pp. 81, 291, etc. 112. See I, 214 (1831). Cf. above, pp. 92-93. 323 324 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD roe"3-if she can bring her civilization up to the sublime level of her nature, her example will be a challenge to all tyrants and an aid to all oppressed peoples, "and America's liberty will in the end make the whole world free.""4 113. On the Pan-American federation, see II, 206-09 (1822) and on Valle as a "Pan-Americanist," see for example P. Leonard Green, Pan American Progress (New York, 1942), pp. 10- 11, and Parker, art. cit., pp. 528-29. The Congreso Interamericano was to take as its first problem "the most useful plan to ensure that no province of America is beset by external invaders, nor becomes victim of internal dis- orders." Monroe formulated his famous doctrine on 2 December 1823. 114. Obras, II, 199 (1821). Hegel and His Contemporaries I. THE AMERICAS POLITICALLY DISMISSED AND THEIR ZOOLOGICAL PROBLEMS DISSOLVED AFTER Herder the dispute seems to lose emphasis and dramatic in- terest. The American revolution recedes into the past, the French revolu- tion commands the attention and emotions of all Europe, the Latin Ameri- can revolutions are still to come, and when they do in fact come they arouse neither the passionate hopes nor the violent reactions of the first two. America retreats to the very edge of Europe's visible horizon. In- terest in the overseas dominions fades almost to the point of extinction. "Perish the colonies rather than a principle!" the reiterated cry of Du- pont de Nemours and Robespierre (1791), means this too: that the eco- nomic interests of the slave owners and the very existence of the West Indian plantations did not and could not count for anything compared with the revolution's maxims as ordained in Paris. A few years later (1803), in an almost symbolic act, the first consul Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory to the United States for some fifteen million dollars, a stretch of land four or five times bigger than France, and large enough to provide the North American union with a dozen new states. And even his implacable adversaries, the Id6ologues, were unanimous in their ap- proval of this peaceful alienation.' A few years more, and Spain saw almost all her American empire crumble, and Portugal lost Brazil. One after another the European powers were expelled from the continent and reduced to lurking on the islands near the coast, or in semiinsular areas like Guiana or Canada, where the climate was extreme and the resources, at the time, practically nonexistent. Monroe's threat of 1823 gave final sanction to a state of affairs that was by then irreversible. The United States, in the person of its first president, George Washington, had already declared that it had no desire to meddle in the affairs of Europe; now it drew the first corollary from that maxim, and in the person of the fifth president warned Europe 1. Cf. Echeverria, Mirage, p. 276. 325 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD not to meddle in America's affairs. The two hemispheres were to ignore each other, to turn their backs on each other. England, mistress of the seas between the two continents, immediately indicated its willingness to adhere to Monroe's isolationist and tutelary "doctrine." And the Ameri- cans were left to seek their destiny alone. Europe, almost relieved of political responsibility, no longer felt America's problems so acutely, or dissolved them in those of a more general nature, the problems of primi- tive peoples, colonization, and civil progress.2 Talleyrand's case is typical, if somewhat complicated by personal re- sentments. He comes to the United States not as a pilgrim, but as a fugitive in search of temporary asylum, and disembarks unwillingly, al- ready out of sorts. And in the course of his two years' sojourn (1794-96) he grows ever more vexed at Washington's failure to receive him, more disappointed at his failure to make a lot of money quickly, and more irritated at the distance placed between himself and the courts and draw- ing rooms which constituted the natural arena for his talents. His inborn liveliness and intelligence, sharpened by necessity, are all for nothing. True, his English is not good. In conversation, writes one of his friends and admirers, he "makes little parsonish witticisms, that are quite lost on everybody," and which in fact would be hardly more appreciated in Paris.3 As for business, at first he criticizes and almost ridicules the cur- rently fashionable speculations on virgin territory, and instead enthuses about the great possibilities of rapid arbitrage in stocks, and forward- dealing operations on merchandise and commodities; later, however, he turns all his dialectical and rhetorical skill to recommending speculation on the land still to be colonized, as the best way of getting rich in the United States, and finally suggests short-term credit-financing of the lucrative export trade in English manufactures to the ex-colonies; all of which would seem to be an indication not so much of any particular ability as salesman, as someone put it, but rather of real and repeated disappointments, and the restless activity they resulted in.4 2. On the decadence of the Amerikakunde in Germany (but not in the English-oriented G6ttingen) toward the end of the century, and its resurgence after 1830, cf., with caution, Doll, op. cit., pp. 436, 454, 464, 470, 507, 511. On the dissolution of the "American mirage" too in France after 1793, and the diminished interest in the United States, see Echeverria, Mirage, pp. 175-224 (esp. 215-16), 235. 3. Duc de Liancourt, Journal de voyage en Am rique et d'un sejour a Philadelphie ... , ed. J. Mar- chand (Paris-Baltimore, 1940), p. 68. Liancourt himself (the author of that remarkable story on Louis XV's last illness found in C. A. Saint-Beuve, Portraits litteraires [Paris, 1862-64], III, 512-39) notes several times that Talleyrand and his friends did nothing but speak ill of the Americans: "It is impossible to have a lower opinion of them in all respects, to speak worse of them, and yet they adulate them when- ever they meet them" (ibid., p. 73; cf. pp. 62, 66, 71, 76); against which he objects that when all's said and done they have the defects of all other men, and are certainly no worse than the Europeans (pp. 97- 98, 112), in fact those of the country areas and the interior are better (p. 147). 4. Talleyrand in America as Financial Promoter, 1794-96, trans. and ed. by H. Huth and W. J. Pugh (Washington, D.C., 1942), passim, but esp. pp. 21-23, 33-57 (against land speculation), 137-75 (in favor of the same); Poniatowski, op. cit., p. 267; G. Pallain, La mission de Talleyrand a Londres, en 1792 (Paris, 1889), pp. 421-44 (letter to Lord Lansdowne, 1 February 1795, on Anglo-American trade). 326 Hegel and His Contemporaries Constitutionally indifferent to nature (in his Memoirs he even forgets to mention that he went to see Niagara Falls!) and bored by this vain and oversensitive society, so completely involved in its concern with business, depassionnee, "devoid of passion" ("the American people are perhaps the people least acquainted with passion in the whole world"), and incapable, in short, of forming a true nation, with the race composed as it is of clumsy parvenus who use Sevres porcelain as hat racks for those awful hats of theirs that a European peasant would not be seen dead in, of vagrant woodcutters and fishermen that go wandering the seas with no more homeland than the cod-fishing ground, disgusted with a country that has "thirty-two religions and only one dish," and even that one inedible, desperate to return to France-"If I stay here another year I shall die," he wrote in 1795 to his friend Mme de Stadl; and to M. Olive in 1796: "Here I am off course"-no sooner does he return to France than he expresses his certainty that Europe will lose all her transatlantic possessions. To compensate for this he suggests an immediate search for others in the warm countries (hence his encouragement of the Egyptian expedition), and then for the rest of his life, with a consistency quite remarkable for him, he continues to urge that France should direct her expansion toward the Mediterranean and Africa, and renounce her American dreams. The discovery of America has already proved to be nothing but a nui- sance. Of its various climates, that of the state of Maine is frigid and stimulating, and in accordance with the rule of Nordic climes will no doubt give birth to a race of conquerors; but New York in summer is downright noxious for Europeans.5 The soil is better in the Old World, and whenever slavery is abolished agricultural products will cost more in America than in Europe or Africa. Furthermore the products that origi- nated in the Old World- sugar, coffee, cotton- are superior to the same products in the Americas (a far-off echo of certain Prussian "slanders"?).6 In any case there can be no doubt of the danger that as the United States continues its implacable expansion it may seize all the European colo- nies. Then if the Europeans emigrate to the New World there is the risk 5. Poniatowski. op. cit., pp. 122, 303. 6. It is by no means certain that he had read it (in fact he admits that before going to America he had rather vague ideas about the United States: Huth and Pugh, op. cit., p. 139) but it is worth noting that his library, auctioned in London in 1793 with dismal financial results, contained almost the entire corpus of our polemic. In addition to Buffon, of course (two copies: and on May 21, 1795 Talleyrand was ac- quiring another copy: G. Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand [Paris, 1928-34], IV, 41) and de Pauw, and be- sides La Condamine and Raynal, Talleyrand owned Pernety's and Cook's travels, Jefferson's Notes, Robertson's History (original and translation), Carli's Lettere amenicane, Mazzei's Recherches, Chastel- lux's journey with Brissot's criticism, and numerous other works dealing with America (A Catalogue of the Entire, Elegant, and Valuable Library, Late the Property of Mons. De Talleyrand Perigord . .. [n.p., but London, 1793]: nos. 25, 260, 352, 571, 742-43, 860, 931, 936, 1008, 1213, 1260, 1276, 1293, 1354, etc.). For this library, which certainly does not prove that Talleyrand was really informed about our polemic, see Poniatowski, op. cit., pp. 17, 41, 63-64. 327 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD of depopulating the Old. From every point of view, in fact, "forget Amer- ica," the diarist-diplomat repeats: the Old World offers us sufficient land and resources and problems, and (but this is taken for granted) a much pleasanter way of life.7 At this same time, around the turn of the century, the sciences of liv- ing nature too, in fact, were beginning to move away from the questions set forth or sketched out by Buffon and his contemporaries, and concern- ing themselves far more with the genesis and variations of the species in time than with their distribution over the face of the earth: biology, and in particular embryology, took the place of "natural philosophy" and ecology. Cuvier was revolutionizing comparative anatomy (1799-1805), rejecting the sublime speculations on the essence of life, and the closed and rigidly coordinated systems. And his study of fossils led him to some surprising conclusions, which among other things necessitated a revision of the very terms of Buffon's original problem: the Indian elephant is a very different species from the African elephant, and the fossil remains of the American elephant actually dictate its classification in a genus of its own, the mastodons.' Fourcroy, who in 1794 had denied the objective validity of natural classes, but defended the compact continuity of the scale of creatures, is by 1804 converted to Cuvier's school, which denied any possibility of forming such a scale or chain, and in its place saw in nature an infinite diversity, "thousands of independent chains, continuous in each of their series, but conflicting with or broken off from each other, and incapable of coordination."9 The result of these new attitudes was the slow but irreversible dis- solution of the basic antithesis between the fauna of the Old and New Worlds. When the Spaniards were exploring South America, Cuvier 7. See Memoires (Paris, 1891-92), I, 70-79, 229-47; letters to Lord Lansdowne, in Pallain, op. cit., pp. 419-54, esp. 425, 432 ("money is the only universal cult"), p. 443; and cf. Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux landis (Paris, 1863-70), XII, 12-133; A. Leroy, Talleyrand economiste et financier (Paris, 1907), pp. 125-41; B. de Lacombe, La vie privee de Tallevrand (Paris, 1910), pp. 63-107; A. Schalk de la Faverie, Napoleon et I'Amerique (Paris, 1917), pp. 99-102; Fay, L'esprit, pp. 270-72; idem, Biblio- graphie critique, p. 85; F. Baldensperger, "Le sejour de Talleyrand aux Etats-Unis," Revue de Paris, 31, no. 6 (November-December 1924), pp. 364-87, which should now be studied in conjunction with the notebook, which is published, regrettably only in translation, in Huth and Pugh, op. cit.; Lacour- Gayet, op. cit., I, 181-206, 302-12; IV, 40-48; D. Cooper, Tallevrand (Turin, 1938), pp. 59-67; J. Gaulmier, Volney (Paris, 1959), p. 203, and Poniatowski, op. cit., esp. p. 182 (loss of colonies). 8. Nordenskj6ld, op. cit., pp. 334, 337; G. Cuvier, Discours sur les Revolutions du Globe (1825; Paris, 1867), pp. 210-11. He remains close however to many eighteenth-century theories with his ex- planation of the disappearance of so many species as a result of "cataclysms," volcanic eruptions and subsequent floods (ibid., pp. 338-39). 9. Texts quoted by L. Febvre, "Un chapitre de I'histoire de I'esprit humain: Les sciences naturelles de Linn6 a Lamarck et a Georges Cuvier," Revue de Synthese Historique, 43 (1927), pp. 42-43; and in Civilisation: Le mot et I'idee, Premiere Semaine Internationale de Synthese (Paris, 1930), pp. 28-29. 328 Hegel and His Contemporaries admits, they found not a single European, Asiatic, or African quadruped; but that continent, like all the others, like the newly discovered New Holland, had its own animal species, which were a source of endless wonder to the naturalists who did not know them. If there were other continents to discover, other species would be found in them perhaps more similar to those whose fossilized remains have been discovered. But by now the whole earth is known, and the greatest problem remaining is to learn "in which strata one finds each species," to assign to each animal its geological age, not its present whereabouts.10 II. KANT: A NEW OPINION OF THE AMERICAN With the reforms of Kant philosophical thought too turned away from the antinomies between empirical concepts, like those of Europe and America, and from the disquisitions on the virtues and vices of the sav- age. Already perhaps by the end of the century nothing in de Pauw's Recherches can have seemed quite as inappropriate as its claim to be philosophique. Yet the thing that Kant himself had admired in de Pauw's writing, a few decades earlier, had been precisely the "philosophical" spirit, the attempt to examine the facts and reduce the confused mass of data to a system. I am certainly not going to turn my head to parchment [the philosopher had written with vigorous disdain] searching the archives for old semiillegible de- tails to scribble down about this. There are people who make the record office their business, but sooner or later someone must make some sensible use of it. In Pauw, even if nine-tenths of his material is unsupported or incorrect, the very effort of intelligence deserves praise and emulation, as making one think and not simply read thoughts. After all [Kant's lecture notes insist] we do not want to turn our brains into mere picture galleries or registries for the storage of the names and faces of natural phenomena." And in fact if we review what Kant wrote about the Americans, de Pauw's influence seems undeniable. In 1764 Kant still had a very high opinion of the savages, of those of North America anyway; and without inquiring into whether this was due to climate or chance or political regime, he described them as endowed with a strong sense of honor, frank and honest, proud and freedom- 10. Cuvier, Discours, pp. 42-43, 59-60. For Cuvier, Buffon's sole claim to distinction would be in the field of literature! (see A. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive [Paris, 1864], VI, 381). 11. Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, sec. 890, Akad.-Ausgabe, XV, 388-89 (cf. sec. 1482; ibid., XV, 671). The lines which follow extend the eulogy to Buffon, whose considerable influence on Kant's knowledge in the natural sciences is well known. The editor E. Adickes refers, for Kant's knowledge of de Pauw, to his Untersuchungen zu Kants physischer Geographie (1911), pp. 120, 189, 206; and suspects other derivations from de Pauw in secs. 987 (ibid., p. 431) and 1371 (ibid., p. 597). Kant was also familiar with Ulloa and with Cook's travels (Akad.-Ausgabe, IX, 316; XV, 536-38, 785, 795). And finally one should remember his notorious preference for authors of originality, even when their original- ity bordered on paradox (Akad.-Ausgabe, II, 516). 329 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America In his enthusiasm for man's battle to overcome the physical world55 Buffon does not quite go so far as to prophesy that the human race will one day succeed in making America teem with wild beasts. Nor will it be able to bring about any increase in the stature of these shrunken local species: the tapir will never be as big as an elephant or a hippopotamus. But "at least the animals transported there will not decrease in size." That's some comfort, anyway. VIII. THE LARGER SPECIES MORE PERFECT AND MORE STABLE THAN THE SMALL Implicit in all these comparisons and conjectures is an assumption that is not stated, but is nevertheless clear, and surprising. Buffon always starts out from the principle that the large is "better" than the small, the bulkier beasts superior to those of less volume, that physical strength is an at- tribute of the more perfect species. It would be too easy to reply with La Fontaine's boastful little mouse: Comme si d'occuper ou plus ou moins de place nous rendait, disait-il, plus ou moins importants!... Nous ne nous prisons pas, tout petits que nous sommes, d'un grain moins que les Elephants." It would be too easy to counter with some of the very recent theories according to which the inferior animals are essential in the economy of nature, while the earth could well do without the superior animals: "[It is] a kind of paradox ... [that] many of the lower forms of animal life [protozoa, insects, invertebrates, and vertebrates down to the smallest mammals] play an essential part in the economy of nature. On the other hand, it is far from easy to prove that some of the higher orders or families of mammals ['large mammals,' such as the ungulates and carnivores, apart from the primates] are necessary to the life scheme of the earth."57 And it would be too easy to remind him in this respect of those primitive species, massive and hugely powerful, that have completely disappeared from the face of the earth: the dinosaurs and the Baluchitheria, in com- parison with which the pachyderms and hippopotamuses dear to Buffon would make an even meaner showing than the tapir compared with the 55. On Buffon's lofty concept of man, understood in the Renaissance sense as a force opposed to nature, see, for example, G. Lanson, Histoire de la litteraturefran(aise, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1895), p. 742; E. Faguet, Dix-huitieme siecle (Paris, 1894), pp. 444-48. For Buffon, as already stated, the human race is one, and therefore, unlike the animals, is not bound to climate or geographic zones: "Man, white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and red in America, is only the same man tinted with the color of the climate" (Oeuvres de Buffon, IX, 2, quoted by Flourens, op. cit., p. 154). 56. Fables, bk. 8, fable 15: "As if occupying more or less space should make us, said he, more or less important! ... Small as we may be, we don't esteem ourselves one jot less than the elephant." 57. Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (London, 1948), pp. 64-65. 15 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD loving, like the ancient Spartans. All they lack is a Lycurgus to create a model republic. And chief Attakakullakulla is inferior to Jason only because he does not have a Greek name. Then again the women in Canada enjoy a rank and influence unequaled even in most civilized Europe. In the rest of America, on the other hand, the natives have no well-defined character and are distinguished only by an "extraordinary insensibility."" All in all, Kant's debt to the Jesuit missionaries' tales and classical comparisons seems obvious-just as there is no mistaking the Rousseauian coloring of his considerations on the pure and noble humanity of savages in general. But in 1775 Kant gives us an altogether different picture of the Ameri- cans; and in the new portrait we see emerging the very notions of deca- dence, imperfection, and coldness that de Pauw had theorized and put forth seven years earlier. The Americans are "eine noch nicht vdllig eingeartete (oder halb ausgeartete) hunnische Race" "a not yet properly formed (or half-degenerated) subrace," from the stock of the Huns or the Kalmucks. Both their physical appearance and their "frigidity and insensi- bility of temperament" give proof of their ancestors' long residence in the glacial regions of the North: their vital force is almost extinct ("eine halb erloschene Lebenskraft.. ."), and they are too feeble for any sort of agricultural labor.13 Again in the notes for his lectures on Menschenkunde, oder philo- sophische Anthropologie, which in their early versions belong to the pre- Critical period (they began in 1772-73), Kant describes the torpid Americans in absolutely de Pauwian terms: The American people are incapable of civilization. They have no motive force; for they are without affection and passion. They are not drawn to one another by love, and are thus unfruitful too. They hardly speak at all, never caress one an- other, care about nothing, and are lazy.'4 Nor does his opinion change in the essay of 1788, On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, where the climate is said to make 12. Beobachtungen lber das Gefllhl des Schbnen and Erhabenen (1764). IV Abschnitt. in Akad.- Ausgabe, II, 243n., 253-55. In the notes for his course in physical geography of ca. 1758, Kant, relying on collections of travels and on Bouguer and La Condamine, had described Chile and the Chileans in the most favorable light: the people are of a happy and lively character, Spanish horses become swifter and more beautiful there. The Peruvians on the other hand are found to be incredibly lazy and indif- ferent to everything (Akad.-Ausgabe, XIV, 632-33). 13. Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen (1775), Akad.-Ausgabe, II, 433, 437; the words in parenthesis were removed in the 1777 version; see E. Adickes, Kant als Naturforscher (Berlin, 1924- 25), II, 412-14. On his sympathy for the cause of the American rebels, see King, op. cit., pp. 86-89. 14. Menschenkunde oder philosophische Anthropologie, ed. F. C. Starke (Leipzig, 1831), p. 353 (in the pages that follow there are various concordant opinions on the "savage"). In the notes the sub- stance of his verdict was the same: "The Americans insensitive. Without affection and passion, unless for revenge. Love of liberty is here mere idle independence. They do not speak, do not love, care about nothing. Mexico and Peru accept absolutely no culture" (Akad.-Ausgabe, XV, 877). The Americans in- capable of governing themselves and destined for extermination: ibid., p. 878. 330 Hegel and His Contemporaries the American race "too weak for hard work, too indifferent to pursue anything carefully, incapable of all culture, in fact lower even than the Negro."' An even more synthetic form of the same notion appears when Kant sets himself the question of whether the human race is young or old, and concludes that it is young, observing, among other proofs, that "one whole continent [is] half brutish and scarcely populated."'6 But in the definitive version of the Menschenkunde (1798) he omits the whole section referring to the various races, the Americans included."7 Not through any change of heart, however. In the Metaphysik der Sitten (1797), the American natives are again said to be inclined to indolence, but even if this were not so they would still be few and scattered "in the deserts of America" through lack of a state, and thus of any juridical organization, and thus of any adequate supply of food - with which the ancient thesis of a shortage of food in America is no longer deduced from the sterility of the soil, but from the absence of organized societies.'8 And finally the late work on Physical Geography contains scattered ref- erences to America, still considered to be very little known, especially in its southern part.'9 Kant repeats that the Patagonians are not true giants (p. 428),20 mentions the flattened or spherical skulls of the redskins (pp. 433-34), and reaffirms that some American tribes represent the lowest level of humanity (p. 316). He notes that all domestic animals and European fruits have been quite successfully acclimatized in America,21 but that there are no lions (p. 336) and the birds, though beautiful and richly colored, do not sing well (pp. 354, 430). Man, lastly, develops precociously in the tropics, though he never reaches the perfection of 15. Quoted by Adickes, Kant als Naturforscher, II, 415n., recalling the concurring opinions of Buf- fon and de Pauw, and the disagreement of Clavigero, cited by J. Unold, Die ethnologischen und an- thropogeographischen Anschauungen bei Kant und Forster (Leipzig Inaugural Dissertation, 1886), p. 32. 16. Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, sec. 1453, Akad.-Ausgabe, XV, 634-35. On the animal character of the savages, cf. ibid., sec. 1260 (XV, 555). The passage from savage to civilized life, from the minority to the majority of the human race, is the most arduous of all history, from which one can deduce: "The world is still young. One half of it is barely discovered" (ibid., secs. 1423, 1498, 1500-01; XV, 621, 779, 789). Cf. "The Americans: rough, wild, barbarous," ibid, sec. 1497; XV, 771. 17. Akad.-Ausgabe, VII, 320; Werke, ed. Cassirer (Berlin, 1912-22), VIII, 214; Kant simply refers back to the work of H. R. Girtanner, Ueber das Kantische Prinzip fUr die Naturgeschichte (Grittingen, 1796; see also Adickes, Kant als Naturforscher, pp. 104-08). On the various versions of the part re- ferring to the races, see also Akad.-Ausgabe, XV, 875-76n. References to the inertia of the Carib: Cassirer ed., VIII, 122 (and Akad.-Ausgabe, XV, 339, 817), and to the meager eroticism of the Ameri- can men (?) in a marginal note, Cassirer ed., VIII, 578 Cf. in Akad.-Ausgabe, XV, 554: "The savages are not at all disturbed by sexual inclination." 18. Metaphysik der Sitten, secs. 55, 62. 19. Physische Geographie, ed. and reworked by F. T. Kint, p. 802, Akad.-Ausgabe, IX, 229, 233-34. Several times, for example ibid. p. 430, Kant says that great discoveries can be expected from Hum- boldt's travels. 20. He had already written in a note of 1758 that Patagonia "is reportedly inhabited by giants, but this is not known for sure" (Akad.-Ausgabe, XIV, 631-32). 21. Op. cit., p. 431. In Africa, on the other hand, the animal species are found to have degenerated: ibid., pp. 314, 317. 331 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD the temperate zone22 - all clich6s by now mechanically repeated with- out any particular emphasis,23 but with a power of suggestion so strong that not even the mighty intellect of a Kant could resist them. It should be said that he was effectively helped in this by the most re- nowned naturalists of his time and his circle, those whom he would naturally draw on for factual data and critical judgments. Far from scorn- fully rejecting de Pauw's libels, they discussed his opinions with all due solemnity and happily accepted his pronouncements and conclusions. The famous Blumenbach, the magister Germaniae of academic mem- ory (but who is still recognized in today's textbooks as the founder of physical or comparative anthropology), mentions de Pauw a dozen times24 already in the doctoral dissertation which won him immediate fame, the De generis humani varietate nativa (GOittingen, 1775), and accepts his criticisms of Linnaeus on the subject of the orangutan, although he does find them to be "severe censures" toward a man so deserving of the highest esteem for his many other merits.25 And Kant read and studied Blumenbach, wrote to him that "your works have taught me much"'26 and referred to him in glowing terms in a celebrated passage of the Cri- tique of Pure Reason,27 while Blumenbach, for his part, openly admitted his great debt to Kant's minor writings, and in particular to the one which dealt with the races of humanity.28 Even more significant than these ideological relations between the anthropologist and the philosopher are perhaps those between Kant and Zimmermann, author of some of the earliest treatises on zoological 22. Ibid., p. 316. Negative verdicts on the mulattoes and the Creoles in the Anthropologie: Akad.- Ausgabe, XV, 598, 601, 760, 878. 23. Being largely unaware of the precedents, Adickes concludes that Kant's verdicts on the Ameri- cans in the period 1775-88 show clearly "how perfectly hypothetical are both the point of departure and the deductions" and that Kant delights in building "castles of fantasy" (Kant als Naturforscher, II, 416; but cf. II, 459, 491-92: Kant's theories on race among his claims to fame) in support of his gen- eral thesis "that Kant was no more than a brilliant amateur when it came to matters of scientific detail" (P. P. Wiener," Jeans's Physics and Philosophy," Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 [ 1943], p. 487, and Adickes, op. cit., II, pp. 483-85, 492-93). For Haldane, on the other hand, Kant "understood the nature of scientific thought in a manner which is entirely impossible to the mere student of science and its his- tory" ("Kant and Scientific Thought," in Possible Worlds, p. 129). Cf. also B. M. Laing, "Kant and Natu- ral Science," Philosophy, 19, no. 74 (November-December 1944), pp. 216-32. 24. Op. cit., p. 34n. (correcting an error of his relating to the membrana nictitans); 47 (on the Pata- gonians); 55 (on the Portuguese in Africa becoming like Negroes); 56 (on the mestizos and the quad- roons); 27 (on the "Ochavones" and the Puchuela); 67 (on the Americans' mania for deforming, dis- guising, or in some way modifying their bodies); 75 (on the hairlessness of the men of America). On Blumenbach, see the article in the Enciclopedia Italiana, and ibid., III, 583, and Nordenskj6ld, op. cit., pp. 306-09. The elder Forster, J. R., father of Georg, was familiar with his works: B. Smith, op. cit., p. 63. On his contacts with the younger Forster, see Kersten, op. cit., pp. 173-74 and passim. 25. Op. cit., pp. 81-82. 26. Letter of 5 August 1790, in Briefwechsel, ed. H. E. Fischer (Munich, 1912), II, 155. 27. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790, sec. 81, ed. Insel (Leipzig, 1921), p. 324. The passage immediately caught the attention of Salomon Maimon, and inspired him to lofty and audacious speculative rhapsodies (cf. his letter to Kant, 15 May 1790, in Briefwechsel, II, 150-53). 28. Letter of J. H. I. Lehmann to Kant, 1 January 1799, in Briefiiechsel, III, 264. 332 Hegel and His Contemporaries geography, who had borrowed a number of theses, arguments, and ob- servations from the acrid and outspoken Recherches. It was actually Zimmermann's opinion of his essay about the races of humanity that inspired Kant to reflect further on the subject.29 While Kant finished up by appropriating de Pauw's pronouncements on American humanity, Zimmermann, in his major work, either respectfully discussed or openly supported de Pauw's assertions on the quadrupeds, the inhabitants of the various continents, and in particular on that midpoint between man and beast, the homo sylvestris, the orangutan of the forests of Borneo and the Congo. Based on extensive documentation from travelers, naturalists, and scientists of every period and academy, the Specimen zoologiae geog- raphicae, quadrupedum domicilia et migrationes sistens (Leyden, 1777) is a real monument of learning and "natural philosophy": a fine quarto volume of more than seven hundred pages, rounded off by the first geographical map of the distribution of the mammals over the globe.30 In this meticulous and pioneering work it is hardly surprising that Buffon is quoted on very nearly every page; what is surprising is that de Pauw's scandalous work is mentioned already in the preface, and then at least fifteen times more, usually with the author's agreement and always with his deepest respect. Zimmermann agrees with de Pauw concerning the greater frigidity of the American environment (p. xiii), the characteris- tics of the Nordic peoples (p. 63), the factors of degeneration inherent in the climate, food, or customs (p. 58), the beautiful Acansas, the Danes of America (p. 66), the Negroes' woolly hair (p. 78), the monstrous albinoes (p. 231), the men that change color (p. 79n.), and the spreading of rodents from Lima throughout all America (p. 223)- a just reward, the professor says, for the many maledictions that the New World heaped upon the Old (one can just picture Mickey Mouse scuttling around taking revenge for venereal disease and punishing America for the revolution in prices). De Pauw is numbered among the authors "fide dignissimi" (p. 74), and it is repeatedly said that no one observed such and such a phenomenon better than he did, or resolved such and such a problem more acutely than him. When Zimmermann finds himself obliged to contradict de Pauw, or even just to question one of his statements, he prefaces his 29. Letter of 4 July 1779 to Johann Jacob Engel, in Briefivechsel, I, 215. 30. Cf. Oscar Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde (Munich, 1865), pp. 673-74 (cf. also 650, n. 1). Part of the map is reproduced in the Enciclopedia Italiana, XXXV, 1009. Jefferson possessed a copy of the French translation of the first part of the work (Catalogue of the Library, I, 469-70), and cites Zimmermann in the Notes on the State of Virginia (ed. Peden [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955], p. 26) and in a letter of 14 May 1809. 333 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD objection with a series of profound obeisances: "I certainly would not wish to contradict a man possessing the erudition and intellect revealed by de Pauw, who so acutely explained natural matters in accordance with the purest rules of philosophy" (p. 39). On the other hand he is ready to side with de Pauw, even when he is attacking celebrities like Boerhaave (ibid.), or, simultaneously, such a venerable and imposing pair as Buffon and Linnaeus - although, come now, he might have shown a little more respect for the latter at least! De Pauw is right, without a doubt, on the matter of the orangutan, but why does he rail against the illustrious Swede as if he was intent on abusing and ridiculing him?31 And it is all very well to refuse to believe in the Patagonian giants, and point out the very valid arguments against the legends of their existence, but why the bared fangs, why such acrimony (mordace dente), "when the truth could have been defended without insult and vituperation"?32 The peace-loving Brunswick zoogeographer (as previously the GOittingen anthropologist) is scandalized by de Pauw's notorious insolence and aggressive zest, but still sees no reason to make common cause with his detractors. Pernety and his "prolix" Examen are dismissed in a footnote.33 All in all, de Pauw's iconoclastic outburst did some good. It subjected ancient fables, myths, and mirages to the coldly ironic eye of Reason. And the most learned Eberhard August Wilhelm Zimmermann deigns to offer the support of an argument of his own-the cowardice of the Peruvians in the face of the Spaniards, compared to the valor of the Cafras against the Portuguese-to the many proofs with which de Pauw "showed the natives of America to be feebler than all the other inhabi- tants of the earth."34 Thus the science of the day, in its most "official" form, was not content merely to adopt the shameless and savage slanders of a man like de Pauw, but proceeded eagerly to produce new evidence to support his thesis. But his mischievous delight in raising Cain and winning a cheap laugh at the expense of learned and painstaking researchers was still repellent to serious writers, indeed to all serious people. All right, so Linnaeus made mistakes. Nobody is arguing about that. But in the attitude toward the error, what a difference between the publicist and the professors! 31. Specimen, p. 400; cf. in fact the Recherches, II, 57, 71-72. 32. Specimen, p. 68. 33. Ibid., p. 72n. The Histoire (1770) is mentioned on p. 669, because it confirms, on the subject of the seal, "what I had already previously suspected in my first chapter [see, in fact, Specimen, p. 253], be- fore examining Pernety's travels." In a note on the German translation of William Bartram's Travels, Zimmermann affirms with de Pauwian peremptoriness that "the Tiger is actually found nowhere in America," on which see N. Bryllion Fagin, William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore, 1953), pp. 90-91. 34. Specimen, p. 592. Elsewhere too Zimmermann, meditating on the fact that the Americans had not yet domesticated the wolf into a dog, deduces therefrom a Buffon-de Pauwian thesis: "Perhaps this can produce a new argument to show that neither America itself nor its inhabitants, who have not yet tamed such a useful animal, can be as ancient as some have believed?" (p. 91). 334 Hegel and His Contemporaries They know very well that there is no call to turn the place upside down over a single error, however serious. Making mistakes is mysteriously coessential with the very search for truth. Whoever seeks is liable to err. Whoever thinks will wander and stray. For someone like de Pauw, convinced of the infallibility of Reason, error deserves only scorn and disgust. Blumenbach and Zimmermann, on the other hand, even while they are defending the authors of laws and rigid systems, like Linnaeus and company, seem to remain more open to the libertarian entreaties of the Sturm und Drang, with their demands for respect and reverence for the fallible and fallacious geniuses of scientific inquiry, great even in their aberrations, almost as if they were so many storm-tossed heroes or blinded supermen. In any case, this is really not the first time that the unconventional boastful blusterer turns out to be more timid and enslaved to the con- ventions of his time, more the captive of torpid fashion, and less revolu- tionary in deed, than the careful and unambitious drafter of plodding treatises, and maybe even the compiler of college notes. "Les esprits forts savent-ils qu'on les appelle ainsi par ironie?" III. THOMAS MOORE: A WRETCHED PEOPLE IN A SPLENDID LAND In this new political and intellectual climate, then, one might rea- sonably have expected to see the dispute wither and die, disappearing without trace. Instead it is precisely at this period that the "slander" of America achieves its fullest (and least significant) triumph, with its adoption by Hegel; it is precisely now that Humboldt opposes it with renewed energy; and even if in fact it seems to be somewhat forgotten by pamphleteers and scientists, its work goes on, both as a persistent source of irritation to the Americans, as we already saw, and in evoking frequent echoes, sometimes querulous, sometimes prophetic, in two specific groups of writers, one of poets and one of mystics. Neither could of course bring anything new to the debate; even their main sources often remain uncertain, so that we shall not be overscrupulous about the occasional breach of chronological order. But with them the polemic flares up again, in one more belated irridescent glow, so that Hegel's harsh and unrelenting condemnations, rather than blazing alone in the desert, are accompanied and heightened by the occasional expression of pity or horror, a few wholehearted vituperations, and the odd ingenuous and innocuous apocalypse. Blake was both poet and mystic. But his rhapsody America (1793) contains only an impassioned and inflated exaltation of the revolt of the colonies. Washington, Franklin, Paine,35 and Hancock appear amidst 35. Blake was a friend of Paine, and protected him (Howard Fast, Citizen Tom Paine [New York, 1953], pp. 215 ff., 239). 335 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD the smoke and glare of crimson meteors, like gigantic figures planted on the American shore of the Atlantic, rampant with anger and prophetic fury, while a number of divinities constructed de toutes pieces flit across the stormy scene punctuating the angels' tears and the stirring blasts of apocalyptic trumpets with ambiguous prophecies. Yet even Blake's poem is a sign of a newly acquired poetic dignity for America-the fol- lowing year he wrote another "prophecy," Europe-now admitted into the company of the great lyric themes, not only as object of discovery and conquest, but as concrete symbol and theater of a new destiny. At this same time Andre Chenier was drafting his Amerique, which was to be a work of twelve thousand lines; and Viscount Chateaubriand was heading toward Niagara and the Mississippi, and clouding their ex- oticism with tones of morbid sentimentality, but presenting French litera- ture and the redskin tribes with a pathetic Cornelian heroine and a kindly old patriarch dripping with Christian wisdom;36 while Goethe was in- troducing America into the reworked Meister as the antithesis of Europe, and the land of the Future.37 Clearly the concept of America grew steadily richer and more com- plex through these widely varying expressions and interpretations, so that almost without the need of any polemics as such it could escape the crude alternatives of the dispute and resist all attempts at summary definition. The vigorous political affirmation of the United States in par- ticular brought a new and disconcerting element into the discussion. It was the first time that a European "colony" had won its freedom and indeed boasted of being the equal in everything of the continent from which it had sprung, and capable, with its untapped and unlimited re- sources, of surpassing and defeating it. Europe, like any elderly parent confronted with an offspring's youthful feats and precocious insolence, was split between a benign and approving pride and an impatient all-holy desire to let go with a few hearty clouts round the ears - or at least a few grave words of wisdom on the conduct expected from the scion of a de- cent family. On the other side of the Atlantic, as we have already seen, the theories of Buffon and de Pauw were no longer discussed, but derisively and an- grily cast in the faces of the Europeans: they were held up as the proof of the incapacity of the inhabitants of the Old World to understand the 36. "I took with me [on returning to France] ... two savages of an unknown race: Chactas and Atala" (Memories d'outre-tombe, I, bk. VIII, chap. 12; ed. Levaillant [Paris, 1950], I, 359). On the nonreality of Atala, see already Volney, "Eclaircissement sur les sauvages," in Oeuvres, p. 727n. (and now Gaulmier, op. cit., p. 274). On Chateaubriand see below, pp. 352-58. 37. See E. Beutler, "Von der Ilm zum Susquehanna: Goethe und Amerika in ihren Wechselbezie- hungen," in Essays um Goethe (Leipzig, 1941), pp. 401-02. On Goethe, see below, pp. 358-72. 336 Hegel and His Contemporaries men and things of America, and thus, by one of those logical somersaults in which the acrobatic genius of politics so cheerfully excels, as one more argument to exalt the greatness and glory of the new state. All those in Europe, on the other hand, and particularly in England, who still nurtured some feelings of bitterness or distrust toward the too recent and already provocative sovereign independence of the United States, were quite prepared to make use of geophysical arguments to rebuff their boasts and aspirations. Typical, in this regard, is the case of Thomas Moore, the Irish bard, who, in 1803-04, crossed the whole of America from Bermuda to Canada. On the one hand Moore is filled with enthusiasm for the imposing grandeur of the American landscape, for the richness and magnificence of a placid but powerful nature-and thus far from accepting the concepts of the slanderers of the continent. But both his writings and his letters, on the other hand, express a com- plete disdain for the new society, which he finds to be miserly, quarrel- some, and uncouth, and shamed by the comparison with the surroundings in which it grows and of which it is unworthy - so that his conclusion, and almost his coup de grdce, is an explicit reference to Buffon's and de Pauw's picture of the American Indian, a "very humiliating" picture, but much more exact than the "flattering representations" of Mister Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia.38 The actual result of this compromise between romanticizing exoticism and patriotic anger is the disintegration of the whole Buffon-de Pauw system. The formula "an ugly race in a sublime country" is the necessary transformation of the classic anti-American thesis "an ugly race in a hor- rendous country" resulting from a double ideological influence: on the one hand the corrosive romantic rehabilitation of nature wild and un- bounded, on the other the criticism leveled at the arrogance and political moralism of the North Americans. This reversal is however so symp- tomatic that Moore goes on to repeat the facile antithesis ten times over, until it begins to sound like a banal mechanical inverted echo of the cli- matic theories - the excellent earth produces the worst of men - and there come flooding into one's mind other similar cliches, like the "paradise inhabited by devils," for example, the label applied for many centuries to Naples and its kingdom.39 America too is depicted as a land thrice happy, a haven of peace "far from the shocks of Europe" - safe even from 38. "To Thomas Hume Esq. M. D.," in the Poems Relating to America in Poetical Works (ed. Lon- don, 1865), p. 101 and n., published for the first time in Epistles, Odes and Other Poems, 1806. Moore too had admired, near Niagara, the statuesque build and the athletic activities of the Tuscarora redskins ("Preface to the Second Volume," ibid., p. xxi). 39. See B. Croce, Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia (Bari, 1927), I, 68-86. The contrast "between the advantages of the climate and the savagery of the inhabitants" was noted and wondered at by the first describers of Brazil (Romeo, op. cit., p. 121) and later by the earliest explorers of the Austral regions (B. Smith, op. cit., p. 247). 337 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD those fiery and death-dealing comets that have so often "into chaos hurled / The systems of the ancient world" !40 America is a new Eden of unconfined vastness, a miracle "which man /Cag'd in the bounds of Europe's pigmy span, I Can scarcely dream of."41 And yet this world, where only demigods should walk, is destined to produce nought but a "half-organised, half-minded race/ Of weak barbarians," and worse, to take to its bosom "the motley dregs / Of every distant clime / Each blast of anarchy and taint of crime I Which Europe shakes from her perturbed sphere."42 All this immense and bewitching America, with its mountains and gardens, with its great shining lakes and rivers rushing onward like conquerors, behold, as soon as it is filled with inhabitants " 'tis one dull chaos, one unfertile strife / Betwixt half-polished and half-barbarous life. 43 It is useless then to nurture hopes for the "future energy and greatness of America." Its early degeneration, "this youthful decay," announces its approaching ruin: "Even now, in dawn of life her sickly breath / Burns with the taint of empires near their death; / And, like the nymphs of her own with'ring clime / She's old in youth, she's blasted in her prime."44 Again in the last composition of the collection Moore recalls the long pleasant evenings spent in conversation and song, when he would tell his American friends of the poets and heroes and glory of Europe, and they would listen in silence and resign themselves with a sigh: "They have listen'd and sigh'd that the powerful stream I Of America's empire should pass, like a dream / Without leaving a relic of genius. .. ."45 One can imagine the angry response that Moore's lines drew from the North Americans - and he himself, with obliging compunction, mentions it several times.46 40. "To Miss Moore," loc. cit., p. 88. 41. "To the Lady Charlotte Rawdon," ibid., p. 105. Note the characteristic contrast with tiny agi- tated Europe, which soon became a cliche. 42. "Oh... say, was world so bright, but born to grace I Its own half-organised, half-minded race [here the references to Buffon and de Pauw] / Of weak barbarians swarming o'er its breast, / Like vermin gendered on the lion's crest?.. . to nurse I The motley dregs I Of every distant clime I Each blast of anarchy and taint of crime / Which Europe shakes from her perturbed sphere?" ("To Thomas Hume," loc. cit., p. 101). America, Europe's Elysian refuge sub specie naturae, becomes its jail and cesspit sub specie societatis! Hence Moore's mockery of Brissot's "revolutionary" enthusiasm (loc. cit., pp. 86, 89 n. 1; cf. below, chap. 9, sec. 5, "The Quakers, the Marquis, and the Girondist"). An im- mediate precedent for his attitude can be found in Dietrich von Billow, Freistaat von Nordmerika in seinem neuesten Zustand (Berlin, 1797), who describes the North American citizens as the dregs of Europe and the climate of the United States as extremely healthy, but rejects the generalizations of "Raynel" on the barrenness of the soil (Doll, op. cit., p. 497). 43. "To the Hon. W. R. Spencer," loc. cit., p. 103. 44. Preface; "To the Lord Viscount Forbes," ibid., pp. 86, 99. A slender and forlorn possibility of America yet becoming great is discussed in the lines "To the Hon. W. R. Spencer," ibid., p. 104. 45. "To the Boston Frigate," loc. cit., p. 108. 46. See Poetical Works, pp. xxii, 86, and An attempt to vindicate the American character, being principally a reply to the animadversions of Thomas Moore (Philadelphia, 1806), cited by G. Vallat, Etude sur la vie et les oeuvres de Thomas Moore (Paris, 1886), p. 50n. Moore is again accused of sus- 338 Hegel and His Contemporaries 339 IV. VOLNEY AND PERRIN DU LAC: CRITICISMS OF THE NORTH AMERICANS On the very eve of Moore's American journey the same ideas were expressed with less passion and less poetry by Volney in his Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats Unis (1803). Volney, a belated philosophe, had spent several turbulent years (1795-98) in North America, and had been a friend of Jefferson. His thoughts had turned to America even before he set out (1782) on his famous expedition to Syria and Egypt: "I was tempted by the newborn America and the Savages."47 He was also very familiar with the Notes on Virginia, had been advised by Jef- ferson in the preparation of his own book, and like him (see above, p. 256) at a certain point mentions Franklin's meteorological observations as blatant contradiction of the assertions of "Dr. Pauw."48 At this point the reader is referred to a footnote, where the author adds the curious comment: "It is a strange book, M. Pauw's Researches on the Ameri- cans." He himself read it only on his return from America, "to profit from the great enlightenment ascribed to him" (as a matter of fact de Pauw's reputation was in full decline by the end of the century), but he dropped the book in horror when he discovered its author's frivolity, presumption, love of paradox, and polemic acrimony.49 But although he rejects the geophysical pessimism of the Recherches, quotes Molina and Humboldt,50 and carries out an objective analysis of the soil and climate, winds, and rainfall of North America, which in fact earned him recognition as the real founder of American scientific geog- raphy,51 Volney still sees no reason to share the optimistic visions of the pecting "sordid motives" beneath America's enthusiasm for liberty by Prof. Ephraim Douglas Adams, The Power of Ideals in American History (New Haven, 1913), p. x; and another American observes obliquely that Moore made only "a brief tour of the Eastern cities" [sic] and spent most of his time "with British naval officers whose ships were in port and with wealthy Federalists, who bitterly resented Jef- ferson's control of the government" (D. Smalley, in a note to his edition of F. Trollope, Domestic Man- ners, p. 244n.). Which does not however explain Moore's particular attitude, nor his explicit reference to the thesis of the degeneration of man in America. Cf. also Jones, Strange New World, pp. 304-05. 47. Quoted in Gaulmier, op. cit., p. 31. 48. On his relations with Franklin, see Gaulmier, op. cit., pp. 28, 49, 65, 205. 49. Tableau, X, sec. 2, in Oeuvres completes, p. 680b; on his relations with Jefferson, cf. the Cata- logue, IV, 211-14, and J. Gaulmier, op. cit., pp. 204, 210, 218, 247, 255, 258-59, 260, 264, 268, 293, 298. In the Observations gendrales sur les Indiens et sauvages de I'Amerique-Nord too, Volney men- tions the fact, well known to all travelers, that the savages remove their hair, "but of course the para- doxical Dr. Pauw seized on this anomaly to support the edifice of his dreams" (ibid., p. 713b; cf. Jef- ferson already, above, p. 259, and Mazzei, p. 272). Volney also rejects de Pauw's thesis attributing the savages' resistance under torture to a supposed physical insensibility: "Truly, they would need to be more insensible than oysters and trees!" The real cause is their exaltation, substantially the same as the fanaticism of the religious martyrs (ibid., p. 723). Cf. also Gaulmier, op. cit., p. 274 (against the "good savage"). 50. Oeuvres completes, p. 648a. "He has read everything one could have read in his time on the geography of America" (Gaulmier, op. cit., p. 269). 51. Remond, op. cit., p. 255; and Humboldt? and Oviedo, then?... On his climatic theories, cf. Gaulmier, op. cit., p. 57. On his rejection of the American illusion that the climate of the United States is the best in the world, ibid., p. 273. 16 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD elephant, or the llama craning his neck as he strives to compete with the giraffe. When at a later stage in the development of his ideas he has to recog- nize that the mammoth is extinct, one detects a strange admiration, a Bossuet-like note of heartfelt sorrow in his funeral oration for the enor- mous beast: "The prodigious mammoth no longer exists anywhere. This species was certainly the first, the largest, the strongest of all quadrupeds; since this species has disappeared, how many others, smaller, weaker, and less noteworthy, must have perished without having left us evidence or information on their past existence.""58 Thus for Buffon the mammoth assumes symbolic value, just as the great men of the world did for Bossuet, those whose deaths furnished an exemplary warning to we other "less noteworthy" and duly awestruck mortals. The oraison funebre has a different subject, but the same tone. Buffon has somewhat vague ideas on the state of the fauna before the flood, but he is not the man to shrink from any problem that presents it- self to him. The problem of the relationship between the size and the evolutionary state of an animal is squarely faced and discussed in his es- say bearing the significant title Concerning the Degeneration of Animals (1766): "The size of the body, which appears to be only a relative quan- tity, does in fact have positive attributes and real significance in the order- ing of nature: the larger animal is as fixed in this ordering as the smaller is variable."59 It is the advantage of the great over the small to be fixed and invariable. Or, if we break up this law into its component elements: the large is superior to the small; the fixed is superior to the changeable; the large is more fixed than the small. All these relationships seem at first to be somewhat arbitrary. Let us consider them one by one. IX. BUFFON'S AVERSION FOR MINUTIAE AND SMALL ANIMALS The probable source of Buffon's preference for large animals, or at least a point of some significance in his psychological makeup, was the fact that he himself was a man of commanding physical presence. Buf- fon was a strong, well-built person and proud of it. Hume found that he 58. Passage quoted by E. Perrier, La philosophie zoologique avant Darwin (Paris, 1884), p. 64. It was precisely the huge animal fossils that induced Darwin to undertake a critical revision of Buffon's theory; see below, p. 454. 59. Oeuvres completes, XIX, 21, repeated by Goldsmith, op. cit., I, 260. Cf. Glass, op. cit., p. 103. It seems possible to find a somewhat sounder logical foundation for another of Buffon's theses, clearly related to this one: namely that short-lived animals have undergone more changes or are more variable (from the prototypes) than long-lived ones, because, in an equal span of time, they have passed through a considerably greater number of generations (cf. Glass, p. 100). And one could draw direct corollaries concerning the cold and humid continent (America) from the related Buffonian theory that the larger animals are also those with more heat, which degenerate when heat is lost (or do they degenerate through loss of heat on the part of the environment?) (Glass, p. 236). THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD free citizens of the new republic. Brissot's and Crbvecoeur's idyllic por- traits provoke only his irony.52 Like Moore, in fact, he actually begins his work with a denunciation of "the romantic error of the writers who refer to a collection of the inhabitants of Old Europe - Germans, Dutch- men, and especially Englishmen of all three kingdoms-as a new and virgin people." This fundamental objection was to be diligently taken up both by Gobineau- "But who are these new arrivals? They represent the most varied specimens of those races of old Europe from whom least is to be expected. They are the products of the refuse of all times; Irish- men, Germans, so frequently half-breeds, a few Frenchmen who are no less so, Italians who surpass them all"53 - and by Proudhon: "The people of the United States, . . . is not a young people at all . . it is an ag- glomeration coming from all corners of Christendom, principally England and Germany," and is indeed the dregs of those countries.54 To the Americans' boast of their national virtue par excellence - their youth- he replies with typical eighteenth-century harshness, and in ac- cord with his constant mockery of Rousseau and his model savages, that with this vaunt America "conceals her present weakness behind her plans for future greatness," and that her people do indeed deserve the epithet young, but only "for their inexperience and the enthusiasm with which they surrender to the pleasures of fortune and the seductions of flattery."55 Their progress cannot be explained by the excellence of their political institutions - Volney brought down on himself the wrath of John Adams for his severe criticism of Adams's defense of the constitution of the United States-and in any case they have been moving steadily further away from the principles of the revolution. The North Americans' prosperity is due to geopolitical circumstances, to their insular location, to their lack of powerful neighbors, and their remoteness from every theater of war. In fact - Volney goes on, with considerable insight - every European war brings the United States more advantages, and reinforces "the natural and progressive direction of her ambitions toward the archipelago of the Antilles and the surrounding continent."56 The target of criticism shifts decisively from the continent to the new 52. Gaulmier, op. cit., pp. 199, 209, 216. 53. Essai sur l'ingalite des races humaines (1854; 4th ed., Paris, n.d.). II, 536. 54. La guerre et la paix (1861; Brussels, n.d.), I, 71. 55. Tableau, prdface, ed. cit., p. 631, and Gaulmier, op. cit., pp. 271, 273. Cf. above, chap. 6, n. 86. See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, VIII, 424-27; F. Baldensperger, Le mouvement des idees, I, 195-06, and G. Chinard, L'homme contre la nature, pp. 76-77, 115. And, for later echoes, Miss Martineau, for whom see below, pp. 491-95. 56. Tableau, preface, ed. cit., pp. 631-32. Volney also mentions, and rejects, the boasts of the Americans based on the vastness of their territories: ibid., p. 633. On his fame and influence, see Re- mond, op. cit., pp. 254-55. 340 Hegel and His Contemporaries state that had arisen therein, from the physical to the sociopolitical sphere, even though Volney never managed to complete the political and social part of his study, perhaps also for personal reasons.57 The same period saw the appearance (1805) of a book by another Frenchman, a minor official very little known and certainly less read then and today than the illustrious Volney, but a man not lacking in good sense and almost always diametrically opposed in his viewpoint to the author of the Tableau. As explained in the far from brief, indeed an- tiquatedly long-winded title of his account-Journey to the two Louisi- anas and to the savage Nations of the Missouri, through the United States, the Ohio and the Provinces bordering it, in 1801, 1802 and 1803, together with an outline of the manners, usages, character and religious and civil customs of the Peoples of these diverse countries- Perrin du Lac is more interested in the savages than the colonists and citizens of the United States. But his account of the North Americans' political institu- tions presents a picture of liberty, order, and supreme happiness. The young republic is in every way different from and superior to Europe. In their manners and customs too, her citizens "seem to have as their fundamental rule to do nothing like us."58 However, in one way at least they are like the Europeans: in their fierce national pride and the embryonic but already vehement imperialism. Forgetting the help they received from France, "they think themselves the finest warriors in the world, because they obliged a few savage na- tions to sue for peace, or because they have a fleet (so they call their wretched little flotilla) in the Mediterranean, laying down the law to the beys of Tunis and Algiers.""59 One can be sure that they will soon claim their "natural boundaries," will then eject the Spanish and French from the new continent, and finally, after a violent revolution, will aspire to occupy the place that has so far been denied them "in the political bal- ance of the world."60 57. For which see Gaulmier, op. cit., p. 265. 58. Voyage (Paris, 1805), pp. ii-iv, 103. 59. Op. cit., pp. 99-100; further irony at the expense of the "formidable American army," ibid., p. 151. 60. Op. cit., pp. 438-42: the revolution will shake their fine but fragile constitution, and "the most advantageous result of this struggle will be the separation of the states of the North from those of the South" (ibid., p. 101). For other prophecies of a schism between North and South in the United States, see Remond, op. cit., pp. 539 (1814, 1817, 1818), 672 n. 27 (1842), 711 n. 53 (1831, 1844), 712 (1833), 735 (1829). The city of Washington will be the theater "of troubles which will surely divide or rend the most beautiful lands of the new continent" (ibid., p. 91). For other contemporary fears about the ex- pansionism of the United States, whose final triumph will bring about the end of civilization, see Echever- ria, Mirage., pp. 243-44, who also mentions the criticisms of Perrin du Lac in the organ of the Ideo- logues, the Americanophile Decade philosophique, ibid., p. 259. 341 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD In wholehearted contrast to this radiant prophecy is Perrin's descrip- tion of the physical, psychological, and social conditions of the North American citizens. Addicted to the most vulgar pleasures, they are un- worthy of the freshness and grace of their young womenfolk: to whom the Frenchman pays the compliment of likening them to his own com- patriots, finding them less seductive perhaps, but more serious and sen- sible. Unfortunately they age quickly, lose their bloom before twenty, and usually their front teeth before they are even eighteen! And what causes this premature decay? "Most travelers attribute it to their habit of drinking very hot tea." But Perrin has an even more singular theory: "I am inclined to believe that this sort of malady is the result of the in- frequency with which they wipe their noses." It's all a question of mucus. And in fact the upper incisors are the first to decay and fall out.6" A little more use of the handkerchief-this is the real remedy for pyorrhea! And - if we may paraphrase a once-famous toothpaste commercial-a smile will be enough to reveal the virtues of blowing one's nose. Among the men there is not the smallest sign of genius. Franklin and Washington alone, perhaps, can really be called great men. Of Jefferson, who had been at such pains to combat this very accusation of America's want of genius (see above, pp. 262-63), of Thomas Jefferson, so much admired by Volney, and incumbent President, the sous-prfet Perrin du Lac has nothing good to say at all: he is a factionalist, a jealous and suspicious demagogue, with a mania for agriculture, a mean and pusil- lanimous man. Certainly he wrote the Notes on Virginia, but "he has hardly more merit as a writer than as President of the United States."62 The Notes, "a work on the statistics of Virginia," is almost the only text quoted by Perrin du Lac.63 But it seems to me that there can be little doubt of a familiarity with de Pauw, and/or some of his echoes or op- ponents, in an author who could say of the savages' beards that "some writers have claimed that nature withheld from them the mark of virility, 61. Voyage, pp. 30, 35, 104-08. The charge against warm tea, made by Volney too (Tableau, pp. 688-89; Gaulmier, op. cit.. p. 202), can probably be traced back to Peter Kalm, quoted in O. Handlin, This Was America, pp. 15-16, and is faithfully repeated by abb6 Robin, op. cit., p. 39: "The loss of their teeth ... is attributed to the tea." The good abb6 was also persuaded that tea weakened the fiber (ibid., pp. 167, 185) and is disappointed to note the early onset of old age among American women (ibid., pp. 15, 39-40). Other writers blamed warm bread and cakes (Dingwall, op. cit., p. 40). On premature old age in the redskins, see Beltrami, op. cit., p. 31. 62. "Caring little about rendering his country respectable in the eyes of the foreign nations, he would like to condemn it to being merely agricultural, without trade or political solidity," op. cit., pp. 87-89, 438-39; in short a sort of precursor of the Morgenthau plan for Germany! Cf. also, below, chap. 9, sec. 5, "The Quakers, the Marquis, and the Girondist." 63. There are fleeting references to Liancourt (Voyage, p. 95) and the naturalist Michaud (more prop- erly Michaux, Franqois Andre: ibid., p. 243), whose Voyage ai l'ouest des Monts Alleghanys ... (Paris, 1804), was recommended to Jefferson by John Vaughan (8 July 1806) with the vindictive comment: "Abbe Raynal would have (if alive) to reverse his stigma of Degeneracy . . ." (in Catalogue of the Li- brary of Jefferson, IV, 210). 342 Hegel and His Contemporaries which is the external characteristic of man in all countries; but this is a gross error" ;64 who denied the existence of fierce quadrupeds in Amer- ica - the black bear, and the jaguar, or panther, are not at all dangerous - and who vaunted rather the goodness of the meat of those inoffensive beasts; and who on the other hand extolled the presence in the New World of all the game species found in the Old, while admitting that they showed differences that embarrassed the naturalists: "The most remark- able thing is their smallness.""65 V. KEATS: THE FLIGHT OF THE DRYADS Moore and Volney became the target of violent attacks from the North Americans, but there was no transatlantic reaction whatever to the dis- mal portrayal of North America by a slightly later and much loftier poet than Moore, John Keats. Not that the Americans looked with benign in- dulgence on an occasional outpouring from the mournful, sublime cantor of autumn and the Grecian Urn. Not that they were grateful to him for that famous image of his - the earliest lyrical effulgence prompted by the New World-in which the sudden revelation of Homer's poetry is sub- limated into the wonderment of Balboa and his companions when they first gazed down from a Darien mountaintop on the vast gleaming ex- panse of the Pacific. No, the reason is more banal: until a few years ago nobody had realized that those particular lines of Keats (the "Lines to Fanny," 1819, first published in 1848) actually described America. All the most authoritative critics, including even Colvin arid Middleton Murry, two Keats spe- cialists, believed them to be a poetic delineation of some imaginary wilderness, a somber cheerless fantasy, quite unrelated to any geographi- cal reality. The very extravagance of the description precluded any possibility of recognizing the territory of the North American union in that savage satire. While from one point of view this shows that the Buffon-de Pauwian theories and descriptions fell into total oblivion in the second half of the nineteenth century, from another it is a clear in- dication that they were so much "in the air" at the beginning of the cen- tury that they could furnish a whole arsenal of disparaging motifs to 64. Op. cit., pp. 345-46. The other defenses, of the savages' pure breath, strong teeth, agility, etc., are a mere paraphrase of Lahontan, op. cit., p. 93: curiously secondhand, for a traveler who had observed the savages in person. For that matter various other of Perrin du Lac's "observations" (p. 184, for exam- ple, on the savages' marriage customs: cf. Lahontan, op. cit., p. 230) are more redolent of the oil lamp than of pure springwater. And in fact quite recently Perrin du Lac has been accused of copying word for word from the manuscript of a certain J. B. Trudeau, who had traveled in Missouri: F. Grenier, "Un plagiaire illustre, F. Perrin du Lac," Revue d'histoire de l'A mrique FranCaise, 7 (1953-54), pp. 207-23. A copy of Perrin du Lac's book is to be found in one of the Private Libraries in Creole Saint-Louis: see McDermott, op. cit., p. 154. 65. Voyage, pp. 249-52. 343 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD anyone who for one reason or another felt ill disposed toward the New World. Keats was never in America. And though it occasionally crossed his mind to visit it he was always repelled by the idea of taking up permanent residence in America, even when his beloved brother and sister-in-law settled there: "It is quite out of my interest to come to America. What could I do there? How could I employ myself?"66 But the absence of his loved ones leaves him desolate, and anxious about their fate in such a distant land (Kentucky!); Keats reread Robertson's History of Amer- ica,67 and in his feverish and agonized imagination conjured up a whole vision of squalor and hidden threats to his dear ones "dungeoned" in "that most hateful land." Nature, the great infallible Nature, for once seems to have erred. Amer- ica is malformed and bereft of poetry. The dismal currents of this "mon- strous" land harbor no divinities with weed-strewn locks; the winds are frozen scourges, and the thick and sunless forests would fright a dryad. If we turn from mythology to natural history, and from wood nymphs to domestic animals, Keats's plaintive verses carry an echo of more fami- liar charges: the prairies of dry weeds starve the famished oxen searching for sustenance, the flowers are bad68 and perfumeless, the birds without the sweetness of song.69 This want of melodious birds was, as we well know, one of the com- monest and most typical charges laid at America's door. But for the poet whose masterpiece was the "Ode to a Nightingale" this muteness was a sinister compendium of everything silent and repulsive. "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" Where that magic voice is lacking, death and despair reign supreme. And how does Keats invoke the nightingale, from his very first stanza? "Thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees." So: 66. Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 17-27 September 1819, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. Buxton Forman (London, 1948), p. 423. For his dreams of travel, ibid., pp. 194, 448. 67. Copious documentation in Harold E. Briggs, "Keats, Robertson and 'That most hateful land'," PMLA, 59, no. 1 (March 1944), pp. 184-99, which was the first work to identify Keats's source. In 1949 Prof. Hiiusermann, of Geneva, furnished the unapprized Middleton Murry with the same in- terpretation (see the Times Literary Supplement, 18 November 1949, p. 751), whereupon it was included in the fourth and last edition of the latter's Keats (New York, 1955), p. 50. 68. Keats's editors, such as Buxton Forman (The Poetical Works of John Keats [Oxford, 1934], pp. 438-39), are surprised at the epithet "bad" applied to flowers, and develop the curious notion that the poet may have written "buds" and then forgotten to remove it! Other, perhaps rather too ingenious, ex- planations of the "bad flowers" in Briggs, op. cit., p. 192, n. 43. One might also consider Keats's declared insensibility to the beauty of exotic flowers (letter of 14 February 1820, in Letters, p. 465). 69. "And no birds sing" is also the refrain of the celebrated "Belle Dame sans Merci," written by Keats about this same time and possibly containing other echoes from Robertson (see Briggs, art. cit., pp. 195-97, and contra, "Ten Days in the Life of Keats," Times Literary Supplement, 14 March 1952). In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1949), A. D. Atkinson confirms that Keats was probably familiar with the works of Buffon, and Cook's travels (see also Letters, p. 456), and that traces of them can be found in his poetry. But there is no need to look further: Robertson mentions those negative characteristics of the American fauna too. 344 Hegel and His Contemporaries and the dark forests of the "Lines to Fanny" "would fright a Dryad." It is not an accidental echo: it is a thematic refrain. In fact the motif reappears once again, right at the beginning of "Lamia" (1820).70 The poet evokes the mythical age when the Fates had not yet driven the nymphs and satyrs from the woods, nor the glittering Oberon "frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns." Thus for Keats the flight of the dryads represents the twilight of classical nature, the corruption of everything beautiful, the death of the eternal Pan. There is no place for the dryads in the grim forests of America. And there's more yet. The setting of some extemporaneous and half- humorous lines included in a letter from Keats to his brother and sister-in- law in America71 is at the same time "both fairyland and America,"72 just as the "hateful land" was simultaneously America and some be- witched country. There too the woods are sad and mute: "so lone and wild, / Where even the Robin feels himself exil'd." There too, rivers and streams scurry by dark and frighted like the dryads: "the very brooks as if affraid I Hurry along to some less magic shade." And there is even a talking mule from Tahiti, a strange quadruped that seems instead to have escaped from the pages of the History of America,73 and even some real savages, evil "Monkeymen," that live in the trees. Of the men, on the other hand, the "Lines to Fanny" say nothing: they suffer rather than share the "errors" of nature. Evidently Keats was thinking then of his brother and sister-in-law, rather than the redskins or the citizens of the young republic. But there are other places where he gives his opinion of each of these groups. Some of his incidental com- ments on the savages have seemed closer to Robertson's realism than Rousseau's idealization.74 And he refers to the North Americans quite bluntly and without admiration in a letter to his brother, which in fact makes fun of his friend Dilke, a naive believer in Godwinian perfect- ability, who imagined-and was not the first to do so; there had been a Berkeley to give voice to the same prophecy - "that America will be the country to take up the human intellect where England leaves off." No, one should not delude oneself. America has had great men certainly, a Franklin, a Washington, but when all's said and done, these gentlemen were vulgar people: the first a philosophizing Quaker given to banal and miserly maxims, the second so mean he even sold the horse that had car- 70. In the same poem one notes other curious derivations from Robertson (R. Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year [London, 1954], pp. 171-72). 71. "When they were come into the Faery's Court" in Poetical Works, pp. 349-52, and Letters, pp. 321-24. 72. Gittings, op. cit., p. 108. 73. Ibid., p. 109. 74. Cf. Briggs, op. cit., pp. 197-98. 345 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD ried him through all his campaigns. How could they have the mark of true greatness? "The humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime."75 Let the young couple, George and Georgiana, infuse a little "Spirit" into the "Settlement," and Keats will pray-prays, in fact, in gay and nimble lines that are at the same time both chant and spell- that their expected child may be the first American poet: "Little child / 0' the Western wild / A Poet now or never!"76 The couple duly produced the awaited child- and then another, and another, and another- eight in all, counting both sexes. But never a single poet. VI. BYRON AND SHELLEY: THE RECHERCHES SUR LES GRECS AND THE RADIANT DESTINY OF THE UNITED STATES Just how personal and unusual these outpourings of Keats are becomes clear when we compare them with the convinced and fervent approval of America shown equally by his bosom friend Shelley and his critic Byron. In both one and other, so much at variance in their judgment of Keats's poetry, but united in their sorrow at his squalid end," the enthusiasm for the liberty secured and successfully defended by the North Americans overrides all other considerations: a political and occasional motif, but one framed and gloriously reflected in the ancient vision of the world's destiny marching inexorably westward (see above, pp. 129 ff.). Lord Byron hailed Washington as "the Cincinnatus of the West,"78 and in the United States' rise to power saw the last hope for liberty, so trampled down in Europe.79 His hopes are supported on the one hand by memories of great deeds of classic times, summoned up to embellish the latest triumph of America and her first president;80 and on the other by a muffled echo of the naturalistic theories, with the twice-repeated ref- erence to the United States as a region-"one great clime"- whose "vigorous progeny" hold high the banner of liberty across the far Atlantic ("Ode on Venice"). 75. Letter of 14-31 October 1818, in Letters, p. 235. 76. Ibid., p. 237; cf. Gittings, op. cit., pp. 19-21. 77. See Byron's letter to Shelley, Ravenna, 26 April 1821, in Works, ed. T. Moore (London, 1832- 36), V, 144-45. 78. "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte" (1814); ed. cit., X, 15. 79. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1817), IV, 96; ed. cit., VIII, 233; "Ode on Venice" (1818), ed. cit., XI, 181-86. Cf., on the other hand, the diffidence of the aging Wordsworth, a conservative and moralist: even if he set no store (1833) by the vulgarity of the Americans' manners- "that comes from the pioneer state of things"-he regretted their attachment to money and base politics. Worse still, there were no "gentlemen" among them, and their morals were poor. So said the venerable poet to the young enthusiastic Emerson (see his English Traits, XI, in Selected Essays, ed. Nelson, pp. 224-25); and some years later he composed two sonnets against the Americans as degenerate descendants of the Pilgrim fathers and the Pennsylvanians who had become forgetful of the morality of the Quakers (Poeti- cal Works, ed. T. Hutchinson [London, 1895], p. 515). 80. "Don Juan," 1819-24, VIII, 5 (ed. cit., XVI, 214) and the closing lines of the above-mentioned "Ode on Venice." On his idealization of the Polynesian natives, see "The Island, or Christian and his Comrades" (1823), in Works, ed. cit., XIV, 299-356, and B. Smith, op. cit., pp. 249-50. 346 Hegel and His Contemporaries An even more explicitly optimistic prophecy appears in Byron's diary of a few years later, in a passage transcribed by Thomas Moore, the selfsame slanderer of the Americans, in his life of the poet. After men- tioning his pleasure in accepting the homage of a young American, Byron adds that he is always glad to receive the visits of citizens of the United States, in particular because he respects the people that managed to win their independence with firmness and without excess, but also because it gives him a feeling of talking with his own posterity: "In a century or two the new English and Spanish Atlantides will be masters of the old countries, in all probability, as Greece and Europe overcame their mother Asia in the older or earlier ages, as they are called."" History has not lost its bearings; it marches ever onward to the West. Byron was no less flattered when an American squadron dropped an- chor in the port of Leghorn, and he received the invitations and com- pliments of the officers, as well as the flirtatious attentions of some of the ladies, although he was not slow to realize that all this obsequious adula- tion was due more to his reputation as an anglophobe than his fame as a poet. He concludes, nevertheless, "I would rather... have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor."82 The American cap- tain-the celebrated Chauncey who carried the United States flag "to the shores of Tripoli"- also offered Byron a passage to the New World; and the artist Edward West, who painted Byron's portrait on the com- mission of the American officers, actually gained the impression that the poet was on the point of accepting the offer.83 It is certainly true that Byron wrote to a friend just at this time to ask for precise information on the situation in South America, "I mean Bolivar's country," where he was thinking of buying some land and settling down. Although he insists that his friend be absolutely objective, it is quite clear that he hopes to be told something that will encourage him in his project. He concludes, in fact: "I have read some publications on the subject, but they seemed violent and vulgar party productions."84 Could it possibly be that he was referring to the violent and "party" Recherches of our own de Pauw?... 81. Extract from 1821: ed. cit., V, 200-01. 82. Letters to Murray and Moore of May and June, 1822; ed. cit., V, 335-37, 341-42. 83. Ibid., V, 346; on the commission, V, 336, 341. Other details in His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. J. E. Lovell (New York, 1954), pp. 290, 296-301, 321. Already in 1815 Byron told Ticknor that he intended to visit the United States, but his American interlocutor re- mained sceptical, with justification, about the seriousness of this proposal (Life, Letters and Journals of G. Ticknor, I, 59, 68). 84. Letter to Mr. Edward Ellice, 12 June 1822, ed. cit., V, 342-43. Later, in fact on the eve of his death at Missolonghi (1824), while continuing to admire North American institutions, he told Parry that the Americans, conceited and egocentric because they lacked a glorious national past, had brought with them from the Old World "some of the worst vices of European society," which had then become aggravated in the soft climate of the slave-owning South, and concluded: "I have no love for America. It is not a country I should like to visit" (His Very Self and Voice, pp. 570-7 1). 347 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD One thing is sure: that Byron knew and as a good philhellene despised de Pauw's third Recherches, on the Greeks, published in 1787: a con- siderably more cautious and less scandalous work than the previous ones, in which de Pauw exalted the Athenians as the sole creators of Hellenic civilization, and treated the Spartans, Aetolians, Thessalians, and Ar- cadians on the other hand as plain barbarians, delightedly vilifying the bloody institutions of the illiterate Lycurgus, a lawmaker without genius or originality, and showing that the Spartan women were base and dis- solute, and their men belligerent, maybe, but not brave.85 The Correspondance of Grimm, Diderot, etc., in describing these Recherches, deplores de Pauw's weakness for paradox and absolute lack of respect, but goes on to admit that he is learned and clever-"in the matter of erudition, he is perhaps the finest mind of the age"-and concludes with the opinion that the third Recherches is "a real libel" on the Lacedaemonians. But it was studied by the young Wilhelm von Hum- boldt;86 and mentioned again, disdainfully, by Antonio Padovani, pro- fessor of statistics at the University of Pavia, who rejected its estimate of the population of Attica- "such calculations are as false as the rest of his researches""7-and then by Macaulay in 1838.88 Dr. Johann Bernard Merian, on the other hand, better known as a par- ticipant in the debates on the "Homeric question," immediately recom- mended it to his friend Cesarotti: "Some Researches on the Greeks by Abbe Pauw have just come off our press, a work very worthy of your interest. In it you will see ancient Greece in a new light, and you will have no difficulty in recognizing the author of the Researches on the Americans, the Chinese and the Egyptians"; and on yet another occasion he spoke to him of "The Researches on the Greeks by Abbe Pauw, a most singular book, filled with paradoxical novelties, where among other things the great legislator Lycurgus and the whole republic of Lace- daemon are very much mistreated." Cesarotti replied somewhat cautiously: "He [Pauw] is a bold thinker, he has new ideas, and subtle thoughts, but he abounds, and superabounds, in defending his own opinions, and might one not sometimes apply to him what Horace said: Mihi res non me rebus submittere conor-'I try to submit the things to myself, not myself to the things'? However that may be, I am grateful to him for having first dared to defy the general 85. Recherches sur les Grecs, II, 307-24, 326-27 (English translation: Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks [London, 1793]). The third Recherches also figures, in the original edition, in the library of Adam Smith, who possessed only the third volume, the Defense, of the first Recherches, on the Ameri- cans (A Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith, p. 139). 86. R. Leroux, G. de Humboldt-La formation de sa pensee jusqu'en 1794 (Paris, 1932), p. 379. 87. Delle finanze di A tene e di vari mezzi di accrescerle - Discorso di Senofonte tradotto ed illustrato da A. P. (Pavia, 1821), p. 89. 88. "Sir William Temple," in Essays and Lays of,Ancient Rome, p. 466. 348 Hegel and His Contemporaries prejudice of other writers, who follow one another like sheep on the sub- ject of the Spartans, whom I love and respect no more than he does, de- spite their fierce patriotism, their savage virtues and political capuchi- nism." Merian in turn wrote back: "You might depict M. I'abb6 de Pauw equally well in the simple phrase, mihi res, non me rebus. I have known him personally, it was I that previously published his Americans, and more recently his Greeks, not without suppressing a considerable amount of material in the one and the other. I must do him the justice of saying that he did not take offence at all. He is a very good man, basically. And his pungent and somewhat ruthless tone is only the result of his retired and solitary way of life. Here is an anecdote that will make you know him rather better, and to his advantage. He had spent a year at Potsdam, during which our King Frederick sent for him every evening, because he was very fond of his conversation. At the end of the year the King, of his own accord, awarded him a pension of a thousand crowns. From that moment abb6 Pauw found it impossible to stay there: he renounced the pension, left Potsdam, and went back to Xanten. Despite the paradoxes strewn throughout his book on the Greeks, it still seems to me to contain wider and more philosophical views than M. Barth6lemy's" (i.e., the famous Voyage du jeune Anacharsis). Our abb6's warlike and sarcastic spirit had thus lost none of its vigor. Not only do we find him picking quarrels with all his old enemies: with Rousseau, "the most inconsequential reasoner that ever appeared,"90 with the sects of mystics and illuminists that were to be found every- where at the close of the eighteenth century," with the congenital stu- pidity of the Spanish and Portuguese aristocrats,92 and the very latest theories on the cooling of the terraqueous globe and the existence of Atlantis." Not only does he persist with his polemic naivetes, as for instance where he opposes the exaggerated descriptions of the Athenians' luxury with the supremely obvious fact that in Athens "the individuals' dwellings, compared to the principal houses of London and Paris, were no more than hovels.""94 But he expands his field of criticism to include Winckelmann and Mably,95 recent fashions (see above, pp. 87-88), and the ancient coats of arms of Europe, "these Gothic and barbarian hiero- 89. 3 February 1790, in Melchiorre Cesarotti, Epistolario, III, (vol. 37 of the Opere [Florence, 1811]), pp. 57, 95, 119, 126-27. On Merian see the Enciclopedia Italiana, sub voce; B. Croce, Biblio- grafia vichiana (Milan-Naples, 1947), pp. 386, 388-90; F. Nicolini, Divagazioni omeriche (Florence, 1919), pp. 77-92, 95-112. 90. Recherches sur les Grecs, II, 167; cf. above, p. 53. 91. Ibid., p. 151. 92. Ibid., I, 144. 93. Ibid., p. 87; allusions to Buffon and Carli? 94. Ibid., p. 281; cf. the descriptions of Cuzco, above, p. 57. 95. Ibid., p. 89, 113, 365n.; II, 163-64. 349 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America had more the build and manner of a marshal of France than a scientist.60 "He was very fond of taking objects and creatures in order of size," and he began his history of the birds with the ostrich "which is as it were the elephant of the genus."61 In fact, "it seemed as though the greater stature with which he himself had been endowed by nature made it diffi- cult for him to lower himself to study the smaller things. He would will- ingly consider the cedar of Lebanon, but the hyssop seemed too small to warrant his interest."62 The fly, he once curiously stated, must occupy no more space in the naturalist's mind than it does in nature.63 Such disdain was completely anachronistic at a point in time when a good century and a half had passed since Father Acosta first warned his readers that "from the very meanest and smallest animals one may derive much important study and profitable philosophy" (Al lector). It was no less long ago that Galileo's defense of his "little" satellites of Jupiter had included an eloquent and highly original plea for the virtue of tiny things, of minuscule animals and organs of restricted volume, concluding with a hymn of praise to Nature for deriving and producing "the most marvelous operations . . . from the most tenuous means."64 Giannone (and after him Costantino) had insisted in his unpublished L'ape ingegnosa on "the perfection of very small animals like the ants and the bees" ;"6 Aldovrandi, following in the footsteps of the author of a 1564 treatise on painting, had exalted the beauty of the insects: "Thus the wisdom of God shines forth in these minuscule little animals";66 Torquato Tasso had exalted "the great power of the great Lord, revealed in the tiniest things";67 and the revolution brought about in biology by the Dutch microscopists was al- ready nearly a hundred years old. One of the earliest English micro- scopists, Henry Power (1632-68), a disciple of Thomas Browne, had written in 1663 that the ancients, since they did not possess that miracu- lous instrument, described the very smallest animals "perfunctorily... as the disregarded pieces and hustlement of the Creation. In these pretty 60. C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (Paris, n.d., but 1924-28), II, 79; XIV, 330. 61. Ibid., X. 61. 62. Ibid., IV, 357. 63. Ibid., X. 61. For similar contempt for the oyster, etc., see Daudin, op. cit., pp. 155-56. "The pas- sage from the small to the large often occupied Buffon's attention, which is not surprising really, con- sidering his two predominant interests: comparisons and great dimensions" (Hanks, op. cit., p. 205; cf. pp. 209, 213, 226). 64. Letter of 21 May 1611, to Mons. P. Dini, in Epistolario (Leghorn, 1872), I, 121-22. From the telescope to the microscope: in 1624 Galilei took with him to Rome the occhialino that enabled him "to see the smallest things from close to" and with which he had "contemplated many tiny creatures with infinite admiration" (quoted in G. de Santillana, Processo a Galileo [Milan, 1960], p. 316). 65. G. Ricuperati, "Alle origini del Triregno: la Philosophia Adamito-noetica di A. Costantino," Rivista Storica Italiana, 77, no. 3 (1965), p. 606. 66. E. Battisti, L'antirinascimento (Milan, 1962), p. 271; and in Le soleil d la Renaissance (Brussels, 1965), p. 175. 67. Mondo creato, V, 596-97; ed. cit., p. 176. 17 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD glyphics, which the princes of Europe call their arms";96 and even manages to treat the noble English thoroughbreds as he had treated the quadrupeds of South America: "the English have very much degraded the strain of their horses with the races at New-Market"- a statement that was to scandalize Lord Byron97 - and to defame the University of Oxford as he had defamed that of Lima: "In these sumptuous palaces, known in Oxford as the schools, one can only with difficulty and at enormous ex- pense form a mediocre man in a hundred years."9" De Pauw does not of course forget the Americas, nor the American savages, nor does he modify his basic opinion of these "savage and bru- talized peoples"; but he does eventually point out certain features that they share with all primitive peoples, and in particular their keen feeling for music, however crude. He recalls Forster's account of the bagpiper whose playing drove the South Sea Islanders into incredible ecstasies; and the well-known fact that a missionary in South America gained much better results with his guitar than with theology.99 They also have war songs, which have the opposite effect, spurring the savages on not to acts of bravery but to bloodthirsty vendettas, just as the songs of Tyrateus and other warrior-bards fed the passion and ferocity of the Lacedae- monians.100 But in effect, as he struggles to bring the Spartans down to the level of the savages, de Pauw finds it impossible to avoid bringing the American natives up a little toward the level of the crudest of the ancient Greeks. Thus to prove that the Spartans could have been cunning without being intelligent, he refers back to Robertson's observation that even the most 96. Ibid., I, 363; cf. contra, Phorkyas's reply to the question of the Coretides: "What are arms?" (Faust, II, 3). Viscount Chateaubriand, on the other hand, mocks the heraldic mania of the North Ameri- can parvenus: "They display the chivalric blasons of the Old World, decorated with the serpents, lizards, and parakeets of the New" (Memoires d'outre-tombe, ed. cit., I, 353). 97. Recherches, I, 155; cf. Byron, note to "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1811) in Works, ed. cit., VIII, 123. 98. Recherches, I, xv; cf. above, pp. 304-05. 99. Ibid., II, 121; on Forster, see above, pp. 171-73. 100. Ibid., p. 332. Already in the article "Ambrique" in the Supplement a I'Encyclopedie de Pauw had likened the savages' custom of killing their deformed children to the analogous and "barbarous" custom of the Spartans (loc. cit., p. 350b). The comparison between the crudest of the ancient Greeks (and also of the Scythians: see above, chap. 5, n. 446, and Horn, op. cit., pp. 459-60) and the American natives was almost instinctive, for that matter. Volney, having seen the savages of America, found that everything Thucydides had written of the Spartans could be applied to them-to the point where "I would happily call the Spartans the Iroquois of the ancient world" (Let'ons d'histoire, VI, in Oeuvres, p. 593, n. 1; cf. also H. N. Smith, op. cit., p. 294, n. 57). Melville compares the Lacaedemonians to his idolized Polynesian natives (Typee, XXIX, in Romances, ed. cit., p. 150). Other examples from 1705, 1766, 1810, 1820-57 in Pearce, The Savages, pp. 43, 100, 170, 190-91. Curious parallels between the Scythians and the savage Irish, on the one hand, and between the latter and the ferocious Indians of the New World on the other, are found in Jones, Strange New World, pp. 170-71. But the comparison was also utilized in a negative sense, to pronounce the Spartans and the Indians equally despicable (Eliza- beth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought [Oxford, 1967], pp. 177-79, 259-60, men- tioning Voltaire's scepticism on the subject of ancient Sparta, and accepting as valid de Pauw's thesis, even though he had been rebuked by Heyne for being far from meticulous in his work: ibid., p. 312). 350 Hegel and His Contemporaries degraded savages sometimes reveal "an astonishing sagacity," when their lives are at stake - as in fact do certain animals, instinctively.'' Examples and arguments of this sort, not to mention the very tone of the work, could only exasperate Byron, the glorifier of eternal Greece and a little later soldier and martyr in the cause of the Hellenes' revolt against the Turks. With Shelley all trace of polemic disappears; but the vision of the New World's future greatness is even more precise and iridescent. It occurs not in the "Ode to the West Wind" - despite the suggestive title-nor in the "Ode to the Lark," that joyfully warbling spirit so different from Keats's magic nightingale, just as the skies where it hovers and soars differ from the shadowy groves where the nightingale pours out his plain- tive melody; nor in the elegy on the death of Keats, the "Adonais"; but tucked away in that tedious poem, the "Revolt of Islam" (1817). This work too takes its point of departure from the Hellenic restless- ness under the Turkish yoke. The liberty sought by the Greeks found a sure omen, for Shelley as for Byron, in the liberty already won in Amer- ica. Over there, beyond the Western seas, there dwells "a people mighty in its youth," worshiping, albeit with the crudest rites, the ideals of liberty and truth. England, glorious but strife-torn parent, "turns to her chain- less child for succour now... That land is like an Eagle... whose golden plume . .. in the blaze of sunrise gleams / When earth is wrapped in gloom." The radiant destiny of this people will be "an epitaph of glory for the tomb of murdered Europe." They will be numberless like the grains of sand, will grow as rapidly as day succeeds the night, and all the world, with all its races, will sleep in their shadow.12 The most fanatical supporter of the Manifest Destiny could hardly ask for more. But the rapt vision includes one realistic feature: the new state will be a refuge and asylum: a meeting place for myriads of men, driven from their homes by the cruelty of proud and frightened tyrants. The decades which followed did in fact see the beginning of the great Euro- pean migration to North America, and the blossoming in the United 101. Recherches, II, 356. Is this perhaps why the anti-de Pauwian Caldas approvingly cites the Re- cherches sur les Grecs (Semanario, pp. 152-53n.)? See also Tanco's unusual verdict on the Greeks and Turks, above, p. 310. No less surprising is the citing of the Recherches sur les Grecs (I, 131 ff.) by the learned W. Rehm (Griechentum und Goethezeit [Bern, 1952], pp. 104, 402) as anticipating Herder's discovery of a mournful quality in Greek poetry. Herder talks of the sweet, most human melancholy in face of the fleetingness of life and youth. The "melancholic afflictions" referred to by de Pauw are mis- anthropy and misogyny! On de Pauw's denigration of the modern Greeks, see Byron, Works, VIII, 120. See also T. Spencer, Fair Greece Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron (Lon- don, 1954), pp. 109-10, 224-25, 241, 288. 102. "The Revolt of Islam," canto XI, stanzas 22-24; cf. Jones, Ideas in America, p. 271. Of Shel- ley's American dreams H. N. Brailsford wrote in 1913: "How ironical the vision seems to us" (Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle [London, n. d.], p. 247). But after the Marshall plan and all the rest, one no longer knows to whom the irony is most applicable! 351 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD States of socialistic communities and religious, anarchical, and economic experiments, resulting in a radical revision of the image of America in the hearts and minds of the tormented sons of ancient Europe. VII. CHATEAUBRIAND: AMERICA'S PERNICIOUS SPLENDOR Chateaubriand is a more complex case. It is established that he was in America, from 10 July to 10 December 1791, but still a matter of argu- ment whether in those five months he could have traveled, as he would have us believe, from Baltimore to the Niagara, and from there to the Mississippi and the Natchez.103 Whatever the truth of the matter, he con- tinued to exploit the American theme throughout his life, from the Essai historique sur les revolutions (1797) to Atala (1801) and Les Natchez (1801-26), and then again in the Voyage en Amerique (1827) and the Memoires d'outre-tombe (pt. I, bks. VI-VIII), and in fact, as a source of comparison and reminiscence, in all his writings. "Throughout his life he will proudly call himself the Savage, but he will use the prestige of savagery to conquer the most civilized of the old societies."104 It is not without reason, then, that he is looked on as the popularizer, if not the actual inventor (being preceded at least by Marmontel and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), of American pathetico-religious exoticism. This is both his greatest glory and his limitation. America for him is never more than a marvelous decor, a brilliantly colored backcloth for heroes and heroines of a confused and restless sentimentalism; but the basic issues of our dispute remain completely foreign to him. His red- skins are features of the landscape, and his landscapes, often nocturnal and always of exquisite literary craftsmanship, are mere melodious "states of mind." True, he was familiar with the Jesuits' letters and many of the travelers' descriptions, had read Buffon and waxed enthusiastic about Raynal, quotes Carli's American Letters and recommends Robert- 103. See J. Bedier, Chateaubriand en Amerique: Veritd etfiction (Paris, 1900); and in the Levaillant edition of the Memoires d'outre-tombe (Paris, 1949), I, 593-610, an overall survey of the various prob- lems relating to this journey. See also: A. Reyes, "Chateaubriand en America," in Obras completas, III, 426-32; and, particularly destructive, P. Martino, "Le voyage de Chateaubriand en Amerique: Essai de mise au point- 1952," Revue d'histoire littraire de la France, 52, no. 2 (April-June 1952), pp. 149- 64; Henri Guillemin, A vrai dire (Paris, 1956), pp. 49-56; P. G. Adams, op. cit., pp. 85-86; Richard Switzer, in the introduction (pp. vii-lxxiii) of his critical edition of Voyage en Amerique; Raymond Lebegue, "Structure et but du Voyage en Amerique de Chateaubriand," in Connaissance de I'tranger: Melanges offerts la memoire de J. M. Carre (Paris, 1964), pp. 273-78, which analyzes the mechanism of Chateaubriand's "whimsical inventions." The accent of exoticism, especially in Atala, is traced in R. Lebbgue, "Chateaubriand rv6lateur de l'Am6rique," Cahiers du Sud, 47 (1960), n. 357, pp. 173-82; see also idem, "Poesie et verit6: Le voyage de Chateaubriand en Amerique," Bulletin de la Socihte Chateaubriand, 21 (1964), pp. 12-21, and the summarizing article (with bibliography) "R6alites et re- sultats du voyage de Chateaubriand en Amerique," Revue d'histoire littdraire de la France, 68, no. 6 (1968), pp. 905-34; and also Manfred Gsteiger, "Chateaubriand in Amerika," Neue Ziircher Zeitung, 5 September 1968. Last of all, doing everything possible (and impossible) to bridge Chateaubriand's "credibility gap," Christian Bazin, Chateaubriand en Amerique (Paris, 1969). 104. A. Maurois, Chateaubriand (Paris, 1938), p. 69. 352 Hegel and His Contemporaries son's "excellent" History of America.105 But both his youthful belief in Rousseau1116 and the attachment of his middle and later years to sump- tuous and formal Catholicism keep him remote and immune from any argument that might cast doubt on the goodness of Nature or the Supreme Deity. De Pauw is mentioned just once, in a contemptuous footnote contradicting an opinion expressed in the Recherches sur les Grecs about the Mainotes or Maniottes.07 In Chateaubriand even the most typical themes of the dispute lose their edge. Their deprecatory overtones are subdued in a sigh, obscured in some flash of wit, or lost altogether in some factual observation. Of the theories on the degeneration of the American fauna-never accepted, et pour cause, by an anthropocentric finalist like the viscount, who moreover contrived to extract ethicoreligious arguments from the law that "man diminishes where the animal grows"0s - one catches a de- formed and almost grotesque echo when he talks of America's car- nivorous insects. These insects, seen under the microscope, are formidable creatures: they were perhaps these winged dragons whose skeletons one finds: reduced in size as matter was reduced in energy [whatever that may mean!], these hydras, gryphons and others, are today found, it seems, in the shape of insects. The antediluvian giants are the little men of today.t°9 Our miserable little present-day species are sextodecimo reductions of some massive prototypes, organic leftovers of the primitive world of monsters and titans. And as for singing birds, while it may be true that the first travelers found few in America, and those displeasing to the ear, today there are several species that sing as sweetly as Europe's thrush.110 In any case Chateaubriand's forests (even if he once speaks of the "dumb solitude" of the Canadian forests,"' and on another occasion of the "absolute silence" which reigns at noon in America's woods112) are anything but 105. See particularly the Essai historique sur les revolutions, in the Oeuvres completes, I, 29n. (Buf- fon: and II, 229, 340 and passim in the Genie and elsewhere), 30n. (Carli), 31n. (Robertson), 143n. (Raynal: and 21 In.; II, 281, 332, 367). On the influence of Raynal, see also A. Dollinger, Les etudes historiques de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1932), pp. 272-75; Villard, op. cit., pp. 318-19. On the literary influence of Fabre d'Olivet and Delisle de Sales on Chateaubriand: L. Cellier, "Chateaubriand et Fabre d'Olivet-Une source des 'Martyrs,'" Revue d'Histoire Litteraire de la France, 52, no. 2 (April-June 1952), pp. 194-206. 106. "I was then, like Rousseau, a great partisan of the savage state" (Essai, I, 299n.; II, 97, 416 ff.). 107. Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem (1811; ed. Paris, 1854), I, 75n.; cf. in fact Recherches, II, 414 ff. (see also T. Spencer, op. cit., pp. 224-25). Possible traces of de Pauw's anti-Spartanism in the Itineraire, II, 255-56? 108. G;nie, ed. cit., I, 149. See below, p. 356. 109. Memoires d'outre-tombe, pt. I, bk. VII, chap. 3 (ed. cit., I, 293). 110. Voyage en Amerique (1827), ed. cit., pp. 51-61, 108 (ed. Switzer, p. 213). God reserved the nightingales to Europe "to charm civilized ears" (passage quoted by Olschki, op. cit., p. 19, n. 17). 111. Essai, quoted by Switzer, in the critical edition of the Voyage, p. xiv. 112. Quoted by R. Lebegue, "Realitbs et resultats," pp. 928, 932. 353 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD quiet: they are filled with murmurs and trills, whisperings and rustlings, and transfused with mysterious harmonies echoing the distant thunder of mighty cataracts. "The forest is all harmony." The dryads, far from fleeing in terror, fill these woods with their eternal chorus.113 As for these unexpected dryads, we are obviously dealing with a par- ticular instance of the famous romantic polemic on the poetic value of ancient deities and mythological beings, whether pagan or Christian (Schiller, Monti, Wordsworth, Keats, Platen, Aleardi, etc.).'14 Moore bewailed the fact that there were no classic dreams to endow the land- scape of America with an aura of immortality.""15 America's "poeticity" was left anemic by its lack of nymphs and allegorical personifications of the aspects of nature. Writers did all they could to furnish the rivers of the United States, for example, with tutelary deities. Fantoni sang of the Delaware's "proud horns.""116 For Chateaubriand the Mississippi too has a forehead adorned "with twin crescents," and an "old and muddy" beard.117 These scholastic mythologies and lyrical fantasies affect everyone. The European finds them gripping, stirring, intoxicating, and the unwitting native is plunged into them as into his natural element. For Chateau- briand the savages and the redskins are most convenient heroes, and, whenever the occasion demands, dewy-eyed preachers. Chactas is a final incarnation of the sententious Antillean cacique; and he strikes us as strangely anachronistic at a time when the robust, athletic, and anything but Lascasian characters of Fenimore Cooper are about to emerge from 113. Voyage en Amerique and Melanges litteraires, ibid., pp. 78, 412. The objective Tocqueville was to note that Chateaubriand portrayed the forests "with false colors. In America he seems to have traversed without seeing it that eternal forest, damp, cold, mournful, somber and soundless," etc. (letter of 14 February 1851, in Oeuvres et correspondances inedites [Paris, 1861], II, 174; cf. De la demo- cratie en Amerique [Paris, 1951], 1, 21; in the Voyages en Sicile et aux Etats-Unis, pp. 167, 169, 336- 37, the dominant note is admiration mixed with dismay and uneasiness; see below, p. 378). But Volney had already stressed the silence and monotony of those forests, the fallen rotting tree trunks, the swarms of gadflies, which certainly do not produce "the charming effect dreamed about by the romantic writers in the bosom of our European cities" (quoted by Gaulmier, op. cit., p. 268). For the silence of the South American forest, see Darwin, in Moorehead, op. cit., p. 51. 114. Cf. for example B. Zumbini, Studi sil Leopardi (Florence, 1909), I, 264-80; and, on the attempt to furnish nature with a new mythology, 0. Walzel, "Nikolas Lenau," in Vom Geistesleben des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1911), pp. 333-42. 115. Works, p. 103b. On the possible transmigration of the Muses to the New World, cf. the even ear- lier prophecies and hopes of seventeenth-century English poets in Blanke, op. cit., pp. 311-13. 116. G. Fantoni, Poesie (Bari, 1913), p. 22 (in point of fact the horns belonged first to all to the Thames: on the curious transplantation, see Visconti, op. cit., pp. 98-99; and Pace, op. cit., p. 252). I 17. Chateaubriand, A tala, prologue, etc. See also the lament of Keats, above, p. 344, and, on classi- cism in the spiritual and political formation of the United States, the whole chapter "Roman Virtue," in Jones, Strange New World, pp. 227-72. On the sixteenth-century travelers' tendency to find in the New World everything recounted by the ancient Greek and Latin writers, see already the pertinent observa- tions of Humboldt, Reise, III, 397. On two later phases of the dissatisfaction over America's lack of easy poetic symbols (this time no longer classicist, but medieval) and for the destruction of myths and legends brought about by Columbus's discovery, cf. below, pp. 363-65 and 381 respectively. See also pp. 547-48. 354 Hegel and His Contemporaries the American woods."8 But the viscount is no longer satisfied with the old parallels with the Scythians and rude Helvetians and other such Rousseauian prosopopeias,"1 and, to find a place for these savages in the plans of Divine Providence, strains orthodoxy to its limits in imagin- ing a total palingenesis in America: "The Eternal revealed to his well- beloved son his plans for America: he was preparing for the human race, in this part of the world, a renewal of existence," the gradual and effective recovery of that primitive "sublimity" lost with Original Sin, and only potentially accessible to man by virtue of the redemption.20 The reality, unfortunately, as opposed to this truly sublime theological delirium, is totally discouraging. No, the United States is not the King- dom of God on earth. Already in the Essai of 1797, the very same work that talks so freely of "American empire" and endows the battlefield of Lexington with the title of "philosophical land," Chateaubriand includes a ferocious satire against the Quakers -"and even a little against all Americans," as he was to write in self-excuse thirty years later.121 The cities of the United States are new, cold, monotonous; the customs-if indeed one can talk of customs, since "what they have there are habits rather than customs" - are frivolous, corrupt, very different from the expected Republican austerity. "With each passing day I thus saw my dreams dissolve, one by one, and that hurt me deeply." In the New World there are no monuments or traditions, although this at least is compen- sated for- Chateaubriand is a real virtuoso in logical and stylistic equilibria and balancements-by the forests, which are ancient, and by liberty, which is eternal: the former the daughters of the earth, the latter the mother of society.122 As he sums up, taking the Americans into his confidence, or at least the few to whom he feels he can bare his soul, the young Chateaubriand makes things quite clear: "I love your country and 118. These too, one need hardly say, no little "romanticized." One should reread those other beauti- ful, frighteningly beautiful pages of Tocqueville describing his first encounter with the redskins, which begin: "I do not think I ever experienced a more complete disappointment than on seeing these Indians. I was full of memories of M. de Chateaubriand and Cooper" (Quinzejours au disert, 1831, in Oeuvres et correspondances inedites, I, 175-77; and now in Voyage en Sicile et aux Etats-Unis, pp. 223, 343; but cf. G. W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America [Oxford, 1938], pp. 287-89, and Fabian, op. cit., p. 22). Cooper himself rejected the accusation "that he was a Chateaubriand dreaming of noble savages" (Pearce, The Savages, p. 211). And a more recent scholar: "ethnologically Chateaubriand's American works can not be taken seriously" (H. F. C. Ten Kate, The Indian in Literature, in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution ... for 1921 [Washington, D.C., 1922], pp. 513, 527). 119. For example, in the Essai historique sur les rivolutions, ed. cit., I, 285-86; in the same work, however, Chateaubriand points out that the Americans have not progressed at all since the time of the discovery, and that already by then they were fairly far from the pure state of nature (ibid., I, 26; cf. A. Maurois, Chateaubriand, p. 64). 120. Les Natchez, in Oeuvres completes, ed. cit., XIX, 117. For other variations on this mystical theme, see below, pp. 357 and 394. 121. Essai, I, 210-13; Voyage en Amerique, p. 54. 122. Voyage, p. 53; cf. pp. 59, 210. 355 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD your government, but you I do not love at all."'23 Volney and Moore were to say the same thing, in prose and in verse, without all the mystery. Coming back forty years later to his study of the difficulties threatening the United States, Chateaubriand, now an aging diplomat made wiser by life and de Tocqueville, characterizes the North Americans as sordid, harsh, and humorless, and in looking for the causes of this settles on one that is crudely naturalistic and transparently de Pauwian in flavor: "Could it be that the Americans, without knowing it, suffer the law of a climate where vegetable nature seems to have profited at the expense of living nature, a law resisted by some distinguished minds, but not beyond the bounds of possibility despite that refutation?"124 One feels like retorting with a few questions for the viscount: does he really not think a vegetable is alive too? and why ever should a vegetable be more mean and miserly than an animal? But it seems more appropriate to reflect on the vitality and vegetude of certain ancient and conspicuous errors. Chateaubriand, in fact, had already welcomed them and subjected them to further revision in the passage of the Ge"nie du christianisme where he refutes various objections to the thesis that morality is not con- ceivable without a life after death. The penultimate objection is that which stresses the influence of climate on the mind, and in so doing "mate- rializes" the spirit. Chateaubriand feels so sure of himself on this point that he turns to his audience like a conjurer or juggler and invites them to watch closely while he performs his amazing tour de force: "Instead of resolving an objection, we are about to extract a proof of the immortality of the soul from the very thing with which they oppose us." As an awed silence falls upon the public the apologist begins by ob- serving that nature is "stronger" in the extreme latitudes, in the tropics and the arctic regions: animals, plants, rivers, and mountains assume gigantic forms there. Only man is exempted: his physical and moral faculties do not "expand" like the elephant's near the equator or the whale's at the pole. Man stands thus in an inverse relation to nature: "Man ... grows feeble by reason of the increase of animal creation [the other two kingdoms are forgotten about] all around him." Look at the Indian, the Peruvian, and the Negro in the south, the Eskimo and the Lapplander in the north. What mean and flaccid creatures compared to the elephants and the whales! (Truth to tell, one's thoughts turn irrev- 123. Essai, I, 212n.; cf. G. Chinard, L'exotisme americain dans l'oeuvre de Chateaubriand, pp. 95- 96; and A. Bellessort, "L'Enchanteur en Amerique," in Reflets de la vieille Amerique (Paris, 1923), pp. 113-49, esp. 120-23. 124. Memoires d'outre-tombe, pt. I, bk. viii, chap. 11; ed. cit., I, 354; cf. M. Stathers, Chateaubriand et I'Amrique (Grenoble, 1905), esp. pp. 127-29. On this bizarre law, see above, p. 256. 356 Hegel and His Contemporaries erently to Ragazzoni's "pacific Lapps," with their "bellies bloated, gorged on whale fat, nodding gently off to sleep.")125 This is not enough? The coup de grdce follows: There is something else: America, where the mixture of silts and waters gives the vegetation the vigor of a primitive land [the magician waves his wand, the ani- mals vanish, and the earth and plants reappear], America is pernicious to the races of men, although it becomes less so each day, by reason of the weakening of the material element. In short, man possesses something antithetical to "passive nature": "now, this thing is our immortal soul," the soul that languishes in afflic- tion when nature is all-powerful, and causes the weakness of the body. "The body, which, if it had been alone, would have thrived in the heat of the sun, is thwarted by the prostration of the spirit." The immortal soul does not like sunbathing. The mental and physical weakness of the peoples of the extreme south and the extreme north is nothing but "a veritable intellectual sadness, produced by the position of the soul and its struggles against the forces of matter." The soul works best where matter acts least: this is the Good Lord's way of demonstrating "almost mathematically" the immortality of our being.126 The reasoning is childishly sophistical. But what interests us is not so much that as the discovery, indeed the remarkable revelation beyond the antithesis of body and soul, strength and weakness of matter, con- trasted, coupled and counterbalanced, of a large undigested residuum of our polemic. De Pauw is chased away from the front door, and comes in at the back. Defeated by the luxuriant and multicolored vision of Ameri- can nature, he lends himself to the support of a laborious metaphysical corollary. The American's decadence however is no longer justified by physical causes, but rather by the oppressive exuberance of the natural surroundings. All in all, then, Chateaubriand's law reechoes on the one hand the Buffonian exception of man as compared to the other animals (see above, pp. 154-56), perhaps also the more distant Renaissance exal- tation of man's antiphysical actions, while on the other hand it falls in with Moore's and Volney's formula, and Chateaubriand's own in the Essai: "a pitiable people in a splendid land." But while that formula had been intended to point out a stupefying contrast, Chateaubriand uses the two terms as the necessary and connected aspects of one and the same reality. In America the men are flabby and mean because the earth is 125. E. Ragazzoni, Poesie (Turin, 1927), p. 56: "ciascun preso gia dal sonno / Perch6 ha l'epa troppo piena / Gia di grasso di balena." 126. Genie du christianisme (1802), pt. I, bk. VI, chap. 3 (ed. cit., I, 148-49). On the subject of these proofs Lanson talks of "incomparable ingenuousness" (Histoire de la littjrature fran(aise, p. 884). 357 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD vigorous and prodigal. Only as it becomes very gradually less so does man begin to raise his head. And again Chateaubriand finds himself agree- ing with de Pauw, who had imagined (above, pp. 91-92) the decadence of the Americans being arrested and converted into slow progress with the leveling of the forest and the reclaiming of the swamps; while his radical pessimism on the fate of America makes one more appearance in a letter he wrote in his later years to the Bergamasque explorer Costan- tino Beltrami: "I fear, Sir, that the transatlantic world that you have seen and so well painted is itself approaching some catastrophe like the old world." 127 Chateaubriand finds the same contrast between a luxuriant nature and a worthless humanity in South America. But here the decadence has a supernatural rather than physical cause. While he waits for the Jesuits to bring him the Good News, the savage of Paraguay is totally lacking in Grace, crushed beneath the weight of Original Sin. The landscape varies between sublime desolation and magical beauty, but "the Indians that one met in these retreats resembled it only in their horrific aspects. An indolent, stupid and savage race, showing primitive man degraded by his fall, in all his ugliness. There is no greater proof of the degenera- tion of human nature than the smallness of the savage in the greatness of the desert."'28 Not therefore "small" because nature is too "big," but because one day Adam ate an apple. The first principles of Paraguayan geography and ethnography should be sought beneath a tree in the Earthly Paradise. VIII. GOETHE: AN AMERICA WITHOUT BASALT OR MANOR HOUSES In the very same year (1827) that saw the publication of the most com- plete if not actually the definitive version of Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amerique, Goethe was condensing his ideas on the New World into the twelve brief lines Den Vereinigten Staaten, "To the United States," one of the most pregnant and extensively annotated texts in our whole rig- marole. 127. Letter of 3 March 1833 (my italics), which goes on ambiguously: "We live in an age of social transformation: we sow painfully; the future will harvest" (in Costantino Beltrami, Notizie e lettere, p. 96). Cf. also Eugenia Costanzi-Masi, "Notizie di Giacomo Costantino Beltrami sugli Indigeni Ame- ricani," in Atti del XXII Congresso internazionale degli Americanisti (Rome, 1928), II, 685-96. Cha- teaubriand utilized Beltrami's works to describe the regions of the Mississippi that he had never seen: cf. Lebegue, "Structure et but," pp. 277, 282. 128. Genie, pt. IV, bk. IV, chap. IV; ed. cit., II, 200, with the intention of magnifying the work of the missionaries. One might note the Robertsonian characteristics of the native, and remember that a little further on Chateaubriand transcribes, with fulsome praise (as Manzoni was also to do, Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, chap. VIII; ed. Opere varie [Milan, 1943], p. 85), the page in which Robertson defends the missionaries' work: History of America, II, 350-51; Genie, ed. cit., II, 248-49; cf. also Stathers, op. cit., pp. 125, 137. De Maistre's very similar portrait of the savages has an analogous origin: cf. below, pp. 389-91. 358 Hegel and His Contemporaries Strictly speaking, Goethe has no place in the dispute: he certainly does not slander America, nor does he indulge in polemics against her slan- derers. But how can he possibly be left out? How can one possibly leave out Goethe in narrating the story of any intellectual current or trend that made itself felt or even just hovered about in Europe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century? One would be lacking an essential point of reference, a necessary gloss, or the radiant reflection of a mind that had no need to set itself above the strife to achieve a lucid but still sympathetic serenity. After all the petty squabbles and con- ventional panegyrics one is suddenly in a different world when one's ears first echo with Goethe's allocution and ardent wish, the first addressed to the continent, in the singular, the second to the United States, in the plural:129 Amerika, du hast es besser Als unser Kontinent, das alte, Hast keine verfallene Schl6sser Und keine Basalte. Dich stdrt nicht im Innern, Zu lebendiger Zeit, Unniitzes Erinnern Und vergeblicher Streit. Benutzt die Gegenwart mit Gliick! Und wenn nun eure Kinder dichten, Bewahre sie ein gut Geschick Von Ritter-, Riuber- und Gespenstergeschichten.130 What is the image of the New World that emerges from this epigram? America is a blessed land. Its contrast with old afflicted Europe is total. On the geological level, it has no basalts. From the point of view of his- tory, it has neither feudal remnants nor age-old grudges. Its poetry will thus be able to remain immune to literary romanticizing. "It is no ceme- tery of romanticism," as Heine was to write of Europe in 1851, "no an- cient pile of rubbish."'31 The United States lives in the present and is truly united - a doubly valid guarantee of its future health and prosperity. Each aspect of this rapid vision, spanning the ages from the most dis- 129. The sudden change in number takes the listener from the physical and historical vision of the New World to the ethical-literary vision of its peoples, from the past to the present and the future. The tone too changes perceptibly from the solemn beginning to the playful smile of the close. 130. Some sort of translation may seem opportune, since these verses have often been partly misun- derstood (see for example Thomas A. Riley, "Goethe and Parker Cleaveland," PMLA, 57, no. 4 [June 1952], p. 350; C. A. and M. R. Beard, The American Spirit, pp. 147-48; F. Amoroso, Lirica e gnomica dell'ultimo Goethe [Bari, 1946], p. 210): "America, thou hast a better lot than this old continent of ours. Thou hast neither ruins of castles nor basalts. Thou art not disturbed within thy inner self, when the moment comes to live, by useless memories and futile strife. Use ye the present with all good fortune! And if some day your sons compose poetry, may a benign fate preserve them from the stories of knights, brigands, and ghosts." 131. Heine, Vitzliputzli, in Werke, ed. O. Walzel, III, 58. 359 18 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Engines are lodged all the perfections of the largest animals. . . . Ruder heads stand amazed at prodigious and Colossean pieces of Nature, but in these narrow Engines there is a more curious Mathematicks.""68 The style is elegant, but the accusation leveled at the ancients not altogether justified. One can find almost the same words in the greatest naturalist of classic times. It was Pliny who pointed out at the beginning of his de- scription of the insects (including the fly) that nowhere else does nature display such artifice; and that the vulgar masses (and Buffon!) were wrong to admire the elephants, bulls, lions, and tigers "when nature can only be seen in its entirety in the most miniature creatures."''69 Take Buffon's contemporaries too; a couple of years before his His- toire naturelle began to appear, La Mettrie published his L'homme machine (1747), with its eulogies of the proteiform character of matter and the omnipotence of Nature: "No, . .. Nature knows no limitations to her workmanship. ... Her power shines forth equally in the creation of the meanest insect or the proudest man."70 But all in vain. Buffon remained as indifferent to the ancient Pliny's reverent regard for the whole universe and the enthusiasm of the doctor, his contemporary, for the physical world as he did to the coupled lenses of the latest optical devices. His disdain for the most diminutive creatures was reinforced by another particular physiological characteristic of his, 68. Quoted in "The New World of Robert Hooke," Times Literary Supplement, 5 January 1946. Hooke himself, in his Micrographia (1665), had celebrated the grace, beauty, and strength of the smallest insects. Even the authoritative American, Cotton Mather, after seeing some tiny little worms under a microscope, perorated in one of his sermons (1689): "How Exquisite, how Stupendous must the Struc- ture of them be." Huge whales, floating islands whose length can exceed a hundred feet, are less worthy of admiration than those minutest of fish (quoted by W. M. Smallwood, Natural History and the Ameri- can Mind [New York, 1941], pp. 197-98). And the sermonizing American Emerson was to repeat: "The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little" ("Compensation," in Selected Essays, ed. Nelson, p. 44). 69. Naturalis Historia, XI, 1. Pliny's words are echoed in Oviedo, who finds ants more wonderful than elephants, and are exactly repeated by Linnaeus: "Nature is never more complete than in the small- est creatures" (quoted by Daudin, op. cit., p. 157n.). 70. J. Offroy de La Mettrie, L'homme machine, ed. M. Solovine (Paris, 1921), p. 139. Similar expres- sions from Lesser, op. cit., 1, 2-10, 113-14; II, 100-02, 122-26, and passim, and Henry Baker, The Microscope Made Easy, 2d ed. (London, 1743), are quoted by A. Vartamian, "Trembley's Polyp, La Mettrie, and XVIII Century French Materialism," Journal of the History of Ideas, 11 (1950), p. 268. The Jesuit Daniello Bartoli, in his Ricreazione del Savio (1659), had already taken up Tertullian's and Augustine's thesis that God is "greatest of all in his smallest creations" and expatiated with pleasure on the magnificence of "contemptible" little animals, such as snails, which even he had observed, by the thousands, under a microscope (in E. Raimondi, op. cit., pp. 517-31). In his Amusement philosophique sur le language des btes (1739), the Jesuit Father G. H. Bougeant had pronounced that "ignorance alone, and false prejudice, can induce us to make some distinction of preference amongst the animals based on their greatness or smallness" (op. cit., ed. Petin [Paris, 1783], p. 78). See also the quotations in Roger, op. cit., pp. 233-39, 448; Bonnet's observations on nature which "works in miniature" (quoted by E. L. Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia [Los Angeles, 1949], p. 182); the admiration of Delisle de Sales for "the prodigious magnificence of nature in the infinitely small beings" (Philosophie de la Nature, II, 286; cf. ibid., IV, 10-15); that of Father Clavigero for the "smallest animals, in which the power and wisdom of the Creator shines forth most" (Storia antica del Messico [Cesena, 1780], I, 105); and the analogous words of Pope Pius XII, according to whom "even the most humble creatures, like the microbes, reflect the Creator's perfection" (11 Mondo, 29 September 1953). THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD tant prehistory to the remotest future, demands and deserves a few words of comment. The basalts are dark-colored volcanic rocks. For an ordinary mineralo- gist they are just rocks, to be studied and classified like any others. But Goethe was no ordinary mineralogist. For him basalts were witnesses of the earth's long-distant revolutionary past, the geological age when the surface of the planet was shaken by eruptions and catastrophes. Basalts were thus associated in Goethe's mind with everything that most horri- fied him, confusion, violence, the blind fury of uncontrolled forces. The man who would rather commit an injustice than tolerate disorderl32 felt an instinctive aversion to admitting that Nature, the divine lawmaker, could commit or tolerate disorder: "Nature, then," Geogony was to repeat in a poem of 1828, "is throughout its wide kingdom ever true to itself, logical and steady." And Goethe, calm and steady on his immov- able granite base, will continue until 1823 to look on volcanoes as late and superficial manifestations of Nature ("oberflichliche Sp*itlingswir- kung der Natur").133 Wherever he found basalts and volcanoes, black rocks and eruptive cones, Goethe immediately imagined that the people were bound to be quarrelsome and violent, and their history strife-filled and tormented. This mineralogical determinism allowed him to establish a harmonic link between nature and history; but it also linked him indissolubly both to those ancient naturalists who used the globe's millennial vicissitudes to explain the events of the last few centuries (see, for example, above, pp. 49, 58-59), and to a somewhat more recent naturalist, Benjamin Franklin, who in 1781 justified the C6vennes Protestants' rebellion in terms of the telluric revolutions in the South of France;134 in fact it caused him to sub- ordinate the inexhaustible development of mankind to fixed and inscruta- ble geological factors. Granite was for him the legitimate sovereign. But as a Xenie of 1827 shrewdly whispers, "As kings are toppled, so is granite now deposed." The Plutonists are real revolutionaries of the chasms. "Pluto's pitch- fork now doth threaten Revolution in the depths." And who emerges from the tumult? "Basalt, the black Devil-Moor, breaks out from the depths of Hell," exfoliating rocks, stone, and clay, and reversing the 132. Belagerung ion Mainz, 25 July 1793, in Werke (Berlin, 1873), XXV, 161. 133. P. Niggli, "Goethes Schriften zur Mineralogie von 1812-1832," Neue Ziircher Zeitung, 7 (and 10) (October 1950). Humboldt's book on volcanoes obliged him to reconsider his convictions; but in 1828 he was again raging against Humboldt's Plutonism, and preferred to side with the minority against similar "absurdities" (Gesprche [Ziirich, 1949], II, 532). Cf. already the Neptunist Forster, Werke, II, 396-97 (on basalt and volcanoes); C. G. Carus, Goethe, zu dessen niiherem Verstiindniss (1843; Ziirich, 1948), p. 127; substantially repeated by P. Witkop, Goethe (Stuttgart-Berlin, 1931), pp. 225, 323-24; E. Cassirer, Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt, pp. 33-34, and one and all, but particularly Wilhelm Emrich, Die Symbolik von Faust II (Bonn, 1957), pp. 286-89, 375-78. 134. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York, 1957), p. 68. 360 Hegel and His Contemporaries natural order of things: "and so then the whole dear world would be turned upside down, geognostically too." Goethe had already been probing these recondite relations on his journey to Italy. And when in 1816 he came across Cleaveland's treatise and began to study the mineralogy of America-in reality that of North America to the East of the Mississippi-and learned that the region had no basalts nor volcanoes, he was much impressed by this sign of tel- luric stability, and thus of calm and regular development."35 "That con- tinent is fortunate [almost the same words as the epigram], since it is without volcanic phenomena, so that the geology of the New World shows a much more stable character than that of the Old, where it seems there is no longer anything that remains stable."'" And again in a note of 1819, with even closer approximation to the text we are considering, one reads: "Lucky the North Americans to have no basalt, no ancestors, and no classic soil."137 The American continent is no longer characterized, as for Buffon, by its fauna, nor, as for others, by its vegetation, but by its geological structure. As early as 1795, in fact, Pictet had noted how "very regrettable" it was "for the European Naturalists, that the North American continent has not yet been studied from the geological point of view."'13 America's present and future rested on firm foundations. Her progress had proceeded without interruption since the beginning of the world. Keine Basalte. But this is not all. The absence of these rocks also saved America from a ferocious and inconclusive scientific dispute. It was in- deed one of the most significant advantages of not having basalts, that a country so deprived was automatically excluded from discussion of their origin. And the formation of the basalts had been precisely the point at issue in the famous quarrel that burst out in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, between the Neptunists and the Plutonists, the former steadfast in attributing the primary role in the forming of volcanic 135. See Riley, art. cit., pp. 350-74, esp. 359-64 (for Italy), 365-70 (for the United States). In 1818 Goethe was given P. Cleaveland's book, An Elementary Treatise of Mineralogy and Geology (Boston, 1816), which became his principal source of information on the minerals of the United States. Cf. also Niggli, op. cit.; and, for observations in Italy, the academic essay of G. Rovereto, W. Goethe geologo in Italia (Rome, 1942). 136. Quoted by Beutler, op. cit., p. 419. The Lisbon earthquake (1755) had given the boy Goethe the first violent emotion of his life (Dichtung und Wahrheit, I, 1; ed. Insel, Leipzig, 1922, pp. 35-36). 137. Weimar ed., Abt. Naturiwissenschaftliche Schriften, XIII, 314, quoted by F. Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur, (Bern, 1946), p. 186, and Riley, op. cit., p. 367. Goethe held that America's crystalliza- tions too were 'different, larger, on a greater scale" than those of the other continents (conversation with J. G. Cogswell, 27 May 1817, in Gespriiche, I, 870). Cf. contra, Fr. Gilij (above, p. 226); and cf. Kiirnberger, who instead bewailed the fact that the North American landscape was so little varied and picturesque: "Nowhere have they [the Alleghanies] been lifted and torn apart by volcanic action" (op. cit., pp. 305-06). The late romantic sees monotony where Goethe admired a classic, firm simplicity of structure. 138. Pictet in a note in the Tableau, II, 170. 361 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD rocks to the waters, while the latter resolutely insisted on assigning it to the planet's internal fire, and more specifically to volcanoes. The great geologist Werner, Goethe's teacher, had been one of the strongest sup- porters of Neptunism, and his pupil, ever averse to explosions and cataclysms, had in general followed the same theories.139 His interest in these problems had been revived just a few months before he wrote the lines to the United States by an essay and some samples sent to him by the geology professor Karl Caisar von Leonhard, to whom he immediately replied telling him that his "delight and pleasure in noble Mineralogy" had been rekindled, and asking him for more sam- ples of certain sandstones and "the basalt accompanying them."140 In Faust, the doctor inclines to Neptunism, while Mephistopheles, of course, is a fiery Plutonist. Goethe is on the side of God's servant, and has his adversaries speak through the mouth of the devil. But even in that same scene Faust shows signs of losing interest in the argument: "I ask not whence? nor why?" - preferring to observe nature simply as it is.141 Goethe was growing weary of the whole thing. Already by 1824 the bigotry shown by both sides reminded him of the wars of religion,42 and in 1828 finally, tired of decades of "futile con- troversy,"43 he lost patience with both parties. In the second part of Faust the polemic between Neptunists and Plutonists has a curious retro- spective echo in the argument between Thales and Anaxagoras, which the former concludes with the words: "How much further does this get us? ... Such quarrels only waste our time and leisure."'44 And just about the time he was writing those lines (ca. 1829), Goethe was asked pre- cisely what Plutonist and Neptunist meant, and replied: Thank the Lord that you know nothing about them; I cannot say either; one could lose one's wits trying to unravel them. But in any case these party labels 139. "I cannot give up my Neptunism" (conversation with Boisser6e, 2 August 1815, in Gesprdche, I, 794-95); and again: "much declaiming against the geologists who think they can explain everything by the action of fire," to Soret, 26 January 1828, loc. cit., II, 527. And see also the Xenien of the same time "The worthy Werner scarcely turns his back" and "No flames, no seas." Besides, the Neptunists were closer to the biblical account, and naturally admitted the Flood, while the Plutonists based them- selves on the principles of the rationalist and "vulcanist" Buffon (Epoques de la nature)- so that the scientific dispute was aggravated by an odium theologicum (Glass, Forerunners of Darwin, pp. 243-44). 140. Letter of 13 February 1827, in F. Soret, Zehn Jahre bei Goethe, ed. H. H. Houben (Leipzig, 1929), pp. 194-95. Cf. the letter to same, 18 September 1819, quoted by Riley, op. cit., p. 369. 141. Faust 11, act IV, opening: cf. E. Kfihnemann, Goethe (Leipzig, 1930), II, 505-06. 142. Conversation with Eckermann, 18 May 1824, in J. P. Eckermann, Gespriiche mit Goethe, p. 555. His rejection of the two extreme theses is already indicated by Bielschowsky (Goethe [Munich, 1918], II, 442, 535) and underlined by R. Magnus, Goethe als Naturforscher (Leipzig, 1906), pp. 275-82, who partially utilized (see pp. 260-61) G. Linck, Goethes Verhaltniss zur Mineralogie und Geognosie (Jena, 1906), and by K. Vidtor, Goethe (Bern, 1949), pp. 410-12. 143. These words, that translate so precisely Goethe's "vergeblicher Streit," are those used by A. Geikie to describe the debate in his article "Geology" in the Encyclopedia Britannica, I Ith ed., XI, 644b. 144. Faust II, act II, scene "Am obern Peneios"; see also the final scene, with Thales's hymn to water and the later astute remarks of Kuhnemann, op. cit., II, 438-41. 362 Hegel and His Contemporaries are certainly meaningless by now, just so much smoke; people don't even know any more what they mean when they use them.145 Verily "useless memories and futile strife." In conclusion, then, America is a country without trace of prehistoric convulsions, with no fatuous pedantic squabbles. O lucky country! But no less lucky in its want of feudal ruins and age-old grudges. Here two of Goethe's profoundest spiritual tendencies coalesce: on the one hand, his lack of sense of history, which makes him condemn as vain and frivolous all ancient quarrels, racial conflicts, and worship of tradi- tion;146 on the other, his aversion for sickly romanticism (romantic means "sick," classic, "healthy"), the picturesque vogue for ghost stories and anything medieval. The absence of castles in America is an eloquent symbol of the special newness of the country. Born of Renaissance Europe, it never knew a medieval period. The institutions of the Dark Ages (apart from a few transplants in Spanish America, such as the encomienda) and the architectural expressions of that time would ring false in America's landscape, just as in fact the neo-Gothic cathedrals, Florentine palaces, and French cloisters copied or rebuilt stone for stone on the banks of the Hudson clash with their surroundings. Of all the emblems of old Europe, nothing caught the American imagination like the "castle" and all it implied-the serf's submission to his feudal lord, the parasitism and heraldry and the warlike defiance of that closed and fortified compound, the "conspicuous waste" and hidden domestic splendor. Zwangs-Uri, the Bastille, and the Tower of London were already symbols for the Europeans, and the Rocca Paolina too would soon become another symbol, in the poetry of Carducci. A history of the "castle" in the New World, and the approval or disapproval of its existence or nonexistence, with or without ghosts, would reflect every little nuance in the ever-changing life-ideals and worldly tastes of North American society. If we follow the path back from the manor house to the reality it symbolized, we shall find that its moats and turrets were the poetic crystallization of the fortified citadel of European history and culture.'47 It was a synthetic image, a picturesque abbreviation. And did not Dante, for that matter, gather the great minds of antiquity and the Arab world within a "noble castle"? 145. Conversation with the art critic and historian Johann Heinrich Meyer, 6 March 1828, in Ges- priiche, II, 532. In act III of Faust II Seismos boasts of having created the varied beauty of the earth by means of shocks. I called the debate "inconclusive"; but perhaps I should have said "inconcluded." It has had a recent revival with the classification of rocks exactly into plutonic, neptunic, and volcanic, proposed (1939) and defended by the English geologist H. H. Read. Now we can expect the new Xe- nien ... 146. See B. Croce, Goethe (Bari, 1946), II, 205-07, polemicizing with Meinecke. 147. On the "castle" as symbol of the "tyranny of expired traditions": see Helmut Kuhn "Amerika- Vision und Wirklichkeit," Anglia, 73 (1955), p. 478. 363 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Thus it is easy to understand why the very earliest American writers felt a hiatus between the literary conventions to which they were bound, inherited entirely from Europe,148 and the "American" subject and setting of their creations: between the tradition in which they had been raised and which shaped both their own and their public's tastes, and the world they were to represent. Almost all the more reflective authors show an aware- ness of this typical contrast between form and content, and suggest ways of resolving it, either by adapting the style to the subject or claiming a classical dignity for the material.149 Longfellow could not bear the tales of frontier adventures (the first Westerns!), and groaned: "Ah, the dis- comforts!" Hawthorne mentioned in 1860 "the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong" (almost paraphrasing Goethe's Xenie).15o And in 1862 Thoreau compared the panorama of the Rhine with that of the Mississippi: the former rich in ancient fortresses, ruins harking back to the Crusades, and the spirit of heroism and chivalry, but the latter full of a fervor of life that turned men's thoughts more to the future than the past or present. "I saw," the poet concludes, in tones that even Goethe would have approved, "that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind: that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid . . . and I felt that this was the heroic age itself."'51 True, there was also a Henry James, with his inveterate nostalgia toward the Old World, who referring in fact to Hawthorne and his artistic problems repeated (in 1879) his lament that there were no feudal castles nor ivy-covered walls, nor numerous other "items of high civilization";'152 and one is hardly surprised to find Matthew Arnold echoing him, in 1888, from the Old World, with his judgment of America as "uninteresting," since among other things it lacks cathedrals, parish churches, and medieval castles.153 But today's 148. Nor did the North Americans have ballads, popular songs, nor a folklore of their own, not to mention a primitive epic: everything had to be drawn from Europe (Stanley T. Williams, "Cosmopoli- tanism in American Literature before 1880," in M. Denny, The American Writer and the European Tradition [Minneapolis, 1950], p. 49; Cunliffe, Literature, p. 47 [the fact deplored in England, 1819], p. 306; and cf. above, pp. 354-55). Hence Goethe's fears of a "contagion" of romantic nonsense. 149. The first formulation of the deprecated absence of castles, fortresses, regal ceremony, and cathedrals is found in Richard Flower (1819), according to Jones, Strange New World, pp. 349-50, but can in fact already be seen in Crevecoeur (1782): see above, p. 251. Cf. also Strout, op. cit., pp. 78, 80-81, 83, 90. 150. H. James, Hawthorne (London, 1879), p. 42; cf. Williams, art. cit., p. 46, and H. N. Smith, "Origins of a Native American Literary Tradition," in Denny, op. cit., pp. 65-66. But Hawthorne de- plores its absence: Goethe had rejoiced at it as a fortunate predisposition for the development of a healthy classical poetry! 151. H. D. Thoreau, Walking (1862) in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York, 1937), pp. 612-13; author's italics. There is also a vision of the Rhine and its castles in "Civil Dis- obedience," ibid., p. 652. 152. H. James, Hawthorne, p. 43, also quoted by Jones, American Literature, pp. 64, 121, 150; and by Williams, op. cit., pp. 46-47. Cf. below, pp. 547-48. 153. M. Arnold, Civilization in the United States, 1888, in Five Uncollected Essays, ed. K. Allott (Liverpool, 1953), pp. 54-55, 102-03. On American reactions, and more on his influence in the "un- interesting" United States, see John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (Berkeley 364 Hegel and His Contemporaries Americans are more in the tradition of Goethe and Thoreau, and usually ready to extol the natural beauties of their vast country as superior to the monuments and ruins of the Middle Ages.154 "It is better to turn directly to Nature than to busy oneself laboriously with the dross of past ages," sounds like a very "American" statement, but it was actually Goethe who said it.155 (Australia too, for that matter, a country whose cultural de- velopment came even later than that of the United States, relied on the worn-out motifs of European romanticism as its models until the end of the nineteenth century. Crawford recalls that even after 1880 the Aus- tralians "turned away from Australia for artistic or literary inspiration," and wrote Tennysonian lyrics about fields and skylarks since "colonial life was regarded as too crude to serve for artistic inspiration," and adds in a footnote: "I remember seeing a sketch-book filled with drawings made in the early 1880's by my mother as a pupil in a little up-country school. The drawings, beautifully done, were of tottering ruins of Old World castles and abbeys, covered with ivy.")156 Goethe's final shaft against the tales of knights, brigands, and specters can obviously be linked to his approval of the fact that America lacks the required scenario for these romantic fancies, but it belongs no less evi- dently to the current literary polemic: it is the sting in the tail of the Xenie, added as a postscript to the lyric. For the "basalts" too, in'fact, we saw that the term refers both to a (prehistoric) fact and the (current) argu- ments about the fact. And likewise we saw that the danger of ghosts ap- pearing on America's soil existed precisely because of the absence of other neutralizing literary interests. American poetry might have been born spectral and romantic by default. The same disturbing possibility had occurred to people in the United States too; and it was actually in 1828157 and Los Angeles, 1961), esp. 43, 78, 151, 180; and Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-17 (London, 1960), pp. 32-33. But already half a century earlier Mrs. Trollope from Britain, while admiring the banks of the Ohio and the Monongahela, had regretted that they were not adorned with feudal castles and Gothic abbeys (Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832, IV and XVIII, and cf. below, chap. 8, n. 220), while another European traveler, who was in America from 1849 to 1857, after having discovered that the Hudson had neither castles nor ruins, added: "I do not regret the ruins and the legends of the Rhine," and indeed admired the Mis- sissippi's imposing natural "castles": "The ruins of the Rhine are wretched compared to these gigantic remains" (Frederika Bremer, La vie de famille, I, 38; II, 263; cf. also I, 144, and, on the absence of popular songs and legends, ibid., pp. 66-67, 361; III, 256, 368). On the commonplace of the parallel between Hudson and Rhine (in Melville, Parkman, James, etc.), useful references in Christof Wegelin, The Image of Europe in Henry James (Dallas, Tex., 1958), pp. 170-71. 154. Example: "Our mountain passes are as picturesque as feudal castles" (Nevins and Commager, America, p. vi). Other examples in "Castles and Culture-America and the Gothic Tradition," Times Literary Supplement, 17 September 1954 ("American writing Today," p. xliv). The title of the article is taken from chap. 40, "Castle and Culture," of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. 155. Tag- und Jahreshefte, 1812, in Autobiographische Schriften (Leipzig, 1910), II I, 521 (concern- ing 6. Bruno). Cf. Meinecke, op. cit., p. 551. 156. My italics: R. M. Crawford, "The Australian National Character-Myth and Reality," Cahiers d'histoire mondiale, II, no. 3 (1955), pp. 715-16. 157. Goethe's epigram was translated into English already in 1831 (Riley, op, cit., p. 350), but German authors were beginning to be read in the original. 365 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD that the young F. H. Hedge, later to become famous as a theologian and Germanist, included the following lines in an address he was giving to an academic gathering: Let foreign climes their varied stories unfold: And German horrors rise in dark array, And German names more horrible than they. Amazed we hear of Werke and Gedichte, Of Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Richter, Fichte, And thou, great Goethe, whose illustrious name, So oft mis-spelt and mis-pronounced by fame, Still puzzles English jaws and English teeth, With Goty, Gurrte, Gewter, and Go-ethe.'15 Goethe would doubtless have read these verses too with amusement and pleasure. How irritated he used to get, in fact, whenever he recalled the puns that Herder had allowed himself on his name, so many decades earlier: "der von GO*ttern Du stammst, von Goten oder von Kote, Goethe?" !15" By some vengeful and ironic twist of fate, however, it came about that all the most successful works of the new poets of the United States bore the clear imprint of those very features so passionately deprecated by Goethe (and by Hedge): and so we find specters and horrors galore in Irving and Poe (and even James), nobles and prostrated sinners in Haw- thorne, legendary figures of sea dogs and brigands in Melville and the tales of the Far West6o- the "romantic material" in its entirety, in fact, reworked with relish and liveliness, and often with a seriousness of ap- proach and a poetic inspiration that would have frozen the smile on the lips of the seventy-eight-year-old Goethe. But there is one more element we must not neglect in those lines he wrote in 1827. America is politically united: it has no internal discords nor old scores to settle, and is thus assured of a happier destiny. This theme, the lauding of its freedom from strife as America's supreme gift, is one that can be traced back at least to the times when America offered itself as a refuge to the persecuted Europeans. An almost pre- Goethian tone can be detected already in Andrew Marvell's previously cited poem on the wondrous "Bermudas" (ca. 1653: see above, chap. 5, n. 433): "a grassy stage, I Safe from the storms' and prelates' rage";161 158. Williams, op. cit., p. 55. 159. Dichtung und Wahrheit, pt. II, bk. X; ed. cit., p. 432. 160. Even the rites and customs of the Ku Klux Klan have been held to be traceable back to the tribunals of the Holy Vehme represented by Goethe in his Goetz von Berlichingen: cf. J. Urzidil, Das Gliick der Gegenwart: Goethes Amerikabild (ZUrich, 1957), pp. 23-24. 161. In the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918 (Oxford, 1939), pp. 404-05. The expression seems to echo the words of John Milton, who had seen so many good Christians obliged to flee England, "whom nothing but the wide Ocean, and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter from the fury of the Bishops" (Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England, 1641, in Works, ed. F. A. Patterson [New York], III, 138). 366 Hegel and His Contemporaries and even, I would say, in Ronsard: "If religion and the Christian faith bring such fruits, I prefer to leave it. And to go off and live in exile in the Indies, under the Antarctic pole, where the savages dwell and happily follow the law of nature";'162 or, a few years later, in Lescarbot (Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 1609), who mentions among the motives for emigrating to the New World the desire "to flee a corrupted world" and leave behind "the strife, quarrels, and trials."'"6 But the elderly Goethe's faith in the future of the United States, of this nation so little burdened down with history, can be linked to his his- torical pessimism, or rather nihilism.'64 Yet it is also part of his religious addiction to harmonious development, uninterrupted by sudden jolts or setbacks. While Hegel, as we shall see (cited below, p. 437), points to this lack of internal tension and class conflicts as a weakness of the United States, Goethe instead looks on it as a sure promise of ascending prog- ress. The very thing which to Hegel seems a deficiency of dialectic is admired by Goethe as fullness and harmony. What else? In the same year in which he wrote the lines to the United States Goethe was explaining to Eckermann that the United States was bound to expand beyond the Rocky Mountains, and thence to the Pacific, and thus to develop an immense trade with the Orient, and thus to secure the isthmus of Panama, and open a canal through it which would take warships and merchant ships of any tonnage, with incalculable conse- quences for all the civilized and uncivilized world.65 The vision is so well argued that Goethe seems to have the gift of prophecy. The prophecy in its turn caught fire in the poet's eager mind, gathered round it other hopes and other dreams, smouldered in secret and then exploded again in a new vision. The image of Europe strewn with black rocks, ruins, and specters lurked in the depths of Goethe's saddened spirit.166 And just about that same time another creature emerges and takes shape in the poet's imagination, the restless, insolent, surprising little figure of the Homunculus. The Homunculus, the completely artificial man, born in a test tube from a crystallized mixture, a creature without history and without parents, not to mention ancestors, speaks to his cousin Mephistopheles as the American of the epigram might speak 162. Oeuvres, ed. P. Laumonier (Paris, 1914-40), VIII, 14-15, quoted by Lapp, op. cit., p. 155. 163. Quoted in G. Atkinson, Les nouveaux horizons de la renaissance fran(-aise (Paris, 1935), pp. 105-06. 164. It is significant that Alexander Herzen quoted (1 January 1868) the first eight lines of Goethe's Xenie to greet America as the land of the future, devoid of historic relics or petty squabbles or feudal influences, and thus equal to Russia in revolutionary possibilities (Max M. Laserson, The American Impact on Russia - Diplomatic and Ideological- 1784-1917 [New York, 1950], pp. 231-32). 165. Eckermann, Gespriiche, 21 February 1827, pp. 599-600. 1827 is also the date of a proposal for reworking L. Gall's Auswanderung nach den Vereinigten Staaten (in Schriften zur Literatur [Leipzig, 1914], 11, 321-22), a violently anti-American work, "the product of a disappointed immigrant" (Doll, op. cit., p. 508). 166. On Goethe's melancholy at the time of composition (June 1827), see Riley, op. cit., pp. 356-57. 367 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD to our old continent: "Thou, from the North, / And in the age of mist brought forth, I In knighthood's and in priesthood's murky den, / How should thy sight be clearer, then?" All around is blackened crumbling stone, ogival and repellent, grotesquely florid. Away, right away, to the Thessalian Walpurgisnacht! Mephistopheles, who a little earlier, when he had said that he saw nothing of Faust's dream, had earned the reply "How should thy sight be clearer, then!" now objects that he has never heard of such goings-on, and is then mocked for being not only blind but deaf: "How should it reach your ears?" The ears of the vieux jeu devil are only attuned to the skeletons and ghosts of the romantic ballads. "Romantic ghosts are all you know." Chivalry, ruins, specters, the low literature of current fashion: nothing is missing. . . . Even the science of the schools, even the good Wagner is dismissed. Farewell, and away, quickly, to the banks of the Peneus, to the Pharsalian plains! America and the Hellad serve equally well as vigorous antitheses of senile and medievalizing Europe. Nor does this exhaust the hidden ferment of his imagination. The Hom- unculus is or at least claims to be superior to Mephistopheles, whose creature he is, however. He is the spirit that sees the present (die Gegen- wart) in all its clarity and transparency, and thus represents the life of intense activity as opposed to intellectualism: he is an impatient Faust, without inner discords.167 On one side, then, he can be the mouthpiece of the new, unhistoried, and strife-free continent, the continent which in fact symbolizes "die Gegenwart."16" In another way he foreshadows Faust's last yearning, which is only satisfied when a new land is torn from the water, half paradise and half artifice, a land where millions of men may be able to pursue free and active lives. It has often been suggested that there are elements in Faust's dream- land that seem to draw their inspiration from the deeds of the American pioneers,169 and it is also known that messages and suggestions from the 167. Eckermann, Gespriche, 16 December 1829, ed. cit., pp. 374-76; F. Gundolf, Goethe (Berlin, 1917), pp. 770-7 1. 168. See Urzidil, op. cit. 169. One can perhaps glimpse an anticipation of Goethe's land torn from the waves and covered with gardens, meadows, and villages in Barlow's lines on "the glad coast... Won from the wave" that "presents a new-formed land, yields richer fruits and spreads a kinder soil" and the "free-born souls" that inhabit it, etc. (Vision of Columbus [ 1787], canto IV, quoted in Brie, op. cit., p. 376, n. 36). See also M. Kerbaker, L'episodio di Bauci e Filemone nel Fausto del Goethe (Naples, 1903), p. 31 ("a certain tint of Americanism"); F. Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern, 1946), p. 188; Beutler, op. cit., pp. 405, 449; T. Mann, Goethe und die Demokratie (Oxford, 1949), p. 21; Vietor, op. cit., pp. 368-69; H. A. Korff, Geist der Goethezeit (Leipzig, 1953), IV, 647-48 (for the analogy suggested by the con- clusion of the Wanderjahre, the liberating "Auswanderung nach Amerika"). W. Mommsen (Die poli- tischen Anschauungen Goethes [Stuttgart, 1948], p. 214n.) notes then that in the Paralipomena (act IV; Insel-Ausgabe, p. 551) Faust refers to the "advantages of society in its beginnings" and wants to associate himself with the natives. In act V of Faust, on the other hand, the natives are massacred and primitive society destroyed. The conqueror replaces the farmer. But even before that Kerbaker had seen 368 Hegel and His Contemporaries New World besieged Goethe's mind in these last years, contributing to that prodigious creation of myth and plastic symbol. Faust concludes his supreme vision of a free people on a free soil with the words: "If I could but see such a swarm," saddened by the certainty that he will not see it. The eighty-seven-year-old Goethe prophesies that the United States will stretch out from ocean to ocean, and sighs: "If only I might live to see that; but I shall not."'70 It remains to be seen how Goethe arrived at this vision of America, so conceptually prolific and reechoing with deep poetic chords. It was not the polemic with Buffon or de Pauw that led him there. The degenera- tive laws formulated by Buffon were the very antithesis of Goethe's whole zoological philosophy (see above, p. 255) and more generally of his resolute reluctance to historicize nature. Of de Pauw he knows and quotes the later works, the study of the Egyptians and Chinese,'7' and that of the Greeks;'72 never the most famous one of all, of the Americans. But in any case he would never have approved of its explanations in terms of cataclysms and earthquakes and terrifying convulsions of the globe, and the anti-Neptunism of his theory of rocks.73" The poet who, like Thales, saw humidity as the fount of life and shaper of the world - "All things sprang from Water! All things are sustained by Water!"'74- could only remain impervious to the classic and fatal image of America as a wet, indeed sodden world. But his overall opinion of de Pauw is singularly benevolent. Visiting Pempelfort, on his way back from the excursion into France, Goethe's thoughts linger on that "marvelous" time, hardly more than a genera- tion ago, but already almost impossible to conjure up vividly. Voltaire had freed humanity from the fetters of ancient superstition and opened men's minds to doubt; and while he fought to bring down the authority of the clergy, "and cast his eye particularly on Europe, so de Pauw stretched his conquering spirit over further continents." Our much- maligned de Pauw is held up by Goethe as the Voltaire of the extra- European world! "He would allow neither Chinese nor Egyptians the in the episode of Baucis and Philemon the parabola of the innocence of whoever lives in conformity with Nature and is swept away by the inexorable violence of Progress. 170. Eckermann, Gespriiche, 21 February 1827, ed. cit., p. 600. 171. Kampagne in Frankreich (Pempelfort, November 1792) in Werke, ed. Berlin, XXV, 99. 172. Italienische Reise (28 May 1787; ed. cit., II, 60), confirming that one can apply to the lazzaroni what de Pauw said of the cynics, namely that given the climate of Greece they did not, when all is said and done, have such a miserable life. "There are today in Naples," De Pauw goes on (Recherches sur les Grecs, ed. cit., II, 148-49), "beggars who would refuse the viceroyalty of Norway, if it was offered to them." Goethe translated almost the whole passage: de Pauw's book, remember, came out exactly in 1787. 173. Recherches sur les Americains, II, 326-51 (Sur les vicissitudes de notre globe), esp. p. 343; cf. above, p. 58. 174. Faust II, act II, scene "The rocky coves on the Aegean Sea," toward the end. 369 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America namely his shortsightedness, so serious as to prevent him from even using the microscope; and further buttressed by a psychological trait, once again negative, namely his unwillingness to involve himself in details or minutiae. This characteristic, a reflection of his faith in his own genius (although it was Buffon himself who coined the phrase "genius is merely an infinite capacity for taking pains"), comes out clearly in the way he refers to the "courage" it takes to "busy oneself continually with little objects, the examination of which requires the coldest patience and makes no demands on true talent.""71 It is obvious again in the celebrated reply to the chemist who wanted to carry out an experiment to check one of Buffon's intuitions: "The best crucible is the mind";72 and once again when he expresses his boredom with the thousands and thousands of species of birds: "I have no desire to do any more work on feathers."73 It is visible again in the curious statement he made, which earned him the ridicule of the students of games and probability calculations, that a "small" probability, less than one in ten thousand, is a "negligible quan- tity" that can safely be ignored;74 in his complaint that in order to classify a plant according to Linnaeus's system "one must go microscope in hand" to observe not the stem, the shape, or the leaves, but just "the stamens, and if one cannot see the stamens, one knows nothing, one has seen noth- ing";75 and finally in the contemptuous comments he makes after stating some facts about the intestines of birds of prey: "I leave the exact verification of this fact to those people who busy themselves with anat- omy,"76 and his haughty refusal to be called a "naturalist" or even a "great 71. Histoire des animaux, quoted in Correspondance inedite de Buffon, ed. H. Nadault de Buffon (Paris, 1860), II, 335-36, and in C. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, X, 350. 72. C. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, IV, 350; D. Mornet, Les sciences de la nature en France au XVII1' siecle (Paris, 1911), p. 114. For him, chemistry was a sort of culinary art, to be practiced in the kitchen and not in a laboratory: "Speaking one day with Monsieur de Buffon on the present ardor of chemical enquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the labora- tory on a footing with those of the kitchen" (letter of Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 19 July 1788, Papers, ed. Julian P. Boyd [Princeton, 1950-], XIII, 381). 73. Quoted by Franck Bourdier, "Principaux aspects de la vie et de l'oeuvre de Buffon," in Bertin, op. cit., p. 35. 74. Karl Georg Zinn, "Buffons Beitrag zur Sozialwissenschaft- Die Entdeckung der messbaren Psy- che im 18. Jahrhundert und die wertsubjektivistische Konsequenz," Jahrbicherfir Nationalidkonomie und Statistik, 181, no. 4 (March 1968), p. 346. 75. 1749, quoted by Daudin, op. cit., p. 126n.; on the danger of "falling into too many little details," cf. also ibid., p. 154n. Mornet (op. cit., p. 114) records another of his aphorisms: "The mind's eye is enough to perceive the real existence of all these little beings, without the microscope." 76. C. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, X, 62. "Buffon is right; there are a thousand things that one must leave to laborers, otherwise one would be crushed, and one would never reach one's object" (Herault de Sechelles, Voyage a Montbard, ed. Jouaust, 1890, p. 46). These words seem to echo Mau- pertuis, who described as "the philosophers' laborers" those "indefatigable observers" who waste time examining the auricular apparatus of certain fish or measuring how far a flea can jump, "not to mention so many other miserable undertakings"; minute details "are the sign of the limited genius of those who give themselves up thereto" (quoted by Roger, op. cit., p. 466). See also P. Hazard, op. cit., I, 192, and Hanks, op. cit., p. 181 (antipathy for repeating experiments). Contemporary examples of impatience in the study of natural minutiae: B. Smith, op. cit., pp. 33, 63. 19 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD honor which age-old prejudice had heaped upon them." As canon of Xanten, near DUsseldorf, he was on friendly terms with Jacobi (see above, chap. 4, n. 285). And how many others should be mentioned along with these three, Goethe goes on, though in fact he mentions precisely three more; only three, but neither obscure nor mediocre men: Hemster- huis, Diderot, and Rousseau.175 De Pauw-like Dante, "a sixth among this band"- is indeed in good company ... Thus if Goethe never speaks of the Recherches sur les Amdricains, it is probably for another basic reason: at the time of its appearance and in the immediately subsequent years of fiercest polemics, America was completely beyond his mental horizons. The young Goethe ignores the New World. Klopstock, then already advanced in age, hails the Ameri- can revolution with hymns of praise. Klinger, still a very young man, uses America as the setting of his Sturm und Drang. Goethe remains cold and indifferent.'7" His beloved Lili tells him she is ready to flee to America with him. Goethe will not leave his native land.'77 America is "accursedly far away." He sighs only for Italy; and even when he sails from Naples to Palermo on a beautiful yacht built in America, his gaze never looks beyond the shores of the Mediterranean: "Sicily points me toward Asia and Africa""'78 In Brunswick in 1784 he attends a pantomime with "Soldiers returned from America disguised as savages," tattooed and painted after the fashion (apparently) of the redskins; and though they strike the persons of the beau monde as terrible or repulsive, Goethe remains quite un- moved. Resolutely anti-Rousseauian and not in the least "primitivist," Goethe sees in the spectacle merely "the efforts of the human race to rejoin the class of animals." The tattoos are no more than imitations of the fleeces of quadrupeds and the multicolored feathers of the birds; when the redskins compare themselves to these creatures they are ashamed of going about naked, with this smooth uninteresting skin that nature gave man. Then as for their dances and mimicry, "that is very like the behavior of monkeys."" America does not interest him, the native bores and disgusts him. It almost seems as though the savage, poised thus between man and beast, tending in fact to degenerate, though not yet fallen from human dignity, 175. Kampagne in Frankreich, loc. cit. Goethe read or reread the second Recherches in 1813-15 (see R. Michea, Le "Voyage en Italie" de Goethe [Paris, 1945], p. 366, n. 34; cf. ibid., pp. 19, 66, 372). 176. "However I only took an interest in all these happenings insomuch as they touched upon the greater society. I myself and my narrow circle did not busy ourselves with newspapers and news" (Dichtung und Wahrheit, IV, bk. 17-the book of Lili!-Insel ed., p. 750). 177. Conversation with Soret, 5 May 1830, in Gesprdche, II, 671n. (in Houben ed., p. 389n.). 178. Italienische Reise, 26 March 1787; ed. cit., I, 229. 179. Letter of 21 August 1784, in Goethes Briefe an Charlotte von Stein, ed. J. Fraenkel (Jena, 1908), II, 224-25. There is a certain de Pauwian flavor about Goethe's words: the Recherches describes the character of the redskin "by reducing the American savage to his animal instinct" (ed. cit., I, 123), but on the question of tattooing de Pauw is much more realistic (ibid., I, 202-06). 370 Hegel and His Contemporaries fills Goethe with a muffled horror, a secret dread of instability. When he writes to his friend Charlotte von Stein he tries to make fun of the savage, but his irritable tone betrays his uneasiness. The crisis, or rather the beginning of a slow but complete transposition, came in '89. Disturbed and ever more anxious at the terrible develop- ments of the Revolution, the unleashing of the rage of the populace and the glowering threat of the organized masses, Goethe looks anxiously around for a new land where man may freely develop all his faculties. The various parts of Wilhelm Meister reflect the phases of this search, the progressive concentration of his yearning, from generic Wandern to necessary emigration (Auswandern), which still however smells of flight, and finally to the ideal of a community in America, which is both flight and conquest, escape and palingenesis. Already in the Lehrjahre (1795) America shines forth as the embryonic fatherland of a new humanity: and immediately acquires all the characteristics of a promised land, a world of the future, a sure refuge from the ills weighing down on the men and values of this too agitated Europe.180 In the years that follow this faith is nutured on extensive, substantial reading, on the words and writings of the recently returned Humboldt (1804),181 and conversations with the long series of Americans who come to visit him at Weimar from 1793 onward, among xWhom are many extremely distinguished men: Trumbull (1797), Ticknor (1816), Bancroft (1819), Calvert (1825), and a select group of other scholars and politicians.182 In 1818 he writes to Voigt that he is absorbed in a number of works on the United States: "Such a growing world is well worth the trouble of looking into."'83 And the following year, 1819, the year when the idea of the epigram is beginning to take shape, Goethe is already sighing: "If I were twenty years younger, I would set sail for North America."184 In the same year he sends his works as a gift to Har- vard University, to feel himself closer (as he says in the dedication) to 180. Copious and precise documentation in Beutler, op. cit., pp. 396-408; cf. also Bielschowsky, op. cit., II, 542-44, and, on the development of Goethe's interest in the United States after 1815. Mommsen, op. cit., pp. 175-79, and Castle, op. cit., pp. 184-85, 253-54, 406; on the character of America in the Meister, Mommsen, op. cit., p. 275, and Viitor, op. cit., pp. 289-90, who brings out well how Goethe's enthusiasm for America did not for a moment imply any Europamiidigkeit, was indeed bound up with his devotion to the Old World. Riley, op. cit., p. 364, asserts too summarily that the United States "came to mean to the older Goethe something of what Italy had meant to the younger man." 181. Kuhn (art. cit., p. 477) quoting Wadepuhl (Walter, Goethe's Interest in the Neiwl World [Jena, 1934], p. 18) is however too peremptory when he asserts: "Goethe's discovery of America occurred, so it seems, very late, around the year 1807, and the impulse was given to him by an offprint of Alexander von Humboldt's 'Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewichse,' sent to him by the author." 182. Beutler, op. cit., pp. 408-19. These visits flattered Goethe the way those of other North Ameri- cans did Byron (see above, p. 347). 183. Quoted in Riley, op. cit., pp. 352-53. 184. Conversation with F. von Mfiller, 10 May 1819, in Gesprdche, II, 54; cf. conversation with Boisseree, 2 August 1815, ibid., I, 798 (and, jokingly, conversation with Miller, 13 July 1818: ibid., II1, 36). Further sighs are heard by Eckermann on 15 February 1824: see Eckermann's Gespridche, p. 84. 371 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD "that wonderful country that attracts the attention of the whole world with its sober system of laws promoting a development that will know no bounds."185 In 1826, finally, Prince Bernard of Weimar, the brave and brilliant second son of the Grand Duke, came home from extended travels in the United States, full of enthusiasm and admiration for the young American republic. In the lines that Goethe wrote to welcome him back, infused with a borrowed distillation of all the young prince's optimism, more than one expression anticipates or echoes the lines in the last part of Faust that relate the feverish activity of the aged but indomitable doctor: "There's a buzzing like a beehive, I With the building and carrying in." And Baucis says: "By day in vain the workers raged, / Pick and shovel, blow on blow." And Philemon: "Wise lords set their serfs in motion, I Dikes upraised and ditches led." Goethe to Bernard: "The river's current now is ruled, / Through the scarcely peopled land." And the bewildered old woman: "Where the fires at night were swarming, I Stood the following day a dike ... Burn- ing torches leading seaward, I On the morrow a canal." The Wanderer, when one day the tempest throws him up on the "dunes," finds that now there is a "garden" there. And "a garden blooms in the sand," in the America from whence the prince returns. One final echo of his yearning for ideological incorporation with the United States - "He feels the joy of the noble land, he gives himself up to it"-is revealed in Faust's impatience to see the people flooding into the new and splendid land he has torn from the waves, and living there in perfect liberty: which liberty is not a gift of heaven, but something to be earned, like one's living, with each day's work. The masonic song for the returning Prince Bernard closes with two solemn chords, each echo- ing the same theme: "The earth becomes free through love, and great through deeds."186 IX. LENAU: THE PROMISED LAND BECOMES THE ACCURSED LAND Nikolas Lenau's first notion of America, of the United States, formed at about the same time, differed little from Goethe's. But he can more 185. Beutler, op. cit., pp. 418-19. 186. One could find other parallels, particularly with the words of Faust in his exhortations to work (as in Urzidil, op. cit., pp. 10-1 1), but perhaps they would be just a little too subtle. Suffice it to recall that Faust's last undertaking is a canal, a ditch (Graben): and Bernard was particularly interested in the vast network of canals in the United States (Beutler, op. cit., p. 427). His book was published in Weimar in 1828, and in the same year, in English, at Philadelphia (Doll, op. cit., p. 515, and Castle, op. cit., pp. 207-08, 253). Again in 1830 Goethe reminded an American of Duke Bernard's "enthusiastic attachment to America" (conversation with J. B. Harrison, 25 March 1830, Gesprdche, II, 681), despite certain un- pleasant experiences he suffered, which are joyfully recounted by the spiteful Mrs. Trollope (Domestic Manners, XXVIII). 372 Hegel and His Contemporaries easily be linked with the travelers and naturalists of the previous century than with the poets and philosophers of his time, inasmuch as he insisted on going to see America for himself, and returned filled with loathing and anguish. Lenau was always a restless and tormented spirit, but intensely sin- cere in each of his successive enthusiasms; he can pass for one of Amer- ica's most ardent apologists or most stubborn slanderers, the only dif- ference being in whether he is writing before or after his arrival in the United States. A man of essentially uncritical temperament, he combines the most extreme poles of the polemic in one person. He contributes no new opinions or elements to the debate, indeed relies exclusively on the motifs already present in the eighteenth century. But by reliving the polemic sentimentally within the space of a few months he shows once more how the apologists and slanderers actually operate on the same scientific level, or rather on no scientific level, but on that other level, be it higher or lower, more fiery or more celestial, where love and hate, dislike and ardent longing, meet face to face and take each other's places. Disappointed and saddened at the repression of the liberal movements of 1830, and in particular at the harsh repression of the Polish revolt (September 1831), Lenau mentally turns his back on the Europe of Met- ternich and Czar Nicholas. He is suddenly seized with the idea of emi- grating to another world, and all his dreams "crystallize" around that notion.'87 America is a divine flame, Liberty, the prosperous strand where tyrants cannot reach, the fatherland, the true fatherland of the poet: "New World, free world, on whose richly flourishing shore the wave of tyranny shatters, I greet thee, my fatherland!"'88 The journey will be safe and easy. And in America, land of plenty, there are neither thieves nor beggars and the wild animals are less to be feared than Europe's mad dogs. Over there all his desires will be fulfilled. He will hear no more talk of this "damned politics," this "truly revolting politics that we have here." He will learn more in the school of the virgin forests than the learned naturalist Schubert can teach him. Five years will scarcely suffice to exhaust this "enormous storehouse" of natural beauty. His song lives and throbs with nature, "and in America nature is more beautiful, more powerful than in Europe": his poetry will be re- newed and raised to fresh heights. "I need America for my education." The latent and half-conscious forces of his spirit will be aroused and 187. A letter of 17 February 1832 talks about literary projects for the summer (ed. Eduard Castle [Leipzig, 1911], III, 139); the following one, of 11 [?] March 1832 shows him determined and enthusi- astic about emigrating, impatient to get to know "the American monkeys" and the treelined banks of the Missouri (ibid., III, 141). According to V. Errante, (Lenau [Messina-Milan, 1935], p. 52) on the other hand, the idea was first conceived while he was still in Vienna (1824-30). 188. Abschied, Lied eines Auswandernden, ed. cit., I, 121-22. 373 374 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD shaken by the great thundering voice of Niagara: "How beautiful the mere name Niagara is! Niagara! Niagara!"189 America will benefit not only his lyrical resources but his economic resources too: he will buy a thousand acres of land, and install his good manservant Philip as tenant; the steward will be a certain Ludwig Hiberle, another very honest and capable emigrant who was a carpenter at home: the contract will of course be ratified by the courts - everything is in order: "in three or four years the value of my property will have multiplied at least six times"-and there's no call for laughter, the ac- counts have been worked out down to the last detail - and he will then be able to live off his income in Austria without lifting one finger.19 ... Even La Fontaine's Perrette, with her milk pail on her head, was never more ironically optimistic: "Everyone has daydreams; there is nothing sweeter." In vain his friends and relatives and even his beloved sister seek to dis- suade him. In vain the government makes a public announcement of its lack of faith in the organizer of the expedition the poet is joining; in vain the faithful Kerner warns him against the seductions of the same man, a hairy devil with a great beard "like a prehensile tail" and a belly like a wrinkled purse: we must save Lenau, he wrote to Mayer, "from the pre- hensile tail of this American specter!"19' Even the Stuttgart wit that trills away to him: "Missouri, Missouri, ubi vos estis pecuniam perdituri" - "Missouri, Missouri, where your wealth will turn to penury"192 - is wast- 189. Letters of 13 and 16 March 1832, ed. cit., III, 142, 145-46. Lenau had just finished reading Gottfried Duden, Bericht ueber eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas (Elberfeld, 1829; ibid., VI, 226). Duden had "romantically described" Missouri "as a wilderness paradise," thus making it a center of attraction for the German emigrants (H. Wish, Early America, pp. 326-27). Even the great Niebuhr immediately gave it a warm recommendation, but particularly for what it had said "about the Germans there, and about the evil consequences of the persistence of the English structure in a barbarian isolation" (letter of 14 June 1829, Lebensnachrichten, III, 235). Later Kfirnberger too (op. cit., p. 319) mentions "Duden's Missouri and similar fantastic works about America," although by 1837 Duden himself had published a repentant "self-criticism," a Selbstanklage wegen seines amerikanischen Reise- berichtes zur Warnung vorfernerem leichtsinnigen Auswandern (Castle, op. cit., pp. 209-10, 408); cf. also Eckhart G. Franz. Das Amerikabild der deutschen Revolution von 1848-49: Zum Problem der Uebertragung gewachsener Verfassungsformen (Heidelberg, 1958), p. 32. 190. Letter of 27 July 1832 (from Amsterdam, in other words when he was already on his way), ed. cit., III, 184-85. The contract can be read there, III, 204-07; on Lenau's subsequent sad adventures with American real estate, see Errante, op. cit., p. 118; Werke, ed. cit., IV, 271; V, 73, 329, 389-90, 395, 425-26. On the joys of return, which he then thought to be imminent, cf. also the letters in the Castle ed., III, 146, 151-52, 169-70, 191-92, etc. 191. Werke, III, 143-44. 192. C. Schaeffer, in the Leipzig edition, Bibliographisches Institut, I, xxxvi, xlii; cf. Castle ed., III, 148, 153, and Errante, op. cit., pp. 53-55. A few years later (1848) an American was to refer to "Mis- souri, or 'Misery', as disappointed emigrants call The State" (J. L. Peyton, Over the Alleghanies [Lon- don, 1870], in Tryon, ed., A Mirror for Americans, p. 596). One can gain some idea of the hyperboles used to laud the virgin lands of America already in the seventeenth century from the passages collected by Blanke, op. cit., pp. 299-300, and in Lenau's time from the novel of F. Kiirnberger, said to have been inspired by the poet's American adventure; in particular "the luxuriousness of the lower Missouri defies all belief" (Der Amerikamiide, p. 70). That Lenau did provide the inspiration for the work is denied on the other hand by Karl J. Arndt, in an essay seeking to demonstrate that in America, and Hegel and His Contemporaries ing his breath. His company is on the road to ruin. Its passport has ex- pired. No matter. His first collection of poetry is handed over to the print- ers, a sort of farewell salutation to Europe and the past, and Lenau sets out for the future, toward the New World. He sails from Holland, and no sooner does he get a glimpse of the ocean from the mouths of the Zuyder Zee than he is convinced he will fall madly in love with it; in fact, he already feels a new lyrical afflatus upon him.'93 Baltimore, 8 October 1832 (a little more than a year since another rebel, Edgar Allen Poe, had sought refuge there; the fateful earthly trajectories of the two poets skimmed past each other, but never touched): seen from the ship, the coastline is pleasant, but the first encounters with the people are enough to shock and repel the young German. They offer him cider, but he does not like it. "Cider," he jokes, "rhymes with 'Leider' " ("alas"). They have no wine, and no nightingales. Developing this latter theme, of purely eighteenth-century flavor (see above, pp. 161 ff.), Lenau immediately weaves a lament on the unhappiness of Ameri- can nature. The nightingale is right to shun these wretches whose only thought is making money. The silence has a deep significance. It is a sort of "poetic curse" (ein poetischer Fluch, three times repeated) weighing down upon America. It would take the voice of Niagara to rouse these boors, to remind them that there are other gods than those coined in the mint. One glimpse of them in a restaurant is enough to make one detest them for ever. Quickly, away up to Niagara, and then home again at the first opportunity.94 The mirage of America fades at the first sight of these merchant-ridden shores, but reappears again further off, in the glittering spray that climbs from the thundering cataracts. Will it prove any more real up there? No: the winter passes, and Lenau-already suffering from gout and scurvy, and nursing a head wound caused by a fall from a sled - is at- tacked by rheumatism; his aversion for the people and the place gets stronger by the day: a rough climate and a rough people; and not boldly and powerfully rough, like the primitives, but feeble, meek and thus doubly repugnant. "Buffon is right when he says that in America men and animals decline from generation to generation. Here I have not yet seen particularly through the influence of the Harmonists of Economy, Lenau recovered his faith in a personal God, and abandoning his liberal radicalism became a moderate and conservative: this would thus be "The Effect of America on Lenau's Life and Work," (Germanic Review, 33, no. I [February 1958], pp. 125-43). 193. Letter of 1 August 1832, ed. cit., III, 187; and on arrival: "The sea has gone to my heart" (letter of 16 October 1832, ed. cit., III, 190). 194. Letter of 16 October 1832, ed. cit., III, 192-94. And a few months later, ratifying the first verdict: "The formation of the Americans is a mercantile and technical,one. Here the practical man develops in his most frightful emptiness" (letters of 6 and 8 March 1833; ed. cit., II1, 201; VI, 7). 375 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD a courageous dog, a fiery horse, or a man full of passion. Nature is terribly languid (matt). There are no nightingales, indeed there are no real song- birds at all." And there are none because nature in America is never so happy or so sad that it must sing. It has no feelings, no imagination, and thus cannot give them to its creatures. The lines of the mountains, the folds of the valleys, everything there is monotonous and unimaginative. The American women are totally unattractive. The men pay them every sort of reverence and compliment, but then there are hill dwellers in Germany who venerate cretins. And, oh dear, when these women sing in society, they are worse than the birds: the sounds they emit remind one of what one gets by wetting one's finger and rubbing it along the edge of a glass - a truly horrifying thing, because every note reechoes the frightening emptiness of their minds.95 Even the American men of European descent have become enfeebled and spineless. The Germans that have lived there some years have lost all their energy, and even their burning fever of nostalgia. The emigra- tion to America is the bitterest fruit of the sad situation in Germany. Lenau, in a delightfully spontaneous emotional reaction, fears that he too might lose his memory of home, his desire to go back. Return he must, at the earliest possible moment. "In this vast fogbath [Nebelbade] of America, love's veins are quietly opened and its lifeblood drained slowly away, and it notices nothing. I really do not know why I longed so much to see America."196 The wheel comes full circle: America plunges from "promised land" to "accursed land. . . . Here are noxious airs, creeping death."'97 Everything is inconvenient and displeasing, the streets, the beds, the desks, the pens, the ink: everything.198 By the time he returns, the radiant United States of his departure has become the "Swinish States of America"- "ver- 195. Letters of 6 and 8 March 1833; ed. cit., II, 200-01; VI, 6-7 ("It had already occurred to many naturalists that here men and animals further deteriorate from generation to generation. It is literally true!") (my italics). But, let us remember once more, Buffon does not extend the degeneration to man. In the above-mentioned novel of Kirnberger, however, the degeneration of the Europeans in America is considered proverbial ("and so let anyone deny the transatlantic degeneration of the races!" op. cit., p. 385), even if it is sometimes treated ironically (ibid., p. 200) or extended from the United States to the whole tropical world (ibid., pp. 260, 394, 414). 196. Letters of 5 and 8 March 1833, ed. cit., III, 196-97; IV, 7-8; cf. also the letter of 6 March 1833, ibid., III, 203; and Chateaubriand: "An abrupt reversal occurred within my mind ... I suddenly interrupted my journey, and said to myself: 'Return to France'" (Memoires d'outre-tombe, ed. cit., 1, 340); and the moving story of Kurt (in Zacharias Werner's Vierundziwanzigste Februar [see above, chap. 5, n. 401]), who in savage America hears the call of the Swiss lakes, the waterfalls, glaciers, alpine bells, like a chorus of voices inviting him to return home: "Come! Come!" (ed. Reclam, pp. 31- 32). The locus classicus of this anxious fear is obviously the Odyssey, bk. IX, where Ulysses chains his two weeping companions and flees from the lotus-eaters to prevent others tasting the sweet lotus and "the fatherland falling from their hearts." 197. Letter of 5 March 1833, ed. cit., III, 197; cf. "sad soil" in the letter of 8 March 1833, ed. cit., VI, 8; and the de Pauwian visions of Moorfeld-Lenau in Kiirnberger: "From every gorge, from every lowland, swamp, and fen the fever wriggles loose" (op. cit., pp. 398, 405, 408). 198. Letter of 6 March 1833, ed. cit., III, 203. 376 Hegel and His Contemporaries schweinte, nicht vereinte amerikanische Staaten.""' The fatherland of liberty is no longer even a fatherland: the American is only interested in money. "What we call a fatherland is here simply an instrument for guar- anteeing one's capital."200 America is one big disappointment, "a land full of chimerical deception."201 It is the real land of the sunset (Untergang) of all things, mankind's Occident (the culmination and reversal of the he- liodromic theory). The Atlantic insulates it against the spirit and every superior form of life.202 Lenau's condemnation is total: nature and so- ciety, the surroundings and the men, are all just as violently repellent to love's disappointed pilgrim. In the lyrics inspired by America the echoes of Buffonian themes re- turn again - less explicit, true, but no less certain to listeners like our- selves, to whom they have become not merely familiar but downright tedious. In the primeval forest an aura of death envelops and oppresses life; after a struggle of thousands of years death has been victorious, and the rotting tree trunks are like bony fingers choking every living shoot; there is no more rustling of foliage, no glitter of greenery, no happy war- bling of birds to enliven the forest, that tomblike symbol swallowing up everything in its mysterious silence and gloom.203 The musical Lenau is particularly grieved at the lack of trillso and warbles; or rather, he takes it as a supremely simple metaphor of all his grief and melancholy. The birds are his own songs: "and even the birds, my songs, have fled away."204 Lenau, who in fact used to amuse himself capturing live birds,205 in poetry adores, extols, allegorizes, and trans- figures them, like his great fellow-spirit Leopardi: "The Nightingale is a profound creature, a singing mystery."206 It is the living emblem of divine liberty. The earth is dying, of cold, its extremities, the poles, are already frozen and the nightingale has now left the rose gardens of Ireland. Its 199. Said to Kerner: see Bibliographisches Institut ed., I, xlii. 200. And not even a sound guarantee: that "idiot" President Jackson, with his struggle against the Spezialbanken, will ruin credit and bring about a terrible crisis (letters of 6 and 8 March 1833, ed. cit., III, 202; VI, 7)- which seems a strange misrepresentation of the battle Jackson was then waging against the (second) United States Bank and in support of the banks of the separate states. The crisis did how- ever materialize, and prove duly severe, in 1837. On the causes of Lenau's dislike of Jackson see Arndt, op. cit., pp. 132-33. On other anti-American reactions provoked by business misfortunes, see Remond, op. cit., p. 647, n. 70. 201. "Der Urwald," I, 268. 202. Letters of 5 and 8 March 1833; ed. cit., III, 199; VI, 6. To Errante, unaware of the historical precedents of Lenau's extreme anti-Americanism, this seems "acute neurasthenia," Freudian anguish and a symptom of his future madness (op. cit., pp. 112-16). 203. "Der Urwald," ed. cit., I, 268-70; VI, 329-30. 204. Ibid.: cf. also the verses of his friends Uhland, Kerner, etc., "like sweet birds" in the virgin forest (letter of 13 March 1832; ed. cit., III, 143). And the plea that if his American poems have some- thing insipid (abgeschmackt) about them, it should be attributed to the American climate (ibid., III, 199). 205. Bibliographisches Institut ed., I, 241, note on "Das Lied vom armen Finken," written in 1834 or 1836; see also the letter of 2 April 1844, ed. Castle, V, 167. 206. Letter of 6 June 1838; ed. cit., IV, 288. Cf. for example Leopardi's Elogio degli uccelli, toward the end (their perfection greater than that of all other living things). 377 378 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD song is the lament for a lost homeland, and a prophetic warning of ap- proaching death. "Oh destiny of Liberty, so like the fate of the Nightin- gale!"o'7 Kein Vogelsang-"no song of birds"-is Lenau's first brush- stroke when he sets out to portray a deserted valley.208 And in the Ameri- can forest, literally "kein Vogel sang"- "no bird sang."209 On the eve of his departure the poet wove an idyllic vision round the song of the lark and the nightingale;210 and when he heard the song of a caged nightingale it awoke his yearning to explore ever more distant climes.211 On his return, after the long journey, what strikes him about his homeland? At first, the trees, "like the dreams of youth grown green again"; but immediately afterward, "dear to me and softly familiar as never before, the song of the birds sounded in my ear."212 The dumbness of the American forest is much more the reflection than the cause of his disappointment and repugnance and the spiritual silence that envelops him in the New World, in this world where he had dreamed of a new blossoming of his song and a feast of hymns of liberty. The echoes of this bitterness are heard not so much in the poems on the traditional theme of the redskin driven from his lands and filled with proud resentment toward the white man,213 but in the impulsive reversal of the Goethian aspiration. Oh happy America, Goethe had just finished saying, you have no ruined castles and useless memories; and may a benign destiny save you from the stories of knights, brigands, and spec- ters. Lenau, on the banks of the Ohio, seems to retort with his lines on "The Ruins of Heidelberg."214 So much for the new poetic material that 207. Letter of 16 January 1832; ed. cit., III, 134. 208. "Die Marionetten" (1831-32); ed. cit., I, 204; "Asyl," ibid., I, 43, and passim. 209. "Der Urwald," ed. cit., ibid., I, 268. See also Kiirnberger, op. cit., pp. 218 ("vogelsangloses Land"), 317, 343, 346 (but Cuba does apparently have feebly amorous nightingales: ibid., p. 258). Cf. our Beltrami, who traveled extensively (before 1824) "these preadamite forests, these immense soli- tudes where a silence of death is only interrupted by the roaring of wild animals or the croaking of the crows" (Notizie e lettere, p. 122), and more radically still, Tocqueville: "Here... the very voices of the animals are never heard . . . everything is silence" (Quinze jours dans le desert, 1831, in Voyages, p. 370; cf. above, n. 113). Echoes of this silence, if such things are possible, are heard in de Vigny: "The wind alone murmurs . . . the birds are hidden in the hollows of the black pines" (La sauvage, ed. Nelson, pp. 228-29), and, for the forests of Brazil, in Darwin: "Within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign" (quoted in Christie, op. cit., p. 123), and again today in Levi-Strauss: "The voice does not carry . . . an extraordinary silence reigns" (Tristes tropiques, p. 310). 210. "Reise-Empfindung" (1832), ed. cit., I, 5-6; cf. also "Friihlings Tod" (1832), ibid., 1, 48; "Warnung und Wunsch" (1832-33), ibid., I, 137, etc. 211. Letter of 16 May 1832, ed. cit., III, 145; on the Rhine he is already disturbed by the total lack of water birds (letter of 2 July 1832; ed. cit., III, 173-74). 212. "Wandel der Sehnsucht" (1833), ed. cit., I, 22. It is symptomatic that in the poems and letters of the years after his return the references to America are extremely rare and insignificant (see examples in ed. cit., IV, 136; V, 73, 178, 349). The New World is "repressed." 213. See for example "Der Indianerzug: Die drei Indianer," ed. cit., I, 108-13; equally negative ver- dict in Walzel, op. cit., p. 358 and in Errante, op. cit., p. 144. 214. Ed. cit., I, 98-101 (cf. III, 62; V, 188). See also the famous poem "Der Postillon" (ibid., I, 105-07), also written in America, in which the nostalgia for his Swabian countryside, cemetery and all, breathes life into his verse (Errante, op. cit., p. 146, and "Gravitation nach dem Ungltick-Zu Lenaus Gedicht Der Postillon," Neue Zircher Zeitung, 14 July 1963). It is typical of Lenau, for that matter, to compose his lyrics far from the places they represent (ibid., pp. 71-72, 335; ed. Castle, VI, 232). Hegel and His Contemporaries he had gone to America to find! Flowers springing up again on crumbling walls, moonlight on the multicolored houses, and watching over the af- fairs of human beings, from high above, the fortress of another age, "the ruin there, in its stony silence, like the scornful laughter of the past." Then suddenly the mocking laughter is pierced and overcome by a dulcet sweet lament, recalling the great company of departed souls: it is the nightingale, prodigious Philomel, at whose notes the shades return to the scene of their all-too-brief happiness, and having no voices of their own pour out all their inexpressible love for this land through the notes of the little bird's song. Isn't it clear? Isn't Lenau himself entrusting the burden of his nostalgia to the voice of poetry? Is the gulf between Lisbon on the Ohio and Heidelberg on the Neckar any less than that which separates the dead from the living?215 In the purity of this yearning toward the Old World, Lenau's American lyrics reach their loftiest vein. He explains it to us himself. In the wilder- ness of America, without friends, without nature(!), without pleasure, he is forced to turn inward upon himself and think how best to plan his future: "As a school of privation, America is really very much to be recommended.'"216 There is more remorse than regret in his tone when he admits that "faithless I deserted my dear land, where joy bloomed for me as nowhere else"217 - and at times something closer to stubbornness or defiance. The picture of Nikolas Lenau, tramping the virgin forest with his feet shod in "spotless patent leather shoes" and the hand that brand- ishes a hatchet in white kid gloves,218 is not a grotesque vignette, but a bitter symbol of an unyielding rejection. The lyrical images that assail him are no less incompatible with the reality of America. Left alone to spend the night in a Blockhaus in the depths of the forest, the poet downs another bottle of Rhine wine and begins to read aloud his friend Uhland's romantic ballad, Held Harald. As the fable unfolds it conjures up the light irresistible scampering of elves and the hero's comrades' fatal at- traction to the fairies. Outside a furious storm bursts, and in the woods, "the tall woods of the republic," that seem to be an extension of Harald's "wild woods," the trees blasted by the tempest groan angrily with the voices of the vanquished defenders of German liberty.219 The deeper Lenau penetrates into America and nature, the tighter he clings to his links with historic Europe. 215. Errante. on the other hand, considers the whole part of the nightingale and its "disturbing song" false, an extraneous accretion: op. cit., p. 145. But the nightingale here is the poetry itself, that which understands the past and brings it back to life; in complete antithesis to Goethe's longing, Lenau invokes its song over the feudal pile: "Well dost thou understand ruins." 216. Letters of 5 and 8 March 1833, ed. cit., III, 197; VI, 6. 217. "Die Rose der Erinnerung," ed. cit., I, 107-08. 218. See Errante, op. cit., p. 111. 219. "Das Blockhaus," ed. cit., I, 273-75. Even before his departure, Lenau intended to declaim the poems of his friends in the American forests (ed. cit., III, 143, 146-47). 379 20 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD naturalist": "Naturalists, linkboys, dentists, etc . . . people who live by their work; a thing ill suited to a gentleman," whereas he himself in- sists on his native and inalienable claim to gentility: "I am a gentleman amusing myself with natural history."77 Buffon always says simply, "I had a rabbit [or a dog] opened up," never "I opened up," which has been explained, perhaps too super- ficially, as the reluctance of the gentleman to dirty his own hands with work he considered more becoming to the butcher.78 But was the plebean and systematic Linnaeus in fact very different, when he asked his corre- spondents to attempt some dissection (of branchiostegals) and then hap- pily carried on without using the precise data furnished by the anatomists and the voluminous detail (on infusorians) contained in the "microgra- phers' books"?79 And did not Vico, another great man who trusted a little too much in his own unarguable genius, write at the beginning of his Scienza nuova: "Diligence must be set aside when one is working on subjects that have a greatness about them, because it is a small virtue, and being small likewise slow"?0 Diderot, too, warned scientists in one of his writings inspired by Buffon that "one fails humanity in observing everything indistinctly." Posterity demands that great men spend their time better. "What would posterity think of us if all we had to hand down to it was a complete insectology, some immense history of microscopic creatures. Great minds must tackle great themes; the smaller things belong to lesser minds." After all, if these lesser minds did not have these minutiae to keep them busy, they would not produce anything at all.81 De minimis non curat praetor. And lastly even the greatest disciple and follower of Buffon, the half- blind Lamarck, disliked having to come down to earth from his lofty ob- servatory where he would remain entranced with the vision of the metamorphoses of living creatures; and in his lectures - so we are told by an unexpected listener- "he would show himself a mortal enemy of the chemists, the analysts and experimenters in miniature, as he would call them."82 77. Victor Jacquemont, Correspondance indite avec sa famille et ses amis, 1824-32 (Paris, 1867), I, 134. 78. Pitman, op. cit., p. 39. Buffon has also been reproached for having spent too much time on polish- ing his sentences and consequently not enough on detailed and patient experiments (Mornet, op. cit., pp. 207-08). 79. Daudin, op. cit., pp. 75-76. 80. Scienza nuova, ed. cit., pp. 11-12; the maxim is taken from Longinus and used elsewhere too by Vico (B. Croce, II carattere della filosofia moderna [Bari, 1941], p. 56; and Quaderni della Critica, nn. 17-18, p. 99); cf. F. Nicolini, La giovinezza di G. B. Vico (Bari, 1932), pp. 62 ff. 81. Diderot, Pens es sur I'interpre'tation de la nature (n.p., 1754), pp. 79-80. 82. Amaury, in C. Sainte-Beuve's Volupte, chap. XI (ed. Paris, 1881), p. 136. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD But even these links could not bring him lasting peace. The poem was composed a few years after his return. Another change of heart brought him closer to the feelings of the time before his departure. And he pen- ciled in a comment above the Blockhaus that echoes the Goethian epi- gram: "Europe's rattling of chains may be more poetic, but America's clinking of coins is more consoling." He added it, and then, wavering, scratched it out.220 The incurable poet could never resign himself to abandoning his dreams, nor could he stop himself destroying them with his own hand. X. LEOPARDI: AMERICA'S DECADENCE BECOMES UNIVERSAL While with Lenau the reminiscences and highlights borrowed from the dispute of America serve to accentuate his own personal tragedy, leaving the polemic more intense but so much reduced in scope as to almost dis- appear, with Leopardi it dissolves in a problem that is more far-reaching and tormented in a different way-the question of the ideological rela- tionship between civilized and savage life, which involves a judgment on the progress and whole history of the human race. Leopardi was certainly familiar with the arguments of the slanderers of the New World: he read Robertson's History of America, Carli's "so well-known" American Letters, and various writings of Buffon, Raynal, and Ulloa. He was not without curiosity about the ancient American civilizations (relying mainly on Pedro Cieza de Le6n, Garcilaso, and Al- garotti in regard to the Peruvian, and Solis for the Mexican), nor about the psychic and somatic characteristics of the inhabitants of the New World, whose indolence and slothfulness he comments on, as also on their heads being deformed and uniformized from infancy, their beard- lessness and great height, the latter with particular reference to the red- skin chiefs and the Americans of the western states as compared to the easterners (see above, p. 244).221 Nor could Leopardi, the poet who so 220. Ed. cit., VI, 334. Another great liberal disappointed by America, without even having been there, was Heinrich Heine, who adjudged its life monotonous and its democracy oppressive (cf. Castle, op. cit., pp. 408-09) and represented it as a gigantic prison, a land cursed by God, tyrannized by the dregs of humanity, inhuman with the Negroes, hypocritical and plutolatrous (letter from Helgoland, I July 1830, in Ludwig Borne: Eine Denkschrift, 1840, ed. Walzel, VIII, 386-88). 221. For Robertson, see G. Leopardi, Opere (ed. Gregoriana, Milan, 1935), p. 312; Zibaldone, ed. cit., II, 945, 951. For Carli, Opere, ed. cit., p. 312; Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (Flor- ence, 1859), pp. 190, 306. For Ulloa, Opere, p. 312. For Buffon and Raynal, Zibaldone, analytical index, and, for the former, Saggio, pp. 288, 306, and Pensieri, LIV (ed. cit., p. 351; though he apparently only read the extracts carried in an anthology: see N. Serban, Leopardi et la France [Paris, 1913], p. 139). For Cieza de Le6n, Opere, p. 312, and Zibaldone, analytical index. For Garcilaso, Serban, op. cit., pp. 91-94, 470, and possibly (Historia de la Florida) Saggio, p. 311. For Algarotti, Zibaldone, II, 792. For Solis, Zibaldone, analytical index. For Cieza, Algarotti, Robertson- and Franklin too-see Manfredi Porena. "Un settennio di letture di Giacomo Leopardi," in Scritti leopardiani (Bologna, 1959), pp. 419- 38, nn. 90, 92, 232, 413. On the habitual idleness of the "uomo silvestre" (an echo of Robertson?), see Elogio degli uccelli, in Opere, ed. cit., p. 252. On heads, Dialogo della Moda e della Morte, loc. cit., p. 132; beards, Zibaldone, II, 739; gigantic Americans, Opere, pp. 1152-53. Leopardi also knows 380 Hegel and His Contemporaries rapturously extols the song of the birds, have been unaware of or in- different to that unhappy particularity of American nature whereby its birds were less melodious than Europe's.222 Nor, finally, was he un- familiar with the theories that explained a rapid improvement in climate in terms of the cultivation of the fields, the reclaiming of the land and the establishment of centers of population, "which effect has been and still is particularly evident in America, where, so to speak, within living memory, a mature civilization has succeeded what was partly a state of barbarism, partly mere emptiness."223 But America in itself, as a new world, as Europe's future or Europe's caricature, as the world's hope or the fatal omen of its ruin, did not interest him at all. For him, in fact, the continent held little intrinsic significance. Of the discovery of that "huge unknown land" - an event that Gdmara and others had hailed as the most significant in world history after the Incarnation - Leopardi's only comment is that it has shrunken the world and destroyed a whole "other world" of "pleasant dreams" and "beautiful imaginings" and "supremely poetic" geographical illusions, in other words America's presence is a lethal threat to poetry!224 And of Columbus's undertaking, hailed by Campanella, for example, as the vast conquest of the Ocean and the throwing of a bridge "for Caesar and for Christ, from one world to the other," Leopardi has the navigator himself say that the enterprise may or may not succeed, but it will at least serve to keep himself and his companions "from getting bored" for a while - as if it were just some sort of game or frivolous "very well that in America there are not and there never were lions" (Zibaldone, II, 1098); and he has read Charlevoix (Saggio, p. 289; Serban, op. cit., p. 463). De Pauw does not figure in the library of Monaldo Leopardi, which until 1827 fed Giacomo's curiosity and thirst for knowledge: possibly be- cause that extensive collection of books was formed almost entirely after 1795 (Serban, op. cit., pp. 16, 30n., 452), or in the period of the almost total eclipse of de Pauw's reputation. 222. "Some say ... that the voices of the birds are gentler and sweeter, and their songs more modu- lated, in our part of the world, than in the regions where the men are savage and rough" (Elogio degli uccelli, loc. cit., p. 249). Among the "some," G. Reichenbach identifies "the highly regarded Buffon" (idem, Studi sulle Operette morali di Giacomo Leopardi [Florence, 1934], p. 121). 223. Pensieri, XXXIX (after 1832; ed. Gregoriana, p. 342); cf. above, pp. 91-92. 224. Ad Angelo Mai (1820) and the relevant notes: cf. F. Montefredini, La vita e le opere di Giacomo Leopardi (Milan, 1881), pp. 417-19. This position coincides substantially with the notion of the Ameri- cas' intrinsic lack of poeticity (see above, n. 115). Sainte-Beuve already indicated its affinity with what Chateaubriand had written in his youth in the Essai sur les revolutions (Chateaubriand et son groupe litte'raire sous l'empire, ed. M. Allem [Paris, 1948], I, 103n.). But even more surprising is the coin- cidence of Leopardi's lament over the disappearance of myths ("Where have they gone, our pleasant dreams, of the unknown refuge of unknown inhabitants ... ?" "Ad Angelo Mai" [1820], and in the hymn "Alla primavera o delle favole antiche" [1822]: "Once the streams and liquid springs were a haven, a placid haven and mirror for snow-white nymphs," with Diana going down to wash therein, and rustic Pans, etc.) with Poe's charge against science in a sonnet of 1829-30: "Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? / And driven the Hamadryad from the wood? ... Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, / The Elfin from the green grass ... ?" (Works, ed. cit., V, 62), and with Melville's similar lament: "Columbus ended earth's romance: no New World to mankind remains!" "Clarel," 1876, in The Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York, 1950), p. 405: cf. also Kuhn, op. cit., p. 481, and below, chap. 8, n. 362. 381 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD diversion."" The words put into the admiral's mouth are actually so out of keeping with what is known of his religious and almost hallucinatory character that they provoked De Sanctis to the sarcastic rejoinder: "This is not Columbus talking, but Leopardi, and Leopardi would not have dis- covered America."226 And in fact, far from dwelling on America, Leopardi's glance passes swiftly over the peculiarities of that continent to come to rest instead on the unhappy destiny of all mankind, within which destiny the deficiencies and weaknesses peculiar to America become absorbed, as it were, and thus lose all individual significance. Leopardi also substantially accepts de Pauw's basic thesis on the corruption or degeneration of the savages, but he extends it to cover all the peoples of the globe, so that in point of fact, America is absolved from its own particular malediction. And while the North American republic is not spared the poet's sarcasm - "the other shore of the Atlantic Sea, new font of purest civilization" - there is really no reason to see this as anything more than a particular instance of that generic mockery of the "glorious and progressive destinies" of the whole world, which Leopardi poured out from his perch on the stony slopes of the havoc-wreaking volcano, whose thunder and lightning merely served to give further proof of the miserable fragility and stupid hopes of the human race.227 Already in the Dialogue Between Two Beasts (1820) he had imagined the extinction of the whole human race, which had moved so far away from the state of nature that it had lost its native felicity, and decayed physically too: "the men too had changed considerably... because at first they were much stronger and bigger and bulkier, and lived longer than they did later, when by dint of vice they became weaker and smal- ler," just as the animal species they domesticated became weaker and bastardized.228 This theory calls to mind the seventeenth-century theo- logians who among the consequences of Original Sin had stressed man's physical decadence and reduced longevity (above, pp. 59-60), and it takes 225. Dialogo di C. Colombo e di P. Gutierrez, ed. cit., pp. 245-46. On the general enthusiasm, be- sides that of Campanella, Bembo, Guicciardini, Ramusio, Tasso, Botero, etc., see Romeo, op. cit., pp. 125-26. 226. Cf. F. de Sanctis, Giacomo Leopardi, ed. W. Binni (Bari, 1953), pp. 301-02, and contra, Reich- enbach, op. cit., pp. 112-15, and L. Giusso, Leopardi e le sue due ideologie (Florence, 1935), pp. 17, 19, 222, who in Leopardi's Columbus, sailing boldly on simply to escape from boredom, discovers no less than a romantic and Faustian hero. 227. Palinodia, ca. 1834; and "La ginestra," 1836. To the founder of the American republic, George Washington, Leopardi elsewhere pays the singular compliment of setting him alongside Timoleon of Corinth and a little higher than Andrea Doria, as a hero not greedy for power (Paralipomeni, III, in Opere, pp. 539-40): cf. S. Cassara, La politica di Giacomo Leopardi nei Paralipomeni della Batracomio- machia (Palermo, 1886), pp. 415-18. 228. Opere, 1145-50: cf. Zibaldone, I, 1302 (1821), where Leopardi recalls that the church fathers, and St. Paul, and even the pagan philosophers, had noted "a degeneration and corruption of man, known and preached even in the most ancient mythologies." 382 Hegel and His Contemporaries or rather keeps Leopardi very close to them, rigorous pessimists, with their denial of all progress and scholarly despair at the irreparable loss of Grace. But this theological theme becomes curiously interwoven with the other quite rationalistic and naturalistic theme of the degeneration of the domesticated animal species (see also above, p. 26); and more gen- erally with the Rousseauian notion of the evil influence of civilization. "Forty or fifty years ago," says Timandro, "the philosophers used to grumble about the human race; but in this century they do quite the op- posite." Eleandro, however, the poet's mouthpiece, agrees with the philosophers of 1774-84.229 In his anxiety to systematize the world's unhappiness, to show the wretchedness of man's condition as necessary and at the same time ab- surd, Leopardi seized hungrily on any arguments that come to hand: and only the violence of his despair can mold such logically heteroclite ma- terial into any sort of unity. In the Wager of Prometheus (1824), the demigod alights first of all in the region of Popayain, near the river Cauca, an area now sodden and deserted although clearly inhabited earlier, and concludes by condemning the cannibalistic savages of the "new world" and the Indian widows who in the "older" continent sacrifice themselves on their husband's funeral pyres as equally barbarous; while Momo under- lines the slowness and haphazardness of the "civilized" Europeans' progress, recalling that the other classes of creatures, the animals, have no need of progress because "from the very beginning they were perfect each one in itself," and that even such an imperfect civilization as man has achieved is extremely precarious: it may easily fall, in fact has al- ready fallen several times. Here Leopardi does not yet state that the savages or the Europeans are "decayed"; but in every relative "perfection" he sees included every sort of imperfection: and as the dialogue ends the London dog lover, whose boredom drives him to infanticide and suicide, reinforces his sarcastic doubt on the value of our civilization.230 But there were other factors already inclining him toward a decadentistic interpretation of uni- versal history - the projection onto the life of the human race of his own life, which passed so abruptly from the dreams and fables of childhood to a premature old age,231 and even more his resolute and so frequently reinforced conviction of the superiority of the ancients over the moderns, 229. Dialogo di Timandro e di Eleandro (1824), loc. cit., p. 265. Typically Rousseauian-ibid., p. 266; in Parini, ovvero della gloria (1824), loc. cit., pp. 194-95 and in the Zibaldone (ed. cit., I, 203; II, 24; contra, ibid., II, 1298, 1301)-is the aversion for the corrupting metropolises. 230. Opere, pp. 156-64, 312-13. 231. M. Losacco, Indagini leopardiane (Lanciano, 1937), pp. 18-19, quoting G. Barzellotti, "A. Schopenhauer e Giacomo Leopardi" in Santi, solitari e filosofi (Bologna, 1886); cf. Pensieri, CII (loc. cit., p. 376). 383 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD of the classical world over the present-day world, proved also by the as- certainment of man's "noticeable shrinking," and often justified with the "greater strength of Nature, being also not corrupt or less corrupt" at the time of the Greeks and Romans;232 or with the splendid explanation that the ancients, although not more long-lived than the moderns, were however "more full of vitality . . better adapted to the functions of the body, more powerful physically."233 The poet becomes even more resolute and coherent in his denial of all progress in certain sections of the Zibaldone, which coalesce and issue forth in a pungent digression in the Paralipomeni della Batracomioma- chia. The starting point is still, as it was with the Dialogue Between Two Beasts, the comparison between the happy or at least ignorant state of the animals (the state of nature) and the corrupt and unhappy state of modem man (see also below, n. 242). But it is better to look at the sim- pler and more dogmatic arguments in the Zibaldone since the Parali- pomeni's Aesopic conventions,' whereby frogs and mice are people too, together with the coating of veiled irony and not always successful sar- casm, can somewhat cloud one's vision. In the Zibaldone Leopardi openly acknowledges the religious deriva- tion of his attitude: "One of the principal dogmas of Christianity is the degeneration of man from a happier and more perfect primitive state: and linked to this dogma is that of the Redemption and, one may say, the entire Christian religion. The principal teaching of my system is precisely the said degeneration."234 This degeneration is greatest whenever man moves away from nature: the most primitive societies, which is to say those of the savages, are also the most barbaric and unnatural; to approach civilization, "a state, which is not at all contrary to nature," man has a long and painful path to reascend.235 Here again, then, the pattern is the biblical one: a sudden fall followed by a long and difficult recovery. The state of innocence is the purely savage state. "Barbarity supposes a beginning of civilization, an inchoate, imperfect civilization; in fact it includes it." The savage tribes of America are so cruel and ferocious because they have a begin- ning of civilization, "because they have started to become civilized, in short because they are barbarous .... Their ills come from a beginning 232. Zibaldone, 1, 299 (1820), 300-01 (1820); cf. ibid., I, 399 (1821). 233. Ibid., I, 896-97 (1821). On the thesis that history is decadence, cf. Giusso, op. cit., pp. 123-26. 234. Zibaldone, I, 674-75 (1821). The passage goes on to say that the demonstration of man's original happiness and his increasing unhappiness as he moves further away from nature are so many "direct proofs" of the truth of Christianity: cf. ibid., I, 337 (1820). Kerbaker (Scritti inediti [Rome, 1932]) and Losacco (op. cit., p. 305) admit that the biblical account of Original Sin is the "theological basis" of Leopardi's system. But cf. below, p. 386. 235. Zibaldone, II, 662-63 (1823). 384 Hegel and His Contemporaries of civilization. There is nothing worse, certainly, than a civilization ei- ther inchoate or past maturity, degenerate, corrupted."236 But does there exist anywhere on the face of the earth a completely savage people, altogether untouched by civilization? It would have to be totally without society, even if this favors civilization which is also "an approach to Nature." Without society, because society, even the most rudimentary, is corruption - corruption which is indeed already apparent in the first expressions of organized society, the cities. Here Leopardi's thought reveals an extraordinary contaminatio of biblical and Rous- seauian motifs. For Jean-Jacques the cities, and particularly the big cities, were the abhorred quintessence of political civilization, of bourgeois luxury, of the fatal progress of the arts and sciences: they were the an- tithesis of Nature, the antithesis of the country, the antithesis of Virtue.237 They were the result and culmination of man's decadence in society. But they were not Original Sin. For Leopardi, however, they were: "the vile urban consortia" ("To Spring") were invented by the fratricidal Cain ("Hymn to the Patriarchs," 1822, quoting Genesis 4:17), and it was he, not the mild-mannered Adam, "the human family's ancient leader and father," that introduced evil into the world. For our moral consciences, let the Bible say what it will, the theft of an apple is much less serious than the murder of a brother. For Leopardi, then, the first cause of man- kind's damnation is not the fruit that Eve stole but the blood that Cain spilled. That and that only is the true "ancient error that offered up the seed of man to the tyrant power of disease and disaster," and it was com- mitted after Adam's departure from the seat of paradise, which when he left it was therefore "unacquainted with sin and sad events." ("Unac- quainted with sin" - the home of the first sin! And "with sad events" - the garden where physical and spiritual death first entered the world!) And when finally Jesus Christ came down to redeem mankind, he came not to erase the guilt of out first forefathers, but that of the "first malefactor," the "first founder of societies," the killer of Abel. The city is Cain's in- vention, and "in a way the effect and daughter and solace of sin," and thus by its very nature "corrupter" and "source of the greater part of our vices and crimes." 236. Ibid., II, 1013-14 (1826). This whole historical scheme can be traced back to the words written in a book that Leopardi knew well, the Genie du christianisme: "man, . . . by a law of Providence, the more civilized he becomes, the closer he approaches to his first state . . . the perfect arts are nature ... between the centuries of nature and those of civilization there are others that we have named centuries of barbarism" (op. cit., pt. III, bk. V, chap. 2; ed. cit., II, 90). What we have here is in essence one of the usual attempts to reconcile the theology of the Bible with the positivity of human history, the pes- simism of the Fall with the optimism of Progress. Cf. also above, p. 358 (a particular instance of this thesis) and below, p. 390 (the de Maistrian version of the same); and J. Moras, Ursprung und Entwick- lung des Begriffs der Zivilisation in Frankreich (1 756-1830) (Hamburg, 1930), p. 65, and n. 96. 237. Cf. Gerbi, La politica del Settecento, pp. 286-89. 385 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD With this twist of Christian myth and theology Leopardi made our cor- ruption a historical consequence of the crime of fratricide, and no longer a mystic heritage of Adam's fault.238 As he put it, while St. Paul and the Fathers saw "an immense imperfection in the primitive system and order of man," and thus judged the Creator's work "substantially imperfect, that is to say composed of contradictory elements," he himself finds the imperfection in man's "acquired qualities... repugnant to the natural ones," or in "corrupted natural qualities, repugnant to each other, only because they have been corrupted." While they "in effect put man almost outside of nature," where everything is perfect, "I replace him there, and say that he is outside of it only because he has abandoned his primi- tive being."239 In transferring Adam's sin to Cain, Leopardi thought in fact to elude the strident contradiction of a benign God immediately permitting the Fall of his creatures, and to find a more satisfactory explanation than the biblical one for the vexed problem of the origin of evil in the world. He humanized the fearful mystery of Original Sin, and could thus delude himself that his implacably rationalistic doctrine was founded on the deepest spiritual truths of Christianity. In fact the rationalization and secularization of Original Sin were in tune with the most marked tenden- cies of modern thought, and its interpretation as a sociopolitical wrong, in particular, harmonized with the dominant preoccupations of the eight- eenth century, that age assailed by recurrent doubts on the value of civili- zation and state-ordered systems. Leopardi is so imbued and tormented with these notions that he remains quite unaware of his heresy. One inevitable corollary of his line of reasoning was the freeing of America from the curse of Original Sin, or at least those peoples of Amer- ica who had no cities, societies, or civilizations. But do they exist?... Yes, they exist. Among all the tribes of the world, perhaps the Califor- nians alone still live in conformity with nature, because they have almost no society between themselves, no language, and so "they are savages and not barbarous."240 They resist civilization, are ignorant of clothing 238. G. A. Levi, Storia del pensiero di Giacomo Leopardi (Turin, 1911), p. 58, appropriately citing the Zibaldone (ed. cit., I, 203-04): "the first author of the city, which is to say society, according to the Scripture, was the first criminal, that is to say Cain ... and as the first criminal was the first founder of society, so the first to corbat it decisively and curse it was the redeemer of guilt, which is to say Jesus Christ" (cf. ibid., I, 454-55). For the identification of Original Sin with civilization, and the substitution of Cain for Adam-a thesis which has deep roots in a crucial passage in Saint Augustine, De Civitate Dei, from bk. XIV, chap. 28, to bk. XV, chaps. 1 and 2-see also A. Aleardi, Le prime storie (Verona, 1858), p. 14; Giusso, op. cit., pp. 132, 138, 174-75; A. Sorrentino, Cultura e poesia di Giacomo Leopardi (Citta di Castello, 1928), p. 135. As for Rousseau and his half-hearted efforts to dilute Original Sin along the course of history and thus have it coincide with "civilization," see for example Guillemin, op. cit., pp. 39-40. 239. Zibaldone, I, 1302-03 (1821). 240. Zibaldone, II, 665 (1823); cf. ibid., II, 306, 376, 577, and the Storia del genere umano, Opere, ed. cit., p. 118; the footnotes to the Inno ai patriarchi, ibid., p. 111: "It is held [by whom?] that the 386 Hegel and His Contemporaries and unacquainted with fire, and eat everything raw. The pious Califor- nians-last heirs of the venerable title of "Noble Savage" after the ca- ciques of the Antilles and the guileless Hurons. The Californians- their fantastic image looms up gigantic in the furthest West.... And lo, the quibbling arguments are drowned in the swelling notes of the "Hymn to the Patriarchs" (1822): "Amid the vast Californian woods, are born such a blessed race. . ." But not even they are safe from our "wicked boldness": "The shores and caves and quiet woods are stripped before our fury; the violated peoples taught new toil, unknown desires; and naked, fleeing Happiness, chased to the setting sun." Leopardi wakes swiftly from the brief dream of the natural life and flays "our" so-called civilized world with renewed bitterness. The hymn to the patriarchs finishes with a burst of Parinian invective against the tyrant Europe devastating innocent America and in her fury poisoning herself with her own prey.241 But not even this slow reconquest, this convergence of civilization and nature at infinity, satisfies Leopardi. In another place he affirms that civilization is so little in conformity with nature that there exist "hun- dreds of savage and barbarous nations of America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania" that have not only not yet reached civilization, but "have taken no step toward reaching it" and will never reach it unless they are vio- lently forced to do so by the civilized peoples. More than half the human race is without civilization. Thus one cannot believe that civilization comes about naturally. Or would someone like to suggest-implies Leopardi, with the usual argument ex absurdo-that nature was "so stupid and so improvident that more than half the time it missed its mark"?242 With the passing of the years Nature changes from benevolence to enmity or indifference,243 and the poet's whole philosophical system Californians are, among the known races, the furthest from civilization, and the most recalcitrant to the same" (the same verdict is given by Mrs. Frances Calder6n de la Barca: "The savages [of California] were the most degraded specimens of humanity existing . . . more degraded than the beasts of the field," op. cit., p. 225); ibid., pp. 968-69; the bibliographical announcement (the hymn "contains in substance a panegyric of the customs of California": pp. 970-71), and the lengthy description of the Californians (based on information from "travelers") in the prose outline of the hymn (Puerili e abbozzi vari [Bari, 1924], pp. 246-47), where the danger threatening them is personified in the missionaries, and thus in Christian religiosity itself (see also Zumbini, op. cit., II, 21-22). On the forests of America, with other reminiscences of Chateaubriand too, see Puerili, F. Neri, II Leopardi e un "mauvais maitre" (Rome, 1915: offprint from Rivista d'ltalia) and A. Omodeo, in Critica, 38 (1940), p. 164. 241. See also Guerrazzi, below, p. 544. 242. Zibaldone, II, 1099 (1827). See chap. 9, sec. 4, "The Impotence of Nature," below. For (human) nature spoiled and weakened by civilization, and other contrasts between civilization and nature, see Zibaldone, I, 99, 627. One need hardly mention the oft-asserted greater happiness (or lesser unhappi- ness) of the animals compared to man (see above, p. 384). The "blessed offspring" of the Californians, over whom "impends all unsuspected the black day of death" are blood brothers of the "blessed" flock envied by the wandering shepherd of Asia for their ignorance of death and boredom. 243. On this reversal, see the whole of the cited work by Giusso, esp. pp. 57 ff. 387 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD comes apart: or rather crumbles and dissolves a little more with each succeeding effort he makes to use it to interpret life and the uni- verse. His fundamental inconsistencies reappear confused and blunted by a vein of humor and satire in the fourth canto of the Batracomiomachia, where the poet describes the degeneration of the savages. Savages only in a manner of speaking, because as the scholars have recently dis- covered, "those that the populace call savages. . . lead no natural and primitive life, as was hitherto believed, but through corruption a de- fective life, having fallen from their former perfect state, in which their father's fathers ever lived, as in their proper native ambience." The other alternative is too absurd even to think of. The ever-benevo- lent Nature cannot have imposed upon her chosen creatures a life so hard and a path so long as that leading from the forests to civilization. "We are left to conclude that the wild and uncouth life must be not nature but corruption," and that man is born civilized and falls from theie into the savage state. But all this, Leopardi continues and objects, is no more than an aprioris- tic argument. The real truth is that Nature is evil, "our greatest enemy and tormentor," concerned with other matters than our good or ill, and treat- ing men just like the animals; and all zoological species are today equally decadent and wretched. The men are like the mice and the mice are like the men. Even the mouse's fear and anxiety-ridden existence "must be not nature but corruption," Leopardi repeats word for word, and goes on to compare it to Israel's historical Diaspora, and the ill-tolerated exile: "and she remembers the temple of Jerusalem and the countryside of Palestine, and weeps." Every barrier falls before Leopardi's impetuous and all-pervasive pessimism. Nineteenth-century' Europe is as primitive as the ancient kingdom of the mice. Poverty, weakness, and terror per- vade the human race, just as they do "every animal that lives in the earth or sky." That "weakness of America," born as a Europeocentric explanation for the infinite variety of the world, as an attempt at mental systematiza- tion of these remote and singular countries, strange animals and natives so curiously human, ends up, bloated with its various turbid additions, by being turned against the same deluded and embittered Europe, to weaken what little pride she has left, to sweep away her centuries of painful progress, to sully her triumphs and her conquests, rob her of her august signs of civilization, and reduce her men to the level of savages and both to the level of the croaking frogs, the ridiculous mice. Parturient montes.... And Rodipane is crowned king and grasps the 388 Hegel and His Contemporaries golden scepter with its globe on top "because then the mousely species thought it ruled the whole world."244 XI. DE MAISTRE: THE DEGENERATION OF THE AMERICAN SAVAGE When Leopardi describes the American and non-American savage as a living example of degenerate and corrupt humanity he adds that the reader will no doubt wonder at this thesis as a great scientific novelty, a "strange and unusual" deduction. But even leaving aside the more disastrous interpretations of the biblical dogma of the Fall, and even if we ignore de Pauw's malevolent generalizations, we still do not have far to go to find at least one recent and exact precedent for Leopardi's gloomy picture: a notion born precisely from the coalescence of Christian and naturalistic pessimism, and formulated once again almost in scorn and defiance of current opinion. Joseph de Maistre, a deliberately paradoxical thinker, draws the ele- ments of his theory on the depravation of the savages from de Pauw, either directly or through Robertson.4 For him, as for Leopardi, man's primitive condition is a state of happy perfection. His state of nature is civilization and science. At the beginning of all history is the Golden Age. The state of the savages, on the other hand, is not even comparable to the Iron Age. It is the barbarity of "some tribes that degenerated and then 244. Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, 1830-37, chap. IV (ed. Gregoriana, pp. 544-49). The comment of Cassara, op. cit., p. 435, is insufficient. On that of Zumbini, see below, n. 245. 245. Leopardi's derivation from de Maistre has been indicated by Zumbini, op. cit., II, 249-53, but he holds that Leopardi uses the thesis of the degeneration of the savages ironically, to attack de Maistre and to defend the ideas of the eighteenth century, and particularly those of d'Holbach, against de Maistre: a thesis which, although it may seem plausible in some details (for example the satire on the balance of power, admired by de Maistre: Soirdes, II, 29-30; Paralipomeni, II, 32-35), seems to me impossible to reconcile with the many passages from the Zibaldone (not yet p'ublished when Zumbini wrote his study) and other writings of Leopardi, all in agreement in upholding the degeneration of the human race and mocking the idea of Progress (see for that matter Zumbini too, op. cit., II, 278-79, and P. Hazard, Leo- pardi [Paris, 1913], p. 195). It remains true however that in the Paralipomeni the intermingling of ridi- cule and sarcasm ends up by revealing all the uncertainties and internal contradictions in the system of the scoffer himself. Another possibility is that Leopardi became aware of the thesis of de Maistre- whose works were actually very well known in Italy, and particularly in the Papal States, around 1830- through Gioberti, a great friend of the poet and constant admirer of the politician (cf. V. Gioberti, Medi- tazioni filosofiche inedite [Florence, 1909], pp. 184-92, esp. 191: "It was possible for men to become savage," 231-32, 245, 388-92; G. A. Levi, Giacomo Leopardi [Messina, n.d.], pp. 309-10; E. Gian- turco, Joseph de Maistre and Giambattista Vico [New York, 1937], pp. 221-24). Even for the well- known octave on "learning," which is no more than "the child reacquiring, at great pains, the knowledge which age has withdrawn from ourselves" (Paralipomeni, IV, ed. cit., p. 547), it is no problem to find precedents in de Maistre or even Saint-Martin: "All our discoveries are only in some way reminis- censes," one learns from the Tableau naturel des rapports qui existent entre Dieu, I'Homme et I' Univers, 1782, in Gnostiques de la Revolution, ed. A. Tanner (Paris, 1946), I, 51-54. There is nothing on the de Maistrean origin of Leopardi's expressions in N. Serban, op. cit. (where the only references, pp. 22-23 and 478, are to the possibility that Leopardi read the Soirees and the Lettres d'un gentilhomme russe sur I'Inquisition espagnole), nor in F. Flora, Leopardi e la letteratura francese (Milan, 1947), nor in the general studies on Leopardian thought by G. A. Levi, Paul Hazard, Karl Vossler, and Giovanni Ame- lotti. Vague references in Giusso, op. cit., pp. 180, 228-29. De Sanctis, op. cit., p. 28, points out that in 1815 Leopardi was unacquainted with de Maistre. 389 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America X. QUANTITATIVE CRITERIA AND LITERARY SCRUPLES The particular interest of these various comments lies in the fact that they reveal in Buffon a psychological attitude not unlike Hegel's in his outbursts of sarcasm and impatience with Master Krug,3 and seem to foreshadow to some extent the naturalist's high-handed arbitrariness with the facts and data of the world, including the Americas. Buffon tells the scientist he cannot afford to waste time on the fly. Hegel was to write that science has other things to do than deduce a rose, a dog, a cat, or even Master Krug's pen. In a celebrated passage from the Philosophy of His- tory he throws out the whole discussion about the future of America, which, he says "doesn't interest us," since it belongs neither to history nor philosophy, "which already give us enough to do."84 This same impa- tience with lesser matters receives even more striking and comprehensive expression when he expounds his theory that history should concern it- self only with the "great" occurrences, and ignore or leave to the writers of romances the "micrology" of the minor details, the little individual events.85 But unfortunately the introduction of the notions of large and small is highly dangerous for the understanding of reality. Qui incipit metiri, incipit errare - "he who begins to measure begins to err." Diderot knew this so well that he once wittily put forward plans for a "great work" destined to confute the "mathematicians": the Treatise on the Aberration of Measurement.86 In Buffon, however, the insistence on quantitative characteristics is not merely psychological in origin, but has a literary motivation too. In every page of his writings one is struck by his enthusiasm, his flowing oratory. For every species lovingly described he tries to bring out some particular feature of excellence which allows him to linger over and en- hance the portrait of that species, turning its instinctive reactions into human qualities. An almost inevitable result of this tendency is the mak- ing of comparisons of less and more, of better and worse, leading on to a desire to discover the fundamental reasons for such distinctions. The animals are no longer considered for themselves, but in respect to each other, the puma as weaker than the lion, the elephant as larger than the tapir. As early as 1770, Mme d'Epinay's plain common sense had noted 83. See the essay of the Jena period: Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme, in Werke (Berlin, 1834), XVI, 56-58. Phanomenologie des Geistes, ed. Lasson (Leipzig, 1921), p. 69; Enzyklopiidie, sec. 250; and Croce, Saggio sullo Hegel (Bari, 1913), p. 116. The target of Buffon's im- patience, however, is minutiae; that of Hegel's, the pretense of deducing empirical realities logically, be they large or small. 84. Ed. Brunstad (Leipzig, n.d., but ca. 1907), p. 134. 85. See Croce, Saggio, pp. 100-01. 86. Pensdes sur l'interpretation de la nature, p. 3. 21 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD painfully made their way back to the state of nature, which is civiliza- tion."246 But how did they slip down to such depths? Some chieftain must have committed a dreadful crime, one of those crimes which we can no longer even conceive of today (just like Leopardi's patriarchal Cain). "This chieftain.., .handed down the anathema to his posterity." And since every constant force, de Maistre muses fancifully, has a coefficient of acceleration (g = 9.8?!), this degradation "weighing down continuously on his descendants, in the end made them what we call savages." From this miscellany of theology and algebra, ethical genetics and rational mechanics, there emerges a great ethnographic truth: "What Rousseau and the like call the state of nature is the last degree of brutalization." That the opposite was generally believed was partially the result of the charity of the missionaries, who idealized the savage with the intention of protecting him (but they were right, those Europeans, when they re- fused to recognize the natives found in America as men), and partially of the bad faith of the philosophes, who made use of the savage to rail against the social order. But just look at him, this savage. The anathema is written not only in his mind but in his body: "He is a misshapen child, robust and ferocious, in whom the flame of intelligence glows with no more than a pale and intermittent flicker." He is neither provident nor perfectible. Even our vices have degenerated in the savage, just as "the most abject and revolting substances" are still susceptible of a further degeneration. He is thieving, cruel, and dissolute, but in a different way from us, because he does not have to overcome his nature: "He has an appetite for crime, but no remorse for it whatever." But who are these savages, anyway, that de Maistre describes so harshly? A footnote provides the answer: "Robertson (History of America, vol. II, bk. 4) has perfectly described the brutalization of the savage. It is a portrait as true as it is shocking."247 246. Soirees (written 1809, pub. 1821), I, 77-78; II, 179; cf. Leopardi, above, pp. 384-85; Chateau- briand, p. 358 (and also, for savages degenerated "naturally" rather than mystically, Humboldt, below, n. 346). On the difficulties in this thesis, and its relations with the "ferine wandering" of Vico and other authors, see F. Nicolini, La religiosita di G. B. Vico (Bari, 1949), pp. 90-92; on its relations with re- moter theosophical doctrines, A. Omodeo, "Cattolicismo e civilth moderna nel secolo XIX," Critica, 34 (1936), pp. 115-16 (and in Un reazionario: II conte G. de Maistre [Bari, 1939]). The point is barely touched on in Emile Dermenghem, Joseph de Maistre mystique (Paris, 1946), pp. 181-82, 194. 247. Soirees, I, 80-82. Carli's American Letters is also cited, ibid., I, 71n.; II, 69, 118, and 287, and in Du pape (Paris, 1918), pp. 278 n. 1, 281 nn. I and 2. Further eulogies of Carli in the Oeuvres inedites (Paris, 1870), p. 339 n. 2. In the course of the demonstration that war is the natural condition of the human race and that "human blood must flow uninterruptedly over the globe, somewhere or other," de Maistre produces in passing these Lascasian words: "The Discovery of the New World: the sentence of death for three million Indians" (Considerations sur la France [1796; ed. Lyon, 1873], pp. 33, 39). A little further on (p. 41) Buffon's thesis "that a great part of the animals are destined to die a violent death" (cf. also above, p. 10) is extended by him, with flamboyant savagery, to include man, and verified by man's history. Raynal and his declamatory philanthropy, on the other hand, were greeted only with dis- dain (Saint-Beuve, Portraits, II, 399). 390 Hegel and His Contemporaries He does not stop with this. In another passage, for example, he writes: The savages of America are not quite men, precisely because they are savages [and at this point de Maistre tears to pieces Pope Paul III's famous bull recogniz- ing their full humanity] and they are moreover beings visibly degraded both physically and mentally; and on this point at least, I do not see that there has been any reply to the ingenious author of the Recherches philosophiques sur les A me- ricains.248 It is all very well for Rousseau to set them up as exemplary models. His defense relies on various successive and superimposed states of nature, and fails through its own internal contradictions. In fact the savage is a long way from the first and genuine "state of nature," still moist with innocence and virtue. "Every moral and sensitive man is revolted by the brutalization and cruelty of these American savages whose happy exist- ence Rousseau dares to boast to us about: hordes of brutalized men wandering in the wilderness.. . having all the vices, except those for which they lack the materials," and so on for line after line. "What frightful pictures !"249 The truth of the matter is that the savage is just the opposite of the primitive. But the profound mystery of his existence has still to be ex- plained: "Perhaps if one knew what a savage is, and why there are sav- ages, one would know everything." One sure fact is that the savage is "necessarily subsequent to civilized man." The proofs? One glance at the New World is enough: "Look at America, for example. This country shows all the signs of a new land"-a clearly Buffonian feature. "Now, since civilization is of great antiquity in the Old World, it follows [sic!] that the savages living in America at the time of its discovery descended from civilized men!" De Maistre, however, seems to have slight doubts about the solidity of his thesis, and hastens to bolster it up with one of the usual arguments ex absurdo: if one did not accept it one would be saying "that they have been savages father and son since the time of the creation, which would be absurd." And why absurd? Because, apparently, the Almighty cannot have created savages. The book of Genesis talks about a primitive life, but it says nothing about savages. The Odyssey, following some time after the Bible, describes barbarous and ferocious beings, but no brutalized savages. "This state has only ever been observed in America." The American native is the sole prototype, the fundamental paradigm of the savage. America, degeneration, brutal violence, and base and loathsome corruption form a single complex of ideas, the complex of the sole au- 248. Etude sur la souverainete, ca. 1794-96, rev. 1815, in Oeuvres inddites, p. 333. 249. Examen d'un dcrit de J. J. Rousseau sur l'inegalite des conditions parmi les hommes, in Oeuvres inddites, pp. 454-55. 391 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD thentic savage. "At least there is no proof that he ever existed elsewhere." And thus, after an unsuccessful excursion in search of a primitive state of animality anywhere in the rest of the world - everywhere the kingdom of the gods and heroes preceded and lit the way for those of men some millennia earlier- America's private curse is reaffirmed. The savage state is a real "anomaly"- it is subsequent to the social state and "has existed incontestably only in America."250 In this mystical transformation of the specific de Pauwian condemna- tion, America even seems to escape the bonds of the first sin, and be afflicted only by those "second-order original sins," which in the Soirees in fact serve to justify the existence of the savages.251 Which means in fact, to reduce the essence of the tortured de Maistrean dissertations to plain terms, that America is devoid of those ancient traditions which give historic coherence to the peoples of our civilization, poor in national myths and literary monuments, and outside the orbit of the great geogo- nies and religions of the Old World. It is America, and neither Europe nor Asia. De Maistre had a well-developed sense of the dignity of the past, and although he scorns man-made history he is always ready to bend a rev- erent mental knee before the ancient institutions, the truths revealed in the depths of the distant past, the sublime veiled knowledge of the sanctu- aries: "The true system of the world was perfectly known in remotest antiquity."252 Where there is no "antiquity" the conservative mystic passes by without a second glance. The America of the savage fills him with a sort of horror and physical repulsion. And as for his pontifications 250. Examen, pp. 482-86. Saint-Martin, from whom de Maistre drew many of the general principles of his system, had already indicated the American savages as the extreme point of debasement and tor- pification of the human race (A. Franck, La philosophie mystique en France a' la fin du XVII"I sicle [Paris, 1866], p. 105). 251. Soirees, I, 58-59 (these secondary and repeated falls too, in fundamental contradiction with the dogma of Original Sin, seem to be Saint-Martinian in derivation, and thus, in the last analysis, cabalistic and Gnostic: see Franck, op. cit., pp. 160-61, 172; Viatte, op. cit., II, 38). The idea of degeneration, with or without Original Sin, preys on the Count's mind. As main cause of the French Revolution he points (Considerations sur la France, p. 175) to the moral degradation of the French aristocracy, and fishes out from Bernardin de Shint-Pierre (Etudes de la Nature, X [ed. Paris, Firmin-Didot, n.d.], pp. 199-200) an argument demonstrating the degeneration of the French nobility with respect to their forbears. These forbears were the "great lords of the court of Louis XIV." In little more than a century "one can see from the evidence how these races have degenerated!" The same argument, evidently drawn from the same source (although it is not cited) is used by Chateaubriand to demonstrate the drying up of France's genius under the influence of the philosophy of the eighteenth century: "Impiety, which makes everything sterile, is also demonstrated in the impoverishment of physical nature. Cast your eyes on the generations which followed the century of Louis XIV. Where are these men with the calm and majestic faces? . . ." (Genie de christianisme, pt. III, bk. IV, chap. 5; ed. cit., II, 87). A slightly later echo (but referring to an earlier epoch) of this supposed shrinking of current generations in respect to their forbears can be heard in the words of don Ruy Gomez before his ancestor: "His giant armor would be ill-suited to our build" (V. Hugo, Hernani, act III, in the famous "portraits" scene). Cf. also Whit- man, below, p. 534. 252. Soirees, I, 73-76. 392 Hegel and His Contemporaries on the subject of the North American colonists, the more apocalyptic and inflexible they get, the more they make one laugh. He discusses, for example, the possibility of universal suffrage; and at the mere mention of America his tone becomes magisterially disdainful: "People quote America; I know nothing more exasperating than the praises heaped on this babe in arms; wait for it to grow up."253 A babe in arms cannot even be considered an example. It is true that the Americans have made use of the democratic traditions of Old England and those of the refugees that fled from the wars of religion, and that "the Americans built on the plan of the three powers that they took from their ancestors, and did not by any means start out anew, like the French," but what is new in their Constitution, what comes from popular deliberation, "is the most fragile thing in the world; it would be difficult to gather together more symptoms of feebleness and caducity."254 Something similar had been said by other critics of the young republic, though without the same acute insight into the traditional elements in- corporated into the American constitution. But de Maistre goes further, goes as usual just that bit too far, and lays himself open to ridicule. In view of their disagreement over thii choice of a capital, the Americans have decided to build one ex novo, to erect it on the banks of a great river, and to call it Washington;and already all Europe has been informed of the "master plan" of the new capital. But a capital constructed de toutes pidces is something unthinkable to the stubbornly traditionalist count. Lord, no, it is not strictly speaking a task beyond the powers of mortal men: One can easily build a town: however, there is too much deliberation, too much humanity in this business: one could lay a thousand to one that the town will not be built, or that it will not be called Washington, or that it will not become the seat of Congress.255 253. Considrations sur la France, p. 56; cf. ibid., p. 102. And see below, p. 395. The thesis of Amer- ica as infant can obviously be traced back to Montaigne (see above, p. 282). But Montaigne's emphasis is different toto coelo: "child," reinstated at the end of the eighteenth century, and by the romantics, for his freshness and innocence, is again vilified (like "youthfulness": see above, pp. 282-83, 286, 318) by the reactionaries and the worshippers of antiquity and whatever is "old." Forty years later (1834) Guizot caused a sensation in the Chamber by declaring a la de Maistre that the United States was "a society being born . . an infant society" (Remond, op. cit., pp. 663-64 n. 20, also noting the echoes of de Maistre, p. 685, n. 7), and again in 1848 a legitimist reverted to the metaphor to reinforce his polemic (ibid., p. 142). 254. Ibid., p. 103; sneers at Paine, ibid., p. 82n. The same thesis- that the American Revolution "has come down, so to speak, to a transference of executive power from England to America," with the fur- ther advantage, as compared to the French Revolution, that "the Americans are a new people, good, religious, and calm," which will not however prevent grave upsets in their political organism-is ex- pounded in the third of the Fragments sur la France (in Oeuvres inddites, pp. 39-40). In his youth de Maistre had in fact taken a sympathetic interest in the progress of the American Revolution (Sainte- Beuve, Portraits, II, 396; Paolo Treves, Profeti del passato [Florence, 1952], p. 49). 255. Considdrations, pp. 103-04. 393 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD The count lost his bet. But beneath his disdain is there not something like an echo of de Pauw's scornful remarks on the capitals of other Ameri- cans, the proud city of Cuzco, which (according to him) could not have been more than a heap of smoky little huts, or the Babylonian city of Mexico, which he reduced to a wretched little hamlet, whose vaunted palace was simply a barn where the Aztec emperors huddled?256 The land of America is not fitted for the splendors of a metropolis. Grotesque as these exaggerations seem, they are basically less serious, less doctrinally inhuman than the debasement of the savage to the rank of wild ignoble animal. Nor can one deny that with this summary condemna- tion de Maistre was really putting himself on a higher level than that of the naturalists and travelers. The question of whether the savages are innocent or degenerate was removed from the diatribes between the devotees of Nature and the fanatics of Progress, and raised to the level of theology. The concept of Original Sin (see above, pp. 283 and 358) became once more the ruling factor in weighing the value and the destiny of man. But by this time there were already many North Americans, and men of authority, who sought to anchor the historicocosmic dignity of their fellow countrymen-not now the rejected and broken native, but the citizen of the United States-to a presumed or at least vigorously as- serted exemption from Original Sin: a theme that was taken up again, with more or less conscious awareness, by almost all the major writers of the American Renaissance. The New World figured as the Garden of Eden, the Old as the land of vice, crime, and degeneration through want of Grace. Innocent of history and unburdened with tradition, the Ameri- can appeared to Noah Webster, for example (1825), as God's immediate offspring, the new Adam.257 A candid primitivistic heresy, that in the atmosphere of dauntless faith soon evolved into a notion of linear Prog- ress, without tragedies or falls. De Maistre, on the other hand, loyal to Catholic dogma, saw all the world's history as a picture of futile struggles, fatal massacres, and un- avoidable decadence from a state of original perfection. He did not be- lieve in Civilization, like de Pauw; nor in Nature, like Leopardi. And he 256. Recherches, 11, 178, 202. The absence of capital cities or at least of real metropolises in the United States alarmed Chastellux (1786), who found the five largest cities (Boston, New York, Phila- delphia, Baltimore, Charleston) too maritime and mercantile; and the same defect, noted in Boston and Philadelphia, worried Brissot too (1791), who however, as a perfect Rousseauian in detesting the big cities in general, concluded with a prophecy agreeing with de Maistre's bet: the fortunate America would never have enormous cities like London and Paris (Stark, op. cit., pp. 79, 90, 93, 96, 100; and below, chap. 9, sec. 5. "The Quakers, the Marquis, and the Girondist"). But it is also worth noting that Ameri- can cities, even state capitals, are in fact extremely unstable, and that many urban centers do have a certain ephemeral and vagabond character about them (Boorstin, National Experience, pp. 93-97, 454). 257. For quotations and copious details, see Lewis, op. cit., esp. p. 72. 394 Hegel and His Contemporaries could thus, with paradoxical logic, see the savage as the most "evolved" and thus the most "decadent" of man. In the historian's texts, and the events of his own day, he sought and found the experimental confirma- tion of his rigorously antihistorical thesis and its consistent denial of any sort of Progress. XII. FABRE D'OLIVET: AMERICA REJECTED BY THE THEOSOPHISTS America reappears in very similar though usually rather less em- phatic guise in the writings of the other reactionaries and mystics; it reappears foreshortened, and merely glimpsed in passing, so that it is impossible to say with certainty whether the basic inspiration of the con- demnation should be traced back to de Maistre, to his teacher, Saint- Martin, to that teacher's teachers, Martinez de Pasqualy and Jakob Boehme, to remoter and vaguer rabbis or theosophists, or whether it derives in fact from doctrines predating the discovery of the continent by several centuries. What is clear is that the Buffon-de Pauw formulas proved their extraordinary malleability yet again, lending themselves to the support of apocalypses, escatologies, and palingenetic visions that would only have amused the author of Recherches and bored the writer of the Histoire naturelle. But all these hallucinated "prophets of the past" consider that they write at God's direct dictation, and would thus feel they were betraying their vocation if they were to quote their profane sources with any exactitude: particularly when the sources in question are very common and very recent, and accessible to everyone without need of any special initiation ceremonies. Historical exactitude is in any case the least of their concerns. "Buf- fonians" in this too, the immensity of the prospects they outline so fasci- nates them that they recoil in horror from defining them, from fixing chronologically ascertainable points of reference. Dates are shackles on the winged feet of the fates. The measuring of geographical distances is an insufferable bore, a mean and useless task for those who devour space while standing still and halt immobile in their flight, like the arrows of Zeno of Elea. America, the continent with an unarguable birthdate, separated from Europe by just so many thousand miles of ocean, is the first victim of this Sybilline and charismatic impulse. With a gesture of indifference even the meek and whimpering Ballanche excludes "the young Americans" from his evolutionary laws, which he formulates according to the scheme of the biblical Fall, and thus rejects them from the apex of history, residing, for him, in a socially redeemed humanity, because they have no past to point the way to the future. These little three-hundred-year-old orphans will have to wait for their salvation, or at least some prophet of their 395 396 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD salvation, until they are a bit older; until, shall we say, they can count three thousand years behind them, like Europe . ...*58 They never went through the initiations that the east imposed on our civilized world. They have no fabled times, no cosmogonic cycles, and thus (a bold leap that was to enjoy spectacular success, from the con- temporary Goethe right up to Henry James) they have no poetry of their own, either in literature or the arts. One day they will have, certainly, when they have assimilated the heritage of their imported tongues and the traditions of the Bible (in other words when they are thoroughly Eu- ropeanized, and no longer the virgin Americas).259 And then, although un- familiar with Roman law and the civil code, and born under the (unhappy) sign of the "social contract," then they will perhaps find a civil mission too, that of bringing back the unfortunate Negroes to the one common humanity: "Do we not see that there are already more ideas of civiliza- tion in the blacks who have reached social emancipation than in the colo- nists brutalized by the unlimited power of the master over the slave?"260 But the most complete and explicit repetition of the thesis of the Amer- icas' physical immaturity occurs in that esoteric rhapsody- whose glim- merings of a sense of history can hardly compensate for its incredible critical liberties - the Histoire philosophique du genre humain26' of Fabre d'Olivet, untiring unveiler of mysteries, intrepid linguist, dialectal poet and author of historical dramas and tragedies, novelist and musicologist, 258. P. S. Ballanche, L'homme sans nom, 1820, in Oeuvres, ed. Paris-Geneva, 1830, III, 26-28, 221-25; ed. Paris, 1833, III, 164 (cf. de Maistre, above, p. 393); Palingenesie sociale: Prolegomenes, 1827, ibid., IV, 26-26, 249-52; cf. also ibid., III, 28, 221, cited by R. Mauduit in his introduction to Le Vieillard et le Jeune Homme (Paris, 1929), p. 36-37, who reminds the reader that Comte too wanted to reason solely on the basis of the "Western world" (without the Americas: cf. also below, p. 461). The influences of the mystics and reactionaries on the Saint-Simonians and Comte are in any case well enough known. But one should not generalize; a fervent admirer of Ballanche, Michel Chevalier (see his Lettres, II, 401-06) sees America assured of a lofty destiny, since it will be the meeting place of the two great currents of civilization, that of our civilization going from east to west and that of the civilization of the Far East going from west to east, each with its path frequently diverted by the effect of two other impulses, Semitic to the south and Japhetic to the north (op. cit., I, pp. iii-viii): a real double paral- lelepiped of forces, which on colliding in America however apparently join forces rather than canceling each other out! The most curious thing is that Chevalier was actually an engineer, who went to the United States (1833-35) to study public works and the early railways (he composes a delightful hymn to the locomotive, that huffs and puffs and snorts and charges off just like a racehorse, no less! [Lettres, I, 223]) and who had a very acute insight into the immense technical and industrial possibilities of the country. On his work and its diffusion in France, cf. Remond, op. cit., pp. 375-77; in Germany, see Franz, op. cit., pp. 36-37, n. 31. 259. P. S. Ballanche, Oeuvres (Paris-Geneva, 1830), IIl, 26-28. 260. Op. cit., III, 223. On the Negroes, cf. below (Hegel), p. 433, and (Schopenhauer) pp. 458-59. 261. In its first edition (1822) the work was entitled De I'etat social de I'homme, ou vues philosophi- ques sur I'histoire du genre humain, and in the second (identical) edition of 1824 Histoire philoso- phique du genre humain, ou L'homme considedr sous ses rapports religieux et politiques dans I'etat social, a toutes les epoques et chez les differents peuples de la terre . . . [sic]. The insistence on the terms man and social betrays the theosophical (man is God) origins of the work and the political humani- tarian tendencies of the age. Its basic concepts, as antithetical to historical materialism [!], are praised by Tanner, in his introduction to the Gnostiques, I, 39-40, though he recognizes that for Fabre the "facts" sometimes serve as proofs "for the support of the preconceived idea." Hegel and His Contemporaries liberal interpreter of oriental wisdom, and in short the greatest polygraph of scientific occultism. And not only polygraph- Fabre d'Olivet was no armchair theosophist; he insisted on putting his esoteric learning into practice, with results that were unfortunately not always the happiest for him. His curing of two deaf-mutes "according to the method of the ancient Egyptian priests" got him into considerable trouble, with the police among others. When he arranged a performance of an oratorio he had written according to the musical system of the ancient Greeks, as rediscovered by himself, it was pointed out to him that it was neither more nor less than the old plagal mode still preserved in Gregorian chant. And when (apparently) he sought to use his beloved wife's powers as a medium for the purpose of extending his knowledge of Pythagorism, it seems he succeeded only in ruining her health and scandalizing her religious faith, whereupon she left him and obtained a decree of separation. But even heretics and sor- cerers have a benign Providence watching over them. And Fabre found some consolation in a zealous (female) disciple, who also restored his posthumous reputation, and even more in assuming a contented attitude of persecuted martyrdom, in daring experiments in necromancy, and in the foundation of the Universal Theodoxic Cult.262 In drafting the Histoire philosophique the extempore historiographer's Providence took the form, in general, of the major compilations of the eighteenth century, taken over in toto, right down to their schemes and ideologies,263 and in particular, for his information on the Americas, the literature of the dispute, used quite indiscriminately; for the continent's natural and geological history, Fabre d'Olivet draws on Buffon and per- haps Carli; for its people, on de Pauw; for the history of the European conquest, on Raynal and the noisier repeaters of Las Casas and the leyenda negra - showering the lot with abundant references to the Flood in the secular versions of Bacon and Boulanger. His references, however, are precious few, and although Buffon264 is named, de Pauw265 never is. But can one doubt the provenance of a pas- sage like this? 262. The previous biographies, brief and dated, are completely superseded by the fundamental work of L. Cellier, op. cit.: see, in particular, on the deaf-mutes, pp. 163-82, 244-48; on Greek music, 98- 102; on conjugal relations, 256-62. It contains nothing, however, about Fabre's ideas on America, not even in the long analysis, pp. 263-93, of the Histoire philosophique. 263. Fabre d'Olivet believed in linear Progress, in a Europe enlightened after the Dark Ages, in the continual "evolution toward perfection" of sciences, arts, and languages (see La langue htbralque restituee [Paris, 1815-16], I, 194; II, 7). 264. Histoire, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1910), I, 289-90n.; and cf. Les Vers Dords de Pythagore expliquds (Paris, 1813), pp. 397-98, and Cellier, op. cit., pp. 76-77. Boulanger is also mentioned several times in the Langue htbraque (for example, I, xxvii, xxix, xxxiv). 265. Fabre d'Olivet had however certainly read at least the Recherches sur les Grecs, which he men- tions with undisguised disdain (while revealing that he knows other works by the same author) on the 397 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD The new hemisphere . . . was a rather new World, compared to the old; younger, more recently emerged from the bosom of the seas, producing, in each of the three kingdoms, substances or creatures on which nature visibly impressed all the signs of youth. And up to here everything is beautifully new, fresh, and solid. But im- mediately afterward, without a word of explanation, this youthfulness splits up, to become a positive attribute in inanimate nature, and a nega- tive one in living nature. The general and geological forms displayed a remarkable magnificence there, but the principle of life, undeveloped, languished still. There were higher moun- tains than in the other hemisphere,266 greater rivers, more numerous and vaster lakes: and yet the vegetable kingdom lacked sap and vigor there.267 One met no species of animal there, that one could compare to that [sic] of the old World. Even the lions and the tigers, or rather the pumas and the jaguars that were given these names, had neither the courage nor the voracity of those of Africa. The very climate itself was quite different from that of the other hemisphere. It was respectively [?] more humid and colder. Only the pliant and "latescent"268 plants, the poisonous reptiles, the noisome insects reproduced abundantly, and with astonishing rapidity.269 But how and when did this "recent" emersion occur? Fabre d'Olivet cannot resist the illustrious myth of Atlantis, and before allowing America to rise from the waters he dunks it in the ocean, plunges it in up to its neck, then fishes it out wet and dripping.... It is a quite certain fact (bien certain) that the continent today known as America is none other than the island of Atlantis; peopled by the red race, it was on the point of making itself master of the world when a "hor- rible catastrophe" or flood occurred, the result, on the metaphysical plane, of the absolute perversion of these peoples and their consequent abandonment on the part of Providence. But even when one admits this primordial and biblical-type cause, "there still remain great difficulties in the matter of the secondary and physical causes." subject of impertinent critics of antiquity: "Further off I see, as the height of singularity, a maker of Re- searches who finds . . . that the first editor of Homer's poems, the manly lawgiver of Sparta, Lycurgus in short, was an ignorant and unlettered man, who could neither read nor write" (Vers Dores, p. 281, quoting "Pauw, Recherches sur les Grecs, vol. II, p. 355"; in fact, Recherches sur les Grecs, ed. cit., II, 379-81, and above, pp. 348-53). 266. An echo of Delisle de Sales (see above, pp. 111-17), another author well known to Fabre d'- Olivet (see for example Vers Dores, pp. 36n., 1 17n., etc.), and one who figures among the subscribers to the Langue hdbraique; cf. Viatte, op. cit., II, 169-70, 181, 187; and especially Cellier, op. cit., pp. 60-63, 78-81, 109-11, 119-20, 205, etc., according to whom the friendship with Delisle played "a large role, larger than has been suspected until now" in Fabre's tormented life (pp. 54-55). 261. Fabre d'Olivet forgets the forests of the North and Amazonia, perhaps influenced by the usual laments over the meager fertility of the earth and the scarcity of edible fruits. 268. Sic: the word is not found in any dictionary. If it derives from the Latin latesco it may mean that these plants hid themselves, shrunk up (liitescere), or that they broadened out in exuberant growth (latescere). Or could it just be a slip of the pen, latescent for lactescent? ... The lapsas of the initiates create insoluble hermeneutical problems. 269. Op. cit., II, 181-82. 398 Hegel and His Contemporaries To resolve them Fabre d'Olivet does not hesitate to imagine a sudden movement of the terraqueous globe, which raised the North Pole, perhaps with several successive shocks, until the earth, forcibly straightening itself out, turned back the waters toward the South Pole, submerging Atlantis and leaving stagnant swamps in the lower areas thus rinsed. All the red men were drowned, except those few who at the time of the flood were on the highest mountains, the Appalachians, the Cordilleras, or the Tapayas,270 and who were thus beyond the reach of that vast tidal wave. But this whole story seems so unconvincing to Fabre d'Olivet himself that he deems it wise to call on the support of other authorities: "Bacon thought as I do that America had been part of the old Atlantis"; Bou- langer, "who carried out considerable research in this matter," sees savagery as having originated with terror of the Flood; and "many schol- ars have since amplified and commented on these ideas."271 Beneath all this, however, one catches a glimpse of another picturesque and unscien- tific element, namely the esoteric tradition of the four races (black, white, yellow, and red) competing throughout the millennia of prehistory for the mastery of the world272 - a tradition which repeats in its formal scheme and translates into naturalistic terms the biblical parabola of the four monarchies (see above, pp. 131-32). The white race, according to Fabre d'Olivet, makes its appearance when the black, "an older race, reigned over the earth and held the scepter of knowledge and power," ruling Africa and the greater part of Asia, where it had brought the yellow race under its sway: Some remnants of the red Race languished in obscurity on the summits of the highest mountains of America, and survived the horrible catastrophe which had just struck them; these feeble remnants were unknown: the red Race, to which they had belonged, had only a short while ago possessed the Western Hemisphere of the globe.273 270. If it were worth the trouble of arguing, one might point out that the Appalachians reach a mere 6700 ft., and the Tapajoz, in Brazil, is a river, a tributary of the Amazon. 271. Op. cit., II, 190-96. For Bacon, see above, pp. 60-62; for Boulanger (disliked for his rationalism by other occultists, like Saint-Martin, who is frequently quoted with reverence by Fabre d'Olivet), see above, p. 59. 272. See Papus (G. Encausse), L'occultisme et le spiritualisme (Paris, 1902), pp. 114-19, who sums up the tradition "following Fabre d'Olivet," who is for him "the angel of this current of erudition and philosophy .., one of the most learned men produced by occultism" (ibid., p. 125). 273. Histoire philosophique, I, 167. The immediate source of this succession of races seems to be a group of articles ("Animal," "Nature," "Quadrupede") in the Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Histoire Natu- relle (1816), quoted by Fabre d'Olivet with glowing praises, and wherein one reads, among other things: "Possibly the Negro race . . . was once the queen of the earth, before the white race was created ... The Negro, once king of the animals, fell under the yoke of the European; will the latter in his turn bow his head before a more powerful and intelligent race?" (Vers Dords, pp. 398-402). But the question is answered in the negative by Fabre d'Olivet (see below, p. 401). See also the extract quoted in Tanner, op. cit., II, 247, and cf. below, pp. 458-59. Schopenhauer's attribution of racial primacy to the Negroes. Gioberti, on the other hand, maintains (1851) that "the red man of America is superior to the Ethiopic," and is in his turn surpassed by the "bronze-colored" [?], the yellow, and the supreme Caucasian races (Rinnovamento civile, I, 128). 399 22 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD the weak point in Buffon's argument. "Why does he insist on pronouncing these eulogies or funeral orations over every species he names? One is what one is. One should set forth the chain of creatures, it seems to me, and not have them trespass upon each other's territory."87 This was in fact just the period when the theory of the chain of being was revived and temporalized by Robinet (1761-68), and also particu- larly Bonnet (1770). But Buffon, consistent in his opposition to any sort of rigid systemization, always refused to be enticed by the attractions of this splendid metaphysical structure. Nor was the naturalist at all im- pressed with the evolutionary theories that were slowly emerging with these ideas of a chain or scale or column of species and prototypes; Buffon at first (1749) expressed his doubts over the validity of the whole concept of species, and finally only accepted species as entities inde- pendent of time, invariable units, the real "constants" of creation.88 For Buffon, we must remember, it is the privilege of the "large" animal to be fixed and not subject to variation. XI. THE STABLE SUPERIOR TO THE CHANGEABLE: ARISTOTLE What strikes one particularly in this basic subthesis is not the logical connection made between large and stable, but the tacit assumption that the stable, the fixed, the invariable has some special virtue setting it off from the variable; that the unchanging species are by nature superior to the changing ones. To alter means to drop in rank. The varieties of a species all are explained as degenerations from a prototype. Leaving aside some major species, such as man, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hip- popotamus, the tiger and lion, which hold a proud place apart, "the privi- lege of being an isolated species depends less on shape than on size"- the other species mingle with their neighbors and form "deteriorated affinity groups," types that have degenerated ab immemorabili.89 87. Letter of 6 November 1770, in La signora d'Epinay e I'abate Galiani, Lettere inedite (1769- 1772), ed. F. Nicolini (Bari, 1929), p. 114, my italics. In the version published by Perey and Maugras (Correspondance de l'abb Galiani [Paris, 1881], I, 288-89), the concept of the "chain of being" is developed and other variants are noted. 88. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 230. Robinet (De la Nature, 1761-68) amended the old idea of the continuity of all natural forms, of the infinite chain which included every possible phenomenon and variety, asserting that the differences were merely quantita- tive. Through his reduction of specific differences from the qualitative to the quantitative, Robinet ap- proaches the Buffonian theory of American fauna: "All the differences in nature must be differences of degree. Her most extreme productions must be recognized as mere exaggerations of something normal" (summarized by A. G. F. Gode-von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism [New York, 1941], p. 143; cf. Lovejoy, op. cit., pp. 275-76). W. Lynskey ("Chain of Being," esp. pp. 367-68) has pointed out curious traces of the chain idea in Buffon. But in reality Buffon (like Robinet) always in- sists emphatically, even in the passages quoted by Lynskey, on the continuity of the real, on the imper- ceptible gradations of the physical world, or, in fact, on the critical principle Natura non facit saltus, much more than on the Platonic metaphysical architecture. For him nature is not a monumental staircase soaring up to the heavens, but an ever so gently inclined plane. 89. Daudin, op. cit., pp. 138, 140; Guyenot, op. cit., pp. 397-99. THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD After the catastrophe the continent was left sterile and incapable of feeding a numerous population. In fact, when the Europeans arrived they found only two "entirely formed nations," the Mexicans and the Peru- vians: two childlike nations of whom Fabre d'Olivet tells us in one place that their development, which perhaps promised something, was stifled before it bloomed by the European Will, and in another, instead, that they had had, at least the Peruvians, "a precocious intellectual development," perhaps the result of the teachings of Chinese sailors that had landed near Panama, but a "slow and stunted physical development." For Fabre d'Olivet, these stunted sages first serve as a confirmation of the cyclical thesis that the decrepit nations are just like the childish ones,"" and are then compared to hothouse fruits, "beautiful to the eye, but flaccid and tasteless to the tongue." The result is easily foreseeable (very easily, three centuries after the fact): since the Peruvians, with all their literary culture, were unwarlike, it could present no problem for a handful of rapacious, shrewd, and cruel brigands to annihilate "this race too involved in ideas beyond their reach."275 Alongside these dreamy Incas, physically Lascasian but mentally heirs of a mysterious oriental wisdom, the simple natives cut a poor figure: they too are of scarce bodily strength, and furthermore (or less) have no intellectual endowments. They remained in the infancy of the social state, and "none of their faculties were fully developed: they were feeble both physically and mentally."276 Even their color is of low quality. They belonged to the red race, certainly, but they were not of pure stock: polluted by mixtures and crossings of blood, their traditions preserved the memory of the disaster of Atlantis and the migration of Europeans, via Iceland-Greenland-Labrador-Canada-Louisiana-Mexico:277 today then, three hundred years after the discovery, they are still more bas- tardized and crossbred, just as the animal and vegetable species show signs of changes resulting from the importation of European specimens and zootechny. Yet the type described is indelibly familiar to us: beard- less, "their constitution was moist and without manly strength. There 274. Old age and infancy come together again, but this time in antithesis, in the reference to the Negro slave trade to America: "A decaying race came to share the misfortunes of an infant race" (op. cit., II, 199; and Tanner, op. cit., II, 257-58). 275. Op. cit., I, 152-53; II, 182, 197, 200. Other savagely antihispanic statements and sacramental references to the "expiation" owed by the Spanish nation for its crimes: op. cit., I, 341n.; II, 129-30, 179-80, 184, 187-89, 201n., 204. On the Mexicans, cf. also II, 200-02; on the Peruvians, II, 203- 04. The monarchy of the former was imperial-feudal, of European type, that of the latter, theocratic, of Oriental type (op. cit., II, 383). 276. Histoire philosophique, II, 186. Other derisive comments about Rousseau's idealized American natives (Caribs, Algonquins, peoples on the banks of the Mississippi) are mentioned by Cellier, op. cit., p. 275. 277. Op. cit., II, 186-88, 200. The idea of human sacrifice is also said to have come to the Mexicans from the Europeans, via Iceland! (ibid., 1, 201). 400 Hegel and His Contemporaries were men who had milk at their breasts."278 Their women were unfruitful and enslaved to the men,279 who were however feeble, without ambition and strong passion, childlike, uncaring. In the whole hemisphere there was not one shepherd: "Not a single animal was known that had been sub- mitted to the yoke of domesticity."280 As for the nations of European stock that are now established through- out the hemisphere, Fabre d'Olivet looks on them with ill-disguised antipathy: North America is Protestant, South America is Jesuit: sooner or later they are bound to come to blows, "and then we shall see the real trial of strength between Luther and Loyola."281 No glorious destiny for the West then, and no question of a transfer of political power from the Old to the New World: instead Fabre d'Olivet sees Europe, ancient Europe, bound together in a holy alliance and led by a Supreme Pontiff, marching "to the conquest of the World, by the sole strength of things."282 An optimist in all things, from Europe's destiny to the success of his book, Fabre d'Olivet was convinced that it would have been difficult "to set forth more clearly, rapidly and perhaps agreeably the history of the human race over the last twelve thousand years, according to an entirely new system combining physics and metaphysics." Even superficial read- ers, he relates, have found his book interesting. If his "contemporaries" refuse to accept the truth he offers them, and which alone can save them from the terrifying disasters threatening them, so much the worse for them: "Posterity will avenge me."283 The ritual appeal for posterity's vengeance has not yet been answered. But what are one hundred and fifty years for the historian of one hundred and twenty centuries? Of his contemporaries, it is known that he was oc- casionally visited by Ballanche, who had read his works and who (ac- cording to another critic and contemporary) felt himself strangely drawn to his ideas, although he found them "permanently dug in behind a bar- rier of scarcely verifiable science and guarded by a haughtiness which never delivers its final judgement." 278. Ibid., ii, 186n. We might have expected to hear this detail reported in shocked tones by anybody rather than the orphic and Pythagoric Fabre d'Olivet, who should have remembered the mammae of his distant predecessor Tiresias! Note however that in Fabre d'Olivet, as in de Maistre and the other frown- ing "prophets," de Pauw's scandalous and erotic details are decorously left in the background. 279. Ibid., II, 187n.; cf. de Pauw, Recherches, I, 54: "They procreated little." 280. Op. cit., II, 187n.; cf. de Pauw, Recherches, I, 111 ("The natives of North America did not have the spirit to subdue these animals, nor to reduce them to pasture . . . the Bisons, which the Tartars domesticated, likewise remained wild with the Americans"). 281. Histoire philosophique, II, 256; cf. Hegel, below, pp. 436-37. 282. Ibid., p. 468 (and Cellier, op. cit., p. 305-06). It was this augury or prophecy, of course, formu- lated in the political terms topical at the time, that was generally misunderstood, and earned Fabre d'Olivet a reputation as theocratic reactionary that he did not really deserve. In the united world one single language will be spoken, which Fabre d'Olivet hopes will be French (Langue he'brdique, I, 197). 283. Letter of 15 May 1822 (in Tanner, Gnostiques, II, 9-10). 401 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD This at least is plain speaking. In defining "this philosopher who could have dispensed with being a charlatan," Sainte-Beuve had not yet learned to tempor his venom.284 XIII. THE REACTION OF THE SCIENTISTS: BARTON AND HUMBOLDT A. Benjamin Smith Barton and the learned North Americans. Now the fact of the matter is that it needed a lot more than the instinctive scepticism of a Sainte-Beuve, the ingenuous enthusiasm of a Bernardin de Saint-Pierre or, going back a few decades, the caviling concern of the odd Jesuit father, to destroy the thesis of America's inferiority pro- pounded by naturalists and historians of considerable fame. What was needed was the word of Science. And the amazing thing is that this word had already been pronounced back at the very beginning of the century, and yet neither poets, nor mystics, nor (as we shall shortly see) the great Hegel, seem to have paid it a blind bit of notice. We have already observed the development of a lively reaction to the specious accusations of Buffon among the proud rebellious citizens of North America. The development of the West and the increase in traf- fic with the Far East were seen as further reasons to reject the French naturalist's thesis. In 1818-19 a disciple of Jefferson, the well-known politician and publicist, T. H. Benton, one of the prophets of the Mani- fest Destiny, dusted off Columbus's grandiose illusion and pointed to the United States as the bridge thrown across to the riches of the Indies, indeed to all Asia. When they reach the Pacific and stand within sight (so to speak) of the continent where Adam and Eve were created, the Americans will have completed the "circumambulation of the globe." And thus having gained control of the traffic with Asia, despite the Eng- lish, they will make themselves independent of Europe and will no longer be servile copyists and imitators, branded by Buffon with a stigma of biological inferiority.285 More serious in their aims were the geologists, ornithologists, and ethnographers who were patiently gathering data and making observa- tions which without being overtly polemic, indeed largely because they were not formulated as explicit contradictions of the thesis of America's telluric inferiority, succeeded in discrediting its basis of fact. The natural- ists of the New World found fossil strata of undeniable antiquity, birds of 284. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains (1834; ed. Paris, 1855), I, 324; cf. E. Faguet, Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvieme siecle (Paris, n.d.), II, 137. Fabre d'Olivet had already been adjudged a charlatan or a ruffian by Volney, by the circle of Benjamin Constant, and later by Renan (Cellier, op. cit., p. 242 n. 1). 285. H. N. Smith, Virgin Land, pp. 22-26. Several times, in the early years of the century, politicians, professors, and journalists raised paeans to Jefferson for his decisive victory over the errors and calum- nies of Buffon (see examples in Martin, op. cit., p. 26). 402 Hegel and His Contemporaries tolerably melodious song,286 and Indians capable of being infected by civilization- such civilization, at least, as was presented to them in the form of intoxicating beverages and thunderous firearms. When in 1801 two fossilized mammoth skeletons were found near New York, a son of the discoverer took one of them to London, and put it on display for the astonished Europeans, describing it in the publicity hand- outs as the "great American incognitum . .. a non-descript carnivorous Animal of immense size, found in America"; he also sent a copy of the leaflet to the President of the United States, who was an old friend of his, Thomas Jefferson. 87 These naturalists and scientists, like Jefferson, were inspired by a sense of love and affectionate curiosity toward their land and all its prod- ucts. The Creoles have already been mentioned (above, pp. 184-85). In the former British colonies political independence preceded the methodi- cal study of local peculiarities and resources, which could thus develop unaffected by the defensive and eulogizing attitude too frequently ob- servable in the scientific literature of Spanish America at the turn of the century. But even if they are more coldly objective the naturalists of the United States set out from the conviction that their "material," the min- erals, plants, animals, and peoples of North America, are just as worthy of study, just as important in themselves and for themselves, as those of any other part of the world. The idea of America as a continent only recently emerged from the waters and still not dried out, "a marshy wilderness inhabited by croco- diles and snakes," was scornfully rejected by the eminent Philadelphia botanist, Benjamin Smith Barton, who had studied in Europe, at Edin- burgh and Gottingen, and who in 1802 became president of the American 286. See, for example, after Jefferson (Papers, VIII, 241, for whom the nightingale is a third-rate songster in comparison with the mockingbird and the American thrush: see above, chap. 5, n. 406), Gilbert Imlay, 1792, who praises the sweetness of song of the birds of Kentucky (H. N. Smith, Virgin Land, p. 130), and the disciple and friend of the famous W. Bartram (Travels ... [Philadelphia, 1791]; on whom see N. B. Fagin, William Bartram; Interpreter of the American Landscape [Baltimore, 1933], esp. p. 96), Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, 1808-13, polemicizing with Buffon (J. R. Moore, op. cit., p. 326; Martin, op. cit., p. 195; Vail, op. cit., pp. 374-88). 287. Cf. Catalogue of the Library of Jefferson, I, 475-76;.Martin, op. cit., 115, 125, and above, pp. 241-42. The find was also depicted by the discoverer, Charles W. Peale, in a vast canvas of banal grandiosity (1806), whose apparent inspiration was the simultaneous effort to show the picturesqueness of the power excavators and the drama of the discovery -a painting that is a classic of its genre. The enormous skeleton was put on display in the Philadelphia Museum, where it was attentively examined by Perrin du Lac (Voyage dans les deux Louisianes, pp. 253-56), scientifically discussed (1815-16) by Montlezun (Remond, op. cit., p. 331), and where a quarter of a century later (1829) it was seen, though leaving the viewer "greatly disappointed in its appearance," by the lady-traveler Anne Royall (Tryon, A Mirror for Americans, pp. 62-63, and Martin, op. cit., pp. 119-20). Liwenstern too, op. cit., p. 198, saw and admired mastodon skeletons in Philadelphia, "the largest and most complete ones known." In 1833-34 a museum in Cincinnati put on show some "enormous organic remains" (Tryon, A Mirror for A mericans, p. 553); while in Columbia, South Carolina, Frederika Bremer saw (1850) "some skeleton fragments of gigantic animals, the megatherium and mastodon, found here" (op. cit., 1, 383: cf. II, 263). 403 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD Philosophical Society. Dr. Barton accepted the challenge of Buffon, de Pauw, and Robertson, retraced the path to the very first sources of Indo- American civilization,28" and in the opening pages (I, 4) of his Fragments of the Natural History of Pennsylvania wrote: I cannot but deem it a puerile supposition, unsupported by the evidence of nature, that a great part of America has probably later emerged from the bosom of the ocean than the other continents. In the Notes on Virginia (which was well known to Barton) Jefferson had already demolished the hypothesis of an American flood, indeed had even doubted that the atmosphere contained enough humidity for the Bible's universal flood; and managed to remain true to his faith in the Old Testa- ment and America at the same time by suggesting that there may well have been some little flood over there "in the country lying around the Mediterranean sea."289 In much the same way the Rev. Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) found it best to defend the climate of the United States, and protect its past from the slander of a post-Noachic flood and its animals from the charge of degeneration, by heaping gross sarcasms on Buffon and his credulous follower, de Pauw.290 With equal zeal and determination Dewitt Clinton denied (in 1814) that the air of America had a harmful influence on the body or spirit of man, and went on to exalt the American "race" as a happy mixture of the best European stock.291 The geographer Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826), in describing the United States, set himself the task in his turn of correcting the many errors committed by the Europeans, the only ones who until then had concerned themselves with American geography, and drew largely on Jefferson's Notes. It was from the Notes that he took the polemic against Buffon and Raynal, who is said to have "extended ... to the inhabitants transplanted in America" the thesis worked out by Buffon "to ennoble the species and individuals of Europe, at the expense of the corresponding species and individuals in the New World"- a task actually carried out by de Pauw - and in several places he defends the healthiness of the climate of the United States, the longevity of its inhabitants, its richness in natural 288. H Bernstein, "Inter-American Aspects," p. 58, and Origins, pp. 61-62. The translation (1808) of Molina's Chilean history was dedicated to Barton (ibid., p. 64), and Jefferson, who owned various of his works (Catalogue of the Library, I, 318-19,468-69; III, 357; IV, 185-87, 219), sent him some of his notes on Indian vocabularies (see Ford ed., IV, 120; IX, 177; Life and Writings, ed. Modern Library, pp. 598-99, and Peden, in a note to his edition, p. 282, n. 13). On Barton, cf. Smallwood, op. cit., pp. 289-93; Pearce, The Savages, pp. 77-78; Martin, op. cit., 194-95, 247. (He should not be confused with William Barton, who [1791] defended the climate, salubriousness, and virtuous disposition of America against Buffon and the other European denigrators, and on whom see Chinard, "America as a Human Habitat," pp. 47, 49; L'homme contre la Nature, pp. 63-66 ff.; and Martin, op. cit., pp. 200-02). 289. Martin, op. cit., p. 128. 290. Ibid., pp. 153, 158, 170, 194-96, 204. 291. Curti, American Loyalty, pp. 66, 71; C. and M. Beard, op. cit., pp. 214 ff. 404 Hegel and His Contemporaries products, and even the virtue of the redskins, whom he absolves from the accusation of sexual frigidity (a characteristic of all nomads and hunt- ers); but he does not hesitate to class as lazy, idle, and despotic, the rich planters of the South, who have been softened by the climate and more especially by their great number of slaves.292 Thus although his references to Latin America reiterate the superficial judgments of Buffon and de Pauw, he describes the natives of North America quite sympathetically, in an accurate and detailed picture that concludes with an attack on Buf- fon and de Pauw; and toward the end of his life (ca. 1824) he founded the American Society for Promoting the Civilization and General Improve- ment of the Indian Tribes in the United States.293 B. Humboldt's enthusiasm for tropical America. But Jefferson, Barton, Clinton, and Morse wrote in America. And in Europe (as Sydney Smith was asking at that very time) "who reads an American book"?294 In Europe too, however, America just then found a defender, and some- one of much superior standing to these worthy North Americans. Alex- ander von Humboldt did, in fact, quote and praise Barton as an "acute naturalist," before going on (1806-07) to take up on his own account, from a more elevated standpoint, the criticism of the well-known, indeed too well known, assertions: Too often writers generally praised, and rightly praised, have repeated that America is in every sense a new continent. That luxuriant vegetation, the enor- 292. See the elaboration in Pictet, Tableau, I, 180-81, 186; II, 134; against his severe judgment on the inhabitants of Maryland, ibid., II, 140, see Bayard, Voyage, pp. 190-91. 293. See M. A. Kraus, A History ofAmerican History (New York, 1937), pp. 151-55; H. Bernstein, Origins, p. 63; Pearce, The Savages, pp. 60-79, 96, 97, 187. And, for other examples, Martin, op. cit., pp. 192-96; in defense of the Americans' longevity, see ibid., pp. 202-03. 294. "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?" (Sydney Smith, in the Edinburgh Review, January 1820; much the same expressions occur in an article by Smith in the same periodical, December 1818: see Cun- liffe, Literature, p. 44). The saying, frequently quoted and becoming almost proverbial (see Basil Hall: in England "the great mass of the people never read an American volume, and never even see or hear of one," Travels in North America in the years 1827 and 1828 [Graz, 1965], II, 49), is taken up again with increased savagery with the revival of anti-Americanism in England after the insolvencies of the American states in 1839-42 (Thistlewaite, op. cit., p. 78). In point of fact the general ignorance in Eu- rope about North American things and writings was really quite extreme at that time (Curti, Probing Our Past [New York, 1954], pp. 193-94), and the same was even more true of Latin America (A. P. Whit- aker, The Western Hemisphere Idea [Ithaca, N.Y., 1954], p. 9). A quarter of a century after Smith's barbed remark an American publisher could answer him that a very large number of American books, 382 within ten years, had been reprinted in England (G. P. Putnam, "Literature in America," 1845, in An American Reader, pp. 291-92). When Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared, and gained its well-known re- sounding success, another American countered facetiously: "Who reads an American book, did you inquire, Mr. Smith? Why ... who does not?" (C. F. Briggs, Uncle Tomitudes, 1853, ibid., p. 383). And in 1859 the Boston Post published a study with statistics on "Who Reads an American Book" (Carl Bode, The Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840-61 [Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1959], p. 115). Finally Melville, in his essay on Hawthorne, announced that the day was near when it would be asked: "Who reads a book by an Englishman that is a modern?" (Matthiessen, op. cit., p. 372, still smarting from the insolent remark, points out that those very years 1820-21, with the appearance of Irving, Bryant, and Cooper, saw the birth of the literature of the new American nation - which in fact amounts to admitting the Englishman to be right). 405 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD mous sweep of its rivers, the restlessness of its powerful volcanoes are a proof (they say) that there the earth, still shaking and not yet dried out, is nearer to the primordial chaotic state than the Old Continent. Already long before I went there I found such ideas as antiphilosophical as they were contradictory to generally recognized physical laws. Fanciful images of youth and restlessness, of growing aridity and inertia [Triigheit] of the aging earth can arise only in those who find it amusing to go in search of contrasts between the two hemispheres and make no effort to gain an overall view of the structure of the terrestrial globe. It would be as much as to say that southern Italy was "newer" than northern Italy, because it had so many more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions: The idea that a certain peace must reign in Nature in an older land is based on a mere trick of our imagination. There is no reason to suppose that one entire part of our planet is older or newer than another.295 Goethe, with his faith in the countries without eruptions or earthquakes being more stable socially too, had let himself be seduced by this same trick of imagination. Humboldt does not. Even his primitive Neptunistic convictions undergo a change in the glow of America's volcanoes. In- stead of hailing the New World as Goethe did for its lack of basalt and seismic disturbances, Humboldt is happy to admire its complexity, the alternating fury and contorted couplings of natural phenomena. Tension is more productive than harmony, the dialectic of the challenge is the mainspring of progress.29" It is not the calm peace of the geological strata that attracts him, but life, the unforeseeable variety of life, including the life of the earth, the violent play of elemental forces. His heart stirs not to the ethereal serenity of the universe but to the impetus and impulses that keep it in motion and agitation, and compose themselves into a superior harmony of discords. In the convulsive darkness of prehistory, the world was infinitely more tempestuous and violent than this "tranquil world of ours, in which we live." The animals were gigantic, the plants differently distributed, the rivers broader and deeper."' And America offers us still the spectacle of those times (Urzeit) and those noisy conflicts, with erupting subter- ranean fires, raging torrents, and thundering hurricanes. "The struggle 295. A. von Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, mit ,'issenschaftlichen Erliiuterungen, 1807, 3rd ed., (Stuttgart-Tfibingen, 1849), I, 16 (the statement on crocodiles and snakes), and n. 19; ibid., pp. 167-71, which cite, apart from Barton, the article "Uber die Urv61lker von Amerika" by the same Humboldt, in the Neue Berlinische Monatsschrift, 15 (1806), p. 190; cf. Minguet, op. cit., pp. 371, 633-34. The French edition (Tableaux de la Nature [Paris, 1808]), was presented with the author's compliments to Jefferson, who already had a very high opinion of Humboldt and replied with heartfelt thanks (Catalogue of the Library, 1, 305; cf. also ibid., IV, 290-92, and below, n. 323). 296. Minguet, op. cit., pp. 60-61, 615. 297. Reise, 111. 122. 406 Hegel and His Contemporaries of the elements with each other is the real characteristic of the natural scene in the New World."298 Thus it is not only America's slanderers that discover and denounce unique and contradictory deficiencies in the continent. The admirers too, like Goethe and Humboldt, find and admire in it what they themselves most intimately worship, the former the sovereign calm of nature, the latter its eternal creativity, which eludes the dichotomies and dilemmas of the professors. The volcano Tunguragua belches forth more mud and water than lava: "So here we have a volcano," jeers Humboldt delightedly, "with which Nature wishes to reconcile and unite the Neptulists and Vulcanists!"299 He says it jokingly, but this volcano and its liquid charge go a lot further toward resolving the scientific conflict than the so-much-later bored in- difference of the aging Goethe.3o1 In the polemic between Neptunists and Plutonists, as in the quarrel over America's geological age and humidity, the empirical objectivity of the new natural science, imbued with the critical spirit and a sense of history, could not but reject all such temporal schemes, value judgments, balances and symmetrical contrasts that showed even a hint of aprioristic systematizing. But any futile condemnation found an even stronger en- emy in Humboldt's alert and sympathetic spirit, his yearning for an or- ganic vision of the world and his romantic longing for totality: "In Amer- ica," Chateaubriand was to write, "the great Humboldt has described and said everything."301 It was in fact for the purpose of conscientious study-quite unmixed 298. Ibid., p. 191; III, 321. 299. Letter to von Zach, from Cuman., 1 September 1799, in K. Bruhns Alexander von Humboldt, eine wissenschaftliche Biographie (Leipzig, 1872: hereafter cited as Bruhns), I, 323. On another vol- cano, Cuchivano, which possibly within its belly separates the water into its elements and belches forth burning hydrogen, see Reise, I, 331-33. On the Neptunism of Humboldt's younger days and his successive oscillations, see Bruhns, op. cit., I, 238-39; III, 102, 108, 182-83. His first work, Min- eralogische Betrachtungen iiber einige Basalte am Rhein (1790), was to show "that this rock is of Nep- tunian origin" (H. Klencke, Alexander von Humboldt [Leipzig, 1851], p. 29). Still, on his return from America, Humboldt believed that his travels provided further confirmation of Werner's system: letter to Freiesleben, from Bordeaux, I August 1804, in Bruhns, 1, 397. On his balanced position, see Minguet, op. cit., pp. 43-44, 73, 551. 300. See above, p. 362. On the resulting conflict of ideas between Goethe and Humboldt see also above, n. 133, and exhaustive details in Bruhns, op. cit., I, 192-97; but see also Friedrich Muthmann, Alexander von Humboldt und sein Naturbild im Spiegel der Goethezeit (Ztirich-Stuttgart, 1955), esp. pp. 16-17, 63-64 and Minguet, op. cit., pp. 28n., 50, 72-74, 78-80. Jefferson too, substantially a Nep- tunist, professed an absolute disinterest in the rival boasts of Vulcan and Neptune (Martin, op. cit., pp. 45, 127-28). Considerably later, but still in the spirit of Humboldt, is the irony of an American journal- ist who in the upper valley of the Mississippi found clear signs that it had once been subject to powerful volcanic and diluvial action, "and neither the Neptunian or Vulcanian theory can advance a superior claim" (E. Flagg, The Far-West [New York, 1838], in Tryor., ed., A Mirror for Americans, pp. 571- 72). 301. Voyage en Amerique, p. 27. 407 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD with morbid exoticism-that Humboldt had set sail (in 1799) for the equatorial regions of the New World- the part of America said to be most unhealthy, the fearsome tropics around the Caribbean Sea. And from the moment of his arrival he had found himself completely enchanted. He had no difficulty at all in getting acclimatized. Quite the reverse, he ex- perienced an immediate and powerful sensation of being in some vast theater, extraordinarily rich and bright, and with his mind tense and reach- ing out he was ready to examine and enjoy its every aspect. In his de- scriptions the enthusiasm of the first discoverers seems to come alive again, so much more surprising after three centuries of travel and ex- ploration, and rendered more serious and solemn by nineteenth-century Europe's scientific maturity. It is no injustice to his innumerable pre- cursors, both ancient and recent, from Oviedo to La Condamine, to say that with Humboldt Western thought at last achieves the peaceful con- quest and intellectual annexation to its own world, the only Cosmos, of the regions which until then had been hardly more than an object of curi- osity, amazement, or derision. And as Humboldt moves toward this conquest his mind is open and excited, touched with that slight euphoria that still today comes over any one of us leaving behind the problems and the unnumbered ancestral voices of our civilization, and seeing for the the first time the mute and dazzling horizons of tropical America, the parched coastal deserts and the untouched flamboyant margins of the great continental forest. One feels reborn. And if remote little Europe is then torn in war, Napoleonic or Hitlerian, it is only too easy for the de- lighted exile to discover a crude rationality, a naive perfection, a pos- sible imitation of ancient Eden in this landscape of low thick woods fur- rowed with vast rivers, and soaring white peaks dropping into the sea. Humboldt's first impressions, and his second ones too, are in fact never without this quality of exaltation: "I cannot repeat to you enough," he writes to his brother, "how very happy I feel in this part of the world where I am already so accustomed to the climate that I feel as if I had never lived in Europe."'302 By night the whole sky sparkles: "I think that right here the starry sky presents the most beautiful and magnificent spectacle."303 By day, plants and animals glow with a thousand colors: the birds, the fish, even the crabs, blue and yellow, contribute to the overall impression, spattering the emphatic green of the vegetation with chromatic harmonies: "Only here, here in Guayana, in the tropical part of South America, is the world really properly green.304"" Mexico's moun- 302. Letter to his brother, from Cumana, 17 October 1800, cited in Bruhns, op. cit., I, 332. Cf. Min- guet, op. cit., pp. 58, 192, 195. 303. Letter from Cumana, 1 September 1799; Bruhns, op. cit., I, 322. 408 Hegel and His Contemporaries tains are the most beautiful in the world. Chimborazo (Ecuador) is the most majestic peak on earth.305 The dream of Humboldt's life has come true. "The tropics are my element." He remains always in excellent health. He even enjoys the company of the Creoles more every day,306 and in a witty and beautiful Mexican lady he actually finds "a sort of Western Mme de Stal1."307 When he has to return to Europe his heart grows heavy; he cannot tear himself away from this "stupendous world of the Indies."308 And still in later life he will yearn for the tropics, the climate of the palm trees and the bananas; and as an old man he will demand that his rooms be kept at a "tropical" temperature, about twenty degrees R6aumur.309 C. His criticisms of Buffon and de Pauw. Now the curious thing is that Humboldt's exact intention in visiting America had been to investi- gate the Buffonian problem, the problem of the relationship between liv- ing creatures and the natural environment. He proposed to collect plants and fossils, of course, and make astronomical observations, and chemical analysis of the air, yes-all of this was part of the traveling naturalist's regular routine, "but all this is not the main purpose of my journey. My attention will always be focused on the convergence of forces, on the in- fluence of inanimate creation on the living animal and plant world, on this harmony."310 But here already it becomes clear that the problem was Buffonian only in name, because with this stress on harmony and convergence of forces it is immediately tinged with romantic and philosophical hues. Rather than dwelling on quantitative and qualitative comparisons between the two hemispheres, Humboldt tries to understand each organism and each environment in itself and in its relation to the universe. And more than once he finds himself in the position of having to take issue with some of the French naturalist's most famous statements. Buffon, for example, was completely wrong to treat the jaguar as a sort of lesser tiger. The jaguar is a much more formidable animal than people think. Humboldt himself met one as he was making his way up the Apure river, and it was bigger than any of the Bengal tigers ever seen in Europe's menageries: "The natives themselves were amazed at its prodigious 304. Letter to his brother, from Cumana, 16 July 1799, and to Willdenow, from Havana, 21 February 1801, in ibid., I, 319-43. 305. Ibid., II, 441. 306. Letter to Baron von Forell, from Caracas, 3 February 1800, ibid., I, 329; cf. ibid., I, 333, 341, 342. On the question of his health, see ibid., I, 341, 396-97, 398; II, 440. 307. Ibid., I, 391. 308. Letter to Freiesleben, from Bordeaux, 1 August 1804, ibid., I, 397. 309. Ibid., I, 426; II, 476. 310. Letter to von Moll, from La Corufia, 5 June 1799, in ibid., I, 274. 409 Buffon and the Inferiority of the Animal Species of America One immediate result of this belief in the superiority of the fixed over the variable is that any tendency toward historicism in Buffon remains stifled and without issue. The theory owes its origins to Scholasticism, or rather to Aristotle. Buffon himself recounts how one day after consider- able labor he thought he had discovered "a very clever system on gen- eration"; but, he adds, "I open Aristotle, and what do I find but all my ideas in this wretched Aristotle. In fact, it's the best thing Aristotle did, for heaven's sake!"90 It is in fact well known that for the Stagyrite invariability is an attribute of perfection, just as immobility is an attribute of the Prime Mover; this is the way he translates into the realm of strict logic and incorporates in a system that superiority of the eternal incorruptible Ideas which Plato and even certain pre-Socratics had arrived at intuitively. Matter, mere Potentiality, is that which is moved and altered without itself mov- ing or altering. Between God (the Pure Act) and nature (mere Potential- ity) comes the whole range of natural phenomena, from the fixed stars, ethereal, immutable, close to God's presence, right down to the change- able aad chaotic terrestrial world.91 The more stable a thing is the more it is divine and happy to remain similar to itself (ai8tov); the more variable it is the further it is separated from God, and subject to corruption. In the world of nature, every natural substance is corruptible (