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Updated: May 23, 2025
The top of their ambition would be reached if they could suppose that they were autochthonous, that they sprang into being fully armed upon American soil. It irks them to think that other races have had a hand in creating "God's own country," and they are happiest when they can convince themselves that a man changes his heart and his mind as well as his sky when he leaves Europe for America.
"Let us once more take a broad view of civilization," said the man of learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened a discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races.
I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out under these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War.
In our trim and polished garden they then remained they were soon afterwards cut down rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them, something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility.
The Annamites admit that they are not autochthonous, a distinction which they confer upon the Moïs, of whom little is known, but whose existence and pigmy Negrito characteristics are considered by De Quatrefages as established. The Mot water or river, says the Shan-hai-king, or canonical book of hills and seas, was situated in the south-east of the Tai-shan in Shan-tung.
The real difficulty is the society: not the autochthonous society, they are worthy people, and it is hardly to be mentioned as a fault that they are not a discriminating race, and will asseverate that all fish are trout, and the most arrant mutton is venison, but the immigrant, colonizing society.
All over Europe, if you care to look close, you will find the aristocrat was the son of the intrusive barbarian; the democrat was the son of the old civilised and educated autochthonous people. It is just the same elsewhere, wherever we turn. Take Greece, for example.
But had the North American continent been able to produce musical art, it could have produced none more indigenous, more really autochthonous, than that of Richard Wagner. Whitman was right when he termed these scores "the music of the 'Leaves." For nowhere did the forest of the Niebelungen flourish more lushly, more darkly, than upon the American coasts and mountains and plains.
We have produced but one poet of the highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a new type of man appearing in this field. "What think ye of Whitman?" This is the question I feel like putting, and sometimes do put, to each young poet I meet. If he thinks poorly of Whitman, I think poorly of him. I do not expect great things of him, and so far my test holds good.
I regard them as the original inhabitants of this land, self-raised, as they call themselves in their own tongue. It is difficult for immigrants to mingle with them. It is certain that foreigners could never be confounded with the autochthonous folk. Since this Germanic stock has remained free from contamination through intermarriage with alien nations, it constitutes a separate, uniform race.
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