French naturalism and the Parnassian school had little influence in Latin America. Although Zola enjoyed a strange popularity--which corresponds, in the literary world, to the enthusiasm of the Trans-atlantic universities for materialism and positivism--we meet with few imitations of _Germinal_ or _La Terre_. The American writers have not assimilated the naturalistic methods, their brutal and minute observation, their study of the crowd, and their intentional pessimism; they have hardly read the masters of the realistic school, Balzac and Flaubert. Only during the last twenty years have Maupassant, the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiros, d'Annunzio, and the great Russian writers interested and disturbed the American reader. The love of the novel is but gradually dislodging the old lyric enthusiasm. [Illustration: CLÉMENTE PALMA. Peruvian essayist and novelist. RICARDO PALMER.] The Parnassian movement, in America, produced the Argentine poet Leopoldo Diaz. He adapted to Spanish verse the sonority, the relief, and the plastic beauty of the French masters. One of his poems is dedicated in homage to the poet of the _Sonnets_, to his incomparable model, José-Maria de Hérédia. Diaz sought to give his native Spanish, the language of eloquence, a Parnassian inevitability, and to mould its rhetorical abundance to the narrow limits of the sonnet. _Les sombras de Hellas_ invokes the Greek {259} life, sensual and luminous; _Les conquistadores_ the thunderous epic; and all his optimistic songs speak of a Latin renaissance in the overseas democracies. An absorbing taste for symbolism and the decadents, for "deliquescent" poetry and the work of the small Parisian cliques, has produced an intensely vital intellectual movement--modernism--which, by its wealth of language and ideas and the renewed vitality of its language, signifies a true renaissance. Beside it the old classic and romantic movements seem lukewarm imitations which pale before the exuberance of more modern work. Modernism is undoubtedly an adequate diet for Transatlantic Latins. But is this decadent renaissance better inspired than the passion and the eloquence of yesterday? Is it also an indication of servitude? By no means; the great poets have retained a robust belief in life, and their master, Ruben Dario, followed his _Prosas profanas_ by his _Songs of life and hope_.