THE PATRIOTISM OF DESIRE
I may not appear to be a very great patriot, but, nevertheless, I am. Yet I am unable to make my Spanish or Basque blood an exclusive criterion for judging the world. If I believe that a better orientation may be acquired by assuming an international point of view, I do not hold it improper to cease to feel, momentarily, as a Spaniard or a Basque.
In spite of this, a longing for the accomplishment of what shall be for the greatest good of my country, normally obsesses my mind, but I am wanting in the patriotism of lying.
I should like to have Spain the best place in the world, and the Basque country the best part of Spain.
The feeling is such a natural and common one that it seems scarcely worth while to explain it.
The climate of Touraine or of Tuscany, the Swiss lakes, the Rhine and its castles, whatever is best in Europe, I would root up, if I had my say, and set down here between the Pyrenees and the Straits of Gibraltar. At the same time, I should denationalize Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievski, making them Spaniards. I should see that the best laws and the best customs were those of our country. But wholly apart from this patriotism of desire, lies the reality. What is to be gained by denying it? To my mind nothing is to be gained.
There are many to whom the only genuine patriotism is the patriotism of lying, which in fact is more of a matter of rhetoric than it is of feeling.
Our falsifying patriots are always engaged in furious combat with other equally falsifying internationalists.
"Nothing but what we have is of any account," cries one party.
"No, it is what the other fellow has," cries the other.
Patriotism is telling the truth as to one's country, in a sympathetic spirit which is guided and informed by a love of that which is best.
Now some one will say: "Your patriotism, then, is nothing but an extension of your ego; it is purely utilitarian."
Absolutely so. But how can there be any other kind of patriotism?
MY HOME LANDS
I have two little countries, which are my homes—the Basque provinces, and Castile; and by Castile I mean Old Castile. I have, further, two points of view from which I look out upon the world: one is my home on the Atlantic; the other is very like a home to me, on the Mediterranean.
All my literary inspirations spring either from the Basque provinces or from Castile. I could never write a Gallegan or a Catalan novel.
I could wish that my readers were all Basques and Castilians.
Other Spaniards interest me less. Spaniards who live in America, or
Americans, do not interest me at all.
CRUELTY AND STUPIDITY
It appears from an article written by Azorín in connection with a book of mine, that, to my way of thinking, there are two enormities which are incredible and intolerable. They are cruelty and stupidity.
Civilized man has no choice but to despise these manifestations of primitive, brute existence.
We may be able to tolerate stupidity and lack of comprehension when they are simple and wholly natural, but what of an utter obtuseness of understanding which dresses itself up and becomes rhetorical? Can anything be more disagreeable?
When a fly devours the pollen greedily from the pyrethrum, which, as we know, will prove fatal to him, it becomes clear at once that flies have no more innate sagacity than men. When we listen to a conservative orator defending the past with salvos of rhetorical fireworks, we are overwhelmed by a realization of the complete odiousness of ornamental stupidity.
With cruelty it is much the same. The habits of the sphex surprise while bull fights disgust us. The more cruelty and stupidity are dressed up, the more hateful they become.
THE ANTERIOR IMAGE
I wrote an article once called, "The Spaniard Fails to Understand." While I do not say it was good, the idea had some truth in it. It is a fact that failure to understand is not exclusively a Spanish trait, but the failing is a human one which is more accentuated among peoples of backward culture, whose vitality is great.
Like a child the Spaniard carries an anterior image in his mind, to which he submits his perceptions. A child is able to recognize a man or a horse more easily in a toy than in a painting by Raphael or by Leonardo da Vinci, because the form of the toy adapts itself more readily to the anterior image which he has in his consciousness.
It is the same with the Spaniard. Here is one of the causes of his want of comprehension. One rejects what does not fit in with one's preconceived scheme of things.
I once rode to Valencia with two priests who were by no means unknown. One of them had been in the convent of Loyola at Azpeitia for four years. We talked about our respective homes; they eulogized the Valencian plain while I replied that I preferred the mountains. As we passed some bare, treeless hills such as abound near Chinchilla, one of them—the one, in fact, who had been at Loyola—remarked to me:
"This must remind you of your own country."
I was dumbfounded. How could he identify those arid, parched, glinting rocks with the Basque landscape, with the humid, green, shaded countryside of Azpeitia? It was easy to see that the anterior image of a landscape existing in the mind of that priest, provided only the general idea of a mountain, and that he was unable to distinguish, as I was, between a green mountain overgrown with turf and trees, and an arid hillside of dry rocks.
An hypothesis explaining the formation of visual ideas has been formulated by Wundt, which he calls the hypothesis of projection. It attributes to the retina an innate power of referring its impressions outward along straight lines, in directions which are determined.
According to Müller, who has adopted this hypothesis, what we perceive is our own retina under the category of space, and the size of the retinal image is the original unit of measurement applied by us to exterior objects.
The Spaniard like a child, will have to amplify his retinal image, if he is ever to amount to anything. He will have to amplify it, and, no doubt, complicate it also.
THE TRAGI-COMEDY OF SEX
It is very difficult to approach the sex question and to treat it at once in a clear and dignified manner. And yet, who can deny that it furnishes the key to the solution of many of the enigmas and obscurities of psychology?
Who can question that sex is one of the bases of temperament?
Nevertheless, the subject may be discussed permissibly in scientific and very general terms, as by Professor Freud. What is unpardonable is any attempt to bring it down to the sphere of the practical and concrete.
I am convinced that the repercussion of the sexual life is felt through all the phenomena of consciousness.
According to Freud, an unsatisfied desire produces a series of obscure movements in consciousness which eat at the soul as electricity is generated in a storage battery, and this accumulation of psychic energy must needs produce a disturbance in the nervous system.
Such nervous disturbances, which are of sexual origin, produced by the strangulation of desires, shape our mentality.
What is the proper conduct for a man during the critical years between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three? He should be chaste, the priests will say, shutting their eyes with an hypocritical air. He can marry afterwards and become a father.
A man who can be chaste without discomfort between fourteen and twenty-three, is endowed with a most unusual temperament. And it is one which is not very common at present. As a matter of fact, young men are not chaste, and cannot be.
Society, as it is well aware of this, opens a little loophole to sexuality, which is free from social embarrassment—the loophole of prostitution.
As the bee-hive has its workers, society has its prostitutes.
After a few years of sexual life without the walls, passed in the surrounding moats of prostitution, the normal man is prepared for marriage, with its submission to social forms and to standards which are clearly absurd.
There is no possibility of escaping this dilemma which has been decreed by society.
The alternative is perversion or surrender.
To a man of means, who has money to spend, surrender is not very difficult; he has but to follow the formula. Prostitution among the upper classes does not offend the eye, and it reveals none of the sores which deface prostitution as it is practised among the poor. Marriage, too, does not sit heavily upon the rich. With the poor, however, shame and surrender walk hand in hand.
To practise the baser forms of prostitution is to elbow all that is most vile in society, and to sink to its level oneself. Then, to marry afterwards without adequate means, is a continual act of self-abasement. It is to be unable to maintain one's convictions, it is to be compelled to fawn upon one's superiors, and this is more true in Spain than it is elsewhere, as everything here must be obtained through personal influence.
Suppose one does not submit? If you do not submit you are lost. You are condemned irretrievably to perversions, to debility, to hysteria.
You will find yourself slinking about the other sex like a famished wolf, you will live obsessed by lewd ideas, your mind will solace itself with swindles and cheats wherewith to provide a solution of the riddle of existence, you will become the mangy sheep that the shepherd sets apart from the flock.
Ever since early youth, I have been clearly conscious of this dilemma, and I have determined and said: "No; I choose the abnormal—give me hysteria, but submission, never!"
So derangement and distortion have come to my mind.
If I could have followed my inclinations freely during those fruitful years between fifteen and twenty-five, I should have been a serene person, a little sensual, perhaps, and perhaps a little cynical, but I should certainly not have become violent.
The morality of our social system has disturbed and upset me.
For this reason I hate it cordially, and I vent upon it in full measure, as best I may, all the spleen I have to give.
I like at times to disguise this poison under a covering of art.
THE VEILS OF THE SEXUAL LIFE
I am unable to feel any spontaneous enthusiasm for fecundity such as that which Zola sings. Moreover, I regard the whole pose as a superstition. I may be a member of an exhausted race,—that is quite possible,—but between the devotion to our species which is professed by these would-be re-peoplers of countries, and the purely selfish preoccupation of the Malthusians, my sympathies are all with the latter. I see nothing beyond the individual in this sex question—beyond the individual who finds himself inhibited by sexual morality.
This question must be faced some day and cleared up, it must be seen divested of all mystery, of all veils, of all deceit. As the hygiene of nutrition has been studied openly, in broad daylight, so it must be with sex hygiene.
As a matter of fact, the notion of sin, then, that of honour, and, finally, dread of syphilis and other sexual diseases, rest like a cloud on the sexual life, and they are jumbled together with all manner of fantastic and literary fictions.
Obviously, rigid sexual morality is for the most part nothing more than the practice of economy in disguise. Let us face this whole problem frankly. A man has no right to let his life slip by to gratify fools' follies. We must have regard to what is, with Stendhal. It will be argued of course that these veils, these subterfuges of the sexual life, are necessary. No doubt they are to society, but they are not to the individual. There are those who believe that the interests of the individual and of society are one, but we, who are defenders of the individual as against the State, do not think so.
A LITTLE TALK
Myself: I often think I should have been happier if I had been impotent.
My Hearers: How can you say such a terrible thing?
Myself: Why not? To a man like me, sex is nothing but a source of misery, shame and cheap hypocrisy, as it is to most of us who are obliged to get on without sufficient means under this civilization of ours. Now you know why I think that I should have been better off if I had been impotent.
UPON THE SUPPOSED MORALITY OF MARRIAGE
Single life is said to be selfish and detestable. Certainly it is immoral. But what of marriage? Is it as moral as it is painted?
I am one who doubts it.
Marriage, like all other social institutions of consequence, is surrounded by a whole series of common assumptions that cry out to be cleared up.
There is a pompous and solemn side to marriage, and there is a private museum side.
Marriage poses as an harmonious general concord in which religion, society, and nature join.
But is it anything of the kind? It would appear to be doubtful. If the sole purpose of marriage is to rear children, a man ought to live with a woman only until she becomes pregnant, and, after that moment, he ought not to touch her. But here begins the second part. The woman bears a baby; the baby is nourished by the mother's milk. The man has no right to co-habit with his wife during this period either, because it will be at the risk of depriving the child of its natural source of nutriment.
In consequence, a man must either co-habit with his wife once in two years, or else there will be some default in the marriage.
What is he to do? What is the moral course? Remember that three factors have combined to impose the marriage. One, the most far-reaching today, is economic; another, which is also extremely important, is social, and the third, now rapidly losing its hold, but still not without influence, is religious. The three forces together attempt to mould nature to their will.
Economic pressure and the high cost of living make against the having of children. They encourage default.
"How are we to have all these children?" the married couple asks. "How can we feed and educate them?"
Social pressure also tends in the same direction. Religious morality, however, still persists in its idea of sin, although the potency of this sanction is daily becoming less, even to the clerical eye.
If nature had a vote, it would surely be cast in favour of polygamy. Man is forever sexual, and in equal degree, until the verge of decrepitude. Woman passes through the stages of fecundation, pregnancy, and lactation.
There can be no doubt but that the most convenient, the most logical and the most moral system of sexual intercourse, naturally, is polygamy.
But the economic subdues the natural. Who proposes to have five wives when he cannot feed one?
Society has made man an exclusively social product, and set him apart from nature.
What can the husband and wife do, especially when they are poor? Must they overload themselves with children, and then deliver them up to poverty and neglect because God has given them, or shall they limit their number?
If my opinion is asked, I advise a limit—although it may be artificial and immoral.
Marriage presents us with this simple choice: we may either elect the slow, filthy death of the indigent workingman, of the carabineer who lives in a shack which teems with children, or else the clean life of the French, who limit their offspring.
The middle class everywhere today is accepting the latter alternative. Marriage is stripping off its morality in the bushes, and it is well that it should do so.
THE SOVEREIGN CROWD
A strong man may either dominate and subdue the sovereign crowd when he confronts it, as he would a wild beast, or he may breathe his thoughts and ideas into it, which is only another form of domination.
As I am not strong enough to do either, I shun the sovereign masses, so as not to become too keenly conscious of their collective bestiality and ill temper.
THE REMEDY
Every man fancies that he has something of the doctor in him, and considers himself competent to advise some sort of a cure, so I come now with a remedy for the evils of life. My remedy is constant action. It is a cure as old as the world, and it may be as useful as any other, and doubtless it is as futile as all the rest. As a matter of fact, it is no remedy at all.
The springs of action lie all within ourselves, and they derive from the vigour and health which we have inherited from our fathers. The man who possesses them may draw on them whenever he will, but the man who is without them can never acquire them, no matter how widely he may seek.
III
THE EXTRARADIUS
The extraradius of a writer may be said to be made up of his literary opinions and inclinations. I wish to expose the literary cell from the nucleus out and to unfold it, instead of proceeding in from the covering.
The term may seem pedantic and histological, but it has the attraction to my mind of a reminiscence of student days.
RHETORIC AND ANTI-RHETORIC
If I were to formulate my opinions upon style, I should say: "Imitations of other men's styles are bad, but a man's own style is good."
There is a store of common literary finery, almost all of which is in constant use and has become familiar.
When a writer lays hands on any of this finery spontaneously, he makes it his own, and the familiar flower blossoms as it does in Nature.
When an author's inspiration does not proceed from within out, but rather from without in, then he becomes at once a bad rhetorician.
I am one of those writers who employ the least possible amount of this common store of rhetoric. There are various reasons for my being anti-rhetorical. In the first place I do not believe that the pages of a bad writer can be improved by following general rules; if they do gain in one respect, they lose inevitably in another.
So much for one reason; but I have others.
Languages display a tendency to follow established forms. Thus Spanish tends toward Castilian. But why should I, a Basque, who never hears Castilian spoken in my daily life in the accents of Avila or of Toledo, endeavour to imitate it? Why should I cease to be a Basque in order to appear Castilian, when I am not? Not that I cherish sectional pride, far from it; but every man should be what he is, and if he can be content with what he is, let him be held fortunate.
For this reason, among others, I reject Castilian turns and idioms when they suggest themselves to my mind. Thus if it occurs to me to write something that is distinctively Castilian, I cast about for a phrase by means of which I may express myself in what to me is a more natural way, without suggestion of our traditional literature.
On the other hand, if the pure rhetoricians, of the national school, who are castizo—the Mariano de Cavias, the Ricardo Leóns—should happen to write something simply, logically and with modern directness, they would cast about immediately for a roundabout way of saying it, which might appear elaborate and out of date.
THE RHYTHM OF STYLE
There are persons who imagine that I am ignorant of the three or four elementary rules of good writing, which everybody knows, while others believe that I am unacquainted with syntax. Señor Bonilla y San Martín has conducted a search through my books for deficiencies, and has discovered that in one place I write a sentence in such and such fashion, and that in another I write something else in another, while in a third I compound a certain word falsely.
With respect to the general subject of structural usage which he raises, it would be easy to cite ample precedent among our classic authors; with respect to the word misticidad occurring in one of my books, I have put it into the mouth of a foreigner. The faults brought to light by Señor Bonilla are not very serious. But what of it? Suppose they were?
An intelligent friend once said to me:
"I don't know what is lacking in your style; I find it acrid." I feel that this criticism is the most apt that has yet been made.
My difficulty in writing Castilian does not arise from any deficiency in grammar nor any want of syntax. I fail in measure, in rhythm of style, and this shocks those who open my books for the first time. They note that there is something about them that does not sound right, which is due to the fact that there is a manner of respiration in them, a system of pauses, which is not traditionally Castilian.
I should insist upon the point at greater length, were it not that the subject of style is cluttered up with such a mass of preconceptions, that it would be necessary to redefine our terminology, and then, after all, perhaps we should not understand one another. Men have an idea that they are thinking when they operate the mechanism of language which they have at command. When somebody makes the joints of language creak, they say: "He does not know how to manage it." Certainly he does know how to manage it. Anybody can manage a platitude. The truth is simply this: the individual writer endeavours to make of language a cloak to fit his form, while, contrarywise, the purists attempt to mould their bodies till they fit the cloak.
RHETORIC OF THE MINOR KEY
Persons to whom my style is not entirely distasteful, sometimes ask:
"Why use the short sentence when it deprives the period of eloquence and rotundity?"
"Because I do not desire eloquence or rotundity," I reply. "Furthermore, I avoid them." The vast majority of Spanish purists are convinced that the only possible rhetoric is the rhetoric of the major key. This, for example, is the rhetoric of Castelar and Costa, the rhetoric which Ricardo León and Salvador Rueda manipulate today, as it has been inherited from the Romans. Its purpose is to impart solemnity to everything, to that which already has it by right of nature, and to that which has it not. This rhetoric of the major key marches with stately, academic tread. At great, historic moments, no doubt it is very well, but in the long run, in incessant parade, it is one of the most deadly soporifics in literature; it destroys variety, it is fatal to subtlety, to nice transitions, to detail, and it throws the uniformity of the copybook over everything.
On the other hand, the rhetoric of the minor key, which seems poor at first blush, soon reveals itself to be more attractive. It moves with a livelier, more life-like rhythm; it is less bombastic. This rhetoric implies continence and basic economy of effort; it is like an agile man, lightly clothed and free of motion.
To the extent of my ability I always avoid the rhetoric of the major key, which is assumed as the only proper style, the very moment that one sits down to write Castilian. I should like, of course, to rise to the heights of solemnity now and then, but very seldom.
"Then what you seek," I am told, "is a familiar style like that of
Mesonero Romanos, Trueba and Pereda?"
No, I am not attracted by that either.
The familiar, rude, vulgar manner reminds me of a worthy bourgeois family at the dinner table. There sits the husband in his shirt sleeves, while the wife's hair is at loose ends and she is dirty besides, and all the children are in rags.
I take it that one may be simple and sincere without either affectation or vulgarity. It is well to be a little neutral, perhaps, a little grey for the most part, so that upon occasion the more delicate hues may stand out clearly, while a rhythm may be employed to advantage which is in harmony with actual life, which is light and varied, and innocent of striving after solemnity.
A modern poet, in my opinion, has illustrated this rhetoric of the minor key to perfection.
He is Paul Verlaine.
A style like Verlaine's, which is non-sequent, macerated, free, is indispensable to any mastery of the rhetoric of the minor key. This, to me, has always been my literary ideal.
THE VALUE OF MY IDEAS
From time to time, my friend Azorín attempts to analyse my ideas. I do not pretend to be in the secret of the scales, as such an assumption upon my part would be ridiculous. As the pilot takes advantage of a favourable wind, and if it does not blow, of one that is unfavourable, I do the same. The meteorologist is able to tell with mathematical accuracy in his laboratory, after a glance at his instruments, not only the direction of the prevailing wind, but the atmospheric pressure and the degree of humidity as well. I am able only, however, to say with the pilot: "I sail this way," and then make head as best I may.
GENIUS AND ADMIRATION
I have no faith in the contention of the Lombrosians that genius is akin to insanity, neither do I think that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. Lombroso, for that matter, is as old-fashioned today as a hoop skirt.
Genius partakes of the miraculous. If some one should tell me that a stick had been transformed into a snake by a miracle, naturally I should not believe it; but if I should be asked whether there was not something miraculous in the very existence of a stick or of a snake, I should be constrained to acknowledge the miracle.
When I read the lives of the philosophers in Diogenes Laertius, I arrive at the conclusion that Epicurus, Zeno, Diogenes, Protagoras and the others were nothing more than men who had common sense. Clearly, as a corollary, I am obliged to conclude that the people we meet nowadays upon the street, whether they wear gowns, uniforms or blouses, are mere animals masquerading in human shape.
Contradicting the assumption that the great men of antiquity were only ordinary normal beings, we must concede the fact that most extraordinary conditions must have existed and, indeed, have been pre-exquisite, before a Greece could have arisen in antiquity, or an Athens in Greece, or a man such as Plato in Athens.
By very nature, the sources of admiration are as mysterious to my mind as the roots of genius. Do we admire what we understand, or what we do not understand? Admiration is of two kinds, of which the more common proceeds from wonder at something which we do not understand. There is, however, an admiration which goes with understanding.
Edgar Poe composed several stories, of which The Goldbug is one, in which an impenetrable enigma is first presented, to be solved afterwards as by a talisman; but, then, a lesson in cryptography ensues, wherein the talisman is explained away, and the miraculous gives place to the reasoning faculties of a mind of unusual power.
He has done something very similar in his poem, The Raven, where the poem is followed by an analysis of its gestation, which is called The Philosophy of Composition. Would it be more remarkable to write The Raven by inspiration, or to write it through conscious skill? To find the hidden treasure through the talisman of The Goldbug, or through the possession of analytical faculties such as those of the protagonist of Poe's tale?
Much consideration will lead to the conclusion that one process is as marvellous as the other.
It may be said that there is nothing miraculous in nature, and it may be said that it is all miraculous.
MY LITERARY AND ARTISTIC INCLINATIONS
Generally speaking, I neither understand old books very well, nor do I care for them—I have been able to read only Shakespeare, and perhaps one or two others, with the interest with which I approach modern writers.
It has sometimes seemed to me that the unreadableness of the older authors might be made the foundation of a philosophic system. Yet I have met with some surprises.
One was that I enjoyed the Odyssey.
"Am I a hypocrite?" I asked myself.
I do not find old painters to be as incompatible as old authors. On the contrary, my experience has been that they are the reverse. I greatly prefer a canvas by Botticelli, Mantegna, El Greco or Velázquez to a modern picture.
The only famous painter of the past for whom I have entertained an antipathy, is Raphael; yet, when I was in Rome and saw the frescos in the Vatican, I was obliged again to ask myself if my attitude was a pose, because they struck me frankly as admirable.
I do not pretend to taste, but I am sincere; nor do I endeavour to be consistent. Consistency does not interest me.
The only consistency possible is a consistency which comes from without, which proceeds from fear of public opinion, and anything of this sort appears to me to be contemptible.
Not to change because of what others may think, is one of the most abject forms of slavery.
Let us change all we can. My ideal is continual change—change of life, change of home, of food, and even of skin.
MY LIBRARY
Among the things that I missed most as a student, was a small library. If I had had one, I believe I should have dipped more deeply into books and into life as well; but it was not given me. During the period which is most fruitful for the maturing of the mind, that is, during the years from twelve to twenty, I lived by turns in six or seven cities, and as it was impossible to travel about with books, I never retained any.
A lack of books was the occasion of my failure to form the habit of re-reading, of tasting again and again and of relishing what I read, and also of making notes in the margin.
Nearly all authors who own a small library, in which the books are properly arranged, and nicely annotated, become famous.
I am not sentimentalizing about stolid, brazen note-taking, such as that with which the gentlemen of the Ateneo debase their books, because that merely indicates barbarous lack of culture and an obtuseness which is Kabyline.
Having had no library in my youth, I have never possessed the old favourites that everybody carries in his pocket into the country, and reads over and over until he knows them by heart.
I have looked in and out of books as travellers do in and out of inns, not stopping long in any of them. I am very sorry but it is too late now for the loss to be repaired.
ON BEING A GENTLEMAN
Viewed from without, I seem to impress some as a crass, crabbed person, who has very little ability, while others regard me as an unhealthy, decadent writer. Then Azorín has said of me that I am a literary aristocrat, a fine and comprehensive mind.
I should accept Azorín's opinion very gladly, but personality needs to be hammered severely in literature before it leaves its slag. Like metal which is removed from the furnace after casting and placed under the hammer, I would offer my works to be put to the test, to be beaten by all hammers.
If anything were left, I should treasure it then lovingly; if nothing were left, we should still pick up some fragments of life.
I always listen to the opinions of the non-literary concerning my books with the greatest interest. My cousin, Justo Goñi, used to express his opinion without circumlocution. He always carried off my books as they appeared, and then, a long time after, would give his opinion.
Of The Way of Perfection he said:
"Good, yes, very good; but it is so tiresome."
I realized that there was some truth in his view.
When he read the three novels to which I had given the general title, The Struggle for Life, he stopped me on the Calle de Alcalá one day and said:
"You have not convinced me."
"How so?"
"Your hero is a man of the people, but he is falsified. He is just like you are; you can never be anything but a gentleman."
This gentility with which my cousin reproached me, and without doubt he was correct, is common to nearly all Spanish writers.
There are no Spaniards at present, and there never have been any at any other time, who write out of the Spanish soul, out of the hearts of the people. Even Dicenta did not. His Juan José is not a workingman, but a young gentleman. He has nothing of the workingman about him beyond the label, the clothes, and such externals.
Galdós, for example, can make the common people talk; Azorín can portray the villages of Castile, set on their arid heights, against backgrounds of blue skies; Blasco Ibáñez can paint the life of the Valencians in vivid colours with a prodigality that carries with it the taint of the cheap, but none of them has penetrated into the popular soul. That would require a great poet, and we have none.
GIVING OFFENCE
I have the name of being aggressive, but, as a matter of fact, I have scarcely ever attacked any one personally.
Many hold a radical opinion to be an insult.
In an article in La Lectura, Ortega y Gasset illustrates my propensity to become offensive by recalling that as we left the Ateneo together one afternoon, we encountered a blind man on the Calle del Prado, singing a jota, whereupon I remarked: "An unspeakable song!"
Admitted. It is a fact, but I fail to see any cause of offence. It is only another way of saying more forcefully: "I do not like it, it does not please me," or what you will.
I have often been surprised to find, after expressing an opinion, that I have been insulted bitterly in reply.
At the outset of my literary career, Azorín and I shared the ill will of everybody.
When Maeztu, Azorín, Carlos del Rio and myself edited a modest magazine, by the name of Juventud, Azorín and I were the ones principally to be insulted. The experience was repeated later when we were both associated with El Globo.
Azorín, perhaps, was attacked and insulted more frequently, so that I was often in a position to act as his champion.
Some years ago I published an article in the Nuevo Mundo, in which I considered Vázquez Mella and his refutation of the Kantian philosophy, dwelling especially upon his seventeenth mathematical proof of the existence of God. The thing was a burlesque, but a conservative paper took issue with me, called me an atheist, a plagiarist, a drunkard and an ass. As for being an atheist, I did not take that as an insult, but as an honour.
Upon another occasion, I published an article about Spanish women, with particular reference to Basque women, in which I maintained that they sacrificed natural kindliness and sympathy on the altars of honour and religion, whereupon the Daughters of Mary of San Sebastian made answer, charging that I was a degenerate son of their city, who had robbed them of their honour, which was absolutely contrary to the fact. In passing, they suggested to the editor of the Nuevo Mundo that he should not permit me to write again for the magazine.
I wrote an article once dealing with Maceo and Cuba, whereupon a journalist from those parts jumped up and called me a fat Basque ox.
The Catalans have also obliged me with some choice insults, which I have found engaging. When I lectured in Barcelona in the Casa del Pueblo, La Veu de Catalunya undertook to report the affair, picturing me as talking platitudes before an audience of professional bomb throwers and dynamiters, and experts with the Browning gun.
Naturally, I was enchanted.
Recently, when writing for the review España, I had a similar experience, which reminded me of my connection with the smaller periodicals of fifteen years ago. Some gentlemen, mostly natives of the provinces, approached the editor, Ortega y Gasset, with the information that I was not a fit person to contribute to a serious magazine, as what I wrote was not so, while my name would ruin the sale of the weekly.
These pious souls and good Christians imagined that I might need that work in order to earn my living, so in the odour of sanctity they did whatever lay in their power to deprive me of my means of support. Oh, noble souls! Oh, ye of great heart! I salute you from a safe distance, and wish you the most uncomfortable beds in the most intolerable wards set apart for scurvy patients, in any hospital of your choosing, throughout the world.
THIRST FOR GLORY
Fame, success, popularity, the illusion of being known, admired and esteemed, appeal in different ways to authors. To Salvador Rueda, glory is a triumphant entrance into Tegucigalpa, where he is taken to the Spanish Casino, and crowned with a crown of real laurel. To Unamuno, glory is the assurance that people will be interested in him at least a thousand years after he is dead. And to others the only glory worth talking about is that courted by the French writer, Rabbe, who busied himself in Spain with la gloire argent comptant. Some yearn for a large stage with pennons and salvos and banners, while others are content with a smaller scene.
Ortega y Gasset says that to me glory reduces itself to the proportions of an agreeable dinner, with good talk across the table.
And he is right. To mingle with pleasant, intelligent, cordial persons is one of the more alluring sorts of fame.
There is something seductive and ingratiating about table talk when it is spirited. A luxurious dining room, seating eight or ten guests, of whom three or four are pretty women, one of whom should be a foreigner; as many men, none of them aristocrats—generally speaking, aristocrats are disagreeable—nor shall we admit artists, for they are in the same class as the aristocrats; one's neighbour, perhaps, is a banker, or a Jew of aquiline feature, and then the talk touches on life and on politics, relieved with a little gallantry toward the ladies, from time to time allowing to each his brief opportunity to shine—all this, beyond doubt, is most agreeable.
I like, too, to spend an afternoon conversing with a number of ladies in a comfortable drawing room, which is well heated. I visualize the various rewards which are meted out by fame as being housed invariably under a good roof. What is not intimate, does not appeal to me.
I have often seen Guimerá in a café on the Rambla in Barcelona, drinking coffee at a table, alone and forlorn, in the midst of a crowd of shop clerks and commercial travellers.
"Is that Guimerá?" I asked a Catalan journalist.
"Yes."
And then he told me that they had tendered him a tremendous testimonial some months previously, which had been attended by I don't know how many hundreds of societies, all marching with their banners.
I have no very clear idea of just what Guimerá has done, as it is many years since I have gone to the theatre, but I know that he is considered in Catalonia to be one of the glories of the country.
I should not care for an apotheosis, and then find myself left forlorn and alone to take my coffee afterwards with a horde of clerks.
I may never write anything that will take the world by storm—most probably not; but if I do, and it occurs to my fellow townsmen to organize one of these celebrations with flags, banners and choral societies, they need not count upon my attendance. They will not be able to discover me even with the aid of Sherlock Holmes.
When I am old, I hope to take coffee with pleasant friends, whether it be in a palace or a porter's lodge. I neither expect nor desire flags, committees, nor waving banners.
Laurel does not seduce me, and you cannot do it with bunting.
ELECTIVE ANTIPATHIES
As I have expressed my opinions of other authors sharply, making them public with the proper disgust, others have done the same with me, which is but logical and natural, especially in the case of a writer such as myself, who holds that sympathy and antipathy are of the very essence of art.
My opponents and myself differ chiefly in the fact that I am more cynical than they, and so I disclose my personal animus quite ingenuously, which my enemies fail to do.
I hold that there are two kinds of morality; morality of work and morality of play. The morality of work is an immoral morality, which teaches us to take advantage of circumstances and to lie. The morality of play, for the reason that it deals with mere futilities, is finer and more chivalrous.
I believe that in literature and in all liberal arts, the morality should be the morality of play, while my opponents for the most part hold that the morality of literature should be the morality of work. I have never, consciously at least, been influenced in my literary opinions by practical considerations. My ideas may have been capricious, and they are,—they may even be bad,—but they have no ulterior practical motive.
My failure to be practical, together, perhaps, with an undue obtuseness of perception, brings me face to face with critics of two sorts: one, esthetic; the other, social.
My esthetic critics say to me:
"You have not perfected your style, you have not developed the technique of your novels. You can scarcely be said to be literate."
I shrug my shoulders and reply: "Are you sure?"
My social critics reproach me for my negative and destructive views. I do not know how to create anything, I am incapable of enthusiasm, I cannot describe life, and so on.
This feeling seems logical enough, if it is sincere, if it is honest, and I accept it as such, and it does not offend me.
But, as some of my esthetic critics tell me: "You are not an artist, you do not know how to write," without feeling any deep conviction on the subject, but rather fearing that perhaps I may be an artist after all and that at last somebody may come to think so, so among my critics who pose as defenders of society, there are those who are influenced by motives which are purely utilitarian.
I am reminded of servants shouting at a man picking flowers over the garden wall, or an apple from the orchard as he passes, who raise their voices as high as possible so as to make their officiousness known.
They shout so that their masters will hear.
"How dare that rascal pick flowers from the garden? How dare he defy us and our masters? Shall a beggar, who is not respectable, tell us that our laws are not laws, that our honours are not honours, and that we are a gang of accomplished idiots?"
Yes, that is just what I tell them, and I shall continue to do so as long as it is the truth.
Shout, you lusty louts in gaudy liveries, bark you little lap-dogs, guard the gates, you government inspectors and carabineers! I shall look into your garden, which is also my garden, I shall make off with anything from it that I am able, and I shall say what I please.
TO A MEMBER OF SEVERAL ACADEMIES
A certain Basque writer, one Señor de Loyarte, who is a member of several academies, and Royal Commissioner of Education, assails me violently upon social grounds in a book which he has published, although the attack is veiled as purely literary.
Señor de Loyarte is soporific as a general rule, but in his polite sortie against me, he is more amusing than is usual. His malice is so keen that it very nearly causes him to appear intelligent.
In literature, Señor de Loyarte—and why should Señor de Loyarte not be associated with literature—presents the figure of a fat, pale, flabby boy in a priests' school, skulking under the skirts of a Jesuit Father.
Señor de Loyarte, like those little, chubby-winged cherubs on sacristy ceilings, shakes his arrowlet at me and lets fling a billet doux.
Señor de Loyarte says I smack of the cadaver, that I am a plagiarist, an atheist, anti-religious, anti-patriotic, and more to boot.
I shall not reply for it may be true. Yet it is also true that Señor de Loyarte's noble words will please his noble patrons, from whom, perhaps, he may receive applause even more substantial than the pat on the shoulder of a Jesuit Father, or the smile of every good Conservative, who is a defender of the social order. His book is an achievement which should induct Señor de Loyarte into membership in several more academies. Señor de Loyarte is already a Corresponding Member of the Spanish Academy, or of the Academy of History, I am not quite sure which; but they are all the same. Speaking of history, I should be interested to know who did first introduce the sponge.
Señor de Loyarte is destined to be a member, a member of academies all his life.
IV
ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES
Diogenes Laertius tells us that when Zeno consulted the oracle as to what he should do in order to attain happiness in life, the deity replied that he should assimilate himself with the dead. Having understood, he applied himself exclusively to the study of books.
Thus speaks Laertius, in the translation of Don José Ortíz y Sanz. I confess that I should not have understood the oracle. However, without consulting any oracle, I have devoted myself for some time to reading books, whether ancient and modern, both out of curiosity and in order to learn something of life.
CERVANTES, SHAKESPEARE, MOLIÈRE
For a long time, I thought that Shakespeare was a writer who was unique and different from all others. It seemed to me that the difference between him and other writers was one of quality rather than of quantity. I felt that, as a man, Shakespeare was of a different kind of humanity; but I do not think so now. Shakespeare is no more the quintessence of the world's literature than Plato and Kant are the quintessence of universal philosophy. I once admired the philosophy and characters of the author of Hamlet; when I read him today, what most impresses me is his rhetoric, and, above all, his high spirit.
Cervantes is not very sympathetic to me. He is tainted with the perfidy of the man who has made a pact with the enemy (with the Church, the aristocracy, with those in power), and then conceals the fact. Philosophically, in spite of his enthusiasm for the Renaissance, he appears vulgar and pedestrian to me, although he towers above all his contemporaries on account of the success of a single invention, that of Don Quixote and Sancho, which is to literature what the discovery of Newton was to Physics.
As for Molière, he is a poor fellow, who never attains the exuberance of Shakespeare, nor the invention that immortalizes Cervantes. But his taste is better than Shakespeare's and he is more social, more modern than Cervantes. The half-century or more that separates the work of Cervantes from that of Molière, is not sufficient to explain this modernity. Between the Spain of Quixote and the France of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, lies something deeper than time. Descartes and Gassendi had lived in France, while, on the other hand, the seed of Saint Ignatius Loyola lay germinating in the Spain of Cervantes.
THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS
A French journalist who visited my house during the summer, remarked:
"The ideas were great in the French Revolution; it was not the men." I replied: "I believe that the men of the French Revolution were great, but not the ideas."
Of all the philosophical literature of the pre-revolutionary period, what remains today?
What books exert influence? In France, excerpts from Montesquieu,
Diderot and Rousseau are still read in the schools, but outside of
France, they are read nowhere.
Only an extraordinary person would go away for the summer with Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois, or Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile in his grip. Montesquieu is demonstration of the fact that a book cannot live entirely by virtue of correctness of style.
Of all the writers who enjoyed such fame in the eighteenth century, the only one who will bear reading today is Voltaire—the Voltaire of the Dictionnaire Philosophique and of the novels.
Diderot, whom the French consider a great man, is of no interest whatsoever to the modern mind, at least to the mind which is not French. He is almost as dull as Rousseau. La Religieuse is an utterly false little book. Some years ago I loaned a copy to a young lady who had just come from a convent. "I have never seen anything like this," she said to me. "It is a fantasy with no relation to the truth." That was my idea. Jacques, le fataliste is tiresome; Le Neveu de Rameau gives at first the impression that it is going to amount to something, to something powerful such as the Satiricon of Petronius, or El Buscón of Quevedo; but at the end, it is nothing.
The only writer of the pre-revolutionary period who can be read today with any pleasure—and this, perhaps, is because he does not attempt anything—is Chamfort. His characters and anecdotes are sufficiently highly flavoured to defy the action of time.
THE ROMANTICISTS
Goethe
If a militia of genius should be formed on Parnassus, Goethe would be the drum-major. He is so great, so majestic, so serene, so full of talent, so abounding in virtue, and yet, so antipathetic!
Chateaubriand
A skin of Lacrymae Christi that has turned sour. At times the good Viscount drops molasses into the skin to take away the taste of vinegar; at other times, he drops in more vinegar to take away the sweet taste of the molasses. He is both moth-eaten and sublime.
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo, the most talented of rhetoricians! Victor Hugo, the most exquisite of vulgarians! Victor Hugo—mere common sense dressed up as art.
Stendhal
The inventor of a psychological automaton moved by clock work.
Balzac
A nightmare, a dream produced by indigestion, a chill, rare acuteness, equal obtuseness, a delirium of splendours, cheap hardware, of pretence and bad taste. Because of his ugliness, because of his genius, because of his immorality, the Danton of printers' ink.
Poe
A mysterious sphinx who makes one tremble with lynx-like eyes, the goldsmith of magical wonders.
Dickens
At once a mystic and a sad clown. The Saint Vincent de Paul of the loosened string, the Saint Francis of Assisi of the London Streets. Everything is gesticulation, and the gesticulations are ambiguous. When we think he is going to weep, he laughs; when we think he is going to laugh, he cries. A remarkable genius who does everything he can to make himself appear puny, yet who is, beyond doubt, very great.
Larra [Footnote: A Spanish poet and satirist (1809-37), famous under the pseudonym of Figaro. He committed suicide. The poet Zorrilla first came into prominence through some verses read at his tomb.]
A small, trained tiger shut up in a tiny cage. He has all the tricks of a cat; he mews like one, he lets you stroke his back, and there are times when his fiercer instincts show in his eyes. Then you realize that he is thinking: "How I should love to eat you up!"
THE NATURALISTS
Flaubert
Flaubert is a heavy-footed animal. It is plain that he is a Norman. All his work has great specific gravity. He disgusts me. One of Flaubert's master strokes was the conception of the character of Homais, the apothecary, in Madame Bovary. I cannot see, however, that Homais is any more stupid than Flaubert himself, and he may even be less so.
The Giants
The good Zola, vigorous, dull and perspiring, dubbed his contemporaries, the French naturalistic novelists, "Giants." What an imagination was possessed by Zola!
These "Giants" were none other than the Goncourts, whose insignificance approached at times imbecility, and in addition, Alphonse Daudet, with the air of a cheap comedian and an armful of mediocre books—a truly French diet, feeble, but well seasoned. These poor Giants, of whom Zola would talk, have become so weak and shrunken with time, that nobody is able any longer to make them out, even as dwarfs.
THE SPANISH REALISTS
The Spanish realists of the same period are the height of the disagreeable. The most repugnant of them all is Pereda. When I read him, I feel as if I were riding on a balky, vicious mule, which proceeds at an uncomfortable little trot, and then, all of a sudden, cuts stilted capers like a circus horse.
THE RUSSIANS
Dostoievski
One hundred years hence Dostoievsky's appearance in literature will be hailed as one of the most extraordinary events of the nineteenth century. Among the spiritual fauna of Europe, his place will be that of the Diplodocus.
Tolstoi
A number of years ago I was in the habit of visiting the Ateneo, and I used to argue there with the habitués, who in general have succeeded in damming up the channels through which other men receive ideas.
"To my mind, Tolstoi is a Greek," I observed. "He is serene, clear, his characters are god-like; all they think of are their love affairs, their passions. They are never called upon to face the acute problem of subsistence, which is fundamental with us."
"Utter nonsense! There is nothing Greek about Tolstoi," declared everybody.
Some years later at a celebration in honour of Tolstoi, Anatole France chanced to remark: "Tolstoi is a Greek."
When this fell from Anatole France, the obstruction in the channels through which these gentlemen of the Ateneo received their ideas ceased for the moment to exist, and they began to believe that, after all, Tolstoi might very well have something of the Greek in him.
THE CRITICS
Sainte Beuve
Sainte Beuve writes as if he had always said the last word, as if he were precisely at the needle of the scales. Yet I feel that this writer is not as infallible as he thinks. His interest lies in his anecdote, in his malevolent insinuation, in his bawdry. Beyond these, he has the same Mediterranean features as the rest of us.
Taine
Hippolyte Taine is also one of those persons who think they understand everything. And there are times when he understands nothing. His History of English Literature, which makes an effort to be broad and generous, is one of the pettiest, most niggardly histories ever written anywhere. His articles on Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Dickens have been fabricated by a French professor, which is to say that they are among the most wooden productions of the universities of Europe.
Ruskin
He impresses me as the Prince of Upstarts, grandiloquent and at the same time unctuous, a General in a Salvation Army of Art, or a monk who is a devotee of an esthetic Doctrine which has been drawn up by a Congress of Tourists.
Croce
The esthetic theory of Benedetto Croce has proved another delusion to me. Rather than an esthetic theory, it is a study of esthetic theories. As in most Latin productions, the fundamental question is not discussed therein, but the method of approaching that question.
Clarin [Footnote: Pseudonym of Leopoldo Alas, a Spanish critic and novelist of the transition, born in Asturias, whose influence was widely felt in Spanish letters. He died in 1905.]
I have a poor opinion of Clarin, although some of my friends regard him with admiration. As a man, he must have been envious; as a novelist, he is dull and unhappy; as a critic, I am not certain that he was ever in the right.