Chapter IV: Prologue: On Intellectual Love (1)

Only what is of the mind has value to the mind. Let us dedicate ourselves without compunction to reflecting a little upon the eternal themes of life and art. It is surely proper that an author should write of them.

I cultivate a love which is intellectual, and of a former epoch, besides a deafness to the present. I pour out my spirit continually into the eternal moulds without expecting that anything will result from it.

But now, instead of a novel, a few stray comments upon my life have come from my pen.

Like most of my books, this has appeared in my hands without being planned, and not at my bidding. I was asked to write an autobiographical sketch of ten or fifteen pages. Ten or fifteen pages seemed a great many to fill with the personal details of a life which is as insignificant as my own, and far too few for any adequate comment upon them. I did not know how to begin. To pick up the thread, I began drawing lines and arabesques. Then the pages grew in number and, like Faust's dog, my pile soon waxed big, and brought forth this work.

At times, perhaps, the warmth of the author's feeling may appear ill-advised to the reader; it may be that he will find his opinions ridiculous and beside the mark on every page. I have merely sought to sun my vanity and egotism, to bring them forth into the air, so that my aesthetic susceptibilities might not be completely smothered.

This book has been a work of mental hygiene.

EGOTISM

Egotism resembles cold drinks in summer; the more you take, the thirstier you get. It also distorts the vision, producing an hydropic effect, as has been noted by Calderón in his _Life is a Dream_.

An author always has before him a keyboard made up of a series of I's. The lyric and satiric writers play in the purely human octave; the critic plays in the bookman's octave; the historian in the octave of the investigator. When an author writes of himself, perforce he plays upon his own "I," which is not exactly that contained in the octave of the sentimentalist nor yet in that of the curious investigator. Undoubtedly at times it must be a most immodest "I," an "I" which discloses a name and a surname, an "I" which is positive and self-assertive, with the imperiousness of a Captain General's edict or a Civil Governor's decree.

I have always felt some delicacy in talking about myself, so that the impulsion to write these pages of necessity came from without.

As I am not generally interested when anybody communicates his likes and dislikes to me, I am of opinion that the other person most probably shares the same feelings when I communicate mine to him. However, a time has now arrived when it is of no consequence to me what the other person thinks.

In this matter of giving annoyance, a formula should be drawn up and accepted, after the manner of Robespierre: the liberty of annoying another begins where his liberty of annoying you leaves off.

I understand very well that there may be persons who believe that their lives are wholly exemplary, and who thus burn with ardour to talk about them. But I have not led an exemplary life to any such extent. I have not led a life that might be called pedagogic, because it is fitted to serve as a model, nor a life that might be called anti-pedagogic, because it would serve as a warning. Neither do I bring a fistful of truths in my hand, to scatter broadcast. What, then, have I to say? And why do I write about myself? Assuredly, to no useful purpose.

The owner of a house is sometimes asked:

"Is there anything much locked up in that room?"

"No, nothing but old rubbish," he replies promptly.

But one day the owner opens the room, and then he finds a great store of things which he had not remembered, all of them covered with dust; so he hauls them out and generally they prove to be of no service at all. This is precisely what I have done.

These pages, indeed, are a spontaneous exudation. But are they sincere? Absolutely sincere? It is not very probable. The moment we sit for a photographer, instinctively we dissemble and compose our features. When we talk about ourselves, we also dissemble.

In as short a book as this the author is able to play with his mask and to fix his expression. Throughout the work of an entire lifetime, however, which is of real value only when it is one long autobiography, deceit is impossible, because when the writer is least conscious of it, he reveals himself.

I

FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS

The Bad Man of Itzea

When I first came to live in this house at Vera del Bidasoa, I found that the children of the district had taken possession of the entryway and the garden, where they misbehaved generally. It was necessary to drive them away little by little, until they flew off like a flock of sparrows.

My family and I must have seemed somewhat peculiar to these children, for one day, when one little fellow caught sight of me, he took refuge in the portal of his house and cried out:

"Here comes the bad man of Itzea!"

And the bad man of Itzea was I.

Perhaps this child had heard from his sister, and his sister had heard from her mother, and her mother had heard from the sexton's wife, and the sexton's wife from the parish priest, that men who have little religion are very bad; perhaps this opinion did not derive from the priest, but from the president of the Daughters of Mary, or from the secretary of the Enthronization of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; perhaps some of them had read a little book by Father Ladrón de Guevara entitled, _Novelists, Good and Bad_, which was distributed in the village the day that I arrived, and which states that I am irreligious, a clerophobe, and quite shameless. Whether from one source or another, the important consideration to me was that there was a bad man in Itzea, and that that bad man was I.

To study and make clear the instincts, pride, and vanities of the bad man of Itzea is the purpose of this book.

HUMBLE AND A WANDERER

Some years ago, I cannot say just how many, probably twelve or fourteen, during the days when I led, or thought I led, a nomadic life, happening to be in San Sebastian, I went to visit the Museum with the painter Regoyos. After seeing everything, Soraluce, the director, indicated that I was expected to inscribe my name in the visitor's register, and after I had done so, he said:

"Place your titles beneath."

"Titles!" I exclaimed. "I have none."

"Then put down what you are. As you see, the others have done the same."

I looked at the book. True enough; there was one signature, So-and-So, and beneath, "Chief of Administration of the Third Class and Knight of Charles III"; another, Somebody Else, and beneath was written "Commander of the Battalion of Isabella the Catholic, with the Cross of Maria Cristina."

Then, perhaps slightly irritated at having neither titles nor honours (burning with an anarchistic and Christian rancour, as Nietzsche would have it), I jotted down a few casual words beneath my signature:

"Pío Baroja, a humble man and a wanderer."

Regoyos read them and burst out laughing.

"What an idea!" exclaimed the director of the Museum, as he closed the volume.

And there I remained a humble man and a wanderer, overshadowed by Chiefs of Administration of all Classes, Commanders of all Branches of the Service, Knights of all kinds of Crosses, rich men returned from America, bankers, etc., etc.

Am I a humble man and a wanderer? Not a bit of it! There is more literary phantasy in the phrase than there is truth. Of humility I do not now, nor have I ever possessed more than a few rather Buddhistic fragments; nor am I a wanderer either, for making a few insignificant journeys does not authorize one to call oneself a wanderer. Just as I put myself down at that time as a humble man and a wanderer, so I might call myself today a proud and sedentary person. Perhaps both characterizations contain some degree of truth; and perhaps there is nothing in either.

When a man scrutinizes himself very closely, he arrives at a point where he does not know what is face and what is mask.

DOGMATOPHAGY

If I am questioned concerning my ideas on religion, I reply that I am an agnostic--I always like to be a little pedantic with philistines--now I shall add that, more than this, I am a dogmatophagist.

My first impulse in the presence of a dogma, whether it be political, moral, or religious, is to cast about for the best way to masticate, digest, and dispose of it.

The peril in an inordinate appetite for dogma lies in the probability of making too severe a drain upon the gastric juices, and so becoming dyspeptic for the rest of one's life.

In this respect, my inclination exceeds my prudence. I have an incurable dogmatophagy.

Ignoramus, Ignorabimus

Such are the words of the psychologist, DuBois-Reymond, in one of his well-known lectures. The agnostic attitude is the most seemly that it is possible to take. Nowadays, not only have all religious ideas been upset, but so too has everything which until now appeared most solid, most indivisible. Who has faith any longer in the atom? Who believes in the soul as a monad? Who believes in the objective validity of the senses?

The atom, unity of the spirit and of consciousness, the validity of perception, all these are under suspicion today. _Ignoramus, ignorabimus_.

NEVERTHELESS, WE CALL OURSELVES MATERIALISTS

Nevertheless, we call ourselves materialists. Yes; not because we believe that matter exists as we see it, but because in this way we may contradict the vain imaginings and all those sacred mysteries which begin so modestly, and always end by extracting the money from our pockets.

Materialism, as Lange has said, has proved itself the most fecund doctrine of science. Wilhelm Ostwald, in his _Victory of Scientific Materialism_, has defended the same thesis with respect to modern physics and chemistry.

At the present time we are regaled with the sight of learned friars laying aside for a moment their ancient tomes, and turning to dip into some manual of popular science, after which they go about and astonish simpletons by giving lectures.

The war horse of these gentlemen is the conception entertained by physicists at the present-day concerning matter, according to which it has substance in the precise degree that it is a manifestation of energy.

"If matter is scarcely real, then what is the validity of materialism?" shout the friars enthusiastically.

The argument smacks of the seminary and is absolutely worthless.

Materialism is more than a philosophical system: it is a scientific method, which will have nothing to do either with fantasies or with caprices.

The jubilation of these friars at the thought that matter may not exist, in truth and in fact is in direct opposition to their own theories. Because if matter does not exist, then what could God have created?

IN DEFENSE OF RELIGION

The great defender of religion is the lie. Lies are the most vital possession of man. Religion lives upon lies, and society maintains itself upon them, with its train of priests and soldiers--the one, moreover, as useless as the other. This great Maia of falsehood sustains all the sky borders in the theatre of life, and, when some fall, it lifts up others.

If there were a solvent for lies, what surprises would be in store for us! Nearly everybody who now appears to us to be upright, inflexible, and to hold his chest high, would be disclosed as a flaccid, weak person, presenting in reality a sorry spectacle.

Lies are much more stimulating than truth; they are also almost always more tonic and more healthy. I have come to this conclusion rather late in life. For utilitarian and practical ends, it is clearly our duty to cultivate falsehood, arbitrariness, and partial truths. Nevertheless, we do not do so. Can it be that, unconsciously, we have something of the heroic in us?

ARCH-EUROPEAN

I am a Basque, if not on all four sides, at least on three and a half. The remaining half, which is not Basque, is Lombard.

Four of my eight family names are Guipúzcoan, two of them are Navarrese, one Alavese, and the other Italian. I take it that family names are indicative of the countries where one's ancestors lived, and I take it also that there is great potency behind them, that the influence of each works upon the individual with a duly proportioned intensity. Assuming this to be the case, the resultant of the ancestral influences operative upon me would indicate that my geographical parallel lies somewhere between the Alps and the Pyrenees. Sometimes I am inclined to think that the Alps and the Pyrenees are all that is European in Europe. Beyond them I seem to see Asia; below them, Africa.

In the riparian Navarrese, as in the Catalans and the Genovese, one already notes the African; in the Gaul of central France, as well as in the Austrian, there is a suggestion of the Chinese.

Clutching the Pyrenees and grafted upon the Alps, I am conscious of being an Arch-European.

DIONYSIAN OR APOLLONIAN?

Formerly, when I believed that I was both humble and a wanderer, I was convinced that I was a Dionysian. I was impelled toward turbulence, the dynamic, the theatric. Naturally, I was an anarchist. Am I today? I believe I still am. In those days I used to enthuse about the future, and I hated the past.

Little by little, this turbulence has calmed down--perhaps it was never very great. Little by little I have come to realize that if following Dionysus induces the will to bound and leap, devotion to Apollo has a tendency to throw the mind back until it rests upon the harmony of eternal form. There is great attraction in both gods.

EPICURI DE GREGE PORCUM

I am also a swine of the herd of Epicurus; I, too, wax eloquent over this ancient philosopher, who conversed with his pupils in his garden. The very epithet of Horace, upon detaching himself from the Epicureans, "_Epicuri de grege porcum_," is full of charm.

All noble minds have hymned Epicurus. "Hail Epicurus, thou honour of Greece!" Lucretius exclaims in the third book of his poem.

"I have sought to avenge Epicurus, that truly holy philosopher, that divine genius," Lucian tells us in his _Alexander, or the False Prophet_. Lange, in his _History of Materialism_, sets down Epicurus as a disciple and imitator of Democritus.

I am not a man of sufficient classical culture to be able to form an authoritative opinion of the merits of Epicurus as a philosopher. All my knowledge of him, as well as of the other ancient philosophers, is derived from the book of Diogenes Laertius.

Concerning Epicurus, I have read Bayle's magnificent article in his _Historical and Critical Dictionary_, and Gassendi's work, _De Vita et Moribus Epicuri_. With this equipment, I have become one of the disciples of the master.

Scholars may say that I have no right to enrol myself as one of the disciples of Epicurus, but when I think of myself, spontaneously there comes to my mind the grotesque epithet which Horace applied to the Epicureans in his _Epistles_, a characterization which for my part I accept and regard as an honour: "Swine of the herd of Epicurus, _Epicuri de grege porcum_."

EVIL AND ROUSSEAU'S CHINAMAN

I do not believe in utter human depravity, nor have I any faith in great virtue, nor in the notion that the affairs of life may be removed beyond good and evil. We shall outgrow, we have already outgrown, the conception of sin, but we shall never pass beyond the idea of good and evil; that would be equivalent to skipping the cardinal points in geography. Nietzsche, an eminent poet and an extraordinary psychologist, convinced himself that we should be able to leap over good and evil with the help of a springboard of his manufacture.

Not with this springboard, nor with any other, shall we escape from the polar North and South of the moral life.

Nietzsche, a product of the fiercest pessimism, was at heart a good man, being in this respect the direct opposite of Rousseau, who, despite the fact that he is forever talking about virtue, about sensibility, the heart, and the sublimity of the soul, was in reality a low, sordid creature.

The philanthropist of Geneva shows the cloven hoof now and then. He asks: "If all that it were necessary for us to do in order to inherit the riches of a man whom we had never seen, of whom we had never even heard, and who lived in the furthermost confines of China, were to press a button and cause his death, what man living would not press that button?"

Rousseau is convinced that we should all press the button, and he is mistaken, because the majority of men who are civilized would do nothing of the kind. This, to my mind, is not to say that men are good; it is merely to say that Rousseau, in his enthusiasm for humanity, as well as in his aversion to it, is wide of the mark. The evil in man is not evil of this active sort, so theatrical, so self-interested; it is a passive, torpid evil which lies latent in the depths of the human animal, it is an evil which can scarcely be called evil.

THE ROOT OF DISINTERESTED EVIL

Tell a man that an intimate friend has met with a great misfortune. His first impulse is one of satisfaction. He himself is not aware of it clearly, he does not realize it; nevertheless, essentially his emotion is one of satisfaction. This man may afterward place his fortune, if he has one, at the disposition of his friend, yes, even his life; yet this will not prevent his first conscious reaction upon learning of the misfortune of his friend, from being one which, although confused, is nevertheless not far removed from pleasure. This feeling of disinterested malice may be observed in the relations between parents and children as well as in those between husbands and wives. At times it is not only disinterested, but counter-interested.

The lack of a name for this background of disinterested malice, which does exist, is due to the fact that psychology is not based so much upon phenomena as it is upon language.

According to our current standards, latent evil of this nature is neither of interest nor significance. Naturally, the judge takes account of nothing but deeds; to religion, which probes more deeply, the intent is of importance; to the psychologist, however, who attempts to penetrate still further, the elemental germinative processes of volition are of indispensable significance.

Whence this foundation of disinterested malice in man? Probably it is an ancestral legacy. Man is a wolf toward man, as Plautus observes, and the idea has been repeated by Hobbes.

In literature, it is almost idle to look for a presentation of this disinterested, this passive evil, because nothing but the conscious is literary. Shakespeare, in his _Othello_, a drama which has always appeared false and absurd to me, emphasizes the disinterested malice of Iago, imparting to him a character and mode of action which are beyond those of normal men; but then, in order to accredit him to the spectators, he adds also a motive, and represents him as being in love with Desdemona.

Victor Hugo, in _L'Homme qui Rit_, undertook to create a type after the manner of Iago, and invented Barkilphedro, who embodies disinterested yet active malice, which is the malice of the villain of melodrama.

But that other disinterested malice, which lurks in the sodden sediment of character, that malice which is disinterested and inactive, and not only incapable of drawing a dagger but even of writing an anonymous note, this no writer but Dostoievski has had the penetration to reveal. He has shown us at the same time mere inert goodness, lying passive in the soul, without ever serving as a basis for anything.

MUSIC AS A SEDATIVE

Music, the most social of the arts, and that undoubtedly which possesses the greatest future, presents enormous attractions to the bourgeoisie. In the first place, it obviates the necessity of conversation; it is not necessary to know whether your neighbor is a sceptic or a believer, a materialist or a spiritualist; no possible argument can arise concerning the meaning and metaphysics of life. Instead of war, there is peace. The music lover may argue, but his conceptions are entirely circumscribed by the music, and have no relation whatever either to philosophy or to politics as such. The wars are small wars, and spill no blood. A Wagnerite may be a freethinker or a Catholic, an anarchist or a conservative. Even painting, which is an art of miserable general ideas, is not so far removed from intelligence as is music. This explains why the Greeks were able to attain such heights in philosophy, and yet fell to such depths in music.

Music has an additional merit. It lulls to sleep the residuum of disinterested malice in the soul.

As a majority of the lovers of painting and sculpture are second-hand dealers and Jews in disguise, music lovers, for the most part, are a debased people, envious, embittered and supine.

CONCERNING WAGNER

I am one of those who do not understand music, yet I am not completely insensible to it. This does not prevent me, however, from entertaining a strong aversion to all music lovers, and especially to Wagnerites.

When Nietzsche, who apparently possessed a musical temperament, set Bizet up against Wagner, he confessed, of course, premeditated vindictiveness. "It is necessary to mediterraneanize music," declares the German psychologist. But how absurd! Music must confine itself to the geographical parallel where it was born; it is Mediterranean, Baltic, Alpine, Siberian. Nor is the contention valid that an air should always have a strongly marked rhythm, because, if this were the case, we should have nothing but dance music. Certainly, music was associated with the dance in the beginning, but a sufficient number of years have now elapsed to enable each of these arts to develop independently.

As regards Nietzsche's hostility to the theatocracy of Wagner, I share it fully. This business of substituting the theatre for the church, and teaching philosophy singing, seems ridiculous to me. I am also out of patience with the wooden dragons, swans, stage fire, thunder and lightning.

Although it may sound paradoxical, the fact is that all this scenery is in the way. I have seen King Lear in Paris, at the Theatre Antoine, where it was presented with very nearly perfect scenery. When the King and the fool roamed about the heath in the third act, amid thunder and lightning, everybody was gazing at the clouds in the flies and watching for the lightning, or listening to the whistling of the wind; no one paid any attention to what was said by the characters.

UNIVERSAL MUSICIANS

German music is undoubtedly the most universal music, especially that of Mozart and Beethoven. It seems as if there were fewer particles of their native soil imbedded in the works of these two masters than is common among their countrymen. They bring out in sharp relief the cultural internationalism of Germany.

Mozart is an epitome of the grace of the eighteenth century; he is at once delicate, joyous, serene, gallant, mischievous. He is a courtier of whatever country one will. Sometimes, when listening to his music, I ask myself: "Why is it that this, which must be of German origin, seems to be part of all of us, to have been designed for us all?"

Beethoven, too, like Mozart, is a man without a country. As the one manipulates his joyous, soft, serene rhythms, the other throbs and trembles with obscure meanings and pathetic, heartrending laments, the source of which lies hidden as at the bottom of some mine.

He is a Segismund who complains against the gods and against his fate in a tongue which knows no national accent. A day will come when the negroes of Timbuktu will listen to Mozart's and Beethoven's music and feel that it belongs to them, as truly as it ever did to the citizens of Munich or of Vienna.

THE FOLK SONG

The folk song lies at the opposite pole from universal music. It is music which smacks most of the soil whereon it has been produced. By its very nature it is intelligible at all times to all persons in the locality, if only because music is not an intellectual art; it deals in rhythms, it does not deal in ideas. But beyond the fact of its intelligibility, music possesses different attractions for different people. The folk song preserves to us the very savour of the country in which we were born; it recalls the air, the climate that we breathed and knew. When we hear it, it is as if all our ancestors should suddenly present themselves. I realize that my tastes may be barbaric, but if there could only be one kind of music, and I were obliged to choose between the universal and the local, my preference would be wholly for the latter, which is the popular music.

ON THE OPTIMISM OF EUNUCHS

In a text book designed for the edification of research workers--a specimen of peculiarly disagreeable tartuffery--the histologist, Ramón y Cajal, who, as a thinker, has always been an absolute mediocrity, explains what the young scholar should be, in the same way that the Constitution of 1812 made it clear what the ideal Spanish citizen should be.

So we know now the proper character of the young scholar. He must be calm, optimistic, serene ... and all this with ten or twelve coppers in his pocket!

Some friends inform me that in the Institute for Public Education at Madrid, where an attempt is made to give due artistic orientation to the pupils, they have contrived an informal classification of the arts in the order of their importance; first comes painting; then, music; and, last, literature.

Considering carefully what may be the reasons for such a sequence, it would appear that the purpose must be to deprive the student of any occasion for becoming pessimistic. Certainly nobody will ever have his convictions upset by looking at ancient cloths daubed over with linseed oil, nor by the bum-ta-ra of music. But, to my mind, in a country like Spain, it is better that our young men should be dissatisfied than that they should go to the laboratory every day in immaculate blouses, chatter like proper young gentlemen about El Greco, Cezanne and the Ninth Symphony, and never have the brains to protest about anything. Back of all this correctness may be divined the optimism of eunuchs.

II

MYSELF, THE WRITER

TO MY READERS THIRTY YEARS HENCE

Among my books there are two distinct classes: Some I have written with more effort than pleasure, and others I have written with more pleasure than effort.

My readers apparently are not aware of this distinction, although it seems evident to me. Can it be that true feeling is of no value in a piece of literature, as some of the decadents have thought? Can it be that enthusiasm, weariness, loathing, distress and ennui never transpire through the pages of a book? Indubitably none of them transpire unless the reader enters into the spirit of the work. And, in general, the reader does not enter into the spirit of my books. I cherish a hope which, perhaps, may be chimerical and ridiculous, that the Spanish reader thirty or forty years hence, who takes up my books, whose sensibilities, it may be, have been a little less hardened into formalism than those of the reader of today, will both appreciate and dislike me more intelligently.

YOUTHFUL WRITINGS

As I turn over the pages of my books, now already growing old, I receive the impression that, like a somnambulist, I have frequently been walking close to the cornice of a roof, entirely unconsciously, but in imminent danger of falling off; again, it seems to me that I have been travelling paths beset with thorns, which have played havoc with my skin.

I have maintained myself rather clumsily for the most part, yet at times not without a certain degree of skill.

All my books are youthful books; they express turbulence; perhaps their youth is a youth which is lacking in force and vigour, but nevertheless, they are youthful books.

Among thorns and brambles there lies concealed a tiny Fountain of Youth in my soul. You may say that its waters are bitter and saline, instead of being crystalline and clear. And it is true. Yet the fountain flows on, and bubbles, and gurgles and splashes into foam. That is enough for me. I do not wish to dam it up, but to let the water run and remove itself. I have always felt kindly toward anything that removes itself.

THE BEGINNING AND END OF THE JOURNEY

I formerly considered myself a young man of protoplasmic capabilities, and I entertained very little enthusiasm for form until after I had talked with some Russians. Since then I have realized that I was more clean cut, more Latin, and a great deal older than I had supposed.

"I see that you belong to the _ancient régime_," a Frenchwoman remarked to me in Rome.

"I? Impossible!"

"Yes," she insisted. "You are a conversationalist. You are not an elegant, sprucely dressed abbé; you are an abbé who is cynical and ill-natured, who likes to fancy himself a savage amid the comfortable surroundings of the drawing-room."

The Frenchwoman's observation set me to thinking.

Can it be that I am hovering in the vicinity of Apollo's Temple without realizing it?

Possibly my literary life has been merely a journey from the Valley of Dionysus to the Temple of Apollo. Now somebody will tell me that art begins only on the bottom step of the Temple of Apollo. And it is true. But there is where I stop--on the bottom step.

MELLOWNESS AND THE CRITICAL SENSE

Whenever my artistic conscience reproaches me, I always think: If I were to undertake to write these books today, now that I am aware of their defects, I should never write them. Nevertheless, I continue to write others with the same old faults. Shall I ever attain that mellowness of soul in which all the vividness of impression remains, yet in which it has become possible to perfect the expression? I fear not. Most likely, when I reach the stage of refining the expression, I shall have nothing to say, and so remain silent.

SENSIBILITY

In my books, as in most that are modern, there is an indefinable resentment against life and against society.

Resentment against life is of far more ancient standing than resentment against society.

The former has always been a commonplace among philosophers.

Life is absurd, life is difficult of direction, life is a disease, the better part of the philosophers have told us.

When man turned his animosity against society, it became the fashion to exalt life. Life is good; man, naturally, is magnanimous, it was said. Society has made him bad.

I am convinced that life is neither good nor bad; it is like Nature, necessary. And society is neither good nor bad. It is bad for the man who is endowed with a sensibility which is excessive for his age; it is good for a man who finds himself in harmony with his surroundings.

A negro will walk naked through a forest in which every drop of water is impregnated with millions of paludal germs, which teems with insects, the bites of which produce malignant abcesses, and where the temperature reaches fifty degrees Centigrade in the shade.

A European, accustomed to the sheltered life of the city, when brought face to face with such a tropical climate, without means of protection, would die.

Man needs to be endowed with a sensibility which is proper to his epoch and his environment; if he has less, his life will be merely that of a child; if he has just the right measure, it will be the life of an adult; if he has more, he will be an invalid.

ON DEVOURING ONE'S OWN GOD

It is said that the philosopher Averroes was wont to remark: "What a sect these Christians are, who devour their own God!"

It would seem that this divine alimentation ought to make men themselves divine. But it does not; our theophagists are human--they are only too human, as Nietzsche would have it.

There can be no doubt but that the Southern European races are the most vivacious, the most energetic, as well as the toughest in the world. They have produced all the great conquerors. Christianity, when it found it necessary to overcome them, innoculated them with its Semitic virus, but this virus has not only failed to make them weaker, but, on the contrary, it has made them stronger. They appropriated what suited them in the Asiatic mentality, and proceeded to make a weapon of their religion. These cruel Levantine races, thanks only to Teutonic penetration, are at last submitting to a softening process, and they will become completely softened upon the establishment in Europe of the domination of the Slav.

Meanwhile they maintain their sway in their own countries.

"They are quite inoffensive," we are told.

Nonsense! They would burn Giordano Bruno as willingly now as they did in the old days.

There is a great deal of fire remaining in the hearts of our theophagists.

ANARCHISM

In an article appearing in _Hermes_, a magazine published in Bilbao, Salaverría assumes that I have been cured of my anarchism, and that I persist in a negative and anarchistic attitude in order to retain my literary clientele; which is not the fact. In the first place, I can scarcely be said to have a clientele; in the second place, a small following of conservatives is much more lucrative than a large one of anarchists. It is true that I am withdrawing myself from the festivals of Pan and the cult of Dionysus, but I am not substituting for them, either outwardly or inwardly, the worship of Yahveh or of Moloch. I have no liking for Semitic traditions--none and none whatever! I am not able, like Salaverría, to admire the rich simply because they are rich, nor people in high stations because they happen to occupy them.

Salaverría assumes that I have a secret admiration for grand society, generals, magistrates, wealthy gentlemen from America, and Argentines who shout out: "How perfectly splendid!" I have the same affection for these things that I have for the cows which clutter up the road in front of my house. I would not be Fouquier-Tinville to the former nor butcher to the latter; but my affection then has reached its limit. Even when I find something worthy of admiration, my inclination is toward the small. I prefer the Boboli Gardens to those of Versailles, and Venetian or Florentine history to that of India.

Great states, great captains, great kings, great gods, leave me cold. They are all for peoples who dwell on vast plains which are crossed by mighty rivers, for the Egyptians, for the Chinese, for the Hindus, for the Germans, for the French.

We Europeans who are of the region of the Pyrenees and the Alps, love small states, small rivers, and small gods, whom we may address familiarly.

Salaverría is also mistaken when he says that I am afraid of change. I am not afraid. My nature is to change. I am predisposed to develop, to move from here to there, to reverse my literary and political views if my feelings or my ideas alter. I avoid no reading except that which is dull; I shall never retreat from any performance except a vapid one, nor am I a partisan either of austerity or of consistency. Moreover, I am not a little dissatisfied with myself, and I would give a great deal to have the pleasure of turning completely about, if only to prove to myself that I am capable of a shift of attitude which is sincere.

NEW PATHS

Some months since three friends met together in an old-fashioned bookshop on the venerable Calle del Olivo--a writer, a printer, and myself.

"Fifteen years ago all three of us were anarchists," remarked the printer.

"What are we today?" I inquired.

"We are conservatives," replied the man who wrote. "What are you?"

"I believe that I have the same ideas I had then."

"You have not developed if that is so," retorted the writer with a show of scorn.

I should like to develop, but into what? How? Where am I to find the way?

When sitting beside the chimney, warming your feet by the fire as you watch the flames, it is easy to imagine that there may be novel walks to explore in the neighbourhood; but when you come to look at the map you find that there is nothing new in the whole countryside.

We are told that ambition means growth. It does not with me. Ortega y Gasset believes that I am a man who is constitutionally unbribable. I should not go so far as to say that, but I do say that I do not believe that I could be bribed in cold blood by the offer of material things. If Mephistopheles wishes to purchase my soul, he cannot do it with a decoration or with a title; but if he were to offer me sympathy, and be a little effusive while he is about it, adding then a touch of sentiment, I am convinced that he could get away with it quite easily.

LONGING FOR CHANGE

Just as the aim of politicians is to appear constant and consistent, artists and literary men aspire to change.

Would that the desire of one were as easy of attainment as that of the other!

To change! To develop! To acquire a second personality which shall be different from the first! This is given only to men of genius and to saints. Thus Caesar, Luther, and Saint Ignatius each lived two distinct lives; or, rather, perhaps, it was one life, with sides that were obverse and reverse.

The same thing occurs sometimes also among painters. The evolution of El Greco in painting upsets the whole theory of art.

There is no instance of a like transformation either in ancient or modern literature. Some such change has been imputed to Goethe, but I see nothing more in this author than a short preliminary period of exalted feeling, followed by a lifetime dominated by study and the intellect.

Among other writers there is not even the suggestion of change. Shakespeare is alike in all his works; Calderón and Cervantes are always the same, and this is equally true of our modern authors. The first pages of Dickens, of Tolstoi or of Zola could be inserted among the last, and nobody would be the wiser.

Even the erudite rhetorical poets, the Victor Hugos, the Gautiers, and our Spanish Zorrillas, never get outside of their own rhetoric.

BAROJA, YOU WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING

(_A Refrain_)

"Baroja does not amount to anything, and I presume that he will never amount to anything," Ortega y Gasset observes in the first issue of the _Spectator_.

I have a suspicion myself that I shall never amount to anything. Everybody who knows me has always thought the same.

When I first went to school in San Sebastian, at the age of four--and it has rained a great deal since that day--the teacher, Don León Sánchez y Calleja, who made a practice of thrashing us with a very stiff pointer (oh, these hallowed traditions of our ancestors!), looked me over and said:

"This boy will prove to be as sulky as his brother. He will never amount to anything."

I studied for a time in the Institute of Pamplona with Don Gregorio Pano, who taught us mathematics; and this old gentleman, who looked like the Commander in _Don Juan Tenorio_, with his frozen face and his white beard, remarked to me in his sepulchral voice:

"You are not going to be an engineer like your father. You will never amount to anything."

When I took therapeutics under Don Benito Hernando in San Carlos, Don Benito planted himself in front of me and said:

"That smile of yours, that little smile ... it is impertinent. Don't you come to me with any of your satirical smiles. You will never amount to anything, unless it is negative and useless."

I shrugged my shoulders.

Women who have known me always tell me: "You will never amount to anything."

And a friend who was leaving for America volunteered:

"When I return in twenty or thirty years, I shall find all my acquaintances situated differently: one will have become rich, another will have ruined himself, this fellow will have entered the cabinet, that one will have been swallowed up in a small town; but you will be exactly what you are today, you will live the same life, and you will have just two pesetas in your pocket. That is as far as you will get."

The idea that I shall never amount to anything is now deeply rooted in my soul. It is evident that I shall never become a deputy, nor an academician, nor a Knight of Isabella the Catholic, nor a captain of industry, nor alderman, nor Member of the Council, nor a common cheat, nor shall I ever possess a good black suit.

And yet when a man has passed forty, when his belly begins to take on adipose tissue and he puffs out with ambition, he ought to be something, to sport a title, to wear a ribbon, to array himself in a black frock coat and a white waistcoat; but these ambitions are denied to me. The professors of my childhood and my youth rise up before my eyes like the ghost of Banquo, and proclaim: "Baroja, you will never amount to anything."

When I go down to the seashore, the waves lap my feet and murmur: "Baroja, you will never amount to anything." The wise owl that perches at night on our roof at Itzea calls to me: "Baroja, you will never amount to anything," and even the crows, winging their way across the sky, incessantly shout at me from above: "Baroja, you will never amount to anything."

And I am convinced that I never shall amount to anything.

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.