SPANISH INDIVIDUALISM

If you are in a town and there are any pictures there of the old traditional school of Castile, go to see them—for in the great days of its expansion this race created a school of realistic painting, of a rude, vigorous, simplified realism, very limited in range of tone, which has the effect of a violent douche upon the vision. Perhaps you will come across some canvas of Ribera or Zurbaran—your eye is held by the bony form of some austere hermit, whose sinewy muscles are presented in high light against strong shadows, a canvas meagre in tones and gradations, in which every objectstands out sharp-edged. Not infrequently the figures fail to form a single whole with the background, which is a mere accessory of insignificant decorative value. Velazquez, who of all Castilian painters possesses most of the racial character, was a painter of men, of whole men, men all of one piece, rude and emphatic, men who fill the whole canvas.

You will find no landscape-painters, you will discover no sense of tone, of suave transition, no unifying, enveloping atmosphere, which blends everything into a single harmonious whole. The unity springs from the more or less architectonic disposition of the several parts.

In this country of climatic extremes, without any softness or mildness, of a landscape uniform in its contrasts, the spirit likewise is dry and sharp-edged, with but a meagre ambience of ideas. It generalises upon raw facts, seen in a discrete series, as in a kaleidoscope, not upon a synthesis or analysis of facts seen in a continuous series, in a living stream; it sees them sharp-edged like figures in the Castilian landscape and it takes them as they appear, in their own dress, without reconstructing them. And it has given birth to a harsh popular realism and to a dry formal idealism, marching alongside one another, in an association like that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but never combining. The Castilian spirit is either ironic or tragic, sometimes both at once, but it never arrives at a fusion of the irony and the austere tragedy of the human drama.

In few books have I found so much food for reflection upon our Spain and us Spaniards as in Martin A. S. Hume’s “The Spanish People: Their Origin, Growth and Influence.” It is written by one who knows and esteems us. It impresses us at a first glance as an excellent compendium of the history of Spain, but on closer examination it is found to be also an excellent psychological study of the Spanish people.

In the tenth chapter there is to be noted a very happy and graphic phrase—“the introspective individuality of Spaniards.” And it is indeed true that we are much given to this direct contemplation of ourselves, a practice which is certainly not the best method of getting to know ourselves, of fulfilling the precept “Know thyself” in its collective and social sense. Introspection is very deceptive and when carried to an extreme produces an actual vacuity of consciousness, like that into which the Yogi falls through perpetual contemplation of his own navel. For a state of consciousness which consisted purely and simply of consciousness contemplating itself would not be a state of consciousness at all, being void of all content. This supposed reflection of the soul upon its own self is an absurdity. To think that one thinks without thinking of anything concrete is mere negation. We learn to know ourselves in the same way that we learn to know others, by observingour actions, and the only difference is that, as we are always with ourselves and scarcely anything that we consciously do escapes us, we have more data for knowing ourselves than we have for knowing others. But even so, we seldom know all that we are capable of until we put ourselves to it, and often we surprise ourselves by achieving something which we did not expect of ourselves.

Hence the utility of a people knowing its own history in order that it may know itself. And Hume studies us in our history.

In one of his books the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaks of the three Johns: the John as he himself thinks he is, the John as others think he is, and the John as he is in reality. And as for every individual, so for every people there are three Johns. There is the Spanish people as we Spaniards believe it to be, there is the Spanish people as foreigners believe it to be, and there is the Spanish people as it really is. It is difficult to say which of the first two approximates most nearly to the last; but it is certainly right that we should compare them together and see ourselves both from within and from without. However much we may lament the injustice or the superficiality of the judgments that our foreign visitors pronounce upon us, it is possible that we are no less unjust or superficial in our own judgment of ourselves.

Havelock Ellis, in a book published not long ago, “The Soul of Spain,” spoke of the unity of our race. Spaniards have generally regarded this view as absurd, but it may very well be that the differences that separate the inhabitants of the various provinces of Spain are no greater than those which exist between the inhabitants of the different districts of other nations which we suppose to be more unified than ourselves, and that our lack of solidarity, our separatist instinct, ourkabylism, as it is called, proceeds from other causes than from differences of race. Little notice need be taken of certain ethnological assertions, not so much based upon scientific investigation as inspired by sentiments which, whether creditable or not, furnish no basis for arriving at the truth. Thus, if a writer asserts that the Catalans are Aryans and all other Spaniards Semites, it is obvious that he is using the terms Aryan and Semite without a proper understanding of them; and as the distinction between Catalans and other Spaniards is one of philology rather than ethnology, it would be interesting to know what language the ancestors of the present Catalans spoke before Latin penetrated into Cataluña, for the supposition that they are descended from Greek colonists is too nonsensical to be taken seriously.

Before proceeding further in this review of Hume’s study of the psychology of the Spanish people, I should like to indicate a distinction which I am in the habit of making between individuality and personality, a distinction which appears to me to be of great importance.

All my readers know what is meant by “individual” or “indivisible,” a unity that is distinct from other unities and not divisible into unities analogous to it; and also what is meant by a person. The notion of person refers rather to the spiritual content, and that of individual to the containing limit. Great individuality, that which separates an individual strongly and emphatically from other analogous individuals, may have very little that is peculiar and personal to itself. It might even be said that individuality and personality are in a certain sense opposed to one another, although in another wider and more exact sense it may be said that they afford one another mutual support. Strong individuality is scarcely possible without a respectable dose of personality, neither is a strong and rich personality possible without a considerable degree of individuality to hold its various elements together; but the vigour of a vigorous individuality may very easily contain only the minimum of personality and the richness of a rich personality may be contained within the minimum of individuality.

I will endeavour, as is my wont, to make my meaning clearer by means of metaphors.

In gases, according to the physicists, the molecules are in a certain state of disassociation, moving rectilinearly in all directions—it is this which produces the phenomena of expansion—a state that is chaotic but not in reality very complex; and it is a well-known fact that very complex bodies are not as a rule found in a gaseous state, but only those that are simplest and least complicated. In solids, on the other hand, the molecules are ordered according to relatively fixed orbits and trajectories—especially in the case of crystals; and their individuality is maintained by a principle of intense cohesion, their surfaces being in direct contact with their environment, capable of affecting it and being affected by it. A middle term is presented by liquids. And thus we may compare certain strongly individualized natures with gases enclosed in a bottle or shell with rigid sides, while there are others, with flexible contours, in a free give-and-take contact with their environment, which possess great internal complexity—in other words, a high degree of personality.

Or we may compare the former with crustaceans, enclosed in hard shells which give them rigid and permanent forms, and the latter with vertebrates, which, since they carry their skeleton within themselves, are capable of considerable external modification.

Individuality refers rather to our external limits, it exhibits our finiteness; personality refers principally to our internal limits, or rather to our inward unlimitedness, it exhibits our infinitude.

All this is somewhat tenuous and perhaps fails to meet the demands of strict psychology, but it is enough if it has helped to make my meaning clearer.

My idea is that the Spaniard possesses, as a general rule, more individuality than personality; that the vigour with which he affirms himself before others and the energy with which he creates dogmas and locks himself up in them, do not correspond with any richness of inward spiritual content, which in his case rarely errs on the side of complexity.

In his preface Hume states that the Spaniards spring from an Afro-Semitic race, that “the keynote of this primitive racial character is overwhelming individuality,” and that to this root-cause is to be attributed all that we have accomplished in the world, our transientimperial greatness and our permanent tenacity. This feeling of individuality lies deep down in the root of the race and cunning politicians have turned it to the advantage of their ambitions.

In speaking of the Arab domination he says that “the Berber, like his far-away relative the Iberian, was a man of strong individuality, with an obstinate reluctance to obey another unless he spoke in the name of a supernatural entity.”

At the conclusion of the ninth chapter in which he treats of our epoch of greatness in the middle of the 16th century, he writes the following notable lines:

“Each unlettered boor and swaggering soldier felt in an undefined way that he was a creature apart by reason of his faith; that Spaniards and the Spaniards’ king had a higher mission than was accorded to other men; and that from among the eight million Spaniards alive the particular Juan or Pedro in question stood out individually, in the sight of God and men, as pre-eminently the most zealous and orthodox of them all. To this had the policy of Fernando and Isabel brought the mass of the Spanish people.”

And in corroboration of this he draws a striking portrait of Philip II, the idol of our traditionalists:

“Intense individuality in him, as in so many of his countrymen, was merged in the idea of personal distinction in the eyes of God by self-sacrifice.... At heart he was kindly, a good father and husband, an indulgent and considerate master, having no love for cruelty itself. And yet lying, dishonesty, cruelty, the infliction of suffering and death upon hosts of helpless ones, and the secret murder of those who stood in his path, were not wrong forhim, because, in his moral obliquity he thought that the ends justified the means, and that all was lawful in the linked causes of God and Spain.” “He was blind and oblivious to all but the blood-boltered Christ, before whom he writhed in a maniacal agony of devotion, sure in his dark soul, as were so many of his countrymen, that the divine finger pointed from glory alone upon him as the one chosen man who was to enforce upon earth the rule of the Most High, with—as a necessary consequence—Philip of Spain as his viceregent.”

I know that many who look upon this portrait will come forward with the familiar objection that this Philip II is the Devil of the South of the Protestant legend, and will advance the counter-legend—equally legendary—which is being built up out of a mass of minute data by historians who combine the method of Dr. Dryasdust with the spirit of rabid partisanship.

What interests me in Hume’s description is his statement that every Spaniard regards himself as an individual apart, specially and personally chosen by God. This recalls Pascal’s claim that Jesus Christ in dying shed a drop of blood for him, Blaise Pascal, who was destined to live in France in the middle of the 17th century. There is a certain characteristic common to all those whom we call geniuses or great men and other heroes. Each of them has a consciousness of being a man apart, chosen very expressly by God for the performance of a certain work.

In this respect we Spaniards are inclined to think ourselves geniuses, or rather we have a very robust conception of the Divinity—we think of Him not as the frigid and exalted God of the French Deism of the18th century, nor yet as the good-natured and easy-going God of good people that Béranger depicts, but rather as a God whose attention and care extends to the very last ant, regarded as a separate individual, as well as to the very greatest and most splendid of suns.

In actual fact all these claims to singularity and to being one apart from the rest may become reprehensible, but it is at least understandable that an orator, for example, or a writer, or a singer, should regard himself as the best orator, the best writer, or the best singer. What is not understandable is that a man who is neither orator, writer, painter, sculptor, musician, nor man of business, that a man who does nothing at all, should expect by the mere fact of his presence to be reputed a man of extraordinary merit and exceptional talent. And nevertheless here in Spain—I do not know how it may be elsewhere—there are many examples of this curious phenomenon.

I know of the man who is ready to admit that others may be handsomer, smarter, stronger, healthier, wiser, more intelligent, more generous, than he, that in each and all of their endowments they have the advantage over him; but nevertheless he, Juan Lopez, the individual in question, is superior to everyone else just because he is Juan Lopez, because there is no other Juan Lopez exactly like him and because it is impossible that all the qualities, good, bad and indifferent, that make him him, Juan Lopez, should ever be assembled together again. He is a unique individual, he cannot be substituted by anyone else—and he is in a measureright in thinking so. He can say withObermann: “In the universe I am nothing; for myself I am everything.”

This violent individualism, combined with very meagre personalism, with a great lack of personality, is a factor that explains a great deal of our history. It explains that intense thirst for individual immortality which consumes the Spaniard, a thirst that lies hidden beneath what is called our cult of death. Homage to this cult of death is rendered no less by the most furious lovers of life, by those in whom the joy of living is unable to extinguish the hunger for survival. It appears to me a very great error to assert that the Spaniard does not love life because he finds life hard. On the contrary, it is because his life is hard that he has not arrived at thetædium vitæ, theWeltschmerzof the satiated, and that he has always aimed at prolonging it indefinitely beyond death.

In the third part of the “Ethics” of Spinoza, a Jew of Spanish origin—or Portuguese, which amounts to the same thing—there are four admirable propositions, the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth, in which he lays it down that everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being; that the endeavour wherewith a thing endeavours to persist in its being is nothing else than the actual essence of that thing (conatus, quo unaquæque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est præter ipsius rei actualem essentiam); that this effort or endeavour involves no finite time but an indefinite time, and that the spirit endeavours to persist in its being for an indefinite period and is conscious of this its endeavour. It is not possible toexpress with more precision the longing for immortality that consumes the soul.

This strong individualism, the individualism of an individual who endeavours to persist, has led the Spaniard to follow always the path of conduct and will, and this is the reason of Schopenhauer’s admiration of Spaniards, whom he deemed to be one of the peoples most fully possessed of will—or rather of wilfulness—most tenacious of life. Our indifference to life is only on the surface and really conceals a most dogged attachment to it. And this practical tendency is manifest in our thought, which ever since Seneca has inclined to what is called moralism and has evinced but little interest in pure metaphysical and speculative contemplation, in viewing the world as a spectator.

It is this imperious individualism that has led us to the dogmatism that corrodes us. Spain is the country of those who are more papistical than the Pope, as the saying is. Spain is the chosen and most propitious soil for what is calledintegrism, which is the triumph of the maximum of individuality compatible with the minimum of personality. Spain was, in short, and in more than one respect continues to be, the land of the Inquisition.

Of the Inquisition and inquisitorialism, Hume writes very aptly. “Innate cruelty, individual pride, a vivid imagination long fed with extravagant fables, religious and secular, and lust for unearned wealth, all combined under the eager blessings of the Queen [Isabel] and the Church to make the Spaniards, as a race, relentless persecutors of those who dared to think differently from themselves.” Beneath the manifest and not inconsiderable exaggeration, there is here a large basis of truth. Spaniards could do no wrong “because they were working for and with the cause of God.” “The bureaucratic unity of the Romans was no longer possible [in the time of Fernando and Isabel], for out of the reconquest had grown separate nations; but at least the various peoples, the autonomous dominions, the semi-independent towns, might be held together by the strong bond of religious unity; and with this object the Inquisition was established, as a governmental system, to be developed later into a political engine.... Thus it is that Spain appears for the first time in the concert of modern European nations a power whose very existence in a concrete form depends upon its rigid doctrinal Catholicism.” This last assertion appears to me so doubtful and I am so far from believing it to be just that I shall have to devote a special study to its refutation.

This Spanish individualism has undoubtedly been the cause of another characteristic feature of our history, a feature to which Hume pays very particular attention. It is known ascantonalismorkabylism. I refer of course to our tendency to disruption, to separate into tribes. Hume alludes to it at the beginning of his history in the following notable lines: “In any case, what is known of their physique seems to negative the supposition that they [the Iberians] were of Indo-European or Aryan origin; and to find their counterpart at the present time, it is only necessary to seek the Kabyl tribes of the Atlas, the original inhabitants of the African coast opposite Spain, who were drivenback into the mountains by successive waves of invasion. Not alone in physique do these tribes resemble what the early Iberian must have been, but in the more unchanging peculiarities of character and institutions the likeness is easily traceable to the Spaniard of to-day. The organization of the Iberians, like that of the Atlas peoples, was clannish and tribal, and their chief characteristic was their indomitable local independence. Warlike and brave, sober and light-hearted, the Kabyl tribesman has for thousands of years stubbornly resisted all attempts to weld him into a nation or subject him to a uniform dominion, while the Iberian, starting probably from the same stock, was blended with Aryan races possessing other qualities, and was submitted for six centuries to the unifying organization of the greatest governing race the world ever saw—the Romans; yet, withal, even at the present day, the main characteristics of the Spanish nation, like that of the Kabyl tribes, is lack of solidarity.”

This fundamental idea appears all through Hume’s book like a refrain orleitmotiv.

Out of all this, two questions now emerge: the first, what is the origin of this individualism? and the second, what is its cure?—the one ethnological, the other therapeutical.

As I indicated at the beginning, in quoting the opinion of Havelock Ellis, I am not at all disposed to believe thatkabylismorcantonalism, the separatist tendency, proceeds from differences of race. If Cataluña or the Basque provinces could be forthwith removed and isolated in the middle of the Atlantic, we shouldvery soon see them torn by internal dissensions, by separatist tendencies, and conflicts for supremacy would arise between the various dialects of the Catalan and Basque languages. In the Basque provinces such internal dissensions are beginning to be patent even to the least acute observer.

There is one capital sin that is very peculiarly Spanish, and that sin is envy. It is a result of our peculiar individualism, and it is one of the causes ofkabylism. Envy has crippled and still cripples not a few of the best minds of Spain, minds that are in other respects vigorous and exuberant. We are all familiar with the famous simile of the greasy pole. Deep down in our racial character there is a certain sediment of spiritual avarice, of lack of generosity of soul, a certain propensity to consider ourselves rich only in so far as others are poor, and this sediment requires to be purged away.

Spanishkabylismand individualism both appear to me to be effects of one and the same cause, the cause that also producedpicarism. In his book entitledHampa, Salillas showed very clearly how the poverty of the soil, its failure to serve as a basis for the support of the people, was responsible for the seasonal migration of flocks and herds together with the vagabond life that resulted therefrom. It appears to me more concrete and more historical to say that it obliged the Iberians to be herdsmen. Hume expresses it exactly when he says that the pure Spaniard has always been “an agriculturist by necessity and a shepherd by choice,

The spectators, so far from encouraging or applauding the competitors, are said to pull them back and generally hinder them from securing the prize.

when he was not a soldier.” I believe that a consideration of this pastoral character of our people would help to explain a great deal of our history and to modify accepted verdicts. At bottom the expulsion of the Moriscos, an industrious people of agriculturists and gardeners, appears to me to have been due to the traditional hatred which those whom I will call Abelites, the spiritual descendants of Abel, the keeper of flocks, bore towards the descendants of Cain, the tiller of the ground, who killed his brother. For the Hebrew legend of Cain and Abel presents one of the most profound intuitions of the beginnings of human history.

And what is the cure for this individualism? The first thing is to see whether it is an evil, and if it appears to be one, to see if it may not be converted into a good, for it is evident that vices and virtues proceed from the same stock and a single passion may be turned either to good or to evil.

The exigences of life in past ages made our remote ancestors herdsmen; being herdsmen, they acquired all the qualities that pastoral life tends to develop—they were idlers, they were wanderers, and they were disunited. The lapse of time, civilized and urban life, the necessities imposed by industrial and commercial competition—progress, in short—will modify this basal character. Can this process be accelerated, and by what means?—But that is another question.

It is a not unprofitable task to examine the national consciousness by examining ourselves and to ask ourselves as Spaniards what there is of intrinsic and permanent worth in most of these schemes for our national regeneration which almost all of us are discussing nowadays, some more insistently than others.

All those things which are being demanded and which almost all of us have demanded on behalf of our people, with a greater or less degree of comprehension of what these demands mean, may be summed up in two terms—Europeanandmodern. “We must be modern,” “we must be European,” “we must modernize ourselves,” “we must go with the century,” “we must Europeanize ourselves”—such are the watchwords of the hour.

The termEuropeanexpresses a vague idea, very vague, excessively vague; but much vaguer is the idea that is expressed by the termmodern. If we combine the two together it would seem that they ought to limit one another and result in something concrete, and that the expression “modern European” ought to be clearer than either of its two component terms; but perhaps it is really vaguer still.

It will be apparent that I am proceeding by way of what some would call arbitrary statement, without documentation, without verification, independent of modern European logic and disdainful of its methods. Perhaps. I seek no other method than the method of passion; and when I am moved with disgust, with repugnance, with pity or with contempt, I let the mouth speak from the fullness of the heart and the words come forth as they will.

We Spaniards, so they say, are arbitrary charlatans, we fill up the broken links of logic with rhetoric, we subtilize skilfully but uselessly, we lack the sense of consecutiveness and induction, we have scholastic minds, we are casuists ... etc., etc.

I have heard similar things said of St. Augustine, the great African, the fiery soul that overflowed in waves of rhetoric, in phraseological contortions, in antitheses, in paradoxes and conceits. St. Augustine was at once a gongorist and a conceptist. Which leads me to believe that Gongorism and conceptism are the natural forms of passion and vehemence.

The great African, the great ancient African! Here you have an expression, “ancient African,” which can be opposed to that of “modern European,” and which is at least of equal value. St. Augustine was African and he was of the ancient world; so also was Tertullian. And why should we not say: “We must Africanize ourselves ancientwise” or “We must ancientize ourselves Africanwise”?

Luis de Gongora (1561-1627) elaborated an affected and euphuistic style of composition. Conception is the name given to the employment ofconceptos, a characteristic Spanish form of conceits. It is exemplified in the writings of Quevedo (1580-1645) and its subtleties were reduced to an exact code by Baltasar Gracián in hisAgudeza y arte de ingenio(1642).

Turning my glance inwards upon myself after the lapse of years, after having wandered among the various fields of modern European culture, I ask myself, face to face with my conscience: Am I European? am I modern? And my conscience replies: No, you are not European, not what is called European; no, you are not modern, not what is called modern. And I ask myself again: Is the fact that you feel that you are neither European nor modern due to the fact that you are a Spaniard? Are we Spaniards, at heart, irreducible to Europeanization and modernization? And if that be the case, is there no salvation for us? Is there no other life than modern and European life? Is there no other culture—or whatever you like to call it?

First of all, so far as I myself am concerned, I must confess that the more I reflect upon it, the more I become aware of the inner repugnance that my spirit feels for all those that are considered to be the guiding principles of the modern European spirit, for the scientific orthodoxy of to-day, for its methods, for its tendencies.

There are two things that are often talked about—science and life. And I must confess that both the one and the other are antipathetic to me.

It is unnecessary to define science, or Science, if you like, with the capital letter, this thing which is now being so widely popularized, the purpose of which is to give us a more logical and exact idea of the Universe. When I used to be something of a Spencerian I believed myself to be enamoured of science; but afterwards I discovered that this was a mistake. It was a mistakelike the mistake of those who think that they are happy when they are not. (It is evident that I reject, arbitrarily of course, the idea that being happy consists in thinking that one is happy.) No, I was never enamoured of science, I always sought for something behind it. And when, endeavouring to get beyond its fatidical relativity, I was led to theignorabimusposition, I realized that science had always irked me.

And what are you going to put in its place? I shall be asked. I might say ignorance, but that is not certain. I might say, with the Preacher, the son of David, king of Jerusalem, that he who increases knowledge increases sorrow and that the same end awaits the wise man and the fool; but no, it is not that. I don’t need to invent a word, however, to express what it is that I oppose to science, for the word exists, and it issabiduría—thesagesseof the French, thewisdomof the English, the GermanWeisheitorKlugheit. But is it opposed to science? I shall be asked. And I, following my arbitrary method, guided by the passion of my spirit, by my innate aversions and my innate attractions, reply: Yes, they are opposed; science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.

The other thing that is being incessantly talked about to-day is life, and to this it is easy to find an opposite. The opposite to life is death.

And this second opposition helps me to explain the first. Wisdom is to science what death is to life, or, if you prefer it, wisdom is to death what science is to life.

The object of science is life, and the object of wisdom is death. Science says: “We must live,” and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable; wisdom says: “We must die,” and seeks how to make us die well.

Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat, et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vita meditatio est—so Spinoza announces in Proposition LXVII of the fourth part of his “Ethics”: The free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

In this case, this wisdom, thissapientia, is no longer wisdom, but science. And it is also necessary to inquire what kind of man is meant by this “free man.” The man free from the supreme anguish, free from the eternal heartache, free from the gaze of the Sphinx, that is to say, the man who is not a man, the ideal of the modern European.

And here we have another concept which is as little sympathetic to me as those of life and science, the concept of liberty. There is no other true liberty than the liberty of death.

And what is at the bottom of all this? What are they seeking and pursuing, those who grasp at science and life and liberty, turning their backs, whether they are aware of it or not, upon wisdom and death? What they are seeking is happiness.

I believe—perhaps this belief of mine is also arbitrary—I believe that here we touch the bottom of our inquiry. The so-called modern European comes to the world to seek happiness for himself and for others, and believes that man ought to succeed in being happy.And this is a supposition to which I am unable to conform. And now, as I am confessing myself, I am going to put before you an arbitrary dilemma—arbitrary, because I cannot prove it to you logically, because it is imposed upon me by the feeling of my heart, not by the reasoning of my head: either happiness or love. If you want the one, you must renounce the other. Love kills happiness, happiness kills love.

And here it would be very apposite to adduce all that our mystics, our admirable mystics, our only classic philosophers, the creators of our Spanish wisdom, not our Spanish science—perhaps the terms “science” and “Spanish” are, happily, mutually repellent—have felt, felt rather than thought, about love and happiness—themuero porque no mueroand thedolor sabrosoand all the rest that emanates from the same depths of feeling.

And what relation does all this bear to the spiritual problem of Spain? Is it anything more than a purely and exclusively personal, that is to say arbitrary, position? Is it as a Spaniard that I feel all this? Is it suggested to me by the Spanish soul?

It has been said that with the Catholic Kings and the beginnings of national unity the course of our history was turned into another channel. It is certain that since then, with the discovery of America and our intermeddling in European affairs, we have been drawn into the current of other peoples. Spain entered into the strong current of the Renaissance and our mediæval soul began to be obliterated. And the Renaissance was in its essence just this: science, above all in theform of humanities, and life. And thought dwelt less upon death and the mystical wisdom gradually disappeared.

It has frequently been said that the Spaniard is too much preoccupied with death; and we have been told, in a variety of ways and especially by those who deal in platitudes, that the preoccupation with death prevents us from living like moderns and like Europeans. The blame even for our death-rate and for our squalor and for our lack of health has been thrown upon our so-called cult of death. And it seems to me, on the other hand, that we think too little about death, or rather that we only half think about it.

And we half think and half meditate about death because we pretend to be European and modern without ceasing to be Spaniards, and that is impossible. And we have made an infamous commixture of our classic wisdom and exotic science, of our innate deep feeling for death and a borrowed solicitude for life. And we have thought we were keenly interested in progress whereas in fact we trouble very little about it.

“You deceive yourself,” a foreign friend of mine once said to me, thinking that although I was a Spaniard I was also European and modern, “you deceive yourself—Spaniards in general are incapable of civilization and refractory to it.”

And I left him cold with stupor when I replied: “And is that a fault?” The man looked at me as one looks at someone who has suddenly gone mad; it must have seemed to him as if I had denied a postulate of geometry. He began to reason with me and I said: “No, don’t attempt to give me reasons. I think I maysay without boasting, and yet without the hypocrisy of modesty, that I know all the reasons you can bring forward on this point. It is not a question of reasons but of feelings.”

He insisted, attempting to talk to me about feeling, and I added: “No, my friend, no, you know all about logic, but it is not logic, but passion, that governs feelings.” And I left him and went away to read the confessions of the great African of the ancient world.

Is it not perhaps true that we Spaniards are, in effect, spiritually refractory to what is called modern European culture? And if this be so, ought we to be distressed about it? Is it not possible to live and to die, above all to die well, without this fortunate culture?

And by this I don’t mean that we are engulfed in inaction, in ignorance and in barbarism—no, not that. There are means of augmenting the spirit, of exalting it, of enlarging it, of ennobling it, of making it more divine, without having recourse to this same culture. We can, I believe, cultivate our wisdom without accepting science except as a means to this end, taking due precautions against its corrupting the spirit.

Just as love of death and the feeling that it is the principle of our true life ought not to lead us to a violent renunciation of life, to suicide—for life is a preparation for death, and the better the preparation, the better the thing prepared for—so neither ought love of wisdom to lead us to a renunciation of science, for that would be equivalent to mental suicide, but to an acceptance of science as a preparation, and as nothing more than a preparation, for wisdom.

For my part I can say that if I had never madeexcursions into the fields of some of the modern European sciences, I should never have taken the delight that I have taken in our ancient African wisdom, in our popular wisdom, in what scandalizes all the Pharisees and Sadducees of intellectualism, that horrible intellectualism that poisons the soul. It is hearing hymns in praise of them that has made me view science and life with distrust, perhaps with horror, and love the wisdom of death, the meditation which, according to Spinoza, the free man, that is, the happy man, does not meditate.

A few days ago I read an article by my friend and fellow-Basque, Pío Baroja, entitled “The Sad Country,” in which he says that Spain is a sad country, just as France is a beautiful country. He opposes smiling France, with its level fertile soil, with its mild climate, with its bright transparent rivers that slide smoothly along flush with their banks, to our peninsula, full of stones, burnt by the sun and frozen with the winter frost. He observes that in France the products of the spirit cannot compare with the products of agriculture and industry; that the dramas of Racine are not fashioned so finely as the wines of Bordeaux; that the pictures of Delacroix are not so good as the oysters of Arcachon; and that, on the other hand, our great men, Cervantes, Velazquez, El Greco, Goya, are the equals or more than the equals of the great men of any other country; while our actual life is not equal to, not the life of Morocco, but the life of Portugal.

And I say: Is it not worth while to undergo the hardship of renouncing this pleasant life of France inorder to breathe the spirit that can produce a Cervantes, a Velazquez, an El Greco, a Goya? Are not these perhaps incompatible with the wine of Bordeaux and the oysters of Arcachon? I believe—arbitrarily of course—that it is so, that they are incompatible, and I take my stand withDon Quixote, with Velazquez, with El Greco, with Goya, and against the wine of Bordeaux and the oysters of Arcachon, against Racine and Delacroix. Passion and sensuality are incompatible; passion is arbitrary, logic is sensual. For logic is nothing but a form of sensuality.

“All our material and intellectual products are hard, rugged and disagreeable,” Baroja continues. “The wine is thick, the meat bad, the papers boring and the literature sad. I don’t know what it is that makes our literature so disagreeable.”

Here I must pause. I am not sensible of this identification of the sad with the disagreeable; and I will even say—although there may be some simple enough to take this to be a paradox—that for me the disagreeable is that which is called gay. I shall never forget the highly disagreeable effect, the deep disgust, which the strident hilarity of the Parisian boulevard produced upon me seventeen years ago, and the feeling of disquiet and uneasiness that came over me there. All that world of youth, dancing, jesting, playing, drinking, making love, seemed to me to be composed of puppets endowed with sense; they seemed to lack consciousness, to be appearances merely. I felt alone, utterly alone among them, and this feeling of loneliness pained me. I could not bring myself to accept the idea that these roisterers, these devotees of thejoie de vivre, were beings like myself, my fellows, or even the idea that they were living creatures dowered with consciousness.

Here you have an instance of the way in which gaiety jarred upon me, was disagreeable to me. And on the other hand, when I am in the midst of heart-sick multitudes crying to heaven for mercy, chanting aDe profundisor aMiserere, I cannot help feeling myself among brothers, united to them by love.

Later on, Baroja says: “For me, one of the saddest things about Spain is that we Spaniards cannot be frivolous or jovial.”

And for me it would be one of the saddest things for Spain if we Spaniards could become frivolous and jovial. In that case we should cease to be Spaniards, yet without even becoming Europeans. In that case we should have to renounce our true consolation and our true glory, which consists precisely in this inability to be either frivolous or jovial. In that case we might be able to repeat in chorus all the unsubstantialities of the popular scientific handbooks, but we should be incapacitated for entering into the kingdom of wisdom. In that case we might perhaps have better and finer wines, purer oil, better oysters; but we should have to renounce the possibility of a newDon Quixote, or a new Velazquez, and, above all, the possibility of a new St. John of the Cross, a new Fray Diego de Estella, a new St. Teresa de Jesús—whether orthodox or heterodox, it matters not which.

And Baroja concludes: “A sad country in which everywhere all people live their lives thinking of nothing less than of life.”

And this arbitrariness provokes my arbitrariness and I exclaim: Unhappy those modern European countries in which people live their lives thinking of nothing more than of life. Unhappy those countries in which men do not continually think of death and in which the guiding principle of life is not the thought that we shall all one day have to lose it.

Here I must halt a moment—if it is possible to speak of halts in a course such as my thought is taking here—and explain, if it is possible to explain it, what this arbitrariness really is.

Foreigners, the French in particular, take from us precisely that which is least ours, that which least clashes with their spirit, and, naturally enough, that which best accommodates itself to the idea that they have formed of us, an idea that is always and necessarily superficial. And we, poor fools, yield to this delusive adulation and hope for this external applause, the applause of those who really don’t hear us, and even when they do hear us don’t understand us.

I don’t really know what they want in taking from us just what they do take, just that which confirms the popular notion they have of us. If I were in their place, what I should take from Spain and make known to my fellow-countrymen would be what was most wounding to their convictions, what amazed them most, what was most repellent to their spirit, what was most different from them.

But after all what they do is natural, for people want to be told just that which they already think, that which confirms them in their preconceived ideas, theirprejudices and their superstitions: men want to be deceived. And so it is here.

In face of this attitude of theirs, what must be our attitude? In face of this process that tends to decharacterize us, to rob us of that which makes us what we are, what course of action is the best for us to adopt? Admonished by those voices that say: “If you want to be like us and save yourselves, take this,” what must we do?

But this question of attempting to Spaniardize Europe, the only means whereby we may Europeanize ourselves, so far as it is fitting that we should be Europeanized, or rather, whereby we may digest those elements in the European spirit which we can convert into our spirit—this question must be left for separate treatment.

All this will appear arbitrary—it is arbitrary. How can I help it?

“Enough,” some logical modern European reader will say; “now I’ve caught you. You yourself admit that your assertions have no foundation, that they are arbitrary, that they cannot be proved, and such assertions ought not to be taken seriously.” And I will say to this poor logical modern and European reader, who may be assumed to be in love with science and life, that the fact that an assertion is arbitrary and cannot be proved by logical reasons, does not mean either that it is without foundation or, still less, that it is false. And above all it does not mean that such an assertion may not excite and animate the spirit, may not strengthen its inner life, that inner life which is a verydifferent thing from the life that the logical and scientificist reader is in love with.

I broke off this essay at this point two days ago, with the intention of continuing it, of resuming the broken thread, as occasion offered, and now to-day, the 13th of May, I have just read a phrase that alters the course of my discourse. Something of the kind happens to rivers when a rock deflects their course and causes them to disembogue many leagues away from where they would otherwise have disembogued, perhaps into another sea altogether.

It is curious what happens to our ideas. We have often in our mind a crowd of ideas that vegetate in the darkness, withered, incomplete, unacquainted with one another and avoiding one another. For in the darkness, ideas, like men, are afraid of one another. And they remain obscured, disassociated, avoiding contact. But suddenly a new and luminous idea enters the mind, emitting light and illuminating the dark corner, and as soon as the other ideas see it and see their own faces, they recognize one another, they arise and gather round the new arrival, they embrace and form a fraternity and recover their full life.

So it has happened with me to-day when a number of half-alive and shadowy ideas that have been lying isolated in a corner of my mind have been joined by this new idea that I have just read in a Madrid newspaper,La Correspondencia de España, of yesterday’s date, the 12th of May.

In an article that it publishes, entitled “CurrentEvents—Cánovas,” the author says: “Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain. Cánovas never knew of what stuff his fellow-countrymen were made.”

The moment that I read this, I realized, as if by a sudden illumination, the difference that there is between the soul of Spain and the aggregate of the souls of all us Spaniards who are living to-day, the actual synthesis of these same souls. And I remembered that at the time of the last Carlist civil war, when I was a boy, I heard someone in my native town say: “Even though all we men of Bilbao were to become Carlists, Bilbao would remain liberal.” A paradox—that is to say, a profound arbitrary truth, a truth of passion, a truth of the heart, and one that I shall never forget.

“Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain.” And all our commonplace rulers, those who let themselves drift with the stream and enjoy long years of office, all our commonplace writers, those who write books that are just long tirades, books that sell, all our commonplace artists and all our commonplace thinkers, understand their fellow-countrymen, but not their country.

Not only our own souls, the souls of us who are living to-day, are alive and operative in the soul of Spain, but in addition to these, the souls of all our forefathers. Our own souls, those of the living, are those that are least alive in it, for our soul does not enter into the soul of our country until it is no longer a detached entity, until after our temporal death.

What is the use of our wanting to make our thought modern and European when our language is neither European nor modern? While we are endeavouringto make it say one thing, it is endeavouring to make us say something different, and thus we don’t say the thought that we pretend we are saying, but we say the thought that we don’t wish to say.

We endeavour—that is to say, many of us endeavour—to deform our spirit conformably with an external standard, and we succeed neither in making ourselves like those whom we pretend to copy nor in being ourselves. Whence results a horrible spiritual half-breed, a kind of barren hybrid.

And the most curious thing about it all is this—something that will be understood one day, if the day ever comes when anyone will occupy himself in investigating the spiritual condition of Spain at the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries—the most curious and surprising thing is that those who are held to be most Spanish, most true-blooded and of the old stock, most authentically Spanish, are those who are the most Europeanizing, the most exotic, those whose soul contains the most alien strains; and on the other hand those whom many simple-minded folk regard as exotic spirits, anglicized, gallicized, Germanized, Norwegianized, are the ones whose roots intermingle most closely with the roots of those who created the Spanish soul. I have observed how frequently a skin-deep classicism, a classicism of external grammatical and rhetorical forms, goes hand in hand with a complete alienation from the national soul, and vice versa. I have known a portentous fool, once an esteemed author, who used to read our mystics in order to learn from them how to write good Castilian and upon whom the ardent soul of these most genuinelySpanish spirits made no impression whatever; and on the other hand I know a man who, although he has never read them nor concerned himself in any way to preserve their literary tradition or their religious orthodoxy, in breathing the national spiritual atmosphere has breathed the air of that mysticism that is inherent in this atmosphere.

What is the origin of this confusion? I cannot tell, but I presume that it must originate in the same cause that makes Spaniards insist on calling him a wise man who has least wisdom in him and demanding logic from a man who is passionate and arbitrary.

“People want and demandthings,” so a friend of mine says to me when I talk to him about these matters, “that is to say, concrete ideas, utilizable facts, scientific theories, information, rational explanations, and it is no use going to them with feelings and dreams.” Usually my first thought on hearing this is, “Unfortunate people!” but immediately afterwards I pull myself up and say: “They are partly right; it is right that they should demand that; but why must so many of them reject the other? and above all why should they not demand from each one just that which he has and which he can give?”

And, to apply this to our own people, why must we persist in distorting our inner nature and rejecting what it gives us in order to try to force it to give us something else?

Our defects, or what others call our defects, are usually the root of our excellencies; the qualities that are censured as our vices are the foundation of our virtues. It is not a universal æsthetic, applicable toall peoples alike, a pure æsthetic—for I doubt whether such an æsthetic exists or even can exist—that has condemned our conceptism and gongorism, for example, and that has decreed that our genuine and natural instinct for emphasis is in bad taste. It is not a universal æsthetic, valid for all peoples alike, but the æsthetic of other peoples, or rather of one other people, the French, that has imposed this canon upon so many of us. The literary and artistic vices of this terribly logical, desperately geometrical, Cartesian people are certainly not those of conceptism or gongorism, and this people has succeeded in great measure in teaching us its virtues and in teaching us its vices. There is nothing more intolerable than gallicized Spanish literature; nothing more false, more futile, more displeasing, than Spanish writers who have formed themselves by imitating French literature.

Emphasis? But what if emphasis is natural to us? What if emphatic expression is the spontaneous expression of our nature? What if emphasis is the form of passion, just as what is called naturalness is the expression of sensuality and of good sense? What I am sure of is that when a man is really irritated or really enthusiastic, he does not express himself in concise, clear, logical, transparent phrases, but he breaks out into emphatic exclamations, into redundant dithyrambs. What I know, and what everybody knows, is that in love-letters, if the love be real love, tragic love, love that cannot be happy, everything is poured forth in a flood of burning commonplaces.

I have often thought that gongorism and conceptism are, in a certain mode, expressions of passion. I affirm it of conceptism, arbitrarily, of course. Almost all the great men of passion that I am acquainted with in the history of human thought, including the great African of whom I have already spoken, have been conceptists, have poured forth their longings, their aspirations, in antitheses, in paradoxes, in phrases that at first sight seem to be merely ingenious. Perhaps this is owing to the fact that passion is the enemy of logic, in which it sees a tyrant, for passion desires that what it desires should exist, and does not desire what must exist, and conceptism in its essence is a violation of logic for the sake of logic itself. He plays with concepts and does violence to ideas who is impeded by concepts and ideas, for he is unable to make them comply with the demands of his passion.

I need the immortality of my soul, the indefinite persistence of my individual consciousness—I need it. Without it, without faith in it, I cannot live, and doubt, the inability to believe that I shall attain it, torments me. And since I need it, my passion leads me to affirm it, and to affirm it arbitrarily, and when I attempt to make others believe, to make myself believe, I do violence to logic and make use of arguments which are called ingenious and paradoxical by those unfortunate people who have no passion and who contemplate their ultimate dissolution with resignation.

The man of passion, the arbitrary man, is the only real rebel, and nothing makes a more grotesque impression upon me than when I come across those—usually gallicized—individuals who proclaim themselves emancipated from all tyrannies, lovers of liberty,esprits forts, anarchists sometimes, frequently atheists, but who nevertheless are the faithful devotees of logic and of the code of good taste.

Yes, emphasis, turgidity, conceptism, paradoxism, these are the language passion speaks, and, on the other hand, there is nothing less natural, for us Spaniards at any rate, than that which the French callnatureland which is usually the refined product of an exquisite and artificial elaboration.

Some Frenchman has said that French literature is that which gives the most eloquent expression to the great commonplaces of humanity; but I would say that it is in this literature, which has done and still does so much harm in Spain, that all middling ideas and middling feelings find their most adequate form and expression, and that it is hostile to extreme ideas and extreme feelings.

Observe that the French spirit has produced no great mystic, no really great pure mystic. Observe that upon Pascal, although he was somewhat arbitrary and passionate, geometry made a profound impression. And consider the fact that Pascal is one of the French spirits that we are best able to appropriate. It is to this most profound and tortured spirit that we owe two great and profound instances, among others, of tormentingly arbitrary utterance: that of theparior wager, and that ofil faut s’abêtir, “we must become as fools”—in order to believe, beginning with acting as if we did believe. But I don’t know of any great mystic, any really pure mystic, who was a Frenchman. And here I should like to say something about the gentle,tranquil, sensual and logical St. Francis of Sales, so full of common sense and of a spiritualvia media, but I must leave it for some other time.

And it is the æsthetic of this people, so opposed to our own, in spite of all that nonsense about the Latin sisterhood—I don’t know whether they are Latin, I don’t know whether we are, and as regards myself personally, I believe that there is nothing Latin about me—it is the æsthetic of this people that is deforming the fruit of our spirit as it is expressed in many of our spiritual creators.

Latins. Latins? And why, if we are really Berbers, must we not feel and assert that we are Berbers, and why must not the poetry in which we endeavour to give expression to our sorrows and our consolations conform to the Berber æsthetic?

The only way of entering into vital relations with another is the aggressive way; only those succeed in mutually penetrating one another, in forming a spiritual brotherhood, who strive to subjugate one another spiritually, whether in the case of individuals or of peoples. It is only when I strive to put my spirit into the spirit of my neighbour that I receive my neighbour’s spirit in mine. The apostle is blessed in receiving in himself the souls of those whom he converts; in this consists the nobility of proselytizing.

No, none of thislaissez-faireandlaissez-aller—don’t let us shrug our shoulders at the ideas, still less at the feelings, of others, but rather try to wound them. It is thus and only thus that they will wound ours and keep them awake within us. For my part I know that those to whom I owe most are those who have actedas if they rejected, who have wished to reject, what I offered to them. The deep moral life is a life of aggression and mutual penetration. Everyone must endeavour to make others in his own image and likeness, as God is said to have made us in His image and likeness.

The condemnation of him who tries to mould himself upon another lies in the fact that he will cease to be himself without succeeding in being the other whom he takes as his model, and so he will be nobody.

Unquestionably there is something, there are many things, in modern European culture and in the modern European spirit that it behoves us to receive into ourselves in order that we may convert them into our flesh, just as we receive the flesh of various kinds of animals into our body and convert it into our flesh. With the brains of oxen I nourish my brain, with the ribs of hogs I make my heart beat, with fish and birds I feed my body so that my spirit can plunge into the deeps and swim in them and ascend to the heights and fly there. And must we not eat the modern European spirit? Yes, but we first kill these oxen, hogs, fishes and birds, upon which we nourish ourselves, imposing our will upon them, and we must deal with this spirit in the same way before eating it.

I am profoundly convinced, arbitrarily of course—the more profoundly, the more arbitrarily, as is always the case when truths of faith are concerned—I am profoundly convinced that the real and deep Europeanization of Spain, that is to say, our digestion of that part of the European spirit which it is possible to convert into our spirit, will not begin until we striveto impose ourselves upon the European spiritual order, to make the Europeans swallow our spirit, that which is genuinely ours, in exchange for theirs, until we strive to Spaniardize Europe.

And to-day—I say it with shame and sorrow—when a Spaniard seeks to enter into the European world, that is to say, in the case of men of letters, when he wishes to be translated, all that he is concerned about is to deform himself, to de-Spaniardize himself, to leave the translator nothing to do but to translate the letter, the external language. And thus it is that one hears remarks like that which a Frenchman made to me the other day, when, speaking of the translation of a contemporary Spanish novel, he stated that it was better in French than in Spanish. To this I replied that it had been translated back into its original language.

Each human faculty has its method, that is to say, its procedure, its mode of action. That which we call logic is the method of reason, the way of discovering conclusions satisfactory to reason. In this way science is made. But when it is a question neither of addressing nor satisfying reason, there is no need of logic. And for my part, I rarely, very rarely, address myself to the reason of those who hear or read me, and when I do so, it is not I myself who speak or write, but rather an artificial self—and because artificial, therefore detachable—which those who hear or read me impose upon me.

It has been said that the heart has its logic, but it is dangerous to call the method of the heart logic; it would be better to call itcardiac.

And there is also the method of passion, which isarbitrariness and which must not be confounded with caprice, as often happens. It is one thing to be capricious and another very different thing to be arbitrary.

Arbitrariness, the brusque affirmation of a thing because I wish it to be so, because I need it to be so, the creation of our vital truth—truth being that which makes us live—is the method of passion. Passion affirms and the proof of its affirmation is founded upon the energy with which it is affirmed. It needs no other proofs. When some poor intellectual, some modern European, opposes ratiocinations and arguments to any of my affirmations, I say to myself: reasons, reasons, and nothing more than reasons!

Although he deserved to have been a Spaniard for writing them, it was not a Spaniard but an Englishman who wrote these lines:

For nothing worthy proving can be provenNor yet disproven; wherefore thou be wise,Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.

It was Lord Tennyson who wrote these pregnant lines, and in the same poem, “The Ancient Sage,” he tells us that “knowledge is the swallow on the lake that stirs and sees the surface-shadow there, but never yet hath dipt into the abysm.”

Let, then, my last words here, while I am preparing to consider how it is possible to Spaniardize Europe, be that nothing worthy proving can be proven nor yet disproven.

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