Part 5

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 is _sabiduría_--the _sagesse_ of the French, the _wisdom_ of the English, the German _Weisheit_ or _Klugheit_. 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, this _sapientia_, 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--the _muero porque no muero_ and the _dolor sabroso_ and 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 the form 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 may say 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 made excursions 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 in order 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 with _Don 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 the _joie 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 a _De profundis_ or a _Miserere_, 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 new _Don 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, their prejudices 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 very different 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 “Current Events--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 endeavouring to 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 genuinely Spanish 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 demand _things_,” 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 to all 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.