Chapter 2

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