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--_European_ and _modern_. “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 term _European_ expresses a vague idea, very vague, excessively
vague; but much vaguer is the idea that is expressed by the term
_modern_. 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 of _conceptos_, 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 his _Agudeza 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 mistake like 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 the _ignorabimus_ position, 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 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.
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 call
_naturel_ and 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 the _pari_ or wager, and that
of _il 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
spiritual _via 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 this _laissez-faire_ and _laissez-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 acted as 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 strive to 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 it
_cardiac_.
And there is also the method of passion, which is arbitrariness 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 proven
Nor 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.