I regret that I have not by me a certain essay dealing with this
subject by Guglielmo Ferrero. I read it in some review the name of
which I have forgotten, but I preserve a clear recollection of it,
for it interested me greatly. Ferrero treated the subject from the
historical and sociological point of view, and I, who am neither an
historian nor a sociologist, intend to treat it, as is my custom, from
the point of view of purely personal opinion and individual impression.
(This is my custom, and yet in spite of the fact I cannot prevent
people from insisting on calling me a savant and talking about my
theories. I have no theories. I have only impressions and sensations.)
But, since I am unable to put some quotation from Ferrero at the head
of this essay--this habit of basing our assertions upon authority is
the conventional way of giving them a deceptive air of objectivity--I
will head it by a sentence from George Meredith, that extremely
subtle English novelist. In “The Egoist” it is stated that Willoughby
“abandoned London as the burial-place of the individual man.”
I, to-day, am one with Willoughby in believing that great cities
de-individualize, or rather de-personalize, us. This may perhaps be
due to the fact that, though not an egoist like the hero of Meredith’s
novel, I still remain, according to Ramiro de Maeztu, an incorrigible
egotist.
Great cities are levelling; they lift up the low and depress the high;
they exalt mediocrity and abase superlativeness--the result of the
action of the mass, as powerful in social life as in chemistry.
Soon after I came to this ancient city of Salamanca which has now
become so dear to me, a city of some thirty thousand souls, I wrote to
a friend and told him that if after two years’ residence here he should
be informed that I spent my time playing cards, taking siestas and
strolling round the square for a couple of hours every day, he might
give me up for lost; but if at the end of that time I should still
be studying, meditating, writing, battling for culture in the public
arena, he might take it that I was better off here than in Madrid. And
so it has proved to be.
I remember that Guglielmo Ferrero’s conclusion, based upon a review of
ancient Greece, of the Italy of the Renaissance and of the Germany of
a century ago, is that for the life of the spirit, small cities of a
population like that of Salamanca are the best--better than very small
towns or large ones of over a hundred thousand inhabitants.
This depends, of course, upon the quality of the spirit in question. I
am convinced that the monastic cloister, which so often atrophies the
soul and reduces the average intelligence to a lamentable slavery to
routine, has in certain exceptional cases exalted the spirit by its
arduous discipline.
Great cities are essentially democratic, and I must confess that I feel
an invincible platonic mistrust of democracies. In great cities culture
is diffused but vulgarized. People abandon the quiet reading of books
to go to the theatre, that school of vulgarity; they feel the need of
being together; the gregarious instinct enslaves them; they must be
seeing one another.
I think it was Taine who observed that the majority of French geniuses
were either themselves country-born or the sons of country-born
parents. And I assure you that I should find it difficult to believe in
the genius of a Parisian born of Parisians.
Guerra Junqueiro once said to me: “You are fortunate in living in a
city in which you can walk along the streets dreaming, without fear of
people disturbing your dream!” And certainly in Madrid it is impossible
to walk along the streets dreaming, not so much for fear of motors,
trams and carriages as because of the continual stream of unknown
faces. The distraction of a great city, so agreeable to those who
must have something, no matter what, to occupy their imagination, is
necessarily vexatious to those whose chief concern is not to have their
imagination diverted. Personally I find nothing more monotonous than a
Paris boulevard. The people seem to me like shadows. I cannot endure a
crowd of unknown faces.
I am afraid of Madrid. That is to say, I am afraid of myself when I
go there. It is easy to say that in great cities everyone can live
the life that suits him best, but it is easier to say it than to do
it. When I am in the capital, I return home every night regretting
having gone to the party or to the meeting that I went to and
resolving never to go again, but only to break my vow the very next
day. I am surrounded, hemmed in and invaded by a lethal atmosphere of
compliance, an atmosphere that is generated by this so-called life of
society.
I have always felt an aversion from this so-called life of society,
which has for its object the cultivation of social relationships. Is
there anything more terrible than a “call”? It affords an occasion for
the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre
are the two great centres for the propagation of platitudes.
A man of society, a drawing-room man who can make himself agreeable to
women when he pays a call, is always a man whose principal concern is
to suppress any arresting spontaneity, not to let his own personality
show through. For it is a man’s own personality that people find
irritating. People like to meet the average man, the normal man, the
man who has nothing exceptional about him. The exception is always
irritating. How many times I have heard the terrible phrase: “This man
irritates me.” Yes, it is “the man” that irritates, and the hardest
fight for the man who feels that he is a man is the fight to win
respect for his own individuality.
And in a small town? Its stage is very restricted; the players soon
tire of playing the parts allotted to them and the real men begin
to appear underneath, with all their weaknesses--that is to say,
with precisely that which makes them men. I have a great liking for
provincial life, for there it is easiest to discern tragedy lurking
beneath an appearance of calm. And just as much as I abhor comedy, I
love tragedy. And, above all, tragi-comedy.
I have heard it said that there are no such seething intestine rancours
and dissensions as in a merchant vessel or a monastery; that whenever
men are obliged to live together, cut off from the rest of the world,
their personalities, their most real and intimate selves, immediately
clash against one another. And I dare say that this is the only way of
attaining that knowledge of ourselves which ought to be our chief aim.
It seems to me scarcely possible that a man should get to know himself
by shutting himself up in the wilderness, contemplating--what? The best
way of knowing one’s self is to clash, heart against heart, that is to
say, rock against rock, with one’s fellow.
I know that I shall be told that I am indulging my love of paradox,
but nevertheless I maintain that if it is true that the most ardent
admirations are those which are disguised in the form of envy, very
often the strongest attractions are those which take the appearance of
hate. In one of these tragi-comic, or rather comi-tragic, small towns
I know two men who, though obliged to see one another constantly in
the way of business, never greet one another in the street and profess
a mutual detestation. Nevertheless at bottom they feel themselves
reciprocally attracted to one another and each one is continually
preoccupied by the other.
These irreconcilable feuds into which small towns are so often divided
are much more favourable to the development of strong personalities
than the bland comedy of a great metropolis, where those who fight a
duel to the death on the public stage embrace one another behind the
scenes. Do you suppose that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is possible
in a city that counts its inhabitants by the million?
And I ask you, do you suppose that anyone who sees a multitude of
people in the course of the day, listens to this man to-day, to another
man to-morrow and to another man the day after, and attends twenty
or thirty conferences--do you think that such a one can preserve his
spiritual integrity without any leakage? In such a life a hedgehog
would end by becoming a lamb, its quills would turn into softest
fleece, and for my part I would rather be a hedgehog than a lamb.
I understand why Willoughby fled from London as from the burial-place
of the individual man. Is it not a terrible thing to walk through two
or three miles of city streets and pass two or three thousand people
without meeting a single known face to set a spark to a train of human
thought? A glance of hate from a known enemy is sweeter than a glance
of indifference, if not of disdain, from an unknown stranger. For man
has acquired the habit of disdaining those whom he does not know, and
seems to suppose that every stranger must be presumed to be an imbecile
until he proves himself otherwise.
And those who say that they are bored in a small town? The reason is
because they have not dug down to its tragic roots, to the august
severity of the depths of its monotony.
It is my belief that in great cities proud natures become vain, that is
to say, the quills become fleece.
And for the man who is engaged in any kind of work in which he can
exercise his influence from a distance, for the writer or the painter,
the small town offers the inestimable advantage of enabling him to live
far from his public and of its being possible that the effects which
his work produces either do not reach him or reach him only after a
searching process of filtration. He can live more or less independently
of his public, without allowing himself to be influenced by it, and
this is the only way of making a public for oneself instead of adapting
oneself to it.
If this be the case, it may be urged that a village would be better
than a small town, a hamlet or perhaps even a remote farm-house. But
no, for then there would be lacking that minimum of organic society
without which our personality runs as much risk as it runs in the heart
of a metropolis.
Essentially, in the sphere of psychologico-sociological relations--this
is for the benefit of those who insist on labelling me savant--it is a
question of what is perhaps the most fundamental of all problems, the
problem of maxima and minima. This is the problem that is the nerve of
physical mechanics and the nerve also of social mechanics or economics.
The problem always is how to obtain the maximum result or profit with
the minimum effort or expense, the largest return with the least
expenditure. It is also the fundamental problem of æsthetics; it is at
the root of all the problems of life.
And with regard to the subject I am now considering, it is a question
of obtaining the maximum of our own personality with the minimum
of others’ society. Less society, or a society less complex, would
diminish our personality, and so also would more society, or a society
apparently more complex. And I say apparently, for I am not aware that
an elephant is more complex than a fox.
Very well then--he who has no sense of his own personality and is
willing to sacrifice it on the altar of sociability, let him go and
lose himself among the millions of a metropolis. For the man who has a
longing for Nirvana the metropolis is better than the desert. If you
want to submerge your own “I,” better the streets of a great city than
the solitudes of the wilderness.
It is not a bad thing now and again to visit the great city and plunge
into the sea of its crowds, but in order to emerge again upon terra
firma and feel the solid ground under one’s feet. For my part, since
I am interested in individuals--in John and Peter and Richard, in you
who are reading this book--but not in the masses which they form when
banded together, I remain in the small town, seeing every day at the
same hour the same men, men whose souls have clashed, and sometimes
painfully, with my soul; and I flee from the great metropolis where my
soul is whipped with the icy whips of the disdainful glances of those
who know me not and who are unknown to me. People whom I cannot name
... horrible!