Pío Baroja is a product of the intellectual reign of terror that went on
in Spain after the catastrophe of 1898. That catastrophe, of course, was
anything but unforeseen. The national literature, for a good many years
before the event, had been made dismal by the croaking of Iokanaans, and
there was a definite _défaitiste_ party among the _intelligentsia_.
But among the people in general, if there was not optimism, there was at
least a sort of resigned indifference, and so things went ahead in the
old stupid Spanish way and the structure of society, despite a few
gestures of liberalism, remained as it had been for generations. In Spain,
of course, there is always a _Kulturkampf_, as there is in Italy,
but during these years it was quiescent. The Church, in the shadow of
the restored monarchy, gradually resumed its old privileges and its old
pretensions. So on the political side. In Catalonia, where Spain keeps the
strangest melting-pot in Europe and the old Iberian stock is almost
extinct, there was a menacing seething, but elsewhere there was not much
to chill the conservative spine. In the middle nineties, when the
Socialist vote in Germany was already approaching the two million mark,
and Belgium was rocked by great Socialist demonstrations, and the
Socialist deputies in the French Chamber numbered fifty, and even England
was beginning to toy gingerly with new schemes of social reform, by
Bismarck out of Lassalle, the total strength of the Socialists of Spain
was still not much above five thousand votes. In brief, the country seemed
to be removed from the main currents of European thought. There was
unrest, to be sure, but it was unrest that was largely inarticulate and
that needed a new race of leaders to give it form and direction.
Then came the colossal shock of the American war and a sudden
transvaluation of all the old values. Anti-clericalism got on its legs
and Socialism got on its legs, and out of the two grew that great
movement for the liberation of the common people, that determined and
bitter struggle for a fair share in the fruits of human progress, which
came to its melodramatic climax in the execution of Francisco Ferrer.
Spain now began to go ahead very rapidly, if not in actual achievement,
then at least in the examination and exchange of ideas, good and bad.
Parties formed, split, blew up, revived and combined, each with its sure
cure for all the sorrows of the land. Resignationism gave way to a harsh
and searching questioning, and questioning to denunciation and demand
for reform. The monarchy swayed this way and that, seeking to avoid both
the peril of too much yielding and the worse peril of not yielding
enough. The Church, on the defensive once more, prepared quickly for
stormy weather and sent hurried calls to Rome for help. Nor was all this
uproar on the political and practical side. Spanish letters, for years
sunk into formalism, revived with the national spirit, and the new books
in prose and verse began to deal vigorously with the here and now.
Novelists, poets and essayists appeared who had never been heard of
before--young men full of exciting ideas borrowed from foreign lands and
even more exciting ideas of their own fashioning. The national
literature, but lately so academic and remote from existence, was now
furiously lively, challenging and provocative. The people found in it,
not the old placid escape from life, but a new stimulation to arduous
and ardent living. And out of the ruck of authors, eager, exigent, and
the tremendous clash of nations, new and old, there finally emerged a
prose based not upon rhetorical reminiscences, but responsive minutely
to the necessities of the national life. The oratorical platitudes of
Castelar and Cánovas del Castillo gave way to the discreet analyses of
Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz) and José Ortega y Gasset, to the sober
sentences of the Rector of the University of Salamanca, Miguel de
Unamuno, writing with a restraint which is anything but traditionally
Castilian, and to the journalistic impressionism of Ramiro de Maeztu,
supple and cosmopolitan from long residence abroad. The poets now
jettisoned the rotundities of the romantic and emotional schools of
Zorrilla and Salvador Rueda, and substituted instead the precise,
pictorial line of Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and the brothers
Machado, while the socialistic and republican propaganda which had
invaded the theatre with Pérez Galdós, Joaquín Dicenta, and Angel
Guimerá, bore fruit in the psychological drama of Benavente, the social
comedies of Linares Rivas, and the atmospheric canvases which the
Quinteros have painted of Andalusia.
In the novel, the transformation is noticeable at once in the rapid
development of the pornographic tale, whose riches might bring a blush
to the cheek of Boccaccio, and provide Poggio and Aretino with a
complete review; but these are stories for the barrack, venturing only
now and then upon the confines of respectability in the erotic romances
of Zamacois and the late enormously popular Felipe Trigo. Few Spaniards
who write today but have written novels. Yet the gesture of the grand
style of Valera is palsied, except, perhaps, for the conservative
Quixote, Ricardo León, a functionary in the Bank of Spain, while the
idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as José María
Salaverría, after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under
the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less
vigorous Antonio de Trueba, and of Madrid vulgarians, headed by Mesonero
Romanos and Coloma. The decadent novel, foreshadowed a few years since
by Alejandro Sawa, has attained full maturity in Hoyos y Vinent, while
the distinctive growth of the century is the novel of ideas, exact,
penetrating, persistently suggestive in the larger sense, which does not
hesitate to make demands upon the reader, and this is exemplified most
distinctively, both temperamentally and intellectually, by Pío Baroja.
It would be difficult to find two men who, dealing with the same ideas,
bring to them more antagonistic attitudes of mind than Baroja and Blasco
Ibáñez. For all his appearance of modernism, Blasco really belongs to
the generation before 1898. He is of the stock of Victor Hugo--a
popular rhapsodist and intellectual swashbuckler, half artist and half
mob orator--a man of florid and shallow certainties, violent
enthusiasms, quack remedies, vast magnetism and address, and even vaster
impudence--a fellow with plain touches of the charlatan. His first solid
success at home was made with _La Barraca_ in 1899--and it was a
success a good deal more political than artistic; he was hailed for his
frenzy far more than for his craft. Even outside of Spain his subsequent
celebrity has tended to ground itself upon agreement with his politics,
and not upon anything properly describable as a critical appreciation of
his talents. Had _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ been
directed against France instead of in favour of France, it goes without
saying that it would have come to the United States without the
_imprimatur_ of the American Embassy at Madrid, and that there
would have appeared no sudden rage for the author among the generality
of novel-readers. His intrinsic merits, in sober retrospect, seem very
feeble. For all his concern with current questions, his accurate news
instinct, he is fundamentally a romantic of the last century, with more
than one plain touch of the downright operatic.
Baroja is a man of a very different sort. A novelist undoubtedly as
skilful as Blasco and a good deal more profound, he lacks the quality of
enthusiasm and thus makes a more restricted appeal. In place of gaudy
certainties he offers disconcerting questionings; in place of a neat and
well-rounded body of doctrine he puts forward a sort of generalized
contra-doctrine. Blasco is almost the typical Socialist--iconoclastic,
oratorical, sentimental, theatrical--a fervent advocate of all sorts of
lofty causes, eagerly responsive to the shibboleths of the hour. Baroja
is the analyst, the critic, almost the cynic. If he leans toward any
definite doctrine at all, it is toward the doctrine that the essential
ills of man are incurable, that all the remedies proposed are as bad as
the disease, that it is almost a waste of time to bother about humanity
in general. This agnostic attitude, of course, is very far from merely
academic, monastic. Baroja, though his career has not been as dramatic
as Blasco's, has at all events taken a hand in the life of his time and
country and served his day in the trenches of the new enlightenment. He
is anything but a theorist. But there is surely no little significance
in his final retreat to his Basque hillside, there to seek peace above
the turmoil. He is, one fancies, a bit disgusted and a bit despairing.
But if it is despair, it is surely not the despair of one who has
shirked the trial.
The present book, _Juventud, Egolatría_, was written at the height
of the late war, and there is a preface to the original edition, omitted
here, in which Baroja defends his concern with aesthetic and
philosophical matters at such a time. The apologia was quite gratuitous.
A book on the war, though by the first novelist of present-day Spain,
would probably have been as useless as all the other books on the war.
That stupendous event will be far more soundly discussed by men who have
not felt its harsh appeal to the emotions. Baroja, evading this grand
enemy of all ideas, sat himself down to inspect and co-ordinate the
ideas that had gradually come to growth in his mind before the bands
began to bray. The result is a book that is interesting, not only as the
frank talking aloud of one very unusual man, but also as a
representation of what is going on in the heads of a great many other
Spaniards. Blasco, it seems to me, is often less Spanish than French;
Valencia, after all, is next door to Catalonia, and Catalonia is
anything but Castilian. But Baroja, though he is also un-Castilian and
even a bit anti-Castilian, is still a thorough Spaniard. He is more
interested in a literary feud in Madrid than in a holocaust beyond the
Pyrenees. He gets into his discussion of every problem a definitely
Spanish flavour. He is unmistakably a Spaniard even when he is trying
most rigorously to be unbiased and international. He thinks out
everything in Spanish terms. In him, from first to last, one observes
all the peculiar qualities of the Iberian mind--its disillusion, its
patient weariness, its pervasive melancholy. Spain, I take it, is the
most misunderstood of countries. The world cannot get over seeing it
through the pink mist of _Carmen_, an astounding Gallic caricature,
half flattery and half libel. The actual Spaniard is surely no such
grand-opera Frenchman as the immortal toreador. I prescribe the
treatment that cured me, for one, of mistaking him for an Iberian. That
is, I prescribe a visit to Spain in carnival time.
Baroja, then, stands for the modern Spanish mind at its most
enlightened. He is the Spaniard of education and worldly wisdom,
detached from the mediaeval imbecilities of the old régime and yet aloof
from the worse follies of the demagogues who now rage in the country.
Vastly less picturesque than Blasco Ibáñez, he is nearer the normal
Spaniard--the Spaniard who, in the long run, must erect a new structure
of society upon the half archaic and half Utopian chaos now reigning in
the peninsula. Thus his book, though it is addressed to Spaniards,
should have a certain value for English-speaking readers. And so it is
presented.