The moon shines coldly out of an intense blue sky where a few stars
glisten faint as mica. Shadow fills half the street, etching a
silhouette of roofs and chimneypots and cornices on the cobblestones,
leaving the rest very white with moonlight. The facades of the houses,
with their blank windows, might be carved out of ice. In the dark of a
doorway a woman sits hunched under a brown shawl. Her head nods, but
still she jerks a tune that sways and dances through the silent street
out of the accordion on her lap. A little saucer for pennies is on the
step beside her. In the next doorway two guttersnipes are huddled
together asleep. The moonlight points out with mocking interest their
skinny dirt-crusted feet and legs stretched out over the icy pavement,
and the filthy rags that barely cover their bodies. Two men stumble out
of a wineshop arm in arm, poor men in corduroy, who walk along
unsteadily in their worn canvas shoes, making grandiloquent gestures of
pity, tearing down the cold hard facades with drunken generous phrases,
buoyed up by the warmth of the wine in their veins.
That is Baroja's world: dismal, ironic, the streets of towns where
industrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted to
it as any in Europe. No one has ever described better the shaggy
badlands and cabbage-patches round the edges of a city, where the
debris of civilization piles up ramshackle suburbs in which starve and
scheme all manner of human detritus. Back lots where men and women live
fantastically in shelters patched out of rotten boards, of old tin cans
and bits of chairs and tables that have stood for years in bright
pleasant rooms. Grassy patches behind crumbling walls where on sunny
days starving children spread their fleshless limbs and run about in
the sun. Miserable wineshops where the wind whines through broken panes
to chill men with ever-empty stomachs who sit about gambling and
finding furious drunkenness in a sip of _aguardiente_. Courtyards
of barracks where painters who have not a cent in the world mix with
beggars and guttersnipes to cajole a little hot food out of
soft-hearted soldiers at mess-time. Convent doors where ragged lines
shiver for hours in the shrill wind that blows across the bare
Castilian plain waiting for the nuns to throw out bread for them to
fight over like dogs. And through it all moves the great crowd of the
outcast, sneak-thieves, burglars, beggars of every description,--rich
beggars and poor devils who have given up the struggle to
exist,--homeless children, prostitutes, people who live a half-honest
existence selling knicknacks, penniless students, inventors who while
away the time they are dying of starvation telling all they meet of the
riches they might have had; all who have failed on the daily treadmill
of bread-making, or who have never had a chance even to enjoy the
privilege of industrial slavery. Outside of Russia there has never been
a novelist so taken up with all that society and respectability reject.
Not that the interest in outcasts is anything new in Spanish
literature. Spain is the home of that type of novel which the
pigeonhole-makers have named picaresque. These loafers and wanderers of
Baroja's, like his artists and grotesque dreamers and fanatics, all are
the descendants of the people in the _Quijote_ and the _Novelas
Ejemplares_, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo de Tormes, who
through _Gil Blas_ invaded France and England, where they rollicked
through the novel until Mrs. Grundy and George Eliot packed them off to
the reform school. But the rogues of the seventeenth century were jolly
rogues. They always had their tongues in their cheeks, and success
rewarded their ingenious audacities. The moulds of society had not
hardened as they have now; there was less pressure of hungry
generations. Or, more probably, pity had not come in to undermine the
foundations.
The corrosive of pity, which had attacked the steel girders of our
civilization even before the work of building was completed, has
brought about what Gilbert Murray in speaking of Greek thought calls
the failure of nerve. In the seventeenth century men still had the
courage of their egoism. The world was a bad job to be made the best
of, all hope lay in driving a good bargain with the conductors of life
everlasting. By the end of the nineteenth century the life everlasting
had grown cobwebby, the French Revolution had filled men up with
extravagant hopes of the perfectibility of this world, humanitarianism
had instilled an abnormal sensitiveness to pain,--to one's own pain,
and to the pain of one's neighbors. Baroja's outcasts are no longer
jolly knaves who will murder a man for a nickel and go on their road
singing "Over the hills and far away"; they are men who have not had
the willpower to continue in the fight for bread, they are men whose
nerve has failed, who live furtively on the outskirts, snatching a
little joy here and there, drugging their hunger with gorgeous mirages.
One often thinks of Gorki in reading Baroja, mainly because of the
contrast. Instead of the tumultuous spring freshet of a new race that
drones behind every page of the Russian, there is the cold despair of
an old race, of a race that lived long under a formula of life to which
it has sacrificed much, only to discover in the end that the formula
does not hold.
These are the last paragraphs of _Mala Hierba_ ("Wild Grass"), the
middle volume of Baroja's trilogy on the life of the very poor in
Madrid.
"They talked. Manuel felt irritation against the whole world, hatred,
up to that moment pent up within him against society, against man....
"'Honestly,' he ended by saying, 'I wish it would rain dynamite for a
week, and that the Eternal Father would come tumbling down in cinders.'
"He invoked crazily all the destructive powers to reduce to ashes this
miserable society.
"Jesus listened with attention.
"'You are an anarchist,' he told him.
"'I?'
"'Yes. So am I.'
"'Since when?'
"'Since I have seen the infamies committed in the world; since I have
seen how coldly they give to death a bit of human flesh; since I have
seen how men die abandoned in the streets and hospitals,' answered
Jesus with a certain solemnity.
"Manuel was silent. The friends walked without speaking round the Ronda
de Segovia, and sat down on a bench in the little gardens of the Virgen
del Puerto.
"The sky was superb, crowded with stars; the Milky Way crossed its
immense blue concavity. The geometric figure of the Great Bear
glittered very high. Arcturus and Vega shone softly in that ocean of
stars.
"In the distance the dark fields, scratched with lines of lights,
seemed the sea in a harbor and the strings of lights the illumination
of a wharf.
"The damp warm air came laden with odors of woodland plants wilted by
the heat.
"'How many stars,' said Manuel. 'What can they be?'
"'They are worlds, endless worlds.'
"'I don't know why it doesn't make me feel better to see this sky so
beautiful, Jesus. Do you think there are men in those worlds?' asked
Manuel.
"'Perhaps; why not?'
"'And are there prisons too, and judges and gambling dens and
police?... Do you think so?'
"Jesus did not answer. After a while he began talking with a calm voice
of his dream of an idyllic humanity, a sweet pitiful dream, noble and
childish.
"In his dream, man, led by a new idea, reached a higher state.
"No more hatreds, no more rancours. Neither judges, nor police, nor
soldiers, nor authority. In the wide fields of the earth free men
worked in the sunlight. The law of love had taken the place of the law
of duty, and the horizons of humanity grew every moment wider, wider
and more azure.
"And Jesus continued talking of a vague ideal of love and justice, of
energy and pity; and those words of his, chaotic, incoherent, fell like
balm on Manuel's ulcerated spirit. Then they were both silent, lost in
their thoughts, looking at the night.
"An august joy shone in the sky, and the vague sensation of space, of
the infinity of those imponderable worlds, filled their spirits with a
delicious calm."