Spain is the classic home of the anarchist. A bleak upland country
mostly, with a climate giving all varieties of temperature, from moist
African heat to dry Siberian cold, where people have lived until very
recently,--and do still,--in villages hidden away among the bare ribs
of the mountains, or in the indented coast plains, where every region
is cut off from every other by high passes and defiles of the
mountains, flaming hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, where the
Iberian race has grown up centerless. The pueblo, the village
community, is the only form of social cohesion that really has roots in
the past. On these free towns empires have time and again been imposed
by force. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Catholic
monarchy wielded the sword of the faith to such good effect that
communal feeling was killed and the Spanish genius forced to ingrow
into the mystical realm where every ego expanded itself into the
solitude of God. The eighteenth century reduced God to an abstraction,
and the nineteenth brought pity and the mad hope of righting the wrongs
of society. The Spaniard, like his own Don Quixote, mounted the
warhorse of his idealism and set out to free the oppressed, alone. As a
logical conclusion we have the anarchist who threw a bomb into the
Lyceum Theatre in Barcelona during a performance, wanting to make the
ultimate heroic gesture and only succeeding in a senseless mangling of
human lives.
But that was the reduction to an absurdity of an immensely valuable
mental position. The anarchism of Pio Baroja is of another sort. He
says in one of his books that the only part a man of the middle classes
can play in the reorganization of society is destructive. He has not
undergone the discipline, which can only come from common slavery in
the industrial machine, necessary for a builder. His slavery has been
an isolated slavery which has unfitted him forever from becoming truly
part of a community. He can use the vast power of knowledge which
training has given him only in one way. His great mission is to put the
acid test to existing institutions, and to strip the veils off them. I
don't want to imply that Baroja writes with his social conscience. He
is too much of a novelist for that, too deeply interested in people as
such. But it is certain that a profound sense of the evil of existing
institutions lies behind every page he has written, and that
occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to hope that
something better may come out of the turmoil of our age of transition.
Only a man who had felt all this very deeply could be so sensitive to
the new spirit--if the word were not threadbare one would call it
religious--which is shaking the foundations of the world's social
pyramid, perhaps only another example of the failure of nerve, perhaps
the triumphant expression of a new will among mankind.
In _Aurora Roja_ ("Red Dawn"), the last of the Madrid trilogy, about
the same Manuel who is the central figure of _Mala Hierba_, he writes:
"At first it bored him, but later, little by little, he felt himself
carried away by what he was reading. First he was enthusiastic about
Mirabeau; then about the Girondins; Vergniau Petion, Condorcet; then
about Danton; then he began to think that Robespierre was the true
revolutionary; afterwards Saint Just, but in the end it was the
gigantic figure of Danton that thrilled him most....
"Manuel felt great satisfaction at having read that history. Often he
said to himself:
"'What does it matter now if I am a loafer, and good-for-nothing? I've
read the history of the French Revolution; I believe I shall know how
to be worthy....'
"After Michelet, he read a book about '48; then another on the Commune,
by Louise Michel, and all this produced in him a great admiration for
French Revolutionists. What men! After the colossal figures of the
Convention: Babeuf, Proudhon, Blanqui, Bandin, Deleschize, Rochefort,
Felix Pyat, Vallu.... What people!
"'What does it matter now if I am a loafer?... I believe I shall know
how to be worthy.'"
In those two phrases lies all the power of revolutionary faith. And how
like phrases out of the gospels, those older expressions of the hope
and misery of another society in decay. That is the spirit that, for
good or evil, is stirring throughout Europe to-day, among the poor and
the hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new affirmation of the
rights and duties of men. Baroja has felt this profoundly, and has
presented it, but without abandoning the function of the novelist,
which is to tell stories about people. He is never a propagandist.