Youth and Egolatry by Pio Baroja

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Youth and Egolatry

By PIO BAROJA

Translated from the Spanish By Jacob S. Fassett, Jr. and Frances L.
Phillips

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY H. L. MENCKEN

PROLOGUE

ON INTELLECTUAL LOVE
EGOTISM

I. FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS

The bad man of Itzea
Humble and a wanderer
Dogmatophagy
Ignoramus, Ignorabimus
Nevertheless, we call ourselves materialists
In defense of religion
Arch-European
Dionysus or Apollonian
Epicuri de grege porcum
Evil and Rousseau's Chinaman
The root of disinterested evil
Music as a sedative
Concerning Wagner
Universal musicians
The folk song
On the optimism of eunuchs

II. MYSELF, THE WRITER

To my readers thirty years hence
Youthful writings
The beginning and end of the journey
Mellowness and the critical sense
Sensibility
On devouring one's own God
Anarchism
New paths
Longing for change
Baroja, you will never amount to anything (A Refrain)
The patriotism of desire
My home lands
Cruelty and stupidity
The anterior image
The tragi-comedy of sex
The veils of the sexual life
A little talk
The sovereign crowd
The remedy

III. THE EXTRARADIUS

Rhetoric and anti-rhetoric
The rhythm of style
Rhetoric of the minor key
The value of my ideas
Genius and admiration
My literary and artistic inclinations
My library
On being a gentleman
Giving offence
Thirst for glory
Elective antipathies
To a member of several academies

IV. ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES

Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere
The encyclopedists
The romanticists
The naturalists
The Spanish realists
The Russians
The critics

V. THE PHILOSOPHERS

VI. THE HISTORIANS

The Roman historians
Modern and contemporary historians

VII. MY FAMILY

Family mythology
Our History

VIII. MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD

San Sebastian
My parents
Monsignor
Two lunatics
The hawk
In Madrid
In Pamplona
Don Tirso Larequi
A visionary rowdy
Sarasate
Robinson Crusoe and the Mysterious Island

IX. AS A STUDENT

Professors
Anti-militarism
To Valencia

X. AS A VILLAGE DOCTOR

Dolores, La Sacristana

XI. AS A BAKER

My father's disillusionment
Industry and democracy
The vexations of a small tradesman

XII. AS A WRITER

Bohemia
Our own generation
Azorin
Paul Schmitz
Ortega y Gasset
A pseudo-patron

XIII. PARISIAN DAYS

Estevanez
My versatility according to Bonafoux

XIV. LITERARY ENMITIES

The enmity of Dicenta
The posthumous enmity of Sawa
Semi-hatred on the part of Silverio Lanza

XV. THE PRESS

Our newspapers and periodicals
Our journalists
Americans

XVI. POLITICS

Votes and applause
Politicians
Revolutionists
Lerroux
An offer
Socialists
Love of the workingman
The conventionalist Barriovero
Anarchists
The morality of the alternating party system
On obeying the law
The sternness of the law

XVII. MILITARY GLORY

The old-time soldier
Down goes prestige
Science and the picturesque
What we need today
Our armies
A word from Kuroki, the Japanese

EPILOGUE
Palinode and fresh outburst of ire

APPENDICES
Spanish politicians
On Baroja's anarchists
Note

INTRODUCTION

Pio 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 _defaitiste_ 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 Canovas del Castillo gave way to the discreet analyses of
Azorin (Jose Martinez Ruiz) and Jose 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 Ruben Dario, Juan Ramon Jimenez, and the brothers
Machado, while the socialistic and republican propaganda which had
invaded the theatre with Perez Galdos, Joaquin Dicenta, and Angel
Guimera, 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 Leon, a functionary in the Bank of Spain, while the
idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as Jose Maria
Salaverria, 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 Pio 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
Ibanez. 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, Egolatria_, 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 regime and yet aloof
from the worse follies of the demagogues who now rage in the country.
Vastly less picturesque than Blasco Ibanez, 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.

H. L. MENCKEN.

PROLOGUE

ON INTELLECTUAL LOVE

Only what is of the mind has value to the mind. Let us dedicate
ourselves without compunction to reflecting a little upon the eternal
themes of life and art. It is surely proper that an author should write
of them.

I cultivate a love which is intellectual, and of a former epoch, besides
a deafness to the present. I pour out my spirit continually into the
eternal moulds without expecting that anything will result from it.

But now, instead of a novel, a few stray comments upon my life have come
from my pen.

Like most of my books, this has appeared in my hands without being
planned, and not at my bidding. I was asked to write an autobiographical
sketch of ten or fifteen pages. Ten or fifteen pages seemed a great many
to fill with the personal details of a life which is as insignificant as
my own, and far too few for any adequate comment upon them. I did not
know how to begin. To pick up the thread, I began drawing lines and
arabesques. Then the pages grew in number and, like Faust's dog, my pile
soon waxed big, and brought forth this work.

At times, perhaps, the warmth of the author's feeling may appear ill-
advised to the reader; it may be that he will find his opinions
ridiculous and beside the mark on every page. I have merely sought to
sun my vanity and egotism, to bring them forth into the air, so that my
aesthetic susceptibilities might not be completely smothered.

This book has been a work of mental hygiene.

EGOTISM

Egotism resembles cold drinks in summer; the more you take, the
thirstier you get. It also distorts the vision, producing an hydropic
effect, as has been noted by Calderon in his _Life is a Dream_.

An author always has before him a keyboard made up of a series of I's.
The lyric and satiric writers play in the purely human octave; the
critic plays in the bookman's octave; the historian in the octave of the
investigator. When an author writes of himself, perforce he plays upon
his own "I," which is not exactly that contained in the octave of the
sentimentalist nor yet in that of the curious investigator. Undoubtedly
at times it must be a most immodest "I," an "I" which discloses a name
and a surname, an "I" which is positive and self-assertive, with the
imperiousness of a Captain General's edict or a Civil Governor's decree.

I have always felt some delicacy in talking about myself, so that the
impulsion to write these pages of necessity came from without.

As I am not generally interested when anybody communicates his likes and
dislikes to me, I am of opinion that the other person most probably
shares the same feelings when I communicate mine to him. However, a time
has now arrived when it is of no consequence to me what the other person
thinks.

In this matter of giving annoyance, a formula should be drawn up and
accepted, after the manner of Robespierre: the liberty of annoying
another begins where his liberty of annoying you leaves off.

I understand very well that there may be persons who believe that their
lives are wholly exemplary, and who thus burn with ardour to talk about
them. But I have not led an exemplary life to any such extent. I have
not led a life that might be called pedagogic, because it is fitted to
serve as a model, nor a life that might be called anti-pedagogic,
because it would serve as a warning. Neither do I bring a fistful of
truths in my hand, to scatter broadcast. What, then, have I to say? And
why do I write about myself? Assuredly, to no useful purpose.

The owner of a house is sometimes asked:

"Is there anything much locked up in that room?"

"No, nothing but old rubbish," he replies promptly.

But one day the owner opens the room, and then he finds a great store of
things which he had not remembered, all of them covered with dust; so he
hauls them out and generally they prove to be of no service at all. This
is precisely what I have done.

These pages, indeed, are a spontaneous exudation. But are they sincere?
Absolutely sincere? It is not very probable. The moment we sit for a
photographer, instinctively we dissemble and compose our features. When
we talk about ourselves, we also dissemble.

In as short a book as this the author is able to play with his mask and
to fix his expression. Throughout the work of an entire lifetime,
however, which is of real value only when it is one long autobiography,
deceit is impossible, because when the writer is least conscious of it,
he reveals himself.

I

FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS

The Bad Man of Itzea

When I first came to live in this house at Vera del Bidasoa, I found
that the children of the district had taken possession of the entryway
and the garden, where they misbehaved generally. It was necessary to
drive them away little by little, until they flew off like a flock of
sparrows.

My family and I must have seemed somewhat peculiar to these children,
for one day, when one little fellow caught sight of me, he took refuge
in the portal of his house and cried out:

"Here comes the bad man of Itzea!"

And the bad man of Itzea was I.

Perhaps this child had heard from his sister, and his sister had heard
from her mother, and her mother had heard from the sexton's wife, and
the sexton's wife from the parish priest, that men who have little
religion are very bad; perhaps this opinion did not derive from the
priest, but from the president of the Daughters of Mary, or from the
secretary of the Enthronization of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; perhaps
some of them had read a little book by Father Ladron de Guevara
entitled, _Novelists, Good and Bad_, which was distributed in the
village the day that I arrived, and which states that I am irreligious,
a clerophobe, and quite shameless. Whether from one source or another,
the important consideration to me was that there was a bad man in Itzea,
and that that bad man was I.

To study and make clear the instincts, pride, and vanities of the bad
man of Itzea is the purpose of this book.

HUMBLE AND A WANDERER

Some years ago, I cannot say just how many, probably twelve or fourteen,
during the days when I led, or thought I led, a nomadic life, happening
to be in San Sebastian, I went to visit the Museum with the painter
Regoyos. After seeing everything, Soraluce, the director, indicated that
I was expected to inscribe my name in the visitor's register, and after
I had done so, he said:

"Place your titles beneath."

"Titles!" I exclaimed. "I have none."

"Then put down what you are. As you see, the others have done the same."

I looked at the book. True enough; there was one signature, So-and-So,
and beneath, "Chief of Administration of the Third Class and Knight of
Charles III"; another, Somebody Else, and beneath was written "Commander
of the Battalion of Isabella the Catholic, with the Cross of Maria
Cristina."

Then, perhaps slightly irritated at having neither titles nor honours
(burning with an anarchistic and Christian rancour, as Nietzsche would
have it), I jotted down a few casual words beneath my signature:

"Pio Baroja, a humble man and a wanderer."

Regoyos read them and burst out laughing.

"What an idea!" exclaimed the director of the Museum, as he closed the
volume.

And there I remained a humble man and a wanderer, overshadowed by Chiefs
of Administration of all Classes, Commanders of all Branches of the
Service, Knights of all kinds of Crosses, rich men returned from
America, bankers, etc., etc.

Am I a humble man and a wanderer? Not a bit of it! There is more
literary phantasy in the phrase than there is truth. Of humility I do
not now, nor have I ever possessed more than a few rather Buddhistic
fragments; nor am I a wanderer either, for making a few insignificant
journeys does not authorize one to call oneself a wanderer. Just as I
put myself down at that time as a humble man and a wanderer, so I might
call myself today a proud and sedentary person. Perhaps both
characterizations contain some degree of truth; and perhaps there is
nothing in either.

When a man scrutinizes himself very closely, he arrives at a point where
he does not know what is face and what is mask.

DOGMATOPHAGY

If I am questioned concerning my ideas on religion, I reply that I am an
agnostic--I always like to be a little pedantic with philistines--now I
shall add that, more than this, I am a dogmatophagist.

My first impulse in the presence of a dogma, whether it be political,
moral, or religious, is to cast about for the best way to masticate,
digest, and dispose of it.

The peril in an inordinate appetite for dogma lies in the probability of
making too severe a drain upon the gastric juices, and so becoming
dyspeptic for the rest of one's life.

In this respect, my inclination exceeds my prudence. I have an incurable
dogmatophagy.

Ignoramus, Ignorabimus

Such are the words of the psychologist, DuBois-Reymond, in one of his
well-known lectures. The agnostic attitude is the most seemly that it is
possible to take. Nowadays, not only have all religious ideas been
upset, but so too has everything which until now appeared most solid,
most indivisible. Who has faith any longer in the atom? Who believes in
the soul as a monad? Who believes in the objective validity of the
senses?

The atom, unity of the spirit and of consciousness, the validity of
perception, all these are under suspicion today. _Ignoramus,
ignorabimus_.

NEVERTHELESS, WE CALL OURSELVES MATERIALISTS

Nevertheless, we call ourselves materialists. Yes; not because we
believe that matter exists as we see it, but because in this way we may
contradict the vain imaginings and all those sacred mysteries which
begin so modestly, and always end by extracting the money from our
pockets.

Materialism, as Lange has said, has proved itself the most fecund
doctrine of science. Wilhelm Ostwald, in his _Victory of Scientific
Materialism_, has defended the same thesis with respect to modern
physics and chemistry.

At the present time we are regaled with the sight of learned friars
laying aside for a moment their ancient tomes, and turning to dip into
some manual of popular science, after which they go about and astonish
simpletons by giving lectures.

The war horse of these gentlemen is the conception entertained by
physicists at the present-day concerning matter, according to which it
has substance in the precise degree that it is a manifestation of
energy.

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