Youth and Egolatry by Pio Baroja

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"If matter is scarcely real, then what is the validity of materialism?"
shout the friars enthusiastically.

The argument smacks of the seminary and is absolutely worthless.

Materialism is more than a philosophical system: it is a scientific
method, which will have nothing to do either with fantasies or with
caprices.

The jubilation of these friars at the thought that matter may not exist,
in truth and in fact is in direct opposition to their own theories.
Because if matter does not exist, then what could God have created?

IN DEFENSE OF RELIGION

The great defender of religion is the lie. Lies are the most vital
possession of man. Religion lives upon lies, and society maintains
itself upon them, with its train of priests and soldiers--the one,
moreover, as useless as the other. This great Maia of falsehood sustains
all the sky borders in the theatre of life, and, when some fall, it
lifts up others.

If there were a solvent for lies, what surprises would be in store for
us! Nearly everybody who now appears to us to be upright, inflexible,
and to hold his chest high, would be disclosed as a flaccid, weak
person, presenting in reality a sorry spectacle.

Lies are much more stimulating than truth; they are also almost always
more tonic and more healthy. I have come to this conclusion rather late
in life. For utilitarian and practical ends, it is clearly our duty to
cultivate falsehood, arbitrariness, and partial truths. Nevertheless, we
do not do so. Can it be that, unconsciously, we have something of the
heroic in us?

ARCH-EUROPEAN

I am a Basque, if not on all four sides, at least on three and a half.
The remaining half, which is not Basque, is Lombard.

Four of my eight family names are Guipuzcoan, two of them are Navarrese,
one Alavese, and the other Italian. I take it that family names are
indicative of the countries where one's ancestors lived, and I take it
also that there is great potency behind them, that the influence of each
works upon the individual with a duly proportioned intensity. Assuming
this to be the case, the resultant of the ancestral influences operative
upon me would indicate that my geographical parallel lies somewhere
between the Alps and the Pyrenees. Sometimes I am inclined to think that
the Alps and the Pyrenees are all that is European in Europe. Beyond
them I seem to see Asia; below them, Africa.

In the riparian Navarrese, as in the Catalans and the Genovese, one
already notes the African; in the Gaul of central France, as well as in
the Austrian, there is a suggestion of the Chinese.

Clutching the Pyrenees and grafted upon the Alps, I am conscious of
being an Arch-European.

DIONYSIAN OR APOLLONIAN?

Formerly, when I believed that I was both humble and a wanderer, I was
convinced that I was a Dionysian. I was impelled toward turbulence, the
dynamic, the theatric. Naturally, I was an anarchist. Am I today? I
believe I still am. In those days I used to enthuse about the future,
and I hated the past.

Little by little, this turbulence has calmed down--perhaps it was never
very great. Little by little I have come to realize that if following
Dionysus induces the will to bound and leap, devotion to Apollo has a
tendency to throw the mind back until it rests upon the harmony of
eternal form. There is great attraction in both gods.

EPICURI DE GREGE PORCUM

I am also a swine of the herd of Epicurus; I, too, wax eloquent over
this ancient philosopher, who conversed with his pupils in his garden.
The very epithet of Horace, upon detaching himself from the Epicureans,
"_Epicuri de grege porcum_," is full of charm.

All noble minds have hymned Epicurus. "Hail Epicurus, thou honour of
Greece!" Lucretius exclaims in the third book of his poem.

"I have sought to avenge Epicurus, that truly holy philosopher, that
divine genius," Lucian tells us in his _Alexander, or the False
Prophet_. Lange, in his _History of Materialism_, sets down
Epicurus as a disciple and imitator of Democritus.

I am not a man of sufficient classical culture to be able to form an
authoritative opinion of the merits of Epicurus as a philosopher. All my
knowledge of him, as well as of the other ancient philosophers, is
derived from the book of Diogenes Laertius.

Concerning Epicurus, I have read Bayle's magnificent article in his
_Historical and Critical Dictionary_, and Gassendi's work, _De
Vita et Moribus Epicuri_. With this equipment, I have become one of
the disciples of the master.

Scholars may say that I have no right to enrol myself as one of the
disciples of Epicurus, but when I think of myself, spontaneously there
comes to my mind the grotesque epithet which Horace applied to the
Epicureans in his _Epistles_, a characterization which for my part
I accept and regard as an honour: "Swine of the herd of Epicurus,
_Epicuri de grege porcum_."

EVIL AND ROUSSEAU'S CHINAMAN

I do not believe in utter human depravity, nor have I any faith in great
virtue, nor in the notion that the affairs of life may be removed beyond
good and evil. We shall outgrow, we have already outgrown, the
conception of sin, but we shall never pass beyond the idea of good and
evil; that would be equivalent to skipping the cardinal points in
geography. Nietzsche, an eminent poet and an extraordinary psychologist,
convinced himself that we should be able to leap over good and evil with
the help of a springboard of his manufacture.

Not with this springboard, nor with any other, shall we escape from the
polar North and South of the moral life.

Nietzsche, a product of the fiercest pessimism, was at heart a good man,
being in this respect the direct opposite of Rousseau, who, despite the
fact that he is forever talking about virtue, about sensibility, the
heart, and the sublimity of the soul, was in reality a low, sordid
creature.

The philanthropist of Geneva shows the cloven hoof now and then. He
asks: "If all that it were necessary for us to do in order to inherit
the riches of a man whom we had never seen, of whom we had never even
heard, and who lived in the furthermost confines of China, were to press
a button and cause his death, what man living would not press that
button?"

Rousseau is convinced that we should all press the button, and he is
mistaken, because the majority of men who are civilized would do nothing
of the kind. This, to my mind, is not to say that men are good; it is
merely to say that Rousseau, in his enthusiasm for humanity, as well as
in his aversion to it, is wide of the mark. The evil in man is not evil
of this active sort, so theatrical, so self-interested; it is a passive,
torpid evil which lies latent in the depths of the human animal, it is
an evil which can scarcely be called evil.

THE ROOT OF DISINTERESTED EVIL

Tell a man that an intimate friend has met with a great misfortune. His
first impulse is one of satisfaction. He himself is not aware of it
clearly, he does not realize it; nevertheless, essentially his emotion
is one of satisfaction. This man may afterward place his fortune, if he
has one, at the disposition of his friend, yes, even his life; yet this
will not prevent his first conscious reaction upon learning of the
misfortune of his friend, from being one which, although confused, is
nevertheless not far removed from pleasure. This feeling of
disinterested malice may be observed in the relations between parents
and children as well as in those between husbands and wives. At times it
is not only disinterested, but counter-interested.

The lack of a name for this background of disinterested malice, which
does exist, is due to the fact that psychology is not based so much upon
phenomena as it is upon language.

According to our current standards, latent evil of this nature is
neither of interest nor significance. Naturally, the judge takes account
of nothing but deeds; to religion, which probes more deeply, the intent
is of importance; to the psychologist, however, who attempts to
penetrate still further, the elemental germinative processes of volition
are of indispensable significance.

Whence this foundation of disinterested malice in man? Probably it is an
ancestral legacy. Man is a wolf toward man, as Plautus observes, and the
idea has been repeated by Hobbes.

In literature, it is almost idle to look for a presentation of this
disinterested, this passive evil, because nothing but the conscious is
literary. Shakespeare, in his _Othello_, a drama which has always
appeared false and absurd to me, emphasizes the disinterested malice of
Iago, imparting to him a character and mode of action which are beyond
those of normal men; but then, in order to accredit him to the
spectators, he adds also a motive, and represents him as being in love
with Desdemona.

Victor Hugo, in _L'Homme qui Rit_, undertook to create a type after
the manner of Iago, and invented Barkilphedro, who embodies
disinterested yet active malice, which is the malice of the villain of
melodrama.

But that other disinterested malice, which lurks in the sodden sediment
of character, that malice which is disinterested and inactive, and not
only incapable of drawing a dagger but even of writing an anonymous
note, this no writer but Dostoievski has had the penetration to reveal.
He has shown us at the same time mere inert goodness, lying passive in
the soul, without ever serving as a basis for anything.

MUSIC AS A SEDATIVE

Music, the most social of the arts, and that undoubtedly which possesses
the greatest future, presents enormous attractions to the bourgeoisie.
In the first place, it obviates the necessity of conversation; it is not
necessary to know whether your neighbor is a sceptic or a believer, a
materialist or a spiritualist; no possible argument can arise concerning
the meaning and metaphysics of life. Instead of war, there is peace. The
music lover may argue, but his conceptions are entirely circumscribed by
the music, and have no relation whatever either to philosophy or to
politics as such. The wars are small wars, and spill no blood. A
Wagnerite may be a freethinker or a Catholic, an anarchist or a
conservative. Even painting, which is an art of miserable general ideas,
is not so far removed from intelligence as is music. This explains why
the Greeks were able to attain such heights in philosophy, and yet fell
to such depths in music.

Music has an additional merit. It lulls to sleep the residuum of
disinterested malice in the soul.

As a majority of the lovers of painting and sculpture are second-hand
dealers and Jews in disguise, music lovers, for the most part, are a
debased people, envious, embittered and supine.

CONCERNING WAGNER

I am one of those who do not understand music, yet I am not completely
insensible to it. This does not prevent me, however, from entertaining a
strong aversion to all music lovers, and especially to Wagnerites.

When Nietzsche, who apparently possessed a musical temperament, set
Bizet up against Wagner, he confessed, of course, premeditated
vindictiveness. "It is necessary to mediterraneanize music," declares
the German psychologist. But how absurd! Music must confine itself to
the geographical parallel where it was born; it is Mediterranean,
Baltic, Alpine, Siberian. Nor is the contention valid that an air should
always have a strongly marked rhythm, because, if this were the case, we
should have nothing but dance music. Certainly, music was associated
with the dance in the beginning, but a sufficient number of years have
now elapsed to enable each of these arts to develop independently.

As regards Nietzsche's hostility to the theatocracy of Wagner, I share
it fully. This business of substituting the theatre for the church, and
teaching philosophy singing, seems ridiculous to me. I am also out of
patience with the wooden dragons, swans, stage fire, thunder and
lightning.

Although it may sound paradoxical, the fact is that all this scenery is
in the way. I have seen King Lear in Paris, at the Theatre Antoine,
where it was presented with very nearly perfect scenery. When the King
and the fool roamed about the heath in the third act, amid thunder and
lightning, everybody was gazing at the clouds in the flies and watching
for the lightning, or listening to the whistling of the wind; no one
paid any attention to what was said by the characters.

UNIVERSAL MUSICIANS

German music is undoubtedly the most universal music, especially that of
Mozart and Beethoven. It seems as if there were fewer particles of their
native soil imbedded in the works of these two masters than is common
among their countrymen. They bring out in sharp relief the cultural
internationalism of Germany.

Mozart is an epitome of the grace of the eighteenth century; he is at
once delicate, joyous, serene, gallant, mischievous. He is a courtier of
whatever country one will. Sometimes, when listening to his music, I ask
myself: "Why is it that this, which must be of German origin, seems to
be part of all of us, to have been designed for us all?"

Beethoven, too, like Mozart, is a man without a country. As the one
manipulates his joyous, soft, serene rhythms, the other throbs and
trembles with obscure meanings and pathetic, heartrending laments, the
source of which lies hidden as at the bottom of some mine.

He is a Segismund who complains against the gods and against his fate in
a tongue which knows no national accent. A day will come when the
negroes of Timbuktu will listen to Mozart's and Beethoven's music and
feel that it belongs to them, as truly as it ever did to the citizens of
Munich or of Vienna.

THE FOLK SONG

The folk song lies at the opposite pole from universal music. It is
music which smacks most of the soil whereon it has been produced. By its
very nature it is intelligible at all times to all persons in the
locality, if only because music is not an intellectual art; it deals in
rhythms, it does not deal in ideas. But beyond the fact of its
intelligibility, music possesses different attractions for different
people. The folk song preserves to us the very savour of the country in
which we were born; it recalls the air, the climate that we breathed and
knew. When we hear it, it is as if all our ancestors should suddenly
present themselves. I realize that my tastes may be barbaric, but if
there could only be one kind of music, and I were obliged to choose
between the universal and the local, my preference would be wholly for
the latter, which is the popular music.

ON THE OPTIMISM OF EUNUCHS

In a text book designed for the edification of research workers--a
specimen of peculiarly disagreeable tartuffery--the histologist, Ramon y
Cajal, who, as a thinker, has always been an absolute mediocrity,
explains what the young scholar should be, in the same way that the
Constitution of 1812 made it clear what the ideal Spanish citizen should
be.

So we know now the proper character of the young scholar. He must be
calm, optimistic, serene ... and all this with ten or twelve coppers in
his pocket!

Some friends inform me that in the Institute for Public Education at
Madrid, where an attempt is made to give due artistic orientation to the
pupils, they have contrived an informal classification of the arts in
the order of their importance; first comes painting; then, music; and,
last, literature.

Considering carefully what may be the reasons for such a sequence, it
would appear that the purpose must be to deprive the student of any
occasion for becoming pessimistic. Certainly nobody will ever have his
convictions upset by looking at ancient cloths daubed over with linseed
oil, nor by the bum-ta-ra of music. But, to my mind, in a country like
Spain, it is better that our young men should be dissatisfied than that
they should go to the laboratory every day in immaculate blouses,
chatter like proper young gentlemen about El Greco, Cezanne and the
Ninth Symphony, and never have the brains to protest about anything.
Back of all this correctness may be divined the optimism of eunuchs.

II

MYSELF, THE WRITER

TO MY READERS THIRTY YEARS HENCE

Among my books there are two distinct classes: Some I have written with
more effort than pleasure, and others I have written with more pleasure
than effort.

My readers apparently are not aware of this distinction, although it
seems evident to me. Can it be that true feeling is of no value in a
piece of literature, as some of the decadents have thought? Can it be
that enthusiasm, weariness, loathing, distress and ennui never transpire
through the pages of a book? Indubitably none of them transpire unless
the reader enters into the spirit of the work. And, in general, the
reader does not enter into the spirit of my books. I cherish a hope
which, perhaps, may be chimerical and ridiculous, that the Spanish
reader thirty or forty years hence, who takes up my books, whose
sensibilities, it may be, have been a little less hardened into
formalism than those of the reader of today, will both appreciate and
dislike me more intelligently.

YOUTHFUL WRITINGS

As I turn over the pages of my books, now already growing old, I receive
the impression that, like a somnambulist, I have frequently been walking
close to the cornice of a roof, entirely unconsciously, but in imminent
danger of falling off; again, it seems to me that I have been travelling
paths beset with thorns, which have played havoc with my skin.

I have maintained myself rather clumsily for the most part, yet at times
not without a certain degree of skill.

All my books are youthful books; they express turbulence; perhaps their
youth is a youth which is lacking in force and vigour, but nevertheless,
they are youthful books.

Among thorns and brambles there lies concealed a tiny Fountain of Youth
in my soul. You may say that its waters are bitter and saline, instead
of being crystalline and clear. And it is true. Yet the fountain flows
on, and bubbles, and gurgles and splashes into foam. That is enough for
me. I do not wish to dam it up, but to let the water run and remove
itself. I have always felt kindly toward anything that removes itself.

THE BEGINNING AND END OF THE JOURNEY

I formerly considered myself a young man of protoplasmic capabilities,
and I entertained very little enthusiasm for form until after I had
talked with some Russians. Since then I have realized that I was more
clean cut, more Latin, and a great deal older than I had supposed.

"I see that you belong to the _ancient regime_," a Frenchwoman remarked
to me in Rome.

"I? Impossible!"

"Yes," she insisted. "You are a conversationalist. You are not an
elegant, sprucely dressed abbe; you are an abbe who is cynical and ill-
natured, who likes to fancy himself a savage amid the comfortable
surroundings of the drawing-room."

The Frenchwoman's observation set me to thinking.

Can it be that I am hovering in the vicinity of Apollo's Temple without
realizing it?

Possibly my literary life has been merely a journey from the Valley of
Dionysus to the Temple of Apollo. Now somebody will tell me that art
begins only on the bottom step of the Temple of Apollo. And it is true.
But there is where I stop--on the bottom step.

MELLOWNESS AND THE CRITICAL SENSE

Whenever my artistic conscience reproaches me, I always think: If I were
to undertake to write these books today, now that I am aware of their
defects, I should never write them. Nevertheless, I continue to write
others with the same old faults. Shall I ever attain that mellowness of
soul in which all the vividness of impression remains, yet in which it
has become possible to perfect the expression? I fear not. Most likely,
when I reach the stage of refining the expression, I shall have nothing
to say, and so remain silent.

SENSIBILITY

In my books, as in most that are modern, there is an indefinable
resentment against life and against society.

Resentment against life is of far more ancient standing than resentment
against society.

The former has always been a commonplace among philosophers.

Life is absurd, life is difficult of direction, life is a disease, the
better part of the philosophers have told us.

When man turned his animosity against society, it became the fashion to
exalt life. Life is good; man, naturally, is magnanimous, it was said.
Society has made him bad.

I am convinced that life is neither good nor bad; it is like Nature,
necessary. And society is neither good nor bad. It is bad for the man
who is endowed with a sensibility which is excessive for his age; it is
good for a man who finds himself in harmony with his surroundings.

A negro will walk naked through a forest in which every drop of water is
impregnated with millions of paludal germs, which teems with insects,
the bites of which produce malignant abcesses, and where the temperature
reaches fifty degrees Centigrade in the shade.

A European, accustomed to the sheltered life of the city, when brought
face to face with such a tropical climate, without means of protection,
would die.

Man needs to be endowed with a sensibility which is proper to his epoch
and his environment; if he has less, his life will be merely that of a
child; if he has just the right measure, it will be the life of an
adult; if he has more, he will be an invalid.

ON DEVOURING ONE'S OWN GOD

It is said that the philosopher Averroes was wont to remark: "What a
sect these Christians are, who devour their own God!"

It would seem that this divine alimentation ought to make men themselves
divine. But it does not; our theophagists are human--they are only too
human, as Nietzsche would have it.

There can be no doubt but that the Southern European races are the most
vivacious, the most energetic, as well as the toughest in the world.
They have produced all the great conquerors. Christianity, when it found
it necessary to overcome them, innoculated them with its Semitic virus,
but this virus has not only failed to make them weaker, but, on the
contrary, it has made them stronger. They appropriated what suited them
in the Asiatic mentality, and proceeded to make a weapon of their
religion. These cruel Levantine races, thanks only to Teutonic
penetration, are at last submitting to a softening process, and they
will become completely softened upon the establishment in Europe of the
domination of the Slav.

Meanwhile they maintain their sway in their own countries.

"They are quite inoffensive," we are told.

Nonsense! They would burn Giordano Bruno as willingly now as they did in
the old days.

There is a great deal of fire remaining in the hearts of our
theophagists.

ANARCHISM

In an article appearing in _Hermes_, a magazine published in
Bilbao, Salaverria assumes that I have been cured of my anarchism, and
that I persist in a negative and anarchistic attitude in order to retain
my literary clientele; which is not the fact. In the first place, I can
scarcely be said to have a clientele; in the second place, a small
following of conservatives is much more lucrative than a large one of
anarchists. It is true that I am withdrawing myself from the festivals
of Pan and the cult of Dionysus, but I am not substituting for them,
either outwardly or inwardly, the worship of Yahveh or of Moloch. I have
no liking for Semitic traditions--none and none whatever! I am not able,
like Salaverria, to admire the rich simply because they are rich, nor
people in high stations because they happen to occupy them.

Salaverria assumes that I have a secret admiration for grand society,
generals, magistrates, wealthy gentlemen from America, and Argentines
who shout out: "How perfectly splendid!" I have the same affection for
these things that I have for the cows which clutter up the road in front
of my house. I would not be Fouquier-Tinville to the former nor butcher
to the latter; but my affection then has reached its limit. Even when I
find something worthy of admiration, my inclination is toward the small.
I prefer the Boboli Gardens to those of Versailles, and Venetian or
Florentine history to that of India.

Great states, great captains, great kings, great gods, leave me cold.
They are all for peoples who dwell on vast plains which are crossed by
mighty rivers, for the Egyptians, for the Chinese, for the Hindus, for
the Germans, for the French.

We Europeans who are of the region of the Pyrenees and the Alps, love
small states, small rivers, and small gods, whom we may address
familiarly.

Salaverria is also mistaken when he says that I am afraid of change. I
am not afraid. My nature is to change. I am predisposed to develop, to
move from here to there, to reverse my literary and political views if
my feelings or my ideas alter. I avoid no reading except that which is
dull; I shall never retreat from any performance except a vapid one, nor
am I a partisan either of austerity or of consistency. Moreover, I am
not a little dissatisfied with myself, and I would give a great deal to
have the pleasure of turning completely about, if only to prove to
myself that I am capable of a shift of attitude which is sincere.

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