Youth and Egolatry by Pio Baroja
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Pio Baroja >> Youth and Egolatry
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NEW PATHS
Some months since three friends met together in an old-fashioned
bookshop on the venerable Calle del Olivo--a writer, a printer, and
myself.
"Fifteen years ago all three of us were anarchists," remarked the
printer.
"What are we today?" I inquired.
"We are conservatives," replied the man who wrote. "What are you?"
"I believe that I have the same ideas I had then."
"You have not developed if that is so," retorted the writer with a show
of scorn.
I should like to develop, but into what? How? Where am I to find the
way?
When sitting beside the chimney, warming your feet by the fire as you
watch the flames, it is easy to imagine that there may be novel walks to
explore in the neighbourhood; but when you come to look at the map you
find that there is nothing new in the whole countryside.
We are told that ambition means growth. It does not with me. Ortega y
Gasset believes that I am a man who is constitutionally unbribable. I
should not go so far as to say that, but I do say that I do not believe
that I could be bribed in cold blood by the offer of material things. If
Mephistopheles wishes to purchase my soul, he cannot do it with a
decoration or with a title; but if he were to offer me sympathy, and be
a little effusive while he is about it, adding then a touch of
sentiment, I am convinced that he could get away with it quite easily.
LONGING FOR CHANGE
Just as the aim of politicians is to appear constant and consistent,
artists and literary men aspire to change.
Would that the desire of one were as easy of attainment as that of the
other!
To change! To develop! To acquire a second personality which shall be
different from the first! This is given only to men of genius and to
saints. Thus Caesar, Luther, and Saint Ignatius each lived two distinct
lives; or, rather, perhaps, it was one life, with sides that were
obverse and reverse.
The same thing occurs sometimes also among painters. The evolution of El
Greco in painting upsets the whole theory of art.
There is no instance of a like transformation either in ancient or
modern literature. Some such change has been imputed to Goethe, but I
see nothing more in this author than a short preliminary period of
exalted feeling, followed by a lifetime dominated by study and the
intellect.
Among other writers there is not even the suggestion of change.
Shakespeare is alike in all his works; Calderon and Cervantes are always
the same, and this is equally true of our modern authors. The first
pages of Dickens, of Tolstoi or of Zola could be inserted among the
last, and nobody would be the wiser.
Even the erudite rhetorical poets, the Victor Hugos, the Gautiers, and
our Spanish Zorrillas, never get outside of their own rhetoric.
BAROJA, YOU WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING
(_A Refrain_)
"Baroja does not amount to anything, and I presume that he will never
amount to anything," Ortega y Gasset observes in the first issue of the
_Spectator_.
I have a suspicion myself that I shall never amount to anything.
Everybody who knows me has always thought the same.
When I first went to school in San Sebastian, at the age of four--and it
has rained a great deal since that day--the teacher, Don Leon Sanchez y
Calleja, who made a practice of thrashing us with a very stiff pointer
(oh, these hallowed traditions of our ancestors!), looked me over and
said:
"This boy will prove to be as sulky as his brother. He will never amount
to anything."
I studied for a time in the Institute of Pamplona with Don Gregorio
Pano, who taught us mathematics; and this old gentleman, who looked like
the Commander in _Don Juan Tenorio_, with his frozen face and his
white beard, remarked to me in his sepulchral voice:
"You are not going to be an engineer like your father. You will never
amount to anything."
When I took therapeutics under Don Benito Hernando in San Carlos, Don
Benito planted himself in front of me and said:
"That smile of yours, that little smile ... it is impertinent. Don't you
come to me with any of your satirical smiles. You will never amount to
anything, unless it is negative and useless."
I shrugged my shoulders.
Women who have known me always tell me: "You will never amount to
anything."
And a friend who was leaving for America volunteered:
"When I return in twenty or thirty years, I shall find all my
acquaintances situated differently: one will have become rich, another
will have ruined himself, this fellow will have entered the cabinet,
that one will have been swallowed up in a small town; but you will be
exactly what you are today, you will live the same life, and you will
have just two pesetas in your pocket. That is as far as you will get."
The idea that I shall never amount to anything is now deeply rooted in
my soul. It is evident that I shall never become a deputy, nor an
academician, nor a Knight of Isabella the Catholic, nor a captain of
industry, nor alderman, nor Member of the Council, nor a common cheat,
nor shall I ever possess a good black suit.
And yet when a man has passed forty, when his belly begins to take on
adipose tissue and he puffs out with ambition, he ought to be something,
to sport a title, to wear a ribbon, to array himself in a black frock
coat and a white waistcoat; but these ambitions are denied to me. The
professors of my childhood and my youth rise up before my eyes like the
ghost of Banquo, and proclaim: "Baroja, you will never amount to
anything."
When I go down to the seashore, the waves lap my feet and murmur:
"Baroja, you will never amount to anything." The wise owl that perches
at night on our roof at Itzea calls to me: "Baroja, you will never
amount to anything," and even the crows, winging their way across the
sky, incessantly shout at me from above: "Baroja, you will never amount
to anything."
And I am convinced that I never shall amount to anything.
THE PATRIOTISM OF DESIRE
I may not appear to be a very great patriot, but, nevertheless, I am.
Yet I am unable to make my Spanish or Basque blood an exclusive
criterion for judging the world. If I believe that a better orientation
may be acquired by assuming an international point of view, I do not
hold it improper to cease to feel, momentarily, as a Spaniard or a
Basque.
In spite of this, a longing for the accomplishment of what shall be for
the greatest good of my country, normally obsesses my mind, but I am
wanting in the patriotism of lying.
I should like to have Spain the best place in the world, and the Basque
country the best part of Spain.
The feeling is such a natural and common one that it seems scarcely
worth while to explain it.
The climate of Touraine or of Tuscany, the Swiss lakes, the Rhine and
its castles, whatever is best in Europe, I would root up, if I had my
say, and set down here between the Pyrenees and the Straits of
Gibraltar. At the same time, I should denationalize Shakespeare,
Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievski, making them Spaniards. I should see
that the best laws and the best customs were those of our country. But
wholly apart from this patriotism of desire, lies the reality. What is
to be gained by denying it? To my mind nothing is to be gained.
There are many to whom the only genuine patriotism is the patriotism of
lying, which in fact is more of a matter of rhetoric than it is of
feeling.
Our falsifying patriots are always engaged in furious combat with other
equally falsifying internationalists.
"Nothing but what we have is of any account," cries one party.
"No, it is what the other fellow has," cries the other.
Patriotism is telling the truth as to one's country, in a sympathetic
spirit which is guided and informed by a love of that which is best.
Now some one will say: "Your patriotism, then, is nothing but an
extension of your ego; it is purely utilitarian."
Absolutely so. But how can there be any other kind of patriotism?
MY HOME LANDS
I have two little countries, which are my homes--the Basque provinces,
and Castile; and by Castile I mean Old Castile. I have, further, two
points of view from which I look out upon the world: one is my home on
the Atlantic; the other is very like a home to me, on the Mediterranean.
All my literary inspirations spring either from the Basque provinces or
from Castile. I could never write a Gallegan or a Catalan novel.
I could wish that my readers were all Basques and Castilians.
Other Spaniards interest me less. Spaniards who live in America, or
Americans, do not interest me at all.
CRUELTY AND STUPIDITY
It appears from an article written by Azorin in connection with a book
of mine, that, to my way of thinking, there are two enormities which are
incredible and intolerable. They are cruelty and stupidity.
Civilized man has no choice but to despise these manifestations of
primitive, brute existence.
We may be able to tolerate stupidity and lack of comprehension when they
are simple and wholly natural, but what of an utter obtuseness of
understanding which dresses itself up and becomes rhetorical? Can
anything be more disagreeable?
When a fly devours the pollen greedily from the pyrethrum, which, as we
know, will prove fatal to him, it becomes clear at once that flies have
no more innate sagacity than men. When we listen to a conservative
orator defending the past with salvos of rhetorical fireworks, we are
overwhelmed by a realization of the complete odiousness of ornamental
stupidity.
With cruelty it is much the same. The habits of the sphex surprise while
bull fights disgust us. The more cruelty and stupidity are dressed up,
the more hateful they become.
THE ANTERIOR IMAGE
I wrote an article once called, "The Spaniard Fails to Understand."
While I do not say it was good, the idea had some truth in it. It is a
fact that failure to understand is not exclusively a Spanish trait, but
the failing is a human one which is more accentuated among peoples of
backward culture, whose vitality is great.
Like a child the Spaniard carries an anterior image in his mind, to
which he submits his perceptions. A child is able to recognize a man or
a horse more easily in a toy than in a painting by Raphael or by
Leonardo da Vinci, because the form of the toy adapts itself more
readily to the anterior image which he has in his consciousness.
It is the same with the Spaniard. Here is one of the causes of his want
of comprehension. One rejects what does not fit in with one's
preconceived scheme of things.
I once rode to Valencia with two priests who were by no means unknown.
One of them had been in the convent of Loyola at Azpeitia for four
years. We talked about our respective homes; they eulogized the
Valencian plain while I replied that I preferred the mountains. As we
passed some bare, treeless hills such as abound near Chinchilla, one of
them--the one, in fact, who had been at Loyola--remarked to me:
"This must remind you of your own country."
I was dumbfounded. How could he identify those arid, parched, glinting
rocks with the Basque landscape, with the humid, green, shaded
countryside of Azpeitia? It was easy to see that the anterior image of a
landscape existing in the mind of that priest, provided only the general
idea of a mountain, and that he was unable to distinguish, as I was,
between a green mountain overgrown with turf and trees, and an arid
hillside of dry rocks.
An hypothesis explaining the formation of visual ideas has been
formulated by Wundt, which he calls the hypothesis of projection. It
attributes to the retina an innate power of referring its impressions
outward along straight lines, in directions which are determined.
According to Mueller, who has adopted this hypothesis, what we perceive
is our own retina under the category of space, and the size of the
retinal image is the original unit of measurement applied by us to
exterior objects.
The Spaniard like a child, will have to amplify his retinal image, if he
is ever to amount to anything. He will have to amplify it, and, no
doubt, complicate it also.
THE TRAGI-COMEDY OF SEX
It is very difficult to approach the sex question and to treat it at
once in a clear and dignified manner. And yet, who can deny that it
furnishes the key to the solution of many of the enigmas and obscurities
of psychology?
Who can question that sex is one of the bases of temperament?
Nevertheless, the subject may be discussed permissibly in scientific and
very general terms, as by Professor Freud. What is unpardonable is any
attempt to bring it down to the sphere of the practical and concrete.
I am convinced that the repercussion of the sexual life is felt through
all the phenomena of consciousness.
According to Freud, an unsatisfied desire produces a series of obscure
movements in consciousness which eat at the soul as electricity is
generated in a storage battery, and this accumulation of psychic energy
must needs produce a disturbance in the nervous system.
Such nervous disturbances, which are of sexual origin, produced by the
strangulation of desires, shape our mentality.
What is the proper conduct for a man during the critical years between
the ages of fourteen and twenty-three? He should be chaste, the priests
will say, shutting their eyes with an hypocritical air. He can marry
afterwards and become a father.
A man who can be chaste without discomfort between fourteen and twenty-
three, is endowed with a most unusual temperament. And it is one which
is not very common at present. As a matter of fact, young men are not
chaste, and cannot be.
Society, as it is well aware of this, opens a little loophole to
sexuality, which is free from social embarrassment--the loophole of
prostitution.
As the bee-hive has its workers, society has its prostitutes.
After a few years of sexual life without the walls, passed in the
surrounding moats of prostitution, the normal man is prepared for
marriage, with its submission to social forms and to standards which are
clearly absurd.
There is no possibility of escaping this dilemma which has been decreed
by society.
The alternative is perversion or surrender.
To a man of means, who has money to spend, surrender is not very
difficult; he has but to follow the formula. Prostitution among the
upper classes does not offend the eye, and it reveals none of the sores
which deface prostitution as it is practised among the poor. Marriage,
too, does not sit heavily upon the rich. With the poor, however, shame
and surrender walk hand in hand.
To practise the baser forms of prostitution is to elbow all that is most
vile in society, and to sink to its level oneself. Then, to marry
afterwards without adequate means, is a continual act of self-abasement.
It is to be unable to maintain one's convictions, it is to be compelled
to fawn upon one's superiors, and this is more true in Spain than it is
elsewhere, as everything here must be obtained through personal
influence.
Suppose one does not submit? If you do not submit you are lost. You are
condemned irretrievably to perversions, to debility, to hysteria.
You will find yourself slinking about the other sex like a famished
wolf, you will live obsessed by lewd ideas, your mind will solace itself
with swindles and cheats wherewith to provide a solution of the riddle
of existence, you will become the mangy sheep that the shepherd sets
apart from the flock.
Ever since early youth, I have been clearly conscious of this dilemma,
and I have determined and said: "No; I choose the abnormal--give me
hysteria, but submission, never!"
So derangement and distortion have come to my mind.
If I could have followed my inclinations freely during those fruitful
years between fifteen and twenty-five, I should have been a serene
person, a little sensual, perhaps, and perhaps a little cynical, but I
should certainly not have become violent.
The morality of our social system has disturbed and upset me.
For this reason I hate it cordially, and I vent upon it in full measure,
as best I may, all the spleen I have to give.
I like at times to disguise this poison under a covering of art.
THE VEILS OF THE SEXUAL LIFE
I am unable to feel any spontaneous enthusiasm for fecundity such as
that which Zola sings. Moreover, I regard the whole pose as a
superstition. I may be a member of an exhausted race,--that is quite
possible,--but between the devotion to our species which is professed by
these would-be re-peoplers of countries, and the purely selfish
preoccupation of the Malthusians, my sympathies are all with the latter.
I see nothing beyond the individual in this sex question--beyond the
individual who finds himself inhibited by sexual morality.
This question must be faced some day and cleared up, it must be seen
divested of all mystery, of all veils, of all deceit. As the hygiene of
nutrition has been studied openly, in broad daylight, so it must be with
sex hygiene.
As a matter of fact, the notion of sin, then, that of honour, and,
finally, dread of syphilis and other sexual diseases, rest like a cloud
on the sexual life, and they are jumbled together with all manner of
fantastic and literary fictions.
Obviously, rigid sexual morality is for the most part nothing more than
the practice of economy in disguise. Let us face this whole problem
frankly. A man has no right to let his life slip by to gratify fools'
follies. We must have regard to what is, with Stendhal. It will be
argued of course that these veils, these subterfuges of the sexual life,
are necessary. No doubt they are to society, but they are not to the
individual. There are those who believe that the interests of the
individual and of society are one, but we, who are defenders of the
individual as against the State, do not think so.
A LITTLE TALK
Myself: I often think I should have been happier if I had been impotent.
My Hearers: How can you say such a terrible thing?
Myself: Why not? To a man like me, sex is nothing but a source of
misery, shame and cheap hypocrisy, as it is to most of us who are
obliged to get on without sufficient means under this civilization of
ours. Now you know why I think that I should have been better off if I
had been impotent.
UPON THE SUPPOSED MORALITY OF MARRIAGE
Single life is said to be selfish and detestable. Certainly it is
immoral. But what of marriage? Is it as moral as it is painted?
I am one who doubts it.
Marriage, like all other social institutions of consequence, is
surrounded by a whole series of common assumptions that cry out to be
cleared up.
There is a pompous and solemn side to marriage, and there is a private
museum side.
Marriage poses as an harmonious general concord in which religion,
society, and nature join.
But is it anything of the kind? It would appear to be doubtful. If the
sole purpose of marriage is to rear children, a man ought to live with a
woman only until she becomes pregnant, and, after that moment, he ought
not to touch her. But here begins the second part. The woman bears a
baby; the baby is nourished by the mother's milk. The man has no right
to co-habit with his wife during this period either, because it will be
at the risk of depriving the child of its natural source of nutriment.
In consequence, a man must either co-habit with his wife once in two
years, or else there will be some default in the marriage.
What is he to do? What is the moral course? Remember that three factors
have combined to impose the marriage. One, the most far-reaching today,
is economic; another, which is also extremely important, is social, and
the third, now rapidly losing its hold, but still not without influence,
is religious. The three forces together attempt to mould nature to their
will.
Economic pressure and the high cost of living make against the having of
children. They encourage default.
"How are we to have all these children?" the married couple asks. "How
can we feed and educate them?"
Social pressure also tends in the same direction. Religious morality,
however, still persists in its idea of sin, although the potency of this
sanction is daily becoming less, even to the clerical eye.
If nature had a vote, it would surely be cast in favour of polygamy. Man
is forever sexual, and in equal degree, until the verge of decrepitude.
Woman passes through the stages of fecundation, pregnancy, and
lactation.
There can be no doubt but that the most convenient, the most logical and
the most moral system of sexual intercourse, naturally, is polygamy.
But the economic subdues the natural. Who proposes to have five wives
when he cannot feed one?
Society has made man an exclusively social product, and set him apart
from nature.
What can the husband and wife do, especially when they are poor? Must
they overload themselves with children, and then deliver them up to
poverty and neglect because God has given them, or shall they limit
their number?
If my opinion is asked, I advise a limit--although it may be artificial
and immoral.
Marriage presents us with this simple choice: we may either elect the
slow, filthy death of the indigent workingman, of the carabineer who
lives in a shack which teems with children, or else the clean life of
the French, who limit their offspring.
The middle class everywhere today is accepting the latter alternative.
Marriage is stripping off its morality in the bushes, and it is well
that it should do so.
THE SOVEREIGN CROWD
A strong man may either dominate and subdue the sovereign crowd when he
confronts it, as he would a wild beast, or he may breathe his thoughts
and ideas into it, which is only another form of domination.
As I am not strong enough to do either, I shun the sovereign masses, so
as not to become too keenly conscious of their collective bestiality and
ill temper.
THE REMEDY
Every man fancies that he has something of the doctor in him, and
considers himself competent to advise some sort of a cure, so I come now
with a remedy for the evils of life. My remedy is constant action. It is
a cure as old as the world, and it may be as useful as any other, and
doubtless it is as futile as all the rest. As a matter of fact, it is no
remedy at all.
The springs of action lie all within ourselves, and they derive from the
vigour and health which we have inherited from our fathers. The man who
possesses them may draw on them whenever he will, but the man who is
without them can never acquire them, no matter how widely he may seek.
III
THE EXTRARADIUS
The extraradius of a writer may be said to be made up of his literary
opinions and inclinations. I wish to expose the literary cell from the
nucleus out and to unfold it, instead of proceeding in from the
covering.
The term may seem pedantic and histological, but it has the attraction
to my mind of a reminiscence of student days.
RHETORIC AND ANTI-RHETORIC
If I were to formulate my opinions upon style, I should say: "Imitations
of other men's styles are bad, but a man's own style is good."
There is a store of common literary finery, almost all of which is in
constant use and has become familiar.
When a writer lays hands on any of this finery spontaneously, he makes
it his own, and the familiar flower blossoms as it does in Nature.
When an author's inspiration does not proceed from within out, but
rather from without in, then he becomes at once a bad rhetorician.
I am one of those writers who employ the least possible amount of this
common store of rhetoric. There are various reasons for my being anti-
rhetorical. In the first place I do not believe that the pages of a bad
writer can be improved by following general rules; if they do gain in
one respect, they lose inevitably in another.
So much for one reason; but I have others.
Languages display a tendency to follow established forms. Thus Spanish
tends toward Castilian. But why should I, a Basque, who never hears
Castilian spoken in my daily life in the accents of Avila or of Toledo,
endeavour to imitate it? Why should I cease to be a Basque in order to
appear Castilian, when I am not? Not that I cherish sectional pride, far
from it; but every man should be what he is, and if he can be content
with what he is, let him be held fortunate.
For this reason, among others, I reject Castilian turns and idioms when
they suggest themselves to my mind. Thus if it occurs to me to write
something that is distinctively Castilian, I cast about for a phrase by
means of which I may express myself in what to me is a more natural way,
without suggestion of our traditional literature.
On the other hand, if the pure rhetoricians, of the national school, who
are _castizo_--the Mariano de Cavias, the Ricardo Leons--should
happen to write something simply, logically and with modern directness,
they would cast about immediately for a roundabout way of saying it,
which might appear elaborate and out of date.
THE RHYTHM OF STYLE
There are persons who imagine that I am ignorant of the three or four
elementary rules of good writing, which everybody knows, while others
believe that I am unacquainted with syntax. Senor Bonilla y San Martin
has conducted a search through my books for deficiencies, and has
discovered that in one place I write a sentence in such and such
fashion, and that in another I write something else in another, while in
a third I compound a certain word falsely.
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