I. Youth & Egolatry 
 
 By Pio Baroja 
 
 ICE BOOKS DEBITED: 
 
 MEHCOH
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Carey McWillias
 
 YOUTH 
 AND EGOLATRY
 
 BOOKS BY P10 BAROJA
 
 THE FREE-LANCE BOOKS 
 
 Edited with Introductions 
 BY H. L. MENCKEN 
 
 I YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 BY Pio BAROJA 
 
 II VENTURES IN COMMON SENSE 
 
 BY E. W. HOWE 
 
 III THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 BY F. W. NIETZSCHE 
 
 IV WE MODERNS 
 
 BY EDWIN Mum 
 Other volumes in preparation. 
 
 For sale at all bookshops 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, PUBLISHER
 
 THE FREE LANCE BOOKS. I 
 
 EDITED WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY H. L. MENCKEN 
 
 YOUTH 
 
 AND EGOLATRY 
 
 By Pfo BAROJA 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH 
 
 By JACOB S. FASSETT, Jr. 
 and FRANCES L. PHILLIPS 
 
 NEW YORK ALFRED A - KNOPF MCMXX
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 
 
 FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PS 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY H. L. MENCKEN, 11 
 PROLOGUE, 21 
 
 ON INTELLECTUAL LOVE, 23 
 EGOTISM, 24 
 
 I. FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS, 29 
 The bad man of Itzea, 29 
 Humble and a wanderer, 30 
 Dogmatophagy, 32 
 Ignoramus, Ignorabimus, 33 
 Nevertheless, we call ourselves materialists, 34 
 In defense of religion, 35 
 Arch-European, 36 
 Dionysus or Apollonian? 37 
 Epicuri de grege porcum, 38 
 Evil and Rousseau's Chinaman, 39 
 The root of disinterested evil, 41 
 Music as a sedative, 43 
 Concerning Wagner, 44 
 Universal musicians, 46 
 The folk song, 47 
 On the optimism of eunuchs, 48 
 
 II. MYSELF, THE WRITER, 50 
 
 To my readers thirty years hence, 50 
 Youthful writings, 51 
 
 The beginning and end of the journey, 52 
 Mellowness and the critical sense, 53 
 Sensibility, 54 
 
 1053518
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 On devouring one's own God, 55 
 
 Anarchism, 56 
 
 New paths, 59 
 
 Longing for change, 60 
 
 Baroja, you will never amount to anything 
 
 (A Refrain), 61 
 The patriotism of desire, 64 
 My home lands, 66 
 Cruelty and stupidity, 67 
 The anterior image, 68 
 The tragi-comedy of sex, 70 
 The veils of the sexual life, 74 
 A little talk, 76 
 The sovereign crowd, 79 
 The remedy, 80 
 
 III. THE EXTRARADIUS, 81 
 Rhetoric and anti-rhetoric, 81 
 The rhythm of style, 83 
 Rhetoric of the minor key, 85 
 The value of my ideas, 88 
 Genius and admiration, 88 
 
 My literary and artistic inclinations, 91 
 
 My library, 92 
 
 On being a gentleman, 94 
 
 Giving offence, 96 
 
 Thirst for glory, 99 
 
 Elective antipathies, 102 
 
 To a member of several academies, 105 
 
 IV. ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES, 107 
 Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, 107 
 The encyclopedists, 109 
 
 The romanticists, 111 
 The naturalists, 113 
 The Spanish realists, 114 
 6
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 The Russians, 115 
 The critics, 116 
 
 V. THE PHILOSOPHERS, 119 
 
 VI. THE HISTORIANS, 122 
 
 The Roman historians, 124 
 
 Modern and contemporary historians, 127 
 
 VII. MY FAMILY, 130 
 
 Family mythology, 130 
 Our History, 134 
 
 VIII. MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD, 139 
 San Sebastian, 139 
 My parents, 143 
 Monsignor, the cat, 145 
 Two lunatics, 146 
 The hawk, 147 
 In Madrid, 148 
 In Pamplona, 149 
 Don Tirso Larequi, 150 
 A visionary rowdy, 152 
 Sarasate, 154 
 
 Robinson Crusoe and the Mysterious Island, 
 155 
 
 IX. As A STUDENT, 157 
 
 Professors, 160 
 Anti-militarism, 163 
 To Valencia, 166 
 
 X. As A VILLAGE DOCTOR, 168 
 Dolores, La Sacristana, 170 
 
 XI. As A BAKER, 172 
 
 My father's disillusionment, 175
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Industry and democracy, 176 
 
 The vexations of a small tradesman, 178 
 
 XII. As A WRITER, 182 
 Bohemia, 183 
 Our own generation, 183 
 Azorin, 185 
 Paul Schmitz, 186 
 Ortega y Gasset, 188 
 A pseudo-patron, 190 
 
 XIII. PARISIAN DAYS, 194 
 Estevanez, 194 
 
 My versatility according to Bonafoux, 196 
 
 XIV. LITERARY ENMITIES, 198 
 The enmity of Dicenta, 198 
 
 The posthumous enmity of Sawa, 200 
 Semi-hatred on the part of Silverio Lanza, 204 
 
 XV. THE PRESS, 209 
 
 Our newspapers and periodicals, 209 
 Our journalists, 211 
 Americans, 215 
 
 XVI. POLITICS, 219 
 
 Votes and applause, 220 
 
 Politicians, 221 
 
 Revolutionists, 224 
 
 Lerroux, 225 
 
 An offer, 228 
 
 Socialists, 230 
 
 Love of the workingman, 231 
 
 The conventionalist Barriovero, 232 
 
 Anarchists, 233 
 
 8
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 The morality of the alternating party system, 
 
 234 
 
 On obeying the law, 235 
 The sternness of the law, 238 
 
 XVII. MILITARY GLORY, 240 
 
 The old-time soldier, 241 
 
 Down goes prestige, 242 
 
 Science and the picturesque, 243 
 
 What we need today, 245 
 
 Our armies, 246 
 
 A word from Kuroki, the Japanese, 249 
 
 EPILOGUE, 250 
 
 Palinode and fresh outburst of ire, 253 
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 Spanish politicians on Baroja's anarchists 
 
 note, 259 
 
 Spanish politicians, 261 
 On Baroja's anarchists, 263 
 Note, 265 
 
 9
 
 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 na- 
 tional literature, for a good many years before 
 the event, had been made dismal by the croaking 
 of lokanaans, 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 Span- 
 ish 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 Cata- 
 lonia, where Spain keeps the strangest melting- 
 pot in Europe and the old Iberian stock is almost 
 extinct, there was a menacing seething, but else-
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 where there was not much to chill the conserva- 
 tive spine. In the middle nineties, when the So- 
 cialist vote in Germany was already approaching 
 the two million mark, and Belgium was rocked 
 by great Socialist demonstrations, and the So- 
 cialist 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 So- 
 cialism got on its legs, and out of the two grew 
 that great movement for the liberation of the 
 common people, that determined and bitter strug- 
 gle for a fair share in the fruits of human prog- 
 ress, which came to its melodramatic climax in 
 the execution of Francisco Ferrer. Spain now 
 began to go ahead very rapidly, if not in actual 
 12
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 denun- 
 ciation 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 politi- 
 cal and practical side. Spanish letters, for years 
 sunk into formalism, revived with the national 
 spirit, and the new books in prose and verse be- 
 gan 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 fashion- 
 ing. The national literature, but lately so aca- 
 demic and remote from existence, was now furi- 
 ously lively, challenging and provocative. The 
 people found in it, not the old placid escape from 
 life, but a new stimulation to arduous and ardent 
 13
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 Gastelar and Cano- 
 vas 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 Unam- 
 uno, writing with a restraint which is anything 
 but traditionally Castilian, and to the journal- 
 istic 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 Ra- 
 mon Jimenez, and the brothers Machado, while 
 the socialistic and republican propaganda which 
 had invaded the theatre with Perez Galdos, Joa- 
 quin 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. 
 
 14
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 In the novel, the transformation is noticeable 
 at once in the rapid development of the porno- 
 graphic 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 Span- 
 iards 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 Sal- 
 averria, after surviving the attacks of the north- 
 ern 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 Romanes 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, penetrat- 
 ing, persistently suggestive in the larger sense, 
 which does not hesitate to make demands upon 
 15
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 the reader, and this is exemplified most dis- 
 tinctively, both temperamentally and intellectu- 
 ally, by Pio Baroja. 
 
 It would be difficult to find two men who, deal- 
 ing with the same ideas, bring to them more an- 
 tagonistic attitudes of mind than Baroja and 
 Blasco Ibaiiez. For all his appearance of mod- 
 ernism, Blasco really belongs to the generation 
 before 1898. He is of the stock of Victor Hugo 
 a popular rhapsodist and intellectual swash- 
 buckler, half artist and half mob orator a man 
 of florid and shallow certainties, violent enthusi- 
 asms, quack remedies, vast magnetism and ad- 
 dress, 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 out- 
 side of Spain his subsequent celebrity has tended 
 to ground itself upon agreement with his poli- 
 tics, and not upon anything properly describable 
 as a critical appreciation of his talents. Had 
 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse been di- 
 rected against France instead of in favour of 
 France, it goes without saying that it would have 
 16
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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-read- 
 ers. His intrinsic merits, in sober retrospect, 
 seem very feeble. For all his concern with cur- 
 rent 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 ap- 
 peal. 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, ora- 
 torical, sentimental, theatrical a fervent advo- 
 cate of all sorts of lofty causes, eagerly respon- 
 sive 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 to- 
 ward the doctrine that the essential ills of man 
 are incurable, that all the remedies proposed are 
 17
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 signifi- 
 cance 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 emo- 
 tions. Baroja, evading this grand enemy of all 
 18
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 ideas, sat himself down to inspect and co-ordi- 
 nate 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 Cata- 
 lonia, and Catalonia is anything but Castilian. 
 But Baroja, though he is also un-Castilian and 
 even a bit anti-Castilian, is still a thorough Span- 
 iard. He is more interested in a literary feud 
 in Madrid than in a holocaust beyond the Pyre- 
 nees. He gets into his discussion of every prob- 
 lem a definitely Spanish flavour. He is unmis- 
 takably a Spaniard even when he is trying most 
 rigorously to be unbiased and international. He 
 thinks out everything in Spanish terms. In him, I 
 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 astound- 
 ing Gallic caricature, half flattery and half libel.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The actual Spaniard is surely no such grand- 
 opera Frenchman as tlhe immortal toreador. I 
 prescribe the treatment that cured me, for one, of 
 mistaking him for an Iberian. That is, I pre- 
 scribe a visit to Spain in carnival time. 
 
 Baroja, then, stands for the modern Spanish 
 mind at its most enlightened. He is the Span- 
 iard of education and worldly wisdom, detached 
 from the mediaeval imbecilities of the old regime 
 and yet aloof from the worse follies of the dema- 
 gogues who now rage in the country. Vastly 
 less picturesque than Blasco Ibafiez, 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. 
 
 20
 
 PROLOGUE
 
 ON INTELLECTUAL LOVE 
 
 Only what is of the mind has value to the 
 mind. Let us dedicate ourselves without com- 
 punction 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 pres- 
 ent. 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 com- 
 ments 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 autobiograph- 
 ical sketch of ten or fifteen pages. Ten or fif- 
 teen 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 
 23
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 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 smoth- 
 ered. 
 
 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 ef- 
 fect, 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 sa- 
 tiric writers play in the purely human octave; 
 the critic plays in the bookman's octave; the his- 
 torian in the octave of the investigator. When 
 an author writes of himself, perforce he plays 
 24
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 upon his own "I," which is not exactly that con- 
 tained in the octave of the sentimentalist nor yet 
 in that of the curious investigator. Undoubt- 
 edly 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 any- 
 body communicates his likes and dislikes to me, 
 I am of opinion that the other person most prob- 
 ably shares the same feelings when I communi- 
 cate mine to him. However, a time has now ar- 
 rived 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 man- 
 ner of Robespierre: the liberty of annoying an- 
 other begins where his liberty of annoying you 
 leaves off. 
 
 I understand very well that there may be per- 
 sons who believe that their lives are wholly ex- 
 emplary, and who thus burn with ardour to talk 
 25
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 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 my- 
 self? 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 exu- 
 dation. But are they sincere? Absolutely sin- 
 cere? It is not very probable. The moment we 
 sit for a photographer, instinctively we dissem- 
 ble and compose our features. When we talk 
 about ourselves, we also dissemble. 
 26
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 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, how- 
 ever, which is of real value only when it is one 
 long autobiography, deceit is impossible, be- 
 cause when the writer is least conscious of it, he 
 reveals himself. 
 
 27
 
 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 dis- 
 trict had taken possession of the entryway and 
 the garden, where they misbehaved generally. 
 It was necessary to drive them away little by lit- 
 tle, 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 
 29
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 Gue- 
 vara entitled, Novelists, Good and Bad, which 
 was distributed in the village the day that I ar- 
 rived, and which states that I am irreligious, a 
 clerophobe, and quite shameless. Whether from 
 one source or another, the important considera- 
 tion 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 pur- 
 pose 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, hap- 
 pening to be in San Sebastian, I went to visit the 
 Museum with the painter Regoyos. After see- 
 ing 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: 
 
 30
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 "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 be- 
 neath 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 anar- 
 chistic and Christian rancour, as Nietzsche would 
 have it), I jotted down a few casual words be- 
 neath 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 Adminis- 
 tration of all Classes, Commanders of all 
 Branches of the Service, Knights of all kinds of 
 Crosses, rich men returned from America, bank- 
 ers, etc., etc. 
 
 31
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 wan- 
 derer either, for making a few insignificant jour- 
 neys 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 de- 
 gree 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 dogma- 
 tophagist. 
 
 My first impulse in the presence of a dogma, 
 whether it be political, moral, or religious, is to 
 32
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 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, Du- 
 Bois-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 every- 
 thing 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 conscious- 
 ness, the validity of perception, all these are un- 
 der suspicion today. Ignoramus, ignorabimus. 
 
 33
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 con- 
 tradict 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 it- 
 self the most fecund doctrine of science. Wil- 
 helm Ostwald, in his Victory of Scientific Mate- 
 rialism, has defended the same thesis with re- 
 spect 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 con- 
 ception entertained by physicists at the present- 
 day concerning matter, according to which it has 
 substance in the precise degree that it is a mani- 
 festation of energy. 
 
 "If matter is scarcely real, then what is the 
 34
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 validity of materialism?" shout the friars enthu- 
 siastically. 
 
 The argument smacks of the seminary and is 
 absolutely worthless. 
 
 Materialism is more than a philosophical sys- 
 tem: it is a scientific method, which will have 
 nothing to do either with fantasies or with ca- 
 prices. 
 
 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. Be- 
 cause 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. Re- 
 ligion lives upon lies, and society maintains it- 
 self upon them, with its train of priests and sol- 
 diers 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 
 35
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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, arbi- 
 trariness, 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 Guipiiz- 
 coan, 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 pro- 
 36
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 portioned intensity. Assuming this to be the 
 case, the resultant of the ancestral influences 
 operative upon me would indicate that my geo- 
 graphical parallel lies somewhere between the 
 Alps and the Pyrenees. Sometimes I am in- 
 clined to think that the Alps and the Pyrenees 
 are all that is European in Europe. Beyond 
 t hem I seem to see Asia ; below them, Africa. 
 
 In the riparian Navarrese, as in the Catalans 
 and the Genovese, one already notes the Afri- 
 can ; 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 tur- 
 bulence, 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 
 37
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 by little I have come to realize that if following 
 Dionysus induces the will to bound and leap, de- 
 votion 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 philoso- 
 pher, who conversed with his pupils in his gar- 
 den. The very epithet of Horace, upon detach- 
 ing himself from the Epicureans, "Epicuri de 
 grege porcum" is full of charm. 
 
 All noble minds have hymned Epicurus. 
 "Hail Epicurus, thou honour of Greece!" Lucre- 
 tius 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 
 38
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 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 Diog- 
 enes 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 en- 
 rol 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 al- 
 ready outgrown, die conception of sin, but we 
 shall never pass beyond the idea of good and
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 die 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 ma- 
 jority of men who are civilized would do nothing 
 40
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 of the kind. This, to my mind, is not to say 
 that men are good ; it is merely to say that Rous- 
 seau, 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 the- 
 atrical, 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, es- 
 sentially 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 mav be ob- 
 served in the relations between parents and chil- 
 dren as well as in those between husbands and 
 41
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 wives. At times it is not only disinterested, but 
 counter-interested. 
 
 The lack of a name for this background of dis- 
 interested 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 signifi- 
 cance. Naturally, the judge takes account of 
 nothing but deeds; to religion, which probes more 
 deeply, the intent is of importance; to the psy- 
 chologist, however, who attempts to penetrate 
 still further, the elemental germinative processes 
 of volition are of indispensable significance. 
 
 Whence this foundation of disinterested mal- 
 ice 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 liter- 
 ary. Shakespeare, in his Othello, a drama which 
 has always appeared false and absurd to me, 
 emphasizes the disinterested malice of lago, im- 
 parting to him a character and mode of action 
 which are beyond those of normal men; but then, 
 42
 
 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 lago, and 
 invented Barkilphedro, who embodies disinter- 
 ested 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 con- 
 versation; it is not necessary to know whether 
 your neighbor is a sceptic or a believer, a mate- 
 43
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 rialist 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 poli- 
 tics 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 die 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 mu- 
 sic, yet I am not completely insensible to it. 
 44
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 This does not prevent me, however, from enter- 
 taining a strong aversion to all music lovers, and 
 especially to Wagnerites. 
 
 When Nietzsche, who apparently possessed a 
 musical temperament, set Bizet up against Wag- 
 ner, he confessed, of course, premeditated vin- 
 dictiveness. "It is necessary to mediterranean- 
 ize 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 the- 
 atocracy of Wagner, I share it fully. This busi- 
 ness of substituting the theatre for the church, 
 and teaching philosophy singing, seems ridicu- 
 lous 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 
 45
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 scen- 
 ery. 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 lis- 
 tening 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 uni- 
 versal music, especially that of Mozart and 
 Beethoven. It seems as if there were fewer par- 
 ticles 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, joy- 
 ous, serene, gallant, mischievous. He is a cour- 
 tier 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, 
 46
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 seems to be part of all of us, to have been de- 
 signed 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 trem- 
 bles with obscure meanings and pathetic, heart- 
 rending 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 Mo- 
 zart's and Beethoven's music and feel that it be- 
 longs to them, as truly as it ever did to the citi- 
 zens 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 
 -4/7 
 
 T? I
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 intelligibility, music possesses different attrac- 
 tions for different people. The folk song pre- 
 serves to us the very savour of the country in 
 which we were born; it recalls the air, the cli- 
 mate 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 prefer- 
 ence 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 dis- 
 agreeable tartuffery the histologist, Ramon y 
 Cajal, who, as a thinker, has always been an ab- 
 solute mediocrity, explains what the young 
 scholar should be, in the same way that the Con- 
 stitution 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, se- 
 rene . . . and all this with ten or twelve coppers 
 in his pocket! 
 
 48
 
 FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS 
 
 Some friends inform me that in the Institute 
 for Public Education at Madrid, where an at- 
 tempt is made to give due artistic orientation to 
 the pupils, they have contrived an informal clas- 
 sification of the arts in the order of their impor- 
 tance; first comes painting; then, music; and, 
 last, literature. 
 
 Considering carefully what may be the rea- 
 sons for such a sequence, it would appear that 
 the purpose must be to deprive the student of 
 any occasion for becoming pessimistic. Cer- 
 tainly nobody will ever have his convictions up- 
 set 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 cor- 
 rectness may be divined the optimism of eunuchs. 
 
 49
 
 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 chi- 
 merical and ridiculous, that the Spanish reader 
 thirty or forty years hence, who takes up my 
 books, whose sensibilities, it may be, have been 
 50
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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, en- 
 tirely 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 ex- 
 press turbulence ; perhaps their youth is a youth 
 which is lacking in force and vigour, but never- 
 theless, they are youthful books. 
 
 Among thorns and brambles there lies con- 
 cealed 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, 
 51
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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' 9 
 a Frenchwoman remarked to me in Rome. 
 
 "I? Impossible!" 
 
 "Yes," she insisted. "You are a conversa- 
 tionalist. You are not an elegant, sprucely 
 dressed abbe; you are an abbe who is cynical 
 and ill-natured, who likes to fancy himself a sav- 
 age amid the comfortable surroundings of the 
 drawing-room." 
 
 The Frenchwoman's observation set me to 
 thinking. 
 
 52
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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 Tem- 
 ple 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. Never- 
 theless, 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 ex- 
 pression, I shall have nothing to say, and so 
 remain silent. 
 
 53
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 so- 
 ciety, 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 exces- 
 sive 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 ab- 
 
 54
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 cesses, 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 environ- 
 ment; 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. 
 
 55
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 Christianity, when it found it necessary to over- 
 come 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 pene- 
 tration, are at last submitting to a softening proc- 
 ess, and they will become completely softened 
 upon the establishment in Europe of the domina- 
 tion 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 
 
 56
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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 fes- 
 tivals of Pan and the cult of Dionysus, but I am 
 not substituting for them, either outwardly or in- 
 wardly, the worship of Yahveh or of Moloch. 
 I have no liking for Semitic traditions none 
 and none whatever! I am not able, like Sala- 
 verria, 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 ad- 
 miration for grand society, generals, magistrates, 
 wealthy gentlemen from America, and Argen- 
 tines 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 admira- 
 tion, my inclination is toward the small. I pre- 
 fer the Boboli Gardens to those of Versailles, 
 57
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 de- 
 velop, 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 my- 
 self, 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. 
 
 58
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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 an- 
 archists," 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," re- 
 torted 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 
 59
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 that I do not believe that I could be bribed in 
 cold blood by die 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 con- 
 stant and consistent, artists and literary men as- 
 pire 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 sec- 
 ond personality which shall be different from the 
 first! This is given only to men of genius and 
 to saints. Thus Caesar, Luther, and Saint Igna- 
 tius each lived two distinct lives ; or, rather, per- 
 haps, 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 paint- 
 ing upsets the whole theory of art. 
 60
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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 pre- 
 liminary period of exalted feeling, followed by 
 a lifetime dominated by study and the intellect. 
 
 Among other writers there is not even the sug- 
 gestion 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. 
 
 61
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 Pam- 
 plona 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 any- 
 thing." 
 
 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 
 62
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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 differ- 
 ently: one will have become rich, another will 
 have ruined himself, this fellow will have en- 
 tered the cabinet, that one will have been swal- 
 lowed up in a small town; but you will be ex- 
 actly 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 any- 
 thing 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 alder- 
 man, 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 
 63
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 his belly begins to take on adipose tissue and 
 he puffs out with ambition, he ought to be some- 
 thing, to sport a title, to wear a ribbon, to array 
 himself in a black frock coat and a white waist- 
 coat; 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 : "Bar- 
 oja, 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 
 
 64
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 that a better orientation may be acquired by as- 
 suming 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 accomplish- 
 ment 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, Tol- 
 stoi 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 
 65
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 in- 
 ternationalists. 
 
 "Nothing but what we have is of any ac- 
 count," cries one party. 
 
 "No, it is what the other fellow has," cries the 
 other. 
 
 Patriotism is telling the truth as to one's coun- 
 try, 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 
 
 66
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 the world: one is my home on the Atlantic; the 
 other is very like a home to me, on the Med- 
 iterranean. 
 
 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 in- 
 terest 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 exist- 
 ence. 
 
 We may be able to tolerate stupidity and lack 
 of comprehension when they are simple and 
 wholly natural, but what of an utter obtuseness 
 67
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 of understanding which dresses itself up and 
 becomes rhetorical? Can anything be more dis- 
 agreeable? 
 
 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 exclu- 
 sively a Spanish trait, but the failing is a hu- 
 man one which is more accentuated among peo- 
 ples of backward culture, whose vitality is great. 
 
 Like a child the Spaniard carries an anterior 
 68
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 image in his mind, to which he submits his per- 
 ceptions. A child is able to recognize a man 
 or a horse more easily in a toy than in a paint- 
 ing by Raphael or by Leonardo da Vinci, be- 
 cause 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 pre- 
 conceived 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 
 
 69
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 un- 
 able 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 re- 
 ferring its impressions outward along straight 
 lines, in directions which are determined. 
 
 According to Miiller, who has adopted this hy- 
 pothesis, what we perceive is our own retina un- 
 der the category of space, and the size of the 
 retinal image is the original unit of measure- 
 ment applied by us to exterior objects. 
 
 The Spaniard like a child, will have to am- 
 plify 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 ques- 
 tion and to treat it at once in a clear and digni- 
 70
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 fied 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 pro- 
 duces a series of obscure movements in con- 
 sciousness which eat at the soul as electricity 
 is generated in a storage battery, and this ac- 
 cumulation of psychic energy must needs pro- 
 duce a disturbance in the nervous system. 
 
 Such nervous disturbances, which are of sex- 
 ual origin, produced by the strangulation of de- 
 sires, 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 hypo- 
 
 71
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 critical air. He can marry afterwards and be- 
 come 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 prostitu- 
 tion. 
 
 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 pros- 
 titution, the normal man is prepared for mar- 
 riage, with its submission to social forms and 
 to standards which are clearly absurd. 
 
 There is no possibility of escaping this di- 
 lemma 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 up- 
 per classes does not offend the eye, and it reveals 
 72
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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 aft- 
 erwards 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 influ- 
 ence. 
 
 Suppose one does not submit? If you do not 
 submit you are lost. You are condemned ir- 
 retrievably to perversions, to debility, to hys- 
 teria. 
 
 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 pro- 
 vide a solution of the riddle of existence, you 
 will become the mangy sheep that the shepherd 
 sets apart from the flock.
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 Ever since early youth, I have been clearly 
 conscious of this dilemma, and I have deter- 
 mined 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 dis- 
 turbed 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 enthus- 
 iasm for fecundity such as that which Zola sings. 
 Moreover, I regard the whole pose as a supersti- 
 tion. I may be a member of an exhausted race, 
 
 74
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 that is quite possible, but between the devo- 
 tion 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 noth- 
 ing beyond the individual in this sex question 
 beyond the individual who finds himself in- 
 hibited by sexual morality. 
 
 This question must be faced some day and 
 cleared up, it must be seen divested of all mys- 
 tery, 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 econ- 
 omy in disguise. Let us face this whole prob- 
 lem 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 subter- 
 fuges of the sexual life, are necessary. No
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 so- 
 ciety 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 ter- 
 rible 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. 
 76
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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 mar- 
 riage, and there is a private museum side. 
 
 Marriage poses as an harmonious general con- 
 cord in which religion, society, and nature join. 
 
 But is it anything of the kind? It would ap- 
 pear 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 preg- 
 nant, 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-reach- 
 ing today, is economic; another, which is also 
 77
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 extremely important, is social, and the third, 
 now rapidly losing its hold, but still not with- 
 out influence, is religious. The three forces to- 
 gether attempt to mould nature to their will. 
 
 Economic pressure and the high cost of liv- 
 ing 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 direc- 
 tion. Religious morality, however, still per- 
 sists 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 lacta- 
 tion. 
 
 There can be no doubt but that the most con- 
 venient, the most logical and the most moral 
 system of sexual intercourse, naturally, is po- 
 lygamy. 
 
 But the economic subdues the natural. Who 
 78
 
 MYSELF, THE WRITER 
 
 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 them- 
 selves 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 al- 
 though 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 accept- 
 ing 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 
 79
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 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 compe- 
 tent 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. 
 
 80
 
 Ill 
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 The extraradius of a writer may be said to be 
 made up of his literary opinions and inclina- 
 tions. I wish to expose the literary cell from the 
 nucleus out and to unfold it, instead of proceed- 
 ing in from the covering. 
 
 The term may seem pedantic and histological, 
 but it has the attraction to my mind of a remi- 
 niscence 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 Na- 
 81
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 ture. When an author's inspiration does not 
 proceed from within out, but rather from with- 
 out in, then he becomes at once a bad rhetori- 
 cian. 
 
 I am one of those writers who employ the 
 least possible amount of this common store of 
 rhetoric. There are various reasons for my be- 
 ing 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 an- 
 other. 
 
 So much for one reason; but I have others. 
 
 Languages display a tendency to follow es- 
 tablished 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 Cas- 
 tilian turns and idioms when they suggest them- 
 82
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 selves 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 litera- 
 ture. 
 
 On the other hand, if the pure rhetoricians, of 
 the national school, who are castizo the Mar- 
 iano de Cavias, the Ricardo Leons should hap- 
 pen 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 ig- 
 norant of the three or four elementary rules of 
 good writing, which everybody knows, while oth- 
 ers 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 sen- 
 tence in such and such fashion, and that in an- 
 other I write something else in another, while in 
 a third I compound a certain word falsely. 
 83
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 With respect to the general subject of structural 
 usage which he raises, it would be easy to cite 
 ample precedent among our classic authors; with 
 respect to the word misticidad occurring in one 
 of my books, I have put it into the mouth of a 
 foreigner. The faults brought to light by 
 Senor Bonilla are not very serious. But what 
 of it? Suppose they were? 
 
 An intelligent friend once said to me: 
 
 "I don't know what is lacking in your style; 
 I find it acrid." I feel that this criticism is the 
 most apt that has yet been made. 
 
 My difficulty in writing Castilian does not 
 arise from any deficiency in grammar nor any 
 want of syntax. I fail in measure, in rhythm 
 of style, and this shocks those who open my 
 books for the first time. They note that there 
 is something about them that does not sound 
 right, which is due to the fact that there is a 
 manner of respiration in them, a system of 
 pauses, which is not traditionally Castilian. 
 
 I should insist upon the point at greater length, 
 were it not that the subject of style is cluttered 
 up with such a mass of preconceptions, that it 
 would be necessary to redefine our terminology, 
 and then, after all, perhaps we should not un- 
 -84.- 
 
 Cr*
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 derstand one another. Men have an idea that 
 they are thinking when they operate the mech- 
 anism of language which they have at command. 
 When somebody makes the joints of language 
 creak, they say: "He does not know how to 
 manage it." Certainly he does know how to 
 manage it. Anybody can manage a platitude. 
 The truth is simply this: the individual writer 
 endeavours to make of language a cloak to fit 
 his form, while, contrarywise, the purists at- 
 tempt to mould their bodies till they fit the 
 cloak. 
 
 RHETORIC OF THE MINOR KEY 
 
 Persons to whom my style is not entirely dis- 
 tasteful, sometimes ask: 
 
 "Why use the short sentence when it deprives 
 the period of eloquence and rotundity?" 
 
 "Because I do not desire eloquence or rotun- 
 dity," I reply. "Furthermore, I avoid them." 
 The vast majority of Spanish purists are con- 
 vinced that the only possible rhetoric is the 
 rhetoric of the major key. This, for example, 
 is the rhetoric of Castelar and Costa, the rhetoric 
 which Ricardo Leon and Salvador Rueda manip- 
 85
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 ulate today, as it has been inherited from the 
 Romans. Its purpose is to impart solemnity to 
 everything, to that which already has it by right 
 of nature, and to that which has it not. This 
 rhetoric of the major key marches with stately, 
 academic tread. At great, historic moments, no 
 doubt it is very well, but in the long run, in in- 
 cessant parade, it is one of the most deadly 
 soporifics in literature; it destroys variety, it is 
 fatal to subtlety, to nice transitions, to detail, and 
 it throws the uniformity of the copybook over 
 everything. 
 
 On the other hand, the rhetoric of the minor 
 key, which seems poor at first blush, soon reveals 
 itself to be more attractive. It moves with a 
 livelier, more life-like rhythm; it is less bom- 
 bastic. This rhetoric implies continence and 
 basic economy of effort; it is like an agile man, 
 lightly clothed and free of motion. 
 
 To the extent of my ability I always avoid the 
 rhetoric of the major key, which is assumed as 
 the only proper style, the very moment that one 
 sits down to write Castilian. I should like, of 
 course, to rise to the heights of solemnity now 
 and then, but very seldom. 
 
 "Then what you seek," I am told, "is a fa- 
 86
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 miliar style like that of Mesonero Romanes, 
 Trueba and Pereda?" 
 
 No, I am not attracted by that either. 
 
 The familiar, rude, vulgar manner reminds 
 me of a worthy bourgeois family at the dinner 
 table. There sits the husband in his shirt 
 sleeves, while the wife's hair is at loose ends and 
 she is dirty besides, and all the children are in 
 rags. 
 
 I take it that one may be simple and sincere 
 without either affectation or vulgarity. It is 
 well to be a little neutral, perhaps, a little grey 
 for the most part, so that upon occasion the more 
 delicate hues may stand out clearly, while a 
 rhythm may be employed to advantage which 
 is in harmony with actual life, which is light 
 and varied, and innocent of striving after solem- 
 nity. 
 
 A modern poet, in my opinion, has illustrated 
 this rhetoric of the minor key to perfection. 
 
 He is Paul Verlaine. 
 
 A style like Verlaine's, which is non-se- 
 quent, macerated, free, is indispensable to any 
 mastery of the rhetoric of the minor key. This, 
 to me, has always been my literary ideal. 
 
 87
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 THE VALUE OF MY IDEAS 
 
 From time to time, my friend Azorin attempts 
 to analyse my ideas. I do not pretend to be in 
 the secret of the scales, as such an assumption 
 upon my part would be ridiculous. As the 
 pilot takes advantage of a favourable wind, and 
 if it does not blow, of one that is unfavourable, 
 I do the same. The meteorologist is able to tell 
 with mathematical accuracy in his laboratory, 
 after a glance at his instruments, not only the 
 direction of the prevailing wind, but the atmos- 
 pheric pressure and the degree of humidity as 
 well. I am able only, however, to say with the 
 pilot: "I sail this way," and then make head 
 as best I may. 
 
 GENIUS AND ADMIRATION 
 
 I have no faith in the contention of the Lom- 
 brosians that genius is akin to insanity, neither 
 do I think that genius is an infinite capacity for 
 taking pains. Lombroso, for that matter, is as 
 old-fashioned today as a hoop skirt. 
 
 Genius partakes of the miraculous. If some 
 one should tell me that a stick had been trans- 
 88
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 formed into a snake by a miracle, naturally I 
 should not believe it; but if I should be asked 
 whether there was not something miraculous in 
 the very existence of a stick or of a snake, I 
 should be constrained to acknowledge the 
 miracle. 
 
 When I read the lives of the philosophers in 
 Diogenes Laertius, I arrive at the conclusion that 
 Epicurus, Zeno, Diogenes, Protagoras and the 
 others were nothing more than men who had 
 common sense. Clearly, as a corollary, I am 
 obliged to conclude that the people we meet 
 nowadays upon the street, whether they wear 
 gowns, uniforms or blouses, are mere animals 
 masquerading in human shape. 
 
 Contradicting the assumption that the great 
 men of antiquity were only ordinary normal be- 
 ings, we must concede the fact that most ex- 
 traordinary conditions must have existed and, 
 indeed, have been pre-exquisite, before a 
 Greece could have arisen in antiquity, or an 
 Athens in Greece, or a man such as Plato in 
 Athens. 
 
 By very nature, the source^s of admiration 
 are as mysterious to my mind as the roots of 
 genius. Do we admire what we understand, or 
 89
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 what we do not understand? Admiration is of 
 two kinds, of which the more common proceeds 
 from wonder at something which we do not 
 understand. There is, however, an admiration 
 which goes with understanding. 
 
 Edgar Poe composed several stories, of which 
 The Goldbug is one, in which an impenetrable 
 enigma is first presented, to be solved afterwards 
 as by a talisman; but, then, a lesson in cryptog- 
 raphy ensues, wherein the talisman is explained 
 away, and the miraculous gives place to the rea- 
 soning faculties of a mind of unusual power. 
 
 He has done something very similar in his 
 poem, The Raven, where the poem is followed by 
 an analysis of its gestation, which is called The 
 Philosophy of Composition. Would it be more 
 remarkable to write The Raven by inspiration, 
 or to write it through conscious skill? To find 
 the hidden treasure through the talisman of The 
 Goldbug, or through the possession of analytical 
 faculties such as those of the protagonist of Poe's 
 tale? 
 
 Much consideration will lead to the conclusion 
 that one process is as marvellous as the other. 
 
 It may be said that there is nothing miraculous 
 90
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 in nature, and it may be said that it is all mir- 
 aculous. 
 
 MY LITERARY AND ARTISTIC INCLINATIONS 
 
 Generally speaking, I neither understand old 
 books very well, nor do I care for them I have 
 been able to read only Shakespeare, and per- 
 haps one or two others, with the interest with 
 which I approach modern writers. 
 
 It has sometimes seemed to me that the un- 
 readableness of the older authors might be made 
 the foundation of a philosophic system. Yet I 
 have met with some surprises. 
 
 One was that I enjoyed the Odyssey. 
 
 "Am I a hypocrite?" I asked myself. 
 
 I do not find old painters to be as incompatible 
 as old authors. On the contrary, my experience 
 has been that they are the reverse. I greatly 
 prefer a canvas by Botticelli, Mantegna, El 
 Greco or Velazquez to a modern picture. 
 
 The only famous painter of the past for whom 
 
 I have entertained an antipathy, is Raphael; 
 
 yet, when I was in Rome and saw the frescos in 
 
 the Vatican, I was obliged again to ask myself 
 
 91
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 if my attitude was a pose, because they struck 
 me frankly as admirable. 
 
 I do not pretend to taste, but I am sincere; 
 nor do I endeavour to be consistent. Consist- 
 ency does not interest me. 
 
 The only consistency possible is a consistency 
 which comes from without, which proceeds from 
 fear of public opinion, and anything of this sort 
 appears to me to be contemptible. 
 
 Not to change because of what others may 
 think, is one of the most abject forms of slavery. 
 
 Let us change all we can. My ideal is con- 
 tinual change change of life, change of home, 
 of food, and even of skin. 
 
 MY LIBRARY 
 
 Among the things that I missed most as a stu- 
 dent, was a small library. If I had had one, I 
 believe I should have dipped more deeply into 
 books and into life as well; but it was not given 
 me. 
 
 During the period which is most fruitful for 
 the maturing of the mind, that is, during the years 
 from twelve to twenty, I lived by turns in six or 
 92
 
 THE EXTRARADWS 
 
 seven cities, and as it was impossible to travel 
 about with books, I never retained any. 
 
 A lack of books was the occasion of my fail- 
 ure to form the habit of re-reading, of tasting 
 again and again and of relishing what I read, 
 and also of making notes in the margin. 
 
 Nearly all authors who own a small library, in 
 which the books are properly arranged, and 
 nicely annotated, become famous. 
 
 I am not sentimentalizing about stolid, brazen 
 note-taking, such as that with which the gentle- 
 men of the Ateneo debase their books, because 
 that merely indicates barbarous lack of culture 
 and an obtuseness which is Kabyline. 
 
 Having had no library in my youth, I have 
 never possessed the old favourites that every- 
 body carries in his pocket into the country, and 
 reads over and over until he knows them by 
 heart. 
 
 I have looked in and out of books as travel- 
 lers do in and out of inns, not stopping long in 
 any of them. I am very sorry but it is too late 
 now for the loss to be repaired. 
 
 93
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 ON BEING A GENTLEMAN 
 
 Viewed from without, I seem to impress some 
 as a crass, crabbed person, who has very little 
 ability, while others regard me as an unhealthy, 
 decadent writer. Then Azorin has said of me 
 that I am a literary aristocrat, a fine and com- 
 prehensive mind. 
 
 I should accept Azorin's opinion very gladly, 
 but personality needs to be hammered severely 
 in literature before it leaves its slag. Like 
 metal which is removed from the furnace after 
 casting and placed under the hammer, I would 
 offer my works to be put to the test, to be beaten 
 by all hammers. 
 
 If anything were left, I should treasure it then 
 lovingly; if nothing were left, we should still 
 pick up some fragments of life. 
 
 I always listen to the opinions of the non- 
 literary concerning my books with the great- 
 est interest. My cousin, Justo Goni, used to 
 express his opinion without circumlocution. He 
 always carried off my books as they appeared, 
 and then, a long time after, would give his opin- 
 ion. 
 
 Of The Way of Perfection he said: 
 94
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 "Good, yes, very good; but it is so tiresome." 
 
 I realized that there was some truth in his 
 view. 
 
 When he read the three novels to which I had 
 given the general title, The Struggle for Life, 
 he stopped me on the Calle de Alcala one day 
 and said: 
 
 "You 'have not convinced me." 
 
 "How so?" 
 
 "Your hero is a man of the people, but he is 
 falsified. He is just like you are ; you can never 
 be anything but a gentleman." 
 
 This gentility with which my cousin re- 
 proached me, and without doubt he was correct, 
 is common to nearly all Spanish writers. 
 
 There are no Spaniards at present, and there 
 never have been any at any other time, who 
 write out of the Spanish soul, out of the hearts 
 of the people. Even Dicenta did not. His 
 Juan Jose is not a workingman, but a young gen- 
 tleman. He has nothing of the workingman 
 about him beyond the label, the clothes, and 
 such externals. 
 
 Galdos, for example, can make the common 
 people talk; Azorin can portray the villages of 
 Castile, set on their arid heights, against back- 
 95
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 grounds of blue skies; Blasco Ibanez can paint 
 the life of the Valencians in vivid colours with 
 a prodigality that carries with it the taint of 
 the cheap, but none of them has penetrated into 
 the popular soul. That would require a great 
 poet, and we have none. 
 
 GIVING OFFENCE 
 
 I have the name of being aggressive, but, as 
 a matter of fact, I have scarcely ever attacked 
 any one personally. 
 
 Many hold a radical opinion to be an insult. 
 
 In an article in La Lectura, Ortega y Gasset 
 illustrates my propensity to become offensive by 
 recalling that as we left the Ateneo together one 
 afternoon, we encountered a blind man on the 
 Calle del Prado, singing a jota, whereupon I re- 
 marked: "An unspeakable song!" 
 
 Admitted. It is a fact, but I fail to see any 
 cause of offence. It is only another way of 
 saying more forcefully: "I do not like it, it 
 does not please me," or what you will. 
 
 I have often been surprised to find, after ex- 
 pressing an opinion, that I have been insulted 
 bitterly in reply. 
 
 96
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 At the outset of my literary career, Azorin and 
 I shared the ill will of everybody. 
 
 When Maeztu, Azorin, Carlos del Rio and my- 
 self edited a modest magazine, by the name of 
 Juventud, Azorin and I were the ones princi- 
 pally to be insulted. The experience was re- 
 peated later when we were both associated with 
 El Globo. 
 
 Azorin, perhaps, was attacked and insulted 
 more frequently, so that I was often in a posi- 
 tion to act as his champion. 
 
 Some years ago I published an article in the 
 Nuevo Mundo, in which I considered Vazquez 
 Mella and his refutation of the Kantian phi- 
 losophy, dwelling especially upon his seventeenth 
 mathematical proof of the existence of God. 
 The thing was a burlesque, but a conservative 
 paper took issue with me, called me an atheist, 
 a plagiarist, a drunkard and an ass. As for 
 being an atheist, I did not take that as an insult, 
 but as an honour. 
 
 Upon another occasion, I published an arti- 
 cle about Spanish women, with particular ref- 
 erence to Basque women, in which I maintained 
 that they sacrificed natural kindliness and sym- 
 pathy on the altars of honour and religion, 
 97
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 whereupon the Daughters of Mary of San Se- 
 bastian made answer, charging that I was a de- 
 generate son of their city, who had robbed them 
 of their honour, which was absolutely contrary 
 to the fact. In passing, they suggested to the 
 editor of the Nuevo Mundo that he should not 
 permit me to write again for the magazine. 
 
 I wrote an article once dealing with Maceo and 
 Cuba, whereupon a journalist from those parts 
 jumped up and called me a fat Basque ox. 
 
 The Catalans have also obliged me with some 
 choice insults, which I have found engaging. 
 When I lectured in Barcelona in the Casa del 
 Pueblo, La Veu de Catalunya undertook to re- 
 port the affair, picturing me as talking plati- 
 tudes before an audience of professional bomb 
 throwers and dynamiters, and experts with the 
 Browning gun. 
 
 Naturally, I was enchanted. 
 
 Recently, when writing for the review Espafia, 
 I had a similar experience, which reminded me 
 of my connection with the smaller periodicals of 
 fifteen years ago. Some gentlemen, mostly na- 
 tives of the provinces, approached the editor, 
 Ortega y Gasset, with the information that I was 
 not a fit person to contribute to a serious maga- 
 98
 
 THE EXTRARAD1US 
 
 zine, as what I wrote was not so, while my name 
 would ruin the sale of the weekly. 
 
 These pious souls and good Christians im- 
 agined that I might need that work in order to 
 earn my living, so in the odour of sanctity they 
 did whatever lay in their power to deprive me 
 of my means of support. Oh, noble souls! Oh, 
 ye of great heart! I salute you from a safe 
 distance, and wish you the most uncomfortable 
 beds in the most intolerable wards set apart for 
 scurvy patients, in any hospital of your choos- 
 ing, throughout the world. 
 
 THIRST FOR GLORY 
 
 Fame, success, popularity, the illusion of be- 
 ing known, admired and esteemed, appeal in 
 different ways to authors. To Salvador Rueda, 
 glory is a triumphant entrance into Tegucigalpa, 
 where he is taken to the Spanish Casino, and 
 crowned with a crown of real laurel. To 
 Unamuno, glory is the assurance that people 
 will be interested in him at least a thousand 
 years after he is dead. And to others the only 
 glory worth talking about is that courted by 
 the French writer, Rabbe, who busied him- 
 99
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 self in Spain with la gloire argent comptant. 
 Some yearn for a large stage with pennons and 
 salvos and banners, while others are content with 
 a smaller scene. 
 
 Ortega y Gasset says that to me glory re- 
 duces itself to the proportions of an agreeable 
 dinner, with good talk across the table. 
 
 And he is right. To mingle with pleasant, 
 intelligent, cordial persons is one of the more 
 alluring sorts of fame. 
 
 There is something seductive and ingratiat- 
 ing about table talk when it is spirited. A lux- 
 urious dining room, seating eight or ten guests, 
 of whom three or four are pretty women, one of 
 whom should be a foreigner; as many men, 
 none of them aristocrats generally speaking, 
 aristocrats are disagreeable nor shall we ad- 
 mit artists, for they are in the same class as the 
 aristocrats; one's neighbour, perhaps, is a banker, 
 or a Jew of aquiline feature, and then the talk 
 touches on life and on politics, relieved with a 
 little gallantry toward the ladies, from time to 
 time allowing to each his brief opportunity to 
 shine all this, beyond doubt, is most agreeable. 
 
 I like, too, to spend an afternoon conversing 
 with a number of ladies in a comfortable draw- 
 100
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 ing room, which is well heated. I visualize the 
 various rewards which are meted out by fame 
 as being housed invariably under a good roof. 
 What is not intimate, does not appeal to me. 
 
 I have often seen Guimera in a cafe on the 
 Rambla in Barcelona, drinking coffee at a table, 
 alone and forlorn, in the midst of a crowd of 
 shop clerks and commercial travellers. 
 
 "Is that Guimera?" I asked a Catalan jour- 
 nalist. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 And then he told me that they had tendered 
 him a tremendous testimonial some months prev- 
 iously, which had been attended by I don't know 
 how many hundreds of societies, all marching 
 with their banners. 
 
 I have no very clear idea of just what 
 Guimera has done, as it is many years since I 
 have gone to the theatre, but I know that he is 
 considered in Catalonia to be one of the glories 
 of the country. 
 
 I should not care for an apotheosis, and then 
 find myself left forlorn and alone to take my 
 coffee afterwards with a horde of clerks. 
 
 I may never write anything that will take the 
 world by storm most probably not; but if I do, 
 101
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 and it occurs to my fellow townsmen to organ- 
 ize one of these celebrations with flags, banners 
 and choral societies, they need not count upon 
 my attendance. They will not be able to dis- 
 cover me even with the aid of Sherlock Holmes. 
 
 When I am old, I hope to take coffee with 
 pleasant friends, whether it be in a palace or 
 a porter's lodge. I neither expect nor desire 
 flags, committees, nor waving banners. 
 
 Laurel does not seduce me, and you cannot 
 do it with bunting. 
 
 ELECTIVE ANTIPATHIES 
 
 As I have expressed my opinions of other 
 authors sharply, making them public with the 
 proper disgust, others have done the same with 
 me, which is but logical and natural, especially 
 in the case of a writer such as myself, who holds 
 that sympathy and antipathy are of the very 
 essence of art. 
 
 My opponents and myself differ chiefly in the 
 fact that I am more cynical than they, and so I 
 disclose my personal animus quite ingenuously, 
 which my enemies fail to do. 
 
 I hold that there are two kinds of morality; 
 102
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 morality of work and morality of play. The 
 morality of work is an immoral morality, which 
 teaches us to take advantage of circumstances 
 and to lie. The morality of play, for the rea- 
 son that it deals with mere futilities, is finer and 
 more chivalrous. 
 
 I believe that in literature and in all liberal 
 arts, the morality should be the morality of 
 play, while my opponents for the most part hold 
 that the morality of literature should be the 
 morality of work. I have never, consciously at 
 least, been influenced in my literary opinions by 
 practical considerations. My ideas may have 
 been capricious, and they are, they may even 
 be bad, but they have no ulterior practical mo- 
 tive. 
 
 My failure to be practical, together, perhaps, 
 with an undue obtuseness of perception, brings 
 me face to face with critics of two sorts: one, 
 esthetic; the other, social. 
 
 My esthetic critics say to me: 
 
 "You have not perfected your style, you have 
 not developed the technique of your novels. 
 You can scarcely be said to be literate." 
 
 I shrug my shoulders and reply: "Are you 
 sure?" 
 
 103
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 My social critics reproach me for my nega- 
 tive and destructive views. I do not know how 
 to create anything, I am incapable of enthus- 
 iasm, I cannot describe life, and so on. 
 
 This feeling seems logical enough, if it is sin- 
 cere, if it is honest, and I accept it as such, and 
 it does not offend me. 
 
 But, as some of my esthetic critics tell me: 
 "You are not an artist, you do not know how 
 to write," without feeling any deep conviction 
 on the subject, but rather fearing that perhaps I 
 may be an artist after all and that at last some- 
 body may come to think so, so among my critics 
 who pose as defenders of society, there are those 
 who are influenced by motives which are purely 
 utilitarian. 
 
 I am reminded of servants shouting at a man 
 picking flowers over the garden wall, or an ap- 
 ple from the orchard as he passes, who raise their 
 voices as high as possible so as to make their 
 officiousness known. 
 
 They shout so that their masters will hear. 
 
 "How dare that rascal pick flowers from the 
 
 garden? How dare he defy us and our masters? 
 
 Shall a beggar, who is not respectable, tell us 
 
 that our laws are not laws, that our honours are 
 
 104
 
 THE EXTRARADIUS 
 
 not honours, and that we are a gang of accom- 
 plished idiots?" 
 
 Yes, that is just what I tell them, and I shall 
 continue to do so as long as it is the truth. 
 
 Shout, you lusty louts in gaudy liveries, bark 
 you little lap-dogs, guard the gates, you govern- 
 ment inspectors and carabineers! I shall look 
 into your garden, which is also my garden, I 
 shall make off with anything from it that I am 
 able, and I shall say what I please. 
 
 To A MEMBER OF SEVERAL ACADEMIES 
 
 A certain Basque writer, one Senor de Loy- 
 arte, who is a member of several academies, and 
 Royal Commissioner of Education, assails me 
 violently upon social grounds in a book which 
 he has published, although the attack is veiled 
 as purely literary. 
 
 Senor de Loyarte is soporific as a general 
 rule, but in his polite sortie against me, he is 
 more amusing than is usual. His malice is so 
 keen that it very nearly causes him to appear 
 intelligent. 
 
 In literature, Senor de Loyarte and why 
 should Senor de Loyarte not be associated with 
 105
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 literature presents the figure of a fat, pale, 
 flabby boy in a priests' school, skulking under the 
 skirts of a Jesuit Father. 
 
 Sefior de Loyarte, like those little, chubby- 
 winged cherubs on sacristy ceilings, shakes his 
 arrowlet at me and lets fling a billet doux. 
 
 Senor de Loyarte says I smack of the cadaver, 
 that I am a plagiarist, an atheist, anti-religious, 
 anti-patriotic, and more to boot. 
 
 I shall not reply for it may be true. Yet it 
 is also true that Senor de Loyarte's noble words 
 will please his noble patrons, from whom, per- 
 haps, he may receive applause even more sub- 
 stantial than the pat on the shoulder of a Jesuit 
 Father, or the smile of every good Conserva- 
 tive, who is a defender of the social order. His 
 book is an achievement which should induct 
 Sefior de Loyarte into membership in several 
 more academies. Sefior de Loyarte is already 
 a Corresponding Member of the Spanish Acad- 
 emy, or of the Academy of History, I am not 
 quite sure which; but they are all the same. 
 Speaking of history, I should be interested to 
 know who did first introduce the sponge. 
 
 Senor de Loyarte is destined to be a member, 
 a member of academies all his life. 
 106
 
 IV 
 ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES 
 
 Diogenes Laertius tells us that when Zeno con- 
 sulted the oracle as to what he should do in 
 order to attain happiness in life, the deity re- 
 plied that he should assimilate himself with the 
 dead. Having understood, he applied himself 
 exclusively to the study of books. 
 
 Thus speaks Laertius, in the translation of 
 Don Jose Ortiz y Sanz. I confess that I should 
 not have understood the oracle. However, with- 
 out consulting any oracle, I have devoted my- 
 self for some time to reading books, whether an- 
 cient and modern, both out of curiosity and in 
 order to learn something of life. 
 
 CERVANTES, SHAKESPEARE, MOLIERE 
 
 For a long time, I thought that Shakespeare 
 
 was a writer who was unique and different from 
 
 all others. It seemed to me that the difference 
 
 between him and other writers was one of qual- 
 
 107
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 ity rather than of quantity. I felt that, as a 
 man, Shakespeare was of a different kind of 
 humanity; but I do not think so now. Shakes- 
 peare is no more the quintessence of the world's 
 literature than Plato and Kant are the quint- 
 essence of universal philosophy. I once ad- 
 mired the philosophy and characters of the au- 
 thor of Hamlet; when I read him today, what 
 most impresses me is his rhetoric, and, above 
 all, his high spirit. 
 
 Cervantes is not very sympathetic to me. He 
 is tainted with the perfidy of the man who has 
 made a pact with the enemy (with the Church, 
 the aristocracy, with those in power), and then 
 conceals the fact. Philosophically, in spite of 
 his enthusiasm for the Renaissance, he appears 
 vulgar and pedestrian to me, although he towers 
 above all his contemporaries on account of the 
 success of a single invention, that of Don Quix- 
 ote and Sancho, which is to literature what the 
 discovery of Newton was to Physics. 
 
 As for Moliere, he is a poor fellow, who never 
 attains the exuberance of Shakespeare, nor the 
 invention that immortalizes Cervantes. But his 
 taste is better than Shakespeare's and he is more 
 social, more modern than Cervantes. The half- 
 108
 
 ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES 
 
 century of more that separates the work of Cer- 
 vantes from that of Moliere, is not sufficient to 
 explain this modernity. Between the Spain of 
 Quixote and the France of Le Bourgeois Gentil- 
 homme, lies something deeper than time. Des- 
 cartes and Gassendi had lived in France, while, 
 on the other hand, the seed of Saint Ignatius Lo- 
 yola lay germinating in the Spain of Cervantes. 
 
 THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS 
 
 A French journalist who visited my house dur- 
 ing the summer, remarked : 
 
 "The ideas were great in the French Revolu- 
 tion; it was not the men." I replied: "I be- 
 lieve that the men of the French Revolution were 
 great, but not the ideas." 
 
 Of all the philosophical literature of the pre- 
 revolutionary period, what remains today? 
 What books exert influence? In France, ex- 
 cerpts from Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau 
 are still read in the schools, but outside of 
 France, they are read nowhere. 
 
 Only an extraordinary person would go away 
 for the summer with Montesquieu's Espr.it des 
 Lois, or Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile in his 
 109
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 grip. Montesquieu is demonstration of the fact 
 that a book cannot live entirely by virtue of cor- 
 rectness of style. 
 
 Of all the writers who enjoyed such fame in 
 the eighteenth century, the only one who will 
 bear reading today is Voltaire the Voltaire of 
 the Dictionnaire Philosophique and of the 
 novels. 
 
 Diderot, whom the French consider a great 
 man, is of no interest whatsoever to the modern 
 mind, at least to the mind which is not French. 
 He is almost as dull as Rousseau. La Re- 
 ligieuse is an utterly false little book. Some 
 years ago I loaned a copy to a young lady who 
 had just come from a convent. "I have never 
 seen anything like this," she said to me. "It is 
 a fantasy with no relation to the truth." That 
 was my idea. Jacques, le fataliste is tiresome; 
 Le Neveu de Rameau gives at first the impres- 
 sion that it is going to amount to something, to 
 something powerful such as the Satiricon of 
 Petronius, or El Buscon of Quevedo; but at the 
 end, it is nothing. 
 
 The only writer of the pre-revolutionary pe- 
 riod who can be read today with any pleasure 
 and this, perhaps, is because he does not at- 
 110
 
 ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES 
 
 tempt anything is Chamfort. His characters 
 and anecdotes are sufficiently highly flavoured to 
 defy the action of time. 
 
 THE ROMANTICISTS 
 Goethe 
 
 If a militia of genius should be formed on 
 Parnassus, Goethe would be the drum-major. 
 He is so great, so majestic, so serene, so full of 
 talent, so abounding in virtue, and yet, so anti- 
 pathetic! 
 
 Chateaubriand 
 
 A skin of Lacrymae Christi that has turned 
 sour. At times the good Viscount drops mo- 
 lasses into the skin to take away the taste of 
 vinegar; at other times, he drops in more vine- 
 gar to take away the sweet taste of the molasses. 
 He is both moth-eaten and sublime. 
 
 Victor Hugo 
 
 Victor Hugo, the most talented of rhetoricians! 
 Victor Hugo, the most exquisite of vulgarians! 
 Ill
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 Victor Hugo mere common sense dressed up as 
 art. 
 
 Stendhal 
 
 The inventor of a psychological automaton 
 moved by clock work. 
 
 Balzac 
 
 A nightmare, a dream produced by indiges- 
 tion, a chill, rare acuteness, equal obtuseness, a 
 delirium of splendours, cheap hardware, of pre- 
 tence and bad taste. Because of his ugliness, 
 because of his genius, because of his immorality, 
 the Danton of printers' ink. 
 
 Poe 
 
 A mysterious sphinx who makes one tremble 
 with lynx-like eyes, the goldsmith of magical 
 wonders. 
 
 Dickens 
 
 At once a mystic and a sad clown. The Saint 
 Vincent de Paul of the loosened string, the Saint 
 Francis of Assisi of the London Streets. Every- 
 thing is gesticulation, and the gesticulations are 
 ambiguous. When we think he is going to weep, 
 112
 
 ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES 
 
 he laughs; when we think he is going to laugh, 
 he cries. A remarkable genius who does every- 
 thing he can to make himself appear puny, yet 
 who is, beyond doubt, very great. 
 
 Larra l 
 
 A small, trained tiger shut up in a tiny cage. 
 He has all the tricks of a cat; he mews like 
 one, he lets you stroke his back, and there are 
 times when his fiercer instincts show in his eyes. 
 Then you realize that he is thinking: "How I 
 should love to eat you up!" 
 
 THE NATURALISTS 
 Flaubert 
 
 Flaubert is a heavy-footed animal. It is plain 
 that he is a Norman. All his work has great 
 specific gravity. He disgusts me. One of 
 Flaubert's master strokes was the conception of 
 the character of Homais, the apothecary, in 
 Madame Bovary. I cannot see, however, that 
 
 *A Spanish poet and satirist (180937), famous under 
 the pseudonym of Figaro. He committed suicide. The poet 
 Zorrilla first came into prominence through some verses read 
 at his tomb. 
 
 113
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 Homais is any more stupid than Flaubert him- 
 self, and he may even be less so. 
 
 The Giants 
 
 The good Zola, vigorous, dull and perspiring, 
 dubbed his contemporaries, the French natural- 
 istic novelists, "Giants." What an imagination 
 was possessed by Zola! 
 
 These "Giants" were none other than the Gon- 
 courts, whose insignificance approached at times 
 imbecility, and in addition, Alphonse Daudet, 
 with the air of a cheap comedian and an armful 
 of mediocre books a truly French diet, feeble, 
 but well seasoned. These poor Giants, of whom 
 Zola would talk, have become so weak and 
 shrunken with time, that nobody is able any 
 longer to make them out, even as dwarfs. 
 
 THE SPANISH REALISTS 
 
 The Spanish realists of the same period are 
 the height of the disagreeable. The most re- 
 pugnant of them all is Pereda. When I read 
 him, I feel as if I were riding on a balky, vicious 
 mule, which proceeds at an uncomfortable little 
 114
 
 ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES 
 
 trot, and then, all of a sudden, cuts stilted capers 
 like a circus horse. 
 
 THE RUSSIANS 
 Dostoievski 
 
 One hundred years 'hence Dostoievski's ap- 
 pearance in literature will be hailed as one of 
 the most extraordinary events of the nineteenth 
 century. Among the spiritual fauna of Europe, 
 his place will be that of the Diplodocus. 
 
 Tolstoi 
 
 A number of years ago I was in the habit of 
 visiting the Ateneo, and I used to argue there 
 with the habitues, who in general have succeeded 
 in damming up the channels through which other 
 men receive ideas. 
 
 "To my mind, Tolstoi is a Greek," I observed. 
 "He is serene, clear, his characters are god-like ; 
 all they think of are their love affairs, their pas- 
 sions. They are never called upon to face the 
 acute problem of subsistence, which is funda- 
 mental with us." 
 
 115
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 "Utter nonsense! There is nothing Greek 
 about Tolstoi," declared everybody. 
 
 Some years later at a celebration in honour of 
 Tolstoi, Anatole France chanced to remark: 
 "Tolstoi is a Greek." 
 
 When this fell from Anatole France, the 
 obstruction in the channels through which these 
 gentlemen of the Ateneo received their ideas 
 ceased for the moment to exist, and they began 
 to believe that, after all, Tolstoi might very well 
 have something of the Greek in him. 
 
 THE CRITICS 
 
 Sainte Beuve 
 
 Sainte Beuve writes as if he had always said 
 the last word, as if he were precisely at the 
 needle of the scales. Yet I feel that this writer 
 is not as infallible as he thinks. His interest 
 lies in his anecdote, in his malevolent insinua- 
 tion, in his bawdry. Beyond these, he has the 
 same Mediterranean features as the rest of us. 
 
 Taine 
 
 Hippolyte Taine is also one of those persons 
 who think they understand everything. And 
 116
 
 ADMIRATIONS AND INCOMPATIBILITIES 
 
 there are times when he understands nothing. 
 His History of English Literature, which makes 
 an effort to be broad and generous, is one of the 
 pettiest, most niggardly histories ever written 
 anywhere. His articles on Shakespeare, Walter 
 Scott and Dickens have been fabricated by a 
 French professor, which is to say that they are 
 among the most wooden productions of the uni- 
 versities of Europe. 
 
 Ruski 
 
 in 
 
 He impresses me as the Prince of Upstarts, 
 grandiloquent and at the same time unctuous, a 
 General in a Salvation Army of Art, or a monk 
 who is a devotee of an esthetic Doctrine which 
 has been drawn up by a Congress of Tourists. 
 
 Croce 
 
 The esthetic theory of Benedetto Croce has 
 proved another delusion to me. Rather than an 
 esthetic theory, it is a study of esthetic theories. 
 As in most Latin productions, the fundamental 
 question is not discussed therein, but the method 
 of approaching that question. 
 117
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 Clarin l 
 
 I have a poor opinion of Clarin, although some 
 of my friends regard him with admiration. As 
 a man, he must have been envious ; as a novelist, 
 he is dull and unhappy; as a critic, I am not cer- 
 tain that he was ever in the right. 
 
 1 Pseudonym of Leopoldo Alas, a Spanish critic and novel- 
 ist of the transition, born in Asturias, whose influence was 
 widely felt in Spanish letters. He died in 1905. 
 
 118
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 A thirst for some knowledge of philosophy 
 resulted in consulting Dr. Letamendi's book 
 on pathology during my student days. I also 
 purchased the works of Kant, Fichte, and Scho- 
 penhauer in the cheap editions which were pub- 
 lished by Zozaya. The first of these that I read 
 was Fichte's Science of Knowledge, of which I 
 understood nothing. It stirred in me a veritable 
 indignation against both author and translator. 
 Was philosophy nothing but mystification, as it is 
 assumed to be by artists and shop clerks? 
 
 Reading Parerga and Paralipomena recon- 
 ciled me to philosophy. After that I bought in 
 French The Critique of Pure Reason, The World 
 as Will and Idea, and a number of other books. 
 
 How was it that I, who am gifted with but little 
 tenacity of purpose, mustered up perseverance 
 enough to read difficult books for which I was 
 without preparation? I do not know, but the 
 fact is that I read them. 
 
 119
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 Years after this initiation into philosophy, I 
 began reading the works of Nietzsche, which im- 
 pressed me greatly. 
 
 Since then I have picked at this and that in 
 order to renew my philosophic store, but with- 
 out success. Some books and authors will not 
 agree with me, and I have not dared to venture 
 others. I have had a volume of Hegel's Logic 
 on my table for a long time. I have looked 
 at it, I have smelled of it, but courage fails me. 
 
 Yet I am attracted to metaphysics more than 
 to any other phase of philosophy. Political 
 philosophy, sociology and the common sense 
 schools please me least. Hobbes, Locke, Ben- 
 tham, Comte and Spencer I have never liked at 
 all. Even their Utopias, which ought to be 
 amusing, bore me profoundly, and this has been 
 true from Plato's Republic to Kropotkin's Con- 
 quest of Bread and Wells's A Modern Utopia. 
 Nor could I ever become interested in the pseudo- 
 philosophy of anarchism. One of the books 
 which have disappointed me the most is Max 
 Stirner's Ego and His Own. 
 
 Psychology is a science which I should like 
 to know. I have therefore skimmed through 
 the standard works of Wundt and Ziehen. After 
 120
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 reading them, I came to the conclusion that the 
 psychology which I am seeking, day by day and 
 every day, is not to be found in these treatises. 
 It is contained rather in the writings of Nietzsche 
 and the novels of Dostoievski. In the course of 
 time, I may succeed, perhaps, in entering the 
 more abstract domains of the science. 
 
 121
 
 VI 
 THE HISTORIANS 
 
 Miss Blimber, the school teacher in Dickens' s 
 Dombey and Son, could have died happily had 
 she known Cicero. Even if such a thing were 
 possible I should have no great desire to know 
 Cicero, but I should be glad to listen to a lecture 
 by Zeno in the portico of the Poecile at Athens, 
 or to Epicurus's meditations in his garden. 
 
 My ignorance of history has prevented me 
 from becoming deeply interested in Greece, al- 
 though now this begins to embarrass me, as a 
 curiosity about and sympathy for classical art 
 stirs within me. If I were a young man and 
 had the leisure, I might even begin the study 
 of Greek. 
 
 As it is, I feel that there are two Greeces: 
 one of statues and temples, which is academic 
 and somewhat cold; the other of philosophers 
 and tragedians, who convey to my mind more of 
 an impression of life and humanity. 
 
 Apart from the Greek, which I know but 
 122
 
 THE HISTORIANS 
 
 fragmentarily, I have no great admiration for 
 ancient literatures. The Old Testament never 
 aroused any devotion in me. Except for Ecclesi- 
 astes and one or two of the shorter books, it im- 
 presses me as repulsively cruel and antipathetic. 
 Among the Greeks, I have enjoyed Homer's 
 Odyssey and the comedies of Aristophanes. I 
 have read also Herodotus, Plutarch and Diogenes 
 Laertius. I am not an admirer of academic, 
 well written books, so I prefer Diogenes Laertius 
 to Plutarch. Plutarch impresses me as having 
 composed and arranged his narratives; not so 
 Diogenes Laertius. Plutarch forces the moral- 
 ity of his personages to the fore; Diogenes gives 
 details of both the good and the bad in his. 
 Plutarch is solid and systematic; Diogenes is 
 lighter and lacks system. I prefer Diogenes 
 Laertius to Plutarch, and if I were especially in- 
 terested in any of the illustrious ancients of 
 whom they write, I should vastly prefer the let- 
 ters of the men themselves, if any existed, or 
 otherwise the gossip of their tentmakers or 
 washerwomen, to any lives written of them by 
 either Diogenes Laertius or Plutarch. 
 
 123
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 THE ROMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 When I turned to the composition of historical 
 novels, I desired to ascertain if the historical 
 method had been reduced to a system. I read 
 Lucian's Instructions for Writing History, an 
 essay with the same title, or with a very similar 
 one, by the Abbe Mably, some essays by Sim- 
 mel, besides a book by a German professor, 
 Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen 
 Methods. 
 
 I next read and re-read the Roman historians 
 Julius Caesar, Tacitus, Sallust and Suetonius. 
 
 Sallust 
 
 All these Roman historians no doubt were 
 worthy gentlemen, but they create an atmosphere 
 of suspicion. When reading them, you suspect 
 that they are not always telling the whole truth. 
 I read Sallust and feel that he is lying; he has 
 composed his narrative like a novel. 
 
 In the Memorial de Sainte Helene, it is re- 
 corded that on March 26, 1816, Napoleon read 
 the conspiracy of Catiline in the Roman History. 
 The Emperor observed that he was unable to 
 124
 
 THE HISTORIANS 
 
 understand what Catiline was driving at. No 
 matter how much of a bandit he may have been, 
 he must have had some object, some social pur- 
 pose in view. 
 
 The observation of this political genius is one 
 which must occur to all who read Sallust's book. 
 How could Catiline have secured the support of 
 the most brilliant men of Rome, among them of 
 Julius Caesar, if his only plan and object had 
 been to loot and burn Rome? It is not logical. 
 Evidently Sallust lies, as governmental writers 
 in Spain lie today when they speak of Lerroux 
 or Ferrer, or as the republican supporters of 
 Thiers lied in 1871, characterizing the Paris 
 Commune. 
 
 Tacitus 
 
 Tacitus is another great Roman historian who 
 is theatrical, melodramatic, solemn, full of 
 grand gestures. He also creates an atmosphere 
 of suspicion, of falsehood. Tacitus has some- 
 thing of the inquisitor in him, of the fanatic in 
 the cause of virtue. He is a man of austere 
 moral attitude, which is a pose that a thorough- 
 going scamp finds it easy to assume. 
 125
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 A temperament such as that of Tacitus is fatal 
 to theatrical peoples like the Italians, Spaniards, 
 and French of the South. From it springs that 
 type of Sicilian, Calabrian, and Andalusian 
 politician who is a great lawyer and an eloquent 
 orator, who declaims publicly in the forum, 
 and then reaches an understanding privately 
 with bandits and thugs. 
 
 Suetonius 
 
 Suetonius, although deficient both in the pomp 
 and sententiousness of Tacitus, makes no attempt 
 to compose his story, nor to impart moral in- 
 struction, but tells us what he knows, simply. 
 His Lives of the Twelve Ccesars is the greatest 
 collection of horrors in history. You leave it 
 with the imagination perturbed, scrutinizing 
 yourself to discover whether you may not be 
 yourself a hog or a wild beast. Suetonius gives 
 us an account of men rather than a history of 
 the politics of emperors, and surely this method 
 is more interesting and veracious. I place more 
 faith in the anecdotes which grow up about an 
 historical figure than I do in his laws. 
 
 Polybius is a mixture of scepticism and com- 
 126
 
 THE HISTORIANS 
 
 mon sense. He is what Bayle, Montesquieu and 
 Voltaire will come to be centuries hence. 
 
 As far as Caesar's Commentaries are con- 
 cerned, in spite of the fact that they have been 
 manipulated very skilfully, they are one of the 
 most satisfying and instructive books that can be 
 read. 
 
 MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORIANS 
 
 I have very little knowledge of the historians 
 of the Renaissance or of those prior to the French 
 Revolution. Apart from the chroniclers of indi- 
 vidual exploits, such as Lopez de Ayala, Bran- 
 tome, and the others, they are wholly colourless, 
 and either pseudo-Roman or pseudo-Greek. 
 Even Machiavelli has a personal, Italian side, 
 which is mocking and incisive and this is all 
 that is worth while in him and he has a pre- 
 tentious pseudo-Roman side, which is unspeak- 
 ably tiresome. 
 
 Generally considered, the more carefully com- 
 posed and smoothly varnished the history, the 
 duller it will be found; while the more personal 
 revelations it contains, the more engaging. 
 Most readers today, for example, prefer Bernal 
 Diaz del Castillo's True History of the Conquest 
 127
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 of New Spain to Solis's History of the Conquest 
 of Mexico. One is the book of a soldier, who 
 had a share in the deeds described, and who re- 
 veals himself for what he is, with all his preju- 
 dices, vanities and arrogance; the other is a 
 scholar's attempt to imitate a classic history and 
 to maintain a monotonous music throughout his 
 paragraphs. 
 
 Practically all the historians who have fol- 
 lowed the French Revolution have individual 
 character, and some have too much of it, as has 
 Carlyle. They distort their subject until it be- 
 comes a pure matter of fantasy, or mere litera- 
 ture, or sinks even to the level of a family dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 Macaulay's moral pedantry, Thiers's cold and 
 repulsive cretinism, the melodramatic, gesticula- 
 tory effusiveness of Michelet are all typical 
 styles. 
 
 Historical bazaars a la Cesare Cantu may be 
 put on one side, as belonging to an inferior 
 genre. They remind me of those great nine- 
 teenth century world's fairs, vast, miscellaneous 
 and exhausting. 
 
 As for the German historians, they are not 
 translated, so I do not know them. I have read 
 128
 
 THE HISTORIANS 
 
 only a few essays of Simmel, which I think ex- 
 tremely keen, and Stewart Chamberlain's book 
 upon the foundations of the nineteenth century, 
 which, if the word France were to be substituted 
 for the word Germany, might easily have been 
 the production of an advanced nationalist of the 
 Action Frangaise. 
 
 129
 
 VII 
 
 MY FAMILY 
 FAMILY MYTHOLOGY 
 
 The celebrated Vicomte de Chateaubriand, 
 after flaunting an ancestry of princes and kings 
 in his Memoires d'outre-tombe, then turns about 
 and tells us that he attaches no importance to 
 such matters. 
 
 I shall do the same. I intend to furbish up 
 our family history and mythology, and then I 
 shall assert that I attach no importance to them. 
 And, what is more, I shall be telling the truth. 
 
 My researches into the life of Aviraneta * 
 have drawn me of late to the genealogical field, 
 and I have looked into my family, which is 
 equivalent to compounding with tradition and 
 even with reaction. 
 
 I have unearthed three family myths: the 
 
 1 A kinsman of Baroja and protagonist of his series of 
 historical novels under the general title of Memoirs of a 
 Man of Action. 
 
 130
 
 MY FAMILY 
 
 Goni myth, the Zornoza myth, and the Alzate 
 myth. 
 
 The Goni myth, vouched for by an aunt of 
 mine who died in San Sebastian at an age of 
 ninety or more, established, according to her, 
 that she was a descendant of Don Teodosio de 
 Goni, a Navarrese caballero who lived in the 
 time of Witiza, and who, after killing his father 
 and mother at the instigation of the devil, be- 
 took himself to Mount Aralar wearing an iron 
 ring about his neck, and dragging a chain behind 
 him, thus pilloried to do penance. One day, a 
 terrible dragon appeared before him during a 
 storm. 
 
 Don Teodosio lifted up his soul unto God, 
 and thereupon the Archangel Saint Michael re- 
 vealed himself to him, in his dire extremity, and 
 broke his chains, in commemoration of which 
 event Don Teodosio caused to be erected the 
 chapel of San Miguel in Excelsis on Mount 
 Aralar. 
 
 There were those who endeavoured to convince 
 my aunt that in the time of this supposititious 
 Don Teodosio, which was the early part of the 
 eighth century, surnames had not come into use 
 in the Basque country, and even, indeed, that 
 131
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 there were at that time no Christians there in 
 short they maintained that Don Teodosio was a 
 solar myth; but they were not able to convince my 
 aunt. She had seen the chapel of San Miguel 
 on Aralar, and the cave in which the dragon 
 lived, and a document wherein Charles V. 
 granted to Juan de Goni the privilege of renam- 
 ing his house the Palace of San Miguel, as well as 
 of adding a dragon to his coat of arms, besides a 
 cross in a red field, and a broken chain. 
 
 The Zornoza myth was handed down through 
 my paternal grandmother of that name. 
 
 I remember having heard this lady say when 
 I was a child, that her family might be traced 
 in a direct line to the chancellor Pero Lopez de 
 Ayala, and, I know not through what lateral 
 branches, also to St. Francis Xavier. 
 
 My grandmother vouched for the fact that her 
 father had sold the documents and parchments 
 in which these details were set forth, to a titled 
 personage from Madrid. 
 
 The Zornozas boast an escutcheon which is 
 embellished with a band, a number of wolves, 
 and a legend whose import I do not recall. 
 
 Indeed, wolves occur in all the escutcheons of 
 the Baroja, Alzate and Zornoza families, in so 
 132
 
 MY FAMILY 
 
 far as I have been able to discover, and I take 
 them to be more or less authentic. We have 
 wolves passant, wolves rampant, and wolves mor- 
 dant. The Goni escutcheon also displays hearts. 
 If I become rich, which I do not anticipate, I shall 
 have wolves and hearts blazoned on the doors of 
 my dazzling automobile, which will not prevent 
 me from enjoying myself hugely inside of it. 
 
 Turning to the Alzate myth, it too runs back 
 to antiquity and the primitive struggles of rival 
 families of Navarre and Labourt. The Alzates 
 have been lords of Vera ever since the fourteenth 
 century. 
 
 The legend of the Alzates of Vera de Navarra 
 relates that one Don Rodrigo, master of the vil- 
 lage in the fifteenth century, fell in love with a 
 daughter of the house of Urtubi, in France, near 
 Urruna, and married her. Don Rodrigo went 
 to live in Urtubi and became so thoroughly gal- 
 licized that he never cared to return to Spain, 
 so the people of Vera banded together, dispos- 
 sessed him of his honours and dignity, and se- 
 questrated his lands. 
 
 In the early part of the nineteenth century, my 
 great-grandfather, Sebastian Ignacio de Alzate, 
 was among those who assembled at Zubieta in 
 133
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 1813 to take part in the rebuilding of San Sebas- 
 tian, and this great-grandfather was uncle to Don 
 Eugenio de Aviraneta, a good relative of mine, 
 protagonist of my latest books. 
 
 St. Francis Xavier, Don Teodosio de Goni, 
 Pero Lopez de Ayala, Aviraneta a saint, a 
 revered worthy, an historian, a conspirator 
 these are our family gods. 
 
 Now let me take my stand with Chateaubriand 
 as attaching no importance to such things. 
 
 OUR HISTORY 
 
 Baroja is a hamlet in the province of Alava in 
 the district of Penacerrada. According to Fer- 
 nandez Guerra, it is an Iberian name derived 
 from Asiatic Iberia. I believe that I have read 
 in Campion that the word Baroja is compounded 
 from the Celtic bar, meaning mountain, and the 
 Basque otza, ocha meaning cold. In short, a 
 cold mountain. 
 
 The district of Penacerrada, which includes 
 Baroja, is an austere land, covered with intri- 
 cate mountain ranges which are clad with trees 
 and scrub live oaks. 
 
 Hawks abound. In his treatise on falconry, 
 134
 
 MY FAMILY 
 
 Zuniga mentions the Bahari falcon, propagated 
 principally among the mountains of Penacerrada. 
 
 My ancestors originally called themselves 
 Martinez de Baroja. One Martin had a son who 
 was known as Martinez. This Martinez (son of 
 Martin) doubtless left the village, and as there 
 were others of the name Martinez (sons of Mar- 
 tin), they dubbed him the Martinez of Baroja, or 
 Martinez de Baroja. 
 
 The Martinez de Barojas lived in that coun- 
 try for many years; they were hidalgos, Chris- 
 tians of old stock. And mere is still a family 
 of the name in Penacerrada. 
 
 One Martinez de Baroja, by name Juan, who 
 lived in the village of Samiano, upon becoming 
 outraged because of an attempt to force him to 
 pay tribute to the Count of Salinas in those 
 days a very natural source of offence took an 
 appeal in the year 1616 from a ruling of the 
 Prosecuting Attorney of His Majesty and the 
 Alcaldes and Regidors of the Earldom of Tre- 
 vifio, and he was sustained by the Chamber of 
 Hidalgos at Valladolid, which decided in his 
 favour in a decree dated the eighth day of the 
 month of August, 1619. 
 
 This same hidalgo, Juan Martinez de Baroja, 
 135
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 moved the enforcement of this decree, as is af- 
 firmed by a writ of execution which is inscribed 
 on forty-five leaves of parchment, to which is 
 attached a leaden seal pendant from a cord of 
 silk, at the end of which may be found the stipu- 
 lations of the judgment entered against the Mu- 
 nicipality and Corporation of the Town and 
 Earldom of Trevino and the Village of Samiano. 
 
 The Martinez de Barojas, despite the fact that 
 they sprang from the land of the falcon and the 
 hawk, in temper must have been dark, heavy, 
 rough. They were members of the Brotherhood 
 of San Martin de Penacerrada, which apparently 
 was of great account in those regions, besides 
 being regidors and alcaldes of the Santa Her- 
 mandad, a rural police and judicial organiza- 
 tion which extended throughout the country. 
 
 In the eighteenth century, one of the family, 
 my great-grandfather Rafael, doubtless possess- 
 ing more initiative, or having more of the hawk 
 in him than the others, grew tired of ploughing 
 up the earth, and left the village, turning phar- 
 macist, setting up in 1803 at'Oyarzun, in Gui- 
 piizcoa. This Rafael shortened his name and 
 signed himself Rafael de Baroja. 
 
 Don Rafael must have been a man of modern
 
 MY FAMILY 
 
 sympathies, for he bought a printing press and 
 began to issue pamphlets and even occasional 
 books. 
 
 Evidently Don Rafael was also a man of radi- 
 cal ideas. He published a newspaper at San 
 Sebastian in 1822 and 1823, which he called El 
 Liberal Guipuzcoano. I have seen only one 
 copy of this, and that was in the National 
 Library. 
 
 That this newspaper was extremely liberal, 
 may be judged by the articles that were reprinted 
 from it in El Espectador, the Masonic journal 
 published at Madrid during the period. Don 
 Rafael had connections both with constitutional- 
 ists and members of the Gallic party. There 
 must have been antecedents of a liberal charac- 
 ter in our family, as Don Rafael's uncle, Don 
 Juan Jose de Baroja, at first a priest at Pipaon 
 and later at Vitoria, had baen enrolled in the 
 Basque Sociedad Economica. 
 
 Don Rafael had two sons, Ignacio Ramon and 
 Pio. They settled in San Sebastian as printers. 
 Pio was my grandfather. 
 
 My second family name, Nessi, ,as I have said 
 before, comes out of Lombardy and the city of 
 Como. 
 
 , 137
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 The Nessis of Como fled from Austrian rule, 
 and came to Spain, probably peddling mouse- 
 traps and santi boniti barati. 
 
 One of the Nessis, who survived until a short 
 time ago, always said that the family had been 
 very comfortably off in Lombardy, where one of 
 his relatives, Guiseppe Nessi, a doctor, had been 
 professor in the University of Pavia during the 
 eighteenth century, besides being major in the 
 Austrian Army. 
 
 As mementos of the Italian branch of the fam- 
 ily, I still preserve a few views of Lake Como 
 in my house, a crude image of the Christ of the 
 Annunziatta, stamped on cloth, and a volume of 
 a treatise on surgery by Nessi, which bears the 
 imprimatur of the Inquisition at Venice. 
 
 138
 
 VIII 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 SAN SEBASTIAN 
 
 I was born in San Sebastian on the 28th of 
 December, 1872. So I am not only a Guipuz- 
 coan but a native of San Sebastian. The former 
 I regard as an honour, but the latter means very 
 little to me. 
 
 I should prefer to have been born in a moun- 
 tain hamlet or in a small coast town, rather than 
 in a city of summer visitors and hotel keepers. 
 
 Garat, who was a most conventional person 
 who lived in Bayonne, always used to maintain 
 that he came from Ustariz. I might say that I 
 am from Vera del Bidasoa, but I should not de- 
 ceive myself. 
 
 There are several reasons why I dislike San 
 Sebastian : 
 
 In the first place, the city is not beautiful, 
 when it might well be so. It is made up of 
 straight streets which are all alike, together with 
 139
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 two or three monuments that are horrible. The 
 general construction is miserable and shoddy. 
 Although excellent stone abounds in the neigh- 
 bourhood, no one has had the sense to erect any- 
 thing either noble or dignified. Cheap houses 
 confront the eye on all sides, whether simple or 
 pretentious. Whenever the citizens of San Se- 
 bastian raise their hands and in this they are 
 abetted by the Madrilenos they do something 
 ugly. They have defaced Monte Igueldo al- 
 ready, and now they are defacing the Castillo. 
 Tomorrow, they will manage somehow to spoil 
 the sea, the sky, and the air. 
 
 As for the spirit of the city, it is lamentable. 
 There is no interest in science, art, literature, 
 history, politics, or anything else. All that the 
 inhabitants think about are the King, the Queen 
 Regent, yachts, bull fights, and the latest fash- 
 ions in trousers. 
 
 San Sebastian is a conglomeration of parvenus 
 and upstarts from Pamplona, Saragossa, Valla- 
 dolid, Chile and Chuquisaca, who are anxious to 
 show themselves off. Some do this by walking 
 alongside of the King, or by taking coffee with a 
 famous bull-fighter, or by bowing to some aristo- 
 crat. The young men of San Sebastian are 
 140
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 among the most worthless in Spain. I have al- 
 ways looked upon them as infra human. 
 
 As for the ladies, many of them might be 
 taken for princesses in summer, but their winter 
 tertulias are on a level with a porter's lodge 
 where they play julepe. It is a card game, but 
 the word means dose, and Madame Recamier 
 would have fainted at the mention of it. 
 
 When I observe these parvenus' attempts to 
 shine, I think to myself: "The ostentation of 
 the freshman year at college. How unfortunate 
 that some of us have moved on to the doctorate!" 
 
 No one reads in San Sebastian. They run 
 over the society news, and then drop the paper 
 for fear their brains will begin to smoke. 
 
 This city, imagining itself to be so cultivated, 
 although it really is a new town, is under the 
 domination of a few Jesuit fathers, who, like 
 most of the present days sons of Loyola, are 
 coarse, heavy and wholly lacking in real ability. 
 
 The Jesuit manages the women, which is not a 
 very difficult thing to do, as he holds the leading 
 strings of the sexual life in his hands. In addi- 
 tion he influences the men. 
 
 He assists the young who are of good social 
 standing, who belong to distinguished families, 
 141
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 and brings about desirable matches. The poor 
 can do anything they like. They are at liberty 
 to eat, to get drunk, to do whatever they will ex- 
 cept to read. These unhappy, timid, torpid 
 clerks and hangers-on imagine they are free men 
 whenever they get drunk. They do not see that 
 they are like the Redskins, whom the Yankees 
 poisoned with alcohol so as to hold them in check. 
 
 I inspected a club installed in a house in the 
 older part of the city some years ago. 
 
 A sign on one door read "Library." When it 
 was opened, I was shown, laughing, a room 
 filled with bottles. 
 
 "If a Jesuit could see this, he would be in 
 ecstasy," I exclaimed. "Yes, replacing books 
 with wines and liquors! What a business for 
 the sons of Saint Ignatius!" 
 
 In spite of all its display, all its tinsel, all 
 its Jesuitism, all its bad taste, San Sebastian will 
 become an important, dignified city within a very 
 few years. When that time comes, the author 
 who has been born there, will not prefer to hail 
 from some hamlet buried in the mountains, 
 rather than from the capital of Guipiizcoa. But 
 I myself prefer it. I have no city, and I hold 
 myself to be strictly extra-urban. 
 142
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 MY PARENTS 
 
 My father, Serafin Baroja y Zornoza, was a 
 mining engineer, who wrote books both in Gas- 
 tilian and Basque, and he, too, came from San 
 Sebastian. My mother's name is Carmen Nessi 
 y Goiii. She was born in Madrid. 
 
 I should be a very good man. My father was 
 a good man, although he was capricious and arbi- 
 trary, and my mother is a good woman, firmer 
 and more positive in her manifestations of virtue. 
 Yet, I am not without reputation for ferocity, 
 which, perhaps, is deserved. 
 
 I do not know why I believed for a long while 
 that I had been born in the Calle del Puyuelo in 
 San Sebastian, where we once lived. The street 
 is well within the old town, and truly ugly and 
 forlorn. The mere idea of it was and is dis- 
 tasteful to me. 
 
 When I complained to my mother about my 
 birthplace and its want of attractiveness, she 
 replied that I was born in a beautiful house 
 near the esplanade of La Zurriola, fronting on 
 the Calle de Oquendo, which belonged to my 
 grandmother and looked out upon the sea, al- 
 though the house does so no longer, as a theatre 
 143
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 has been erected directly in front. I am glad 
 that I was born near the sea, because it suggests 
 freedom and change. 
 
 My paternal grandmother, Dona Concepcion 
 Zornoza, was a woman of positive ideas and 
 somewhat eccentric. She was already old when 
 I knew her. She had mortgaged several houses 
 which she owned in the city in order to build the 
 house which was occupied by us in La Zurriola. 
 
 Her plan was to furnish it and rent it to King 
 Amadeo. Before Amadeo arrived at San Se- 
 bastian, however, the Carlist war broke out, and 
 the monarch of the house of Savoy was com- 
 pelled to abdicate, and my grandmother to 
 abandon her plans. 
 
 My earliest recollection is the Carlist attempt 
 to bombard San Sebastian. It is a memory 
 which has now grown very dim, and what I saw 
 has been confused with what I have heard. I 
 have a confused recollection of the bringing in 
 of soldiers on stretchers, and of having peeped 
 over the wall of a little cemetery near the city, 
 in which corpses were laid out, still unburied. 
 
 As I have said, my father was a mining en- 
 gineer, but during the war he was engaged in 
 teaching natural history at the Institute. I have 
 144
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 no idea how this came about. He was also one 
 of the Liberal volunteers. 
 
 I have a vague idea that one night I was taken 
 from my bed, wrapped up in a mantle, and car- 
 ried to a chalet on the Concha, belonging to one 
 Errazu, who was a relative of my mother's. 
 We lived there for a time in the cellar of the 
 chalet. 
 
 Three shells, which were known in those days 
 as cucumbers, dropped on the house, and 
 wrecked the roof, making a great hole in the 
 wall which separated our garden from the next. 
 
 MONSIGNOR, THE CAT 
 
 Monsignor was a handsome yellow cat be- 
 longing to us while we were living in the cellar 
 of Seiior Errazu's chalet. 
 
 From what I have since learned, his name was 
 a tribute to the extraordinary reputation en- 
 joyed at that period by Monsignor Simeoni. 
 
 Monsignor I am referring to the yellow cat 
 was intelligent. A bell surmounted the Cas- 
 tillo de la Mota at San Sebastian, by whose side 
 was stationed a look-out. When the look-out 
 spied the flash of Carlist guns, he rang the bell, 
 145
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 and then the townspeople retired into the door- 
 ways and cellars. 
 
 Monsignor was aware of the relation of the 
 bell to the cannonading, so when the bell rang, he 
 promptly withdrew into the house, even going so 
 far sometimes as to creep under the beds. 
 
 My father had friends who were not above 
 going down into our cellar on such occasions so 
 as better to observe the manoeuvres of the cat. 
 
 Two LUNATICS 
 
 After the war, I used to stroll as a boy with 
 my mother and brothers to the Castillo de la 
 Mota on Sundays. It was truly a beautiful walk, 
 which will soon be ruined utterly by the citizens 
 of San Sebastian. We looked out to sea from 
 the Castillo and then we talked with the guard. 
 We often met a lunatic there, who was in the 
 care of a servant. As soon as he caught sight 
 of us children, the lunatic was happy at once, 
 but if a woman came near him, he ran away and 
 flattened himself against the walls, kicking and 
 crying out: "Blind dog! Blind dog!" 
 
 I remember also having seen a young woman, 
 who was insane, in a great house which we used 
 146
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 to visit in those days at Loyola. She gesticu- 
 lated and gazed continually into a deep well, 
 where a half moon of black water was visible far 
 below. These lunatics, one at the Castillo and 
 the other in that great house, haunted my imag- 
 ination as a child. 
 
 THE HAWK 
 
 My latest recollection of San Sebastian is of 
 a hawk, which we brought home to our house 
 from the Castillo. 
 
 Some soldiers gave us the hawk when it was 
 still very young, and it grew up and became ac- 
 customed to living indoors. We fed it snails, 
 which it gulped down as if they were bonbons. 
 
 When it was full-grown, it escaped to the court- 
 yard and attacked our chickens, to say nothing of 
 all the cats of the neighbourhood. It hid under 
 the beds during thundershowers. 
 
 When we moved away from San Sebastian, we 
 were obliged to leave the hawk behind. We car- 
 ried him up to the Castillo one day, turned him 
 loose, and off he flew. 
 
 147
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 IN MADRID 
 
 We moved from San Sebastian to Madrid. 
 My father had received an appointment to the 
 Geographic and Political Institute. We lived on 
 the Calle Real, just beyond the Glorieta de Bil- 
 bao, in a street which is now a prolongation of 
 the Calle de Fuencarral. 
 
 Opposite our house, there was a piece of high 
 ground, which has not yet been removed, which 
 went by the name of "La Era del Mico," or "The 
 Monkey Field." Swings and merry-go-rounds 
 were scattered all over it, so that the diversions 
 of "La Era del Mico" together with the two- 
 wheeled calashes and chaises which were still 
 in use in those days, and the funerals passing 
 continually through the street, were the amuse- 
 ments which were provided ready-made for us, 
 as we looked down from our balcony. 
 
 Two sensational executions took place while 
 we lived here those of the regicide Otero and 
 of Oliva one following closely on the heels of 
 the other. We heard the Salve, or prayer, which 
 is sung by the prisoners for the criminal awaiting 
 death, hawked about us then on the streets. 
 
 148
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 IN PAMPLONA 
 
 From Madrid we went to Pamplona. Pam- 
 plona was still a curious city maintaining cus- 
 toms which would have been appropriate to a 
 state of war. The draw-bridges were raised at 
 night, only one, or perhaps two, gates being left 
 open, I am not certain which. 
 
 Pamplona proved an amusing place for a 
 small boy. There were the walls with their 
 glacis, their sentry boxes, their cannon; there 
 were the gates, the river, the cathedral and the 
 surrounding quarters all of them very attrac- 
 tive to us. 
 
 We studied at the Institute and committed all 
 sorts of pranks like the other students. We 
 played practical jokes in the houses of the 
 canons, and threw stones at the bishop's palace, 
 many of the windows of which were already 
 paneless and forlorn. 
 
 We also made wild excursions to the roof of 
 our house and to those of other houses in the 
 neighbourhood, prying about the garrets and 
 peering down over the cornices into the court- 
 yards. 
 
 Once we seized a stuffed eagle, cherished by a 
 149
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 neighbour, hauled it to the attic, pulled it through 
 the skylight to the roof, and flung it down into 
 the street, creating a genuine panic among the 
 innocent passers-by, when they saw the huge bird 
 drop at their feet. 
 
 One of my most vivid memories of Pamplona 
 is seeing a criminal on his way to execution 
 passing our house, attired in a round cap and 
 yellow robe. 
 
 It was one of the sights which has impressed 
 me most. Later in the afternoon, driven by 
 curiosity, knowing that the man who had been 
 garroted must be still on the scaffold, I ventured 
 alone to see him, and remained there examining 
 him closely for a long time. When I returned 
 home that night, I was unable to sleep because 
 of the impression he had made. 
 
 DON Tmso LAREQUI 
 
 Many other vivid memories of Pamplona re- 
 main with me, never to be forgotten. I remem- 
 ber a lad of our own age who died, leaping from 
 the wall, and then there were our adventures 
 along the river. 
 
 Another terrible memory was associated with 
 150
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 the cathedral. I had begun my first year of 
 Latin, and was exactly nine at the time. 
 
 We had come out of the Institute, and were 
 watching a funeral. Afterwards, three or four 
 of the boys, among whom were my brother Ri- 
 cardo and myself, entered the cathedral. The 
 echo of the responses was ringing in my ears 
 and I hummed them, as I wandered about the 
 aisles. 
 
 Suddenly, a black shadow shot from behind 
 one of the confessionals, pounced upon me and 
 seized me around the neck with both hands, al- 
 most choking me. I was paralyzed with fear. 
 It proved to be a fat, greasy canon, by name 
 Don Tirso Larequi. 
 
 "What is your name?" he shouted, shaking me 
 vigorously. 
 
 I could not answer because of my fright. 
 
 "What is his name?" the priest demanded of 
 the other boys. 
 
 "His name is Antonio Garcia," replied my 
 brother Ricardo, coolly. 
 
 "Where does he live?" 
 
 "In the Calle de Curia, Number 14." 
 
 There was no such place, of course. 
 
 "I shall see your father at once," shouted the 
 151
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 priest, and he rushed out of the cathedral like a 
 bull. 
 
 My brother and I then made our escape 
 through the cloister. 
 
 This red-faced priest, fat and ferocious, rush- 
 ing out of the dark to choke a nine-year-old boy, 
 has always been to me a symbol of the Catholic 
 religion. 
 
 This experience of my boyhood partly ex- 
 plains my anti-clericalism. I recall Don Tirso 
 with an undying hate, and were he still alive I 
 have no idea whether he is or not I should not 
 hesitate to climb up to the roof of his house some 
 dark night, and shout down his chimney in a cav- 
 ernous voice: "Don Tirso! You are a damned 
 villain!" 
 
 A VISIONARY ROWDY 
 
 I was something of a rowdy as a boy and 
 rather quarrelsome. The first day I went to 
 school in Pamplona, I came out disputing with 
 another boy of my own age, and we fought in the 
 street until we were separated by a cobbler and 
 the blows of a leather strap, to which he added 
 kicks. Later, I foolishly quarrelled and fought 
 152
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 whenever the other boys set me on. In our 
 stone-throwing escapades on the outskirts of the 
 town, I was always the aggressor, and quite in- 
 defatigable. 
 
 When I began to study medicine, I found that 
 my aggressiveness had departed completely. 
 One day after quarrelling with another student 
 in the cloisters of San Carlos, I challenged him 
 to fight. When we got out on the street, it 
 struck me as foolish to goad him to hit me in the 
 eye or else to land on my nose with his fist, and I 
 slipped off and went home. I lost my morale 
 as a bully then and there. Although I was a 
 fighter from infancy, I was also something of a 
 dreamer, and the two strains scarcely make a 
 harmonious blend. 
 
 Before I was grown, I saw Gisbert's Death of 
 the Comuneros reproduced as a chromo. For a 
 long, long while, I always seemed to see that 
 picture hanging in all its variety of colour on the 
 wall before me at night. For months and 
 months after my vigil with the body of the man 
 who had been garroted outside of Pamplona, I 
 never entered a dark room but that his image rose 
 up before me in all its gruesome details. I also 
 passed through a period of disagreeable dreams. 
 153
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 Some time would elapse after I awoke before I 
 was able to tell where I was, and I was fright- 
 ened by it. 
 
 V. 
 
 SARASATE 
 
 It was my opinion then, and still is, that a 
 fiesta at Pamplona is among the most vapid 
 things in the world. 
 
 There was a mixture of incomprehension and 
 culture in Pamplona, that was truly ridiculous. 
 The people would devote several days to going to 
 bull fights, and then turn about, when evening 
 came, and welcome Sarasate with Greek fire. 
 
 A rude and fanatical populace forgot its orgy 
 of blood to acclaim a violinist. And what a 
 violinist! He was one of the most effeminate 
 and grotesque individuals in the world. I can 
 see him yet, strutting along with his long hair, 
 his ample rear, and his shoes with their little 
 quarter-heels, which gave him the appearance of 
 a fat cook dressed up in men's clothes for 
 Carnival. 
 
 When Sarasate died he left a number of 
 trinkets which had been presented to him during
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 his artistic career mostly match-boxes, ciga- 
 rette cases, and the like which the Town Coun- 
 cil of Pamplona has assembled and now exhibits 
 in glass cases, but which, in the public interest, 
 should be promptly disposed of at auction. 
 
 ROBINSON CRUSOE AND THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND 
 
 During my life in Pamplona, my brother Ri- 
 cardo imparted his enthusiasm for two stories to 
 me. These were Robinson Crusoe and Jules 
 Verne's The Mysterious Island, or rather, I 
 should say they were The Mysterious Island and 
 Robinson Crusoe, because we preferred Jules 
 Verne's tale greatly to Defoe's. 
 
 We would dream about desert islands, about 
 manufacturing electric batteries in the fashion of 
 the engineer Cyrus Harding, and as we were not 
 very certain of finding any "Granite House" dur- 
 ing the course of our adventures, Ricardo would 
 paint and paint at plans and elevations of houses 
 which we hoped to construct in its place in those 
 far-off, savage lands. 
 
 He also made pictures of ships which we took 
 care should be rigged properly. 
 
 There were two variations of this dream of 
 155
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 adventure one involving a snow-house, with 
 appropriate episodes such as nocturnal attacks 
 by bears, wolves, and the like, and then we 
 planned a sea voyage. 
 
 I rebelled a long time at the notion that my 
 life must be like that of everybody else, but 
 I had no recourse in the end but to capitulate. 
 
 156
 
 IX 
 
 I was never more than commonplace as a stu- 
 dent, inclining rather to be bad than good. I 
 had no great liking for study, and, to tell the 
 truth, I never entertained any clear idea of what 
 I was studying. 
 
 For example, I never knew what the word 
 preterite meant until years after completing my 
 course, although I had repeated over and over 
 again that the preterite, or past perfect, was thus, 
 while the imperfect was thus, without having any 
 conception that the word preterite meant past 
 that it was a past that was entirely past in the 
 former case, and a past that was past to a less 
 degree in the latter. 
 
 To complete two years of Latin grammar, two 
 of French, and one of German without having 
 any conception of what preterite meant, demon- 
 strated one of two things: either my stupidity 
 was very great, or the system of instruction de- 
 157
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 plorable. Naturally, I incline toward the second 
 alternative. 
 
 While preparing to take my degree in medi- 
 cine, when I was studying chemical analysis, I 
 heard a student, who was already a practising 
 physician, state that zinc was an element which 
 contained a great deal of hydrogen. When the 
 professor attempted to extricate him from his 
 difficulty, it became apparent that the future doc- 
 tor had no idea of what an element was. My 
 classmate, who doubtless entertained as little 
 liking for chemistry as I did for grammar, had 
 not been able throughout his entire course to 
 grasp the definition of an element, as I had never 
 been able to comprehend what a preterite might 
 be. 
 
 For my part and I believe that all of us have 
 had the same experience I have never been suc- 
 cessful in mastering those subjects which have 
 not interested me. 
 
 Doubtless, also, my mental development has 
 been slow. 
 
 As for memory, I have always possessed very 
 
 little. And liking for study, none whatever. 
 
 Sacred history, or any other history, Latin, 
 
 French, rhetoric and natural history have inter- 
 
 158
 
 A STUDENT 
 
 ested me not at all. The only subjects for which 
 I cared somewhat, were geometry and physics. 
 
 My college course left me with two or three 
 ideas in my head, whereupon I applied myself 
 to making ready for my professional career, as 
 one swallows a bitter dose. 
 
 In my novel, The Tree of Knowledge, I have 
 drawn a picture of myself, in which the psycho- 
 logical features remain unchanged, although 
 I have altered the hero's environment, as well as 
 his family relations, together with a number of 
 details. 
 
 Besides the defects with which I have endowed 
 my hero in this book, I was cursed with an in- 
 stinctive slothfulness and sluggishness which 
 were not to be denied. 
 
 People would tell me: "Now is the time for 
 you to study; later on, you will have leisure to 
 enjoy yourself; and after that will come the time 
 to make money." 
 
 But I needed all three times in which to do 
 nothing and I could have used another three 
 hundred. 
 
 159
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 PROFESSORS 
 
 I have not been fortunate in my professors. 
 It might be urged that I have not been in a posi- 
 tion, being idle and sluggish, to take advantage 
 of their instruction. I believe, however, that if 
 they had been good teachers, now that so many 
 years have passed, I should be able to acknowl- 
 edge their merits. 
 
 I cannot remember a single teacher who knew 
 how to teach, or who succeeded in arousing any 
 interest in what he taught, or who had any com- 
 prehension of the student mentality. No one 
 learned how to reason in the schools of my youth, 
 nor mastered any theory, nor acquired a practical 
 knowledge of anything. In other words, we 
 learned nothing. 
 
 In medicine, the professors adhered to a sys- 
 tem that was the most foolish imaginable. In 
 the two universities in which I studied, subjects 
 might be taken only by halves, which would have 
 been ridiculous enough in any branch, but it 
 was even more preposterous in medicine. Thus, 
 in pathology, a certain number of intending 
 physicians studied the subject of infection, while 
 others studied nervous disorders, and yet oth- 
 160
 
 AS A STUDENT 
 
 ers the diseases of the respiratory organs. No- 
 body studied all three. A plan of this sort could 
 only have been conceived by Spanish professors, 
 who, it may be said in general, are the quintes- 
 sence of vacuity. 
 
 "What difference does it make whether the 
 students learn anything or not?" every Spanish 
 professor asks himself continually. 
 
 Unamuno says, apropos of the backwardness 
 of Spaniards in the field of invention: "Other 
 nations can do the inventing." In other words, 
 let foreigners build up the sciences, so that we 
 may take advantage of them. 
 
 There was one among my professors who con- 
 sidered himself a born teacher and, moreover, a 
 man of genius, and he was Letamendi. I made 
 clear in my Tree of Knowledge what I thought of 
 this professor, who was not destitute, indeed, of 
 a certain talent as an orator and man of letters. 
 When he wrote, he was rococo, like so many 
 Catalans. Sometimes he would discourse upon 
 art, especially upon painting, in the class-room, 
 but the ideas he entertained were preposterous. 
 I recall that he once said that a mouse and a 
 book were not a fit subject for a painting, but if 
 you were to write the words Aristotle's Works
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 on the book, and then set the mouse to gnawing 
 at it, what had originally meant nothing would 
 immediately become a subject for a picture. 
 Yes, a picture to be hawked at the street fairs! 
 
 Letamendi was prolixity and puerile ingenuity 
 personified. Yet Letamendi was no different 
 from all other Spaniards of his day, including 
 even the most celebrated, such as Castelar, Eche- 
 garay and Valera. 
 
 These men read much, they possessed good 
 memories, but I verily believe that, honestly, 
 they understood nothing. Not one of them had 
 an inkling of that almost tragic sense of the dig- 
 nity of culture or of the obligations which it 
 imposes, which distinguishes the Germans above 
 all other nationalities. They nearly all revealed 
 an attitude toward science which would have sat 
 easily upon a smart, sharp-tongued Andalusian 
 young gentleman. 
 
 I recall a profoundly moving letter by the 
 critic Garve, which is included in Kant's Prole- 
 gomena. 
 
 Garve wrote an article upon The Critique of 
 Pure Reason, and sent it to a journal at Gottin- 
 gen, and the editor of the journal, in malice and 
 animosity toward Kant, so altered it that it be-
 
 AS A STUDENT 
 
 came an attack on the philosopher, and then pub- 
 lished it unsigned. 
 
 Kant invited his anonymous critic to divulge 
 his name, whereupon Garve wrote to Kant ex- 
 plaining what had taken place, and Kant made a 
 reply. 
 
 It would be difficult to parallel in nobility 
 these two letters, which were exchanged be- 
 tween a comprehensive intellect such as Garve 
 and one of the most portentous geniuses of the 
 world, as was Kant. 
 
 They appear to be two travellers, face to 
 face with the mystery of Nature and the Un- 
 known. No such feeling for learning and cul- 
 ture is to be met with among our miserably af- 
 fected Latin mountebanks. 
 
 ANTI-MILITARISM 
 
 I am an anti-militarist by inheritance. The 
 Basques have never been good soldiers in the 
 regular army. My great-grandfather Nessi 
 probably fled from Italy as a deserter. I have 
 always loathed barracks, messes, and officers 
 profoundly. 
 
 One day, when I was studying therapeutics 
 with Don Benito Hernando, my brother opened 
 163
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 the door of the class-room and motioned for me 
 to come out. 
 
 I did so, at the cost, by the way, of a furious 
 scene with Don Benito, who shattered several 
 test tubes in his wrath. 
 
 The cause of my brother's appearance was to 
 advise me that the Alcaldia del Centre, or Town 
 Council of the Central District, had given notice 
 to the effect that if I did not present myself for 
 the draft, I was to be declared in default. As I 
 had already laid before the Board a copy of a 
 royal decree in which my name was set down as 
 exempt from the draft because my father had 
 served as a Liberal Volunteer in the late war, 
 and because, in addition, I was born in the 
 Basque provinces, I had supposed that the mat- 
 ter had been disposed of. One of those ill- 
 natured, dictatorial officials who held sway in the 
 offices of the Board, took it upon himself to rule 
 that the exemption held good only in the Basque 
 provinces, but not in Madrid, and so, in fact, for 
 the time it proved to be. In spite of my furious 
 protests, I was compelled to report and submit to 
 have my measurements taken, and was well nigh 
 upon the point of being marched off to the bar- 
 racks. 
 
 164
 
 AS A STUDENT 
 
 "I am no soldier," I thought to myself. "If 
 they insist, I shall run away." 
 
 I went at once from the Alcaldia to the Minis- 
 try and called upon a Guipuzcoan politician, as 
 my father had previously advised me to do; but 
 the man was a political mastodon, puffed up with 
 huge pretensions, who, perhaps, might have been 
 a stevedore in any other country. So he did 
 nothing. Finally, it occurred to me to go and 
 see the Conde de Romanones, who had just been 
 appointed Alcalde del Centre, having jurisdic- 
 tion over the district. 
 
 When I entered his office, Romanones ap- 
 peared to be in a jovial frame of mind. He 
 wore a flower in his button-hole. Two persons 
 were with him, one of whom was no other than 
 the Secretary of the Board, my enemy. 
 
 I related what had happened to Romanones 
 with great force. The Secretary then answered. 
 
 "The young man is right," said the Count. 
 "Bring me the roll of the draft." 
 
 The roll was brought. Romanones took his 
 pen and crossed my name off altogether. Then 
 he turned to me with a smile: 
 
 "Don't you care to be a soldier?" 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 165
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 "But what are you, a student?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "In which branch?" 
 
 "Medicine." 
 
 "Good! Very good. You may go now." 
 
 I would willingly have been anything to have 
 escaped becoming a soldier, and so be obliged 
 to live in barracks, eat mess, and parade. 
 
 To VALENCIA 
 
 I failed in both June and September during 
 the fourth year of my course, which was a mere 
 matter of luck, as I neither applied myself more 
 nor less than in previous years. 
 
 In the meantime my father had been trans- 
 ferred to Valencia, whither it seemed wise that I 
 should remove to continue my studies. 
 
 I appeared at Valencia in January for a sec- 
 ond examination in general pathology, and 
 failed for the second time. 
 
 I began to consider giving up my intended 
 profession. 
 
 I found that I had lost what little liking I had 
 for it. As I had no friends in Valencia, I never 
 left the house; I had nowhere to go. I passed 
 166
 
 AS A STUDENT 
 
 my days stretched out on the roof, or, else, in 
 reading. After debating long what I should do, 
 and realizing fully that there was no one obvi- 
 ous plan to pursue, I determined to finish my 
 course, committing the required subjects me- 
 chanically. After adopting this plan, I never 
 failed once. 
 
 When I came up for graduation, the profes- 
 sors made an effort to put some obstacles in my 
 way, which, however, were not sufficient to de- 
 tain me. 
 
 Admitted as a physician, I decided next to 
 study for the doctor's degree at Madrid. 
 
 My former fellow-students, when they saw 
 that now I was doing nicely, all exclaimed: 
 
 "How you have changed! Now you pass 
 your examinations." 
 
 "Passing examinations, you know, is a com- 
 bination, like a gambling game," I told them. 
 "I have found a combination." 
 
 167
 
 X 
 
 AS A VILLAGE DOCTOR 
 
 I returned to Burjasot, a small town near 
 Valencia, where my family lived at the time, a 
 full-fledged doctor. We had a tiny house, be- 
 sides a garden containing pear, peach and pome- 
 granate trees. 
 
 I passed some time there very pleasantly. 
 
 My father was a contributor to the Voz de 
 Guipuzcoa of San Sebastian, so he always re- 
 ceived the paper. One day I read or it may 
 have been one of the family that the post of 
 official physician was vacant in the town of 
 Cestona. 
 
 I decided to apply for the place, and dis- 
 patched a letter accompanied by a copy of my 
 diploma. It turned out that I was the only ap- 
 plicant, and so the post was awarded to me. 
 
 I set out for Madrid, where I passed the night, 
 and then proceeded to San Sebastian, receiving 
 a letter from my father upon my arrival, in- 
 forming me that there was another physician at 
 168
 
 AS A VILLAGE DOCTOR 
 
 Cestona who was receiving a larger salary than 
 that which had been offered to me, and recom- 
 mending that perhaps it would be better not to 
 put in appearance too soon, until I was better 
 advised as to the prospects. 
 
 I hesitated. 
 
 "In any event," I thought, "I shall learn what 
 the town is like. If I like it, I shall stay; if not, 
 I shall return to Burjasot." 
 
 I took the diligence, which goes by the name 
 of "La Vascongada," and made the trip from 
 San Sebastian to Cestona, which proved to be 
 long enough in all conscience, as we were five or 
 six hours late. I got off at a posada, or small 
 inn, at Alcorta, to get something to eat. I dined 
 sumptuously, drank bravely, and, encouraged by 
 the good food, made up my mind to remain in 
 the village. I talked with the other doctor and 
 with the alcalde, and soon everything was ar- 
 ranged that had to be arranged. 
 
 As night was coming on, the priest and the 
 doctor recommended that I go to board at the 
 house of the Sacristana, as she had a room va- 
 cant, which had formerly been occupied by a 
 notary. 
 
 169
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 DOLORES, LA SACRISTANA 
 
 Dolores, my landlady and mistress of the Sa- 
 cristy, was an agreeable, exceedingly energetic, 
 exceedingly hard-working woman, who was a 
 pronounced conservative. 
 
 I have met few women as good as she. In 
 spite of the fact that she soon discovered that I 
 was not at all religious, she did not hold it 
 against me, nor did I harbour any resentment 
 against her. 
 
 I often read her the Analejo, or church cal- 
 endar, which is known as the Gallofa, or beg- 
 gars' mite, in the northern provinces, in allusion 
 to the ancient custom of making pilgrimages to 
 Santiago, and I cooked sugar wafers over the 
 fire with her on the eve of feast days, at which 
 times her work was especially severe. 
 
 I realized in Cestona my childish ambitions 
 of having a house of my own, and a dog, which 
 had lain in my mind ever since reading Robin- 
 son Crusoe and The Mysterious Island. 
 
 I also had an old horse named Juanillo, which 
 I borrowed from a coachman in San Sebastian, 
 but I never liked horses. 
 
 The horse seems to me to be a militaristic, 
 170
 
 A VILLAGE DOCTOR 
 
 antipathetic animal. Neither Robinson Crusoe 
 nor Cyrus Harding rode horse-back. 
 
 I committed no blunders while I was a vil- 
 lage doctor. I had already grown prudent, and 
 my sceptical temperament was a bar to any 
 great mistakes. 
 
 I first began to realize that I was a Basque 
 in Cestona, and I recovered my pride of race 
 there, which I had lost. 
 
 171
 
 XI 
 AS A BAKER 
 
 I have been asked frequently: "How did you 
 ever come to go into the baking business?" I 
 shall now proceed to answer the question, al- 
 though the story is a long one. 
 
 My mother had an aunt, Juana Nessi, who 
 was a sister of her father's. 
 
 This lady was reasonably attractive when 
 young, and married a rich gentleman just re- 
 turned from America, whose name was Don 
 Matias Lacasa. 
 
 Once settled in Madrid, Don Matias, who 
 deemed himself an eagle, when, in reality, he 
 was a common barnyard rooster, embarked 
 upon a series of undertakings that failed with 
 truly extraordinary unanimity. About 1870, a 
 physician from Valencia by the name of Marti, 
 who had visited Vienna, gave him an account of 
 the bread they make there, and of the yeast they 
 use to raise it, enlarging upon the profits which 
 lay ready to hand in that line. 
 172
 
 AS A BAKER 
 
 Don Matias was convinced, and he bought an 
 old house near the Church of the Descalzas upon 
 Marti's advice. It stood in a street which 
 boasted only one number the number 2. I 
 believe the street was, and still is, called the 
 Calle de la Misericordia. 
 
 Marti set up ovens in the old building by the 
 Church of the Descalzas, and the business be- 
 gan to yield fabulous profits. Being a devotee 
 of the life of pleasure, Marti died three or four 
 years after the business had been established, 
 and Don Matias continued his gallinaceous evo- 
 lutions until he was utterly ruined, and had 
 pawned everything he possessed, remaining at 
 last with the bakery as his only means of sup- 
 port. 
 
 He succeeded in entangling and ruining that, 
 too, before he died. My aunt then wrote my 
 mother requesting that my brother Ricardo come 
 up to Madrid. 
 
 My brother remained in Madrid for some 
 time, when he grew tired and left; then I went, 
 and later we were both there together, making 
 an effort to improve the business and to push it 
 ahead. Times were bad: there was no way of 
 pushing ahead. Surely the proverb "Where 
 173
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 flour is lacking, everything goes packing," could 
 never have been applied with more truth. And 
 we could get no flour. 
 
 When the bakery was just about to do better, 
 the Conde de Romanones, who was our landlord 
 in those days, notified us that the building was 
 to be torn down. 
 
 Then our troubles began. We were obliged 
 to move elsewhere, and to undertake alterations, 
 for which money was indispensable, but we had 
 no money. In that predicament, we began to 
 speculate upon the Exchange, and the Exchange 
 proved a kind mother to us; it sustained us 
 until we were on our feet again. As soon as we 
 had established ourselves upon another site, we 
 proceeded to lose money, so we withdrew. 
 
 It is not surprising, therefore, that I have 
 always regarded the Stock Exchange as a phi- 
 lanthropic institution, or that, on the other hand, 
 a church has always seemed a sombre place 
 in which a black priest leaps forth from behind 
 a confessional to seize one by the throat in the 
 dark, and to throttle him. 
 
 174
 
 AS A BAKER 
 
 MY FATHER'S DISILLUSIONMENT 
 
 My father was endowed with a due share of 
 the romantic fervour which distinguished men 
 of his epoch, and set great store by friendship. 
 More particularly, he was wrapped up in his 
 friends in San Sebastian. 
 
 When we discovered that we were in trouble, 
 before throwing ourselves into the loving arms 
 of the Bourse, my father spoke to two intimate 
 friends of his who were from San Sebastian. 
 They made an appointment to meet me in the 
 Cafe Suizo. I explained the situation to them, 
 after which they made me certain propositions, 
 which were so usurious, so outrageously extor- 
 tionate, that they took my breath away. They 
 offered to advance us the money we needed for 
 fifty per cent of the gross receipts, while we 
 were to meet the running expenses out of our 
 fifty per cent, receiving no compensation what- 
 ever for our services in taking care of the busi- 
 ness. 
 
 I was astonished, and naturally did not ac- 
 cept. The episode was a great blow to my 
 father. I frequently came face to face with 
 one of our friends at a later date, but I never 
 175
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 bowed to him. He was offended. I was 
 tempted to 'approach him and say: "The reason 
 that I do not bow to you is because I know you 
 are a rascal." 
 
 If either of these friends of ours were alive, I 
 should proceed to mention their names, but, as 
 they are dead, it will serve no useful purpose. 
 
 INDUSTRY AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 The bakery has been brandished against me 
 in literature. 
 
 When I first wrote, it was said: 
 
 "This Baroja is a crusty fellow; naturally, he 
 is a baker." 
 
 A certain picturesque academician, who was 
 also a dramatist, and given to composing stu- 
 pendous quintillas and cuartetas in his day, 
 which, despite their flatness, were received with 
 applause, had the inspiration to add: 
 
 "All this modernism has been cooked up in 
 Baroja's oven." 
 
 Even the Catalans lost no time in throwing 
 the fact of my being a baker in my face, al- 
 though they are a commercial, manufacturing 
 people. Whether calico is nobler than flour, or 
 176
 
 ^5 A BAKER 
 
 flour than calico, I am not sure, but the subject 
 is one for discussion, as Maeztu would have it. 
 
 I am an eclectic myself on this score. I pre- 
 fer flour in the shape of bread with my dinner, 
 but cloth will go further with a man who desires 
 to appear well in public. 
 
 When I was serving upon the Town Council, 
 an anonymous publication entitled "Masks Off," 
 printed the following among other gems: 
 "Pio Baroja is a man of letters who runs a 
 bake-shop." 
 
 A Madrid critic recently declared in an 
 American periodical that I had two personalities: 
 one that of a writer and the other of a baker. 
 He was solicitous to let me know later that he 
 intended no harm. 
 
 But if I should say to him: "Mr. So and So" 
 is a writer who is excellently posted upon the 
 value of cloth, as his father sold dry-goods, it 
 would appeal to his mind as bad taste. 
 
 Another journalist paid his respects to me 
 some months ago in El Parlamentario, saying I 
 'baked rolls, oppressed the people, and sucked 
 the blood of the workingman. 
 
 It would appear to be more demeaning to 
 own a small factory or a shop, according to the 
 177
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 standards of both literary and non-literary cir- 
 cles, than it is to accept money from the cor- 
 ruption funds of the Government, or bounties 
 from the exchequers of foreign Embassies. 
 
 When I hear talk nowadays about the dues 
 of the common people, my propensity to laugh 
 is so great that I am apprehensive that my end 
 may be like that of the Greek philosopher in 
 Diogenes Laertius, who died of laughter because 
 he saw an ass eating figs. 
 
 THE VEXATIONS OF A SMALL TRADESMAN 
 
 The trials and tribulations of the literary life, 
 its feuds and its backbitings are a common topic 
 of conversation. However, I have never expe- 
 rienced anything of the kind in literature. The 
 trouble with literature is that there is very little 
 money in it, which renders the writer's existence 
 both mean and precarious. 
 
 Nothing compares for vexation with the life 
 of the petty tradesman, especially when that 
 tradesman is a baker. Upon occasion, I have 
 repeated to my friends the series of outrages 
 to which we were obliged to submit, in particu- 
 lar at the hands of the municipal authorities. 
 178
 
 AS A BAKER 
 
 Sometimes it was through malice, but more often 
 through sheer insentient imbecility. 
 
 When my brother and I moved to the new 
 site, we drew up a plan and submitted it to the 
 Ayuntamiento, or City Government. A clerk 
 discovered that no provision had been made for 
 a stall for a mule to run the kneading machine, 
 and so rejected it. When we learned that our 
 application had not been granted, we inquired 
 the reason and explained to the clerk that no 
 provision had been made for the mule because 
 we had no mule, as our kneading machine was 
 operated by an electric motor. 
 
 "That makes no difference, no difference 
 whatever," replied the clerk with the importance 
 and obtuseness of the bureaucrat. "The ordi- 
 nance requires that there be a stall for one." 
 
 Another of the thousand instances of official 
 barbarity was perpetrated at our expense while 
 Sanchez de Toca was Alcalde. This gentleman 
 is a Siamese twin of Maura's when it comes to 
 garrulousness and muddy thinking, and he had 
 resolved to do away with the distribution of 
 bread by public delivery, and to license only 
 deliveries by private bakeries. The order was 
 arbitrary enough, but the manner in which it 
 179
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 was put into effect was a masterpiece. It was 
 reported that plates bearing license numbers 
 would be given out at the Ayuntamiento to the 
 delivery men from the bakeries. So we re- 
 paired to the Ayuntamiento and questioned a 
 clerk : 
 
 "Where do they give out the numbers? 
 
 "There are no numbers." 
 
 "What will happen tomorrow then, when we 
 make our deliveries?" 
 
 "How do I know?" 
 
 The next day when the delivery men began 
 their rounds, a policeman accosted them : 
 
 "Have you your numbers?" 
 
 "No, sir; they are not ready yet." 
 
 "Well, come with me then, to the police sta- 
 tion." 
 
 And that was the last of our bread. 
 
 The Caid of Mechuar in Morocco favoured 
 his subjects in some such fashion several years 
 since, but the Moors, being men of spirit, fell on 
 him one day, and left him at death's door on a 
 dung heap. Meanwhile, Sanchez de Toca con- 
 tinues to talk nonsense in these parts, and is 
 considered by some to be one of the bulwarks 
 of the country. 
 
 180
 
 AS A BAKER 
 
 I could spin many a tale of tyranny in high 
 places, and almost as many, no doubt, of the 
 pettinesses of workingmen. But what is the 
 good? Why stir up my bile? In progressive 
 incarnations, I have now passed through those of 
 baker and petty tradesman. I am no longer 
 an employer who exploits the workingman, nor 
 can I see that I ever did so. If I have exploited 
 workers merely because I employed them, all 
 that was some time ago. I support myself by 
 my writings now, although it is quite proper to 
 state that I live on very little. 
 
 181-
 
 XII 
 AS A WRITER 
 
 My pre-literary career was three-fold : I was 
 a student for eight years, during two a village 
 doctor, and for six more a baker. 
 
 These having elapsed, being already close 
 upon thirty, I began to write. 
 
 My new course was a wise one. It was the 
 best thing that I could have done; anything else 
 would have annoyed me more and have pleased 
 me less. I have enjoyed writing, and I have 
 made some money, although not much, yet it 
 has been sufficient to enable me to travel, which 
 otherwise I should not have been able to do. 
 
 The first considerable sum which I received 
 was upon the publication of my novel The 
 Mayorazgo of Labraz. Henrich of Barcelona 
 paid me two thousand pesetas for it. T in- 
 vested the two thousand pesetas in a specula- 
 tion upon the Bourse, and they disappeared in 
 two weeks. 
 
 The money which I have received for my 
 other books, I have employed to better purpose. 
 182
 
 AS A WRITER 
 
 BOHEMIA 
 
 I have never been a believer in the absurd 
 myth called Bohemia. The idea of living gaily 
 and irresponsibly in Madrid, or in any other 
 Spanish city, without taking thought for the mor- 
 row, is so preposterous that it passes comprehen- 
 sion. Bohemia is utterly false in Paris and 
 London, but in Spain, where life is difficult, it is 
 even more of a cheat. 
 
 Bohemia is not only false, it is contemptible. 
 It suggests to me a minor Christian sect, of the 
 most inconsequential degree, nicely calculated 
 for the convenience of hangers on at cafes. 
 
 Henri Murger was the son of the wife of a 
 concierge. 
 
 Of course, this would not have mattered had 
 his outlook upon life not been that of the son of 
 the wife of a concierge. 
 
 OUR OWN GENERATION 
 
 The beginner in letters makes his way up, as a 
 rule, amid a literary environment which is dis- 
 tinguished by reputations and hierarchies, all re- 
 spected by him. But this was not the case with 
 183
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 the young writers of my day. During the years 
 1898 to 1900, a number of young men suddenly 
 found themselves thrown together in Madrid, 
 whose only rule was the principle that the imme- 
 diate past did not exist for them. 
 
 This aggregation of authors and artists might 
 have seemed to have been brought together un- 
 der some leadership, and to have been directed 
 to some purpose; yet one who entertained such 
 an assumption would have been mistaken. 
 
 Chance brought us together for a moment, a 
 very brief moment, to be followed by a general 
 dispersal. There were days when thirty or forty 
 young men, apprentices in the art of writing, 
 sat around the tables in the old Cafe de Madrid. 
 
 Doubtless such gatherings of new men, eager 
 to interfere in and to influence the operations of 
 the social system, yet without either the warrant 
 of tradition or any proved ability to do so, are 
 common upon a larger scale in all revolutions. 
 
 As we neither had, nor could have had, in 
 the nature of the case, a task to perform, we 
 soon found that we were divided into small 
 groups, and finally broke up altogether. 
 
 184
 
 AS A WRITER 
 
 AZORIN 
 
 A few days after the publication of my first 
 book, Sombre Lives, Miguel Poveda, who was 
 responsible for printing it, sent a copy to Mar- 
 tinez Ruiz, who was at that time in Monovar. 
 Martinez Ruiz wrote me a long letter concerning 
 the book by return mail; on the following day 
 he sent another. 
 
 Poveda handed me the letters to read and I 
 was filled with surprise and joy. Some weeks 
 later, returning from the National Library, Mar- 
 tinez Ruiz, whom I knew by sight, came up to 
 me on the Recoletos. 
 
 "Are you Baroja?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I am Martinez Ruiz." 
 
 We shook hands and became friends. 
 
 In those day we travelled about the country 
 together, we contributed to the same papers, and 
 the ideas and the men we attacked were the 
 same. 
 
 Later, Azorin became an enthusiastic partisan 
 of Maura, which appeared to me particularly ab- 
 surd, as I have never been able to see anything 
 but an actor of the grand style in Maura, a man 
 185
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 of small ideas. Next he became a partisan 
 of La Cierva, which was as bad in my opinion 
 as being a Maurista. I am unable to say at the 
 moment whether he is contemplating any fur- 
 ther transformations. 
 
 But, whether he is or not, Azorin will always 
 remain a master of language to me, besides an 
 excellent friend who has a weakness for believ- 
 ing all men to be great who talk in a loud voice 
 and who pull their cuffs down out of their coat 
 sleeves with a grand gesture whenever they ap- 
 pear upon the platform. 
 
 PAUL SCHMITZ 
 
 Another friendship which I found stimulating 
 was that of Paul Schmitz, a Swiss from Basle, 
 who had come to Madrid because of some weak- 
 ness of the lungs, spending three years among 
 us in order to rehabilitate himself. Schmitz 
 had studied in Switzerland and in Germany, and 
 also had lived for a long time in the north of 
 Russia. 
 
 He was familiar with what in my judgment 
 are the two most interesting countries of Europe. 
 
 Paul Schmitz was a timid person of an in- 
 186
 
 AS A WRITER 
 
 quiring turn of mind, whose youth had been 
 tempestuous. I made a number of excursions 
 with Schmitz to Toledo, to El Paular and to the 
 Springs of Urbion; a year or two later we visited 
 Switzerland several times together. 
 
 Schmitz was like an open window through 
 which I looked out upon an unknown world. I 
 held long conversations with him upon life, 
 literature, art and philosophy. 
 
 I recall that I took him one Sunday afternoon 
 to the home of Don Juan Valera. 
 
 When Schmitz and I arrived, Valera had just 
 settled down for the afternoon to listen to his 
 daughter, who was reading aloud one of the 
 latest novels of Zola. 
 
 Valera, Schmitz and I sat chatting for per- 
 haps four or five hours. There was no sub- 
 ject that we could all agree upon. Valera and 
 I were no sooner against the Swiss than the 
 Swiss and Valera were against me, or the Swiss 
 and I against Valera, and then each flew off after 
 his own opinion. 
 
 Valera, who saw that the Swiss and I were 
 anarchists, said it was beyond his comprehen- 
 sion how any man could conceive of a state of 
 general well being. 
 
 187
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 "Do you mean to say that you believe," he 
 said to me, "that there will ever come a time 
 when every man will be able to set a bowl of 
 oysters from Arcachon upon his table and top 
 it off with a bottle of champagne of first-rate 
 vintage, besides having a woman sitting beside 
 him in a Worth gown?" 
 
 "No, no, Don Juan," I replied. "In the eyes 
 of the anarchist, oysters, champagne, and Worth 
 are mere superstitions, myths to which we at- 
 tach no importance. We do not spend our time 
 dreaming about oysters, while champagne is not 
 nectar to our tastes. All that we ask is to live 
 well, and to have those about us live well 
 also." 
 
 We could not convince each other. When 
 Schmitz and I left Valera's house it was al- 
 ready night, and we found ourselves absorbed in 
 his talents and his limitations. 
 
 ORTEGA Y GASSET 
 
 Ortega y Gasset impresses me as a traveller 
 who has journeyed through the world of culture. 
 He moves upon a higher level, which it is diffi- 
 188
 
 AS A WRITER 
 
 cult to reach, and upon which it is still more 
 difficult to maintain oneself. 
 
 It may be that Ortega has no great sympathy 
 for my manner of living, which is insubordinate ; 
 it may be that I look with unfriendly eye upon 
 his ambitious and aristocratic sympathies ; never- 
 theless, he is a master who brings glad news of 
 the unknown that is, of the unknown to us. 
 
 Doctor San Martin was fond of telling how 
 he was sitting one day upon a bench in the Re- 
 tiro, reading. 
 
 "Are you reading a novel?" inquired a gentle- 
 man, sitting down beside him. 
 
 "No, I am studying." 
 
 "What! Studying at your age?" exclaimed 
 the gentleman, amazed. 
 
 The same remark might be made to me: 
 "What! Sitting under a master at your age?" 
 
 As far as I am concerned, every man who 
 knows more than I do is my master. 
 
 I know very well that philosophy and meta- 
 physics are nothing to the great mass of physi- 
 cians who pick up their science out of foreign 
 reviews, adding nothing themselves to what they 
 read ; nor, for that matter, are they to most Span- 
 189
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 ish engineers, who are skilled in doing suffi- 
 ciently badly today what was done in England 
 and Germany very well thirty years ago; and 
 the same thing is true of the apothecaries. The 
 practical is all that these people concede to ex- 
 ist, but how do they know what is practical? 
 Considering the matter from the practical point 
 of view, there can be no doubt but that civiliza- 
 tion has attained a high development wherever 
 there have been great metaphysicisms, and then 
 with the philosophers have come the inventors, 
 who between them are the glory of mankind. 
 Unamuno despises inventors, but in this case 
 it is his misfortune. It is far easier for a na- 
 tion which is destitute of a tradition of culture 
 to improvise an histologist or a physicist, than 
 a philosopher or a real thinker. 
 
 Ortega y Gasset, the only approach to a phi- 
 losopher whom I have ever known, is one of 
 the few Spaniards whom it is interesting to 
 hear talk. 
 
 A PSEUDO-PATRON 
 
 Although a man may never have amounted to 
 anything, and will probably continue in much 
 190
 
 AS A WRITER 
 
 the same case, that is to say never amounting to 
 anything, yet there are persons who will take 
 pride in having given him his start in the world 
 in short, upon having made him known. 
 Senor Ruiz Contreras has set up some such ab- 
 surd claim in regard to me. According to Ruiz 
 Contreras, he brought me into public notice 
 through a review which he published in 1899, 
 under the title Revista Nueva. Thus, accord- 
 ing to Ruiz Contreras, I am known, and have 
 been for eighteen years! Although it may seem 
 scarcely worth while to expose such an obvious 
 joke, I should like to clear up this question for 
 the benefit of any future biographers. Why 
 should I not indulge the hope of having them? 
 
 In 1899, Ruiz Contreras invited my co-opera- 
 tion in a weekly magazine, in which I was to be 
 both stockholder and editor. Those days al- 
 ready seem a long way off. At first I refused, 
 but he insisted ; at length we agreed that I should 
 write for the magazine and share in meeting the 
 expenses, in company with Ruiz Contreras, Re- 
 paraz, Lassalle and the novelist Matheu. 
 
 I made two or three payments, and moved 
 down some of my pictures and furniture to the 
 office in consequence, until the time came when 
 191
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 I began to feel that it was humorous for me to 
 be paying for publishing my articles, when I was 
 perfectly well able to dispose of them to any 
 other sheet. Upon my cutting off payments, 
 Ruiz Contreras informed me that a number of 
 the stockholders, among whom was Icaza, who 
 had replaced Reparaz, took the position that if 
 I did not pay, I should not be permitted to write 
 for the magazine. 
 
 "Very well, I shall not write." And I ceased 
 to write. 
 
 Previous to my connection with the Revista 
 Nueva, I had contributed articles to El Lib- 
 eral, El Pais, El Globo, La Justicia, and La 
 Voz de Guipuzcoa, as well as to other publica- 
 tions. 
 
 A year after my contributions to the Revista 
 Nueva, I brought out Sombre Lives, which 
 scarcely sold one hundred copies, and, then, a 
 little later, The House of Aizgorri, the sale of 
 which fell short of fifty. 
 
 At this time, Martinez Ruiz published a com- 
 edy, The Power of Love, for which I provided 
 a prologue, and I went about with the publisher, 
 Rodriguez Serra, through the bookshops, ped- 
 dling the book. In a shop on the Plaza de Santa 
 192
 
 AS A WRITER 
 
 Ana, Rodriguez Serra asked the proprietor, not 
 altogether without a touch of malice: 
 
 "What do you think of this book?" 
 
 "It would be all right," answered the pro- 
 prietor, who did not know me, "if anybody knew 
 who Martinez Ruiz was; and who is this Pio 
 Baroja?" 
 
 Senor Ruiz Contreras says that he made me 
 known, but the fact is that nobody knew me in 
 those days; Senor Ruiz Contreras flatters himself 
 that he did me a great favour by publishing my 
 articles, at a cost to me, at the very least, of 
 two or three duros apiece. 
 
 If this is to be a patron of letters, I should like 
 to patronize half the planet. 
 
 As for literary influence, Ruiz Contreras never 
 had any upon me. He was an admirer of Ar- 
 sene Houssage, Paul Bourget, and other novel- 
 ists with a sophisticated air, who never meant 
 anything to me. The theatre also obsessed him, 
 a malady which I have never suffered, and he 
 was a devotee of the poet, Zorrilla, in which re- 
 spect I was unable to share his enthusiasm, nor 
 can I do so today. Finally, he was a politi- 
 cal reactionary, while I am a man of radical 
 tendencies. 
 
 193
 
 XIII 
 PARISIAN DAYS 
 
 For the past twenty years I have been in the 
 habit of visiting Paris, not for the purpose of 
 becoming acquainted with the city to see it 
 once is enough; nor do I go in order to meet 
 French authors, as, for the most part, they con- 
 sider themselves so immeasurably above Span- 
 iards that there is no way in which a self-re- 
 specting person can approach them. I go to 
 meet the members of the Spanish colony, which 
 includes some types which are most interesting. 
 
 I have gathered a large number of stories and 
 anecdotes in this way, some of which I have in- 
 corporated in my books. 
 
 ESTEVANEZ 
 
 Don Nicolas Estevanez was a good friend of 
 mine. During my sojourns in Paris, I met him 
 every afternoon in the Cafe de la Fleur in the 
 Boulevard St. Germain. 
 
 194
 
 PARISIAN DAYS 
 
 When I was writing The Last of the Roman- 
 tics and Grotesque Tragedies, Estevanez fur- 
 nished me with data and information concerning 
 life in Paris under the Second Empire. 
 
 When I last saw him in the autumn of 1913, 
 he made a practice of coming to the cafe with 
 a paper scribbled over with notes, to assist his 
 memory to recall the anecdotes which he had it in 
 mind to tell. 
 
 I can see him now in the Cafe de la Fleur, 
 with his blue eyes, his long white beard, his 
 cheeks, which were still rosy, his calm and al- 
 ways phlegmatic air. 
 
 Once he became much excited. Javier Bueno 
 and I happened on him in a cafe on the Avenue 
 d'Orleans, not far from the Lion de Belfort. 
 Bueno asked some questions about the recent 
 attempt by Moral to assassinate the King in 
 Madrid, and Estevanez suddenly went to pieces. 
 An anarchist told me afterwards that Estevanez 
 had carried the bomb which was thrown by Mor- 
 ral in Madrid, from Paris to Barcelona, at which 
 port he had taken ship for Cuba, by arrange- 
 ment with the Duke of Bivona. 
 
 I believe this story to have been a pure fabri- 
 cation, but I feel perfectly certain that Estevanez 
 195
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 knew beforehand that the crime was to be at- 
 temped. 
 
 MY VERSATILITY ACCORDING TO BONAFOUX 
 
 Speaking of Estevanez, I recall also Bonaf oux, 
 whom I saw frequently. According to Gonzalez 
 de la Pena, the painter, he held my versatility 
 against me. 
 
 "Bonafoux," remarked Pefia, "feels that you 
 are too versatile and too volatile." 
 
 "Indeed? In what way?" 
 
 "One day you entered the bar and said to 
 Bonafoux that a testimonial banquet ought to 
 be organized for Estevanez, enlarging upon 
 it enthusiastically. Bonafoux answered: 'Go 
 ahead and make the preparations, and we will 
 all get together.' When you came into the cafe 
 a few nights later, Bonafoux asked: 'How 
 about that banquet?' 'What banquet?' you re- 
 plied. It had already passed out of your mind. 
 Now, tell me: Is this true?" inquired Pena. 
 
 "Yes, it is. We all have something of Tar- 
 tarin in us, more or less. We talk and we talk, 
 and then we forget what we say." 
 
 Other Parisian types return to me when I think 
 196
 
 PARISIAN DAYS 
 
 of those days. There was a Cuban journalist, 
 who was satisfactorily dirty, of whom Bonafoux 
 used to say that he not only ate his plate of soup 
 but managed to wash his face in it at the same 
 time. There was a Catalan guitar player, be- 
 sides some girls from Madrid who walked the 
 tight rope, whom we used to invite to join us 
 at the cafe from time to time. And then there 
 was a whole host of other persons, all more or 
 less shabby, down at the heel and picturesque. 
 
 197
 
 XIV 
 LITERARY ENMITIES 
 
 Making our entrance into the world of letters 
 hurling contradictions right and left, the young 
 men of our generation were received by the writ- 
 ers of established reputation with unfriendly 
 demonstrations. As was natural, this was not 
 only the attitude of the older writers, but it ex- 
 tended to our contemporaries in years as well, 
 even to those who were most modern. 
 
 THE ENMITY OF DICENTA 
 
 Among those who cherished a deadly hatred 
 of me was Dicenta. It was an antipathy which 
 had its origin in the realm of ideas, and it was 
 accentuated subsequently by an article which I 
 contributed to El Globo upon his drama 
 Aurora, in which I maintained that Dicenta 
 was not a man of new or broad ideas, but com- 
 pletely preoccupied with the ancient conceptions 
 of honesty and honour. One night in the Cafe 
 198
 
 LITERARY ENMITIES 
 
 Fornos I am able to vouch for the truth of this 
 incident because, years afterwards, he told me 
 the story himself Dicenta accosted a young man 
 who was sitting at an adjacent table taking sup- 
 per, and attempted to draw him into discus- 
 sion, under the impression that it was I. The 
 young man was so frightened that he never dared 
 to open his mouth. 
 
 "Come," shouted Dicenta, "we shall settle this 
 matter at once." 
 
 "I have nothing to settle with you," replied 
 the young man. 
 
 "Yes, sir, you have; you have stated in an 
 article that my ideas are not revolutionary." 
 
 "I never stated anything of the kind." 
 
 "What is that?" 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 "But aren't you Pio Baroja?" 
 
 "I am not, sir." 
 
 Dicenta turned on his heel and marched back 
 to his seat. 
 
 Sometime later, Dicenta and I became friends, 
 although we were never very intimate, because 
 he felt that I did not appreciate him at his full 
 worth. And it was the truth. 
 
 199
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 THE POSTHUMOUS ENMITY OF SAWA 
 
 I met Alejandro Sawa one evening at the Cafe 
 Fornos, where I had gone with a friend. 
 
 As a matter of fact, I had never read anything 
 which he had written, but his appearance im- 
 pressed me. Once I followed him in the street 
 with the intention of speaking to him, but my 
 courage failed at the last moment. A number 
 of months later, I met him one summer after- 
 noon on the Recoletos, when he was in the com- 
 pany of a Frenchman named Cornuty. Cor- 
 nuty and Sawa were conversing and reciting 
 verses; they took me to a wine-shop in the Plaza 
 de Herradores, where they drank a number of 
 glasses, which I paid for, whereupon Sawa 
 asked me to lend him three pesetas. I did not 
 have them, and told him so. 
 
 "Do you live far from here?" asked Ale- 
 jandro, in his lofty style. 
 
 "No, near by." 
 
 "Very well then, you can go home and bring 
 me the money." 
 
 He issued this command with such an air of 
 authority that I went home and brought him the 
 200
 
 LITERARY ENMITIES 
 
 money. He came to the door of the wine-shop, 
 took it from me, and then said: 
 
 "You may go now." 
 
 This was the way in which insignificant bour- 
 geois admirers were treated in the school of 
 Baudelaire and Verlaine. 
 
 Later again, when I brought out Sombre 
 Lives, I sometimes saw Sawa in the small hours 
 of the morning, his long locks flowing, and fol- 
 lowed by his dog. He always gripped my hand 
 with such force that it did me some hurt, and 
 then he would say to me, in a tragic tone: 
 
 "Be proud! You have written Sombre 
 Lives." 
 
 I took it as a joke. 
 
 One day Alejandro wrote me to come to his 
 house. He was living on the Cuesta de Santo 
 Domingo. I betook myself there, and he made 
 me a proposition which was obviously prepos- 
 terous. He handed me five or six articles, writ- 
 ten by him, which had already been published, 
 together with some notes, saying that if I would 
 add certain material, we should then be able to 
 make up a book of "Parisian Impressions," 
 which could appear under the names of us both. 
 
 201
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 I read the articles and did not care for them. 
 When I went to return them, he asked me: 
 
 "What have you done?" 
 
 "Nothing. I think it would be difficult for 
 us to collaborate; there is no possible bond of 
 unity in what we write." 
 
 "How is that?" 
 
 "You are one of these eloquent writers, and I 
 am not." 
 
 This remark gave great offence. 
 
 Another reason for Alejandro's enmity was 
 an opinion expressed by my brother, Ricardo. 
 
 Ricardo wished to paint the portrait of Man- 
 uel Sawa in oils, as Manuel had marked person- 
 ality at that time, when he still wore a beard. 
 
 "But here am I," said Alejandro. "Am I 
 not a more interesting subject to be painted?" 
 
 "No, no, not at all," we all shouted together 
 this took place in the Cafe de Lisboa "Man- 
 uel has more character." 
 
 Alejandro said nothing, but, a few moments 
 later, he rose, looked at himself in the glass, 
 arranged his flowing locks, and then, glaring at 
 us from top to toe, while he pronounced the 
 letter with the utmost distinctness, he said sim- 
 ply: 
 
 202
 
 LITERARY ENMITIES 
 
 "M . . ." and walked out of the cafe. 
 
 Some time passed before Alejandro heard that 
 I had put him into one of my novels and he con- 
 ceived a certain dislike for me, in spite of which 
 we saw each other now and then, always con- 
 versing affectionately. 
 
 One day he sent for me to come and see him. 
 He was living in the Calle del Conde Duque. 
 He was in bed, already blind. His spirit was 
 as high as before, while his interest in literary 
 matters remained the same. His brother, 
 Miguel, who was present, happened to say dur- 
 ing the conversation that the hat I wore, which I 
 had purchased in Paris a few days previously, 
 had a flatter brim than was usual. Alejandro 
 asked to examine it, and busied himself feeling 
 of the brim. 
 
 "This is a hat," he exclaimed enthusiastically, 
 "that a man can wear with long hair." Some 
 months subsequent to his death a book of his, 
 Light Among the Shadows, was published, in 
 which Alejandro spoke ill of me, although he had 
 a good word for Sombre Lives. 
 
 He called me a country-man, said that my 
 bones were misshapen, and then stated that glory 
 does not go hand in hand with tuberculosis. 
 203
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 Poor Alejandro! He was sound at heart, an 
 eloquent child of the Mediterranean, born to 
 orate in the lands of the sun, but he took it into 
 his head that it was his duty to make himself 
 over into the likeness of one of the putrid prod- 
 ucts of the North. 
 
 SEMI-HATRED ON THE PART OF SILVERIO LANZA 
 
 A mutual friend, Antonio Gil Campos, intro- 
 duced me to Silverio Lanza. 
 
 Silverio Lanza was a man of great originality, 
 endowed with an enormous fund of thwarted 
 ambition and pride, which was only natural, as 
 he was a notably fine writer who had not yet 
 met with success, nor even with the recognition 
 which other younger writers enjoyed. 
 
 The first time that I saw Lanza, I remember 
 how his eyes sparkled when I told him that I 
 liked his books. Nobody ever paid any atten- 
 tion to him in those days. 
 
 Silverio Lanza was a singular character. At 
 times he seemed benevolent, and then again there 
 were times when he would appear malignant in 
 the extreme. 
 
 His ideas upon the subject of literature were 
 204
 
 LITERARY ENMITIES 
 
 positively absurd. When I sent him Sombre 
 Lives, he wrote me an unending letter in which 
 he attempted to convince me that I ought to ap- 
 pend a lesson or moral, to every tale. If I did 
 not wish to write them, he offered to do it him- 
 self. 
 
 Silverio thought that literature was not to be 
 composed like history, according to Quintilian's 
 definition, ad narrandum, but ad probandum. 
 
 When I gave him The House of Aizgorri, he 
 was outraged by the optimistic conclusion of the 
 book, and advised me to change it. According 
 to his theory, if the son of the Aizgorri family 
 came to a bad end, the daughter ought to come 
 to a bad end also. 
 
 Being of a somewhat fantastical turn of mind, 
 Silverio Lanza was full of political projects that 
 were extraordinary. 
 
 I remember that one of his ideas was that we 
 ought all to write the King a personal note of con- 
 gratulation upon his attaining his majority. 
 
 "It is the most revolutionary thing that can 
 be done at such a time," insisted Lanza, appar- 
 ently quite convinced. 
 
 "I am unable to see it," I replied. 
 
 Azorin and myself were of the opinion that it 
 205
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 was a ridiculous proceeding which would never 
 produce the desired result. 
 
 Another of Lanza's hobbies was an aggressive 
 misogyny. 
 
 "Baroja, my friend," he would say to me, 
 "you are too gallant and respectful in your 
 novels with the ladies. Women are like laws, 
 they are to be violated." 
 
 I laughed at him. 
 
 One day I was walking with my friend Gil 
 Campos and my cousin Goni, when we happened 
 on Silverio Lanza, who took us to the Cafe de 
 San Sebastian, where we sat down in the section 
 facing the Plazuela del Angel. It was a com- 
 pany that was singularly assorted. 
 
 Silverio reverted to the theme that women 
 should be handled with the rod. Gil Campos 
 proceeded to laugh, being gifted with an ironic 
 vein, and made fun of him. For my part, I 
 was tired of it, so I said to Lanza: 
 
 "See here, Don Juan" (his real name was 
 Juan Bautista Amoros), "what you are giving 
 us now is literature, and poor literature at that. 
 You are not, and I am not, able to violate law 
 and women as we see fit. That may be all very 
 well for Caesars and Napoleons and Borgias, but 
 206
 
 LITERARY ENMITIES 
 
 you are a respectable gentleman who lives in a 
 little house at Getafe with your wife, and I am 
 a poor man myself, who manages as best he may 
 to make a living. You would tremble in your 
 boots if you ever broke a law, or even a munici- 
 pal ordinance, and so would I. As far as 
 women are concerned, we are both of us glad to 
 take what we can get, if we can get anything, 
 and I am afraid that neither of us is ever going 
 to get very much, despite the fact" I added 
 by way of a humorous touch "that we are two 
 of the most distinguished minds in Europe." 
 
 My cousin Goni replied to this with the rare 
 tact that was characteristic of him, arguing that 
 within the miserable sphere of tangible reality I 
 was right, while Lanza moved upon a higher 
 plane, which was more ideal and more romantic. 
 He went on to add that Lanza and he were both 
 Berbers, and so violent and passionate, while I 
 was an Aryan, although a vulgar Aryan, whose 
 ideas were simply those which were shared by 
 everybody. 
 
 Lanza was not satisfied with my cousin's ex- 
 planation and departed with a marked lack of 
 cordiality. 
 
 Since that time, Silverio has regarded me with 
 207
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 mixed emotions, half friendly, half the reverse, 
 although in one of his latest books, The Sur- 
 render of Santiago, he has referred to me as a 
 great friend and a great writer. I suspect, how- 
 ever, that he does not love me. 
 
 208
 
 XV 
 
 THE PRESS 
 OUR NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS 
 
 I have always been very much interested in 
 the newspaper and periodical press, and in ev- 
 erything that has any connection with printing. 
 When my father, my grandfather, and great 
 grandfather set up struggling papers in a pro- 
 vincial capital, it may be said that they were 
 not printers in vain. 
 
 Because of my fondness for newspapers and 
 magazines, it is a grief to me that the Spanish 
 press should be so weak, so poor, so pusillani- 
 mous and stiff-jointed. 
 
 Of late, while the foreign press has been ex- 
 panding and widening its scope, ours has been 
 standing still. 
 
 There is, of course, an economic explanation 
 
 to justify our deficiency, but this is valid only 
 
 in the matter of quantity, and not as to quality. 
 
 Comparing our press with that of the rest of the 
 
 209
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 world, a rosary of negation might easily be made 
 up in this fashion: 
 
 Our press does not concern itself with what is 
 of universal interest. 
 
 Our press does not concern itself with what is 
 of national interest. 
 
 Our press does not concern itself with litera- 
 ture. 
 
 Our press does not concern itself with philos- 
 ophy. 
 
 And so on to infinity. 
 
 Corpus Barga has told me that when Senor 
 Groizard, a relative of his, was ambassador to 
 the Vatican, Leo XIII once inquired of him, in a 
 jargon of Italo-Spanish, in the presence of the 
 papal secretary, Cardinal Rampolla: 
 
 "Does the Senor Ambasciatore speak Italian?" 
 
 "No, not Italian, although I understand it a 
 little." 
 
 "Does the Senor Ambasciatore speak Eng- 
 lish?" 
 
 "No, not English, I do not speak that," replied 
 Groizard. 
 
 "Does the Senor Ambasciatore speak Ger- 
 man?" 
 
 "No German, no Dutch; not at all." 
 210
 
 THE PRESS 
 
 "No doubt then the Sefior Ambasciatore speaks 
 French?" 
 
 "French? No. I am able to translate it a 
 little, but I do not speak it." 
 
 "Then what does the Senor Ambasciatore 
 speak?" asked Leo XIII, smiling that Voltairian 
 smile of his at his secretary. 
 
 "Then Senor Ambasciatore speaks a heavy 
 back-country dialect called Extramaduran," re- 
 plied Rampolla del Tindaro, bending over to His 
 Holiness's ear. 
 
 The Spanish press has made a resolution, now 
 of long standing, to speak nothing but a back- 
 country dialect called Extramaduran. 
 
 Our Journalists 
 
 Our journalists supply the measure of our 
 journals. When the great names are those of 
 Miguel Moya, Romeo, Rocamora and Don Pio, 
 what are we to think of the little fellows? 
 
 Speaking generally, the Spanish journalist is 
 interested in politics, in theatres, in bull fights, 
 and in nothing else; whatever is beyond these, 
 does not concern him. Not even the feuilleton 
 attracts his attention. A wooden, highly man- 
 nered phrase sponsored by Maura, is much more 
 211
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 stimulating to his mind than the most sensational 
 piece of news. 
 
 The Spanish newspaper man is endowed with 
 an extraordinary lack of imagination and of 
 curiosity. I recall having given a friend, who 
 was a journalist, a little book of Nietzsche's to 
 read, which he returned with the remark that he 
 had not been able to get through it, as it was in- 
 sufferable drivel. I have heard the same opin- 
 ion, or similar ones, expressed by journalists of 
 Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Dostoievsky, Stendhal and 
 all the most stimulating minds of Europe. 
 
 The wretched Saint Aubin, wretched certainly 
 as a critic, used to ridicule Tolstoi and the illness 
 which resulted in his death, maintaining that it 
 was nothing more than an advertisement. The 
 most benighted vulgarity reigns in our press. 
 
 Upon occasion, vulgarity goes hand in hand 
 with an ignorance which is astounding. I re- 
 member going to a cafe on the Calle de Alcala 
 known as la Maison Doree one afternoon with 
 Regoyos. Felipe Trigo, the novelist, sat down 
 at our table with a friend of his, a journalist, 
 I believe, from America. I have never been a 
 friend of Trigo's, and could never take any inter- 
 est either in the man or his work, which to my 
 212
 
 THE PRESS 
 
 mind is tiresome and commercially erotic, be- 
 sides being absolutely devoid of all charm. 
 
 Regoyos, who is effusive by nature, soon be- 
 came engaged in conversation with them, and the 
 talk turned upon artistic subjects, in which he 
 was interested, and then to his travels abroad. 
 
 Trigo put in his oar and uttered a number of 
 preposterous statements. In particular, he de- 
 scribed a ship which had unloaded at Milan. 
 When Regoyos pointed out that Milan was not a 
 seaport, he replied: 
 
 "Probably it was some other place then. 
 What is the difference?" 
 
 He continued with a string of geographical 
 and anthropological blunders, which were con- 
 curred in by the journalist, while Regoyos and 
 I sat by in amazement. 
 
 When we left the cafe, Regoyos inquired : 
 
 "Could they have been joking?" 
 
 "No; nonsense. They do not believe that 
 such things are worth knowing. They think they 
 are petty details which might be useful to rail- 
 way porters. Trigo imagines that he is a magi- 
 cian, who understands the female mind." 
 
 "Well, does he?" asked Regoyos, with na'ive 
 innocence. 
 
 213
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 "How can he understand anything? The poor 
 fellow is ignorant. His other attainments are 
 on a par with his geography." 
 
 The ignorance of authors and journalists is 
 accompanied as a matter of course by a total 
 want of comprehension. A number of years 
 ago, a rich young man called at my house, in- 
 tending to found a review. During the conver- 
 sation, he explained that he was a Murcian, a 
 lawyer and a follower of Maura. 
 
 Finally, after expounding his literary ideas, 
 he informed me that Ricardo Leon, who at that 
 time had just published his first novel, would, 
 in his opinion, come to be acknowledged as the 
 first novelist of Europe. He also assured me 
 that Dickens's humour was absolutely vulgar, 
 cheap and out of date. 
 
 "I am not surprised that you should think so," 
 I said to him. "You are from Murcia, you are 
 a lawyer and a Maurista; naturally, you like 
 Ricardo Leon, and it is equally natural that you 
 should not like Dickens." 
 
 Persons who imagine that it is of no conse- 
 quence whether Milan is a seaport or not, who 
 believe that Nietzsche is a drivelling ass, and 
 who make bold to tell us that Dickens is a cheap 
 214
 
 THE PRESS 
 
 author in one word, young gentlemen lawyers 
 who are partisans of Maura, are the people who 
 provide copy for our press. How can the Span- 
 ish press be expected to be different from what 
 it is? 
 
 AMERICANS 
 
 Unquestionably, Spaniards suffer much from 
 the uncertainty of information and narrowness 
 of view inevitable to those who live apart from 
 the main currents of life. 
 
 In comparison with the English, the Germans, 
 or the French, whether we like it or not, we ap- 
 pear provincial. We are provincials who pos- 
 sess more or less talent, but nevertheless we are 
 provincials. 
 
 So it is that an Italian, a Russian, or a Swede 
 prefers to read a book by a mediocre Parisian, 
 such as Marcel Prevost, to one by a writer of 
 genuine talent, such as Galdos; it also explains 
 why the canvases of second rate painters such as 
 David, Gericault, or Ingres are more highly es- 
 teemed in the market than those of a painter of 
 genius like Goya. 
 
 To be provincial has its virtues as well as its 
 defects. At times the provincial are accom- 
 panied by universal elements, which blend and
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 form a masterpiece. This was the case with 
 Don Quixote, with the etchings of Goya and 
 the dramas of Ibsen. Similarly, among new 
 peoples, provincial stupidity will often form a 
 blend with an obtuseness which is world-wide. 
 The aridness and infertility characteristic of the 
 soil combine with the detritus of fashion and the 
 follies of the four quarters of the globe. The 
 result is a child-like type, petulant, devoid of vir- 
 tue, and utterly destitute of a single manly qual- 
 ity. This is the American type. America is 
 par excellence the continent of stupidity. 
 
 The American has not yet outgrown the mon- 
 key in him and remains in the imitative stage. 
 
 I have no particular reason to dislike Ameri- 
 cans. My hostility towards them arises merely 
 from the fact that I have never known one who 
 had the air of being anybody, who impressed me 
 as a man. 
 
 You frequently meet a man in the interior of 
 Spain, in some small village, perhaps, whose 
 conversation conveys the impression that he is a 
 real man, wrought out of the ore that is most 
 human and most noble. At such times one be- 
 comes reconciled to one's country, for all its 
 charlatans and hordes of sharpers. 
 216
 
 THE PRESS 
 
 An Americart never appears to be calm, serene 
 and collected. There are plenty who seem to be 
 wild, impulsive creatures, driven on by sangui- 
 nary fury, while others disclose the vanity of the 
 chorus girl, or a self-conceit which is wholly 
 ridiculous. 
 
 My lack of sympathy for Spanish-Americans 
 extends to their literary productions. Every- 
 thing that I have read by South Americans, and 
 I bear in mind the not disinterested encomiums 
 of Unamuno, I have found to be both poor and 
 deficient in substance. 
 
 Beginning with Sarmiento's Facundo, which 
 is heavy, cheap, and uninteresting, and coming 
 down to the latest productions of Ingenieros, 
 Manuel Ugarte, Ricardo Rojas and Contreras, 
 this is true without exception. 
 
 What a deluge of shoddy snobbery and vulgar 
 display pours out of America! 
 
 It is often argued that Spaniards should eulo- 
 gize South Americans for political reasons. 
 This is one of many recommendations which pro- 
 ceed from the craniums of gentlemen who top 
 themselves off with silk hats and who carry a lec- 
 ture inside which is in demand by Ibero-Amer- 
 ican societies. 
 
 217
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 I have no faith that this brand of politics will 
 be productive of results. 
 
 Citizens of old, civilized countries are still 
 sensible to flattery and compliment, but what are 
 you to tell an Argentine who is fully convinced 
 that Argentina is a more important country than 
 England or Germany, because she raises a large 
 quantity of wheat, to say nothing of a great num- 
 ber of cows? 
 
 Whenever Unamuno writes he decries Kant, 
 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and then promptly 
 eulogizes the mighty General Anibal Perez and 
 the great poet Diocleciano Sanchez, who hail 
 from tihe pampas. To these fellows, such praise 
 seems grudging enough. Salvador Rueda him- 
 self must appear tame to these hide-stretchers. 
 
 218
 
 XVI 
 POLITICS 
 
 I have always been a liberal radical, an indi- 
 vidualist and an anarchist. In the first place, I 
 am an enemy of the Church ; in the second place, 
 I am an enemy of the State. When these great 
 powers are in conflict I am a partisan of the 
 State as against the Church, but on the day of 
 the State's triumph, I shall become an enemy of 
 the State. If I had lived during the French 
 Revolution, I should have been an international- 
 ist of the school of Anacarsis Clootz; during the 
 struggle for liberty, I should have been one of 
 the Carbonieri. 
 
 To the extent in which liberalism has been a 
 destructive force, inimical to the past, it enthralls 
 me. The fight against religious prejudice and 
 the aristocracy, the suppression of religious com- 
 munities, inheritance taxes in short, whatever 
 has a tendency to pulverize completely the an- 
 cient order of society, fills me with a great joy. 
 On the other hand, insofar as liberalism is con- 
 219
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 structive, as it has been for example in its ad- 
 vocacy of universal suffrage, in its democracy, 
 and in its system of parliamentary government, 
 I consider it ridiculous and valueless as well. 
 
 Even today, wherever it is obliged to take the 
 aggressive, it seems to me that the good in liberal- 
 ism is not exhausted ; but wherever it has become 
 an accomplished fact, and is accepted as such, it 
 neither interests me nor enlists my admiration. 
 
 VOTES AND APPLAUSE 
 
 In our present day democracy, there are only 
 two effective sanctions: votes and applause. 
 
 Those are all. Just as in the old days men 
 committed all sorts of crimes in order to please 
 their sovereign, now they commit similar crimes 
 in order to satisfy the people. 
 
 And this truth has been recognized from 
 Aristotle to Burke. 
 
 Democracy ends in histrionism. 
 
 A man who gets up to talk before a crowd 
 must of necessity be an actor. I have wondered 
 from time to time if I might not have certain 
 histrionic gifts myself; however, when I have 
 put them to the test, I have found that they were 
 220
 
 POLITICS 
 
 not sufficient. I have made six or seven speeches 
 during my brief political career. I spoke in 
 Valencia, in a pelota court, and I delivered an 
 address at Barcelona in the Casa del Pueblo, in 
 both of which places I was applauded gener- 
 ously. Nevertheless the applause failed to in- 
 toxicate me; it produced no impression upon me 
 whatever. It seemed too much like mere noise 
 noise made by men's hands, and having noth- 
 ing to do with myself. 
 
 I am not good enough as an actor to be a poli- 
 tician. 
 
 POLITICIANS 
 
 I have never been able to feel any enthusiasm 
 for Spanish politicians. We hear a great deal 
 about Canovas. Canovas has always impressed 
 me as being as bad an orator as he was a writer. 
 When I first read his Bell of Huesca, I could not 
 contain myself for laughing. As far as his 
 speeches are concerned, I have also read a few, 
 and find them horribly heavy, diffuse, monot- 
 onous and deficient in style. I hear that Cano- 
 vas is a great historian, but if so, I am not ac- 
 quainted with that side of him. 
 
 Castelar was unquestionably a man of excep- 
 991 - 
 
 ftfiJ.
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 tional gifts as a writer, but he failed to take ad- 
 vantage of them, and they were utterly dissi- 
 pated. He lacked what most Spaniards of the 
 19th Century lacked with him ; that is, reserve. 
 
 When Echegaray was made Minister of Fi- 
 nance, he was already an old man. A reporter 
 called one day to interview him at the Ministry, 
 and Echegaray confessed that he was without any 
 very clear idea as to just what the duties of his 
 office were to be. When the reporter took leave 
 of the dramatist, he remarked: 
 
 "Don Jose, you are not going to be comfort- 
 able here; it is cold in the building. Besides, 
 the air is too fresh." 
 
 Echegaray replied : 
 
 "Yes, and your description suits me exactly." 
 
 This cynically cheap joke might have fallen 
 appropriately from the tongues of the majority 
 of Spanish politicians. Among these male 
 bailarinas, nearly all of whom date back to the 
 Revolution of September, we may find, indeed, 
 some men of austere character: Salmeron, Pi y 
 Margall and Costa. Salmeron was an inimita- 
 ble actor, but an actor who was sincere in his 
 part. He was the most marvellous orator that I 
 have ever heard. 
 
 222
 
 POLITICS 
 
 As a philosopher, he was of no account, and as 
 a politician he was a calamity. 
 
 Pi y Margall, whom I met once in his own 
 home where I went in company with Azorin, 
 was no more a politician or a philosopher than 
 was Salmeron. He was a journalist, a popu- 
 larizer of other men's ideas, gifted with a style 
 at once clear and concise. Pi y Margall was 
 sincere, enamoured of ideas, and took but little 
 thought of himself. 
 
 As to Costa, I confess that he was always an- 
 tipathetic to me. Like Nakens, he was a man 
 who lived upon the estimation in which he was 
 held by others, pretending all the while that he 
 attached no importance to it whatever. Aguirre 
 Metaca once told me that while he was connected 
 with a paper in Saragossa, he had solicited an 
 interview with Costa, and thereupon Costa wrote 
 the interview himself, referring to himself here 
 and there in it as the Lion of Graus. I cannot 
 accept Costa as a modern European, intellectu- 
 ally. He was a figure for the Cortes of Cadiz, 
 solemn, pompous, becollared and rhetorical. 
 He was one of those actors who abound in south- 
 ern countries, who are laid to rest in their graves 
 without ever having had the least idea that their 
 223
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 entire lives have been nothing but stage spec- 
 tacles. 
 
 REVOLUTIONISTS 
 
 Whether politicians or authors, the Spanish 
 revolutionists always smack to my mind of the 
 property room, and especially is this true of the 
 authors. Zozaya, Morote and Dicenta have 
 passed for many years now as terrible men, both 
 destructive and great innovators. But how ri- 
 diculous! Zozaya, like Dicenta, has never done 
 anything but manipulate the commonplace, fail- 
 ing to impart either lightness or novelty to it, 
 as have Valera and Anatole France, succeeding 
 only on the other hand in making it more 
 plumbeous and indigestible. 
 
 Speaking of Luis Morote, against whom I urge 
 nothing as a man, he has always been a bugbear 
 to me, the personification of dullness, of vul- 
 garity, of everything that lacks interest and 
 charm. I can conceive nothing lower than an 
 article by Morote. 
 
 "What talent that man has! What a revolu- 
 tionary personality!" they used to say in Valen- 
 cia, and once the janitor at the Club added: 
 "To think I knew that man when he was only this 
 224
 
 POLITICS 
 
 high!" And he held out his hand about a metre 
 above the ground. 
 
 Spain has never produced any revolutionists. 
 Don Nicolas Estevanez, who imagined himself 
 an anarchist, would fly into a rage if he read an 
 article which concealed a gallicism in it. 
 
 "Do not bother your head about gallicisms," 
 I used to say to him. "What do they matter, 
 anyway?" 
 
 No, we have never had any revolutionists in 
 Spain. That is, we have had only one: Ferrer. 
 
 He was certainly not a man of great mind. 
 When he talked, he was on the level of Morote 
 arid Zozaya, which is nothing more nor less than 
 the level of everybody else; but when it came to 
 action, he did amount to something, and that 
 something was dangerous. 
 
 LERROUX 
 
 My only experience in politics was gained 
 with Lerroux. 
 
 One Sunday, seven or eight years ago, on com- 
 ing out of my house and crossing the Plaza de 
 San Marcial, I observed that a great crowd had 
 gathered.
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 "What is the matter?" I asked. 
 
 "Lerroux is coming," they told me. 
 
 I delayed a moment and happened on Villar, 
 the composer, among the crowd. We fell to 
 talking of Lerroux and what he might accom- 
 plish. A procession was soon formed, which we 
 followed, and we found ourselves in front of the 
 editorial offices of El Pais. 
 
 "Shall we go in?" asked Villar. "Do you 
 know Lerroux?" 
 
 I had met Lerroux in the days when El Prog- 
 reso was still published, having called once with 
 Maeztu at his office; afterwards I saw him in 
 Barcelona in a large shed, which, if I recall 
 rightly, went by the name of "La Fraternidad 
 Republicana," and then I was accompanied by 
 Azorin and Junoy. 
 
 Villar and I went upstairs and greeted Lerroux 
 in the offices of El Pais. 
 
 "Estevanez has spoken of you to me," he said. 
 "Is he well?" 
 
 "Yes, very well." 
 
 A few days later, Lerroux invited me to din- 
 ner at the Cafe Ingles. Lerroux, Fuente and 
 I dined together, and then fell to talking. 
 Lerroux asked me to join his party, whereupon 
 226
 
 POLITICS 
 
 I pointed out the qualifications which were lack- 
 ing in me, which were necessary to a politician. 
 Shortly after, I was nominated as a candidate for 
 the City Council, and I addressed a number of 
 meetings, although always coldly, and never at 
 high tension. 
 
 While I was with Lerroux, I was never treated 
 save with consideration. 
 
 Why did I leave his party? Chiefly because 
 of differences as to ideas and as to tactics. 
 Lerroux wished to organize his party into a party 
 of law and order, so that it might be capable of 
 governing, and also to have it friendly with the 
 Army. I was of the opinion that it ought to be a 
 revolutionary party, not in the sense that I was 
 thinking of erecting barricades, but I wished it 
 to contest, to upset things, and to protest against 
 injustice. 
 
 What Lerroux wanted was a party of orators 
 who could speak at public meetings, a party 
 of office-holders, councillors, provincial deputies 
 and the like, while I held, and still hold, that the 
 only efficacious revolutionary weapon is the 
 printed page. Lerroux was anxious to transform 
 the radical party into something aristocratic and 
 Castilian; I desired to see it retain its Catalan 
 227
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 character, and continue to wear blouses and rope- 
 soled shoes. 
 
 I withdrew from the party for these reasons, 
 to which I may add Lerroux's attitude of indiffer- 
 ence upon the occasion of the execution of the 
 stoker of the "Numancia." 
 
 Not many months after, I met him on the 
 Carrera de San Jeronimo, and he said to me: 
 
 "I have read your diatribes." 
 
 "They were not directed against you, but 
 against your politics. I shall never speak ill of 
 you, because I have no cause." 
 
 "Yes," he replied, "I know that at heart you 
 are one of my friends." 
 
 AN OFFER 
 
 A number of years ago, when the Conserva- 
 tives were in power and Dato was President of the 
 Ministry, Azorin brought me word that Sanchez 
 Guerra, then Minister of the Interior, wished to 
 see me and to have a little talk, as perhaps some 
 way might be arranged by which I might be made 
 deputy. During the afternoon, I accompanied 
 Azorin to the Ministry, and we saw the Minister. 
 228
 
 POLITICS 
 
 He informed me that he would like to have me 
 enter the Congress. 
 
 "I should like to myself," I replied, "but it 
 would appear to me rather difficult." 
 
 "But is there not some town where you are well 
 known, and where you have influence?" 
 
 "No, none whatever." 
 
 "How would you like then to be deputy to 
 represent the Government?" 
 
 "As a regular?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "As a Conservative?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 I thought a moment and said: "No, I can 
 never be a Conservative, however it might suit 
 my interest to be so. Try as hard as I might, I 
 should never succeed." 
 
 "That is the only way in which we can make 
 you deputy." 
 
 "Well, it cannot be helped! I must resign 
 myself then to amount to nothing." 
 
 Thanking the Minister for his kindness. 
 Azorin and I walked out of the Ministry of the 
 Interior. 
 
 229
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 SOCIALISTS 
 
 As for Socialists, I have never cared to have 
 anything to do with them. One of the most of- 
 fensive things about Socialists, which is more 
 offensive than their pedantry, than their charla- 
 tanry, than their hypocrisy, is their inquisitorial 
 instinct for prying into other people's lives. 
 Whether Pablo Iglesias travels first or third 
 class, has been for years one of the principal 
 topics of dispute between Socialists and their 
 opponents. 
 
 Fifteen years ago I was in Tangier, where I 
 had been sent by the Globo, and, upon my return, 
 a newspaper man who had socialistic ideas, re- 
 proached me: 
 
 "You talk a great deal about the working man, 
 but I see you were living in the best hotel in 
 Tangier." 
 
 I answered: "In the first place, I have never 
 spoken of the workingman with any fervour. 
 Furthermore, I am not such a slave as to be too 
 cowardly to take what life offers as it comes, 
 as you are. I take what I can that I want, and 
 When I do not take it, it is because I cannot get 
 it." 
 
 230
 
 POLITICS 
 
 LOVE OF THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 To gush over the workingman is one of the 
 commonplaces of the day which is utterly false 
 and hypocritical. Just as in the 18th century 
 sympathy was with the simple hearted citizen, so 
 today we talk about the workingman. The term 
 workingman can never be anything but a gram- 
 matical common denominator. Among work- 
 ingmen, as among the bourgeoisie, there are all 
 sorts of people. It is perfectly true that there 
 are certain characteristics, certain defects, which 
 may be exaggerated in a given class, because of 
 its special environment and culture. The dif- 
 ference in Spanish cities between the labouring 
 man and the bourgeoisie is not very great. We 
 frequently see the workingman leap the barrier 
 into the bourgeoisie, and then disclose himself 
 as a unique flower of knavery, extortion and mis- 
 directed ingenuity. Deep down in the hearts of 
 our revolutionists, I do not believe that there is 
 any real enthusiasm for the workingman. 
 
 When the bookshop of Fernando Fe was still 
 
 in the Carrera de San Jeronimo, I once heard 
 
 Blasco Ibanez say with the cheapness that is his 
 
 distinguishing trait, laughing meanwhile ostenta- 
 
 231
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 tiously, that a republic in Spain would mean the 
 rule of shoemakers and of the scum of the streets. 
 
 THE CONVENTIONALIST BARRIOVERO 
 
 Barriovero, a conventionalist, according to 
 Grandmontagne yes, and how keen the scent 
 of this American for such matters! attended the 
 opening of a radical club in the Calle del Prin- 
 cipe with a party of friends. We were all drink- 
 ing champagne. Like other revolutionists and 
 parvenus generally, Lerroux is a victim of the 
 superstition of champagne. 
 
 "Aha, suppose those workingmen should see 
 us drinking champagne!" suggested some one. 
 
 "What of it?" asked another. 
 
 "I only wish for my part," Barriovero inter- 
 rupted with a show of sentiment, "that the work- 
 ingman could learn to drink champagne." 
 
 "Learn to drink it?" I burst out, "I see no 
 difficulty about that. He could drink champagne 
 as well as anything else." 
 
 "Not at all," said Barriovero the conventional- 
 ist, very gravely. "He has the superstition of 
 the peasant; he thinks he must leave enough 
 wine to cover the bottom of the glass." 
 232
 
 POLITICS 
 
 I doubt whether this observation will attract 
 the attention of any future Plutarch, although it 
 might very well do so, as it expresses most 
 clearly the distinction which exists in the minds 
 of our revolutionists between the workingman 
 and the young gentleman. 
 
 ANARCHISTS 
 
 I have had a number of acquaintances among 
 anarchists. Some of them are dead; the major- 
 ity of the others have changed their ideas. It 
 is apparent nowadays that the anarchism of 
 Reclus and Kropotkin is out of date, and en- 
 tirely a thing of the past. The same tendencies 
 will reappear under other forms, and present 
 new aspects. Among anarchists, I have known 
 Elysee Reclus, whom I met in the editorial offi- 
 ces of a publication called U Humanite Nouvelle, 
 which was issued in Paris in the Rue des Saints- 
 Peres. I have also met Sebastien Faure during 
 a mass meeting organized in the interests of one 
 Guerin, who had taken refuge in a house in the 
 Rue de Chabrol some eighteen or twenty years 
 ago. I have had relations with Malatesta and 
 Tarrida del Marmol. As a matter of fact, both 
 233
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 these anarchists escorted me one afternoon from 
 Islington, where Malatesta lived, to the door of 
 the St. James Club, one of the most aristocratic 
 retreats in London, where I had an appointment 
 to meet a diplomat. 
 
 As for active anarchists, I have known a num- 
 ber, two or three of whom have been dynamiters. 
 
 THE MORALITY OF THE ALTERNATING 
 PARTY SYSTEM 
 
 The only difference between the morality of 
 tihe Liberal party and that of the Conservative 
 party is one of clothes. Among Conservatives 
 the most primitive clout seems to be slightly more 
 ample, but not noticeably so. 
 
 The preoccupations of both are purely with 
 matters of style. The only distinction is that 
 the Conservatives make off with a great deal at 
 once, while the Liberals take less, but do it often. 
 
 This is in harmony with the law of mechanics 
 according to which what is gained in force is lost 
 in velocity and what is gained in intensity is lost 
 in expansion. After all, no doubt morality in 
 politics should be a negligible quantity. Hon- 
 est, upright men who hearken only to the voice of 
 234
 
 POLITICS 
 
 conscience, never get on in politics, neither are 
 they ever practical, nor good for anything. 
 
 To succeed in politics, a certain facility is 
 necessary, to which must be added ambition and 
 a thirst for glory. The last is the most innocent 
 of the three. 
 
 ON OBEYING THE LAW 
 
 It is safe, it seems to me, to assume the fol- 
 lowing axioms: First, to obey the law is in 
 no sense to attain justice; second, it is not pos- 
 sible to obey the law strictly, thoroughly, in any 
 country in the world. 
 
 That obeying the law has nothing to do with 
 justice is indisputable, and this is especially true 
 in the political sphere, in which it is easy to point 
 to a rebel, such as Martinez Campos, who has 
 been elevated to the plane of a great man and 
 who has been immortalized by a statue upon his 
 death, and then to a rebel such as Sanchez Moya, 
 who was merely shot. The only difference be- 
 tween the men was in the results attained, and in 
 the manner of their exit. 
 
 Hence I say that Lerroux was not only base, 
 but obtuse and absurdly wanting in human feel- 
 235
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 ing and revolutionary sympathy, when he con- 
 curred in the execution of the stoker of the 
 "Numancia." 
 
 If law and justice are identical and to comply 
 with the law is invariably to do justice, then 
 what can be the distinction between the progress- 
 ive and the conservative? On the other hand, 
 the revolutionist has no alternative but to hold 
 that law and justice are not the same, and so he 
 is obliged to subscribe to the benevolent charac- 
 ter of all crimes which are altruistic and social 
 in their purposes, whether they are reactionary 
 or anarchistic in tendency. 
 
 Now the second axiom, which is to the effect 
 that there is no city or country in the world in 
 which it is possible to obey the law thoroughly, is 
 also self-evident. A certain class of common 
 crimes, such as robbery, cheating and swindling, 
 murder and the like, are followed by a species 
 of automatic punishment in all quarters of the 
 civilized world, in spite of exceptions in specific 
 cases, which result from the intervention of 
 political bosses and similar influences; but there 
 are other offenses which meet with no such auto- 
 matic punishment. In these pardon and penalty 
 are meted out in a spirit of pure opportunism. 
 236
 
 POLITICS 
 
 I was discussing Zurdo Olivares one day with 
 Emiliano Iglesias in the office of El Radical, 
 when I asked him: 
 
 "How was it that Zurdo Olivares could save 
 himself after playing such an active role in the 
 tragic week at Barcelona?" 
 
 "Zurdo's salvation was indirectly owing to 
 me," replied Iglesias. 
 
 "But, my dear sir!" 
 
 "Yes, indeed." 
 
 "How did that happen?" 
 
 "Very naturally. There were three cases to 
 be tried; one was against Ferrer, one against 
 Zurdo, and another against me. A friend who 
 enjoyed the necessary influence, succeeded in 
 quashing the case against me, as a matter of per- 
 sonal favour, and as it seemed rather barefaced 
 to make an exception alone in my favour, it was 
 decided to include Zurdo Olivares, who, thanks 
 to the arrangement, escaped being shot." 
 
 "Then, if an influential friend of yours had not 
 been a member of the Ministry, you would both 
 have been shot in the moat at Montjuich?" 
 
 "Beyond question." 
 
 And this took place in the heyday of Conserva- 
 tive power. 
 
 237
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 THE STERNNESS OF THE LAW 
 
 There are men who believe that the State, as 
 at present constituted, is the end and culmination 
 of all human effort. According to this view, the 
 State is the best possible state, and its organiza- 
 tion is considered so perfect that its laws, disci- 
 pline and formulae are held to be sacred and 
 immutable in men's eyes. Maura and all con- 
 servatives must be reckoned in this group, and 
 Lerroux too, appears to belong with them, as he 
 holds discipline in such exalted respect. 
 
 On the other hand, there are persons who be- 
 lieve that the entire legal structure is only a tem- 
 porary scaffolding, and that what is called jus- 
 tice today may be thought savagery tomorrow, so 
 that it is the part of wisdom not to look so much 
 to the rule of the present as to the illumination of 
 the future. 
 
 Since it is impossible to effect in practice auto- 
 matic enforcement of the law, especially in the 
 sphere of political crimes, because of the un- 
 limited power of pardon vested in the hands of 
 our public men, it would seem judicious to err 
 upon the side of mercy rather than upon that of 
 severity. Better fail the law and pardon a re- 
 238
 
 POLITICS 
 
 pulsive, bloody beast such as Chato de Cuqueta, 
 than shoot an addle-headed unfortunate such as 
 Clemente Garcia, or a dreamer like Sanchez 
 Moya, whose hands were innocent of blood. 
 
 It was pointed out a long time ago that laws 
 are like cobwebs; they catch the little flies, and 
 let the big ones pass through. 
 
 How very severe, how very determined our 
 politicians are with the little flies, but how ex- 
 tremely affable they are with the big ones! 
 
 239
 
 XVII 
 MILITARY GLORY 
 
 No, I 'have not made up my mind upon the 
 issues of this war. If it were possible to deter- 
 mine what is best for Europe, I should of course 
 desire it, but this I do not know, and so I am 
 uncertain. I am preoccupied by the conse- 
 quences which may follow the war in Spain. 
 Some believe that there will be an increase of 
 militarism, but I doubt it. 
 
 Many suppose that the crash of the present war 
 will cause the prestige of the soldier to mount 
 upward like the spray, so that we shall have noth- 
 ing but uniforms and clanking of spurs through- 
 out the world very shortly, while the sole topics 
 of conversation will be mortars, batteries and 
 guns. 
 
 In my judgment those who take this standpoint 
 are mistaken. The present conflict will not es- 
 tablish war in higher favour. 
 
 Perhaps its glories may not be diminished 
 utterly. It may be that man must of necessity 
 240
 
 MILITARY GLORY 
 
 kill, burn, and trample under foot, and that these 
 excesses of brutality are symptoms of collective 
 health. 
 
 Even if this be so, we may be sure that mili- 
 tary glory is upon the eve of an eclipse. 
 
 Its decline began when the professional armies 
 became nothing more than armed militia, and 
 from the moment that it became apparent that a 
 soldier might be improvised from a countryman 
 with marvellous rapidity. 
 
 THE OLD-TIME SOLDIER 
 
 Formerly, a soldier was a man of daring and 
 adventure, brave and audacious, preferring an 
 irregular life to the narrowing restraints of civil 
 existence. 
 
 The old time soldier trusted in his star with- 
 out scruple and without fear, and imagined that 
 he could dominate fate as the gambler fancies 
 that he masters the laws of chance. 
 
 Valour, recklessness, together with a certain 
 rough eloquence, a certain itch to command, lay 
 at the foundation of his life. His inducements 
 were pay, booty, showy uniforms and splendid 
 horses. The soldier's life was filled with adven- 
 241
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 ture, he conquered wealth, he conquered women, 
 and he roamed through unknown lands. 
 
 Until a few years ago, the soldier might have 
 been summed up in three words: he was brave, 
 ignorant and adventurous. 
 
 The warrior of this school passed out of Eu- 
 rope about the middle of the 19th Century. He 
 became extinct in Spain at the conclusion of our 
 Second Civil War. 
 
 Since that day there has been a fundamental 
 change in the life of the soldier. 
 
 War has taken on greater magnitude, while the 
 soldier has become more refined, l and it is not to 
 be denied that both war and the fighting man are 
 losing their traditional prestige. 
 
 DOWN GOES PRESTIGE 
 
 The causes of this diminution of prestige are 
 various. Some are moral, such as the increased 
 respect for human life, and the disfavour with 
 which the more aggressive, crueler qualities have 
 come to be regarded. Others, however, and per- 
 haps these are of more importance, are purely 
 esthetic. Through a combination of circum- 
 stances, modern warfare, although more tragic 
 242
 
 MILITARY GLORY 
 
 than was ancient warfare, and even more deadly, 
 nevertheless has been deprived of its spectacular 
 features. 
 
 Capacity for esthetic appreciation has its 
 limits. Nobody is able to visualize a battle in 
 which two million men are engaged; it can only 
 be imagined as a series of smaller battles. In 
 one of these modern battles, substantially all the 
 traditional elements which we have come to as- 
 sociate with war, have disappeared. The horse, 
 which bulks so largely in the picture of a battle 
 as it presents itself to our minds, scarcely retains 
 any importance at all ; for the most part, automo- 
 biles, bicycles and motor cycles have taken its 
 place. These contrivances may be useful, but 
 they do not make the same appeal to the popular 
 imagination. 
 
 SCIENCE AND THE PICTURESQUE 
 
 Upon taking over warfare, science stripped it 
 of its picturesqueness. The commanding gen- 
 eral no longer cavorts upon his charger, nor 
 smiles as the bullets whistle about him, while he 
 stands surrounded by an ornamental general 
 staff, whose breasts are covered with ribbons and 
 243
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 medals representing every known variety of 
 hardware, whether monarchical or republican. 
 
 Today the general sits in a room, surrounded 
 by telephones and telegraph apparatus. If he 
 smiles at all, it is only before the camera. 
 
 An officer scarcely ever uses a sword, nor does 
 he strut about adorned with all his crosses and 
 medals, nor does he wear the resplendent uni- 
 forms of other days. On the contrary, his uni- 
 form is ugly and dirt coloured, and innocent of 
 devices. 
 
 This officer is without initiative, he is subordi- 
 nated to a fixed general plan ; surprises on either 
 one side or the other, are almost out of the 
 question. 
 
 The plan of battle is rigid and detailed. It 
 permits neither originality nor display of indi- 
 viduality upon the part of the generals, the lesser 
 officers, or the private soldiers. The individual 
 is swallowed up by the collective force. Out- 
 standing types do not occur; nobody develops 
 the marked personality of the generals of the 
 old school. 
 
 Besides this, individual bravery, when not re- 
 inforced by other qualities, is of less and less 
 consequence. The bold, adventurous youth who, 
 244
 
 MILITARY GLORY 
 
 years ago, would have been an embryo Murat, 
 Messina, Espartero or Prim, would be rejected 
 today to make room for a mechanic who had 
 the skill to operate a machine, or for an aviator 
 or an engineer who might be capable of solving 
 in a crisis a problem of pressing danger. 
 
 The prestige of the soldier, even upon the bat- 
 tle field, has fallen today below that of the man 
 of science. 
 
 WHAT WE NEED TODAY 
 
 There are still same persons of a romantic 
 turn of mind who imagine that none but the sol- 
 dier who defends his native land, the priest 
 who appeases the divine wrath and at the same 
 time inculcates the moral law, and the poet who 
 celebrates the glories of the community, are 
 worthy to be leaders of the people. 
 
 But the man of the present age does not desire 
 any leaders. 
 
 He has found that when someone wears red 
 trousers or a black cassock, or is able to write 
 shorter lines than himself, it is no indication that 
 he is any better, nor any braver, nor any more 
 moral, nor capable of deeper feeling than he. 
 245
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 The man of today will have no magicians, no 
 high priests and no mysteries. He is capable of 
 being his own priest, his own soldier when it is 
 necessary, and of fighting for himself; he re- 
 quires no specialists in courage, in morals, nor 
 in the realm of sentiment and feeling. What 
 we need today are good men and wise men. 
 
 OUR ARMIES 
 
 Prussian militarism has been explained upon 
 the theory that it was a development consequent 
 upon a realization of the benefits which had 
 accrued to Prussia through war. As a matter 
 of fact, however, it is not possible to explain all 
 militarism in this way. Certainly in Spain 
 neither wars nor the army have been of the 
 slightest benefit to the country. 
 
 If we consider the epoch which goes by the 
 name of contemporary history, that is to say from 
 the French Revolution to the present time, we 
 shall perceive immediately that we have not been 
 over fortunate. 
 
 The French Republic declared war upon us in 
 1793. A campaign of astuteness, a tactical war- 
 fare was waged by us upon the frontiers, upon 
 246
 
 MILITARY GLORY 
 
 occasion not without success, until finally the 
 French army grew strong enough to sweep us 
 back, and to cross the Ebro. 
 
 We took part in the battle of Trafalgar in 
 1805. Spain presented a fine appearance, she 
 made a mighty gesture with her Gravinas, her 
 Churrucas and her Alavas, but the battle itself 
 was a disaster. 
 
 In 1808 the War of Independence broke out, 
 providing another splendid exhibition of popular 
 fervour. In this war, the regular Army was the 
 force which accomplished least. The war took 
 its character from the guerrillas, from the dwel- 
 lers in the towns. The campaign was directed 
 by Englishmen. The Spanish army suffered 
 more defeats than it won victories, while its ad- 
 ministrative and technical organization was de- 
 plorable. The intervention of Angouleme fol- 
 lowed in 1823. The Army was composed of 
 liberal officers, but it contained no troops, so 
 that all they ever did was to retire before the 
 enemy, as he was more numerous and more 
 powerful. 
 
 The Spanish cause in America was hopeless 
 before the fighting began. The land was enor- 
 mous, troops were few, and in large measure 
 
 - 247- 
 fj 1 1
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 composed of Indians. What the English were 
 never able to do in the fulness of their power, 
 was not to be accomplished by Spaniards in their 
 decadence. Our First Civil War, which was 
 fierce, terrible, and waged without quarter, called 
 into being a valorous liberal army, and soldiers 
 sprang up of the calibre of Espartero, Zurbano 
 and Narvaez, but simultaneously a powerful 
 Carlist army was organized under leaders of 
 military genius, such as Zumalacarregui and 
 Cabrera. Victory for either side was impos- 
 sible, and the war ended in compromise. 
 
 The Second Civil War also resulted in a system 
 of pacts and compromises far more secret than 
 the Convention of Vergara. The Cuban war and 
 the war in the Philippines, as afterwards the war 
 with the United States, were calamitous, while 
 the present campaign in Morocco has not one 
 redeeming feature. 
 
 From the War of the French Revolution to this 
 very day, the African War has been the only one 
 in which our forces have met with the slightest 
 success. 
 
 Nevertheless, our soldiers aspire to a position 
 of dominance in the country equal to that at- 
 -24,8- 
 
 ffro
 
 MILITARY GLORY 
 
 tained by the French soldiers subsequent to Jena, 
 and by the Germans after Sedan. 
 
 A WORD FROM KUROKI, THE JAPANESE 
 
 "Gentlemen," said General Kuroki, speaking 
 at a banquet tendered to him in New York, "I 
 cannot aspire to the applause of the world, be- 
 cause I have created nothing, I have invented 
 nothing. I am only a soldier." 
 
 If these are not his identical words, they con- 
 vey the meaning of them. 
 
 This victorious, square-headed Mongolian had 
 gotten into his head what the dolichocephalic 
 German blond, who, according to German anthro- 
 pologists is the highest product of Europe, and 
 the brachycephalic brunette of Gaul and the 
 Latin and the Slav have never been able to un- 
 derstand. 
 
 Will they ever be able to understand it? Per- 
 haps they never will be able. 
 
 249
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 When I sat down to begin these pages, some- 
 what at random, my intention was to write an au- 
 tobiography, accompanying it with such com- 
 ments as might suggest themselves. Looking 
 continually to the right and to the left, I have 
 lost my way, and this book is the result. 
 
 I have not attempted to correct or embellish 
 it. So many books, trimmed up nicely and well- 
 padded, go to their graves every year to be for- 
 gotten forever, that it has hardly seemed worth 
 while to bedeck this one. I am not a believer in 
 maquillage for the dead. 
 
 Now one word more as to the subject of the 
 book, which is I. 
 
 If I were to live two hundred years at the very 
 least, I might be able to realize, by degrees, the 
 maximum programme which I have laid down 
 for my life. As it scarcely seems possible that a 
 man could live to such an age, which is attained 
 only by parrots, I find myself with no alternative 
 250
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 but to limit myself to a small portion of the 
 introductory section of my minimum programme, 
 and this, as a matter of fact, I am content to do. 
 
 With hardship and effort, and the scanty 
 means at my command, I have succeeded in ac- 
 quiring a house and garden in my own country, 
 a comfortable retreat which is sufficient for my 
 needs. I have gathered a small library in the 
 house, which I hope will grow with time, besides 
 a few manuscripts and some curious prints. I 
 do not believe that I have ever harmed any man 
 deliberately, so my conscience does not trouble 
 me. If my ideas are fragmentary and ill-con- 
 sidered, I have done my best to make them sound, 
 clear, and complete, so that it is not my fault if 
 they are not so. 
 
 I have become independent financially. I not 
 only support myself, but I am able to travel occa- 
 sionally upon the proceeds of my pen. 
 
 A Russian publishing house, another in Ger- 
 many, and another in the United States are 
 bringing out my books, paying me, moreover, 
 for the right of translation; and I am satisfied. 
 I have friends of both sexes in Madrid and in 
 the Basque provinces, who seem already like old 
 friends, because I have grown fond of them. As 
 251
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 I face old age, I feel that I am walking upon 
 firmer ground than I did in my youth. 
 
 In a short time, what a few years ago the 
 sociologists used to call involution that is, a 
 turning in will begin to take place in my brain ; 
 the cranial sutures will become petrified, and an 
 automatic limitation of the mental horizon will 
 soon come. 
 
 I shall accept involution, petrification of the 
 sutures and limitation with good grace. I have 
 never rebelled against logic, nor against nature, 
 against the lightning or the thunder storm. No 
 sooner does one gain the crest of the hill of life 
 than at once he begins to descend rapidly. We 
 know a great deal the moment that we realize 
 that nobody knows anything. I am a little 
 melancholy now and a little rheumatic; it is time 
 to take salicylates and to go out and work in the 
 garden a time for meditation and for long 
 stories, for watching the flames as they flare up- 
 ward under the chimney piece upon the hearth. 
 
 I commend myself to the event. It is dark 
 outside, but the door of my house stands open. 
 Whoever will, be he life or be he death, let him 
 come in. 
 
 252
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 PALINODE AND FRESH OUTBURST OF IRE 
 
 A few days ago I left the house with the manu- 
 script of this book, to which I have given the 
 name of Youth and Egolatry, on my way to the 
 post office. 
 
 It was a romantic September morning, swathed 
 in thick, white mist. A blue haze of thin smoke 
 rose upward from the shadowy houses of the 
 neighbouring settlement, vanishing in the mist. 
 Meanwhile, the birds were singing, and a rivulet 
 close by murmured in the stillness. 
 
 Under the influence of the homely, placid 
 country air, I felt my spirit soften and grow more 
 humble, and I began to think that the manuscript 
 which I carried in my hand was nothing more 
 than a farrago of foolishness and vulgarity. 
 
 The voice of prudence, which was also that of 
 cowardice, cautioned me: 
 
 "What is the good of publishing this? Will 
 it bring you reputation?" 
 
 "Certainly not." 
 
 "Have you anything to gain by it?" 
 
 "Probably not either." 
 
 "Then, why irritate and offend this one and 
 253
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 that by saying things which, after all, are no- 
 body's business?" 
 
 To the voice of prudence, however, my 
 habitual self replied: 
 
 "But what you have written is sincere, is it 
 not? What do you care, then, what they think 
 about it?" 
 
 But the voice of prudence continued: 
 
 "How quiet everything is about you, how 
 peaceful! This is life, after all, and the rest is 
 madness, vanity and vain endeavour." 
 
 There was a moment when I was upon the 
 point of tossing my manuscript into the air, and 
 I believe I should have done so, could I have 
 been sure that it would have dematerialized itself 
 immediately like smoke ; or I would have thrown 
 it into the river, if I had felt certain that the cur- 
 rent would have swept it out to sea. 
 
 This afternoon I went to San Sebastian to buy 
 paper and salicylate of soda, which is less agree- 
 able. 
 
 A number of public guards were riding to- 
 gether in the car on the way over, along the fron- 
 tier. They were discussing bull fighters, El 
 254
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 Gallo and Belmonte, and also the disorders of 
 the past few days. 
 
 "Too bad that Maura and La Cierva are not 
 in power," said one of them, who was from 
 Murcia, smiling and exhibiting his decayed 
 teeth. "They would have made short work of 
 this." 
 
 "They are in reserve for the finish," said an- 
 other, with the solemnity of a pious scamp. 
 
 Returning from San Sebastian, I happened 
 on a family from Madrid in the same car. The 
 father was weak, jaundiced and sour-visaged ; 
 the mother was a fat brunette, with black eyes, 
 who was loaded down with jewels, while her 
 face was made up until it was brilliant white, in 
 colour like a stearin candle. A rather good 
 looking daughter of between fifteen and twenty 
 was escorted by a lieutenant who apparently was 
 engaged to her. Finally, there was another girl, 
 between twelve and fourteen, flaccid and lively 
 as a still-life on a dinner table. Suddenly the 
 father, who was reading a newspaper, exclaimed : 
 
 "Nothing is going to be done, I can see that; 
 they are already applying to have the revolu- 
 tionists pardoned. The Government will do 
 nothing." 
 
 255
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 "I wish they would kill every one of them," 
 broke in the girl who was engaged to the lieuten- 
 ant. "Think of it! Firing on soldiers! They 
 are bandits." 
 
 "Yes, and with such a king as we have!" ex- 
 claimed the fat lady, with the paraffine hue, in 
 a mournful tone. "It has ruined our summer. 
 I wish they would shoot every one of them." 
 
 "And they are not the only ones," interrupted 
 the father. "The men who are behind them, the 
 writers and leaders, hide themselves, and then 
 they throw the first stones." 
 
 Upon entering the house, I found that the final 
 proofs of my book had just arrived from the 
 printer, and sat down to read them. 
 
 The words of that family from Madrid still 
 rang in my ears: "I wish they would kill every 
 one of them!" 
 
 However one may feel, I thought to myself, it 
 is impossible not to hate such people. Such 
 people are natural enemies. It is inevitable. 
 
 Now, reading over the proofs of my book, 
 it seems to me that it is not strident enough. I 
 could wish it were more violent, more anti-mid- 
 dle class. 
 
 I no longer hear the voice of prudence seduc- 
 256
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 ing me, as it did a few days since, to a palinode 
 in complicity with a romantic morning of white 
 mist. 
 
 The zest of combat, of adventure stirs in me 
 again. The sheltered harbour seems a poor 
 refuge in my eyes, tranquillity and security 
 appear contemptible. 
 
 "Here, boy, up, and throw out the sail! Run 
 the red flag of revolution to the masthead of our 
 frail craft, and forth to sea!" 
 
 Itzea, September, 1917. 
 
 257
 
 APPENDICES 
 SPANISH POLITICIANS 
 ON BAROJA'S ANARCHISTS 
 NOTE
 
 SPANISH POLITICIANS 
 
 The Spanish alternating party system has prevailed 
 as a national institution since the restoration of the 
 monarchy under Alfonso XII. Ostensibly it is based 
 upon manhood suffrage, and in the cities this is the 
 fact, but in the more remote districts the balloting 
 plays but small part in the returns. Upon the disso- 
 lution of the Cortes and the resignation of a ministry, 
 one of the two great parties the liberal party and the 
 conservative party automatically retires from power, 
 and the other succeeds it, always carrying the ensuing 
 elections by convenient working majorities. 
 
 Spain is a poor country. During the half century 
 previous to the restoration of the Bourbons, she was 
 a victim of internecine strife and factional warfare. 
 She is not poor naturally, but her energy has been 
 drawn off; she has been bled white, and needs time 
 to recuperate. The Spaniards are a practical people. 
 They realize this condition. Even the lower classes 
 are tired of fine talking. No people have heard more, 
 and none have profited less by it. The country is not 
 like Russia, a fertile field for the agitator; it looks 
 coldly upon reform. Such response as has been ob- 
 tained by the radical has come from the labour centres 
 under the stimulus of foreign influences, and more 
 particularly from Barcelona, where the problem is 
 political even before it is an individual one. 
 261
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 For this reason the Spanish Republicans are in large 
 part theorists. The land has been disturbed suffi- 
 ciently. They would hesitate to inaugurate radical 
 reforms, if power were to be placed in their hands, 
 while the possession of power itself might prove not 
 a little embarrassing. Behind the monarchy lies the 
 republic of 1873, behind Canovas and Castelar, Pi y 
 Margall; the republic has merged into and was, in a 
 sense, the foundation of the constitutional system of 
 today. Even popular leaders such as Lerroux are 
 quick to recognize this fact, and govern themselves ac- 
 cordingly. The lack of general education today, 
 would render any attempt at the establishment of a 
 thorough-going democracy insecure. 
 
 Francisco Ferrer, although idealized abroad, has 
 been no more than a symptom in Spain. Such men 
 even as Angel Guimera, the dramatist, a Catalan 
 separatist who has been under surveillance for years, 
 or Pere Aldavert, who has suffered imprisonment in 
 Barcelona because of his opinions, while they speak 
 for the proletariat, nevertheless have had scant sym- 
 pathy for Ferrer's ideas. It would be interesting to 
 know just to what extent these commend themselves to 
 Pablo and Emiliano Iglesias and the professed politi- 
 cal Socialists. 
 
 Of the existing parties, the Liberal, being more or 
 less an association of groups tending to the left, is 
 the least homogeneous. Its most prominent leader of 
 late years has been the Conde de Romanones, who 
 
 262
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 may scarcely be said to represent a new era. He has 
 shared responsibility with Eduardo Dato. 
 
 Among Conservatives, the chief figure has long been 
 Antonio Maura. He is not a young man. Politically, 
 he represents very much what the cordially detested 
 Weyler did in the military sphere. But Maurism to- 
 day is a very different thing from the Maurism of 
 fifteen years ago, or of the moat of Montjuich. The 
 name of Maura casts a spell over the Conservative 
 imagination. It is the rallying point of innumerable 
 associations of young men of reactionary, aristocratic 
 and clerical tendencies throughout the country, while 
 to progressives it symbolizes the oppressiveness of the 
 old regime. 
 
 ON BAROJA'S ANARCHISTS 
 
 Baroja's memoirs afford convincing proof of his 
 contact with radicals of all sorts and classes, from 
 stereotyped republicans such as Barriovero, or the 
 Argentine Francisco Grandmontagne, correspondent of 
 La Prensa of Buenos Aires, to active anarchists of the 
 type of Mateo Morral. 
 
 Morral was an habitue of a cafe in the Calle de Al- 
 cala at Madrid, where Baroja was accustomed to go 
 with his friends to take coffee, and, in the Spanish 
 phrase, to attend his tertulia. Morral would listen to 
 these conversations. After his attempt to assassinate 
 the King and Queen in the Calle Mayor on their 
 return from the Royal wedding ceremony, Baroja 
 263
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 went to view Morral's body, but was refused admit- 
 tance. A drawing of Morral was made at the time, 
 however, by Ricardo Baroja. 
 
 In this connection, Jose Nakens, to whom the author 
 pays his compliments on an earlier page, was sub- 
 jected to an unusual experience. Nakens, who was a 
 sufficiently mild gentleman, had taken a needy radical 
 into his house, and had given him shelter. This per- 
 sonage made a point of inveighing to Nakens con- 
 tinually against Canovas del Castillo, proposing to 
 make way with him. When the news of the assassina- 
 tion of Canovas was cried through the city, Nakens 
 knew for the first that his visitor had been in earnest. 
 He was none other than the murderer Angiolillo. 
 
 This anecdote became current in Madrid. Years 
 afterwards when the prime-minister Canalejas was 
 shot to death, the assassin recalled it to mind, and 
 repaired to the house of Nakens, who saw in dismay 
 for the second time his radical theories put to 
 violent practical proof. The incident proved ex- 
 tremely embarrassing. 
 
 The crime of Morral forms the basis of Baroja's 
 novel La Dama Errante. He has also dealt with 
 anarchism in Aurora Roja (Red Dawn). 
 
 The mutiny on the ship "Numancia," referred to in 
 the text, was an incident of the same period of unrest, 
 which was met with severe repressive measures. 
 
 264
 
 YOUTH AND EGOLATRY 
 
 NOTE 
 
 The Madrid Ateneo is a learned society maintain- 
 ing a house on the Calle del Prado, in which is in- 
 stalled a private library of unusual excellence. It 
 has been for many years the principal depository of 
 modern books in Spain, and a favourite resort of 
 scholars and research-workers of the capital. 
 
 265
 
 THE WORKS OF PIO BAROJA 
 
 Pio Baroja, recognized by the best critics as the 
 foremost living Spanish novelist, is without doubt the 
 chief exponent of that ferment of political and social 
 thought in Spain which had its inception in the cata- 
 clysm of 1898, and which gave rise to the new move- 
 ment in Spanish literature. 
 
 Of course this "modern movement" was not actu- 
 ally born in 1898. It dates back as far as Galdos, 
 who is in spirit a modern. But it marked the turn- 
 ing point. Benavente the dramatist, Azorin the critic, 
 Ruben Dario the poet, Pio Baroja the novelist, all 
 date from this period, belonging to and of the new 
 generation, and, together with the Valencian Blasco 
 Ibanez, form the A B C of modern Spanish culture. 
 
 "Baroja stands for the modern Spanish mind at its 
 most enlightened," says H. L. Mencken. "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 . . . 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 peninsular." 
 
 Pio Baroja was born in 1872 at San Sebastian, the 
 most fashionable summer resort of Spain, the Spanish 
 'Summer Capital." Baroja's father was a noted
 
 mining engineer, and while without reputation as a 
 man of letters he was an occasional contributor to va- 
 rious periodicals and dailies. He had destined his 
 son for the medical profession, and Pio studied at 
 Valencia and Madrid, where he received his degree. 
 He started practice in the small town of Cestona, the 
 type of town which figures largely in his novels. 
 
 But the young doctor soon wearied of his profes- 
 sion, and laying aside his stethoscope forever, he re- 
 turned to Madrid, where, in partnership with an older 
 brother, he opened a bakery. However he was no 
 more destined to be a cook than a doctor, so, encour- 
 aged by interested friends, he succeeded in getting a 
 few articles and stories accepted by various Madrid 
 papers. It was not long before he won distinction as 
 a journalist, and he presently abandoned baking en- 
 tirely, devoting all his energies to writing. 
 
 His first novel, Camina de Perfection, published 
 in 1902, was received with but little enthusiasm, 
 However he closely followed it with several others, 
 and Spain soon realized that she had a new writer of 
 unusual merit. Today he is pre-eminent among con- 
 temporary Spanish authors. His books have been 
 translated into French, German, Italian and English. 
 
 Alfred A. Knopf, Senor Baroja's authorized pub- 
 lisher in the English-speaking countries, has published 
 to date two of the novels: 
 
 THE CITY OF THE DISCREET. Translated by 
 
 Jacob S. Fassett, Jr. $2.00 net. 
 Around Cordova, the fascinating and romantic "city
 
 of the discreet," Baroja has spun an adventurous tale. 
 He gives you a vivid picture of the city with her tor- 
 tuous streets, ancient houses with their patios and tiled 
 roofs and of her "discreet" inhabitants. In a style 
 that is polished where Ibanez' is crudely vigorous, and 
 with sympathy and understanding, he portrays Quen- 
 tin, the natural son of a Marquis and a woman of 
 humble birth; Pacheco, the ambitious bandit chief; 
 Don Gil Sabadia, the garrulous and convivial antiqua- 
 rian, and a host of other characters. 
 
 "Unforgettable pictures are spread in a rich back- 
 ground for the action Cordova at twilight, with its 
 spires showing against the violet sky, the narrow 
 streets with white houses leaning toward each other, 
 its squares with sturdy beggars squatting around and 
 its gardens heavy with the scent of orange blossoms, 
 where old fountains quietly drip." Indianapolis 
 News. 
 
 "This fine novel . . . shows us the best features of 
 the modern Spanish realistic school." The Bookman. 
 
 CAESAR OR NOTHING. Translated by Louis How. 
 
 $2.00 net. 
 
 This is the story of Caesar Moncada, a brilliantly 
 clever young Spaniard, who sets out to reform his 
 country, to modernize it and its government. In de- 
 picting Caesar's preparation in Rome, where his uncle 
 is a Cardinal, for the career he has planned for him- 
 self, Senor Baroja etches vividly and entertainingly a 
 typical cosmopolitan society witty, worldly, prosper- 
 ous and cynical. The second part of the book de- 
 scribes Caesar's political fight in Castro Duro.
 
 "Not only Spain's greatest novelist, but his greatest 
 book. It is the most important translation that has 
 come out of Spain in our time in the field of fiction 
 and it will be remembered as epochal." JOHN GAR- 
 RETT UNDERBILL, Representative in America of the So- 
 ciety of Spanish Authors of Madrid. 
 
 "Ranks Baroja as a master of fiction, with a keen 
 sense of character, constructive power and an active, 
 dynamic style." Philadelphia Ledger. 
 
 "I read Caesar or Nothing with a profound admi- 
 ration for its power and skill. It is a great novel, 
 which you deserve our thanks for publishing." HAR- 
 OLD J. LASKI, of Harvard University. 
 
 "A brilliant book amazingly clever and humorous 
 in its earlier chapters, gradually accumulating depth 
 as it moves along until it becomes the stuff of tragedy 
 at the close. The character he has created in Caesar 
 Moncada is one of the few really notable portrayals in 
 recent fiction." Chicago Post. 
 
 Translations of three other novels by Baroja are in 
 preparation in the competent hands of Dr. Isaac Gold- 
 berg. The first, LA DAMA ERRANTE, will be 
 ready in the Fall of 1920. Probable price, $2.00.
 
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