Youth and Egolatry Part 20

OUR OWN GENERATION

The beginner in letters makes his way up, as a rule, amid a literary environment which is distinguished by reputations and hierarchies, all respected by him. But this was not the case with 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 immediate past did not exist for them.

This aggregation of authors and artists might have seemed to have been brought together under some leaders.h.i.+p, and to have been directed to some purpose; yet one who entertained such an a.s.sumption 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.

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 Martinez 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, Martinez 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 days 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 absurd, as I have never been able to see anything but an actor of the grand style in Maura, a man 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 further 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 believing 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 appear upon the platform.

PAUL SCHMITZ

Another friends.h.i.+p which I found stimulating was that of Paul Schmitz, a Swiss from Basle, who had come to Madrid because of some weakness 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 inquiring 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 perhaps four or five hours. There was no subject 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 comprehension how any man could conceive of a state of general well being.

"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 superst.i.tions, myths to which we attach 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 already night, and we found ourselves absorbed in his talents and his limitations.

ORTEGA Y Ga.s.sET

Ortega y Ga.s.set impresses me as a traveller who has journeyed through the world of culture. He moves upon a higher level, which it is difficult 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; nevertheless, 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 Retiro, reading.

"Are you reading a novel?" inquired a gentleman, 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 metaphysics are nothing to the great ma.s.s of physicians who pick up their science out of foreign reviews, adding nothing themselves to what they read; nor, for that matter, are they to most Spanish engineers, who are skilled in doing sufficiently 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 exist, but how do they know what is practical? Considering the matter from the practical point of view, there can be no doubt but that civilization 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 nation which is dest.i.tute of a tradition of culture to improvise an histologist or a physicist, than a philosopher or a real thinker.

Ortega y Ga.s.set, the only approach to a philosopher whom I have ever known, is one of the few Spaniards whom it is interesting to hear talk.

A PSEUDO-PATRON