Caesar or Nothing Part 1

Caesar or Nothing.

by Pio Baroja Baroja.

PROLOGUE

THE AUTHOR HOLDS FORTH IN REGARD TO THE CHARACTER OF HIS HERO

MORE OR LESS TRANSCENDENTAL DIGRESSIONS

The individual is the only real thing in nature and in life.

Neither the species, the genus, nor the race, actually exists; they are abstractions, terminologies, scientific devices, useful as syntheses but not entirely exact. By means of these devices we can discuss and compare; they const.i.tute a measure for our minds to use, but have no external reality.

Only the individual exists through himself and for himself. I am, I live, is the sole thing a man can affirm.

The categories and divisions arranged for cla.s.sification are like the series of squares an artist places over a drawing to copy it by. The lines of the squares may cut the lines of the sketch; but they will cut them, not in reality but only in the artist's eye.

In humanity, as in all of nature, the individual is the one thing. Only individuality exists in the realm of life and in the realm of spirit.

Individuality is not to be grouped or cla.s.sified. Individuality simply cannot fit into a pigeon-hole, and it is all the further from fitting if the pigeon-hole is shaped according to an ethical principle. Ethics is a poor tailor to clothe the body of reality.

The ideas of the good, the logical, the just, the consistent, are too generic to be completely represented in nature.

The individual is not logical, or good, or just; nor is he any other distinct thing; and this through the force of his own fatal actions, through the influence of the deviation in the earth's axis, or for whatsoever other equally amusing cause. Everything individual is always found mixed, full of absurdities of perspective and picturesque contradictions,--contradictions and absurdities that shock us, because we insist on submitting individuals to principles which are not applicable to them.

If instead of wearing a cravat and a bowler hat, we wore feathers and a ring in our nose, all our moral notions would change.

People of today, remote from nature and nasal rings, live in an artificial moral harmony which does not exist except in the imagination of those ridiculous priests of optimism who preach from the columns of the newspapers. This imaginary harmony makes us abhor the contradictions, the incongruities of individuality, at least it forces us not to understand them.

Only when the individual discord ceases, when the attributes of an exceptional being are lost, when the mould is spoiled and becomes vulgarized and takes on a common character, does it obtain the appreciation of the mult.i.tude.

This is logical; the dull must sympathize with the dull; the vulgar and usual have to identify themselves with the vulgar and usual.

From a human point of view, perfection in society would be something able to safeguard the general interests and at the same time to understand individuality; it would give the individual the advantages of work in common and also the most absolute liberty; it would multiply the results of his labour and would also permit him some privacy. This would be equitable and satisfactory.

Our society does not know how to do either of these things; it defends certain persons against the ma.s.ses, because it has injustice and privilege as its working system; it does not understand individuality, because individuality consists in being original, and the original is always a disturbing and revolutionary element.

A perfect democracy would be one which, disregarding hazards of birth, would standardize as far as possible the means of livelihood, of education, and even the manner of living, and would leave free the intelligence, the will, and the conscience, so that they might take their proper places, some higher than others. Modern democracy, on the contrary, tends to level all mentalities, and to impede the predominance of capacity, shading everything with an atmosphere of vulgarity. At the same time it aids some private interests to take their places higher than other private interests.

A great part of the collective antipathy for individuality proceeds from fear. Especially in our Southern countries strong individualities have usually been unquiet and tumultuous. The superior mob, like the lower ones, does not wish the seeds of Caesars or of Bonapartes to flourish in our territories. These mobs pant for a spiritual levelling; for there is no more distinction between one man and another than a coloured b.u.t.ton on the lapel or a t.i.tle on the calling-card. Such is the aspiration of our truly socialist types; other distinctions, like valour, energy, virtue, are for the democratic steam-roller, veritable impertinences of nature.

Spain, which never had a complete social system and has unfolded her life and her art by spiritual convulsions, according as men of strength and action have come bursting forth, today feels herself ruined in her eruptive life, and longs to compete with other countries in their love for the commonplace and well-regulated and in their abhorrence for individuality.

In Spain, where the individual and only the individual was everything, the collectivist aspirations of other peoples are now accepted as indisputable dogmas. Today our country begins to offer a brilliant future to the man who can cry up general ideas and sentiments, even though these ideas and sentiments are at war with the genius of our race.

It would certainly be a lamentable joke to protest against the democratic-bourgeois tendency of the day: what is is, because it must be and because its determined moment has come; and to rebel against facts is, beyond dispute, childish.

I merely mention these characteristics of the actual epoch; and I point them out to legitimatize this prologue I have written, which, for what I know, may after all give more clearness, or may give more obscurity to my book.... BROTHER AND SISTER

Many years ago I was stationed as doctor in a tiny Basque town, in Cestona. Sometimes, in summer, while going on my rounds among the villages I used to meet on the highway and on the cross-roads pa.s.sersby of a miserable aspect, persons with liver-complaint who were taking the waters at the neighbouring cure.

These people, with their leather-coloured skin, did not arouse any curiosity or interest in me. The middle-cla.s.s merchant or clerk from the big towns is repugnant to me, whether well or ill. I would exchange a curt salute with those liverish parties and go my way on my old nag.

One afternoon I was sitting in a wild part of the mountain, among big birch-trees, when a pair of strangers approached the spot where I was. They were not of the jaundiced and disagreeable type of the valetudinarians. He was a lanky young man, smooth-shaven, grave, and melancholy; she, a blond woman, most beautiful.

She was dressed in white and wore a straw hat with large flowers; she had a refined and gracious manner, eyes of blue, a very dark blue, and flame-coloured hair.

I surmised that they were a young married couple; but he seemed too indifferent to be the husband of so pretty a woman. In any event, they were not recently wed.

He bowed to me, and then said to his companion:

"Shall we sit down here?"

"Very well."

They seated themselves on the half-rotten trunk of a tree.

"Are you on a trip?" he asked me, noticing my horse fastened to a branch.

"Yes. I am coming back from a visit."

"Ah! Are you the town doctor?"

"Yes."

"And do you live here, in Cestona?"

"Yes, I live here."

"Alone?"

"Quite alone."

"In an hotel?"

"No; in that house there down the road. Behold my house; that is it."

"It must be hard to live among so many invalids!" he exclaimed.

"Why?" she asked. "This gentleman may not have the same ideas as you."

"I believe I have. To my mind, he is right. It is very hard to live here."

"You can have n.o.body to talk to. That's evident."

"Absolutely n.o.body. Just imagine; there is not a Liberal in the town; there are nothing but Carlists and Integrists."