Caesar or Nothing Part 8

As a student he was mediocre. He learned the secret of pa.s.sing examinations well with the minimum of effort, and practised it. He found that by knowing only a couple of things under each heading of the program, it was enough for him to answer and to pa.s.s well. And so, from the beginning of each course, he marked in the text the two or three lines of every page which seemed to him to comprise the essential, and having learned those, considered his knowledge sufficient.

Caesar had a deep contempt for the University and for his fellow-students; all their rows and manifestations seemed to him repulsively flat and stupid.

Alzugaray was studying law too, and had obtained a clerks.h.i.+p in a Ministry. Alzugaray got drunk on music. His great enthusiasm was for playing the 'cello. Caesar used to call on him at his office and at home.

The clerks at the Ministry seemed to Caesar to form part of an inferior human race.

At Alzugaray's house, Caesar felt at home. Ignacio's mother, a lady with white hair, was always making stockings, and after dinner she recited the rosary with the maid; Alzugaray's sister, Celedonia, a tall ungainly la.s.s, was often ill.

All the family thought a great deal of Caesar; his advice was followed at that house, and one of the operations on 'change that he recommended making with some Foreign bonds that Ignacio's mother was holding at the time of the Cuban War, gave everybody in the house an extraordinary idea of young Moncada's financial talents.

Caesar kept his balance among his separate activities; one set of studies complemented others. This diversity of points of view kept him from taking the false and one-sided position that those who preoccupy themselves with one branch of knowledge exclusively get into.

The one-sided position is most useful to a specialist, to a man who expects to remain satisfied in the place where chance has put him; but it is useless for one who proposes to enter life with his blood afire.

As almost always occurs, the projecting of ideas of distinct derivation and of different orders into the same plane, carried Caesar into absolute scepticism, scepticism about things, and especially scepticism about the instrument of knowledge.

His negation had no reference,--far from it,--to women, to love, or to friends, things where the pedantic and ostentatious scepticism of literary men of the Larra type usually finds its fodder; his nihilism was much more the confusion and discomposure of one that explores a region well or badly, and finds no landmarks there, no paths, and returns with a belief that even the compa.s.s is not exact in what it shows.

"Nothing absolute exists," Caesar told himself, "neither science nor mathematics nor even the truth, can be an absolute thing."

Arriving at this result surprised Caesar a good deal. On finding that he was not successful in lighting on a philosophical system which would be a guide to him and which could be reasoned out like a theorem, he sought within the purely subjective for something that might satisfy him and serve as a standard.

A PHILOSOPHY

Toward the end of their course Caesar presented himself one day in his friend Alzugaray's office.

"I think," he said, "that I am getting my philosophy into shape."

"My dear man!"

"Yes. I have tacked some new contours on to my Darwinian pragmatism."

Alzugaray, in whom every treasure-trove of his friend's always produced great surprise, stood staring navely at him.

"Yes, I am building up my system," Caesar went on, "a system within relative truth. It is clear."

"Let's hear what it is."

"In regard to us," said Caesar, as if he were speaking of something that had happened in the street a few minutes before, "our uncertain instrument of knowledge makes two apparent states of nature seem real to us; one, the static, in which things are perceived by us as motionless; the other, the dynamic, wherein these same things are found in motion.

It is clear that in reality everything is in motion; but within the relative truth of our ideas we are able to believe that there are some things in repose and others in action. Isn't that so?"

"Yes. That is, I think so," replied Alzugaray, who was beginning to wonder if the whole earth was trembling under his feet.

"Good!" Caesar continued. "I am going to pa.s.s from nature to life: I am going to a.s.sume that life has a purpose. Where can this purpose be found? We don't know. But what can be the machinery of this purpose?

Only movement, action. That is to say, struggle. This a.s.sertion once made, I am going to take a hand in carrying it out. The things we call spiritual also are dynamic. Who says anything whatsoever says matter and force; who says force affirms attraction and repulsion; attraction and repulsion are synonymous with movement, with struggle, with action. Now I am inside of my system. It will consist of putting all the forces near me into movement, into action, into struggle. What pleasure may there be in this? First, the pleasure of doing, the pleasure, we might call it, of efficiency; secondly, the pleasure of seeing, the pleasure of observing.... What do you think of it?"

"Fine, man! The things you start are always good." "Then there is the moral point. I think I have settled that too."

"That too?"

"Yes. Morals should be nothing more than the true, fitting, and natural law of man. Man considered solely as a spiritual machine? No. Considered as an animal that eats and drinks? Not that either. Man considered as a complete whole. Isn't that so?"

"I believe it is."

"I proceed. In nature laws become more obscure, according as more complicated objects of knowledge turn up. We all clearly see the law of the triangle, and the law of oxygen or of carbon with the same clearness. These laws appear to us as being without exception. But then comes the mineral, and we begin to see variations; in this form it exerts one attraction, in that form a different one. We ascend to the vegetable and find a sort of surprise-package. The surprises are centupled in the animal; and are raised to an unknown degree in man.

What is the law of man, as man? We do not know it, probably we shall never know it. Right and justice may be truths, but they will always be fractional truths. Traditional morality is a pragmatism, useful and efficacious for social life, for well-ordered life; but at the bottom, without reality. Summing all this up: first, life is a labyrinth which has no Ariadne's thread but one,--action; secondly, man is upheld in his high qualities by force and struggle. Those are my conclusions."

"Clever devil! I don't know what to say to you."

Alzugaray a.s.serted that, without taking it upon him to say whether his friend's ideas were good or bad, they had no practical value; but Caesar insisted once and many times on the advantages he saw in his metaphysics.

ENCHIRIDION SAPIENTIAE

Caesar remained in the same sphere during the whole period of his law course, always seeking, according to his own words, to add one wheel more to his machine.

His life contained few incidents; summers he went to Valencia, and there, in the villa, he read and talked with the peasants. His mother, devoted solely to the Church, bothered herself little about her son.

Caesar ended his studies, and on his coming of age, they gave him his share of his father's estate.

Incontinently he took the train, he went to Paris, he looked up Yarza.

He explained to him his vague projects of action. Yarza listened attentively, and said:

"Perhaps it will appear foolish to you, but I am going to give you a book I wrote, which I should like you to read. It's called _Enchiridion Sapientiae_. In my youth I was something of a Latinist. In these pages, less than a hundred, I have gathered my observations about the financial and political world. It might as well be called _Contribution to Common-sense, or Neo-Machiavellianism_. If you find that it helps you, keep it."

Caesar read the book with concentrated attention.

"How did it strike you?" said Yarza.

"There are many things in it I don't agree with; I shall have to think over them again."

"All right. Then keep my _Enchiridion_ and go on to London. Paris is a city that has finished. It is not worth the trouble of losing one's time staying here."

Caesar went to London, always with the firm intention of going into something. From time to time he wrote a long letter to Ignacio Alzugaray, telling him his impressions of politics and financial questions.

While he was in London his sister joined him and invited him to go to Florence; two years later she begged him to accompany her to Rome.

Caesar had always declined to visit the Eternal City, until, on that occasion, he himself showed a desire to go to Rome with his sister.

IV. PEOPLE WHO Pa.s.s CLOSE BY

_THE SAN MARTINO YOUNG LADIES_