Youth and Egolatry Part 3

German music is undoubtedly the most universal music, especially that of Mozart and Beethoven. It seems as if there were fewer particles 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, joyous, serene, gallant, mischievous. He is a courtier 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, seems to be part of all of us, to have been designed 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 trembles with obscure meanings and pathetic, heartrending laments, the source of which lies hidden as at the bottom of some mine.

He is a Segismund who complains against the G.o.ds and against his fate in a tongue which knows no national accent. A day will come when the negroes of Timbuktu will listen to Mozart's and Beethoven's music and feel that it belongs to them, as truly as it ever did to the citizens 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 intelligibility, music possesses different attractions for different people. The folk song preserves to us the very savour of the country in which we were born; it recalls the air, the climate 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 preference 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 disagreeable tartuffery--the histologist, Ramon y Cajal, who, as a thinker, has always been an absolute mediocrity, explains what the young scholar should be, in the same way that the Const.i.tution 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, serene ... and all this with ten or twelve coppers in his pocket!

Some friends inform me that in the Inst.i.tute for Public Education at Madrid, where an attempt is made to give due artistic orientation to the pupils, they have contrived an informal cla.s.sification of the arts in the order of their importance; first comes painting; then, music; and, last, literature.

Considering carefully what may be the reasons for such a sequence, it would appear that the purpose must be to deprive the student of any occasion for becoming pessimistic. Certainly n.o.body will ever have his convictions upset by looking at ancient cloths daubed over with linseed oil, nor by the b.u.m-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 correctness may be divined the optimism of eunuchs.

II

MYSELF, THE WRITER

TO MY READERS THIRTY YEARS HENCE

Among my books there are two distinct cla.s.ses: 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 chimerical and ridiculous, that the Spanish reader thirty or forty years hence, who takes up my books, whose sensibilities, it may be, have been 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, entirely 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 express turbulence; perhaps their youth is a youth which is lacking in force and vigour, but nevertheless, they are youthful books.

Among thorns and brambles there lies concealed 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, 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_," a Frenchwoman remarked to me in Rome.

"I? Impossible!"

"Yes," she insisted. "You are a conversationalist. You are not an elegant, sprucely dressed abbe; you are an abbe who is cynical and ill-natured, who likes to fancy himself a savage amid the comfortable surroundings of the drawing-room."

The Frenchwoman's observation set me to thinking.

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 Temple 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. Nevertheless, 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 expression, I shall have nothing to say, and so remain silent.

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.