Youth and Egolatry Part 6

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 exclusively a Spanish trait, but the failing is a human one which is more accentuated among peoples of backward culture, whose vitality is great.

Like a child the Spaniard carries an anterior image in his mind, to which he submits his perceptions. A child is able to recognize a man or a horse more easily in a toy than in a painting by Raphael or by Leonardo da Vinci, because 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 preconceived 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 pa.s.sed 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 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 unable 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 referring its impressions outward along straight lines, in directions which are determined.

According to Muller, who has adopted this hypothesis, what we perceive is our own retina under the category of s.p.a.ce, and the size of the retinal image is the original unit of measurement applied by us to exterior objects.

The Spaniard like a child, will have to amplify 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 s.e.x

It is very difficult to approach the s.e.x question and to treat it at once in a clear and dignified 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.xual life is felt through all the phenomena of consciousness.

According to Freud, an unsatisfied desire produces a series of obscure movements in consciousness which eat at the soul as electricity is generated in a storage battery, and this acc.u.mulation of psychic energy must needs produce a disturbance in the nervous system.

Such nervous disturbances, which are of s.e.xual origin, produced by the strangulation of desires, 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 hypocritical air. He can marry afterwards and become 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 s.e.xuality, which is free from social embarra.s.sment--the loophole of prost.i.tution.

As the bee-hive has its workers, society has its prost.i.tutes.

After a few years of s.e.xual life without the walls, pa.s.sed in the surrounding moats of prost.i.tution, the normal man is prepared for marriage, with its submission to social forms and to standards which are clearly absurd.

There is no possibility of escaping this dilemma 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. Prost.i.tution among the upper cla.s.ses does not offend the eye, and it reveals none of the sores which deface prost.i.tution 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 prost.i.tution is to elbow all that is most vile in society, and to sink to its level oneself. Then, to marry afterwards without adequate means, is a continual act of self-abas.e.m.e.nt.

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 influence.

Suppose one does not submit? If you do not submit you are lost. You are condemned irretrievably to perversions, to debility, to hysteria.

You will find yourself slinking about the other s.e.x like a famished wolf, you will live obsessed by lewd ideas, your mind will solace itself with swindles and cheats wherewith to provide a solution of the riddle of existence, you will become the mangy sheep that the shepherd sets apart from the flock.

Ever since early youth, I have been clearly conscious of this dilemma, and I have determined 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 disturbed 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 s.e.xUAL LIFE

I am unable to feel any spontaneous enthusiasm for fecundity such as that which Zola sings. Moreover, I regard the whole pose as a superst.i.tion. I may be a member of an exhausted race,--that is quite possible,--but between the devotion 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 nothing beyond the individual in this s.e.x question--beyond the individual who finds himself inhibited by s.e.xual morality.

This question must be faced some day and cleared up, it must be seen divested of all mystery, of all veils, of all deceit. As the hygiene of nutrition has been studied openly, in broad daylight, so it must be with s.e.x hygiene.

As a matter of fact, the notion of sin, then, that of honour, and, finally, dread of syphilis and other s.e.xual diseases, rest like a cloud on the s.e.xual life, and they are jumbled together with all manner of fantastic and literary fictions.

Obviously, rigid s.e.xual morality is for the most part nothing more than the practice of economy in disguise. Let us face this whole problem 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 subterfuges of the s.e.xual life, are necessary. No 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 society are one, but we, who are defenders of the individual as against the State, do not think so.

A LITTLE TALK