In an article that it publishes, entitled “Current Events—Cánovas,” the author says: “Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain. Cánovas never knew of what stuff his fellow-countrymen were made.”
The moment that I read this, I realized, as if by a sudden illumination, the difference that there is between the soul of Spain and the aggregate of the souls of all us Spaniards who are living to-day, the actual synthesis of these same souls. And I remembered that at the time of the last Carlist civil war, when I was a boy, I heard someone in my native town say: “Even though all we men of Bilbao were to become Carlists, Bilbao would remain liberal.” A paradox—that is to say, a profound arbitrary truth, a truth of passion, a truth of the heart, and one that I shall never forget.
“Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain.” And all our commonplace rulers, those who let themselves drift with the stream and enjoy long years of office, all our commonplace writers, those who write books that are just long tirades, books that sell, all our commonplace artists and all our commonplace thinkers, understand their fellow-countrymen, but not their country.
Not only our own souls, the souls of us who are living to-day, are alive and operative in the soul of Spain, but in addition to these, the souls of all our forefathers. Our own souls, those of the living, are those that are least alive in it, for our soul does not enter into the soul of our country until it is no longer a detached entity, until after our temporal death.
What is the use of our wanting to make our thought modern and European when our language is neither European nor modern? While we are endeavouring to make it say one thing, it is endeavouring to make us say something different, and thus we don’t say the thought that we pretend we are saying, but we say the thought that we don’t wish to say.
We endeavour—that is to say, many of us endeavour—to deform our spirit conformably with an external standard, and we succeed neither in making ourselves like those whom we pretend to copy nor in being ourselves. Whence results a horrible spiritual half-breed, a kind of barren hybrid.
And the most curious thing about it all is this—something that will be understood one day, if the day ever comes when anyone will occupy himself in investigating the spiritual condition of Spain at the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries—the most curious and surprising thing is that those who are held to be most Spanish, most true-blooded and of the old stock, most authentically Spanish, are those who are the most Europeanizing, the most exotic, those whose soul contains the most alien strains; and on the other hand those whom many simple-minded folk regard as exotic spirits, anglicized, gallicized, Germanized, Norwegianized, are the ones whose roots intermingle most closely with the roots of those who created the Spanish soul. I have observed how frequently a skin-deep classicism, a classicism of external grammatical and rhetorical forms, goes hand in hand with a complete alienation from the national soul, and vice versa. I have known a portentous fool, once an esteemed author, who used to read our mystics in order to learn from them how to write good Castilian and upon whom the ardent soul of these most genuinely Spanish spirits made no impression whatever; and on the other hand I know a man who, although he has never read them nor concerned himself in any way to preserve their literary tradition or their religious orthodoxy, in breathing the national spiritual atmosphere has breathed the air of that mysticism that is inherent in this atmosphere.
What is the origin of this confusion? I cannot tell, but I presume that it must originate in the same cause that makes Spaniards insist on calling him a wise man who has least wisdom in him and demanding logic from a man who is passionate and arbitrary.
“People want and demand things,” so a friend of mine says to me when I talk to him about these matters, “that is to say, concrete ideas, utilizable facts, scientific theories, information, rational explanations, and it is no use going to them with feelings and dreams.” Usually my first thought on hearing this is, “Unfortunate people!” but immediately afterwards I pull myself up and say: “They are partly right; it is right that they should demand that; but why must so many of them reject the other? and above all why should they not demand from each one just that which he has and which he can give?”
And, to apply this to our own people, why must we persist in distorting our inner nature and rejecting what it gives us in order to try to force it to give us something else?