Bloodless, serene, purified suffering.... Yes, yes, “stylistic”—or shall we say, artistic?—suffering. The cry of suffering breathed into a flute and become a dirge. Very good. All that the Laocoön inspired in Lessing was just that.
Very good. But it is the same with this kind of suffering as with irony. Usually ironists are people who are never angry. He who is angry is insulting. The ironist forgives everything and says that it is because he understands everything. And what if it is because he understands nothing? I don’t know.
This harsh, raw manner of ours—I said to my friend, the South American—not everyone can bear it. It has been said that hate is rife in Spain. Perhaps. Perhaps we begin by hating ourselves. You will find many here, a great many, who dislike themselves. We follow the precept of “love thy neighbour as thyself,” and since, in spite of inevitable egoism, we do not love ourselves, so neither do we love our neighbours. The ascetic and the egoist are made in the same way. Not that the ascetic is not an egoist; egoistic he may indeed be, and with a vengeance. But even when an egoist, he does not know how to love himself.
When you see a bull-fight, I continued, you will understand these Christs. The poor bull is also a kind of irrational Christ, a propitiatory victim, whose blood cleanses us from not a few of the sins of barbarism. And leads us, nevertheless, to others. But is it not true that forgiveness leads us—unhappy humans!—to sin again?
My friend saw a bull-fight in Madrid and wrote to me as follows;
“You are right. The Spanish people likes violent spectacles, which beget the emotion of tragedy, or rather of ferocity. I had no difficulty in understanding this at the bull-fight last Sunday. I understood it also when I conversed with various people, and in particular with literary people, who tear one another to pieces with unparalleled ferocity. Poor Christ, pierced and bathed with blood! There is no hope that His wounds will ever heal in these Spanish cathedrals or that the grimace of His frenzied pain will ever relax—for here there is no knowledge of the return of Jesus to heaven, after His martyrdom.”
Perhaps—who knows?—our heaven is martyrdom itself.
Not a few foreigners who have learnt to know us have been struck with this ferocity with which, here in Spain, men of letters destroy one another. Yes, here all men, but particularly artists and writers, destroy one another with the ferocity of bull-fighters—or it may be with the Christian ferocity of our Tangerine Christianity.
And I, who do not like bull-fights and never go to see them, I, who do not like flaying my fellow writers (for the office of executioner dirties the hands), I like these Tangerine Christs, purple, livid, blood-stained and blood-drained. Yes, I like these bleeding and exsanguious Christs.
And the smell of tragedy! Above all, the smell of tragedy!