In order to accomplish this work—a religious work—among peoples like those that speak the Castilian tongue who suffer from intellectual inertia and superficiality, slumbering in the routine of Catholic dogma or in the dogmatism of free-thought or of scientificism, it has been necessary for me to appear sometimes shameless and indecorous, at other times harsh and aggressive, and not a few times perverse and paradoxical. In our pusillanimous literature it was a rare thing to hear anyone cry out from the depths of his heart, to get excited, to exclaim. The shout was almost unknown. Writers were frightened of making themselves ridiculous. They behaved and still behave like those who put up with an affront in the street for fear of the ridicule of being seen with their hat on the ground marched off by the police. But I, no! When I have felt like shouting I have shouted. Never have I been restrained by decorum. And this is one of the things for which I have never been forgiven by my colleagues of the pen, so discreet, so correct, so disciplined, even when they preach indiscretion and indiscipline. Literary anarchists are more punctilious about style and syntax than about anything else. And when they play out of tune they do so tunefully; their discords resolve themselves into harmonies.
When I have felt a pain I have shouted and shouted in public. The psalms which are to be found in my Poesías are simply the cries from the heart with which I have sought to make the heart-strings of the wounded hearts of others vibrate. If they have no heart-strings or only heart-strings that are too rigid to vibrate, then my cry will awaken no echo in them and they will declare that it is not poetry and they will proceed to investigate its acoustic properties. It is possible also to study acoustically the cry that is torn from the heart of a man who sees his son suddenly fall down dead—and he who has neither heart nor sons will understand no more of it than the acoustics.
These psalms, together with various other pieces in my Poesías, are my religion, a religion that I have sung, not expressed in logic and reasoning. And I sing it as best I can, with the voice and ear that God has given me, because I cannot reason it. And he to whom my verses appear to be more full of reasoning and logic and method and exegesis than of life, because they are not peopled with fauns, dryads, satyrs and the like or garbed in the latest modernist fashion, had better leave them alone, for it is evident that I shall not touch his heart whether I use a violin bow or a hammer.
What I fly from, I repeat, as from the plague, is any kind of classification of myself, and when I die I hope I shall still hear these intellectual sluggards inquiring: “And this gentleman, what is he?” Liberal or progressive fools will take me for a reactionary and perhaps for a mystic, without understanding of course what they may mean; and conservative and reactionary fools will take me for a kind of spiritual anarchist; and both of them will pity me as an unfortunate gentleman anxious to distinguish himself by singularity, hoping to be reputed an original, and with a bonnet full of bees. But no one need worry about what fools think of him, be they progressive or conservative, liberal or reactionary.
And since man is naturally intractable, and does not habitually thirst for the truth, and after being preached at for four hours usually returns to all his inveterate habits, these busy inquirers, if they chance to read this, will return to me with the question: “Well, but what solutions do you offer?” And I will tell them, once and for all, that if it is solutions they want, they can go to the shop opposite, for I do not deal in the article. My earnest desire has been, is and will be that those who read me should think and meditate on fundamental things, and it has never been to furnish them with thoughts ready made. I have always sought to agitate and to suggest rather than to instruct. It is not bread that I sell, not bread, but yeast, ferment.
I have friends, and good friends, who advise me to abandon this task and to concentrate upon what they call some objective work, something which will be, so they express it, definitive, something constructive, something that will last. They mean something dogmatic. I declare that I am incapable of it, and I claim my liberty, my holy liberty, even, if need be, the liberty of contradicting myself. I do not know whether anything that I have written or may write in the future is destined to live for years and centuries after I am dead; but I know that if anyone agitates the surface of a shoreless sea the waves will go radiating without end, even though at last they dwindle into ripples. To agitate is something. And if thanks to this agitation another who comes after me shall create something that will live, then my work will live in his.
It is a work of supreme mercy to awaken the sleeper and to shake the sluggard, and it is a work of supreme religious piety to seek truth in everything and to expose fraud, stupidity and ignorance wherever they are to be found.
SOLITUDE
It is my love for the multitude that makes me fly from them. In flying from them, I go on seeking them. Do not call me a misanthrope. Misanthropes seek society and intercourse with people; they need them in order to feed their hatred and disdain of them. Love can live upon memories and hopes; hate needs present realities.
Let me, then, fly from society and take refuge in the quiet of the country, seeking in the heart of it and within my own soul the company of people.