Pío Baroja

“ 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. ”

“ Spanish letters, for years sunk into formalism, revived with the national spirit, and the new books in prose and verse began to deal vigorously with the here and now. Novelists, poets and essayists appeared who had never been heard of before—young men full of exciting ideas borrowed from foreign lands and even more exciting ideas of their own fashioning. The national literature, but lately so academic and remote from existence, was now furiously lively, challenging and provocative. The people found in it, not the old placid escape from life, but a new stimulation to arduous and ardent living. ”

“ Baroja, though his career has not been as dramatic as Blasco's, has at all events taken a hand in the life of his time and country and served his day in the trenches of the new enlightenment. He is anything but a theorist. But there is surely no little significance in his final retreat to his Basque hillside, there to seek peace above the turmoil. He is, one fancies, a bit disgusted and a bit despairing. But if it is despair, it is surely not the despair of one who has shirked the trial. ”

“ THIRST FOR GLORY Fame, success, popularity, the illusion of being known, admired and esteemed, appeal in different ways to authors. To Salvador Rueda, glory is a triumphant entrance into Tegucigalpa, where he is taken to the Spanish Casino, and crowned with a crown of real laurel. To Unamuno, glory is the assurance that people will be interested in him at least a thousand years after he is dead. And to others the only glory worth talking about is that courted by the French writer, Rabbe, who busied himself in Spain with la gloire argent comptant. ”

“ BOHEMIA I have never been a believer in the absurd myth called Bohemia. The idea of living gaily and irresponsibly in Madrid, or in any other Spanish city, without taking thought for the morrow, is so preposterous that it passes comprehension. Bohemia is utterly false in Paris and London, but in Spain, where life is difficult, it is even more of a cheat. ”

“ We may be able to tolerate stupidity and lack of comprehension when they are simple and wholly natural, but what of an utter obtuseness of understanding which dresses itself up and becomes rhetorical? Can anything be more disagreeable?
When a fly devours the pollen greedily from the pyrethrum, which, as we know, will prove fatal to him, it becomes clear at once that flies have no more innate sagacity than men. When we listen to a conservative orator defending the past with salvos of rhetorical fireworks, we are overwhelmed by a realization of the complete odiousness of ornamental stupidity. ”

“ ON BEING A GENTLEMAN Viewed from without, I seem to impress some as a crass, crabbed person, who has very little ability, while others regard me as an unhealthy, decadent writer. Then Azorín has said of me that I am a literary aristocrat, a fine and comprehensive mind.
I should accept Azorín's opinion very gladly, but personality needs to be hammered severely in literature before it leaves its slag. Like metal which is removed from the furnace after casting and placed under the hammer, I would offer my works to be put to the test, to be beaten by all hammers. ”

“ We frequently see the workingman leap the barrier into the bourgeoisie, and then disclose himself as a unique flower of knavery, extortion and misdirected ingenuity. Deep down in the hearts of our revolutionists, I do not believe that there is any real enthusiasm for the workingman.
When the bookshop of Fernando Fé was still fin the Carrera de San Jerónimo, I once heard Blasco Ibáñez say with the cheapness that is his distinguishing trait, laughing meanwhile ostentatiously, that a republic in Spain would mean the rule of shoemakers and of the scum of the streets. ”

“ Certainly nobody will ever have his convictions upset by looking at ancient cloths daubed over with linseed oil, nor by the bum-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. ”

“ Cheap houses confront the eye on all sides, whether simple or pretentious. Whenever the citizens of San Sebastian raise their hands—and in this they are abetted by the Madrileños—they do something ugly. They have defaced Monte Igueldo already, and now they are defacing the Castillo. Tomorrow, they will manage somehow to spoil the sea, the sky, and the air.
As for the spirit of the city, it is lamentable. There is no interest in science, art, literature, history, politics, or anything else. ”

“ EVIL AND ROUSSEAU'S CHINAMAN I do not believe in utter human depravity, nor have I any faith in great virtue, nor in the notion that the affairs of life may be removed beyond good and evil. We shall outgrow, we have already outgrown, the conception of sin, but we shall never pass beyond the idea of good and evil; that would be equivalent to skipping the cardinal points in geography. Nietzsche, an eminent poet and an extraordinary psychologist, convinced himself that we should be able to leap over good and evil with the help of a springboard of his manufacture. ”

“ Languages display a tendency to follow established forms. Thus Spanish tends toward Castilian. But why should I, a Basque, who never hears Castilian spoken in my daily life in the accents of Avila or of Toledo, endeavour to imitate it? Why should I cease to be a Basque in order to appear Castilian, when I am not? Not that I cherish sectional pride, far from it; but every man should be what he is, and if he can be content with what he is, let him be held fortunate. ”

“ As the hygiene of nutrition has been studied openly, in broad daylight, so it must be with sex hygiene.
As a matter of fact, the notion of sin, then, that of honour, and, finally, dread of syphilis and other sexual diseases, rest like a cloud on the sexual life, and they are jumbled together with all manner of fantastic and literary fictions.
Obviously, rigid sexual 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. ”

“ At the same time, I should denationalize Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievski, making them Spaniards. I should see that the best laws and the best customs were those of our country. But wholly apart from this patriotism of desire, lies the reality. What is to be gained by denying it? To my mind nothing is to be gained.
There are many to whom the only genuine patriotism is the patriotism of lying, which in fact is more of a matter of rhetoric than it is of feeling. ”

“ I hold that there are two kinds of morality; morality of work and morality of play. The morality of work is an immoral morality, which teaches us to take advantage of circumstances and to lie. The morality of play, for the reason that it deals with mere futilities, is finer and more chivalrous.
I believe that in literature and in all liberal arts, the morality should be the morality of play, while my opponents for the most part hold that the morality of literature should be the morality of work. ”

“ The fight against religious prejudice and the aristocracy, the suppression of religious communities, inheritance taxes—in short, whatever has a tendency to pulverize completely the ancient order of society, fills me with a great joy. On the other hand, insofar as liberalism is constructive, as it has been for example in its advocacy of universal suffrage, in its democracy, and in its system of parliamentary government, I consider it ridiculous and valueless as well.
Even today, wherever it is obliged to take the aggressive, it seems to me that the good in liberalism is not exhausted ”

“ IN DEFENSE OF RELIGION The great defender of religion is the lie. Lies are the most vital possession of man. Religion lives upon lies, and society maintains itself upon them, with its train of priests and soldiers—the one, moreover, as useless as the other. This great Maia of falsehood sustains all the sky borders in the theatre of life, and, when some fall, it lifts up others. ”

“ Few Spaniards who write today but have written novels. Yet the gesture of the grand style of Valera is palsied, except, perhaps, for the conservative Quixote, Ricardo León, a functionary in the Bank of Spain, while the idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as José María Salaverría, after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less vigorous Antonio de Trueba, and of Madrid vulgarians, headed by Mesonero Romanos and Coloma. ”

“ Rousseau is convinced that we should all press the button, and he is mistaken, because the majority of men who are civilized would do nothing of the kind. This, to my mind, is not to say that men are good; it is merely to say that Rousseau, in his enthusiasm for humanity, as well as in his aversion to it, is wide of the mark. The evil in man is not evil of this active sort, so theatrical, so self-interested; it is a passive, torpid evil which lies latent in the depths of the human animal, it is an evil which can scarcely be called evil. ”

“ Then came the colossal shock of the American war and a sudden transvaluation of all the old values. Anti-clericalism got on its legs and Socialism got on its legs, and out of the two grew that great movement for the liberation of the common people, that determined and bitter struggle for a fair share in the fruits of human progress, which came to its melodramatic climax in the execution of Francisco Ferrer. Spain now began to go ahead very rapidly, if not in actual achievement, then at least in the examination and exchange of ideas, good and bad. ”

“ Our press does not concern itself with what is of universal interest.
Our press does not concern itself with what is of national interest.
Our press does not concern itself with literature.
Our press does not concern itself with philosophy. ”

“ Marriage presents us with this simple choice: we may either elect the slow, filthy death of the indigent workingman, of the carabineer who lives in a shack which teems with children, or else the clean life of the French, who limit their offspring.
The middle class everywhere today is accepting the latter alternative. Marriage is stripping off its morality in the bushes, and it is well that it should do so. ”

“ I take it that one may be simple and sincere without either affectation or vulgarity. It is well to be a little neutral, perhaps, a little grey for the most part, so that upon occasion the more delicate hues may stand out clearly, while a rhythm may be employed to advantage which is in harmony with actual life, which is light and varied, and innocent of striving after solemnity.
A modern poet, in my opinion, has illustrated this rhetoric of the minor key to perfection. ”

“ When he read the three novels to which I had given the general title, The Struggle for Life, he stopped me on the Calle de Alcalá one day and said:
"You have not convinced me."
"How so?"
"Your hero is a man of the people, but he is falsified. He is just like you are; you can never be anything but a gentleman."
This gentility with which my cousin reproached me, and without doubt he was correct, is common to nearly all Spanish writers.
There are no Spaniards at present, and there never have been any at any other time, who write out of the Spanish soul, out of the hearts of the people. ”

“ THE TRAGI-COMEDY OF SEX It is very difficult to approach the sex 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 sex 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. ”