Caesar or Nothing | Page 2

and nasal rings, live in an artificial
moral harmony which does not exist except in the imagination of those
ridiculous priests of optimism who preach from the columns of the
newspapers. This imaginary harmony makes us abhor the
contradictions, the incongruities of individuality, at least it forces us not
to understand them.
Only when the individual discord ceases, when the attributes of an
exceptional being are lost, when the mould is spoiled and becomes
vulgarized and takes on a common character, does it obtain the
appreciation of the multitude.
This is logical; the dull must sympathize with the dull; the vulgar and
usual have to identify themselves with the vulgar and usual.
From a human point of view, perfection in society would be something
able to safeguard the general interests and at the same time to
understand individuality; it would give the individual the advantages of
work in common and also the most absolute liberty; it would multiply
the results of his labour and would also permit him some privacy. This
would be equitable and satisfactory.
Our society does not know how to do either of these things; it defends
certain persons against the masses, because it has injustice and
privilege as its working system; it does not understand individuality,
because individuality consists in being original, and the original is
always a disturbing and revolutionary element.
A perfect democracy would be one which, disregarding hazards of birth,
would standardize as far as possible the means of livelihood, of
education, and even the manner of living, and would leave free the
intelligence, the will, and the conscience, so that they might take their
proper places, some higher than others. Modern democracy, on the
contrary, tends to level all mentalities, and to impede the predominance
of capacity, shading everything with an atmosphere of vulgarity. At the

same time it aids some private interests to take their places higher than
other private interests.
A great part of the collective antipathy for individuality proceeds from
fear. Especially in our Southern countries strong individualities have
usually been unquiet and tumultuous. The superior mob, like the lower
ones, does not wish the seeds of Caesars or of Bonapartes to flourish in
our territories. These mobs pant for a spiritual levelling; for there is no
more distinction between one man and another than a coloured button
on the lapel or a title on the calling-card. Such is the aspiration of our
truly socialist types; other distinctions, like valour, energy, virtue, are
for the democratic steam-roller, veritable impertinences of nature.
Spain, which never had a complete social system and has unfolded her
life and her art by spiritual convulsions, according as men of strength
and action have come bursting forth, today feels herself ruined in her
eruptive life, and longs to compete with other countries in their love for
the commonplace and well-regulated and in their abhorrence for
individuality.
In Spain, where the individual and only the individual was everything,
the collectivist aspirations of other peoples are now accepted as
indisputable dogmas. Today our country begins to offer a brilliant
future to the man who can cry up general ideas and sentiments, even
though these ideas and sentiments are at war with the genius of our
race.
It would certainly be a lamentable joke to protest against the
democratic-bourgeois tendency of the day: what is is, because it must
be and because its determined moment has come; and to rebel against
facts is, beyond dispute, childish.
I merely mention these characteristics of the actual epoch; and I point
them out to legitimatize this prologue I have written, which, for what I
know, may after all give more clearness, or may give more obscurity to
my book.... BROTHER AND SISTER
Many years ago I was stationed as doctor in a tiny Basque town, in
Cestona. Sometimes, in summer, while going on my rounds among the
villages I used to meet on the highway and on the cross-roads passersby
of a miserable aspect, persons with liver-complaint who were taking the
waters at the neighbouring cure.
These people, with their leather-coloured skin, did not arouse any

curiosity or interest in me. The middle-class merchant or clerk from the
big towns is repugnant to me, whether well or ill. I would exchange a
curt salute with those liverish parties and go my way on my old nag.
One afternoon I was sitting in a wild part of the mountain, among big
birch-trees, when a pair of strangers approached the spot where I was.
They were not of the jaundiced and disagreeable type of the
valetudinarians. He was a lanky young man, smooth-shaven, grave, and
melancholy; she, a blond woman, most beautiful.
She was dressed in white and wore a straw hat with large flowers; she
had a refined and gracious manner, eyes of blue,