Youth and Egolatry | Page 3

full maturity in Hoyos
y Vinent, while the distinctive growth of the century is the novel of
ideas, exact, penetrating, persistently suggestive in the larger sense,
which does not hesitate to make demands upon the reader, and this is
exemplified most distinctively, both temperamentally and intellectually,
by Pio Baroja.
It would be difficult to find two men who, dealing with the same ideas,
bring to them more antagonistic attitudes of mind than Baroja and
Blasco Ibanez. For all his appearance of modernism, Blasco really
belongs to the generation before 1898. He is of the stock of Victor
Hugo--a popular rhapsodist and intellectual swashbuckler, half artist
and half mob orator--a man of florid and shallow certainties, violent
enthusiasms, quack remedies, vast magnetism and address, and even
vaster impudence--a fellow with plain touches of the charlatan. His first
solid success at home was made with La Barraca in 1899--and it was a
success a good deal more political than artistic; he was hailed for his
frenzy far more than for his craft. Even outside of Spain his subsequent
celebrity has tended to ground itself upon agreement with his politics,

and not upon anything properly describable as a critical appreciation of
his talents. Had The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse been directed
against France instead of in favour of France, it goes without saying
that it would have come to the United States without the imprimatur of
the American Embassy at Madrid, and that there would have appeared
no sudden rage for the author among the generality of novel-readers.
His intrinsic merits, in sober retrospect, seem very feeble. For all his
concern with current questions, his accurate news instinct, he is
fundamentally a romantic of the last century, with more than one plain
touch of the downright operatic.
Baroja is a man of a very different sort. A novelist undoubtedly as
skilful as Blasco and a good deal more profound, he lacks the quality of
enthusiasm and thus makes a more restricted appeal. In place of gaudy
certainties he offers disconcerting questionings; in place of a neat and
well-rounded body of doctrine he puts forward a sort of generalized
contra-doctrine. Blasco is almost the typical Socialist--iconoclastic,
oratorical, sentimental, theatrical--a fervent advocate of all sorts of
lofty causes, eagerly responsive to the shibboleths of the hour. Baroja is
the analyst, the critic, almost the cynic. If he leans toward any definite
doctrine at all, it is toward the doctrine that the essential ills of man are
incurable, that all the remedies proposed are as bad as the disease, that
it is almost a waste of time to bother about humanity in general. This
agnostic attitude, of course, is very far from merely academic, monastic.
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.
The present book, _Juventud, Egolatria_, was written at the height of
the late war, and there is a preface to the original edition, omitted here,
in which Baroja defends his concern with aesthetic and philosophical
matters at such a time. The apologia was quite gratuitous. A book on
the war, though by the first novelist of present-day Spain, would

probably have been as useless as all the other books on the war. That
stupendous event will be far more soundly discussed by men who have
not felt its harsh appeal to the emotions. Baroja, evading this grand
enemy of all ideas, sat himself down to inspect and co-ordinate the
ideas that had gradually come to growth in his mind before the bands
began to bray. The result is a book that is interesting, not only as the
frank talking aloud of one very unusual man, but also as a
representation of what is going on in the heads of a great many other
Spaniards. Blasco, it seems to me, is often less Spanish than French;
Valencia, after all, is next door to Catalonia, and Catalonia is anything
but Castilian. But Baroja, though he is also un-Castilian and even a bit
anti-Castilian, is still a thorough Spaniard. He is more interested in a
literary feud in Madrid than in a holocaust beyond the Pyrenees. He
gets into his discussion of every problem a definitely Spanish flavour.
He is unmistakably a Spaniard even when he is trying most rigorously
to be unbiased and international. He thinks out everything in Spanish