Two Petulant Basques
Mist. By Miguel de Unamuno. Translated by Warner Fite. (Knopf. 7s. 6d.).
The Tree of Knowledge: By Pio Baroja. Translated by Aubrey Bell. (Knopf. 7s. 6d.).
THE enormous success of Blasco Ibanez outside of Spain is as incomprehensible to Spaniards as the vogue of Oscar Wilde on the Continent is to ourselves. These international illusions die hard. Ibatiez flattered our cosulopolitanism. It was as if Zola had put on a sombrero and had gone to Hollywood. And even when the celebrated squadron of apoca:- lyptical horsemen were demobilized at the end of the War, and, like old soldiers, became peevish and began a feeble guerrilla warfare on the King and the Dictator, it is doubtful if the Ibanez legend lost anything by it. He had given us the Spain we wanted. But as for Unamuno, a vastly greater man, who had been associated with him in this silly enterprise, we were inclined to dismiss him as one of those unfortunate, misguided Continental professors who are always getting mixed up in politics.
But it is to Unamuno and to Pio Baroja—another petulant Basque—and not to lbailez, that we must turn if we are to attempt to understand the Spain of the last thirty years. The child, as Unamuno once said, is born in protest against the father ; and Unamuno and Baroja are perhaps the two outstanding figures of the brilliant protesting generation of writers who began to make themselves known after the Cuban disaster. They made war on the national complacency and not only demanded a fearless examination of conscience but (heresy of heresies !) called for light from beyond the Pyrenees to lighten their country's darkness. Unamuno found his inspiration in Carlyle, and Kierkegaard ; and Baroja in Dostoievsky and Dickens. But in his cantankerous Basque fashion Baroja completely denies belonging to this "generation of '98." The real generation of '98, according to him, were the politicians whose careers ended in the anti- climax of the military dictatorship. He regards the whole movement as a convenient fiction invented by the critics. It is certainly true that nothing united the movement beyond its original shout of protest ; and each man, with characteristic Spanish individualism, has since gone spinning away, each on his own axis, a world of his own—Baroja caustically stating his despair of ever attaining the scientific anarchist's ideal village republic " without flies, priests, or police " ; and Unamuno defying science, reason, or Primo de Rivera to destroy his immortal soul.
Unamuno is a philosopher whose system is himself. Kant may say this and Hegel that ; but Kant and Hegel are only men, men of flesh and bones, balancing their systems on their noses like jugglers. The important fact is that he, Miguel dc Unamuno, a man also, will die and he does not want to die. Reason and faith quarrel at his elbow as the fiend quarrelled with Gobbo ; reason tells him he will die, and faith- -the Castilian mystic's variant of the Shavian life-force—that he will live for ever. This is the theme of his great work, The Tragic Sense of Life—already available in English—and this golden, heroic strand is threaded in and out of all his other writings. Mist, which he describes as " nivola "—something more nebulous and unruly than a novels—uses fiction for a further variation of the theme.
It is a very bad novel. Its characters are all lay figures. Ifs plot runs along fitfully like an ingenious but underwound
elockerork-rtngine--: 7:The Elory:-has the air of being talked in-a cafe. But one follows the life of the unfortunate Augusto :Perez and his unhappy love affair—from his discovery that that strong minded lady is already engaged to-be married to a scoundrel, through the thwarted engagement, to PerU's final visit to the author at Salamanca, who tells him he is to
die and that his life is only a dream—with little impatience. For Unamuno's- humour and irony are as good as his meta- physics are exciting. In fact he is rather like what Socrates
may have been-like before Plato made him too perfect. But :Mist is not Unamuno at his best ; also, unfortunately, the translation, an American one, is poor and inept.
. Pio Baroja is happier in his translator. Mr. Bell has entirely succeeded in his rendering of that curt, dry, diffident style. • But here again, The Tree- of Knowledge is not charac-
teristic Baroja. It lacks his passion for action and for the dynamic. Almost without plot, it takes one through the life of a young man at his medical studies in Madrid, his journeys
into the provinces on behalf of a _consumptive brother, his thwarted attempts to make a practice for himself in a decaying southern town among rival doctors, to 'xis final return_ to Madrid where brief married happiness is snatched from him. Andres Hurtado is one of those pessimistic visionaries whose
Spirits contract and become embittered by the grossness and meanness of the world. He is foredoomed to failure because he will make no attempt to resist the evils that attack him. 'However, thepieture Baroja draws of the people in the Madrid streets, Cafes, schools, the hospitals and brothels, boarding houses and shops, have a Dickensian variety and sharpness Of outline. These creatures pass in and out of his pages with the fascinating listlessness of people in a street. He has an :amazing power of drawing a character in a few lines :
' " His father Pedro Hurtado, was a tall, slim elegant and handsome )nan who had been wild iri his youth. Fiercely egoistic, he con- sidered himself the centre of the universe.. . . His wife, Fermina iturrioz, had been a victim ; she spent her whole life in the belief that it was a woman's natural lot to suffer. After her death Don Pedro -Hurtado was ready enough to recognize her great virtues. You are not like your mother,' he would say to his children. She was a saint.'
In this book the whole panorama of waterless Castile is evoked with the uncanniness of a mirage, by that almost colourless style in which rhetoric could not exist and emotion rediteed- to a minimum. At his worst Baroja is merely dyspeptic and peevish ; at his best his pessimism has the heroic quality of a spirit that is biding its time in intense loneliness.
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