Youth and Egolatry | Page 2

of the restored
monarchy, gradually resumed its old privileges and its old pretensions.
So on the political side. In Catalonia, where Spain keeps the strangest
melting-pot in Europe and the old Iberian stock is almost extinct, there
was a menacing seething, but elsewhere there was not much to chill the
conservative spine. In the middle nineties, when the Socialist vote in
Germany was already approaching the two million mark, and Belgium
was rocked by great Socialist demonstrations, and the Socialist deputies
in the French Chamber numbered fifty, and even England was
beginning to toy gingerly with new schemes of social reform, by
Bismarck out of Lassalle, the total strength of the Socialists of Spain
was still not much above five thousand votes. In brief, the country
seemed to be removed from the main currents of European thought.
There was unrest, to be sure, but it was unrest that was largely
inarticulate and that needed a new race of leaders to give it form and
direction.
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. Parties
formed, split, blew up, revived and combined, each with its sure cure
for all the sorrows of the land. Resignationism gave way to a harsh and
searching questioning, and questioning to denunciation and demand for
reform. The monarchy swayed this way and that, seeking to avoid both
the peril of too much yielding and the worse peril of not yielding
enough. The Church, on the defensive once more, prepared quickly for
stormy weather and sent hurried calls to Rome for help. Nor was all
this uproar on the political and practical side. 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. And out of the ruck of authors, eager,
exigent, and the tremendous clash of nations, new and old, there finally
emerged a prose based not upon rhetorical reminiscences, but
responsive minutely to the necessities of the national life. The
oratorical platitudes of Castelar and Canovas del Castillo gave way to
the discreet analyses of Azorin (Jose Martinez Ruiz) and Jose Ortega y
Gasset, to the sober sentences of the Rector of the University of
Salamanca, Miguel de Unamuno, writing with a restraint which is
anything but traditionally Castilian, and to the journalistic
impressionism of Ramiro de Maeztu, supple and cosmopolitan from
long residence abroad. The poets now jettisoned the rotundities of the
romantic and emotional schools of Zorrilla and Salvador Rueda, and
substituted instead the precise, pictorial line of Ruben Dario, Juan
Ramon Jimenez, and the brothers Machado, while the socialistic and
republican propaganda which had invaded the theatre with Perez
Galdos, Joaquin Dicenta, and Angel Guimera, bore fruit in the

psychological drama of Benavente, the social comedies of Linares
Rivas, and the atmospheric canvases which the Quinteros have painted
of Andalusia.
In the novel, the transformation is noticeable at once in the rapid
development of the pornographic tale, whose riches might bring a blush
to the cheek of Boccaccio, and provide Poggio and Aretino with a
complete review; but these are stories for the barrack, venturing only
now and then upon the confines of respectability in the erotic romances
of Zamacois and the late enormously popular Felipe Trigo. 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 Leon, a functionary in the Bank of Spain,
while the idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as Jose
Maria Salaverria, 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. The decadent novel, foreshadowed a
few years since by Alejandro Sawa, has attained