Youth and Egolatry | Page 9

each of these arts to develop independently.
As regards Nietzsche's hostility to the theatocracy of Wagner, I share it
fully. This business of substituting the theatre for the church, and
teaching philosophy singing, seems ridiculous to me. I am also out of
patience with the wooden dragons, swans, stage fire, thunder and
lightning.
Although it may sound paradoxical, the fact is that all this scenery is in
the way. I have seen King Lear in Paris, at the Theatre Antoine, where
it was presented with very nearly perfect scenery. When the King and
the fool roamed about the heath in the third act, amid thunder and
lightning, everybody was gazing at the clouds in the flies and watching
for the lightning, or listening to the whistling of the wind; no one paid
any attention to what was said by the characters.

UNIVERSAL MUSICIANS
German music is undoubtedly the most universal music, especially that

of Mozart and Beethoven. It seems as if there were fewer particles of
their native soil imbedded in the works of these two masters than is
common among their countrymen. They bring out in sharp relief the
cultural internationalism of Germany.
Mozart is an epitome of the grace of the eighteenth century; he is at
once delicate, joyous, serene, gallant, mischievous. He is a courtier of
whatever country one will. Sometimes, when listening to his music, I
ask myself: "Why is it that this, which must be of German origin,
seems to be part of all of us, to have been designed for us all?"
Beethoven, too, like Mozart, is a man without a country. As the one
manipulates his joyous, soft, serene rhythms, the other throbs and
trembles with obscure meanings and pathetic, heartrending laments, the
source of which lies hidden as at the bottom of some mine.
He is a Segismund who complains against the gods and against his fate
in a tongue which knows no national accent. A day will come when the
negroes of Timbuktu will listen to Mozart's and Beethoven's music and
feel that it belongs to them, as truly as it ever did to the citizens of
Munich or of Vienna.

THE FOLK SONG
The folk song lies at the opposite pole from universal music. It is music
which smacks most of the soil whereon it has been produced. By its
very nature it is intelligible at all times to all persons in the locality, if
only because music is not an intellectual art; it deals in rhythms, it does
not deal in ideas. 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.

ON THE OPTIMISM OF EUNUCHS
In a text book designed for the edification of research workers--a
specimen of peculiarly disagreeable tartuffery--the histologist, Ramon
y Cajal, who, as a thinker, has always been an absolute mediocrity,
explains what the young scholar should be, in the same way that the
Constitution of 1812 made it clear what the ideal Spanish citizen
should be.
So we know now the proper character of the young scholar. He must be
calm, optimistic, serene ... and all this with ten or twelve coppers in his
pocket!
Some friends inform me that in the Institute for Public Education at
Madrid, where an attempt is made to give due artistic orientation to the
pupils, they have contrived an informal classification of the arts in the
order of their importance; first comes painting; then, music; and, last,
literature.
Considering carefully what may be the reasons for such a sequence, it
would appear that the purpose must be to deprive the student of any
occasion for becoming pessimistic. 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.
Back of all this correctness may be divined the optimism of eunuchs.

II
MYSELF, THE WRITER

TO MY READERS THIRTY YEARS HENCE
Among my books there are two distinct classes: