Invertebrate Spain

THIS volume is made up of various selections from the writings of Señor Ortega published before his Revolt of the Masses, a book which, in translation, revealed him to the English-speaking world as one of the few very great creative thinkers of our time. These papers, so well arranged by Miss Mildred Adams, show the pathway of his thought through many years; in a sense the volume validates his conclusions in the most famous of all his works — if such were needed, which is not the case. It also shows a broader and more intimate portrait of the man himself in all his loyal and passionate Hispanic quality; it gives a new view of his power as a master of literature in its highest aspects; finally, it demonstrates the fact that he was as able and penetrating in the field of prognosis as in that of diagnosis. Knowing his own people as he does (not to speak of ‘people’ generally and throughout the Western world), wholly fearless because of his deep convictions, and utterly frank because of his burning patriotism, he makes it quite clear in these collected essays that the present civil war in Spain was, sooner or later, bound to come, and, coming, to take on the lamentable aspect that it has assumed.

Most of the material in this book was put out before the riots in 1931 that overthrew the monarchy. It is all, therefore, singularly prophetic. If enough of the Spanish people could have accepted Señor Ortega’s diagnosis of conditions and heeded his warnings, as happened in the case of the small minority of the younger intelligentsia, the ruin of Spain might possibly have been averted. This could hardly have happened, however, for the reason that Spain was, and had been for nearly three centuries, progressively decadent. The sign of national and cultural vitality is a centripetal synthesis; of degeneration and dissolution, a centrifugal process. When a State follows after ‘ particularism,’ whether in intellectual, social, economic, or political categories of life, it is on the road to destruction. ’History shows a perpetual swinging back and forth between two kinds of epochs — periods in which aristocracies and therewith society are being formed, and periods in which those same aristocracies are decaying and society is dissolving along with them.’

One of the most illuminating sections in this book is that on Fascism. Señor Ortega ascribes to it no positive force, but one that is purely negative. ‘The essence of the phenomenon lay not in the action of Fascism but in the inaction of liberalism,’ which had become only a word. There was no public confidence in anything, in any social or political principle or form. ’It looks as though it was not so much Cæsar who won over the others as the others who let Cæsar win.’ He has no liking for Fascism, but neither has he any liking for the spurious democracy of the present day, and least of all for Bolshevism of the Russian ‘Asiatic’ type or the anarchism of Spain or France. He is at one with Señor de Madariaga’s recently published Anarchy or Hierarchy. Sound society and a legitimate State are founded on social and personal differentiation. ‘A nation is a human mass which is organized and given structure by a minority of chosen individuals. ... In a nation, when the mass refuses to be a mass — that is to say, when it refuses to follow the directing minority — the nation goes to pieces, society is dismembered, and social chaos results. . . . The first of all social acts is the organization of a human mass into those who lead and those who are led. . . . Without a minority to act on a collective mass, and a mass which knows how to accept the influence of the minority, there is no society, or there will very shortly be none. . . . Wherever you choose to look, you see the depressing spectacle of the worst — who form the majority — rising feverishly against the best. . . . Then there will be no way out. As long as the mass denies its own biological mission —which is to follow the best of our people— it will neither listen to nor accept their opinions, and only the opinions of the mass itself, which are inchoate, erroneous, and childish, will triumph.’

These essays apply especially to Spain, and show why there is war there to-day. They have a wider significance, for it was not in that unhappy country alone that evil conditions bred evil results. The same false doctrines and wrong methods exist in nearly all the nations of the modern age. They may well profit by Spain’s dark example.

RALPH ADAMS CRAM