Part 25 (1/2)
When Echegaray was made Minister of Finance, he was already an old man.
A reporter called one day to interview him at the Ministry, and Echegaray confessed that he was without any very clear idea as to just what the duties of his office were to be. When the reporter took leave of the dramatist, he remarked:
”Don Jose, you are not going to be comfortable here; it is cold in the building. Besides, the air is too fresh.”
Echegaray replied:
”Yes, and your description suits me exactly.”
This cynically cheap joke might have fallen appropriately from the tongues of the majority of Spanish politicians. Among these male _bailarinas_, nearly all of whom date back to the Revolution of September, we may find, indeed, some men of austere character: Salmeron, Pi y Margall and Costa. Salmeron was an inimitable actor, but an actor who was sincere in his part. He was the most marvellous orator that I have ever heard.
As a philosopher, he was of no account, and as a politician he was a calamity.
Pi y Margall, whom I met once in his own home where I went in company with Azorin, was no more a politician or a philosopher than was Salmeron. He was a journalist, a popularizer of other men's ideas, gifted with a style at once clear and concise. Pi y Margall was sincere, enamoured of ideas, and took but little thought of himself.
As to Costa, I confess that he was always antipathetic to me. Like Nakens, he was a man who lived upon the estimation in which he was held by others, pretending all the while that he attached no importance to it whatever. Aguirre Metaca once told me that while he was connected with a paper in Saragossa, he had solicited an interview with Costa, and thereupon Costa wrote the interview himself, referring to himself here and there in it as the Lion of Graus. I cannot accept Costa as a modern European, intellectually. He was a figure for the Cortes of Cadiz, solemn, pompous, becollared and rhetorical. He was one of those actors who abound in southern countries, who are laid to rest in their graves without ever having had the least idea that their entire lives have been nothing but stage spectacles.
REVOLUTIONISTS
Whether politicians or authors, the Spanish revolutionists always smack to my mind of the property room, and especially is this true of the authors. Zozaya, Morote and Dicenta have pa.s.sed for many years now as terrible men, both destructive and great innovators. But how ridiculous!
Zozaya, like Dicenta, has never done anything but manipulate the commonplace, failing to impart either lightness or novelty to it, as have Valera and Anatole France, succeeding only on the other hand in making it more plumbeous and indigestible.
Speaking of Luis Morote, against whom I urge nothing as a man, he has always been a bugbear to me, the personification of dullness, of vulgarity, of everything that lacks interest and charm. I can conceive nothing lower than an article by Morote.
”What talent that man has! What a revolutionary personality!” they used to say in Valencia, and once the janitor at the Club added: ”To think I knew that man when he was only this high!” And he held out his hand about a metre above the ground.
Spain has never produced any revolutionists. Don Nicolas Estevanez, who imagined himself an anarchist, would fly into a rage if he read an article which concealed a gallicism in it.
”Do not bother your head about gallicisms,” I used to say to him. ”What do they matter, anyway?”
No, we have never had any revolutionists in Spain. That is, we have had only one: Ferrer.
He was certainly not a man of great mind. When he talked, he was on the level of Morote and Zozaya, which is nothing more nor less than the level of everybody else; but when it came to action, he did amount to something, and that something was dangerous.
LERROUX
My only experience in politics was gained with Lerroux.
One Sunday, seven or eight years ago, on coming out of my house and crossing the Plaza de San Marcial, I observed that a great crowd had gathered.
”What is the matter?” I asked.
”Lerroux is coming,” they told me.
I delayed a moment and happened on Villar, the composer, among the crowd. We fell to talking of Lerroux and what he might accomplish. A procession was soon formed, which we followed, and we found ourselves in front of the editorial offices of _El Pais_.