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: Some I have written with
more effort than pleasure, and others I have written with more pleasure
than effort.
My readers apparently are not aware of this distinction, although it
seems evident to me. Can it be that true feeling is of no value in a
piece of literature, as some of the decadents have thought? Can it be
that enthusiasm, weariness, loathing, distress and ennui never transpire
through the pages of a book? Indubitably none of them transpire unless
the reader enters into the spirit of the work. And, in general, the
reader does not enter into the spirit of my books. I cherish a hope
which, perhaps, may be chimerical and ridiculous, that the Spanish
reader thirty or forty years hence, who takes up my books, whose
sensibilities, it may be, have been a little less hardened into
formalism than those of the reader of today, will both appreciate and
dislike me more intelligently.
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