Books: Ortega on Spain

INVERTEBRATE SPAIN—José Ortega y Gasset—Norton ($2.75).

Professors have always been a byword and a hissing to Wall Street, and—except for their late brief heyday—not too highly regarded in Washington. But in 1932 appeared a book by a professor, and a Spaniard at that, which was read with respect by brokers and Senators alike. The Revolt oj the Masses (TIME, Sept. 19, 1932) was one of those surprise best-sellers which was not aimed at the large depression-chastened audience it found. That book established Professor José Ortega y Gasset in the U. S. consciousness as an original and forceful thinker-about-civilization. Last week his third book, a collection of essays on Spain, came no less timely to U. S. readers.

José Ortega is no longer a professor and no longer in Spain. After the Spanish Revolution of 1931 which his writing and influence did much to bring about, he was a deputy to the new Republic’s first Cortes. At the outbreak of the Franco rebellion last summer, Ortega added his signature to a proclamation of loyalty to the Government. Later, a sick man, he left his war-torn country for neutral France. The essays in his book were all written before the Spanish civil war began, but this historian’s-eye-view reveals an even grimmer prospect than appears in current headlines and newsreels.

A nation’s history, according to Ortega, consists of a period of amalgamation and a period of disintegration. Spain has been disintegrating since 1580, when Philip II conquered Portugal. If the process of history could be telescoped like the cinema of a growing plant, “the history of Spain takes on the clear expressiveness of a gesture, and the modern incidents with which the vast attitude is ending are as self-explanatory as cheeks marked by anguish or a hand that falls exhausted.” Spain’s last 300 years Ortega calls a “long coma of egotism and idiocy . . . today we are not so much a people as a cloud of dust that was left hovering in the air when a great people went galloping down the high road of history.” The sectionalism which has marked modern Spanish history, notably the movements for Basque and Catalan nationalism, have their roots. Ortega thinks, deep in the past. It took a strong Castile to make Spain and its empire, and once Castile lost its strength, the elements of its domain split off by centrifugal force.

“Spain drags itself along invertebrate, not only in its political life, but—and this goes deeper and is more fundamental—in its own social living together. None of the mechanisms which integrate the machinery of public life can function this way. One institution breaks down today, another tomorrow, until complete historic collapse will overtake us.” But Ortega will not admit that economic determinism (Marxism) supplies the right answer for Spain’s condition. Marxism, which he calls “one of the great ideas of the 19th Century, … is one of the great wheels in the mechanism of history, but it travels in gear with many other wheels. The whole machine is much more complex than this, so much more complex that we have not yet caught a glimpse of its entire plan.” What the outline of that plan might be Ortega does not say, but he tries to show that, in Spain’s case, a military reading of history answers more questions better.

As for fascism, though Ortega’s first remarks sound coolly friendly, he ends by analyzing it in terms no fascist will like: “If no one believes firmly in any political form, if there is no single institution which warms all hearts, it is natural that the victory should go to one which despises all existing forms and institutions and occupies itself with other things. . . . [But] the moment there arises a new principle of political law which can win the unstinted enthusiasm of a social group, fascism will vanish into thin air.”