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politically and intellectually. It became provincial. European Ro–
manticism discovered it as a picturesque background. And such it re–
mained through the nineteenth century. Spain was the country of the
Alhambra and bullfights. It was the operatic country of
Carmen.
It was not until about 1900 that Spain began to reawaken intellectual–
ly. The founder of modem painting is the Spaniard Picasso. He was
born in 1881, Ortega in 1883.
The cultural reawakening of Spain is one of the few heart–
warming things that have taken place in the twentieth century. And
it is no unimportant matter. Spanish is a world language, which has a
vast sphere of influence in South America. Ortega's books appear
simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Madrid.
Spain had the good fortune not to be touched by the first World
War. In 1930 and thereabouts, Madrid was an enchanting mixture
of ultramodern luxury and historic patina. An elite of Spanish society
was exploring new modes of life and new ideas. The channel for
modem ideas was the
Revista de Occidente,
which was edited by
Ortega. It imported the best of the intellectual production of foreign
countries. But elegant Madrid was situated on the raw Castilian
plateau. A high, blue range of steep mountains shuts off the horizon;
at its base, a thousand feet above sea-level, lies the gray fortress of
the Escorial, dedicated to God and monarchy.
It
is Philip II's austere
dream of empire frozen into granite. On the terrace before that vast
fa<;ade, Ortega used to walk at eighteen, studying Kant. In 1906 he
was in Berlin. In 1913 we find him at Marburg as a pupil of the
great Neo-Kantian, Hermann Cohen. In 1932, the Goethe centennial
year, he writes of Weimar and Jena. He is full of enthusiasm for
what the University of Jena represented between 1790 and 1825 :
a "fabulous treasure of the loftiest intellectual stimuli." "Thousands
of miles removed from it in space, and still further removed by my
difference from it, I cannot hear that name without trembling-I, a
little Celt-Iberian, brought up on an arid Mediterranean plateau."
The encounter between the Mediterranean sun and the climate
of Nordic-German thought, the productive tension which resulted,
is one of the biological premises of Ortega's intellectual activity. One
of the tasks which Ortega set himself and accomplished was "to
swell the thought of Spain with the full stream of German intel–
lectual riches." Yet Ortega is anything but a mere disciple and off-
