ORTEGA
269
These sentences have a decisive and irrefutable ring. Recollect–
ing Ortega's race metaphor, one would say that the Celt-Iberian
speaks in them.
I; his earliest writings Ortega criticized the "faith in culture,"
the bigoted Pharisaism of culture, which is rampant in the modern
world. Nevertheless, at that period he was much interested in the
modern literary movement. He wrote on Proust and on Congora,
whose tercentenary in 1927 was of such great significance for
modern Spanish criticism. But gradually symptoms of an estrange–
ment from literature appeared. This found expression in 1932 in an
essay on-and against- Goethe, which aroused much comment. His
attitude toward French literature is critical too. It is, he writes, the
"normal" literature-but, like everything normal, it has neither
heights nor depths. He is suspicious of Pascal. "Long ago," he wrote
in 1937, " I learned to beware when I hear anyone quoting Pascal.
This is an elementary hygienic precaution." Rousseau, on the other
hand, with his mad doctrine of the natural goodness of man, spoiled
a century and a half of European history, until, after interminable
catastrophes (the series of which is perhaps not yet closed) we
have learned to re-discover the simple truth, known to almost all
earlier centuries: that man is by birth an evil beast.
*
Ortega has
also made some caustic remarks on the subject of Paul Valery. Such
are a few of Ortega's opinions on the subject of French literature.
For three hundred years, France has regarded herself-and perhaps
rightly-as the country where the best writing is done. "But France
has also hesitated the longest over convincing herself that in this day
and age one can no longer live on literature."
Philosophers, when they have rightly understood themselves, have
always been the enemies of poets. The Pre-Socratics rebuked Homer,
and Plato wanted to banish poets from his republic. In his turn,
Ortega has said: "We have grown accustomed to speaking of poetry
without much emotion.
If
we say that it is not a
serious
matter, no one
gets angry but the poets." In Germany too there have been cases
of great poets being called to order by philosophers, as Goethe was
by Jaspers. This is inevitable, because philosophy is by nature in–
tensely intolerant. It is natural to philosophy to take nothing seriously
*
I may add that this truth was discovered by Bias of Pirene, one of the Seven
Sages of Greece. Later Greek philosophy seems to have lost sight of it.
