Comment (Glosa)

Galicia is miserable like Mignon but like her it has admirable melodies (3).

My friend, the old translator of Virgil, had the most gallant polemic with me. He is a very clean and correct old man who argues as, undoubtedly, Spinoza would argue, as those who live in the country argue; with a pantheistic serenity. His voice doesn't tremble or get irritated; it flows like water between pebbles (4).

“A poor country is absolutely despicable. It's not worth a visit," I said.

“You see,” replied the Latinist, “that great beauty can be found in the greatest misery.

"My good and respectable friend," I exclaimed impertinently, "Racine says 'that honor without money is but a disease.' The same beauty. If it's not a weariness of life, it's just an abstraction. I do not believe in the charm of Toledo, with its musty houses full of legends and its streets so old, so uncomfortable... You see, and I find aesthetic seduction in the boulevards, nervous as strong muscles, and in the numbered avenues of New York with its twenty-five storey houses (5).

"You're right, you're right, young man," but come, come... and he took me to his garden. A garden, almost an orchard at the end of which a stone gazebo faced the sea (6).

He sat me down and walked away without saying a word.

Behind me, hidden among tall grass, a fountain poured its endless stream.

The old translator of Virgil had played a trick on me... (7)

In an immense embrace, he closes the land to the ocean. Like a great lake, the estuary stretches out into view. The land descends in leaps from the mountain to the sea.

The sun has set. The fields are pale green cornfields with their yellow wild heads; They are wide canopies of vines with their wide, paradisiacal leaves that make the light transparent.

They are dark and mysterious oak masses. The three nuances are always repeated, with sweet monotony, like refrains of an endless song.

The gaze glides softly, flattering itself on the fresh greenery of the ground. And there, in front, in silhouette against the red, twilight curtain that the sun tends to hide, the Cies Islands rise above the sea, purple, with a sinuous profile, with the majesty of old sea monsters, heroes of religious legends. The sea girds them silver.

A white light spills over the sky over the countryside.

Rumors are heard of life fading away; distant barks that sound like echoes: ignored shrills with a tinkling of stars. The cart that moves slowly; the axes prolong their two screeching and alternating notes.

The light of the earth is fleeing, erasing the colors, overturning the mystery on the houses. It recedes like a celestial apparition.

You can still see the white line of the road and you can hear the roll of the carriages that return from happy expeditions: jingling, letting out the screams of excited women.

The sky darkens. On the horizon a long line of leaden clouds, beyond the islands, gallops over the sea in a rush.

A flock of girls linked by the arms arrives, passes and leaves singing simple and prolonged melodies of a primitive melancholy; behind my back the fountain with crystalline speech, continues its ancient tale.

It seems that a gallant intrigue is about to unfold. It seems that the cleats of two rival shepherds are going to sound. The gentle wind from the sea caresses as it passes. The friendly and warm tones of the houses and the silver of ancient coins that the sea dresses, give the landscape an evangelical sweetness.

Near me, at the door of a little white house, an old woman chants the oldest prayer. A simple and frank prayer that asks heaven for healing for the children and for the cows.

City life is remembered as impassive of rudeness. Instead, first loves are longed for and the atmosphere envelops the senses in an eclogue perfume.

Rhythmically the nerves shrink feigning peaceful fright...

It is sinking into life like a feather mattress (8).

NOTES TO "COMMENT" (writing: Noé Massó)

1. Comment (glosa)

In a musical sense, glosa is the free variation on the same notes; in an accounting sense, a note or objection to some accounts. The two senses, aesthetic and critical, operate consciously in this Glosa: it is, on the one hand, an aesthetic exercise where the young man from Madrid rehearses lyrical variations on his summer landscape. On the other, a objection, a criticism of the young polemicist to his own initial position in the discussion about progress and beauty, agreeing with his opponent.

1902 is, for the young Ortega, the year of the glosas, with which he begins his intellectual production. Shortly before this lyrical glosa, the young graduate had to write two other outdated glosa, still unpublished: “De la luz a las sobras” and “Jadear”. Both denounce the expiration of the ideals of the XIX before the beginning of the new XX century. At the end of the year he will publish a fourth and last glosa in Madrid, "On personal criticism", where he calls for heroes with determined personalities who, armed with sincerity, will endow the people with conscience and identity, saving it from decadence.

The intellectual adventure that these Glosas of 1902 open up leads to the Moralejas, a series of articles that he announces in December 1903 and concludes in the summer of 1906, when the young doctor is already twenty-three years old. In the Moralejas, he returns to address the themes of the glosa (progress, beauty, caste, criticism, the landscape...), but now -there is the moral- from the intellectual and vital background acquired over the years. last four years. In them, he has committed himself to an ambitious and heroic -alone- study project, with the aim of acquiring a solid scientific training to promote the progress of the Nation. The decisive stimulus to concoct and assume this training project, which will end up taking him to Germany, is found by the young philosopher at the School of Arts and Industries of Vigo: in his Library he "discovers" sociology as a scientific tool to redirect society towards the progress; Maeztu's lectures, given at the School throughout July and August, incite him to action.

2. Ramon del Valle-Inclan

All this Lyrical Glosa does not cease to be a tribute to Valle-Inclán, both in his style and in his setting and even in his meaning, the superiority of concrete beauty over the general idea. At this point in the century, Valle has published Femininas, Epitalamio and the Autumn Sonata. When in 1904 he presented the Summer Sonata, the young critic dedicated his first review to it; in it, while confessing his devotion to the teacher, he suggests that he abandon so many “little blonde princess who spins on a glass spinning wheel” to count “human things, very human”.

The admiration of the young thinker for the Galician responds to his literature, his strange personality (“it was not strange things that interested him, but men interested in strange things”, Maeztu points out in 1916) and, above all, to his attitude of rupture with the established molds and consecrated authors, such as Echegaray. Valle represents what Ortega would call the "irruption of the barbarians" (Azorín, Baroja, Unamuno...) in the apathy of Spanish culture at the end of the 19th century.

It is possible that in the long conversations this summer, Maeztu told him about his meeting with Don Ramón, which he remembers ten years later:

“On the corner of the Bank of Spain he saw a man, like a ghost, defending himself with his cane from some students. The one who came from the provinces was in defense of the outstanding man against the many aggressors. And the man who was like a ghost said to him in a loud voice: "Step aside, hidalgo, or lash out with me at eztoz villainous!". After the half battle, the two became acquainted, shook hands, introduced themselves:

―Ramón del Valle-Inclán, man of letters.

―Ramiro de Maeztu, journalist.

Valle-Inclán was in "that time" of the confusion of the Spanish languages ​​the maximum modernist. When I came to the world of intellectual curiosity, when the surrounding mythology began to act on me in a conscious way, a great scandal was taking place in Madrid: this scandal was Valle-Inclán.” (in “Pío Baroja: Anatomy of a scattered soul”)

3. Galicia is miserable like Mignon but like her she has admirable melodies...

In Goethe's novel Years of Learning by Guillermo Meister, (book II, chapter VIII) Mignon appears: a strange girl of twelve or thirteen years old, dark-haired, crecha, distrustful as a brave cat and alert as a hungry dog. Orphaned, ignorant, poor and mistreated, she had been taken in by a trapeze artist brother, the Great Devil, and, after he died, by the ferocious leader of the troupe of mountebanks.

Beneath her misery and roughness, Mignon harbors spells that she only shows to those who know how to enchant her heart: then she dances exactly, lively and lightly, the mysterious dance of the eggs or breaks out into an inciting and seductive Italian song:

Do you know the country where the lemon tree grows

and golden the oranges under the vine shine?

The breeze comes down briefly from the blue sky

And placid the myrtle and proud the laurel vibrate

Oh yes, there,

with you, my love,

I would like to fly!

4. The old Latinist translator of Virgil

Who is this discreet local “Virgilio” who guides the young esthete to the Mirador de la Belleza, the “clean and correct” old man who corrects the page for the young progressive? We cannot know, nor is it precise, because, deep down, he is himself. In the four Glosas of 1902, the young Ortega dialogues with “someone”: Herr Habacuc Humburgman (“Glosas Inactuales”) or a “friend of mine (...) who wants to breathe metaphysical certainties” (“De la Crítica personal”). In the following years Rubín de Cendoya, "Spanish mystic" or Professor Vulpius "subtle and metaphysical" will be occasional interlocutors. In 1934 Ortega y Gasset clarified that "dialogue is the logos from the other's point of view" and that this is the norm that governs his writing "from early youth" (VIII, 17).

5. The musty houses of Toledo and the nervous boulevards of New York

Toledo and New York, the traditional and the modern, conservation and progress, race and science, aesthetic enjoyment and ethical commitment, nature and culture, Spain and Europe, are the two dialectical poles between which he oscillates. the Glosa, and, in a certain way, the Ortegan thought of youth. Here, the "charm" of Toledo is "abstraction", "must", "uncomfortable" in the face of the "aesthetic seduction" of progress which, following Maeztu's rhetoric, is a "fed up with life", "nervous", " muscular". In his search for meaning, the young Ortega will perceive the need to overcome the Spanish casticismo but will not find accommodation in the cold Europeanist idealism. He will not be able to reconcile the two poles until the Meditations of 1914, where he proposes to integrate, through the concept, the Mediterranean and the Germanic, aesthetics and science, surface and depth, concrete life and the general idea: intelligence, abstraction, then becomes a distancing from life so that when we look back “it makes sense to our eyes”.

Toledo and Córdoba are for the young philosopher the paradigm of a traditional city; the German Cordoba, “translated from Arabic into Gothic”, is Nuremberg; and the secret of Nuremberg, he will answer in 1906, is to drink in his own past, renewing it. Only then will “a multitude of factories rise up around Toledo and Córdoba, petulantly giving the air smoke from their chimneys” (“Las Fuentes de Nuremberg”, 1906). A certain "strategy" of social pedagogy can also be detected in the progressive imposture adopted here by the young Ortega: "He believed that (...) a means of awakening the race was to preach luxury and the unlimited increase in demands on life" ( Letter to Navarro Ledesma, 1905).

6. Almost an orchard, at the end of which a stone lookout overlooked the sea...

During their stays in Vigo, the Ortega-Gasset family used to stay at the homes of the Gasset-Chinchilla aunts: Maria Gasset, widow of José Neyra, and Manuela Gasset, wife of Álvaro López-Mora. Villa Manuela, Aunt Manuela's house in Peniche, on the edge of the old road to Bayonne, had good views of the sea, but its atmosphere did not seem to please the young man from Madrid ("going to Aunt Manuela's house... it is very attractive!” he writes to his father this summer). On the contrary, the quinta del Cristo (the Rivas or Graña farm, between López Mora and Regueiro), owned by Aunt Maria, added to its pleasant foliage the attractiveness of the Neyra-Gasset cousins, "beautiful and elegant." . Known as "El Bosque", it seems to fit more with that "garden, almost an orchard", where the Glosa culminates.

7. He had played a trick on me....

Discreetly, the old Latinist has arranged around the young polemicist four omnipresent and inalienable elements in Ortega y Gasset's imaginary, which are documented here for the first time: the garden, the fountain, the viewpoint and the twilight. They are, rather than physical realities, elements of his intimate landscape, places of the soul: the Garden of “Adan in Paradise” that will be transformed into the Herrerian forest of Meditations on Don Quixote; the Mirador that will persist as a Castilian mountain range and will be conceptualized in El Espectador; the Endless Fountain or the clear stream that will often set its descriptions to music; the Hegelian Twilight that closes innumerable writings, in which things lose their strict geometries, making the heart harmonize with the cosmic order and integrate into the landscape. The play inevitably dislodges the imposture of the impertinent young man, forced to choose between a landscape and a theory.

8. It's sinking into life like a feather mattress...

La Glosa culminates in fusion, aesthetic ecstasy, sentimental abduction, rapture in the beauty of the landscape. The boulevards of New York, “nervous like strong muscles” give way to nerves that shrink “faking peaceful frightening”, until “sinking into life”. The old debater wins and drags. It is, in a certain way, Ortega's purpose, which is fulfilled in the immediate path of art as opposed to the mediate path of science. It is also the defeat of progressive prejudice due to the immediacy of what is concrete and present, the recognition of ideological falsification, admitting oneself as I am, with my circumstances and given over to the fruition of my senses. It is, ultimately, an unexpected response to Maeztu's machinist shouting.

Finally, a playful gloss. The young activist at the beginning has become a passive spectator, the despicable country has become an aesthetic spectacle, the miserable Mignon, a seductive dancer. The dialectical contradiction is a reflection of the vital crossroads of the young graduate, worried about "the blank days to come", looking for a meaning in which to commit his efforts. Between enthusiastic progressivism, melancholic aestheticism and ironic lucidity, the young man from Madrid strives to find an ideal to assume, an adventure to undertake, the sparkles of which he has glimpsed in this month of August. It is also a farewell to the landscape of his last summers, to the estuary, to the city, to his cousins, to himself, from when “around the age of twenty, tired of playing with our body, our spirit woke up to exercise” ( I89, 1908). A conclusion where, as in any crossroads, the path that comes is the path that goes.

Published in Faro de Vigo on Thursday, August 28, 1902 (signed by Ortega on August 26). Reproduced in the Cultural Supplement -monographic number on Ortega- of the same newspaper, on Wednesday, August 28, 2002.