Return of the Native

Every seat in the columned auditorium at Madrid's Club Mercantil had been taken, but still the people came. Mink-coated ladies and threadbare scholars jostled for places behind the doors, crowded onto the balcony overlooking the hall. They waited patiently for the wiry little man with unruly white hair to step to the gold desk on the dais. When he did, they burst into cheers. They clapped and shouted so long that they seemed almost hysterical. The little man smiled, slowly raised his arms for silence. Then he began to speak.

The speech Jose Ortega y Gasset made that night was on an academic subject--Arnold J. Toynbee's Study of History (TIME, March 17, 1947). But all over Madrid last week, it was the talk of the coffeehouses. It had been twelve years since Spain's most celebrated living philosopher had gone into voluntary exile when Franco came to power. Now, with Franco's permission, he was back lecturing again. He had been told to stick to cultural subjects, but Ortega seemed to have other plans. He had chosen to lecture on Toynbee merely "to loosen up my fingers like a pianist." Toynbee was "a good minor subject, vast enough to be used as a pretext for ... my lifelong tendency toward social and political themes."

A Philosophical Pope. Whatever themes he might pick, Spaniards would remember what it was like to have Ortega around. He had been a proud and fastidious figure, quoted and copied everywhere. When he lectured at the University of Madrid, students jammed his classes. He was called "the philosophical Pope of Spain"; and when he went to his favorite coffeehouse, it was with a crowd of disciples tagging behind. There, perched on the edge of his chair, he would hold forth each night, spinning phrases like sparks from a pinwheel, sometimes until the sun came up.

The precocious son of a Madrid journalist (at seven, he had memorized whole chapters out of Cervantes), Ortega was no mere academician. In 1923 he founded the powerful Revista de Occidente, which became the meeting place of Madrid's intellectuals. He wrote on everything--from Kant's philosophy ("my house and my prison") to donkeys and Don Quixote, art and music.

A Curious Spectacle. He attacked and denounced as he wished--rebelling against Alfonso's tottering monarchy ("Spaniards, your state is no more--reconstruct it") and denouncing the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera ("this curious spectacle"). Finally, he founded a political party made up of intellectuals--the League for the Service of the Republic, which sent him to the 1931 Constituent Cortes. There, in his elegant Castilian, he helped write the constitution of the Spanish Republic: "The magnificent and momentous time has come," he cried, "when fate imposes upon Spaniards the duty of acting grandly."

"I do not live," Ortega once snapped at a lady who had asked for his ideas on life. "I merely observe others live." Over the years, Ortega's observations have not been pleasant. His Spain was merely "a cloud of dust that was left hovering in the air when a great people went galloping [away]." The world was not much better. Suffering from a "vertical invasion" of the masses, it had been taken over by the commonplace mind. It was a time "superior to other times; inferior to itself . . . Never perhaps has the ordinary man been so far below his times."

Agnostic Ortega had no system to give; with his own brand of humanism, he could only hope to guide men, as he had once urged them to act grandly. "Man has no nature," he once wrote. "He has a history." That history changed each moment, each moment bringing new decisions. It was an eternal "dialogue between man and his circumstances." To know those circumstances was the job of the philosopher; to act by them, mankind's.

A Dramatic Struggle. Now, at 65, Ortega is not much changed by his years in exile. He has wandered from France to Argentina and to Portugal. But he is still the erect and fastidious intellectual, forever on guard against spotting his suits, always using his long holders to prevent cigarette stains. "If there is something that characterizes my life," he says, "it is that I have had to struggle with the world's dramatic future--the future always tending to shake the ground of the present on which I had my feet." Far into the night, Ortega still struggles with a "passion which is the most vivid I find in my heart. I would call it intellectual love."

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