THE FOLK SONG


The folk song lies at the opposite pole from universal music. It is
music which smacks most of the soil whereon it has been produced. By its
very nature it is intelligible at all times to all persons in the
locality, if only because music is not an intellectual art; it deals in
rhythms, it does not deal in ideas. But beyond the fact of its
intelligibility, music possesses different attractions for different
people. The folk song preserves to us the very savour of the country in
which we were born; it recalls the air, the climate that we breathed and
knew. When we hear it, it is as if all our ancestors should suddenly
present themselves. I realize that my tastes may be barbaric, but if
there could only be one kind of music, and I were obliged to choose
between the universal and the local, my preference would be wholly for
the latter, which is the popular music.




ON THE OPTIMISM OF EUNUCHS


In a text book designed for the edification of research workers--a
specimen of peculiarly disagreeable tartuffery--the histologist, Ramon y
Cajal, who, as a thinker, has always been an absolute mediocrity,
explains what the young scholar should be, in the same way that the
Constitution of 1812 made it clear what the ideal Spanish citizen should