And, to apply this to our own people, why must we persist in distorting our inner nature and rejecting what it gives us in order to try to force it to give us something else? Our defects, or what others call our defects, are usually the root of our excellencies; the qualities that are censured as our vices are the foundation of our virtues. It is not a universal æsthetic, applicable to all peoples alike, a pure æsthetic--for I doubt whether such an æsthetic exists or even can exist--that has condemned our conceptism and gongorism, for example, and that has decreed that our genuine and natural instinct for emphasis is in bad taste. It is not a universal æsthetic, valid for all peoples alike, but the æsthetic of other peoples, or rather of one other people, the French, that has imposed this canon upon so many of us. The literary and artistic vices of this terribly logical, desperately geometrical, Cartesian people are certainly not those of conceptism or gongorism, and this people has succeeded in great measure in teaching us its virtues and in teaching us its vices. There is nothing more intolerable than gallicized Spanish literature; nothing more false, more futile, more displeasing, than Spanish writers who have formed themselves by imitating French literature. Emphasis? But what if emphasis is natural to us? What if emphatic expression is the spontaneous expression of our nature? What if emphasis is the form of passion, just as what is called naturalness is the expression of sensuality and of good sense? What I am sure of is that when a man is really irritated or really enthusiastic, he does not express himself in concise, clear, logical, transparent phrases, but he breaks out into emphatic exclamations, into redundant dithyrambs. What I know, and what everybody knows, is that in love-letters, if the love be real love, tragic love, love that cannot be happy, everything is poured forth in a flood of burning commonplaces. I have often thought that gongorism and conceptism are, in a certain mode, expressions of passion. I affirm it of conceptism, arbitrarily, of course. Almost all the great men of passion that I am acquainted with in the history of human thought, including the great African of whom I have already spoken, have been conceptists, have poured forth their longings, their aspirations, in antitheses, in paradoxes, in phrases that at first sight seem to be merely ingenious. Perhaps this is owing to the fact that passion is the enemy of logic, in which it sees a tyrant, for passion desires that what it desires should exist, and does not desire what must exist, and conceptism in its essence is a violation of logic for the sake of logic itself. He plays with concepts and does violence to ideas who is impeded by concepts and ideas, for he is unable to make them comply with the demands of his passion.