Bullfighting reflected in a drop of dew

These essays on art and literature, which are sometimes fragments of memories, travel, experiences and on other occasions they approach fiction literature, form a kind of moral and aesthetic self -portrait that was, perhaps, the last decadentist of Europe. In ‘The House of Life’ it ends up confessing a feeling of intimate failure to lifel Having taken refuge in cameras full of mirrors, statuettes, Empire -style furniture (his favorite), palaces and landscape paints, rare books.

But I think that in no other Praz book I have felt so close to understanding the enigma of his sensitivity tortured by Images of unusual beauty that are mixed and signed with images of sordid horror, in a synthesis that for him was, perhaps, the meaning of the word ‘romantic’.

Since Praz’s ‘romanticism’, which extends from the counter -reformist aesthetics to symbolism and has a large neoclassical garden in the middle, the empire style (which he defines as sad, hieratic and funéreo), is mostly An attraction for what he calls “the beauty of Medusa”and mix the most sinister side of Catholic aesthetics, with its blood and torture, with a Parnassian passion with the mythological and the decorative arts, particularly furniture and mirrors, of which you always have wonderful things to say, because always those who write about mirrors see this topic reflected many times and it is not possible to write about mirrors only once.

One of the most amazing texts of this anthology, infinitely fascinating even in its darkest corners, is the text ‘Blood, voluptuousness, death’, 1928, Dedicated to bullfighting, that all in this country, those in favor and those of us who are against this old ritual, should read.

It is this, otherwise, a true garden of the senses of reading and art, An intelligence adventure and sensitivity. The image of Carlos V in the Yuste monastery obsessed with automatons and watches. The passion for English literature and culture. The warm evocation of writer Vernon Lee. The pleasure of walking through the suburbs of the big cities. A mysterious conversation heard by phone. The “I don’t know what” of Tasso as the origin of romantic sensitivity.

The attraction for operettas and elegant clothes. A description of the banks of the Mersey River. The ‘flying chairs’ of the Tiovivos. The extraordinary essay ‘the wax figures in the literature’. The fascination with bubbles and dew drops.