biography
pronunciation:
[maetsoo]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1874–1936)
|
| biography:
| Philosopher and essayist, born in Vitoria, N Spain, whose father was Basque and whose mother was English. After periods in Paris and Cuba, he returned to Spain, turning to journalism at first in Bilbao and, in 1898, settling in Madrid as one of the Generación del 1898. He lived in England as a press correspondent from 1905, and reported from the Allied front during World War 1, returning to Spain in 1919. Under Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he was nominated ambassador to Argentina in 1928. In his earlier writings he is influenced generally by English thought and also by that of Nietzsche, as in Hacia otra España (1899). Later he proposed the Roman Catholic Church as the model institution in La crisis del humanismo (1919), originally published in English as Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of the War. His last work, La defensa de la hispanidad (1934) contradicts his earlier views. It is a collection of essays that had appeared in the conservative magazine Acción Española, founded and edited by Maeztu himself, and attacks the leyenda negra that alleged brutality and wilful exploitation of Latin America by the Spanish conquistadores. In it, he argues for a return to the monarchical evangelistic enthusiasm of 16th-c Spain. Even in his best literary essays, Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina (1926), he concentrates on the socio-political significance of the characters concerned. |
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