No writer ever stood less in need of an introduction than Miguel de
Unamuno, for probably none ever revealed himself so naturally and so
nakedly in his writings. The identity between the author and the man is
absolute. He has a way of putting the whole of himself into all that
he writes so that to read him is not merely to learn his views as a
philosopher or a publicist, but to know his loves and hates, his hopes
and despairs, as a man of flesh and bone. His method of communicating
his message is not to address an audience from the elevation of the
pulpit or the platform, but to accost the individual face to face, to
grasp him warmly by the hand, to look him full in the eyes and tell
him what is in his heart. The task of the introducer therefore may be
restricted to prefixing to the intimacy so immediately established
between reader and author some few notes relative to the latter’s
history and the background against which he presents himself.
The determining events in his outward biography are soon told. Miguel
de Unamuno y Jugo was born in Bilbao on September 29, 1864. Although
he comes of pure Basque stock, Unamuno’s mother-tongue was Castilian,
a fact which precludes the supposition that the idiosyncrasies of his
style are to be attributed to an early familiarity with the Basque
speech. His father, who had spent most of his life in Mexico, died
in 1870. Four years later Bilbao was besieged and bombarded by the
Carlist troops, the first shell falling only a few houses away from
that in which his family was living. The events of the siege naturally
made a lively impression upon the mind of the ten-year-old boy. At
the first sound of the horns blown to give warning of the renewal of
the bombardment, the family took shelter with the neighbours in the
cellars, from which the youngsters sallied forth to collect the still
burning fragments of the shells. The schools were closed and the whole
town became an extended playground, offering to the idle schoolboys
the novel liberty of clambering about roofless churches and conducting
miniature bombardments of ruined houses with projectiles gathered from
the debris. This exciting holiday was terminated by the entry of the
liberating troops on May 2, 1874. These personal experiences of Spain’s
last civil war provided Unamuno with a background for his first novel,
_Paz en la Guerra_.
The religious atmosphere of Unamuno’s home was that of a Catholicism
whose traditions of simple and heart-felt piety bore a certain affinity
to those of Anglo-Saxon Quakerism. The youthful Miguel was a member
of the guild or _Congregación_ of San Luis Gonzaga and on the feast
of Corpus Christi used to walk in procession through the streets with
lighted candle in his hand and the medal of the order suspended upon
his breast. About the age of fourteen he passed through that phase of
spiritual ferment which usually characterizes the entrance of the soul
into puberty, a period of vague aspirations towards sanctity mingled
with the romanticism engendered in a lively imagination by the reading
of Ossian. This religious _Schwärmerei_, however, was tempered by the
course of philosophy prescribed by his study for his baccalaureate.
Introduced through the reading of the Catalan philosopher Balmes to
the works of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, he at once plunged into the
vertigo of metaphysics and proceeded to elaborate and transcribe into a
twopenny note-book a philosophical system of his own, “very symmetrical
and bristling with formulas.”
In 1880 Unamuno went to Madrid to continue his studies. Passionately
attached to his native Bilbao and the wild mountain country in which
all his youthful summers had been passed, Unamuno has related how
he entered Madrid with tears in his eyes. His spirit never became
acclimated to the atmosphere of the capital and the years which he
spent there were rendered unhappy by his sense of isolation and
home-sickness, preoccupations with ill health, intellectual strain and
acute spiritual crises. Having taken his doctor’s degree in philosophy
and letters, he presented himself as a candidate for a professorship,
first in psychology, logic and ethics, and then in metaphysics; but
no doubt owing to a certain uncompromising independence of mind and
contempt of the conventional curriculum, he failed to obtain the
suffrages of the examiners. After two further unsuccessful attempts to
obtain a chair in Latin, he was finally appointed to a professorship
in Greek by a board presided over by the famous scholar Menendez y
Pelayo. After returning to Bilbao, where he married, he took up his
residence in Salamanca in 1891. There he conducted two courses of
lectures, one on Greek literature, the other on the evolution of the
Castilian language, and nine years later, in 1900, he was appointed to
the Rectorship of the University.
Unamuno has always been possessed of a formidable capacity for work.
His scholastic activities, his administrative duties as head of the
University, his participation in municipal affairs, absorbed only a
portion of his energies. An omnivorous reader, he is familiar not
only with the cultures of the ancient world but with all the modern
literatures of Europe and America, most of which his extensive
knowledge of languages has enabled him to read in the original. But
the fertility of his mind and spirit manifested itself above all in a
continual stream of creative work, taking the manifold forms of essays,
poetry, novels, criticism and philosophy. His career as a publicist
coincided with the period following Spain’s disastrous war with the
United States, during which the fortunes of his country appeared to
be at their lowest ebb. Unamuno at once took a foremost place in that
group of writers and public men, known as “the generation of ’98,” who
were preoccupied with the problem of national regeneration. Whereas the
majority of the regenerationists, however, pointed to “modernization”
and “Europeanization” as the only possible path leading to material and
cultural progress, Unamuno advocated a return to the eternal tradition
of Spain and held that a spiritual renaissance was the necessary
pre-condition of her restoration as a world-power.
It was impossible for a man with so deep and intimate a love for his
country to confine himself to the publication of general encyclicals
from a professorial and not to step down into the stormy arena
of practical politics. Without identifying himself with any one
of the official political parties, Unamuno conducted a personal
and independent campaign by means of newspaper articles and public
addresses, frankly and fearlessly denouncing abuses and corruption
wherever he discerned them, whether displayed in the acts of rulers
or inherent in the governmental system of the country. Such outspoken
criticism from one who held his appointment from the state savoured
too much, to the government of the day, of insubordination and was
reproved accordingly by his removal from the office of Rector of the
University of Salamanca. Some time afterward, in virtue of two articles
which he published in a Valencia newspaper, the ex-Rector was deemed
to have contravened the law of _lèse-majesté_, for which offence he
was formally condemned by the courts to a period of sixteen years’
imprisonment. The sentence, which was of course never intended to be
carried out, was subsequently annulled by the royal grant of pardon.
The _coup d’état_ of September, 1923, by which General Primo de Rivera
suspended the constitution and established the Military Directory,
naturally aroused Unamuno’s vehement protestation. Liberty of speech,
however, formed no part of the program of the new régime and the
Dictator, dispensing with the customary civil processes of writ,
trial and judgment, replied by an arbitrary decree of deportation. On
Feb. 21, 1924, Unamuno received notice to prepare to proceed within
twenty-four hours under escort to Fuerteventura, the most remote and
barren of the Canary Islands. It is possible that the authorities
might have been willing to connive at the flight of their captive to
the Portuguese frontier, distant only some eighty miles from Salamanca;
but Unamuno refused to relieve them from any of the embarrassment which
the consequences of their action might entail. He packed up the few
necessaries for his journey, put a couple of books in his pocket--the
Greek New Testament and Leopardi’s poems--and awaited the arrival of
the escort.
The news of the banishment of one of Spain’s foremost writers and
patriots was received with a spontaneous outburst of denunciation both
at home and abroad. Numerous councils of universities and learned
societies in Europe and America passed resolutions of protest;
the newspaper press of almost every country published articles by
representative literary men condemning the action of the government and
testifying to the universality of the esteem which Unamuno had won in
the international republic of letters. The Directory was compelled to
recognize that the sole result of its act of petty tyranny had been to
raise the prestige of its victim and damage its own. A project for the
rescue of the exile was secretly organized in France, but its fruition
was forestalled by the publication of a decree of amnesty in July,
1924. Unamuno embarked on the sailing-ship which had been dispatched
for his deliverance and on arriving at Madeira took ship to Cherbourg.
Although free to return to Spain, he felt that under the present régime
his liberty of action would be too much circumscribed and therefore
preferred to take up his residence temporarily in Paris.
I think that it was in the year 1912 when travelling in Spain that I
chanced to buy a book entitled _Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_ by Miguel
de Unamuno. Both the book and its author were then unkown to me. Before
I had read many pages I knew that I was listening to a voice that spoke
with that accent of sincerity and intimacy which gives the assurance
of immediate contact with a living man, a man of flesh and bone, a man
who had suffered, despaired, hoped and struggled with an intensity
that burned in every word. Next year was published _Del Sentimiento
Trágico de la Vida_, that passionate record of the adventures of the
spirit that takes its place with the self-revelations of St. Augustine,
Pascal, Amiel and Kierkegaard. I resolved that if I could accomplish
it this voice should be heard in the countries that speak the English
tongue. The War intervened, and it was not until 1920 that I found
myself in Salamanca with the typewritten sheets of the translation of
“The Tragic Sense of Life” ready to be submitted to the author for
revision.
I well remember how, on the afternoon after my arrival, I was sitting
in a café on the Plaza Mayor when the door opened and my eyes fell upon
the arresting figure of a man half-way through the fifties, clad in a
double-breasted blue-serge jacket with a rim of white collar falling
over a kind of clerical waistcoat that was void of the usual triangular
opening for the display of shirt and necktie, his head crowned by a
round parsonical black hat. There was an almost aggressive announcement
of bluff health and energy in the erect carriage of the body, the
alert set of the head on squared shoulders, the thick brush-like crop
of iron-grey hair, the crisp curl of the close-trimmed beard that
emphasized rather than masked the firm lines of the jaw, the keen
glance behind gold-rimmed spectacles of eyes that gleamed bright and
brown like the eyes of a bird of prey. It would have been difficult for
one to whom he was a stranger to have guessed his vocation from his
appearance. Certainly never was philosopher less sicklied o’er with
the pale cast of thought. The tan that bronzed a skin glowing with the
flush of health seemed to tell of a life that was spent in the air of
the mountains rather than in the study. It could scarcely be doubted
that the figure standing there in the doorway was that of a man of
action and a fighter.
During the course of the next two months I had ample opportunity to
observe the daily routine of Unamuno’s life at Salamanca. An early
riser, he may be seen in the streets before nine o’clock on his way
to the lecture-room. After the midday _comida_, at which he usually
abstains from both wine and meat, he is accustomed to take his coffee
at the Circulo Salmantino with a group of friends whose thought and
convictions are as widely varying as their occupations--university
professors, students, doctors, magistrates, writers, poets and men
of business. The quite unacademic conversation ranges over the whole
gamut of human interests. While the talk is flowing freely or the
argument being waged, Unamuno--who, by the way, is a non-smoker--may
sometimes be seen folding square sheets of paper with deft fingers
into complicated geometrical patterns which presently grow into
astonishingly realistic shapes of animals. Before the party breaks up,
his table is not infrequently covered with a menagerie of pigs, jumping
frogs, vultures and other wildfowl, to the no small delight of the
street urchins whose noses are flattened against the other side of the
wide plate-glass window. This _arte salmatino_, as its inventor calls
it, presents baffling constructional problems, the solutions of which
are sometimes thought out upon abstract geometrical principles in the
sleepless watches of the night.
When most of the members of the _tertulia_ have withdrawn either to
take their afternoon siesta or resume their avocations, Unamuno sets
out for a long walk into the country, accompanied in winter by the few
who are willing to brave the icy winds that sweep over the treeless
tableland from the snow-clad summits of the sierras. During the walk
the conversation is continued without intermission, the party halting
to form a circle round the speaker whenever a point arises that demands
special emphasis or elucidation. As these points arise at frequent
intervals, a spectacle that must often arrest the wondering gaze of the
peasant hurrying on his mule along the high road to Salamanca on wintry
afternoons, is that of a group of individuals muffled in greatcoats and
waterproofs, with collars raised and hat-brims pulled down in a vain
endeavour to protect tingling ears from the lashing flaws of rain and
sleet, gathered round a robust, coatless figure, with double-breasted
blue jacket thrown open to the blast, whose concentration upon the
subject-matter of his discourse renders him apparently oblivious of the
inclemency of the elements and the physical discomfort of his auditors.
The point having been elucidated, the party struggles on again in the
teeth of the gale, some of its weaker members perhaps hoping that no
fresh dialectical crisis will arise until further exercise has restored
the benumbed circulation.
On days of storm or heavy rain, when faint-hearted disciples shrink
from the exposure of the open country, the afternoon diversion takes
the form of a promenade beneath the arcades of the Plaza Mayor, perhaps
the finest square of its kind in Spain, into which towards evening
most of the population of the city seems to empty itself. The crowd
surges round in two opposing streams, for a time-honoured custom
demands that the men shall proceed in one direction and the women
in another. Unamuno diversifies the monotony of this promenade by a
curious amusement. Having abstracted the crumb from his luncheon roll
and kneaded it up into a kind of snowball, he manufactures therefrom a
supply of pellets, and these, during the course of his walk, he propels
by means of a dexterous flick of the middle finger with deadly accuracy
at selected members of the crowd. Whether the principle of selection
is based upon friendly interest or personal dislike, or whether
indeed there is any principle at all, is a question that must be left
undetermined.
About dusk he returns home and withdraws to his study, a spacious,
lofty square room, the plain workshop of the intellectual worker,
furnished only with a large writing-table, a few simple chairs, and
crowded bookshelves which not only surround the walls but occupy most
of the floor-space. A brazier underneath the table emits from its
white ashes a faint warmth scarcely perceptible to ordinary senses.
Having refreshed himself with a drink of cold water, Unamuno takes
up the work in hand and writes until the hour arrives for the evening
meal with his family. The theatre does not attract him--I only saw him
present once when Ibsen was being played--and it is very seldom that a
social function keeps him from going to bed betimes.
Profound as is his attachment to the city which has been his home for
over thirty years, Unamuno always welcomes an opportunity to escape
from streets and squares into the open country and the mountains. His
knowledge of the Peninsula, as his books of travel testify, is both
wide and intimate. His visits to the more distant provinces are of
course reserved for the vacations, but during term-time his week-ends
and the holidays occurring on the seasonal feasts are often spent in
the regions of the Sierra de Gredos and the Peña de Francia. During
these excursions he touches life at a multiplicity of centres and
penetrates into all the various social strata. At every stage of the
journey--at the railway stations, in the train, at the local club, in
the inn, in the village shop or the peasant’s cottage--he is usually to
be seen at the centre of a group of men, discussing local affairs and
politics, inquiring into the technique of trades, saturating himself
in the atmosphere of popular thought and belief. His knowledge and
love of Spain are thus fed by a familiarity with the inner life of the
people, the intra-historical life, as he calls it, the life that flows
by unobserved for the most part by politicians and publicists and never
agitates the surface of history.
A minor outcome of this contact with the people, and with the
_charros_ or peasants of the province of Salamanca in particular,
has been the enrichment of his vocabulary by many of those pungent,
expressive and sometimes beautiful words and locutions which have
long since disappeared from literary Spanish but still abound in
peasant speech. This racy idiom of the soil often gives a peculiar
tang to Unamuno’s writing. When accused by the literary critic, as not
infrequently happens, of sprinkling his prose with words unearthed
from the dusty works of some sixteenth or seventeenth-century author,
he will reply that the so-called archaisms, though possibly unfamiliar
in literary coteries, still enjoy a vigorous life in the speech of the
people.
It will no doubt have been already gathered that Unamuno, like all good
Spaniards, delights in talk. Indeed, some of those who have observed
how considerable a part of his leisure is spent in general conversation
may have wondered how and when he finds time for the production of the
large volume of his writing. The answer is that much of his thought
is generated and shaped into form in the act of talking. He has a
disrelish, amounting almost to a prejudice, for writing that has not
the vibration and elasticity of living speech, the prose of men who
are usually found to be non-talkers. “Ideas come with talking,” I have
heard him say. “One must speak, one must have to put one’s thought
into words, one must hear how the words sound spoken. Writing for
oneself is not enough.” It is in the conversational encounter, in the
face-to-face conflict of disputants, in the exertion to convince an
opponent, to unravel a difficulty, to press home a personal conviction,
that his mind is strung to its highest tension, seizes upon the aptest
and keenest words with an instinctive sense of their effective values
and wields them like sharp and flashing weapons. Returning to his
study after a discussion at the Circulo Salmantino or an afternoon’s
discourse on the wind-swept heights above the Tormes, he transcribes
with the speed of dictation the substance of his argument or homily in
phrases still vibrating with the passion of the spoken word. Hence his
prose retains in a degree exceptional even in Spanish literature the
qualities of animated talk--rapid, emphatic, exclamatory, elliptical,
disjointed, charged with intonation and gesture. And this written
talk, it must be noted, never develops into written oratory, for it is
addressed in the first instance not to the general public but to the
personal interlocutor; it is the continuation or recapitulation of talk
with a friend, or the reply to the confessions of a correspondent, or
sometimes the communing of the writer with _alter ego_.
There are times when the channel of written speech seems to afford
too narrow an outlet for the flood of passion storming through it.
Unamuno seems to be impatient of the mutism of the printed page,
as if, like the written score of music, it were incomplete lacking
embodiment in sound. The written symbols are an inadequate substitute
for the bodily presence, incapable of conveying the conviction, the
force, the sense of mass, which only the living organism with all its
full-charged vitality can impart. It might even be conjectured that
for Unamuno writing is after all only a _pis-aller_--he would prefer
to talk, or rather he would prefer to dispense with words altogether
and impose himself in some transcendental act of communion. Of one
of Goya’s pictures, the tumultuous _Third of May_ in the Prado, the
Italian critic De Amicis says: “It is the last point which painting can
reach before being transmuted into action; having passed this point,
one throws away the brush and seizes the dagger.” A similar sense of
an intolerable straining of the medium is sometimes felt in reading
Unamuno. The texture of language is stretched to the breaking-point;
words are contorted in an endeavour to force them beyond the limits
of their capacity; grammar and syntax collapse before the rush
of passionate utterance. It is the pressure and drive of a whole
personality that seeks to translate itself into words and finds in the
end that it is untranslatable.
The impulse towards action and the exertion of personal influence
which forms one of the dominant features of Unamuno’s character, finds
a considerable part of its expression in his participation in the
public affairs of his country. He has little patience with the view
that the scholar or professor ought to stand aside from the larger
issues of the day in order to devote all his energies to perfecting
himself as a machine for grinding out erudition and culture. Indeed,
he considers that politics are themselves an invaluable instrument
of culture, in that for large masses of the people they provide the
principal, perhaps the only avenue of approach to a consideration of
general ideas. Devoting himself in his political activities primarily
to the exposition of these general ideas, the basic principles of
citizenship, Unamuno has always evinced a whole-hearted contempt for
that preoccupation with political machinery and an intrigue which
tends to make the professional politician, particularly perhaps in
Spain, little more than an electioneerer. Unamuno is among the prophets
rather than the politicians, and his followers form not a party but a
band of disciples. “All round the ring,” he said to me once, “sit the
spectators. They applaud or hiss. But down in the arena, there I fight
alone, face to face with the bull.”
To the suggestion sometimes expressed by his well-wishers that he
should withdraw from the arena in order to devote himself more
exclusively to poetry and philosophy, Unamuno would reply that this
poetry and philosophy are simply the outcome of his intense, energetic
and passionate living. If he had never known the dangers, the ardours,
the hopes and despairs of battle, his poetry might have withered for
lack of roots. _Primum vivere, deinde philosopari_--the philosopher
must first live before he can philosophize. And the end of life,
Unamuno has said, is living, not understanding. Nothing is more
repugnant to his spirit than the conception of æsthetics embodied in
the catch-phrase, “art for art’s sake.” The idea that letters can be
separated from life and literature produced _in vacuo_ is inconceivable
to one whose impulse to write springs directly from his zeal to affect
and mould life. Unamuno provides yet another corroboration of Tchekov’s
maxim that all great writers have axes to grind.
If the object of Unamuno’s political opponents in banishing him from
the society of his fellows to the ocean-girt desert of Fuerteventura
was to reduce his spirit to submission, they little knew the man
they had to deal with. He has never overprized the amenities of
civilization and it is probable that he would have felt much more in
exile if he had been condemned to live in the cosmopolitan atmosphere
of Tenerife or Las Palmas. The Canaries have been identified with
the Fortunate Isles of the ancient world, and Unamuno remarked
humorously that Fuerteventura was indeed fortunate among islands in
being one where there were no hotels _de luxe_, no bull-fights, no
cinemas, no football, no boy-scouts. But apart from its lack of the
more futile expedients for killing time, there is something in the
spirit and even in the structure of this stern and naked island that
was in harmony with Unamuno’s temperament. It is, as he phrased it,
not merely _desnudo_ but _descarnado_, not merely without vesture
but without flesh. Like a bleached skeleton in the sun, it reveals
every articulation of its structure. In its landscape everything
fugitive gives place to what is enduring and elemental; it bears the
impress of eternity rather than of time. Living in this austere but
serene ambience, between the mountains and the sea, Unamuno found a
refreshment of mental and spiritual energy, the activity of his inner
life was perhaps never more intense and what he wrote during his four
months’ exile was quarried from those deeper strata of his spirit where
thought and passion lie embedded in a single matrix.
In Puerto de Cabras, the cluster of low whitewashed houses that forms
the principal port of the island, time flowed in a tranquil stream that
was scarcely agitated by the weekly arrival of the steamer bringing the
mail, provisions, water, and out-of-date newspapers from Las Palmas.
For the safer custody of the exile, fifty _guardias civiles_ had been
drafted to the island and stationed in couples at various points round
the coast. Every letter which he wrote or received was first opened and
censored by police officials. In other respects his liberty of movement
within the island was not interfered with and he was free to visit the
distant villages that are sparsely scattered like oases in the midst
of the stone-strewn wilderness of extinct volcanoes. Unamuno occupied
a room overlooking the sea in the principal _fonda_ of the port. He
usually rose before the bell of the little church on the other side of
the wide cobbled street had rung for six o’clock Mass, and spent the
morning working in his bedroom or composing a sonnet as he paced up
and down the flat roof, bare-headed and stripped to the waist, in the
sun. After a frugal lunch--the diet of Fuerteventura is of a Spartan
simplicity!--he took a siesta during the heat of the afternoon and
afterward strolled along the rock-bound shore or the _carretera_ that
leads into the interior of the island. Although the action can scarcely
have come within the compass of their duties, it was not surprising
to see the lounging soldiers spring to salute when their prisoner,
with his native air of authority and command, passed before the
barracks-gate. When the brief twilight fell and the camels, returning
from browsing on the scanty scrub, padded with muffled footfall through
the darkening street, Unamuno joined the circle of village notables
who were wont to assemble nightly on a row of chairs ranged on the
pavement in front of the general store. Then, until the tardy supper
hour arrived, a flow of philosophy, philology, paradox, travel-lore and
political wisdom fell upon the astonished ears of the shopkeepers and
petty officials of the port. Fortunate islanders!
Perhaps there is no more distinguishing mark of greatness of character
than that patience and inner quietude which springs from assurance of
the ultimate efficacy of the force latent within the soul. No term
had been fixed to Unamuno’s banishment; it might have been his fate,
for all he knew, to have passed the best of his remaining years in
the island wilderness of Fuerteventura. But so far from chafing at
his enforced isolation and inaction, he seemed to be sustained by the
consciousness that it was beyond the power of circumstances to prevent
the work to which he had set his hand from accomplishing itself.
Whatever might happen to the sower, the seed that had been scattered
would go on bearing fruit. In the plans which his friends had made for
his escape he took an uneager and slightly amused interest. A point
was fixed not far from the port where it was arranged that between the
hours of ten and twelve at night the exile should await a boat that was
to carry him to a sailing-vessel lying somewhere off the coast. Owing
to unforeseen delays, the vessel did not finally arrive until after
the decree of banishment had been rescinded, and consequently many
nights were spent in frustrated watching beneath the shadow of a ruined
tower standing on a rocky ledge by the shore. These summer nights were
breathlessly still, the bright globe of the moon rose up out of the sea
into a clear sky thickly silvered with stars, the unrippled surface of
the water stretched between the arms of the bay like a sheet of metal.
In the distance the green harbour-light at the end of the stone jetty
gleamed malignly. The only sound was the gurgling of the water in the
hollows of the rocks. The far horizon was void of any vestige of a
sail. Twelve o’clock came and the fruitless vigil was broken off. Not
wholly fruitless, perhaps, for during these tranquil hours of waiting
Unamuno kept a vigil of the spirit, the fruit of which will doubtless
appear when the poems of his exile are made known to the world.
* * * * *
Of the two elements which appear to be combined in every philosophy,
the impersonal, scientific investigation of the nature of reality and
the personal affective reaction to the scheme of things thus envisaged,
it is with the latter that Unamuno’s interest is overwhelmingly
concerned. It may be that it is not so much this attitude that
singularizes him as his candid avowal of it. At any rate, he himself
appears to believe that the impersonal methods of philosophy merely
provide a conceptional framework for the personal _Weltanschauung_
of the philosopher. And the core of this inward affective problem
must always be, for the human philosopher, the relation of man to
the universe. It is this point where philosophy and religion meet in
considering the problem of human destiny, that forms the burning focus
of the main energies of Unamuno’s thought and passion.
What distinguishes Unamuno from most other thinkers--and perhaps one
should say “feelers” rather than thinkers--is the intensity of his
realization and awareness of his own personality, of his own unique
individual being, and the passion with which he desires the indefinite
persistence of this being. This is the main ground for the charge of
egoism and egocentrism that has often been levelled against him. But
so far from driving him to a narrow self-centred individualism, this
passion is the source from which springs a generous sympathy with all
humanity. He rightly insists upon the fact that the problem of personal
immortality involves that of the future of the whole human species.
His passionate concern for his own destiny, his own salvation, Unamuno
transfers to all his brothers in humanity. The salvation of man, the
central problem of all religion, is the axis about which his thought
and emotion revolve. But it is salvation in what he understands to be
the Catholic rather than the Protestant sense, salvation not so much
from sin as from death, from annihilation.
To a man of the modern world, endowed with any special degree of
sensitiveness to his own personality, this problem tends to become
increasingly acute. The importance of man’s place in the universe is
seen to diminish in direct ratio to his knowledge with regard to it.
In the searchlight of science, the planet upon which he lives shrinks
to infinitesimal proportions in relation to the incommensurable cosmic
scheme; man takes his place no longer as the lord of creation but as
an apparently meaningless by-product of the play of irresponsible and
unconscious forces. This strange efflorescence of human consciousness
in an obscure corner of the universe would appear to be a transitory
phenomenon, resting upon an unstable equilibrium of natural forces and
destined to vanish completely when the inevitable working of these
same forces shall have dissipated the conditions under which life is
able to sustain itself on this planet. This sense of the doom of
annihilation impending over humanity is like a cloud looming upon the
horizon of Unamuno’s consciousness and throwing a menacing shadow
upon the whole terrestrial scene. It is the basis of his tragic sense
of life. It projects upon the screen of his mind that vision which
so often seems to occupy it, the vision of a world finally ordered
and catalogued by human science, of a civilization perfected after
æons of agonized human effort, existing without any human or other
consciousness left to appropriate it.
It may be said that in the contemplation of this vision the only
rational attitude for the human spirit to adopt is that of resignation
to mortality. But this counsel can only be given by those who are
affectively insensitive, and in Unamuno the will to live and to
survive are too imperious to submit to it unprotestingly. The note of
passionate protest rings in his writings. He inscribes upon his page
the challenge of Sénancour’s _Obermann_: “_L’homme est périssable. Il
se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est reservé,
ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice._” Life refuses to abdicate to
reason; between the rationalistic and vitalistic attitude to existence
there is an impassable gulf. His own personal solution is found in the
inspiration and energy which he draws from this position of uncertainty
and conflict. “I will not make peace between my heart and my head,” he
cries; “rather let the one affirm what the other denies and the one
deny what the other affirms, and I shall live by this contradiction.”
His “Tragic Sense of Life,” which is the record of the encounter of
his spirit with the problems centring round the salvation of man from
death and annihilation, issues in the assertion that all virtue is
based upon “uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of
our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable
dogmatic foundation.” Convert _Obermann’s_ sentence from its negative
to a positive form--“if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so
act that it shall be an injustice”--and you get “the firmest basis of
action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.” A solution,
perhaps, but a desperate one.
Unamuno’s concern is not only with the salvation of man from
nothingness after death but also from the next-to-nothingness during
life into which he is plunged by the processes of an inhumane
civilization. He is never weary of affirming that man is an end in
himself, not a means. He protests passionately against the sacrifice
of the individual concrete man upon the altar of the abstract idea,
whether the abstraction be that of the state, of society, of progress,
of posterity, or of humanity itself. “They tell me that I am here to
realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of
my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live.” This individualism,
it must be noted, has nothing in common with the anarchist’s
undiscriminating revolt against society. Nobody realizes more fully
than this champion of individualism that man is a social being, and
that he can exist and grow to his full stature only in society. But
the point which he is insistent in emphasizing and which so many
social theorists appear to forget is that society exists for man, not
man for society. “The weak point in our socialism,” he says, “is its
confused notion of the supreme end of the individual life.” He is led
to question the value of our modern civilization--that civilization
which Spain is told by her would-be reformers that she ought to
assimilate--because it has arrived at a point at which it suppresses
rather than expands, enslaves rather than liberates, the life of
the individual. Man becomes exhausted with tending the machinery of
progress.
It is this distrust of the tendencies of modern Western civilization
that causes Unamuno to turn to the ancient, and--as he is willing to
consider--African, tradition of his own country. No native reformer
or foreign critic can have said harder things of his compatriots than
Unamuno. His essays reverberate with the sound of the lash with which
he chastises the besetting sins of the Spaniards of to-day, their
servitude to the spirit of routine, their intellectual and spiritual
inertia, their paralysing mutual suspicion and envy, their renunciation
of the life of adventure and danger. But Unamuno distinguishes
between the Spain of the passing generations and the Spain of the
eternal tradition, between the agitations that give a changing form
to the surface and the life that sleeps and dreams in the depths of
subconsciousness. This dreaming, undying, subliminal Spain is the Spain
of his love and of his faith. He appeals from Spaniards to Spain. He
seeks to awaken this inner Spain to full consciousness of itself. And
when it awakens it is possible that this Spain may be unable to find
its expression in the terms of our current civilization. The culture in
which the intellect and ideals of the advance-guard of the so-called
_Kulturvölker_ naturally clothe themselves, becomes an alien and
ill-fitting garment when forced upon the Iberian spirit. And perhaps
the secret of this difference lies in the greater importance in the
Spanish social structure of the part played by the concrete individual
relatively to the instruments of culture. “Other peoples,” Unamuno
says, “have left institutions, books--we have left souls.” His message
to Spain might perhaps be resumed in Whitman’s words: “Produce great
Persons: the rest follows.”
A cardinal tenet of Unamuno’s creed is the superlative value of the
individual soul. It is precious because it is unique and irreplaceable:
“There cannot be any other I.” In the whole world there is only one
Juan López or John Smith; the particular ingredients, good, bad or
indifferent, that have combined to form this unique individuality can
never again reunite in precisely the same proportions to form another
identical combination. This theory, or rather this sense, of the
uniqueness of personality may serve as the basis for an ethic. “Our
greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the
theoretical fact--that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable--a
practical truth.” The whole duty of man is to discover himself, to
discover his own reality, to discover what is unique in himself, to
bring it to the light, not to shrink from exposing it, to express it in
action and to impose it upon the world. The courage of self-affirmation
is the virtue which Unamuno exhorts his fellow-countrymen to achieve.
He presents a symbol of it in his vision of the Tower of Monterrey
that lifts itself into the wintry air above the brown roofs of his
beloved Salamanca, definite in its clean-cut contours, sure in its
poise and self-containment, serenely affirming its uniqueness and
indestructibility. It says itself, and to say himself is the utmost
that a man can say.
But society, which is the necessary medium through which the individual
must express himself, is a resistant medium. It seeks to impose
conformity upon the individual. It resents the exceptional, the
idiosyncratic. And the social canons that circumscribe the expression
of the individual’s liberty of thought and conduct operate perhaps
nowhere more oppressively than in Spain. They derive their sanction
largely from a sentiment by no means peculiar to Spain though perhaps
peculiarly rampant there, the sentiment of envy, the sense of
bitterness and hostility that is evoked by any salient excellence. And
the chief weapon which envy uses with which to assail the uniqueness of
the individual is ridicule. The special form, therefore, of the courage
of self-affirmation that is demanded of the heroic individual is the
courage to confront ridicule. This courage finds its exemplary exponent
in the figure of Don Quixote, whom Unamuno takes as the supreme symbol
of the warfare of the individual soul. His “Commentary upon the Life of
Don Quixote and Panza” is a clarion-call to his countrymen to emulate
the quixotic qualities of courage and faith--faith, even though it be
in illusion--the quixotic tenacity of conviction, and the quixotic
contempt of the standards of worldly prudence and of the authority of
common sense and the cold, mocking reason.
It must be claimed for Unamuno that he is, in the truest sense of
the word, a great humanist. He himself distinguishes between the
true humanism, which he calls the humanism of man, and the humanism
which is concerned rather with “the things of man”--in other words,
with culture as it is generally understood. Towards the latter his
attitude is tinctured with suspicion. For him there is an element of
the inhumane in the cult of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and in
the cult of science as a mere cataloguing of existence. Culture must
have reference to character and perhaps its definition as “the best
that is known and has been thought in the world” he would feel to be
incomplete without the addition of “the best that has been felt and
done.” But mere knowledge and classification of the movements of the
human mind or the achievements of human energy do not necessarily of
themselves touch the heart to finer issues. The most urgent need, at
any rate as he sees it in his own country, is not so much for quickened
intelligence as for reawakened capacity for feeling and enthusiasm. By
itself sceptical enlightenment tends to paralyse action and the soil
of a chilly intellectualism is not the most fertile for the burgeoning
of that seed of faith from which all fruitful human endeavour must
ultimately spring. Unamuno seeks to generate warmth of feeling as the
necessary condition of high achievement. “Warmth, warmth, more warmth,”
he cries, “for we die of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night
but the frost that kills.” Culture, therefore, as he understands and
counsels it, is not a dry light but an ardent flame and its purpose is
to kindle “the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle,
of intensest disquietude, of intensest despair.”
Unamuno has always protested passionately against any attempt to
affix a label to him. If a definition of himself is demanded of
him, he replies that he is “a man of contradiction and strife.”
The contradictions of which he is the synthesis are those of the
Catholic and the agnostic, the mystic and the realist, the vitalist
and the rationalist, the contemplative and the man of action, the
contradictions inherent in the man who finds consolation in despair and
peace in conflict. But if he himself is not to be circumscribed within
the narrow limits of a definition, perhaps the scope of his aim and
achievement may be most succinctly resumed in that description which
Giordano Bruno gave of himself, _dormitantium animarum excubitor_--an
awakener of sleeping souls.