Although Miguel de Unamuno was recently condemned to fifteen years'
imprisonment for _lese majeste_ for some remark made in an article
published in a Valencia paper, no attempt has been made either to make
him serve the term or to remove him from the chair of Greek at the
University of Salamanca. Which proves something about the efficiency of
the stand Giner de los Rios and his friends made fifty years before.
Furthermore, at the time of the revolutionary attempt of August, 1917,
the removal of Bestiero from his chair caused so many of the faculty to
resign and such universal protest that he was reinstated although an
actual member of the revolutionary committee and at that time under
sentence for life. In 1875 after the fall of the republic it had been
in the face of universal popular reaction that the Krausistas founded
their free university. The lump is leavened.
But Unamuno. A Basque from the country of Loyola, living in Salamanca
in the highest coldest part of the plateau of old Castile, in many
senses the opposite of Giner de los Rios, who was austere as a man on a
long pleasant walk doesn't overeat or overdrink so that the walk may be
longer and pleasanter, while Unamuno is austere religiously, mystically.
Giner de los Rios was the champion of life, Unamuno is the champion of
death. Here is his creed, one of his creeds, from the preface of the
_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_:
"There is no future: there is never a future. This thing they call
the future is one of the greatest lies. To-day is the real future.
What will we be to-morrow? There is no to-morrow. What about us
to-day, now; that is the only question.
"And as for to-day, all these nincompoops are thoroughly satisfied
because they exist to-day, mere existence is enough for them.
Existence, ordinary naked existence fills their whole soul. They
feel nothing beyond existence.
"But do they exist? Really exist? I think not, because if they did
exist, if they really existed, existence would be suffering for
them and they wouldn't content themselves with it. If they really
and truly existed in time and space they would suffer not being of
eternity and infinity. And this suffering, this passion, what is it
but the passion of God in us? God who suffers in us from our
temporariness and finitude, that divine suffering will burst all
the puny bonds of logic with which they try to tie down their puny
memories and their puny hopes, the illusion of their past and the
illusion of their future.
* * * * *
"Your Quixotic madness has made you more than once speak to me of
Quixotism as the new religion. And I tell you that this new
religion you propose to me, if it hatched, would have two singular
merits. One that its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote--not
Cervantes--probably wasn't a real man of flesh and blood at all,
indeed we suspect that he was pure fiction. And the other merit
would be that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet, people's butt
and laughing stock.
"What we need most is the valor to face ridicule. Ridicule is the
arm of all the miserable barbers, bachelors, parish priests, canons
and dukes who keep hidden the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness,
Knight who made all the world laugh but never cracked a joke. He
had too great a soul to bring forth jokes. They laughed at his
seriousness.
"Begin then, friend, to do the Peter the Hermit and call people to
join you, to join us, and let us all go win back the sepulchre even
if we don't know where it is. The crusade itself will reveal to us
the sacred place.
* * * * *
"Start marching! Where are you going? The star will tell you: to
the sepulchre! What shall we do on the road while we march? What?
Fight! Fight, and how?
"How? If you find a man lying? Shout in his face: 'lie!' and
forward! If you find a man stealing, shout: 'thief!' and forward!
If you find a man babbling asininities, to whom the crowd listens
open-mouthed, shout at them all: 'idiots!' and forward, always
forward!
* * * * *
"To the march then! And throw out of the sacred squadron all those
who begin to study the step and its length and its rhythm. Above
everything, throw out all those who fuss about this business of
rhythm. They'll turn the squadron into a quadrille and the march
into a dance. Away with them! Let them go off somewhere else to
sing the flesh.
"Those who try to turn the squadron on the march into a dancing
quadrille call themselves and each other poets. But they're not.
They're something else. They only go to the sepulchre out of
curiosity, to see what it's like, looking for a new sensation, and
to amuse themselves along the road. Away with them!
"It's these that with their indulgence of Bohemians contribute to
maintain cowardice and lies and all the weaknesses that flood us.
When they preach liberty they only think of one: that of disposing
of their neighbor's wife. All is sensuality with them. They even
fall in love sensually with ideas, with great ideas. They are
incapable of marrying a great and pure idea and breeding a family
with it; they only flirt with ideas. They want them as mistresses,
sometimes just for the night. Away with them!
"If a man wants to pluck some flower or other along the path that
smiles from the fringe of grass, let him pluck it, but without
breaking ranks, without dropping out of the squadron of which the
leader must always keep his eyes on the flaming sonorous star. But
if he put the little flower in the strap above his cuirass, not to
look at it himself, but for others to look at, away with him! Let
him go with his flower in his buttonhole and dance somewhere else.
"Look, friend, if you want to accomplish your mission and serve
your country you must make yourself unpleasant to the sensitive
boys who only see the world through the eyes of their sweethearts.
Or through something worse. Let your words be strident and rasping
in their ears.
"The squadron must only stop at night, near a wood or under the lee
of a mountain. There they will pitch their tents and the crusaders
will wash their feet, and sup off what their women have prepared,
then they will beget a son on them and kiss them and go to sleep to
begin the march again the following day. And when someone dies they
will leave him on the edge of the road with his armor on him, at
the mercy of the crows. Let the dead take the trouble to bury the
dead."
Instead of the rationalists and humanists of the North, Unamuno's idols
are the mystics and saints and sensualists of Castile, hard stalwart
men who walked with God, Loyola, Torquemada, Pizarro, Narvaez, who
governed with whips and thumbscrews and drank death down greedily like
heady wine. He is excited by the amorous madness of the mysticism of
Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. His religion is paradoxical,
unreasonable, of faith alone, full of furious yearning other-worldliness.
His style, it follows perforce, is headlong, gruff, redundant, full of
tremendous pounding phrases. There is a vigorous angry insistence about
his dogmas that makes his essays unforgettable, even if one objects as
violently as I do to his asceticism and death-worship. There is an
anarchic fury about his crying in the wilderness that will win many a
man from the fleshpots and chain gangs.
In the apse of the old cathedral of Salamanca is a fresco of the Last
Judgment, perhaps by the Castilian painter Gallegos. Over the retablo
on a black ground a tremendous figure of the avenging angel brandishes
a sword while behind him unrolls the scroll of the _Dies Irae_ and
huddled clusters of plump little naked people fall away into space from
under his feet. There are moments in "_Del Sentimiento Tragico de la
Vida_" and in the "_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_" when in the
rolling earthy Castilian phrases one can feel the brandishing of the
sword of that very angel. Not for nothing does Unamuno live in the rust
and saffron-colored town of Salamanca in the midst of bare red hills
that bulge against an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look like
piles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are so solid, heavy,
ominous. A country where barrenness and the sweep of cold wind and the
lash of strong wine have made people's minds ingrow into the hereafter,
where the clouds have been tramped by the angry feet of the destroying
angel. A Patmos for a new Apocalypse. Unamuno is constantly attacking
sturdily those who clamor for the modernization, Europeanization of
Spanish life and Spanish thought: he is the counterpoise to the
northward-yearning apostles of Giner de los Rios.
In an essay in one of the volumes published by the _Residencia de
Estudiantes_ he wrote:
"As can be seen I proceed by what they call arbitrary affirmations,
without documentation, without proof, outside of a modern European
logic, disdainful of its methods.
"Perhaps. I want no other method than that of passion, and when my
breast swells with disgust, repugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let
the mouth speak the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come
as they come.
"We Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans, who fill up with
rhetoric the gaps in logic, who subtilize with more or less
ingenuity, but uselessly, who lack the sense of coherence, with
scholastic souls, casuists and all that.
"I've heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African,
soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping waves of rhetoric,
twistings of the phrase, antithesis, paradoxes and ingenuities.
Saint Augustine was a Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same
time, which makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism are the
most natural forms of passion and vehemence.
"The great African, the great ancient African! Here is an
expression--ancient African--that one can oppose to modern
European, and that's worth as much at least. African and ancient
were Saint Augustine and Tertullian. And why shouldn't we say: 'We
must make ourselves ancient African-style' or else 'We must make
ourselves African ancient-style.'"
The typical tree of Castile is the encina, a kind of live-oak that
grows low with dense bluish foliage and a ribbed, knotted and contorted
trunk; it always grows singly and on dry hills. On the roads one meets
lean men with knotted hands and brown sun-wizened faces that seem
brothers to the encinas of their country. The thought of Unamuno,
emphatic, lonely, contorted, hammered into homely violent phrases,
oak-tough, oak-twisted, is brother to the men on the roads and to the
encinas on the hills of Castile.
This from the end of "_Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida_":
"And in this critical century, Don Quixote has also contaminated
himself with criticism, and he must charge against himself, victim
of intellectualism and sentimentalism, who when he is most sincere
appears most affected. The poor man wants to rationalize the
irrational, and irrationalize the rational. And he falls victim of
the inevitable despair of a rationalism century, of which the
greatest victims were Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Out of despair he
enters into the heroic fury of that Quixote of thought who broke
out of the cloister, Giordano Bruno, and makes himself awakener of
sleeping souls, '_dormitantium animorum excubitor_,' as the
ex-Dominican says of himself, he who wrote: 'Heroic love is proper
to superior natures called insane--_insane_, not because they do
not know--_non sanno_--but because they know too
much--_soprasanno_--.'
"But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines, or at least at
the foot of his statue on the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the
Vatican, they have put that it is offered by the century he had
divined--'_il secolo da lui divinato_.' But our Don Quixote,
the resurrected, internal Don Quixote, does not believe that his
doctrines will triumph in the world, because they are not his. And
it is better that they should not triumph. If they wanted to make
Don Quixote king he would retire alone to the hilltop, fleeing the
crowds of king-makers and king-killers, as did Christ when, after
the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they wanted to proclaim him
king. He left the title of king to be put above the cross.
"What is, then, the new mission of Don Quixote in this world? To
cry, to cry in the wilderness. For the wilderness hears although
men do not hear, and one day will turn into a sonorous wood, and
that solitary voice that spreads in the desert like seed will
sprout into a gigantic cedar that will sing with a hundred thousand
tongues an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and death."
_XVII: Toledo_
"Lyaeus, you've found it."
"Her, you mean."
"No, the essence, the gesture."
"I carry no butterfly net."
The sun blazed in a halo of heat about their heads. Both sides of the
straight road olive trees contorted gouty trunks as they walked past.
On a bank beside a quietly grazing donkey a man was asleep wrapped in a
brown blanket. Occasionally a little grey bird twittered encouragingly
from the telegraph wires. When the wind came there was a chill of
winter and wisps of cloud drifted across the sun and a shiver of silver
ran along the olive groves.
"Tel," cried Lyaeus after a pause, "maybe I have found it. Maybe you
are right. You should have been with me last night."
"What happened last night?" As a wave of bitter envy swept over him
Telemachus saw for a moment the face of his mother Penelope, brows
contracted with warning, white hand raised in admonition. For a
fleeting second the memory of his quest brushed through the back of his
mind. But Lyaeus was talking.
"Nothing much happened. There were a few things.... O this is
wonderful." He waved a clenched fist about his head. "The finest
people, Tel! You never saw such people, Tel. They gave me a tambourine.
Here it is; wait a minute." He placed the bag he carried on his
shoulder on top of a milestone and untied its mouth. When he pulled the
tambourine out it was full of figs. "Look, pocket these. I taught her
to write her name on the back; see, 'Pilar,' She didn't know how to
write."
Telemachus involuntarily cleared his throat.
"It was the finest dive ... Part house, part cave. We all roared in and
there was the funniest little girl ... Lot of other people, fat women,
but my eyes were in a highly selective state. She was very skinny with
enormous black eyes, doe's eyes, timid as a dog's. She had a fat pink
puppy in her lap."
"But I meant something in line, movement, eternal, not that."
"There are very few gestures," said Lyaeus.
They walked along in silence.
"I am tired," said Lyaeus; "at least let's stop in here. I see a bush
over the door."
"Why stop? We are nearly there."
"Why go on?"
"We want to get to Toledo, don't we?"
"Why?"
"Because we started for there."
"No reason at all," said Lyaeus with a laugh as he went in the door of
the wineshop.
When they came out they found Don Alonso waiting for them, holding his
horse by the bridle.
"The Spartans," he said with a smile, "never drank wine on the march."
"How far are we from Toledo?" asked Telemachus. "It was nice of you to
wait for us."
"About a league, five kilometers, nothing.... I wanted to see your
faces when you first saw the town. I think you will appreciate it."
"Let's walk fast," said Telemachus. "There are some things one doesn't
want to wait for."
"It will be sunset and the whole town will be on the _paseo_ in front
of the hospital of San Juan Bautista.... This is Sunday of Carnival;
people will be dressed up in masks and very noisy. It's a day on which
they play tricks on strangers."
"Here's the trick they played me at the last town," said Lyaeus
agitating his bag of figs. "Let's eat some. I'm sure the Spartans ate
figs on the road. Will Rosinante,--I mean will your horse eat them?" He
put his hand with some figs on it under the horse's mouth. The horse
sniffed noisily out of black nostrils dappled with pink and then
reached for the figs. Lyaeus wiped his hand on the seat of his pants
and they proceeded.
"Toledo is symbolically the soul of Spain," began Don Alonso after a
few moments of silent walking. "By that I mean that through the many
Spains you have seen and will see is everywhere an undercurrent of
fantastic tragedy, Greco on the one hand, Goya on the other, Morales,
Gallegos, a great flame of despair amid dust, rags, ulcers, human life
rising in a sudden paean out of desolate abandoned dun-colored spaces.
To me, Toledo expresses the supreme beauty of that tragic farce.... And
the apex, the victory, the deathlessness of it is in El Greco.... How
strange it is that it should be that Cypriote who lived in such
Venetian state in a great house near the abandoned synagogue,
scandalizing us austere Spaniards by the sounds of revelry and
unabashed music that came from it at meal-times, making pert sayings
under the nose of humorless visitors like Pacheco, living solitary in a
country where he remained to his death misunderstood and alien and
where two centuries thought of him along with Don Quixote as a
madman,--how strange that it should be he who should express most
flamingly all that was imperturbable in Toledo.... I have often
wondered whether that fiery vitality of spirit that we feel in El
Greco, that we felt in my generation when I was young, that I see
occasionally in the young men of your time, has become conscious only
because it is about to be smothered in the great advancing waves of
European banality. I was thinking the other day that perhaps states of
life only became conscious once their intensity was waning."
"But most of the intellectuals I met in Madrid," put in Telemachus,
"seemed enormously anxious for subways and mechanical progress, seemed
to think that existence could be made perfect by slot-machines."
"They are anxious to hold stock in the subway and slot-machine
enterprises that they may have more money to unSpanish themselves in
Paris ... but let us not talk of that. From the next turn in the road,
round that little hill, we shall see Toledo."
Don Alonso jumped on his horse, and Lyaeus and Telemachus doubled the
speed of their stride.
First above the bulge of reddish saffron striped with dark of a plowed
field they saw a weathercock, then under it the slate cap of a tower.
"The Alcazar," said Don Alonso. The road turned away and olive trees
hid the weathercock. At the next bend the towers were four, strongly
buttressing a square building where on the western windows glinted
reflections of sunset. As they walked more towers, dust colored, and
domes and the spire of a cathedral, greenish, spiky like the tail of a
pickerel, jutted to the right of the citadel. The road dipped again,
passed some white houses where children sat in the doorways; from the
inner rooms came a sound of frying oil and a pungence of cistus-twigs
burning. Starting up the next rise that skirted a slope planted with
almond trees they caught sight of a castle, rounded towers, built of
rough grey stone, joined by crenellated walls that appeared
occasionally behind the erratic lacework of angular twigs on which here
and there a cluster of pink flowers had already come into bloom. At the
summit was a wineshop with mules tethered against the walls, and below
the Tagus and the great bridge, and Toledo.
Against the grey and ochre-streaked theatre of the Cigarrales were
piled masses of buttressed wall that caught the orange sunset light on
many tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and square towers
and domes and slate-capped spires above a litter of yellowish tile
roofs that fell away in terraces from the highest points and sloped
outside the walls towards the river and the piers from which sprang the
enormous arch of the bridge. The shadows were blue-green and violet. A
pale cobalt haze of supperfires hung over the quarters near the river.
As they started down the hill towards the heavy pile of San Juan
Bautista, that stood under its broad tiled dome outside the nearest
gate, a great volley of bell-ringing swung about their ears. A donkey
brayed; there was a sound of shouting from the town.
"Here we are, gentlemen, I'll look for you to-morrow at the _fonda_,"
shouted Don Alonso. He took off his hat and galloped towards the gate,
leaving Telemachus and Lyaeus standing by the roadside looking out over
the city.
* * * * *
Beyond the zinc bar was an irregular room with Nile-green walls into
which light still filtered through three little round arches high up on
one side. In a corner were some hogsheads of wine, in another small
tables with three-legged stools. From outside came the distant braying
of a brass band and racket of a street full of people, laughter, and
the occasional shivering jangle of a tambourine. Lyaeus had dropped
onto a stool and spread his feet out before him on the tiled floor.
"Never walked so far in my life," he said, "my toes are pulverized,
pulverized!" He leaned over and pulled off his shoes. There were holes
in his socks. He pulled them off in turn, and started wiggling his toes
meditatively. His ankles were grimed with dust.
"Well...." began Telemachus.
The _padron_, a lean man with moustaches and a fancy yellow vest which
he wore unbuttoned over a lavender shirt, brought two glasses of dense
black wine.
"You have walked a long way?" he asked, looking with interest at
Lyaeus' feet.
"From Madrid."
"_!Carai!_"
"Not all in one day."
"You are sailors going to rejoin your ship in Sevilla." The _padron_
looked from one to another with a knowing expression, twisting his
mouth so that one of the points of his moustache slanted towards the
ceiling and the other towards the floor.
"Not exactly...."
Another man drew up his chair to their table, first taking off his wide
cap and saying gravely: "_Con permiso de ustedes._" His broad, slightly
flabby face was very pale; the eyes under his sparse blonde eyelashes
were large and grey. He put his two hands on their shoulders so as to
draw their heads together and said in a whisper:
"You aren't deserters, are you?"
"No."
"I hoped you were. I might have helped you. I escaped from prison in
Barcelona a week ago. I am a syndicalist."
"Have a drink," cried Lyaeus. "Another glass.... And we can let you
have some money if you need it, too, if you want to get out of the
country."
The _padron_ brought the wine and retired discreetly to a chair beside
the bar from which he beamed at them with almost religious approbation.
"You are comrades?"
"Of those who break out," said Lyaeus flushing. "What about the
progress of events? When do you think the pot will boil over?"
"Soon or never," said the syndicalist.... "That is never in our
lifetime. We are being buried under industrialism like the rest of
Europe. Our people, our comrades even, are fast getting the bourgeois
mentality. There is danger that we shall lose everything we have fought
for.... You see, if we could only have captured the means of production
when the system was young and weak, we could have developed it slowly
for our benefit, made the machine the slave of man. Every day we wait
makes it more difficult. It is a race as to whether this peninsula will
be captured by communism or capitalism. It is still neither one nor the
other, in its soul." He thumped his clenched fist against his chest.
"How long were you in prison?"
"Only a month this time, but if they catch me it will be bad. They
won't catch me."
He spoke quietly without gestures, occasionally rolling an unlit
cigarette between his brown fingers.
"Hadn't we better go out before it gets quite dark?" said Telemachus.
"When shall I see you again?" said Lyaeus to the syndicalist.
"Oh, we'll meet if you stay in Toledo a few days...."
Lyaeus got to his feet and took the man by the arm.
"Look, let me give you some money; won't you be wanting to go to
Portugal?"
The man flushed and shook his head.
"If our opinions coincided...."
"I agree with all those who break out," said Lyaeus.
"That's not the same, my friend."
They shook hands and Telemachus and Lyaeus went out of the tavern.
Two carriages hung with gaudily embroidered shawls, full of dominos and
pierrots and harlequins who threw handfuls of confetti at people along
the sidewalks, clattered into town through the dark arches of the gate.
Telemachus got some confetti in his mouth. A crowd of little children
danced about him jeering as he stood spluttering on the curbstone.
Lyaeus took him by the arm and drew him along the street after the
carriages, bent double with laughter. This irritated Telemachus who
tore his arm away suddenly and made off with long strides up a dark
street.
* * * * *
A half-waned moon shone through the perforations in a round terra-cotta
chimney into the street's angular greenish shadow. From somewhere came
the seethe of water over a dam. Telemachus was leaning against a damp
wall, tired and exultant, looking vaguely at the oval of a woman's face
half surmised behind the bars of an upper window, when he heard a
clatter of unsteady feet on the cobbles and Lyaeus appeared, reeling a
little, his lips moist, his eyebrows raised in an expression of drunken
jollity.
"Lyaeus, I am very happy," cried Telemachus stepping forward to meet
his friend. "Walking about here in these empty zigzag streets I have
suddenly felt familiar with it all, as if it were a part of me, as if I
had soaked up some essence out of it."
"Silly that about essences, gestures, Tel, silly.... Awake all you
need." Lyaeus stood on a little worn stone that kept wheels off the
corner of the house where the street turned and waved his arms. "Awake!
_Dormitant animorum excubitor._... That's not right. Latin's no good.
Means a fellow who says: 'wake up, you son of a gun.'"
"Oh, you're drunk. It's much more important than that. It's like
learning to swim. For a long time you flounder about, it's unpleasant
and gets up your nose and you choke. Then all at once you are swimming
like a duck. That's how I feel about all this.... The challenge was
that woman in Madrid, dancing, dancing...."
"Tel, there are things too good to talk about.... Look, I'm like St.
Simeon Stylites." Lyaeus lifted one leg, then the other, waving his
arms like a tight-rope walker.
"When I left you I walked out over the other bridge, the bridge of St.
Martin and climbed...."
"Shut up, I think I hear a girl giggling up in the window there."
Lyaeus stood up very straight on his column and threw a kiss up into
the darkness. The giggling turned to a shrill laughter; a head craned
out from a window opposite. Lyaeus beckoned with both hands.
"Never mind about them.... Look out, somebody threw something.... Oh,
it's an orange.... I want to tell you how I felt the gesture. I had
climbed up on one of the hills of the Cigarrales and was looking at the
silhouette of the town so black against the stormy marbled sky. The
moon hadn't risen yet.... Let's move away from here."
"_Ven, flor de mi corazon_," shouted Lyaeus towards the upper window.
"A flock of goats was passing on the road below, and from somewhere
came the tremendous lilt of...."
"Heads!" cried Lyaeus throwing himself round an angle in the wall.
Telemachus looked up, his mind full of his mother Penelope's voice
saying reproachfully:
"You might have been murdered in that dark alley." A girl was leaning
from the window, shaken with laughter, taking aim with a bucket she
swung with both hands.
"Stop," cried Telemachus, "it's the other...."
As he spoke a column of cold water struck his head, knocked his breath
out, drenched him.
"Speaking of gestures...." whispered Lyaeus breathlessly from the
doorway where he was crouching, and the street was filled with
uncontrollable shrieking laughter.