[CONTENTS]

ESSAYS AND
SOLILOQUIES
BORZOI TRANSLATIONS
SPRING 1925
FROM THE SPANISH
FIGURES OF THE PASSION OF OUR LORD
BY GABRIEL MIRO
Translated by C. J. Hogarth
FROM THE FRENCH
THE MODERN ENGLISH NOVEL
BY ABEL CHEVALLEY
Translated by Ben Ray Redman
FROM THE GERMAN
DEATH IN VENICE
BY THOMAS MANN
Translated by Kenneth Burke
FROM THE RUSSIAN
THE CLOCK
BY ALEKSEI REMIZOV
Translated by John Cournos
TALES OF THE WILDERNESS
BY BORIS PILNIAK
Translated by F. O’Dempsey
FROM THE NORWEGIAN
SEGELFOSS TOWN
BY KNUT HAMSUN
Translated by J. S. Scott
FROM THE POLISH
THE PEASANTS
BY LADISLAS REYMONT
Translated by Michael H. Dziewicki

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
BY J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH

NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
SET UP, ELECTROTYPED, PRINTED AND BOUND BY
THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, BINGHAMTON, N. Y.
ESPARTO PAPER MANUFACTURED IN SCOTLAND
AND FURNISHED BY W.F. ETHERINGTON & CO.,
NEW YORK.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Erratum

The two paragraphs on [pages 100-101] beginning:

In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says

and:

Readers of Don Quixote will recall

are a continuation of [the footnote on page 99].

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I am writing these lines, to-day the 6th of June, 1924, in this island of Fuerteventura, an island that is propitious to calm thinking and to a laying bare of the soul, even as this parched land is bare, bare even to the bone. Here I have been confined now for nearly three months, no reason for my confinement having been given other than the arbitrary mandate of the military power that is de-civilizing and debasing my native country.

Hither came my friend Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch to bear me company. He was entrusted by Mr. Alfred A. Knopf with the task of making an anthology or florilegium of my shorter articles and extracts from my more extensive writings which should present a conspectus of my whole literary work. It is he, my friend and translator, who is responsible for the selection of the pieces which form this anthology.

I am in principle an enemy of all such selections or anthologies of an author’s works, and the more so when the author’s influence is due primarily not so much to his ideas as to the passionate tone and gesture with which he expresses them, to his style. This work of selection appears to me to be as difficult as would be that of abridging a sonata or a picture. And what appears to me almost impossible is that the author himself should make the selection. It is not possible for us to see ourselves from the outside, to become part of our public.

In any case, a work like this is a kind of index or catalogue, and its chief utility is to incite in the public a desire to get to know the author better. It is, to put it bluntly, in the nature of an advertisement.

Collections of selected writings are most valuable when the chief importance of an author lies in his ideology, which may or may not be welded into a system; they are less valuable when he is distinguished not so much by his ideas as by the warm images which incarnate them. It is relatively easy to give a summary of an author when we are asked: “What does he say?” but not so easy when the question to be answered is: “How does he say it?” That is to say, it is possible to abridge a philosophic system, but not a poem. In the poem, that which we call the argument is the most external element of its form, and its essence, the essence of the poem, is the rhythm, the aroma of the words, the style. Rhythm may give birth to argument or subject, but subject does not always give birth to rhythm.

In selecting these pieces—torsos, arms and heads of statuary—my friend the translator has been guided by an artistic rather than by a philosophical or ideological criterion, and for this I am grateful to him. And when I say that I am grateful to him, I mean that in this way he has best served the public that seeks to know me—me, the man, and not a system, for I have no system. Like Walt Whitman I would say of each one of my works: “This is not a book, it is a man.” It is comparatively easy, for example, to synthetize the philosophical system of Descartes, or that of Kant, or that of Hegel, or that of Comte, or, still more so, that of Spencer; but it is not easy to synthetize Goethe or Nietzsche, in both of whom is a latent philosophy. And still less so to synthetize Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare. And it has not been the object of my translator to present a summary of an ideology but to give an impression of a spirit.

To elucidate this point still further would lead us into an intricate examination of the relations which subsist between a man and his work, and to inquire whether the man makes the work or the work makes the man or whether each makes the other at the same time. The man makes himself in making his work and the work makes itself in making the man. The Creation makes God the Creator, and God the Creator makes the Creation, the Universe.

Strictly speaking, is not every translation in effect a new and original work? In being turned into English, however faithful the translator may be, shall I not say something different from what I have said in Spanish? Does a song say the same when played on the violin, the flute, the harp, the bassoon? Is a sonata the same when played on the piano and the organ? I know that when I have read my writings translated into another language I have been aware of echoes and reverberations which lay sleeping in the depths of my spirit, I have glimpsed horizons which the firm and severe contours of my native tongue did not permit me to see. And I have sometimes thought of making a new work based upon a retranslation of the translation.

Among these essays is one upon the religion of Quixotism. Hitherto I have been meditating and perhaps dogmatizing upon this religion—now I am living it. For it is here, where the waves murmur tidings of my native shores, the mountainous coast of the wild Bay of Biscay, it is here that I have felt most deeply all the melancholy grandeur of the ridiculous passion of the Knight of the impossible Chimera. While the cowardly comic-opera tyrants who have banished me here are dishonouring our Spain, her whom they call their mother, I am exalting and eternalizing her, and I call her my daughter.

There is a famous Spanish couplet which says that there is no handful of earth without a Spanish grave—

No hay un puñado de tierra
Sin una tumba española,

and it would seem that these unhappy rulers wish to extend the national graveyard. And I propose that there shall be no corner of heaven without a nest of Spanish thought.

Nests of Spanish thought are the pieces which compose this book.

And now I return to contemplate the sea, to feed my spirit upon it, to watch its white-crested waves which are born and die and succeed one another like the generations of men and of men’s works in the sea of history. I return to contemplate the all-consoling sea which smiles, with its superhuman smile, upon our tragic human frailties.

Greeting! my readers of the English-speaking world. And when, having read this book, you wish me farewell, may you carry with you something of the quixotesque passion which I have put into my work and which is the life of my life.

Miguel de Unamuno.

Fuerteventura,
June 6, 1924.

CONTENTS

E S S A Y S A N D S O L I L O Q U I E S

INTRODUCTION

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.

THE SPIRIT OF CASTILE

From whatever point you penetrate into the Spanish peninsula, you will find yourself confronted almost at once by a region of hills; you will then enter into a labyrinth of valleys, gorges and ravines; and finally, after a longer or shorter ascent, you will emerge upon the central tableland, barred by the naked sierras whose wide and deep valleys form the mighty cradles of mighty rivers. Across this tableland stretches Castile, the land of castles.

Like all great expanses of earth, this tableland receives and irradiates heat more quickly than the sea and the coast-lands which the sea refreshes and tempers. Hence, when the sun scorches it, an extreme of heat, and as soon as the sun forsakes it, an extreme of cold; burning days of summer followed by cool fresh nights during which the lungs gratefully inhale the breeze from the land; freezing winter nights following hard upon days which the bright cold sun in its brief diurnal course has failed to warm. Winters long and hard and summers short and fiery have given birth to the saying, “nueve meses de invierno y tres de infierno”—nine months of winter and three months of hell. In the autumn, however, there is a serene and placid breathing-space. The sierras, shutting out the winds from the sea, help to make the winter colder and the summer hotter; but while they impede the passage of the gentle low-trailing clouds they form no barrier to the violent cyclones which burst among their valleys. Thus long droughts are succeeded by torrential deluges.

In this severe climate of opposing extremes, in which the transition from heat to cold and from drought to flood is so violent, man has invented the cloak with which to isolate himself from his environment, a personal ambience, constant in the midst of external changes, a defence at once against both heat and cold.

The great storms of rain and snow bursting upon these sierras and drained thence by the swollen rivers have in the course of centuries scoured the soil of the tableland, and the succeeding droughts have prevented the retention of the rain-washed soil in a network of fresh and robust vegetation. Thus it is that the view presents a wide and desolate expanse of burning country, without foliage and without water, a country in which a deluge of light throws dense shadows upon a dazzling surface, extinguishing all intermediate tones. The landscape is seen cut out in hard outline, almost without atmosphere, through a thin and transparent air.

You may sometimes range over leagues and leagues of desert country without descrying anything save the illimitable plain with its patches of green corn or yellow stubble, here a sparsely extended array of oaks, marching in solemn and monotonous procession, clothed in their austere and perennial green, there a group of mournful pines, holding aloft their uniform crests. Now and again, fringing a bright river or half-dry stream, a few poplars, seeming intensely and vividly alive in the midst of the infinite solitude. As a rule these poplars announce the presence of man: yonder on the plain lies some village, scorched by the sun, blasted by the frost, built of sun-baked bricks very often, its belfry silhouetted against the blue of the sky. Often the spinal ridge of the sierra can be seen in the distance, but if you approach it you must not look to find rounded bossy mountains, fresh with verdure and clothed with woods, with the yellow of the gorse and the carmine of the heather flecking the bracken. Here is nothing but a framework of bony fleshless rock, bristling with crags, sharp-cut hummocks nakedly displaying drought-cracked strata, covered at most with a scanty scrub, where flourish only the hardy thistle and the naked scented broom, the poor genestra contenta dei deserti of Leopardi’s poem. Down in the plain the highway with its festoon of trees loses itself in the greyness of the earth, which kindles into an intense warm red when the sun sinks to rest.

The setting of the sun in these immense solitudes is full of beauty. The sun dilates as it touches the horizon as if greedy to enjoy still more of the earth and in sinking it sheds its light upon it like blood and fills the sky with a dust of gold. The infinite dome of the sky grows paler and paler, then swiftly darkens, and the fleeting twilight is followed by the profundity of a night tremulous with stars. Here are no northern twilights, long, soft and languorous.

Broad is Castile! And beautiful with a sad quiet beauty this sea of stone beneath its expanse of sky. It is a landscape uniform and monotonous in its contrasts of light and shade, in its sharply juxtaposed and unmodulated colours. It presents the appearance of an immense floor of mosaic, without variety of design, above which is spread out a sky of intensest blue. It is lacking in gentle transitions and its only harmonic continuity is that of the immense plain and the massed blue which overspreads and illumines it.

It is a landscape that awakens no voluptuous sensations of joie de vivre, that inspires no longings for ease and idleness. Here are no lush green meadows inviting indolent repose, no dells that beckon like nests.

Its contemplation does not call forth the sleeping animal in us, the animal that delights to drowse in a leafy paradise, brooding over the remembered satisfactions of those appetites which have been kneaded into the flesh since the earliest dawn of life.

Nature does not here recreate the spirit. Rather it detaches us from the low earth and enfolds us in the pure naked unvarying sky. Here there is no communion with nature, no absorption in her exuberant splendours. This infinite landscape is, if it may be so said, nonotheistic rather than pantheistic. Man is not lost in it so much as diminished by it, and in its immense drought he is made aware of the aridity of his own soul.

The population of the Castilian country-side is concentrated for the most part in hamlets, villages or towns, in groups of clustered dwelling-houses, separated from one another by immense and naked solitudes. The villages are compact and sharply delimited, not melting away into the plain in a surrounding fringe of isolated homesteads, the intervening country being entirely unpopulated. The houses seem to crowd together round the church as if for warmth or for defence against the rigour of nature, as if the inhabitants sought a second cloak in which to isolate themselves from the cruelty of the climate and the melancholy of the landscape. Thus it is that very often the villagers have to journey considerable distances on mule-back in order to reach the fields where they work, one here, another there, in isolation, and it is already dark before they return to their homes to stretch themselves on the hard kitchen settles and sleep the comforting sleep of toil. A notable sight it is to see them at nightfall, mounted on their mules, their figures silhouetted against the pale sky, their sad, slow, monotonous songs dying away on the sharp night air into the infinity of the furrowed plain.

While the men labour in the sweat of their brow on the hard land, the womenfolk perform their tasks at home, filling the sunny arcades in front of the houses with a murmur of voices. In the long winter evenings it is usual for masters and serving-folk to assemble together, while the latter dance to the accompaniment of the sharp dry tap of the tambourine or sometimes to an old ballad measure.

Go into one of these villages or drowsing cities of the plain, where life flows slowly and calmly in a monotonous procession of hours, and there you will find the living souls beneath whose transitory existence lies the eternal essence out of which is woven the inner history of Castile.

Within these towns and villages lives a breed of men of a dry, hard and sinewy constitution, burned by the sun and inured by the cold, a sober, frugal breed, the product of a long process of natural selection by searching winter frosts and intermittent periods of scarcity, tempered to withstand the inclemency of the skies and the asperities of penury. The peasant who gave you a grave “Good day” as he passed by on his mule, huddled in his cloak, will receive you without overmuch courtesy, with a kind of restrained sobriety. He is collected in his movements, circumspect and deliberate in his conversation, with a gravity which gives him the air of a dethroned king. Such at any rate he appears when he is not cunningly ironical. This sly biting irony—socarronería, a racy word full of racy character—is the classical form of Castilian humour, a quiet and circumspect humour, sententious and phlegmatic, the humour of Sanson Carrasco in Don Quixote and of Quevedo, he who wrote the discourses of Marcus Brutus.

His slowness is matched by his tenacity, qualities that have an intimate association. His reaction-interval, as the psycho-physiologists would express it, is long; it takes him a considerable time to realize an impression or an idea, but once he has grasped it he does not readily relinquish it, does not in fact relinquish it until another has impinged upon it and driven it out. The slowness and tenacity of his impressions would appear to be due to the lack of an environing and unifying nimbus, blending them into a conjunctive whole; they do not merge into one another by subtle gradations, but each one disappears completely before the next takes its place. They seem to follow one another like the succession of uniform and monotonous tones in the landscape of his country, sharp edge against sharp edge.

Go with him into his house. On the front wall the violent contrast of strident blue paint against a snow-white background exposed to the full blaze of the sun is almost painful to the eye. Sit down to table with him and partake of his simple dinner, prepared without much culinary art, accompanied only by keen and fiery condiments, a meal that is at once both frugal and violent, providing the palate with sharp-edged sensations. After the dinner, if the day chances to be a holiday, you will witness a dance, a dance slow and uniform, danced to the monotonous beat of drum or tambourine, a series of stabbing sounds that strike upon the ear like blows. And you will hear songs, wailing and monotonous, full of long-drawn-out notes, songs of the steppes, with the rhythm of the dragging labour of the plough in them. They testify to an ear that is incapable of appreciating the finer gradations of cadences and semi-tones.

If you are in a town and there are any pictures there of the old traditional school of Castile, go to see them—for in the great days of its expansion this race created a school of realistic painting, of a rude, vigorous, simplified realism, very limited in range of tone, which has the effect of a violent douche upon the vision. Perhaps you will come across some canvas of Ribera or Zurbaran—your eye is held by the bony form of some austere hermit, whose sinewy muscles are presented in high light against strong shadows, a canvas meagre in tones and gradations, in which every object stands out sharp-edged. Not infrequently the figures fail to form a single whole with the background, which is a mere accessory of insignificant decorative value. Velazquez, who of all Castilian painters possesses most of the racial character, was a painter of men, of whole men, men all of one piece, rude and emphatic, men who fill the whole canvas.

You will find no landscape-painters, you will discover no sense of tone, of suave transition, no unifying, enveloping atmosphere, which blends everything into a single harmonious whole. The unity springs from the more or less architectonic disposition of the several parts.

In this country of climatic extremes, without any softness or mildness, of a landscape uniform in its contrasts, the spirit likewise is dry and sharp-edged, with but a meagre ambience of ideas. It generalises upon raw facts, seen in a discrete series, as in a kaleidoscope, not upon a synthesis or analysis of facts seen in a continuous series, in a living stream; it sees them sharp-edged like figures in the Castilian landscape and it takes them as they appear, in their own dress, without reconstructing them. And it has given birth to a harsh popular realism and to a dry formal idealism, marching alongside one another, in an association like that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but never combining. The Castilian spirit is either ironic or tragic, sometimes both at once, but it never arrives at a fusion of the irony and the austere tragedy of the human drama.

SPANISH INDIVIDUALISM

In few books have I found so much food for reflection upon our Spain and us Spaniards as in Martin A. S. Hume’s “The Spanish People: Their Origin, Growth and Influence.” It is written by one who knows and esteems us. It impresses us at a first glance as an excellent compendium of the history of Spain, but on closer examination it is found to be also an excellent psychological study of the Spanish people.

In the tenth chapter there is to be noted a very happy and graphic phrase—“the introspective individuality of Spaniards.” And it is indeed true that we are much given to this direct contemplation of ourselves, a practice which is certainly not the best method of getting to know ourselves, of fulfilling the precept “Know thyself” in its collective and social sense. Introspection is very deceptive and when carried to an extreme produces an actual vacuity of consciousness, like that into which the Yogi falls through perpetual contemplation of his own navel. For a state of consciousness which consisted purely and simply of consciousness contemplating itself would not be a state of consciousness at all, being void of all content. This supposed reflection of the soul upon its own self is an absurdity. To think that one thinks without thinking of anything concrete is mere negation. We learn to know ourselves in the same way that we learn to know others, by observing our actions, and the only difference is that, as we are always with ourselves and scarcely anything that we consciously do escapes us, we have more data for knowing ourselves than we have for knowing others. But even so, we seldom know all that we are capable of until we put ourselves to it, and often we surprise ourselves by achieving something which we did not expect of ourselves.

Hence the utility of a people knowing its own history in order that it may know itself. And Hume studies us in our history.

In one of his books the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaks of the three Johns: the John as he himself thinks he is, the John as others think he is, and the John as he is in reality. And as for every individual, so for every people there are three Johns. There is the Spanish people as we Spaniards believe it to be, there is the Spanish people as foreigners believe it to be, and there is the Spanish people as it really is. It is difficult to say which of the first two approximates most nearly to the last; but it is certainly right that we should compare them together and see ourselves both from within and from without. However much we may lament the injustice or the superficiality of the judgments that our foreign visitors pronounce upon us, it is possible that we are no less unjust or superficial in our own judgment of ourselves.

Havelock Ellis, in a book published not long ago, “The Soul of Spain,” spoke of the unity of our race. Spaniards have generally regarded this view as absurd, but it may very well be that the differences that separate the inhabitants of the various provinces of Spain are no greater than those which exist between the inhabitants of the different districts of other nations which we suppose to be more unified than ourselves, and that our lack of solidarity, our separatist instinct, our kabylism, as it is called, proceeds from other causes than from differences of race. Little notice need be taken of certain ethnological assertions, not so much based upon scientific investigation as inspired by sentiments which, whether creditable or not, furnish no basis for arriving at the truth. Thus, if a writer asserts that the Catalans are Aryans and all other Spaniards Semites, it is obvious that he is using the terms Aryan and Semite without a proper understanding of them; and as the distinction between Catalans and other Spaniards is one of philology rather than ethnology, it would be interesting to know what language the ancestors of the present Catalans spoke before Latin penetrated into Cataluña, for the supposition that they are descended from Greek colonists is too nonsensical to be taken seriously.

Before proceeding further in this review of Hume’s study of the psychology of the Spanish people, I should like to indicate a distinction which I am in the habit of making between individuality and personality, a distinction which appears to me to be of great importance.

All my readers know what is meant by “individual” or “indivisible,” a unity that is distinct from other unities and not divisible into unities analogous to it; and also what is meant by a person. The notion of person refers rather to the spiritual content, and that of individual to the containing limit. Great individuality, that which separates an individual strongly and emphatically from other analogous individuals, may have very little that is peculiar and personal to itself. It might even be said that individuality and personality are in a certain sense opposed to one another, although in another wider and more exact sense it may be said that they afford one another mutual support. Strong individuality is scarcely possible without a respectable dose of personality, neither is a strong and rich personality possible without a considerable degree of individuality to hold its various elements together; but the vigour of a vigorous individuality may very easily contain only the minimum of personality and the richness of a rich personality may be contained within the minimum of individuality.

I will endeavour, as is my wont, to make my meaning clearer by means of metaphors.

In gases, according to the physicists, the molecules are in a certain state of disassociation, moving rectilinearly in all directions—it is this which produces the phenomena of expansion—a state that is chaotic but not in reality very complex; and it is a well-known fact that very complex bodies are not as a rule found in a gaseous state, but only those that are simplest and least complicated. In solids, on the other hand, the molecules are ordered according to relatively fixed orbits and trajectories—especially in the case of crystals; and their individuality is maintained by a principle of intense cohesion, their surfaces being in direct contact with their environment, capable of affecting it and being affected by it. A middle term is presented by liquids. And thus we may compare certain strongly individualized natures with gases enclosed in a bottle or shell with rigid sides, while there are others, with flexible contours, in a free give-and-take contact with their environment, which possess great internal complexity—in other words, a high degree of personality.

Or we may compare the former with crustaceans, enclosed in hard shells which give them rigid and permanent forms, and the latter with vertebrates, which, since they carry their skeleton within themselves, are capable of considerable external modification.

Individuality refers rather to our external limits, it exhibits our finiteness; personality refers principally to our internal limits, or rather to our inward unlimitedness, it exhibits our infinitude.

All this is somewhat tenuous and perhaps fails to meet the demands of strict psychology, but it is enough if it has helped to make my meaning clearer.

My idea is that the Spaniard possesses, as a general rule, more individuality than personality; that the vigour with which he affirms himself before others and the energy with which he creates dogmas and locks himself up in them, do not correspond with any richness of inward spiritual content, which in his case rarely errs on the side of complexity.

In his preface Hume states that the Spaniards spring from an Afro-Semitic race, that “the keynote of this primitive racial character is overwhelming individuality,” and that to this root-cause is to be attributed all that we have accomplished in the world, our transient imperial greatness and our permanent tenacity. This feeling of individuality lies deep down in the root of the race and cunning politicians have turned it to the advantage of their ambitions.

In speaking of the Arab domination he says that “the Berber, like his far-away relative the Iberian, was a man of strong individuality, with an obstinate reluctance to obey another unless he spoke in the name of a supernatural entity.”

At the conclusion of the ninth chapter in which he treats of our epoch of greatness in the middle of the 16th century, he writes the following notable lines:

“Each unlettered boor and swaggering soldier felt in an undefined way that he was a creature apart by reason of his faith; that Spaniards and the Spaniards’ king had a higher mission than was accorded to other men; and that from among the eight million Spaniards alive the particular Juan or Pedro in question stood out individually, in the sight of God and men, as pre-eminently the most zealous and orthodox of them all. To this had the policy of Fernando and Isabel brought the mass of the Spanish people.”

And in corroboration of this he draws a striking portrait of Philip II, the idol of our traditionalists:

“Intense individuality in him, as in so many of his countrymen, was merged in the idea of personal distinction in the eyes of God by self-sacrifice.... At heart he was kindly, a good father and husband, an indulgent and considerate master, having no love for cruelty itself. And yet lying, dishonesty, cruelty, the infliction of suffering and death upon hosts of helpless ones, and the secret murder of those who stood in his path, were not wrong for him, because, in his moral obliquity he thought that the ends justified the means, and that all was lawful in the linked causes of God and Spain.” “He was blind and oblivious to all but the blood-boltered Christ, before whom he writhed in a maniacal agony of devotion, sure in his dark soul, as were so many of his countrymen, that the divine finger pointed from glory alone upon him as the one chosen man who was to enforce upon earth the rule of the Most High, with—as a necessary consequence—Philip of Spain as his viceregent.”

I know that many who look upon this portrait will come forward with the familiar objection that this Philip II is the Devil of the South of the Protestant legend, and will advance the counter-legend—equally legendary—which is being built up out of a mass of minute data by historians who combine the method of Dr. Dryasdust with the spirit of rabid partisanship.

What interests me in Hume’s description is his statement that every Spaniard regards himself as an individual apart, specially and personally chosen by God. This recalls Pascal’s claim that Jesus Christ in dying shed a drop of blood for him, Blaise Pascal, who was destined to live in France in the middle of the 17th century. There is a certain characteristic common to all those whom we call geniuses or great men and other heroes. Each of them has a consciousness of being a man apart, chosen very expressly by God for the performance of a certain work.

In this respect we Spaniards are inclined to think ourselves geniuses, or rather we have a very robust conception of the Divinity—we think of Him not as the frigid and exalted God of the French Deism of the 18th century, nor yet as the good-natured and easy-going God of good people that Béranger depicts, but rather as a God whose attention and care extends to the very last ant, regarded as a separate individual, as well as to the very greatest and most splendid of suns.

In actual fact all these claims to singularity and to being one apart from the rest may become reprehensible, but it is at least understandable that an orator, for example, or a writer, or a singer, should regard himself as the best orator, the best writer, or the best singer. What is not understandable is that a man who is neither orator, writer, painter, sculptor, musician, nor man of business, that a man who does nothing at all, should expect by the mere fact of his presence to be reputed a man of extraordinary merit and exceptional talent. And nevertheless here in Spain—I do not know how it may be elsewhere—there are many examples of this curious phenomenon.

I know of the man who is ready to admit that others may be handsomer, smarter, stronger, healthier, wiser, more intelligent, more generous, than he, that in each and all of their endowments they have the advantage over him; but nevertheless he, Juan Lopez, the individual in question, is superior to everyone else just because he is Juan Lopez, because there is no other Juan Lopez exactly like him and because it is impossible that all the qualities, good, bad and indifferent, that make him him, Juan Lopez, should ever be assembled together again. He is a unique individual, he cannot be substituted by anyone else—and he is in a measure right in thinking so. He can say with Obermann: “In the universe I am nothing; for myself I am everything.”

This violent individualism, combined with very meagre personalism, with a great lack of personality, is a factor that explains a great deal of our history. It explains that intense thirst for individual immortality which consumes the Spaniard, a thirst that lies hidden beneath what is called our cult of death. Homage to this cult of death is rendered no less by the most furious lovers of life, by those in whom the joy of living is unable to extinguish the hunger for survival. It appears to me a very great error to assert that the Spaniard does not love life because he finds life hard. On the contrary, it is because his life is hard that he has not arrived at the tædium vitæ, the Weltschmerz of the satiated, and that he has always aimed at prolonging it indefinitely beyond death.

In the third part of the “Ethics” of Spinoza, a Jew of Spanish origin—or Portuguese, which amounts to the same thing—there are four admirable propositions, the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth, in which he lays it down that everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being; that the endeavour wherewith a thing endeavours to persist in its being is nothing else than the actual essence of that thing (conatus, quo unaquæque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est præter ipsius rei actualem essentiam); that this effort or endeavour involves no finite time but an indefinite time, and that the spirit endeavours to persist in its being for an indefinite period and is conscious of this its endeavour. It is not possible to express with more precision the longing for immortality that consumes the soul.

This strong individualism, the individualism of an individual who endeavours to persist, has led the Spaniard to follow always the path of conduct and will, and this is the reason of Schopenhauer’s admiration of Spaniards, whom he deemed to be one of the peoples most fully possessed of will—or rather of wilfulness—most tenacious of life. Our indifference to life is only on the surface and really conceals a most dogged attachment to it. And this practical tendency is manifest in our thought, which ever since Seneca has inclined to what is called moralism and has evinced but little interest in pure metaphysical and speculative contemplation, in viewing the world as a spectator.

It is this imperious individualism that has led us to the dogmatism that corrodes us. Spain is the country of those who are more papistical than the Pope, as the saying is. Spain is the chosen and most propitious soil for what is called integrism, which is the triumph of the maximum of individuality compatible with the minimum of personality. Spain was, in short, and in more than one respect continues to be, the land of the Inquisition.

Of the Inquisition and inquisitorialism, Hume writes very aptly. “Innate cruelty, individual pride, a vivid imagination long fed with extravagant fables, religious and secular, and lust for unearned wealth, all combined under the eager blessings of the Queen [Isabel] and the Church to make the Spaniards, as a race, relentless persecutors of those who dared to think differently from themselves.” Beneath the manifest and not inconsiderable exaggeration, there is here a large basis of truth. Spaniards could do no wrong “because they were working for and with the cause of God.” “The bureaucratic unity of the Romans was no longer possible [in the time of Fernando and Isabel], for out of the reconquest had grown separate nations; but at least the various peoples, the autonomous dominions, the semi-independent towns, might be held together by the strong bond of religious unity; and with this object the Inquisition was established, as a governmental system, to be developed later into a political engine.... Thus it is that Spain appears for the first time in the concert of modern European nations a power whose very existence in a concrete form depends upon its rigid doctrinal Catholicism.” This last assertion appears to me so doubtful and I am so far from believing it to be just that I shall have to devote a special study to its refutation.

This Spanish individualism has undoubtedly been the cause of another characteristic feature of our history, a feature to which Hume pays very particular attention. It is known as cantonalism or kabylism. I refer of course to our tendency to disruption, to separate into tribes. Hume alludes to it at the beginning of his history in the following notable lines: “In any case, what is known of their physique seems to negative the supposition that they [the Iberians] were of Indo-European or Aryan origin; and to find their counterpart at the present time, it is only necessary to seek the Kabyl tribes of the Atlas, the original inhabitants of the African coast opposite Spain, who were driven back into the mountains by successive waves of invasion. Not alone in physique do these tribes resemble what the early Iberian must have been, but in the more unchanging peculiarities of character and institutions the likeness is easily traceable to the Spaniard of to-day. The organization of the Iberians, like that of the Atlas peoples, was clannish and tribal, and their chief characteristic was their indomitable local independence. Warlike and brave, sober and light-hearted, the Kabyl tribesman has for thousands of years stubbornly resisted all attempts to weld him into a nation or subject him to a uniform dominion, while the Iberian, starting probably from the same stock, was blended with Aryan races possessing other qualities, and was submitted for six centuries to the unifying organization of the greatest governing race the world ever saw—the Romans; yet, withal, even at the present day, the main characteristics of the Spanish nation, like that of the Kabyl tribes, is lack of solidarity.”

This fundamental idea appears all through Hume’s book like a refrain or leitmotiv.

Out of all this, two questions now emerge: the first, what is the origin of this individualism? and the second, what is its cure?—the one ethnological, the other therapeutical.

As I indicated at the beginning, in quoting the opinion of Havelock Ellis, I am not at all disposed to believe that kabylism or cantonalism, the separatist tendency, proceeds from differences of race. If Cataluña or the Basque provinces could be forthwith removed and isolated in the middle of the Atlantic, we should very soon see them torn by internal dissensions, by separatist tendencies, and conflicts for supremacy would arise between the various dialects of the Catalan and Basque languages. In the Basque provinces such internal dissensions are beginning to be patent even to the least acute observer.

There is one capital sin that is very peculiarly Spanish, and that sin is envy. It is a result of our peculiar individualism, and it is one of the causes of kabylism. Envy has crippled and still cripples not a few of the best minds of Spain, minds that are in other respects vigorous and exuberant. We are all familiar with the famous simile of the greasy pole. Deep down in our racial character there is a certain sediment of spiritual avarice, of lack of generosity of soul, a certain propensity to consider ourselves rich only in so far as others are poor, and this sediment requires to be purged away.

Spanish kabylism and individualism both appear to me to be effects of one and the same cause, the cause that also produced picarism. In his book entitled Hampa, Salillas showed very clearly how the poverty of the soil, its failure to serve as a basis for the support of the people, was responsible for the seasonal migration of flocks and herds together with the vagabond life that resulted therefrom. It appears to me more concrete and more historical to say that it obliged the Iberians to be herdsmen. Hume expresses it exactly when he says that the pure Spaniard has always been “an agriculturist by necessity and a shepherd by choice,

The spectators, so far from encouraging or applauding the competitors, are said to pull them back and generally hinder them from securing the prize.

when he was not a soldier.” I believe that a consideration of this pastoral character of our people would help to explain a great deal of our history and to modify accepted verdicts. At bottom the expulsion of the Moriscos, an industrious people of agriculturists and gardeners, appears to me to have been due to the traditional hatred which those whom I will call Abelites, the spiritual descendants of Abel, the keeper of flocks, bore towards the descendants of Cain, the tiller of the ground, who killed his brother. For the Hebrew legend of Cain and Abel presents one of the most profound intuitions of the beginnings of human history.

And what is the cure for this individualism? The first thing is to see whether it is an evil, and if it appears to be one, to see if it may not be converted into a good, for it is evident that vices and virtues proceed from the same stock and a single passion may be turned either to good or to evil.

The exigences of life in past ages made our remote ancestors herdsmen; being herdsmen, they acquired all the qualities that pastoral life tends to develop—they were idlers, they were wanderers, and they were disunited. The lapse of time, civilized and urban life, the necessities imposed by industrial and commercial competition—progress, in short—will modify this basal character. Can this process be accelerated, and by what means?—But that is another question.

SOME ARBITRARY REFLECTIONS UPON EUROPEANIZATION

It is a not unprofitable task to examine the national consciousness by examining ourselves and to ask ourselves as Spaniards what there is of intrinsic and permanent worth in most of these schemes for our national regeneration which almost all of us are discussing nowadays, some more insistently than others.

All those things which are being demanded and which almost all of us have demanded on behalf of our people, with a greater or less degree of comprehension of what these demands mean, may be summed up in two terms—European and modern. “We must be modern,” “we must be European,” “we must modernize ourselves,” “we must go with the century,” “we must Europeanize ourselves”—such are the watchwords of the hour.

The term European expresses a vague idea, very vague, excessively vague; but much vaguer is the idea that is expressed by the term modern. If we combine the two together it would seem that they ought to limit one another and result in something concrete, and that the expression “modern European” ought to be clearer than either of its two component terms; but perhaps it is really vaguer still.

It will be apparent that I am proceeding by way of what some would call arbitrary statement, without documentation, without verification, independent of modern European logic and disdainful of its methods. Perhaps. I seek no other method than the method of passion; and when I am moved with disgust, with repugnance, with pity or with contempt, I let the mouth speak from the fullness of the heart and the words come forth as they will.

We Spaniards, so they say, are arbitrary charlatans, we fill up the broken links of logic with rhetoric, we subtilize skilfully but uselessly, we lack the sense of consecutiveness and induction, we have scholastic minds, we are casuists ... etc., etc.

I have heard similar things said of St. Augustine, the great African, the fiery soul that overflowed in waves of rhetoric, in phraseological contortions, in antitheses, in paradoxes and conceits. St. Augustine was at once a gongorist and a conceptist. Which leads me to believe that Gongorism and conceptism are the natural forms of passion and vehemence.

The great African, the great ancient African! Here you have an expression, “ancient African,” which can be opposed to that of “modern European,” and which is at least of equal value. St. Augustine was African and he was of the ancient world; so also was Tertullian. And why should we not say: “We must Africanize ourselves ancientwise” or “We must ancientize ourselves Africanwise”?

Luis de Gongora (1561-1627) elaborated an affected and euphuistic style of composition. Conception is the name given to the employment of conceptos, a characteristic Spanish form of conceits. It is exemplified in the writings of Quevedo (1580-1645) and its subtleties were reduced to an exact code by Baltasar Gracián in his Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642).

Turning my glance inwards upon myself after the lapse of years, after having wandered among the various fields of modern European culture, I ask myself, face to face with my conscience: Am I European? am I modern? And my conscience replies: No, you are not European, not what is called European; no, you are not modern, not what is called modern. And I ask myself again: Is the fact that you feel that you are neither European nor modern due to the fact that you are a Spaniard? Are we Spaniards, at heart, irreducible to Europeanization and modernization? And if that be the case, is there no salvation for us? Is there no other life than modern and European life? Is there no other culture—or whatever you like to call it?

First of all, so far as I myself am concerned, I must confess that the more I reflect upon it, the more I become aware of the inner repugnance that my spirit feels for all those that are considered to be the guiding principles of the modern European spirit, for the scientific orthodoxy of to-day, for its methods, for its tendencies.

There are two things that are often talked about—science and life. And I must confess that both the one and the other are antipathetic to me.

It is unnecessary to define science, or Science, if you like, with the capital letter, this thing which is now being so widely popularized, the purpose of which is to give us a more logical and exact idea of the Universe. When I used to be something of a Spencerian I believed myself to be enamoured of science; but afterwards I discovered that this was a mistake. It was a mistake like the mistake of those who think that they are happy when they are not. (It is evident that I reject, arbitrarily of course, the idea that being happy consists in thinking that one is happy.) No, I was never enamoured of science, I always sought for something behind it. And when, endeavouring to get beyond its fatidical relativity, I was led to the ignorabimus position, I realized that science had always irked me.

And what are you going to put in its place? I shall be asked. I might say ignorance, but that is not certain. I might say, with the Preacher, the son of David, king of Jerusalem, that he who increases knowledge increases sorrow and that the same end awaits the wise man and the fool; but no, it is not that. I don’t need to invent a word, however, to express what it is that I oppose to science, for the word exists, and it is sabiduría—the sagesse of the French, the wisdom of the English, the German Weisheit or Klugheit. But is it opposed to science? I shall be asked. And I, following my arbitrary method, guided by the passion of my spirit, by my innate aversions and my innate attractions, reply: Yes, they are opposed; science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.

The other thing that is being incessantly talked about to-day is life, and to this it is easy to find an opposite. The opposite to life is death.

And this second opposition helps me to explain the first. Wisdom is to science what death is to life, or, if you prefer it, wisdom is to death what science is to life.

The object of science is life, and the object of wisdom is death. Science says: “We must live,” and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable; wisdom says: “We must die,” and seeks how to make us die well.

Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat, et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vita meditatio est—so Spinoza announces in Proposition LXVII of the fourth part of his “Ethics”: The free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

In this case, this wisdom, this sapientia, is no longer wisdom, but science. And it is also necessary to inquire what kind of man is meant by this “free man.” The man free from the supreme anguish, free from the eternal heartache, free from the gaze of the Sphinx, that is to say, the man who is not a man, the ideal of the modern European.

And here we have another concept which is as little sympathetic to me as those of life and science, the concept of liberty. There is no other true liberty than the liberty of death.

And what is at the bottom of all this? What are they seeking and pursuing, those who grasp at science and life and liberty, turning their backs, whether they are aware of it or not, upon wisdom and death? What they are seeking is happiness.

I believe—perhaps this belief of mine is also arbitrary—I believe that here we touch the bottom of our inquiry. The so-called modern European comes to the world to seek happiness for himself and for others, and believes that man ought to succeed in being happy. And this is a supposition to which I am unable to conform. And now, as I am confessing myself, I am going to put before you an arbitrary dilemma—arbitrary, because I cannot prove it to you logically, because it is imposed upon me by the feeling of my heart, not by the reasoning of my head: either happiness or love. If you want the one, you must renounce the other. Love kills happiness, happiness kills love.

And here it would be very apposite to adduce all that our mystics, our admirable mystics, our only classic philosophers, the creators of our Spanish wisdom, not our Spanish science—perhaps the terms “science” and “Spanish” are, happily, mutually repellent—have felt, felt rather than thought, about love and happiness—the muero porque no muero and the dolor sabroso and all the rest that emanates from the same depths of feeling.

And what relation does all this bear to the spiritual problem of Spain? Is it anything more than a purely and exclusively personal, that is to say arbitrary, position? Is it as a Spaniard that I feel all this? Is it suggested to me by the Spanish soul?

It has been said that with the Catholic Kings and the beginnings of national unity the course of our history was turned into another channel. It is certain that since then, with the discovery of America and our intermeddling in European affairs, we have been drawn into the current of other peoples. Spain entered into the strong current of the Renaissance and our mediæval soul began to be obliterated. And the Renaissance was in its essence just this: science, above all in the form of humanities, and life. And thought dwelt less upon death and the mystical wisdom gradually disappeared.

It has frequently been said that the Spaniard is too much preoccupied with death; and we have been told, in a variety of ways and especially by those who deal in platitudes, that the preoccupation with death prevents us from living like moderns and like Europeans. The blame even for our death-rate and for our squalor and for our lack of health has been thrown upon our so-called cult of death. And it seems to me, on the other hand, that we think too little about death, or rather that we only half think about it.

And we half think and half meditate about death because we pretend to be European and modern without ceasing to be Spaniards, and that is impossible. And we have made an infamous commixture of our classic wisdom and exotic science, of our innate deep feeling for death and a borrowed solicitude for life. And we have thought we were keenly interested in progress whereas in fact we trouble very little about it.

“You deceive yourself,” a foreign friend of mine once said to me, thinking that although I was a Spaniard I was also European and modern, “you deceive yourself—Spaniards in general are incapable of civilization and refractory to it.”

And I left him cold with stupor when I replied: “And is that a fault?” The man looked at me as one looks at someone who has suddenly gone mad; it must have seemed to him as if I had denied a postulate of geometry. He began to reason with me and I said: “No, don’t attempt to give me reasons. I think I may say without boasting, and yet without the hypocrisy of modesty, that I know all the reasons you can bring forward on this point. It is not a question of reasons but of feelings.”

He insisted, attempting to talk to me about feeling, and I added: “No, my friend, no, you know all about logic, but it is not logic, but passion, that governs feelings.” And I left him and went away to read the confessions of the great African of the ancient world.

Is it not perhaps true that we Spaniards are, in effect, spiritually refractory to what is called modern European culture? And if this be so, ought we to be distressed about it? Is it not possible to live and to die, above all to die well, without this fortunate culture?

And by this I don’t mean that we are engulfed in inaction, in ignorance and in barbarism—no, not that. There are means of augmenting the spirit, of exalting it, of enlarging it, of ennobling it, of making it more divine, without having recourse to this same culture. We can, I believe, cultivate our wisdom without accepting science except as a means to this end, taking due precautions against its corrupting the spirit.

Just as love of death and the feeling that it is the principle of our true life ought not to lead us to a violent renunciation of life, to suicide—for life is a preparation for death, and the better the preparation, the better the thing prepared for—so neither ought love of wisdom to lead us to a renunciation of science, for that would be equivalent to mental suicide, but to an acceptance of science as a preparation, and as nothing more than a preparation, for wisdom.

For my part I can say that if I had never made excursions into the fields of some of the modern European sciences, I should never have taken the delight that I have taken in our ancient African wisdom, in our popular wisdom, in what scandalizes all the Pharisees and Sadducees of intellectualism, that horrible intellectualism that poisons the soul. It is hearing hymns in praise of them that has made me view science and life with distrust, perhaps with horror, and love the wisdom of death, the meditation which, according to Spinoza, the free man, that is, the happy man, does not meditate.

A few days ago I read an article by my friend and fellow-Basque, Pío Baroja, entitled “The Sad Country,” in which he says that Spain is a sad country, just as France is a beautiful country. He opposes smiling France, with its level fertile soil, with its mild climate, with its bright transparent rivers that slide smoothly along flush with their banks, to our peninsula, full of stones, burnt by the sun and frozen with the winter frost. He observes that in France the products of the spirit cannot compare with the products of agriculture and industry; that the dramas of Racine are not fashioned so finely as the wines of Bordeaux; that the pictures of Delacroix are not so good as the oysters of Arcachon; and that, on the other hand, our great men, Cervantes, Velazquez, El Greco, Goya, are the equals or more than the equals of the great men of any other country; while our actual life is not equal to, not the life of Morocco, but the life of Portugal.

And I say: Is it not worth while to undergo the hardship of renouncing this pleasant life of France in order to breathe the spirit that can produce a Cervantes, a Velazquez, an El Greco, a Goya? Are not these perhaps incompatible with the wine of Bordeaux and the oysters of Arcachon? I believe—arbitrarily of course—that it is so, that they are incompatible, and I take my stand with Don Quixote, with Velazquez, with El Greco, with Goya, and against the wine of Bordeaux and the oysters of Arcachon, against Racine and Delacroix. Passion and sensuality are incompatible; passion is arbitrary, logic is sensual. For logic is nothing but a form of sensuality.

“All our material and intellectual products are hard, rugged and disagreeable,” Baroja continues. “The wine is thick, the meat bad, the papers boring and the literature sad. I don’t know what it is that makes our literature so disagreeable.”

Here I must pause. I am not sensible of this identification of the sad with the disagreeable; and I will even say—although there may be some simple enough to take this to be a paradox—that for me the disagreeable is that which is called gay. I shall never forget the highly disagreeable effect, the deep disgust, which the strident hilarity of the Parisian boulevard produced upon me seventeen years ago, and the feeling of disquiet and uneasiness that came over me there. All that world of youth, dancing, jesting, playing, drinking, making love, seemed to me to be composed of puppets endowed with sense; they seemed to lack consciousness, to be appearances merely. I felt alone, utterly alone among them, and this feeling of loneliness pained me. I could not bring myself to accept the idea that these roisterers, these devotees of the joie de vivre, were beings like myself, my fellows, or even the idea that they were living creatures dowered with consciousness.

Here you have an instance of the way in which gaiety jarred upon me, was disagreeable to me. And on the other hand, when I am in the midst of heart-sick multitudes crying to heaven for mercy, chanting a De profundis or a Miserere, I cannot help feeling myself among brothers, united to them by love.

Later on, Baroja says: “For me, one of the saddest things about Spain is that we Spaniards cannot be frivolous or jovial.”

And for me it would be one of the saddest things for Spain if we Spaniards could become frivolous and jovial. In that case we should cease to be Spaniards, yet without even becoming Europeans. In that case we should have to renounce our true consolation and our true glory, which consists precisely in this inability to be either frivolous or jovial. In that case we might be able to repeat in chorus all the unsubstantialities of the popular scientific handbooks, but we should be incapacitated for entering into the kingdom of wisdom. In that case we might perhaps have better and finer wines, purer oil, better oysters; but we should have to renounce the possibility of a new Don Quixote, or a new Velazquez, and, above all, the possibility of a new St. John of the Cross, a new Fray Diego de Estella, a new St. Teresa de Jesús—whether orthodox or heterodox, it matters not which.

And Baroja concludes: “A sad country in which everywhere all people live their lives thinking of nothing less than of life.”

And this arbitrariness provokes my arbitrariness and I exclaim: Unhappy those modern European countries in which people live their lives thinking of nothing more than of life. Unhappy those countries in which men do not continually think of death and in which the guiding principle of life is not the thought that we shall all one day have to lose it.

Here I must halt a moment—if it is possible to speak of halts in a course such as my thought is taking here—and explain, if it is possible to explain it, what this arbitrariness really is.

Foreigners, the French in particular, take from us precisely that which is least ours, that which least clashes with their spirit, and, naturally enough, that which best accommodates itself to the idea that they have formed of us, an idea that is always and necessarily superficial. And we, poor fools, yield to this delusive adulation and hope for this external applause, the applause of those who really don’t hear us, and even when they do hear us don’t understand us.

I don’t really know what they want in taking from us just what they do take, just that which confirms the popular notion they have of us. If I were in their place, what I should take from Spain and make known to my fellow-countrymen would be what was most wounding to their convictions, what amazed them most, what was most repellent to their spirit, what was most different from them.

But after all what they do is natural, for people want to be told just that which they already think, that which confirms them in their preconceived ideas, their prejudices and their superstitions: men want to be deceived. And so it is here.

In face of this attitude of theirs, what must be our attitude? In face of this process that tends to decharacterize us, to rob us of that which makes us what we are, what course of action is the best for us to adopt? Admonished by those voices that say: “If you want to be like us and save yourselves, take this,” what must we do?

But this question of attempting to Spaniardize Europe, the only means whereby we may Europeanize ourselves, so far as it is fitting that we should be Europeanized, or rather, whereby we may digest those elements in the European spirit which we can convert into our spirit—this question must be left for separate treatment.

All this will appear arbitrary—it is arbitrary. How can I help it?

“Enough,” some logical modern European reader will say; “now I’ve caught you. You yourself admit that your assertions have no foundation, that they are arbitrary, that they cannot be proved, and such assertions ought not to be taken seriously.” And I will say to this poor logical modern and European reader, who may be assumed to be in love with science and life, that the fact that an assertion is arbitrary and cannot be proved by logical reasons, does not mean either that it is without foundation or, still less, that it is false. And above all it does not mean that such an assertion may not excite and animate the spirit, may not strengthen its inner life, that inner life which is a very different thing from the life that the logical and scientificist reader is in love with.

I broke off this essay at this point two days ago, with the intention of continuing it, of resuming the broken thread, as occasion offered, and now to-day, the 13th of May, I have just read a phrase that alters the course of my discourse. Something of the kind happens to rivers when a rock deflects their course and causes them to disembogue many leagues away from where they would otherwise have disembogued, perhaps into another sea altogether.

It is curious what happens to our ideas. We have often in our mind a crowd of ideas that vegetate in the darkness, withered, incomplete, unacquainted with one another and avoiding one another. For in the darkness, ideas, like men, are afraid of one another. And they remain obscured, disassociated, avoiding contact. But suddenly a new and luminous idea enters the mind, emitting light and illuminating the dark corner, and as soon as the other ideas see it and see their own faces, they recognize one another, they arise and gather round the new arrival, they embrace and form a fraternity and recover their full life.

So it has happened with me to-day when a number of half-alive and shadowy ideas that have been lying isolated in a corner of my mind have been joined by this new idea that I have just read in a Madrid newspaper, La Correspondencia de España, of yesterday’s date, the 12th of May.

In an article that it publishes, entitled “Current Events—Cánovas,” the author says: “Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain. Cánovas never knew of what stuff his fellow-countrymen were made.”

The moment that I read this, I realized, as if by a sudden illumination, the difference that there is between the soul of Spain and the aggregate of the souls of all us Spaniards who are living to-day, the actual synthesis of these same souls. And I remembered that at the time of the last Carlist civil war, when I was a boy, I heard someone in my native town say: “Even though all we men of Bilbao were to become Carlists, Bilbao would remain liberal.” A paradox—that is to say, a profound arbitrary truth, a truth of passion, a truth of the heart, and one that I shall never forget.

“Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain.” And all our commonplace rulers, those who let themselves drift with the stream and enjoy long years of office, all our commonplace writers, those who write books that are just long tirades, books that sell, all our commonplace artists and all our commonplace thinkers, understand their fellow-countrymen, but not their country.

Not only our own souls, the souls of us who are living to-day, are alive and operative in the soul of Spain, but in addition to these, the souls of all our forefathers. Our own souls, those of the living, are those that are least alive in it, for our soul does not enter into the soul of our country until it is no longer a detached entity, until after our temporal death.

What is the use of our wanting to make our thought modern and European when our language is neither European nor modern? While we are endeavouring to make it say one thing, it is endeavouring to make us say something different, and thus we don’t say the thought that we pretend we are saying, but we say the thought that we don’t wish to say.

We endeavour—that is to say, many of us endeavour—to deform our spirit conformably with an external standard, and we succeed neither in making ourselves like those whom we pretend to copy nor in being ourselves. Whence results a horrible spiritual half-breed, a kind of barren hybrid.

And the most curious thing about it all is this—something that will be understood one day, if the day ever comes when anyone will occupy himself in investigating the spiritual condition of Spain at the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries—the most curious and surprising thing is that those who are held to be most Spanish, most true-blooded and of the old stock, most authentically Spanish, are those who are the most Europeanizing, the most exotic, those whose soul contains the most alien strains; and on the other hand those whom many simple-minded folk regard as exotic spirits, anglicized, gallicized, Germanized, Norwegianized, are the ones whose roots intermingle most closely with the roots of those who created the Spanish soul. I have observed how frequently a skin-deep classicism, a classicism of external grammatical and rhetorical forms, goes hand in hand with a complete alienation from the national soul, and vice versa. I have known a portentous fool, once an esteemed author, who used to read our mystics in order to learn from them how to write good Castilian and upon whom the ardent soul of these most genuinely Spanish spirits made no impression whatever; and on the other hand I know a man who, although he has never read them nor concerned himself in any way to preserve their literary tradition or their religious orthodoxy, in breathing the national spiritual atmosphere has breathed the air of that mysticism that is inherent in this atmosphere.

What is the origin of this confusion? I cannot tell, but I presume that it must originate in the same cause that makes Spaniards insist on calling him a wise man who has least wisdom in him and demanding logic from a man who is passionate and arbitrary.

“People want and demand things,” so a friend of mine says to me when I talk to him about these matters, “that is to say, concrete ideas, utilizable facts, scientific theories, information, rational explanations, and it is no use going to them with feelings and dreams.” Usually my first thought on hearing this is, “Unfortunate people!” but immediately afterwards I pull myself up and say: “They are partly right; it is right that they should demand that; but why must so many of them reject the other? and above all why should they not demand from each one just that which he has and which he can give?”

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.

I need the immortality of my soul, the indefinite persistence of my individual consciousness—I need it. Without it, without faith in it, I cannot live, and doubt, the inability to believe that I shall attain it, torments me. And since I need it, my passion leads me to affirm it, and to affirm it arbitrarily, and when I attempt to make others believe, to make myself believe, I do violence to logic and make use of arguments which are called ingenious and paradoxical by those unfortunate people who have no passion and who contemplate their ultimate dissolution with resignation.

The man of passion, the arbitrary man, is the only real rebel, and nothing makes a more grotesque impression upon me than when I come across those—usually gallicized—individuals who proclaim themselves emancipated from all tyrannies, lovers of liberty, esprits forts, anarchists sometimes, frequently atheists, but who nevertheless are the faithful devotees of logic and of the code of good taste.

Yes, emphasis, turgidity, conceptism, paradoxism, these are the language passion speaks, and, on the other hand, there is nothing less natural, for us Spaniards at any rate, than that which the French call naturel and which is usually the refined product of an exquisite and artificial elaboration.

Some Frenchman has said that French literature is that which gives the most eloquent expression to the great commonplaces of humanity; but I would say that it is in this literature, which has done and still does so much harm in Spain, that all middling ideas and middling feelings find their most adequate form and expression, and that it is hostile to extreme ideas and extreme feelings.

Observe that the French spirit has produced no great mystic, no really great pure mystic. Observe that upon Pascal, although he was somewhat arbitrary and passionate, geometry made a profound impression. And consider the fact that Pascal is one of the French spirits that we are best able to appropriate. It is to this most profound and tortured spirit that we owe two great and profound instances, among others, of tormentingly arbitrary utterance: that of the pari or wager, and that of il faut s’abêtir, “we must become as fools”—in order to believe, beginning with acting as if we did believe. But I don’t know of any great mystic, any really pure mystic, who was a Frenchman. And here I should like to say something about the gentle, tranquil, sensual and logical St. Francis of Sales, so full of common sense and of a spiritual via media, but I must leave it for some other time.

And it is the æsthetic of this people, so opposed to our own, in spite of all that nonsense about the Latin sisterhood—I don’t know whether they are Latin, I don’t know whether we are, and as regards myself personally, I believe that there is nothing Latin about me—it is the æsthetic of this people that is deforming the fruit of our spirit as it is expressed in many of our spiritual creators.

Latins. Latins? And why, if we are really Berbers, must we not feel and assert that we are Berbers, and why must not the poetry in which we endeavour to give expression to our sorrows and our consolations conform to the Berber æsthetic?

The only way of entering into vital relations with another is the aggressive way; only those succeed in mutually penetrating one another, in forming a spiritual brotherhood, who strive to subjugate one another spiritually, whether in the case of individuals or of peoples. It is only when I strive to put my spirit into the spirit of my neighbour that I receive my neighbour’s spirit in mine. The apostle is blessed in receiving in himself the souls of those whom he converts; in this consists the nobility of proselytizing.

No, none of this laissez-faire and laissez-aller—don’t let us shrug our shoulders at the ideas, still less at the feelings, of others, but rather try to wound them. It is thus and only thus that they will wound ours and keep them awake within us. For my part I know that those to whom I owe most are those who have acted as if they rejected, who have wished to reject, what I offered to them. The deep moral life is a life of aggression and mutual penetration. Everyone must endeavour to make others in his own image and likeness, as God is said to have made us in His image and likeness.

The condemnation of him who tries to mould himself upon another lies in the fact that he will cease to be himself without succeeding in being the other whom he takes as his model, and so he will be nobody.

Unquestionably there is something, there are many things, in modern European culture and in the modern European spirit that it behoves us to receive into ourselves in order that we may convert them into our flesh, just as we receive the flesh of various kinds of animals into our body and convert it into our flesh. With the brains of oxen I nourish my brain, with the ribs of hogs I make my heart beat, with fish and birds I feed my body so that my spirit can plunge into the deeps and swim in them and ascend to the heights and fly there. And must we not eat the modern European spirit? Yes, but we first kill these oxen, hogs, fishes and birds, upon which we nourish ourselves, imposing our will upon them, and we must deal with this spirit in the same way before eating it.

I am profoundly convinced, arbitrarily of course—the more profoundly, the more arbitrarily, as is always the case when truths of faith are concerned—I am profoundly convinced that the real and deep Europeanization of Spain, that is to say, our digestion of that part of the European spirit which it is possible to convert into our spirit, will not begin until we strive to impose ourselves upon the European spiritual order, to make the Europeans swallow our spirit, that which is genuinely ours, in exchange for theirs, until we strive to Spaniardize Europe.

And to-day—I say it with shame and sorrow—when a Spaniard seeks to enter into the European world, that is to say, in the case of men of letters, when he wishes to be translated, all that he is concerned about is to deform himself, to de-Spaniardize himself, to leave the translator nothing to do but to translate the letter, the external language. And thus it is that one hears remarks like that which a Frenchman made to me the other day, when, speaking of the translation of a contemporary Spanish novel, he stated that it was better in French than in Spanish. To this I replied that it had been translated back into its original language.

Each human faculty has its method, that is to say, its procedure, its mode of action. That which we call logic is the method of reason, the way of discovering conclusions satisfactory to reason. In this way science is made. But when it is a question neither of addressing nor satisfying reason, there is no need of logic. And for my part, I rarely, very rarely, address myself to the reason of those who hear or read me, and when I do so, it is not I myself who speak or write, but rather an artificial self—and because artificial, therefore detachable—which those who hear or read me impose upon me.

It has been said that the heart has its logic, but it is dangerous to call the method of the heart logic; it would be better to call it cardiac.

And there is also the method of passion, which is arbitrariness and which must not be confounded with caprice, as often happens. It is one thing to be capricious and another very different thing to be arbitrary.

Arbitrariness, the brusque affirmation of a thing because I wish it to be so, because I need it to be so, the creation of our vital truth—truth being that which makes us live—is the method of passion. Passion affirms and the proof of its affirmation is founded upon the energy with which it is affirmed. It needs no other proofs. When some poor intellectual, some modern European, opposes ratiocinations and arguments to any of my affirmations, I say to myself: reasons, reasons, and nothing more than reasons!

Although he deserved to have been a Spaniard for writing them, it was not a Spaniard but an Englishman who wrote these lines:

For nothing worthy proving can be proven
Nor yet disproven; wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.

It was Lord Tennyson who wrote these pregnant lines, and in the same poem, “The Ancient Sage,” he tells us that “knowledge is the swallow on the lake that stirs and sees the surface-shadow there, but never yet hath dipt into the abysm.”

Let, then, my last words here, while I am preparing to consider how it is possible to Spaniardize Europe, be that nothing worthy proving can be proven nor yet disproven.

THE SPANISH CHRIST

He was a foreigner, a South American, and he came from Paris. “But these Christs!—Good God!” he said to me, as we stood before one of the bloodiest of those that are to be found in our cathedrals, “this thing repels, revolts—— ”

“It revolts him who knows nothing of the cult of suffering,” I said. And he replied: “But suffering is not blood. There is bloodless suffering, serene suffering.” ...

And we began to talk about it.

I confessed to him that I have the soul of my people, and that I like these livid Christs, emaciated, purple, bloody, these Christs that someone has called ferocious. Lacking in art? Barbarous? I don’t know. And I like these harsh Marias Dolorosas, rigid with grief.

The Spanish Christ—so Guerra Junqueiro has often said to me—was born in Tangiers. Perhaps. Perhaps He is an African Christ. Would He be more Christ if He were an Attic or a Parisian or an English Christ? For the other Christ, the Galilean, the historical, we must bid farewell to. And as for history as applied to Christianity.... This history is the history of the last twenty centuries, and here, in Spain, history is Spanish. He was born then, perhaps, in Tangiers. Not very far from Tangiers was born St. Augustine.

Bloodless, serene, purified suffering.... Yes, yes, “stylistic”—or shall we say, artistic?—suffering. The cry of suffering breathed into a flute and become a dirge. Very good. All that the Laocoön inspired in Lessing was just that.

Very good. But it is the same with this kind of suffering as with irony. Usually ironists are people who are never angry. He who is angry is insulting. The ironist forgives everything and says that it is because he understands everything. And what if it is because he understands nothing? I don’t know.

This harsh, raw manner of ours—I said to my friend, the South American—not everyone can bear it. It has been said that hate is rife in Spain. Perhaps. Perhaps we begin by hating ourselves. You will find many here, a great many, who dislike themselves. We follow the precept of “love thy neighbour as thyself,” and since, in spite of inevitable egoism, we do not love ourselves, so neither do we love our neighbours. The ascetic and the egoist are made in the same way. Not that the ascetic is not an egoist; egoistic he may indeed be, and with a vengeance. But even when an egoist, he does not know how to love himself.

When you see a bull-fight, I continued, you will understand these Christs. The poor bull is also a kind of irrational Christ, a propitiatory victim, whose blood cleanses us from not a few of the sins of barbarism. And leads us, nevertheless, to others. But is it not true that forgiveness leads us—unhappy humans!—to sin again?

My friend saw a bull-fight in Madrid and wrote to me as follows;

“You are right. The Spanish people likes violent spectacles, which beget the emotion of tragedy, or rather of ferocity. I had no difficulty in understanding this at the bull-fight last Sunday. I understood it also when I conversed with various people, and in particular with literary people, who tear one another to pieces with unparalleled ferocity. Poor Christ, pierced and bathed with blood! There is no hope that His wounds will ever heal in these Spanish cathedrals or that the grimace of His frenzied pain will ever relax—for here there is no knowledge of the return of Jesus to heaven, after His martyrdom.”

Perhaps—who knows?—our heaven is martyrdom itself.

Not a few foreigners who have learnt to know us have been struck with this ferocity with which, here in Spain, men of letters destroy one another. Yes, here all men, but particularly artists and writers, destroy one another with the ferocity of bull-fighters—or it may be with the Christian ferocity of our Tangerine Christianity.

And I, who do not like bull-fights and never go to see them, I, who do not like flaying my fellow writers (for the office of executioner dirties the hands), I like these Tangerine Christs, purple, livid, blood-stained and blood-drained. Yes, I like these bleeding and exsanguious Christs.

And the smell of tragedy! Above all, the smell of tragedy!

You should read the great Sarmiento’s comparison between bull-fights and tragedy, in his account of his journey in Spain about the middle of the last century. In the bull-fight there is none of the insupportable unities of the pseudo-classical tragedy, and there is, moreover, real dying. Real dying, and, above all, real killing. The bull is killed just as an infidel dog was killed by a good Spanish Christian in the good old days—really killed.

For many people, perhaps for my friend the American, all this creates an atmosphere difficult to breathe, an acrid atmosphere. But if you take away the taste, other atmospheres too become insipid. It is like the austere beauty of our bleak upland deserts. He who tempers his soul, or distempers it—I know not which—in the contemplation of these blood-stained and blood-drained Christs, never accustoms himself afterwards to others.

And this hate, this same hate that circulates everywhere here, like a subterranean stream of lava, this same hate ...

It has its source in what is deepest in ourselves; we hate ourselves and not one another only, but each one his own self.

“But you people have no real love of life, although you are tenacious of it,” another foreigner said to me once, a Frenchman, as one who makes a discovery. And I replied: “Perhaps!” He exclaimed again: “But this is a veritable cult of death!” And I answered: “Of death, no—of immortality!” The fear that if we die, we die utterly and altogether, makes us cling to life, and the hope of living another life makes us hate this one.

La joie de vivre. It has been translated la alegría de vivir. But it is only a translation. This alegría de vivir—let them say what they like—is a gallicism. It is not an authentic Spanish phrase. I do not remember to have met with it in any of our classics. For man’s greatest crime is that of having been born.[1] Indeed it is!

And this same literary ferocity with which our men of letters bite and tear and flay and quarter one another is not without its sharp voluptuousness for the spectator. And it is in this strife that our masterminds are tempered. Many of their ripest have been produced in the atmosphere of defamatory coteries. And they carry with them, naturally enough, the acrid flavour of their origin. They smell of hate. And the public, scenting hate, becomes excited and applauds. Applauds as it does at the bull-fight when it smells blood. Blood of the body or blood of the soul, what is there else?

Is this cultured? is this civilized? is this European? I don’t know. But it is Spanish.

Ought we to be ashamed of it? Why? Better to probe into it, scrutinize it, stir up the depths of it, make ourselves fully conscious of this hatred of our own selves. The evil lies in our being unconscious of it, for once it is revealed to us for what it is, a hatred and abhorrence of our own selves, it is already in the way of becoming ennobling and strengthening and redeeming. Do you not remember that terrible paradox of the Gospels about having to hate father and mother and wife and children in order to take up the cross, the blood-stained cross, and follow the Redeemer? Hatred of ourselves, when it is unconscious, obscure, purely instinctive, almost animal, engenders egoism; but when it becomes conscious, clear, rational, it is able to engender heroism. And there is a rational hatred, yes, there is.

Yes, there is a triumphant, heavenly, glorious Christ, He of the Transfiguration, He of the Ascension, He who sits at the right hand of the Father; but He is for when we shall have triumphed, for when we shall have been transfigured, for when we shall have ascended. But for here and now, in this bull-ring of the world, in this life which is nothing but tragic bull-fighting, the other Christ, the livid, the purple, the bleeding and exsanguious.

THE SEPULCHRE OF DON QUIXOTE

You ask me, my friend, if I know of any way of loosing a delirium, a vertigo, any kind of madness, upon these poor ordered and tranquil multitudes who are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves and die. Is there no means, you ask me, of reproducing the epidemic of the Flagellants or of the Tarantists? And you talk of the millennium.

Like you, I often feel a nostalgia for the Middle Ages; like you, I should like to live in the throes of the millennium. If we could make people believe that on a given day, say the 2nd of May, 1908,—the centenary of our shout of independence—Spain would come to an end for ever, that on that day we should be scattered like sheep, then I believe that the 3rd of May, 1908, would be the greatest day of our history, the dawn of a new life.

But now it’s all hopeless, utterly hopeless. Nothing whatever matters to anybody. And if any isolated individual attempts to agitate any problem or question, he is supposed to be prompted either by self-interest or by a thirst for notoriety and a passion for singularizing himself.

Not even madness is understood here to-day. Even of the madman they say that there is method and reason in his madness. The wretched multitude takes for granted the reason of unreason. If our Lord Don Quixote were to rise again and return to this Spain of his, they would go about looking for some ulterior purpose in his noble extravagances. If any one denounces an abuse, attacks injustice, fustigates orthodox platitudes, the slavish crowd asks: What is his object in that? What is he aiming at? Sometimes they believe and say that he does it in the hope of being paid to keep quiet; sometimes that he is actuated by base and despicable passions of vengeance and envy; sometimes that his motive is vainglory, that he only wants to make a stir in order to get himself talked about; sometimes that he does it for the sake of killing time, for amusement, for sport. Pity that there are so few who go in for this kind of sport!

Mark this well!—When confronted by any act of generosity, of heroism, of madness, all these stupid bachelors, curates and barbers of to-day think only of asking: Why does he do it? And as soon as they think they have discovered the reason of the action, whether their supposition is correct or not, they exclaim: Bah! he has done it for the sake of this or for the sake of that. As soon as they know the raison d’être of a thing, that thing has lost all its value for them. Such are the uses of logic, filthy logic.

To understand is to forgive, it has been said. And these mean souls need to understand in order to forgive their being humiliated, to forgive the indirect reproach of deeds and words that show up their own meanness.

When it has occurred to them to ask themselves, stupidly enough, why God made the world, they have answered: For His own glory! And the fools are as pompously satisfied with the answer as if they knew what is meant by the glory of God.

Things are made first, their wherefore comes afterwards. Give me any new idea about anything and it will tell me its wherefore afterwards.

Whenever I put forward some project, something which it appears to me ought to be done, there is always somebody who is sure to ask me: And afterwards? To such a question the only possible reply is another question. To the “And afterwards?” one can only ripost by an “And before?”

There is no future, there is never any future. This thing that is called the future is one of the greatest of deceptions. The real future is to-day. What is going to happen to us to-morrow? There is no to-morrow. What is happening to us to-day? That is the only question.

And so far as to-day is concerned, all these petty souls are quite content because to-day they exist. Existing suffices them. Existence, sheer, naked existence, fills their whole soul. They don’t feel that there is something more than existing.

But do they exist? Do they really exist? I believe not. For if they existed, if they really existed, they would suffer because they existed, existing would not content them. If they really and truly existed in time and in space they would suffer because they did not exist in eternity and in infinity. And this suffering, this passion, which is nothing other than the passion of God in us, of God who in us suffers at feeling Himself imprisoned in our finitude and our temporality, this divine suffering would cause them to break all those paltry logical chains with which they seek to bind their paltry memories to their paltry hopes, the illusion of their past to the illusion of their future.

“Why does he do it?” Did Sancho, perchance, never inquire why Don Quixote did the things that he did?

And to return to your question, to your preoccupation: With what collective madness could we inoculate these tranquil multitudes? With what delirium?

You yourself have hinted at a solution in one of those letters in which you bombard me with questions. “Do you not believe,” you asked me, “that it might be possible to start some new crusade?”

Yes, I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the redemption of the sepulchre of Don Quixote from the dominion of the bachelors, curates, barbers, dukes and canons who have taken possession of it. I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the redemption of the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly from the dominion of the mandarins of Reason.

They will defend their usurpation, naturally, and will endeavour to prove with many and elaborate reasons that the guard and custody of the sepulchre belongs to them. They guard it in order that the Knight shall not rise again.

These reasons must be answered with insults, with stone-throwings, with shouts of passion, with lance-thrusts. These people are not to be reasoned with. If you try to reason against their reasons, you are lost.

If they ask you, as they usually do, by what right you claim the sepulchre, answer nothing. They will find out afterwards. Afterwards ... perhaps when both they and you no longer exist, at any rate not in this world of appearances.

And this holy crusade has one great advantage over those other holy crusades which spread the dawn of a new life upon this old world. Those other ardent crusaders knew where the sepulchre of Christ was, where it was said that it was; but our new crusaders will not know where the sepulchre of Don Quixote is to be found. It must be sought for in the act of fighting to redeem it.

Your quixotesque madness has led you more than once to speak to me of quixotism as of a new religion. And I must tell you that this new religion which you propose, if it should ever come to materialize, would have two notable characteristics. First, that we are not sure whether its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote—not Cervantes, of course—was a real man, a man of flesh and bone; indeed, we rather suspect that he was a pure fiction. And second, that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet; the butt and laughing-stock of the world.

It is courage that we need most of all—courage to face ridicule. Ridicule is the weapon wielded by all the miserable bachelors, barbers, curates, canons and dukes who guard the hidden sepulchre of the Knight of Folly. The Knight who made all the world laugh but never made a joke himself. He had too great a soul to make jokes. He was laughed at for his seriousness.

Begin then, my friend, to play Peter the Hermit and call the people to join you, to join us, and let us all go to redeem this sepulchre which lies we know not where. The crusade itself will reveal the holy place to us.

You will see that as soon as the sacred squadron begins to march, a new star will appear in the sky, a bright and sounding star, which will sing a new song in the long night that encompasses us, and the star will begin to move when the squadron of the crusaders begins to march, and when they have conquered in their crusade, or when they have all succumbed—which is perhaps the only way of truly conquering—the star will fall from the sky, and the place where it falls will be the place of the sepulchre. The sepulchre will be where the squadron dies.

And where the sepulchre is, there is the cradle, there is the birth-place. And from there the bright and sounding star will mount again heavenwards....

Question me no more, dear friend. When you force me to speak of these things, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my heart, sick with the atmosphere of conventionality that harasses and oppresses me on all sides, sick with the slime of the slough of falsehood in which we are mired, sick with scrabbling cowardice which shows itself on every hand, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my sick heart visions without reason, concepts without logic, things of which I know not the meaning and whose meaning I do not wish to try to fathom.

What do you mean by that? you ask me yet again. And I reply: Perhaps I don’t even know myself.

No, my friend, no. The meaning of many of these utterances of my spirit I do not know myself, or rather it is not I who know them. There is someone within me who dictates them to me, who speaks them to me. I obey him and I never penetrate within to behold his face or to ask his name. Only I know that if I beheld his face and if he told me his name, I should die that he might live.

I am ashamed of having sometimes created fictitious beings, the personages of my novels, in order that I might put into their mouths that which I dare not put into my own and make them say in jest what I feel in deadly earnest.

You know me, and you know how far I am from intentionally going in search of paradoxes, extravagances, and mannerisms—whatever some dull fools may think. You and I, my good friend, my only absolute friend, have often debated between ourselves as to what madness really is, and we have commented upon that saying of Ibsen’s Brand, the spiritual son of Kierkegaard, to the effect that the man who is mad is the man who is alone. And we have agreed that madness ceases to be madness when it becomes collective, when it is the madness of a whole people, of the whole human race perhaps. In so far as a hallucination becomes collective, becomes popular, becomes social, it ceases to be a hallucination and becomes a reality, something that is external to each one of those who share it. And you and I are agreed that the multitudes, the people, our Spanish people, must be inoculated with some madness or other, the madness of some one of its members who is mad—but really mad, not mad only in jest. Mad, and not foolish.

You and I, my good friend, have been scandalized at that which they call here fanaticism and which—to our shame be it said—is not fanaticism at all. No, nothing is fanaticism that is regulated and restrained and directed by bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and dukes; nothing is fanaticism that carries a banner inscribed with logical formulas, nothing that has a program, nothing that holds out for to-morrow merely a proposition that an orator can develop methodically in a speech.

Once—do you remember?—we saw a group of eight or ten youths and one of them said: “Let’s do something rash!” and the others followed him. And you and I long for the people to get together and shout: “Let’s do something rash!” and begin to march. And if any bachelor, any barber, any curate, any canon or any duke should stop them and say: “My children, that’s right! I see that you are bursting with heroism and righteous indignation. I also will go with you. But before we all go, and I along with you, to do this rash deed, don’t you think that we ought to agree as to the rashness that we are going to commit?”—if any of these mandarins should stop them and say that, then they ought to knock him down on the spot and walk over him, trampling on him, and that would be a beginning of the heroic rashness. Don’t you think, my friend, that there are many lonely souls amongst us whose heart craves for some rashness, something to set it aflame? Go then and see if you can’t gather them together and form them into a squadron and start us on the march—for I will go with them and march behind you—to redeem the sepulchre of Don Quixote, which lies, thank God, we know not where. The bright and sounding star will tell us.

But—you say in your hours of depression, when your spirit fails you—may it not be that when we think we are marching forward into new countries, we are really all the time revolving round the same spot? In that case the star will rest quietly over our heads and the sepulchre will be within us. And then the star will fall, but it will fall in order that it may bury itself in our souls. And our souls will be turned to light, and when they are all fused together in the bright and sounding star, the star will mount upwards, brighter still, and it will change into a sun, a sun of eternal melody, to lighten the sky of our redeemed country.

Forward then! And take care that no bachelors, barbers, curates, canons or dukes disguised as Sancho Panzas join the sacred squadron of crusaders. No matter if they ask you for islands; what you have got to do is to throw them out directly they ask to be informed of the itinerary of the march, directly they begin to talk about a program, directly they whisper to you and ask you, maliciously, to tell them the whereabouts of the sepulchre. Follow the star! And do like the Knight—redress the wrong that lies in front of you. Do now what is to be done now; do here what is to be done here.

Begin the march! Where are we going? The star answers: To the sepulchre! What are we going to do on the way, as we march? What? Fight! Fight, and how?

How? If you come across a man who is telling lies, shout out Liar! in his face, and forward! If you come across a man who is stealing, shout out Thief! and forward! If you come across a man who is talking fool-talk to a crowd listening with gaping mouths, shout out Idiots! and forward! Always forward!

“And is this the way,” a would-be crusader asks me, “that you propose to abolish lying and thieving and foolishness from the world?” Why not? The most pusillanimous of all pusillanimities, the most detestable and pestilent sophistry of cowardice, is that of saying that it is no use denouncing a thief because others will go on stealing, that nothing is gained by calling a fool a fool to his face, for this will not lessen the sum of foolishness in the world.

Yes, it has got to be repeated a thousand and one times—if you can finish once, only once, utterly and for ever, with only one liar, then you will have finished with lying for good and all.

March then! And throw out of the sacred squadron all those who begin to pay too much attention to the step that has to be kept on the march, to its time and rhythm. Above all, out with those who are always talking about rhythm. They will turn your squadron into a quadrille and the march into a dance. Out with them! Let them go and sing to the flesh somewhere else.

Those who would seek to turn your marching squadron into a quadrille call themselves and call one another poets. They are not. They are anything else you like. They only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity, to see what it is like, to get a new sensation, and to amuse themselves on the way. Out with them!

They it is whose Bohemian tolerance contributes to the maintenance of cowardice and falsehood and all the other ignominies that overwhelm us. When they preach liberty, the only liberty they are thinking about is that of making free with their neighbour’s wife. They are compact of sensuality, and they have a sensual attitude even to the great ideas that they are enamoured of. They are incapable of marrying themselves to any great and pure idea and begetting a family upon it; they only intoxicate themselves with ideas. They make mistresses of them, and sometimes tire of them after a single night. Out with them!

If when on the march anyone wants to pluck a flower that smiles by the roadside, let him pluck it, but in passing, without stopping, and let him follow the squadron, whose leader must not take his eyes off the bright and sounding star. And if he fastens the flower to his breastplate, not to look at himself but for others to look at, out with him! Let him go off, with his flower in his buttonhole, and dance somewhere else.

Listen, my friend. If you wish to fulfil your mission and serve your country, you must needs make yourself hateful to all those sensible young men who see the world only through the eyes of the woman they love. Or worse still: your words must be strident and bitter in their ears.

The squadron must halt only at night, at the edge of the wood or in the shadow of the mountain. The crusaders will pitch their tents, they will wash their feet, they will sup on what their wives have prepared for them, and afterwards they will beget sons on them, they will give them a kiss, and then they will fall asleep and the following day they will continue their march. And when any one of them dies, they will leave him by the roadside, shrouded in his armour, to the mercy of the ravens. Let the dead bury their dead.

If during the march anyone essays to play the fife or the pipe or the flute or the guitar or whatever it may be, break his instrument and throw him out of the ranks, for he hinders the others from hearing the song of the star. And, what is more, he himself does not hear it. And he who does not hear the celestial song must not go in quest of the sepulchre of the Knight.

They will talk to you, these poet-dancers. Pay no heed to them. He who begins to play his Pan-pipes beneath the sky of heaven and does not hear the music of the spheres, does not deserve to hear it. He does not know the abyss-deep depths of the poetry of fanaticism, he does not know the infinite poetry of empty temples, without lights, without ornament, without images, without pomps, without incense, without anything of what is called art.

Throw all these Pan-pipe dancers out of the squadron. Throw them out before they leave you for a mess of pottage. They are the cynical philosophers, the tolerant Bohemians, the good fellows who understand everything and forgive everything. And he who understands everything understands nothing and he who forgives everything forgives nothing. They have no scruples about selling themselves. As they live in two worlds at the same time, they are able to preserve their liberty in the other world and sell themselves as slaves in this. They serve art and at the same time they are the servants of López or Pérez or Rodriguez.

It has been said that hunger and love are the two mainsprings of human life. Of this low human life, of the life of earth. The dancers dance only because of hunger or because of love; hunger of the flesh, love also of the flesh. Throw them out of the squadron and let them dance their fill in yonder meadow, while one plays the pipe, another claps his hands to the music, and another sings in praise of his pottage or of his mistress’s thighs. And there let them invent new dancesteps, new pirouettes, new figures of a rigadoon.

And if anyone shall come to you and say that he knows how to construct bridges and that perhaps a time will come when you will wish to avail yourself of his science in order to cross over a river, out with him! Out with the engineer! Rivers will be crossed by wading or swimming them, even if half the crusaders drown themselves. Let the engineer go off and build bridges somewhere else, where they are badly wanted. For those who go in quest of the sepulchre, faith is bridge enough.