Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

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.