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.