Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

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.