Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

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?