Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

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.