Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

I think it was Taine who observed that the majority of French geniuses were either themselves country-born or the sons of country-born parents. And I assure you that I should find it difficult to believe in the genius of a Parisian born of Parisians.

Guerra Junqueiro once said to me: “You are fortunate in living in a city in which you can walk along the streets dreaming, without fear of people disturbing your dream!” And certainly in Madrid it is impossible to walk along the streets dreaming, not so much for fear of motors, trams and carriages as because of the continual stream of unknown faces. The distraction of a great city, so agreeable to those who must have something, no matter what, to occupy their imagination, is necessarily vexatious to those whose chief concern is not to have their imagination diverted. Personally I find nothing more monotonous than a Paris boulevard. The people seem to me like shadows. I cannot endure a crowd of unknown faces.

I am afraid of Madrid. That is to say, I am afraid of myself when I go there. It is easy to say that in great cities everyone can live the life that suits him best, but it is easier to say it than to do it. When I am in the capital, I return home every night regretting having gone to the party or to the meeting that I went to and resolving never to go again, but only to break my vow the very next day. I am surrounded, hemmed in and invaded by a lethal atmosphere of compliance, an atmosphere that is generated by this so-called life of society.

I have always felt an aversion from this so-called life of society, which has for its object the cultivation of social relationships. Is there anything more terrible than a “call”? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centres for the propagation of platitudes.

A man of society, a drawing-room man who can make himself agreeable to women when he pays a call, is always a man whose principal concern is to suppress any arresting spontaneity, not to let his own personality show through. For it is a man’s own personality that people find irritating. People like to meet the average man, the normal man, the man who has nothing exceptional about him. The exception is always irritating. How many times I have heard the terrible phrase: “This man irritates me.” Yes, it is “the man” that irritates, and the hardest fight for the man who feels that he is a man is the fight to win respect for his own individuality.

And in a small town? Its stage is very restricted; the players soon tire of playing the parts allotted to them and the real men begin to appear underneath, with all their weaknesses—that is to say, with precisely that which makes them men. I have a great liking for provincial life, for there it is easiest to discern tragedy lurking beneath an appearance of calm. And just as much as I abhor comedy, I love tragedy. And, above all, tragi-comedy.

I have heard it said that there are no such seething intestine rancours and dissensions as in a merchant vessel or a monastery; that whenever men are obliged to live together, cut off from the rest of the world, their personalities, their most real and intimate selves, immediately clash against one another. And I dare say that this is the only way of attaining that knowledge of ourselves which ought to be our chief aim. It seems to me scarcely possible that a man should get to know himself by shutting himself up in the wilderness, contemplating—what? The best way of knowing one’s self is to clash, heart against heart, that is to say, rock against rock, with one’s fellow.

I know that I shall be told that I am indulging my love of paradox, but nevertheless I maintain that if it is true that the most ardent admirations are those which are disguised in the form of envy, very often the strongest attractions are those which take the appearance of hate. In one of these tragi-comic, or rather comi-tragic, small towns I know two men who, though obliged to see one another constantly in the way of business, never greet one another in the street and profess a mutual detestation. Nevertheless at bottom they feel themselves reciprocally attracted to one another and each one is continually preoccupied by the other.

These irreconcilable feuds into which small towns are so often divided are much more favourable to the development of strong personalities than the bland comedy of a great metropolis, where those who fight a duel to the death on the public stage embrace one another behind the scenes. Do you suppose that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is possible in a city that counts its inhabitants by the million?

And I ask you, do you suppose that anyone who sees a multitude of people in the course of the day, listens to this man to-day, to another man to-morrow and to another man the day after, and attends twenty or thirty conferences—do you think that such a one can preserve his spiritual integrity without any leakage? In such a life a hedgehog would end by becoming a lamb, its quills would turn into softest fleece, and for my part I would rather be a hedgehog than a lamb.