Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

INTRODUCTION

No writer ever stood less in need of an introduction than Miguel de Unamuno, for probably none ever revealed himself so naturally and so nakedly in his writings. The identity between the author and the man is absolute. He has a way of putting the whole of himself into all that he writes so that to read him is not merely to learn his views as a philosopher or a publicist, but to know his loves and hates, his hopes and despairs, as a man of flesh and bone. His method of communicating his message is not to address an audience from the elevation of the pulpit or the platform, but to accost the individual face to face, to grasp him warmly by the hand, to look him full in the eyes and tell him what is in his heart. The task of the introducer therefore may be restricted to prefixing to the intimacy so immediately established between reader and author some few notes relative to the latter’s history and the background against which he presents himself.

The determining events in his outward biography are soon told. Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was born in Bilbao on September 29, 1864. Although he comes of pure Basque stock, Unamuno’s mother-tongue was Castilian, a fact which precludes the supposition that the idiosyncrasies of his style are to be attributed to an early familiarity with the Basque speech. His father, who had spent most of his life in Mexico, died in 1870. Four years later Bilbao was besieged and bombarded by the Carlist troops, the first shell falling only a few houses away from that in which his family was living. The events of the siege naturally made a lively impression upon the mind of the ten-year-old boy. At the first sound of the horns blown to give warning of the renewal of the bombardment, the family took shelter with the neighbours in the cellars, from which the youngsters sallied forth to collect the still burning fragments of the shells. The schools were closed and the whole town became an extended playground, offering to the idle schoolboys the novel liberty of clambering about roofless churches and conducting miniature bombardments of ruined houses with projectiles gathered from the debris. This exciting holiday was terminated by the entry of the liberating troops on May 2, 1874. These personal experiences of Spain’s last civil war provided Unamuno with a background for his first novel, Paz en la Guerra.

The religious atmosphere of Unamuno’s home was that of a Catholicism whose traditions of simple and heart-felt piety bore a certain affinity to those of Anglo-Saxon Quakerism. The youthful Miguel was a member of the guild or Congregación of San Luis Gonzaga and on the feast of Corpus Christi used to walk in procession through the streets with lighted candle in his hand and the medal of the order suspended upon his breast. About the age of fourteen he passed through that phase of spiritual ferment which usually characterizes the entrance of the soul into puberty, a period of vague aspirations towards sanctity mingled with the romanticism engendered in a lively imagination by the reading of Ossian. This religious Schwärmerei, however, was tempered by the course of philosophy prescribed by his study for his baccalaureate. Introduced through the reading of the Catalan philosopher Balmes to the works of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, he at once plunged into the vertigo of metaphysics and proceeded to elaborate and transcribe into a twopenny note-book a philosophical system of his own, “very symmetrical and bristling with formulas.”

In 1880 Unamuno went to Madrid to continue his studies. Passionately attached to his native Bilbao and the wild mountain country in which all his youthful summers had been passed, Unamuno has related how he entered Madrid with tears in his eyes. His spirit never became acclimated to the atmosphere of the capital and the years which he spent there were rendered unhappy by his sense of isolation and home-sickness, preoccupations with ill health, intellectual strain and acute spiritual crises. Having taken his doctor’s degree in philosophy and letters, he presented himself as a candidate for a professorship, first in psychology, logic and ethics, and then in metaphysics; but no doubt owing to a certain uncompromising independence of mind and contempt of the conventional curriculum, he failed to obtain the suffrages of the examiners. After two further unsuccessful attempts to obtain a chair in Latin, he was finally appointed to a professorship in Greek by a board presided over by the famous scholar Menendez y Pelayo. After returning to Bilbao, where he married, he took up his residence in Salamanca in 1891. There he conducted two courses of lectures, one on Greek literature, the other on the evolution of the Castilian language, and nine years later, in 1900, he was appointed to the Rectorship of the University.

Unamuno has always been possessed of a formidable capacity for work. His scholastic activities, his administrative duties as head of the University, his participation in municipal affairs, absorbed only a portion of his energies. An omnivorous reader, he is familiar not only with the cultures of the ancient world but with all the modern literatures of Europe and America, most of which his extensive knowledge of languages has enabled him to read in the original. But the fertility of his mind and spirit manifested itself above all in a continual stream of creative work, taking the manifold forms of essays, poetry, novels, criticism and philosophy. His career as a publicist coincided with the period following Spain’s disastrous war with the United States, during which the fortunes of his country appeared to be at their lowest ebb. Unamuno at once took a foremost place in that group of writers and public men, known as “the generation of ’98,” who were preoccupied with the problem of national regeneration. Whereas the majority of the regenerationists, however, pointed to “modernization” and “Europeanization” as the only possible path leading to material and cultural progress, Unamuno advocated a return to the eternal tradition of Spain and held that a spiritual renaissance was the necessary pre-condition of her restoration as a world-power.

It was impossible for a man with so deep and intimate a love for his country to confine himself to the publication of general encyclicals from a professorial and not to step down into the stormy arena of practical politics. Without identifying himself with any one of the official political parties, Unamuno conducted a personal and independent campaign by means of newspaper articles and public addresses, frankly and fearlessly denouncing abuses and corruption wherever he discerned them, whether displayed in the acts of rulers or inherent in the governmental system of the country. Such outspoken criticism from one who held his appointment from the state savoured too much, to the government of the day, of insubordination and was reproved accordingly by his removal from the office of Rector of the University of Salamanca. Some time afterward, in virtue of two articles which he published in a Valencia newspaper, the ex-Rector was deemed to have contravened the law of lèse-majesté, for which offence he was formally condemned by the courts to a period of sixteen years’ imprisonment. The sentence, which was of course never intended to be carried out, was subsequently annulled by the royal grant of pardon.

The coup d’état of September, 1923, by which General Primo de Rivera suspended the constitution and established the Military Directory, naturally aroused Unamuno’s vehement protestation. Liberty of speech, however, formed no part of the program of the new régime and the Dictator, dispensing with the customary civil processes of writ, trial and judgment, replied by an arbitrary decree of deportation. On Feb. 21, 1924, Unamuno received notice to prepare to proceed within twenty-four hours under escort to Fuerteventura, the most remote and barren of the Canary Islands. It is possible that the authorities might have been willing to connive at the flight of their captive to the Portuguese frontier, distant only some eighty miles from Salamanca; but Unamuno refused to relieve them from any of the embarrassment which the consequences of their action might entail. He packed up the few necessaries for his journey, put a couple of books in his pocket—the Greek New Testament and Leopardi’s poems—and awaited the arrival of the escort.

The news of the banishment of one of Spain’s foremost writers and patriots was received with a spontaneous outburst of denunciation both at home and abroad. Numerous councils of universities and learned societies in Europe and America passed resolutions of protest; the newspaper press of almost every country published articles by representative literary men condemning the action of the government and testifying to the universality of the esteem which Unamuno had won in the international republic of letters. The Directory was compelled to recognize that the sole result of its act of petty tyranny had been to raise the prestige of its victim and damage its own. A project for the rescue of the exile was secretly organized in France, but its fruition was forestalled by the publication of a decree of amnesty in July, 1924. Unamuno embarked on the sailing-ship which had been dispatched for his deliverance and on arriving at Madeira took ship to Cherbourg. Although free to return to Spain, he felt that under the present régime his liberty of action would be too much circumscribed and therefore preferred to take up his residence temporarily in Paris.

I think that it was in the year 1912 when travelling in Spain that I chanced to buy a book entitled Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos by Miguel de Unamuno. Both the book and its author were then unkown to me. Before I had read many pages I knew that I was listening to a voice that spoke with that accent of sincerity and intimacy which gives the assurance of immediate contact with a living man, a man of flesh and bone, a man who had suffered, despaired, hoped and struggled with an intensity that burned in every word. Next year was published Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida, that passionate record of the adventures of the spirit that takes its place with the self-revelations of St. Augustine, Pascal, Amiel and Kierkegaard. I resolved that if I could accomplish it this voice should be heard in the countries that speak the English tongue. The War intervened, and it was not until 1920 that I found myself in Salamanca with the typewritten sheets of the translation of “The Tragic Sense of Life” ready to be submitted to the author for revision.