Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

I well remember how, on the afternoon after my arrival, I was sitting in a café on the Plaza Mayor when the door opened and my eyes fell upon the arresting figure of a man half-way through the fifties, clad in a double-breasted blue-serge jacket with a rim of white collar falling over a kind of clerical waistcoat that was void of the usual triangular opening for the display of shirt and necktie, his head crowned by a round parsonical black hat. There was an almost aggressive announcement of bluff health and energy in the erect carriage of the body, the alert set of the head on squared shoulders, the thick brush-like crop of iron-grey hair, the crisp curl of the close-trimmed beard that emphasized rather than masked the firm lines of the jaw, the keen glance behind gold-rimmed spectacles of eyes that gleamed bright and brown like the eyes of a bird of prey. It would have been difficult for one to whom he was a stranger to have guessed his vocation from his appearance. Certainly never was philosopher less sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. The tan that bronzed a skin glowing with the flush of health seemed to tell of a life that was spent in the air of the mountains rather than in the study. It could scarcely be doubted that the figure standing there in the doorway was that of a man of action and a fighter.

During the course of the next two months I had ample opportunity to observe the daily routine of Unamuno’s life at Salamanca. An early riser, he may be seen in the streets before nine o’clock on his way to the lecture-room. After the midday comida, at which he usually abstains from both wine and meat, he is accustomed to take his coffee at the Circulo Salmantino with a group of friends whose thought and convictions are as widely varying as their occupations—university professors, students, doctors, magistrates, writers, poets and men of business. The quite unacademic conversation ranges over the whole gamut of human interests. While the talk is flowing freely or the argument being waged, Unamuno—who, by the way, is a non-smoker—may sometimes be seen folding square sheets of paper with deft fingers into complicated geometrical patterns which presently grow into astonishingly realistic shapes of animals. Before the party breaks up, his table is not infrequently covered with a menagerie of pigs, jumping frogs, vultures and other wildfowl, to the no small delight of the street urchins whose noses are flattened against the other side of the wide plate-glass window. This arte salmatino, as its inventor calls it, presents baffling constructional problems, the solutions of which are sometimes thought out upon abstract geometrical principles in the sleepless watches of the night.

When most of the members of the tertulia have withdrawn either to take their afternoon siesta or resume their avocations, Unamuno sets out for a long walk into the country, accompanied in winter by the few who are willing to brave the icy winds that sweep over the treeless tableland from the snow-clad summits of the sierras. During the walk the conversation is continued without intermission, the party halting to form a circle round the speaker whenever a point arises that demands special emphasis or elucidation. As these points arise at frequent intervals, a spectacle that must often arrest the wondering gaze of the peasant hurrying on his mule along the high road to Salamanca on wintry afternoons, is that of a group of individuals muffled in greatcoats and waterproofs, with collars raised and hat-brims pulled down in a vain endeavour to protect tingling ears from the lashing flaws of rain and sleet, gathered round a robust, coatless figure, with double-breasted blue jacket thrown open to the blast, whose concentration upon the subject-matter of his discourse renders him apparently oblivious of the inclemency of the elements and the physical discomfort of his auditors. The point having been elucidated, the party struggles on again in the teeth of the gale, some of its weaker members perhaps hoping that no fresh dialectical crisis will arise until further exercise has restored the benumbed circulation.

On days of storm or heavy rain, when faint-hearted disciples shrink from the exposure of the open country, the afternoon diversion takes the form of a promenade beneath the arcades of the Plaza Mayor, perhaps the finest square of its kind in Spain, into which towards evening most of the population of the city seems to empty itself. The crowd surges round in two opposing streams, for a time-honoured custom demands that the men shall proceed in one direction and the women in another. Unamuno diversifies the monotony of this promenade by a curious amusement. Having abstracted the crumb from his luncheon roll and kneaded it up into a kind of snowball, he manufactures therefrom a supply of pellets, and these, during the course of his walk, he propels by means of a dexterous flick of the middle finger with deadly accuracy at selected members of the crowd. Whether the principle of selection is based upon friendly interest or personal dislike, or whether indeed there is any principle at all, is a question that must be left undetermined.

About dusk he returns home and withdraws to his study, a spacious, lofty square room, the plain workshop of the intellectual worker, furnished only with a large writing-table, a few simple chairs, and crowded bookshelves which not only surround the walls but occupy most of the floor-space. A brazier underneath the table emits from its white ashes a faint warmth scarcely perceptible to ordinary senses. Having refreshed himself with a drink of cold water, Unamuno takes up the work in hand and writes until the hour arrives for the evening meal with his family. The theatre does not attract him—I only saw him present once when Ibsen was being played—and it is very seldom that a social function keeps him from going to bed betimes.

Profound as is his attachment to the city which has been his home for over thirty years, Unamuno always welcomes an opportunity to escape from streets and squares into the open country and the mountains. His knowledge of the Peninsula, as his books of travel testify, is both wide and intimate. His visits to the more distant provinces are of course reserved for the vacations, but during term-time his week-ends and the holidays occurring on the seasonal feasts are often spent in the regions of the Sierra de Gredos and the Peña de Francia. During these excursions he touches life at a multiplicity of centres and penetrates into all the various social strata. At every stage of the journey—at the railway stations, in the train, at the local club, in the inn, in the village shop or the peasant’s cottage—he is usually to be seen at the centre of a group of men, discussing local affairs and politics, inquiring into the technique of trades, saturating himself in the atmosphere of popular thought and belief. His knowledge and love of Spain are thus fed by a familiarity with the inner life of the people, the intra-historical life, as he calls it, the life that flows by unobserved for the most part by politicians and publicists and never agitates the surface of history.

A minor outcome of this contact with the people, and with the charros or peasants of the province of Salamanca in particular, has been the enrichment of his vocabulary by many of those pungent, expressive and sometimes beautiful words and locutions which have long since disappeared from literary Spanish but still abound in peasant speech. This racy idiom of the soil often gives a peculiar tang to Unamuno’s writing. When accused by the literary critic, as not infrequently happens, of sprinkling his prose with words unearthed from the dusty works of some sixteenth or seventeenth-century author, he will reply that the so-called archaisms, though possibly unfamiliar in literary coteries, still enjoy a vigorous life in the speech of the people.

It will no doubt have been already gathered that Unamuno, like all good Spaniards, delights in talk. Indeed, some of those who have observed how considerable a part of his leisure is spent in general conversation may have wondered how and when he finds time for the production of the large volume of his writing. The answer is that much of his thought is generated and shaped into form in the act of talking. He has a disrelish, amounting almost to a prejudice, for writing that has not the vibration and elasticity of living speech, the prose of men who are usually found to be non-talkers. “Ideas come with talking,” I have heard him say. “One must speak, one must have to put one’s thought into words, one must hear how the words sound spoken. Writing for oneself is not enough.” It is in the conversational encounter, in the face-to-face conflict of disputants, in the exertion to convince an opponent, to unravel a difficulty, to press home a personal conviction, that his mind is strung to its highest tension, seizes upon the aptest and keenest words with an instinctive sense of their effective values and wields them like sharp and flashing weapons. Returning to his study after a discussion at the Circulo Salmantino or an afternoon’s discourse on the wind-swept heights above the Tormes, he transcribes with the speed of dictation the substance of his argument or homily in phrases still vibrating with the passion of the spoken word. Hence his prose retains in a degree exceptional even in Spanish literature the qualities of animated talk—rapid, emphatic, exclamatory, elliptical, disjointed, charged with intonation and gesture. And this written talk, it must be noted, never develops into written oratory, for it is addressed in the first instance not to the general public but to the personal interlocutor; it is the continuation or recapitulation of talk with a friend, or the reply to the confessions of a correspondent, or sometimes the communing of the writer with alter ego.

There are times when the channel of written speech seems to afford too narrow an outlet for the flood of passion storming through it. Unamuno seems to be impatient of the mutism of the printed page, as if, like the written score of music, it were incomplete lacking embodiment in sound. The written symbols are an inadequate substitute for the bodily presence, incapable of conveying the conviction, the force, the sense of mass, which only the living organism with all its full-charged vitality can impart. It might even be conjectured that for Unamuno writing is after all only a pis-aller—he would prefer to talk, or rather he would prefer to dispense with words altogether and impose himself in some transcendental act of communion. Of one of Goya’s pictures, the tumultuous Third of May in the Prado, the Italian critic De Amicis says: “It is the last point which painting can reach before being transmuted into action; having passed this point, one throws away the brush and seizes the dagger.” A similar sense of an intolerable straining of the medium is sometimes felt in reading Unamuno. The texture of language is stretched to the breaking-point; words are contorted in an endeavour to force them beyond the limits of their capacity; grammar and syntax collapse before the rush of passionate utterance. It is the pressure and drive of a whole personality that seeks to translate itself into words and finds in the end that it is untranslatable.

The impulse towards action and the exertion of personal influence which forms one of the dominant features of Unamuno’s character, finds a considerable part of its expression in his participation in the public affairs of his country. He has little patience with the view that the scholar or professor ought to stand aside from the larger issues of the day in order to devote all his energies to perfecting himself as a machine for grinding out erudition and culture. Indeed, he considers that politics are themselves an invaluable instrument of culture, in that for large masses of the people they provide the principal, perhaps the only avenue of approach to a consideration of general ideas. Devoting himself in his political activities primarily to the exposition of these general ideas, the basic principles of citizenship, Unamuno has always evinced a whole-hearted contempt for that preoccupation with political machinery and an intrigue which tends to make the professional politician, particularly perhaps in Spain, little more than an electioneerer. Unamuno is among the prophets rather than the politicians, and his followers form not a party but a band of disciples. “All round the ring,” he said to me once, “sit the spectators. They applaud or hiss. But down in the arena, there I fight alone, face to face with the bull.”