Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

To the suggestion sometimes expressed by his well-wishers that he should withdraw from the arena in order to devote himself more exclusively to poetry and philosophy, Unamuno would reply that this poetry and philosophy are simply the outcome of his intense, energetic and passionate living. If he had never known the dangers, the ardours, the hopes and despairs of battle, his poetry might have withered for lack of roots. Primum vivere, deinde philosopari—the philosopher must first live before he can philosophize. And the end of life, Unamuno has said, is living, not understanding. Nothing is more repugnant to his spirit than the conception of æsthetics embodied in the catch-phrase, “art for art’s sake.” The idea that letters can be separated from life and literature produced in vacuo is inconceivable to one whose impulse to write springs directly from his zeal to affect and mould life. Unamuno provides yet another corroboration of Tchekov’s maxim that all great writers have axes to grind.

If the object of Unamuno’s political opponents in banishing him from the society of his fellows to the ocean-girt desert of Fuerteventura was to reduce his spirit to submission, they little knew the man they had to deal with. He has never overprized the amenities of civilization and it is probable that he would have felt much more in exile if he had been condemned to live in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Tenerife or Las Palmas. The Canaries have been identified with the Fortunate Isles of the ancient world, and Unamuno remarked humorously that Fuerteventura was indeed fortunate among islands in being one where there were no hotels de luxe, no bull-fights, no cinemas, no football, no boy-scouts. But apart from its lack of the more futile expedients for killing time, there is something in the spirit and even in the structure of this stern and naked island that was in harmony with Unamuno’s temperament. It is, as he phrased it, not merely desnudo but descarnado, not merely without vesture but without flesh. Like a bleached skeleton in the sun, it reveals every articulation of its structure. In its landscape everything fugitive gives place to what is enduring and elemental; it bears the impress of eternity rather than of time. Living in this austere but serene ambience, between the mountains and the sea, Unamuno found a refreshment of mental and spiritual energy, the activity of his inner life was perhaps never more intense and what he wrote during his four months’ exile was quarried from those deeper strata of his spirit where thought and passion lie embedded in a single matrix.

In Puerto de Cabras, the cluster of low whitewashed houses that forms the principal port of the island, time flowed in a tranquil stream that was scarcely agitated by the weekly arrival of the steamer bringing the mail, provisions, water, and out-of-date newspapers from Las Palmas. For the safer custody of the exile, fifty guardias civiles had been drafted to the island and stationed in couples at various points round the coast. Every letter which he wrote or received was first opened and censored by police officials. In other respects his liberty of movement within the island was not interfered with and he was free to visit the distant villages that are sparsely scattered like oases in the midst of the stone-strewn wilderness of extinct volcanoes. Unamuno occupied a room overlooking the sea in the principal fonda of the port. He usually rose before the bell of the little church on the other side of the wide cobbled street had rung for six o’clock Mass, and spent the morning working in his bedroom or composing a sonnet as he paced up and down the flat roof, bare-headed and stripped to the waist, in the sun. After a frugal lunch—the diet of Fuerteventura is of a Spartan simplicity!—he took a siesta during the heat of the afternoon and afterward strolled along the rock-bound shore or the carretera that leads into the interior of the island. Although the action can scarcely have come within the compass of their duties, it was not surprising to see the lounging soldiers spring to salute when their prisoner, with his native air of authority and command, passed before the barracks-gate. When the brief twilight fell and the camels, returning from browsing on the scanty scrub, padded with muffled footfall through the darkening street, Unamuno joined the circle of village notables who were wont to assemble nightly on a row of chairs ranged on the pavement in front of the general store. Then, until the tardy supper hour arrived, a flow of philosophy, philology, paradox, travel-lore and political wisdom fell upon the astonished ears of the shopkeepers and petty officials of the port. Fortunate islanders!

Perhaps there is no more distinguishing mark of greatness of character than that patience and inner quietude which springs from assurance of the ultimate efficacy of the force latent within the soul. No term had been fixed to Unamuno’s banishment; it might have been his fate, for all he knew, to have passed the best of his remaining years in the island wilderness of Fuerteventura. But so far from chafing at his enforced isolation and inaction, he seemed to be sustained by the consciousness that it was beyond the power of circumstances to prevent the work to which he had set his hand from accomplishing itself. Whatever might happen to the sower, the seed that had been scattered would go on bearing fruit. In the plans which his friends had made for his escape he took an uneager and slightly amused interest. A point was fixed not far from the port where it was arranged that between the hours of ten and twelve at night the exile should await a boat that was to carry him to a sailing-vessel lying somewhere off the coast. Owing to unforeseen delays, the vessel did not finally arrive until after the decree of banishment had been rescinded, and consequently many nights were spent in frustrated watching beneath the shadow of a ruined tower standing on a rocky ledge by the shore. These summer nights were breathlessly still, the bright globe of the moon rose up out of the sea into a clear sky thickly silvered with stars, the unrippled surface of the water stretched between the arms of the bay like a sheet of metal. In the distance the green harbour-light at the end of the stone jetty gleamed malignly. The only sound was the gurgling of the water in the hollows of the rocks. The far horizon was void of any vestige of a sail. Twelve o’clock came and the fruitless vigil was broken off. Not wholly fruitless, perhaps, for during these tranquil hours of waiting Unamuno kept a vigil of the spirit, the fruit of which will doubtless appear when the poems of his exile are made known to the world.

Of the two elements which appear to be combined in every philosophy, the impersonal, scientific investigation of the nature of reality and the personal affective reaction to the scheme of things thus envisaged, it is with the latter that Unamuno’s interest is overwhelmingly concerned. It may be that it is not so much this attitude that singularizes him as his candid avowal of it. At any rate, he himself appears to believe that the impersonal methods of philosophy merely provide a conceptional framework for the personal Weltanschauung of the philosopher. And the core of this inward affective problem must always be, for the human philosopher, the relation of man to the universe. It is this point where philosophy and religion meet in considering the problem of human destiny, that forms the burning focus of the main energies of Unamuno’s thought and passion.

What distinguishes Unamuno from most other thinkers—and perhaps one should say “feelers” rather than thinkers—is the intensity of his realization and awareness of his own personality, of his own unique individual being, and the passion with which he desires the indefinite persistence of this being. This is the main ground for the charge of egoism and egocentrism that has often been levelled against him. But so far from driving him to a narrow self-centred individualism, this passion is the source from which springs a generous sympathy with all humanity. He rightly insists upon the fact that the problem of personal immortality involves that of the future of the whole human species. His passionate concern for his own destiny, his own salvation, Unamuno transfers to all his brothers in humanity. The salvation of man, the central problem of all religion, is the axis about which his thought and emotion revolve. But it is salvation in what he understands to be the Catholic rather than the Protestant sense, salvation not so much from sin as from death, from annihilation.

To a man of the modern world, endowed with any special degree of sensitiveness to his own personality, this problem tends to become increasingly acute. The importance of man’s place in the universe is seen to diminish in direct ratio to his knowledge with regard to it. In the searchlight of science, the planet upon which he lives shrinks to infinitesimal proportions in relation to the incommensurable cosmic scheme; man takes his place no longer as the lord of creation but as an apparently meaningless by-product of the play of irresponsible and unconscious forces. This strange efflorescence of human consciousness in an obscure corner of the universe would appear to be a transitory phenomenon, resting upon an unstable equilibrium of natural forces and destined to vanish completely when the inevitable working of these same forces shall have dissipated the conditions under which life is able to sustain itself on this planet. This sense of the doom of annihilation impending over humanity is like a cloud looming upon the horizon of Unamuno’s consciousness and throwing a menacing shadow upon the whole terrestrial scene. It is the basis of his tragic sense of life. It projects upon the screen of his mind that vision which so often seems to occupy it, the vision of a world finally ordered and catalogued by human science, of a civilization perfected after æons of agonized human effort, existing without any human or other consciousness left to appropriate it.

It may be said that in the contemplation of this vision the only rational attitude for the human spirit to adopt is that of resignation to mortality. But this counsel can only be given by those who are affectively insensitive, and in Unamuno the will to live and to survive are too imperious to submit to it unprotestingly. The note of passionate protest rings in his writings. He inscribes upon his page the challenge of Sénancour’s Obermann: “L’homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est reservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice.” Life refuses to abdicate to reason; between the rationalistic and vitalistic attitude to existence there is an impassable gulf. His own personal solution is found in the inspiration and energy which he draws from this position of uncertainty and conflict. “I will not make peace between my heart and my head,” he cries; “rather let the one affirm what the other denies and the one deny what the other affirms, and I shall live by this contradiction.” His “Tragic Sense of Life,” which is the record of the encounter of his spirit with the problems centring round the salvation of man from death and annihilation, issues in the assertion that all virtue is based upon “uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable dogmatic foundation.” Convert Obermann’s sentence from its negative to a positive form—“if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an injustice”—and you get “the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.” A solution, perhaps, but a desperate one.

Unamuno’s concern is not only with the salvation of man from nothingness after death but also from the next-to-nothingness during life into which he is plunged by the processes of an inhumane civilization. He is never weary of affirming that man is an end in himself, not a means. He protests passionately against the sacrifice of the individual concrete man upon the altar of the abstract idea, whether the abstraction be that of the state, of society, of progress, of posterity, or of humanity itself. “They tell me that I am here to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live.” This individualism, it must be noted, has nothing in common with the anarchist’s undiscriminating revolt against society. Nobody realizes more fully than this champion of individualism that man is a social being, and that he can exist and grow to his full stature only in society. But the point which he is insistent in emphasizing and which so many social theorists appear to forget is that society exists for man, not man for society. “The weak point in our socialism,” he says, “is its confused notion of the supreme end of the individual life.” He is led to question the value of our modern civilization—that civilization which Spain is told by her would-be reformers that she ought to assimilate—because it has arrived at a point at which it suppresses rather than expands, enslaves rather than liberates, the life of the individual. Man becomes exhausted with tending the machinery of progress.

It is this distrust of the tendencies of modern Western civilization that causes Unamuno to turn to the ancient, and—as he is willing to consider—African, tradition of his own country. No native reformer or foreign critic can have said harder things of his compatriots than Unamuno. His essays reverberate with the sound of the lash with which he chastises the besetting sins of the Spaniards of to-day, their servitude to the spirit of routine, their intellectual and spiritual inertia, their paralysing mutual suspicion and envy, their renunciation of the life of adventure and danger. But Unamuno distinguishes between the Spain of the passing generations and the Spain of the eternal tradition, between the agitations that give a changing form to the surface and the life that sleeps and dreams in the depths of subconsciousness. This dreaming, undying, subliminal Spain is the Spain of his love and of his faith. He appeals from Spaniards to Spain. He seeks to awaken this inner Spain to full consciousness of itself. And when it awakens it is possible that this Spain may be unable to find its expression in the terms of our current civilization. The culture in which the intellect and ideals of the advance-guard of the so-called Kulturvölker naturally clothe themselves, becomes an alien and ill-fitting garment when forced upon the Iberian spirit. And perhaps the secret of this difference lies in the greater importance in the Spanish social structure of the part played by the concrete individual relatively to the instruments of culture. “Other peoples,” Unamuno says, “have left institutions, books—we have left souls.” His message to Spain might perhaps be resumed in Whitman’s words: “Produce great Persons: the rest follows.”