Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

A cardinal tenet of Unamuno’s creed is the superlative value of the individual soul. It is precious because it is unique and irreplaceable: “There cannot be any other I.” In the whole world there is only one Juan López or John Smith; the particular ingredients, good, bad or indifferent, that have combined to form this unique individuality can never again reunite in precisely the same proportions to form another identical combination. This theory, or rather this sense, of the uniqueness of personality may serve as the basis for an ethic. “Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact—that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable—a practical truth.” The whole duty of man is to discover himself, to discover his own reality, to discover what is unique in himself, to bring it to the light, not to shrink from exposing it, to express it in action and to impose it upon the world. The courage of self-affirmation is the virtue which Unamuno exhorts his fellow-countrymen to achieve. He presents a symbol of it in his vision of the Tower of Monterrey that lifts itself into the wintry air above the brown roofs of his beloved Salamanca, definite in its clean-cut contours, sure in its poise and self-containment, serenely affirming its uniqueness and indestructibility. It says itself, and to say himself is the utmost that a man can say.

But society, which is the necessary medium through which the individual must express himself, is a resistant medium. It seeks to impose conformity upon the individual. It resents the exceptional, the idiosyncratic. And the social canons that circumscribe the expression of the individual’s liberty of thought and conduct operate perhaps nowhere more oppressively than in Spain. They derive their sanction largely from a sentiment by no means peculiar to Spain though perhaps peculiarly rampant there, the sentiment of envy, the sense of bitterness and hostility that is evoked by any salient excellence. And the chief weapon which envy uses with which to assail the uniqueness of the individual is ridicule. The special form, therefore, of the courage of self-affirmation that is demanded of the heroic individual is the courage to confront ridicule. This courage finds its exemplary exponent in the figure of Don Quixote, whom Unamuno takes as the supreme symbol of the warfare of the individual soul. His “Commentary upon the Life of Don Quixote and Panza” is a clarion-call to his countrymen to emulate the quixotic qualities of courage and faith—faith, even though it be in illusion—the quixotic tenacity of conviction, and the quixotic contempt of the standards of worldly prudence and of the authority of common sense and the cold, mocking reason.

It must be claimed for Unamuno that he is, in the truest sense of the word, a great humanist. He himself distinguishes between the true humanism, which he calls the humanism of man, and the humanism which is concerned rather with “the things of man”—in other words, with culture as it is generally understood. Towards the latter his attitude is tinctured with suspicion. For him there is an element of the inhumane in the cult of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and in the cult of science as a mere cataloguing of existence. Culture must have reference to character and perhaps its definition as “the best that is known and has been thought in the world” he would feel to be incomplete without the addition of “the best that has been felt and done.” But mere knowledge and classification of the movements of the human mind or the achievements of human energy do not necessarily of themselves touch the heart to finer issues. The most urgent need, at any rate as he sees it in his own country, is not so much for quickened intelligence as for reawakened capacity for feeling and enthusiasm. By itself sceptical enlightenment tends to paralyse action and the soil of a chilly intellectualism is not the most fertile for the burgeoning of that seed of faith from which all fruitful human endeavour must ultimately spring. Unamuno seeks to generate warmth of feeling as the necessary condition of high achievement. “Warmth, warmth, more warmth,” he cries, “for we die of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night but the frost that kills.” Culture, therefore, as he understands and counsels it, is not a dry light but an ardent flame and its purpose is to kindle “the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle, of intensest disquietude, of intensest despair.”

Unamuno has always protested passionately against any attempt to affix a label to him. If a definition of himself is demanded of him, he replies that he is “a man of contradiction and strife.” The contradictions of which he is the synthesis are those of the Catholic and the agnostic, the mystic and the realist, the vitalist and the rationalist, the contemplative and the man of action, the contradictions inherent in the man who finds consolation in despair and peace in conflict. But if he himself is not to be circumscribed within the narrow limits of a definition, perhaps the scope of his aim and achievement may be most succinctly resumed in that description which Giordano Bruno gave of himself, dormitantium animarum excubitor—an awakener of sleeping souls.

THE SPIRIT OF CASTILE

From whatever point you penetrate into the Spanish peninsula, you will find yourself confronted almost at once by a region of hills; you will then enter into a labyrinth of valleys, gorges and ravines; and finally, after a longer or shorter ascent, you will emerge upon the central tableland, barred by the naked sierras whose wide and deep valleys form the mighty cradles of mighty rivers. Across this tableland stretches Castile, the land of castles.

Like all great expanses of earth, this tableland receives and irradiates heat more quickly than the sea and the coast-lands which the sea refreshes and tempers. Hence, when the sun scorches it, an extreme of heat, and as soon as the sun forsakes it, an extreme of cold; burning days of summer followed by cool fresh nights during which the lungs gratefully inhale the breeze from the land; freezing winter nights following hard upon days which the bright cold sun in its brief diurnal course has failed to warm. Winters long and hard and summers short and fiery have given birth to the saying, “nueve meses de invierno y tres de infierno”—nine months of winter and three months of hell. In the autumn, however, there is a serene and placid breathing-space. The sierras, shutting out the winds from the sea, help to make the winter colder and the summer hotter; but while they impede the passage of the gentle low-trailing clouds they form no barrier to the violent cyclones which burst among their valleys. Thus long droughts are succeeded by torrential deluges.

In this severe climate of opposing extremes, in which the transition from heat to cold and from drought to flood is so violent, man has invented the cloak with which to isolate himself from his environment, a personal ambience, constant in the midst of external changes, a defence at once against both heat and cold.

The great storms of rain and snow bursting upon these sierras and drained thence by the swollen rivers have in the course of centuries scoured the soil of the tableland, and the succeeding droughts have prevented the retention of the rain-washed soil in a network of fresh and robust vegetation. Thus it is that the view presents a wide and desolate expanse of burning country, without foliage and without water, a country in which a deluge of light throws dense shadows upon a dazzling surface, extinguishing all intermediate tones. The landscape is seen cut out in hard outline, almost without atmosphere, through a thin and transparent air.

You may sometimes range over leagues and leagues of desert country without descrying anything save the illimitable plain with its patches of green corn or yellow stubble, here a sparsely extended array of oaks, marching in solemn and monotonous procession, clothed in their austere and perennial green, there a group of mournful pines, holding aloft their uniform crests. Now and again, fringing a bright river or half-dry stream, a few poplars, seeming intensely and vividly alive in the midst of the infinite solitude. As a rule these poplars announce the presence of man: yonder on the plain lies some village, scorched by the sun, blasted by the frost, built of sun-baked bricks very often, its belfry silhouetted against the blue of the sky. Often the spinal ridge of the sierra can be seen in the distance, but if you approach it you must not look to find rounded bossy mountains, fresh with verdure and clothed with woods, with the yellow of the gorse and the carmine of the heather flecking the bracken. Here is nothing but a framework of bony fleshless rock, bristling with crags, sharp-cut hummocks nakedly displaying drought-cracked strata, covered at most with a scanty scrub, where flourish only the hardy thistle and the naked scented broom, the poor genestra contenta dei deserti of Leopardi’s poem. Down in the plain the highway with its festoon of trees loses itself in the greyness of the earth, which kindles into an intense warm red when the sun sinks to rest.