While his school flourished—a little hearth of Europe at which the Spanish intellectual might warm his hand—a young diplomat, Angel Ganivet,[38] published a work that was the antiphony of this Modern hymn. The Idearium Español looms large in the tale of Spain’s renascence. Ganivet was a poor historian and a weak logician. His little book bristles with arguments, æsthetic and ethnic, which no one can accept. Yet it holds a deep philosophy of Spain’s career. To Ganivet, Spain is not of Europe: the trend of her growth must be toward Africa as it has been from Africa. All of the adventure in America and Europe was a false step. The “Age of Gold” was an age of madness. The effort to adopt the pragmatic materialist culture of the West was doomed to failure. Spain is Christian; not Roman; Christian in the way of the Spanish Stoic, Seneca, of the African patrists, Origen and Augustine, of the Semitic spirit of Don Quixote. Ganivet scorns the standards and success of modern Europe. He senses the heroism—the need of heroism—in the Spanish soul: its peculiar way of sudden climaxes followed by periods of sleep. The down leveling of Europe is as alien and abhorrent to him as it was to Nietzsche. He fears the aurea mediocritas of England as a poison to the Spanish blood. He looks with equanimity on Spain’s colonial disasters since Spain colonized “not for coal but for souls”; and on the nadir of Spain’s culture, since from it shall rise again such sudden giants as were Cervantes, Velázquez, Góngora, Lope. He pleads for the acceptance, in the spirit of a religious sacrifice, of Spain’s difference from the brilliant capabilities of France and England. His book, appearing in 1896, urged the relinquishment of the last Colonies. Two years later, Cuba and the Philippines were gone. But though his book was a Jeremiah’s prophecy, Ganivet lacked the strength to face the apathy of his people. In that same year, he died by his own hand.
Not, however, before he had met the opposing, clamorous word of the man who, gradually, was to veer to his own vision. Miguel de Unamuno[39] had corresponded with Ganivet while they were young in Madrid. The result of their exchange was El Porvenir de España, a volume in which they estimate the opposing doctrines: that Spain must be awakened by letting in “ultra-pyrenean currents,” and that Spain has been ruined precisely by these currents. To Ganivet, the history of Spain reveals no “Spanish period.” Let there be one! he cries. Unamuno counters that eclecticism is the unity of Spain. “Spain is still to be discovered,” he thunders, “and will be discovered only by European Spaniards.” In the volume which defines this attitude of his youth, En Torno al Casticizmo, he diagnoses the abulia of Spain. The Inquisition was bad because it shut out the four winds of Europe: Spain was forced to feed upon herself. Spain’s historical tradition was bad, because it was anti-European. He declares for the corrientes ultrapirenáicas. Ganivet was dead. Even had he lived, this mystic afield in history must have lacked the power to answer Unamuno. Unamuno is the strongest moralist of our day. Wells and Shaw have thin voices beside his well-aimed uproar. There was no one, then, in Spain to answer Unamuno. Unamuno answered himself.
His answer is not analytic. This radical mystic scorns the fuss of argument. The Inquisition, shutting out the “four winds” from Spain was indeed “bad.” Its purpose—unity—was good. Its confusing homogeneity with unity and its means of action were not Spanish at all: were of Rome, of France, of Europe. Spain had been the most tolerant land of all the West: even Islam grew tolerant in Spain: Rome alone, making the Visigoth into crusader and winning Isabel to its own waning theoditic dream, made Spain intolerant. The historical tradition which won in Spain was also European: it was a mixture of the state policy of France and the church policy of Rome. (France was never guilty of such nonsense: France the State was consistently anti-Roman.) Finally, whence came these “ultra-pyrenean currents” that were to flush Spain once more with fecund air? They were ideas that reached Western Europe by the very ethnic worlds of which Spain is the organic integer. Ideas from the Greek and Alexandrian, from the Jew and Egyptian and Arab: many entered Europe directly by the door of Spain; none came to Spain by way of western Europe. They came by the sea and the south—in that long germinal embrace whereby Phœnician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Jew, Copt, Arab, Moor were poured into Spain’s womb. What Western Europe did was to transform and finally to betray these living thoughts. The Visigoth minority represented Spain’s medievalism: and its action was a retarded and arbitrary form of what in Germanic Europe produced the noble synthesis of Catholic culture. In Spain, the naturalistic Semites were too dominant for a culture based on transcendental values. Medievalism in Spain became a maniacal gesture. Modernism? It is the breakdown of the medieval culture: its intellectualism, its systematization is a vast Machine proficient at destroying, and creating nothing. Is this what Spain must come to, to be saved? Unamuno reconsiders; and by 1905 he has his answer—which is indeed a conversion.
Unamuno is an expression of dynamic egoism. This atom has got loose from the locked coil of Spain; and what a surge it has! Yet all his doctrine comes rather simply down to the assertion of an immense personal will emerging from the stratified social trammels of his land. The intrinsic substance of Unamuno’s thought will strike the Western mind as meager; but the drama of its formulation is a new act in Spain, the flesh of its assertion is a fresh embodiment of the Spanish spirit.
This announcement of a personal will recalls at once earlier apocalypses of the north: Blake, Whitman, Dostoievski, Nietzsche. Unamuno’s assertion is important, because it is made up of the conflicting substances of Spain. The voice of this man declaring that he will never die, and that he will never live according to the herd-patterns of modern Europe, becomes palpable and true, because it is so deeply Spanish. Perhaps the æsthetic value of the utterances of Whitman, Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Blake is similarly grounded in racial substance. The case is evident in Unamuno. Freeing himself from the still equipoise of Spain he frees himself from nothing that is Spanish.
In Unamuno, the same Spanish spirit heretofore held in tragic unison—in the actless unison of its will—swings once more into motion. Instead of equating each other, the elements of the Spanish soul line up behind the soul of Unamuno and serve to project him, parabola-wise, into his personal heaven. Here is Spain’s neo-medieval sense of the futility of life; here is Christ; here is Spain’s narcistic love of the extremes within her, whence arose the pícaro and the saint. Here above all is Spain, enemy of pragmatism and of rational progress, worshiper of the Absolute—Spain that will be heaven or hell, and never merely earth; and yet will not loose her hold on earth, in all her visions of heaven.
Unamuno transfigures the despised and comic person of Don Quixote. This symbol of his land’s wrong-headed action becomes for Unamuno the god of a new Order, the prophet of a new national revelation. Don Miguel de Unamuno of the Basques identifies his cause of pure and personal effort with the crusade of the old hidalgo of La Mancha. Like that knight, he will construct his world platonically from the ideals of his inheritance and go forth really that it may prevail. As Quixote fought common sense, Unamuno fights “business.” The old windmills are now factories, the old inns are industrial cities, the old King’s police are the votaries of Demos. Where all that is glorious has become so sterile, all that is serious so low, let Don Quixote be savior. The final jest of the bitter, broken Cervantes becomes our Man of Sorrows. Does not the mockery of modern Europe call for a ridiculous Messiah? The sterile and impotent meseta of Castile—that butt of Europe—shall be the mount of the new Zion, for the new Sermon.
So with inimitable verve and wit, Unamuno identifies his will with the old body of Spain: and hobbles forth, like Quixote, to enact justice. He wants it for himself. But since Spain is in him, since Spain is his Rocinante, Spain must go along. Spain must wake, if only for his sake.
Unamuno’s philosophy is a tissue of compensations: which by no means proves it to be false. He feels inferior in Europe as a Spaniard? he will assert his immortal soul against all Germany and England. He feels his peopled cultural impotence before the sure voice of France? he will turn this anguish into the travail of birth. The method is persuasive. Our modern world is so very shoddy, that any honest light can show it up. The prose fabric of our civilization is so thin, that any song can tear it. And Unamuno is essentially a poet, even though his best vehicle is the short personal essay which, indeed, his pen has made a powerful æsthetic organ.
The atomic individualism of Unamuno is strictly modern: it springs from Rousseau and the German romantics. It is the inevitable impulse to “return to a beginning” which has overwhelmed the modern soul since the breakdown of the Medieval House. But if this atomic will is modern, the values it propels in Unamuno remain medieval.