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Title: Essays and soliloquies
Author: Unamuno, Miguel de
Language: English
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ESSAYS AND
SOLILOQUIES
_BORZOI TRANSLATIONS SPRING 1925_
_FROM THE SPANISH_
FIGURES OF THE PASSION OF OUR LORD
BY GABRIEL MIRO
_Translated by C. J. Hogarth_
_FROM THE FRENCH_
THE MODERN ENGLISH NOVEL
BY ABEL CHEVALLEY
_Translated by Ben Ray Redman_
_FROM THE GERMAN_
DEATH IN VENICE
BY THOMAS MANN
_Translated by Kenneth Burke_
_FROM THE RUSSIAN_
THE CLOCK
BY ALEKSEI REMIZOV
_Translated by John Cournos_
_TALES OF THE WILDERNESS_
BY BORIS PILNIAK
_Translated by F. O’Dempsey_
_FROM THE NORWEGIAN_
SEGELFOSS TOWN
BY KNUT HAMSUN
_Translated by J. S. Scott_
_FROM THE POLISH_
THE PEASANTS
BY LADISLAS REYMONT
_Translated by Michael H. Dziewicki_
[Illustration]
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
BY J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
SET UP, ELECTROTYPED, PRINTED AND BOUND BY
THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, BINGHAMTON, N. Y.
ESPARTO PAPER MANUFACTURED IN SCOTLAND
AND FURNISHED BY W.F. ETHERINGTON & CO.,
NEW YORK.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_Erratum_
The two paragraphs on pages 100-101 beginning:
In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says
and:
Readers of Don Quixote will recall
are a continuation of the footnote on page 99.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
I am writing these lines, to-day the 6th of June, 1924, in this island
of Fuerteventura, an island that is propitious to calm thinking and to
a laying bare of the soul, even as this parched land is bare, bare even
to the bone. Here I have been confined now for nearly three months, no
reason for my confinement having been given other than the arbitrary
mandate of the military power that is de-civilizing and debasing my
native country.
Hither came my friend Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch to bear me company.
He was entrusted by Mr. Alfred A. Knopf with the task of making an
anthology or _florilegium_ of my shorter articles and extracts from my
more extensive writings which should present a conspectus of my whole
literary work. It is he, my friend and translator, who is responsible
for the selection of the pieces which form this anthology.
I am in principle an enemy of all such selections or anthologies of
an author’s works, and the more so when the author’s influence is
due primarily not so much to his ideas as to the passionate tone
and gesture with which he expresses them, to his style. This work
of selection appears to me to be as difficult as would be that of
abridging a sonata or a picture. And what appears to me almost
impossible is that the author himself should make the selection. It is
not possible for us to see ourselves from the outside, to become part
of our public.
In any case, a work like this is a kind of index or catalogue, and
its chief utility is to incite in the public a desire to get to know
the author better. It is, to put it bluntly, in the nature of an
advertisement.
Collections of selected writings are most valuable when the chief
importance of an author lies in his ideology, which may or may not be
welded into a system; they are less valuable when he is distinguished
not so much by his ideas as by the warm images which incarnate them. It
is relatively easy to give a summary of an author when we are asked:
“What does he say?” but not so easy when the question to be answered
is: “How does he say it?” That is to say, it is possible to abridge a
philosophic system, but not a poem. In the poem, that which we call the
argument is the most external element of its form, and its essence, the
essence of the poem, is the rhythm, the aroma of the words, the style.
Rhythm may give birth to argument or subject, but subject does not
always give birth to rhythm.
In selecting these pieces--torsos, arms and heads of statuary--my
friend the translator has been guided by an artistic rather than by
a philosophical or ideological criterion, and for this I am grateful
to him. And when I say that I am grateful to him, I mean that in this
way he has best served the public that seeks to know me--me, the man,
and not a system, for I have no system. Like Walt Whitman I would
say of each one of my works: “This is not a book, it is a man.” It
is comparatively easy, for example, to synthetize the philosophical
system of Descartes, or that of Kant, or that of Hegel, or that of
Comte, or, still more so, that of Spencer; but it is not easy to
synthetize Goethe or Nietzsche, in both of whom is a latent philosophy.
And still less so to synthetize Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare.
And it has not been the object of my translator to present a summary of
an ideology but to give an impression of a spirit.
To elucidate this point still further would lead us into an intricate
examination of the relations which subsist between a man and his work,
and to inquire whether the man makes the work or the work makes the man
or whether each makes the other at the same time. The man makes himself
in making his work and the work makes itself in making the man. The
Creation makes God the Creator, and God the Creator makes the Creation,
the Universe.
* * * * *
Strictly speaking, is not every translation in effect a new and
original work? In being turned into English, however faithful the
translator may be, shall I not say something different from what I
have said in Spanish? Does a song say the same when played on the
violin, the flute, the harp, the bassoon? Is a sonata the same when
played on the piano and the organ? I know that when I have read my
writings translated into another language I have been aware of echoes
and reverberations which lay sleeping in the depths of my spirit, I
have glimpsed horizons which the firm and severe contours of my native
tongue did not permit me to see. And I have sometimes thought of
making a new work based upon a retranslation of the translation.
Among these essays is one upon the religion of Quixotism. Hitherto I
have been meditating and perhaps dogmatizing upon this religion--now
I am living it. For it is here, where the waves murmur tidings of
my native shores, the mountainous coast of the wild Bay of Biscay,
it is here that I have felt most deeply all the melancholy grandeur
of the ridiculous passion of the Knight of the impossible Chimera.
While the cowardly comic-opera tyrants who have banished me here are
dishonouring our Spain, her whom they call their mother, I am exalting
and eternalizing her, and I call her my daughter.
There is a famous Spanish couplet which says that there is no handful
of earth without a Spanish grave--
_No hay un puñado de tierra_
_Sin una tumba española,_
and it would seem that these unhappy rulers wish to extend the national
graveyard. And I propose that there shall be no corner of heaven
without a nest of Spanish thought.
Nests of Spanish thought are the pieces which compose this book.
* * * * *
And now I return to contemplate the sea, to feed my spirit upon it, to
watch its white-crested waves which are born and die and succeed one
another like the generations of men and of men’s works in the sea of
history. I return to contemplate the all-consoling sea which smiles,
with its superhuman smile, upon our tragic human frailties.
Greeting! my readers of the English-speaking world. And when, having
read this book, you wish me farewell, may you carry with you something
of the quixotesque passion which I have put into my work and which is
the life of my life.
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.
_Fuerteventura,
June 6, 1924._
CONTENTS
_Author’s Preface_ xii
_Introduction_ 3
_The Spirit of Castile_ 30
_Spanish Individualism_ 38
_Some Arbitrary Reflections upon Europeanization_ 52
_The Spanish Christ_ 76
_The Sepulchre of Don Quixote_ 82
_The Helmet of Mambrino_ 99
_Don Quixote’s Niece_ 108
_The Religion of Quixotism_ 113
_Large and Small Towns_ 125
_To My Readers_ 133
_Soliloquies_ 142
_My Religion_ 154
_Solitude_ 163
_Intellectuality and Spirituality_ 170
_The Materialism of the Masses_ 190
_The Man of Flesh and Bone_ 195
_The Problem of Immortality_ 205
_Creative Faith_ 217
_The Song of the Eternal Waters_ 226
_The Tower of Monterrey_ 233
_Appendix_ 241
_Bibliography_ 243
ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
The setting of the sun in these immense solitudes is full of beauty.
The sun dilates as it touches the horizon as if greedy to enjoy still
more of the earth and in sinking it sheds its light upon it like blood
and fills the sky with a dust of gold. The infinite dome of the sky
grows paler and paler, then swiftly darkens, and the fleeting twilight
is followed by the profundity of a night tremulous with stars. Here are
no northern twilights, long, soft and languorous.
Broad is Castile! And beautiful with a sad quiet beauty this sea
of stone beneath its expanse of sky. It is a landscape uniform and
monotonous in its contrasts of light and shade, in its sharply
juxtaposed and unmodulated colours. It presents the appearance of an
immense floor of mosaic, without variety of design, above which is
spread out a sky of intensest blue. It is lacking in gentle transitions
and its only harmonic continuity is that of the immense plain and the
massed blue which overspreads and illumines it.
It is a landscape that awakens no voluptuous sensations of _joie de
vivre_, that inspires no longings for ease and idleness. Here are no
lush green meadows inviting indolent repose, no dells that beckon like
nests.
Its contemplation does not call forth the sleeping animal in us, the
animal that delights to drowse in a leafy paradise, brooding over the
remembered satisfactions of those appetites which have been kneaded
into the flesh since the earliest dawn of life.
Nature does not here recreate the spirit. Rather it detaches us from
the low earth and enfolds us in the pure naked unvarying sky. Here
there is no communion with nature, no absorption in her exuberant
splendours. This infinite landscape is, if it may be so said,
nonotheistic rather than pantheistic. Man is not lost in it so much as
diminished by it, and in its immense drought he is made aware of the
aridity of his own soul.
* * * * *
The population of the Castilian country-side is concentrated for
the most part in hamlets, villages or towns, in groups of clustered
dwelling-houses, separated from one another by immense and naked
solitudes. The villages are compact and sharply delimited, not melting
away into the plain in a surrounding fringe of isolated homesteads,
the intervening country being entirely unpopulated. The houses seem
to crowd together round the church as if for warmth or for defence
against the rigour of nature, as if the inhabitants sought a second
cloak in which to isolate themselves from the cruelty of the climate
and the melancholy of the landscape. Thus it is that very often the
villagers have to journey considerable distances on mule-back in order
to reach the fields where they work, one here, another there, in
isolation, and it is already dark before they return to their homes to
stretch themselves on the hard kitchen settles and sleep the comforting
sleep of toil. A notable sight it is to see them at nightfall, mounted
on their mules, their figures silhouetted against the pale sky, their
sad, slow, monotonous songs dying away on the sharp night air into the
infinity of the furrowed plain.
While the men labour in the sweat of their brow on the hard land,
the womenfolk perform their tasks at home, filling the sunny arcades
in front of the houses with a murmur of voices. In the long winter
evenings it is usual for masters and serving-folk to assemble together,
while the latter dance to the accompaniment of the sharp dry tap of the
tambourine or sometimes to an old ballad measure.
Go into one of these villages or drowsing cities of the plain, where
life flows slowly and calmly in a monotonous procession of hours, and
there you will find the living souls beneath whose transitory existence
lies the eternal essence out of which is woven the inner history of
Castile.
Within these towns and villages lives a breed of men of a dry, hard
and sinewy constitution, burned by the sun and inured by the cold, a
sober, frugal breed, the product of a long process of natural selection
by searching winter frosts and intermittent periods of scarcity,
tempered to withstand the inclemency of the skies and the asperities
of penury. The peasant who gave you a grave “Good day” as he passed by
on his mule, huddled in his cloak, will receive you without overmuch
courtesy, with a kind of restrained sobriety. He is collected in
his movements, circumspect and deliberate in his conversation, with
a gravity which gives him the air of a dethroned king. Such at any
rate he appears when he is not cunningly ironical. This sly biting
irony--_socarronería_, a racy word full of racy character--is the
classical form of Castilian humour, a quiet and circumspect humour,
sententious and phlegmatic, the humour of Sanson Carrasco in _Don
Quixote_ and of Quevedo, he who wrote the discourses of Marcus Brutus.
His slowness is matched by his tenacity, qualities that
have an intimate association. His reaction-interval, as the
psycho-physiologists would express it, is long; it takes him a
considerable time to realize an impression or an idea, but once he
has grasped it he does not readily relinquish it, does not in fact
relinquish it until another has impinged upon it and driven it out.
The slowness and tenacity of his impressions would appear to be due
to the lack of an environing and unifying nimbus, blending them into
a conjunctive whole; they do not merge into one another by subtle
gradations, but each one disappears completely before the next takes
its place. They seem to follow one another like the succession of
uniform and monotonous tones in the landscape of his country, sharp
edge against sharp edge.
Go with him into his house. On the front wall the violent contrast of
strident blue paint against a snow-white background exposed to the full
blaze of the sun is almost painful to the eye. Sit down to table with
him and partake of his simple dinner, prepared without much culinary
art, accompanied only by keen and fiery condiments, a meal that is at
once both frugal and violent, providing the palate with sharp-edged
sensations. After the dinner, if the day chances to be a holiday,
you will witness a dance, a dance slow and uniform, danced to the
monotonous beat of drum or tambourine, a series of stabbing sounds that
strike upon the ear like blows. And you will hear songs, wailing and
monotonous, full of long-drawn-out notes, songs of the steppes, with
the rhythm of the dragging labour of the plough in them. They testify
to an ear that is incapable of appreciating the finer gradations of
cadences and semi-tones.
If you are in a town and there are any pictures there of the old
traditional school of Castile, go to see them--for in the great days
of its expansion this race created a school of realistic painting, of
a rude, vigorous, simplified realism, very limited in range of tone,
which has the effect of a violent douche upon the vision. Perhaps you
will come across some canvas of Ribera or Zurbaran--your eye is held
by the bony form of some austere hermit, whose sinewy muscles are
presented in high light against strong shadows, a canvas meagre in
tones and gradations, in which every object stands out sharp-edged.
Not infrequently the figures fail to form a single whole with the
background, which is a mere accessory of insignificant decorative
value. Velazquez, who of all Castilian painters possesses most of the
racial character, was a painter of men, of whole men, men all of one
piece, rude and emphatic, men who fill the whole canvas.
You will find no landscape-painters, you will discover no sense of
tone, of suave transition, no unifying, enveloping atmosphere, which
blends everything into a single harmonious whole. The unity springs
from the more or less architectonic disposition of the several parts.
* * * * *
In this country of climatic extremes, without any softness or mildness,
of a landscape uniform in its contrasts, the spirit likewise is dry
and sharp-edged, with but a meagre ambience of ideas. It generalises
upon raw facts, seen in a discrete series, as in a kaleidoscope, not
upon a synthesis or analysis of facts seen in a continuous series, in a
living stream; it sees them sharp-edged like figures in the Castilian
landscape and it takes them as they appear, in their own dress, without
reconstructing them. And it has given birth to a harsh popular realism
and to a dry formal idealism, marching alongside one another, in an
association like that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but never
combining. The Castilian spirit is either ironic or tragic, sometimes
both at once, but it never arrives at a fusion of the irony and the
austere tragedy of the human drama.
SPANISH INDIVIDUALISM
In few books have I found so much food for reflection upon our Spain
and us Spaniards as in Martin A. S. Hume’s “The Spanish People:
Their Origin, Growth and Influence.” It is written by one who knows
and esteems us. It impresses us at a first glance as an excellent
compendium of the history of Spain, but on closer examination it is
found to be also an excellent psychological study of the Spanish people.
In the tenth chapter there is to be noted a very happy and graphic
phrase--“the introspective individuality of Spaniards.” And it is
indeed true that we are much given to this direct contemplation of
ourselves, a practice which is certainly not the best method of getting
to know ourselves, of fulfilling the precept “Know thyself” in its
collective and social sense. Introspection is very deceptive and when
carried to an extreme produces an actual vacuity of consciousness,
like that into which the Yogi falls through perpetual contemplation
of his own navel. For a state of consciousness which consisted purely
and simply of consciousness contemplating itself would not be a state
of consciousness at all, being void of all content. This supposed
reflection of the soul upon its own self is an absurdity. To think that
one thinks without thinking of anything concrete is mere negation. We
learn to know ourselves in the same way that we learn to know others,
by observing our actions, and the only difference is that, as we are
always with ourselves and scarcely anything that we consciously do
escapes us, we have more data for knowing ourselves than we have for
knowing others. But even so, we seldom know all that we are capable
of until we put ourselves to it, and often we surprise ourselves by
achieving something which we did not expect of ourselves.
Hence the utility of a people knowing its own history in order that it
may know itself. And Hume studies us in our history.
In one of his books the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
speaks of the three Johns: the John as he himself thinks he is, the
John as others think he is, and the John as he is in reality. And as
for every individual, so for every people there are three Johns. There
is the Spanish people as we Spaniards believe it to be, there is the
Spanish people as foreigners believe it to be, and there is the Spanish
people as it really is. It is difficult to say which of the first two
approximates most nearly to the last; but it is certainly right that
we should compare them together and see ourselves both from within
and from without. However much we may lament the injustice or the
superficiality of the judgments that our foreign visitors pronounce
upon us, it is possible that we are no less unjust or superficial in
our own judgment of ourselves.
Havelock Ellis, in a book published not long ago, “The Soul of Spain,”
spoke of the unity of our race. Spaniards have generally regarded
this view as absurd, but it may very well be that the differences
that separate the inhabitants of the various provinces of Spain
are no greater than those which exist between the inhabitants of
the different districts of other nations which we suppose to be
more unified than ourselves, and that our lack of solidarity, our
separatist instinct, our _kabylism_, as it is called, proceeds from
other causes than from differences of race. Little notice need be taken
of certain ethnological assertions, not so much based upon scientific
investigation as inspired by sentiments which, whether creditable or
not, furnish no basis for arriving at the truth. Thus, if a writer
asserts that the Catalans are Aryans and all other Spaniards Semites,
it is obvious that he is using the terms Aryan and Semite without a
proper understanding of them; and as the distinction between Catalans
and other Spaniards is one of philology rather than ethnology, it
would be interesting to know what language the ancestors of the
present Catalans spoke before Latin penetrated into Cataluña, for
the supposition that they are descended from Greek colonists is too
nonsensical to be taken seriously.
* * * * *
Before proceeding further in this review of Hume’s study of the
psychology of the Spanish people, I should like to indicate a
distinction which I am in the habit of making between individuality
and personality, a distinction which appears to me to be of great
importance.
All my readers know what is meant by “individual” or “indivisible,”
a unity that is distinct from other unities and not divisible into
unities analogous to it; and also what is meant by a person. The
notion of person refers rather to the spiritual content, and that of
individual to the containing limit. Great individuality, that which
separates an individual strongly and emphatically from other analogous
individuals, may have very little that is peculiar and personal to
itself. It might even be said that individuality and personality are
in a certain sense opposed to one another, although in another wider
and more exact sense it may be said that they afford one another
mutual support. Strong individuality is scarcely possible without
a respectable dose of personality, neither is a strong and rich
personality possible without a considerable degree of individuality
to hold its various elements together; but the vigour of a vigorous
individuality may very easily contain only the minimum of personality
and the richness of a rich personality may be contained within the
minimum of individuality.
I will endeavour, as is my wont, to make my meaning clearer by means of
metaphors.
In gases, according to the physicists, the molecules are in a certain
state of disassociation, moving rectilinearly in all directions--it
is this which produces the phenomena of expansion--a state that is
chaotic but not in reality very complex; and it is a well-known fact
that very complex bodies are not as a rule found in a gaseous state,
but only those that are simplest and least complicated. In solids,
on the other hand, the molecules are ordered according to relatively
fixed orbits and trajectories--especially in the case of crystals; and
their individuality is maintained by a principle of intense cohesion,
their surfaces being in direct contact with their environment, capable
of affecting it and being affected by it. A middle term is presented
by liquids. And thus we may compare certain strongly individualized
natures with gases enclosed in a bottle or shell with rigid sides,
while there are others, with flexible contours, in a free give-and-take
contact with their environment, which possess great internal
complexity--in other words, a high degree of personality.
Or we may compare the former with crustaceans, enclosed in hard
shells which give them rigid and permanent forms, and the latter with
vertebrates, which, since they carry their skeleton within themselves,
are capable of considerable external modification.
Individuality refers rather to our external limits, it exhibits our
finiteness; personality refers principally to our internal limits, or
rather to our inward unlimitedness, it exhibits our infinitude.
All this is somewhat tenuous and perhaps fails to meet the demands of
strict psychology, but it is enough if it has helped to make my meaning
clearer.
My idea is that the Spaniard possesses, as a general rule, more
individuality than personality; that the vigour with which he affirms
himself before others and the energy with which he creates dogmas
and locks himself up in them, do not correspond with any richness of
inward spiritual content, which in his case rarely errs on the side of
complexity.
* * * * *
In his preface Hume states that the Spaniards spring from an
Afro-Semitic race, that “the keynote of this primitive racial
character is overwhelming individuality,” and that to this root-cause
is to be attributed all that we have accomplished in the world, our
transient imperial greatness and our permanent tenacity. This feeling
of individuality lies deep down in the root of the race and cunning
politicians have turned it to the advantage of their ambitions.
In speaking of the Arab domination he says that “the Berber, like his
far-away relative the Iberian, was a man of strong individuality, with
an obstinate reluctance to obey another unless he spoke in the name of
a supernatural entity.”
At the conclusion of the ninth chapter in which he treats of our epoch
of greatness in the middle of the 16th century, he writes the following
notable lines:
“Each unlettered boor and swaggering soldier felt in an undefined
way that he was a creature apart by reason of his faith; that
Spaniards and the Spaniards’ king had a higher mission than was
accorded to other men; and that from among the eight million
Spaniards alive the particular Juan or Pedro in question stood out
individually, in the sight of God and men, as pre-eminently the
most zealous and orthodox of them all. To this had the policy of
Fernando and Isabel brought the mass of the Spanish people.”
And in corroboration of this he draws a striking portrait of Philip II,
the idol of our traditionalists:
“Intense individuality in him, as in so many of his countrymen,
was merged in the idea of personal distinction in the eyes of God
by self-sacrifice.... At heart he was kindly, a good father and
husband, an indulgent and considerate master, having no love for
cruelty itself. And yet lying, dishonesty, cruelty, the infliction
of suffering and death upon hosts of helpless ones, and the secret
murder of those who stood in his path, were not wrong for _him_,
because, in his moral obliquity he thought that the ends justified
the means, and that all was lawful in the linked causes of God and
Spain.” “He was blind and oblivious to all but the blood-boltered
Christ, before whom he writhed in a maniacal agony of devotion,
sure in his dark soul, as were so many of his countrymen, that
the divine finger pointed from glory alone upon him as the one
chosen man who was to enforce upon earth the rule of the Most
High, with--as a necessary consequence--Philip of Spain as his
viceregent.”
I know that many who look upon this portrait will come forward with
the familiar objection that this Philip II is the Devil of the South
of the Protestant legend, and will advance the counter-legend--equally
legendary--which is being built up out of a mass of minute data by
historians who combine the method of Dr. Dryasdust with the spirit of
rabid partisanship.
What interests me in Hume’s description is his statement that every
Spaniard regards himself as an individual apart, specially and
personally chosen by God. This recalls Pascal’s claim that Jesus Christ
in dying shed a drop of blood for him, Blaise Pascal, who was destined
to live in France in the middle of the 17th century. There is a certain
characteristic common to all those whom we call geniuses or great men
and other heroes. Each of them has a consciousness of being a man
apart, chosen very expressly by God for the performance of a certain
work.
In this respect we Spaniards are inclined to think ourselves geniuses,
or rather we have a very robust conception of the Divinity--we think of
Him not as the frigid and exalted God of the French Deism of the 18th
century, nor yet as the good-natured and easy-going God of good people
that Béranger depicts, but rather as a God whose attention and care
extends to the very last ant, regarded as a separate individual, as
well as to the very greatest and most splendid of suns.
In actual fact all these claims to singularity and to being one
apart from the rest may become reprehensible, but it is at least
understandable that an orator, for example, or a writer, or a singer,
should regard himself as the best orator, the best writer, or the
best singer. What is not understandable is that a man who is neither
orator, writer, painter, sculptor, musician, nor man of business, that
a man who does nothing at all, should expect by the mere fact of his
presence to be reputed a man of extraordinary merit and exceptional
talent. And nevertheless here in Spain--I do not know how it may be
elsewhere--there are many examples of this curious phenomenon.
I know of the man who is ready to admit that others may be handsomer,
smarter, stronger, healthier, wiser, more intelligent, more generous,
than he, that in each and all of their endowments they have the
advantage over him; but nevertheless he, Juan Lopez, the individual in
question, is superior to everyone else just because he is Juan Lopez,
because there is no other Juan Lopez exactly like him and because it is
impossible that all the qualities, good, bad and indifferent, that make
him him, Juan Lopez, should ever be assembled together again. He is a
unique individual, he cannot be substituted by anyone else--and he is
in a measure right in thinking so. He can say with _Obermann_: “In the
universe I am nothing; for myself I am everything.”
This violent individualism, combined with very meagre personalism, with
a great lack of personality, is a factor that explains a great deal of
our history. It explains that intense thirst for individual immortality
which consumes the Spaniard, a thirst that lies hidden beneath what is
called our cult of death. Homage to this cult of death is rendered no
less by the most furious lovers of life, by those in whom the joy of
living is unable to extinguish the hunger for survival. It appears to
me a very great error to assert that the Spaniard does not love life
because he finds life hard. On the contrary, it is because his life is
hard that he has not arrived at the _tædium vitæ_, the _Weltschmerz_
of the satiated, and that he has always aimed at prolonging it
indefinitely beyond death.
In the third part of the “Ethics” of Spinoza, a Jew of Spanish
origin--or Portuguese, which amounts to the same thing--there are
four admirable propositions, the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth, in
which he lays it down that everything, in so far as it is in itself,
endeavours to persist in its own being; that the endeavour wherewith
a thing endeavours to persist in its being is nothing else than the
actual essence of that thing (_conatus, quo unaquæque res in suo esse
perseverare conatur, nihil est præter ipsius rei actualem essentiam_);
that this effort or endeavour involves no finite time but an indefinite
time, and that the spirit endeavours to persist in its being for an
indefinite period and is conscious of this its endeavour. It is not
possible to express with more precision the longing for immortality
that consumes the soul.
This strong individualism, the individualism of an individual who
endeavours to persist, has led the Spaniard to follow always the
path of conduct and will, and this is the reason of Schopenhauer’s
admiration of Spaniards, whom he deemed to be one of the peoples most
fully possessed of will--or rather of wilfulness--most tenacious of
life. Our indifference to life is only on the surface and really
conceals a most dogged attachment to it. And this practical tendency
is manifest in our thought, which ever since Seneca has inclined to
what is called moralism and has evinced but little interest in pure
metaphysical and speculative contemplation, in viewing the world as a
spectator.
It is this imperious individualism that has led us to the dogmatism
that corrodes us. Spain is the country of those who are more
papistical than the Pope, as the saying is. Spain is the chosen and
most propitious soil for what is called _integrism_, which is the
triumph of the maximum of individuality compatible with the minimum
of personality. Spain was, in short, and in more than one respect
continues to be, the land of the Inquisition.
Of the Inquisition and inquisitorialism, Hume writes very aptly.
“Innate cruelty, individual pride, a vivid imagination long fed with
extravagant fables, religious and secular, and lust for unearned
wealth, all combined under the eager blessings of the Queen [Isabel]
and the Church to make the Spaniards, as a race, relentless persecutors
of those who dared to think differently from themselves.” Beneath the
manifest and not inconsiderable exaggeration, there is here a large
basis of truth. Spaniards could do no wrong “because they were working
for and with the cause of God.” “The bureaucratic unity of the Romans
was no longer possible [in the time of Fernando and Isabel], for out
of the reconquest had grown separate nations; but at least the various
peoples, the autonomous dominions, the semi-independent towns, might
be held together by the strong bond of religious unity; and with this
object the Inquisition was established, as a governmental system, to
be developed later into a political engine.... Thus it is that Spain
appears for the first time in the concert of modern European nations a
power whose very existence in a concrete form depends upon its rigid
doctrinal Catholicism.” This last assertion appears to me so doubtful
and I am so far from believing it to be just that I shall have to
devote a special study to its refutation.
* * * * *
This Spanish individualism has undoubtedly been the cause of another
characteristic feature of our history, a feature to which Hume pays
very particular attention. It is known as _cantonalism_ or _kabylism_.
I refer of course to our tendency to disruption, to separate into
tribes. Hume alludes to it at the beginning of his history in the
following notable lines: “In any case, what is known of their physique
seems to negative the supposition that they [the Iberians] were of
Indo-European or Aryan origin; and to find their counterpart at the
present time, it is only necessary to seek the Kabyl tribes of the
Atlas, the original inhabitants of the African coast opposite Spain,
who were driven back into the mountains by successive waves of
invasion. Not alone in physique do these tribes resemble what the
early Iberian must have been, but in the more unchanging peculiarities
of character and institutions the likeness is easily traceable to
the Spaniard of to-day. The organization of the Iberians, like that
of the Atlas peoples, was clannish and tribal, and their chief
characteristic was their indomitable local independence. Warlike and
brave, sober and light-hearted, the Kabyl tribesman has for thousands
of years stubbornly resisted all attempts to weld him into a nation
or subject him to a uniform dominion, while the Iberian, starting
probably from the same stock, was blended with Aryan races possessing
other qualities, and was submitted for six centuries to the unifying
organization of the greatest governing race the world ever saw--the
Romans; yet, withal, even at the present day, the main characteristics
of the Spanish nation, like that of the Kabyl tribes, is lack of
solidarity.”
This fundamental idea appears all through Hume’s book like a refrain or
_leitmotiv_.
* * * * *
Out of all this, two questions now emerge: the first, what is the
origin of this individualism? and the second, what is its cure?--the
one ethnological, the other therapeutical.
As I indicated at the beginning, in quoting the opinion of Havelock
Ellis, I am not at all disposed to believe that _kabylism_ or
_cantonalism_, the separatist tendency, proceeds from differences of
race. If Cataluña or the Basque provinces could be forthwith removed
and isolated in the middle of the Atlantic, we should very soon see
them torn by internal dissensions, by separatist tendencies, and
conflicts for supremacy would arise between the various dialects of the
Catalan and Basque languages. In the Basque provinces such internal
dissensions are beginning to be patent even to the least acute observer.
There is one capital sin that is very peculiarly Spanish, and that sin
is envy. It is a result of our peculiar individualism, and it is one
of the causes of _kabylism_. Envy has crippled and still cripples not
a few of the best minds of Spain, minds that are in other respects
vigorous and exuberant. We are all familiar with the famous simile of
the greasy pole. Deep down in our racial character there is a certain
sediment of spiritual avarice, of lack of generosity of soul, a certain
propensity to consider ourselves rich only in so far as others are
poor, and this sediment requires to be purged away.
Spanish _kabylism_ and individualism both appear to me to be effects
of one and the same cause, the cause that also produced _picarism_. In
his book entitled _Hampa_, Salillas showed very clearly how the poverty
of the soil, its failure to serve as a basis for the support of the
people, was responsible for the seasonal migration of flocks and herds
together with the vagabond life that resulted therefrom. It appears
to me more concrete and more historical to say that it obliged the
Iberians to be herdsmen. Hume expresses it exactly when he says that
the pure Spaniard has always been “an agriculturist by necessity and a
shepherd by choice,
The spectators, so far from encouraging or applauding the
competitors, are said to pull them back and generally hinder them
from securing the prize.
when he was not a soldier.” I believe that a consideration of this
pastoral character of our people would help to explain a great deal of
our history and to modify accepted verdicts. At bottom the expulsion of
the Moriscos, an industrious people of agriculturists and gardeners,
appears to me to have been due to the traditional hatred which those
whom I will call Abelites, the spiritual descendants of Abel, the
keeper of flocks, bore towards the descendants of Cain, the tiller of
the ground, who killed his brother. For the Hebrew legend of Cain and
Abel presents one of the most profound intuitions of the beginnings of
human history.
And what is the cure for this individualism? The first thing is to see
whether it is an evil, and if it appears to be one, to see if it may
not be converted into a good, for it is evident that vices and virtues
proceed from the same stock and a single passion may be turned either
to good or to evil.
The exigences of life in past ages made our remote ancestors herdsmen;
being herdsmen, they acquired all the qualities that pastoral life
tends to develop--they were idlers, they were wanderers, and they
were disunited. The lapse of time, civilized and urban life, the
necessities imposed by industrial and commercial competition--progress,
in short--will modify this basal character. Can this process be
accelerated, and by what means?--But that is another question.
SOME ARBITRARY REFLECTIONS UPON EUROPEANIZATION
It is a not unprofitable task to examine the national consciousness by
examining ourselves and to ask ourselves as Spaniards what there is of
intrinsic and permanent worth in most of these schemes for our national
regeneration which almost all of us are discussing nowadays, some more
insistently than others.
All those things which are being demanded and which almost all of us
have demanded on behalf of our people, with a greater or less degree
of comprehension of what these demands mean, may be summed up in
two terms--_European_ and _modern_. “We must be modern,” “we must
be European,” “we must modernize ourselves,” “we must go with the
century,” “we must Europeanize ourselves”--such are the watchwords of
the hour.
The term _European_ expresses a vague idea, very vague, excessively
vague; but much vaguer is the idea that is expressed by the term
_modern_. If we combine the two together it would seem that they ought
to limit one another and result in something concrete, and that the
expression “modern European” ought to be clearer than either of its two
component terms; but perhaps it is really vaguer still.
It will be apparent that I am proceeding by way of what some would call
arbitrary statement, without documentation, without verification,
independent of modern European logic and disdainful of its methods.
Perhaps. I seek no other method than the method of passion; and when I
am moved with disgust, with repugnance, with pity or with contempt, I
let the mouth speak from the fullness of the heart and the words come
forth as they will.
We Spaniards, so they say, are arbitrary charlatans, we fill up the
broken links of logic with rhetoric, we subtilize skilfully but
uselessly, we lack the sense of consecutiveness and induction, we have
scholastic minds, we are casuists ... etc., etc.
I have heard similar things said of St. Augustine, the great African,
the fiery soul that overflowed in waves of rhetoric, in phraseological
contortions, in antitheses, in paradoxes and conceits. St. Augustine
was at once a gongorist and a conceptist. Which leads me to believe
that Gongorism and conceptism are the natural forms of passion and
vehemence.
The great African, the great ancient African! Here you have an
expression, “ancient African,” which can be opposed to that of “modern
European,” and which is at least of equal value. St. Augustine was
African and he was of the ancient world; so also was Tertullian. And
why should we not say: “We must Africanize ourselves ancientwise” or
“We must ancientize ourselves Africanwise”?
Luis de Gongora (1561-1627) elaborated an affected and euphuistic
style of composition. Conception is the name given to the
employment of _conceptos_, a characteristic Spanish form of
conceits. It is exemplified in the writings of Quevedo (1580-1645)
and its subtleties were reduced to an exact code by Baltasar
Gracián in his _Agudeza y arte de ingenio_ (1642).
Turning my glance inwards upon myself after the lapse of years, after
having wandered among the various fields of modern European culture,
I ask myself, face to face with my conscience: Am I European? am I
modern? And my conscience replies: No, you are not European, not what
is called European; no, you are not modern, not what is called modern.
And I ask myself again: Is the fact that you feel that you are neither
European nor modern due to the fact that you are a Spaniard? Are we
Spaniards, at heart, irreducible to Europeanization and modernization?
And if that be the case, is there no salvation for us? Is there no
other life than modern and European life? Is there no other culture--or
whatever you like to call it?
First of all, so far as I myself am concerned, I must confess that the
more I reflect upon it, the more I become aware of the inner repugnance
that my spirit feels for all those that are considered to be the
guiding principles of the modern European spirit, for the scientific
orthodoxy of to-day, for its methods, for its tendencies.
There are two things that are often talked about--science and life. And
I must confess that both the one and the other are antipathetic to me.
It is unnecessary to define science, or Science, if you like, with the
capital letter, this thing which is now being so widely popularized,
the purpose of which is to give us a more logical and exact idea of the
Universe. When I used to be something of a Spencerian I believed myself
to be enamoured of science; but afterwards I discovered that this
was a mistake. It was a mistake like the mistake of those who think
that they are happy when they are not. (It is evident that I reject,
arbitrarily of course, the idea that being happy consists in thinking
that one is happy.) No, I was never enamoured of science, I always
sought for something behind it. And when, endeavouring to get beyond
its fatidical relativity, I was led to the _ignorabimus_ position, I
realized that science had always irked me.
And what are you going to put in its place? I shall be asked. I might
say ignorance, but that is not certain. I might say, with the Preacher,
the son of David, king of Jerusalem, that he who increases knowledge
increases sorrow and that the same end awaits the wise man and the
fool; but no, it is not that. I don’t need to invent a word, however,
to express what it is that I oppose to science, for the word exists,
and it is _sabiduría_--the _sagesse_ of the French, the _wisdom_ of
the English, the German _Weisheit_ or _Klugheit_. But is it opposed to
science? I shall be asked. And I, following my arbitrary method, guided
by the passion of my spirit, by my innate aversions and my innate
attractions, reply: Yes, they are opposed; science robs men of wisdom
and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.
The other thing that is being incessantly talked about to-day is life,
and to this it is easy to find an opposite. The opposite to life is
death.
And this second opposition helps me to explain the first. Wisdom is to
science what death is to life, or, if you prefer it, wisdom is to death
what science is to life.
The object of science is life, and the object of wisdom is death.
Science says: “We must live,” and seeks the means of prolonging,
increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable
and acceptable; wisdom says: “We must die,” and seeks how to make us
die well.
_Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat, et eius
sapientia non mortis, sed vita meditatio est_--so Spinoza announces
in Proposition LXVII of the fourth part of his “Ethics”: The free man
thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation
not of death but of life.
In this case, this wisdom, this _sapientia_, is no longer wisdom, but
science. And it is also necessary to inquire what kind of man is meant
by this “free man.” The man free from the supreme anguish, free from
the eternal heartache, free from the gaze of the Sphinx, that is to
say, the man who is not a man, the ideal of the modern European.
And here we have another concept which is as little sympathetic to me
as those of life and science, the concept of liberty. There is no other
true liberty than the liberty of death.
And what is at the bottom of all this? What are they seeking and
pursuing, those who grasp at science and life and liberty, turning
their backs, whether they are aware of it or not, upon wisdom and
death? What they are seeking is happiness.
I believe--perhaps this belief of mine is also arbitrary--I believe
that here we touch the bottom of our inquiry. The so-called modern
European comes to the world to seek happiness for himself and for
others, and believes that man ought to succeed in being happy. And
this is a supposition to which I am unable to conform. And now, as
I am confessing myself, I am going to put before you an arbitrary
dilemma--arbitrary, because I cannot prove it to you logically, because
it is imposed upon me by the feeling of my heart, not by the reasoning
of my head: either happiness or love. If you want the one, you must
renounce the other. Love kills happiness, happiness kills love.
And here it would be very apposite to adduce all that our mystics, our
admirable mystics, our only classic philosophers, the creators of our
Spanish wisdom, not our Spanish science--perhaps the terms “science”
and “Spanish” are, happily, mutually repellent--have felt, felt rather
than thought, about love and happiness--the _muero porque no muero_ and
the _dolor sabroso_ and all the rest that emanates from the same depths
of feeling.
* * * * *
And what relation does all this bear to the spiritual problem of Spain?
Is it anything more than a purely and exclusively personal, that is to
say arbitrary, position? Is it as a Spaniard that I feel all this? Is
it suggested to me by the Spanish soul?
It has been said that with the Catholic Kings and the beginnings of
national unity the course of our history was turned into another
channel. It is certain that since then, with the discovery of America
and our intermeddling in European affairs, we have been drawn into the
current of other peoples. Spain entered into the strong current of the
Renaissance and our mediæval soul began to be obliterated. And the
Renaissance was in its essence just this: science, above all in the
form of humanities, and life. And thought dwelt less upon death and the
mystical wisdom gradually disappeared.
It has frequently been said that the Spaniard is too much preoccupied
with death; and we have been told, in a variety of ways and especially
by those who deal in platitudes, that the preoccupation with death
prevents us from living like moderns and like Europeans. The blame even
for our death-rate and for our squalor and for our lack of health has
been thrown upon our so-called cult of death. And it seems to me, on
the other hand, that we think too little about death, or rather that we
only half think about it.
And we half think and half meditate about death because we pretend to
be European and modern without ceasing to be Spaniards, and that is
impossible. And we have made an infamous commixture of our classic
wisdom and exotic science, of our innate deep feeling for death and
a borrowed solicitude for life. And we have thought we were keenly
interested in progress whereas in fact we trouble very little about it.
“You deceive yourself,” a foreign friend of mine once said to me,
thinking that although I was a Spaniard I was also European and
modern, “you deceive yourself--Spaniards in general are incapable of
civilization and refractory to it.”
And I left him cold with stupor when I replied: “And is that a fault?”
The man looked at me as one looks at someone who has suddenly gone mad;
it must have seemed to him as if I had denied a postulate of geometry.
He began to reason with me and I said: “No, don’t attempt to give me
reasons. I think I may say without boasting, and yet without the
hypocrisy of modesty, that I know all the reasons you can bring forward
on this point. It is not a question of reasons but of feelings.”
He insisted, attempting to talk to me about feeling, and I added: “No,
my friend, no, you know all about logic, but it is not logic, but
passion, that governs feelings.” And I left him and went away to read
the confessions of the great African of the ancient world.
Is it not perhaps true that we Spaniards are, in effect, spiritually
refractory to what is called modern European culture? And if this be
so, ought we to be distressed about it? Is it not possible to live and
to die, above all to die well, without this fortunate culture?
And by this I don’t mean that we are engulfed in inaction, in ignorance
and in barbarism--no, not that. There are means of augmenting the
spirit, of exalting it, of enlarging it, of ennobling it, of making
it more divine, without having recourse to this same culture. We can,
I believe, cultivate our wisdom without accepting science except as a
means to this end, taking due precautions against its corrupting the
spirit.
Just as love of death and the feeling that it is the principle of our
true life ought not to lead us to a violent renunciation of life,
to suicide--for life is a preparation for death, and the better the
preparation, the better the thing prepared for--so neither ought love
of wisdom to lead us to a renunciation of science, for that would be
equivalent to mental suicide, but to an acceptance of science as a
preparation, and as nothing more than a preparation, for wisdom.
For my part I can say that if I had never made excursions into the
fields of some of the modern European sciences, I should never have
taken the delight that I have taken in our ancient African wisdom, in
our popular wisdom, in what scandalizes all the Pharisees and Sadducees
of intellectualism, that horrible intellectualism that poisons the
soul. It is hearing hymns in praise of them that has made me view
science and life with distrust, perhaps with horror, and love the
wisdom of death, the meditation which, according to Spinoza, the free
man, that is, the happy man, does not meditate.
* * * * *
A few days ago I read an article by my friend and fellow-Basque, Pío
Baroja, entitled “The Sad Country,” in which he says that Spain is a
sad country, just as France is a beautiful country. He opposes smiling
France, with its level fertile soil, with its mild climate, with its
bright transparent rivers that slide smoothly along flush with their
banks, to our peninsula, full of stones, burnt by the sun and frozen
with the winter frost. He observes that in France the products of the
spirit cannot compare with the products of agriculture and industry;
that the dramas of Racine are not fashioned so finely as the wines of
Bordeaux; that the pictures of Delacroix are not so good as the oysters
of Arcachon; and that, on the other hand, our great men, Cervantes,
Velazquez, El Greco, Goya, are the equals or more than the equals of
the great men of any other country; while our actual life is not equal
to, not the life of Morocco, but the life of Portugal.
And I say: Is it not worth while to undergo the hardship of renouncing
this pleasant life of France in order to breathe the spirit that
can produce a Cervantes, a Velazquez, an El Greco, a Goya? Are not
these perhaps incompatible with the wine of Bordeaux and the oysters
of Arcachon? I believe--arbitrarily of course--that it is so, that
they are incompatible, and I take my stand with _Don Quixote_, with
Velazquez, with El Greco, with Goya, and against the wine of Bordeaux
and the oysters of Arcachon, against Racine and Delacroix. Passion and
sensuality are incompatible; passion is arbitrary, logic is sensual.
For logic is nothing but a form of sensuality.
“All our material and intellectual products are hard, rugged and
disagreeable,” Baroja continues. “The wine is thick, the meat bad, the
papers boring and the literature sad. I don’t know what it is that
makes our literature so disagreeable.”
Here I must pause. I am not sensible of this identification of the
sad with the disagreeable; and I will even say--although there may
be some simple enough to take this to be a paradox--that for me the
disagreeable is that which is called gay. I shall never forget the
highly disagreeable effect, the deep disgust, which the strident
hilarity of the Parisian boulevard produced upon me seventeen years
ago, and the feeling of disquiet and uneasiness that came over me
there. All that world of youth, dancing, jesting, playing, drinking,
making love, seemed to me to be composed of puppets endowed with sense;
they seemed to lack consciousness, to be appearances merely. I felt
alone, utterly alone among them, and this feeling of loneliness pained
me. I could not bring myself to accept the idea that these roisterers,
these devotees of the _joie de vivre_, were beings like myself, my
fellows, or even the idea that they were living creatures dowered with
consciousness.
Here you have an instance of the way in which gaiety jarred upon
me, was disagreeable to me. And on the other hand, when I am in the
midst of heart-sick multitudes crying to heaven for mercy, chanting
a _De profundis_ or a _Miserere_, I cannot help feeling myself among
brothers, united to them by love.
Later on, Baroja says: “For me, one of the saddest things about Spain
is that we Spaniards cannot be frivolous or jovial.”
And for me it would be one of the saddest things for Spain if we
Spaniards could become frivolous and jovial. In that case we should
cease to be Spaniards, yet without even becoming Europeans. In that
case we should have to renounce our true consolation and our true
glory, which consists precisely in this inability to be either
frivolous or jovial. In that case we might be able to repeat in chorus
all the unsubstantialities of the popular scientific handbooks, but
we should be incapacitated for entering into the kingdom of wisdom.
In that case we might perhaps have better and finer wines, purer oil,
better oysters; but we should have to renounce the possibility of a
new _Don Quixote_, or a new Velazquez, and, above all, the possibility
of a new St. John of the Cross, a new Fray Diego de Estella, a new St.
Teresa de Jesús--whether orthodox or heterodox, it matters not which.
And Baroja concludes: “A sad country in which everywhere all people
live their lives thinking of nothing less than of life.”
And this arbitrariness provokes my arbitrariness and I exclaim: Unhappy
those modern European countries in which people live their lives
thinking of nothing more than of life. Unhappy those countries in
which men do not continually think of death and in which the guiding
principle of life is not the thought that we shall all one day have to
lose it.
* * * * *
Here I must halt a moment--if it is possible to speak of halts in
a course such as my thought is taking here--and explain, if it is
possible to explain it, what this arbitrariness really is.
Foreigners, the French in particular, take from us precisely that
which is least ours, that which least clashes with their spirit, and,
naturally enough, that which best accommodates itself to the idea
that they have formed of us, an idea that is always and necessarily
superficial. And we, poor fools, yield to this delusive adulation and
hope for this external applause, the applause of those who really don’t
hear us, and even when they do hear us don’t understand us.
I don’t really know what they want in taking from us just what they do
take, just that which confirms the popular notion they have of us. If I
were in their place, what I should take from Spain and make known to my
fellow-countrymen would be what was most wounding to their convictions,
what amazed them most, what was most repellent to their spirit, what
was most different from them.
But after all what they do is natural, for people want to be told
just that which they already think, that which confirms them in their
preconceived ideas, their prejudices and their superstitions: men want
to be deceived. And so it is here.
In face of this attitude of theirs, what must be our attitude? In face
of this process that tends to decharacterize us, to rob us of that
which makes us what we are, what course of action is the best for us to
adopt? Admonished by those voices that say: “If you want to be like us
and save yourselves, take this,” what must we do?
But this question of attempting to Spaniardize Europe, the only means
whereby we may Europeanize ourselves, so far as it is fitting that we
should be Europeanized, or rather, whereby we may digest those elements
in the European spirit which we can convert into our spirit--this
question must be left for separate treatment.
All this will appear arbitrary--it is arbitrary. How can I help it?
“Enough,” some logical modern European reader will say; “now
I’ve caught you. You yourself admit that your assertions have no
foundation, that they are arbitrary, that they cannot be proved, and
such assertions ought not to be taken seriously.” And I will say to
this poor logical modern and European reader, who may be assumed to
be in love with science and life, that the fact that an assertion is
arbitrary and cannot be proved by logical reasons, does not mean either
that it is without foundation or, still less, that it is false. And
above all it does not mean that such an assertion may not excite and
animate the spirit, may not strengthen its inner life, that inner life
which is a very different thing from the life that the logical and
scientificist reader is in love with.
* * * * *
I broke off this essay at this point two days ago, with the intention
of continuing it, of resuming the broken thread, as occasion offered,
and now to-day, the 13th of May, I have just read a phrase that alters
the course of my discourse. Something of the kind happens to rivers
when a rock deflects their course and causes them to disembogue many
leagues away from where they would otherwise have disembogued, perhaps
into another sea altogether.
It is curious what happens to our ideas. We have often in our mind a
crowd of ideas that vegetate in the darkness, withered, incomplete,
unacquainted with one another and avoiding one another. For in the
darkness, ideas, like men, are afraid of one another. And they remain
obscured, disassociated, avoiding contact. But suddenly a new and
luminous idea enters the mind, emitting light and illuminating the
dark corner, and as soon as the other ideas see it and see their own
faces, they recognize one another, they arise and gather round the new
arrival, they embrace and form a fraternity and recover their full life.
So it has happened with me to-day when a number of half-alive and
shadowy ideas that have been lying isolated in a corner of my mind
have been joined by this new idea that I have just read in a Madrid
newspaper, _La Correspondencia de España_, of yesterday’s date, the
12th of May.
In an article that it publishes, entitled “Current Events--Cánovas,”
the author says: “Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain. Cánovas
never knew of what stuff his fellow-countrymen were made.”
The moment that I read this, I realized, as if by a sudden
illumination, the difference that there is between the soul of Spain
and the aggregate of the souls of all us Spaniards who are living
to-day, the actual synthesis of these same souls. And I remembered that
at the time of the last Carlist civil war, when I was a boy, I heard
someone in my native town say: “Even though all we men of Bilbao were
to become Carlists, Bilbao would remain liberal.” A paradox--that is
to say, a profound arbitrary truth, a truth of passion, a truth of the
heart, and one that I shall never forget.
“Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain.” And all our commonplace
rulers, those who let themselves drift with the stream and enjoy
long years of office, all our commonplace writers, those who
write books that are just long tirades, books that sell, all our
commonplace artists and all our commonplace thinkers, understand their
fellow-countrymen, but not their country.
Not only our own souls, the souls of us who are living to-day, are
alive and operative in the soul of Spain, but in addition to these,
the souls of all our forefathers. Our own souls, those of the living,
are those that are least alive in it, for our soul does not enter into
the soul of our country until it is no longer a detached entity, until
after our temporal death.
What is the use of our wanting to make our thought modern and European
when our language is neither European nor modern? While we are
endeavouring to make it say one thing, it is endeavouring to make us
say something different, and thus we don’t say the thought that we
pretend we are saying, but we say the thought that we don’t wish to say.
We endeavour--that is to say, many of us endeavour--to deform our
spirit conformably with an external standard, and we succeed neither
in making ourselves like those whom we pretend to copy nor in being
ourselves. Whence results a horrible spiritual half-breed, a kind of
barren hybrid.
And the most curious thing about it all is this--something that will
be understood one day, if the day ever comes when anyone will occupy
himself in investigating the spiritual condition of Spain at the
transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries--the most
curious and surprising thing is that those who are held to be most
Spanish, most true-blooded and of the old stock, most authentically
Spanish, are those who are the most Europeanizing, the most exotic,
those whose soul contains the most alien strains; and on the other
hand those whom many simple-minded folk regard as exotic spirits,
anglicized, gallicized, Germanized, Norwegianized, are the ones whose
roots intermingle most closely with the roots of those who created the
Spanish soul. I have observed how frequently a skin-deep classicism,
a classicism of external grammatical and rhetorical forms, goes hand
in hand with a complete alienation from the national soul, and vice
versa. I have known a portentous fool, once an esteemed author, who
used to read our mystics in order to learn from them how to write
good Castilian and upon whom the ardent soul of these most genuinely
Spanish spirits made no impression whatever; and on the other hand I
know a man who, although he has never read them nor concerned himself
in any way to preserve their literary tradition or their religious
orthodoxy, in breathing the national spiritual atmosphere has breathed
the air of that mysticism that is inherent in this atmosphere.
What is the origin of this confusion? I cannot tell, but I presume that
it must originate in the same cause that makes Spaniards insist on
calling him a wise man who has least wisdom in him and demanding logic
from a man who is passionate and arbitrary.
“People want and demand _things_,” so a friend of mine says to me
when I talk to him about these matters, “that is to say, concrete
ideas, utilizable facts, scientific theories, information, rational
explanations, and it is no use going to them with feelings and dreams.”
Usually my first thought on hearing this is, “Unfortunate people!”
but immediately afterwards I pull myself up and say: “They are partly
right; it is right that they should demand that; but why must so many
of them reject the other? and above all why should they not demand from
each one just that which he has and which he can give?”
And, to apply this to our own people, why must we persist in distorting
our inner nature and rejecting what it gives us in order to try to
force it to give us something else?
Our defects, or what others call our defects, are usually the root of
our excellencies; the qualities that are censured as our vices are the
foundation of our virtues. It is not a universal æsthetic, applicable
to all peoples alike, a pure æsthetic--for I doubt whether such an
æsthetic exists or even can exist--that has condemned our conceptism
and gongorism, for example, and that has decreed that our genuine and
natural instinct for emphasis is in bad taste. It is not a universal
æsthetic, valid for all peoples alike, but the æsthetic of other
peoples, or rather of one other people, the French, that has imposed
this canon upon so many of us. The literary and artistic vices of
this terribly logical, desperately geometrical, Cartesian people are
certainly not those of conceptism or gongorism, and this people has
succeeded in great measure in teaching us its virtues and in teaching
us its vices. There is nothing more intolerable than gallicized
Spanish literature; nothing more false, more futile, more displeasing,
than Spanish writers who have formed themselves by imitating French
literature.
Emphasis? But what if emphasis is natural to us? What if emphatic
expression is the spontaneous expression of our nature? What if
emphasis is the form of passion, just as what is called naturalness is
the expression of sensuality and of good sense? What I am sure of is
that when a man is really irritated or really enthusiastic, he does not
express himself in concise, clear, logical, transparent phrases, but he
breaks out into emphatic exclamations, into redundant dithyrambs. What
I know, and what everybody knows, is that in love-letters, if the love
be real love, tragic love, love that cannot be happy, everything is
poured forth in a flood of burning commonplaces.
I have often thought that gongorism and conceptism are, in a certain
mode, expressions of passion. I affirm it of conceptism, arbitrarily,
of course. Almost all the great men of passion that I am acquainted
with in the history of human thought, including the great African of
whom I have already spoken, have been conceptists, have poured forth
their longings, their aspirations, in antitheses, in paradoxes, in
phrases that at first sight seem to be merely ingenious. Perhaps this
is owing to the fact that passion is the enemy of logic, in which it
sees a tyrant, for passion desires that what it desires should exist,
and does not desire what must exist, and conceptism in its essence is a
violation of logic for the sake of logic itself. He plays with concepts
and does violence to ideas who is impeded by concepts and ideas, for he
is unable to make them comply with the demands of his passion.
I need the immortality of my soul, the indefinite persistence of my
individual consciousness--I need it. Without it, without faith in
it, I cannot live, and doubt, the inability to believe that I shall
attain it, torments me. And since I need it, my passion leads me to
affirm it, and to affirm it arbitrarily, and when I attempt to make
others believe, to make myself believe, I do violence to logic and
make use of arguments which are called ingenious and paradoxical by
those unfortunate people who have no passion and who contemplate their
ultimate dissolution with resignation.
The man of passion, the arbitrary man, is the only real rebel, and
nothing makes a more grotesque impression upon me than when I come
across those--usually gallicized--individuals who proclaim themselves
emancipated from all tyrannies, lovers of liberty, _esprits forts_,
anarchists sometimes, frequently atheists, but who nevertheless are the
faithful devotees of logic and of the code of good taste.
Yes, emphasis, turgidity, conceptism, paradoxism, these are the
language passion speaks, and, on the other hand, there is nothing less
natural, for us Spaniards at any rate, than that which the French call
_naturel_ and which is usually the refined product of an exquisite and
artificial elaboration.
Some Frenchman has said that French literature is that which gives the
most eloquent expression to the great commonplaces of humanity; but I
would say that it is in this literature, which has done and still does
so much harm in Spain, that all middling ideas and middling feelings
find their most adequate form and expression, and that it is hostile to
extreme ideas and extreme feelings.
Observe that the French spirit has produced no great mystic, no really
great pure mystic. Observe that upon Pascal, although he was somewhat
arbitrary and passionate, geometry made a profound impression. And
consider the fact that Pascal is one of the French spirits that we are
best able to appropriate. It is to this most profound and tortured
spirit that we owe two great and profound instances, among others, of
tormentingly arbitrary utterance: that of the _pari_ or wager, and that
of _il faut s’abêtir_, “we must become as fools”--in order to believe,
beginning with acting as if we did believe. But I don’t know of any
great mystic, any really pure mystic, who was a Frenchman. And here
I should like to say something about the gentle, tranquil, sensual
and logical St. Francis of Sales, so full of common sense and of a
spiritual _via media_, but I must leave it for some other time.
And it is the æsthetic of this people, so opposed to our own, in spite
of all that nonsense about the Latin sisterhood--I don’t know whether
they are Latin, I don’t know whether we are, and as regards myself
personally, I believe that there is nothing Latin about me--it is the
æsthetic of this people that is deforming the fruit of our spirit as it
is expressed in many of our spiritual creators.
Latins. Latins? And why, if we are really Berbers, must we not feel
and assert that we are Berbers, and why must not the poetry in which
we endeavour to give expression to our sorrows and our consolations
conform to the Berber æsthetic?
The only way of entering into vital relations with another is the
aggressive way; only those succeed in mutually penetrating one another,
in forming a spiritual brotherhood, who strive to subjugate one another
spiritually, whether in the case of individuals or of peoples. It is
only when I strive to put my spirit into the spirit of my neighbour
that I receive my neighbour’s spirit in mine. The apostle is blessed
in receiving in himself the souls of those whom he converts; in this
consists the nobility of proselytizing.
No, none of this _laissez-faire_ and _laissez-aller_--don’t let us
shrug our shoulders at the ideas, still less at the feelings, of
others, but rather try to wound them. It is thus and only thus that
they will wound ours and keep them awake within us. For my part I know
that those to whom I owe most are those who have acted as if they
rejected, who have wished to reject, what I offered to them. The deep
moral life is a life of aggression and mutual penetration. Everyone
must endeavour to make others in his own image and likeness, as God is
said to have made us in His image and likeness.
The condemnation of him who tries to mould himself upon another lies in
the fact that he will cease to be himself without succeeding in being
the other whom he takes as his model, and so he will be nobody.
Unquestionably there is something, there are many things, in modern
European culture and in the modern European spirit that it behoves us
to receive into ourselves in order that we may convert them into our
flesh, just as we receive the flesh of various kinds of animals into
our body and convert it into our flesh. With the brains of oxen I
nourish my brain, with the ribs of hogs I make my heart beat, with fish
and birds I feed my body so that my spirit can plunge into the deeps
and swim in them and ascend to the heights and fly there. And must we
not eat the modern European spirit? Yes, but we first kill these oxen,
hogs, fishes and birds, upon which we nourish ourselves, imposing our
will upon them, and we must deal with this spirit in the same way
before eating it.
I am profoundly convinced, arbitrarily of course--the more profoundly,
the more arbitrarily, as is always the case when truths of faith
are concerned--I am profoundly convinced that the real and deep
Europeanization of Spain, that is to say, our digestion of that part of
the European spirit which it is possible to convert into our spirit,
will not begin until we strive to impose ourselves upon the European
spiritual order, to make the Europeans swallow our spirit, that
which is genuinely ours, in exchange for theirs, until we strive to
Spaniardize Europe.
And to-day--I say it with shame and sorrow--when a Spaniard seeks to
enter into the European world, that is to say, in the case of men of
letters, when he wishes to be translated, all that he is concerned
about is to deform himself, to de-Spaniardize himself, to leave the
translator nothing to do but to translate the letter, the external
language. And thus it is that one hears remarks like that which a
Frenchman made to me the other day, when, speaking of the translation
of a contemporary Spanish novel, he stated that it was better in French
than in Spanish. To this I replied that it had been translated back
into its original language.
Each human faculty has its method, that is to say, its procedure, its
mode of action. That which we call logic is the method of reason,
the way of discovering conclusions satisfactory to reason. In this
way science is made. But when it is a question neither of addressing
nor satisfying reason, there is no need of logic. And for my part, I
rarely, very rarely, address myself to the reason of those who hear
or read me, and when I do so, it is not I myself who speak or write,
but rather an artificial self--and because artificial, therefore
detachable--which those who hear or read me impose upon me.
It has been said that the heart has its logic, but it is dangerous
to call the method of the heart logic; it would be better to call it
_cardiac_.
And there is also the method of passion, which is arbitrariness and
which must not be confounded with caprice, as often happens. It is one
thing to be capricious and another very different thing to be arbitrary.
Arbitrariness, the brusque affirmation of a thing because I wish
it to be so, because I need it to be so, the creation of our vital
truth--truth being that which makes us live--is the method of passion.
Passion affirms and the proof of its affirmation is founded upon the
energy with which it is affirmed. It needs no other proofs. When some
poor intellectual, some modern European, opposes ratiocinations and
arguments to any of my affirmations, I say to myself: reasons, reasons,
and nothing more than reasons!
Although he deserved to have been a Spaniard for writing them, it was
not a Spaniard but an Englishman who wrote these lines:
For nothing worthy proving can be proven
Nor yet disproven; wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.
It was Lord Tennyson who wrote these pregnant lines, and in the same
poem, “The Ancient Sage,” he tells us that “knowledge is the swallow on
the lake that stirs and sees the surface-shadow there, but never yet
hath dipt into the abysm.”
Let, then, my last words here, while I am preparing to consider how it
is possible to Spaniardize Europe, be that nothing worthy proving can
be proven nor yet disproven.
THE SPANISH CHRIST
He was a foreigner, a South American, and he came from Paris. “But
these Christs!--Good God!” he said to me, as we stood before one of the
bloodiest of those that are to be found in our cathedrals, “this thing
repels, revolts---- ”
“It revolts him who knows nothing of the cult of suffering,” I said.
And he replied: “But suffering is not blood. There is bloodless
suffering, serene suffering.” ...
And we began to talk about it.
I confessed to him that I have the soul of my people, and that I like
these livid Christs, emaciated, purple, bloody, these Christs that
someone has called ferocious. Lacking in art? Barbarous? I don’t know.
And I like these harsh Marias Dolorosas, rigid with grief.
The Spanish Christ--so Guerra Junqueiro has often said to me--was born
in Tangiers. Perhaps. Perhaps He is an African Christ. Would He be more
Christ if He were an Attic or a Parisian or an English Christ? For
the other Christ, the Galilean, the historical, we must bid farewell
to. And as for history as applied to Christianity.... This history is
the history of the last twenty centuries, and here, in Spain, history
is Spanish. He was born then, perhaps, in Tangiers. Not very far from
Tangiers was born St. Augustine.
Bloodless, serene, purified suffering.... Yes, yes, “stylistic”--or
shall we say, artistic?--suffering. The cry of suffering breathed into
a flute and become a dirge. Very good. All that the Laocoön inspired in
Lessing was just that.
Very good. But it is the same with this kind of suffering as with
irony. Usually ironists are people who are never angry. He who is
angry is insulting. The ironist forgives everything and says that it
is because he understands everything. And what if it is because he
understands nothing? I don’t know.
This harsh, raw manner of ours--I said to my friend, the South
American--not everyone can bear it. It has been said that hate is rife
in Spain. Perhaps. Perhaps we begin by hating ourselves. You will
find many here, a great many, who dislike themselves. We follow the
precept of “love thy neighbour as thyself,” and since, in spite of
inevitable egoism, we do not love ourselves, so neither do we love our
neighbours. The ascetic and the egoist are made in the same way. Not
that the ascetic is not an egoist; egoistic he may indeed be, and with
a vengeance. But even when an egoist, he does not know how to love
himself.
When you see a bull-fight, I continued, you will understand these
Christs. The poor bull is also a kind of irrational Christ, a
propitiatory victim, whose blood cleanses us from not a few of the sins
of barbarism. And leads us, nevertheless, to others. But is it not true
that forgiveness leads us--unhappy humans!--to sin again?
My friend saw a bull-fight in Madrid and wrote to me as follows;
“You are right. The Spanish people likes violent spectacles, which
beget the emotion of tragedy, or rather of ferocity. I had no
difficulty in understanding this at the bull-fight last Sunday. I
understood it also when I conversed with various people, and in
particular with literary people, who tear one another to pieces
with unparalleled ferocity. Poor Christ, pierced and bathed with
blood! There is no hope that His wounds will ever heal in these
Spanish cathedrals or that the grimace of His frenzied pain will
ever relax--for here there is no knowledge of the return of Jesus
to heaven, after His martyrdom.”
Perhaps--who knows?--our heaven is martyrdom itself.
Not a few foreigners who have learnt to know us have been struck with
this ferocity with which, here in Spain, men of letters destroy one
another. Yes, here all men, but particularly artists and writers,
destroy one another with the ferocity of bull-fighters--or it may be
with the Christian ferocity of our Tangerine Christianity.
And I, who do not like bull-fights and never go to see them, I, who
do not like flaying my fellow writers (for the office of executioner
dirties the hands), I like these Tangerine Christs, purple, livid,
blood-stained and blood-drained. Yes, I like these bleeding and
exsanguious Christs.
And the smell of tragedy! Above all, the smell of tragedy!
* * * * *
You should read the great Sarmiento’s comparison between bull-fights
and tragedy, in his account of his journey in Spain about the middle of
the last century. In the bull-fight there is none of the insupportable
unities of the pseudo-classical tragedy, and there is, moreover, real
dying. Real dying, and, above all, real killing. The bull is killed
just as an infidel dog was killed by a good Spanish Christian in the
good old days--really killed.
For many people, perhaps for my friend the American, all this creates
an atmosphere difficult to breathe, an acrid atmosphere. But if you
take away the taste, other atmospheres too become insipid. It is like
the austere beauty of our bleak upland deserts. He who tempers his
soul, or distempers it--I know not which--in the contemplation of
these blood-stained and blood-drained Christs, never accustoms himself
afterwards to others.
And this hate, this same hate that circulates everywhere here, like a
subterranean stream of lava, this same hate ...
It has its source in what is deepest in ourselves; we hate ourselves
and not one another only, but each one his own self.
“But you people have no real love of life, although you are tenacious
of it,” another foreigner said to me once, a Frenchman, as one who
makes a discovery. And I replied: “Perhaps!” He exclaimed again: “But
this is a veritable cult of death!” And I answered: “Of death, no--of
immortality!” The fear that if we die, we die utterly and altogether,
makes us cling to life, and the hope of living another life makes us
hate this one.
_La joie de vivre._ It has been translated _la alegría de vivir_. But
it is only a translation. This _alegría de vivir_--let them say what
they like--is a gallicism. It is not an authentic Spanish phrase. I
do not remember to have met with it in any of our classics. For man’s
greatest crime is that of having been born.[1] Indeed it is!
And this same literary ferocity with which our men of letters bite
and tear and flay and quarter one another is not without its sharp
voluptuousness for the spectator. And it is in this strife that our
masterminds are tempered. Many of their ripest have been produced
in the atmosphere of defamatory coteries. And they carry with them,
naturally enough, the acrid flavour of their origin. They smell of
hate. And the public, scenting hate, becomes excited and applauds.
Applauds as it does at the bull-fight when it smells blood. Blood of
the body or blood of the soul, what is there else?
Is this cultured? is this civilized? is this European? I don’t know.
But it is Spanish.
Ought we to be ashamed of it? Why? Better to probe into it, scrutinize
it, stir up the depths of it, make ourselves fully conscious of this
hatred of our own selves. The evil lies in our being unconscious of it,
for once it is revealed to us for what it is, a hatred and abhorrence
of our own selves, it is already in the way of becoming ennobling and
strengthening and redeeming. Do you not remember that terrible paradox
of the Gospels about having to hate father and mother and wife and
children in order to take up the cross, the blood-stained cross, and
follow the Redeemer? Hatred of ourselves, when it is unconscious,
obscure, purely instinctive, almost animal, engenders egoism; but when
it becomes conscious, clear, rational, it is able to engender heroism.
And there is a rational hatred, yes, there is.
Yes, there is a triumphant, heavenly, glorious Christ, He of the
Transfiguration, He of the Ascension, He who sits at the right hand
of the Father; but He is for when we shall have triumphed, for when
we shall have been transfigured, for when we shall have ascended. But
for here and now, in this bull-ring of the world, in this life which
is nothing but tragic bull-fighting, the other Christ, the livid, the
purple, the bleeding and exsanguious.
THE SEPULCHRE OF DON QUIXOTE
You ask me, my friend, if I know of any way of loosing a delirium, a
vertigo, any kind of madness, upon these poor ordered and tranquil
multitudes who are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves and die.
Is there no means, you ask me, of reproducing the epidemic of the
Flagellants or of the Tarantists? And you talk of the millennium.
Like you, I often feel a nostalgia for the Middle Ages; like you, I
should like to live in the throes of the millennium. If we could make
people believe that on a given day, say the 2nd of May, 1908,--the
centenary of our shout of independence--Spain would come to an end
for ever, that on that day we should be scattered like sheep, then I
believe that the 3rd of May, 1908, would be the greatest day of our
history, the dawn of a new life.
But now it’s all hopeless, utterly hopeless. Nothing whatever matters
to anybody. And if any isolated individual attempts to agitate
any problem or question, he is supposed to be prompted either
by self-interest or by a thirst for notoriety and a passion for
singularizing himself.
Not even madness is understood here to-day. Even of the madman they
say that there is method and reason in his madness. The wretched
multitude takes for granted the reason of unreason. If our Lord Don
Quixote were to rise again and return to this Spain of his, they would
go about looking for some ulterior purpose in his noble extravagances.
If any one denounces an abuse, attacks injustice, fustigates orthodox
platitudes, the slavish crowd asks: What is his object in that? What
is he aiming at? Sometimes they believe and say that he does it in the
hope of being paid to keep quiet; sometimes that he is actuated by
base and despicable passions of vengeance and envy; sometimes that his
motive is vainglory, that he only wants to make a stir in order to get
himself talked about; sometimes that he does it for the sake of killing
time, for amusement, for sport. Pity that there are so few who go in
for this kind of sport!
Mark this well!--When confronted by any act of generosity, of heroism,
of madness, all these stupid bachelors, curates and barbers of to-day
think only of asking: Why does he do it? And as soon as they think they
have discovered the reason of the action, whether their supposition is
correct or not, they exclaim: Bah! he has done it for the sake of this
or for the sake of that. As soon as they know the _raison d’être_ of a
thing, that thing has lost all its value for them. Such are the uses of
logic, filthy logic.
To understand is to forgive, it has been said. And these mean souls
need to understand in order to forgive their being humiliated, to
forgive the indirect reproach of deeds and words that show up their own
meanness.
When it has occurred to them to ask themselves, stupidly enough, why
God made the world, they have answered: For His own glory! And the
fools are as pompously satisfied with the answer as if they knew what
is meant by the glory of God.
Things are made first, their wherefore comes afterwards. Give me any
new idea about anything and it will tell me its wherefore afterwards.
Whenever I put forward some project, something which it appears to
me ought to be done, there is always somebody who is sure to ask me:
And afterwards? To such a question the only possible reply is another
question. To the “And afterwards?” one can only ripost by an “And
before?”
There is no future, there is never any future. This thing that is
called the future is one of the greatest of deceptions. The real
future is to-day. What is going to happen to us to-morrow? There is no
to-morrow. What is happening to us to-day? That is the only question.
And so far as to-day is concerned, all these petty souls are quite
content because to-day they exist. Existing suffices them. Existence,
sheer, naked existence, fills their whole soul. They don’t feel that
there is something more than existing.
But do they exist? Do they really exist? I believe not. For if they
existed, if they really existed, they would suffer because they
existed, existing would not content them. If they really and truly
existed in time and in space they would suffer because they did not
exist in eternity and in infinity. And this suffering, this passion,
which is nothing other than the passion of God in us, of God who in
us suffers at feeling Himself imprisoned in our finitude and our
temporality, this divine suffering would cause them to break all
those paltry logical chains with which they seek to bind their paltry
memories to their paltry hopes, the illusion of their past to the
illusion of their future.
“Why does he do it?” Did Sancho, perchance, never inquire why Don
Quixote did the things that he did?
And to return to your question, to your preoccupation: With what
collective madness could we inoculate these tranquil multitudes? With
what delirium?
You yourself have hinted at a solution in one of those letters in which
you bombard me with questions. “Do you not believe,” you asked me,
“that it might be possible to start some new crusade?”
Yes, I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the
redemption of the sepulchre of Don Quixote from the dominion of the
bachelors, curates, barbers, dukes and canons who have taken possession
of it. I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the
redemption of the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly from the dominion of
the mandarins of Reason.
They will defend their usurpation, naturally, and will endeavour to
prove with many and elaborate reasons that the guard and custody of the
sepulchre belongs to them. They guard it in order that the Knight shall
not rise again.
These reasons must be answered with insults, with stone-throwings,
with shouts of passion, with lance-thrusts. These people are not to be
reasoned with. If you try to reason against their reasons, you are lost.
If they ask you, as they usually do, by what right you claim the
sepulchre, answer nothing. They will find out afterwards. Afterwards
... perhaps when both they and you no longer exist, at any rate not in
this world of appearances.
And this holy crusade has one great advantage over those other holy
crusades which spread the dawn of a new life upon this old world. Those
other ardent crusaders knew where the sepulchre of Christ was, where
it was said that it was; but our new crusaders will not know where the
sepulchre of Don Quixote is to be found. It must be sought for in the
act of fighting to redeem it.
Your quixotesque madness has led you more than once to speak to me
of quixotism as of a new religion. And I must tell you that this new
religion which you propose, if it should ever come to materialize,
would have two notable characteristics. First, that we are not sure
whether its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote--not Cervantes, of
course--was a real man, a man of flesh and bone; indeed, we rather
suspect that he was a pure fiction. And second, that this prophet was a
ridiculous prophet; the butt and laughing-stock of the world.
It is courage that we need most of all--courage to face ridicule.
Ridicule is the weapon wielded by all the miserable bachelors, barbers,
curates, canons and dukes who guard the hidden sepulchre of the Knight
of Folly. The Knight who made all the world laugh but never made a joke
himself. He had too great a soul to make jokes. He was laughed at for
his seriousness.
Begin then, my friend, to play Peter the Hermit and call the people to
join you, to join us, and let us all go to redeem this sepulchre which
lies we know not where. The crusade itself will reveal the holy place
to us.
You will see that as soon as the sacred squadron begins to march, a new
star will appear in the sky, a bright and sounding star, which will
sing a new song in the long night that encompasses us, and the star
will begin to move when the squadron of the crusaders begins to march,
and when they have conquered in their crusade, or when they have all
succumbed--which is perhaps the only way of truly conquering--the star
will fall from the sky, and the place where it falls will be the place
of the sepulchre. The sepulchre will be where the squadron dies.
And where the sepulchre is, there is the cradle, there is the
birth-place. And from there the bright and sounding star will mount
again heavenwards....
Question me no more, dear friend. When you force me to speak of these
things, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my heart,
sick with the atmosphere of conventionality that harasses and oppresses
me on all sides, sick with the slime of the slough of falsehood in
which we are mired, sick with scrabbling cowardice which shows itself
on every hand, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my
sick heart visions without reason, concepts without logic, things of
which I know not the meaning and whose meaning I do not wish to try to
fathom.
What do you mean by that? you ask me yet again. And I reply: Perhaps I
don’t even know myself.
No, my friend, no. The meaning of many of these utterances of my spirit
I do not know myself, or rather it is not I who know them. There is
someone within me who dictates them to me, who speaks them to me. I
obey him and I never penetrate within to behold his face or to ask his
name. Only I know that if I beheld his face and if he told me his name,
I should die that he might live.
I am ashamed of having sometimes created fictitious beings, the
personages of my novels, in order that I might put into their mouths
that which I dare not put into my own and make them say in jest what I
feel in deadly earnest.
You know me, and you know how far I am from intentionally going in
search of paradoxes, extravagances, and mannerisms--whatever some
dull fools may think. You and I, my good friend, my only absolute
friend, have often debated between ourselves as to what madness really
is, and we have commented upon that saying of Ibsen’s Brand, the
spiritual son of Kierkegaard, to the effect that the man who is mad
is the man who is alone. And we have agreed that madness ceases to be
madness when it becomes collective, when it is the madness of a whole
people, of the whole human race perhaps. In so far as a hallucination
becomes collective, becomes popular, becomes social, it ceases to be
a hallucination and becomes a reality, something that is external to
each one of those who share it. And you and I are agreed that the
multitudes, the people, our Spanish people, must be inoculated with
some madness or other, the madness of some one of its members who is
mad--but really mad, not mad only in jest. Mad, and not foolish.
You and I, my good friend, have been scandalized at that which they
call here fanaticism and which--to our shame be it said--is not
fanaticism at all. No, nothing is fanaticism that is regulated and
restrained and directed by bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and
dukes; nothing is fanaticism that carries a banner inscribed with
logical formulas, nothing that has a program, nothing that holds
out for to-morrow merely a proposition that an orator can develop
methodically in a speech.
Once--do you remember?--we saw a group of eight or ten youths and one
of them said: “Let’s do something rash!” and the others followed him.
And you and I long for the people to get together and shout: “Let’s
do something rash!” and begin to march. And if any bachelor, any
barber, any curate, any canon or any duke should stop them and say:
“My children, that’s right! I see that you are bursting with heroism
and righteous indignation. I also will go with you. But before we all
go, and I along with you, to do this rash deed, don’t you think that
we ought to agree as to the rashness that we are going to commit?”--if
any of these mandarins should stop them and say that, then they ought
to knock him down on the spot and walk over him, trampling on him, and
that would be a beginning of the heroic rashness. Don’t you think, my
friend, that there are many lonely souls amongst us whose heart craves
for some rashness, something to set it aflame? Go then and see if you
can’t gather them together and form them into a squadron and start us
on the march--for I will go with them and march behind you--to redeem
the sepulchre of Don Quixote, which lies, thank God, we know not where.
The bright and sounding star will tell us.
But--you say in your hours of depression, when your spirit fails
you--may it not be that when we think we are marching forward into
new countries, we are really all the time revolving round the same
spot? In that case the star will rest quietly over our heads and the
sepulchre will be within us. And then the star will fall, but it will
fall in order that it may bury itself in our souls. And our souls will
be turned to light, and when they are all fused together in the bright
and sounding star, the star will mount upwards, brighter still, and it
will change into a sun, a sun of eternal melody, to lighten the sky of
our redeemed country.
Forward then! And take care that no bachelors, barbers, curates,
canons or dukes disguised as Sancho Panzas join the sacred squadron of
crusaders. No matter if they ask you for islands; what you have got
to do is to throw them out directly they ask to be informed of the
itinerary of the march, directly they begin to talk about a program,
directly they whisper to you and ask you, maliciously, to tell them
the whereabouts of the sepulchre. Follow the star! And do like the
Knight--redress the wrong that lies in front of you. Do now what is to
be done now; do here what is to be done here.
Begin the march! Where are we going? The star answers: To the
sepulchre! What are we going to do on the way, as we march? What?
Fight! Fight, and how?
How? If you come across a man who is telling lies, shout out Liar!
in his face, and forward! If you come across a man who is stealing,
shout out Thief! and forward! If you come across a man who is talking
fool-talk to a crowd listening with gaping mouths, shout out Idiots!
and forward! Always forward!
“And is this the way,” a would-be crusader asks me, “that you propose
to abolish lying and thieving and foolishness from the world?” Why not?
The most pusillanimous of all pusillanimities, the most detestable and
pestilent sophistry of cowardice, is that of saying that it is no use
denouncing a thief because others will go on stealing, that nothing is
gained by calling a fool a fool to his face, for this will not lessen
the sum of foolishness in the world.
Yes, it has got to be repeated a thousand and one times--if you can
finish once, only once, utterly and for ever, with only one liar, then
you will have finished with lying for good and all.
March then! And throw out of the sacred squadron all those who begin to
pay too much attention to the step that has to be kept on the march, to
its time and rhythm. Above all, out with those who are always talking
about rhythm. They will turn your squadron into a quadrille and the
march into a dance. Out with them! Let them go and sing to the flesh
somewhere else.
Those who would seek to turn your marching squadron into a quadrille
call themselves and call one another poets. They are not. They are
anything else you like. They only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity,
to see what it is like, to get a new sensation, and to amuse themselves
on the way. Out with them!
They it is whose Bohemian tolerance contributes to the maintenance of
cowardice and falsehood and all the other ignominies that overwhelm us.
When they preach liberty, the only liberty they are thinking about is
that of making free with their neighbour’s wife. They are compact of
sensuality, and they have a sensual attitude even to the great ideas
that they are enamoured of. They are incapable of marrying themselves
to any great and pure idea and begetting a family upon it; they only
intoxicate themselves with ideas. They make mistresses of them, and
sometimes tire of them after a single night. Out with them!
If when on the march anyone wants to pluck a flower that smiles by
the roadside, let him pluck it, but in passing, without stopping, and
let him follow the squadron, whose leader must not take his eyes off
the bright and sounding star. And if he fastens the flower to his
breastplate, not to look at himself but for others to look at, out
with him! Let him go off, with his flower in his buttonhole, and dance
somewhere else.
Listen, my friend. If you wish to fulfil your mission and serve your
country, you must needs make yourself hateful to all those sensible
young men who see the world only through the eyes of the woman they
love. Or worse still: your words must be strident and bitter in their
ears.
The squadron must halt only at night, at the edge of the wood or in
the shadow of the mountain. The crusaders will pitch their tents, they
will wash their feet, they will sup on what their wives have prepared
for them, and afterwards they will beget sons on them, they will give
them a kiss, and then they will fall asleep and the following day they
will continue their march. And when any one of them dies, they will
leave him by the roadside, shrouded in his armour, to the mercy of the
ravens. Let the dead bury their dead.
If during the march anyone essays to play the fife or the pipe or the
flute or the guitar or whatever it may be, break his instrument and
throw him out of the ranks, for he hinders the others from hearing the
song of the star. And, what is more, he himself does not hear it. And
he who does not hear the celestial song must not go in quest of the
sepulchre of the Knight.
They will talk to you, these poet-dancers. Pay no heed to them. He who
begins to play his Pan-pipes beneath the sky of heaven and does not
hear the music of the spheres, does not deserve to hear it. He does
not know the abyss-deep depths of the poetry of fanaticism, he does
not know the infinite poetry of empty temples, without lights, without
ornament, without images, without pomps, without incense, without
anything of what is called art.
Throw all these Pan-pipe dancers out of the squadron. Throw them out
before they leave you for a mess of pottage. They are the cynical
philosophers, the tolerant Bohemians, the good fellows who understand
everything and forgive everything. And he who understands everything
understands nothing and he who forgives everything forgives nothing.
They have no scruples about selling themselves. As they live in two
worlds at the same time, they are able to preserve their liberty in the
other world and sell themselves as slaves in this. They serve art and
at the same time they are the servants of López or Pérez or Rodriguez.
It has been said that hunger and love are the two mainsprings of human
life. Of this low human life, of the life of earth. The dancers dance
only because of hunger or because of love; hunger of the flesh, love
also of the flesh. Throw them out of the squadron and let them dance
their fill in yonder meadow, while one plays the pipe, another claps
his hands to the music, and another sings in praise of his pottage or
of his mistress’s thighs. And there let them invent new dancesteps, new
pirouettes, new figures of a rigadoon.
And if anyone shall come to you and say that he knows how to construct
bridges and that perhaps a time will come when you will wish to avail
yourself of his science in order to cross over a river, out with him!
Out with the engineer! Rivers will be crossed by wading or swimming
them, even if half the crusaders drown themselves. Let the engineer go
off and build bridges somewhere else, where they are badly wanted. For
those who go in quest of the sepulchre, faith is bridge enough.
* * * * *
My friend, if you want to fulfil your task duly, distrust art, distrust
science, or at any rate distrust that which is called art and science
and which is nothing but a wretched mockery of true art and true
science. Let your faith suffice you. Your faith will be your art, your
faith will be your science.
More than once, when I observed what pains you take in composing your
letters, I have doubted whether you would be able to accomplish your
work. They are full of erasures, emendations, corrections, Pan-pipings.
They don’t jet forth violently, driving out the plug. Occasionally
your letters degenerate into literature, into that filthy literature
which is the natural ally of all slaveries and of all ignominies.
Slavedrivers know well enough that when the slave is singing a hymn to
liberty, he is consoling himself for his slavery and not thinking about
breaking his chain.
But at other times I regain my faith and hope in you when I feel
beneath the hurrying, spontaneous, cacophonous words the voice
trembling with the fever that consumes you. There are times when your
speech may be said to belong to no determinate language. Let everyone
translate it into his own.
Aim at living in a continual vertigo of passion, be the passion that
dominates you what it may. Only men of passion achieve works that
really live and bear fruit. When you hear it said of someone that his
works are impeccable, in whichever sense that stupid word is employed,
fly from him--above all if he is an artist. Just as the man who is
most a fool is he who has never done or said a foolish thing, so
the artist who is least a poet, most anti-poetic--and among artists
anti-poetic natures are common--is the impeccable artist, the artist
whom the Pan-pipe dancers decorate with the pasteboard laurel crown of
impeccability.
You are consumed, my friend, with a perpetual fever, with a thirst for
unfathomable, shoreless oceans, with a hunger for universes, with a
home-sickness for eternity. Reason is suffering to you. And you don’t
know what you want. And now, now you want to go to the sepulchre of the
Knight of Folly and there dissolve yourself in tears, consume yourself
in fever, die of your thirst for oceans, of your hunger for universes,
of your home-sickness for eternity.
Begin to march, alone. All the other lonely souls will march by your
side, even though you don’t see them. Each one will think that he
marches alone, but together you will form a sacred battalion, the
battalion of the holy and unending crusade.
You don’t yet understand, my good friend, how all lonely souls, without
knowing one another, without beholding one another’s face, without
knowing one another’s names, journey together and lend one another
mutual support. The others, those who are not lonely, talk about one
another, offer one another their hands, congratulate one another,
belaud and denigrate one another, chatter among themselves--and each
one goes his own way. And they all fly from the sepulchre.
You don’t belong to the coterie but to the battalion of free crusaders.
Why do you hover round the walls of the coterie to hear what they are
cackling about inside? No, my friend, no! When you pass close to a
coterie, stop your ears, fling your word and go straight on, on to
the sepulchre. And let the word that you fling vibrate with all your
thirst, with all your hunger, with all your home-sickness, with all
your love.
I remember that unhappy letter that you wrote me when you were on the
point of succumbing, of yielding, of joining the confraternity. I saw
then how much your solitude weighed upon you, that solitude which must
be your consolation and your strength.
You had arrived at the most terrible and desolating state of all; you
had approached the brink of the precipice of your perdition; you had
come to doubt your solitude, you had come to believe that you were
surrounded by companions. “May not this notion that I am alone,” you
said, “be mere cavilling, the fruit of pride, of petulance, perhaps of
madness? For when I am tranquil, I see myself companioned, I feel my
hand warmly clasped, I hear voices of encouragement, words of sympathy,
I receive all kinds of proofs that I am not alone--far from it.” And I
saw you deceived and lost, I saw you flying from the sepulchre.
No, you are not deceived in the accesses of your fever, in the agonies
of your thirst, in the anguish of your hunger; you are alone, eternally
alone. Not only are the bites that you feel really bites, but those
that seem like kisses are bites too. Those who applaud you are hissing
you, they want to stop you marching to the sepulchre when they shout
“Forward!” Stop your ears. And, above all, beware of a terrible
temptation--however much you may try to shake it off, it will return to
you with the pertinacity of a fly--beware of the temptation to concern
yourself with how you appear to others. Think only of how you appear to
God, think only of the idea that God has of you.
You are alone, much more alone than you imagine, and yet, even so,
you have not arrived at absolute, utter, real solitude. Absolute,
utter, real solitude consists in not being even with yourself. And you
will not be really, utterly, absolutely alone until you have emptied
yourself of yourself, by the side of the sepulchre. Holy Solitude!
* * * * *
All this I said to my friend, and he answered me, in a long letter,
full of furious dismay, in these words:
“All that you say is good, very good. But don’t you think that
instead of going in quest of the sepulchre of Don Quixote and
redeeming it from the bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and
dukes, we ought to go in quest of the sepulchre of God and rescue
it from the atheists and deists who occupy it, and there, giving
voice to our supreme despair and dissolving our heart in tears,
wait for God to rise again and save us from nothingness?”
THE HELMET OF MAMBRINO
_“Pray, good gentlemen,” said the barber,[2] “let us have your opinion
in this matter. I suppose you will grant this same helmet to be a
basin?” “He that dares grant any such thing,” said Don Quixote, “must
know that he lies plainly, if he is a knight; but, if a squire, he lies
abominably.”_
That’s right, my lord Don Quixote, that’s right. It is courage, it is
the barefaced courage that is ready to affirm a thing aloud and before
all the world and to defend the affirmation of it to the death, it is
courage that creates all truths. Things are so much the truer the more
they are believed, and it is not intelligence but will that imposes
them upon the world.
“Now I swear before you all,” said Don Quixote, “by the order of
knighthood which I profess, that that is the same individual helmet
which I won from him, without the least addition or diminution.” To
which Sancho added, in timid support of his master: “That I will swear,
for since my lord won it, he never fought but once in it, and that was
the battle wherein he freed those ungracious galley-slaves, who by the
same token would have knocked out his brains with a shower of stones,
had not this same honest basin-helmet saved his skull.”
In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says: “I wrote my _Vida de
Don Quixote y Sancho_ in opposition to the Cervantists and erudite
persons, in order to make a living work of what was and still is for
the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to me what Cervantes
intended or did not intend to put into it and what he actually did
put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover in it,
whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and under
and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to track down our
philosophy in it.”
Readers of Don Quixote will recall the encounter between the Knight
of La Mancha and the barber who had clapped his brass basin on his
head to keep his hat from being spoiled by the rain. Having routed his
enemy, the Knight seized the basin, which he asserted to be the golden
helmet of Mambrino, a famous Saracen (see _Orlando Furioso_, Canto I).
When afterwards the barber met Don Quixote at an inn and claimed his
basin, the dispute as to whether it was really a basin or a helmet
was referred to the rest of the company, some of whom sided with the
Knight and others with the barber.
Basin-helmet? Basin-helmet, Sancho? We must not do you the injustice
to suppose that your calling it a basin-helmet was one of your sly
jokes--no, it marks the progress of your faith. You were unable to pass
from what your eyes assured you of, showing you the object in dispute
in the likeness of a basin, to what faith in your master assured you,
showing it to you in the likeness of a helmet, without catching at this
compromise of a basin-helmet. In this respect there are many Sanchos
like you and you have invented this notion that virtue consists in
the _via media_. No, friend Sancho, no, there is no basin-helmet that
is worth a straw. It is a helmet or it is a basin according to him
who uses it, or rather it is basin and helmet at the same time for it
serves both turns. Without the least addition or diminution it can
and ought to be both helmet and basin, all of it helmet and all of it
basin; but what it can never be nor ought to be, however much be added
to it or taken away from it, is basin-helmet.
The barber to whom the basin belonged found the other barber, Master
Nicolas, and Don Fernando and the curate and Cardenio and the judge
more emphatic, for to the amazement of all the others who were present
they insisted that it was a helmet. One of the four pursuivants,
regarding this as a laborious joke, became annoyed and treated those
who said it was a helmet as if they were drunk. Don Quixote called him
a liar and hurled himself upon him; both sides prepared for battle
and fell to blows. Then it was that Don Quixote, thinking that he was
certainly involved in the disorder and confusion of King Agramant’s
camp, lifted up his voice and quieted the tumult.
What! it surprises you that the question as to whether the basin was a
basin or a helmet should have given rise to a general dispute? Other
and more involved disputes have broken out in the world with regard to
other basins and those not belonging to Mambrino. As to whether bread
is bread and wine wine and the like. Human sheep flock round Knights
of the Faith and maintain for various reasons or for no reason at
all, that the basin is a helmet, as the Knights assert, and they are
surprisingly rewarded for so maintaining it, and the strange thing is
that most of those who contend that it is a helmet really believe it
to be a basin. The heroism of Don Quixote communicated itself to his
mockers, who became quixotized in spite of themselves, and Don Fernando
made one of the pursuivants measure his length on the ground because
he had dared to maintain that the basin was not a helmet but a basin.
Heroical Don Fernando!
Thus we see Don Quixote’s mockers mocked by him, quixotized in their
own despite, joining in the fray and fighting with all their might
to defend the Faith of the Knight, although without sharing it. I am
convinced--although Cervantes does not tell us so--I am convinced that
the partisans of the Knight, the quixotists or helmetists, after having
received and administered punishment, began themselves to doubt whether
the basin were a basin and to believe that it really was the helmet of
Mambrino, for their ribs bore evidence of their belief. It must be
affirmed here yet again that it is martyrs who create faith rather than
faith that creates martyrs.
In few of his adventures does Don Quixote appear greater than in this
one, in which he imposes his faith upon those who mocked at it, so that
they are led to defend it with kicks and blows and to suffer for it.
And what was it that inspired them to do so? Simply his courage in
affirming before everybody that that basin, which he no less than they
saw with his own eyes to be a basin, was the helmet of Mambrino, for to
him it served the office of a helmet.
This is the courage of the purest water--that which resists not merely
a shock to the reason or decay of fortune or loss of honour, but also
being taken for a madman and an idiot.
This is the courage that we need in Spain and our soul remains
paralysed because of the lack of it. It is because of the lack of it
that we are neither powerful nor wealthy nor cultured; it is because of
the lack of it that we have no system of irrigation, no good harvests;
it is because of the lack of it that it doesn’t rain more on our
drought-parched fields, or that when it does rain it rains in torrents,
sweeping away the manure and sometimes sweeping away the houses too.
This seems to you like a paradox? Go into the country and propose
to any farmer some improvement in his methods of cultivation or the
introduction of a new kind of crop or of a new agricultural machine,
and he will say: “That doesn’t pay here.” “Have you tried it?” you
ask, and he simply repeats: “That doesn’t pay here.” He doesn’t know
whether it pays or whether it doesn’t pay, for he hasn’t tried it and
doesn’t mean to try it. He would try it if he were sure of its success
beforehand, but the prospect of the possibility of a failure, with the
consequent mockery and derision of his neighbours, the possibility
of their taking him for a deluded fool or a lunatic, this prospect
terrifies him and so he doesn’t experiment. And then people are
surprised at the triumph of those who have the courage to face ridicule
serenely, of those who rid themselves of the herd-instinct.
In the province of Salamanca there was a remarkable man who rose from
the greatest poverty to be a millionaire. The peasants of the district,
with the sheep-like instincts of their kind, were only able to explain
his success by supposing that in his younger days he had embezzled
money, for these wretched peasants, crusted over with common sense
and entirely lacking in moral courage, believe only in theft and the
lottery. But one day I was told of a quixotic feat which this cattle
farmer had performed. It seems that he had brought sea-bream’s spawn
from the Cantabrian coast to put in one of his ponds! When I heard
that, I understood everything. He who has the courage to face the jeers
which are bound to be provoked by bringing the spawn of a salt-water
fish to put in a pond in Castile, he who does that deserves his fortune.
But it was absurd, you say? And who knows what is absurd and what is
not? And even if it were! Only he who attempts the absurd is capable
of achieving the impossible. There is only one way of hitting the nail
on the head and that is by hammering on the shoe a hundred times. And
there is only one way of achieving a real triumph and that is by
facing ridicule with serenity. And it is because our agriculturists
haven’t the courage to face ridicule that our agriculture languishes in
its present backward condition.
Yes, all our ills spring from moral cowardice, from the individual’s
lack of staunch resolution in affirming his own truth, his own faith,
and defending it. The soul of this people, this flock of somnolent
sheep, is smothered and swathed in falsehood, and their stupidity
proceeds from their very excess of prudence.
It is claimed that there are certain principles that are beyond
discussion and when anyone attempts to criticize them the air rings
with shouts of protest. Not long ago I proposed that we should
demand the abolition of certain of the articles of our law of Public
Instruction, and a pack of poltroons began to bellow that such a course
was inopportune and impertinent, not to mention stronger and more
offensive epithets that were used. I am sick of hearing everything that
is most opportune called inopportune, everything that tends to disturb
the digestion of the full-bellied and infuriates fools. What are they
afraid of? That it will result in a brawl? that a new civil war will
break out? Better and better. That’s what we need.
Yes, that’s what we need--a new civil war. It is necessary to assert
that basins ought to be and are helmets and to get up a fight about
it like the fight they got up at the inn. A new civil war, let the
weapons be what they will. Can’t you hear those spiritless creatures
whose hearts are dried and shrivelled up reiterating that these kinds
of disputes lead to nothing practical? What do they understand by
practical? Can’t you hear them reiterating that there are discussions
which ought never to be broached?
There are plenty of cowardly spirits who are always drilling it into
us that we ought to leave religious questions on one side, that the
first thing to do is to become powerful and wealthy. And the poltroons
don’t see that it is just because we ignore what concerns our inward
well-being that we are not and never shall be wealthy and powerful. I
repeat it yet again, there will never be any agriculture or industry or
commerce in our country, nor roads where there ought to be roads, until
we have discovered our Christianity, which is Quixotic Christianity.
We shall never have a powerful and splendid and glorious and strong
external life until we have kindled in the hearts of our people the
fire of the eternal disquietudes. We cannot be rich so long as our life
is nothing but deceit, and deceit is our spirit’s daily bread.
Can’t you hear the solemn ass that opens his mouth and says: “It’s
forbidden to say that here”? Can’t you hear all those who are bound
with the fetters of falsehood talking about peace, a peace that is more
deadly than death itself? That terrible and ignominious rule which
figures in the list of regulations of almost all the social clubs in
Spain, “political and religious discussions prohibited”--does that say
nothing to you?
Peace! peace! peace! all the frogs of our national pond croak in chorus.
Peace! peace! peace! Yes, but peace established upon the triumph of
sincerity, peace established upon the overthrow of falsehood. Peace,
but not a peace of compromise, not a hollow political agreement, but a
comprehensive peace. Peace, yes, but only after the pursuivants have
recognized Don Quixote’s right to assert that the basin is a helmet;
and, furthermore, only after the pursuivants themselves have admitted
and affirmed that in the hands of Don Quixote the basin is a helmet.
And the wretched crowd that shout “Peace! peace!” dare to take upon
their lips the name of Christ! They forget that Christ said that He
came not to bring peace but war, and that because of Him they of the
same household should be divided against one another, father against
son and brother against brother. And this should be because of Him,
because of Christ, that His kingdom might be established, the social
kingdom of Jesus--which is the very reverse of that which the Jesuits
call the social kingdom of Jesus Christ--the kingdom of real sincerity
and real truth and real love and real peace. In order that the kingdom
of Jesus may be established, there must be war.
DON QUIXOTE’S NIECE[3]
The good Alonso Quixano went on with the dictation of his will and
bequeathed all his estate to Antonia Quixano, his niece, but imposing
it upon her, as a necessary condition of enjoying the bequest, that “if
she is desirous of marrying, she marry none but a man who, upon strict
inquiry, shall be found never to have read a book of knight-errantry in
his life; and in case it appears that he has been conversant with such
books, and that she persists in her resolution to marry him, she is
then to forfeit all that I have bequeathed her, which in such case my
executors shall dispose of to pious uses at their own discretion.”
How clearly Don Quixote recognized the violent mutual incompatibility
that exists between the office of husband and that of knight-errant!
And in dictating this clause, may not the good knight have been
thinking of his Aldonza and of how, had he but ventured to break
the seal of his too great love, he might have been spared all the
misfortunes of his knight-errantry and remained by his own fireside a
happy prisoner in the arms of his love?
Your will has been faithfully executed, Don Quixote, and the young
men of this your country have renounced all knight-errantry so that
they might enjoy the estates of your nieces--and among these must be
counted almost all the women of Spain--and enjoy the nieces themselves
too. In their arms all heroism is smothered. They tremble lest it
should strike their lovers and husbands with its rushing wind as it
struck their uncle. It is your niece, Don Quixote, it is your niece
who rules and governs Spain to-day--it is your niece, not Sancho. It
is the timorous, home-keeping, narrow-souled Antonia Quixano, she who
feared lest you should turn poet, “a catching and incurable disease”;
she who so zealously assisted the curate and the barber in burning your
books; she who presumed to tell you to your face that all stories of
knight-errantry were nothing but a pack of lies and fables--a maidenly
audacity which provoked you to exclaim: “By the God that sustains me,
wert thou not my proper niece, my own sister’s daughter, I would take
such revenge for the blasphemy thou hast uttered as would resound
through the whole world”; it is she, “the young baggage who scarce
knows how to manage a dozen lace-work bobbins,” and who presumed to put
in her oar and censure the histories of knights-errant, it is she who
manages and dangles and juggles with the sons of your Spain as if they
were puppets. It is not Dulcinea del Toboso, no. Neither is it Aldonza
Lorenzo, she for whom you sighed for twelve years without seeing her
more than four times and without ever confessing your love. It is
Antonia Quixano, she who scarce knew how to manage a dozen lace-work
bobbins, who controls your countrymen to-day.
It is Antonia Quixano, who, because she has a small soul and no belief
in her husband’s greatness, keeps him at home and hinders him from
going forth to seek heroic adventures which would win him glory and
an everlasting name. If it were only Dulcinea!... Dulcinea, yes, for
however strange it may seem, Dulcinea can make a man renounce all
glory, can make him choose the glory of renouncing glory. Dulcinea,
or let us rather call her Aldonza, the ideal Aldonza might say to
him: “Come, come to my arms and let all your wild longings melt away
in tears upon my breast. Come to me. Yes, I see you set up on a lofty
pinnacle for all time, I see all your brother men gazing up at you, I
see you acclaimed by generations yet unborn--but come to me, renounce
it all for my sake, and that will make you great, my Alonso, that will
make you greater still. Take my mouth and cover it with warm kisses in
silence, and renounce a cold eternity of fame in the mouths of those
whom you will never know. Will you hear them speaking of you when you
are dead? Bury all your love in my breast, and if it is a great love,
it is better that you should bury it in me than that you should lavish
it among men who easily forget and soon pass away. They are not worthy
of admiring you, my Alonso, they are not worthy of it. You will live
for me alone and so you will live more truly for all the universe and
for God. So living, your might and your heroism will seem to be lost,
but don’t mind that. Do you not know the infinite streams of life which
flow from a silent and heroic love, flowing out in wave after wave
beyond humanity to the orbit of the remotest of the stars? Do you not
know that the silent and triumphant love of a happy pair of lovers is
a fount of mysterious energy that irradiates a whole people and all
generations to come to the end of time? Do you not know what it is to
guard the sacred fire of life, fanning it to ever brighter flame in
simple and silent worship? Love, the simple act of loving, without
deeds, is itself a heroic deed. Come and renounce all your deeds in my
arms--the dim obscurity of your repose in my arms will be a seed-time
which will bear fruit in the deeds and glory of others to whom your
very name will be unknown. When even the echo of your name is no longer
borne upon the air, when there is no longer any air to bear the echo
of it, the embers of your love will warm the ruins of perished worlds.
Come and give yourself to me, Alonso, for though you should never ride
abroad redressing wrongs, your greatness will not be lost, for in my
heart nothing is lost. Come, rest your head upon my heart and I will
carry you thence to the rest that has no ending.”
With such words Aldonza might speak, and in renouncing all glory in her
arms Alonso would be truly great; but such words you can never speak,
Antonia. You do not believe that love is of more worth than glory; what
you believe is that neither love nor glory is worth as much as sleepy
fireside peace and quiet, that neither love nor glory is worth as much
as the certainty of the daily mess of pottage; you believe that those
who don’t sleep easily in their beds come to a bad end, and you don’t
know that love, like glory, never sleeps but watches.
THE RELIGION OF QUIXOTISM
I become more and more convinced that our philosophy, the Spanish
philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life,
in our action, above all in our mysticism, and not in philosophical
systems. It is concrete. (And is there not perhaps as much philosophy
or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel?) The poetry of Jorge
Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueño_, _La Subida
al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of
life--_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_. This philosophy of ours could
with difficulty formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth
century, a period that was a-philosophical, positivist, technicist,
given up to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially
materialist and pessimistic.
We shall find the hero of Spanish thought, perhaps, not in any
philosopher who lived in flesh and bone, but in an entity of
fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers--in Don
Quixote. For there is doubtless a philosophic Quixotism, but there
is also a Quixotic philosophy. Was not perhaps the philosophy of the
Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and, above all,
the philosophy latent in the abstract but passionate thought of our
mystics, in its essence none other than this? What was the mysticism
of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the
divine warfare?
And the feeling that animated Don Quixote cannot strictly be called
idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was spiritualism; he fought
for the spirit.
Speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like practical Quixotism,
foolishness, a daughter-foolishness to the foolishness of the cross.
And therefore it is contemned by reason. Philosophy at bottom abhors
Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.
The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross.
Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, sought by means of ridicule
to turn it into comedy and conceived the farce of the king with the
reed sceptre and crown of thorns, saying: “Behold the man!” But the
people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, cried:
“Crucify him! crucify him!” And the other tragedy, the human, the
intra-human tragedy, is that of Don Quixote with his face lathered for
the ducal servants to laugh at, and for the dukes, as much slaves as
their servants, to laugh at too. “Behold the fool!”--so they would say.
And the comic, the irrational tragedy is suffering beneath ridicule and
contempt.
For an individual, as for a people, the highest heroism is being
willing to face ridicule--still more, being willing to make oneself
ridiculous and not flinching at the ridicule.
Antero de Quental, the tragic Portuguese who committed suicide, wrote
as follows, smarting under the ultimatum which England delivered to
his country in 1890: “An English statesman of the last century, also
certainly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole,
said that life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those
who think. Very well then, if we have to end tragically, we Portuguese,
we who _feel_, we much prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny to
that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for
England, the country that _thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny is
to end miserably and comically.” We may leave on one side the assertion
that England thinks and calculates, implying that she does not feel,
the injustice of which is explained by the circumstance that provoked
it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying that they
scarcely ever think or calculate--for we sister peoples of the Atlantic
have always been distinguished by a certain sentimental pedantry; but
there remains the terrible underlying idea, namely, that some, those
who put thought above feeling--I should say reason above faith--die
comically, and those die tragically who put faith above reason. For
it is the ridiculers who die comically, and God laughs at their
comic ending, while the portion, the noble portion, of those who are
ridiculed is tragedy.
And what we must look out for in the record of Don Quixote is ridicule.
* * * * *
The philosophy in the soul of my people presents itself to me as the
expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of
Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between the world as the
reason of science exhibits it to us and the world as we wish it to be,
as our religious faith tells us that it is. And in this philosophy is
to be found the secret of what is usually said about us, that we are
fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_, that is to say, that we do not
resign ourselves to it. No, Don Quixote resigns himself neither to the
world nor to its truth, neither to science nor to logic, neither to art
nor aesthetics, neither to morality nor to ethics.
“In any case the result of all this,” so I have been told more than
once and by more than one person, “will simply be to urge people on to
the maddest kind of Catholicism.” And they have accused me of being a
reactionary and even a Jesuit. So be it! And what then?
Yes, I know, I know that it is folly to seek to turn the waters of the
river back to their source, and that it is the crowd that seeks the
medicine for its ills in the past; but I know too that everyone who
fights for any ideal whatsoever, even though it may seem to belong
to the past, is urging the world on to the future, and that the only
reactionaries are those who find themselves at ease in the present.
Every pretended restoration of the past is a creation of the future,
and if the past is dream, something not properly known, so much the
better. As always, the march is towards the future; he who marches,
marches thither, even though he march backwards way--and who knows if
that is not the better way?
I feel that I have a mediæval soul and I believe that the soul of
my country is mediæval--that it has been forced to traverse the
Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution, learning from them,
yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the
spiritual heritage of those ages that are called dark. And Quixotism is
nothing but the most desperate phase of the struggle of the Middle Ages
against their offspring, the Renaissance.
And if some accuse me of furthering the cause of Catholic reaction,
perhaps the others, the official Catholics, accuse me of.... But
these, in Spain trouble themselves little about anything and are only
interested in their own quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor
folk, they are somewhat dull of understanding.
But the fact is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to
shatter the faith of both these and those and of others besides, faith
in affirmation, faith in negation and faith in abstention, and this
for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those
who resign themselves, whether to Catholicism or to rationalism or
to agnosticism; it is to make them all live lives of inquietude and
passionate desire.
Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the
immediate and visible efficacy of his work? It is greatly to be
doubted, and at any rate he did not risk putting the visor he had
made to the test by giving it a second blow. And many passages in his
history indicate that he did not believe much in the immediate success
of his design to restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter so
long as he himself thus lived and immortalized himself? And he must
have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his achievement would have
another and a higher efficacy--namely, that it would go on working
in the minds of all those who in the spirit of devotion read of his
exploits.
Don Quixote made himself ridiculous, but did he perchance know the most
tragic ridicule of all, the ridicule that is reflected in the eyes of
a man’s own soul, the ridicule with which a man sees his own self?
Transfer Don Quixote’s battlefield to his own soul; conceive him to
be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance,
not to lose the treasure of his infancy; turn him into an inward Don
Quixote--with his Sancho, a Sancho equally inward and equally heroical
at his side--and then talk to me of the comic tragedy.
And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer that he has left
himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and
all philosophies. Other peoples have left principally institutions,
books--we have left souls. St. Teresa is worth any institution, any
“Critique of Pure Reason.”
Don Quixote was converted? Yes, but only to die. But the other,
the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us,
breathing his spirit into us, this Don Quixote was never converted,
this Don Quixote goes on inciting us to make ourselves ridiculous,
this Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don
Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was
mad, and it was his madness, not his death or his conversion, that
immortalized him and earned for him the forgiveness of the crime of
having been born. _Felix culpa!_ Neither was his madness cured but only
transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure--in dying he
stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.
This Don Quixote died and descended into hell, and he entered it lance
on rest and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley-slaves,
and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down from them the scroll that
Dante saw there, and replaced it by one on which was written “Long
live hope!” and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing
at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed at him paternally and this
divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.
And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with
desperation. Is not despair the mainspring of his fighting? How
is it that among the words that English has borrowed from our
tongue--_siesta_, _camarilla_, _guerilla_ and the like--there
occurs this word _desperado_? This inward Don Quixote that I
spoke of, conscious of his own comicness, is he not a man of
despair--_desesperado_? A desperado, yes, like Pizarro and like Loyola.
But “despair is the master of impossibilities,” as Salazar y Torres
tells us, and it is despair and despair alone from whence springs
heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to
be said, rather than _credo_.
And Don Quixote, who lived solitary, sought more solitude still, sought
the solitudes of the Peña Pobre in order that there, alone, without
witnesses, he might plunge into yet wilder extravagances to the easing
of his soul. Yet he was not quite solitary, for Sancho accompanied him,
Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the simple. If, as some
say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives, then we are saved,
for Sancho, his master dead, will become a knight-errant himself. At
any rate he is waiting for some other mad knight to follow yet again.
And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who
journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it does not appear certain that
he died, although some say that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his
lance, and believing that all those things which on his death-bed his
converted master abominated as lies had been really true. But neither
does it appear certain that the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, or the
curate, or the barber, or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with
these that the heroic Sancho has to fight.
Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his
solitude. And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers creating
for ourselves a quixotesque Spain which exists only in our imagination?
And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to
_Kultur_? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing. It is a
whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole aesthetic, a whole logic,
a whole ethic, above all a whole religion, that is to say, a whole
economy of things human and divine, a whole hope in the rationally
absurd.
For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for
survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice,
who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen,
who is culture. He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.
And what is greatest in him is his having been ridiculed and overcome,
for it is in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame the world by
making it laugh at him.
And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his
efforts so far as temporal issues are concerned; he sees himself from
without--culture has taught him to objectify himself, that is to say,
to alienate himself from himself instead of to enter into himself,
and in seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a
bitter laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be an inward
Margutte, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die bursting with
laughter, but with laughter at himself. _E riderá in eterno_, he will
laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not
hear the laughter of God?
The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, understood his own comicness and wept
for his sins; but the immortal Don Quixote understands and rises above
his comicness and triumphs over it without renouncing it.
But now Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine
laughter, and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in eternal
life, he has to fight, attacking the modern scientific inquisitorial
orthodoxy by adducing a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic,
contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola--an Italian Quixote
of the end of the fifteenth century--he fights against this Modern Age
which began with Machiavelli and which will end comically. He fights
against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of
consciousness, reconciliation between reason and faith, are now, thanks
to the providence of God, impossible. The world must be as Don Quixote
wishes it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight against
it and will, to all appearances, be overcome, but he will triumph by
making himself ridiculous. He will triumph by laughing at himself and
making himself laughed at.
“Reason speaks and feeling bites,” said Petrarch; but reason also bites
and bites in the heart of hearts. And more light does not make more
warmth. “Light, light, more light!” they tell us that the dying Goethe
cried. No, warmth, warmth, more warmth, for we die of cold and not of
darkness. It is not the night but the frost that kills.
* * * * *
The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration,
in its essence mystical, mediæval, quixotesque, has been called
_demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_,
mundane. Mundane--yes, for the world and not for philosophers, just as
chemistry ought not to be for chemists alone. The world wishes to be
deceived--_mundus vult decipi_--either with the illusion antecedent to
reason, which is poetry, or with the illusion subsequent to reason,
which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to
deceive will always find someone who will let himself be deceived.
And blessed are those who are made fools of. A Frenchman, Jules de
Gaultier, has said that it was the privilege of his countrymen _n’être
pas dupe_--not to be taken in. A sorry privilege!
Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. “Then let
him not demand it,” it will be said, “let him resign himself, let him
accept life and truth as they are.” But he does not accept them as
they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho who stands
by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what
those understand who talk thus to him, those who are able to resign
themselves and to accept rational life and rational truth. No, it is
that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows?
And in this critical century Don Quixote, who has contaminated himself
with criticism also, has to attack his own self, the victim of
intellectualism and sentimentalism, and it is when he wishes to be most
spontaneous that he appears most affected. And the poor fellow wishes
to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he
sinks into the inner despair of the critical century whose two greatest
victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through despair he attains the
heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that Don Quixote of the mind
who escaped from the cloister--and he becomes an awakener of sleeping
souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican said of
himself. “Heroic love,” Bruno wrote, “is the property of those superior
natures called insane [_insano_]--not because they do not know [_non
sanno_], but because they over-know [_soprasanno_].”
But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines--at any rate they
have stated on the inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo
dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, that it is dedicated to him by the age
which he foretold (_il secole da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote,
the Don Quixote who has risen from the dead, the inward Don Quixote,
the Don Quixote who is conscious of his own comicness, does not believe
that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of
it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world
wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire to the mountain,
fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired
alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes,
they sought to proclaim Him king. He left the title of king to be
written upon the cross.
What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote in the world of to-day?
To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But the wilderness hears,
though men do not hear, and one day it will be transformed into a
sounding forest, and this solitary voice that falls upon the wilderness
like seed, will yield a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred thousand
tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of death.
LARGE AND SMALL TOWNS
I regret that I have not by me a certain essay dealing with this
subject by Guglielmo Ferrero. I read it in some review the name of
which I have forgotten, but I preserve a clear recollection of it,
for it interested me greatly. Ferrero treated the subject from the
historical and sociological point of view, and I, who am neither an
historian nor a sociologist, intend to treat it, as is my custom, from
the point of view of purely personal opinion and individual impression.
(This is my custom, and yet in spite of the fact I cannot prevent
people from insisting on calling me a savant and talking about my
theories. I have no theories. I have only impressions and sensations.)
But, since I am unable to put some quotation from Ferrero at the head
of this essay--this habit of basing our assertions upon authority is
the conventional way of giving them a deceptive air of objectivity--I
will head it by a sentence from George Meredith, that extremely
subtle English novelist. In “The Egoist” it is stated that Willoughby
“abandoned London as the burial-place of the individual man.”
I, to-day, am one with Willoughby in believing that great cities
de-individualize, or rather de-personalize, us. This may perhaps be
due to the fact that, though not an egoist like the hero of Meredith’s
novel, I still remain, according to Ramiro de Maeztu, an incorrigible
egotist.
Great cities are levelling; they lift up the low and depress the high;
they exalt mediocrity and abase superlativeness--the result of the
action of the mass, as powerful in social life as in chemistry.
Soon after I came to this ancient city of Salamanca which has now
become so dear to me, a city of some thirty thousand souls, I wrote to
a friend and told him that if after two years’ residence here he should
be informed that I spent my time playing cards, taking siestas and
strolling round the square for a couple of hours every day, he might
give me up for lost; but if at the end of that time I should still
be studying, meditating, writing, battling for culture in the public
arena, he might take it that I was better off here than in Madrid. And
so it has proved to be.
I remember that Guglielmo Ferrero’s conclusion, based upon a review of
ancient Greece, of the Italy of the Renaissance and of the Germany of
a century ago, is that for the life of the spirit, small cities of a
population like that of Salamanca are the best--better than very small
towns or large ones of over a hundred thousand inhabitants.
This depends, of course, upon the quality of the spirit in question. I
am convinced that the monastic cloister, which so often atrophies the
soul and reduces the average intelligence to a lamentable slavery to
routine, has in certain exceptional cases exalted the spirit by its
arduous discipline.
Great cities are essentially democratic, and I must confess that I feel
an invincible platonic mistrust of democracies. In great cities culture
is diffused but vulgarized. People abandon the quiet reading of books
to go to the theatre, that school of vulgarity; they feel the need of
being together; the gregarious instinct enslaves them; they must be
seeing one another.
I think it was Taine who observed that the majority of French geniuses
were either themselves country-born or the sons of country-born
parents. And I assure you that I should find it difficult to believe in
the genius of a Parisian born of Parisians.
Guerra Junqueiro once said to me: “You are fortunate in living in a
city in which you can walk along the streets dreaming, without fear of
people disturbing your dream!” And certainly in Madrid it is impossible
to walk along the streets dreaming, not so much for fear of motors,
trams and carriages as because of the continual stream of unknown
faces. The distraction of a great city, so agreeable to those who
must have something, no matter what, to occupy their imagination, is
necessarily vexatious to those whose chief concern is not to have their
imagination diverted. Personally I find nothing more monotonous than a
Paris boulevard. The people seem to me like shadows. I cannot endure a
crowd of unknown faces.
I am afraid of Madrid. That is to say, I am afraid of myself when I
go there. It is easy to say that in great cities everyone can live
the life that suits him best, but it is easier to say it than to do
it. When I am in the capital, I return home every night regretting
having gone to the party or to the meeting that I went to and
resolving never to go again, but only to break my vow the very next
day. I am surrounded, hemmed in and invaded by a lethal atmosphere of
compliance, an atmosphere that is generated by this so-called life of
society.
I have always felt an aversion from this so-called life of society,
which has for its object the cultivation of social relationships. Is
there anything more terrible than a “call”? It affords an occasion for
the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre
are the two great centres for the propagation of platitudes.
A man of society, a drawing-room man who can make himself agreeable to
women when he pays a call, is always a man whose principal concern is
to suppress any arresting spontaneity, not to let his own personality
show through. For it is a man’s own personality that people find
irritating. People like to meet the average man, the normal man, the
man who has nothing exceptional about him. The exception is always
irritating. How many times I have heard the terrible phrase: “This man
irritates me.” Yes, it is “the man” that irritates, and the hardest
fight for the man who feels that he is a man is the fight to win
respect for his own individuality.
And in a small town? Its stage is very restricted; the players soon
tire of playing the parts allotted to them and the real men begin
to appear underneath, with all their weaknesses--that is to say,
with precisely that which makes them men. I have a great liking for
provincial life, for there it is easiest to discern tragedy lurking
beneath an appearance of calm. And just as much as I abhor comedy, I
love tragedy. And, above all, tragi-comedy.
I have heard it said that there are no such seething intestine rancours
and dissensions as in a merchant vessel or a monastery; that whenever
men are obliged to live together, cut off from the rest of the world,
their personalities, their most real and intimate selves, immediately
clash against one another. And I dare say that this is the only way of
attaining that knowledge of ourselves which ought to be our chief aim.
It seems to me scarcely possible that a man should get to know himself
by shutting himself up in the wilderness, contemplating--what? The best
way of knowing one’s self is to clash, heart against heart, that is to
say, rock against rock, with one’s fellow.
I know that I shall be told that I am indulging my love of paradox,
but nevertheless I maintain that if it is true that the most ardent
admirations are those which are disguised in the form of envy, very
often the strongest attractions are those which take the appearance of
hate. In one of these tragi-comic, or rather comi-tragic, small towns
I know two men who, though obliged to see one another constantly in
the way of business, never greet one another in the street and profess
a mutual detestation. Nevertheless at bottom they feel themselves
reciprocally attracted to one another and each one is continually
preoccupied by the other.
These irreconcilable feuds into which small towns are so often divided
are much more favourable to the development of strong personalities
than the bland comedy of a great metropolis, where those who fight a
duel to the death on the public stage embrace one another behind the
scenes. Do you suppose that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is possible
in a city that counts its inhabitants by the million?
And I ask you, do you suppose that anyone who sees a multitude of
people in the course of the day, listens to this man to-day, to another
man to-morrow and to another man the day after, and attends twenty
or thirty conferences--do you think that such a one can preserve his
spiritual integrity without any leakage? In such a life a hedgehog
would end by becoming a lamb, its quills would turn into softest
fleece, and for my part I would rather be a hedgehog than a lamb.
I understand why Willoughby fled from London as from the burial-place
of the individual man. Is it not a terrible thing to walk through two
or three miles of city streets and pass two or three thousand people
without meeting a single known face to set a spark to a train of human
thought? A glance of hate from a known enemy is sweeter than a glance
of indifference, if not of disdain, from an unknown stranger. For man
has acquired the habit of disdaining those whom he does not know, and
seems to suppose that every stranger must be presumed to be an imbecile
until he proves himself otherwise.
And those who say that they are bored in a small town? The reason is
because they have not dug down to its tragic roots, to the august
severity of the depths of its monotony.
It is my belief that in great cities proud natures become vain, that is
to say, the quills become fleece.
And for the man who is engaged in any kind of work in which he can
exercise his influence from a distance, for the writer or the painter,
the small town offers the inestimable advantage of enabling him to live
far from his public and of its being possible that the effects which
his work produces either do not reach him or reach him only after a
searching process of filtration. He can live more or less independently
of his public, without allowing himself to be influenced by it, and
this is the only way of making a public for oneself instead of adapting
oneself to it.
If this be the case, it may be urged that a village would be better
than a small town, a hamlet or perhaps even a remote farm-house. But
no, for then there would be lacking that minimum of organic society
without which our personality runs as much risk as it runs in the heart
of a metropolis.
Essentially, in the sphere of psychologico-sociological relations--this
is for the benefit of those who insist on labelling me savant--it is a
question of what is perhaps the most fundamental of all problems, the
problem of maxima and minima. This is the problem that is the nerve of
physical mechanics and the nerve also of social mechanics or economics.
The problem always is how to obtain the maximum result or profit with
the minimum effort or expense, the largest return with the least
expenditure. It is also the fundamental problem of æsthetics; it is at
the root of all the problems of life.
And with regard to the subject I am now considering, it is a question
of obtaining the maximum of our own personality with the minimum
of others’ society. Less society, or a society less complex, would
diminish our personality, and so also would more society, or a society
apparently more complex. And I say apparently, for I am not aware that
an elephant is more complex than a fox.
Very well then--he who has no sense of his own personality and is
willing to sacrifice it on the altar of sociability, let him go and
lose himself among the millions of a metropolis. For the man who has a
longing for Nirvana the metropolis is better than the desert. If you
want to submerge your own “I,” better the streets of a great city than
the solitudes of the wilderness.
It is not a bad thing now and again to visit the great city and plunge
into the sea of its crowds, but in order to emerge again upon terra
firma and feel the solid ground under one’s feet. For my part, since
I am interested in individuals--in John and Peter and Richard, in you
who are reading this book--but not in the masses which they form when
banded together, I remain in the small town, seeing every day at the
same hour the same men, men whose souls have clashed, and sometimes
painfully, with my soul; and I flee from the great metropolis where my
soul is whipped with the icy whips of the disdainful glances of those
who know me not and who are unknown to me. People whom I cannot name
... horrible!
TO MY READERS
Yes, I know it--I am not sympathetic to all those who read me, perhaps
not even to the majority of them. But what I am to do?... So long as
they go on reading me.... For the fact is I would rather that they
should find me not sympathetic and nevertheless go on reading me than
that they should find me sympathetic and cease to read me. Sympathy is
often purchased at the cost of authority and respect. I confess that
the quality of being sympathetic does not appear to me to be a very
desirable thing in a writer. It is perhaps the beginning of discredit,
a discredit that is none the less profound because it wears a gilded
disguise.
Yes, I know that I am not sympathetic, that I have perhaps succeeded
in making myself antipathetic to many of those who read me and who in
spite of this antipathy--or rather because of it--still continue to
read me.
A short time ago a friend wrote to me saying that although he often
disagrees with me he reads me because his reaction to my opinions
stimulates ideas in him. I profess myself well content with this, to
beget ideas in those who read me, although these ideas should be the
contrary of those which I expound and defend.
But there are many, very many readers who don’t like being obliged to
think and who only want to be told what they already know, what they
have already thought. In order to become sympathetic a writer has
only to flatter and confirm his readers’ preconceptions, clinching
the commonplaces to which their minds have given assent. That is the
way for a writer to become sympathetic and it is also the way for him
to become soon tedious, so that the reader remarks: “Ah, yes, a very
sympathetic writer, very understanding!” and ceases to read him.
Most people--I have said this more than once before and as I am an
insistent writer, another quality which does not help to make me
sympathetic, I shall have to repeat it many times more--most people
read in order not to be informed. Yes, literally, not to be informed.
The worthy Fulánez takes the paper or the review at breakfast-time and
reads it as he would listen to a waltz-tune, in order to while away the
time. He dislikes being agitated, he dislikes being contradicted; but
most of all he dislikes being told something that he has never thought
of before.
There is a spiritual pain analogous to physical pain; there is a
spiritual pain when the tissues of the soul are torn away. For just as
the body has its tissues of cells and filaments, so the soul has its
tissues of impressions, memories, sensations and ideas. The breaking
of an association of ideas is like the breaking of an association of
bodily cells and may produce anything from a slight irritation to the
most acute pain.
It is a matter of common observation that the pain which we feel at the
death of someone dear to us, with whom we have lived together, at first
goes on increasing until it reaches a point when it begins to diminish.
Its progress might be described by a rapidly ascending and gradually
descending curve. The first effect is one of stupor. The pain becomes
most acute when we feel the gap that has been left in our existence,
when we feel the rupture of our associations of ideas and feelings. The
image of the loved one was intimately woven into the spiritual tissue
of our life, and death cannot tear it away without destroying the
tissue.
And every rupture of an association of ideas and feelings is
accompanied by a disturbance which varies in degree from the pain
that we feel at the death of a father, husband, wife, brother or son,
to the minor irritation which is caused by the exploding of some
commonplace that had become a habit of our mind. And we writers who are
given to breaking these associations--and that is why we are called
paradoxists--jar on people and incur their antipathy. It is our fate.
And they tell us that what jars is not so much what we say as our way
of saying it. Yes, it is because instead of cutting these associations
with surgical delicacy, first chloroforming or hypnotizing the patient,
we tear them roughly and when he is most wide awake. It is a question
of method, and it is a question of temperament. Chloroform, the
clinical as well as the literary variety, has its inconveniences, and
there are cases in which the patient has to suffer pain. To irritate
people may even become a duty binding upon the conscience, a painful
duty, but a duty none the less.
And then there is another thing which makes me antipathetic, I know,
and that is my lack of impersonality, my incapacity to produce what is
called objective work, my putting my whole self, more or less, into
all my writings, my egotism, as it is called. But what am I to do?...
I am amazed at those who are able to eliminate their own selves, I am
amazed, but I don’t imitate them and I don’t wish to imitate them.
I don’t know how it may be elsewhere, but here in Spain the man, the
individual man, irritates us. And as I believe that the great battle is
how to win respect for man, respect for individuality, I for my part
irritate the myriad-headed, anonymous multitude. Let them respect me.
Thus they will learn to respect every individual, to respect themselves
as individuals.
Yes, yes, it is quite right to use one’s knowledge with discretion,
just as it is quite right to use one’s wealth with discretion. But
neither knowledge nor wealth is one’s self; they are something annexed,
something that comes and goes, that can be taken or left. But I cannot
make a discreet use of myself. If I am deprived of a shilling or a
dollar I can submit to it, but I cannot easily submit to being deprived
of an arm or, still less, of a piece of my soul. A shilling or a
dollar I can give away discreetly, but an arm or a piece of my soul,
these I can only tear off and give away passionately, that is to say
indiscreetly. And I do not give ideas, I do not give knowledge--I give
pieces of my soul. The ideas that I expound matter to me less, far
less, than the way I expound them.
It is not the shilling that I give you that counts, but the warmth that
it carries with it from my hand.
These antipathies that I provoke proceed--as well I know, in spite
of whatever those who see only the surface may say--from the fact
that I am not an intellectual but a man of passion. Almost all the
things that I have said, hundreds, thousands, have said before me. I
am neither erudite nor a savant. There is no great originality in my
ideas. Whence, then, the potency which, thanks to God, I have attained?
Whence these antipathies and sympathies, and how is it that I am able
to say, thanks to God, that I am seldom read with indifference?--It is
due to passion, to the tone of my voice.
Yes, I know it, I am antipathetic to many of my readers, and one of the
things that makes me most antipathetic to them is my aggressiveness,
my sometimes morbid aggressiveness. I don’t deny it. But the truth is,
my friend, that this aggressiveness is directed against myself. When
I attack others I am attacking myself. I live in a state of inward
conflict. I imagine that I am misinterpreted? Very likely, since I
myself do not always succeed in interpreting myself aright. The ideas
that crowd in upon me from all quarters are always battling together in
my mind and I fail to make peace between them. I fail because I don’t
even try. I need these battles.
And, moreover I am not anxious for a reputation among scholars, for I
am not a scholar, I am not what is called a scholar. Nor even among men
of culture, although I am always preaching culture. But by culture I
understand the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle,
of intensest disquietude, of intensest desire. I come of a race which
some people say is still, in its essence, in a state of savagery, a
race of a turbulent and taciturn spirit, a race of which Salmerón said
that it had not yet adapted itself to European civilization. And so far
as I myself and my own branch of the race[4] are concerned, I accept
this judgment and I accept it with pride.
No, no, friend, I am not a philanthropist. The hunger and thirst for
God are too strong within me for me to love men in the philanthropic
way. Needs must be sown among men germs of doubt, of distrust, of
inquietude, and even of despair--why not? yes, even of despair--and
if thereby they lose what they call happiness, since it is not really
happiness, they have lost nothing.
And above all and before all, none of this living in peace with all
the world! Living in peace with all the world--horrible, horrible,
horrible! No, no, no, none of this living in peace. Peace, spiritual
peace I mean, is usually a lie and is usually stagnation. I do not wish
to live in peace either with others or with myself. I need war, inward
war. We all need war.
Truth before peace. That is my watchword. And to give it greater
brilliance I will write it in Latin: _veritas primus pace_. And it goes
without saying that the war that I need as the sustenance of my life
and of the lives of others is a spiritual war, not war with gun and
sword.
All the rest--in spite of whatever the champions of the central current
of culture and of disciplined solidarity and of respect for the
so-called definitive conquests of the human spirit may say--all the
rest I understand and I am even ready to applaud it if you like; but it
is not my concern, it is not my lot to put myself at its service.
And above all, my friend, there is one thing that I have hated all my
life and that I hope to die hating, and that is, becoming the prisoner
of my public, submitting to follow the course marked out for me by my
readers. I will not sacrifice my independence, above all I will not
mortgage my future. You understand? I will not mortgage my future. I
will keep it open and free.
And so I alienate sympathy?... Who knows? What I want to avoid is
public indifference. Sympathies and antipathies are perhaps the same
thing. Antipathy--now for a paradox!--is a form of sympathy. Reading me
for the sake of being annoyed and quarrelling with what I say or my way
of saying it, is the same as reading me and agreeing with what I say.
To combat a man is one way of animating and confirming him.
I have put warmth and life into my books and it is for the sake of the
warmth and life I have put into them that you read them. I have put
passion into my books. Passion of hate, passion of disdain, passion
of contempt very often--I don’t deny it. But does warmth come only
from this thing that they call love and which, ninety times out of a
hundred, is nothing but drivelling mawkishness and debility of spirit?
And I have put my loves into my books too, those loves which beget my
indignations, those loves which are the cause of my being so often
harsh, severe, disdainful. Yes, love makes me antipathetic, a greater
and purer love than that delusive sympathy which some people urge me to
seek after.
Never, never, never! Let such apostleship be for others. Every man has
his own destiny.
And this is not a presumption of superiority. No, don’t think that.
If you suspect such a thing it is because you don’t know me. No, it
is not that. I don’t condemn your opinion; I don’t regard the advice
you give me as bad; I only say that it is no use to me. I tell you
that you are mistaken about me. And not because you lack intelligence,
no, a thousand times no. You are mistaken because each of us sets out
from a different point of view, or rather from a different point of
feeling. You appear to me to be an optimist, or at any rate a man who
believes that progress will alleviate the pains of mankind; you speak
with a certain unction of the noble crusade of thought and of the great
enterprise of culture, and I believe that the best that this enterprise
can do is to make us forget that we have been born and that we have to
die. I confess that I have a tragic sense of life. I confess it without
petulance or pedantry, and I know that you will not doubt my sincerity.
This bitterness that you find so disagreeable in my writings has grown
with being exercised against myself. I am the sword and the whetstone
and I sharpen my sword on myself. Hence it is that I am as tired with
the sword-play as I am with sharpening the sword that I play with.
And if I am to tell you the truth, it hurts and wounds me to see men
marching as confidently as if they marched on solid ground, some
confident in the prejudices and anti-prejudices of their religious
beliefs, others slaves of science, others slaves of ignorance, slaves
all of them. I would have them doubt, I would have them suffer, above
all I would have them despair, I would have them be men and not mere
partisans of the party of progress. Despair, even though it be a
resigned despair, is perhaps the highest state that man can attain to.
God, friend, did not send me into the world to be an apostle of peace,
or to reap sympathy, but to be a sower of disquietude and irritation
and to endure antipathy. Antipathy is the price of my redemption.
SOLILOQUIES
I
It would seem, Miguel, that your audience will have to allow you,
if only just for once, to talk aloud to yourself, to unburden your
heart.--Do it now, and then it will be all the easier to do it again
some other day.--Writing for the public is a harsh kind of slavery.
Doubtless you willed it. You chose to be a writer and you must
patiently bear the consequences of your choice. But are we as free to
choose our vocation as we think we are?
You crave retirement, tranquillity and silence in order that you may
devote yourself to some solid and unhurried task, remote from the
turmoil that deafens the ear with its noise and blinds the eye with its
dust. Your heart with its yearning for solitude turns longingly towards
those men of old who dedicated themselves to works that endure, far
from the traffic of the world with its daily contentions and anxieties.
You yearn for the classic, the eternally classic. But the vertigo of
life sweeps you along and you find yourself involved in the burning
dissensions of your contemporaries. You cannot live among the dead; you
have to live among the living.
And yet, dear Miguel, what a source of consolation and strength is this
intercourse with the glorious dead, whose works never die! How the soul
is refreshed by the vivifying streams that flow from those immortal
spirits who live their deepest lives in us--Homer, Plato, Virgil, St.
Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, and so many
others!
Yes, there is no doubt about it--this insane eagerness to know what
those round about us are saying or repeating hinders us from following
the progress of the human soul as it reveals itself in its immortal
sons, those erect pillars that are landmarks for all time. What does
it matter to you, tell me, what your neighbour is clamouring about?
You are not going to follow the example of those whose time and soul
are so absorbed in listening to all the superficialities of their
contemporaries that they have no time left to enjoy the enduring legacy
of humanity. This form of modernity serves only to enfeeble both men
and peoples. Distrust novelties, Miguel, and be sure that there is
nothing more novel than what is for ever. Homer and Shakespeare are
more modern than most of the living writers who are accounted most
modern. You will learn more from Plato than from the author of the
latest volume in Alcan’s Library of Modern Philosophy. The modern is
the fashionable and you must fly from all fashions.
But it is useless--I know it--useless. I can see that the voices round
about you, the ardent voices of the living, have caught your ear,
perhaps in spite of yourself. It is the voice of humanity, and you are
and ought to be before all else a man. Do you remember what your dead
friend Coleridge, the wonderful Coleridge, says in his _Biographia
Literaria_ about his contemporaries? I will repeat it to you again:
“The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another
race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and
submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a
contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded
by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners,
possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a
man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans his hope.
The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To
recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt
due to one who exists to receive it.”
Consider this same Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote these words and
tell me if the memory of this man who died many years before you were
born can give you that glow which the recollection of one still living
gives you. And nevertheless, you will say, how sweet and peaceful it is
to converse with those who once were and to-day sleep in the lap of the
teeming earth.
* * * * *
You have dreamed of producing a _magnum opus_ that would endure, and
you find yourself condemned to the fragmentary and fugitive labour of
journalism. Must you repine at that? We never know, believe me, when we
have succeeded best.
And remember that the slowly and carefully elaborated work of the
solitary author, holding himself aloof from all collaboration with his
public, is perhaps after all only the monument of his own egoism.
Collaboration with the public, I say. For the public collaborates more
or less ostensibly in the work of every publicist, sometimes with
applause, sometimes with censure. I know that you have been influenced
in your work by the letters which from time to time you receive from
unknown readers, especially from those in America, and which have
provided you with helpful notes and suggestions. But in addition to
this, you are influenced, perhaps without knowing it, by the reaction
of your readers, of those who follow your work, and this reaction
affects what you write, forcing you sometimes to adapt yourself to your
readers’ point of view, sometimes to combat it and endeavour to make it
conform to yours.
It is said that some of the greatest dramas, among others those of
Shakespeare, have been actually created on the stage, in collaboration
with the public, having been modified at every representation according
to the way in which the public received them. And do you not think that
the successive works of a productive author are not very often merely
successive editions, more or less revised, of one and the same work?
Every author who writes much repeats himself much; the more original
he is and the more he draws from his own depths instead of merely
echoing what he hears round about him, the more he repeats himself.
The greatest geniuses have been men of few and simple ideas expressed
with vigour and efficacy, but expressed also with more uniformity and
continuity than those of writers of only average ability. There have
been men whose greatness has been owing to the fact that they were
men of one idea, men who were simply an idea incarnate. By dint of
living one single but noble and fruitful idea, they have succeeded in
presenting it to us in all its forms. Variety, multiplicity of points
of view, almost always indicates a certain spiritual weakness. But I
do not need to convince you of this, for I know how much you admire
Athanasius for being a man of one idea.
Yes, your own works, in spite of their apparent variety--novels,
commentaries, essays, poems--are, if you consider it carefully, simply
the continuous development in multiple forms of but one and the same
fundamental idea. And in thus seeking to communicate this central
thought of yours, you go on condensing it more and more and discovering
new forms of expression for it, until perhaps some day you will hit
upon the most adequate, the most precise form. And, believe me, a
writer achieves a lasting place when he has discovered the permanent
form of any idea, when he has succeeded in giving it its definitive
body. And in your effort to discover this, who shall say that this
writing of fugitive and fragmentary pieces is not as useful as any
other way of search? You know that very often one thinks more when
talking than when meditating.
Do you remember that experience which occurred to you one afternoon
when you were walking with your friend Vincent, that wise and subtle
spirit, so unhappily cut off in his prime? You were arguing as usual;
his subtle objections forced you to concentrate your mind, and after
a quick reply to one of his questions, almost before the words were
out of your mouth, you exclaimed delightedly: “How right that is! how
exact! how precise!” And when he showed surprise that you should be
astonished by one of your own remarks, you said: “The fact is, it is
as new to me as it is to you. Doubtless the solution was already there
in my mind, but it was dim and confused. I myself was not conscious of
its being there. It was only in the effort to meet your objections that
it took shape and disclosed itself to me. And so you see it was really
as new to me as to you.”
And so it often happens. Thought depends upon language, for we think
with words, and language is a social thing. Language is conversation.
And thought itself is therefore social. The only clear thought is
transmissible thought. If anyone tells you that he sees a thing quite
clearly but that he does not know how to communicate it, you may
reply that he cannot be sure whether he sees it clearly or not. To
every writer it has happened more than once that he has realized the
absurdity or obscurity of his own thought only after he has seen it in
print.
Be assured, then, that you meditate more and meditate better when you
are writing things like this letter that you are now addressing to
yourself than when you shut yourself up in your room to devote yourself
to what is called meditation and what is really only mind-wandering.
The necessity of giving your thought transmissible expression is that
which makes it a living and effective process. It is when your pen is
in your hand that things occur to you most readily, and the reason is
because then you are not thinking for yourself but thinking for others.
Thinking for oneself is not properly thinking--it is losing oneself
in vague reveries, like a man on the verge of sleep idly watching the
drift of his cigar-smoke. To think is to think for others; thinking is
a social function.
You have sometimes heard it said that Paul of Tarsus used to draw
inspiration from his own words, that these words provoked ideas, and
that in his epistles it is possible to follow this process of ideation
by means of verbal associations. And of Augustine of Hippo--one of
the immortal pillars, like Paul, Bernard and Martin Luther, of the
Christianity of the heart--it has been said that he developed his theme
by antitheses, that is to say rhetorically. And both Paul and Augustine
were men of burning passion, not solitary contemplatives, but active
fighters.
They consider you to be an egotist because you often refer to
yourself--you are doing it now in this soliloquy--and talk about
yourself, but the truth is that this self of yours, in so far as you
are a writer, is something that belongs to all the world--you stand
in the middle of the street, hailed by everybody and answering back.
You would be not merely an egotist but a miserable egoist if you shut
yourself up in the tower of ivory, far from your fellows, and worked
day after day upon some minute and exquisite jewel. You work in the
open air, in the public gaze, and from time to time, in order to keep
your work clean, you blow away the dust of the turmoil that has settled
upon it.
Enough. Let us talk no more together, you and I, this hidden and
intimate self and this apparent and public self. Are they really two?
Are you anything else but a writer? Or rather, this self that is not
the publicist, of what worth is it?
II
It appears to be the fact that many people believe me to be a man who
lives shut up in a library, buried among books, isolated from the
world. They say that I lack what they call the sense of reality. As
for the first charge, that I spend my days devouring books, it is a
pure fiction. I travel more than I wish to travel and I see more people
than I wish to see. With regard to the second, my lack of the sense of
reality--let us consider it.
That which men of the world--and in my speech and writings I always use
this phrase in a sufficiently depreciatory sense--that which men of
the world call the sense of reality appears to me to be no more than a
sense of apparentiality. A man is said to possess the sense of reality
who stops to consider only the transient surface of things and does not
penetrate into their permanent substance.
Those who are said to possess this sense of reality are interested
only in news, what is called the latest information. And as for me--I
must say it perfectly frankly--I detest the latest information. There
is nothing in the newspaper that strikes me as so empty as the page
devoted to the latest news. This craving to have news, news usually
lacking in any deep import, as quickly as possible, seems to me
puerile. The important thing, I have always supposed, is to know things
thoroughly, not to know them quickly.
But the current runs in the other direction. For one who reads a book
with the sole purpose of knowing, enjoying and profiting by it, there
are twenty who read it simply in order to say that they have read it
and to gain kudos by quoting from it.
There are, or at any rate there ought to be, in each one of us two men,
the temporal and the eternal, the one who is preoccupied with the cares
of the passing day and the one who is preoccupied with the eternal
preoccupations, the one who says: “What shall I eat, or how shall I
amuse myself to-morrow?” and the one who says: “What will happen to us
after death?” In some cases the inner man dominates and leads captive
the external man and then the individual either retires to a monastery
or he lives a life of resigned despair, ceaseless wrestling with
mystery; and in some cases the external and temporal man subjugates
and strangles the inner and eternal man, and then we have the man of
the world, the man who boasts of being practical and of possessing the
sense of reality. And this practical man does not interest me in the
least.
When I find myself in a modern city, in one of these cities that are
called progressive because of their system of police and hygiene,
with smoothly paved streets, pretentious buildings, electric trams,
luxurious motors replete with fashionably dressed women, well-kept
parks, comfortable clubs, theatres--in short, complete with all the
apparatus of a modern city--whenever I find myself in such a city
I am enveloped, invaded and oppressed by a sense of profound and
utter solitude. The men appear to me like shadows without substance.
And like Diogenes I begin to look for a man, a real man, a man who
wrestles with destiny and mystery, a man of religious spirit, a man,
in short, who believes in God or denies Him, but who believes in Him
or denies Him passionately, with the heart, not merely in virtue of
some philosophical formula forming part of the general knowledge that a
well-educated man is expected to possess.
I set about looking for a man ... and rarely, very rarely, do I find
him. “The man you ought to know is López,” they tell me, “a man of
culture and distinction.” And so, although without any illusion, and
chiefly in order not to offend the friend who recommends him to me, I
get to know López. And in effect López has read a great deal and knows
the names of the most prominent writers and publicists and discusses
Comte and Spencer and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and has read the
latest French novelists, and knows several famous passages of poetry
by heart and has his tincture of history, sociology, psychology and
natural science, and López ... is not the man I am looking for.
It is not the great classic authors that López has read, the essential
geniuses, the men who have gazed at the Sphinx face to face, but rather
their expositors and commentators; he knows the great minds of all
time as they are reflected in manuals of the history of philosophy or
literature. Once perhaps, not so much even for curiosity’s sake as to
be able to say that he has read them, he has looked into the book of
Job or St. Augustine or Pascal or à Kempis, but his heart has not been
touched. And naturally López does not interest me, does not even appear
to me to be a man; he is simply a member of a club, or a member of
Parliament, or a brilliant figure in polite society. His distinction
is of the same category as that of his wife’s mediocre facility in
playing the piano. López knows how to present himself to the best
advantage.
But fortunately and thanks to God I do not live in one of these
cities, which are all alike, all attempting to imitate Paris. I live
in an ancient city, whose age is perpetual youth, whose golden stones
distil memories. And even so, whenever I can I escape into the country
and there I talk with some old shepherd who has brooded for long
hours beneath the sky upon eternal themes. And this man who reads no
newspapers, who does not know where Serbia is and has never heard of
Dreyfus or Anatole France or the Kaiser, who knows nothing about the
latest sociological theory or the latest fashion in morning coats, this
man speaks to me the ancient words of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. And
as he has never read Ecclesiastes, but has derived his wisdom from the
same fount, the ancient words come to me new, eternally new.
Many times I have wished in my secret heart that I had lived in one of
those ages of burning faith, among a people consumed by an infinite
passion, among the Crusaders or among the Albigenses, in the ranks of
Cromwell’s Ironsides or of Coligny’s Huguenots, or in the obscurity
of the monastery in which Heinrich Seuss underwent his tremendous
mortifications.... But who in God’s name, if he be a man and a real
man, can stand one of those banquets with which the friends of the
distinguished López celebrate the honour of his being appointed
governor of a province, with their interminable toasts, all full of the
same empty platitudes, pronounced to the hateful accompaniment of the
popping of champagne corks? When the unavoidable exigencies of social
servitude compel me to attend one of these ceremonies of homage, I feel
a desire to get up and say: “Brothers, let us meditate upon death!” and
launch forth into a sermon. I don’t do so, of course, though not for
fear of ridicule, but because I know that it would avail nothing.
* * * * *
But enough of unbosoming myself. You needn’t be afraid, I know that
I am a slave, I know that we are all slaves.... I will return to the
beaten track, I will return to “objective” themes, but.... But must
my heart never be allowed the relief of a sigh, a sigh at once of
resignation and rebellion? Must I not be allowed some time to say that
all this that you call civilization appears to me to be nothing but the
trappings of culture and that those who are content merely with the
trappings are savages muffled in royal robes, and that the splendour of
your metropolises leaves me cold?
MY RELIGION
A friend writing to me from Chile tells me that he has met people
acquainted with my writings who have asked him: “What, in a word, is
the religion of this Señor Unamuno?” I myself have several times been
asked a similar question. And I am going to see if I cannot--I will not
say, answer it, for that is a thing I do not pretend to be able to do,
but endeavour at any rate to elucidate the meaning of the question.
Individuals as well as peoples characterized by intellectual
inertia--and intellectual inertia is quite compatible with great
productive activity in the sphere of economics and in other kindred
spheres--tend to dogmatism, whether they know it or not, whether they
wish it or not, whether they intend it or not. Intellectual inertia
shuns the critical or sceptical attitude.
I say sceptical, taking the word scepticism in its etymological and
philosophical sense, for the sceptic does not mean him who doubts, but
him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and
thinks that he has found. The one is the man who studies a problem and
the other is the man who gives us a formula, correct or incorrect, as
the solution of it.
In the order of pure philosophical speculation it is premature to
demand that an investigator shall produce a definite solution of
a problem while he is engaged in defining the problem itself more
exactly. When a long calculation does not work out correctly, it is
no small step forward to rub it all out and begin afresh. When a house
threatens to collapse or becomes completely uninhabitable, the first
thing to do is to pull it down and not to demand that another shall be
built on top of it. The new house may indeed be built with materials
taken from the old one, but only after the old one has first been
demolished. In the meantime, if there is no other house available, the
people can find shelter in a hut or sleep in the open.
And it is necessary not to lose sight of the fact that in the problems
of practical life we must seldom expect to find definite scientific
solutions. Men live and always have lived upon hazardous hypotheses
and explanations, and sometimes even without them. Men have not waited
to agree as to whether or not the criminal was possessed of free will
before punishing him, and a man does not pause before sneezing to
reflect upon the possible injury that may be caused by the obstructing
particle that provokes him to sneeze.
I think that those men are mistaken who assert that they would live
evilly if they did not believe in the eternal pains of hell, and the
mistake is all to their credit. If they ceased to believe in a sanction
after death, they would not live worse, but they would look for some
other ideal justification for their conduct. The good man is not good
because he believes in a transcendental order, but rather he believes
in it because he is good--a proposition which I am sure must appear
obscure or involved to those inquirers who suffer from intellectual
inertia.
I am asked, then: “What is your religion?” And I will reply: My
religion is to seek truth in life and life in truth, even though
knowing full well that I shall never find them so long as I live; my
religion is to wrestle unceasingly and unwearyingly with mystery; my
religion is to wrestle with God from nightfall until the breaking
of the day, as Jacob is said to have wrestled with Him. I cannot
accommodate myself to the doctrine of the Unknowable or to that of
“thus far and no farther.” I reject the everlasting _Ignorabimus_. And
at all hazards I seek to scale the unattainable.
“Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” Christ said to us,
and such an ideal of perfection is, without doubt, unattainable. But He
put the unattainable before us as the goal and term of our endeavours.
And He attained to it, say the theologians, by grace. And I wish to
fight my fight careless of victory. Are there not armies and even
peoples who march to certain defeat? Do we not praise those who die
fighting rather than surrender? This, then, is my religion.
Those who put this question to me want me to give them a dogma, a
solution which they can accept without disturbing their mental inertia.
Or rather it is not this that they want, so much as to be able to
label me and put me into one of the divisions in which they classify
minds, so that they can say of me: He is a Lutheran, a Calvanist, a
Catholic, an atheist, a rationalist, a mystic, or any other of those
nicknames whose exact meaning they do not understand but which dispense
them from further thinking. And I do not wish to have myself labelled,
for I, Miguel de Unamuno, like every other man who aspires to full
consciousness, am a unique species. “There are no diseases, but only
persons who are diseased,” some doctors say, and I say that there are
no opinions, but only opining persons.
In religion there is but little that is capable of rational resolution,
and as I do not possess that little I cannot communicate it logically,
for only the rational is logical and transmissible. I have, it is true,
so far as my affections, my heart and my feelings are concerned, a
strong bent towards Christianity, but without adhering to the special
dogmas of this or that Christian confession. I count every man a
Christian who invokes the name of Christ with respect and love, and I
am repelled by the orthodox, whether Catholic or Protestant--the latter
being usually as intransigent as the former--who deny the Christianity
of those who interpret the Gospel differently from themselves. I know a
Protestant Christian who denies that Unitarians are Christians.
I frankly confess that the supposed rational proofs--ontological,
cosmological, ethical, etc.--of the existence of God, prove to me
nothing; that all the reasons adduced to show that a God exists appear
to me to be based on sophistry and begging of the question. In this I
am with Kant. And in discussions of this kind, I feel that I am unable
to talk to cobblers in the terms of their craft.
Nobody has succeeded in convincing me rationally of the existence of
God, nor yet of His non-existence; the arguments of atheists appear to
me even more superficial and futile than those of their opponents. And
if I believe in God, or at least believe that I believe in Him, it is,
first of all, because I wish that God may exist, and then, because He
is revealed to me, through the channel of the heart, in the Gospel and
in Christ and in history. It is an affair of the heart.
Which means that I am not convinced of it as I am of the fact that two
and two make four.
If it were a question of something that did not touch my peace of
conscience or console me for having been born, perhaps I should pay
no heed to the problem; but as it involves my whole interior life and
the spring of all my actions, I cannot quiet myself by saying: I do
not know nor can I know. I do not know, that is certain; perhaps I can
never know. But I want to know. I want to, and that is enough.
And I shall spend my life wrestling with mystery, and even without
hope of penetrating it, for this wrestling is my sustenance and my
consolation. Yes, my consolation. I have accustomed myself to wrest
hope from despair itself. And let not fools in their superficiality
shriek: Paradox!
I cannot conceive of a man of culture without this preoccupation, and
in point of culture--and culture is not the same as civilization--I
can hope but little from those who live without interest in the
metaphysical aspect of the religious problem, and only study it in
its social or political aspects. I can hope but very little for the
enrichment of the spiritual treasury of mankind from those men or from
those peoples who, whether it be from intellectual inertia, or from
superficiality, or from scientificism, or from any other cause, are
unmoved by the great and eternal disquietudes of the heart. I can hope
nothing from those who say: “We must not think about these things!” I
can hope even less from those who believe in a heaven and a hell such
as those which we believed in when we were children; and still less can
I hope from those who affirm with a fool’s gravity: “All this is but
myth and fable; he who dies is buried and there’s an end of it.” I can
hope for something only from those who do not know, but who are not
resigned not to know; from those who fight unrestingly for the truth
and put their life in the fight itself rather than in the victory.
The greater part of my work has always been to disquiet my neighbours,
to rob them of heart’s ease, to vex them if I can. I have said this
already in my commentary upon “The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho,” in
which I have confessed myself most fully. Let them seek as I seek, let
them wrestle as I wrestle, and between us all we will tear some shred
of secret from God, and at any rate this wrestling will make us more
men, men of more spirit.
In order to accomplish this work--a religious work--among peoples like
those that speak the Castilian tongue who suffer from intellectual
inertia and superficiality, slumbering in the routine of Catholic
dogma or in the dogmatism of free-thought or of scientificism, it has
been necessary for me to appear sometimes shameless and indecorous,
at other times harsh and aggressive, and not a few times perverse
and paradoxical. In our pusillanimous literature it was a rare thing
to hear anyone cry out from the depths of his heart, to get excited,
to exclaim. The shout was almost unknown. Writers were frightened of
making themselves ridiculous. They behaved and still behave like those
who put up with an affront in the street for fear of the ridicule of
being seen with their hat on the ground marched off by the police.
But I, no! When I have felt like shouting I have shouted. Never have
I been restrained by decorum. And this is one of the things for which
I have never been forgiven by my colleagues of the pen, so discreet,
so correct, so disciplined, even when they preach indiscretion and
indiscipline. Literary anarchists are more punctilious about style and
syntax than about anything else. And when they play out of tune they do
so tunefully; their discords resolve themselves into harmonies.
When I have felt a pain I have shouted and shouted in public. The
psalms which are to be found in my _Poesías_ are simply the cries from
the heart with which I have sought to make the heart-strings of the
wounded hearts of others vibrate. If they have no heart-strings or only
heart-strings that are too rigid to vibrate, then my cry will awaken no
echo in them and they will declare that it is not poetry and they will
proceed to investigate its acoustic properties. It is possible also to
study acoustically the cry that is torn from the heart of a man who
sees his son suddenly fall down dead--and he who has neither heart nor
sons will understand no more of it than the acoustics.
These psalms, together with various other pieces in my _Poesías_, are
my religion, a religion that I have sung, not expressed in logic and
reasoning. And I sing it as best I can, with the voice and ear that
God has given me, because I cannot reason it. And he to whom my verses
appear to be more full of reasoning and logic and method and exegesis
than of life, because they are not peopled with fauns, dryads, satyrs
and the like or garbed in the latest modernist fashion, had better
leave them alone, for it is evident that I shall not touch his heart
whether I use a violin bow or a hammer.
What I fly from, I repeat, as from the plague, is any kind of
classification of myself, and when I die I hope I shall still hear
these intellectual sluggards inquiring: “And this gentleman, what is
he?” Liberal or progressive fools will take me for a reactionary and
perhaps for a mystic, without understanding of course what they may
mean; and conservative and reactionary fools will take me for a kind of
spiritual anarchist; and both of them will pity me as an unfortunate
gentleman anxious to distinguish himself by singularity, hoping to
be reputed an original, and with a bonnet full of bees. But no one
need worry about what fools think of him, be they progressive or
conservative, liberal or reactionary.
And since man is naturally intractable, and does not habitually thirst
for the truth, and after being preached at for four hours usually
returns to all his inveterate habits, these busy inquirers, if they
chance to read this, will return to me with the question: “Well, but
what solutions do you offer?” And I will tell them, once and for all,
that if it is solutions they want, they can go to the shop opposite,
for I do not deal in the article. My earnest desire has been, is and
will be that those who read me should think and meditate on fundamental
things, and it has never been to furnish them with thoughts ready made.
I have always sought to agitate and to suggest rather than to instruct.
It is not bread that I sell, not bread, but yeast, ferment.
I have friends, and good friends, who advise me to abandon this task
and to concentrate upon what they call some objective work, something
which will be, so they express it, definitive, something constructive,
something that will last. They mean something dogmatic. I declare that
I am incapable of it, and I claim my liberty, my holy liberty, even,
if need be, the liberty of contradicting myself. I do not know whether
anything that I have written or may write in the future is destined to
live for years and centuries after I am dead; but I know that if anyone
agitates the surface of a shoreless sea the waves will go radiating
without end, even though at last they dwindle into ripples. To agitate
is something. And if thanks to this agitation another who comes after
me shall create something that will live, then my work will live in his.
It is a work of supreme mercy to awaken the sleeper and to shake the
sluggard, and it is a work of supreme religious piety to seek truth in
everything and to expose fraud, stupidity and ignorance wherever they
are to be found.
SOLITUDE
It is my love for the multitude that makes me fly from them. In
flying from them, I go on seeking them. Do not call me a misanthrope.
Misanthropes seek society and intercourse with people; they need them
in order to feed their hatred and disdain of them. Love can live upon
memories and hopes; hate needs present realities.
Let me, then, fly from society and take refuge in the quiet of the
country, seeking in the heart of it and within my own soul the company
of people.
Men only feel themselves really brothers when they hear one another
in the silence of things in the midst of solitude. The hushed moan of
your neighbour which reaches you through the wall that separates you
penetrates much more deeply into your heart than would all his laments
if he told you them to your face. I shall never forget a night that I
once spent at a watering-place, during the whole of which I was kept
awake by a very faint intermittent moaning--a moaning that seemed to
wish to stifle itself in order not to awaken those who were asleep,
a discreet and gentle moaning that came to me from the neighbouring
bedroom. That moaning, which came from I know not whom, had lost all
personality; it produced upon me the illusion of coming out of the
silence of the night itself, as if it were the silence or the night
that lamented, and there was even a moment when I dreamt that that
gentle lament rose to the surface from the depths of my own soul.
I left the following day without having sought to ascertain who was the
sufferer or why he suffered. And I believe that I have never felt so
much pity for any other man.
It is only solitude that dissolves that thick cloak of shame that
isolates us from one another; only in solitude do we find ourselves;
and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in
solitude. Solitude unites us, believe me, just as much as society
separates us. And if we do not know how to love one another, it is
because we do not know how to be alone.
It is only in solitude, when it has broken the thick crust of shame
that separates us from one another and separates us all from God, that
we have no secrets from God; only in solitude do we raise our heart to
the Heart of the Universe; only in solitude does the redeeming hymn of
supreme confession issue from our soul.
There is no other real dialogue than the dialogue that you hold with
yourself, and you can hold this dialogue only when you are alone. In
solitude and only in solitude can you know yourself as a neighbour;
and so long as you do not know yourself as a neighbour, you can never
hope to see in your neighbours other I’s. If you want to learn to love
others, withdraw into yourself.
* * * * *
I am accused of not caring about or being interested in the anxieties
of men. It is just the contrary. I am convinced that there is no more
than one anxiety, one and the same for all men, and never do I feel it
or understand it more deeply than when I am alone. Each day I believe
less and less in the social question, and in the political question,
and in the æsthetic question, and in the moral question, and in the
religious question, and in all the other questions that people have
invented in order that they shall not have to face resolutely the only
real question that exists--the human question, which is mine, yours,
his, everyone’s.
And as I know that you will say that I am playing with words and that
you will ask me what I mean by this human question, I shall have to
repeat it once again: The human question is the question of knowing
what is to become of my consciousness, of yours, of his, of everyone’s,
after each one of us has died. So long as we are not facing this
question, all that we are doing is simply making a noise so that we
shall not hear it. And that is why we fear solitude so much and seek
the company of one another.
* * * * *
The greatest thing that there is among men is a poet, a lyric poet,
that is to say a real poet. A poet is a man who keeps no secrets from
God in his heart, and who, in singing his griefs, his fears, his hopes
and his memories, purifies and purges them from all falsehood. His
songs are your songs, are my songs.
Have you ever heard any deeper, any more intimate, any more enduring
poetry than that of the Psalms? And the Psalms are meant for singing
alone. I know that they are sung by crowds, assembled together under
the same roof in religious services; but in singing them the crowd
ceases to be a crowd. In singing the Psalms, each one withdraws into
himself and the voices of others echo in his ears simply as the
consonance and reinforcement of his own voice.
And I observe this difference between a crowd assembled together to
sing the Psalms and a crowd assembled to see a drama or to hear an
orator: it is that the former is a real society, a company of living
souls, in which each one exists and subsists by himself, while the
other is a formless mass and each one of those who compose it no more
than a fragment of the human herd.
I have never felt any desire to move a crowd, to exercise influence
upon a mass of people--who lose their personality in being massed
together--and on the other hand I have always felt a furious desire to
perturb the heart of each individual man, to exercise an influence upon
each one of my brothers in humanity. Whenever I have spoken in public
I have almost always succeeded in employing a kind of lyrical oratory,
and I have endeavoured to force upon myself the illusion that I was
speaking to only one of my hearers, to any one, no matter which, to
each one, not to all of them _en masse_.
* * * * *
We men are impenetrable. Spirits, like solid bodies, can only
communicate with one another by the contact of surfaces, not by
penetrating one another, still less by fusing together.
You have heard me say a thousand times that most spirits seem to me
like crustaceans, with the bone outside and the flesh inside. And when
in some book that I have forgotten I read what a painful and terrible
thing it would be if the human spirit were to be incarnated in a crab
and had to make use of the crab’s senses, organs and members, I said to
myself: “This is what actually happens; we are all unfortunate crabs,
shut up in hard shells.”
And the poet is he whose flesh emerges from the shell, whose soul oozes
forth. And when, in our hours of anguish or joy, our soul oozes forth,
we are all of us poets.
And that is why I believe that it is necessary to agitate the masses,
to shake men and winnow them as in a sieve, to throw against one
another, in order to see if in this way their shells will not break
and their spirits flow forth, whether they will not mingle and unite
with one another, and whether the real collective spirit, the soul of
humanity, may not thus be welded together.
But the sad thing is, if we are to go by past experience, that all
these mutual rubbings and clashings, far from breaking the shells,
harden, thicken and enlarge them. They are like corns that grow larger
and stronger with rubbing. Although perhaps it is that the clashes are
not violent enough. And in any case it must be clashing, not rubbing. I
do not like to rub against people but to clash against them; I do not
like to approach people obliquely and glance off them at a tangent, but
to meet them frontally, and if possible split them in two. It is the
best service I can do them. And there is no better preparation for this
task than solitude.
It is very sad that we have to communicate with one another by
touching, at most by rubbing, through the medium of the hard shells
that isolate us from one another. And I am convinced that this hard
shell becomes weaker and more delicate, in solitude, until it changes
into the most tenuous membrane which permits of the action of osmosis
and exosmosis. And that is why I believe that it is solitude that makes
men really sociable and human.
* * * * *
There are two kinds of union: one by removing differences, separating
the elements that differentiate from those that unite, the other by
fusion, bringing these differences into agreement. If we take away from
the mind of each man that which is his own, that way of looking at
things that is peculiar to him, everything that he takes care to hide
for fear people should think him mad, we are left with that which he
has in common with everyone else, and this common element gives us that
wretched thing that is called common sense and which is nothing more
than the abstract of the practical intelligence. But if we fuse into
one the differing judgments of people, with all that they jealously
preserve, and bring their caprices, their oddities, their singularities
into agreement, we shall have human sense, which, in those who are rich
in it, is not common but private sense.
The best that occurs to men is that which occurs to them when they
are alone, that which they dare not confess, not only not to their
neighbour but very often not even to themselves, that which they fly
from, that which they imprison within themselves while it is in a state
of pure thought and before it can flower into words. And the solitary
is usually daring enough to express this, to allow it to flower, and
so it comes about that he speaks that which others think in solitude
by themselves and which nobody dares to publish. The solitary thinks
everything aloud, and surprises others by saying that which they
think beneath their breath, while they seek to deceive one another by
pretending to make them believe that they are thinking something else,
but without anybody believing them.
All this will help you to deduce for yourself in what way and to what
extent solitude is the great school of sociability, and how right it is
that we should sometimes withdraw ourselves from men in order that we
may the better serve them.
INTELLECTUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
_Hamlet_, Act I, Scene V.
For some days he had been spiritually restless. His sterile mind
flitted hither and thither like a butterfly. Nothing succeeded in
interesting him. He picked up a book, read two or three pages and then
had to close it again, unable to control his wandering attention. He
tried to write, but half of the sheets that he wrote he tore up. And
yet he had never enjoyed better health, never felt the blood coursing
more vigorously through his veins, or the heart and lungs working in
better unison. At the same time he had a premonition of something
strong and mature within himself striving to come to birth; he felt
that he was on the verge of bringing forth thoughts brimful of vitality
and splendour. But something, a kind of solemn calm, against which he
contended in vain, encompassed and paralysed him. It was no doubt sheer
insensibility in him not to wait in peace for the grace of the Spirit
to visit him but to seek to force it with violence.
At last, one afternoon, when the light of the setting sun was pouring
upon the wide balcony of his cell-like room, he shut himself up in it,
with its dumb books, with all its familiar objects the sight of which
was always grateful to him. It was like shutting himself up within
himself, or even better than that, for this wonted ambience served him
as a means of communion with the world. That square glass inkstand,
those fat pen-holders, that carpet, that stout leather arm-chair in
which his body rested while his mind went galloping away, those rough
plain chairs, those rows of books against the white naked walls: all
these things were a kind of prolongation of his spirit and at the same
time they were like arms which the world stretched out to enfold him
in. They belonged to him and yet they belonged also to the world; they
were himself and at the same they were the not-himself. They would not
deceive him, no. He had touched them once and a thousand times and
every touch had linked itself with all the other touches, until at last
these things of humble use had become invested with a kind of soul made
up of the outpourings of spirit and memories.
He had books that were like lovers, grateful, remembering, for whenever
he opened them at random they opened themselves of their own accord at
the same place, always offering him the same passage, the choicest, the
most intense, the most life-giving that they had to offer. And when he
read the passage over again, the intimate ambience of the peaceful room
yielded up the memory of all the other fugitive moments when he had
read it before, and his soul vibrated across the gulf of time until its
vibrations were lost in that remoteness of the past where consciousness
loses itself too.
From the balcony of his room, across red roofs stained here and there
with the green of lichen, he could just glimpse the clouds glowing
in the sunset light. And nearer at hand, along the eaves of the roof
opposite, the white stone-crop blossomed, its tiny flowerets nourishing
their life upon the moist earthy sediment washed down by the rain from
the sun-baked clay tiles and deposited in the guttering. In summer,
pigeons flew down from the neighbouring belfry to bill and coo upon the
roof, picking the seeds of the stone-crop at its edge, while the dark
swifts skimmed through the air above. Sometimes cats crept stealthily
with sinuous movement across the tiles. Upon this roof too his eyes had
often rested; the little wild garden in the gutter, the pigeons, the
swifts, the cats, these too belonged to him and at the same time to the
world; and often while he had held them in his gaze his mind had been
intent upon his innermost thoughts.
He shut himself up there in his study, like an oyster in its shell. He
untethered his mind, letting it roam at will, without spur or bridle.
For a time it wandered up and down, plucking at passing ideas, ranging
over the backs of the books and divining famous names and titles of
renown. Then it collected itself and withdrew into the body that it
animated and made use of, and presently the arm of this body reached
out for a sheet of paper and the eyes glanced over it.
It was the strident manifesto that had been so much talked about; it
was the famous composition into which he, he himself, who was now
sitting at ease in his cow-hide arm-chair, had emptied his spirit. He
began to read it, and as he read it a strange disquiet invaded him. No,
that was not his, that was not what he had thought and believed, that
was not what he had written. And yet there could be no doubt about it.
That, that which now seemed so strange to him, he had written that, and
it had increased his fame. He read it over again.
No, we do not communicate what we want to communicate, he reflected.
No sooner does a thought incarnate itself in words and issue forth
into the world than it belongs to someone not ourself, or rather it
belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody. The flesh with which
language clothes itself is communal and external; it wizens up thought,
it imprisons it and even reverses and falsifies it.
It was a singular and disturbing effect that was produced in him
by reading himself as if he were a stranger, as if his writing had
been written by someone else. This effect of the duplication of his
personality reminded him of a former experience of self-duplication
which he never recalled without a shudder. Once when gazing at the
reflection of his own gaze in a mirror he had the sensation of seeing
himself as someone else; he regarded himself as an unsubstantial
shadow, as an impalpable phantom, and this alarmed him to such a degree
that he called to himself softly by his own name. And his voice sounded
to him as if it were the voice of another, a voice which came forth out
of space, out of the invisible, out of impenetrable mystery. He cleared
his throat, touched himself, felt the quickened beating of his heart.
He had never forgotten that unforgettable experience.
His present feeling was not the same, but it had something that
resembled it. Had he written that? Was he the same person as the man
who had written that? Did he contain within himself more than one
person? Might it not be that he carried within him a whole legion of
souls sleeping one below another? Were not all his ancestors sleeping
somewhere in the limbo of his brain? Did others see him as he saw
himself, or did they see him quite differently, and was he always
actually doing and saying that which he thought he was?
This last idea, an absurd and extravagant idea, had obsessed him for
some time past and it caused him anguish, for he said to himself: This
is madness, this is sheer madness.
Only too often, in fact, as he walked quietly along the street, it
had occurred to him to think something like this: “What if, instead
of walking quietly and soberly, I were really pirouetting or making
ridiculous contortions or behaving improperly? This hostility which I
have remarked in certain of my acquaintance, may it not have arisen
because I have said things to them which I am unaware of having said,
or because when I thought I was offering them my hand I was in fact
making some impudent or contemptuous gesture? When I imagine myself to
be saying one thing, may it not be they hear something very different
or perhaps contrary?”
This absurd obsession disquieted him, irritated him, made him doubt the
sanity and vigour of his reason, and he had to exercise all the power
of autosuggestion at his command to overcome it.
With a vigorous effort he threw off this obstinate vagary of his mind,
but only to return to the question of the strangeness of what he had
written.
Formerly, a long time ago, he had been a convinced determinist, unable
to tolerate even the mention of free will, so irrational did the
supposition of it seem to him. But later on, after further examination
of the question, his inflexible determinist faith had broken down; and
now, at the time at which we discover him, seated in his arm-chair
in his study, he has put this question of determinism and free will
away into the lumber-room of metaphysics from which he rarely takes
it out. He believes now that science has not succeeded in putting
this question in its true light, but that it always involves it in a
_petitio principii_. But what he really does feel--he feels rather
than thinks it--is that however free a man may be within himself, in
so far as he has to exteriorize and manifest himself, to speak or to
act, to communicate with his fellows, in so far as he has to avail
himself of his body and of the bodies of others, he remains bound by
the rigid laws of these bodies, he is a slave. My acts--he thinks--are
never exclusively mine: if I speak I have to make use of air that is
not mine in order to produce my voice; neither are my vocal cords,
strictly speaking, mine; nor is the language mine which I must use if
I wish to make myself understood; and the case is the same if I write,
if I strike a blow, if I kiss, if I fight. And he asks himself in
conclusion: “Am I myself really mine?” And so the tormenting obsession
buzzes round him again.
There is something which we have incorporated and made our own and
there is much that is completely alien to us; and between these two
extreme terms everything is partly ours and partly not ours. Our life
is a continual combat between our spirit which seeks to make itself
master of the world, to make the world its own, to make the world it,
and the world which in its turn seeks to possess itself of our spirit,
to make our spirit its own. I wish to make the world mine--our man
thinks--to make it myself, and the world tries to make me its, to make
me it; I strive to personalize it and it strives to depersonalize me.
And in this tragic combat--for yes, the combat is a tragic one--I have
to make use of my enemy in order to dominate him, and my enemy has to
make use of me in order to dominate me. Whatever I say, write or do, it
is only with the world’s help that I can say, write or do it; and thus
the world at once depersonalizes my saying, writing and doing and makes
them its own, and I appear to be different from what I am.
What an unhappy necessity is that of writing! What woeful constraint
is that of having to talk! Between any two who talk together, language
mediates, the world mediates, that which is neither one nor the other
of the interlocutors mediates; they are involved in this intrusive
element which, while enabling them to communicate, separates them. If
it were only possible to create language in the very act of speaking
our thought!...
Undoubtedly speech is a more perfect medium than writing, because
it is less material: the vibrations of the air are dissipated,
while the trace of the ink remains. Undoubtedly the _flatus vocis_,
like everything fugitive, is richer in association, more complete
in orchestration, while writing, like everything concrete, remains
detached. But better still if pure thought could communicate itself
by means only of those vague and fluid words upon which it floats
within the soul! To make oneself understood in words or writing is to
communicate the accidents, not the substance, of thought.
Our man looks at the clouds in the western sky, combed out by the
unseen comb of the wind, and watches them turn to flame in the light of
the setting sun. And he thinks of the substantial communion of spirits,
communication by the act of spiritual presence alone. He remembered
how once, on hearing some old ballad sung by a shepherd boy, the sound
of which had come to him faintly through a leafy screen of grey oaks,
he had trembled and felt as if he heard voices from another world,
not from another world beyond this world, but from a world that lives
within the world we know--voices which seemed to issue from the very
heart of things, as if they were the song of the soul of the oaks, of
the clouds, of the pebbles of the stream, of the earth and of the sky.
Where had he heard that song before?
Who knows? Perhaps one night, when he lay asleep, the shepherd boy
had passed by singing his song, and the song had lapped his dream and
steeped it in the fountains of life.
Another time--he remembered--when on a journey, he had met a woman, a
foreigner, who did not know his language nor did he know hers. Neither
of them knew any human tongue in which they could make themselves
understood, and they sat there in the railway carriage alone, opposite
one another, looking and sometimes smiling at one another. Theirs was a
protracted and mute conversation. When he thought kindly and tenderly
of her the stranger smiled, and when a less innocent desire stirred
within him the shadow of a frown crossed her brow. Perhaps they heard,
without themselves knowing that they heard, the measured beating of
their hearts, beating in unison while their eyes gazed at one another;
but without a doubt the breath of their souls mingled together. For the
soul breathes.
The soul breathes.--Why not speak in metaphors?
Our man began to think about breathing and how the air, penetrating
into the cells of the lungs, aerates the blood, this inner atmosphere
of our bodies. It is the material substance of the world--he
thought--which circulates within us; it is the world diluted and made
our own. And from this he went on to imagine a kind of spiritual
aeration of our mind, and how the world of colours, forms, sounds and
impressions of every kind is diluted in it.
But these are metaphors, nothing but metaphors, he said, then at once
reflecting: Metaphors? and what is not metaphor? Science is built up
of metaphors and language is essentially metaphorical. Matter, force,
light, memory--all metaphors. When positivists, or those who consider
themselves positivists, try to sweep science clean of metaphors, they
sweep them away with a metaphorical broom, and so sweep the metaphors
back again.
And then his mind began to play around one of his specially favourite
ideas, namely the idea of the superiority of what we call imagination
over the other so-called faculties of the spirit, and how the
excellency of poets was greater than that of men of science and men of
action.
A thousand times he had deplored the barbarous intransigence of most of
those with whom he had to communicate--in accidental, not substantial,
communion; that dismal lack of comprehension of every opinion which
they do not themselves share; that ridiculous belief that there are
ideas which one must necessarily consider absurd and which can only be
professed by confused and unhinged minds. All that--he was wont to say
to himself--is simply lack of imagination, incapacity to see things
oneself, even momentarily, as others see them, sheer aridity of mind.
How far from all that was the large spirit of the great Goethe, who was
able to feel himself deist, pantheist, atheist all at the same time,
whose mind embraced a profound understanding of paganism together with
an equally profound understanding of Christianity! But Goethe was a
poet, the poet, a true and essential poet, not a miserable didacticist
or dogmatist like those who think they travel more safely the more
ballast of formal logic they carry, at the expense of intelligence, and
the more closely they hug the level shores of thought, moored fast to
tradition and the senses.
Our man cast his eyes once more over the manifesto and said to himself:
“And I have been called an intellectual! I! I who abhor intellectualism
more than anybody! If they had labelled me ‘an imaginative’--well and
good. But an intellectual?” And he thought of Paul of Tarsus and the
pregnant sentences of his epistles.
He thought of Paul of Tarsus and his classification of men into carnal,
intellectual and spiritual, for so he was pleased to translate it, or
rather to interpret it. For there was a time when he had delighted
in exegesis. Not scientific exegesis; not investigating and searching
for the actual meaning of the writers of the sacred books; not
co-ordinating them logically and trying to discover, by reference to
the ideas and sentiment of the age and country in which they lived,
what they really felt and thought; but taking as his starting-point the
text that had been consecrated and enriched by centuries of tradition
and thence launching out into free speculation. The moment that Paul
of Tarsus gave his epistles to the world they ceased to be his, they
belonged to the world, they were part of the common stock, of the
patrimony, of humanity, and it was possible for him to understand them
and feel them altogether differently from the way in which the Apostle
himself had felt and understood them. That which others did to his
writings when they read them and commented upon them, it was possible
for him to do to the Apostle’s, provided he undertook the task with
knowledge and conscientiousness. The actual text furnished his mind
with the necessary foothold, it was the jumping-off place from which
his imagination could take flight.
And in Paul of Tarsus, in his epistle to the Romans and his first
epistle to the Corinthians, he found those three classes of men: the
carnal or _sarcinal_, σάρϰινοι, the natural or psychical, Ψυϰικοί,
and the spiritual or pneumatical, πνευματικοί. He had often read that
14th verse of the 7th chapter of the epistle to the Romans: “For
we know that the law is spiritual [_pneumatical_]; but I am carnal
[_sarcinal_], sold under sin”; and that 44th verse of the 11th chapter
of the first epistle to the Corinthians which says that there is a
natural or _psychical_ body and a spiritual or _pneumatical_ body; and
he was aware that for the Apostle the _psyche_, Ψυϰή, was something
inferior, something that was more or less equivalent to what was later
to be called the vital force, the sensitive soul, common to men and
animals; the _pneuma_, on the other hand, being the higher part of
the soul, the spirit, the ήγεμονικόν of the Stoics, something that
survives the body. But he preferred to give it another interpretation,
and he always regarded the _psyche_ as the intellectual power that is
bound to the necessities of our actual earthly life, the slave of a
logic that is educated and trained by the struggle for life, ordinary,
common, current knowledge, necessary in order to enable us to live, the
knowledge from which science is evolved. He could not help thinking
of psychical men as intellectuals, men of common sense and logic, men
whose ideas are dominated by the associations which the external and
visible world suggests to them, reasonable men who are trained to some
profession and practice it, who, if they are doctors, learn how to cure
diseases, if engineers to construct roads, if chemists to prepare drugs
and analyse compounds, if architects to build houses. These psychical
men are the average men, those who take the middle course, those of
whom it is said that they have a sound and clear judgment and standard,
those who do not believe in any fallacy that is not consecrated by
tradition and habit, those who never swallow any new absurdity, because
their minds are already so stuffed with timeworn absurdities.
Between these and the carnal or _sarcinal_ men he always established
a difference. For him the carnal men were the brutish, the absolutely
uncultured, those who scarcely think of anything but eating, drinking
and sleeping, those who are wholly and completely immerged in animal
life. The psychical man, no; the psychical man is interested in
questions of science and culture; the psychical Spaniard preaches
national regeneration, is enthusiastic about the telephone, the
gramophone and the cinematograph, reads Flammarion, Haeckel, Ribot,
buys popular works on philosophy, and if he is in the neighbourhood of
a railway stands in ecstatic contemplation of the majestic progress
of the locomotive. If the psychical man is an orthodox Catholic, he
admires the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas, although he has never read
him, he knows that modern geology squares with the Mosaic account of
the Creation, and that it is legitimate to admit a part of Darwinism,
and that the Church possesses a remedy for all the social ills that
afflict our age. The psychical man is an intellectual, his intellect
may be small or great, but fundamentally he is an intellectual.
And lastly come the spiritual men, the dreamers, those whom the
intellectuals contemptuously call mystics, those who tolerate the
tyranny neither of science nor of logic, those who believe that there
is another world within our world and mysterious dormant forces in the
depths of our spirit, those who speak the language of the heart and
many who prefer not to speak at all. Most of the great poets have been
spiritual men, not intellectuals. Of one of them, of the sweet singer
Wordsworth, it has been said that he was a genius without talent, that
is to say a great spirit without sufficient intelligence.
How many times had he not read and re-read the end of the second
and the beginning of the third chapter of the first epistle to the
Corinthians! “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit
of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but
the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world,
but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that
are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the
words which man’s wisdom teacheth [not with didactical arguments,
which is the term employed in the text], but which the Holy Spirit
teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural
man [_psychical_, or as our man translated it, intellectual] receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him:
neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But
he that is spiritual [_pneumatical_] judgeth all things, yet he himself
is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he
may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. And I, brethren,
could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal
[_sarcinal_], even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk,
and not with meat; for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither
yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal....”
He turned again to the epistles of Paul of Tarsus and re-read the
verses that he had so often read before. “The things of God knoweth no
man, but the Spirit of God.” And he said to himself: Useless to seek
to know the things of God by the method of didactical argument, of
theology, of logic; a theology is a contradiction in terms, for the
_theos_ is at war with the _logia_; arguments do not help us to reach
God. And he remembered Kant and his shattering of the supposed logical
proofs of the existence of God, and how in his own spirit all that
scaffolding of a metalogical belief, spiritual and not intellectual,
psychical and not pneumatical, had collapsed. The ontological proof,
the cosmological proof, the metaphysical proof, the ethical proof, all
had come tumbling down in his mind at the same time, and with them the
so-called God of reason. All that theological rationalism had come to
earth in his spirit with a crash, though the noise of it was heard
only by himself, destroying not a few delicate flowers in its fall and
covering the ground with rubbish. Upheavals of the heart, earthquakes
of the spirit, had cleared the ground of the debris, and in a new way,
a way the intellectuals do not know, there sprung up within him a faith
which came from the Spirit of God. For the things of God knoweth no
man, but the Spirit of God.
“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom
teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things
with spiritual.”--Mystic! This word, spat out with contempt, like an
insult or a reproach, seemed to be spoken into his ear, and so near, so
clear, so distinct it was, that he involuntarily turned his head. And
there at his side, not in the body, visible and tangible, but present
in the spirit, was the prototype of the intellectual, with all his most
exclusively intellectual attributes--there was the psychical man, the
natural man _par excellence_. There he was repeating his physiological
creed parrot-wise, while in his heart he rebelled against his poetic
and creative impotence, against his unconfessed unspirituality.--He
shrugged his shoulders, smiled and turned again to look at the slowly
darkening sky. The sunset clouds now appeared like mountains of ashes,
the remains of the solar conflagration. He turned on the electric
switch and the wire thread glowed in the bulb--there was light, light
of man’s making, light of applied science.
“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for
they are foolishness into him: neither can he know them, because they
are spiritually discerned.” Foolishness ... madness ... he repeated
to himself, while his eyes wandered over those familiar objects which
the electric light had called forth out of the dark shadows. Madness
... and what is madness? There are alienists, phreno-pathologists,
psychiatrists, and who knows by how many other names they are
called?... But what is sanity? For perhaps one ought to begin with that.
Health is that condition in which a man is free from every kind of
disease; but what is disease? Health, others say, is “that condition in
which the organism exercises all its faculties normally.”[5] Normally
... normally ... and what is the normal? He stretched out his hand
for a book which he was just then reading, a book stored with a mass
of data relating to the mysterious life of the spirit, the work of
that noble mind that had been the soul of the Society for Psychical
Research, and he read:
“The word _normal_ in common speech is used almost indifferently to
imply either of two things, which may be very different from each
other--conformity to a standard and position as an average between
extremes. Often, indeed, the average constitutes the standard--as
when a gas is of average density; or is practically equivalent to the
standard--as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come
to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each
living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor.
To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank
at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal
standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is
tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of
the future.”[6]
He shut the book and said to himself again: Normal ... madness ...
sanity ... disease ... health.... The madness of to-day will be the
sanity of to-morrow, just as the sanity of to-day will appear madness
to-morrow. Intellectuals call that madness which they are unable
to understand, for it can only be discerned spiritually. And an
intellectual, what is he, in the last instance, but a normal man, a
man of the _via media_, equally far removed from the carnal and from
the spiritual man? The intellectual is the man of the _via media_, at
an equal distance from the enormous mass of carnality and from the
very limited quantity of conscious spirituality--for the other kind of
spirituality, the unconscious and potential, is dormant in all men
and is perhaps more alive in the carnal men themselves than in the
intellectuals. For it is easier for the flesh than for the intellect
to receive the spirit; between intellect and spirit the logic of the
schools interposes. The intellectual is the man of average sense, which
he calls common sense, and which is as far from the universal, cosmic
or instinctive sense in which carnal men live, as it is from that
private sense which fortifies the spirit of spiritual men.
“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged
of no man.” By what right do those whose own spirit is buried beneath
their intellect judge the things of the spirit?
“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But
we have the mind of Christ.” At this word Christ our man’s thinking
was arrested. He had arrived at what is called the religious problem
and it presented itself to him in the form under which he had been
contemplating it now for some time. In this problem--_the_ problem, the
religious problem--he saw the principal touchstone that distinguishes
the intellectuals from the spiritual men.
In so far as the religious question is concerned, the intellectuals
presented themselves to him, in effect, as divided into two large
groups, usually called believers and unbelievers. Taking these terms
in the concrete and in relation to his own country, they resolved
themselves into intellectual Catholics and intellectual non-Catholics,
who in practice were always anti-Catholics. These two factions
contended one against another; but as a contest is only possible on
a common basis, they contended on the same ground. No contest is
possible between a fish which never emerges from the depths of the sea
and a bird which never descends from the altitudes of the air. These
two factions contended facing one another--that is to say, one looking
in one direction and the other in another--but both standing on the
same ground, both on the same plane of intellectuality. And woe to him
who should address them either from above or from below, from another
plane than theirs, from the plane of spirituality or from the plane of
carnality. They will both unite in calling him either a madman or a
brute.
These two factions contend together. For the one, religion is needful
as the necessary basis of morality, social order being impossible
without the fear of hell, of death and of the devil; religion is
assured by external proofs, prophecies, miracles--or, rather, accounts
of miracles--and before all and above all, by a tradition of centuries
resting upon an authority. For the other, proofs of the truth of
religion are wanting; social order can be established without hell
or the fear of death and of the devil, and the tradition has neither
been constant nor does it possess any convincing logical value. Both
approach the question from the same side: the one sees in religion
a social institution devoted to the interests of order, the other a
social institution devoted to the interests of despotism; the one
seeks for external logical proofs and the other rejects these proofs.
Advocates, and merely advocates, both of them! For both of them it
is a question of a social institution, something based upon external
authorities and evidences or inevidences, upon something logical or
illogical. It is what they call the conflict between reason and faith,
although this faith is not faith but only belief. It was not possible
for him, for our man, to feel it in that way, and the arguments of the
one side interested him as little as those of the other. Disputes of
intellectuals!...
He was now called to supper and he went away to attend to the wants of
the body, giving it first food and then sleep.
THE MATERIALISM OF THE MASSES
In the course of my frequent peregrinations, when I go up and down the
country preaching my lay sermons in the towns and cities of Spain, I
have a way of taking my audiences as raw material for experiment. I
carry out tests upon them, observing how they respond and react to my
words. And I have observed that whenever they hear me say something
which they think, however erroneously, implies a kind of negation
of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of another life
transcending this world, they break out into applause. And this
applause saddens me and sometimes prompts me to attack.
If these outbursts of applause meant simply: “Hear, hear! Bravo! This
man’s honest. He puts love of truth, however painful the truth may
be, before love of consolation”--if the applause meant that, I would
accept it, though with a certain sadness. But no, this applause means
something different. It means: “Hear, hear! Excellent! We don’t want
another life! This life is enough for us!” And this wounds me, for it
is an explosion of the most debasing materialism.
Not believing that God exists or that the soul is immortal,
or believing that God does not exist and that the soul is not
immortal--and believing that the soul is not immortal is not the same
as not believing that it is immortal--this is a belief that I can
respect; but not wishing that God should exist or that the soul should
be immortal is a thing profoundly repellent to me.
And it is precisely because I have this thorn in my heart of hearts,
because I cannot resign myself to one day returning to unconsciousness,
because I have a thirst for eternity, that this applause bruises
my heart. That a man should not believe in another life, that I
understand, for I myself find no proof of it; but that he should resign
himself to this, and above all that he should not desire anything more
than this life, that is a thing I do indeed not understand.
And then these gross calumniations of Christ and of Christianity, these
stupidities that go contrary to nature and that have stunted the human
spirit, and all this alluvion of vulgarity that so many unfortunate
people swallow whole....
In one of those series of popular publications which flatter and
seduce the coarsest instincts of the unlettered multitudes, there is a
book--translated from the Italian, I believe--entitled “Jesus Christ
Has Never Existed.” It is one of the most deplorable, shallow, and
worthless books imaginable, inspired not by a love of truth but by
the most blatant sectarianism. I was talking about it one day to a
man who had read it and who had been delighted with it, and I said:
“It is not the thesis that shocks me. The thesis that Jesus had no
historical existence, that He is a myth, has many times been put
forward, and with apparently very plausible arguments, at any rate with
erudition--recently by Karthoff--but it is a thesis that has been
demolished by the most judicious investigators, no matter what their
personal creed may have been.” He replied: “Then I’m sorry, for He
ought not to have existed.” And naturally I did not know what to say to
that.
This lack of ideality, this aridity and poverty of inward life, which
is implied by not longing for another and transcendental life, all this
practical materialism, is dismaying to the mind of whosoever meditates
a little upon the worth of human life. For my own part, I have very
little hope of peoples who fall into this materialistic attitude.
Understand me clearly: I am not assuring you, nor can I assure you,
that there is another life; I myself am not convinced that there is;
but I cannot conceive that a man, a true man, should not merely resign
himself to the enjoyment of this life only, but that he should renounce
and even spurn another life. And as for this idea that we shall
continue to live in our works, in our children, in the memory of other
generations, and that everything renews and transforms itself, and that
we shall help to build up a more perfect society--all this appears
to me to be the most miserable subterfuge for escaping the depths of
despair.
This is the reason why the radicalism of certain sections of the masses
dismays me and why I cannot hope that anything fruitful will come
of it. The radicalism of the masses in Spain, and perhaps in other
so-called Latin, or, more strictly speaking, Catholic, countries, is
lacking in the spirit and substance of religion. The weak point in our
socialism is its confused notion of the supreme end of the individual
life.
Let us better the economic condition of man--good! Let us put an end to
the division between rich and poor--exactly! Let us realize a state in
which a moderate amount of work will be sufficient to satisfy all our
wants--very good! And then? We have now created a society such as Bebel
or Kropotkin dreamed of, and what is to happen to each one of us in
this society? What is to be the end of this society? What shall we live
for?
“Get rich!” said Guizon, the Calvinist, to the Catholic bourgeoisie of
France; “get rich!” Very good. And then, when we have got rich?...
A country in which the people think only of getting rich is a country
... well, I would rather not inquire what kind of a country it is.
Suffice it to say that I at any rate should die in it of cold, of
shame, of disgust.
And if a country which is solely preoccupied with getting rich is
abhorrent to me, still more abhorrent is the country in which the
dominant preoccupation is that of enjoyment, of diversion. In other
words, of self-stupefaction.
A collective patriotic enthusiasm, an imperialistic instinct, a
passionate desire to influence other peoples and to impress your own
stamp upon them--this, after all, is something. But this enthusiasm,
this instinct, this desire, lives and burns in those peoples which
preserve the inward spring of religion, an underlying inextinguishable
thirst for eternity.
The people that is satisfied with this life lives, strictly speaking,
on the defensive, and the people that lives on the defensive ends
by being absorbed and dominated by those in whom the aggressive and
dominating instinct is uppermost. The so-called struggle for life
is efficacious only when the struggle is for predominance, not for
preservation. The essence of being, as Spinoza showed, consists not
so much in the effort to persist in mere being as in the effort to
become more, to become everything. It is the appetite for infinity and
eternity.
I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples that have been
materialized by a long indoctrination of implicit Catholic faith, whose
beliefs are a matter of routine, in whom the inner spring appears to be
exhausted--that inward disquietude which distinguishes the essentially
Protestant spirit. I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples in
whom centuries of a religion more social than individual, characterized
rather by ritual and ceremony and externality and authority than by
inward struggle, have resulted in generating a kind of free-thinking
that issues in indifference and in resignation to the life of this
world.
From the superstition of a ridiculous and childish heaven and hell they
have fallen into the superstition of a gross and unspiritual earth.
THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
_Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright.
And I would rather say: _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man;
no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is
no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity.
Neither the “human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor
the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The
man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above
all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and thinks and
wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
For there is something else that is also called man, and he is the
subject of many more or less scientific speculations. He is the
legendary featherless biped, the ξῷον πολιτικόυ of Aristotle, the
social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the Manchester
school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the vertical
mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of
another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an
idea. That is to say, a no-man.
Our man is the other man, the man of flesh and bone--I and you, my
reader, and the other man over there, all of us who weigh upon the
earth.
And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
self-styled philosophers like it or not.
In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems
are presented to us as if they grew out of one another and their
authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inward
biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
secondary place. And it is this, nevertheless, this inward biography,
that explains most things to us.
It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry
than to science. All philosophic systems that have been constructed as
a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have
in every age possessed much less consistency and less life than those
which have expressed the integral desire of the spirit of their authors.
For the fact is that the sciences, important to us as they are and
indeed indispensable for our life and thought, are in a certain sense
more extraneous to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective
end, that is to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are, at
bottom, a matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the
kind called theoretical, is like a mechanical discovery--that of the
steam-engine, the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing
that is useful for something. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in
enabling us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But
she, what is she useful to us for? A man takes an electric tram to go
to hear an opera and asks himself: Which is in this case more useful,
the tram or the opera?
Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary
conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this
conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude
and even to an activity. But in fact this feeling, instead of
being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our
philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or of not understanding
the world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And
this, like everything affective, has subconscious, perhaps unconscious,
roots.
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists,
but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps
pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.
Man, they say, is a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not
been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which
differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason.
More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it
weeps or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps the crab also resolves
equations of the second degree inwardly.
And thus in a philosopher what must most concern us is the man.
* * * * *
Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to
man, to each man, to each “I.” What is this idol--call it Humanity
or call it what you will--to which all men and each individual man
must be sacrificed? For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my
fellow-countrymen, for my children, and these sacrifice themselves in
their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those who come after them,
and so on in a never-ending series of generations. And who receives the
fruit of this sacrifice?
Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication
without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live.
And what is this right to live? They tell me that I have come into the
world 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.
Yes, yes, I see it all--an enormous social activity, a mighty
civilization, an accumulation of science, of art, of industry, of
morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial
marvels, with great factories, with roads, with museums, with
libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will
endure--for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
“Why!”--the reader will exclaim--“we are getting back to what the
Catechism says: ‘Q. For whom did God create the world? A. For man’?”
Precisely--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it took
account of these matters and were a person, conscious of itself, would
reply: “For the ant,” and it would reply rightly. The world is made for
consciousness, for each consciousness.
A human soul is worth all the universe, someone has said--I know not
who, but it was excellently well said. A human soul, mind you! Not
a human life. Not this life. And it is a fact that the less a man
believes in the soul, that is to say, in his conscious immortality,
personal and concrete, the more he will exaggerate the worth of this
poor transitory life. Hence arises the effeminate sentimental feeling
against war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but it is the other,
the eternal death, that he ought not to wish. “Whosoever will save his
life shall lose it,” says the Gospel; but it does not say “whosoever
will save his soul,” the immortal soul--the soul that we believe and
wish to be immortal.
And all those definers of objectism do not realize, or rather do
not wish to realize, that a man, in affirming his “I,” his personal
consciousness, affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true
humanism--the humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in
affirming man he affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of
which we have consciousness is that of man.
The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of
finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling is
born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are
the same thing fundamentally.
If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it
lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above
all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them
light and joy in giving them light and so live. And it would think well.
And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal
craving for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that
immortal leap[7] of which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for
consciousness. If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said,
nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness,
then there is nothing more execrable than existence.
It is possible that someone will discover that everything that I
am saying rests upon a contradiction, since sometimes I express a
longing for immortality and at other times I say that this life does
not possess the value that is attributed to it. Contradiction? To be
sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes and of my head that
says No. Of course there is contradiction. Who does not recollect
those words of the Gospel: “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”?
Contradiction? Of course! For we only live upon contradictions and by
them; life is tragedy, and the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without
victory or the hope of victory; life is contradiction.
It is a question, as you see, of an affective value, and against
affective values reasons do not avail. For reasons are nothing more
than reasons, that is to say, they are not even truths. There are
definition-mongers--pedants by nature and by grace--who produce an
effect upon me like that of a man who consoles a father for the loss of
a son, dead in the prime of his life, by saying: “Patience, friend, we
all must die.” Would you think it strange if this father were irritated
by such an ineptitude? For it is an ineptitude. How often may it not
be said--
_para penser cual tú, sólo es preciso_
_no tener nada más que inteligencia?_[8]
There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain or
with whatever other organ may be the specific organ for thinking; while
others think with the whole body and with the whole soul, with the
blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs,
with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the
brain become definition-mongers; they become the professionals of
thought. And you know what a professional is....
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything rather than a
philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is to say, a caricature
of a man. The cultivation of any science--of chemistry, of physics, of
geometry, of philology--may be, though within very narrow limits and
restrictions, a work of differentiated specialization; but philosophy,
like poetry, is either a work of integration and harmony or else it is
mere philosophism, psuedo-philosophical erudition.
All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowing for the sake of knowing
is, say what you will, nothing but a solemn begging of the question.
We learn a thing either for an immediate practical end, or in order to
complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the ideas that appear to us
most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate application to
the non-intellectual necessities of life--answer to an intellectual
necessity, which is also a real necessity, to a principle of unity and
continuity of consciousness. But just as scientific knowledge has its
finality in the rest of our knowledge, the philosophy which we may
be forced to choose has another extrinsic finality--it refers to our
whole destiny, to our attitude towards life and the universe. And the
most tragic problem of philosophy is that of reconciling intellectual
necessities of the heart and the will. For it is just here that every
philosophy that claims to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction
that is the very basis of our existence breaks down. But do all men
confront this contradiction?
Little can be hoped for from a ruler, for example, who has not been
preoccupied at some time or other, even if only in some dim way, with
the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and, above all, of
men, with their first “why” and their ultimate “wherefore.”
And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must be
affective. It is not enough to think about our destiny, it must be
felt. And the would-be leader of men who says and proclaims that he
pays no heed to the things of the spirit, does not deserve to lead
them. Which does not mean, of course, that any determinate solution is
to be required of him. Solution? Is there, indeed, any?
For my part, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my
confidence, to any popular leader who has not a real conviction that
the leader of a people is a leader of men--men of flesh and bone; men
who are born, suffer, and, although they may not wish to die, die;
men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who have to be
themselves and not others; men, in short, who seek that which we call
happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of
men to the generation following when there is no regard for the destiny
of those sacrificed--not merely for their memory, for their names, but
for themselves.
All this idea that a man lives in his children, or in his works, or
in the universe, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who
suffer from affective stupidity and who may, for the rest, be persons
of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess a
great talent or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as far
as the feelings are concerned, and even morally imbecile. There have
been instances.
Those who are mentally talented and affectively stupid usually say
that it is useless to seek to delve into the unknowable or to kick
against the pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has
been amputated that it is useless to think about it. And we all lack
something; only some of us feel it and others do not. Or they pretend
not to feel it, and then they are hypocrites.
There is something which, for want of a better name, we will call
the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception
of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy, more or less
formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed,
and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples.
And this sense does not flow from ideas but rather determines them,
although afterwards, of course, these ideas react upon the sense
and confirm it. Sometimes this sense may proceed from a casual
illness--from dyspepsia, for example--but at other times it is
constitutional. And it is useless to speak of men who are healthy and
men who are unhealthy. Apart from there being no normal standard of
health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature.
And, further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing
consciousness, is, when compared with the ass or the crab, already a
diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those
who possess the tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St.
Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René_, _Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi,
Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men laden with
wisdom rather than with knowledge.
And there are, I believe, also peoples who possess this tragic sense of
life.
THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his
essay “On the Immortality of the Soul” with these decisive words: “It
appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality
of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from
metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really
the Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and
immortality.” Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the
belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.
Kant, who took Hume as the starting-point for his criticism, attempted
to establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the
belief that it imports, and that is the real origin, the inward origin,
of his “Critique of Practical Reason” and of his categorical imperative
and of his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation
of Hume remains unshaken. There is no way of rationally proving
the immortality of the soul. There are, on the other hand, ways of
rationally proving its mortality.
It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to explain here at
length how far the individual human consciousness depends upon the
organization of the body, how it comes gradually to birth according
as the brain receives impressions from without, how it is temporally
interrupted during sleep, swoons, and other accidents, and how
everything leads us to the rational conjecture that death carries with
it loss of consciousness. And just as before our birth we were not, nor
have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after our death we shall no
longer be. This is the rational position.
Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely
by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not
idealists be scandalized thereby.
The truth is--it is necessary to state it clearly--that what we call
materialism means for us nothing else but the doctrine which denies
the immortality of the individual soul, the persistence of personal
consciousness after death.
In another sense it may be said that, since we know what spirit is,
and since matter is for us no more than an idea, materialism is
idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most vital, the
only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that everything
is matter as to say that everything is idea, or everything energy,
or what you please. Every monist system will always seem to us
materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only by the dualist
systems--those which teach that human consciousness is something
substantially distinct and different from other manifestations of
phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is the function
of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in order to
understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the soul to
be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of understanding and
explaining our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul
is unnecessary.
All the attempts to substantivate consciousness, making it independent
of extension--it will be remembered that Descartes opposed thought to
extension--are but sophistical subtleties intended to establish the
rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to
give the value of objective reality to that which does not possess
it, to that of which the reality exists only in thought. And the
immortality that we crave is a phenomenal reality, it is a continuation
of this life.
From whatever side we look at it, it is always found that reason
confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And
in strict truth, reason is the enemy of life. All that is vital is
anti-rational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is
essentially sceptical.
Rationalists persist in endeavouring to convince men that there are
motives for living and that there is a consolation for having been
born, even though there must come a time, at the end of some tens or
hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall
have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this
thing which some call humanism, illustrate the amazing affectional and
emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy--a
hypocrisy that is resolved to sacrifice sincerity to veracity and not
to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power.
Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this idea of
creating culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and
beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for
those who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny,
divorced from all preoccupation with the ultimate end of each one of
us? Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of art,
of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful
conceptions, if at the last end of everything, in four days or in four
million centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall
exist to appropriate this culture, this science, art, good, truth,
beauty, justice, and all the rest?
Many and various have been the rationalist devices--more or less
rational--from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics, by means
of which it has been sought to discover rational consolation in
truth and to convince men--though the convincers were themselves
unconvinced--that there are motives for working and lures for living,
even though the human consciousness be destined ultimately to disappear.
The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is
“Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” or the Horatian _carpe
diem_, which may be rendered by “Live for the day,” is not radically
different from the Stoic attitude with its “Do what your conscience
tells you, and afterward let it be as it may be.” Both attitudes have a
common base, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake comes to the same thing
as duty for duty’s sake.
It is true that there are people who assert that reason suffices them,
and they counsel us not to seek to penetrate into the impenetrable.
But of those who say that they have no need of any faith in eternal
personal life in order to find incentives to living and motives for
action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from birth may also
assure us that he feels no great desire to enjoy the world of sight
nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must
needs believe him, for _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, nothing can be
willed that is not previously known. But I cannot be persuaded that he
who has once in his life, either in his youth or at some other point
of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will
ever find peace without it. And this kind of blindness from birth is
scarcely possible among men, except by a strange aberration. And the
merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an
aberration.
I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be
scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed once again the bankruptcy of
science. For science, in so far as it is a substitute for religion,
and reason, in so far as it is a substitute for faith, have always
foundered. Science will be able to satisfy in an increasing measure,
and in fact does satisfy, our increasing logical and intellectual
needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does
not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, our hunger for
immortality--far from satisfying it, it contradicts it. Rational life
and truth stand in opposition to one another. And can it be that there
is any other truth than rational truth?
It must remain established, therefore, that reason, human reason,
within its limits not only does not prove rationally that the soul
is immortal and that the human consciousness is through all the ages
indestructible, but that it proves rather--within its limits, I
repeat--that the individual consciousness cannot persist after the
death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits,
within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of
rationality, of what we know by demonstration. Beyond these limits
is the irrational, which is all the same whether it be called the
super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational. Beyond
these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the _certum
est, quia impossible est_. And this absurd can only base itself upon
the most absolute incertitude.
* * * * *
The vital longing for human immortality, therefore, finds no rational
confirmation, nor does reason give us any incentive or consolation
for living or give to life itself any real finality. But here, in the
depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and the will and the
scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace fraternally. And
it will be from this embrace, a tragic, that is to say a profoundly
loving, embrace, that the fountain of life will flow, a life earnest
and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty--the ultimate position at which
reason arrives by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own
validity--is the foundation upon which the despair of the vital sense
must build its hope.
Disillusioned, we have had to abandon the position of those who seek
to convert rational and logical truth into consolation, pretending
to prove the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of
consolation; and we have had to abandon likewise the position of those
who seek to convert consolation and motives for living into rational
truth. Neither of these positions satisfies us. The one is at variance
with our reason, the other with our feeling. Peace between these two
powers is impossible and we must live by their war. We must make of
this war, of war itself, the condition of our spiritual life.
Faith in immortality is irrational. And nevertheless, faith, life and
reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not
properly a problem, cannot be formulated in propositions capable of
rational discussion; but it announces itself in us as hunger announces
itself. Neither can the wolf that throws itself upon its prey to
devour it or upon the she-wolf to fecundate her, enunciate its impulse
rationally and as a logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies
neither of which can maintain itself without the other. The irrational
demands to be rationalized and reason alone can operate on the
irrational. They are compelled to seek mutual support and association.
But association in conflict, for conflict is a mode of association.
* * * * *
There is no possible permanent position of agreement and harmony
between reason and life, between philosophy and religion. And the
tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle
between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and making
it resign itself to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on
vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its vital
desires. And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the
history of religion.
Our sense of the world, of objective reality, is necessarily
subjective, human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up
against rationalism, the will will always stand up against reason.
Hence the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation
of periods in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual
forms, with periods in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to
materialistic forms, although both of these classes of forms of belief
may disguise themselves under other names. Neither reason nor life ever
acknowledges itself vanquished.
No doubt it will be said that life ought to submit to reason and to
this we shall reply that nothing ought to be done that cannot be done,
and life cannot submit to reason. “Ought, therefore can,” some Kantian
will retort. To which we shall demur: “Cannot, therefore ought not.”
And life cannot submit to reason, because the end of life is living and
not understanding.
There is always someone who will tell us of the religious duty of
resigning ourselves to mortality. This is indeed the very summit of
aberration and insincerity. And over against sincerity will be set the
opposing ideal of veracity. Be it so, and yet it is quite possible to
reconcile the two. Veracity, respect for what I believe to be rational,
for what we call truth in the logical sense, moves me to affirm that
the immortality of the individual soul is a logical contradiction,
is something not only irrational but contra-rational; but sincerity
leads me to affirm also that I do not resign myself to this former
affirmation and that I protest against its validity. What I feel is a
truth, as much a truth at any rate as what I see, touch, hear, and what
is demonstrated to me--I believe that it is even more of a truth--and
sincerity obliges me not to hide my feelings.
And in self-defence life searches for the weak point in reason and
finds it in scepticism, which it seizes hold of, endeavouring to save
itself by maintaining its hold. It needs the weakness of its adversary.
In an outburst of passion, Lamennais exclaims: “But what! All hope
lost, shall we plunge blindly into the mute depths of a universal
scepticism? Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are?
Nature does not allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason
is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike
forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes,
as between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be
the extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it
is not given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something
which invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith,
which the will itself cannot master. Whether he like it or not, he must
believe, because he must act, because he must preserve himself. His
reason, if he listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything,
itself included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he
would perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he
existed.”[10]
It is not strictly true that reason leads us to absolute scepticism.
No, reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist.
Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly to
vital negation--not merely to doubt but to deny that my consciousness
survives my death. Vital scepticism comes from the clash between reason
and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair
and scepticism is born holy, sweet, saving incertitude, our supreme
consolation.
The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a
complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness,
a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles
of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand,
the absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness
is prolonged beyond death in these or those conditions, including
withal the extraneous and adventitious addition of eternal rewards
and punishments--both of these certainties would equally make life
impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him
who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal
consciousness, his memory, for ever, there lurks a shadow, all unknown
to him perhaps, a vague shadow, a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty,
and while he says within himself: “Well, let us live this passing life,
for there is no other!” the silence of this secret chamber speaks to
him and murmers: “Who knows!...” He may not think he hears it, but he
hears it. And likewise in some secret place of the soul of the believer
who most firmly holds the faith in future life, there is a muffled
voice, a voice of uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit:
“Who knows!...” These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when
the gale roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish
this faint humming, nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm,
it reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we
live?
“Is there?” “Is there not?”--these are the bases of our inner life.
There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of
the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never
wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only
prove that just as there are monsters, so there are people who are
affectively and feelingly stupid, however much intelligence they may
have, and people who are intellectually stupid, however great their
virtue may be. But in normal cases I cannot believe those who assure
me that never, not even for a moment, not in the hours of greatest
loneliness and tribulation, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed
upon their consciousness. I do not understand the men who tell me that
the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that
the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part
I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my
faith and my reason--I wish rather that there should be war between
them.
* * * * *
“Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief!” This may appear to be a
contradiction, for if the man believes, if he trusts, how is it that he
beseeches the Lord to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless it is this
contradiction that gives all its deepest human value to this cry torn
from the heart of the father of a demoniac. His faith is a faith that
is based upon incertitude. Because he believes, that is to say, because
he wishes to believe, because he has need that his son should be
cured--he beseeches the Lord to help his unbelief, his doubt that such
a cure could be effected. Of such a kind is human faith. Of such a kind
was the heroic faith that Sancho Panza had in his master, the knight
Don Quixote de la Mancha, as I think I have shown in my “Life of Don
Quixote and Sancho”--a faith based upon incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho
Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a real man, and he was not stupid,
for only if he had been stupid would he have believed without a shadow
of doubt in the follies of his master. Neither did his master believe
in them without a shadow of doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though
mad, stupid. He was fundamentally a man of despair, as I think I have
shown in my book. And because he was a man of an heroic despair, the
hero of that inward and resigned despair, he is the eternal exemplar
of every man whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal
desire. Our Lord Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose
faith is based upon incertitude, and Sancho is the prototype of the
rationalist who doubts his own reason.
CREATIVE FAITH
When as a boy I began to be disquieted by the eternal problems, I read
in a book, the author of which I have no wish to recall, this sentence:
“God is the great x placed over the barrier of human knowledge--as
science advances, the barrier recedes.” And I wrote in the margin:
“On this side of the barrier, everything is explained without Him; on
the further side, nothing is explained, either with Him or without
Him. God, therefore, is superfluous.” And so as far as concerns the
God-Idea, the God whose existence is supposed to be logically proved, I
continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have stated that
he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in the construction of
his system of the origin of the Universe, and it very certainly is so.
The idea of God does not in any way help us to understand any better
the existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
* * * * *
The living God, the human God, is reached not by the way of reason but
by the way of love and of suffering. Reason rather separates us from
Him. It is not possible to know Him in order that afterwards we may
love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering for
Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of
God, and it is a knowledge that has little or nothing of the rational
in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to claim to
limit Him in our mind--that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we
attempt to define Him, we are confronted by Nothingness.
The idea of God which the would-be rational theodicy presents us with
is merely an hypothesis, like the hypothesis of the ether, for example.
The ether is, in effect, merely a hypothetical entity, which is of
value only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we seek
to explain--light, or electricity, or universal gravitation--and only
so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. Similarly
the idea of God is also an hypothesis which is of value only in so far
as we explain by means of it that which we seek to explain--the essence
and existence of the Universe--and only so long as these cannot be
explained better in some other way. And since in reality we explain the
Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the
idea of God, the supreme _petitio principii_, fails of its purpose.
But if the ether is nothing but an hypothesis intended to explain
light, air on the other hand is a thing that is directly felt; and
even though it did not enable us to explain sound, we should have a
direct sensation of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in moments of
suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way, God Himself, not the
idea of God, may become a directly felt reality; and although the idea
of Him may not enable us to explain either the existence or the essence
of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all
in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this feeling--mark it well,
for herein lies its tragicness and the whole tragic sense of life--is a
feeling of hunger for God, of lack of God. To believe in God is, in the
first instance, to wish that there may be a God, not to be able to live
without Him.
So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of
God, I could not find Him, for I was not taken in by the idea of God,
neither could I take an idea for God; and it was then, as I wandered
among the wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to
seek no other consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and
yet for all that I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper
into rational scepticism on the one hand and into heart’s despair on
the other, the hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of
spirit made me feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His
reality. And I wished that there might be a God, that God might exist.
* * * * *
The problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally
insoluble, is in its essence none other than the problem of
consciousness, the very problem of the substantial existence of the
soul, the very problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the
very problem of the human finality of the Universe. To believe in a
living and personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness
that knows us and loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists
_for_ man. For man, or for a consciousness of the same order as the
human consciousness, of the same nature, although sublimated, a
consciousness that is cognizant of us, in whose depths our memory lives
for ever.
Perhaps by a supreme and desperate effort of resignation we might
succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality if we knew that
in dying it would go to enrich a Supreme Personality, a Supreme
Consciousness, if we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished by
our souls and had need of them. Perhaps we might meet death with a
desperate resignation or with a resigned desperation, delivering up our
soul to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that
bears the stamp of our personality, if this humanity were in its turn
to bequeath its soul to another soul after the ultimate extinction of
consciousness upon this earth with its burden of longings. But if it be
otherwise?
And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective
consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe
and if this Consciousness is eternal, why should not our own individual
consciousness, yours, reader, and mine, not be eternal?
In the whole of the vast universe must there needs be such a thing as
a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, an
exception united to a organism that can only live between such and such
degrees of heat, a transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity
to wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living
organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and there is an element
of profound longing in the dream of the transmigration of our souls
through the stars that people the vast remotenesses of the heavens.
The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is
animated, that consciousness, in a greater or lesser degree, extends
through all things. We wish not only to save ourselves but to save the
world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His felt finality.
What would a universe be without any consciousness to reflect it and to
know it? What would the objectified reason be, without will and without
feeling? For us it would be the same as nothing--a thousand times more
dreadful than nothing.
If such a supposed universe is reality, then our life lacks value and
meaning.
It is not, therefore, rational necessity but vital anguish that
leads us to believe in God. And to believe in God--I must repeat it
again--is, before all and above all, to feel hunger for God, hunger for
divinity, to feel the lack and absence of God, to wish that God may
exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe.
For we might even succeed in resigning ourselves to being absorbed by
God if our consciousness rests upon a Consciousness, if consciousness
is the end of the Universe.
“The wicked man has said in his heart: There is no God.” And there is
truth in this. For it is possible for a righteous man to say in his
head: God does not exist. But only the wicked can say it in his heart.
Not to believe that there is a God or to believe that there is not
a God, is one thing; to resign oneself to there not being a God is
another thing, though an inhuman and horrible thing; but not to wish
that there is a God exceeds every other moral aberration. Although in
fact those who deny God do so because of their despair at not finding
Him.
And now once again there comes the rational question, the question
of the Sphinx--the Sphinx, in effect, is reason--does God exist?
This eternal and eternalizing Person who gives meaning--I do not add
“human,” for there is no other meaning--to the universe, is He a
substantial something external to our consciousness, external to our
desire? Here you have something that is insoluble, and it is better
that it should be insoluble. Let it suffice for reason that the
impossibility of His existence cannot be proved.
To believe in God is to long for His existence, and, furthermore, it is
to act as if He existed. It is to live by this longing and to make it
the inner spring of our action.
* * * * *
To believe is to place confidence in someone, and it has reference
to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called the
horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have
seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or
the ornithorhyncus, and that it has such and such qualities, because
I believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the
element of uncertainty that attaches to faith, for a person may be
deceived or he may deceive us.
But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an
affective character, it connects it with love, and above all, in
religious faith, it carries with it a reference to what is hoped for.
Perhaps there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of
maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together equal
to two right angles, for such a truth does not require the sacrifice
of our life; but on the other hand there are many who have lost their
lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith, and it is
martyrs that make faith rather than faith that makes martyrs. For faith
is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract principle; it
is not the recognition of a theoretical truth in which the will does
nothing save move us to understand; faith is a matter of the will, it
is a movement of the mind towards a practical truth, towards a person,
towards something that makes us live and not merely understand life.
But although we said that faith is a matter of the will, it would
perhaps be better to say that it is the will itself, the will not to
die, or rather some other psychic force distinct from intelligence,
will and feeling. We should then have feeling, knowing, willing, and
believing or creating. For neither feeling nor intelligence nor will
creates; they operate upon a material already given, upon a material
given by faith. Faith is the creating power of man. But since it has
a more intimate relation with the will than with any other of his
faculties, we present it under the form of volition.
Faith is, then, if not creative power, the fruit of the will, and its
function is to create. Faith, in a certain sense, creates its object.
And faith in God consists in creating God, and since it is God that
gives us faith in Him, it is God who is continually creating Himself
in us. Hence St. Augustine said: “I will seek Thee, Lord, by calling
upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My faith
calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with which
Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the
ministry of the Preacher” (“Confessions,” Book I, chap. I). The power
of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the
Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of
what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His image
and likeness.
But after all this I shall be told that to show that faith creates its
own object is to show that this object is an object for faith alone,
that it has no objective reality external to faith itself--just as,
on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary in order to
restrain or to console people is to declare that the object of faith is
illusory. What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith
is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did
exist. And it is in this way, wishing for God’s existence and acting
conformably with this desire, that we create God in ourselves, that
is, that God creates Himself in us, manifests Himself to us, opens and
reveals Himself to us. For God goes out to meet him who seeks Him with
love and by love and withdraws Himself from him who seeks Him with the
cold and loveless reason. God wills that the heart should have rest but
not the head, while in the physical life the head sometimes rests and
sleeps and the heart wakes and works unrestingly. And thus knowledge
without love removes us from God; and love, even without knowledge, and
perhaps better without it, leads us to God, and through God to wisdom.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
* * * * *
Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God’s
longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which
advances to meet our faith and raises us up. Man aspires to God by
faith and cries to Him: “I believe--give me, Lord, wherein to believe.”
And God, the divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order
that he may believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who
believes truly hopes, and only he who truly hopes believes. We believe
only what we hope, and we hope only what we believe.
THE SONG OF THE ETERNAL WATERS
The narrow road, hewn out of the naked rock, goes winding along above
the abyss. On one side rise high tors and crags, on the other side is
heard the ceaseless murmur of waters in the dark depths of the ravine,
deeper than eye can reach. At intervals the track widens so as to form
a kind of refuge, just large enough to hold about a dozen people, a
resting-place, screened by leafy branches, for those who travel along
the road above the ravine. In the distance, crowning the summit of a
jutting crag, a castle stands out against the sky. The clouds passing
over it are torn by the pinnacles of its tall towers.
With the pilgrims goes Maquetas. He walks hurriedly, sweating, seeing
nothing but the road in front of his eyes, except when from time to
time he raises them towards the castle. As he walks he sings an old
wailing song that his grandmother taught him when he was a child, and
he sings it so that he shall not hear the ominous murmur of the torrent
flowing unseen in the depths of the abyss.
As he approaches one of the resting-places, a maiden who is sitting
inside on a bank of turf calls to him:
“Maquetas, come here and stop awhile. Come and rest by my side, with
your back to the abyss, and let us talk a little. Nothing heartens us
for this journey like a few words spoken in love and companionship.
Stay awhile here with me. Afterwards you will go on your way again
refreshed and renewed.”
“I cannot, my girl,” Maquetas replied, slowing his pace but without
halting, “I cannot. The castle is still a great way off and I must
reach it before the sun sets behind its towers.”
“You will lose nothing by staying here awhile, young man, for
afterwards you will take the road again with more mettle and with new
strength. Are you not tired?”
“That I am, lass.”
“Then stay awhile and rest. Here you have this turf for your couch and
my lap for your pillow. Come, stay!”
And she opened her arms, offering him her bosom.
Maquetas paused for a moment, and as he did so there came to his ears
the voice of the invisible torrent flowing in the depths of the abyss.
He quitted the road, stretched himself on the turf and laid his head on
the girl’s lap. With her fresh rosy hands she wiped the sweat from his
brow, while his eyes gazed up at the morning sky overhead, a sky that
was as young as the eyes of the girl.
“What is it you are singing, lass?”
“’Tis not I singing--it is the water that flows down there, behind us.”
“And what is it that it sings?”
“It sings the song of eternal rest. But now rest yourself.”
“Eternal, did you say?”
“Yes, that is what the torrent sings. But now rest.”
“And afterwards....”
“Rest, Maquetas, and don’t say ‘afterwards.’”
The girl put her lips to his lips and kissed him. Maquetas felt the
kiss melt and flow through all his body, and so sweet it was that
it seemed as if all the sky poured itself down over him. His senses
swooned. He dreamed that he was falling endlessly down into the
bottomless abyss....
When he awoke and opened his eyes he saw above him the sky of evening.
“O lass, how late it is! Now I shall not have time to reach the castle.
Let me go, let me go.”
“Go then, and God guide and companion you. And don’t forget me,
Maquetas.”
“Give me one kiss more.”
“Take it, and may it strengthen you.”
With the kiss Maquetas felt that his strength was increased a
hundredfold and he began to run along the road, the lilt of his song
keeping time with his strides. And he ran and ran, leaving the other
pilgrims behind him. One of them shouted to him as he passed:
“You’ll stop, Maquetas.”
Then he saw that the sun was beginning to set behind the towers of the
castle and Maquetas felt a chill strike his heart. The fires of the
sunset lasted but for a moment. He heard the grating of the chains of
the drawbridge. And Maquetas said to himself:
“They are shutting the castle-gate.”
Night began to fall, an impenetrable night. Very soon Maquetas had to
halt, for he could see nothing, absolutely nothing. Blackness enveloped
everything. Maquetas stood still, silent, and in the impenetrability
of the darkness he heard only the murmur of the waters of the torrent
in the abyss. The cold grew denser.
Maquetas stooped down, felt the road with his numb hands, and began to
creep along on all fours, warily, like a fox. He kept edging away from
the abyss.
He went forward like this for a long, long time. And he said to himself:
“Ah, that lass deceived me! Why did I heed her?”
The cold became horrible. It penetrated everywhere, like a
thousand-edged sword. Maquetas no longer felt the touch of the ground,
he no longer felt his own hands; he was benumbed. He stopped still. Or
rather he scarcely knew whether he was stopping or crawling.
Maquetas felt himself suspended in the midst of the darkness, black
night all around him. He heard nothing but the ceaseless murmur of the
waters of the abyss.
“I will call out,” Maquetas said to himself, and he made an effort to
shout. But no sound was heard; his voice did not come forth out of his
chest. It was as if it were frozen within him.
Then Maquetas thought:
“Can I be dead?”
And as this thought took hold of him, it seemed as if the darkness and
the cold fused together and eternalized themselves round about him.
“Can this be death?” Maquetas went on thinking. “Shall I have to live
henceforward like this, in pure thought, in memory? And the castle? And
the abyss? What do the waters say? What a dream, what an appalling
dream! And not to be able to sleep!... To die like this, dreaming,
dying little by little, and not to be able to sleep!... And now what am
I going to do? What shall I do to-morrow?
“To-morrow? What is to-morrow? What does to-morrow mean? What is this
idea of to-morrow that seems to come to me out of the depth of the
darkness, where the waters are singing? To-morrow? For me there is now
no to-morrow. Everything is now, everything is blackness and cold. Even
this song of the eternal waters seems like a song of ice--just one
prolonged note.
“But can I really have died? How long the dawn is in coming! But I
don’t even know how long it is since the sun set behind the towers of
the castle....
“Once upon a time,” he went on thinking, “there was a man who was
called Maquetas, a great wayfarer, and he walked for days and days
journeying to a castle, where a good dinner awaited him and a warm
fire and a good bed to rest in, and in the bed a good bedmate. And
there in the castle he was going to live days without end, listening to
stories that went on for ever, joying in his sweet companion, a life of
perpetual youth. And those days would be all alike and all peaceful.
And as they passed, oblivion would fall on them. And all those days
would be thus one eternal day, one same day eternally renewed, a
perpetual to-day overflowing with a whole infinity of yesterdays and
with a whole infinity of to-morrows.
“And Maquetas believed that that was life, and set out on his journey.
And he journeyed on, stopping at inns where he slept, and when the sun
rose he went on his way again. And once, as he was leaving an inn,
he met an aged beggar who was sitting on the trunk of a tree by the
door, and the beggar said to him: ‘Maquetas, what meaning have things?’
And that Maquetas answered him, shrugging his shoulders: ‘What does
that matter to me?’ And the aged beggar asked him again: ‘Maquetas,
what does this road mean?’ And that Maquetas, now somewhat irritated,
answered him: ‘Why do you ask me what the road means? How should I
know? Does anybody know? Does the road mean anything? Leave me in
peace, and God be with you.’ And the aged beggar knitted his brows and
smiled sadly, gazing on the ground.
“And then Maquetas came to a very rugged country and had to cross a
wild mountain ridge by a precipitous footpath hewn out of the rock,
high up over an abyss, in the depths of which sang the waters of an
invisible torrent. And thence he discerned afar the castle that he had
to reach before the sun set, and when he discerned it his heart leaped
for joy in his breast, and he quickened his steps. But a lass, sweet as
a vision, compelled him to stop and rest awhile on a bank of turf, and
that Maquetas rested his head on her lap and stopped. And when he left
her the lass gave him a kiss, the kiss of death, and as soon as the sun
set behind the towers of the castle the cold and the darkness closed in
all round him and the darkness and the cold grew denser and merged into
one. And there fell a silence from which only that song of the eternal
waters emerged. Yonder, in life, sounds, songs, murmurs, used to issue
out of a vague murmurous background, out of a kind of mist of sound;
but here this song emerged out of the profound silence, the silence of
darkness and cold, the silence of death.
“Of death? Yes, of death, for that Maquetas, that valiant wayfarer,
died....
“How sweet the story is, and how sad! It is sweeter, far sweeter,
sadder, far sadder, than that old song my grandmother taught me. Let me
see, how does it go? I will repeat it over again.
“Once upon a time there was a man who was called Maquetas, a great
wayfarer, and he walked for days and days journeying to a castle....”
And Maquetas repeated to himself again and again and again and again
the story of that other Maquetas, and he continues repeating it and
so he will go on repeating it as long as the waters of the invisible
torrent go on singing, and the waters will sing for ever, ever, ever,
without a yesterday and without a to-morrow, for ever, ever, ever....
THE TOWER OF MONTERREY
It is freezing. A biting north wind cuts short the breath. From the
steely blue a pale sun sheds a glittering light that cuts out the
shadows and models the landscape into a kind of architectural relief.
For this crystal-clear light, bright as frost, without haze, appears
not so much to illumine as to civilize Nature; it makes it civil,
which means that it makes it more than human. To humanize is much, but
to civilize is more. To civilize, to make civil--or, if you like, to
citizenize--is to superhumanize. Humanity seems to us, so far as man is
concerned, to be everything; but civility embraces more than humanity;
it is more than all, for it is the future in never-ending process of
realization--it is the ideal. The all is that which is and that which
is permanent; but the more than all is that which, over and above all
that has been and is, will be. The all is the past that is condensed in
the present; the more than all is the eternity that embraces the past,
the present and the future. The all is the universe and the more than
all is thought. For thought exceeds all that has been thought and all
that is thinkable and goes beyond them.
The city also is Nature. Its streets and its squares and its erect
pillared towers also are landscape. And its lines are like the lines of
the country. Baroque lines they are said to be. But not all.
The escarpments which slope down from the vast tableland of La Armuña
to the banks of the Tormes are like the buttresses of a gigantic
cathedral; they are architectonic. There are villages which seem as if
they were sculptured out of the earth of the bleak upland plains, out
of the rock itself. And if you look long enough at some dark poplar
standing near the spire of a village church, you begin to wonder which
is the tree and which the spire. And the skeleton trees, all swart
naked bone, look like the pillars of a ruined temple the roof of which
has fallen in.
In travelling through this barren rocky Iberian land, have you never
sometimes fancied that you discerned in some distant craggy hill the
outline of a Baroque cathedral?
And conversely, here in the city, one might imagine oneself to be in
the midst of some vast geological formation. Men, like coral insects,
have built up these masses of grey and golden coral, gleaming in the
naked winter sun.
Every one of these fabrics of stone might be said to be an immense
architectonic phrase, an aphorism in lines. In a phrase culminates and
is condensed a whole system of ideas, of thoughts. In the title--_La
Vida es Sueño_--of Calderón’s drama, the immortal fellow of “Don
Quixote,” is condensed (as Farinelli rightly says in his work _La Vita
é un Sogno_, which I have just been reading) “the substance of all
earthly philosophies.” It was by a phrase that each of the seven wise
men of Greece won a lasting place in the memory of their race; for
these seven wise men eternalized themselves in the thought of their
people as being the authors of seven single sentences. And a phrase,
a civil sentence, civil rather than human, is an edifice of thought in
which economy of material and of brute force has achieved its supreme
triumph. The Pyramids are phrases of stone which rise up from the sands
of the desert; and like an immense phrase, like one of the periods of
Demosthenes, or rather of Pericles, which Thucydides has bequeathed to
us for ever, stands the Parthenon. And these towers are phrases too,
civil phrases, phrases of civility now made one with Nature.
I know not how I am to translate to you in sounding words--words that
are winged, yet captive, words that fly and soar, yet abide--that which
this harmonious phrase of hewn stone, this tower of Monterrey, says to
me, says to us all, in the fine cutting light of these benumbing winter
mornings, when the frost sleeps idly on its lofty pinnacles; but I know
that it is a phrase when I see it clear-cut against the blue of heaven.
And if men pass away and yet abide, these stones will abide to tell
Nature that once there was Humanity, once there was thought; they will
abide to tell of plan, and of order, and of proportion, to the Universe.
And why should not the planets which journey through space in obedience
to the laws which they themselves communicated to Kepler, understand
geometry and mathematics? Is not the whole vast structure of the
Universe a great city, the city of God, its supreme Architect and
Inhabiter?
All this is a dream. True! But this dream of stone, in the clarified
frosty light, tells us that dream is what abides, the lasting, the
permanent, the substantial, and that on the surface of the dream, like
waves on the surface of the sea, roll our sorrows and our joys, our
hates and our loves, our memories and our hopes. The waves are of the
sea; but the waves pass and the sea abides; the sorrows and the joys,
the hates and the loves, the memories and the hopes, are of the dream,
the dream of life; but they--sorrows, joys, hates, loves, memories,
hopes--pass away and the dream abides. And it abides thus, converted
into stone, stone of the earth, but civilized, civil or spiritual
stone, a phrase minted for ever, _monumentum ære perennius_, more
enduring than bronze.
This dream of stone enters into the soul and sinks into it, into the
innermost depths of it, into the soul’s soul, into what is innermost
in the soul itself, and it bears our soul along with it into the
underlying substance of all souls, fugitive waves submerged in the sea
of souls. Is it a sea? Is it liquid? Is it not rather a rocky floor,
a plain, a stony stratum of many mansions for civil human thought
to dwell in? And is not each one of our souls a stone which life
hews--hews with hammer-strokes of sorrow and joy, of hate and love,
of memory and hope--so that it may fit into the great civil, human
cathedral, in the temple of our civil and human God?
It was but yesterday, but a moment ago, that is to say it was five
and twenty years ago--the third of a full lifetime--that I first saw
you, tower of Monterrey, and you carry me beyond, far beyond, those
twenty-five years, back to when, before ever I was born, I beheld
you--where?--and in beholding you, you carry me from the midst of these
twenty-five years, beyond, far beyond, to when, after I am dead and
dead indeed, I shall go on beholding you--this vision of you which in
the clarified frosty light is imprinted on my soul will abide with me,
at rest and buried deep in the sea of souls. Dream abides. It is the
only thing that abides; vision abides.
Spirit, when it suffers or rejoices, when it hates or loves, when it
remembers or hopes, becomes earth, becomes water, becomes fire or
becomes air; and stone, when it thinks and thinks civilly, becomes
abiding spirit, congealed, crystallized, substantivated. This tower is
a diamond of spirit.
And what does it say? It says nothing that is not itself; it says
itself, it proclaims itself immortal, it affirms itself. No matter
if an earthquake or a bombardment--which is another earthquake--or
any other accident that the hate of Nature or of man may bring about,
throws you to the ground and scatters your stones in confusion, tower
of Monterrey, for the vision of you will remain. It will remain fused
in the souls which behold you.
And to the soul that beholds you, tower of Monterrey, you say that he
says the utmost that can be said who says himself, who expresses his
person, who strips his spirit naked in the icy-clear light of the civil
world, standing statue-like before the world of men. The greatest thing
that men can see is another man, and if they but once saw him utterly
and completely, they would carry him with them for ever.
And this tower and other towers fill our soul with the tormenting
longing to say the unsayable, to leave in words that are borne on wings
of sound and pass away and are lost, something that does not pass away
and is never lost. To say what one sees and to say it so that it is
seen in being heard; to see what is heard: that is the whole secret of
Art. Art makes the blind to see--and many are blind whose eyes reflect
the images of what they see upon the mind--and it makes them see with
the word; Art makes the deaf to hear--and many are deaf whose ears
vibrate with the sounds they hear round about them--and it makes them
hear with the vision. A poem gives sight to the blind; a picture gives
hearing to the deaf. Art fuses the senses, descending to that which
unites them in a common root and ascending to that which also unites
them in a common crown.
Tower of Monterrey, not the tower which I see with my eyes when I go
forth from my house on these benumbing mornings of clarified light
to read the divine Plato with my pupils--O noble word degraded to so
ignoble use!--my tower of Monterrey, the tower that I carry in the
crystal of my mind, as if it were a vision which by some enchantment
had remained frozen for ever upon the frozen surface of a lake, this
tower of mine tells me that he who says himself remains for ever too.
It matters not, my soul, what you say if you say yourself. For what art
thou but a phrase in the thought of God?
The thought of God is History: human history, civil history, the
history of this civil humanity in which God became man and dwelt among
men, and proclaimed that His kingdom, the kingdom of God, that is, the
kingdom of Man, the kingdom of God-Man, is not of this world of sorrows
and joys, of hates and loves, of memories and hopes. For the kingdom
of God, the kingdom of Man, is of thought, which is above sorrow and
joy, above hate and love, above memory and hope, although it is made
of these, as the towers that abide in History are made of stones. The
thought of God is History; History is what God thinks, what He goes
on thinking. And he who lives in History, more or less audible and
visible, whatever the fashion of his life, however far beneath the
surface, lives in the thought of God, and, abiding in God’s thought, he
abides in God. And everyone who, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or
unknowingly, helps to make History, lives in History; everyone, however
obscurely and hesitatingly he lives, who has civil consciousness.
Absolute death is unconsciousness.
And this my tower of Monterrey speaks to me of our Renaissance, of the
Spanish renaissance, of the eternal essence of Spain, and tells me to
say my Spanish self and to affirm that if life is dream, dream is the
only thing that abides, and that the rest, all that is not dream, is
nothing but a process of digestion that passes away, as sorrow and joy,
hate and love, memory and hope, pass away. Yes, life without dream is
nothing but digestion and respiration, breath that vanishes. Breath,
air, _pneuma_, _anima_, _spiritus_, such are the names that have been
given to the life that animates the body but is not dream; and the
breath passes away, but the dream abides.
“Life is dream!” affirmed the man, the Spaniard, who believed in the
eternal and the substantial, and those who do not believe in it say in
the foolishness of their hearts: “Life is breath!” And the tower of
Monterrey, my tower of Monterrey, my tower of the Spanish renaissance,
of renaissant Spanishness, tells me that life is not breath that passes
away and is lost, but dream that abides and triumphs.
When I go forth in the morning and the tower says to me: “Here am I!”
I, beholding it, say to it: “Here am I!”
APPENDIX
The foregoing essays are derived from the following works.
“The Spirit of Castile”--_En Torno al Casticismo_, 1895, _Ensayos_,
Vol. I.
“Spanish Individualism”--_El Individualismo Español_ (_A propósito del
libro_ de Martin A. S. Hume, “The Spanish People: Their Origin, Growth
and Influence,” London, 1901), 1902, _Ensayos_, Vol. IV.
“Some Arbitrary Reflections upon Europeanization”--_Sobre la
Europeizacion_ (_Arbitrariedades_), 1906, _Ensayos_, Vol. VII.
“The Spanish Christ”--_Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_ (_El Cristo
Español_), 1910.
“The Sepulchre of Don Quixote”--Introduction to 2nd edition of _La Vida
de Don Quijote y Sancho_, 1913. (Originally published in _La España
Moderna_, February, 1906.)
“The Helmet of Mambrino”--_La Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, Part I,
Chap. XLV.
“Don Quixote’s Niece”--_La Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, Part II,
Chap. LXXIV.
“The Religion of Quixotism”--_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_ (_Don
Quijote en la Tragi-Comedia Europea Contemporánea_), 1912.
“Large and Small Towns”--_Por Tierras de Portugal y de España_
(_Grandes y Pequeñas Ciudades_), 1908.
“To My Readers”--_Soliloquios y Conversaciones_ (_A Mis Lectores_),
1911.
“Soliloquies”--_Soliloquios y Conversaciones_ (_Soliloquios_ and
_Desahogo Lirico_), 1911.
“My Religion”--_Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_, 1910.
“Solitude”--_Soledad_, 1905, _Ensayos_, Vol. VI.
“Intellectuality and Spirituality”--_Intellectualidad y
Espiritualidad_, 1904, _Ensayos_, Vol. IV.
“The Materialism of the Masses”--_Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_,
(_Materialismo Popular_, 1909).
“The Man of Flesh and Bone,” “The Problem of Immortality,” “Creative
Faith”--_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, 1912.
“The Song of the Eternal Waters”--_Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_ (_El
Canto de las Aguas Eternas_, 1909).
“The Tower of Monterrey”--_Andanzas y Visiones Españolas_ (_La Torre de
Monterrey_, 1916).
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_El Sepulcyo de Don Quijote_, 1913.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1]
Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido.
--CALDERON, _La Vida es Sueño_, Act I, Scene II.
[2] Unamuno describes his “Commentary upon the Life of Don Quixote” as
“a free and personal exegesis.” “I do not think I need repeat,” he says
in his preface, “that I feel myself to be a Quixotist rather than a
Cervantist and that I have allowed myself sometimes even to differ from
the way in which Cervantes understood and dealt with his two heroes.
The truth is, I believe that these fictitious personages possess a
life of their own, with a certain autonomy, within the mind of the
author who created them, and that they obey an inner logic of which
the author himself is not wholly conscious.” Cervantes did not so much
create them, he maintains, as derive them from the spiritual depths of
the Spanish people, and therefore it is possible for us to understand
them better even than their author. It may be conjectured that Unamuno
can never quite forgive the slightly ironical attitude that Cervantes
always adopts towards his hero.
[3] It will be remembered that Don Quixote, otherwise known as Alonso
Quixano, when he turned knight-errant, resolved that it was proper
for him to have some lady to whom he might send the trophies of his
valour. Accordingly he chose for his mistress one Aldonza Lorenzo, “a
good, likely country lass,” for whom he had long cherished an unavowed
passion. He bestowed upon her the name of Dulcinea, with the addition
of Del Toboso from the place where she was born.
According to Unamuno’s exegesis, Dulcinea stands “for glory, for life,
for survival.”
[4] The Basque race.
[5] This is the definition given by the _Real Academia de la Lengua_.
[6] “Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death,” by Frederic
W. H. Myers. Chap. 3, para. 306.
[7] The leap from the “Critique of Pure Reason,” in which he subjected
the traditional proofs of the existence of God to a destructive
analysis, to the “Critique of Practical Reason,” in which he
reconstructed God, but the God of the conscience, the Author of the
moral order.
[8] To think as you think, all that is necessary is to possess nothing
more than intelligence.
[9] James Thomson, author of “The City of Dreadful Night.”
[10] _Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion_, Part III, chap.
lxvii.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
example, to snythetize=> example, to synthetize {pg vii}
possibly unfamilar=> possibly unfamiliar {pg 14}
inadequate susbtitute=> inadequate substitute {pg 15}
uniqueness and indestrucibility=> uniqueness and indestructibility {pg
27}
that of the the immense plain=> that of the immense plain {pg 33}
the suppostion that=> the supposition that {pg 48}
innate atttractions=> innate attractions {pg 55}
it sees a tryant=> it sees a tyrant {pg 70}
not know know what=> not know what {pg 111}
not for philosphers=> not for philosophers {pg 122}
Schopenhauer and Neitzsche=> Schopenhauer and Nietzsche {pg 151}
the poltical question=> the political question {pg 165}
making ricidulous=> making ridiculous {pg 174}
cummunicate itself=> communicate itself {pg 176}
a social instituion=> a social institution {pg 188}
people is a a leader=> people is a leader {pg 202}
shadow of uncertainity=> shadow of uncertainty {pg 214}
heroic dsepair=> heroic despair {pg 216}
supreme Achitect=> supreme Architect {pg 235}
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Essays and soliloquies" ***
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