Essays and soliloquies
Date: 2023-07-23T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Essays; Spain -- Civilization

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Title: Essays and soliloquies

Author: Miguel de Unamuno

Translator: J. E. Crawford Flitch

Release date: July 23, 2023 [eBook #71260]
Most recently updated: September 26, 2023

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71260

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES ***

CONTENTS

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

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
BY J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH

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

E S S A Y S   A N D   S O L I L O Q U I E S

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, pseudo-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 murmurs: “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).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PAZ EN LA GUERRA (Peace in War. Novel). Fernando Fé, Madrid, 1897.

DE LA ENSEÑANZA SUPERIOR EN ESPAÑA (Secondary Education in Spain). Revista Nueva, Madrid, 1899.

TRES ENSAYOS (Three Essays). B. Rodriguez Serra, Madrid, 1900.

AMOR Y PEDAGOGIA (Love and Pedagogy. Novel). Heinrich y Cia. Barcelona, 1902.

PAISAJES (Landscapes). Colon, Salamanca, 1902.

DE MI PAIS (About My Country). Fernando Fé, Madrid, 1903.

VIDA DE DON QUIJOTE Y SANCHO según Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra explicada y comentada por Miguel de Unamuno (Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, with explanation and commentary by Miguel de Unamuno). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1905. Second edition, with introductory article, El Sepulcro de Don Quijote, 1913.

POESIAS. Fernando Fé y Victoriano Suarez, Madrid, 1907.

RECUERDOS DE NIÑEZ Y DE MOCEDAD (Recollections of Childhood and Youth). Fernando Fé y Victoriano Suarez, Madrid, 1908.

MI RELIGION Y OTROS ENSAYOS BREVES (My Religion and other short essays). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1910.

POR TIERRAS DE PORTUGAL Y DE ESPAÑA (Travels in Portugal and Spain). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1911.

ROSARIO DE SONETOS LIRICOS (Rosary of Lyrical Sonnets). Fernando Fé y Victoriano Suarez, Madrid, 1911.

SOLILOQUIOS Y CONVERSACIONES (Soliloquies and Conversations). Biblioteca Renacimiento, Madrid, 1912.

CONTRA ESTO Y AQUELLO (Against This and That). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1912.

EL PORVENIR DE ESPAÑA (The Future of Spain. A series of open letters exchanged between Miguel de Unamuno and Angel Ganivet, reprinted from El Defensor de Granada). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1912.

EL ESPEJO DE LA MUERTE (The Mirror of Death. Short Stories). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1913.

DEL SENTIMIENTO TRÁGICO DE LA VIDA EN LOS HOMBRES Y EN LOS PUEBLOS (The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1913.

NIEBLA (Mist. Novel). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1914.

ENSAYOS (Essays. Collected Edition, 7 Vols.). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1916-18.

ABEL SÁNCHEZ, una historia de pasión (Abel Sánchez, a story of passion. Novel). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1917.

TRES NOVELAS EJEMPLARES Y UN PRÓLOGO (Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue). Calpe, Madrid and Barcelona, 1920.

EL CRISTO DE VELASQUEZ (The Christ of Velasquez. Poem). Calpe, Madrid, 1920.

LA TIA TULA (Aunt Tula. Novel). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1921.

ANDANZAS Y VISIONES ESPAÑOLAS (Things Done and Seen in Spain). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1922.

FEDRA (Play, originally published in La Pluma). Madrid, 1924.

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}

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Table of Contents

- ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES
- Erratum
- AUTHOR’S PREFACE
- CONTENTS

- E S S A Y S A N D S O L I L O Q U I E S INTRODUCTION

- THE SPIRIT OF CASTILE

- SPANISH INDIVIDUALISM

- SOME ARBITRARY REFLECTIONS UPON EUROPEANIZATION

- THE SPANISH CHRIST
- THE SEPULCHRE OF DON QUIXOTE
- THE HELMET OF MAMBRINO
- DON QUIXOTE’S NIECE[3]
- THE RELIGION OF QUIXOTISM
- LARGE AND SMALL TOWNS
- TO MY READERS
- SOLILOQUIES
- MY RELIGION
- SOLITUDE
- INTELLECTUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY
- THE MATERIALISM OF THE MASSES
- THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
- THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
- CREATIVE FAITH
- THE SONG OF THE ETERNAL WATERS
- THE TOWER OF MONTERREY
- APPENDIX
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE