Introduction

Unamuno Re-read

AS I RETURN to Unamuno, forty years after I first wrote an introductory essay to his Tragic Sense of Life, I am struck by a certain incongruity between the way his work is nearly always approached and the spirit of the work itself. We read about his “thought,” his reading, and of course, the “influences” he is supposed to have undergone. In all the discussion lurks the fallacy he constantly fought against: the belief that thought presides over the council of ministers of the soul and decides what a man writes. Whereas, of course, for Unamuno (as for most of us, at any rate for most Spaniards) thought is not at the origin but at the end of the creative line of our lives. At the origin there is I.

I, yo. The most important word in the Spanish language. Pretty important, despite appearances, also in English—possibly second only to Spanish in granting this importance, for the English, though masters in striking a balance between the social and the individual poles of the self, are possibly the most individualistic of Europeans after the Spanish. Think how insignificant is the French je, so insignificant that it often has to be propped up with moi: et bien, moi, je vous dis, . . . But the way best to test the strength of our Spanish yo is to compare it with its (it would appear) identical Italian io. The Italians stress the i, as we would expect them to do, since i is the key vowel of their language and character, while we stress the o. They make it two syllables and thus render it both more flexible and weaker. They say io; and we yo, imbuing that o with the full force of the voice of the self. To in Spanish is so strong that it is seldom used, like a loaded revolver.

* * *

The yo of Unamuno was formidable. You could see that at first sight. Ortega was impressive enough to meet: wide magnetic eyes above a vast jaw surprisingly strong in an intellectual, a smile of more light than warmth, in which, by the way, that voluntary jaw fully shared, an inner masculine strength wrapped in a smooth suavity almost feminine in its grace; and one would look and look, charmed and admiring. But his counterpart, Unamuno, was not content to remain there standing in front of you, passively to be looked at and spoken to. He stood aggressively, as if ready to launch an attack, features taut, eye glaring, mouth set into an earnest, unyielding, locked straight line which no smile ever would bend. Unamuno was a challenge on legs. You felt on meeting him that he had begun to contradict you before you had spoken.

And this may well be the master key to his life and work. Unamuno “was against.” He was against by nature, even before that which he was to be against had turned up. He was born anti. He was the anti-everything. Why? There is no why. Above all, seek not for motives: “resentment,” “inferiority complex,” all those seemingly deep, at bottom naïve labels of so-called modern, so-called scientific, so-called psychology. Why should men have to be explained when stars, roses, and worms can shine, bloom, and crawl without explanations? His portraits as a youth show him already tense, earnest, unsmiling, defiant, anti-world.

Yes: Anti-world. For the world is that thing out there which is not me. And for Unamuno what mattered was his I, his yo. In a nation of yo-ists, he was the most yoist of all. If we accept as one, and possibly the most significant, of the many Spanish realities for which Don Quixote is a symbol, the deep tendency of the Spaniard to deny reality the right to be itself and to dare force it to adjust itself to our inner dream, Unamuno is one of the most forcible incarnations of Don Quixote which Spain has given forth.

What that dour face is saying is: “I do see you but I do not accept you. You need not speak, still less argue; your words will be drowned by mine, and all arguments are vanities. I am I. Take it or leave it.” This attitude was, so to speak, the shape of his being; not his thought, not his philosophy; but the root-cause of his philosophy and of his thought, as it was also of his faith and of his religion, and indeed of his lack of faith and of his doubts.

It is a sheer waste of time to endeavor to discover where Unamuno picked up this or that idea, or what philosopher influenced his thought. It all came from within; and not merely, indeed not mainly, from his brain, but from that attitude, that inner shape of his soul which was born with him. That is why he is, on the one hand, a fierce, contemptuous adversary of that rationalism which was so widespread in the Europe of his day and, on the other, a mind so irreducible to any definite form of the several “philosophies” which arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as reactions to it.

This refusal to be labeled or classified has been criticized, depicted even as a shortcoming of the men of his epoch. There may be some substance in the reproach as far as other men are concerned; but as for Unamuno, could he help it? He meant to be no philosopher; he was simply Miguel de Unamuno, and the ready-to-leap attitude of his mind did not allow him honestly to wear any label. The chances are that if you challenged him, confronted him on behalf of Kierkegaard or Bergson, with an attack against rationalism, he would fight for rationalism with the utmost vigor and sincerity, for, among other things, he was also a rationalist.

Yet, of course, no cynic, no dilettante. The idea of either would have horrified this earnest soul. He was a rationalist in so far as he felt his reason as a live organ of his spirit and self, with as much right to be heard as the other organs of perception and understanding living in him. And he would not defend rationalism as a philosophy in itself, or as a means to attain truth, but as a living part of a living Unamuno whom you were attacking by the mere fact of attacking rationalism. He would willingly have paraphrased Terence: “Nothing Unamunian do I consider alien.”

Who but Unamuno could have invented that title Nada menos que todo un hombre (Nothing Less than a Whole Man)? That man standing there, staring at you in full earnest, was nothing less than a whole man and wished you to be in no doubt about it. He was aware of his contradictions, indeed he gloried in them for they were tokens of his existence as a human being, since a creature without contradictions could be no more than a contrivance of mere intellect. And precisely because he felt all these contradictions in himself and even nurtured them, he had a way of standing firmly on his feet as if ready for your attack, knowing it would be an attack since, no matter what you would say, he would feel it as an aggression on this or that part of his many-sided self.

* * *

This it was that made him so argumentative. It was one of the many paradoxes of his life (more substantial if less numerous than those in his writings) that this advocate of the irrational and the vital, this contemner of logic, should be a veritable addict of verbal discussion. Here, as we say in Spain, appetite and hunger came together, for he loved both discussion and talk—on condition, that is, that he did the talking. It was typically Spanish of him that he should grant so much importance to the Word; for in this, Spaniards preach, so to speak, what they do and do what they preach. He thought, we all think, that thought is at its best at the moment it is uttered, because it is then that it comes alive out of the spirit that has begotten it. And this opinion is but natural in a people that thinks while talking.

In his addiction to verbal argument, therefore, Unamuno gave vent at the same time to his intellectual combativeness and to that tendency to think while talking which grants so much spontaneity and unexpectedness to the talk of a worthwhile Spanish mind. The truth in this observation may serve to excuse Spaniards for the reverse of the coin: their tendency to turn their talk into a monologue. I have known but very few prominent Spaniards who were wholly free from this foible. Unamuno was not one of them.

There was a lot of him to be lived, and life is short. So there he went for all he was worth. He was endowed with a fair share of those formidable qualities we all readily acknowledge in the Basque: stubbornness and strength. Unamuno will at times strike the reader as persistent and insistent even beyond the needs of the case, just for the love of pounding on; and his style does at times also suggest the hammer of the stonecutter rather than the chisel of the goldsmith. It is all part of the urge of that passionate yo imprinting itself on nature.

When he happened not to be ready with a homemade version of the world to oppose to God’s own, rather than conform to God’s he would turn it upside down. This was the cause of his taste for paradox, a necessity in him of which, however, he came to make a habit and later a practice. He would pick up a well-known formula, say, “Faith is believing what we do not see,” and he would at once start to prove that in fact it was the other way about: “Faith is seeing what we do not believe.” It was all part of his initial position: Unamuno versus the world.

It was part also of his anarchical, undisciplined, spontaneous nature which led him to trust in intuition rather than in concentrated thought—something that was all to the good, for this tendency made him ever fresh, inventive and stimulating—but led him also at times to mistake for intuition what was no more than caprice, and to indulge in caprice for its own sake. Thus he often had recourse to mere sonority and to what were no more than puns. For instance, not only would he turn the definition of faith upside down, “Faith is believing what we do not see,” but at another moment he would turn it into a parallel formula: “Faith is creating what we do not see,” based on the pun creer (believe) and crear (create). Nor was this frivolous game always sterile, for rich is the world of the mind, and his own skill to move among ideas considerable. The trouble here is that he played without a smile, as if he were in dead earnest, which in fact he was.

* * *

There was strength in it, but also a weakness due partly to anarchy, partly perhaps also to an aversion for any intellectual pursuits requiring discipline. Thinking aloud, improvising more hispano, was for him a more attractive occupation than building up a well-poised edifice requiring a scrupulous calculation of its logical stresses. He would no doubt retort that many such edifices have been built through the ages so that they now form an imposing Philosophy Avenue, but that no one can live in them who is really alive; and, sad to say, he would be right.

Nevertheless, the admiration he deserves as, with Ortega, the most eminent Spanish man of letters of our century, must be tempered by a recognition of his lack of discipline and of his arbitrariness. Discipline is no prominent feature of great artists. There was not much of it in Shakespeare, or in Lope de Vega; on the other hand, too much of it spoils, one fancies, the all too perfect work of Racine. Be that as it may, there are too many moments in which Unamuno is undisciplined not because life surges in him with so much strength that he cannot canalize it (Shakespeare’s case), but because he just lets himself go, thinking no doubt that all that shines in him is gold.

Within every author, a critic must be on the watch. Unamuno’s self-critic was not up to the mark. There were at least three reasons for this. The first was his “nothing-less-than-the-whole-man” attitude: everything that was thrown up had to be accepted. The second was his irrational vent: if what turned up was absurd, so much the better. The third was Unamuno’s pronounced masculinity, a typical Basque feature. He was more of a genius than a talent, in contrast with Ortega who was more of a talent than a genius. In the work of creation, genius is the fecundating, masculine force; talent, the feminine, shaping capacity. Unamuno was lacking in that subtle critical talent which exerts itself prenatally on the work of art and sees that its body is shapely.

* * *

The chief paradox of Unamuno’s life, however, may well be that this apostle of life, this eloquent advocate of irrationality and experience versus reason and intellectualism, lived mostly in the mind, gathered but little outward experience, and often mistook his thoughts on life for life itself. He was a professor of Greek; he lived a regular, middle-class simple man’s life, in the bosom of an exemplary family: regular meals, regular walks, regular classes; he now and then vibrated with the “high frequency” of hectic political events, knew exile but found no interest in Paris and secluded himself in Hendaye, returned to Spain, passed through the Republic like something between a meteor and a ghost, and on finding that the events of 1936 did not let him carry on his quiet way of living in his beloved retreat of Salamanca, he died.

His life was all within. His experience was inner experience. Not for him those excursions to foreign lands, those adventures in the realms of danger, passion, the strange, the unfamiliar, the irregular, the shocking, the crags, peaks, and abysses which surround, fascinate, attract, and repel other men, and out of which they form their thoughts, thoughts fed with the sap of reality. Unamuno spoke and wrote about life far more than most, but he lived far less than most.

Could it be that this formidable man, the uncompromising stand, the proud uplifted head, the glaring eye, and the stubborn mouth, could it be that this challenger was deep down a shy man? Yes. It could be. In fact he was. The forbidding mask hid untold shyness and even tenderness within. His search for retreat, solitude, the quiet of the countryside, the reflective and inward looking contemplation, possibly even that negation of outer life and that wish to unamunize it rather than accept it within—what were they but consequences of the over-sensitiveness of the man within? Look more closely at those portraits of him, all immediately so impressive as images of a dour, aggressive man. That man is on the defensive.

His concentration on his own self, on his inner world, is for him one of the ways of escape from an outer world which he fears. He will roam in the vast spaces of his inner self, whose dangers he knows well and he can face, rather than risk adventures in that outer reality he does not actually know and he prefers to deny. Hence that feature, often observed in his novels and in his plays: the indrawn quality of characters and places. In Unamuno’s works, details of time and place are seldom given. Everything happens in people’s minds rather than in their fields, backyards, rooms, or kitchens.

Furthermore, in Unamuno’s works every character speaks and feels like Unamuno. He is so many people himself that the several Unamunos of his plays and novels do not necessarily strike a note of monotony. They are saved by his intensity, and so is the reality he paints, a projection of outer reality onto his inner cavern.

* * *

This is yet another paradox. The aggressive man, who seemed eager to conquer the outer world and to unamunize it, lets himself be invaded by the outer world, and everything he describes really happens within. But does he actually let in reality—such as it is? For reality to enter a man, he must be ready to give himself to it. The bridge must lend itself to a two-way traffic. On reading him, one is struck by the depth, the liveliness, the ever-renewed vigor of ideas, rather than by any familiarity with things as they actually are.

Nor was it only a lack of familiarity. There was bias as well. The chief virtue of the true artist is passivity. He must allow the river of life to flow through him without meddling, without altering or regulating its course. Later, when the hour of talent arrives, he will have to take an active part in the work, to shape the emotions received; but he should not intervene too soon and try to influence the impressions before they form. Unamuno often falls into this error, impelled by his eagerness to express the thought which dominated all his life. His life was polarized by this one thought which, in one way or another, conditions, determines, and orientates all his works—survival. He must survive. There must be another life.

For him, it need hardly be said, this is not an idea. It is a want, a need, a hunger, an urge, an obsession. It does not generate in his mind but in the recesses of his being. What would you expect? Philosophy? An abstract, objective, “horizontal,” concatenated study of the problem of life after death and of the existence of God? Not from Unamuno. The issue is not one between perceptions and logic, but one between Unamuno and non-Unamuno, including God.

Unamuno must live on after death. That is his will. And the will of God must adjust itself to that fact. Nor will he be content with some vapid form of spiritual life:

The other world . . .

The other world is that of pure spirit.

Of pure spirit . . .

Oh dreadful purity,

inanity, void.

He must have his flesh and bone, and in this he reveals himself a true Catholic. He wants the other world to be as much of the senses as this, and sighs for the resurrection of the body. Nothing less than the whole man.

* * *

So here is the picture of Unamuno as an artist. Weak in his sense of form through an excessive masculinity and an overbalance of genius as against talent; weak also in that his passivity and his impartiality are disturbed by his obsession with his own personal survival; he is strong in his sensuous enjoyment of the whole of his life as a man of flesh and bone; strong also in the spontaneous flow of his thoughts and feelings, in the “vertical,” so to speak, spring-like vigor of his utterance.

Unamuno must therefore be considered above all as a lyrical poet. True, his argumentative, didactical tendency was so strong that it often led him to the essay and to the novel, which, for him, is at times an argument between a number of Unamunos of both sexes. But at times his novels are also poems, and he himself once defined a novel as a poem. His way of presenting reality, not directly and in itself, but reflected or, better still, re-lived in his own inner world, and so transfigured and unamunized, could lead to no other result than that of turning his novels into poems.

And it is above all as a lyrical poet that he will remain—a case not dissimilar from that of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: men who felt more than they thought; whose thoughts were, in fact, mere flowers of the sap of feeling; and, therefore, only universal insofar as they are profoundly individual, only meaningful insofar as they convey the aroma and the shape of the individual spirit that lives in them.

It follows that Unamuno, despite his shortcomings, will have his place in Spanish literature as one of the greatest poets in the language of Castille. This he owes to the dimensions of his spirit—depth, width, height; the freshness and spontaneity of his language and style, which in his truly poetical pages, whether in prose or in verse, are of the noblest, most diaphanous and luminous in Spanish letters; to the universal, human quality and greatness of his themes; and to the transparent sincerity which shines in his life and works.

* * *

The earnestness, the intensity, and the oneness of his predominant passion are the main cause of the strength of Unamuno’s philosophic work. They remain his main asset, yet become also the principal cause of his weakness as a creative artist. Great art can only flourish in the temperate zone of the passions, on the return journey from the torrid. Unamuno, as a creator, has none of the failings of those artists who have never felt deeply. But he does show the limitations of those artists who cannot cool down. And the most striking of them is that at bottom he is seldom able to put himself in a purely aesthetical mood. In this, as in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles Wordsworth—and was, by the way, one of the few Spaniards to read and appreciate him. Like him, Unamuno is an essentially purposeful and utilitarian mind. Of the two qualities which the work of art requires for its inception—earnestness and detachment—both Unamuno and Wordsworth possess the first; both are deficient in the second. Their interest in their respective leading thought—survival in the first, virtue in the second—is too direct, too pressing, to allow them the “distance” necessary for artistic work. Both are urged to work by a lofty utilitarianism—the search for God through the individual soul in Unamuno; the search for God through the social soul in Wordsworth—so that their thoughts and sensations are polarized, and their spirit loses that impartial transparence to nature’s lights without which no great art is possible. Once suggested, this parallel is too rich in sidelights to be lightly dropped. This single-mindedness which distinguishes them explains that both should have consciously or unconsciously chosen a life of semiseclusion, for Unamuno lived in Salamanca very much as Wordsworth lived in the Lake District—

in a still retreat

Sheltered, but not to social duties lost,

hence in both a certain proclivity toward plowing a solitary furrow and becoming self-centered. There are no doubt important differences. The Englishman’s sense of nature is both keener and more concrete; while the Spaniard’s knowledge of human nature is not barred by the subtle inhibitions and innate limitations which tend to blind its more unpleasant aspects to the eye of the Englishman. There is more courage and passion in the Spaniard; more harmony and good will in the Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like light. For Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay, a means for conveying a lesson in forcible and easily remembered terms to those who are in need of improvement. For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds that a novel is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man’s passion, the overflow of the heart which cannot help itself and lets go. And it may be that the essential difference between the two is to be found in this difference between their respective purposes: Unamuno’s purpose is more intimately personal and individual; Wordsworth’s is more social and objective. Thus both miss the temperate zone, where emotion takes shape into the molds of art; but while Wordsworth is driven by his ideal of social service this side of it, into the cold light of both moral and intellectual self-control, Unamuno remains beyond, where the molten metal is too near the fire of passion, and cannot cool down into shape.

Unamuno is therefore not unlike Wordsworth in the insufficiency of his sense of form. We have just seen the essential cause of this insufficiency to lie in the non-aesthetical attitude of his mind, and we have tried to show one of the roots of such an attitude in the very loftiness and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others, for living nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched. It cannot be doubted that a certain refractoriness to form is a typical feature of the Basque character. The sense of form is closely in sympathy with the feminine element in human nature, and the Basque race is strongly masculine. The predominance of the masculine element—strength without grace—is as typical of Unamuno as it is of Wordsworth. The literary gifts which might for the sake of synthesis be symbolized in a smile are absent in both. There is as little humor in the one as in the other. Humor, however, sometimes occurs in Unamuno, but only in his ill-humored moments, and then with a curious bite of its own which adds an unconscious element to its comic effect. Grace only visits them in moments of inspiration, and then it is of a noble character, enhanced as it is by the ever-present gift of strength. And as for the sense for rhythm and music, both Unamuno and Wordsworth seem to be limited to the most vigorous and masculine gaits. This feature is particularly pronounced in Unamuno, for while Wordsworth is painstaking, all-observant, and too good a “teacher” to underestimate the importance of pleasure in man’s progress, Unamuno knows no compromise. His aim is not to please but to strike, and he deliberately seeks the naked, the forceful, even the brutal word for truth. There is in him, however, a cause of formlessness from which Wordsworth is free—namely, an eagerness for sincerity and veracity which brushes aside all preparation, ordering or planning of ideas as suspect of “dishing up” intellectual trickery, and juggling with spontaneous truths.

Setting Unamuno next to Wordsworth has shown them both as typical spirits of their respective nations. A similar effect would be obtained by comparing Unamuno with Valéry, for both might well stand as, again, typical spirits of their respective nations. Valéry was above all an intellect, a shape-giving, feminine spirit. Unamuno was a nothing-less-than-a-whole-man, a seed-providing, masculine spirit, with all that non-intellectual, vital sap which goes into a work, even into a work of “mere” thought, all the life-element without which, for Unamuno, a work would be worthless, all that which would be brushed aside by Valéry as mere dross, a muddying of the pure waters of the intellect; while the perfection of form, consciously sought and painfully attained by the Frenchman—a perfection, by the way, utterly beyond the powers of Unamuno unless he struck it by chance—would have been for the Spaniard mere vanity and waste. Finish for the Frenchman, finicking for the Spaniard.

Passionate versus dispassionate; a man living from his roots up, giving forth his “works” as a chestnut tree its “candles,” versus a goldsmith patiently chiseling his jewels; Unamuno versus Valéry symbolizes the secular tension between the spirit of Spain and the spirit of France, between fullness and perfection, substance and shape, power and care, hunger and fear, a beginning and an end.

* * *

Historically, Unamuno must be counted as one of the chief pioneers of the worldwide rebirth of spiritual forces which set in during the nineteenth century, precisely as a reaction against the rationalistic atheism of that epoch. His originality in this attitude cannot be disputed. He discovered Kierkegaard when his own way of thinking had come to full maturity and was already well known. Nor, had it been otherwise, would it matter at all; for there was no man less apt to borrow from another (a process in any case which is definitely “horizontal”) than our “vertical” Unamuno. To put it in the language of Ortega, he was an “Adamic” Spaniard, i.e., a man who, though immensely well read, starts all over again from Adam as if no one had ever written a word since. His reading is incredibly wide; but he only spots in books that which he is already thinking; and his attitude to the problem which obsessed him remains original in its purity and nobility because he is above all determined to keep it true. True even if it must lead him to contradictions. Hence his satisfaction when he found himself backed in this by Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”

Historically again, Unamuno occupies in Spanish culture a place somewhat singular and isolated. “Our brother enemy,” Ortega said of him once. He was definitely on the side of Spanish liberals, a liberal himself in the best and most profound sense. But perhaps because he had meditated so deeply on the roots of liberalism, he could hardly accept the line all too frequently taken for granted around him as the frontier between “right” and “left,” i.e., with or against the Catholic Church. “I’d rather talk to a canon than to a lieutenant colonel,” he once said on a somewhat resonant occasion.

What he meant was perhaps twofold. First, that of the two institutions, both based as they were on discipline, the Church was more capable than the Army to open out toward freedom, because the very basis of the Gospels is the freedom of the human soul; and then, that liberalism can only rest on the divine origin of man, for if man’s soul is not divine there is no reason why it should be respected.

In thus seeking a synthesis of liberalism and religious faith, Unamuno was a precursor as much as he had been in his attitude toward nineteenth-century rationalism. Looking back on the struggles Spain has lived from 1808 on to this date, it is possible to wonder whether their true cause, a too black-or-white attitude on both sides, would not have been avoided had more Spanish leaders openly advocated, by no means a middle course, but a loftier perspective such as Unamuno managed to command throughout his exemplary life.

SALVADOR DE MADARIAGA

London, 1970