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ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES

INTRODUCTION

No writer ever stood less in need of an introduction than Miguel de Unamuno, for probably none ever revealed himself so naturally and so nakedly in his writings. The identity between the author and the man is absolute. He has a way of putting the whole of himself into all that he writes so that to read him is not merely to learn his views as a philosopher or a publicist, but to know his loves and hates, his hopes and despairs, as a man of flesh and bone. His method of communicating his message is not to address an audience from the elevation of the pulpit or the platform, but to accost the individual face to face, to grasp him warmly by the hand, to look him full in the eyes and tell him what is in his heart. The task of the introducer therefore may be restricted to prefixing to the intimacy so immediately established between reader and author some few notes relative to the latter's history and the background against which he presents himself.

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.

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 r?gime his liberty of action would be too much circumscribed and therefore preferred to take up his residence temporarily in Paris.

I well remember how, on the afternoon after my arrival, I was sitting in a caf? 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.

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 Pe?a 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.

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."

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.

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 aeons of agonized human effort, existing without any human or other consciousness left to appropriate it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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