Read Ebook: Essays and soliloquies by Unamuno Miguel De Flitch J E Crawford John Ernest Crawford Translator

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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 B?ranger 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.

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 ; 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.

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 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 , 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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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 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 mediaeval 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, P?o 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.

"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."

Later on, Baroja says: "For me, one of the saddest things about Spain is that we Spaniards cannot be frivolous or jovial."

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.

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