Miguel de Unamuno
BOOKS OF THE DAY By V. S. PRITCHETT ONE of the good effects of the Spanish revolution has been to reveal to a wider audience the writers of that forcible Spanish. literary movement who worked, for a generation, towards a
Change of regitnz. Of these men, Miguel de Unamuno who has received honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge this week and who is lecturing on the movement at King's College; London, is the most striking figure. His reputation is Euro- pean and he is known in England by the translations of sonic of his novels and his two semi-philosophical works—The Tragic Sense of Life and The Life of Dan Quixote and Sancho; Ile is probably better known for his political escapades. His denunciations of the monarchy, his quarrels with all parties, his periods of exile, his attacks upon the republic he helped to make, his paradoxes and witticisms, arc celebrated. At over seventy he is still full of fight. • Shaw and Chesterton have familiarised us with this kind of individualist. Literature towards the end of the nineteenth century produced a lay revivalism in which the preachers were devil's advocates, or exuberant reactionaries. Dr. Unamuno does not belong to either category. Apart from his assertive individualism he has little in common with the -word- inebriated Irishman or the chuckling Englishman who solves
the enigmas of belief' with a pun. He is- profounder than either and if we look for an English parallel, the prophetic passion of his utterance has more in common with the work of a later prophet, D. 11. Lawrence, than with the wicked.
cerebral verve of Slum. Lawrence's manner has been com- pared to Carlyle's, and it is interesting to observe that Unamuno has been Carlyle's Spanish translator. The Spaniard's insistence on the pre-eminent importance of the identity of the physical man, " the man of flesh and bones,".
is close, in its typically Spanish stress on the physical, to Lawrence's strange panegyric of the body in love, but Umummo sees in man not the creature who must live merely through a fulfilment. of the body. He sees the man who cannot
fully live in body or mind until, discarding the objections of Reason, he discovers faith in his personal immortality. The cult of death has often been noted in the sombre Spanish nature.- Like a Spanish Tolstoy, Unamuno is asking in all his books, " What does Truth matter if a man dies ? " It is the -characteristic and gnawing problem for the out and out individualist, for individualism without faith is reduced to -futility and eccentricity :
." I need my soul's immortality ; I need to be assured of the indefinite persistence of my individual consciousness; without it, -without faith is it, I cannot live. And since doubt of it, the -uncertainty of ever knowing certainly, torments me, immortality is a need. I am impelled to affirm it passionately, arbitrarily. In convincing others I convince myself. Poor, passionless creatures who are resigned to a final dissolution, may say that my reasoning is merely paradotical and ingenious, but it is not."
It is not ; because this is the " reasoning " of faith. The - whole of The Tragic Sense of Life, from which I have translated. the passage, is an attack upon scientific culture and its rational, agnostic hedonism because they destroy the individual • by first withdrawing the belief in his immortality. Against western European rationalism and its great culture, particu- larly as it is expressed in France, Unamuno puts the mysticism of Spain, a country " which may not have left institutions and books," but " which has made souls "—souls like Don Quixote, Loyola and Santa Teresa. Against a religion of happines.s, is placed the stoical argument that a true philosophy teaches men the value of suffering, how to live by preparing them for death.
The Tragic Sense of Life was written in 1912, and since then the European War and the 'neurotic condition of Western Europe have given a cogency to Unamuno's ideas. His irrationalism was not, of course, unique. Irrationalism is typical of our times. The revolt against reason, when it is non-vicious, is really a revolt against a rationalism which has proved sterile. Unamuno is not trying to destroy reason— he has a superb rational gift—but to revive conflict ; above all the conflict between reason and faith. If he is to be written down as an irrationalist, a strongly marked distinction must be made between his irrationalism, which postulates a soul, and that of a fashionable eclectic like Keyserling, or that associated with Jung and Freud in which the soul has become a jungle called the unconscious. Teutonic speculation has no attraction to the unphilosophical Spanish mind which is hard, objective and individual. Unamuno does not ask us, as John Cowper Powys once did, to relax into " the primordial slime " or to, recover our " iethyosaurus egos." We are not to found Chestertonian guilds or to exalt, with D. H. Lawrence, our solar plexus. " I am, therefore God is"—Unamuno's mysticism is that of the intense individuality of the Spanish race which has put the " making of souls," the making of men, before art,. knowledge, religion or society. " My method," he writes, is the method of passion "—the method of the mystics. His work is not so much adjuration or criticism as the revelation. or expression of a racial temperament. One reads him not to be convinced but to be influenced..
Writing of this kind must be understood in the terms of the conditions which gave rise to it. The men of Unamune's generation began their work at a time of national disaster. One result of the Bourbon restoration had been the loss of the last of the colonies, and it was felt that an age of rhetoric must be deflated and an age of ruthless self-criticism must begin. Out of the first destructive phase, there grew the cry of " Europeanisation," from the wealthy who wanted the latest modern convenience to the intellectuals who wished to catch up with western culture. Like all revolutionaries they were true nationalists, and Unamuno's insistence on the Spanish values was at once a genuine patriotism and a warning to his contemporaries who were reaching eagerly to Europe. And every Spaniard who reaches out to Europe must go through France—France with her intellectual patronage, her method and order, her sensuality and rational culture, the country which every Spaniard, ascetic and passionate, regards with a feeling of spiritual superiority and horror ; and yet, to the extent that he is a Latin, with an insidious, half-acknowledged feeling of cultural inferiority. To redress the balance, Unamuno rose up to preach his Quixotism, his unorthodox anti-clerical Catholieism, hiS mysticism, the life-giving force of the preoccupation with death—all those things which no Frenchman can ever under; stand. Ile broughtto those Spaniards (whose love of their own Quixotism and paradoxes was not exasperated by his!) a consciousness of themselves. Unamunn has called himself " a voice crying in the wilderness." Essentially lie is a voice.
The value of personal writers like Unamuno must always fluctuate violently with different readers. For those tempera- mentally attracted by his mixture of learning, humanity and irascibility, by his election to be a shaker of the faith of -the faithful and the reason of the reasonable, he has perhaps a prestige unwarranted by a close examination of his words ; for those who expect solid doctrine he seems to suffer- from the Spanish fault of extreme, irresponsible originality which never sees beyond the personal. The Spanish voice is so different from the voice of the rest of western Europe in our present circumstances, that it is rather as a Spaniard than as a thinker that he impresses us, as a man who reawakens in us, as Spaniards do, the capacity to feel the unity of our physical and spiritual natures. This last, in another way, was I). IL Lawrence's virtue.
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