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Tragic Sense Of Life by Miguel de Unamuno

M >> Miguel de Unamuno >> Tragic Sense Of Life




* * * * *

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 esthetical mood. In
this, as in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles
Wordsworth--whom, by the way, he is one of the few Spaniards to read
and appreciate.[1] 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 for 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 semi-seclusion, for Unamuno lives 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 towards ploughing a solitary furrow
and becoming self-centred. 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 goodwill 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 moulds
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 nonesthetical 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 humour in the one as in the other.
Humour, however, sometimes occurs in Unamuno, but only in his
ill-humoured 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.

* * * * *

Such qualities--both the positive and the negative--are apparent in his
poetry. In it, the appeal of force and sincerity is usually stronger
than that of art. This is particularly the case in his first volume
(_Poesias_, 1907), in which a lofty inspiration, a noble attitude of
mind, a rich and racy vocabulary, a keen insight into the spirit of
places, and above all the overflowing vitality of a strong man in the
force of ripeness, contend against the still awkward gait of the Basque
and a certain rebelliousness of rhyme. The dough of the poetic language
is here seen heavily pounded by a powerful hand, bent on reducing its
angularities and on improving its plasticity. Nor do we need to wait for
further works in order to enjoy the reward of such efforts, for it is
attained in this very volume more than once, as for instance in _Muere
en el mar el ave que volo del nido_, a beautiful poem in which emotion
and thought are happily blended into exquisite form.

In his last poem, _El Cristo de Velazquez_ (1920), Unamuno undertakes
the task of giving a poetical rendering of his tragic sense of life, in
the form of a meditation on the Christ of Velazquez, the beautiful and
pathetic picture in the Prado. Why Velazquez's and not Christ himself?
The fact is that, though in his references to actual forms, Unamuno
closely follows Velazquez's picture, the spiritual interpretation of it
which he develops as the poem unfolds itself is wholly personal. It
would be difficult to find two great Spaniards wider apart than Unamuno
and Velazquez, for if Unamuno is the very incarnation of the masculine
spirit of the North--all strength and substance--Velazquez is the image
of the feminine spirit of the South--all grace and form. Velazquez is a
limpid mirror, with a human depth, yet a mirror. That Unamuno has
departed from the image of Christ which the great Sevillian reflected on
his immortal canvas was therefore to be expected. But then Unamuno has,
while speaking of Don Quixote, whom he has also freely and personally
interpreted,[2] taken great care to point out that a work of art is, for
each of us, all that we see in it. And, moreover, Unamuno has not so
much departed from Velazquez's image of Christ as delved into its
depths, expanded, enlarged it, or, if you prefer, seen in its limpid
surface the immense figure of his own inner Christ. However free and
unorthodox in its wide scope of images and ideas, the poem is in its
form a regular meditation in the manner approved by the Catholic Church,
and it is therefore meet that it should rise from a concrete, tangible
object as it is recommended to the faithful. To this concrete character
of its origin, the poem owes much of its suggestiveness, as witness the
following passage quoted here, with a translation sadly unworthy of the
original, as being the clearest link between the poetical meditation
and the main thought that underlies all the work and the life of
Unamuno.

NUBE NEGRA

O es que una nube negra de los cielos
ese negror le dio a tu cabellera
de nazareno, cual de mustio sauce
de una noche sin luna sobre el rio?
?Es la sombra del ala sin perfiles
del angel de la nada negadora,
de Luzbel, que en su caida inacabable
--fondo no puede dar--su eterna cuita
clava en tu frente, en tu razon? ?Se vela,
el claro Verbo en Ti con esa nube,
negra cual de Luzbel las negras alas,
mientras brilla el Amor, todo desnudo,
con tu desnudo pecho por cendal?

BLACK CLOUD

Or was it then that a black cloud from heaven
Such blackness gave to your Nazarene's hair,
As of a languid willow o'er the river
Brooding in moonless night? Is it the shadow
Of the profileless wing of Luzbel, the Angel
Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling--
Bottom he ne'er can touch--whose grief eternal
He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason?
Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled
--A cloud as black as the black wings of Luzbel--
While Love shines naked within Thy naked breast?

The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this lofty level
throughout, and if he had written nothing else Unamuno would still
remain as having given to Spanish letters the noblest and most sustained
lyrical flight in the language. It abounds in passages of ample beauty
and often strikes a note of primitive strength in the true Old Testament
style. It is most distinctively a poem in a major key, in a group with
_Paradise Lost_ and _The Excursion_, but in a tone halfway between the
two; and, as coming from the most Northern-minded and substantial poet
that Spain ever had, wholly free from that tendency towards
grandiloquence and Ciceronian drapery which blighted previous similar
efforts in Spain. Its weakness lies in a certain monotony due to the
interplay of Unamuno's two main limitations as an artist: the absolute
surrender to one dominant thought and a certain deficiency of form
bordering here on contempt. The plan is but a loose sequence of
meditations on successive aspects of Christ as suggested by images or
advocations of His divine person, or even of parts of His human body:
Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown, Head, Knees. Each meditation is treated
in a period of blank verse, usually of a beautiful texture, the
splendour of which is due less to actual images than to the inner vigour
of ideas and the eagerness with which even the simplest facts are
interpreted into significant symbols. Yet, sometimes, this blank verse
becomes hard and stony under the stubborn hammering of a too insistent
mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a line accented on
its last syllable tends but to increase the monotony of the whole.

Blank verse is never the best medium for poets of a strong masculine
inspiration, for it does not sufficiently correct their usual deficiency
in form. Such poets are usually at their best when they bind themselves
to the discipline of existing forms and particularly when they limit the
movements of their muse to the "sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
Unamuno's best poetry, as Wordsworth's, is in his sonnets. His _Rosario
de Sonetos Liricos_, published in 1911, contains some of the finest
sonnets in the Spanish language. There is variety in this volume--more
at least than is usual in Unamuno: from comments on events of local
politics (sonnet lii.) which savour of the more prosaic side of
Wordsworth, to meditations on space and time such as that sonnet
xxxvii., so reminiscent of Shelley's _Ozymandias of Egypt_; from a
suggestive homily to a "Don Juan of Ideas" whose thirst for knowledge is
"not love of truth, but intellectual lust," and whose "thought is
therefore sterile" (sonnet cvii.), to an exquisitely rendered moonlight
love scene (sonnet civ.). The author's main theme itself, which of
course occupies a prominent part in the series, appears treated under
many different lights and in genuinely poetical moods which truly do
justice to the inherent wealth of poetical inspiration which it
contains. Many a sonnet might be quoted here, and in particular that
sombre and fateful poem _Nihil Novum sub Sole_ (cxxiii.), which defeats
its own theme by the striking originality of its inspiration.

So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the
question of outside influences does not even arise. Unamuno is probably
the Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at
all, to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their
source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive and over-refined
artists have no doubt enriched the sensuous, the formal, the
sentimental, even the intellectual aspects of verse with an admirable
variety of exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems
old-fashioned to the fastidious palate of modern men. Unamuno is too
genuine a representative of the spiritual and masculine variety of
Spanish genius, ever impervious to French, and generally, to
intellectual, influences, to be affected by the esthetic excellence of
this art. Yet, for all his disregard of the modern resources which it
adds to the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his modernity. He is
indeed more than modern. When, as he often does, he strikes the true
poetic note, he is outside time. His appeal is not in complexity but in
strength. He is not refined: he is final.

* * * * *

In the Preface to his _Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un Prologo_ (1921)
Unamuno says: " ... novelist--that is, poet ... a novel--that is, a
poem." Thus, with characteristic decision, he sides with the lyrical
conception of the novel. There is of course an infinite variety of
types of novels. But they can probably all be reduced to two
classes--_i.e._, the dramatic or objective, and the lyrical or
subjective, according to the mood or inspiration which predominates in
them. The present trend of the world points towards the dramatic or
objective type. This type is more in tune with the detached and
scientific character of the age. The novel is often nowadays considered
as a document, a "slice of life," a piece of information, a literary
photograph representing places and people which purse or time prevents
us from seeing with our own eyes. It is obvious, given what we now know
of him, that such a view of the novel cannot appeal to Unamuno. He is a
utilitarian, but not of worldly utilities. His utilitarianism transcends
our daily wants and seeks to provide for our eternal ones. He is,
moreover, a mind whose workings turn in spiral form towards a central
idea and therefore feels an instinctive antagonism to the dispersive
habits of thought and sensation which such detailed observation of life
usually entails. For at bottom the opposition between the lyrical and
the dramatic novel may be reduced to that between the poet and the
dramatist. Both the dramatist and the poet create in order to link up
their soul and the world in one complete circle of experience, but this
circle is travelled in opposite directions. The poet goes inwards first,
then out to nature full of his inner experience, and back home. The
dramatist goes outwards first, then comes back to himself, his harvest
of wisdom gathered in reality. It is the recognition of his own lyrical
inward-looking nature which makes Unamuno pronounce the identity of the
novel and the poem.

Whatever we may think of it as a general theory, there is little doubt
that this opinion is in the main sound in so far as it refers to
Unamuno's own work. His novels are created within. They are--and their
author is the first to declare it so--novels which happen in the
kingdom of the spirit. Outward points of reference in time and space
are sparingly given--in fact, reduced to a bare minimum. In some of
them, as for instance _Niebla_ (1914), the name of the town in which the
action takes place is not given, and such scanty references to the
topography and general features as are supplied would equally apply to
any other provincial town of Spain. Action, in the current sense of the
word, is correspondingly simplified, since the material and local
elements on which it usually exerts itself are schematized, and in their
turn made, as it were, spiritual. Thus a street, a river of colour for
some, for others a series of accurately described shops and dwellings,
becomes in Unamuno (see _Niebla_) a loom where the passions and desires
of men and women cross and recross each other and weave the cloth of
daily life. Even the physical description of characters is reduced to a
standard of utmost simplicity. So that, in fine, Unamuno's novels, by
eliminating all other material, appear, if the boldness of the metaphor
be permitted, as the spiritual skeletons of novels, conflicts between
souls.

Nor is this the last stage in his deepening and narrowing of the
creative furrow. For these souls are in their turn concentrated so that
the whole of their vitality burns into one passion. If a somewhat
fanciful comparison from another art may throw any light on this feature
of his work we might say that his characters are to those of Galdos, for
instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony. Joaquin
Monegro, the true hero of his _Abel Sanchez_ (1917), is the
personification of hatred. Raquel in _Dos Madres_[1] and Catalina in _El
Marques de Lumbria_[1] are two widely different but vigorous, almost
barbarous, "maternities." Alejandro, the hero of his powerful _Nada
Menos que Todo un Hombre_,[3] is masculine will, pure and unconquerable,
save by death. Further still, in most if not all of his main
characters, we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being
to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno
himself, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after. Here is, for
instance, _Abel Sanchez_, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase
of the story of Cain. Joaquin Monegro, the Cain of the novel, has been
reading Byron's poem, and writes in his diary: "It was when I read how
Lucifer declared to Cain that he, Cain, was immortal, that I began in
terror to wonder whether I also was immortal and whether in me would be
also immortal my hatred. 'Have I a soul?' I said to myself then. 'Is
this my hatred soul?' And I came to think that it could not be
otherwise, that such a hatred cannot be the function of a body.... A
corruptible organism could not hate as I hated."

Thus Joaquin Monegro, like every other main character in his work,
appears preoccupied by the same central preoccupation of Unamuno. In one
word, all Unamuno's characters are but incarnations of himself. But that
is what we expected to find in a lyrical novelist.

There are critics who conclude from this observation that these
characters do not exist, that they are mere arguments on legs,
personified ideas. Here and there, in Unamuno's novels, there are
passages which lend some colour of plausibility to this view. Yet, it is
in my opinion mistaken. Unamuno's characters may be schematized,
stripped of their complexities, reduced to the mainspring of their
nature; they may, moreover, reveal mainsprings made of the same steel.
But that they are alive no one could deny who has a sense for life. The
very restraint in the use of physical details which Unamuno has made a
feature of his creative work may have led his critics to forget the
intensity of those--admirably chosen--which are given. It is significant
that the eyes play an important part in his description of characters
and in his narrative too. His sense of the interpenetration of body and
soul is so deep that he does not for one moment let us forget how bodily
his "souls" are, and how pregnant with spiritual significance is every
one of their words and gestures. No. These characters are not arguments
on legs. They truly are men and women of "flesh and bones," human,
terribly human.

In thus emphasizing a particular feature in their nature, Unamuno
imparts to his creations a certain deformity which savours of romantic
days. Yet Unamuno is not a romanticist, mainly because Romanticism was
an esthetic attitude, and his attitude is seldom purely esthetic. For
all their show of passion, true Romanticists seldom gave their real
selves to their art. They created a stage double of their own selves for
public exhibitions. They sought the picturesque. Their form was lyrical,
but their substance was dramatic. Unamuno, on the contrary, even though
he often seeks expression in dramatic form, is essentially lyrical. And
if he is always intense, he never is exuberant. He follows the Spanish
tradition for restraint--for there is one, along its opposite tradition
for grandiloquence--and, true to the spirit of it, he seeks the maximum
of effect through the minimum of means. Then, he never shouts. Here is
an example of his quiet method, the rhythmical beauty of which is
unfortunately almost untranslatable:

"Y asi pasaron dias de llanto y de negrura hasta que las lagrimas fueron
yendose hacia adentro y la casa fue derritiendo los negrores" (_Niebla_)
(And thus, days of weeping and mourning went by, till the tears began to
flow inward and the blackness to melt in the home).

* * * * *

Miguel de Unamuno is to-day the greatest literary figure of Spain.
Baroja may surpass him in variety of external experience, Azorin in
delicate art, Ortega y Gasset in philosophical subtlety, Ayala in
intellectual elegance, Valle Inclan in rhythmical grace. Even in
vitality he may have to yield the first place to that over-whelming
athlete of literature, Blasco Ibanez. But Unamuno is head and shoulders
above them all in the highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and
loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served all through his life his
unattainable Dulcinea. Then there is another and most important reason
which explains his position as first, _princeps_, of Spanish letters,
and it is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to bear,
incarnates the spirit of modern Spain. His eternal conflict between
faith and reason, between life and thought, between spirit and
intellect, between heaven and civilization, is the conflict of Spain
herself. A border country, like Russia, in which East and West mix their
spiritual waters, Spain wavers between two life-philosophies and cannot
rest. In Russia, this conflict emerges in literature during the
nineteenth century, when Dostoievsky and Tolstoy stand for the East
while Turgeniev becomes the West's advocate. In Spain, a country less
articulate, and, moreover, a country in which the blending of East and
West is more intimate, for both found a common solvent in centuries of
Latin civilization, the conflict is less clear, less on the surface.
To-day Ortega y Gasset is our Turgeniev--not without mixture. Unamuno is
our Dostoievsky, but painfully aware of the strength of the other side
within him, and full of misgivings. Nor is it sure that when we speak of
East in this connection we really mean East. There is a third country in
Europe in which the "Eastern" view is as forcibly put and as deeply
understood as the "Western," a third border country--England. England,
particularly in those of her racial elements conventionally named
Celtic, is closely in sympathy with the "East." Ireland is almost purely
"Eastern" in this respect. That is perhaps why Unamuno feels so strong
an attraction for the English language and its literature, and why, even
to this day, he follows so closely the movements of English thought.[4]
For his own nature, of a human being astride two enemy ideals, draws him
instinctively towards minds equally placed in opposition, yet a
co-operating opposition, to progress. Thus Unamuno, whose literary
qualities and defects make him a genuine representative of the more
masculine variety of the Spanish genius, becomes in his spiritual life
the true living symbol of his country and his time. And that he is great
enough to bear this incarnation is a sufficient measure of his
greatness.

S. DE MADARIAGA.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In what follows, I confess to refer not so much to the generally
admitted opinion on Wordsworth as to my own views on him and his poetry,
which I tried to explain in my essay: "The Case of Wordsworth" (_Shelley
and Calderon, and other Essays_, Constable and Co., 1920).

[2] _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, explicada y comentada_, por M. de
Unamuno: Madrid, Fernando Fe, 1905.

[3] These three novels appeared together as _Tres Novelas y un Prologo_
Calpe, Madrid, 1921.

[4] "Me va interesando ese Dean Inge," he wrote to me last year.

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