The Project Gutenberg eBook ofEssays and soliloquiesThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Essays and soliloquiesAuthor: Miguel de UnamunoTranslator: J. E. Crawford FlitchRelease date: July 23, 2023 [eBook #71260]Most recently updated: September 26, 2023Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Essays and soliloquiesAuthor: Miguel de UnamunoTranslator: J. E. Crawford FlitchRelease date: July 23, 2023 [eBook #71260]Most recently updated: September 26, 2023Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
Title: Essays and soliloquies
Author: Miguel de UnamunoTranslator: J. E. Crawford Flitch
Author: Miguel de Unamuno
Translator: J. E. Crawford Flitch
Release date: July 23, 2023 [eBook #71260]Most recently updated: September 26, 2023
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES ***
CONTENTS
ESSAYS ANDSOLILOQUIESBORZOI TRANSLATIONSSPRING 1925FROM THE SPANISHFIGURES OF THE PASSION OF OUR LORDBY GABRIEL MIROTranslated by C. J. HogarthFROM THE FRENCHTHE MODERN ENGLISH NOVELBY ABEL CHEVALLEYTranslated by Ben Ray RedmanFROM THE GERMANDEATH IN VENICEBY THOMAS MANNTranslated by Kenneth BurkeFROM THE RUSSIANTHE CLOCKBY ALEKSEI REMIZOVTranslated by John CournosTALES OF THE WILDERNESSBY BORIS PILNIAKTranslated by F. O’DempseyFROM THE NORWEGIANSEGELFOSS TOWNBY KNUT HAMSUNTranslated by J. S. ScottFROM THE POLISHTHE PEASANTSBY LADISLAS REYMONTTranslated by Michael H. Dziewicki
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISHWITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAYBY J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH[image of the colophon unavailable.]NEW YORKALFRED · A · KNOPF1925COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.SET UP, ELECTROTYPED, PRINTED AND BOUND BYTHE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, BINGHAMTON, N. Y.ESPARTO PAPER MANUFACTURED IN SCOTLANDAND FURNISHED BY W.F. ETHERINGTON & CO.,NEW YORK.MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The two paragraphs onpages 100-101beginning:
In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says
In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says
In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says
and:
Readers of Don Quixote will recall
Readers of Don Quixote will recall
Readers of Don Quixote will recall
are a continuation ofthe footnote on page 99.
I am writing these lines, to-day the 6th of June, 1924, in this island of Fuerteventura, an island that is propitious to calm thinking and to a laying bare of the soul, even as this parched land is bare, bare even to the bone. Here I have been confined now for nearly three months, no reason for my confinement having been given other than the arbitrary mandate of the military power that is de-civilizing and debasing my native country.
Hither came my friend Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch to bear me company. He was entrusted by Mr. Alfred A. Knopf with the task of making an anthology orflorilegiumof my shorter articles and extracts from my more extensive writings which should present a conspectus of my whole literary work. It is he, my friend and translator, who is responsible for the selection of the pieces which form this anthology.
I am in principle an enemy of all such selections or anthologies of an author’s works, and the more so when the author’s influence is due primarily not so much to his ideas as to the passionate tone and gesture with which he expresses them, to his style. This work of selection appears to me to be as difficult as would be that of abridging a sonata or a picture. And what appears to me almost impossible is that the authorhimself should make the selection. It is not possible for us to see ourselves from the outside, to become part of our public.
In any case, a work like this is a kind of index or catalogue, and its chief utility is to incite in the public a desire to get to know the author better. It is, to put it bluntly, in the nature of an advertisement.
Collections of selected writings are most valuable when the chief importance of an author lies in his ideology, which may or may not be welded into a system; they are less valuable when he is distinguished not so much by his ideas as by the warm images which incarnate them. It is relatively easy to give a summary of an author when we are asked: “What does he say?” but not so easy when the question to be answered is: “How does he say it?” That is to say, it is possible to abridge a philosophic system, but not a poem. In the poem, that which we call the argument is the most external element of its form, and its essence, the essence of the poem, is the rhythm, the aroma of the words, the style. Rhythm may give birth to argument or subject, but subject does not always give birth to rhythm.
In selecting these pieces—torsos, arms and heads of statuary—my friend the translator has been guided by an artistic rather than by a philosophical or ideological criterion, and for this I am grateful to him. And when I say that I am grateful to him, I mean that in this way he has best served the public that seeks to know me—me, the man, and not a system, for I have no system. Like Walt Whitman I would say of each one of my works: “This is not a book, it is a man.” It is comparatively easy, for example, to synthetize the philosophical system of Descartes, or that of Kant, or that of Hegel, or that of Comte, or, still more so, that of Spencer; but it is not easy to synthetize Goethe or Nietzsche, in both of whom is a latent philosophy. And still less so to synthetize Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare. And it has not been the object of my translator to present a summary of an ideology but to give an impression of a spirit.
To elucidate this point still further would lead us into an intricate examination of the relations which subsist between a man and his work, and to inquire whether the man makes the work or the work makes the man or whether each makes the other at the same time. The man makes himself in making his work and the work makes itself in making the man. The Creation makes God the Creator, and God the Creator makes the Creation, the Universe.
Strictly speaking, is not every translation in effect a new and original work? In being turned into English, however faithful the translator may be, shall I not say something different from what I have said in Spanish? Does a song say the same when played on the violin, the flute, the harp, the bassoon? Is a sonata the same when played on the piano and the organ? I know that when I have read my writings translated into another language I have been aware of echoes and reverberations which lay sleeping in the depths of my spirit, I have glimpsed horizons which the firm and severe contours of my native tongue did not permit me to see. And I have sometimes thought of makinga new work based upon a retranslation of the translation.
Among these essays is one upon the religion of Quixotism. Hitherto I have been meditating and perhaps dogmatizing upon this religion—now I am living it. For it is here, where the waves murmur tidings of my native shores, the mountainous coast of the wild Bay of Biscay, it is here that I have felt most deeply all the melancholy grandeur of the ridiculous passion of the Knight of the impossible Chimera. While the cowardly comic-opera tyrants who have banished me here are dishonouring our Spain, her whom they call their mother, I am exalting and eternalizing her, and I call her my daughter.
There is a famous Spanish couplet which says that there is no handful of earth without a Spanish grave—
No hay un puñado de tierraSin una tumba española,
No hay un puñado de tierraSin una tumba española,
No hay un puñado de tierraSin una tumba española,
and it would seem that these unhappy rulers wish to extend the national graveyard. And I propose that there shall be no corner of heaven without a nest of Spanish thought.
Nests of Spanish thought are the pieces which compose this book.
And now I return to contemplate the sea, to feed my spirit upon it, to watch its white-crested waves which are born and die and succeed one another like the generations of men and of men’s works in the sea of history. I return to contemplate the all-consoling seawhich smiles, with its superhuman smile, upon our tragic human frailties.
Greeting! my readers of the English-speaking world. And when, having read this book, you wish me farewell, may you carry with you something of the quixotesque passion which I have put into my work and which is the life of my life.
Miguel de Unamuno.
Fuerteventura,June 6, 1924.
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.
The determining events in his outward biography are soon told. Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was born in Bilbao on September 29, 1864. Although he comes of pure Basque stock, Unamuno’s mother-tongue was Castilian, a fact which precludes the supposition that the idiosyncrasies of his style are to be attributed to an early familiarity with the Basque speech. His father, who had spent most of his life in Mexico, died in 1870.Four years later Bilbao was besieged and bombarded by the Carlist troops, the first shell falling only a few houses away from that in which his family was living. The events of the siege naturally made a lively impression upon the mind of the ten-year-old boy. At the first sound of the horns blown to give warning of the renewal of the bombardment, the family took shelter with the neighbours in the cellars, from which the youngsters sallied forth to collect the still burning fragments of the shells. The schools were closed and the whole town became an extended playground, offering to the idle schoolboys the novel liberty of clambering about roofless churches and conducting miniature bombardments of ruined houses with projectiles gathered from the debris. This exciting holiday was terminated by the entry of the liberating troops on May 2, 1874. These personal experiences of Spain’s last civil war provided Unamuno with a background for his first novel,Paz en la Guerra.
The religious atmosphere of Unamuno’s home was that of a Catholicism whose traditions of simple and heart-felt piety bore a certain affinity to those of Anglo-Saxon Quakerism. The youthful Miguel was a member of the guild orCongregaciónof San Luis Gonzaga and on the feast of Corpus Christi used to walk in procession through the streets with lighted candle in his hand and the medal of the order suspended upon his breast. About the age of fourteen he passed through that phase of spiritual ferment which usually characterizes the entrance of the soul into puberty, a period of vague aspirations towards sanctity mingled with the romanticism engendered in a lively imagination by thereading of Ossian. This religiousSchwärmerei, however, was tempered by the course of philosophy prescribed by his study for his baccalaureate. Introduced through the reading of the Catalan philosopher Balmes to the works of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, he at once plunged into the vertigo of metaphysics and proceeded to elaborate and transcribe into a twopenny note-book a philosophical system of his own, “very symmetrical and bristling with formulas.”
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 otheron 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.
It was impossible for a man with so deep and intimate a love for his country to confine himself to the publication of general encyclicals from a professorialand not to step down into the stormy arena of practical politics. Without identifying himself with any one of the official political parties, Unamuno conducted a personal and independent campaign by means of newspaper articles and public addresses, frankly and fearlessly denouncing abuses and corruption wherever he discerned them, whether displayed in the acts of rulers or inherent in the governmental system of the country. Such outspoken criticism from one who held his appointment from the state savoured too much, to the government of the day, of insubordination and was reproved accordingly by his removal from the office of Rector of the University of Salamanca. Some time afterward, in virtue of two articles which he published in a Valencia newspaper, the ex-Rector was deemed to have contravened the law oflèse-majesté, for which offence he was formally condemned by the courts to a period of sixteen years’ imprisonment. The sentence, which was of course never intended to be carried out, was subsequently annulled by the royal grant of pardon.
Thecoup d’étatof September, 1923, by which General Primo de Rivera suspended the constitution and established the Military Directory, naturally aroused Unamuno’s vehement protestation. Liberty of speech, however, formed no part of the program of the new régime and the Dictator, dispensing with the customary civil processes of writ, trial and judgment, replied by an arbitrary decree of deportation. On Feb. 21, 1924, Unamuno received notice to prepare to proceed within twenty-four hours under escort to Fuerteventura, the most remote and barren of the CanaryIslands. It is possible that the authorities might have been willing to connive at the flight of their captive to the Portuguese frontier, distant only some eighty miles from Salamanca; but Unamuno refused to relieve them from any of the embarrassment which the consequences of their action might entail. He packed up the few necessaries for his journey, put a couple of books in his pocket—the Greek New Testament and Leopardi’s poems—and awaited the arrival of the escort.
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 régime his liberty of action would be too much circumscribed and therefore preferred to take up his residence temporarily in Paris.
I think that it was in the year 1912 when travelling in Spain that I chanced to buy a book entitledMi Religión y Otros Ensayosby Miguel de Unamuno. Both the book and its author were then unkown to me. Before I had read many pages I knew that I was listening to a voice that spoke with that accent of sincerity and intimacy which gives the assurance of immediate contact with a living man, a man of flesh and bone, a man who had suffered, despaired, hoped and struggled with an intensity that burned in every word. Next year was publishedDel Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida, that passionate record of the adventures of the spirit that takes its place with the self-revelations of St. Augustine, Pascal, Amiel and Kierkegaard. I resolved that if I could accomplish it this voice should be heard in the countries that speak the English tongue. The War intervened, and it was not until 1920 that I found myself in Salamanca with the typewritten sheets of the translation of “The Tragic Sense of Life” ready to be submitted to the author for revision.
I well remember how, on the afternoon after my arrival, I was sitting in a café 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 onsquared 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.
During the course of the next two months I had ample opportunity to observe the daily routine of Unamuno’s life at Salamanca. An early riser, he may be seen in the streets before nine o’clock on his way to the lecture-room. After the middaycomida, at which he usually abstains from both wine and meat, he is accustomed to take his coffee at the Circulo Salmantino with a group of friends whose thought and convictions are as widely varying as their occupations—university professors, students, doctors, magistrates, writers, poets and men of business. The quite unacademic conversation ranges over the whole gamut of human interests. While the talk is flowing freely or the argument being waged, Unamuno—who, by the way, is a non-smoker—may sometimes be seen folding square sheets of paper with deft fingers into complicated geometrical patterns which presently grow into astonishingly realistic shapesof animals. Before the party breaks up, his table is not infrequently covered with a menagerie of pigs, jumping frogs, vultures and other wildfowl, to the no small delight of the street urchins whose noses are flattened against the other side of the wide plate-glass window. Thisarte salmatino, as its inventor calls it, presents baffling constructional problems, the solutions of which are sometimes thought out upon abstract geometrical principles in the sleepless watches of the night.
When most of the members of thetertuliahave withdrawn either to take their afternoon siesta or resume their avocations, Unamuno sets out for a long walk into the country, accompanied in winter by the few who are willing to brave the icy winds that sweep over the treeless tableland from the snow-clad summits of the sierras. During the walk the conversation is continued without intermission, the party halting to form a circle round the speaker whenever a point arises that demands special emphasis or elucidation. As these points arise at frequent intervals, a spectacle that must often arrest the wondering gaze of the peasant hurrying on his mule along the high road to Salamanca on wintry afternoons, is that of a group of individuals muffled in greatcoats and waterproofs, with collars raised and hat-brims pulled down in a vain endeavour to protect tingling ears from the lashing flaws of rain and sleet, gathered round a robust, coatless figure, with double-breasted blue jacket thrown open to the blast, whose concentration upon the subject-matter of his discourse renders him apparently oblivious of the inclemency of the elements and the physical discomfort of his auditors. The point having been elucidated, the party struggleson again in the teeth of the gale, some of its weaker members perhaps hoping that no fresh dialectical crisis will arise until further exercise has restored the benumbed circulation.
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 Peña 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.
A minor outcome of this contact with the people, andwith thecharrosor peasants of the province of Salamanca in particular, has been the enrichment of his vocabulary by many of those pungent, expressive and sometimes beautiful words and locutions which have long since disappeared from literary Spanish but still abound in peasant speech. This racy idiom of the soil often gives a peculiar tang to Unamuno’s writing. When accused by the literary critic, as not infrequently happens, of sprinkling his prose with words unearthed from the dusty works of some sixteenth or seventeenth-century author, he will reply that the so-called archaisms, though possibly unfamiliar in literary coteries, still enjoy a vigorous life in the speech of the people.
It will no doubt have been already gathered that Unamuno, like all good Spaniards, delights in talk. Indeed, some of those who have observed how considerable a part of his leisure is spent in general conversation may have wondered how and when he finds time for the production of the large volume of his writing. The answer is that much of his thought is generated and shaped into form in the act of talking. He has a disrelish, amounting almost to a prejudice, for writing that has not the vibration and elasticity of living speech, the prose of men who are usually found to be non-talkers. “Ideas come with talking,” I have heard him say. “One must speak, one must have to put one’s thought into words, one must hear how the words sound spoken. Writing for oneself is not enough.” It is in the conversational encounter, in the face-to-face conflict of disputants, in the exertion to convince an opponent, to unravel a difficulty, to press home a personal conviction, that his mind is strung toits highest tension, seizes upon the aptest and keenest words with an instinctive sense of their effective values and wields them like sharp and flashing weapons. Returning to his study after a discussion at the Circulo Salmantino or an afternoon’s discourse on the wind-swept heights above the Tormes, he transcribes with the speed of dictation the substance of his argument or homily in phrases still vibrating with the passion of the spoken word. Hence his prose retains in a degree exceptional even in Spanish literature the qualities of animated talk—rapid, emphatic, exclamatory, elliptical, disjointed, charged with intonation and gesture. And this written talk, it must be noted, never develops into written oratory, for it is addressed in the first instance not to the general public but to the personal interlocutor; it is the continuation or recapitulation of talk with a friend, or the reply to the confessions of a correspondent, or sometimes the communing of the writer withalter ego.
There are times when the channel of written speech seems to afford too narrow an outlet for the flood of passion storming through it. Unamuno seems to be impatient of the mutism of the printed page, as if, like the written score of music, it were incomplete lacking embodiment in sound. The written symbols are an inadequate substitute for the bodily presence, incapable of conveying the conviction, the force, the sense of mass, which only the living organism with all its full-charged vitality can impart. It might even be conjectured that for Unamuno writing is after all only apis-aller—he would prefer to talk, or rather he would prefer to dispense with words altogether and impose himselfin some transcendental act of communion. Of one of Goya’s pictures, the tumultuousThird of Mayin the Prado, the Italian critic De Amicis says: “It is the last point which painting can reach before being transmuted into action; having passed this point, one throws away the brush and seizes the dagger.” A similar sense of an intolerable straining of the medium is sometimes felt in reading Unamuno. The texture of language is stretched to the breaking-point; words are contorted in an endeavour to force them beyond the limits of their capacity; grammar and syntax collapse before the rush of passionate utterance. It is the pressure and drive of a whole personality that seeks to translate itself into words and finds in the end that it is untranslatable.
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 withpolitical 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.”
To the suggestion sometimes expressed by his well-wishers that he should withdraw from the arena in order to devote himself more exclusively to poetry and philosophy, Unamuno would reply that this poetry and philosophy are simply the outcome of his intense, energetic and passionate living. If he had never known the dangers, the ardours, the hopes and despairs of battle, his poetry might have withered for lack of roots.Primum vivere, deinde philosopari—the philosopher must first live before he can philosophize. And the end of life, Unamuno has said, is living, not understanding. Nothing is more repugnant to his spirit than the conception of æsthetics embodied in the catch-phrase, “art for art’s sake.” The idea that letters can be separated from life and literature producedin vacuois inconceivable to one whose impulse to write springs directly from his zeal to affect and mould life. Unamuno provides yet another corroboration of Tchekov’s maxim that all great writers have axes to grind.
If the object of Unamuno’s political opponents in banishing him from the society of his fellows to the ocean-girt desert of Fuerteventura was to reduce his spirit to submission, they little knew the man they had to deal with. He has never overprized the amenitiesof civilization and it is probable that he would have felt much more in exile if he had been condemned to live in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Tenerife or Las Palmas. The Canaries have been identified with the Fortunate Isles of the ancient world, and Unamuno remarked humorously that Fuerteventura was indeed fortunate among islands in being one where there were no hotelsde luxe, no bull-fights, no cinemas, no football, no boy-scouts. But apart from its lack of the more futile expedients for killing time, there is something in the spirit and even in the structure of this stern and naked island that was in harmony with Unamuno’s temperament. It is, as he phrased it, not merelydesnudobutdescarnado, not merely without vesture but without flesh. Like a bleached skeleton in the sun, it reveals every articulation of its structure. In its landscape everything fugitive gives place to what is enduring and elemental; it bears the impress of eternity rather than of time. Living in this austere but serene ambience, between the mountains and the sea, Unamuno found a refreshment of mental and spiritual energy, the activity of his inner life was perhaps never more intense and what he wrote during his four months’ exile was quarried from those deeper strata of his spirit where thought and passion lie embedded in a single matrix.
In Puerto de Cabras, the cluster of low whitewashed houses that forms the principal port of the island, time flowed in a tranquil stream that was scarcely agitated by the weekly arrival of the steamer bringing the mail, provisions, water, and out-of-date newspapers from Las Palmas. For the safer custody of the exile, fiftyguardias civileshad been drafted to the island and stationed in couples at various points round the coast. Every letter which he wrote or received was first opened and censored by police officials. In other respects his liberty of movement within the island was not interfered with and he was free to visit the distant villages that are sparsely scattered like oases in the midst of the stone-strewn wilderness of extinct volcanoes. Unamuno occupied a room overlooking the sea in the principalfondaof the port. He usually rose before the bell of the little church on the other side of the wide cobbled street had rung for six o’clock Mass, and spent the morning working in his bedroom or composing a sonnet as he paced up and down the flat roof, bare-headed and stripped to the waist, in the sun. After a frugal lunch—the diet of Fuerteventura is of a Spartan simplicity!—he took a siesta during the heat of the afternoon and afterward strolled along the rock-bound shore or thecarreterathat leads into the interior of the island. Although the action can scarcely have come within the compass of their duties, it was not surprising to see the lounging soldiers spring to salute when their prisoner, with his native air of authority and command, passed before the barracks-gate. When the brief twilight fell and the camels, returning from browsing on the scanty scrub, padded with muffled footfall through the darkening street, Unamuno joined the circle of village notables who were wont to assemble nightly on a row of chairs ranged on the pavement in front of the general store. Then, until the tardy supper hour arrived, a flow of philosophy, philology, paradox, travel-lore and political wisdom fell upon theastonished ears of the shopkeepers and petty officials of the port. Fortunate islanders!
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 jettygleamed 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.
Of the two elements which appear to be combined in every philosophy, the impersonal, scientific investigation of the nature of reality and the personal affective reaction to the scheme of things thus envisaged, it is with the latter that Unamuno’s interest is overwhelmingly concerned. It may be that it is not so much this attitude that singularizes him as his candid avowal of it. At any rate, he himself appears to believe that the impersonal methods of philosophy merely provide a conceptional framework for the personalWeltanschauungof the philosopher. And the core of this inward affective problem must always be, for the human philosopher, the relation of man to the universe. It is this point where philosophy and religion meet in considering the problem of human destiny, that forms the burning focus of the main energies of Unamuno’s thought and passion.
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 mainground 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 tosustain 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 æons of agonized human effort, existing without any human or other consciousness left to appropriate it.
It may be said that in the contemplation of this vision the only rational attitude for the human spirit to adopt is that of resignation to mortality. But this counsel can only be given by those who are affectively insensitive, and in Unamuno the will to live and to survive are too imperious to submit to it unprotestingly. The note of passionate protest rings in his writings. He inscribes upon his page the challenge of Sénancour’sObermann: “L’homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est reservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice.” Life refuses to abdicate to reason; between the rationalistic and vitalistic attitude to existence there is an impassable gulf. His own personal solution is found in the inspiration and energy which he draws from this position of uncertainty and conflict. “I will not make peace between my heart and my head,” he cries; “rather let the one affirm what the other denies and the one deny what the other affirms, and I shall live by this contradiction.” His “Tragic Sense of Life,” which is the record of the encounter of his spirit with the problems centring round the salvation of man from death and annihilation, issues in the assertion that all virtue is based upon “uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable dogmatic foundation.” ConvertObermann’ssentence from its negative to a positive form—“if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an injustice”—and you get “the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.” A solution, perhaps, but a desperate one.
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.
It is this distrust of the tendencies of modern Western civilization that causes Unamuno to turn to the ancient, and—as he is willing to consider—African, tradition of his own country. No native reformer or foreign critic can have said harder things of his compatriots than Unamuno. His essays reverberate with the sound of the lash with which he chastises the besetting sins of the Spaniards of to-day, their servitude to the spirit of routine, their intellectual and spiritual inertia, their paralysing mutual suspicion and envy, their renunciation of the life of adventure and danger. But Unamuno distinguishes between the Spain of the passing generations and the Spain of the eternal tradition, between the agitations that give a changing form to the surface and the life that sleeps and dreams in the depths of subconsciousness. This dreaming, undying, subliminal Spain is the Spain of his love and of his faith. He appeals from Spaniards to Spain. He seeks to awaken this inner Spain to full consciousness of itself. And when it awakens it is possible that this Spain may be unable to find its expression in the terms of our current civilization. The culture in which the intellect and ideals of the advance-guard of the so-calledKulturvölkernaturally clothe themselves, becomes an alien and ill-fitting garment when forced upon the Iberian spirit. And perhaps the secret of this difference lies in the greater importance in the Spanish social structure of the part played by the concrete individual relatively to the instruments of culture. “Other peoples,” Unamuno says, “have left institutions, books—we have left souls.” His message to Spain might perhaps be resumed in Whitman’s words: “Produce great Persons: the rest follows.”
A cardinal tenet of Unamuno’s creed is the superlative value of the individual soul. It is precious because it is unique and irreplaceable: “There cannot be any other I.” In the whole world there is only one Juan López or John Smith; the particular ingredients, good, bad or indifferent, that have combined to form this unique individuality can never again reunite in precisely the same proportions to form another identical combination. This theory, or rather this sense, of the uniqueness of personality may serve as the basis for an ethic. “Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact—that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable—a practical truth.” The whole duty of man is to discover himself, to discover his own reality, to discover what is unique in himself, to bring it to the light, not to shrink from exposing it, to express it in action and to impose it upon the world. The courage of self-affirmation is the virtue which Unamuno exhorts his fellow-countrymen to achieve. He presents a symbol of it in his vision of the Tower of Monterrey that lifts itself into the wintry air above the brown roofs of hisbeloved Salamanca, definite in its clean-cut contours, sure in its poise and self-containment, serenely affirming its uniqueness and indestructibility. It says itself, and to say himself is the utmost that a man can say.
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.
It must be claimed for Unamuno that he is, in the truest sense of the word, a great humanist. He himself distinguishes between the true humanism, which he calls the humanism of man, and the humanism which is concerned rather with “the things of man”—in other words, with culture as it is generally understood. Towards the latter his attitude is tinctured with suspicion. For him there is an element of the inhumane in the cult of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and in the cult of science as a mere cataloguing of existence. Culture must have reference to character and perhaps its definition as “the best that is known and has been thought in the world” he would feel to be incomplete without the addition of “the best that has been felt and done.” But mere knowledge and classification of the movements of the human mind or the achievements of human energy do not necessarily of themselves touch the heart to finer issues. The most urgent need, at any rate as he sees it in his own country, is not so much for quickened intelligence as for reawakened capacity for feeling and enthusiasm. By itself sceptical enlightenment tends to paralyse action and the soil of a chilly intellectualism is not the most fertile for the burgeoning of that seed of faith from which all fruitful human endeavour must ultimately spring. Unamuno seeks to generate warmth of feeling as the necessary condition of high achievement. “Warmth, warmth, more warmth,” he cries, “for we die of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night but the frost that kills.” Culture, therefore, as he understands and counsels it, is not a dry light but an ardent flame and its purpose is to kindle “the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle, of intensest disquietude, of intensest despair.”
Unamuno has always protested passionately against any attempt to affix a label to him. If a definition of himself is demanded of him, he replies that he is “a man of contradiction and strife.” The contradictions of which he is the synthesis are those of the Catholic and the agnostic, the mystic and the realist, the vitalist and the rationalist, the contemplative and the man of action, the contradictions inherent in the man who finds consolation in despair and peace in conflict. But if he himself is not to be circumscribed within the narrow limits of a definition, perhaps the scope of his aim and achievement may be most succinctly resumed in that description which Giordano Bruno gave of himself,dormitantium animarum excubitor—an awakener of sleeping souls.
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.
Like all great expanses of earth, this tableland receives and irradiates heat more quickly than the sea and the coast-lands which the sea refreshes and tempers. Hence, when the sun scorches it, an extreme of heat, and as soon as the sun forsakes it, an extreme of cold; burning days of summer followed by cool fresh nights during which the lungs gratefully inhale the breeze from the land; freezing winter nights following hard upon days which the bright cold sun in its brief diurnal course has failed to warm. Winters long and hard and summers short and fiery have given birth to the saying, “nueve meses de invierno y tres de infierno”—nine months of winter and three months of hell. In the autumn, however, there is a serene and placid breathing-space. The sierras, shutting out the winds from the sea, help to make the winter colder and the summer hotter; but while they impede thepassage of the gentle low-trailing clouds they form no barrier to the violent cyclones which burst among their valleys. Thus long droughts are succeeded by torrential deluges.
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.
You may sometimes range over leagues and leagues of desert country without descrying anything save the illimitable plain with its patches of green corn or yellow stubble, here a sparsely extended array of oaks, marching in solemn and monotonous procession, clothed in their austere and perennial green, there a group of mournful pines, holding aloft their uniform crests. Now and again, fringing a bright river or half-dry stream, a few poplars, seeming intensely and vividly alive in the midst of the infinite solitude. As a rulethese poplars announce the presence of man: yonder on the plain lies some village, scorched by the sun, blasted by the frost, built of sun-baked bricks very often, its belfry silhouetted against the blue of the sky. Often the spinal ridge of the sierra can be seen in the distance, but if you approach it you must not look to find rounded bossy mountains, fresh with verdure and clothed with woods, with the yellow of the gorse and the carmine of the heather flecking the bracken. Here is nothing but a framework of bony fleshless rock, bristling with crags, sharp-cut hummocks nakedly displaying drought-cracked strata, covered at most with a scanty scrub, where flourish only the hardy thistle and the naked scented broom, the poorgenestra contenta dei desertiof Leopardi’s poem. Down in the plain the highway with its festoon of trees loses itself in the greyness of the earth, which kindles into an intense warm red when the sun sinks to rest.
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 ofan 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.
It is a landscape that awakens no voluptuous sensations ofjoie de vivre, that inspires no longings for ease and idleness. Here are no lush green meadows inviting indolent repose, no dells that beckon like nests.
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.
Within these towns and villages lives a breed of men of a dry, hard and sinewy constitution, burned bythe sun and inured by the cold, a sober, frugal breed, the product of a long process of natural selection by searching winter frosts and intermittent periods of scarcity, tempered to withstand the inclemency of the skies and the asperities of penury. The peasant who gave you a grave “Good day” as he passed by on his mule, huddled in his cloak, will receive you without overmuch courtesy, with a kind of restrained sobriety. He is collected in his movements, circumspect and deliberate in his conversation, with a gravity which gives him the air of a dethroned king. Such at any rate he appears when he is not cunningly ironical. This sly biting irony—socarronería, a racy word full of racy character—is the classical form of Castilian humour, a quiet and circumspect humour, sententious and phlegmatic, the humour of Sanson Carrasco inDon Quixoteand of Quevedo, he who wrote the discourses of Marcus Brutus.
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.