Tragic Sense of Life | Page 2

Welsh, it is surely this ancient Basque
people, whose greatest contemporary figure is perhaps Don Miguel de
Unamuno. I am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it
may be worth, though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of
the inner, untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and
tombfuls of undecipherable papers.
This reminiscence, moreover, which springs up into the light of my
memory every time I think of Don Miguel de Unamuno, has to my
mind a further value in that in it the image of Don Miguel does not
appear as evoked by one man, but by many, though many of one
species, many who in depth are but one man, one type, the Welsh
divine. Now, this unity underlying a multiplicity, these many faces,
moods, and movements, traceable to one only type, I find deeply
connected in my mind with Unamuno's person and with what he
signifies in Spanish life and letters. And when I further delve into my
impression, I first realize an undoubtedly physical relation between the
many-one Welsh divines and the many-one Unamuno. A tall,
broad-shouldered, bony man, with high cheeks, a beak-like nose,
pointed grey beard, and a complexion the colour of the red hematites on
which Bilbao, his native town, is built, and which Bilbao ruthlessly
plucks from its very body to exchange for gold in the markets of
England--and in the deep sockets under the high aggressive forehead
prolonged by short iron-grey hair, two eyes like gimlets eagerly
watching the world through spectacles which seem to be purposely
pointed at the object like microscopes; a fighting expression, but of
noble fighting, above the prizes of the passing world, the contempt for
which is shown in a peculiar attire whose blackness invades even that
little triangle of white which worldly men leave on their breast for the
necktie of frivolity and the decorations of vanity, and, blinding it,

leaves but the thinnest rim of white collar to emphasize, rather than
relieve, the priestly effect of the whole. Such is Don Miguel de
Unamuno.
Such is, rather, his photograph. For Unamuno himself is ever changing.
A talker, as all good Spaniards are nowadays, but a talker in earnest and
with his heart in it, he is varied, like the subjects of his conversation,
and, still more, like the passions which they awake in him. And here I
find an unsought reason in intellectual support of that intuitional
observation which I noted down in starting--that Unamuno resembles
the Welsh in that he is not ashamed of showing his passions--a thing
which he has often to do, for he is very much alive and feels therefore
plenty of them. But a word of caution may here be necessary, since that
term, "passion," having been diminished--that is, made meaner--by the
world, an erroneous impression might be conveyed by what precedes,
of the life and ways of Unamuno. So that it may not be superfluous to
say that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek in the
University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who left behind the
reputation of being a strong ruler; a father of a numerous family, and a
man who has sung the quiet and deep joys of married life with a
restraint, a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to match in
any literature. Yet a passionate man--or, as he would perhaps prefer to
say, therefore a passionate man. But in a major, not in a minor key; of
strong, not of weak passions.
The difference between the two lies perhaps in that the man with strong
passions lives them, while the man with weak passions is lived by them,
so that while weak passions paralyze the will, strong passions urge man
to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake,
which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the
mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his time.
But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book will
realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the stock-in-trade of
every intellectual worker--the Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Italian
cultures--but there is hardly anything worth reading in Europe and
America which he has not read, and, but for the Slav languages, in the
original. Though never out of Spain, and seldom out of Salamanca, he

has succeeded in establishing direct connections with most of the
intellectual leaders of the world, and in gathering an astonishingly
accurate knowledge of the spirit and literature of foreign peoples. It
was in his library at Salamanca that he once explained to an
Englishman the meaning of a particular Scotticism in Robert Burns;
and it was there that he congratulated another Englishman