Tragic Sense of Life | Page 5

his masterpiece. The
conflict is here seen as reflected in the person of the author. The book
opens by a definition of the Spanish man, the "man of flesh and bones,"
illustrated by the consideration of the real living men who stood behind
the bookish figures of great philosophers and consciously or
unconsciously shaped and misshaped their doctrines in order to satisfy
their own vital yearnings. This is followed by the statement of the will
to live or hunger for immortality, in the course of which the usual
subterfuges with which this all-important issue is evaded in philosophy,
theology, or mystic literature, are exposed and the real, concrete, "flesh
and bones" character of the immortality which men desire is reaffirmed.
The Catholic position is then explained as the vital attitude in the
matter, summed up in Tertullian's Credo quia absurdum, and this is
opposed to the critical attitude which denies the possibility of
individual survival in the sense previously defined. Thus Unamuno
leads us to his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher than
scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith, exacting
anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be apprehended by the
logical mind, remains incommunicable. From the bottom of this abyss
Unamuno builds up his theory of life. But is it a theory? Unamuno does
not claim for it such an intellectual dignity. He knows too well that in
the constructive part of his book his vital self takes the leading part and
repeatedly warns his reader of the fact, lest critical objections might be
raised against this or that assumption or self-contradiction. It is on the
survival of his will to live, after all the onslaughts of his critical
intellect, that he finds the basis for his belief--or rather for his effort to
believe. Self-compassion leads to self-love, and this self-love, founded
as it is on a universal conflict, widens into love of all that lives and
therefore wants to survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our
own hunger for immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the
Universe--that is, to create God.
Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the transcendental
pessimism of his inner contradiction, extracts an everyday optimism

founded on love. His symbol of this attitude is the figure of Don
Quixote, of whom he truly says that his creed "can hardly be called
idealism, since he did not fight for ideas: it was spiritualism, for he
fought for the spirit." Thus he opposes a synthetical to an analytical
attitude; a religious to an ethico-scientific ideal; Spain, his Spain--_i.e._,
the spiritual manifestation of the Spanish race--to Europe, his
Europe--_i.e._, the intellectual manifestation of the white race, which
he sees in Franco-Germany; and heroic love, even when comically
unpractical, to culture, which, in this book, written in 1912, is already
prophetically spelt Kultura.
This courageous work is written in a style which is the man--for
Buffon's saying, seldom true, applies here to the letter. It is written as
Carlyle wrote, not merely with the brain, but with the whole soul and
the whole body of the man, and in such a vivid manner that one can
without much effort imagine the eager gesticulation which now and
then underlines, interprets, despises, argues, denies, and above all
asserts. In his absolute subservience to the matter in hand this manner
of writing has its great precedent in Santa Teresa. The differences, and
they are considerable, are not of art, absent in either case, but of nature.
They are such deep and obvious differences as obtain between the
devout, ignorant, graceful nun of sixteenth-century Avila and the
free-thinking, learned, wilful professor of twentieth-century Salamanca.
In the one case, as in the other, the language is the most direct and
simple required. It is also the least literary and the most popular.
Unamuno, who lives in close touch with the people, has enriched the
Spanish literary language by returning to it many a popular term. His
vocabulary abounds in racy words of the soil, and his writings gain
from them an almost peasant-like pith and directness which suits his
own Basque primitive nature. His expression occurs simultaneously
with the thoughts and feelings to be expressed, the flow of which, but
loosely controlled by the critical mind, often breaks through the meshes
of established diction and gives birth to new forms created under the
pressure of the moment. This feature Unamuno has also in common
with Santa Teresa, but what in the Saint was a self-ignorant charm
becomes in Unamuno a deliberate manner inspired, partly by an acute
sense of the symbolical and psychological value of word-connections,

partly by that genuine need for expansion of the language which all true
original thinkers or "feelers" must experience, but partly also by an
acquired habit of