Essays and Soliloquies
9781465680648
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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 or Congregación of 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 the reading 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.”
