Unamuno in England: Four Unpublished Articles (1909) Part I

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Notes

Translated from a series of articles written in Spanish by Don Miguel de Unamuno, Rector of the University of Salamanca, for The Englishwoman.

²This article was written before Francisco Ferrer was sentenced to be shot for sedition at Barcelona.

³A second article, to appear in the next issue of BHS (October 1991), will give the text, with a commentary, of the third and fourth essays published in The Englishwoman.

1. These articles are not entirely unknown. Emilio Salcedo refers to them in his Vida de Don Miguel (Salamanca: Anaya, 1964), at p. 156. Four volumes of The Englishwoman (1909–1910) are found in Unamuno's library; see Mario J. Valdés and María Elena de Valdés, An Unamuno Sourcebook (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1973), at p. 78, but the articles are not cited in Pelayo M. Fernández's Bibliografía crítica de Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1976).

2. The best-known of this editorial board are Frances Balfour, a non-militant suffragist married to Eustace, the younger brother of Arthur Balfour (whose book, Foundations of Belief [1958] is referred to in Del sentimiento trágico) and the actress and playwright Cecily Hamilton, author of Marriage as a Trade (1909).

3. It is worth noting that in her excellent study La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea (1868–1974) (2nd ed., Madrid: Akal, 1986), 192–94, Geraldine Scanlon unexpectedly finds Unamuno's attitudes relatively sympathetic to women.

4. 1884–1953. Continuing his work as an art historian, he translated M. B. Cossío's El Greco (1915) and was joint author, with Hayford Pierce, of Three Byzantine Works of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1941). As a diplomatic historian, he edited the Calendar of Letters, Dispatches and State Papers between England and Spain, from 1862 (vol. 9, with M. A. S. Hume, and vol.10) and wrote a book on Charles V: El Emperador Carlos V. Traducción de Juan Ríos Sarmiento (Barcelona: Juventud, 1959). Between the wars, he was the League of Nations’ representative in Hungary. It is curious that he should have precisely the same name as a well-known early nineteenth-century American lawyer and playwright.

5. Strangely enough, in view of his friendship with Unamuno, Tyler took an altogether different view of France, which he praised unstintingly, speaking of its overpowering influence in Spain.

6. London: Grant Richards, 1909; it should be noted that the publisher Grant Richards has the same name as the Editor of the review.

7. Miguel de Unamuno–Joan Maragall, Epistolario y escritos complementarios (Madrid: Seminarios y Ediciones, 1971), Unamuno's letter of 15 February 1907 (59–60).

8. See Maragall's letters of 7 March: ‘Ya tenemos aquí al joven Tyler. ¡Qué simpático y qué interesante es!’ (63) and Christmas 1907: ‘¡Cuánto le agradezco la amistad que me procuró V., de Tyler! Yo le he cobrado una gran afición, y creo que es mutua’ (75).

9. Perry reached the North Pole on 6 April 1909 and returned to the United States in September, to discover that Cook had claimed to have achieved the feat a year before.

10. See Joan Connelly Ullman's thorough study The Tragic Week. A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1795–1912 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1962).

11. It is unfortunate that his name should be distorted by a misprint in the text.

12. As Ortega declared, with some exaggeration, in an unpublished lecture on the occasion of Unamuno's dismissal from the Rectorship at Salamanca in 1914, ‘Los que seguís con alguna atención el desenvolvimiento de la ideología española no ignoráis que soy enemigo extremo del señor Unamuno y que él me devuelve con creces esta hostilidad intelectual. Desde hace años vivimos en una incesante contienda, áspera en ocasiones y no creo que el ex rector de Salamanca haya escrito contra nadie mayor número de párrafos que contra mí’ (Cuadernos de la Cátedra Miguel de Unamuno, XIV–XV [1964–65], at p. 6). See Emilio Salcedo, ‘Unamuno y Ortega: diálogo entre dos españoles’, Cuadernos de la Cátedra Miguel de Unamuno, VII (1956), 97–130; Antonio Regalado García, El siervo y el señor (Madrid: Gredos, 1968), 95–100 and my ‘Unamuno y “Los jóvenes” en 1904, in Niebla y Soledad: aspectos de Unamuno y Machado (Madrid: Gredos, 1971), 52–59.

13. See Juan Marichal, ‘La “generación de los intelectuales” y la política (1909–1914)’ in La crisis de fin de siglo: ideología y literatura (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975) and his ‘Unamuno y la recuperación liberal (1900–1914)’, in Spanish Thought and Letters, ed. Germán Bleiberg and E. Inman Fox (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt U.P., 1966), 331–4, in which Marichal deals with Unamuno's equation of liberalism and state intervention, but does not touch on his confrontation with Ortega. Maeztu was also closely involved; see E. Inman Fox, ‘Sobre el liberalismo socialista (cartas inéditas de Maeztu a Ortega (1908–1915)’, first published in Homenaje a Juan López-Morillas. De Cadalso a Aleixandre: estudios sobre literatura e historia intelectual españolas, ed. José Amor y Vázquez and A. David Kossoff (Madrid: Castalia, 1982), 221–36, and subsequently incorporated and extended in Ideologia y política en las letras de fin de siglo (1898) (Madrid: Colección Austral, Espasa-Calpe, 1988), 334–37.

14. ‘Unamuno y la política: Turrieburnismo y compromiso’, op. cit., 238–45. A slightly different version of this essay appeared in Volumen-Homenaje a Miguel de Unamuno, ed. D. Gómez Molleda (Salamanca: Casa Museo Unamuno, 1986), 157–74.

15. Published in La España moderna, 216 (December 1906); Obras completas, ed. Manuel García Blanco (Madrid: Escelicer, 1968), III, 925–38.

16. Revisión de Unamuno (Madrid: Tecnos, 1968), 108–11. Unamuno's volte-face was not dissimilar to his earlier distinctive separation from the radical left at the time of the Montjuïc trials. See my ‘Unamuno en 1899: el proceso de Montjuich y los anarquistas’, op. cit., 17–44.

17. ‘Es un joven extraordinariamente simpático, muy culto y muy inteligente, muy superior, desde luego, a su padre . . .’, Cartas inéditas de Miguel de Unamuno, ed. Sergio Fernández Larrain (Santiago de Chile: Zigzag, 1965), p. 346. See my ‘Unamuno y “Los jóvenes” en 1904’, op. cit., 58.

18. ‘Sobre los estudios clásicos’ (28 September 1907), Obras completas (3rd ed., Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1953), I, 63–67.

19. ‘Renán: La libación’, op. cit., p. 461.

20. ‘Colección de farsantes’, published in ABC (12 September 1909). For a detailed account, see Salcedo, who emphasizes, rightly, that ‘no hubo ruptura’ between the two writers, op. cit., 154–57.

21. Fox, Volumen-Homenaje, 168–69, gives the full text.

22. ‘Unamuno y Europa, fábula’, published in Los lunes de El Imparcial (27 September 1909), op. cit., I, 128–32. Ortega's own formulation was ‘Sin Descartes nos quedaríamos a oscuras y nada veríamos, y menos que nada el pardo sayal de Juan de Yepes’, at p. 129.

23. Op. cit., VII, 288, 302.

24. Unamuno y los protestantes liberales (1912). Sobre las fuentes de ‘Del sentimiento trágico de la vida’ (Madrid: Gredos, 1985), p. 208.

25. Enten-Eller occupies the first two volumes of Kierkegaard's collected works, Soeren Kierkegaards Samlede Vaerker, ed. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske, 1901–1906). See Jesús-Antonio Collado, Kierkegaard y Unamuno (Madrid: Gredos, 1962), 543–44. Unamuno acquired the volumes as they appeared. See Valdés, op. cit., at p. xx.

26. For this influence, see Ruth House Webber, ‘Kierkegaard and the Elaboration of Unamuno's Niebla’, Hispanic Review, XXXII (1964), 118–34; my ‘The Structure of Unamuno's Niebla’, Spanish Thought and Letters . . ., 395–406; and Gemma Robert's thorough and perspicacious re-examination of the problem, ‘Los tres estudios de la dialéctica kierkegaardiana en Niebla’, in Unamuno: afinidades y coincidencias kierkegaardianas (Boulder, Col.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1986), 25–77.

27. Hernán Benítez, El drama religioso de Miguel de Unamuno y Cartas a Jiménez Ilundain (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Publicaciones de la Universidad, 1949), 430–31.

28. Quoted in Salcedo, op. cit., at p. 145. See also Regalado, op. cit., 89–90, and Fox, Volumen-Homenaje, p. 170.

29. Chronicled by Josep Benet in Maragall i la Setmana Tràgica (Barcelona: Institut d'Estudis Catalans, 1963).

30. This attitude anticipates ‘La fe pascaliana’, incorporated many years later into La agonía del cristianismo, Obras completas, VI, 344–52, in which Unamuno seeks a Basque imprint (Saint-Cyran, Loyola) in Pascal.

31. See, for example, his remarks in an open letter to Antonio Machado, in my ‘Unamuno y Antonio Machado’, op. cit., 291–92.

32. For example, ‘Sarta sin cuerda’, (February 1907), Obras completas, VII, 1298–1302, and the numerous expressions of frustration and despair in the correspondence with Maragall.