54 Modem Spanish Literature
with the idea of death. There is no literature in the world
that has occupied itself so much with death as the Spanish.
Outside the idea of Christianity, it is closely allied to the
Islamic certainty of mortality. You find this same idea of
Death in the biggest monument to death—the Escorial—
that magnificent building erected by Philip II to be at once
convent, church, palace, and mausoleum. The Spaniards
worship life with passion and death with passion, but above
all we meet this obsession of death. In life man is a king,
seated on a golden throne, wielding the sceptre of power
and majesty. He looks on Death as the terrible avenger,
coming, so to speak, to dethrone him. So you have this man
of flesh and bones, the king of creation, who has perforce
to perform the Dance of Death with the skeleton which is
to dethrone him. The Spaniard is obsessed by this thought
because he cannot submit to the idea of nonsurvival. He
longs always for corporeal immortality, and hence it is that
all through Spanish literature we feel as if death were ever
present behind the writer’s desk. You discover that this idea
is the mainspring of the greatest writer of modern Spain—
Unamuno. In spite of his ceaseless soul-struggles he is
essentially Catholic, because he recognizes the reality of the
spirit only in its fleshy embodiment. And that reminds me of
a story he once told me. His little son sat in a café with him
one day, and he found him scribbling on the table ceaselessly :
“I am made of flesh, I am made of flesh,” Soy de carné, and
Unamuno quotes this example of the survival of the flesh.
Another example I should like to mention from Don Quixote
and Don Juan—every dream of theirs runs to fleshly reality
and every reality embodies the super-earthly spirit.
I now desire to say a few words about Cervantes because
he was to my mind the great symbol of this idea of nobleza;
he was a noble and a soldier, and thus in line with the Cid.