The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [65]
The following year, their father as well as an older brother died, and Sabino drifted into a deep depression from which he emerged with an intense interest in the study of Euskera. He wanted to write a book on Euskera grammar, Elemental Grammar for Vizcayan Euskera, which could be used to teach the language. He also became convinced that Basques needed to study “the glory of their past in order to understand their current degradation.”
But, to please his mother, he studied law in Barcelona. As soon as she died, in 1888, he left law school and returned to the family estate in Vizcaya. That year a professorship of Euskera was created at the Instituto Vizcaíno, and Sabino applied. The winning candidate was Resurrección María Azkue. In second place, was Miguel de Unamuno. Sabino Arana had not attracted a single vote.
FOR TWO MEN who are almost perfect opposites, Sabino Arana y Goiri and Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo had a great deal in common. Both were deeply religious, and both saw the loss of the Fueros, the cataclysm that darkened their childhood, as the great tragedy of their times. Like Arana, Unamuno was devoted to issues of the Basque language and identity. His first book, his university thesis, was Critique on the Issue of the Origin and Prehistory of the Basque Race. His early dream, never realized, was to write a twenty-volume history of the Basque people. Both men were born in Vizcaya, Unamuno in Bilbao in 1864 and Arana the following year in a nearby town. The town and the city, Carlism and Liberalism. But in the beginning they did not seem so different. Perhaps their clash was heightened by the fact that neither man was much given to humility.
When older, Unamuno said that in his youth he had been a “staunch nationalist.” He used the Euskera word, bizkaitarra, that Arana had given to his journal, the first Basque nationalist publication. But it was clear even in his university thesis at age twenty that Unamuno was not a bizkaitarra. He was too honest an intellectual to be a true crusader. He was a contrapelo, someone who liked to comb his hair against the natural flow. In his Critique, he attempted to expose the romantic half-truths, the preposterous myths about Basque origin. Later he would write an essay titled Ideocracia about the tyranny of ideas. He declared himself an “ideophobe” who never wanted to see his thoughts turned into a movement.
Sabino Arana did not suffer from this fear of ideas. The tyranny of ideas was to be his kingdom. He did not want to expose myths; he wanted to create them. While Miguel de Unamuno is remembered as one of the greatest intellectuals Spain has ever produced, Sabino Arana was a fanatic, perhaps a lunatic, certainly a racist, and a man who spent his life in a hotheaded fury, dying young and absurdly. During a half century Unamuno produced a large body of work, including novels, poetry, and essays; Arana’s few writings are seldom read, and he is rarely spoken of with fondness even by his supporters. Yet it is Arana, not Unamuno, who has had the great impact on history. That is partly because Arana, unlike Unamuno, did want to start a movement.
Sabino Arana. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)
The more Unamuno reflected, the more he turned against Basque nationalism, which he called, in his first novel, Paz en La Guerra, “exclusivist regionalism, blind to all broader visions.” Typical of middle-class Bilbao, he became a Liberal, and remained one even after that movement had become, by his own admission, irrelevant. He was always proud of his Basqueness, but he concluded that Basques were simply an interesting and valuable element in the greater quilt that was Spain. He regarded Euskera as an inferior language to Spanish, an oral language of peasants, unsuitable for literature, and claimed that agglutinating languages were not capable of articulating sophisticated ideas.
Contemporary writers have proven Unamuno wrong about Euskera. He failed to see how the Basque Renaissance could change the language.