Tragic Sense of Life | Page 6

juggling with words which is but natural in a
philologist endowed with a vigorous imagination. Unamuno revels in
words. He positively enjoys stretching them beyond their usual
meaning, twisting them, composing, opposing, and transposing them in
all sorts of possible ways. This game--not wholly unrewarded now and
then by striking intellectual finds--seems to be the only relaxation
which he allows his usually austere mind. It certainly is the only light
feature of a style the merit of which lies in its being the close-fitting
expression of a great mind earnestly concentrated on a great idea.
* * * * *
The earnestness, the intensity, and the oneness of his predominant
passion are the main cause of the strength of Unamuno's philosophic
work. They remain his main asset, yet become also the principal cause
of his weakness, as a creative artist. Great art can only flourish in the
temperate zone of the passions, on the return journey from the torrid.
Unamuno, as a creator, has none of the failings of those artists who
have never felt deeply. But he does show the limitations of those artists
who cannot cool down. And the most striking of them is that at bottom
he is seldom able to put himself in a purely esthetical mood. In this, as
in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles
Wordsworth--whom, by the way, he is one of the few Spaniards to read
and appreciate.[1] Like him, Unamuno is an essentially purposeful and
utilitarian mind. Of the two qualities which the work of art requires for
its inception--earnestness and detachment--both Unamuno and
Wordsworth possess the first; both are deficient in the second. Their
interest in their respective leading thought--survival in the first, virtue
in the second--is too direct, too pressing, to allow them the "distance"
necessary for artistic work. Both are urged to work by a lofty
utilitarianism--the search for God through the individual soul in
Unamuno, the search for God through the social soul in
Wordsworth--so that their thoughts and sensations are polarized and
their spirit loses that impartial transparence for nature's lights without
which no great art is possible. Once suggested, this parallel is too rich

in sidelights to be lightly dropped. This single-mindedness which
distinguishes them explains that both should have consciously or
unconsciously chosen a life of semi-seclusion, for Unamuno lives in
Salamanca very much as Wordsworth lived in the Lake District--
in a still retreat Sheltered, but not to social duties lost,
hence in both a certain proclivity towards ploughing a solitary furrow
and becoming self-centred. There are no doubt important differences.
The Englishman's sense of nature is both keener and more concrete;
while the Spaniard's knowledge of human nature is not barred by the
subtle inhibitions and innate limitations which tend to blind its more
unpleasant aspects to the eye of the Englishman. There is more courage
and passion in the Spaniard; more harmony and goodwill in the
Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like light. For
Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay, a means for conveying a
lesson in forcible and easily remembered terms to those who are in
need of improvement. For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds
that a novel is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man's passion, the
overflow of the heart which cannot help itself and lets go. And it may
be that the essential difference between the two is to be found in this
difference between their respective purposes: Unamuno's purpose is
more intimately personal and individual; Wordsworth's is more social
and objective. Thus both miss the temperate zone, where emotion takes
shape into the moulds of art; but while Wordsworth is driven by his
ideal of social service this side of it, into the cold light of both moral
and intellectual self-control, Unamuno remains beyond, where the
molten metal is too near the fire of passion, and cannot cool down into
shape.
Unamuno is therefore not unlike Wordsworth in the insufficiency of his
sense of form. We have just seen the essential cause of this
insufficiency to lie in the nonesthetical attitude of his mind, and we
have tried to show one of the roots of such an attitude in the very
loftiness and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others, for living
nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched. It cannot be doubted that
a certain refractoriness to form is a typical feature of the Basque

character. The sense of form is closely in sympathy with the feminine
element in human nature, and the Basque race is strongly masculine.
The predominance of the masculine element--strength without grace--is
as typical of Unamuno as it is of Wordsworth. The literary gifts which
might for the sake of synthesis be symbolized in a smile are absent in
both.