Salvador de Madariaga, Introduction: Unamuno Re-read, in: Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (Princeton University Press, 1972), tr. Anthony Kerrigan, pp. xli-xlv:
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 æsthetical mood. In this, as in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles Wordsworth—and was, by the way, one of the few Spaniards to read and appreciate him. 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 to 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 lived 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 toward plowing a solitary furrow and becoming self-centered. 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 good will 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 molds 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 non-æsthetical 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 pre-dominance 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. There is as little humor in the one as in the other. Humor, however, sometimes occurs in Unamuno, but only in his ill-humored moments, and then with a curious bite of its own which adds an unconscious element to its comic effect. Grace only visits them in moments of inspiration, and then it is of a noble character, enhanced as it is by the ever-present gift of strength. And as for the sense for rhythm and music, both Unamuno and Wordsworth seem to be limited to the most vigorous and masculine gaits. This feature is particularly pronounced in Unamuno, for while Wordsworth is painstaking, all-observant, and too good a “teacher” to underestimate the importance of pleasure in man’s progress, Unamuno knows no compromise. His aim is not to please but to strike, and he deliberately seeks the naked, the forceful, even the brutal word for truth. There is in him, however, a cause of formlessness from which Wordsworth is free—namely, an eagerness for sincerity and veracity which brushes aside all preparation, ordering or planning of ideas as suspect of “dishing up” intellectual trickery, and juggling with spontaneous truths.
Setting Unamuno next to Wordsworth has shown them both as typical spirits of their respective nations. A similar effect would be obtained by comparing Unamuno with Valéry, for both might well stand as, again, typical spirits of their respective nations. Valéry was above all an intellect, a shape-giving, feminine spirit. Unamuno was a nothing-less-than-whole-man, a seed-providing, masculine spirit, with all that non-intellectual, vital sap which goes into a work, even into a work of “mere” thought, all the life-element without which, for Unamuno, a work would be worthless, all that which would be brushed aside by Valéry as mere dross, a muddying of the pure waters of the intellect; while the perfection of form, consciously sought and painfully attained by the Frenchman—a perfection, by the way, utterly beyond the powers of Unamuno unless he struck it by chance—would have been for the Spaniard mere vanity and waste. Finish for the Frenchman, finicking for the Spaniard.
Passionate versus dispassionate; a man living from his roots up, giving forth his “works” as a chestnut tree its “candles,” versus a goldsmith patiently chiseling his jewels; Unamuno versus Valéry symbolizes the secular tension between the spirit of Spain and the spirit of France, between fullness and perfection, substance and shape, power and care, hunger and fear, a beginning and an end.
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