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Updated: May 29, 2025
Political individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he so energetically condemns as pedantic that is, inhuman. His opposition of the individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to a no less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish about Unamuno.
And here I find an unsought reason in intellectual support of that intuitional observation which I noted down in starting that Unamuno resembles the Welsh in that he is not ashamed of showing his passions a thing which he has often to do, for he is very much alive and feels therefore plenty of them.
Further still, in most if not all of his main characters, we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno himself, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after. Here is, for instance, Abel Sánchez, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase of the story of Cain.
He is solely concerned with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of his life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno, however, can and does answer the charge. We can only know and feel humanity in the one human being which we have at hand.
Unamuno despises inventors, but in this case it is his misfortune. It is far easier for a nation which is destitute of a tradition of culture to improvise an histologist or a physicist, than a philosopher or a real thinker. Ortega y Gasset, the only approach to a philosopher whom I have ever known, is one of the few Spaniards whom it is interesting to hear talk.
So that it may not be superfluous to say that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek in the University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who left behind the reputation of being a strong ruler; a father of a numerous family, and a man who has sung the quiet and deep joys of married life with a restraint, a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to match in any literature.
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. Like him, Unamuno is an essentially purposeful and utilitarian mind.
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.
It is by penetrating deep into ourselves that we find our brothers in us branches of the same trunk which can only touch each other by seeking their common origin. This searching within, Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a fearlessness which cannot be excelled.
Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled A cloud as black as the black wings of Luzbel While Love shines naked within Thy naked breast? The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this lofty level throughout, and if he had written nothing else Unamuno would still remain as having given to Spanish letters the noblest and most sustained lyrical flight in the language.
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