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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.
Nowhere will the reader find the inner contradictions of a modern human being, who is at the same time healthy and capable of thought set down with a greater respect for truth. Here the uncompromising tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes never turn away from nature, however unwelcome the sight, is strengthened by that passion for life which burns in Unamuno.
So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe that is, to create God. Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the transcendental pessimism of his inner contradiction, extracts an everyday optimism founded on love.
Whenever Unamuno writes he decries Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and then promptly eulogizes the mighty General Anibal Perez and the great poet Diocleciano Sanchez, who hail from the pampas. To these fellows, such praise seems grudging enough. Salvador Rueda himself must appear tame to these hide-stretchers. I have always been a liberal radical, an individualist and an anarchist.
The novel is often nowadays considered as a document, a "slice of life," a piece of information, a literary photograph representing places and people which purse or time prevents us from seeing with our own eyes. It is obvious, given what we now know of him, that such a view of the novel cannot appeal to Unamuno. He is a utilitarian, but not of worldly utilities.
But, on the other hand, History, the process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man, each individual. Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de Unamuno. The individual is the end of the Universe. And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end of the Universe.
"My cat," says Unamuno, who takes this view in his new book Del sentimiento tragico de la vida, "never laughs or cries; he is always reasoning." November 22. I note that a fine scholar remarks with a smile that the direct simplicity of the Greeks hardly suits our modern taste for obscurity. Yet there is obscurity and obscurity.
It was Unamuno himself who once said that the Basque is the alkaloid of the Spaniard. The saying is true, so far as it goes. But it would be more accurate to say "one of the two alkaloids."
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