Miguel de Unamuno is to-day the greatest literary figure of Spain.  Baroja may surpass him in variety of external experience, Azorin in delicate art, Ortega y Gasset in philosophical subtlety, Ayala in intellectual elegance, Valle Inclan in rhythmical grace.  Even in vitality he may have to yield the first place to that over-whelming athlete of literature, Blasco Ibanez.  But Unamuno is head and shoulders above them all in the highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served all through his life his unattainable Dulcinea.  Then there is another and most important reason which explains his position as first, princeps, of Spanish letters, and it is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to bear, incarnates the spirit of modern Spain.  His eternal conflict between faith and reason, between life and thought, between spirit and intellect, between heaven and civilization, is the conflict of Spain herself.  A border country, like Russia, in which East and West mix their spiritual waters, Spain wavers between two life-philosophies and cannot rest.  In Russia, this conflict emerges in literature during the nineteenth century, when Dostoievsky and Tolstoy stand for the East while Turgeniev becomes the West’s advocate.  In Spain, a country less articulate, and, moreover, a country in which the blending of East and West is more intimate, for both found a common solvent in centuries of Latin civilization, the conflict is less clear, less on the surface.  To-day Ortega y Gasset is our Turgeniev—­not without mixture.  Unamuno is our Dostoievsky, but painfully aware of the strength of the other side within him, and full of misgivings.  Nor is it sure that when we speak of East in this connection we really mean East.  There is a third country in Europe in which the “Eastern” view is as forcibly put and as deeply understood as the “Western,” a third border country—­England.  England, particularly in those of her racial elements conventionally named Celtic, is closely in sympathy with the “East.”  Ireland is almost purely “Eastern” in this respect.  That is perhaps why Unamuno feels so strong an attraction for the English language and its literature, and why, even to this day, he follows so closely the movements of English thought.[4] For his own nature, of a human being astride two enemy ideals, draws him instinctively towards minds equally placed in opposition, yet a co-operating opposition, to progress.  Thus Unamuno, whose literary qualities and defects make him a genuine representative of the more masculine variety of the Spanish genius, becomes in his spiritual life the true living symbol of his country and his time.  And that he is great enough to bear this incarnation is a sufficient measure of his greatness.

S. DE MADARIAGA.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] In what follows, I confess to refer not so much to the generally admitted opinion on Wordsworth as to my own views on him and his poetry, which I tried to explain in my essay:  “The Case of Wordsworth” (Shelley and Calderon, and other Essays, Constable and Co., 1920).