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.