above all asserts.  In his absolute subservience to the matter in hand this manner of writing has its great precedent in Santa Teresa.  The differences, and they are considerable, are not of art, absent in either case, but of nature.  They are such deep and obvious differences as obtain between the devout, ignorant, graceful nun of sixteenth-century Avila and the free-thinking, learned, wilful professor of twentieth-century Salamanca.  In the one case, as in the other, the language is the most direct and simple required.  It is also the least literary and the most popular.  Unamuno, who lives in close touch with the people, has enriched the Spanish literary language by returning to it many a popular term.  His vocabulary abounds in racy words of the soil, and his writings gain from them an almost peasant-like pith and directness which suits his own Basque primitive nature.  His expression occurs simultaneously with the thoughts and feelings to be expressed, the flow of which, but loosely controlled by the critical mind, often breaks through the meshes of established diction and gives birth to new forms created under the pressure of the moment.  This feature Unamuno has also in common with Santa Teresa, but what in the Saint was a self-ignorant charm becomes in Unamuno a deliberate manner inspired, partly by an acute sense of the symbolical and psychological value of word-connections, partly by that genuine need for expansion of the language which all true original thinkers or “feelers” must experience, but partly also by an acquired habit of juggling with words which is but natural in a philologist endowed with a vigorous imagination.  Unamuno revels in words.  He positively enjoys stretching them beyond their usual meaning, twisting them, composing, opposing, and transposing them in all sorts of possible ways.  This game—­not wholly unrewarded now and then by striking intellectual finds—­seems to be the only relaxation which he allows his usually austere mind.  It certainly is the only light feature of a style the merit of which lies in its being the close-fitting expression of a great mind earnestly concentrated on a great idea.

* * * * *

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 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.[1] Like him, Unamuno is an essentially