A knight-errant of the
spirit, as he himself calls the Spanish mystics, he starts for his
adventures after having, like Hernan Cortes, burnt his ships. But, is it
necessary to enhance his figure by literary comparison? He is what he
wants to be, a man--in the striking expression which he chose as a title
for one of his short stories, _nothing less than a whole man_. Not a
mere thinking machine, set to prove a theory, nor an actor on the world
stage, singing a well-built poem, well built at the price of many a
compromise; but a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his
negations, all the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies,
and all the desperate self-assertions of a soul that yearns for eternal
life.
This strife between enemy truths, the truth thought and the truth felt,
or, as he himself puts it, between veracity and sincerity, is Unamuno's
_raison d'etre_. And it is because the "_Tragic Sense of Life_" is the
most direct expression of it that this book is his masterpiece. The
conflict is here seen as reflected in the person of the author. The book
opens by a definition of the Spanish man, the "man of flesh and bones,"
illustrated by the consideration of the real living men who stood behind
the bookish figures of great philosophers and consciously or
unconsciously shaped and misshaped their doctrines in order to satisfy
their own vital yearnings.
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