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.
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