* * * * *
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.
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