to dwell on anything less than man's origin and destination. We are here
confronted with that humanistic tendency of the Spanish mind which can
be observed as the dominant feature of her arts and literature. All
races are of course predominantly concerned with man. But they all
manifest their concern with a difference. Man is in Spain a concrete
being, the man of flesh and bones, and the whole man. He is neither
subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman
by social laws and prejudices. Spanish art and letters deal with
concrete, tangible persons. Now, there is no more concrete, no more
tangible person for every one of us than ourself. Unamuno is therefore
right in the line of Spanish tradition in dealing predominantly--one
might almost say always--with his own person. The feeling of the
awareness of one's own personality has seldom been more forcibly
expressed than by Unamuno. This is primarily due to the fact that he is
himself obsessed by it. But in his expression of it Unamuno derives also
some strength from his own sense of matter and the material--again a
typically Spanish element of his character. Thus his human beings are as
much body as soul, or rather body and soul all in one, a union which he
admirably renders by bold mixtures of physical and spiritual metaphors,
as in _gozarse uno la carne del alma_ (to enjoy the flesh of one's own
soul).

In fact, Unamuno, as a true Spaniard which he is, refuses to surrender
life to ideas, and that is why he runs shy of abstractions, in which he
sees but shrouds wherewith we cover dead thoughts. He is solely
concerned with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of his
life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno, however, can and does
answer the charge. We can only know and feel humanity in the one human
being which we have at hand. It is by penetrating deep into ourselves
that we find our brothers in us--branches of the same trunk which can