This book, which was first published in 1949 and revised in 1955, appears once again as a revised edition. According to the author, this third version is really a new book, for “the experiences, or the worlds, of Sarmiento and Unamuno are not of the kind that can rest in definitive texts.” The lives of these two men were too complex, too contradictory, too controversial to lend themselves to an easy analysis. And yet, the author of this fine study has succeeded in giving his readers an unusually clear picture of two great personalities, who, at first glance, seem so different, but who had, in actuality, very much in common.
Though Sarmiento was an Argentine and had been born more than fifty years before the Spaniard Unamuno, he found a kindred spirit in the man from the Basque country. Unamuno knew Sarmiento through his writings, and his admiration for the Argentine patriot knew no bounds. He referred to him as a “Homeric figure” and “the greatest American mind writing in the Spanish language.”
Both men had known the bitterness of exile, and each had waged a literary battle against the tyrant. Unamuno’s Facundo, his Rosas, had been Primo de Rivera.
Both were men of strong passions and contradictions. “Hermanos en la contradicción” is the expression Señor Cúneo employs to refer to them. Unamuno, the oldest member of the Generation of ’98, was convinced at one time that the salvation of Spain depended on its Europeanization. “Death to Don Quijote!,” shouted he, just as Sarmiento had shouted earlier, “Death to the gaucho!” To Europeanize their countries, according to them, meant getting rid of the traditions and elements that stood in the way of progress. Both later recognized their mistake and recanted. Unamuno, in his novel Niebla, has one of his characters refer to himself as “a Spaniard first and foremost; and love for all things Spanish is my religion, and the heaven in which I want to believe is a celestial and eternal Spain.” Sarmiento, who had condemned the gaucho in his Facundo as an impediment to civilized life, later looked on with apprehension at the avalanche of European immigrants entering his country. If this were to continue, he wrote, “we would have a republic of foreigners with only a small minority of nationals.” In his later years, Sarmiento’s anti-gaucho feelings had mellowed. He identified himself with Facundo and even justified Rosas, saying: “He was the expression of the will of the people.”
A debt of gratitude is owed Señor Cúneo for a perceptive, brilliant study of two important personalities in Hispanic letters and history.