mily, and a
man who has sung the quiet and deep joys of married life with a
restraint, a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to match
in any literature. _Yet_ a passionate man--or, as he would perhaps
prefer to say, _therefore_ a passionate man. But in a major, not in a
minor key; of strong, not of weak passions.

The difference between the two lies perhaps in that the man with strong
passions lives them, while the man with weak passions is lived by them,
so that while weak passions paralyze the will, strong passions urge man
to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake,
which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the
mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his
time. But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book
will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the
stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker--the Biblical, Greek, Roman,
and Italian cultures--but there is hardly anything worth reading in
Europe and America which he has not read, and, but for the Slav
languages, in the original. Though never out of Spain, and seldom out of
Salamanca, he has succeeded in establishing direct connections with most
of the intellectual leaders of the world, and in gathering an
astonishingly accurate knowledge of the spirit and literature of foreign
peoples. It was in his library at Salamanca that he once explained to
an Englishman the meaning of a particular Scotticism in Robert Burns;
and it was there that he congratulated another Englishman on his having
read _Rural Rides_, "the hall-mark," he said, "of the man of letters who
is no mere man of letters, but also a man." From that corner of Castile,
he has poured out his spirit in essays, poetry, criticism, novels,
philosophy, lectures, and public meetings, and that daily toil of press
article writing which is the duty rather than the privilege of most
present-day writers in Spain. Such are the many faces, moods, and
movements in which Unamuno appears before Spain and the world. And yet,
despite this multiplicity and this dispersion, the dominant impression
which his personality leaves behind is that of a vigorous unity, an
unswerving concentration both of mind and purpose. Bagaria, the national
caricaturist, a genius of rhythm and character which the war revealed,
but who was too good not to be overshadowed by the facile art of
Raemaekers (imagine Goya overshadowed by