clusters of plump little naked people fall away into space from
under his feet. There are moments in "_Del Sentimiento Tragico de la
Vida_" and in the "_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_" when in the
rolling earthy Castilian phrases one can feel the brandishing of the
sword of that very angel. Not for nothing does Unamuno live in the rust
and saffron-colored town of Salamanca in the midst of bare red hills
that bulge against an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look like
piles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are so solid, heavy,
ominous. A country where barrenness and the sweep of cold wind and the
lash of strong wine have made people's minds ingrow into the hereafter,
where the clouds have been tramped by the angry feet of the destroying
angel. A Patmos for a new Apocalypse. Unamuno is constantly attacking
sturdily those who clamor for the modernization, Europeanization of
Spanish life and Spanish thought: he is the counterpoise to the
northward-yearning apostles of Giner de los Rios.

In an essay in one of the volumes published by the _Residencia de
Estudiantes_ he wrote:

"As can be seen I proceed by what they call arbitrary affirmations,
without documentation, without proof, outside of a modern European
logic, disdainful of its methods.

"Perhaps. I want no other method than that of passion, and when my
breast swells with disgust, repugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let
the mouth speak the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come
as they come.

"We Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans, who fill up with
rhetoric the gaps in logic, who subtilize with more or less
ingenuity, but uselessly, who lack the sense of coherence, with
scholastic souls, casuists and all that.

"I've heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African,
soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping waves of rhetoric,
twistings of the phrase, antithesis, paradoxes and ingenuities.
Saint Augustine was a Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same
time, which makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism are the
most natural forms of passion and vehemence.

"The great African, the great ancient African! Here is an
expression--ancient African--that one can oppose to modern
European, and that's worth as much at least. African and ancient
were Saint Augustine and Tertullian. And why shouldn't we say: 'We
must make ourselves ancient