Such is, rather, his photograph.  For Unamuno himself is ever changing.  A talker, as all good Spaniards are nowadays, but a talker in earnest and with his heart in it, he is varied, like the subjects of his conversation, and, still more, like the passions which they awake in him.  And here I find an unsought reason in intellectual support of that intuitional observation which I noted down in starting—­that Unamuno resembles the Welsh in that he is not ashamed of showing his passions—­a thing which he has often to do, for he is very much alive and feels therefore plenty of them.  But a word of caution may here be necessary, since that term, “passion,” having been diminished—­that is, made meaner—­by the world, an erroneous impression might be conveyed by what precedes, of the life and ways of Unamuno.  So that it may not be superfluous to say that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek in the University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who left behind the reputation of being a strong ruler; a father of a numerous family, 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