The name is absent

Personalities of Modern Spain 61
him pardon came, he sat there and looked at it, and instead
of being glad, he was angry, for pardon had taken away the
idea of conflict. You see he was always the embodiment of
the contradictory character. Even after that he could not
resist the impulse to attack again and again. He is a de-
scendant of Fray Luis de Léon, whom the Inquisition took
and put in prison for about five years, underground, yet
after five years of suffering when he came back to Salamanca
University, and stood before his class in the University, he
started his lecture by saying : “As I was saying yesterday”—
to him the whole five years was blotted out; that is typical
of Unamuno. I always think that in the poetry of Calderon
de la Barca you find the same idea as you do in Unamuno.

You find many characters the exact opposite in modern
Spain. Such a well-known personage as Blasco Ibanez, a
writer of a certain notoriety, is an entirely different char-
acter—a man not having the asceticism of Unamuno, that
mysticism of thought; he is rash, a person of first impulse,
possessing the florid imagination of the Valencian. His
imagination is rich, luxuriant, but without any sort of
Casticismo, as we say in Spanish. I remember once while in
Salamanca with him, Unamuno asked him if he would not
go back and look again at one of the cathedrals he had
visited, but he replied : “I don’t care for anything that does
not strike me at first sight.” He wrote his earlier books
about Valencia without deep thought but with a certain
erratic talent. In his short stories he beautifully depicts
scenes of emotions and character with bold simplicity. Later
in his life he became a writer for the films and lost his direct
vision of Spanish life.

I feel I should tell a few anecdotes about him. He had a
beautiful villa that he had built along the Riviera ; and in this
villa he conceived the idea of building an immense Roman

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