86 RAM6N PEREZ DE AYALA

Ayala succeeds here and there in giving us that sense of being before a moment of nature, and his success is often due to the boldness with which he

dared uplift

The closest, all-concealing tunic of nature.

Era la sazOn otolial, de color de miel y niebla aterciopelada y argentina, a manera de vello, con que la tierra estaba como un melocotOn maduro. Por encima de las tapias del huerto conventual asomaban los negros y rigidos cipreses, que eran como el prOlogo del arrobo mistico, el dechado de la voluntad erectil y aspiraciOn al trance ; y los sauces anemicos y adolecientes — en la region los llaman desmayos — , que eran la fatiga y rendimiento, epilogo dulce del mistico espasmo ; y los pomares sinuosos y musculosos, las ramas, de agarrotados dedos, mostrando rojas y pequeiias manzanas, que no sugerfan la imagen del pecado, sino a lo mas, de un pecadillo. Para los ojos, todo era paz en el huerto conventual ; para el ofdo, la querellosa algarabia de los gorriones vespertinos.1

Such examples of acute penetration are frequent in Ayala's later work. They reveal a personality calm and detached in outward appearance, yet deeply sensitive to the inner currents of sympathy between man and the world. ' The philosopher '—says the famished student Aligator in Belarmino y Apolonio' is the inverse type of the dramatist. Outwardly, all serenity and impassiveness ; in his most secret self, inextinguishable ardour.' Aligator wrote these words thinking of Belarmino. We might perhaps apply them to Ayala himself.

1 It was the autumn season, with its colour like honey and its velvety and silvery mist, like bloom, so that the earth seemed a ripe peach. Over the walls of the convent garden rose the black and rigid cypresses which were like the prologue of the mystical rapture, the symbol of taut will and of the aspiration to the trance ; and the anwmic, suffering willows,—dismays is their local name—which were like the fatigue and exhaustion, the sweet epilogue of the mystic spasm ; and the sinuous and muscular apple-trees, whose knotty-fingered branches did not suggest the image of sin, but at most, of peccadilloes. For the eyes, all was peace in the garden of the convent ; for the ears, the quarrelsome hullabaloo raised by the evening sparrows.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

I SAT, several years ago, at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, under the vast tent in which the Bard of Wales was being crowned. After the small golden crown had been placed in unsteady equilibrium on the head of a clever-looking pressman, several Welsh bards came on the platform and recited little epigrams. A Welsh bard is, if young, a pressman, and if of maturer years, a divine. In this case, as England was at war, they were all of the maturer kind, and, while I listened to the music of their ditties—the sense thereof being, alas ! beyond my reach—I was struck by the fact that all of them, though different, closely resembled Don Miguel de Unamuno. It is not my purpose to enter into the wasp-nest of racial disquisitions. If there is a race in the world over which more sense and more nonsense can be freely said, for lack of definite information, than the Welsh, it is surely this ancient Basque people, whose greatest contemporary figure is perhaps Don Miguel de Unamuno. I am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may be worth, though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of the inner, untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of undecipherable papers.

This reminiscence, moreover, which springs up into the light of my memory every time I think of Don Miguel de Unamuno, has to my mind a further value in that in it the image of Don Miguel does not appear as evoked by one man, but by many, though many of one species, many who in depth are but one man, one type, the Welsh divine. Now, this unity underlying a multiplicity, these many faces, moods, and movements,