making grandiloquent gestures of
pity, tearing down the cold hard facades with drunken generous phrases,
buoyed up by the warmth of the wine in their veins.

That is Baroja's world: dismal, ironic, the streets of towns where
industrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted to
it as any in Europe. No one has ever described better the shaggy
badlands and cabbage-patches round the edges of a city, where the
debris of civilization piles up ramshackle suburbs in which starve and
scheme all manner of human detritus. Back lots where men and women live
fantastically in shelters patched out of rotten boards, of old tin cans
and bits of chairs and tables that have stood for years in bright
pleasant rooms. Grassy patches behind crumbling walls where on sunny
days starving children spread their fleshless limbs and run about in
the sun. Miserable wineshops where the wind whines through broken panes
to chill men with ever-empty stomachs who sit about gambling and
finding furious drunkenness in a sip of _aguardiente_. Courtyards
of barracks where painters who have not a cent in the world mix with
beggars and guttersnipes to cajole a little hot food out of
soft-hearted soldiers at mess-time. Convent doors where ragged lines
shiver for hours in the shrill wind that blows across the bare
Castilian plain waiting for the nuns to throw out bread for them to
fight over like dogs. And through it all moves the great crowd of the
outcast, sneak-thieves, burglars, beggars of every description,--rich
beggars and poor devils who have given up the struggle to
exist,--homeless children, prostitutes, people who live a half-honest
existence selling knicknacks, penniless students, inventors who while
away the time they are dying of starvation telling all they meet of the
riches they might have had; all who have failed on the daily treadmill
of bread-making, or who have never had a chance even to enjoy the
privilege of industrial slavery. Outside of Russia there has never been
a novelist so taken up with all that society and respectability reject.

Not that the interest in outcasts is anything new in Spanish
literature. Spain is the home of that type of novel which the
pigeonhole-makers have named picaresque. These loafers and wanderers of
Baroja's, like his artists and grotesque dreamers and fanatics, all are
the descendants of the people in the _Quijote_ and the _Novelas
Ejemplares_, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo de To