rmes, who
through _Gil Blas_ invaded France and England, where they rollicked
through the novel until Mrs. Grundy and George Eliot packed them off to
the reform school. But the rogues of the seventeenth century were jolly
rogues. They always had their tongues in their cheeks, and success
rewarded their ingenious audacities. The moulds of society had not
hardened as they have now; there was less pressure of hungry
generations. Or, more probably, pity had not come in to undermine the
foundations.

The corrosive of pity, which had attacked the steel girders of our
civilization even before the work of building was completed, has
brought about what Gilbert Murray in speaking of Greek thought calls
the failure of nerve. In the seventeenth century men still had the
courage of their egoism. The world was a bad job to be made the best
of, all hope lay in driving a good bargain with the conductors of life
everlasting. By the end of the nineteenth century the life everlasting
had grown cobwebby, the French Revolution had filled men up with
extravagant hopes of the perfectibility of this world, humanitarianism
had instilled an abnormal sensitiveness to pain,--to one's own pain,
and to the pain of one's neighbors. Baroja's outcasts are no longer
jolly knaves who will murder a man for a nickel and go on their road
singing "Over the hills and far away"; they are men who have not had
the willpower to continue in the fight for bread, they are men whose
nerve has failed, who live furtively on the outskirts, snatching a
little joy here and there, drugging their hunger with gorgeous mirages.

One often thinks of Gorki in reading Baroja, mainly because of the
contrast. Instead of the tumultuous spring freshet of a new race that
drones behind every page of the Russian, there is the cold despair of
an old race, of a race that lived long under a formula of life to which
it has sacrificed much, only to discover in the end that the formula
does not hold.

These are the last paragraphs of _Mala Hierba_ ("Wild Grass"), the
middle volume of Baroja's trilogy on the life of the very poor in
Madrid.

"They talked. Manuel felt irritation against the whole world, hatred,
up to that moment pent up within him against society, against man....

"'Honestly,' he ended by saying, 'I wish it would rain dynamite for a
week, and that the Eternal Father would come tumbling down in cinders.'

"He invoked crazily all the destructive powers to reduce to ashes