of cruelty and
stupidity that crops out everywhere in his work. I have never found any
trace of influence of the other three. To be sure there are a few early
sketches in the manner of Poe, but in respect to form he is much more
in the purely chaotic tradition of the picaresque novel he despises
than in that of the American theorist.

Baroja's most important work lies in the four series of novels of the
Spanish life he lived, in Madrid, in the provincial towns where he
practiced medicine, and in the Basque country where he had been brought
up. The foundation of these was laid by _El Arbol de la Ciencia_ ("The
Tree of Knowledge"), a novel half autobiographical describing the life
and death of a doctor, giving a picture of existence in Madrid and then
in two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously vivid painting of
inertia and the deadening under its weight of intellectual effort made
a very profound impression in Spain. Two novels about the anarchist
movement followed it, _La Dama Errante_, which describes the state of
mind of forward-looking Spaniards at the time of the famous anarchist
attempt on the lives of the king and queen the day of their marriage,
and _La Ciudad de la Niebla_, about the Spanish colony in London. Then
came the series called _La Busca_ ("The Search"), which to me is
Baroja's best work, and one of the most interesting things published in
Europe in the last decade. It deals with the lowest and most miserable
life in Madrid and is written with a cold acidity which Maupassant
would have envied and is permeated by a human vividness that I do not
think Maupassant could have achieved. All three novels, _La Busca_,
_Mala Hierba_, and _Aurora Roja_, deal with the drifting of a typical
uneducated Spanish boy, son of a maid of all work in a boarding house,
through different strata of Madrid life. They give a sense of unadorned
reality very rare in any literature, and besides their power as novels
are immensely interesting as sheer natural history. The type of the
_golfo_ is a literary discovery comparable with that of Sancho Panza by
Cervantes.

Nothing that Baroja has written since is quite on the same level. The
series _El Pasado_ ("The Past") gives interesting pictures of
provincial life. _Las Inquietudes de Shanti Andia_ ("The Anxieties of
Shanti Andia"), a story of Basque seamen which contains a charming
picture of a childhood in a seaside village in Guipuzcoa, delightful as
it is to read, is too