muddled in romantic claptrap to add much to his
fame. _El Mundo es Asi_ ("The World is Like That") expresses, rather
lamely it seems to me, the meditations of a disenchanted revolutionist.
The latest series, _Memorias de un Hombre de Accion_, a series of yarns
about the revolutionary period in Spain at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, though entertaining, is more an attempt to escape
in a jolly romantic past the realities of the morose present than
anything else. _Cesar o Nada_, translated into English under the title
of "Aut Caesar aut Nullus" is also less acid and less effective than his
earlier novels. That is probably why it was chosen for translation into
English. We know how anxious our publishers are to furnish food easily
digestible by weak American stomachs.

It is silly to judge any Spanish novelist from the point of view of
form. Improvisation is the very soul of Spanish writing. In thinking
back over books of Baroja's one has read, one remembers more
descriptions of places and people than anything else. In the end it is
rather natural history than dramatic creation. But a natural history
that gives you the pictures etched with vitriol of Spanish life in the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century which
you get in these novels of Baroja's is very near the highest sort of
creation. If we could inject some of the virus of his intense sense of
reality into American writers it would be worth giving up all these
stale conquests of form we inherited from Poe and O. Henry. The
following, again from the preface of _La Dama Errante_, is Baroja's own
statement of his aims. And certainly he has realized them.

"Probably a book like _la Dama Errante_ is not of the sort that lives
very long; it is not a painting with aspirations towards the museum but
an impressionist canvas; perhaps as a work it has too much asperity, is
too hard, not serene enough.

"This ephemeral character of my work does not displease me. We are men
of the day, people in love with the passing moment, with all that is
fugitive and transitory and the lasting quality of our work preoccupies
us little, so little that it can hardly be said to preoccupy us at
all."

_VI: Talk by the Road_

"Spain," said Don Alonso, as he and Telemachus walked out of Illescas,
followed at a little distance by Lyaeus and the dumpling-man, "has
never been swept clean. There have been the Romans and the Visigoths
and the Moors and