old world to the new, and to take back the new to the old." He spoke
with enthusiasm, for he is an enthusiast by temperament, filled with
nervous energy that looks out compellingly from his gray eyes--not at
all a Spanish type, as we conceive the typical Spaniard. "I am sorry you
Americans know so little of Spanish letters. You have always gone to
France, rather than to Spain, for your literary loves. To you, as a
race, the names of Galdos, Benavente, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Valle Inclan,
Martinez Ruiz, Baroja, Trigo, Machado, the Quintero, Carrere, Marquina,
Dicenta, Martinez Sierra and Linares Rivas are but names. The literary
world still looks to France; but Spain is slowly coming into her own.
Her language and literature are spreading. Civilization is beginning to
realize something of the tremendous fecundity and genius of the modern
Spanish literary renaissance."

When I asked him about himself, he tried to evade me. The man is modest.
He prefers to talk about Spain. Only with difficulty can one make him
reveal anything of his personality, his life.

"I have no biography," he laughed, when I insisted on knowing something
of him. "Oh, yes, I was born, I suppose. We all are. My birth took place
in Cuba, in 1878. When I was three, my parents took me to Brussels. I
grew up there, and in Spain and Paris. My education--the beginning of
it--was given me in Paris and at the University of Madrid. Degree?
Well--a '_Philosophe es Lettres_.' I much prefer the title of
Philosopher of Humanity." That, alone, shows the type of mind inherent
in Zamacois.

His first novel was published when he was eighteen. He has since written
about thirty more, together with thousands of newspaper articles in _El
Liberal_, _El Imparcial_, and no end of others. He has produced ten
plays, and many volumes of criticisms, chronicles and miscellanea,
beside two volumes on the great war. His pen must have had few idle
moments!

In addition to all this, he has edited several papers. At twenty-two he
was editing _Germinal_. A Socialist? Yes. Once on a time more radical
than now, when the more universal tendencies have entered in, he still
believes in the principles of Socialism, as do so many of the "young,"
all over Europe.

He himself divides his work into three main epochs. The first has love
for its keynote; and here we find _El Seductor_, _Sobre el Abismo_,
_Punto-Negro_, _Loca de Amor_, _De Carne y Hueso_, _Duelo a Muerte_,
_Impresiones de Arte_,