people have lived until very
recently,--and do still,--in villages hidden away among the bare ribs
of the mountains, or in the indented coast plains, where every region
is cut off from every other by high passes and defiles of the
mountains, flaming hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, where the
Iberian race has grown up centerless. The pueblo, the village
community, is the only form of social cohesion that really has roots in
the past. On these free towns empires have time and again been imposed
by force. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Catholic
monarchy wielded the sword of the faith to such good effect that
communal feeling was killed and the Spanish genius forced to ingrow
into the mystical realm where every ego expanded itself into the
solitude of God. The eighteenth century reduced God to an abstraction,
and the nineteenth brought pity and the mad hope of righting the wrongs
of society. The Spaniard, like his own Don Quixote, mounted the
warhorse of his idealism and set out to free the oppressed, alone. As a
logical conclusion we have the anarchist who threw a bomb into the
Lyceum Theatre in Barcelona during a performance, wanting to make the
ultimate heroic gesture and only succeeding in a senseless mangling of
human lives.

But that was the reduction to an absurdity of an immensely valuable
mental position. The anarchism of Pio Baroja is of another sort. He
says in one of his books that the only part a man of the middle classes
can play in the reorganization of society is destructive. He has not
undergone the discipline, which can only come from common slavery in
the industrial machine, necessary for a builder. His slavery has been
an isolated slavery which has unfitted him forever from becoming truly
part of a community. He can use the vast power of knowledge which
training has given him only in one way. His great mission is to put the
acid test to existing institutions, and to strip the veils off them. I
don't want to imply that Baroja writes with his social conscience. He
is too much of a novelist for that, too deeply interested in people as
such. But it is certain that a profound sense of the evil of existing
institutions lies behind every page he has written, and that
occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to hope that
something better may come out of the turmoil of our age of transition.

Only a man who had felt all this very deeply could be so sensitive to
the new spirit