instinct, he is fundamentally a romantic of the last century, with more
than one plain touch of the downright operatic.

Baroja is a man of a very different sort. A novelist undoubtedly as
skilful as Blasco and a good deal more profound, he lacks the quality of
enthusiasm and thus makes a more restricted appeal. In place of gaudy
certainties he offers disconcerting questionings; in place of a neat and
well-rounded body of doctrine he puts forward a sort of generalized
contra-doctrine. Blasco is almost the typical Socialist--iconoclastic,
oratorical, sentimental, theatrical--a fervent advocate of all sorts of
lofty causes, eagerly responsive to the shibboleths of the hour. Baroja
is the analyst, the critic, almost the cynic. If he leans toward any
definite doctrine at all, it is toward the doctrine that the essential
ills of man are incurable, that all the remedies proposed are as bad as
the disease, that it is almost a waste of time to bother about humanity
in general. This agnostic attitude, of course, is very far from merely
academic, monastic. Baroja, though his career has not been as dramatic
as Blasco's, has at all events taken a hand in the life of his time and
country and served his day in the trenches of the new enlightenment. He
is anything but a theorist. But there is surely no little significance
in his final retreat to his Basque hillside, there to seek peace above
the turmoil. He is, one fancies, a bit disgusted and a bit despairing.
But if it is despair, it is surely not the despair of one who has
shirked the trial.

The present book, _Juventud, Egolatria_, was written at the height
of the late war, and there is a preface to the original edition, omitted
here, in which Baroja defends his concern with aesthetic and
philosophical matters at such a time. The apologia was quite gratuitous.
A book on the war, though by the first novelist of present-day Spain,