would probably have been as useless as all the other books on the war.
That stupendous event will be far more soundly discussed by men who have
not felt its harsh appeal to the emotions. Baroja, evading this grand
enemy of all ideas, sat himself down to inspect and co-ordinate the
ideas that had gradually come to growth in his mind before the bands
began to bray. The result is a book that is interesting, not only as the
frank talking aloud of one very unusual man, but also as a
representation of what is going on in the heads of a great many other
Spaniards. Blasco, it seems to me, is often less Spanish than French;
Valencia, after all, is next door to Catalonia, and Catalonia is
anything but Castilian. But Baroja, though he is also un-Castilian and
even a bit anti-Castilian, is still a thorough Spaniard. He is more
interested in a literary feud in Madrid than in a holocaust beyond the
Pyrenees. He gets into his discussion of every problem a definitely
Spanish flavour. He is unmistakably a Spaniard even when he is trying
most rigorously to be unbiased and international. He thinks out
everything in Spanish terms. In him, from first to last, one observes
all the peculiar qualities of the Iberian mind--its disillusion, its
patient weariness, its pervasive melancholy. Spain, I take it, is the
most misunderstood of countries. The world cannot get over seeing it
through the pink mist of _Carmen_, an astounding Gallic caricature,
half flattery and half libel. The actual Spaniard is surely no such
grand-opera Frenchman as the immortal toreador. I prescribe the
treatment that cured me, for one, of mistaking him for an Iberian. That
is, I prescribe a visit to Spain in carnival time.

Baroja, then, stands for the modern Spanish mind at its most
enlightened. He is the Spaniard of education and worldly wisdom,
detached from the mediaeval imbecilities of the old regime and yet aloof
from the worse follies of the demagogues who now rage in the country.