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go with confidence. She can descend to the lower levels of life, but takes with her man's divine soul ; she can rise to mystic heights, but does not leave behind man's earthly body. To humanity she opposes man ; to art, life ; to science, passion. Shelley divined the nature of her spirit with marvellous intuition when he spoke of her as flame-like Spain '.

II. THE CHARACTER OF SPANISH
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

THE first impression produced on the mind by a general survey of Spanish contemporary literature is one of incoherence and dispersion. We miss that social, almost official, orderliness of English literary life, a society in itself, admirably organized with its standards of taste, language, manners, and conduct ; with its sure instinct for placing every one of its members in his own class, rank, function ; with its common purpose and aim, towards the fulfilment of which all its members, whether creative, critical, or passive, co-operate. Nor do we find in Spain those powerful currents of literary activity which periodically sweep over France—movements of a mind ever awake and self-observant, generally born in some small cenacle or chapelle, which soon grow into a legion of keen intellectual fighters animated with all the bellicose spirit of the Gallic race. Neither the Saxon spirit of co-operation, nor the Gallic spirit of revolution is available to unite and herd together Spanish creative minds. Like the goats of the bare hills of Castile, they seem to prefer solitary haunts among the peaks of self, face to face with Nature.

Thus the first condition for the tracing of a tableau of Spanish contemporary literature appears to be missing. There would be no composition in the picture,

no general lines, no connexion between the figures. Here a pensive, narcissus-like mind turns his back to Spanish tradition, and looks to the north for light in which to chisel his carefully thought-out phrases ; there a picturesque hidalgo, with the soul of a soldier and the face of a monk, seeks inspiration in the recesses of the national spirit, and style in the fastidious craftsmen of contemporary Italy and France ; a sensitive delicate artist delights in miniature renderings of Spanish things and people ; a powerful but somewhat rough man of letters seeks profit and honour in the supply of novels fitted for the general taste, according to the recognized tenets of French literary cooking ; a Basque rationalist lets fall novels of instinct and action with the self-ignorant spontaneity of the tree that lets fall its fruit ; while the most eminent of his countrymen, in truly Wordsworthian isolation, keeps proving to himself and to his readers, by means of hard intellectual work, that the intellect does not matter, that instinct and vital force are the impulses which move the world, and that thought is but disguised desire ; open to all influences, from that of Ibsen to that of Franz Lehar ; the theatre lives in perfect anarchy, yet manages to preserve its strong national character ; and in poetry, the ever-living inspiration of the Romancero flourishes side by side with transplantations from Verlaine, Walt Whitman, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Yet this very incoherence is in itself a typical feature of Spanish contemporary letters, and an analysis of it may lead to the discovery of still more pronounced characteristics. There is little doubt that the first cause which explains this dispersion of literary efforts is the strong individualistic bent of the Spanish people. The world of letters does not essentially differ in this respect from the world of politics, the