the master of modern Spanish scholarship. In his relatively short life he managed to achieve an imposing task of critical research. He drew the tableau of Spanish literary life with a masterly hand, no less sure in the placing of the main lines and the judging of relative values than in the handling of the minutest details. He set up before Spain the reality of her literary past, with all the authority of his immense erudition and of his fine sense of criticism. He taught by example how to look objectively at national facts. And, fortunately,' he left an excellent school of disciples.

There was no set co-operation between these three men, and I am, so far as I know, the first to connect their names in a constructive explanation of Spanish contemporary culture. Yet Giner, Menendez y Pelayo, and GaldOs undoubtedly are the symbols and standards respectively of the ethical, the critical, and the creative aspects of this culture. Symbols, because they incarnate the diffused spirit of the age, which obscurely groped towards a reassertion of Spanish values in their true relation to Europe and the world. Standards, because in them Spanish life, scholarship, and literature possess models which, being purely Spanish, are yet universal and modern, that is human and free.'

We are now in a position to attempt a summary of the chief characteristics of Spanish contemporary literature. For the first time, thanks to the favourable spirit of the age, humanistic and free from prejudice, the intellect of the country seems to beat in sympathy with the creative instinct traditional in the race. Not

1 This would perhaps apply in a lesser degree to Menendez y Pelayo, whose mind was somewhat hindered in its movements by a closely guarded Catholic orthodoxy. Yet there is no doubt that he always strove to, and often succeeded in, overcoming this limitation when engaged in critical work.

that traces of the intellectualist tendency are wholly absent. The same type of mind which in the eighteenth century condemned Calderon in the name of Boileau, and in the sixteenth condemned Lope in the name of Aristotle, inspires nowadays rigidly imitated pastiches of Cervantes. Similarly, the same literary ambition which led even great men like Cervantes to imitate Sannazaro inspires in lesser men than Cervantes imitations of Oscar Wilde. There is, moreover, in the Spanish intellect an innate tendency towards breaking loose from reality—perhaps a reaction against the realism of the Spanish instinct. It is the weak side of the Spanish variety of fancy which goes by the name of ingenio. The present movement runs, therefore, counter to both innate and acquired intellectual ways, and cannot be expected to make much progress without provoking eddies and countercurrents. But the main current undoubtedly leads towards a straightforward interpretation of reality which is in line with the true creative spirit of the Spanish classics.

I have spoken of a main current. An undercurrent would have been a better image, for, though the present tendency towards spiritual realism is general—at any rate, among the best—the ways in which this aim is sought and attained are as numerous as the individual writers afield. We are again at our point of departure, confronted with that incoherence and dispersion of effort typical of Spanish literature and art, and which we found then to be rooted in the individualism of the race. But we can now give yet another cause of it. We know that the mainspring in the literature of the country is a creative, genius-like spirit. It is the law of such a spirit that it seeks reality direct and not in its reflection on culture. Just as the critical spirit feeds on books, the creative spirit feeds on living facts and feelings. It follows that the Spanish writer, even