Catholic dogma which, despite his subtlety and elevation, often hindered the free movements of that great master, Menendez y Pelayo ; but he is if anything still more free from that rationalistic turn of mind which in the nineteenth century has blighted so many excellent Spanish intellects. His taste is solidly grounded on truth and human nature, and refined by familiarity with the great European masters.

Such criticism—the true one—resolves itself into the collation of art with life, and ultimately rests on psychology. Ayala is a consummate psychologist, and he is never more fortunate than when, giving full scope to his natural proclivities, he analyses the psychological background of plays, persons, and events. Curiously enough, this detached observer of life seems to prefer to the study of motives the exploration of the obscure region where the springs of emotion are hidden. Many are the pages where with masterly hand he has set down the delicate movements of the soul tossed to and fro in the vacillating border between laughter and tears.

Observation is the basis of psychology, and Ayala is a good observer. But there is a kind of observation, more usually to be found with creative genius, which consists in a quiet, almost passive contemplation, a soaking-in ' of impressions half-consciously felt and absorbed by the mind. This is not Ayala's way. His observation is rather a keen and penetrating attention which owes less to the actual stimulus of reality than to the quick intellectual sensibility of a mind rich in ideas and ready to yield a generous flow of thought at the slightest provocation. Hence the peculiar character of his critical work, which is not constructed in logical fashion so much as poured out in a kind of liquid vein of ideas. This does not by any means imply that Ayala is poor in dialectical powers. Far from it. To his Asturian origin he owes a mind of excellent

steel, which the Jesuits, his masters, took great care to sharpen, little knowing that they would be the first to suffer from its edge,1 and his essays and novels, even his verse, are witness that he loves an argument as much as any Scot. But it is not the dialectic mind that is the most logically constructive, and Ayala seems to prefer for his critical work the fluid atmosphere of the English essay to the clear-cut plan of the French etude. It may be that, to a certain extent, this fluid impression which his essays give, as if he had been thinking aloud before a shorthand typist, may be due to the hurried way in which nowadays the newspaper forces the critic to work for an impatient public used to breakfasting with ideas. Many, if not all, of Ayala's essays were written as press reviews. A certain inequality in his style, usually good, sometimes rising to a high level of expressiveness, but at times bald and bare, suggest a work written without that preparation in still leisure which alone can give unity of texture to substance and form. But there is something deeper than mere hurry in his manner. There is an intellectual attitude. Ayala does not look at his subject from the ground of a fundamental principle. His view of life and the world is too complex, and perhaps too detached also ; and thus he prefers to look at his subject very much as a collector looks at a small objet d'art, this way and that, and this way again, in every possible light.

It is perhaps in his poetry that Ayala gives the clearest exposition of his philosophy and of his creed. This poetry is so far represented by three volumes (two of which, the first and the second, are now issued together), bearing names which suggest a certain sequence : La Paz del Sendero, El Sendero Innumerable, El Sendero Andante. The uniformity of the titles does

1 A. M. D. G., a novel by R. Perez de Ayala.