The novel, too, is on the slide. An age that gives undue credence to the hoary formulas of Emile Coué and the late Mrs. Eddy; an age age that gulps whole hog the sensational news items of the daily press; an age that religiously attends the movies, and religiously reads the "Radio News," "Aircraft," and "The Pictorial Review," and religiously explains this and that as "something altogether Freudian;" an age where the "intellectuals", but lately become "intelligentsia," are now dubbed by a lady novelist "sophisticates;" an age of cults and cults and cults—an age like this certainly cannot be expected to concern itself with, or produce anything so natural and exhilarating as, a good book.

Do

To which cult do you belong? The radio cult; the Coué cult; the cinema cult; the Freud cult; or the James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot cult? Messrs. D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, and Waldo Frank whet in you a desire to experiment with monkey glands? Have you read "Black Oxen" by Mrs. Atherton? Who is your favorite fictioneer-E. M. Hull, Sinclair Lewis, or George Gissing? What, you have never heard of the latter! Well, he didn't write "The Sheik." Candidly, have you read Samuel Butler's "Way of All Flesh," or Hardy's "Return of The Native," or Conrad's "Victory," or Gissing's "New Grub Street"?

Yesterday I took up "Don Quixote". I have taken up "Don Quixote" before, but not as I did yesterday. What a realm of satire and romance and dream

what a master hand, this Spaniard! I thought to myself, were it not better for me to spend a hundred days in the company of the quaint old don than a hundred hours in the company of clever prestidigiteurs who have nothing to tell me that I do not already know and want to forget and who amplify this nothing by countless other nothings leaving nothing at the last but a sense of one's time having been imposed upon and one's patience frightfully exasperated.

Now I do not mean to say that we have no novelist at present who can write a novel. Such a statement would be sweepingly absurd. For Mr. Hardy, in the fact that he is still alive, and Mr. Conrad, are contemporary; and Somerset Maugham wrote "Of Human Bondage," in verve and sincerity an exceltent book; Hugh Walpole has done "Fortitude" and "The Duchess of Wrexe"; Dreiser's "Sister Carrie"; Cabell's "Jurgen"; Willa Cather's "My Antonia,' and Hergesheimer's "The Three Black Pennys", are, all in their kind, good books. But mechanics, structure, and that "infinite capacity for taking pains" seem somehow missing. Novelty, invention and suggestiveness, brilliancy at times, we still have, but of genius and of su craftsmanship there is woeful lack.

I'

N that remarable autobiographical notebook, Juventud, Egolatría, Baroja declares himself native of and debtor to two regions, the Basque-land and Old Castile, from one or the other of which issue all his literary inspiration. "Among Basques and Castilians I should like to find my readers," he adds. "The other Spaniards interest me less. The Spaniards of America and the Latin-Americans do not interest me at all." His work ranges from the lives of the sea-faring Basques, of whom he writes with an evident gusto lacking in his Castilian studies, to the underworld of Madrid. In these latter books, of which La Busca is one of the most powerful, Society itself is usually a protagonist-the Society whose interests Baroja finds always at variance with those of the individual; whose prevailing traits are the two most antipathetic to him personally, stupidity and cruelty; and whose most casual desires can be ministered to only at the cost of tragedy and gratuitous pain. He is not a sentimentalist; he rather jeers at sentiment. The mirror he holds up to the storm and passion of life may be of bronze or glass or polished steel; but be the reflection distorted or no, as he finds it, he returns it. There is little organization to his work-hardly more than there is to life; characters wander in or out, things are begun and forgot

LA BUSCA

By Pio Baroja; R. Caro Raggio, Madrid THE QUEST

By Pio Baroja; translated from the Spanish by Isaac Goldberg; A. A. Knopf, New York.

ten about, neither good nor evil are rewarded, death and hunger and cold stalk about selecting their victims almost at random. It is not a story that Baroja tells us; it is rather life itself that speaks hoarsely, and grotesquely from his page.

There is reason to believe that he regards with especial favor the trilogy of which this is the first volume; though he does not consider the work entirely successful, quoting with evident approval a friend's verdict to the effect that the hero is falsified, not a true product of his class but a señorito, a perfect little gentleman. It is true. Manuel, child of the slums, is finer-fibred, more sensitive-not to beauty, for your most degraded Spaniard rarely loses his feeling for beauty-but to pity nd tenderness, than his environment would probably have allowed him to be. His life among the child outcasts of Madrid, living upon cat-meat, warming themselves in ash-heads, indulging in precocious "love"-affairs at once casual and dreary, was hardly the soil to nourish the delicacy, the idealism, and the passion for justice that he displays. Yet he lives. He never ceases to move with the authentic gesture of life. We believe even in his revolt at the bull-fight, so different from the chivalric spectacle of his dreams where man and beast fought nobly for the mastery: "a petty, filthy thing; a medley of cowardice and intestines, a celebration in which one saw nothing but the torero's fear and the cowardly cruelty of the public taking pleasure in the throb of that fear."

Searching for Baroja's counterpart among artists, one would light upon Zuloaga, that other son and lover of the Basque country who seems to give her children pity and horror as their heritage. They seemed doomed to search out and drag to the light shame and pain and evil, as their method of combating it. It is significant that Baroja has elsewhere given as his ideal of happiness a simple human relationship easy of attainment for himself, but impossible to the doomed beings of whom he writes: for him, happiness lies in after dinner talk over the coffee cups of luxuriously comfortable home, among whose eight or ten guests are three or four charming women-one of them, he specifies, a foreigner-with no aristocrat, no artist, to mar the evening with stupidity or egotism; but a banker perhaps, or a cultured Jew: to talk of affairs, to pay a gallant compliment or so; to let each one have his moment of brilliancethat, he ends, wistfully, is undoubtedly very agreeable. But he writes of the black comedy, and of the manner in which the shivering soul is forced to walk the lonely path that leads to its doom.

It is a service to the American public to print Baroja's work, and one would wish to speak nothing but good of the publisher and translator who have rendered that service. The latter is evidently well-versed in Spanish, and has gone about his work with vigor and enthusiasm. He is, however, lamentably careless. Too often Mr. Goldberg has jotted down the first phrase that came into his head: too often he has made Baroja sound like Ethel Dell or some other exponent of sweetness rather than

light. There is no excuse, for example, for the sickly sentimentality of "e rendering, "The youth looked at her for a moment, shrugged his shoulders indifferently, and his pale lips traced a smile of disdainful mockery" even if one pardoned the abominable construction. To say "beneath a low zinc-hued sky" in. stead of "under a low zinc-colored sky' is merely a fault of ear; but it is something worse to translate with absolute literalness the second sentence of the volume: "It was the habit of that tall old narrow-cased clock to accelerate or retard, after its own sweet taste and whim, the uniform and monotonous series of hours that encircle our life until it wraps and leaves it, like an infant in his crib, in the obscure bosom of time." That is well enough in a language more fully inflected, as is Spanish; but in English it becomes obscure nonsense. That introductory paragraph, together with several others the opening paragraphs of Chapter II of Book I and of Chapter I of Book II, for instance-are, as the author takes pains to inform us, a burlesque upon the ponderous style of some of his contemporaries, set in the midst of what he aptly terms his own "pedestrian language" to win him favorable notice from the Spanish Academy: but the translator does not bother to mark the differentiation in style. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of Baroja, who cares nothing, as he has said repeatedly, for form, but who is very particular as to idiom; declaring that when an idea comes to him in rigidly correct Castilian, he immediately sets about re-phrasing it, giving it a personal slant. The style is the cloak, he declares, which molds itself easily to the