His mind is peculiar in its reaction to ideas. But his modesty we admit. I noticed a line in which he confesses the opposite of what Loti happens to say in his last book, Prime Jeunesse.
“No la quiero conservar: que corra, que se pierda. Siempre he tenido entusiasmo por lo que huye.” (I do not care to preserve anything: let it hasten away, let it be lost. Always I have felt enthusiasm for that which was fleeting.) Loti declared he had devoted life to preventing anything from perishing, even memory.
In Baroja there is visible joy in destruction. With it, insensibility to beauty. A nature harsh, dry, cold. He is narrow, dogmatic. He steps nimbly in a little circle where everywhere are marks of poverty. He is not grandly gloomy, tragic, like Leopardi, nor can he, like the Italian, create impeccable art. He suffers from lack of sympathy, vision. He has neither the generosity nor expansive spirit that permits him to enjoy, admire, learn. There is something about the book which is crabbed, petty. In addition, words do not come fluently. He is what Germans call wortkarg. His critical ability is slight. He recalls faintly now Leopardi, Dostoievsky, as to constant inclemency of mental weather. They, however, were moved by genius. He hates splendor, the fury of great spirits with which he has little in common. They make him feel small, cold, old.
He accuses Balzac of stupidity, delirium. That very likely is the way the mountain looks to the mouse. Victor Hugo is rhetoric, vulgarity. No wonder he was dazed by Hugo’s vocabulary! He can not admire the prose of Flaubert. He is like a person who having lived in darkness, has dwarfed eyes unable to respond to light. Again he seems a naughty boy who stands in middle of the street for purpose of spattering passers-by with mud, taking account neither of age, infancy, his interest being to bespatter.
What he writes of Dostoievsky is rather brilliant. That is seldom ascribed to Baroja. He says (translating as I quote): “In the spiritual fauna of the Twentieth Century he will be something like the Diplodocus.” He is perhaps an uncatalogueable monster, but a monster of genius not easily to be equalled or imitated.
He could appreciate neither Sainte Beuve nor Taine. He read them like a blind man. When he read Ruskin he had no comprehension that whatever that critic’s opinions as criticism, as stylist he is worth while. Baroja talks something like the conceited fop of an isolated village. He may be scientist gone wrong, who uses a scalpel, where his present profession calls for a pen. He makes attempt to vaccinate his readers with his peculiar virus.
Baroja’s opinion of the Latin historians, Sallust, Tacitus, shows an inclination to baseness. He thinks evil persistently. In these two cases judgment and scholarship are weak. He grudges Tacitus posthumous fame. But it must be admitted he can appreciate Caesar’s Commentaries, and that his word of them is juste. It may be he does not know how to envy them.
Baroja is not even pleased with the place where he was born, something regarded with affection by people in general. He wishes, plaintively, peevishly, it had been elsewhere. He wishes it had been among the mountains or else beside the sea. He is displeased it was a city where foreign people come. He treats his fellow townsmen, Sarasate, with disdain.
Stylists have been men of charm, kindliness. The lack of these qualities, suavity of surface, is marked in Baroja. There is seldom a sentence that gives pleasure.
Yet if he disavows ability of other men we must give him credit of disavowing his own ability as frankly. That points to crabbed honor. He does not forget to say a good word about Azorin, the critic. A Yankee eye to business! But heaven forbid me from accusing him! None could have the heart to wish him a disagreeable trait with which he is not endowed.