Baroja boasts he is modern. This is something of which he is proud. With him it has a local, countrified application, meaning that he is not emotional, that he reserves accelerated motion for his feet. He has a limited outlook. An unchanging view point.
The Spaniard, no matter what his condition in life, worships the aristocratic idea, and is more or less guided by it. No race cherishes more deeply ideal of class.
Baroja does have disconcerting directness. The result perhaps of constitutional disillusion, motived by dislike for what charms others. Steel-edged seeing, however, is his! It may be he is disgusted with the sham men call life.
I would like to believe something akin to the pity of Dostoievsky is mainspring of his hatreds, or a sense of justice which he sees violated. And perhaps he regrets that life is becoming scientific, collective, and must suppress the individual.
War we know has lost dramatic beauty. It is merely scientific slaughter. We can not guess what science will do to transform life.
La Busca (novel), by Pio Baroja. In the novel I find the same sad, gloomy mind, with no sense of structure, of reasoned novel-building. Once in a while, in this book, he has forgotten himself and written a resonant sentence, (page 30, the top), which I feel sure if he knew, he would pluck out, to throw away.
The novel shows that Baroja, in his mediæval Spain, has felt urge of new forms, new bottles for wine of the spirit, but which he himself is unable to procure because of imperfect technique. He has, too, affiliation for filth. But he does not paint it well. He should read Rachilde. La Busca is a saving in too permanent print, of trivialities.
I have read two novels for which it is not easy to find justification. One is La Busca, the other Duhamel’s Confession de Minuit. The latter shows, however, the miracle of writing three hundred pages about nothing. That takes skill. You can not find a better example. It is an attempt in abnormal psychology, providing mind magnified sufficiently to find the idea.
The Tour, by Louis Couperus, is another disappointing book. But the advertising agent of the House that published it is not disappointing. I commend him. He deserves increase in salary. I bought it upon his recommendation. I rose to the bait.