Viewed from without, I seem to impress some as a crass, crabbed person, who has very little ability, while others regard me as an unhealthy, decadent writer. Then AzorÍn has said of me that I am a literary aristocrat, a fine and comprehensive mind.

I should accept AzorÍn's opinion very gladly, but personality needs to be hammered severely in literature before it leaves its slag. Like metal which is removed from the furnace after casting and placed under the hammer, I would offer my works to be put to the test, to be beaten by all hammers.

If anything were left, I should treasure it then lovingly; if nothing were left, we should still pick up some fragments of life.

I always listen to the opinions of the non-literary concerning my books with the greatest interest. My cousin, Justo GoÑi, used to express his opinion without circumlocution. He always carried off my books as they appeared, and then, a long time after, would give his opinion.

Of The Way of Perfection he said:

"Good, yes, very good; but it is so tiresome."

I realized that there was some truth in his view.

When he read the three novels to which I had given the general title, The Struggle for Life, he stopped me on the Calle de AlcalÁ one day and said:

"You have not convinced me."

"How so?"

"Your hero is a man of the people, but he is falsified. He is just like you are; you can never be anything but a gentleman."

This gentility with which my cousin reproached me, and without doubt he was correct, is common to nearly all Spanish writers.

There are no Spaniards at present, and there never have been any at any other time, who write out of the Spanish soul, out of the hearts of the people. Even Dicenta did not. His Juan JosÉ is not a workingman, but a young gentleman. He has nothing of the workingman about him beyond the label, the clothes, and such externals.

GaldÓs, for example, can make the common people talk; AzorÍn can portray the villages of Castile, set on their arid heights, against backgrounds of blue skies; Blasco IbÁÑez can paint the life of the Valencians in vivid colours with a prodigality that carries with it the taint of the cheap, but none of them has penetrated into the popular soul. That would require a great poet, and we have none.