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Morral was an habitue of a cafe in the Calle de Alcala at Madrid, where Baroja was accustomed to go with his friends to take coffee, and, in the Spanish phrase, to attend his tertulia. Morral would listen to these conversations.
Baroja may surpass him in variety of external experience, Azorín in delicate art, Ortega y Gasset in philosophical subtlety, Ayala in intellectual elegance, Valle Inclán in rhythmical grace. Even in vitality he may have to yield the first place to that over-whelming athlete of literature, Blasco Ibáñez.
When that time comes, the author who has been born there, will not prefer to hail from some hamlet buried in the mountains, rather than from the capital of Guipuzcoa. But I myself prefer it. I have no city, and I hold myself to be strictly extra-urban. My father, Serafin Baroja y Zornoza, was a mining engineer, who wrote books both in Castilian and Basque, and he, too, came from San Sebastian.
Azorin and myself were of the opinion that it was a ridiculous proceeding which would never produce the desired result. Another of Lanza's hobbies was an aggressive misogyny. "Baroja, my friend," he would say to me, "you are too gallant and respectful in your novels with the ladies. Women are like laws, they are to be violated." I laughed at him.
That is, I prescribe a visit to Spain in carnival time. Baroja, then, stands for the modern Spanish mind at its most enlightened. He is the Spaniard of education and worldly wisdom, detached from the mediaeval imbecilities of the old regime and yet aloof from the worse follies of the demagogues who now rage in the country.
The wise owl that perches at night on our roof at Itzea calls to me: "Baroja, you will never amount to anything," and even the crows, winging their way across the sky, incessantly shout at me from above: "Baroja, you will never amount to anything." And I am convinced that I never shall amount to anything. I may not appear to be a very great patriot, but, nevertheless, I am.
One Martinez de Baroja, by name Juan, who lived in the village of Samiano, upon becoming outraged because of an attempt to force him to pay tribute to the Count of Salinas in those days a very natural source of offence took an appeal in the year 1616 from a ruling of the Prosecuting Attorney of His Majesty and the Alcaldes and Regidors of the Earldom of Trevino, and he was sustained by the Chamber of Hidalgos at Valladolid, which decided in his favour in a decree dated the eighth day of the month of August, 1619.
There must have been antecedents of a liberal character in our family, as Don Rafael's uncle, Don Juan Jose de Baroja, at first a priest at Pipaon and later at Vitoria, had been enrolled in the Basque Sociedad Economica. Don Rafael had two sons, Ignacio Ramon and Pio. They settled in San Sebastian as printers. Pio was my grandfather.
"Baroja does not amount to anything, and I presume that he will never amount to anything," Ortega y Gasset observes in the first issue of the Spectator. I have a suspicion myself that I shall never amount to anything. Everybody who knows me has always thought the same. He will never amount to anything."
Blasco, it seems to me, is often less Spanish than French; Valencia, after all, is next door to Catalonia, and Catalonia is anything but Castilian. But Baroja, though he is also un-Castilian and even a bit anti-Castilian, is still a thorough Spaniard. He is more interested in a literary feud in Madrid than in a holocaust beyond the Pyrenees.
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