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.