Spain is not a failure; Spain is not decadent; Spain is complete. By the too literal achievement of kings and mystics, the vital forces of a vital land lock as in sleep. This sleep is one of the two moods of art and letters in contemporary Spain. It has been long upon the land and the land loves it. Poets have found in it all the delight of cradled balance, all the delight of dream. They have made of this sleep of Spain a passionate Nirvana in which the actions of Spain’s waking life return in pageantry. The ghosts of fire and blood are here: and a pleasant hopelessness which saves from the scourge of ambition. Spain becomes a mirrored play of faces and of scenes, for her own self-adoring. First of all despair. This perennially ironic race has distilled the love of failure from its too great success. Spain in the nineteenth century knew an ecstatic impotence which only Russia equaled. It was about 1835 that Larra wrote: “_Escribir en Madrid es llorar_--to write in Madrid is to weep.” “Do not attempt to create,” he told his fellows. “Ye are Spaniards; the task is hopeless. Must ye wield a pen? Then translate from the French.” Larra’s last logical act was to blow out his brains. But the spirit of Larra is still upon the tables of the cafés of Madrid. Sleep here is a wine of Spain’s historic act. Despair is voluptuous. Incompetence is a cult. And votaries of this narcistic trance are among Spain’s finest writers. Chief of them all perhaps is Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán.[30] Cervantes had a crippled hand; Don Ramón lacks an arm. Rojas who wrote _La Celestina_ four centuries ago split his novel into dialogue and acts. Don Ramón does likewise--and interweaves with his Castilian words and forms that even Rojas would have found archaic. Don Ramón’s books sell not for current pesetas, but for obsolete _reales_. His typography is studiously ancient. Upon his works is printed _opera omnia_: and they are illumined with medieval wood-cuts. His texts reveal a virtuosity in the use of old Castilian with a mingling of the pure vocables of Galician, once the poetic tongue of Spain, so imaginative as to be an art. It is an art of tone and verbal plastic. Don Ramón is an hidalgo of Galicia, that rocky northwest province which the Arabs scarce pierced: and he boasts of his Celtic blood. There is a strong and curious kinship between the dialogue of his books and that of Synge. But the kinship goes no deeper than an echo. The volumnear body of Valle-Inclán’s prose serves to mass a death: his drama is one of furious rhetoric. All the more glorious ghosts of Spain stalk in his books. The Church with its “charity of the sword,” chivalry mildewed and broken from its long passage southward, clan warfare, mystic fealty and love are personified in the were-wolf bombast of his scenes. But though these shapes be ghosts, they have no charnel odor: the salt of modern irony--the perennial Spanish irony--is on them. Their puissance is not to be challenged.