The dark firm candor of this prose is so enchanting that one accepts the nightmarish or sentimental dumb-show: this gesturing pageantry of Dream which is the Dream of Spain. A pendant to Don Ramón is José Martínez Ruiz, known as Azorín.[31] Valle-Inclán is dramatic and dionysian: his mood is perpendicular like the mountain steeps of his Galicia. Azorín’s elegiac tone is smooth as the subtle huertas of Valencia where he was born. His books are haunting, climaxless: they spread the nostalgia which inspires them. In them lives the small _pueblo_ of high Spain. He loves the village for the pure success of its equilibrium in sleep. He loves to follow Don Quixote over the _llanura_ of La Mancha. He loves to doze in the manure-soaked inns of the Castilian desert. For this world is full of ghosts. And Azorín casts the wide net of wistfulness to snare them all. His prose, unlike the mighty, archaic organ of Valle-Inclán, has been tinged with the perfumed winds of France which mingle oddly enough, across the Pyrenees, with the rank heat of the posadas of Toledo or with the ciceronian rhetoric of a peasant from Medina. Azorín’s passive, apollonian state has left him open to invading foreign accents. Yet his central impulse is authentic, and his form is Spanish. Here is the pleasant pain of dream--against the nightmare mood of Don Ramón: a minor note within Spain’s sleep. After the battalions of Moor and Catholic have trampled on, here is the plaint in which the fields and towns sink back upon themselves.... Spain’s most popular poet, Antonio Machado[32] is an Andalusian: but he sings of Castile. His theme is the robust and brutal world in which the pícaro careered. Unlike Valle-Inclán, Machado does not recreate this world of four centuries past with archaic language or atavistic mood. His means is more subtle. That world lives on, evaporate and refined, in the subconscious tone of Spain. Machado captures the old splendor by imaging its reverberations. His prosody is a canon of echoes. The echo is the shell of the shout. So the rounded and mellow music of Machado suggests the hollow form of an heroic life. The graphic density of life in heroic Spain has left this pattern. If the hard bodies of the Spanish soil were bubbles holding a void as hollow as the Spanish sky, they would be the poems of Machado. He harks back to Velázquez: the supreme graphic master reappears in words, diminished, lyrical, plaintive. The voice of the stark past of Spain comes muffled in this sleep.