The ecstatic revery is rich in changes. Against Machado who sings the larger currents of the Dream is set the exquisite, scholarly Ramón Pérez de Ayala.[33] Ayala, who is an Asturian, is his epoch’s most cultivated novelist and most fanciful poet. This man who in _Política y Toros_ has written the profoundest apologia of the bull fight and the subtlest satire on Spain’s political abulia, beneath his disguise of timeliness is an archaicizer also: one who dwells as deep as his neighbor Valle-Inclán within Spain’s narcistic adoration. But it is the schools and cloisters which haunt Ayala: his way to the past is that of meditation and of learning. Like Azorín, Ayala has not been proof against French literary currents. The note of Anatole France is a bit too clear in his novels. But perhaps there is an organic kinship between the Spaniard and the last master of the French contemplative tradition. Like Anatole France, Ayala is a musing man: a man of satiric, wistful fancy rather than of imagination. His style progenitors are those amazing mystics of sixteenth century Spain who managed to endow ecstasy with Horatian polish. The sedulous, synthetic texts of Ayala are a panoply of dream: Spain dreaming of her cathedrals and her schools, Spain blowing lovely and seductive patterns--two volumes upon the Names of Christ--from the effluvia of medieval culture. The modern in Ayala is the ironic salt of intellectual awareness.[34] * * * * * There is a moment between sleep and waking, when the mind spans the abyss between eternity and time. Consciousness turns inward on the realm of sleep; the materials and meanings of the dream form to the measure of thought, live an instant the spatial, temporal life ere they dissolve. In this encounter the worlds of sleep and waking are both broken up. Their fragments make a counterpoint of exquisite discord; but the relation between them brings a subtle vision. The minute and the infinite merge. Essence of dream takes the conforming shape of the categories of the intellect; and the objective sense for once is applied to what is real. This mysterious hinterland Ramón Gómez de la Serna has made his realm. He has mastered it. He has been mastered by it.[35]