Spain stands at this transition, between sleep and waking. Ramón is the elegist of its dissolving colors, of its shattered and luminous shapes. Valery Larbaud has compared Ramón with Arthur Rimbaud. The æsthetic object of Ramón is indeed the atom; but whereas in Rimbaud the atom is explosive, bursting the cerements of cultured France, the atom in Ramón merges forever with the intricate flow of waking sense and thought. His true fellow is not Rimbaud but Marcel Proust. Proust made a portrait of a society in deliquescence: of its break-up into the essences, atoms, maggots of dissolution. Ramón also weaves the filmy spell of a dissolving world, although in him the dissolution is not social but subjective. Spain stirs in this limbo: her eye peers back into the fleeting images of dream. Ramón is her eye. Wherefore the contradictions in his work. Rich in color, it is evanescent. Affluent in intimations of form, it is formless. His books are collections of uncollectible items. His true form is chaos. He is indeed the runner of a rainbow; and should he stop one moment, he would fall through mist. His one subject is the instant of palpable inarticulation. But his world is still the dreamed Body of Spain. However dissolute her state, Spain yet looks inward on her slumber. Ramón is no prophet; save unconsciously. In him, Spain says to herself: “I am asleep”--the sign of waking.... _b. The Awakeners_ The entire nineteenth century of Spain was the stormy and dark threshold of this waking. In 1898, Spain suffered more from the loss of the Isle of Cuba than she had suffered from the previous loss of the worlds from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. So the “generation of 1898” became the symbol, when it was but the sequel, of Spain’s stir. Spain suffered more in 1898 because she was nearer waking. The earliest signs were perhaps political. The extraordinary Constitution of 1812--more radical than the present one of England--gave way to absolutism. Quixotism tremored on, in the sleep of Spain. Carlism, the extreme of reaction, swung back into a republic. But the republic[36] was a mere parade of presidents. High-minded, eloquent men, they had no contact with organic Spain. The face twitched; the mind slept.