I should like to develop, but into what? How? Where am I to find the way? When sitting beside the chimney, warming your feet by the fire as you watch the flames, it is easy to imagine that there may be novel walks to explore in the neighbourhood; but when you come to look at the map you find that there is nothing new in the whole countryside. We are told that ambition means growth. It does not with me. Ortega y Gasset believes that I am a man who is constitutionally unbribable. I should not go so far as to say that, but I do say that I do not believe that I could be bribed in cold blood by the offer of material things. If Mephistopheles wishes to purchase my soul, he cannot do it with a decoration or with a title; but if he were to offer me sympathy, and be a little effusive while he is about it, adding then a touch of sentiment, I am convinced that he could get away with it quite easily. LONGING FOR CHANGE Just as the aim of politicians is to appear constant and consistent, artists and literary men aspire to change. Would that the desire of one were as easy of attainment as that of the other! To change! To develop! To acquire a second personality which shall be different from the first! This is given only to men of genius and to saints. Thus Caesar, Luther, and Saint Ignatius each lived two distinct lives; or, rather, perhaps, it was one life, with sides that were obverse and reverse. The same thing occurs sometimes also among painters. The evolution of El Greco in painting upsets the whole theory of art. There is no instance of a like transformation either in ancient or modern literature. Some such change has been imputed to Goethe, but I see nothing more in this author than a short preliminary period of exalted feeling, followed by a lifetime dominated by study and the intellect. Among other writers there is not even the suggestion of change. Shakespeare is alike in all his works; Calderón and Cervantes are always the same, and this is equally true of our modern authors. The first pages of Dickens, of Tolstoi or of Zola could be inserted among the last, and nobody would be the wiser. Even the erudite rhetorical poets, the Victor Hugos, the Gautiers, and our Spanish Zorrillas, never get outside of their own rhetoric. BAROJA, YOU WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING (_A Refrain_) "Baroja does not amount to anything, and I presume that he will never amount to anything," Ortega y Gasset observes in the first issue of the _Spectator_. I have a suspicion myself that I shall never amount to anything. Everybody who knows me has always thought the same. When I first went to school in San Sebastian, at the age of four--and it has rained a great deal since that day--the teacher, Don León Sánchez y Calleja, who made a practice of thrashing us with a very stiff pointer (oh, these hallowed traditions of our ancestors!), looked me over and said: "This boy will prove to be as sulky as his brother. He will never amount to anything."