TO MY READERS THIRTY YEARS HENCE


Among my books there are two distinct classes: Some I have written with
more effort than pleasure, and others I have written with more pleasure
than effort.

My readers apparently are not aware of this distinction, although it
seems evident to me. Can it be that true feeling is of no value in a
piece of literature, as some of the decadents have thought? Can it be
that enthusiasm, weariness, loathing, distress and ennui never transpire
through the pages of a book? Indubitably none of them transpire unless
the reader enters into the spirit of the work. And, in general, the
reader does not enter into the spirit of my books. I cherish a hope
which, perhaps, may be chimerical and ridiculous, that the Spanish
reader thirty or forty years hence, who takes up my books, whose
sensibilities, it may be, have been a little less hardened into
formalism than those of the reader of today, will both appreciate and
dislike me more intelligently.




YOUTHFUL WRITINGS


As I turn over the pages of my books, now already growing old, I receive
the impression that, like a somnambulist, I have frequently been walking
close to the cornice of a roof, entirely unconsciously, but in imminent
danger of falling off; again, it seems to me that I have been travelling