including anarchist ideas, seeing writing as a catalyst for change, and depreciating aesthetics and faith. However, by 1899 his outlook was beginning to change. His work began to display a new philosophical and artistic consciousness, and an interest in the past. His book El alma castellana (The Castilian Soul), and his essay collections, La ruta de Don Quijote (The Route of Don Quixote) and, much later, Una hora de España 1560–1590 (Spain's Hour, 1560–1590) capture the essence of being Spanish. He was abandoning revolutionary ideas, but becoming more nihilist, though respecting the dignity of human beings, and using irony to stand at arm's length from the world. This pessimism would eventually lead him to a period of political conservatism In 1902 he published the first of three intensely biographical novels, La voluntad (Volition), followed by Antonio Azorín, and Las confesiones de un pequeño filósofo (The Confessions of a Minor Philosopher). Early in his career, Ruiz had used pen names, such as Cándido (in honor of Voltaire) and Ahrimán (the Persian god of destruction), and in 1904 he discarded his own name and began to use the surname of one of his characters, "Azorín". Using mostly short sentences, in both his fiction and his essays he emphasized the small but enduring elements and events in history and in one's life. In his view, time consisted of a series of repetitions, a notion of time described as "timeless". He married Julia Guinda Urzanqui in 1908; she was to remain beside him for the rest of life and outlive him. She died in 1974 aged 98. They had no children. By 1913 he was writing for ABC, the popular pro-monarchy, conservative newspaper, including a series of articles on “La generación de 1898” (Generation of 98), a literary and artistic group to which he belonged. Ruiz served as a conservative deputy in the Cortes Generales from 1907 to 1919, eventually becoming an under-secretary for the Ministry of Public Instruction. He gave up politics in opposition to the dictatorship of Gen. Primo de Rivera, though he never opposed him publicly. He had by now become noted as a drama critic and essayist. His literary criticism, such as Al margen de los clásicos (Marginal Notes to the Classics), Don Juan and Doña Inés, helped to open up new avenues of literary taste and to arouse a new enthusiasm for the Spanish classics at a time when