The Shadow of the Cathedral

The Shadow of the Cathedral

Project Gutenberg's The Shadow of the Cathedral, by Vicente Blasco
Ibañez This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Shadow of the Cathedral
Author: Vicente Blasco Ibañez
Release Date: April 15, 2004 [EBook #12041]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tim Koeller and PG Distributed
Proofreaders

THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL
BY
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ

1919
Translated From The Spanish By Mrs. W.A. Gillespie
With A Critical Introduction By W.D. Howells

INTRODUCTION
There are three cathedrals which I think will remain chief of the
Spanish cathedrals in the remembrance of the traveller, namely the
Cathedral at Burgos, the Cathedral at Toledo, and the Cathedral at
Seville; and first of these for reasons hitherto of history and art, and
now of fiction, will be the Cathedral at Toledo, which the most
commanding talent among the contemporary Spanish novelists has
made the protagonist of the romance following. I do not mean that
Vincent Blasco Ibañez is greater than Perez Galdós, or Armando
Palacio Valdés or even the Countess Pardo-Bazan; but he belongs to
their realistic order of imagination, and he is easily the first of living
European novelists outside of Spain, with the advantage of superior
youth, freshness of invention and force of characterization. The
Russians have ceased to be actively the masters, and there is no
Frenchman, Englishman, or Scandinavian who counts with Ibañez, and
of course no Italian, American, and, unspeakably, no German.
I scarcely know whether to speak first of this book or the writer of it,
but as I know less of him than of it I may more quickly dispatch that
part of my introduction. He was born at Valencia in 1866, of
Arragonese origin, and of a strictly middle class family. His father kept
a shop, a dry-goods store in fact, but Ibañez, after fit preparation,
studied law in the University of Valencia and was duly graduated in
that science. Apparently he never practiced his profession, but became
a journalist almost immediately. He was instinctively a revolutionist,
and was imprisoned in Barcelona, the home of revolution, for some
political offence, when he was eighteen. It does not appear whether he
committed his popular offence in the Republican newspaper which he
established in Valencia; but it is certain that he was elected a

Republican deputy to the Cortes, where he became a leader of his party,
while yet evidently of no great maturity.
He began almost as soon to write fiction of the naturalistic type, and of
a Zolaistic coloring which his Spanish critics find rather stronger than I
have myself seen it. Every young writer forms himself upon some older
writer; nobody begins master; but Ibañez became master while he was
yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel very strongly
the Zolaistic influence in his first novel, La Barraca, or The Cabin,
which paints peasant life in the region of Valencia, studied at first hand
and probably from personal knowledge. It is not a very spacious
scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly a novela de costumbres, or
novel of manners, as we used to call the kind. Ibañez has in fact never
written anything but novels of manners, and La Barraca pictures a
neighborhood where a stranger takes up a waste tract of land and tries
to make a home for himself and family. This makes enemies of all his
neighbors who after an interval of pity for the newcomer in the loss of
one of his children return to their cruelty and render the place
impossible to him. It is a tragedy such as naturalism alone can stage
and give the effect of life. I have read few things so touching as this
tale of commonest experience which seems as true to the suffering and
defeat of the newcomers, as to the stupid inhumanity of the neighbors
who join, under the lead of the evillest among them, in driving the
strangers away; in fact I know nothing parallel to it, certainly nothing
in English; perhaps The House with the Green Shutters breathes as
great an anguish.
At just what interval or remove the novel which gave Ibañez worldwide
reputation followed this little tale, I cannot say, and it is not important
that I should try to say. But it is worth while to note here that he never
flatters the vices or even the swoier virtues of his countrymen; and it is
much to their