The Shadow of the Cathedral | Page 2

honor that they have accepted him in the love of his art
for the sincerity of his dealing with their conditions. In Sangre y Arena
his affair is with the cherished atrocity which keeps the Spaniards in the
era of the gladiator shows of Rome. The hero, as the renowned torrero
whose career it celebrates, from his first boyish longing to be a
bull-fighter, to his death, weakened by years and wounds, in the arena

of Madrid, is something absolute in characterization. The whole book
in fact is absolute in its fidelity to the general fact it deals with, and the
persons of its powerful drama. Each in his or her place is realized with
an art which leaves one in no doubt of their lifelikeness, and keeps each
as vital as the torrero himself. There is little of the humor which
relieves the pathos of Valdés in the equal fidelity of his Marta y Maria
or the unsurpassable tragedy of Galdós in his Doña Perfecta. The
torrero's family who have dreaded his boyish ambition with the anxiety
of good common people, and his devotedly gentle and beautiful
wife,--even his bullying and then truckling brother-in-law who is
ashamed of his profession and then proud of him when it has filled
Spain with his fame,--are made to live in the spacious scene. But above
all in her lust for him and her contempt for him the unique figure of
Doña Sol astounds. She rules him as her brother the marquis would rule
a mistress; even in the abandon of her passion she does not admit him
to social equality; she will not let him speak to her in thee and thou, he
must address her as ladyship; she is monstrous without ceasing to be a
woman of her world, when he dies before her in the arena a broken and
vanquished man. The torrero is morally better than the aristocrat and
he is none the less human though a mere incident of her wicked
life,--her insulted and rejected worshipper, who yet deserves his fate.
Sangre y Arena is a book of unexampled force and in that sort must be
reckoned the greatest novel of the author, who has neglected no phase
of his varied scene. The torrero's mortal disaster in the arena is no
more important than the action behind the scenes where the gored
horses have their dangling entrails sewed up by the primitive surgery of
the place and are then ridden back into the amphitheatre to suffer a
second agony. No color of the dreadful picture is spared; the whole
thing passes as in the reader's presence before his sight and his other
senses. The book is a masterpiece far in advance of that study of the
common life which Ibañez calls La Horda; dealing with the horde of
common poor and those accidents of beauty and talent as native to
them as to the classes called the better. It has the attraction of the
author's frank handling, and the power of the Spanish scene in which
the action passes; but it could not hold me to the end.

It is only in his latest book that he transcends the Spanish scene and
peoples the wider range from South America to Paris, and from Paris to
the invaded provinces of France with characters proper to the times and
places. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse has not the rough
textures and rank dyes of the wholly Spanish stories, but it is the
strongest story of the great war known to me, and its loss in the
Parisian figures is made more than good in the novelty and veracity of
the Argentinos who supply that element of internationality which the
North American novelists of a generation ago employed to give a fresh
interest to their work. With the coming of the hero to study art and
make love in the conventional Paris, and the repatriation of his father, a
cattle millionaire of French birth from the pampas, with his wife and
daughters, Ibañez achieves effects beyond the art of Henry James,
below whom he nevertheless falls so far in subtlety and beauty.
The book has moments of the pathos so rich in the work of Galdós and
Valdés, and especially of Emilia Pardo-Bazan in her Morriña or Home
Sickness, the story of a peasant girl in Barcelona, but the grief of the
Argentine family for the death of the son and brother in battle with the
Germans, has the appeal of anguish beyond any moment in La Catedral.
I do not know just the order of this last-mentioned novel among the
stories of Ibañez, but it has a quality of imagination, of poetic feeling
which surpasses the invention of any other that I have read, and makes
me think it came before