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 Ibanez is greater than Perez Galdos, or Armando
Palacio Valdes 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 Ibanez, 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 Ibanez, 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 Ibanez 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. Ibanez 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
