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 Ibanez 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 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 Valdes in the equal fidelity of his Marta y Maria or the unsurpassable tragedy of Galdos in his Dona 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 Dona 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.