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Proofreaders
1919
Translated From The Spanish By
Mrs. W.A. Gillespie
With A Critical Introduction By
W.D. Howells
There are three cathedrals which I think will remain chief of theSpanish cathedrals in the remembrance of the traveller, namely theCathedral at Burgos, the Cathedral at Toledo, and the Cathedral atSeville; and first of these for reasons hitherto of history and art,and now of fiction, will be the Cathedral at Toledo, which the mostcommanding talent among the contemporary Spanish novelists has madethe protagonist of the romance following. I do not mean that VincentBlasco Ibañez is greater than Perez Galdós, or Armando Palacio Valdésor even the Countess Pardo-Bazan; but he belongs to their realisticorder of imagination, and he is easily the first of living Europeannovelists outside of Spain, with the advantage of superior youth,freshness of invention and force of characterization. The Russianshave ceased to be actively the masters, and there is no Frenchman,Englishman, or Scandinavian who counts with Ibañez, and of course noItalian, American, and, unspeakably, no German.
I scarcely know whether to speak first of this book or the writer ofit, but as I know less of him than of it I may more quickly dispatchthat part of my introduction. He was born at Valencia in 1866, ofArragonese origin, and of a strictly middle class family. His fatherkept a shop, a dry-goods store in fact, but Ibañez, after fitpreparation, studied law in the University of Valencia and wasduly graduated in that science. Apparently he never practiced hisprofession, but became a journalist almost immediately. He wasinstinctively a revolutionist, and was imprisoned in Barcelona, thehome of revolution, for some political offence, when he was eighteen.It does not appear whether he committed his popular offence in theRepublican newspaper which he established in Valencia; but it iscertain that he was elected a Republican deputy to the Cortes, wherehe became a leader of his party, while yet evidently of no greatmaturity.
He began almost as soon to write fiction of the naturalistic type, andof a Zolaistic coloring which his Spanish critics find rather strongerthan I have myself seen it. Every young writer forms himself upon someolder writer; nobody begins master; but Ibañez became master while hewas yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel verystrongly 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 isnot a very spacious scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly anovela de costumbres, or novel of manners, as we used to call thekind. Ibañez has in fact never written anything but novels of manners,and La Barraca pictures a neighborhood where a stranger takes up awaste 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 pityfor the newcomer in the loss of one of his children return to theircruelty and render the place impossible to him. It is a tragedy suchas naturalism alone can stage and give the effect of life. I have readfew things so touching as this tale of commonest experience whichseems as true to the suffering and defeat of the newcomers, as to the