Spaniard's books there is waged, on both a large scale and a small, the ceaseless, implacable struggle of the new against the old. This eternal battle early formed an appreciable part of even the writer's short fiction. His old seamen look with scorn upon the steam-vessels that replace their beloved barks; his vintners regret the passing of the good old days when sherry sold high and had not yet been ousted from the market by cheap, new-fangled concoctions; his toilers begin to rebel against ecclesiastical authority; some of his heroes are even capable of falling in love with Jewesses or with women below their station (Luna Benamor, Los Muertos Mandan); everywhere is the fermentation of transition. His protagonists,—red-blooded, vigorous, determined,—usually fail at the end, but if there are victories that spell failure, so are there failures that spell victory. It is the clash of these ancient and modern forces that strikes the spark which ignites the author's passion. He is with the new and of it, yet rises above blind partisanship. His dominant figures, chiefly men, are representative of the Spain of to-morrow; not that ma?ana which has so long (and often unjustly) been a standing reproach to Iberian procrastination, but a to-morrow of rebirth, of rededication to lofty ideals and glowing realities.

In Sangre y Arena (Blood and Sand, written in 1908) Blasco Ibá?ez attacks the Spanish national sport. With characteristic thoroughness, approaching his subject from the psychological, the historical, the national, the humane, the dramatic and narrative standpoint, he evolves another of his notable documents, worthy of a place among the great tracts of literary history The Prince wasvery much alarmedwhen he perceived that Selbstwas growing sorapidly..

His process, like his plot, is simple; whether attacking the Church or the evils of drink, or the bloodlust of the[Pg viii] bull ring, his methods are usually the same. He provides a protagonist who shall serve as the vehicle or symbol of his ideas, surrounding him with minor personages intended to serve as a foil or as a prop. He fills in the background with all the wealth of descriptive and coloring powers at his command—and these powers are as highly developed in Ibá?ez, I believe, as in any living writer. The beauty of Blasco Ibá?ez's descriptions—a beauty by no means confined to the pictures he summons to the mind—is that, at their best, they rise to interpretation. He not only brings before the eye a vivid image, but communicates to the spirit an intellectual reaction. Here he is the master who penetrates beyond the exterior into the inner significance; the reader is carried into the swirl of the action itself, for the magic of the author's pen imparts a sense of palpitant actuality; you are yourself a soldier at the Marne, you fairly drown with Ulises in his beloved Mediterranean, you defend the besieged city of Saguntum, you pant with the swordsman in the bloody arena. This gift of imparting actuality to his scenes is but another evidence of the Spaniard's dynamic personality; he lives his actions so thoroughly that we live them with him; his gift of second sight gives us to see beyond amphitheatres of blood and sand into national character, beyond a village struggle into the vexed problem of land, labor and property. Against this type of background develops the characteristic Ibá?ez plot, by no means lacking intimate interest, yet beginning somewhat slowly and gathering the irresistible momentum of a powerful body.