One of the secrets of the immense power exercised by the novels of Vicente Blasco Ibá?ez is that they are literary projections of his dynamic personality. Not only the style, but the book, is here the man. This is especially true of those of his works in which the thesis element predominates, and in which the famous author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appears as a novelist of ideas-in-action. It is, of course, possible to divide his works into the "manners" or "periods" so dear to the literary cataloguers, and it may thus be indicated that there are such fairly distinct genres as the regional novel, the sociological tale and the psychological study; a convenient classification of this sort would place among the regional novels such masterpieces as La Barraca and Ca?as y Barro,—among the novels of purpose such powerful writings as La Catedral, La Bodega and Sangre y Arena,—among the psychological studies the introspective La Maja Desnuda. The war novels, including The Four Horsemen and the epic Mare Nostrum, would seem to form another group. Such non-literary diversions as grouping and regrouping, however, had perhaps best be left to those who relish the task. It is for the present more important to note that the passionate flame of a deeply human purpose welds the man's literary labors into a larger unity. His pen, as his person, has been given over to humanity. He is as fearless in his denunciation of evil as he is powerful in his description of it; he has lived his ideas as well as fashioned them into enduring documents; he reveals not only a new Spain, but a new world.
While Blasco Ibá?ez does not desire to be known as regional novelist—nor does a complete view of his numerous works justify such a narrow description—he[Pg vi] has nevertheless in his earlier books made such effective and artistic use of regional backgrounds that some critics have found this part of his production best. Speaking from the standpoint of durable literary art, I am inclined to such a view. Yet is there less humanitarian impulse in The Four Horsemen than in these earlier masterpieces? Whether Blasco Ibá?ez's background is a corner in Valencia, a spot on the island of Majorca, a battlefield in France, or Our Sea the Mediterranean,—the cradle of civilization,—his real stage is the human heart and his real actor, man.
Upon his election to the Cortes,—Spain's national parliamentary assembly,—Blasco Ibá?ez naturally turned, in his novels, to a consideration of political and social themes. Beginning with La Catedral (The Shadow of the Cathedral), one of the most powerful modern documents of its kind, he took up in successive novels the treatment of such vital subjects as the relation of Church to State, the degrading and backward influence of drunkenness, the problem of the Jesuits, the brutality and psychology of the bull-fight. In all of these works the writer is characterized by fearlessness, passion and even vehemence; yet his ardor is not so strong as to lead him into conscious unfairness. A fiery advocate of the lowly, he yet can cast their shortcomings into their teeth; they, in their ignorance, are accomplices in their own degradation, partners in the crimes that oppress them. They slay the leaders whom they misunderstand; they are slow to organize for the purpose of bursting their shackles. This appears in La Barraca (one of the so-called regional novels) no less than in La Catedral, La Bodega and other books of the more purely sociological series. In varying degree, applied to a nation rather than to a class, this fearless attitude is evident in Los Cuatros Jinetes del Apocalipsis and Mare Nostrum, in which is assailed the neutrality of Spain during the late and unlamented conflict. This unflinching determination to see the truth and state it is also discernible in a most personal manner; the sad inability of such noble spirits[Pg vii] as Gabriel Luna (La Catedral) or Fernando Salvatierra (La Bodega) to solace themselves with a belief in future life is perhaps an exteriorization of the author's own views, even as these revolutionary spirits are, in part, embodiments of himself.
In the bulk of the noted 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.
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.
Juan Gallardo, the hero of Blood and Sand, has from earliest childhood exhibited a natural aptitude for the bull ring. He is aided in his career by interested parties, and soon jumps to the forefront of his idolized profession, without having to thread his way arduously up the steep ascent of the bull fighters' hierarchy. Fame and fortune come to him, and he is able to gratify the desires of his early days, as if the mirage of hunger and desire had suddenly been converted into dazzling reality. He[Pg ix] lavishes largess upon his mother and his childless wife, and there comes, too, a love out of wedlock.
But neither his powers nor his fame can last forever. The life of even Juan Gallardo is taken into his hands every time he steps into the ring to face the wild bulls; at first comes a minor accident, then a loss of prestige, and at last the fatal day upon which he is carried out of the arena, dead. He dies a victim of his own glory, a sacrifice upon the altar of national blood-lust. That Do?a Sol who lures him from his wife and home is, in her capricious, fascinating, baffling way, almost a symbol of the fickle bull-fight audience, now hymning the praises of a favorite, now sneering him off the scene of his former triumphs.
The tale is more than a colorful, absorbing story of love and struggle. It is a stinging indictment brought against the author's countrymen, thrown in their faces with dauntless acrimony. He shows us the glory of the arena,—the movement, the color, the mastery of the skilled performers,—and he reveals, too, the sickening other side. In successive pictures he mirrors the thousands that flock to the bull fights, reaching a tremendous climax in the closing words of the tale. The popular hero has just been gored to death, but the crowd, knowing that the spectacle is less than half over, sets up yells for the continuance of the performance. In the bellowing of the mob Blasco Ibá?ez divines the howl of the real and only animals. Not the sacrificial bulls, but the howling, bloodthirsty assembly is the genuine beast!
The volume is rich in significant detail, both as regards the master's peculiar powers and his views as expressed in other words. Once again we meet the author's determination to be just to all concerned. Through Dr. Ruiz, for example, a medical enthusiast over tauromachy, we receive what amounts to a lecture upon the evolution of the brutal sport. He looks upon bull-fighting as the historical substitute for the Inquisition, which was in itself a great national festival. He is ready to admit, too, that the bull fight is a barbarous institution, but calls[Pg x] to your attention that it is by no means the only one in the world. In the turning of the people to violent, savage forms of amusement he beholds a universal ailment. And when Dr. Ruiz expresses his disgust at seeing foreigners turn eyes of contempt upon Spain because of the bull-fight, he no doubt speaks for Blasco Ibá?ez. The enthusiastic physician points out that horse-racing is more cruel than bull-fighting, and kills many more men; that the spectacle of fox-hunting with trained dogs is hardly a sight for civilized onlookers; that there is more than one modern game out of which the participants emerge with broken legs, fractured skulls, flattened noses and what not; and how about the duel, often fought with only an unhealthy desire for publicity as the genuine cause?
Thus, through the Doctor, the Spaniard states the other side of the case, saying, in effect, to the foreign reader, "Yes, I am upbraiding my countrymen for the national vice that they are pleased to call a sport. That is my right as a Spaniard who loves his country and as a human being who loves his race. But do not forget that you have institutions little less barbarous, and before you grow too excited in your desire to remove the mote from our eye, see to it that you remove your own, for it is there."
Juan Gallardo is not one of the impossible heroes that crowd the pages of fiction; to me he is a more successful portrait than, for example, Gabriel Luna of The Shadow of the Cathedral. There is a certain rigidity in Luna's make-up, due perhaps to his unbending certainty in matters of belief,—or to be exact, matters of unbelief. This is felt even in his moments of love, although that may be accounted for by the vicissitudes of his wandering existence and the illness with which it has left him. Gallardo is somehow more human; he is not a matinée hero; he knows what it is to quake with fear before he enters the ring; he comes to a realization of what his position has cost him; he impresses us not only as a powerful type, but as a flesh and blood creature. And[Pg xi] his end, like that of so many of the author's protagonists, comes about much in the nature of a retribution. He dies at the hands of the thing he loves, on the stage of his triumphs. And while I am on the subject of the hero's death, let me suggest that Blasco Ibá?ez's numerous death scenes often attain a rare height of artistry and poetry,—for, strange as it may seem to some, there is a poet hidden in the noted Spaniard, a poet of vast conception, of deep communion with the interplay of Nature and her creatures, of vision that becomes symbolic. Recall the death of the Centaur Madariaga in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, dashing upon his beloved steed, like a Mazeppa of the South American plains, straight into eternity; read the remarkable passages portraying the deaths of Triton and Ulises in Mare Nostrum; consider the deeply underlying connotation of Gabriel Luna's fate. These are not mere dyings; they are apotheoses.
Do?a Sol belongs to the author's siren types; she is an early sister of Freya, the German spy who leads to the undoing of Ulises in Mare Nostrum. She is one of the many proofs that Blasco Ibá?ez, in his portrayals of the worldly woman, seizes upon typical rather than individual traits; she puzzles the reader quite as much as she confuses her passionate lover. And she is no more loyal to him than is the worshipping crowd that at last, in her presence, dethrones its former idol.
Among the secondary characters, as interesting as any, is the friend of Juan who is nicknamed Nacional, because of his radical political notions. Nacional does not drink wine; to him wine was responsible for the failure of the laboring-class, a point of view which the author had already enunciated three years earlier in La Bodega; similar to the r?le played by drink is that of illiteracy, and here, too, Nacional feels the terrible burdens imposed upon the common people by lack of education. Indicative of the author's sympathies is also his strange bandit Plumitas, a sort of Robin Hood who robs from the rich and succors the poor. The humorous figure of the [Pg xii]bull-fighter's brother-in-law suggests the horde of sycophants that always manage to attach themselves to a noted—and generous—public personage.
The dominant impression that the book leaves upon me is one of power,—crushing, implacable power. The author's paragraphs and chapters often seem hewn out of rock and solidly massed one upon the other in the rearing of an impregnable structure. And just as these chapters are massed into a temple of passionate protest, so the entire works of Blasco Ibá?ez attain an architectural unity in which not the least of the elements are a flaming nobility of purpose and a powerful directness of aim.
Once upon a time, and it was not so very long ago, it was the fashion in certain quarters to regard Blasco Ibá?ez as impossible and utopian. The trend of world events has greatly modified the meanings of some of our words and has given us a deeper insight into hitherto neglected aspects of foreign and domestic life. Things have been happening lately in Spain (as well as elsewhere, indeed!) that reveal our author in somewhat the light of a prophet. Or is it merely that he is closer to the heart of his nation and describes what he sees rather than draws a veil of words before unpleasant situations? Ultimately these situations must be met. The Spain of to-morrow will be found to have moved more in the direction of Blasco Ibá?ez than in that of his detractors.
The renowned novelist is but fifty-two, energetic, prolific, voluminous; besides more than a score of novels thus far to his credit he has written several books of travel, a history of the world war, has travelled in both hemispheres and made countless volumes of translations. He has now a larger audience than has been vouchsafed any of his fellow novelists, and his future works will be watched for by readers the world over. That is a rare privilege and imposes a rare obligation. Blasco Ibá?ez has it in him to meet both.