less over the continent of Europe. At once, upon its appearance in Spain, Mare Nostrum was hailed as The New Odyssey: the author, in whom love of the ancient heroes is mingled with a rich vein of classic lore, makes excellent use of Homeric symbolism in this tale of the Mediterranean and the perfidious German submarine; his hero is named, like that of Homer's Odyssey, Ulysses; his hero, like his classic prototype, wanders away from home and forgets, for a time, his faithful Penelope; our modern wanderer, entrapped by a German vampire-spy into aiding the Teuton cause, pays double retribution for his deeds. His only son is blown up by the very vessels to whom he has furnished fuel; he himself finds an untimely grave in that sea he loved so much. And what a colorful, powerful sea does the Mediterranean—the cradle of civilization—appear to us when beheld through the magic art of a Blasco Ibañez; only in the pages of a Victor Hugo, who has so much influenced the great Spaniard, may such wonderful passages upon the waves be found. It is Our Sea indeed that is the real protagonist of Mare Nostrum, and the sea becomes a vast symbol of the entire civilized world whose name Blasco Ibañez was one of the first to speak for the Spanish people. Mare Nostrum belongs in the hearts of the American people beside The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
We have seen that one of the author's great purposes was to fulminate against injustice wherever he beheld it. This is the origin of the three great protests. The Shadow of the Cathedral, Blood and Sand and La Bodega (The Fruit of the Vine), named in the order of their American publication.
The Shadow of the Cathedral has been recognized by such masters as William Dean Howells for an incomparable fund of power and description. Reading Blasco
