Ibañez is no mere exercise of the eye; it is a vivid experience that is more like something actually lived than simply read. Open the pages of this astounding document and you at once become a dweller of the Cathedral; you live amid the people whose world it is; you listen to the muffled voices of protest as they rise against clerical oppression, and overhear the surging clamors of a demand for a better day. With Gabriel Luna, the self-sacrificing hero, you seek to teach these lowly people, only to find that the oppression has bred an equally anarchic spirit in their hearts. The disciples prove stronger than the master, and in the end he is, by a flashing stroke of irony—in which our author abounds—slain by his own people, the lowly whom he had sought to raise. It is Christ crucified anew. Throughout these powerful pages the shadow of the Cathedral falls upon every line; the background is described with a sense of detail that the author learned from his early master, Zola; that same oratory that rang from the deputy's mouth when he stood in the national assembly for the commoners, rings here like the clang of steel against iron. The Shadow of the Cathedral is itself a cathedral of secular freedom—one of the foundation stones in Blasco Ibañez's mighty temple of protest. It is an impregnable monument to an idea.
More absorbing as action, just as powerful as a protest, and equally daring on the part of the author in casting the weaknesses of his countrymen into their very teeth is Blood and Sand (Sangre y Arena), one of the greatest indictments against the bull-fight evil ever penned. The horror of this national atrocity is depicted with a pen that fairly drips with the gore of the bull-ring; if you think that an exaggeration, read the pages of a novel that shows you one bull fight after another, yet each time presents a new picture and a new indictment. Note, too,
