The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse/Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. The Man and his Work
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
By Dr. Isaac Goldberg
Vicente Blasco Ibañez, the famous author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that have galloped around the entire civilized world over a path of glory, is easily one of the most interesting personages now before the public. Had he never written a book his name would have gone down in the annals of a race rich in versatile men as one of the most gifted and prolific figures produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is no mere rhetorical phrase to say that he has, in his fifty-two years, lived the lives of a half-dozen men. It is because of this multifarious life, because of his wide travels, his passionate beliefs, his unceasing activity in both the intellectual and the everyday spheres—that he appeals so much to the American reader, who, from the very traditions of the country, admires the writer and the hero of red blood and undaunted courage.
In no uncertain sense is Blasco Ibañez's own life as interesting as any novel that he ever wrote. And it is out of that life that his books have flowered—a life so rich in incident, so varied in scene, yet so potently dominated by a flaming purpose, that it overflowed into some of the most splendid works of literature that our age has brought forth. For it is real life, existence in the palpitating sense of reality, that gushes from this master's novels. To this desire for reality he is at times willing to sacrifice everything in the way of the more tender literary graces, yet they deceive themselves who imagine that Blasco Ibañez is no artist in the more purely literary sense. None better than he can communicate the aroma that rises from a landscape, none can better portray the atmosphere of a region. And it should be remembered that Spain is preeminently the home of the regional novelist.
The author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was born in Valencia, in 1867, the son of a dry-goods merchant who early cherished ambitions to make a lawyer of his son. But the son, quite as early, began to reveal those anti-legal tendencies that later made of him the leader of the Republican party of his nation. At the age of eighteen he was clapped into prison for a sonnet directed against the government, and this was the beginning of a series of imprisonments that have done the writer honor. Prison records are a common thing among the revolutionary youth of Spain and Spanish America; no less than thirty entries exist against our author's name. He has utilized the prison atmosphere in more than one of his short tales—and it is as a writer of short tales that he began his literary career. Our writer, then, is no mere parlor agitator; he has suffered for every idea he championed, and has returned again and again, undaunted, to the attack.
Forced more than once to leave the nation because of his anti-monarchical views, Blasco Ibañez has made many journeys to the most remote lands; he has thus an intimate knowledge of Europe, the Orient and the Western hemisphere. And just as he has made use of his numerous personal experiences in his novels, so his travels have lent him more than one background.
As a leader of the people and the disseminator of progressive ideas, Blasco Ibañez has translated many volumes dealing with sociological and political topics, issuing them at prices within the reach of the masses. He has directed one of Spain's largest publishing houses, stimulating not only a love for what is best in Spanish, but also a desire for the best works of an international nature. His history of the war, which he studied at first hand, as readers of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are well aware, is still in process of writing, and has reached an enormous sale.
Such are the elements that have entered into the making of the great writer's novels. Possessing a vivid sense of backgrounds, a broad knowledge of humanity, a deep sympathy with the lowly, a fearless love of justice, he instils his works with the power of universal passion.
Of these, not a few are already at hand for the English reader, and more are in process of translation. No modern spirit, whether he be in search of that pleasure which comes from all sincere works of the imagination, or of that deeper acquaintance with the currents of modern thought which is today imperative because of the vast complexity of contemporary life, can afford not to know an author who so merges pleasure with profit.
There is little need to speak here of the work that established the fame of Blasco Ibañez in the United States; The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the one book every American has read, of all that were produced by the war; it is the one novel which, in the vastness of its background, the vigor of its spirit, the torch of its idealism, matches the great cause in which it was written. And now, in the companion volume Mare Nostrum (Our Sea), it has found a worthy spiritual fellow. Here again we find a vast background, a flaming purpose, and withal a tale of love and adventure that carries us breathless 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 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, how human the tragic hero, Juan Gallardo, is made, and how he appears not only in the light of a brave heart but also of a sacrifice to popular brutality. For to Blasco Ibañez the real beast is not the bull who is goaded to death by the red flag, but the sweating, yelling blood-lusting mob that assembled to satisfy a primitive instinct of cruelty. It is characteristic of the author that while he gives you a love tale which moves forward on its own power, so to speak, he presents you with a thorough study of one aspect of this wonderful, versatile people. And lest you are misled into a notion of your own superiority, he reminds you that we have sports no less cruel, if less spectacular. Blood and Sand! Red and Yellow: the national colors of Spain and the colors of a national disgrace that stains the noble banner. Such is the bull fight as a great fighter himself views it. It is not the horror of a timid soul at the sight of blood; there is no timidity in Blasco Ibañez; it is the disgust of a robust spirit who beholds nobler fields of activity for his people and for the world.
La Bodega (The Fruit of the Vine) is of double timeliness; it attacks two problems which are to-day uppermost in the minds of all thinking people: social revolution and drink. And the attack is as direct as vehement purpose and volcanic language can make it. Drink, especially in the form of Spain's wine, is here portrayed as the enemy of society; it intoxicates the wealthy few with a false sense of power; it befogs the mind of the poor many and deadens them to a sense of their misery and a realization of their own strength to end their wretched lot and inaugurate a better day. Drink leads to the seduction of the heroine by a worthless scion of the upper crust and paves the way to the murderous vengeance inflicted upon by the brother of the wronged woman. There is more love in La Bodega (The Fruit of the Vine) than in the other propagandist novels; there is more poetry—and poetry of a very genuine sort. The scenes of life in town and in country, of love among the peasantry, of life and death among the gypsy laborers, are portrayed with a sense of poesy that few would suspect in the author from a cursory acquaintance. For, bear in mind that great as is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the genius of Blasco Ibañez is too expansive to be contained in a single book. La Bodega will first of all present you with an absorbing love story; it will introduce a new aspect of Spanish labor; touches again the religious question; it is an earlier Blasco Ibañez that considers the overthrow of the present order in a manner to make you stop and think hard.
But not all is protest and intellectuality in Blasco Ibañez; by no means. The volumes scheduled for early publication will introduce still another aspect of his versatile spirit: the man of amorous passion, the man of bicontinental vision, the pure fiction writer.
Take, for example, The Argonauts (Los Argonautas). This is easily one of the most important volumes that has come from the prolific author. It summarizes the spirit not of one age but of centuries. The classic symbolism of its name takes us back to the good ship Argos and that Jason who went in search of the golden fleece; and ever since, man has, now hither, now thither, embarked upon a similar unending quest. Now it was a Columbus braving the Sea of Darkness, now it was the great Spanish Conquerors in search of El Dorado, now the Crusaders in quest of the Holy Grail; only yesterday it was the vast hordes of immigrants that sought in the New World what the Old World denied—and found it, too, in the United States, in Argentina … It is this spirit of eternal hope that breathes upon every page of this monumental volume; written just before The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it represents the first of a Spanish American series which the author hopes to complete shortly; it is, indeed, as he has himself told us, the prologue to that series of novels. Filled with the idealism of his two later works, it is replete, too, with an interpretation of human passions such as only this ardent Spaniard could portray. The entire action takes place upon a trans-Atlantic steamer journeying from Spain to the city of hope—Buenos Aires. The vessel becomes a floating symbol of the human race in all its divisions, its baseness, its aspirations, its conquests. From the steerage to the de luxe staterooms wafts one and the same spirit—hope, the radiant future. The book contains some of the most remarkable passages of an author peculiarly wealthy in them; literally and figuratively it is oceanic in conception; no sooner have we opened its pages and witnessed the affecting separation of the passionate Spanish lovers, and followed the hero Fernando Ojeda, on to the steamer, than we ourselves have taken passage and are inscribed upon the purser's list. In one sense, for the moment overlooking the fascinating love adventures which this poet manages to engage in during the short trip across the ocean, the book is a spiritual history of the human race, with the eternal motive of love on the one hand, and gain on the other. In presenting Los Argonautas—The Argonauts—to the English-reading public, the publishers feel that they are offering not only one of Blasco Ibañez's masterworks, but one of the greatest novels of human strivings ever penned. In scope, in incident, in background, in effect, it is one of the dominating novels of the present century.
Following directly upon The Argonauts will come a group of novels that display the versatile powers of the noted author.
Thus Among the Orange Groves (Entre Naranjos) is a tale of romantic passion placed in most picturesque surroundings; La Maja Desnuda (The Naked Girl, so named from one of the famous Goya's paintings) will present a vivid account of the struggle between the artist's temperament and life's realities, unfolded in pages that reveal Blasco Ibañez as an uncommonly expert psychologist with a deep insight into the hearts of man and woman; Canas y Barro (Reeds and Mud), one of the earlier regional tales of the author, has been called the greatest novel he has written; in force of characterization, ardor of passion, savor of the country, baring of the human soul a prey to love, utilization of folk lore, understanding of his people, it surpassed The Cabin.
And on top of these pleasurable anticipations—nor has the whole list of his books been given—comes the news of the finishing of his latest novel Los Enemigos de la Mujer (The Enemies of Woman), which, report has it, considers the nobility of the United States attitude in the late war.
Blasco Ibañez is still in his prime as a writer; he owes us his South American series; the new world that has emerged from the cataclysm has doubtless stirred him to the depths and suggested a host of ideas that will eventually crystallize into new works for which the world is waiting. He has thus become a source of pleasure to a veritable world of readers. Perhaps no author of any nation, at the present day, has a greater number of readers waiting for his next book. And among those nations, the United States is favored, as are few, with a steady issue of the master's works. Readers of discretion will read them as they come out, and not allow them to accumulate in a set that eventually will have to be read as a whole if one is to maintain intellectual connection with the times.
For Blasco Ibañez is peculiarly an author of the times; years ago, before certain ideas had become popular, he was championing them at the cost of his own liberty; to-day, too, he is ahead of the procession. To read him is, as we said at the outset, to combine pleasure with profit, instruction with enjoyment. Is not that, after all, the great function of reading?