Page:The four horsemen of the Apocalypse - (Los cuatro jinetes de Apocalipsis) (IA cu31924014386738).djvu/14

 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 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.