sance, he has lived as well as thought
and written. He is said to have been thirty times in prison, six times
deputy; he has been a cowboy in the pampas of Argentina; he has founded
a city in Patagonia with a bullring and a bust of Cervantes in the
middle of it; he has rounded the Horn on a sailing-ship in a hurricane,
and it is whispered that like Victor Hugo he eats lobsters with the
shells on. He hobnobs with the universe.

One must admit, too, that Blasco Ibanez's universe is a bulkier,
burlier universe than Mr. Wells's. One is strangely certain that the
axle of Mr. Wells's universe is fixed in some suburb of London, say
Putney, where each house has a bit of garden where waddles an asthmatic
pet dog, where people drink tea weak, with milk in it, before a
gas-log, where every bookcase makes a futile effort to impinge on
infinity through the encyclopedia, where life is a monotonous going and
coming, swathed in clothes that must above all be respectable, to
business and from business. But who can say where Blasco Ibanez's
universe centers? It is in constant progression.

Starting, as Walt Whitman from fish-shaped Paumonauk, from the fierce
green fertility of Valencia, city of another great Spanish conqueror,
the Cid, he had marched on the world in battle array. The whole history
comes out in the series of novels at this moment being translated in
such feverish haste for the edification of the American public. The
beginnings are stories of the peasants of the fertile plain round about
Valencia, of the fishermen and sailors of El Grao, the port, a sturdy
violent people living amid a snappy fury of vegetation unexampled in
Europe. His method is inspired to a certain extent by Zola, taking from
him a little of the newspaper-horror mode of realism, with inevitable
murder and sudden death in the last chapters. Yet he expresses that
life vividly, although even then more given to grand vague ideas than
to a careful scrutiny of men and things. He is at home in the strong
communal feeling, in the individual anarchism, in the passionate
worship of the water that runs through the fields to give life and of
the blades of wheat that give bread and of the wine that gives joy,
which is the moral make-up of the Valencian peasant. He is sincerely
indignant about the agrarian system, about social inequality, and is
full of the revolutionary bravado of his race.

A typical novel of this period is _La Barraca_, a story of a peasant
fami