Project Gutenberg's The Shadow of the Cathedral, by Vicente Blasco Ibanez

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Title: The Shadow of the Cathedral

Author: Vicente Blasco Ibanez

Release Date: April 15, 2004 [EBook #12041]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL

BY

VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ

1919

Translated From The Spanish By
Mrs. W.A. Gillespie

With A Critical Introduction By
W.D. Howells

INTRODUCTION

There are three cathedrals which I think will remain chief of the
Spanish cathedrals in the remembrance of the traveller, namely the
Cathedral at Burgos, the Cathedral at Toledo, and the Cathedral at
Seville; and first of these for reasons hitherto of history and art,
and now of fiction, will be the Cathedral at Toledo, which the most
commanding talent among the contemporary Spanish novelists has made
the protagonist of the romance following. I do not mean that Vincent
Blasco Ibanez is greater than Perez Galdos, or Armando Palacio Valdes
or even the Countess Pardo-Bazan; but he belongs to their realistic
order of imagination, and he is easily the first of living European
novelists outside of Spain, with the advantage of superior youth,
freshness of invention and force of characterization. The Russians
have ceased to be actively the masters, and there is no Frenchman,
Englishman, or Scandinavian who counts with Ibanez, and of course no
Italian, American, and, unspeakably, no German.

I scarcely know whether to speak first of this book or the writer of
it, but as I know less of him than of it I may more quickly dispatch
that part of my introduction. He was born at Valencia in 1866, of
Arragonese origin, and of a strictly middle class family. His father
kept a shop, a dry-goods store in fact, but Ibanez, after fit
preparation, studied law in the University of Valencia and was
duly graduated in that science. Apparently he never practiced his
profession, but became a journalist almost immediately. He was
instinctively a revolutionist, and was imprisoned in Barcelona, the
home