of revolution, for some political offence, when he was eighteen.
It does not appear whether he committed his popular offence in the
Republican newspaper which he established in Valencia; but it is
certain that he was elected a Republican deputy to the Cortes, where
he became a leader of his party, while yet evidently of no great
maturity.

He began almost as soon to write fiction of the naturalistic type, and
of a Zolaistic coloring which his Spanish critics find rather stronger
than I have myself seen it. Every young writer forms himself upon some
older writer; nobody begins master; but Ibanez became master while he
was yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel very
strongly the Zolaistic influence in his first novel, _La Barraca_,
or The Cabin, which paints peasant life in the region of Valencia,
studied at first hand and probably from personal knowledge. It is
not a very spacious scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly a
_novela de costumbres_, or novel of manners, as we used to call the
kind. Ibanez has in fact never written anything but novels of manners,
and _La Barraca_ pictures a neighborhood where a stranger takes up a
waste tract of land and tries to make a home for himself and family.
This makes enemies of all his neighbors who after an interval of pity
for the newcomer in the loss of one of his children return to their
cruelty and render the place impossible to him. It is a tragedy such
as naturalism alone can stage and give the effect of life. I have read
few things so touching as this tale of commonest experience which
seems as true to the suffering and defeat of the newcomers, as to the
stupid inhumanity of the neighbors who join, under the lead of the
evillest among them, in driving the strangers away; in fact I know
nothing parallel to it, certainly nothing in English; perhaps _The
House with the Green Shutters_ breathes as great an anguish.

At just what interval or remove the novel which gave Ibanez worldwide
reputation followed this little tale, I cannot say, and it is not
important that I should try to say. But it is worth while to note here
that he never flatters the vices or even the swoier virtues of his
countrymen; and it is much to their honor that they have accepted him
in the love of his art for the sincerity of his dealing with their
conditions. In _Sangre y Arena_ his affair is with the cherished
atrocity which keeps the Spaniards in the era of the gladiator
shows