of Rome. The hero, as the renowned _torrero_ whose career it
celebrates, from his first boyish longing to be a bull-fighter, to
his death, weakened by years and wounds, in the arena of Madrid, is
something absolute in characterization. The whole book in fact is
absolute in its fidelity to the general fact it deals with, and the
persons of its powerful drama. Each in his or her place is realized
with an art which leaves one in no doubt of their lifelikeness, and
keeps each as vital as the _torrero_ himself. There is little of the
humor which relieves the pathos of Valdes in the equal fidelity of his
_Marta y Maria_ or the unsurpassable tragedy of Galdos in his _Dona
Perfecta_. The _torrero's_ family who have dreaded his boyish ambition
with the anxiety of good common people, and his devotedly gentle and
beautiful wife,--even his bullying and then truckling brother-in-law
who is ashamed of his profession and then proud of him when it has
filled Spain with his fame,--are made to live in the spacious scene.
But above all in her lust for him and her contempt for him the unique
figure of Dona Sol astounds. She rules him as her brother the marquis
would rule a mistress; even in the abandon of her passion she does not
admit him to social equality; she will not let him speak to her in
thee and thou, he must address her as ladyship; she is monstrous
without ceasing to be a woman of her world, when he dies before her in
the arena a broken and vanquished man. The _torrero_ is morally better
than the aristocrat and he is none the less human though a mere
incident of her wicked life,--her insulted and rejected worshipper,
who yet deserves his fate.

_Sangre y Arena_ is a book of unexampled force and in that sort must
be reckoned the greatest novel of the author, who has neglected no
phase of his varied scene. The _torrero's_ mortal disaster in the
arena is no more important than the action behind the scenes where the
gored horses have their dangling entrails sewed up by the primitive
surgery of the place and are then ridden back into the amphitheatre to
suffer a second agony. No color of the dreadful picture is spared; the
whole thing passes as in the reader's presence before his sight and
his other senses. The book is a masterpiece far in advance of that
study of the common life which Ibanez calls _La Horda_; dealing with
the horde of common poor and those accidents of beauty and talent
as native to them as to the classes called th