e better. It has the
attraction of the author's frank handling, and the power of the
Spanish scene in which the action passes; but it could not hold me to
the end.

It is only in his latest book that he transcends the Spanish scene and
peoples the wider range from South America to Paris, and from Paris to
the invaded provinces of France with characters proper to the times
and places. _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ has not the rough
textures and rank dyes of the wholly Spanish stories, but it is the
strongest story of the great war known to me, and its loss in the
Parisian figures is made more than good in the novelty and veracity of
the Argentinos who supply that element of internationality which the
North American novelists of a generation ago employed to give a fresh
interest to their work. With the coming of the hero to study art and
make love in the conventional Paris, and the repatriation of his
father, a cattle millionaire of French birth from the pampas, with his
wife and daughters, Ibanez achieves effects beyond the art of Henry
James, below whom he nevertheless falls so far in subtlety and beauty.

The book has moments of the pathos so rich in the work of Galdos and
Valdes, and especially of Emilia Pardo-Bazan in her _Morrina_ or _Home
Sickness_, the story of a peasant girl in Barcelona, but the grief of
the Argentine family for the death of the son and brother in battle
with the Germans, has the appeal of anguish beyond any moment in _La
Catedral_. I do not know just the order of this last-mentioned novel
among the stories of Ibanez, but it has a quality of imagination, of
poetic feeling which surpasses the invention of any other that I have
read, and makes me think it came before _Sangre y Arena_, and possibly
before _La Horda_. I cannot recall any other novel of the author which
is quite so psychological as this. It is in fact a sort of biography,
a personal study, of the mighty fane at Toledo, as if the edifice were
of human quality and could have its life expressed in human terms.
There is nothing forced in the poetic conception, or mechanical in
the execution. The Cathedral is not only a single life, it is a
neighborhood, a city, a world in itself; and its complex character
appears in the nature of the different souls which collectively
animate it. The first of these is the sick and beaten native of it who
comes back to the world which he has never loved or trusted, but in
which he was born and r