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 Ibañez, 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 Ibañez, 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 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 Ibañez 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_,