his other senses. The book is a masterpiece far in advance of that
study of the common life which Ibañez 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 the 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, Ibañez 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 Galdós and
Valdés, and especially of Emilia Pardo-Bazan in her _Morriña_ 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 Ibañez, but it has a quality of imagination, of