Salaverria, after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under
the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less
vigorous Antonio de Trueba, and of Madrid vulgarians, headed by Mesonero
Romanos and Coloma. The decadent novel, foreshadowed a few years since
by Alejandro Sawa, has attained full maturity in Hoyos y Vinent, while
the distinctive growth of the century is the novel of ideas, exact,
penetrating, persistently suggestive in the larger sense, which does not
hesitate to make demands upon the reader, and this is exemplified most
distinctively, both temperamentally and intellectually, by Pio Baroja.

It would be difficult to find two men who, dealing with the same ideas,
bring to them more antagonistic attitudes of mind than Baroja and Blasco
Ibanez. For all his appearance of modernism, Blasco really belongs to
the generation before 1898. He is of the stock of Victor Hugo--a
popular rhapsodist and intellectual swashbuckler, half artist and half
mob orator--a man of florid and shallow certainties, violent
enthusiasms, quack remedies, vast magnetism and address, and even vaster
impudence--a fellow with plain touches of the charlatan. His first solid
success at home was made with _La Barraca_ in 1899--and it was a
success a good deal more political than artistic; he was hailed for his
frenzy far more than for his craft. Even outside of Spain his subsequent
celebrity has tended to ground itself upon agreement with his politics,
and not upon anything properly describable as a critical appreciation of
his talents. Had _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ been
directed against France instead of in favour of France, it goes without
saying that it would have come to the United States without the
_imprimatur_ of the American Embassy at Madrid, and that there
would have appeared no sudden rage for the author among the generality
of novel-readers. His intrinsic merits, in sober retrospect, seem very
feeble. For all his concern with current questions, his accurate news