INTRODUCTION

Señor Blasco Ibáñez has asked me to say a few words by way of

introduction to _The Cabin_ which shall be both simple and true.

He has watched with conflicting emotions the reception of his words in

this country--pleasure as he has realized the warmth of their welcome

and the general consensus of critical approval, pleasure not unmixed

with other feelings as he has read the notices in which these opinions

have been expressed and the accounts of his career which have

accompanied them. Few writers during the past twenty years have lived so

much in the public eye; the facts of his life are accessible and clear.

Then why invent new ones? "It is necessary," he writes, "to correct all

this, to give an account of my life which shall be accurate and

authentic, and which shall not lead the public into further error."

Why is the American press entirely ignorant in matters pertaining to

Spain? It is guiltless even of the shadow of learning. Not one editor in

the United States knows anything about the intellectual life of the

peninsula. Why print as information the veriest absurdities? A liberal

use of the word _perhaps_ is not a substitute for good faith with the

reader. Here is one of the great dramatic literatures of the world,

which by common consent is unrivalled except by the English and the

Greek, which today is as vigorous as it ever was in its Golden Age

during the seventeenth century, yet a fastidious and reputable review

published in this city is able to say when the plays of Benavente are

first translated in this country, that it "feels that Jacinto Benavente

has dramatic talent." Dramatic talent!--a man who has revolutionized the

theatre of a race, and whose works are the intellectual pride of tens of

millions of people over two continents? Ignorance ceases to be

ridiculous at a certain point and becomes criminal. The Irishman who

perpetrated this bull should be deported for it. Again, Spain has

produced the greatest novel of all time in _Don Quixote_, she has

originated the modern realistic novel, yet the publications may be

counted upon the fingers of one hand which can command the services of a

reviewer who is able even to name the two leading Spanish novelists of

today, much less to distinguish Pío Baroja from Blasco Ibáñez or Ricardo

León. This condition must cease, or it will become wilful.

The author of _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ is not a regional

novelist.

He is not a literary disciple of the late Don Juan Valera.

He is not a literary anarchist, nor a follower of the Catalan Ferrer.

He has not reformed Spain.

He is not associated with a group of novelists or other writers who have

done so.

Had this desirable end been attained, and attained through the efforts

of a novelist, that novelist would have been Don Benito Pérez Galdós.

The author of _The Cabin_ cannot in modesty accept of foreigners the

laurels of all the writers of Spain. The Spanish is an ancient, complex,

strongly characteristic civilization, of which he happily is a product.

It is his hope that Americans may become some day better acquainted with

the spirit and rich heritage of a great national literature through his

pages. As his works have long been translated into Russian and have been

familiar for many years in French, perhaps it is not too early to

anticipate the attention of the enterprising American public.

Unfortunately standards of translation do not exist in this country.

Many believe that there is no such thing as translation, that the

essence of a book cannot be conveyed. The professor seizes his

dictionary, the lady tourist her pen; the ingenious publisher knows that

none is so low that he will not translate--the less the experience, the

more the translator, a maxim in the application of which Blasco Ibáñez

has suffered appalling casualties. When _Sangre y arena_ ("Blood and

Sand") comes from the press as _The Blood of the Arena_, the judicious

pause--this is to thunder on the title page, not in the index--but when

we meet the eunuch of Sónnica transformed into an "old crone," error

passes the bounds of decency and deserves punishment which is

callipygian. Nor are these translations worse than their fellows.

Blunders of this sort ought no longer to be possible. If American

scholarship is not a sham, this reform, which is imperative, must be

immediate.

Blasco Ibáñez was born in Valencia, that most typical of the cities of

the eastern littoral along the Mediterranean, known as the Spanish

Levant. The Valencian dialect is directly affiliated with the

neighboring Catalan, and through it with the Provençal rather than with

the Castilian of the interior plateau. In the character of the people

there is a facility which suggests the French, while an oriental element

is distinctly evident, persisting not only from the days of the Moorish

kingdoms, but eloquent of the shipping of the East and the _lingua

franca_ of the inland sea. Blasco Ibáñez is a Levantine touched with a

suggestion of Cyprus, of Alexandria, with an adaptability and mobility

of temperament which have endowed him with a faculty of literary

improvisation which is extraordinary. He has been a novelist, a

controversialist, a politician, a member of the Cortes, a republican, an

orator, a traveller, an expatriate, a ranchman, a duellist, a

journalist. "He writes," says the Argentine Manuel Ugarte, "as freely as

other men talk. This is the secret of the freshness and charm of the

unforgettable pages of _The Cabin_, of the sense of fraternity and

_camaraderie_ which springs up immediately, uniting the author and his

readers. He seems to be telling us a story between cigarettes at the

café table. In these times when mankind is shaking itself free from

stupid snobbery to return to nature and to simple sincerity, this gift

of free and lucid expression is the highest of merits."

Ibáñez's first stories dealt with the life of the Valencian plain, whose

marvellous fertility has become proverbial:

"Valencia is paradise;

Wheat today, tomorrow rice."

Swift with the movement of the born story-teller and the vitality of a

mind which is always at white heat, these tales are remarkable for vivid

descriptive power in which each successive picture conveys an impression

of the subject so intense that it seems plastic. He is a painter of

sunshine, not as it idly falls on the slumberous streets of the

Andalusian cities, but turbulent with the surging of the spirit, welling

up and pressing on.

In the novel of a more intellectual, introspective feature, he has also

met with rare success, as Mr. Howells has well shown in one of the few

articles upon this author in English which are of value. The vein is

more complex but not less copious, remaining instinct with power. It is

indeed less national, an excursion into the processes of the northern

mind. Ibáñez, however, was never an æsthete; no phase of art could

detain him long. He sailed for Argentina to deliver a series of lectures

on national themes at a time when Anatole France was upholding the

Gallic tradition in that country. Argentine life attracted him and he

became a ranchman on the Pampas, bought an American motor tractor, and

settled down to create the Argentine novel. South America, it must be

confessed, for some reason has been incontinently unproductive of great

novels, nor was Ibáñez to find its atmosphere more propitious than it

had proved to its native sons. Besides, the Spaniards, who are a

religious people, were praying for his return. He took ship as suddenly

as he had arrived and has since resided chiefly at Paris, a city which

has been to him from early youth a second home.

In the cosmopolitan vortex of the great war capital, he has interpreted

the spirit of the vast world conflict in terms of the imagination with a

breadth and force of appeal such as has been given, perhaps, to no other

man. While Spain has remained neutral, under compulsion of material

conditions which those who best understand her will appreciate at their

true weight, in a single volume Ibáñez has been able to abrogate this

neutrality of the land, and to marshal his people publically where their

heart has always been secretly, in line with the progressive opinion of

the world.

If in _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ he has rendered his greatest

service to humanity, in _The Cabin_ he has made his chief contribution

to art. It is the most nicely rounded of his stories, the most perfect.

Spanish and Latin-American opinion is here unanimous. Nevertheless,

primarily it is a human document. Rubén Darío, than whom, certainly,

none is better qualified to speak, emphasizes this crusading bias: "The

soul of a gladiator, a robust teller of tales _à la_ Zola is

externalized in _The Cabin_. The creative flood proceeds without

faltering with a rapidity of invention which proclaims the riches of the

source. Books such as this are not written purely for love of art, they

embody profound human aspirations. They are beautiful pages not only,

but generous deeds and apostolic exploits as well." The ambient blends

admirably with the action and the characters to present a picture which

is satisfying and which appeals to the eye as complete. _The Cabin_ is a

rarely visual story, and directly so, affording in this respect an

interesting contrast to the imaginative suggestion of the present-day

Castilian realists. In no other work has the author combined so

effectively the broad swish of his valiant style with the homely, even

crass detail which lends it significance. "A book like this," to quote

Iglesias Hermida, "is written only once in a life-time, and one book

like this is sufficient."

A favorite anecdote of Blasco Ibáñez is so illuminative that it deserves

to be told in his own words:

"When I go to the Bull Ring, as I do from time to time with a foreigner,

I enjoy the polychromatic animated spectacle of the crowded

amphitheatre, the theatric entrance of the fighters and the encounters

with the first bull. The second diverts me less, at the third I begin to

yawn, and when the fourth appears, I reach for the book or newspaper

which I have forehandedly brought along in my pocket. And I suspect

that half of the spectators feel very much as I do.

"A number of years ago a professor in one of the celebrated universities

of the United States came to visit me at Madrid, and I took him, as is

customary, to see a bull-fight.

"This learned gentleman was also a man of action, a Roosevelt of the

professorial chair; he rode, he boxed, he was devoted to hunting big

game as well as to the exploration of unknown lands. He watched intently

every incident of the fight, knitting his blond eyebrows above his

spectacles--for he was near-sighted--as he did so. Occasionally he

muttered a word of approbation: 'Very good!' 'Truly interesting!' I saw,

however, that some new, original idea was crystallizing in his mind.

"When we came out, he expressed himself:

"'Very interesting entertainment, but somewhat monotonous. Would it not

be better to turn the six bulls loose simultaneously and then kill them

all at once? It might shorten the exhibition, but how much more

exciting! It would give those chaps an opportunity to show off their

courage.'

"I looked upon that Yankee as upon a great sage. He had formulated

definitely the vague dissatisfaction with the bull-fight which had

lurked in my mind ever since, as a boy, I had suffered at the tiresome

spectacle. Yes! Six bulls at one time!"

In the novel of Blasco Ibáñez, it is always six bulls at one time.