Few Spaniards
who write today but have written novels. Yet the gesture of the grand
style of Valera is palsied, except, perhaps, for the conservative
Quixote, Ricardo Leon, a functionary in the Bank of Spain, while the
idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as Jose Maria
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.
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