Rosinante to the Road Again

Excerpt: ...universe. The proletariat is being vulgarized for the benefit of the people who buy novels. From Valencia raids seem to have been made on other parts of Spain. Sonnica la Cortesana gives you antique Saguntum and the usual "Aves," wreaths, flute-players and other claptrap of costume novels. In La Catedral you have Toledo, the church, socialism and the modern world in the shadow of Gothic spires. La Bodega takes you into the genial air of the wine vaults of Jerez-de-la-Frontera, with smugglers, processions blessing the vineyards and agrarian revolt in the background. Up to now they have been Spanish novels written for Spaniards; it is only with Sangre y Arena that the virus of a European reputation shows results. In Sangre y Arena, to be sure, you learn that toreros use scent, have a home life, and are seduced by passionate Baudelairian ladies of the smart set who plant white teeth in their brown sinewy arms and teach them to smoke opium cigarettes. You see toreros taking the sacraments before going into the ring and you see them tossed by the bull while the crowd, which a moment before had been crying "hola" as if it didn't know that something was going wrong, gets very pale and chilly and begins to think what dreadful things corridas are anyway, until the arrival of the next bull makes them forget it. All of which is good fun when not obscured by grand, vague ideas, and incidentally sells like hot cakes. Thenceforward the Casa Prometeo becomes an exporting house dealing in the good Spanish products of violence and sunshine, blood, voluptuousness and death, as another vulgarizer put it. Next comes the expedition to South America and The Argonauts appears. The Atlantic is bridged,--there open up rich veins of picturesqueness and new grand vague ideas, all in full swing when the war breaks out. Blasco Ibáñez meets the challenge nobly, and very soon, with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which captures the Allied world and proves again...