FICTION.
BLOOD AND SAND.t IJESTOR VINCENT BLASCO IBAREE, the well-known Spanish novelist, is, we believe, translated here into English for the first time. Judging from the precision of touch and the vividness of this story, we should say that he deserved the honour long ago. Mrs. W. A. Gillespie has done her work well, and we trust that she will have a wide enough public for this translation to make it worth her while to perform such services for Sefior Ibanez as Mrs. Garnett has performed for Tourgeniev. The blood and sand of the title belong to the bull-ring. The story is a finished picture of the customs and psychology of the Spanish national sport. Senor method is so simple and free from hortatory belabourings that the reader is astonished, after being carried swiftly along through a hundred pages or more, by the discovery that the concealed art of the author has conveyed a moral analysis of the effect of bull-fighting on public and private character. Senor Ibailez does not formally contemn even what be scorns ; he has the sympathy of a deep and piercing interest in every- thing human, even though it sometimes be inhuman. His irony comes from literal statement. Not until the last line of the story does he let himself go with a stinging, uncom- promising phrase.
Juan Gallardo is a brilliant and daring matador, and con- sequently a popular idol. He has not risen through the various stages of his profession—he has never, for instance, practised the art of the banderillero who fixes the pairs of darts in the bull's back before the final struggle takes place and the estocada, or death-blow, is delivered by the matador (more frequently spoken of as the espada). Gallardo knows no rules; he acts on inspiration, and his daring unconvention- ality delights Spain from one end of her borders to the other. He began at the top, so to speak ; he was always an espada. We make his acquaintance first at his hotel, where he is
• The Mulberry Tree. By Winifred James. London : Chapman and Hall. [7s. 6d. net.] t Blood and Sand: a Nord. By Vincent Blasco Thanes. Translated from the Spanish by Mrs. W. A. Gillespie. London : Simpkin, Marshall and Co.
waiting for the hour of a great bull-fight. We have a notable picture of the effect of unbounded popularity on a narrow mind. The man's daring, self-confidence, and vanity alternate with flashes of foreboding. He is the prey of gross and ridiculous superstitions. Although a perfect figure of a man, his intelligence is too small to rejoice in a classical austerity, and his toilet, with its unguents and scents, and his jewellery are worthy of a ballerina. The nervousness of the long morning's wait—all bull-fighters apparently suffer from what undergraduates call a " needle "—is dissipated only now and again, when admirers burst into the hotel to enjoy the honour of shaking hands with him. In the limelight of popularity the gratification of his vanity expels all other mental pre- occupations.
Entirely separate from the shouting, adoring world of the ring is the quiet household of Gallardo—his wife and his old mother. Carmen, the wife, has never seen a bull-fight. She cannot trust herself to look upon perils which threaten and haunt her all through the season. Only in the winter does peace really visit the espada's household; then there is no bull-fighting, and Carmen almost forgets the tortures of those bull-fight days when she waited for the telegram from her hus- band containing the reassuring words "nothing new" (all right). Gallardo amasses wealth, is taken up by a rich patron who sings his praises as devoutly as Don Quixote ever Bang those of Dulcinea, enters the society of country gentlemen, and him- self becomes a large landowner. A great lady bestows her affections upon him, and he enters into a liaison with her, not because he is wilfully negligent of Carmen, but because his vanity cannot resist this too-ready tribute to his prowess. Incidentally the episode unfolds, without any insistence but with excellent deftness, the intense reality of social prestige in Spain. Even Gallardo's companion of the ring, El Nacional, the Socialist and anti-Clerical (who gravely earns his living as a banderillero as the only way of supporting his family), though he denounces all the amusements of the rich, is susceptible to the wonderfully permeating influence of rank whenever he is in contact with it.
Such popularity as Gallardo's is a climbing to the rarefied atmosphere of a lofty hill. Descent is inevitable, and in Spain it is very often ungainly and rapid. After an accident Gallardo loses his nerve. Sometimes his old daring returns— in a subtle passage Senor Ibanez tells how one of the most reckless of the espada's feats is performed when be is in terror of ridicule—but generally he cannot control some errant muscles which make him shorten his sword-arm and avert his eyes at the crisis of the bull's charge. Howls of execration run round the ring when he makes a clumsy thrust. Sport in Spain is not sportsmanlike—though we Englishmen, who have seen football referees carried off the field on shutters, should not, perhaps, throw stones. By an odd twist of feeling, the spectators, though they are longing for the death of the bull, expend all the pity of which they are capable on a noble animal that has been clumsily treated.
The final scene, when Carmen visits the precincts of the ring and the chapel where the toreros are shriven, is memorable. She sees the squalid horror of lacerated horses and dead bulls withdrawn from the ring and divorced from all the glitter and ecstasy of combat. She flees at the moment that Gallardo has met his fate. By a stroke of irony the author makes the bull which killed him a skulker. It would not fight at all till it had been tortured with explosive darts. After the tragedy the show goes on as before, and noisy cries of delight burst from the spectators as the next bull enters the ring. El Nacional, near the body of his dead friend, whose stomach is ripped open, and near the dead bull with its singed and tattered carcase, pities both man and bull in a new-found remorse. He clenches his fists as the roar from the spectators penetrates through the passages to where he is standing. "It was the roaring of the wild beast, the true and only one." With that sentence Seiior Ibaiiez ends.
We think that the author should have emphasized even more particularly than he does the suffering of the picadors' horses. To us this is by far the most sickening part of bull- fighting. The blood of the bull is up ; the matador and his retinue take their chances voluntarily ; but the blindfold horses, without a possibility of retaliation, are used as mere material for slaughter, in order that the bull may tire himself by goring masses of unresisting flesh.
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