The _torrero_ is morally better than the aristocrat and he is none the less human though a mere incident of her wicked life,--her insulted and rejected worshipper, who yet deserves his fate.
_Sangre y Arena_ is a book of unexampled force and in that sort must be reckoned the greatest novel of the author, who has neglected no phase of his varied scene.

The _torrero's_ mortal disaster in the arena is no more important than the action behind the scenes where the gored horses have their dangling entrails sewed up by the primitive surgery of the place and are then ridden back into the amphitheatre to suffer a second agony.

No color of the dreadful picture is spared; the whole thing passes as in the reader's presence before his sight and his other senses.

The book is a masterpiece far in advance of that study of the common life which Ibanez calls _La Horda_; dealing with the horde of common poor and those accidents of beauty and talent as native to them as to the classes called the better.

It has the attraction of the author's frank handling, and the power of the Spanish scene in which the action passes; but it could not hold me to the end.
It is only in his latest book that he transcends the Spanish scene and peoples the wider range from South America to Paris, and from Paris to the invaded provinces of France with characters proper to the times and places.