_The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ has not the rough textures and rank dyes of the wholly Spanish stories, but it is the strongest story of the great war known to me, and its loss in the Parisian figures is made more than good in the novelty and veracity of the Argentinos who supply that element of internationality which the North American novelists of a generation ago employed to give a fresh interest to their work.

With the coming of the hero to study art and make love in the conventional Paris, and the repatriation of his father, a cattle millionaire of French birth from the pampas, with his wife and daughters, Ibanez achieves effects beyond the art of Henry James, below whom he nevertheless falls so far in subtlety and beauty.
The book has moments of the pathos so rich in the work of Galdos and Valdes, and especially of Emilia Pardo-Bazan in her _Morrina_ or _Home Sickness_, the story of a peasant girl in Barcelona, but the grief of the Argentine family for the death of the son and brother in battle with the Germans, has the appeal of anguish beyond any moment in _La Catedral_.

I do not know just the order of this last-mentioned novel among the stories of Ibanez, but it has a quality of imagination, of poetic feeling which surpasses the invention of any other that I have read, and makes me think it came before _Sangre y Arena_, and possibly before _La Horda_.

I cannot recall any other novel of the author which is quite so psychological as this.

It is in fact a sort of biography, a personal study, of the mighty fane at Toledo, as if the edifice were of human quality and could have its life expressed in human terms.
There is nothing forced in the poetic conception, or mechanical in the execution.