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The Vicar of Wakefield: Saxon

The great story-teller gathers his characters together at the tournament of Ashby. There come for the sports of chivalry Rowena, heiress of Saxon rulers now dispossessed by the Normans, accompanied by her sturdy uncle Cedric; Rebecca, beautiful Jewish maiden, whose fate is constantly joined with that of Ivanhoe, disinherited son of Cedric, a father who will have naught to do with a Saxon son who is willing to accept the Normans and their ways, and even to be a devout follower of Richard the king; Isaac of York, Rebecca's father, wandering Jew of vast wealth, who is constantly the prey of the ruthless Norman nobles who would wring his riches from him by torture and imprisonment; Robin Hood and his merry men of the forest glades, not forgetting the redoubtable Friar Tuck, equally adept in the ways of the clerk, the yeoman, or the roisterer. To them are added of Norman stock the redoubtable Front-de-Boeuf, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the prior of Jorvaulx, and Prince John; Athelstane, Saxon lord, destined by Cedric for the hand of Rowena; Gurth the swineherd and Wamba the jester; and the mysterious Black Prince, who, like Ivanhoe, makes his appearance incognito till he shall discover how things have gone in his absence.

Sir Walter prided himself on his mastery of what he called "the big bow-wow" style; no other of the Waverley Novels illustrates this power better than Ivanhoe. One stately and stirring event follows another, all holding the reader rapt in thrills, but none quite so much as the siege of the castle of Front-de-Boeuf by Richard and his Saxon friends. Rebecca, from the lattice recounting to the wounded Ivanhoe the fortunes of the battle, stands out in the memory of many a reader as Sir Walter's greatest success in the grand style. And despite the heroic mold in which the characters are cast, they yet surpass in the hold they gain upon the reader. Few have closed the book without a sigh of regret that the hero had to make a choice between Rebecca and Rowena; and in our own day and country few can fail to see the likeness in many respects between Richard of the Lion Heart and the President so lately gone.

The knights are dust, And their good swords are rust, Their souls are with the saints, we trust.

In the passage at arms at Ashby appears the Mysterious Knight, whom the reader knows to be Ivanhoe, fresh from the Crusade in the Holy Land; in the contests of chivalry he valiantly defeats the Norman champions and bestows the prize of Queen of Beauty upon his youthful love, Rowena; the reader gets but a glimpse of a still more mysterious knight, whom he can only suspect to be the king. From the jousts all journey on their several ways, but in the forest the Normans plan a lawless ambuscade and carry off to the castle of Front-de-Boeuf, for motives of revenge, or passion, or greed, Ivanhoe, who had been wounded at Ashby, Rebecca, Rowena, and Isaac of York. The mysterious Knight of the Fetterlock appears as the timely leader of the merry men of the greenwood, who besiege the castle, to the great disaster of the lordly brigands. After the rescue of the prisoners, all save Rebecca, there follows the joyous celebration of the forest outlaws, a happy interlude between the scenes of derring-do.

The strenuous king departed for still more strenuous struggles in winning back his kingdom; Rowena and Cedric sought their home; Ivanhoe followed his chief; Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Templar though he was and pledged to holy practices, bore off his unhappy prisoner, Rebecca. But he was discovered in his wicked designs by the austere head of his order. In an assembly of the Templars, however, Rebecca was condemned to death as a sorceress who has seduced from the paths of virtue an unwilling knight! Her only chance for life lies in the ordeal of battle. Her one champion is Ivanhoe, far away though he is, whom she has cured of the wound received at Ashby. Brian de Bois-Guilbert, by the irony of chivalry, is the champion of his order and of virtue in distress. At the last possible moment Ivanhoe comes spurring into the lists, to a victory which all the laws of fiction foreordain. Hot after him comes clattering Richard and his train, to unfurl the royal standard as undisputed King of England. And all live happy ever after? Save only Rebecca! If Ivanhoe must wed Rowena, every masculine reader feels that he would gladly offer himself to her rival. For as Prince John cried when first he saw her, "By the bald scalp of Abraham, yonder Jewess must be the very model of perfection whose charms drove frantic the wisest king that ever lived!"

IBANEZ VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ was born in Valencia, Spain, in January, 1867, the son of a proprietor of a dry-goods shop. He died at Mentone, France, on January 28, 1928. He attended the University of Valencia and received a degree in law. He was against the established order from his college days. As a result he received the first of a series of imprisonments when he was eighteen--for a sonnet against the government. He passed periods of exile at Paris and in Italy, alternating with stays in prison. One of his protests was against the measures pursued by the government in suppressing the Cuban insurrection. He founded a republican newspaper, of which he was editor, reporter, and reviewer. He established a publishing-house to introduce to Spain the great works of European literature at popular prices; this was but one of the attempts he has made, sometimes at the risk of his life, to bring his country into the current of modern thought. He was elected to the Cortes, and became the leader of his party.

In his novels he began in the usual Spanish way with pictures of local provincial life with the types and the pictures of which he was familiar. But he dealt not merely with pictures; his stories all have an object in which their strenuous author is greatly interested. He lacked restraint, his passion for independence was without bounds, he carried his admiration for the realism of Zola to limits which shock our more restrained habit of mind, but despite the opposition which he encountered at home and abroad, the author of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" was one of the most widely read of contemporary writers.