THE HORSEMAN AFOOT

The propaganda value of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, both in the novel and film forms, has never been calculated. But its violent assertion of feeling was an extra puff of wind to raise even higher the wave of antagonism toward all things German. The mere depiction of French heroism, regardless to the end to which that dauntless effort was directed, was a rousing stimulus to European and American imagination and cooperation.

Since the war this Spanish novelist has been thrust from the lime-light back upon the obscure wings of the stage. He intends now to recover his stellar role by leading a new crusade against Spanish military despotism. The present foe is not the Hun, but the repressive Directory headed by General Primo de Rivera. It is against this hydra of temporal and intellectual enslavement that Ibanez is trying to arouse universal indignation.

But he forgets that the unified spirit of national effort is, in time of peace, relaxed into a much-divided, formless, wavering public opinion. The catchwords which caught a reply in flashing bayonets have come to seem childlike to a world innoculated against dangerous abstractions by a cynical peace. This new effort has come too late to restir the naive enthusiasm of the war years.

In the late struggles his pictures of German cruelty and greed were fuel to the fires which consumed the middle European powers. His new propaganda may be just as good fuel, but there is no fire to energize the matter into power. The moral heat which loaned his war novels a high pitch of earnestness has spent itself in ashes. To convince a world iddled with the evils and inconsistencies of popular government of the already flagrant crimes of Rivera's dictatorship, will not be difficult, but, for the while at least, moral indignation is exhausted, and it is doubtful whether any crusading zeal will spring up in response to Ibanez's call.