In the Eighteen Eighties, Venezuela had some _cuentistas_, whose style, whose imaginative reach, was above the ordinary. Some of these men could command a prose-surface greater than anyone save Hearne, who was not American, but Irish and Greek. Latin people of the South keep an art-sense, a kind of _finura_, that we of more mixed blood to the north, have not. Spanish blood is having a second, a royal flowering down there. _Opopomax_, by Coll, is the story of a perfume. Aside from owning an idea, this and his other stories have trained workmanship. It is well done. I sometimes wonder if the novel ever reaches quite the same intensity—the perfect fluidity of dissolving vision, as the short story. On this pallid, dove-grey morning of winter, I have finished Blanco-Fombona’s _Man of Iron_, (_El Hombre de Hierro_). Fombona was born in Venezuela too, like Coll, but now he is living in Europe. He was in prison in Ciudad, Bolivia—1905, when he wrote this book. In France they say of him:—“A tender soul whom no emotion leaves indifferent.” Fombona remarks that Herbert Spencer calls us _hybrid beings_, with all the defects of hybridism. Once Rubén Darío wrote a glorious appreciation of Fombona, as Rodo wrote one equally fine of Darío. He declared: “My friend, Rufino, was born only to realize great things.” Darío is dead now; when he was writing so eloquently about his friend he was in Mallorca—and happy. _Alas!_ There is a Portuguese critic in South America—in Rio—by name José Verissimo, who remarks that America was colonized at one of the most powerful moments of European mind, and that this nature of explorers, _conquistadores_, the something epic that makes poets, still lives in Blanco-Fombona. His novels have conquered two worlds; the Old and the New. Spain was enthusiastic. Like Columbus, Fombona set her dreaming of a New World. A young Spaniard says: “... When I think of Fombona I connect his name with the charm of the city where he lived, Caracas ... the name of that city remains a mythological place to me—remote, perfumed, mysterious, a city which Fate will have it, that I shall sometime see. How I have lingered over Fombona’s pages, when they picture the sun of gold in that sky of azure; dawn-fresh, mountain mornings that are chill; the romantic song of old bells in old towers; the iced-water Americans drink ... lots and lots of things that suit my dream-city, city made for adventure and love, and ill luck....” Hear Blanco-Fombona for a moment himself: (I am translating from memory)—... “and more important than everything else, more important than people, than events, that brilliant sun of America, toward which the breath of our lives ascends continually, like prayer....” It is not true that the characters of _Man of Iron_ are commonplace as the critics keep calling them. It is because Fombona has looked down upon them from a great height. From such height, perhaps, all the little figures in the game—_life_—are small and commonplace.