incident as love interest in the book.  The extraordinary power of it lies in its fealty to the truth and its insight into human nature.  The reader of course perceives that it is intensely anti-ecclesiastical, but he could make no greater mistake than to imagine it in any wise Protestant.  The author shares this hate or slight of ecclesiasticism with all the Spanish novelists, so far as I know them; most notably with Perez Galdos in Dona Perfecta and Lean Rich, with Pardo-Bazan in several of her stories, with Palacio Valdes in the less measure of Marta y Maria, and La Hermana de San Sulpicio and even with the romanticist Valera in Pepita Jimenez.  But it may be said that while Ibanez does not go any farther than Galdos, for instance, he is yet more intensively agnostic.  He is the standard bearer of the scientific revolt in the terms of fiction which spares us no hope of relief in the religious notion of human life here or hereafter that the Hebraic or Christian theology has divined.

It is right to say this plainly, but the reader who can suffer it from the author will find his book one of the fullest and richest in modern fiction, worthy to rank with the greatest Russian work and beyond anything yet done in English.  It has not the topographical range of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Resurrection; but in its climax it is as logically and ruthlessly tragical as anything that the Spanish spirit has yet imagined.

Whoever can hold on to the end of it will find his reward in the full enjoyment of that “noble terror” which high tragedy alone can give.  Nothing that happens in the solemn story—­in which something significant is almost always happening—­is of the supreme effect of the socialist agitator’s death at the hands of the disciples whom he has taught to expect mercy and justice on earth, but forbidden to expect it within the reach of the longest life of any man or race of men.  His rebellious followers come at night into the Cathedral where Gabriel is watching, to rob an especially rich Madonna, whom he has taught them to regard as a senseless and wasteful idol, and they will not hear him when he pleads with them against the theft.  The inevitable irony of the event is awful, but it is not cruel, rather it is the supreme touch of that pathos which seems the crowning motive of the book.

W.D.  HOWELLS.

* * * * *

THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL

CHAPTER I

The dawn was just rising when Gabriel Luna arrived in front of the Cathedral, but in the narrow street of Toledo it was still night.  The silvery morning light that had scarcely begun to touch the eaves and roofs, spread out more freely in the little Piazza del Ayuntamiento, bringing out of the shadows the ugly front of the Archbishop’s Palace, and the towers of the municipal buildings capped with black slate, a sombre erection of the time of Charles V.