and women of this thinking, feeling, and breathing world, and he must recognize their experiences as veritable facts.  From the first moment to the last it is like some passage of actual events in which you cannot withhold your compassion, your abhorrence, your admiration, any more than if they took place within your personal knowledge.  Where they transcend all facts of your personal knowledge, you do not accuse them of improbability, for you feel their potentiality in yourself, and easily account for them in the alien circumstance.  I am not saying that the story has no faults; it has several.  There are tags of romanticism fluttering about it here and there; and at times the author permits himself certain old-fashioned literary airs and poses and artifices, which you simply wonder at.  It is in spite of these, and with all these defects, that it is so great and beautiful a book.

III

What seems to be so very admirable in the management of the story is the author’s success in keeping his own counsel.  This may seem a very easy thing; but, if the reader will think over the novelists of his acquaintance, he will find that it is at least very uncommon.  They mostly give themselves away almost from the beginning, either by their anxiety to hide what is coming, or their vanity in hinting what great things they have in store for the reader.  Galdos does neither the one nor the other.  He makes it his business to tell the story as it grows; to let the characters unfold themselves in speech and action; to permit the events to happen unheralded.  He does not prophesy their course, he does not forecast the weather even for twenty-four hours; the atmosphere becomes slowly, slowly, but with occasional lifts and reliefs, of such a brooding breathlessness, of such a deepening density, that you feel the wild passion-storm nearer and nearer at hand, till it bursts at last; and then you are astonished that you had not foreseen it yourself from the first moment.

Next to this excellent method, which I count the supreme characteristic of the book merely because it represents the whole, and the other facts are in the nature of parts, is the masterly conception of the characters.  They are each typical of a certain side of human nature, as most of our personal friends and enemies are; but not exclusively of this side or that.  They are each of mixed motives, mixed qualities; none of them is quite a monster; though those who are badly mixed do such monstrous things.

Pepe Rey, who is such a good fellow—­so kind, and brave, and upright, and generous, so fine a mind, and so high a soul—­is tactless and imprudent; he even condescends to the thought of intrigue; and though he rejects his plots at last, his nature has once harbored deceit.  Don Inocencio, the priest, whose control of Dona Perfecta’s conscience has vitiated the very springs of goodness in her, is by no means bad, aside from his purposes.  He loves his sister and her son tenderly, and wishes to provide for them by the marriage which Pepe’s presence threatens to prevent.  The nephew, though selfish and little, has moments of almost being a good fellow; the sister, though she is really such a lamb of meekness, becomes a cat, and scratches Don Inocencio dreadfully when he weakens in his design against Pepe.