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.
