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.