poetic feeling which surpasses the invention of any other that I have
read, and makes me think it came before _Sangre y Arena_, and possibly
before _La Horda_. I cannot recall any other novel of the author which
is quite so psychological as this. It is in fact a sort of biography,
a personal study, of the mighty fane at Toledo, as if the edifice were
of human quality and could have its life expressed in human terms.
There is nothing forced in the poetic conception, or mechanical in
the execution. The Cathedral is not only a single life, it is a
neighborhood, a city, a world in itself; and its complex character
appears in the nature of the different souls which collectively
animate it. The first of these is the sick and beaten native of it who
comes back to the world which he has never loved or trusted, but in
which he was born and reared. As a son of its faith, Gabriel Luna was
to have been a priest; but before he became a minister of its faith,
it meant almost the same that he should become a Carlist soldier, and
fight on for that cause till it was hopeless. In his French captivity
he loses the faith which was one with the Carlist cause, and in
England he reads Darwin and becomes an evolutionist of the ardor which
the evolutionists have now lost. He wanders over Europe with the
English girl whom he worships with an intellectual rather than
passionate ardor, and after her death he ends at Barcelona in time to
share one of the habitual revolutions of the province and to spend
several years in one of its prisons. When he comes out it is into a
world which he is doomed to leave; he is sick to death and in hopeless
poverty; he has lost the courage of his revolutionary faith if not his
fealty to it; all that he asks of the world is leave to creep out of
it and somewhere die in peace. He thinks of an elder brother who like
himself was born in the precincts of the Cathedral where generations
of their family have lived and died, and his brother does not deny
him. In fact the kind, dull gardener welcomes him to a share of his