was limited to that of his scientific characters, however noble and open-minded he portrayed them. He was saved from the religion of science by his sense of humour.

At bottom, and when he is writing free from the direct influence of public events, his work is purely aesthetic. Many of his friends have reproached him for his artistic impartiality, which they call impassivity. He knew best. He was true to his vocation, and true to the literary tradition of Spain, which from its earliest epics to its picaresque novel and to Don Quixote, has contemplated life with an artistic serenity rivalled only by the calm attitude of Shakespeare, the pole-star and model of all true artists. It is because he was able to look upon life with eyes clean from prejudice and kindled with love that his creations are so true. He has that universal sympathy of poetic souls—souls, that is, which carry within them the whole world.

A writer possessing that virtue can impart a permanent and universal value to any subject upon which he may chance to touch. Glimpses of GalclOs's inner poetical vision shine here and there in his style, shedding a ray of light on the humblest, apparently most unimportant, facts ; little touches which do not in the least disturb the quiet pace of the narrative, yet give it nobility and deepen and widen the interest of the plot, in which, we feel, God and nature and destiny are present and co-operate.

From such depth of intuition his characters are created. We must not go to him for that skilful analysis, that chemistry of the human soul, into which the modern novel seems to degenerate under the influence of intellectual culture and progress. GaldOs's characters are not dissected, but alive, and they give us their actions, not their motives.

It follows that his art is mainly dramatic. GalclOs

has given Spain and the world a splendid galaxy of characters, creatures of flesh and blood who are known to us body and soul and quickly become familiar figures in our national life. In the skill and vigour of his dramatic developments he can stand comparison with any novelist old or new. He excels in the knitting of events into crises of admirable emotional strength, by means which are within the bounds of good taste and never fall into melodrama. Let us mention for instance the murder of Angel Guerra, a denouement as inevitable, and yet as skilfully brought to its close almost by surprise as the death of Othello. GaldOs's dramatic ability, though not without a certain astuteness, is, however, essentially different from that almost mechanical ingeniousness with which Calderon contrived his plays. A novel of GalclOs is to a play of Calderon what an organism is to a mechanism. In GaldOs the crisis is brought about by the interplay of external circumstances and character. This noninterference before events leads him sometimes to awkward, almost childish inability of exposition, which is particularly observable in his plays.

GalclOs's characters are not static. They grow, evolve, and develop as the work proceeds. And this tendency towards emphasizing growth probably explains why, though born above all a dramatist, he should have devoted most of his time to novel-writing. He undoubtedly found the modern stage—as Shakespeare himself would have done—too narrow for the delineation of character along the line of time. Our theatre has gradually contracted along the dimension of time. The last phase of this evolution is the Cinema, in spirit, no less than in matter, a mere film. The characters in GalclOs are not cinematographic. They live and develop, and in this he is superior to all Spanish classics except Cervantes.

It goes vithout saying that since GaldOs can make