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humour arises out of a social or conventional setting. Dickens deliberately mixes the comic element in the composition of his fables. In GalclOs, humorous situations naturally result from the interplay of circumstance and character. Moreover, GalelOs easily reaches that high pinnacle of dramatic art which Shakespeare and Cervantes alone were great enough to attain before him, namely, the interweaving of comic and tragic in one and the same scene and even in one and the same person. Many of his characters in fact live in a zone of changing lights, comic and tragic, and move to tears and laughter at the same time—thus, Maxi in Fortunata y Jacinta, Don Pio in El Abuelo, and Pepet in La Loca de la Casa. It is doubtful whether Dickens ever rose to such heights of dramatic conception. Rather than tragic, his outlook might not unfairly be described as melodramatic.

With Balzac, the comparison suggests itself because GalclOs wrote a real Comedie Humaine in a Spanish setting. His inferiority to the French master lies perhaps in that his works are more easy-going, and have in them less of that intensity, that appetite for life which is the secret of Balzac's creative power. Balzac is the more vigorous of the two, GaldOs perhaps the better artist and certainly the more lovable mind.

GaldOs resembles Dostoievsky in his preference for that zone of human nature where subliminal forces work obscurely in the shaping of action and character. As with Dostoievsky, his characters are often highly strung and at times unhinged. Maxi, Nazarin, are true Dostoievskian types. Both the Spaniard and the Russian seem to have a foible for depicting mystics and madmen. There is a Spanish saying that ' children and madmen tell the truth '. It is in search of truth that Dostoievsky and GalclOs go to their abnormal types of humanity, hoping thus to evade the strict censorship of reason. Their main

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interest is in destiny. They are not so much concerned with man in his relation to society as with man in his relation to Eternity, and they instinctively feel that it is in exploring the subconscious depths that glimmers of truth may be seen shining here and there in moments of crisis. Hence their common preoccupation with religion. The three anti-clerical novels of GalclOs are little more than a preliminary phase of his religious obsession, during which he, as it were, clears the ground of all political prepossessions before starting on his really religious work. He seems to have a marked preference for the mystical-practical type which St. Teresa immortalized and of which he gave such a lovable rendering in his Sor Lorenza or Lere in Angel Guerra. But he has studied almost every possible variety of the type with his usual penetration and impartiality.

GalclOs does not reach the poignancy of Dostoievsky's tortured questionings. There is nothing in his work to compare with the tragedy of Ivan Karamazov. But he is calmer and more serene. This is due first to his Spanish common sense. In the Spaniard there is always a Sancho along with a Don Quixote, as Santa Teresa herself brilliantly proved by her own life. Then, the Spanish genius shuns that almost morbid tendency towards analysis which made Dostoievsky unhappy and his novels bibles of desperation. What in Dostoievsky is a problem, ever present to the intellect, never transcends in GalclOs the aesthetic plane, and remains a tacit sense of tragedy contemplated-in silence like the black heavens in a moonless night. Dostoievsky, moreover, never found an answer to his questionings, and to the end remained haunted by his unsolved problem of destiny. Galdes found in his nature a living answer which satisfied him. GaldOs is the novelist of love.

The whole of his work is an illustration of the forms