s. "With a certain fundamental humanity," she says,
"a certain magisterial simplicity in his creations, with the natural
tendency of his clear intelligence toward the truth, and with the
frankness of his observation, the great novelist was always disposed
to pass over to realism with arms and munitions; but his aesthetic
inclinations were idealistic, and only in his latest works has he
adopted the method of the modern novel, fathomed more and more the human
heart, and broken once for all with the picturesque and with the typical
personages, to embrace the earth we tread."

For her, as I confess for me, "Dona Perfecta" is not realistic
enough--realistic as it is; for realism at its best is not tendencious.
It does not seek to grapple with human problems, but is richly content
with portraying human experiences; and I think Senora Pardo-Bazan is
right in regarding "Dona Perfecta" as transitional, and of a period when
the author had not yet assimilated in its fullest meaning the faith he
had imbibed.

II

Yet it is a great novel, as I said; and perhaps because it is
transitional it will please the greater number who never really arrive
anywhere, and who like to find themselves in good company _en route_. It
is so far like life that it is full of significations which pass beyond
the persons and actions involved, and envelop the reader, as if he too
were a character of the book, or rather as if its persons were men
and women of this thinking, feeling, and breathing world, and he must
recognize their experiences as veritable facts. From the first moment
to the last it is like some passage of actual events in which you cannot
withhold your compassion, your abhorrence, your admiration, any more
than if they took place within your personal knowledge. Where they
transcend all facts of your personal knowledge, you do not accuse them
of improbability, for you feel their potentiality in yourself, and
easily account for them in the alien circumstance. I am not saying that
the story has no faults; it has several. There are tags of romanticism
fluttering about it here and there; and at times the author permits
himself certain old-fashioned literary airs and poses and artifices,
which you simply wonder at. It is in spite of these, and with all these
defects, that it is so great and beautiful a book.

III

What seems to be so very admirable in the management of the story is the
author's success in keeping his own counsel. This m