sign of a poor and tepid imagination. And not only
people who seem cultivated, but are not so, suppose this, but there are
sensible persons, and even sagacious and intelligent critics, who
sometimes allow themselves to be hoodwinked by the dramatic mystery and
the surprising and fantastic scenes of a novel. They own it is all
false; but they admire the imagination, what they call the 'power' of the
author. Very well; all I have to say is that the 'power' to dazzle with
strange incidents, to entertain with complicated plots and impossible
characters, now belongs to some hundreds of writers in Europe; while
there are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with the
ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human.
If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than
the latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to their
fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumas
above Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without
belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. This
novel which was called 'Don Quixote,' is perhaps the greatest work of
human wit. Very well; the same Cervantes, mischievously influenced
afterwards by the ideas of the vulgar, who were then what they are now
and always will be, attempted to please them by a work giving a lively
proof of his inventive talent, and wrote the 'Persiles and Sigismunda,'
where the strange incidents, the vivid complications, the surprises, the
pathetic scenes, succeed one another so rapidly and constantly that it
really fatigues you . . . . But in spite of this flood of invention,
imagine," says Seflor Valdes, "the place that Cervantes would now occupy
in the heaven of art, if he had never written 'Don Quixote,'" but only
'Persiles and Sigismund!'

From the point of view of modern English criticism, which likes to be
melted, and horrified, and astonished, and blood-curdled, and goose-
fleshed, no less than to be "chippered up" in fiction, Senor Valdes were
indeed incorrigible. Not only does he despise the novel of complicated
plot, and everywhere prefer 'Don Quixote' to 'Persiles and Sigismunda,'
but he has a lively contempt for another class of novels much in favor
with the gentilities of all countries. He calls their writers "novelists
of the world," and he says that more than any others they have the rage
of effectism. "They do not seek to produce effect