The Shadow of the Cathedral | Page 3

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 poverty, and
Gabriel begins dying where he began living. The kindness between the
brothers is as simple in the broken adventurer whose wide world has
failed him as in the aging peasant, pent from his birth in the Cathedral
close, with no knowledge of anything beyond it. All their kindred who
serve in their several sort the stepmother church, down to the gardener's
son whose office is to keep dogs out of the Cathedral and has the title
of perrero, are good to the returning exile. They do not well understand
what and where he has been; the tradition of his gifted youth when he
was dedicated to the church and forsook her service at the altar for her
service in the field, remains unquestioned, and he is safe in the refuge
of his family who can offer mainly their insignificance for his
protection. The logic of the fact is perfect, and Gabriel's emergence
from the quiet of his retreat inevitably follows from the nature of the
agitator as the logic of his own past and has the approval at least of the
perrero and the allegiance of the rest. What is very important in the
affair is that most of the inhabitants of this Cathedral-world, rich and
poor, good, bad, and indifferent, mean and generous, are few of them
wicked people, as wickedness is commonly understood; they all have
their habitual or their occasional moments of good will.
The refugee is tired of his past but he does not deny his faith in
humanity; his doctrine only postpones to a time secularly remote the
redemption of humanity from its secular suffering. He begins at once to

do good; he rescues his kind elder brother from the repudiation of the
daughter whom he has cast off because her seduction has condemned
her to a life of shame; he wins back the poor prostitute to her home, and
forces her father to tolerate her in it.
Most of the Cathedral folk are of course miserably poor, but willing to
be better than they are if they can keep from starving; the fierce and
prepotent Cardinal who is over them all, has moments of the common
good will, when he forgives all his enemies except the recalcitrant
canons. He likes to escape from these, and talk with the elderly widow
of the gardener whom he has known from his boyhood, and to pity
himself in her presence and smoke himself free from, his rancor and
trouble. He is such a prelate as we know historically in enough
instances; but he is pathetic in that simplicity