The Shadow of the Cathedral | Page 4

which survives in him
and almost makes good the loss of innocence in Latin souls. He keeps
with him the young girl who is the daughter of his youth, and whom it
cuts him to the soul to have those opprobrious canons imagine his
mistress. He is one out of the many figures that affirm their veracity in
the strange world where they have their being; and he is only the more
vivid as the head of a hierarchy which he rules rather violently though
never ignobly.
But the populace, the underpaid domestics and laborers of the strange
ecclesiastical world in their wretched over-worked lives and hopeless
deaths are what the author presents most vividly. There is the death of
the cobbler's baby which starves at the starving mother's breast which
the author makes us witness in its insupportable pathos, but his art is
not chiefly shown in such extremes: his affair includes the whole
tragical drama of the place, both its beauty and its squalor of fact, but
he keeps central the character of the refugee, Gabriel Luna, in the
allegiance to his past which he cannot throw off. When he begins to
teach the simple denizens of the Cathedral, some of them hear him
gladly, and some indifferently, and some unwillingly, but none
intelligently. He fails with them in that doctrine of patience which was
his failure, as an agitator, with the proletariat wherever he has been;
they could not wait through geological epochs for the reign of mercy
and justice which he could not reasonably promise the over-worked and

underfed multitude to-morrow or the day after. His brother, who could
not accept his teachings, warns him that the people of the Cathedral
will not understand him and cannot accept his scientific gospel, and for
a while he desists. In fact he takes service in the ceremonial of the
Cathedral; he even plays a mechanical part in the procession of Corpus
Christi, and finally he becomes one of the night-watchmen who guard
the temple from the burglaries always threatening its treasures.
The story is quite without the love-interest which is the prime attraction
of our mostly silly fiction. Gabriel's association with the English girl
who wanders over Europe with him is scarcely passionate if it is not
altogether platonic; his affection for the poor girl for whom he has won
her father's tolerance if not forgiveness becomes a tender affection, but
not possibly more; and there is as little dramatic incident as love
interest in the book. The extraordinary power of it lies in its fealty to
the truth and its insight into human nature. The reader of course
perceives that it is intensely anti-ecclesiastical, but he could make no
greater mistake than to imagine it in any wise Protestant. The author
shares this hate or slight of ecclesiasticism with all the Spanish
novelists, so far as I know them; most notably with Perez Galdós in
Doña Perfecta and Lean Rich, with Pardo-Bazan in several of her
stories, with Palacio Valdés in the less measure of Marta y Maria, and
La Hermana de San Sulpicio and even with the romanticist Valera in
Pepita Jimenez. But it may be said that while Ibañez does not go any
farther than Galdós, for instance, he is yet more intensively agnostic.
He is the standard bearer of the scientific revolt in the terms of fiction
which spares us no hope of relief in the religious notion of human life
here or hereafter that the Hebraic or Christian theology has divined.
It is right to say this plainly, but the reader who can suffer it from the
author will find his book one of the fullest and richest in modern fiction,
worthy to rank with the greatest Russian work and beyond anything yet
done in English. It has not the topographical range of Tolstoy's War
and Peace, or Resurrection; but in its climax it is as logically and
ruthlessly tragical as anything that the Spanish spirit has yet imagined.
Whoever can hold on to the end of it will find his reward in the full

enjoyment of that "noble terror" which high tragedy alone can give.
Nothing that happens in the solemn story--in which something
significant is almost always happening--is of the supreme effect of the
socialist agitator's death at the hands of the disciples whom he has
taught to expect mercy and justice on earth, but forbidden to expect it
within the reach of the longest life of any man or race of men. His
rebellious followers come at night into the Cathedral where Gabriel is
watching, to rob an especially rich Madonna, whom he has taught them
to regard as a senseless and wasteful idol, and they will not hear him
when he pleads with them against the theft. The inevitable irony of