life and its higher aspirations, and not that coarse
part of it to which the French would seem to have devoted an undue
amount of attention. The reader of Anglo-Saxon origin approaches this
fiction with ease and sympathy; he has not to acquire any new point of
view in order to understand it, nor to unlearn any wonted standards of
taste or morals.

An informing Spanish critic, Emilia Pardo Bazan, herself a novelist of
talent, points out that the present Spanish school cannot be said to
have a "yesterday," but only "a day before yesterday." She means that
it has skipped a certain interval, and connects itself with remoter,
and not with recent, tradition. It really comes down from a time
antedating even the great "Golden Age." It takes its rise in the
wonderful naturalness of the 'Celestina,' a quaint "tragi-comedy" of
the year 1499. It bears a close relationship, next, to Don Quixote and
to the "Novelas Picarescas," the stories of amusing knaves in very low
life, of which 'Lazarillo de Tormes' and 'Guzman de Alfarache' are the
best examples, and that French imitation, 'Gil Blas,' better than the
originals. A period of very stiff Classicism in the eighteenth
century, and of extravagant Romanticism in the beginning of the
nineteenth, followed, constituting the omitted "yesterday"; and then
arrived the vigorous literature of the present time, here in question.
The qualities of truth to nature, practical good sense, genuine humor,
and play of imagination, have nearly always characterized Spanish
fiction, and these qualities seem possessed by the contemporary
novelists in a higher degree than ever before. The Picaresque or Rogue
stories seem to be--their naturalness admitted--a mere string of
disconnected adventures, written to the taste of a period that had not
the habit of keeping its attention fixed upon anything long; and we
scarcely know any leading character more intimately at the end than at
the beginning. As against this, we have now complete and lengthy
novels, in which situations and characters are all worked out upon a
symmetrical plan, and in which the conclusions generally follow like
those of fate; that is to say, they are not arbitrary, but inevitably
result from the conditions and circumstances given.

So far as there is English influence in this literature, it may be
said to be more in the form of example than as a direct component. It
has given the Spanish movement courage and persistence, to see the
same