He has given evidence that in his catholic sympathies the fact of a common humanity is sufficient for the inclusion of any man in his brotherly regard. Of such as he the nations as yet count too few among their sons. And when one of these speaks, no difference of tongue should be allowed to bar our listening.
In the same article that has furnished the text for these remarks, Mr. Howells notes, among the admirable attributes in which this noble-minded Spaniard excels, "something very like our own boasted American humor with some other things which we cannot lay special claim to; as a certain sweetness, a gentle spirituality, a love of purity and goodness in themselves, and an insight into the workings of what used to be called the soul." As to the specific qualities of the book before us, I cannot better express my own sentiments than to continue in the words of Mr. Howells:
"La Alegria del Capitán Ribot is, as all the stories of this delightful author are, a novel of manners, the modern manners of provincial Spain; and, by the way, while we were spoiling our prostrate foe, I wish we could have got some of these, too; they would form an agreeable relief to our own, which they surpass so much in picturesqueness, to say the least. The scene is mostly at Valencia, where Capitán Ribot, who commands a steamer plying between Barcelona and Hamburg, is the guest of the civil engineer, Martí. The novel is, as far as Ribot and his two friends are concerned, a tender idyll, but on the other side it is an exquisite comedy, with some fine tragic implications. Around all is thrown the atmosphere of a civilization so different from our own, and of a humanity so like the Anglo-Saxon, as well as the Russian and the Scandinavian, even, that we find ourselves charmed at once by its strangeness and its familiarity. There are the same temptations, the same aspirations, the same strong desires, the same trembling resolutions, masking under southern skies and in alien air; but instantly recognizable by their truth to what all men feel and know."
Mr. Howells has expressed a desire to have Señor Valdés for our own. So far as a most intelligently sympathetic presentation of this beautiful story in English can do so, I am sure that my friend the translator has made him so.