These writers are a highly beneficent influence in Spain at the present time, spreading over it as they do a multitude of stimulating pictures and liberalizing ideas, cast into charming literary form. They cannot fail to have a considerable effect upon conduct. In its manner, its aversion to obscurity, and fondness for floods of daylight that almost abolish shadow, this fiction is like the Spanish-Roman school of art, the painting of Fortuny, the two Madrazos, and others: the two seem but manifestations of a common impulse. On another side it is to be recommended to foreigners, as affording a body of information about Spain such as the mere traveler could never attain, and which it is useless to look for in fiction depending for its interest upon clever devices of plot and fantastic adventure. It lets an illumination into the heart of what has been the most reserved and mysterious country of Europe. It shows the true Spain, and not merely the conventional one of strumming guitars and jingling mule bells. With all its strangeness, we see it full of that genuine human nature that makes the world akin; and we see, with pleasure and hope, the breaking up of the forces of mediaevalism, the working of a mental and moral turmoil that is preparing the way for a general betterment. It would not be reasonable to suppose that Spanish literature remained wholly unaffected by the vigorous French movement just across the border. On the contrary, it clearly shows the trace of the robust modern style that has prevailed in France from Balzac to Zola. This trace, however, is in the style and not in the matter. It may possibly have aided the plainness of speech in the Spanish work, which is greater than in English books; and yet this plainness of speech is probably not greater than all books should be allowed, in the interest of their own usefulness, and in order not to be narrow instead of broad pictures of life. The tone towards sexual problems is never flippant; immorality is never put in an attractive light; there is hardly anywhere a more severe homily on the text that "the wages of sin is death" than is found in the wretched career of the transgressors in such books as Galdos's 'Lo Prohibido,' 'Tormento,' and 'La Desheredada.'