Similarly, Señor Menéndez y Pelayo remarks that “about the year 1870, the date of Pérez Galdós’ first book, the Spanish novel was slumbering in the arms of insipid or monstrous productions, _entre ñoñerías y monstruosidades_.” There is little insipidity or sentimentalism in the more modern Spanish novel. Realism is the dominant note of Spanish literature. The very atmosphere of Spain makes for clear vision. Its artists are realistic, even brutally realistic, as Goya occasionally is; even its mystics have not been wrapped wholly from the world: they do not live in a cloud, insensible to the real facts of life. And in the same way the great Spanish novelists are realistic. There is, however, a true Castilian dignity about their realism. They do not, in George Meredith’s phrase, mistake the “muddy shallows” for the depths of Nature. They may treat of the vulgar and the base, but they do not treat of them in a way that is vulgar and base. They may be as outspoken as Martial, but their realism is eminently sane and clean. The modern fashion, strongly in favour of realism, should do justice to the merits of Spanish novels. It is no doubt guided by the love of contrast that caused Stendhal, a romantic and an enthusiast at heart, to read pages of the “Code Civil” before writing his novels, and to adopt a style mathematically cold and thin, and Flaubert, a poet, to analyse a subject so vulgar as that of _Madame Bovary_. A simpler age may delight in works of a fantastic imagination, but a more complex and perhaps hypocritical age must have truth and away with vagueness and pretence.