But Valera could delineate characters skilfully. In his longest novel, “Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino,” the hero, Señor Don Faustino López y Mendoza, is in some degree a typical figure of modern Spain. Living in his half ruinous ancestral house in the village of Villabermeja, he feels himself to be capable of great deeds, but achieves nothing. He laments not being of humble birth to become a brigand like the great José María, he laments not having been born in the eleventh or twelfth century to carve out for himself a kingdom with his sword, and he ends by obtaining a modest post at Madrid, which brings him little over £100 a year. Valera’s creations have only seemed unreal because, through the alchemy of his style, he is a King Midas, turning all to gold, and the excellence of his art raises his figures to the level of statues in Parian marble. They are not, therefore, less lifelike; because he has an “exquisite adjustment of word to thought,”[101] it does not follow that he is “without life and passion”[102]--rather the passion is raised to a white heat, with the flames no longer visible. And in his descriptions he is a true realist, giving us the light and laughter of Andalucía. His “Juanita la Larga” is a charming sketch of life in an Andalusian village that may recall Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de tres picos.” Some of the most laughter-rousing scenes of “El Sombrero de tres picos” pass in the little stone-paved court in front of a flour mill, a quarter of a league from a certain cathedral town in Andalucía. The court is shaded by a huge vine-trellis, sufficiently thick and solid for the miller to sleep--or pretend to sleep--unnoticed among its leaves. It is a brief, delightful sketch, coloured and malicious, of Andalusian life in the first years of the nineteenth century. To Andalucía also belong two novels by Palacio Valdés, “La Hermana San Sulpicio” and “Los Majos de Cádiz.” But it is Andalucía described not by a native but by a stranger, for Palacio Valdés is of the North. He has a sense of humour rather English than Spanish, and he is, indeed, almost as well known out of Spain as within the Peninsula. It is a humour less bitter and aggressive than that of another Asturian, Leopoldo Alas, with whom Valdés collaborated in a volume of critical essays. As a sketcher of character, Valdés is admirable. Gloria, the typically Andalusian girl, and the Gallegan Sanjurjo are both excellently drawn in “La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of his “Marta y María” is laid in an old town of Astúrias--the author is now in his native country--surrounded by a wide level of meadows and gently sloping hills to the _ría_, bordered by immense pine woods and the sea. It is a novel even more delightful than “La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of “La Aldea perdida” is also Astúrias. It is a pastoral symphony, an Asturian counterpart to Pereda’s “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” a charming story--in spite of its theatrical ending--of village rivalries and reconciliations in a land wooded with chestnuts and oaks and cider-apples, a land of maize and cool green fields of trefoil, and mountain paths hedged with honeysuckle. But in other works Palacio Veldés has not maintained this Spanish inspiration. In “La Espuma,” “Maximina,” “La Fe,” the influence is that of the French naturalistic School. _Clarín_ (Leopoldo Alas), though born at Zamora also an Asturian, was likewise deeply influenced by France in his long work “La Regenta.” In one of his critical essays _Clarín_ wrote that “Spanish realism is very Spanish; it is in the race. But it has its defects, _no todo en él es flores_; it is deficient in psychology and the poetry of passion.” In “La Regenta” we have passion and psychological analysis and epigrammatic wit. The scene is the old cathedral city of Vetusta (or rather Oviedo). The treatment is not characteristically Spanish. Vetusta is here a typical provincial town, such as Flaubert might have described and hated, and its inhabitants are almost all represented as ignorant, vulgar, or vicious. Their stupidity and vulgarity are lashed with an ingenious subtlety that is unsparing, and the motives guiding their actions are laid bare with an amazing skill. _Clarín’s_ humour is often a little cruel, and the novel is crowded with terse and biting phrases. One of the readers of the Vetusta _casino_--the worthiest of them, _Clarín_ is careful to assure us--is thus pilloried in a few lines: “He arrived at nine o’clock every evening without fail, took _Le Figaro_ and _The Times_, which he placed over _Le Figaro_, put on his gold spectacles, and, lulled by the sound of the gas, fell gently asleep over the foremost paper of the world, a privilege which no one sought to dispute.