The Joy of Captain Ribot

The Joy of Captain Ribot

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION FROM THE ORIGINAL OF A. PALACIO VALDÉS BY MINNA CAROLINE SMITH
NEW YORK BRENTANO'S 1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY BRENTANOS.
We Americans are apt to think because we have banged the Spanish war-ships to pieces that we are superior to the Spaniards, but here in the field where there is always peace they shine our masters. If we have any novelists to compare with theirs at their best, I should be puzzled to think of them, and I should like to have some one else try —wrote William Dean Howells in Literature .
When a work by one of the world's masters of fiction has called forth a remark like the foregoing from a leading man of letters in America, it would be a misfortune if the public to whom the remark is addressed might not enjoy the privilege of acquaintance with that work. And it was this most charming novel by Señor Armando Palacio Valdés, La Alegria del Capitán Ribot, that prompted Mr. Howells to write those words. Any reader must be hard to please who would not take the keenest delight in a story presented with a touch so delicate. The scene is laid in Valencia, one of the earth's famous garden spots, where the touch of the classic hand, laid upon the spot ages ago yet lingers. It is a story dominated by the purest joy, as its serene Mediterranean landscape is dominated by the purest sunshine.
Every novelist of character must have some purpose in mind in a given work, and the purpose of Señor Valdés in this is of no slight import. It happens that, from an unclean quality that distinguishes the fiction of a certain nation, the minds of many lands have been infected. For the almost universal aim of its authors has seemed to be so pervasively to color their pictures of life with one particular kind of sin as to give the impression that it is a main factor of modern civilization, instead of something that blots but a small proportion of the lives of men and women in any land. So, when Señor Valdés wrote to me, several months ago, about his new novel, he said: It is a protest from the depths against the eternal adultery of the French novel. And when I read the book, I thought that A Married Woman would have been a good name for the story, so nobly and so truly does it present a type of the true and devoted wife in Cristina Martí—one of the great creations in modern literature. The trait that makes Señor Valdés one of the most eminent of living novelists is greatness of soul, finding expression as it does in a consummate mastery of his art. That trait appears in his La Fé as in no other novel that I know; and in the present story it pervades the whole work, which, moreover, is clean, sweet, and wholesome in every part. Magnanimity is a word that somehow implies that greatness of soul derives itself from greatness of heart, and the magnanimity of Señor Valdés is of a degree that transcends limitations of race, of creed, and of patriotism.