Will the Saint triumph--will love victoriously claim its own?
We hurry on, at the first reading, for the solution; then we go back and discover in it another world of profound interest.

That is the true sign of a masterpiece.
In English we have only _John Inglesant_ and _Robert Elsmere_ to compare it with; but such a comparison, though obviously imperfect, proves at once how easily _The Saint_ surpasses them both, not merely by the greater significance of its central theme, but by its subtler psychology, its wider horizon, its more various contacts with life.
Benedetto, the Saint, is a new character in fiction, a mingling of St.
Francis and Dr.Dollinger, a man of to-day in intelligence, a medieval in faith.

Nothing could be finer than the way in which Signor Fogazzaro depicts his zeal, his ecstasies, his visions, his depressions, his doubts; shows the physical and mental reactions; gives us, in a word, a study in religious morbid psychology--for, say what we will, such abnormalities are morbid--without rival in fiction.

We follow Benedetto's spiritual fortunes with as much eagerness as if they were a love story.
And then there is the love story.

Where shall one turn to find another like it?
Jeanne seldom appears in the foreground, but we feel from first to last the magnetism of her presence.