Doña Perfecta | Page 3

in the opinion of many well qualified to
judge, there is in no language at the present time a body of fiction more
original, more various, more genuinely interesting than Spanish authors
have produced. Juan Valera, Pedro Alarcón, José María Pereda,
Armando Palacio Valdés, the Padre Luís Coloma, Doña Emilia Pardo
Bazán, and, last, the author of the present volume, Benito Pérez Galdós,
have succeeded along very different lines, and with striking
independence of manner, in composing a mass of fiction which depicts
the real Spain of to-day perhaps more adequately than the novelists of
any other country have been able to render their native land. The reader
of Valera is filled with perpetual admiration of his fine cosmopolitan
scepticism, combined with rich traditional culture of the true Spanish
type, rendered in a subtle, gay, delightful style that derives from the
purest sources of sixteenth-century Spanish. In Alarcón Spanish irony
and Spanish rhetoric (l'emphase espagnole, as the French call it)
combine in rarely personal admixture. Pereda studies the crude and
homely life of the region of Santander with the care for detail of the
most scrupulous realist, but without the hard and brutal curiosity about
the merely external that realism adopted as a literary creed seems to
bring with it. Valdés and Coloma and Señora Bazán, writing from very
different points of view, all reproduce for us with sure touches the
sentiments and ideals, the virtues and vices of Spanish society, high
and low, urban or rural, of to-day. And Pérez Galdós, the most fruitful
of them all, has embraced the entire century in his work, and affords us,
on the whole, the clearest and fullest account of the recent spiritual and
social life of his nation anywhere to be found.
Benito Pérez Galdós was born at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands,

May 10, 1845. The details of his early life are entirely unknown except
to himself, his invincible modesty denying them even to personal
friends like the writer of the only biography of him (a meagre one) that
has appeared, Leopoldo Alas. He studied in the local Instituto, and
must have profited by his opportunities, for the literary attainments
shown in his novels can have resulted only from persistent labor from
youth up. In 1863 he went to Madrid to study law in the University, but
with little eagerness for his future profession. He already dreamed of a
literary career, and tried the hand of an apprentice at journalism and at
pieces for the theatre, none of which, happily, as he has since said, was
represented. In 1867, his mind being engaged at once by the
revolutionary agitation of his own time, and by the similar interest of
the still more violent upheaval in Spain in the first years of the century,
he began a kind of historical novel, La Fontana de Oro, in which he
undertook to study the inner motives and history of that period, so
all-important for modern Spanish history, and to illustrate the
detestable character of Ferdinand VII as it appeared in one of his most
disgraceful moments. It was four years, however, before the book was
completed and published. During this time Galdós had visited France
and had returned to Madrid by way of Barcelona, where he was when
the Revolution of 1868, which deprived Queen Isabel of her throne,
broke out. This he greeted with delight, believing the realization of his
conservatively radical political views to be at hand; but he speedily
found himself sadly disillusioned. In 1871 his novel appeared, making
no sensation, but attracting the favorable attention of a few competent
judges. The road was at last opened before him, and he pressed steadily
on in it.
His imagination had now become deeply stirred by both the political
and the social aspects of the great period of the awakening of Spain,
when, to begin with, she freed herself by heroic efforts from the
Napoleonic tyranny, and then made her incipient advances towards
modernity in the face of the opposition of the representatives of her
traditional religion and of her outworn social order. In 1872 he had
completed a second novel, El Audaz, in which a phase of the struggle
earlier than that studied in La Fontana de Oro, was his theme. Then,
taking a suggestion perhaps from the success of the historical novels of

Erckmann-Chatrian, he began a succession of consecutive tales,
Episodios Nacionales, as he called them, which, in two series, cover
the whole agitated time from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 down to
the death of Ferdinand VII in 1833. Each series has its hero, whose
fortunes afford a slender thread binding the tales together, and whose
participation in the successive events or crises of the War of
Independence and of the reign of Ferdinand VII enables the author