Doña Perfecta | Page 4

to
give these events their proper setting in the political and social
movements of the period. Naturally, there is great inequality in the
execution of so long a list of tales (twenty in all), and the reader's
attention at times flags. Yet the care with which Galdós studied his
material, acquainting himself with the minutest details of the history of
the time, and the skill as a narrator that rarely fails him, make the
Episodios Nacionales incomparably the best documents in which to
obtain a true understanding of one of the greatest movements in the life
of a great and interesting nation.
Before he had concluded the Episodios Nacionales, however, Galdós
had begun to feel the attraction of an even deeper and more significant
movement,--that of the modernization of the Spain of the present day.
Here, to be sure, the situations are less famous and picturesque, the part
of action is diminished, and patriotic emotion is less evoked; but the
struggle to be studied is none the less violent and profound. For readers
of our time this struggle perhaps gains in interest from being rather
inward than outward, and from demanding of him who paints it rather a
study of souls than the delineation of stirring events. In few countries
has the clash between the new and the old been so violent, or the
adjustment to the new produced so many and so startling incongruities
as in Spain. The deadly antagonism of the traditional religious and
social feeling of the race towards the whole modern manner of thinking,
the ruinous effects of a first taste of modern luxury upon those who
come ignorantly and blindly under its spell, the agitations of minds
whose moral continuity has been broken by ill-understood freedom of
speculation, the disasters produced by political or social ambitions
aroused in those grotesquely unfit for their attainment,--in short, the
illusions, the vain hopes, the failures, the despairs, the hates, the woe
which every great movement of the Zeitgeist inevitably causes in every

nation, these are the themes which Galdós has of late found irresistibly
attractive, and to which he has devoted much the richest and strongest
part of his work.
The first novel in which the new interest was predominant was the
present book, Doña Perfecta, finished in April, 1876. In it Galdós
brought the new and the old face to face: the new in the form of a
highly trained, clear-thinking, frank-speaking modern man; the old in
the guise of a whole community so remote from the current of things
that its religious intolerance, its social jealousy, its undisturbed
confidence and pride in itself must of necessity declare instant war
upon that which comes from without, unsympathetic and critical. The
inevitable result is ruin for the party whose physical force is less, the
single individual, yet hardly less complete ruin for those whom
intolerance and hate have driven to the annihilation of their adversary.
The sympathies of the author, as his closing sentence shows, are with
the new, but his conscience as artist has none the less compelled him to
give to the old its right of full and fair utterance.
The same ignorant or stubborn religiosity, negative for good, working
evil for all affected by it, has been studied by Galdós in two subsequent
novels, La Familia de León Roch and Gloria, which are generally
reputed to be, with Doña Perfecta, the greatest of his works. Gloria, in
particular, has received great and deserved laudation, in spite of some
looseness and unevenness of the technique due to the rapidity with
which it was written (the first part in hardly more than a fortnight, the
author tells us). The theme is not unlike that of George Eliot's Daniel
Deronda, one of the protagonists being an English Jew, with the
profoundest attachment to the traditions of his race, the other a Spanish
girl, in whom the faith of her fathers is an ineradicable instinct. Few
finer and more tragic situations have been imagined by moderns than
this. No less tragic, though less poetic, is the ruin of León Roch,
weighed down by the burden of an insanely bigoted wife.
Other groups of novels deal with the other aspects of the modern
society of Spain of which mention has been made. In one group we
have the disasters caused in lowly homes by the vanity of women who

have caught a glimpse of the pleasures of the rich, and pitilessly
demand them. The poor official, out of a place, in Miau, is goaded to
suicide by the exactions of his wife and daughter and sister-in-law. In
La de Bringas we have the squalid intrigues of a family on the edge of
'high life' and striving to get within it. El Amigo Manso loves, and is
exploited for her social advantage by