The two literary _genres_ in which Spaniards have most excelled are the
drama and the novel. Indeed, outside of these two forms, it may be said
that no Spaniard has won a literary success of the first order. Thus, in
the past six centuries there have been many Spanish poets of real worth;
and yet in the list of the world's supreme poets no Spanish name
appears. Among the world's great philosophers Spain has no
representative, though she has had thinkers of genuine power. She has
had no moralist, or historian, or political writer, or scientist of the
highest rank. Even religion, which at first sight would seem to be the
predominant interest of Spain, has not there inspired any work of
universal and permanent appeal to the race. The other nations of the
civilized world have at no time derived from Spain a powerful literary
impulse in any of these directions. Palestine and Greece and Rome and
Italy and France and Germany and England have all had something
lastingly valuable to say upon one or more of these matters; but no one
would think of turning to Spanish books for the best that has been
thought and said upon any of them.
With the drama and the novel, however, the case is very different. Here
Spain has had writers universally placed among the great artists of the
world. Calderón and Lope de Vega, with the crowd of lesser dramatists of
the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century (the
period Spaniards call their _siglo de oro_), produced a body of dramatic
literature, which for extent, variety, poetic force, and original
national feeling and conception can be compared only with the Greek and
the English drama. Of their own motion these poets learned all the
essential secrets of the dramatic art. They acquired the faculty of
telling upon the stage any story they chose in such a way that it should
seem a picture of life itself to their audience; and, at the same time,
they managed to fuse with their tales all their accumulated reflection
upon men and things, all the various play of fancy, all the fine gold of
the imagination, and all the humor, gay or grotesque, which the plain
prose of life itself does not contain. Working freely, unawed by classic
models whose perfection they would attain, they were easy in their
motions, frank of conception, and ready to follow their matter wherever
it might lead them. They had no dread of being dull or unpoetical or
undignified; the best of them were constantly all these. But for this
very reason they were large and free and powerful, scornful of trivial
difficulties and obstacles, and able to attain success where all the
chances were against them. The thought and feeling, the hopes and
aspirations, the delusions and absurdities of Spain in the period of her
greatest power and splendor are all mirrored in their verse. Like the
Elizabethan dramatists, furthermore, they exacted tribute from all other
literatures and spent it as they would. And though their work has seldom
the rare distinction of ultimate perfection of form (indeed, in this
respect falls below the best Elizabethan standard), no one can read it
without perceiving that he is engaged with the rich and vital utterance
of artists who are masters of their craft.
Hardly less remarkable than the Spanish drama is the Spanish novel.
Obviously, much the same qualities are demanded for success in the one
form as in the other; and from the earliest period Spanish story-tellers
have known how to do their work well. There are tales in the
fourteenth-century collection by Don Juan Manuel, known as _El Conde
Lucanor_, that are as skillfully contrived as could possibly be. In
spite of its prolixity, the once famous romance of _Amadis of Gaul_,
which was given its Spanish form in the end of the fifteenth century,
must still be regarded as a highly successful piece of narration. At the
close of the same century, the often indecent, but never dull
'tragi-comedy' of _Celestina_ (a novel in fact, though dramatic in form)
proved its excellence as a piece of literary workmanship by attaining
speedily a European reputation. The sixteenth century saw the evolution
of so-called _novela picaresca_, or rogue novel, one of the most
important and influential of modern literary forms. And, finally, in
1605 Cervantes published the first part of one of the greatest of modern
books, _Don Quixote_,--a novel in which the art of story-telling is
brought to almost unrivaled perfection.
In more recent times, the Spanish novel has, of course, suffered from
the general intellectual decline of Spain as a whole. Its originality
has been impaired by the inevitable and generally baneful influence
exercised by foreign models upon the taste of a people not confident in
its own strength and superiority. The eighteenth century, in particular,
produced little deserving even casual mention. Yet in no period have
evidences of the old power been entirely lacking; and as soon as the
intellectual, no less than political, agitations that attended the
opening of the present century began, these evidences at once became
more numerous and more significant. The task of acquiring modernity has,
to be sure, proved longer and more difficult in Spain than in any other
great European nation, and the earlier literary work of the century has
about it too much of the general spiritual and artistic uncertainty of
such a period of confusion and change to possess enduring excellence.
But the trained observer can detect even in the unequal and hesitating
essays of the first half of our century indications of a renewal of the
old skill and of the gradual evolution of a new type of novel, which,
while modern in its methods and materials, still allies itself with what
is best in the older tradition.
The fruition of this period of growth has been seen since the middle of
the century, and to-day Spanish novelists easily hold their own with the
best of the world. Indeed, 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 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 the woman whom he loves. A second group of tales
deals with the hard question how the woman, left to her own resources
and without income, shall find her support. Here belong _Fortunata y
Jacinta, La Desheredada, Tristana_, and _Tormento_. It is the pathos of
this problem, not its unseemly and revolting details, that impresses
Galdós and that he strives to convey. And finally, there should be
mentioned those stories in which Galdós shows us the beauty and
uplifting power of natural sentiment, as _Marianela_; or the positive
and beneficent results that may come from a certain pure and unbigoted,
though somewhat mystical, religious feeling, as _Angel Guerra, Nazarín,_
and _Halma_.
It is clear from the above hasty survey of Galdós' work that there runs
through it all a profound moral sentiment, a sense of the tragedy of
modern life, an impatience of the irremediable and hopeless
contradictions in which ignorance and intolerance involve us. At the
same time, it should not be supposed that the general impression
produced by his novels is gloomy and forbidding. On the contrary, few
modern writers show so constantly the play of a free and wholesome
humor, or in more manly fashion take life as it comes, without tears or
whining. He does not strive nor cry; nor does he moralize. He shows us
life as it appears to him in a critical period of his nation's history,
unfolding it before us in its incessant variety, and not debauching us
by lessons of unmanly pessimism any more than by alluring optimism. And
to give to his work its final and irresistible claim upon us, he is the
master of a singularly rich and virile style--a style not modeled upon a
fad, but expressive of the whole nature of the man; capable of
eloquence, of wit and humor, of anger and scorn; now simple and
unadorned, now laden with a burden of reflection and of the great
traditional memories, literary and other, of the race. The Spanish
purists have indeed declared this style to be far from impeccable, and
this is altogether probable. But none the less it has something much
more important than impeccability; it has life and strength, and, when
its master pleases, beauty.
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