Doña Perfecta | Page 4

list of tales (twenty in all), and the reader's attention at times flags. Yet the care with which Gald��s 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, Gald��s 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 Gald��s 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, Do?a Perfecta, finished in April, 1876. In it Gald��s 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 Gald��s in two subsequent novels, La Familia de Le��n Roch and Gloria, which are generally reputed to be, with Do?a 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 Le��n 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.