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.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]