Galdós and His Critics 9781487579937

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GALDOS AND HIS CRITICS

Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) is regarded as one of Europe's greatest writers, the equal in Spanish literature of Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Tolstoy. He dominated the literary scene in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain, and is credited with almost single-handedly setting the Spanish realist novel on its course. For more than a century, critical comment on diverse aspects of Galdos's life has been abundant; he is one of the most discussed of modern Spanish writers. This study is the first to attempt to trace the main lines in this critical tradition down to the present. Percival organizes the vast body of Galdos criticism into five distinct approaches. The first uses biographical information to interpret Galdos's writing and, conversely, studies his work to extend biographical knowledge about him. The second approach is literary-historical and involves the study of sources and indebtedness to demonstrate the influence of the work of others on Galdos. The third approach relates the author's life and works to ideas: subjects like society, politics, history, religion, philosophy and psychology. The fourth and fifth approaches deal with the works themselves: in one case Galdos's achievements in the field of the novel, in the other his drama, journalism, and other writings. This comprehensive study of literary criticism on Galdos emphasizes the central place he holds in Spanish literature, and charts the changing course in literary tastes and critical attitudes in Spain and the world of Hispanic studies. Anthony Percival is a member of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto.

ANTHONY PERCIVAL

Gald6s and His Critics

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto

Buffalo

London

©

University of Toronto Press 1985 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018

ISBN 0-8020-5601-6 ISBN 978-1-4875-8100-8 (paper)

University of Toronto Romance Series 53 TO OFELIA, OPHELIA BEATRIZ, AND ANTHONY RODRIGO

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Percival, Anthony, 1944Galdos and his critics (University of Toronto romance series, ISSN 0082-5336 Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-5601-6

53)

ISBN 978-1-4875-8100-8 (paper)

1. Perez Galdos, Benito, 1843-1920 - Criticism and interpretation - History. I. Title. II. Series PQ6555.Z5P47 1985

863'.5

C85-098773-3

The sketch on the cover is the work of the Spanish artist Daniel Vazquez Diaz (1882-1969). This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and a grant from the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press.

Contents

Preface

vii

1

The Biographical Approach

2

Literary History

3

Literature and Ideas

4

Galdos: The Novels

s

Galdos: Drama, Journalism, and Other Writings

Conclusions

3

67 107 161 243

287

APPENDIX: Contribution to a Study of Galdos Criticism circa 1975 to circa 1982 291 Notes

345

Selected Bibliography

483

Index of Galdosian Works and Characters Cited General Index

511

SOS

~efuce

The first serious cr1t1c1sm of the literary production of Benito Perez Galdos appeared over a century ago, in 1870. Since then an enormous quantity of critical comment has appeared on many aspects of his life and works. Much more has been written about him than about the other outstanding nineteenth-century Spanish novelists, and he is without doubt one of the most discussed of modern Spanish writers. It is clearly of considerable interest and importance to follow down to the present critical fortunes of the works of a major writer like Galdos. For examination of the ways his works have been read and judged by successive generations helps to throw light on the place of Galdos in history, on changing literary tastes and critical attitudes, and even the state of Spanish cultural life at large. The twofold purpose of this study is to give a reasoned account of the vast body of Galdosian criticism and to provide a general bibliographical guide for use with other bibliographies devoted to specific aspects of the Spanish author and his writings. It would be a Sisyphean labour to take into account all the critical writings devoted to Galdos when, for example, the contemporary critical reviews of Galdos's plays have only very recently been catalogued and studied. My main concern has been to examine a wide selection of Galdos criticism from its beginnings down to the early eighties, paying particular attention to those writings that illustrate leading trends and orientations. In order to bring out these broad tendencies in Galdos criticism, it seemed convenient to classify them according to areas of literary study and their various related critical approaches. Accordingly, chapter 1 deals with writings on Galdos's life and with attempts made to use biographical information for interpretation of his works and, conversely, information gleaned from the works to extend

viii

Preface

knowledge of his life. Chapter 2 considers Galdos's life and works from the point of view of literary history, centring on the various historical methods that have been employed, such as study of sources, influences, and indebtedness. The third chapter takes up the broad topic of literature and ideas, and contains a consideration of approaches that study the author's life and works in relation to subjects like society, politics, history, religion, morality, philosophy, and psychology. In each of these chapters, the aims, assumptions, and limitations of the critical approaches and concerns under discussion are briefly examined and since the nature of a critical approach is to some extent defined by the ways in which it differs from opposing approaches, some attention is paid to the matter of competing literary theories. An effort has been made to avoid excessive rigidity in the categorization of critical writings on Galdos. I have tried to bear in mind A.N. Whitehead's dictum, 'We must be systematic; but we must keep our systems open.' After all, a critic may use various methods on various occasions depending on his particular needs and intentions and on the kind of work before him, or use methods in combination when it seems necessary. Thus some Galdos studies are treated in different contexts and different chapters. In the last two chapters the focus is placed on critical responses to the works themselves. Chapter 4 concentrates on criticism dealing with Galdos's prodigious achievements in the field of the novel. This chapter opens with a summary of the developments in theory and criticism of the novel, goes on to consider the main aspects of the contemporary reception of Galdos's works, and finally examines the generally more disciplined and academic kind of studies, most of which have been made in the period between the author's death and 1975. Chapter 5 is concerned with Galdos's drama, journalism, and other writings. Since these areas have as yet been submitted to relatively little rigorous and sophisticated analysis, it was considered appropriate to give a detailed account of such pertinent critical commentary that does exist. An appendix, 'Contribution to a Study of Galdos Criticism circa 1975 to circa 1982,' has been included at the suggestion of the publisher. This is an attempt to deal with the enormous flood of writings published in recent years. In view of the difficulties libraries now have in maintaining their collections and the delays they experience in obtaining publications from other libraries, I have renounced any ambition of coming close to complete coverage of Galdosian

ix

Preface

criticism published in this period. What I have done is examine as many publications as possible in the time at my disposal. My apologies go to colleagues whose works I have missed or been unable to obtain in time for inclusion. Given the vast number of writings on Galdos consulted for this study, it seemed impractical to itemize them in bibliographical form. Instead, the principal bibliographies containing Galdosian criticism have been grouped in the first section of the Bibliography. Since HensleyC. Woodbridge's annotated bibliographies (1975 and 1981) contain a full listing of post-1943 writings on Galdos's novels in particular, I have been selective in dealing with this area of criticism. (Information on the criticism referred to in the text is included in the Notes to each chapter.) The second section of the Bibliography lists other works referred to in the text, including a small number of critical writings on Galdos not to be found in the standard bibliographies. I am pleased to acknowledge my indebtedness to all of these Galdos bibliographers, without whose efforts this book would have been scarcely conceivable.

GALDOS AND HIS CRITICS

1 The Biographical Approach

With the rise of individualism since the Renaissance, the writing of life histories has been practised with increasing frequency. The eighteenth century can boast of two notable successes, Dr Johnson's The Lives of the Poets (1779-81) and James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), a fitting tribute to one of the outstanding literary figures of the period in England . A heightening of the historical sense and the nineteenth-century Romantic obsession with subjectivity gave impetus to biographical curiosity; numerous biographies were written, some of which were striking achievements. In the present century biographies are one of the most popular of literary and subliterary forms . Scientific advances (particularly in the fields of psychology and sociology) have been incorporated, with varying success, into the outlook of the contemporary biographer, who commonly shows a concern to understand and exploit the potentialities of his medium. From Lytton Strachey to Richard Ellmann biographers have been at pains to exp~ain their standpoint, preoccupations, and working methods. So far these observations apply to English biographies. What of biographies in the Hispanic world? In the medieval period there are quasi biographies in the Croniaas; and Fernan Perez de Guzman and Fernando del Pulgar are famed for their biographical sketches. After the Renaissance biographies continued to be written, though seemingly not in great numbers.1 In the nineteenth century a considerable number of literary biographies were written - by scholars and critics such as F. Blanco Garcia, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, Jose Amador de los Rios, Manuel Mila y Fontanals, and Jose Yxart. 2 None of these, though, achieved the kind of lasting acclaim accorded to such biographies as J.G. Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (1837-8) and John Forster's

4

Galdos and His Critics

The Life of Charles Dickens (1872-4). 3 Galdos himself wrote

excellent biographical sketches and appreciations at various stages in his literary career. Spanish writers of the twentieth century have devoted themselves zealously to the biographical form. Highly idiosyncratic biographies and literary portraits have been produced by Ramon Gomez de la Serna; other prominent exponents of the literary biography include Benjamin Jarnes, Gregorio Maranon, Miguel Perez Ferrero, and Carmen Bravo-Villasante. Literary biography, considered as a branch of biography, has been studied in depth only in recent decades. Richard D. Altick has traced the development of literary biography in Britain and North America, showing that the form took on fully grown dimensions only when it was recognized that the literary artist had a place - albeit a shadowy and ambiguous one - in society.~ From the Romantic period to our own day literary biographies have had a wide appeal, not just to the literary specialist but also to the common reader. For writers often invite curiosity by virtue of seeming to be mysterious figures engaged in creative pursuits that appear to have no ties with the workaday world. There is, of course, much common ground between literary biography and other types of biography. Lytton Strachey's remark that biography is 'the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing' 5 points to one of the central problems of the form: the need for moral responsibility in dealing with the life of a human being. Even if a proper attitude of fairness to the subject is maintained, there are all manner of difficulties confronting the biographer: should he suppress scandalous facts, play down revelations of foibles and disabilities, let himself be swayed by family interference, respect the rights of the dead, or attempt to reveal everything, 'warts and all'? Certainly a franker and more open attitude to human behaviour is prevalent today; even so, moral problems do not simply dissolve but rather are reinterpreted according to the temper of the age. Now, as before, the writing of biography calls for tact, discrimination, and compassion; biographers are just as prone as ever to treat their subjects in a patronizing or censorious fashion. In particular, the use of psychoanalytical techniques has often led to a reductive portrait of human life. New methods of reproduction, the boom in scholarship, and the increased accessibility of documents have not eased the task of the biographer. Scholarly procedures and improved criteria of objectivity have helped to set higher standards

5

The Biographical Approach

for the evaluation of evidence. From Dr Johnson onwards the criterion of truth has been held up as a prime necessity for the successful biography. Andre Maurois has said that the first duty of the biographer is 'to produce a true portrait. ' 6 But many biographical theorists treat the truth claim with reservation. Julian Marias has commented cogently that 'en general, una biografia no puede hacerse adecuadamente; nunca podemos conocer a un projimo, mucho menos a un projimo preterito. Una biografia es siempre algo tectonico: hay que construirla con ciertos datos mas o menos; entonces la construimos como la figura de un personaje ficticio. Y esa biografia nunca puede ser ''verdader~•: lo masque puede ser · es verosimil, plausible. ' 7 Furthermore, allowing for a slack use of the word true, it is unlikely that most biographies would remain so for very long, since the pressure of events, shifts in perspective, and changes in mental habits and interests are continually modifying the climate of the times, noticeably with each new generation. Although few today would agree with Carlyle's dictum that 'History is the essence of innumerable Biographies,' 8 it is true that biography is a branch of history by reason of its quintessential concern to relate the facts of a real individual's life. The biographer worth his salt must show due respect for facts, a willingness to hunt in archives and libraries, and an inclination for detective work. In addition to being something of a historian, the ideal biographer should - to meet the requirements of theorists like Maurois - also possess the talents of a portrait painter and a novelist.9 The biographer's task is to produce a verbal likeness of his subject, and since, like the novelist, he is engaged in creating characters, he can benefit from using fictional techniques of narration and characterization. But in fact most biographers are not competent in each of these three disciplines. This has brought about a categorization of biographies according to their fundamental orientation; for example, the popular biography, the scholarly biography, and the artistic biography. Few biographies combine the properties of these three types; popular biographers generally aim at swift monetary reward, scholarly biographers often have no shaping sense to bring to their desire to reveal all, and artistic biographers tend to sacrifice facts in their concern with narrative design and literary quality. Memorable biographies are very rare in the present century, despite a closer understanding of the form and a greater preoccupation with technique.

6

Galdos and His Critics

In recent times impressive work has been done in the theory of literary biography. Leon Edel has discussed the main questions in detail, providing a useful description of 'three types of literary biography : the chronicle-compendium, the synthesized and summarized narrative (which might be termed the "organic" type), and the literary portrait.' 10 James L. Clifford has written perceptively of the complex involvement of biographer and subject and of the kind of choices and decisions the former has to face in selecting his material. 11 And Richard Ellmann dealt admirably in his inaugural lecture at Oxford with 'the problems that particularly beset biographers at the present time. 12 His forecast of future developments is interesting to note: The form of biography, then, is countenancing experiments comparable to those of the novel and poem. It cannot be as mobile as those forms because it is associated with history, and must retain a chronological pattern, though not necessarily a simple one ••• Biographies will continue to be archival, but the best ones will offer speculations, conjectures, hypotheses. The attempt to connect disparate elements, to describe the movements within the mind as if they were the movements within the atom, to label the most elusive particles, will become more venturesome. (p. 18) If literary biography does follow these directions it will find itself at an exciting stage in its development. Literary biography is an especially subtle and exacting art because both its subject and its materials are so intimately related to language. The biographer seeks to understand an individual whose life is usually complex and largely bound up with the creation of literary works. It is hardly surprising, then, that he should feel drawn to speculate on the connections between his subject's life and art. The next step is to wonder if knowledge of the life can be an aid to the understanding and evaluation of the work. This manner of thinking became widespread only in the nineteenth century with the advent of Romanticism and the tendency of writers like Byron and Shelley to live out their art. 13 The great representative of the biographical mode of criticism in the nineteenth century is Sainte-Beuve. He went further than previous critics in raising questions about the writer's physical and spiritual constitution. His aim was to understand the author as an individual, the work being viewed as the expression of personality . A judgment of the work amounts

7

The Biographical Approach

to a judgment of the author as a human being. Sainte-Beuve's critical endeavour is summed up in the following much-quoted passage: 'La litterature, la production litteraire, n'est point pour moi distincte ou du moins separable du reste de l'homme et de !'organisation; je puis goGter une oeuvre, mais il m'est difficile de la juger independamment de la connaissance de l'homme meme; et je dirais volontiers: tel arbre, tel fruit. L'etude litteraire me mene ainsi tout naturellement a l'etude morale. ' 14 With the mounting interest in authors' lives in the nineteenth century, biographical criticism was widely practised, though opposition and disclaimers came from some literary figures like Wordsworth. 15 By the turn of the century criticism had fallen into the doldrums, and a reaction against irrelevance, slack thinking, and vapid impressionism was a welcome development. The efforts of such diverse critics as T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and the so-called New Critics led to a greater concern with criticism as a disciplined, objective activity. Emphasis was placed on the analysis of literary texts ('words on the page') and inquiry into the nature of criticism itself. The business of the critic was 'to see the poem as both expression and artifact - and the poet, if one will have him, as both sayer and maker,' 16 in the words of W.K. Wimsatt, one of the foremost later theorists of the Anglo-American movement in criticism. The shift of focus from the personality of the author to the structure of the work is illustrated in Wimsatt's 'The Intentional Fallacy,' a locus classicus of modern criticism, written in collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley. Focusing on the question of authorial intention they dissociate 'biographical or genetic inquiry' from 'the true and objective way of criticism. ' 17 Other notable theorists have followed a similar path in dealing with the problems relating to biographical criticism. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, in a judicious examination of the question which points out the undeniable uses of biography, remark that 'the biographical interpretation and use of every work of art needs careful scrutiny and examination in each case, since the work of art is not a document for biography .•. 18 No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation ••. The poem exists; the tears shed or unshed, the personal emotions, are gone and cannot be reconstructed, nor need they be' (p. 80). Like Wellek and Warren, Victor Erlich - the author of a book on Russian Formalism - lays great stress on the fundamental difference between life as actual experience and art as experience transmuted into

8

Galdos and His Critics

aesthetic form, seeing 'life and work as interrelated but qualitatively distinct levels of reality.' He adds that 'since the poem is always a deflection, not a reflection, of experience, we cannot hope to assess properly the nature of the latter without gauging first the deforming impact of the aesthetic formula, the angle of deflection. ' 19 So, great care must be taken, not only in using information concerning the writer's life for the elucidation of his works, but also in arriving at an assessment of the personality of the writer based on a reading of the work of art he has produced. One of the finest exponents of 'close reading,' Cleanth Brooks offers this synoptic comment on the biographical approach: A study of the poet's personality and intellectual background will certainly be rewarding. After all, the poem is an expression of the mind and sensibility of the man who wrote it, and may well reflect his cultural background and the time spirit of his age. Yet concentration upon these matters can also take us away from the poem - into author psychology or the history of ideas or cultural history. In any case, it is valuable to ponder the fact that we often know very little about the author's experience beyond what he has been able to catch and make permanent within the poem .•. Even where we know a great deal about the author's personality and ideas, we rarely know as much as the poem itself can tell us about itself; for the poem is no mere effusion of a personality. It is a construct - an articulation of ideas and emotions - a dramatization. It is not a slice of raw experience but a product of the poet's imagination - not merely suffered by him but the result of his creative activity. As a work of art, it calls for a reciprocal imaginative activity on our part; and that involves seeing it for what it is. 20 This and the foregoing views can fairly be said to represent the outlook of the critical tendency often called 'New Criticism,' or 'Practical Criticism.' A careful reading of its theorists shows that the possible uses of biography in literary study received no outright condemnation - as biographical critics sometimes allege - but a well-reasoned caveat was urged against the irrelevant and illogical application of biographical information in the writing of literary criticism. During the heyday of this movement, in the late thirties and the forties, biographical criticism continued to be

9

The Biographical Approach

written, but it was only in the fifties that intelligent articles looking at the question from the biographical standpoint began to appear. Generally they were not the work of diehard practitioners of biographical criticism. In 1952 Leslie E. Fiedler mounted a vigorous attack on a caricatured concept of New Critical formalist intransigence, asserting that 'the notion that a work of art is, or should be, absolutely self-contained, a discrete set of mutually interrelated references, needs only to be stated to seem the reductio ad absurdwn which it is ..• 21 There is no "work itself," no independent formal entity which is its own sole context; the poem is the sum total of many contexts, all of which must be known to know it and evaluate it ... the connective link between the poem on the page and most of its rewarding contexts is precisely - biography' (pp. 259-60). Two years later, Father Walter J . Ong published an article attempting not so much to defend the 'personalist deviation in criticism' as to explain its persistence as a critical approach. He argues that 'in a valid but not exclusive sense, each work of art is not only an object but a kind of surrogate for a person. Anything that bids for attention in an act of contemplation is a surrogate for a person. In proportion as the work of art is capable of being taken in full seriousness, it moves further and further along an asymptote to the curve of personality. ' 22 In recent years critics sympathetic to biographical criticism - like Patrick Cruttwell in a fine article on the relationship between author and work, and Jacques Barzun in a sagacious discussion of the uses of biography in criticism 23 - adhere to the criterion of relevance, counselling caution in the adoption of biographical information for critical purposes. There is, however, one critic who is pungent and uncompromising in his defence of biographical criticism: Leon Edel. In his Literary Biography, Edel declares his unqualified support for Sainte-Beuve's biographical approach to criticism (p. 69), and elsewhere goes so far as to say that 'we can most truthfully study literature when we link the poem to the poet. ' 24 'Biographical and historical evidence,' Edel insists, 'are the foundations upon which criticism can truly function. Without them we are in realms of gratuitous speculation and ultimately of critical anarchy' (p . 69). Because such high claims for biographical criticism had been impugned by the reigning orthodoxy in Anglo-American criticism, Edel endeavoured to discredit the opposition with dismissive assertion:

10

Galdos and His Critics I have been struck in recent years by the attempt of certain critics to rule out biography from the criticism of literature. They argue that we must divorce the literary work from its creator, and while this has led, in a very healthy way, to an insistence upon the importance of a writer's text, it has also led to the view that the literary work is a mere artifact, to be examined as we would a vase or an ancient ornament in a museum. I find it difficult to accept such a dehumanization of literature. The literary voice, after all, is not one of the 'voices of silence'; it cannot be separated as easily as might be believed either from the speaker or from the listening world . 25

Nevertheless, though New Critics sometimes fell into unfortunate use of terminology, biographical criticism can seldom rival them for the fineness of discrimination, sensitivity, and intelligence exhibited in their best critical performances. Criticism has of late taken on a pluralistic look. No longer hostile to compromise and conjunction, theory finds itself in a fluid state . A renewal of interest in Romantic aesthetics and a greater openness to Continental (principally French, Swiss, and German) theories following existential, structuralist, and phenomenological lines have sparked an increased concern with exploring the complex relations operating between writer, work, and reader. The author has been brought back into the picture, but not in the crude, disconcertingly literal way characteristic of the earlier biographical critics. Recent years have seen the introduction of critical terms like persona, voice, and impli ed author, 26 which, though perhaps not in the working vocabulary of all critics, have extended and refined the manner in which the concept of authorial presence in the work can be discussed. For instance, the term implied author refers to 'an ideal, literary, created version of the real man,' 27 that is to say, a kind of second self in which the author invests his values and beliefs so that it constitutes a controlling presence in the work as a whole. In another direction critics like J. Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman concentrate on the works in their attempts to explore the author's consciousness . And psychoanalysis serves as a point of departure for critics, such as Norman H. Holland and Frederick C. Crews, who study authors' personalities as revealed in their works . In Spain and Spanish America, where the biographical approach to criticism has been much practised, there has

11

The Biographical Approach

been rather little theoretical discussion of the question. Yet valuable contributions having a bearing on the subject do exist, as Alfonso Reyes's distinguished essay 'La vida y la obra' shows. After dealing with the topic in impressive detail, Reyes comes to the cautionary conclusion that 'en suma, que entre la vida y la obra se producen transmutaciones tan imprevistas como las de los suefios, ya veces, aquellas rupturas que Coleridge llamaba "aloofness". El ilogismo de la creacion y la logica de la vida - o viceversa - corren por caminos diferentes, mas engafiosos por lo mismo que se entrecruzan. Detras de la obra hay siempre una verdad general, pero no en el sentido historico. Definicion de la literatura : "La verdad sospechosa. 11128 An informed statement might have been expected of Spain's leading literary biographer, Carmen Bravo-Villasante, but she restricts herself to an assertion of her whole-hearted belief in the need for biographical criticism : 'Un escritor no es un hombre y su obra. Un escritor es su obra ••. Nunca masque ahora estamos convencidos de la necesidad de la biografia del hombre para explicar su obra, de la biografia del escritor para comprender sus escritos. ' 29 Nineteenth-century writings on Galdos offer, for the most part, mere glimpses of the man and author; apart from one outstanding exception - Clarin's biographical study - they tend to be meagre in insight and interest . Galdos had no friend on hand like John Forster who, after Dickens's death, could produce a superb inward account of the English novelist's life and personality. But conceivably Galdos would not have wished for such a biographer, being essentially a modest, retiring individual - in fact perhaps the most unassuming of the great nineteenth-century European novelists. The few scattered paragraphs devoted to Galdos's life in the 1870s leave a hazy picture of the author. In 1871 Jose Alcala Galiano describes the writer as 'un joven modesto, amante de las letras hasta el entusiasmo, adornado de una erudicion vasta y solida, de un talento superior. 130 A few lines on Galdos's origins, character, and literary career are contained in an article by L. Louis-Lande, published in 1876 in the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes. 31 Two years later, Manuel de la Revilla - one of Galdos's shrewdest early critics portrays him as 'un joven alto, delgado, palido, de glacial fisonomia, insignificante expresion y desgarbado cuerpo,' adding that, apart from the mark he had made as a journalist and his triumphant venture into the novel, little was known of him. 32

12

Galdos and His Critics

In a brief piece dated 1882, Jose Ortega Munilla supplies a few summary facts from Galdos's 'biografia sencilla,' remarking that the author must have spent much of his time in seclusion at his writing desk. 'Hace una vida retirada,' he notes, 'y puede aplicarsele la frase que aplica Gautier a Ba·lzac, cuando le llama "benedictino de la novela."' 33 Writing in 1886, Eusebio Blasco depicts Galdos, in the light of his memory of him in the 187Os, as 'un muchacho flaco, serio, casi sombrio, en honor de la verdad, no muy simpatico. ' 34 Towards the end of his brief sketch he notes rather sourly that 'de su caracter apenas se puede decir nada, por la monomania que todos le reconocen, de vivir aislado del mundo. Para obsequiarle con un banquete nacional hubo de sacarle de su rincon, y nose obtuvo de el sino un brindis de veinte palabras. "Gracias, sen.ores, muchas gracias"' (p,59). The banquet mentioned here took place on 26 March 1883. Amply covered by the national press, the occasion brought the author to public notice. One of the chief organizers of the banquet was Leopoldo Alas, or Clarin, a staunch supporter of Galdos and his most sensitive critic in the nineteenth century. His 1889 pamphlet on Galdos, described as an 'estudio-biografico,' demands close attention. 35 He begins by wittily referring to his \ subject's self-effacing attitude: 'Uno de los datos biograficos de mas sustancia que he podido sonsacarle a Perez Galdos es ••• que el, tan amigo de contar historias, no quiere contar la suya' (p. 7). Much of Galdos's life is devoted to the literary task and 'tal vez lo principal, a lo menos la mayor parte, de la historia de Perez Galdos, esta en SUS libros, que son la historia de su trabajo y de su fantasia' (p. 8) . A dominant trait of his character is his deep-seated modesty; and his desire for privacy is such that he has refrained from offering his biographer much information. It is a pity, Clarin notes, that Galdos declines to talk at length about his childhood, for this period in a writer's life is of great importance. But Galdos was probably not precocious, though he must have led a healthy and happy life as a child. 36 There follows a quotation from a letter written by Pereda, in which his friendship with Galdos is characterized as 'masque intima, fraternal ••• indestructible' (pp. 22-3). Before long Clarin announces that his sources of authenticated information have run dry and that henceforth he will concentrate on what he calls 'mi Galdos' (p. 29). He writes of his discovery of Galdos while at university and of his subsequent admiration for 'aquel ingenio tan original,

13

The Biographical Approach

rico, prudente, variado y robusto' (p. 30). A thumb-nail sketch of Galdos, based on an impression gained when Clarin first met him in the Ateneo, is sharply drawn: Vi ante mi un hombre alto, moreno, de fisonomia nada vulgar. Si por la tranquilidad, cabal y seria honradez que expresa su fisonomia poco dibujada puede creerse que se tiene enfrente a un benemerito comandante de la Guardia Civil, con su bigote ordenancista, en los ojos yen la frente se lee algo que no suele distinguir a la mayor parte de los individuos de las armas generales ni de las especiales. La frente de Galdos habla de genio y de pasiones, por lo menos imaginadas, tal vez contenidas; los ojos, algo plegados los parpados, son penetrantes y tienen una singular expresion de ternura apasionada y reposada que se mezcla con un acento de malicia •.• la cual, mirando mejor, se ve que es inocente, malicia de artista. No viste mal •.• ni bien. Viste como deben hacerlo todas las personas formales; para ocultar el desnudo, que ya no es arte de la epoca. No habla mucho, y se ve luego que prefiere oir, pero guiando a su modo, por preguntas, la conversacion. (p. 30) The essay continues with comments on Galdos's acute inquiring mind, his keen interest in English life and culture, his practical approach to religious, philosophical, and moral matters, and his reticence about his intimate life. Finally, Clarin talks of the writer's interest in the arts and in politics, mentioning his financial success as a writer. Though his attempt to get Galdos into focus was hampered by the author's reluctance to provide any but the most outward information and his own lack of day-to-day contact with him - living as Clarin did for most of the year in Oviedo Clarin's study represents the fullest and most delicately perceptive portrait of the Spanish writer produced in the nineteenth century. Given all the facts about Galdos's life that have since been brought to light, it is bound to seem limited in scope, but for all that succeeds admirably in conveying the sense of a living man who was a literary genius. Another eminent Spanish author who wrote on Galdos was Emilia Pardo Bazan, an intimate friend. In an article published in her Nuevo Teatro Critico (1891), she offers a vivid evocation of Galdos's study in Madrid . 37 Another article, published in La Epoca in 1894, contains her impressions of the writer's 'palaciete' in Santander. 38

14

Galdos and His Critics

The pilgrimage to visit Galdos at his villa in Santander or his residence in Madrid seems to have started in the early nineties . Galdos had by then become something of a legend: he was good 'news' material . An article published in a Santander newspaper by Pedro Sanchez under the title 'Lacasa de Galdos (9 March 1983) reveals that the recently built villa has come to be considered a local landmark : 'No ha habido quien no haya sentido curiosidad de invadir su morada, ansioso de penetrar los secretos, la vida intima de un hombre tan famoso y tan "retraido." 13 9 A few months later, in May 1893, another journalist paid a visit, this time the Madrid-based Jose de Cubas. He is more intent on conveying the actual presence of Galdos than on talking of the villa as if it were a literary museum, as Sanchez had tended to do. The one snatch of conversation quoted brings out the writer's down-to-earth nature: 'lPreguntaba usted por mi ultima obra? Aquila tiene usted; estas flores recien abiertas, aquella huerta que esta a la espalda de la casa. 140 Two years later Luis Ruiz Contreras, the noted Spanish man of letters, visited Galdos at 'San Quintin' (p. 374). Even a minor French writer and Academician like Rene Bazin called on the author at his Santander home, recording his impressions of the visit in one of a series of articles published in the Revue des Deux Mandes (1895). 41 But one of the warmest and most sensitive appreciations of Galdos came from an Argentinian writer, Manuel Ugarte, who must have met the author in the late 1890s: Galdos estaba en SU gabinete; me recibio con esa buena franqueza de los que tienen conciencia de su propio valor y no necesitan improvisarse una superioridad con vanas formas protocolares. Nada mas llano y mas afectuoso que su apreton de manos. Y nada mas sencillo que su conversacion, que se hace familiar gradualmente, hasta acabar en charla de amigo .•. Hablo de America, de la literatura, de Paris, de todo, con interes, con modestia y con sinceridad •.. Yen esa camaraderie, en ese abandono, no habia la pose que hemos notado en otros hombres celebres, sino el deseo de ser verdaderamente humano ••• Es un ejemplo de honradez intelectual . 42 None the less, Galdos, like most writers of importance, had his detractors. It is hardly surprising, the human propensity to envy being what it is, that unscrupulous journalists and hack writers should attempt to disparage such an enviable figure as Galdos, one of the few Spanish writers of his time

15

The Biographical Approach

to achieve monetary success and enjoy a reputation that extended beyond Spain. A notorious attack on Galdos was mounted by Luis Bonafoux who, in articles published in Paris, alleged that Galdos was involved in sordid dealings in some of his relationships with women. 43 A brief piece that appeared in Blanco y Negro (1891) gives an idea of the kind of flippant treatment Galdos had to put up with from 'los chicos de la prensa.' It is all the more impertinent for being a mixture of sweeping praise and petty denigration. 'Sise quitara el bigote,' the piece begins, 'seria un lego perfecto.' Galdos is an eminent man but, 'alto, delgado, anguloso, no revela en su envoltura nada de lo que lleva dentro.' After heaping praise upon him for his Episodios nacionales and Dona Perfecta, the article takes Galdos sharply to task for his subsequent mercenary approach to literature: 'Desde que sus amigos (los amigos de Benito) le dieron aquel banquete famoso, se hizo algo comerciante, vendio mas caros SUS libros, y estiro demasiado algunos asuntos al objeto de extender en dos o tres tomos lo que cabia perfectamente en uno. Algunos creen que ah{ principio su decadencia. 144 This is, of course, a preposterous viewpoint; little wonder that Galdos never hid his aversion for newspaper critics. Yet this kind of inane disparagement was greatly outweighed by the testimony of friendship and appreciation shown by a wide circle of admirers. One close friend from the 1890s to his death in 1905 was Francisco Navarro Ledesma - remembered for his book on Cervantes - who finds that Galdos, 'como todos los hombres de genio, parece complicado yes muy sencillo, lo cual no quiere decir que no tenga una sagacidad y perspicacia incomparables. Pero, tratandole mucho, se ve queen el dominan la bondad y la indulgencia. Es compasivo por naturaleza y muchos que le tachan de misero y de egoista, le deben favores de todo genero, que else calla, como se lo calla todo. 145 By the 1890s Galdos had also gained a certain amount of recognition abroad, the best-informed appraisals coming from France. Boris de Tannenburg begins his 'Silhouettes Contemporaines. B. Perez Galdos': 'Demandez a un Espagnol quel est a l'heure actuelle l'ecrivain le plus populaire dans tousles pays ou resonne la belle langue castillane: il VOUS nommera sans hesiter Perez Galdos. 146 Tannenburg's impressions of Galdos, based on meetings dating back to 1875, are interesting: Ce qui frappe chez Galdos, au premier abord, c'est je ne sais quoi d'indolent, de flegmatique, d'oriental, en un

16

Galdos and His Critics mot, que trahissent ses gestes rares, l'expression un peu lasse de ses traits. La moustache tombe des deux cotes de la bouche, nonchalamment . Physionomie attirante et singuliere . C'est dans les yeux que se concentre la vie, des yeux un peu voiles par les paupieres, mais penetrants et doux, avec une expression parfois d'une exquise tendresse ou de malicieuse ironie. Dans ce regard, qui connait l'oeuvre de Galdos la peut relire tout entiere . . • . Sa causerie reste toujours discrete, presque a demi-voix, sans rien de l'exuberance espagnole . . . Il n'a jamais aime faire de confidences au public sous forme de prefaces : il lui donne ses romans, et non sa personne. Dans l'intimite meme, il se reserve . •. 'Ma biographie?'me disait-il un jour, 'elle tient en deux mots: j'ai passe toute ma vie a travailler a ma table . ' (p. 341)

From accounts of personal observations and reports of visits, it is appropriate to go on to consider interviews. 47 At best the interview offers a 'close-up' of the author, conveying an impression of his personal voice, his ideas and opinions, his sense of his creative powers, his understanding of past efforts and experiences, and his hopes and plans for the future: the skilled interviewer can bring out the writer's conception of himself at a particular time and place. In practice, the interviewer will generally not only attempt to recount his subject's words and ideas, but also supplement the account with his observations of the individual's style of life, his chosen surroundings, his physical idiosyncrasies, and non-verbal responses, and also draw upon documents that are publicly available or supplied by the subject himself. Published interviews can thus be most useful to the biographer, particularly when he has not known the writer personally. By the end of the century Galdos had become a nationally known celebrity and was frequently sought out for interviews. Two early Galdos interviews were conducted - in 1900 by Jose Leon Pagano and the following year by Viator (pseudonym of Henry Becker) - in the wake of the resounding success of Electra. Before proceeding to the interview, which deals mainly with the writer's literary activities and his social and patriotic preoccupations, Pagano provides an introduction to the historical and cultural background of Galdos's works . He reports that Galdos has interesting things to say about social 'nivelacion' and its disruptive effects on art; and he also explains why he is drawn to the theatre. With the disaster of the Spanish-American War of 1898 so recent, it

17

The Biographical Approach

is fitting that Galdos should air his views of Spain's troubled situation and her prospects for the future. The interview as a whole is of considerable interest. Pagano shows himself to be well-informed on Hispanic affairs and knowledgeable about both Spanish and Catalan literature; moreover, he succeeds in prompting Galdos into making some thoughtful and relevant statements which enable us to appreciate the author's position on literary and social matters at the beginning of the twentieth century. 48 Like Pagano, Viator visited Galdos at his Madrid publishing offices in the Calle Hortaleza. A brief sketch is first given of the author's physical and intellectual qualities . The interview itself on the day that Romanones, the education minister, issued decrees to reform the Spanish educational system - was conducted in French and centred on Galdos's opinions concerning political topics, such as education, caciquismo, Church and State, Franco-Spanish relations, and Spain's future. Apart from the introductory section, no space is allotted to commentary or asides, the interview consisting only of Viator's questions and detailed replies from Galdos. Viator handles the questioning skilfully, managing to draw the author out on the debated political questions of the day. Galdos's cogent remarks demonstrate the depth of his concern with social and political affairs. 49 A less successful interview was conducted by Juan Jose de Soiza Reilly, a Uruguayan journalist. In company with Mariano de Val, the secretary of the Ateneo, he appears to have intruded into the Galdos residence at a moment when the writer was in the middle of a meal. Galdos kept the pair waiting but seems not to have been perturbed by the intrusion. The piece is scarcely an interview at all, for it consists largely of commentary and observation - not always flattering to Galdos (for instance, 'su sonrisa es desagradable' and 'es un orgulloso impenitente'). Galdos's reported words are few and not especially revealing: he mentions Spanish-American writers of his acquaintance, complains of pirated publications of his works, and remarks on his announced intention of visiting Buenos Aires. Though he praises Galdos the novelist, Soiza Reilly shows little evidence of having sought to understand the man, appearing too wrapped up in his own personality and too intent on impressing the reader with superficial comments. 50 Of quite a different calibre is the extended interview conducted in 1910 by Enrique Gonzalez-Fiol, who wrote under the pseudonym El Bachiller Corchuelo . 51 It offers a singularly

18

Galdos and His Critics

revealing look into Galdos's life, part of its success deriving from the distinctive structure, which reflects the complex nature of interviews and the developing relations between interviewer and subject. The interview is split into two parts. El Bachiller Corchuelo be3ins the first part with a long letter to his brother, in which he comments on the writer's failure to cooperate (later explained by Galdos as being due to fear of overtaxing his own memory and thus hindering the process of writing El aabellePo enaantado), on his dwindling interest in pushing on with the project, and his sudden breakthrough to more relaxed relations with the author after abandoning the method of asking direct questions for one of ostensibly engaging in desultory conversation. These details are followed by a lengthy postscript on Galdos's politics and his reticence about his amorous affairs. The second part begins with a discussion of the first part, touching on the question of journalistic discretion and specifically the advisability of publishing Galdos's sharp comments on the Republican party. Earlier scepticism about Galdos's political concerns has now given way to a recognition of his disinterested idealistic stance. The third chapter of El Bachiller Corchuelo's work centres on Galdos's close relationship with his 'escudero,' Victoriano, and on literary matters, bringing out aspects of the author's character. In chapter4 the interviewer describes episodes from his few hours as Galdos's acting secretary and deals with the early phases of the novelist's life up to his withdrawal from journalism to dedicate himself to literature. The final chapter takes up Galdos's fondness of children, his attitudes to the Academy, the administrative side of his works, and the harmful effects his Republican views have had on the sales and distribution of his works; at the end there is another reference to the author's evasiveness on the question of women. This summary account of the coordinating features of the interview gives little impression of its richness of detail, but it does intimate how the interview form is exploited so as to take the reader behind the scenes, as it were, into the confines of Galdos's day-to-day existence. Though the letter device in the opening part of the interview may at first seem contrived, it serves the purpose of showing Galdos's dislike of importunate publicity and his concern with sincerity and integrity in human affairs. The interview charts the development of a relationship between a journalist and a great writer which was sustained

19

The Biographical Approach

over several months of almost daily contact. Only when El Bachiller Corchuelo dropped his guise as interviewer could the meetings cease to consist of role-playing and attitudinizing and become truly meaningful. Only when he felt free of the defeating restrictions of a set interview situation could Galdos reveal himself naturally - and as never before. (Yet there were fields of his experience that the writer refused to permit his interviewer to enter. To the end of the interview Galdos warded off any peering into his love affairs. Notwithstanding, El Bachiller Corchuelo succeeded in eliciting responses that show how important women were in the writer's life. 'iLas mujeres!' he exclaims at one point, 'Son lo mejor de este mundo' [no. 185, p. 801) .) And, in fact, there are interesting comments on a wide range of topics. Even domestic details are recorded; for instance, the author's instructions to a maid that 'cuando venga el que ha traido esta carta, le da usted un duro. Otro, al que trajo esta. A este, que me tiene frito a sablazos, y que es un vago, digale usted que me he muerto' (no. 185, p. 805). It ·is interesting to learn of Galdos's vehement advocacy of political involvement and of the extent to which he was impressed by Pablo Iglesias and his Socialist party. The picture of Galdos's character that emerges is fuller than that in any previous biographical study. Particular emphasis is placed on the writer's ind~cisiveness: 'Le he observado y tengo por cierto que, fuera de su labor literaria, en lo demas de la vida va arrastrado tan pronto por sus impulsos como por los ajenos, dando bandazos sin saber lo que quiere' (no. 186, p. 29). This is contrary to the view of a calm, methodical Galdos, as presented by earlier commentators, but that may be because they simply took note of an external, public image. The interviewer's opinion certainly confirms Galdos's description of himself as 'un espiritu turbado, inquieto' (no. 186, p. 33). At certain points Galdos talks of himself with surprising candour . He reveals that he was a sickly child. Referring to a prologue he has agreed to write for a book by Fray Candil, he admits regretfully that his own tardiness in completing it is holding up publication. He regards courage as being one of his virtues and confesses to being 'muy terco, digno de haber nacido en Aragon' (no. 186, p. 46). Where literature is concerned, some noteworthy facts come out. 'Conforme voy entrando en anos,' he reveals, 'soy de gusto mas descontentadizo en esto del estilo. Nunca me acaban de gustar las cuartillas' (no. 186, p. 43). His childhood reading, he notes, consisted of 'el Quijote y las novelas de Fernandez

20

Galdos and His Critics

y Gonzalez y de Dumas' (no. 186, p. 47). He characterizes his literary vocation in the early seventies as 'una mania, un vicio' and adds, 'Yo no vivia ni paraba masque en novelista' (no. 186, pp. 49-50). Finally, he states that, because of his Republican sympathies, the sale of his books is prohibited in railway stations. These facts and many others help to make this interview an absorbing and indispensable document for the biographer of Galdos. The first full-length biography of Galdos, Los grandes espanoles. Galdos (1912), written in collaboration by Luis Anton del Olmet and Arturo Garcia Carraffa, is built around a series of interviews with the writer. 52 In the introductory section of the book, the authors argue that the lives of great men are not only interesting in themselves but also serve as examples for the present generations as well as those to come. With this kind of argument they managed to win Galdos from his scepticism about the whole venture: 'Si valgo tan poco ... lCreen ustedes que mi vida puede tener interes alguno? Es tan insignificante' (p. 15). The book's value lies in the fact that it unfolds in an earnest and orderly fashion the main events and outer concerns of Galdos's life. The thirty chapters of the book contain much information in the form of dialogue, observation, and comment; among other topics it deals with Galdos's early life, his travels and political activity, his memories of the 'viejo Ateneo,' his views on literature and earnings from his books, his houses in Madrid and Santander, his daily existence, and his close working relationship with his secretary Pablo Nougues. Interesting details emerge. It appears that the artistic director of the Teatro Espanol, D. Federico Balart, in answer to Galdos's talk of making some corrections to the text of Electra, had gloomily commented: 'Dejelo asi, porque de todas maneras ha de ser igual' (p. 79). On another occasion he remarks on his moral approach to literature: 'Creo que la literatura debe ser ensenanza, ejemplo' - and afterwards explains what it means to him as a profession and way of life: 'Gane para vivir con holgura. No es poco. Ni ambicione mas. Nunca tuve el arte como medio de granjeria. Aunque el arte no me hubiera producido nada, hubiera sido esclavo del arte. iDa tantas alegrias, y tantas satisfacciones! El dinero viene como de anadidura' (pp. 93 and 96). Considerable space is given to Galdos's Republicanism; once again we find the author extolling Socialism: 'iEl socialismo! Por ahi es por donde llega la aurora' (p. 111). In chapter 22, entitled 'Galdos intimo,' the authors state that their frequent visits

21

The Biographical Approach

have left them with 'una vision completa .•• de Galdos intimo, de Galdos en el tranquilo apartamiento' (pp. 135-6). They sketch out a typical Galdosian day and describe the writer's life as 'una vida austera, sosegada, placida, ejemplar. Una vida en la que el trabajo es una distraccion y el carifio de la familia el compendio de todas las aspiraciones' (p. 136). In the broad sense there is some truth in this description, but as El Bachiller Corchuelo affirmed (and Galdos himself corroborated) there were deep currents of tension and doubt in Galdos's inner life. Anton del Olmet and Garcia Carraffa seem not to suspect these. The disappointing thing about the book is that the biographers do not probe deeply or intelligently enough: they are too respectful, too blind with admiration for the 'insigne biografiado.' Indeed their mode of enquiry, stiff and archaic in its moralistic prejudice, militates against any possibility of penetrating below the conventional surface. Their questioning sticks to the well-worn areas and lacks the versatility of approach deployed by El Bachiller Corchuelo. The book is undeniably informative about Galdos's outward life, but the authors' disabling reverence can open no avenues towards a deep understanding of Galdos's complex nature. Javier Bueno's brief interview in 1912 for Mundial (a Spanish-language magazine edited in Paris by Ruben Dario) is notable for catching Galdos in a mood of despondency . Whereas South American countries have youth and vigour, 'aqui todo esta muerto, aqui tiene que haber una gran catastrofe o esto desaparece por putrefaccion. ' 53 Other details give the impression of a Galdos weary in body and spirit. 'Trabajo despacio;' he discloses, 'no puedo, no puedo ... ' (p. 245). This short piece brings out the early signs of the writer's physical and creative decline. El Caballero Audaz (ps. of Jose Maria Carretero) visited Galdos in 1914 and was struck by the author's physical deterioration and shabby appearance. He observed that 'de su fortaleza de roble no conserva masque el recio esqueleto, agobiado por el peso de sus setenta afios ••• don Benito ... nos ha dado la ·vision horrible del menesteroso. ' 54 At the end, the writer's revelations of his enforced literary labours led Carretero to call on Spaniards to rally round Galdos in his old age. A note explains that the interview gave rise to the National Public Subscription Appeal set up to bring financial relief to the needy author. Jose Maria Salaverria interviewed Galdos in the Infanta Isabel theatre in Madrid for the Argentinian magazine Plus

22

Galdos and His Critics

Ultra in 1916. He too was saddened by the writer's decrepit

appearance; the great master's aged and enfeebled condition is the keynote of the whole interview. 55 Other interviews conducted late in Galdos's life, such as Domingo Navarro Navarro's in or around 1914, and Juan Gonzalez Olmedilla's of 1918, add no new facts or insights. 56 The interviews discussed in the foregoing pages vary greatly in depth, accuracy, and quality of perception, just as the interviewers differ in age, nationality, and literary experience. Since Galdos is now long dead and most of his interviewers too, it is clearly impossible to check the published facts at first hand; this means that it would be foolhardy to take all of Galdos's reported words at their face value without prior reflection as to whether they seem convincing, given other available evidence. The transcription of what was said in the interviews is likely to be only an approximation, at most capturing his characteristic tone, inflexions, and turns of phrase - and distortion cannot be ruled out, in view of the natural human bias towards imaginative reconstruction and self-dramatization. 57 With these limitations stated it can be said that the finest of the interviews offer enlightening glimpses into and valuable facts about Galdos's life at particular periods of time, and as such they constitute an important source of knowledge for the biographer. Georges Gusdorf has likened the task of the biographer to that of the detective in that he must weigh the motives and intentions of the subject, follow up clues, interpret signs. 58 The biographer seeks - as a recent theorist puts it in more abstract terms - 'to discern the inner structure of a life from an assembled mass of data on actualized external behavior and conduct from the externalized statements of inward life. ' 59 However perceptive and skilled he may be, the view he gives us of a person is inevitably an external one. Only the individual himself can reveal the inner quality, 'the specific dynamic truth' of his life. 60 'Beyond factual truth, beyond the "likeness,"' Roy Pascal remarks, 'the autobiography has to give that unique truth of life as it is seen from inside, and in this respect it has no substitute or rival. ' 61 The Galdos canon contains several autobiographical writings, among which the most notable are 'Memorias de un desmemoriado, first published in La Esfera during the years 1915 and 1916. 62 It is important to note the term memorias, for the stress is laid not so much on the inner world as on the apprehension

23

The Biographical Approach

of external facts and circumstances . Galdos is not engaged in what Karl J. Weintraub calls 'the genuine autobiographic effort,' 63 which, according to Roy Pascal, involves 'the part-discovery, part-assertion of a spiritual personality, of a pattern in a life, of self-fulfilment. 64 If Henry James's superb volumes of autobiography represent 'the personal history of an imagination,' Galdos, his exact contemporary, limits himself to writing his 'historial retrospectivo . ' 65 This modest intention is wholly in character; but his approach has been sharply criticized. Guillermo de Torre has remarked tartly of the 'huidizas "Memorias de un desmemoriado"'66 that 'lamentablemente justifican demasiado su titulo : el autor omite lo esencial, la genesis de sus grandes creaciones novelescas, se detiene en detalles triviales, narra viajes comunes, queen nada influyeron sobre su vida, y silencia por completo su variada vida sentimental' (p. 90). These charges are generally valid. Galdos deals superficially with the emergence of his literary calling and, apart from the account of his preparations for writing Los condenados, reveals nothing of the genesis of his works. His travels are described in a rather flat way, such as many a cultured Spaniard of the time could have matched; and the accompanying historical details and mention of literary associations verge on the trite. 67 Yet, despite their uneven and evasive quality, the memoirs remain interesting. For they show how Galdos chose to see his life in 1915 and enclose an image of his self-illusion. To a large extent the author's version of himself tallies with the consensus of his biographers, who point to the reserved, hard-working, good-natured, ironic, and imaginative constituents of his personality. But he illuminates aspects of his being that no biographer could have done. The binding force of the work is announced in the ironic title: Galdos is preoccupied with the function and play of memory; and his concomitant concern is to treat the relationship between his imaginary world and the real world. Early in the text memory and self are shown in conversation: -Ven aqui, memoria mia, auxiliar solicita de mi pensamiento. iPor que me abandonas? iDuermes, estas distraida? -El distraido eres tu. Anos ha que estas engolfado en la tarea de fingir caracteres y sucesos. Apenas terminas una novela, empiezas otra. Vives en un mundo imaginario . -Esque lo imaginario me deleita masque lo real. 68

24

Galdos and His Critics

Galdos portrays himself as a man pledged to the world of imagination, a world superior to that of 'la desabrida realidad' (p. 214). Referring to characters in Hamlet, he exclaims: 'iOh poder del arte, que das al mundo creaciones mis perdurables que los de la propia Naturaleza!' (p. 213). He also talks of 'el migico poder del arte' (p. 213). This conception of art may seem paradoxical, coming from a writer who has often been painted as an archrealist, but the imaginative, even fantastical, vein is always detectable in his writings, though it becomes more accentuated in the later works. In his image of himself at this period the imaginative predominates over the observational tendency: there is only one direct reference to his artistic concern with Spanish social life. 69 The blurring of the border between the fictional world and the real world, a characteristic of Galdos's fiction, is also manifest in the memoirs. And even his own memory is symbolized in the form of a nymph. When mentioning his literary endeavours he invariably uses strongly emotional words like frenesi, febril, and ardor (pp. 232, 243). He talks at length of his travels, explaining that they served as a form of relaxation from his literary pursuits; once back from his wanderings, refreshed, he would plunge into his literary projects. Art is thus shown to be the controlling force in Galdos's 'existencia laboriosa' (p. 253). Different though he may be in many other respects, he recalls the examples of Flaubert and James in his dedication to literature. In his memoirs Galdos touches on his early period in Madrid, his friendship with Pereda, his first spell in politics, his travels in Spain and abroad, and his experience as a man of the theatre and as a publisher; but what really emerge are the intensity of his imaginative experience and the depth of his commitment to literature. If Galdos's memoirs cannot be recommended as an outstanding autobiographical work, they should not on the other hand be written off as a collection of 'simples recuerdos' conceived by a senile mind. 70 Galdos was probably sceptical of the enterprise, almost certainly dissatisfied with his efforts; still, he leaves a valuable self-portrait of a man who was perhaps self-effacing to a fault but endowed with deep sensitivity and integrity and wedded to the creative task. Much can still be learned from pondering on these 'desmemoriadas memorias . ' From 1900 onwards numerous writers in Spain and Spanish America published their eyewitness impressions of Galdos. These writers belong to several younger generations (extending

25

The Biographical Approach

from those born in the 1850s to those born in the 1890s), thus testifying to Galdos's contacts with a broad range of fellow authors. The pieces by writers born in the 1850s, though few in number, are warm and sympathetic. The Catalan novelist Narcis Oller (b. 1852) gives a genial account of his meetings with Galdos in his Memories literaries. 71 Jose Ortega Munilla (b. 1856) writes of Galdos with deep respect and affection, conscious of the bond of shared experience of life in nineteenth-century Spain. He opens one of his articles, published soon after the author's death in January 1920, with the comment that 'al desaparecer Galdos, los hombres de mi tiempo nos sentimos en medrosa soledad, como acontece en la familia cuando se aleja el padre fuerte y valeroso. ' 72 Leading members of the Generation of '98 hold a very different view of Galdos. Miguel de Unamuno 73 and Pio Baroja reacted adversely to Galdos's works and adopted an ambiguous and narrow-minded attitude to Galdos the man; the approach adopted to both man and works by Azorin was more balanced and perceptive, even though Azorin seems to have had a more distant relationship with the older writer. In his writings on Galdos - most of them published after the Canarian writer's death - Unamuno fastened on certain attributes of the author's character and created the impression of a grey humdrum existence. Galdos struck him as a placid, retiring individual whose distinguishing feature was a capacity for hard work in the field of literature. Lending credence to the rumour that Galdos had turned to politics so as to gain a wider audience for his works, Unamuno asserts that 'el bueno de don Benito' was essentially a natve person ('Don Benito fue toda su vida un nino grande, un hombre sencillisimo y muy ingenuo' 7 ~). A later article on Galdos's style shows that Unamuno considered him to be lacking in personality ('Su personalidad artistica era algo como una representacion de la impersonalidad; era el hombre medio que hablaba en el' 75 ). What is suggested by this patronizing, blinkered view is that Unamuno regards his subject as a kind of counter-image of himself. To judge by an observation of Azorin's in an autobiographical volume entitled Madrid, Baroja appears to have been on good terms with Galdos. 76 In his memoirs Baroja tells of walks taken together and quotes snatches from conversations. 77 But though he had reason to be grateful to Galdos for showing an early interest in his work, Baroja confesses that 'no por ingratitud, sino por un fondo un tanto etico no correspondi

26

Galdos and His Critics

del todo. ' 78 Referring to incidents that bear on Galdos's supposed philandering activities, Baroja stigmatizes him as '[un) hombre un poco lioso y hasta trapacero' (p. 743). Galdos is also accused of having grovelled to critics to gain their support. Furthermore, Baroja bluntly states his belief that Galdos's alleged lack of moral sensitivity is responsible for the overall failure of the works, artistically perfect though some of them are. And he even calls Galdos a 'cuco' (p. 743), more interested in 'lo pintoresco de Espana, el dinero y las mujeres' than anything else (pp. 743-4). This one-sided view amounts to one of the most devastating attacks on Galdos's integrity ever written. By comparison, Azorin's biographical comments on Galdos are measured and respectful, but 'si el maestro se mostraba deferente conmigo, y hasta me enviaba con carinosas dedicatorias sus libros, siempre hubo entre nosotros como una ligera neblina que no llegaba a disolverse. ' 79 Azorin did not allow this to cloud his judgment; his talent as a literary critic and his psychological penetration enabled him to grasp Galdos's great stature as a writer and a seminal figure in Spanish culture. He describes Galdos as 'este hombre suave, bondadoso, casi taciturno,' in whom 'todo ... es sencillo, uniforme, tranquilo, regular, constante. 180 A Mexican writer closely associated with members of the Generation of '98, Amado Nervo (b. 1870), wrote an essay entitled 'Los grandes de Espana. Don Benito Perez Galdos' that expresses deep admiration for Galdos the writer and the man. 81 Another writer of the period, Jose Maria Salaverria (b. 1873), has left interesting accounts of his meetings with Galdos. Salaverria had reason to be grateful to the older writer, for, as he recounts, Galdos himself suggested that Salaverria collect some newspaper articles in book form and even offered to write a prologue. In his estimation Galdos is above all an exemplary figure ('Fue Galdos, una leccion viva y ejemplar para uso de escritores. El ensenaba a los jovenes que quisieran imitarle como se puede llenar una large vida con el esfuerzo infatigable y austero de una obra en la que se ha puesto la mayor sinceridad y el amor mas consecuente' 82 ). This could be taken as a counter to Baroja's charge of moral deficiency in Galdos's life and works; Salaverria does tend to exalt Galdos at the expense of the Generation of '98. 83 In Ramon Perez de Ayala (b. 1881) Galdos found not only a close friend but also a superbly intelligent critic. His revealing remarks on Galdos the man move subtly between presentation of concrete detail and cogent generalization.

27

The Biographical Approach

In some pieces the Asturian writer elaborates on what he considers to be Galdos's chief characteristics. He talks of his first meetings with the writer and his recognition that Galdos 'era serene en su actitud de reposo atento, serene en sus ademanes, serene en la mirada, ' 8 ~ indeed the very epitome of serenity. In a lecture he presents Galdos as 'el mas robusto y hermoso conato, ademan titanico, hacia la tolerancia, en la Espana del siglo XIX, como Cervantes lo fue en el siglo XVII' 8 5 his description of Galdos is enlivened with sharp details, some of them domestic and previously unmentioned: 'Toda la vida se corto, por higiene, el pelo al rape (hasta cerca de los cincuenta anos padecia de frecuentes y horribles jaquecas; segun el me conto, SUS hermanas le aplicaban rodajas de patata cruda en las sienes). ' 86 He also deals with such aspects of the writer's character as his reticence, modesty, and lack of envy and pettiness. 'Longanimidad' is singled out as Galdos's principal virtue (p. 162). Conjuring up the picture of the author's 'dadivosidad irrefrenable,' Perez de Ayala writes that 'Don Benito se llevaba sin cesar la mano izquierda al bolsillo interno de la chaqueta, sacaba esos papelitos magicos, denominados billetes de Banco, que para el no tenian valor ninguno sino para este unico fin, y los iba aventando a la ventura sobre aquellas manos ociosas y avidas. Ese era su gesto habitual de sembrador . ' 87 Perez de Ayala's essays on Galdos form a splendid and moving tribute to an admired master. Another admirer was Gabriel Miro (b. 1879), who wrote a brief essay in which he declared that 'la palabra "maestro" aplicada a Galdos, es palabra viva, sentida con ardimiento y honradez, y emociona noblemente. ' 88 A writer of such differing literary approach and personality from Galdos as Ramon Gomez de la Serna (b. 1888) is predictably less enthusiastic about the Canarian author. Nevertheless, his retrato of the 'monstru0 espanol Galdos' is a wonderfully provocative assortment of biographical detail, 'implied author' characterization, anecdote, and literary history, in which irritatingly partial judgments jostle with brilliantly provocative insights into Galdos's life and works. 89 The sketches published by the young writers who visited Galdos in his last years 90 - some of whom, according to rumour, sponged off him 91 - are, by and large, slight in interest. However, one younger writer, Tomas Borras (b. 1891), has left a vivid picture of Galdos as an old man:

28

Galdos and His Critics Iba, tan altote era, a tientos de baston, con los ojos unos ojos como cabezas de alfiler, pequenitos - tapados por dos rodajas de vidrio negro, tacteando la esquina igual que el clasico 'pobre ciego'. Metido en un gaban muy usado y de clase barata. Con el poderoso craneo, modelado a grandes planos, huesudo, tal que un huaco guanche de barro cocido; craneo de gran cabida coronado por el mas humilde sombrero redondo, negro desvaido a ala de mosca. Sonaba su andar menudito, un ris ras de botas hechas. Alrededor del cuello, la bufanda verdosa sostenia, ancho plinto, la cabeza escultorica noble. Inofensivo, dulce, apagado, ciego, menestral, don Benito escondia asi a Galdos. Encubriendole aun con SU mudez pertinaz, inacabable, hasta parecer aquel hombron estatua de si mismo. Solo un remiso 'Buenos dias, buenos dias', o un 'Adios , adios', salia del inmovil rostro agujereado por los dos tuneles de las gafas . 92

One of the sections of the essay begins, 'Yo he sido periodico de Galdos,' and goes on to describe how Borras used to read the news to the blind author in the offices of Espana Nueva (pp. 186-8). The jovial tone of the whole essay would no doubt have delighted Don Benito himself . Among the finest pages of Galdosian biography are those written by Gregorio Maranon. In the later years of the writer's life, Maranon was perhaps closer to him than anybody else outside the family circle. Through his father's friendship with Galdos, Maranon knew him as a child; and he enjoyed many years of unbroken contact with the writer and his family, who shared an interest in his medical career . (Maranon was the doctor who attended the author during his final illness . ) This unrivalled knowledge of Galdos in his personal background led Maranon to cherish the ambition of writing Galdos's biography. He talks of the project several times ('El azar quiso que estuviese por largo tiempo cerca de el, lleno de su intimidad y de su afecto. Y tuve la ambicion de ser un pequeno Eckermann de aquel grande hombre, tan parco de palabra' 93 ) . Unfortunately Maranon did not live to produce 'la historia viva de Perez Galdos,' 94 a work he was so admirably equipped to write. However, he did produce illuminating essays that recount anecdotes and domestic details, probe into aspects of Galdos's psyche, and disclose 'pliegues reconditos' (p. 569) of his personality . He deals with many topics, including Galdos's friendship with Menendez y Pelayo and Pereda, his relationships

29

The Biographical Approach

with his nephew 'Don Pepino' and his sister Carmen, his preoccupation with Spain's past and future, and his interests and activities in Toledo. His moral portrait of Galdos conveys the author's tolerance and humanity, his ordinariness, his lack of vanity, his 'incurable timidez y la flojera de su voluntad, ' 95 and his childlike quality. A thumb-nail sketch describes Galdos as 'alto y un tanto tosco de cuerpo y de facciones, como tallado en piedra; vestia con la suma vulgaridad y desalifio compatibles con la decencia, y esta, gracias al cuidado incesante de santas mujeres ode hombres fervorosos que vigilaban su hogar; tenia los ojos pequefios y timidos, parco el gesto, la palabra breve, entrecortada y opaca. ' 96 A subject that recurs in these biographical writings is the writer's love of children. Marafion remarks that Galdos lost all his shyness when in the company of children and 'se explayaba en una verborrea copiosa y alegre, llena de humorosas puerilidades, mezcladas con la experiencia, llena de humor, de su vasta y profunda vida. ' 97 In his biography of Amiel, he refers to Galdos's sexual constitution in relation to his love of children: 'Galdos, igualmente soltero, por probable influencia de la emocion materna, hombre superviril y mujeriego, aunque timido con las mujeres; y de inagotable ternura para los nifios, cuyos juegos compartia ya cuyas opiniones daba tanta importancia como a las sentencias de los adultos mas conspicuos. ' 98 Another subject to which Marafion attaches profound importance is Galdos's religiousness. Indeed he declares that his main purpose in wishing to write Galdos's biography is 'el deshacer la leyenda de su escepticismo; el poder demostrar el hondo misticismo de su alma delicada, con pruebas que me proporciono la intimidad con el, y que duro hasta que muches afios despues murio asistido por mi, en Madrid. ' 99 And in one of his last essays on Galdos, he seeks to show that 'lo que ataba para siempre a Galdos, con amor de discipulos verdaderos a los que alcanzaban a ser sus amigos, era ese nunca igualado contraste entre su simplicidad personal y su obra de titan. Y, sobre todo, la consideracion de que su obra, hecha de humanidad directa y pura, no hubiera podido realizarse de no haber sido asi, como los demas, SU autor. 1100 In shor½ Marafion's writings on Galdos are full of fascinating detail and psychological insight, forming a treasury of biographical information. In the last years of Galdos's life a decline in his literary reputation was already noticeable, a decline that continued through the twenties and thirties and only began to be

30

Galdos and His Critics

reversed in 1943 with the centenary of his birth. Galdos was widely considered passe by the literary generations holding sway during this period. He was now 'Don Benito el Garbancero, an 'enorme mediania,' 'la gloriosa escombrera. • 101 Antonio Espina, giving an impression of how low Galdos's literary credit had slumped, commented that 'hoy, despues de la liquidacion intelectual de la guerra europea, en plena actividad critica y creciente analisis, Galdos no alza nuestro interes a la altura de SU nombre. Fue un punto en el itinerario lectoral de los quince anos. Verne, Dumas, Galdos. Pero ya no tiene regreso posible. 1102 A damning comment, but one that few would have challenged in the second and third decades of this century. Given this hostile climate of literary opinion, it is hardly to be expected that much work on Galdos would appear in Spain: those articles and books with a biographical slant that did appear are largely undistinguished. Towards the end of 1919, Luis and Agustin Millares Cubas published the text of a lecture on Galdos's childhood given at 'El Gabinete Literario' in Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. The authors drew on information obtained chiefly from Galdos's elder sister, Dona Tomasa, and from their own father, who had been Galdos's music teacher at the Colegio de San Agustin in Las Palmas. The lecture deals interestingly with Galdos's failure to use his Canarian experience in his writings and his comparative lack of popularity there; other subjects discussed are his family background, early schooling, secondary education, boyhood friendships, and literary and artistic pursuits . 103 An article by Claudio de la Torre published in ABC in 1931 is also concerned with Galdos and his Canarian background. The scope of the article, however, is more restricted, centring on Galdos's ancestors and on explanations for his not having written of his native region. 104 Galdos's biographical relations with Pereda are considered by Jose Montero in his book on Pereda (1919), and by Jose Maria de Cossio in a brief article entitled 'Pereda y Galdos en Portugal' (1924) and, ten years later, in a book on Pereda. 105 In an article that appeared in La Leatura in 1920, Ceferino Palencia Tubau addresses himself to Galdos's interest in drawing, painting, and art criticism, commenting briefly on some of Galdos's youthful efforts, including his album of sketches satirizing local plans to build a theatre close to the ocean. 106 In the same year Antonio Maura, president of the Royal Academy, delivered a memorial speech to Galdos. 107 The

31

The Biographical Approach

biographical portion is not simply conventional rhetoric, for the two had been friends for over thirty years. Maura could draw on personal knowledge of Galdos acquired in the Congress when they were fellow Liberal deputies in the 1880s, on painting expeditions in Santander, as Galdos's lawyer in the lawsuit with his publishing partner, and as political adversaries from roughly 1906 to 1915. Brief as it is, Maura's portrait is interesting though at some points controversial. He feels that Galdos's personality lies in his works : 'Don Benito Perez Galdos no era sujeto cuya obra literaria se puede considerar como una de las fases de su vida; en esta obra consiste su personalidad entera •.• El solo nombre de Galdos evoca a los animos de todos vosotros aquella colosal y gloriosa produccion ••• yes evocacion que eclipsa y borra la restante existencia del autor' (p. 133). In Maura's opinion, Galdos was that rara avis of his time: a professional novelist; an insistence on seeing Galdos as exclusively a novelist by vocation leads him to dismiss the writer's theatrical and political activities. Writing of Galdos's character, Maura stresses his reserve: 'Galdos, aunque bondadosamente afable, resultaba seco, glacial, reservadisimo; ignoro si habra tenido algun instante de efusion, yo nose lo conoci; cuando quebrantaba su mutismo solia ser para preguntar, o bien para incitar al interlocutor; que se explayase, que prosiguiese, que ahondase' (p. 136). In the light of what has since emerged about Galdos's life, there is much that is debatable here. Galdos's dramas are no longer written off as a sterile departure; his second intervention in politics appears to have been sincere and committed, though relatively short-lived; and his personality - with all its reserve - seems to have been warmer and more prepossessing than Maura would have it. Yet Maura's remarks have the virtue of being polished and perceptive; this cannot be said of most of the books on Galdos published between 1920 and 1943. Rafael de Mesa's book, published in 1920, deals briefly with two main periods in Galdos's life: his boyhood and adolescence in the Canary Islands, and his old age spent largely in Madrid . 108 Some of the information for the early period seems to have been based on his family's knowledge of the Galdos family - his father had an important part in running the Colegio de San Agustin during Galdos's time there. In the author's later years Mesa appears to have been a close friend and frequent visitor to Galdos's house, and his book contains some interesting facts. 'Recuerdo oir contar a mi buen padre,' he remarks, 'que D. Benito era mal estudiante.

32

Galdos and His Critics

No era travieso, sino, al contrario, muy docil. Pero no habia medio de que estudiase. En los cuadernos en que diariamente se anotaba motivadamente las penas que se imponian en los ninos, aparece a menudo detenido media hora "D. Benito Perez Galdos, por inquieto"' (p. 16). (Still, Mesa's father had the perspicacity to regard him as 'un ser extraordinario' [p. 17) and kept some of his school work.) There are also anecdotes relating to Galdos's family that sound as if they had their origin in gossip. 109 Mesa's account of Galdos's last years is more convincing as a whole. He tells of Galdos's eye operations and his deteriorating health caused by 'tabes dorsal,' bringing out the pathos of the writer's accompanying mental disintegration. Galdos is shown racked with boredom at not being able to sit down to work, testy and capricious, and at moments aspiring to write another novel (on the life of the Rio Tinto miners in Huelva). This short biography is rambling, undocumented, often unreliable; but it also offers memorable glimpses into the domestic side of Galdos's later life. Between 1922 and 1934 several books dealing with Galdos's life and works appeared in Spain: by Guillermo Dendariena (1922), Antonio Alarcon Capilla (1922), Armando Donoso (1925), Cesar Arroyo (1930), and Jose Sanchez-Trincado (1934). 110 To a greater or lesser extent all of these are shoddy and pretentious efforts and as a body they show Galdosian commentary at its very worst. Less pretentious (but hardly less shoddy) is the popular study of Galdos and his work by Roberto Castrovido (1927), a friend and political associate of Galdos. 111 In 1933 Emilio Gutierrez Gamero y de Laiglesia brought out the first of his three-volume study of Galdos and his works, which is an attempt to challenge the adverse 'placing' of the Spanish writer by contemporary critics. His opening chapter is a solid biographical account. 112 Eight years later the Aguilar publishing house issued the first four volumes of the six-volume misnamed Obras eompletas, edited by Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles. 113 Among other extensive prefatory material is a biography of Galdos. What is immediately notable about it is the racy, flamboyant style, which runs over with puns, hyperbole, elaborate word-play, and dashing use of metaphor. In Leon Edel's terminology, Sainz's study would seem to fall into the 'organic' category of biography, or the kind of biography that is 'imaginative in its construction and design.' Sainz is no Lytton Strachey, though; his biography is more accurately defined as novelized biography, since it is often hard to determine which events

33

The Biographical Approach

have a basis in fact and which are the fruit of the author's fancy. Certainly the main lines of Galdos's life emerge, for Sainz has drawn on previous biographical contributions (with scarcely an acknowledgment of having done so), on gossip and hearsay, and on his own experience of the Madrid literary scene in the few years before the writer's death. But the novelistic aspects, which include snatches of invented conversation (p. 24), miniature dramatic scenes (pp. 67-8), and the reconstruction of Galdos's state of mind at certain points in time (p. 73), seem too glibly achieved and often fail to be anchored in any hard evidence. Sweeping statements are made about the author's amorous experience after a confession that verifiable information is lacking: 'Galdos se nos escapa con su vida amorosa, nos deja con tres palmos de narices ... lCuando amo? lA quien amo? Y debemos contestar: amo muchas veces, amo epidermicamente, amo a mujeres de nombres cualesquiera y de condiciones sociales distintas' (p. 53). Also, Galdos's travels are called 'viajes de presumir' (p. 49) and treated as of no account. Where Sainz excels is in creating the 'spirit of place,' particularly in regard to Madrid. Chapter 2 opens with a description of how Galdos must have felt upon arriving in Madrid in the early 1860s and contains a series of lively vignettes of Madrid scenes. Nevertheless, even this flair is a mixed blessing, seeing that urban description tends to crowd out the figure of Galdos. The main criticism that can be levelled against the biography is that Sainz's opinions and personality divert attention from the true subject: Galdos. It is not difficult to imagine that this biography could be shaped into an interesting work if the author were to tone down the style, have recourse to available documents, and incorporate new findings. Clearly, however, Sainz de Robles does not share this opinion, for the text was republished as late as 1970 with only slight modifications in wording and paragraphing and without a single mention of the biographical studies that had appeared in the preceding decades. The biographical contributions published abroad in the twenties and thirties by foreign Hispanists and Spanish emigre writers are generally scholarly and analytical in approach. L.B. Walton's full-scale study of Galdos (1927) contains a cursory and at points questionable account of Galdos's life. 114 Jacob Warshaw, an American Hispanist, published two useful biographical articles in 1927 and 1928. The first article, designed to urge the Spanish government or, failing that, some interested Hispanophile, to acquire

34

Galdos and His Critics

'San Quintin' as an historical monument, gives a detailed description of Galdos's villa and its contents, particularly the library. 115 The second, which is more scholarly, deals briskly with biographical errors relating to 'the date of Galdos's birth, his interest in his native land, his standing as a student, his journalistic experience, his earliest contacts with the drama and the theater, his knowledge of aristocratic society, the rapidity with which he wrote, and the dates of some of his works and of a few incidents in his life.' Warshaw is generally cogent in his discussion of these questions, but, as often happens in undertakings of this sort, he himself falls into error. He states categorically that Galdos arrived in Madrid in 1863, when the year of arrival was in fact 1862. There is also a misunderstanding concerning Galdos's schooling. 116 In the Introduction to an American edition of Torquemada en la hoguera (1931), Angel del Rio wrote some intelligent and moving pages on Galdos the man. 117 Jose A. Balseiro includes a brief, rather superficial biographical sketch in his chapter on Galdos in Novelistas espanoles modernos (1933). 118 Juan Guixe's article, publish~d in 1939, offers a personal view of Galdos the man, followed by a general review of the works. The sketch contains some interesting touches but adds little that is new. 119 In the thirties and early forties an American academic named H. Chonon Berkowitz published a number of important papers on Galdos, all of them bearing to some extent on the writer's biography. They are invariably earnest, welldocumented, and highly informative; some break new ground: there are pioneer studies on, for example, Galdos's early literary efforts and on his relations with Mesonero Romanos, Giner de los Rios, and Unamuno. 120 In an early article, Berkowitz notes that 'behind his modesty and discretion Galdos concealed a complicated personality and a compelling life-story. ' 121 Berkowitz more than anybody else during this period strove to understand that personality and life-story, establishing contact with the Galdos family in Madrid and Las Palmas, exploring in libraries and archives, unearthing forgotten documents . And his articles are preparatory sketches for his full-scale biography, published posthumously in 1948. Berkowitz has a strong claim to be considered the first serious investigator of Galdos's life. The year 1943 represents an important landmark in Galdosian studies; the centennial of the writer's birth marks the start of a resurgence of interest in the man and his works. Some periodicals, such as Atenea (Santiago de Chile), Cursos y

35

The Biographical Approach

Conferencias (Buenos Aires), and Revista Hispanica Moderna

(New York), commemorated the occasion with special issues. In Spain there was no such organized commemoration: Galdos, whose works had been ~roscribed by the Burgos government during the Civil War, 22 was still an unacceptable figure to the literary Establishment in Spain. 123 Many of the biographical articles published in periodicals and newspapers in 1943 consist of personal impressions of Galdos and passing references to his life. The articles by Rodrigo Soriano and Alberto Ghiraldo, 124 published in Atenea, are interesting, coming as they do from two men who knew Galdos at first hand and had earned his respect for their professional endeavours. Soriano, politician and sometime critic, was associated with Galdos in the Republican party, and Ghiraldo, an Argentinian writer, was picked by the author to be the editor of his so-called obra inedita. Another friend, the Spanish writer Pedro de Repide, published in Revista Nacional de Cultura (Caracas) a vivacious article telling of his meetings with Galdos and commenting on his life and works. 125 Biographical remarks by Gabriel Trillas, Vicente Sanchez Ocana, Roberto Giusti, and Angel Ossorio 126 are less substantial. Maria Teresa Leon's article 'Una mujer de Galdos que no esta en SUS novelas' is the published version of a lecture delivered in Buenos Aires. The subject is Galdos's adolescent relationship with his cousin Sisita. Though the writer claims that her information is authentic (based on facts supplied by Galdos's nephew Manuel Hurtado de Mendoza), the fulsome style and factual errors suggest that the account is largely romanticized. 127 The pressing need for a revaluation of Galdos's works was eloquently stated by Guillermo de Torre in several articles, one of which discusses some general aspects of the writer's biography. 128 But the chief Galdosian event of 1943 was the publication of Joaquin Casalduero's important study Vida y obra de Galdos. The first chapter offers a reasoned account of the main features of Galdos's life based on existing knowledge but without any acknowledgment of sources (chiefly, Clarin, El Bachiller Corchuelo, and Del Olmet and Garcia Carraffa). 129 Casalduero's skilful weaving of biographical facts, references to the works, and comments on the historico-cultural background produce thought-provoking conclusions. The essence of his method is to bring life and works as closely together as possible in an attempt to shed light on both. In his hands. the approach is fruitful, but its shortcomings are also evident in his over-simplified concern to find autobiography in

36

Galdos and His Critics

quotations from El doctor Centeno, Angel Guerra, Dona Perfecta, and Fortunata y Jacinta. It is not cautious speculation that is put forward, but assertion in the absence of supporting facts; for example, on a passage from El doctor Centeno he comments that 'en lugar del Toboso leamos Las Palmas y tendremos una idea exacta de lo que Galdos pensaba de su infancia y de su juventud' (p. 10); and after quoting from a description of Pepe Rey, he notes that 'asi concebia el, en 1876, a Pepe Rey (Dona Perfecta), y asi se veia a si mismo' (p. 21). When he proceeds in this way Casalduero is not convincing, but as a whole his biographical study is superior to most of the others published since Clarin's and is the fruit of a lucid and perceptive mind that gives evidence of having pondered deeply on Galdos's life and works. (Some of his ideas have become common currency in Galdos studies.) In direct contrast to Casalduero's probing study, Clemente Cimorra's book on Galdos, published in Buenos Aires (1947), is a popular biography, glibly written and full of glaring errors of fact and fanciful references to Galdos's amorous affairs. 130 It is a prime example of novelized biography, in which exactitude and concern for truth are sacrificed to the popular taste for romance and vivid journalistic outline. In the United States W.H. Shoemaker prepared an edition of some of Galdos's early journalism under the title Cronica de la quincena (1948), including a preliminary study that contains some fascinating glimpses of Galdos in a journalistic setting. 131 In the same year (1948) H. Chonon Berkowitz's long-awaited biography was published, posthumously. 132 This is a 'chroniclecompendium' type of biographical work, immensely broad in scope. Apparently Berkowitz had been at work on the book for many years, and it constitutes a vast repository of fact, detail, and reference. 'Based on information gathered from a variety of printed, manuscript, and oral sources,' Berkowitz remarks, 'it is only an honest attempt to bring into focus one of the most impressive of modern Spanish figures' (p . vi). The book is well-documented, but it also relies on many unsubstantiated claims and statements, whose source can probably be traced to Galdos's daughter Maria Perez-Galdos de Verde, her husband, Juan Verde y Rodriguez, and especially to his nephew Jose Hurtado de Mendoza (Berkowitz refers in his Preface to Don Jose's indispensable assistance) (pp. vi-vii). The biography as a whole can be regarded as an exemplification of the comment in the text that 'his own life, notwithstanding his reputedly hermit-like existence, was varied, rich, and picturesque' (pp. 105_-6).

37

The Biographical Approach

Berkowitz presents a wealth of detail, drawing on contemporary reviews and articles and to a lesser extent on memoirs. He deals informatively with memorable events in Galdos's life: the 1883 banquet in his honour (pp. 165-73); the staging of Realidad (pp. 245-61); his entrance into the Royal Academy (pp. 227-35); the ElectPa episode (pp. 346-82); his espousal of Republicanism in 1907 (pp. 383-408). There is also a useful chapter entitled 'The Creative Process,' which provides the starting point for studies of Galdos's creative personality (pp. 104-18). The atmosphere of the period is sketched in - reference being made to historical events, changes, and currents, to contemporary critics, journalists, intellectuals, and public figures - and deftly related to Galdos's personal situation. The picture of the writer that emerges, though hazy in parts, is unconventional and even in some respects 'startling,' to use Berkowitz's own epithet. He avoids the awed, sycophantic tone adopted by many of his Spanish predecessors, and employing the 'warts and all' mode of portrayal, brings Galdos down to human size. In Galdos he detects a moral disarray caused basically by his sexual needs, which were so imperious that 'in the management of his private affairs his realistic perception of life completely failed him. Something akin to the moral and spiritual disability of some of his characters forced him into passional indulgences which only his own reserve, the inordinate respect of his admirers, and the zealous watchfulness of those close to him prevented from becoming a scandal' (p. 242). Berkowitz takes sexual over-indulgence to be the motivating force of Galdos's personality. It is shown to be at the root of his quarrel with his publishing partner, Miguel H. de la Camara, and the main reason for the accusation of fraud he levelled against Tomas Romero, the treasurer of the National Public Subscription. This preoccupation with the writer's sexual experience is, of course, the aspect of the work most likely to startle some Galdos admirers. Not that it amounts to a revelation: there were hints and allusions to his love affairs in some early articles and studies. The novelty lies in the controversial interpretation of this side of Galdos's life, controversial because Berkowitz is not working with documents and facts but with hearsay and opinion - he makes few references to sources, not even to oral ones. Phrases like 'the demands of his physical nature' (p. 112), and 'the abnormal urges and passions even in his old age' (p. 419) abound, but an examination of the contexts in which they occur suggests that Berkowitz's approach tends to be puritanical and reductive. The index includes the entry 'Sexual abnormalities

38

Galdos and His Critics

of Galdos, sources for' (p. 497); however, the meaning of the term abnormalities is never made clear, and the indiscriminate use of such a 'loaded' term seems slipshod. The tone at times is sensationalist; for example, reference is made to Galdos's 'complete enslavement by the pathological habits of his intimate life' (p. 421). This phrase would be more appropriate in a biography of Maupassant. In short, Berkowitz's treatment of Galdos's sex life is lacking in tact and understanding and remains unconvincing. Another shortcoming of the book is the failure to offer a coherent critical account of the works. Berkowitz deals with Galdos's literary career, alluding to many works and singling out some for special attention, but despite the announcement in the index of a 'critique' of such works as La desheredada and Fortunata y Jacinta, he offers no such thing, limiting himself rather to relating what early critics had to say about the works (pp. 488, 490). It is undoubtedly important to have information on the contemporary reception of the works, but an individual critical response is certainly to be expected of a biographer who is also a leading scholar of the subject. This lack of a firm critical focus is probably responsible for the author's tendency to place greater emphasis on the plays than on the novels. A Spanish commentator, Enrique Sanchez Reyes, charges that Berkowitz 'no penetro en nuestras costumbres, ni mucho menos en el alma nacional de Espana,' and objects to the author's ideological slant in favour of Republicanism and anticlericalism, which he considers to be 'un enfoque tan decimonico y pasado de moda. ' 133 Since Galdos was always a controversial figure where religion and politics were concerned, and since the political winds in post-Civil War Spain had veered far to the right of the position he occupied in the latter period of his life, this kind of reaction to the book was predictable. Sanchez Reyes's curt dismissal of the political and religious aspects of the biography is tendentious and not closely discussed. Berkowitz's liberal slant is no doubt there but it seems justified by the material used . The biography contains errors and contradictory statements but they are neither numerous nor grave. Finally, it has to be said that, though it may not have the stature of the great biographies of our time, this is far and away the best biography of Galdos to date. Three years later, in 1951, another book by Berkowitz was published La biblioteca de Benito Perez Galdos, a work that contains an introductory study dealing briefly with 'la personalidad de Galdos como lector. ' 13 "

39

The Biographical Approach

In the 1950s four biographical studies appeared, revealing their author, Jose Perez Vidal, to be one of the most perceptive and reliable of Galdos's Spanish biographers. An article entitled 'Perez Galdos y la noche de San Daniel' (1951) centres on Galdos's response to the bloody events of 10 April 1865. 'Asiste, observa, se fija en todo,' Perez Vidal observes, 'sin perder serenidad ni en los momentos de peligro, y luego, ya en la casa, hace el doble comentario del dibujo y el apunte literario. lFue otra aliuna vez, la actitud galdosiana ante la vida espafiola?' 1 5 An examination of the writings and particularly the drawings inspired by the events of the night of San Daniel leads to the illuminating conclusion that Galdos's literary efforts show the effects of madx>ilenizaaion on him, and his drawings disclose his more intimate, spontaneous self with vigorous roots in the Canarian world. Perez Vidal's next study, Galdos en CanaPias (1843-1862), published in 1952, is a short book that describes Galdos in the environment of his childhood and adolescence, and brings out the early formative stages of his creative personality. 136 Being a native of the Canary Islands, Perez Vidal pays particular attention to the historico-cultural background and development of the region. The biographical account is composed, for the most part, of well-known facts, though new light is thrown on the subject of Galdos's schooling. In his second and third chapters Perez Vidal cautiously employs the 'bio-critical' approach as he focuses on young Benito's developing creativity as manifested in early literary and pictorial efforts. Biographical information is to be found also in Perez Vidal's Galdos, ap{tiao musiaal. 137 The overall purpose of t~is book is to establish 'la importancia que la musica tuvo en la juventud del gran escritor.' The opening chapter concentrates on Galdos's contact with music in Las Palmas and his keen interest in it during his early period in Madrid; and there are further biographical references in the remaining _chapters, which deal with the writer's activities as a young music critic for La Naaion. The fourth study is a prologue to a collection of predominantly early essays published under the title Madx>id. 138 The heading of the prologue is plain enough: 'Madrilefiizacion de Galdos.' Perez Vidal holds that Galdos was initially disappointed with Madrid, and only as he gradually abandoned his university studies and dedicated himself to exploring the city and writing largely about it in articles for the press did he become fully adapted to life in the capital.

40

Galdos and His Critics

The year 1865 is highlighted as decisive, for it is in that year that 'Benito celebra sus esponsales con Madrid y con la literatura, dos amores de los cuales el segundo casino va a ser sino clara expresion del primero' (p. 41). Although he does not uncover any new facts about Galdos's life in Madrid from 1862 to 1866, Perez Vidal impressively recounts the main events and activities in which the writer was involved, placing them in their socio-historical setting. This study - addressed to a larger reading public than the preceding ones is less scholarly, with few references to other commentators and critics, and a greater boldness is shown in the use of quotations from Galdos's works for their autobiographical quality . In the absence of direct sources, it is proper that the biographer examine the works for biographical intimations, but he should always be alive to the tentative nature of his undertaking. In this respect Perez Vidal is generally circumspect - more so than Casalduero in his book on Galdos. In his Diecionario de literatura (1953), Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles gives a rapid survey of Galdos's life which, in the light of such studies as Perez Vidal's, contains some highly questionable statements. 139 Maria Martinez Sierra's Gregorio y yo. Medio siglo de colaboracion (1953) has a section containing praise for Galdos's character and achievement, piquant anecdotes, and recollections of visits paid him. 140 Another book of memoirs - Mario Verdaguer's Medio siglo de vida {ntima barcelonesa (1957) - includes a brief but entertaining eyewitness account of Galdos's stays in Barcelona, particularly in 1917, when he went for the opening night of Marianela, and in 1918 for that of Santa Juana de Castilla. Verdaguer notes the writer's failing health in these years, but also records some of the festive moments he enjoyed in the Catalan city. 141 In an article published in 1956, Donald F. Brown deals with Galdos's relationship with his mother (in accordance with facts unearthed by Berkowitz), surmising that Galdos's portrayal of Dona Maria, Condesa de Rumblar, owes much to his observation of his mother's character and behaviour. 142 Two editions of Galdos's works - one of Misericordia, the other of Miau - appeared in 1957, each preceded by an extensive introduction containing an initial biographical study. The editors are two well-known though very dissimilar Spanish scholar-critics, Joaquin de Entrambasaguas and Ricardo Gullon . 143 Entrambasaguas draws on Clarin, Pardo Bazan, Sainz de Robles, Perez Vidal, and Mario Verdaguer among other biographers (but seemingly not Berkowitz) for his survey of

41

The Biographical Approach

Galdos's life, which is basically academic in approach, though tinctured with the author's madrileni smo. No new facts come out, and in addition to making several factual errors , the study betrays a strong right-wing Catholic bias. 144 Gullon's study, based on earlier biographical works (including Berkowitz's), is not free of errors but is unmarred by obtrusive bias. Entrambasaguas is tendentious in dealing with politics and religion: he alludes scathingly to Don Graciano Alfonso (a revered teacher at the Seminario Conciliar de Las Palmas); 145 also, talking of 'la influencia liberaloide de SUS [de Galdos] educadores,' 146 hemisrepresents Galdos's anticlericalism; and blandly explains away his Republicanism as the outcome of pressure from political friends and a moment of weakness on his part (p . 791) . Gullon's treatment of religious and political matters is more in consonance with the facts when, for instance, he comments tersely that 'idealista extraviado en la politica, la inevitable decepcion con los republicanos le incito a dejar para siempre una esfera de accion inadecuada. ' 147 Entrambasaguas musters more facts, but Gullon is far superior in interpreting the facts : he is simply more of a literary critic. Conscious that Galdos's life is important by virtue of his being a supreme creative genius, he channels his biographical observations towards the illumination of Galdos the literary artist. For example, he remarks of Galdos's numerous love affairs (mostly with 'mujeres del pueblo') that 'nadie debe lamentarlo. Seria absurdo moralizar a este proposito, porque gracias a esa inclinacion con lo entranable del pueblo, SUS novelas estan empapadas de vida, henchidas de vida' (p. 19) . Similarly Gullon has interesting things to say about the formation of Galdos's style (p. 21), his developing sense of artistic direction (p. 22), and the nature of his creative process (p. 25). Gullon's biographical study is valuable as a prelude to his attempt at reassessing Galdos's literary achievement . Through the sixties to the present, writings on Galdos have poured out, the author having come back into favour, particularly in academe. Although these writings embrace a wide range of aspects of the writer's life and works, it is clear that far more critical attention is paid to the works than to the life . Nevertheless many biographical articles and some book-length studies have been published in the past fifteen years or so, especially in 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the author's death. They deal with diverse facets of Galdos's biography.

42

Galdos and His Critics

One group of studies concentrates on Galdos's family background and childhood and adolescence in the Canary Islands. Juan Antonio de Zunzunegui's 'Galdos y la tierra vascongada' makes reference to Galdos's ancestral relations with the Basque country, and briefly mentions his visit to Azcoitia in 1898; small additions and corrections are made to this article by Guillermo Camacho y Perez Galdos in 'La familia de Galdos (Carta abierta a Zunzunegui). ' 148 Camacho has also recently published a thorough genealogical study entitled 'Ascendencia de los Perez Galdos. Estudio especial de las ramas cubanas de esta familia . ' 149 An article by Joaquin Artiles takes up biographical details relating to the author's maternal grandparents, Don Domingo Galdos de Alcorta and Dona Maria de la Concepcion Medina. Referring to birth and marriage records, the author exposes three biographical errors that were given currency by Galdos himself: they relate to Galdos's birth date, his maternal grandfather's place of · birth, and the nature of his position with the Inquisition. 150 Two brief articles by Pedro Ortiz Armengol focus mainly on the figure of Galdos's uncle Benito Galdos Medina, a liberal emigre who lived in Paris (and on occasions in London). 151 Ignacio Perez Galdos, the author's grandnephew, adds a few touches and makes corrections to these articles in a letter to the editor of La Estafeta Literaria. 152 In 'La Casa-Museo Perez Galdos' Alfonso Armas Ayala writes of the recently opened museum in the house on the Calle de Cano where Galdos was born. 153 Enrique Ruiz de la Serna and Sebastian Cruz Quintana's Prehistoria y protohistoria de Benito Perez Galdos is a long, informative account of Galdos's life and family background in the Canary Islands. 154 Published in 1973 but apparently completed in 1954, a prominent feature of the study is the frequent reference to documents discovered in Grand Canarian archives. These documents disclose certain biographical errors - the second and third errors mentioned by Artiles are here dealt with in greater detail - and also shed light on other matters, such as the character and professional acitivities of Sebastian Perez, the author's father. Interesting things emerge about the Colegio de San Agustin and Galdos's schooling there: chapter 16 evokes a typical day (lasting fifteen hours!) in the life of a pupil (pp. 257-69). The authors note the liberal attitude prevalent in the colegio, seeing Galdos's years there as forming the 'genesis del ideario galdosiano' (pp. 283-9). Their consideration of Galdos's school reports reveals that the author was not a poor student,

43

The Biographical Approach

as legend would have it, but 'un superdotado que, con menor esfuerzo que otros, obtenia mayor rendimiento' (p. 241). There are, however, details in the book that are highly questionable; for instance, Galdos's knowledge of English seems not to have been anything like as solid as the authors assume. 155 Ruiz de la Serna and Cruz Quintana urge their belief that 'para los que creen en una absoluta objetividad de la obra galdosiana y desechan toda supuesta ingerencia autobiografica, subrayaremos que apenas hay un volumen de don Benito donde algun momento de su vida no haya dejado estela' (p. 205), But they do not satisfactorily substantiate this vague statement, going no farther than pointing out passages that appear to have an autobiographical flavour and characters that seem to have been based on persons known to the author. On the whole they do this in a discreet way and show awareness of the dangers implicit in this kind of procedure (pp. 167, 210-11, 268). This monograph on Galdos's Canarian background offers more information than Perez Vidal's study, but lacks the terseness and sharp focus of the earlier work. Jose Perez Vidal's recent 'Canarias en Galdos' is a brilliant extended essay. 156 Its scope extends far beyond the confines of biography, taking account of Galdos's use of language, his moral vision, and his flair for comic drawing. Deserving of mention at this point is the case he puts forward for the importance of Galdos's Canarian experience as a strong influence on his moral outlook, and particularly the illuminating comments he makes on the writer's character: Lo primero que pugna por saltar al papel es la impresion de que no fue verdaderamente joven. Esto es, que no tuvo una juventud pletorica de vitalidad expansiva. Fue un gran observador, gozo de una gran memoria visual, de una gran memoria auditiva; tuvo desde muy pronto - con la pluma unas grandes facultades mimeticas; pero fue personalmente gris, poco expresivo. Probo y hasta saboreo los goces de la vida, pero sin viciosos excesos ni mundanidades indiscretas. Trato a numerosas mujeres, tuvo amorios con no pocas, pero permanecio soltero, Esta permanente situacion de solteria, de soltura o desasimiento, no exenta de amor, respecto de personas y cosas, constituye uno de los rasgos mas caracteristicos de Galdos. Penetra en la vida, ahonda en ella, le toma el pulso, pero sin duraderas n1 1rreparables entregas; cuidando mucho su retirada y la salida. (p. 115)

44

Galdos and His Critics

In a closely argued article entitled 'Lecturas de juventud,' Josette Blanquat casts light on Galdos's early spiritual and intellectual formation by considering in detail aspects of his general education at the Colegio de San Agustin and his reading during vacations at the family house near Tafira; in the second part of the article she demonstrates the humanist influence exercised on Galdos by Alfredo Adolfo Camus, the writer's professor of Latin literature at the University of Madrid. 15 7 Another group of studies deals tangentially with the writer's life in Madrid. Two articles by Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles are chiefly concerned with Galdos's portrayal of Madrid's streets and commercial life, but also contains incidental biographical information. Studies by William H. Shoemaker and Leo J. Hoar 158 concentrate on Galdos's career as a journalist and on his writings published in Madrid periodicals La Nacion, Revista del Movimiento Intelectual de Europa, and El Correo de Espana, and in La Prensa of Buenos Aires. Galdos's deep attachment to Madrid is well-known, but he also spent extended periods in Santander and visited many parts of Spain and western Europe. A group of studies centres on this aspect of the author's experience. In Rutas literarias de la Montana Jose Maria de Cossio comments briefly on the relations between Galdos and Pereda, mentioning the younger writer's villa, 'San Quintin,' and the areas of La Montana depicted in Gloria and Marianela. 159 But for a fuller understanding of Galdos's manifold contacts with Santander life, Jose Simon Cabarga's 'Santander en la biografia y bibliografia de Galdos' is required reading. 160 It gives a detailed, graphic account of Galdos's life in the coastal city, describing his initial meeting with Pereda, his frequent summer stays from 1871 onwards, and his later presence there as a member of the community: visits to his villa by Emilia Pardo Bazan and Narcis Oller, working in his garden, sitting with local friends, or engrossed in writing his books. An article by Walter T. Pattison discusses Galdos's long stay in Santander from the summer of 1879 till the autumn of 1880, revealing that he was caught up in family life with his brother Ignacio and other relatives, and mainly because of this preoccupation, interrupted his normal schedule of 'systematic production. ' 161 There is also mention of a certain Juanita Lund, whom Galdos had met and admired in Santander in 1876. 162 Carmen Bravo-Villasante's 'Polemicas en torno a Galdos en la prensa de Santander ("La Atalaya" contra "El

45

The Biographical Approach

Atlantico" en 1893 . "La Atalaya" contra "El Cantabrico" en 1901)' deals with ideological squabbles in Santander stirred up by Galdos's works (especially Electra) and political views, showing the extent to which the writer was a controversial figure. 163 An article by Jose Garcia Mercadal gives an onthe-scene account of Galdos's visit to Saragossa in 1908 for a staging of an opera, based on the Epi sodio named after the Aragonese capital, during the first centenary of the siege of Saragossa. A young newspaperman at the time, Mercadal recalls a walk and a meal taken in the author's company. 164 Pedro Ortiz Armengol's 'Galdos, ano a ano' briefly describes the author's two trips to Paris, in 1867 and 1868. 165 An article by Anson C. Piper considers Galdos's published impressions of Portugal based on a visit made with Pereda in 1885. 166 In recent years, with the publication of letters and other relevant documents, more has come to light concerning Galdos's personal relations, and the writer's friendships and love affairs have been made the subject of numerous studies. Alfonso Armas Ayala has published an article dealing with the lifelong friendship between Galdos and Fernando Leon y Castillo ('dos insulares unidos por una profunda amistad y por un conjunto de ideas comunes'). 167 The friendly relations between Galdos and Ricardo Palma, Joaquin Costa, and' Jacint Verdaguer are touched upon in articles by Robert Ricard, C.J . G. Cheyne, and Walter T. Pattison, 168 respectively. Marcos Guimera Peraza's Maura y Galdos is an interesting, well-documented monograph that focuses on the various facets of the relationship between these two eminent Spaniards. 169 In 'Jose Ortega Munilla: friend, critic and disciple of Galdos,' Ruth Schmidt examines the long-standing relationship between the two writers. 17 Fernando Ibarra has recently devoted an article to the important literary friendship between Clarin and Galdos, 171 which regrettably continues to remain hazy and one-sided owing to the fact that Galdos's letters to the Asturian writer are not available (Ibarra intimates that they may be in the hands of Dionisio Gamallo Fierros) (p. 66, note 2). Vicente Marrero's Historia de una amistad is an absorbing study of the contacts between those whom the author regards as the leading writers of the Restoration: Pereda, Valera, Menendez Pelayo, Galdos, Clar in, and Ruben Dario (p. 13). In his treatment of Galdos, Marrero concentrates on the deep relationship with Pereda and the close ties of friendship with Clarin. Less is said of Galdos's friendship with Menendez

°

46

Galdos and His Critics

Pelayo; much less of his relations with Valera; and nothing at all of his acquaintanceship with Ruben Dario. In describing Galdos's literary friendships, Marrero makes deft use of the published correspondence of the writers concerned; and he is perceptive in his comments on Galdos's character, especially when, himself a native of the Canary Islands, he deals with what he takes to be the writer's Canarian characteristics. Marrero considers Galdos's humour not at all 'de sello britanico' but 'canario de pura cepa' (pp. 47-8); he also regards the writer's 'singular mezcla de laboriosidad e indolencia' as being typically Canarian, and explains his 'celebres silencios' with strangers as a symptom of the complex from which Canarians suffer in relation to 'peninsulares' (pp . 48-9). In the epilogue Marrero concludes that 'el mas problematico y desconcertante, de espiritu mas equivoco y de moral mas confusa, es Galdos. Azotado en SU ser mas intimo por dudas silenciadas y por una existencia sombria, de la impresion, entre estos grandes nombres, de un planeta errante' (p. 303). In an article published in 1967 and in a chapter of her Navarro Ledesma. El hombre y su tierrrpo (1968), Carmen de Zulueta considers the close friendship between Navarro Ledesma and Galdos, quoting from the correspondence between the two writers. 172 It emerges that Navarro supplied Galdos with details concerning life in Toledo and its environs for his use in writing the second part of Angel Guerra; and Navarro is described as showing, down to his untimely death in 1905, 'amistad incondicional' towards the writer. Julio Caro Baroja has devoted an article to the relations between Pio Baroja and Galdos. 173 Drawing on his own boyhood memories of his uncle's comments on Galdos, and referring to the Basque writer's published opinions on the older writer, Caro demonstrates that Baroja's attitude became steadily more antagonistic for a complex of reasons having to do with generational differences, his own creative interest in the historical novel (entailing rivalry with Galdos), and moral disapproval of 'las aventurillas de don Benito y sus flaquezas' (p. 166) . Ciriaco Moron Arroyo's article on Galdos and Ortega is concerned mainly with their literary and political ideas and, in view of the paucity of documents and information, says little of their personal relationship. 174 In 'Two Women in the Life of Galdos,' Walter T. Pattison discusses the author's love affairs with Emilia Pardo Bazan and Lorenza Cobian, the mother of Galdos's daughter Maria. The sources for his study are three letters published in

47

The Biographical Approach

Mexico in 1971, and others that have in recent years found their way to the Casa-Museo Perez Galdos. 175 Another view of Galdos's amorous relations with Emilia Pardo Bazan is put forward in Carmen Bravo-Villasante's Vida y obra de Emilia Pardo Bazan, which includes several previously unpublished letters from the Galician writer to Galdos. 176 In her brief linking commentary Bravo-Villasante describes Galdos as 'hombre bueno, sufrido, apasionado y resignado, enfermo, y mas de una vez desconcertante en su maquiavelismo' (p. 154); and later, that 'de las varias epistolas se deduce que era hombre de salud delicada, necesitado de cuidados, con frecuentes jaquecas, casi como un nifio grande, debil y achacoso. Frente a la robusta vitalidad de Emilia, Galdos aparece enfermizo y doliente, las mas de las veces ••. Anadase a esto, el temor de Galdos a envejecer, preocupacion que muestran algunos personajes de sus novelas' (pp. 175-6). It must be said that, in the absence of Galdos's letters to Dona Emilia and in the light of the letters brought forward as evidence, the deductions made by Carmen Bravo-Villasante are arguable, particularly her insistence on Galdos's delicate health. However, the letters themselves are clearly important from the standpoint of biography, biographical criticism, and literary history. An interesting sidelight on the GaldosPardo Bazan love affair is provided in Rafael Olivar-Bertrand's Literatura y pol{tica. Olivar-Bertrand recounts that Francisco Rodriguez Marin told him of a visit paid to his office at the Biblioteca Nacional by a certain Modesto Perez, who unsuccessfully offered to sell him Pardo Bazan's letters to Galdos. There is also passing mention of a 'pisito compartido amorosamente por ambos' in Chamber{ (p. 88). An article by A.F. Lambert 177 has thrown light on another of Galdos's love affairs, this one involving Concha-Ruth Morell, 'an impulsive and strong-willed woman, intensely emotional and given to self-dramatisation, at times hysterical but certainly attractive' (p. 40). The affair seems to have been intermittent though long-lasting (at least six years in duration and pos-· sibly as long as nineteen) (pp. 39-40). Two articles ·have to do with Galdos's publishing and editorial affairs. The first of these, 'Galdos editor,' by Alfonso Armas Ayala, consists of an introduction to six letters from Galdos to his publishing partner, Mi~uel H. de la Camara, addressed familiarly as Don Prisco. 1 8 The letters, written from Santander in 1880, deal with business matters, but they also bring out Galdos's intense preoccupation with family affairs. He shows himself utterly absorbed in a bid to obtain

48

Galdos and His Critics

the vacant post as military governor of Grand Canary Island for his brother Ignacio. When his plans fall through, Galdos is furious; he turns on Canovas, who had raised his hopes, scathingly calls him 'un pillete, y me alegraria infinito de que le echaran a puntapies del gobierno' and the 'monstruo, a quien de buena gana veria colgado de la Puerta del Sol' (p. 49). The picture we have is of a vigorous, hard-headed, and impassioned person, impatient of political intrigue but willing to pull all the strings he can in the interests of his family. The introductory study comments adequately on the content and style of the letters and on Galdos's personal situation, but suffers from not providing any information about the recipient of the letters - clearly a close confidant as well as a business associate. The second article, by Jean-Francois Botrel, is the first serious study of Galdos's relations with a publishing house during a specific period. 179 Basing his arguments on documents from the archives of the publishers in question, Perlado Paez y Ca., Sucesores de Hernando, Botrel shows that initially Galdos made an advantageous contract with them but subsequently fell deeply into debt to them, thereby losing the effective property rights over most of his works. Botrel's figures show, however, that between 1904 and 1911 the author earned a great deal of money from his writing - roughly twice as much, calculated on an annual basis, as that paid a Spanish ambassador. Botrel concludes that with the possible exception of Manuel Fernandez y Gonzalez and Blasco Ibanez, Galdos earned more from his books than any other Spanish writer of his time. Several studies may be placed in a miscellaneous group. In 'How Well Did Galdos Know English?' Walter T. Pattison concludes that he did not know it at all well. 180 Pablo Beltran de Heredia's 'Espana en la muerte de Galdos' is a documentary article based on press articles and reports, that deals with the writer's personal situation and public and literary image in the last years of his life, and describes the funeral ceremonies and the Spanish reaction to his death. 181 There are several references to Galdos in Cesar Gonzalez Ruano's Diario -rntimo 1951-1965; and in his recently published Espaijoles de mi tiempo Salvador de Madariaga recounts his impressions of Galdos, whom he never actually spoke to but saw at political meetings and in the streets of Madrid. 182 Two books on Galdos aimed at the popular reading public contain biographical information. The 'Esquema biografico' in Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles's Un autor en un Zibro. Galdos. Estudio y Antologia is a reworking in year-by-year

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The Biographical Approach

sequence of the biographical portion of the introduction to the Obras oompletas, itself published (as previously stated) - with minimal modifications to the text - in 1970 as part of a book. 183 Los gigantes. Benito Perez Galdos, produced under the direction of Jose Lopez Rubio, includes two biographical sections entitled 'La vida' and 'Galdos desde cerca. ' 184 These amount to readable and unpretentious summaries of Galdos's life and character . Two Canarian journalists have written books on Galdos. In a rambling sycophantic work Domingo Navarro Navarro recounts his impressions of Galdos and includes other biographical data, all expressed in an overwhelmingly turgid style. Less banal and diffuse is Francisco Rodriguez Batllori's Galdos en su tiempo (Estampas de una vida), 185 which is composed of twenty-three short essays on 'rasgos y facetas de la vida y la obra de un hombre genial' (p. 17), most of which are probably refritos of newspaper articles, though this is not explicitly stated. 186 Batllori sticks closely to the welltrodden areas of Galdos's biography and, apart from the odd detail (for instance, the description of Galdos at the tertulia [regular social gathering) of Sofia Casanova in the Calle de Marques de Urquijo), 187 says nothing that has not been said before. W.H. Shoemaker's 'lComo era Galdos?' is a major article. His method i~ to deal systematically with what he regards as the principal characteristics of Galdos's personality, drawing on a profusion of material published in books, newspapers, periodicals, and letters (some of them little known). 188 By mixing commentary with a multiplicity of quotations and references he achieves a collage-like portrait of Galdos, one of the most luminous small-scale portraits that exist. In masterly fashion Shoemaker compresses his interpretation of Galdos into a concluding paragraph : De todos los elementos que hemos querido destacar de la esencia de Galdos, de como era el hombre, surje [sio] la integridad de su caracter. De su sencillez, modestia y timidez, de la finura de sus sentidos y de su voz debil, de su voluntad para el trabajo, y de la curiosidad multiforme e insaciable, asi como de su capacidad para amar desmedidamente a Espana y la patria chica, a sus familiares, a sus amigos, a los ninos, y al projimo, a los animales, las flores y las plantas, ya las mujeres salia siempre un Galdos sincere, directo, entero. Vivia en la sociedad, pero vivia desde dentro, sin falsedades, ni artificios, ni

50

Galdos and His Critics farsanterias, con una gracia natural, a veces, en apariencia, desgarbada. (p. 17)

Another distinguished Galdos scholar, Jose F. Montesinos, makes some penetrating passing remarks on Galdos's ~ersonal situation in the 'Nota preliminar' to his Galdas I. 89 In a brief introduction to Galdos's literary production published in Argentina, Beatriz Entenzade Solare includes biographical information. 190 The two most interesting recent biographically oriented works on Galdos are Carmen Bravo-Villasante's Caldas visto por st mismo and Walter T. Pattison's Benito Perez Caldas. Bravo-Villasante's book is clearly addressed to the general reader. 191 In Edel's terminology it can be described as lying somewhere between the 'chronicle-compendium biography' and the 'organic,' or artistic, biography; extensive reference to documents and concern with background and appraisal are accompanied by a conscious effort to give artistic shape to the narrative. Indeed the author seems to have struck a balance between the two and produced a popular yet serious life-study . The work is by no means scholarly; there are no footnotes and sources frequently go unacknowledged. But this limitation is compensated for by the lively and intelligent treatment of biographical questions. Her procedure is to devote individual chapters to a theme or aggregate of themes centring on a phase or aspect of the author's life or works; the early chapters are presented chronologically, but later chapters move freely backwards and forwards in time. There are quotations from numerous unpublished letters: from Galdos to Pereda, Maria Guerrero, his daughter Maria, and Rafaelita; and to Galdos from Apeles Mesttes, Alcala Galiano, Maria Guerrero, Leon y Castillo, Cristobal de Castro, and Victorio Macho. Also included is the unpublished questionnaire that Galdos, in preparation for writing Prim, had handed to Martinez, a close friend of Juan Prim, the Spanish general and political figure . The discussion of most topics is fresh and stimulating, particularly so in regard to Galdos's relations with women (pp. 110-13), his 'humorismo' (pp. 41-2), and his relations with certain painters of the day (pp. 13643). Walter T. Pattison's Benito Perez Caldas is a more sober and conscientious work, which sets out to give a systematic account of the author's life and works. 192 The book appeared as part of a series intended primarily for 'the cultivated nonspecialist,' but Pattison hoped that it would 'stimulate

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The Biographical Approach

Galdosian scholars to further researches towards the revelation of the real Galdos' (p. 7). It is interesting to observe that Pattison's view that scholarship is moving towards the elucidation of 'the real Galdos' is in conflict with BravoVillasante's view that 'toda biografia se encuentra ante un misterio, pues el hombre es un ser misterioso. ' 193 In the Preface Pattison affirms that Galdos is 'perhaps the leastknown author of comparable fame,' and that 'myths about him circulate with the authority of fact' (p. 7). To counter this situation the author explains that he has attempted 'to verify with documentary sources as many of the events in Don Benito's life as possible' (p. 7). This preoccupation is faithfully reflected in the text. Particularly important is the revealing discussion - based on documents recently made available at the Casa-Museo Perez Galdos - of Galdos's finances, which shows what a crucial role money played in Galdos's life and in the shaping of his approach to literature. Unlike his fellow-biographer in Spain, Pattison takes a strictly chronological approach, keeping sections on the life separate from sections on the works - though he does on occasions indulge in biographical speculations and criticism. His first chapter, entitled 'A Very Private Person,' is a synoptic view of Galdos's personality, which contains valuable remarks on aspects of the writer's life, such as his family concerns, charity, religion, and tolerance. On the subject of women he betrays a tendency to whitewash Galdos, but some of his points are weak, as when he writes that 'no doubt there were some amorous entanglements with women of the lower classes, but if Galdos, as some claim, was so promiscuous, why were his sisters so devoted to him? Such excess could hardly be regarded as honorable' (pp. 19-20). (The simple answer is that this intimate part of Galdos's life was kept hidden from the women members of his family.) However, on other biographical matters Pattison is measured and perceptive. In sum, his book offers a concise, scholarly examination of Galdos's life; less rigorous and weighty, Carmen Bravo-Villasante's book shows greater vivacity and literary flair. Students of Galdos have cause to be thankful to both authors; yet both works are essentially small-scale undertakings, neither approaching the status of a fully fledged biography - a work which would probably have to extend to more than one dense volume to both incorporate all the recent documentation and biographical findings and do justice to the complex subject.

52

Galdos and His Critics

Passing mention has been made of letters included in biographical studies of Galdos; briefly now letters will be considered mainly in their biographical perspective . Among all the documents used by the biographer, his subject's correspondence is especially treasured. Indeed, as Martin Seymour-Smith has lately observed , the collection of writers' papers and letters in our times has reached fetishistic proportions . 194 The case for the importance of letters (and biographies) in the human and psychological sense has been succinctly put by Gerald Brenan, who considers that 'the detailed biography or collection of letters is one of the best aids to the understanding of human nature and is especially revealing in the case of writers, because we already possess in their work a more or less intimate revelation of their inner selves; by contrasting this with the outer features and circumstances of their lives, we are able to get the most complete picture possible of what a human being is like. 1195 And it is plain that the discriminating incorporation of quotations from letters can enliven a biography considerably, as Carmen Bravo-Villasante's biography testifies . Collections of letters that display human and aesthetic qualities take their place in the history of literature, though that place is a rather uneasy one, being commonly qualified by limiting definitions, such as 'one of the pleasanter of byways in the whole realm of literature. ' 196 Furthermore, some consider them a wholly inferior form of literary expression; for example, E.M. Forster talks of them as being products of the 'surface-personality,' whereas 'creation comes from the depths' of the 'lower personality . 1197 But others would regard this too summary a judgment; and the form has been praised by several prominent literary men - in the Spanish-speaking world Pedro Salinas springs to mind . His 'Defensa de la carta misiva y de la correspondencia epistolar, an examination of the historical, psychological, and moral aspects of letters, underscores their value as human documents.198 Writers themselves vary in their attitudes to letter-writing according to temperament and personality. Galdos is known for his 'dejadez epistolar'; ·for Unamuno, who suffered from self-confessed 'epistolamania,' letters were an integral part of his habitual mode of expression . 199 Letters have not been submitted as a rule to the close scrutiny and analysis that poetry and fiction have received in recent years; commentators tend to stop short at outward discussion of content and tone . However, one of the finest biographers of our age, Richard Ellmann, has suggested the

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The Biographical Approach

lines along which a profitable study of letters might be conducted: Letter-writing imposes its small ceremonies even upon those who disdain the medium. An audience of one requires confrontation too, and even a perfunctory message discloses a little with what candour, modesty, or self-esteem its writer ranks himself in the world. Some accompanying hint of appraisal of that world is bound to appear in the way he asserts or beseeches a tie with his correspondent, the degree of familiarity he takes for granted, the extent to which he solicits action or approbation, the alacrity and tenacity with which he joins issue. He may present himself in many guises, as machine, badger, deer, spider, bird. Whatever his mode, if he is a practising writer his assembling of words can never be totally negligent; once enslaved by language forever enslaved. 200 Before dealing with the question of Galdos's correspondence it is fitting to say a brief word about the status of letters in Spanish literature. It has often been stated that a marked feature of Spanish literature is its relative lack of 'informal literature,' that is, letters, memoirs, diaries, confessions, autobiography, and the like. Critics such as Gerald Brenan and Guillermo de Torre have placed special emphasis on this fact; and Unamuno, mindful of this deficiency, has delivered an adverse judgment on Spanish literature as a whole. 201 Certainly, outstanding letter-writers seem to be few in number - a list would include Santa Teresa, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Valera, and Unamuno. Nevertheless, Guillermo de Torre argues that Spanish writers have not written proportionately fewer letters than their counterparts in other countries, but, for reasons of discretion, prudishness, and neglect, those who have had them in their keeping have rarely troubled to collect and publish them or permitted others to do so. 202 In this connection, Berkowitz's comments on the frustrated hopes of Galdos's heirs of publishing (in the late twenties) ·a volume of the author's correspondence are pertinent. 203 Galdos enjoyed receiving letters and went to some bother to preserve them in an 'archivo epistolar.' It is clear that the writer took pride in the letters he had received from other literary figures. 'Le advierto a usted,' he confided to El Bachiller Corchuelo, 'que mi archivo es interesantisimo. Conservo todas las cartas que por asuntos literarios han

54

Galdos and His Critics

entrado en mi casa desde hace cuarenta anos •.• Entre otras, tengo cartas de Zola, de Turgenieff ••• de Clarin .•• de Pereda. 204 And remarks made in the 'Memorias' and in a letter to Pereda show that Galdos attached great importance to the elder writer's letters, considering that they might have documentary value for later generations. 205 But he himself seems to have been a half-hearted letter-writer. Complaints of Galdos's tardiness in replying run as a refrain through the correspondence addressed to the author. 'Acabo de leer su grata epistola,' Ortega Munilla wrote, 'que agradezco tanto mas cuanto que es proverbial su odio a servirse del correo. ' 206 Berkowitz characterized Galdos as 'generally speaking, a chronically procrastinating, reluctant, and laconic letter writer' (ibid.). It must be remembered, though, that Galdos was a prodigiously industrious author and, being a national figure as the leading Spanish writer during much of his literary career, he received correspondence from a great variety of sources - more than he could possibly ever have answered. As more of Galdos's own letters become available or at least known about, it becomes plain that he wrote more letters than had earlier been supposed. It is only since the sixties that letters to and from Galdos have been published in great numbers. Before that a few ap~eared in newspapers like El Pa{s, El Liberal, and El Sol, 20 or were published with explanatory comment, by individuals, such as Manuel B. Cossio, Berkowitz, Eulogio Varela Hervias, Jose Maria de Cossio, Ada M. Coe, and Manuel Rodriguez-Avello. 208 These offered a mere foretaste of what was to come. In the centenary year of 1943 Eulogio Varela Hervias edited the first collection of Galdos's letters, Cartas de Perez Galdos a Mesonero Romanos, accompanied by a serviceable preliminary study (see note 214). But the important date for Galdos epistolary studies is 1964, the year of the publication of Cartas a Galdos, edited by Soledad Ortega. 209 The volume contains important letters from, among others, Mesonero Romanos, Pereda, and Clarin, and those Galdos sent to Perez de Ayala between 1907 and 1918. These are interesting documents for the understanding of the individual authors' and Galdos's personalities and the literary and social life of the period; but it is obviously a disappointment to have such a small proportion of Galdos's own letters. In a useful prologue Soledad Ortega reveals that one or two years before his death Galdos entrusted to the care of Ramon Perez de Ayala a black leather suitcase containing 'todas las cartas

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The Biographical Approach

que Galdos recibiera en el transcurso de su vida de escritor y que el juzgaba dignas de ser conservadas' (p. 15). Also included in the prologue are brief comments on the letters and on Galdos's personality. Three years later another collection of letters was published bearing the title Cartas deZ Archivo de Perez GaZdos and edited by Sebastian de la Nuez and Jose Schraibman. 210 Their introduction explains that the selection was made from the letters in the author's 'Archivo particular' now housed in the Casa-Museo Perez Galdos in Las Palmas. In fact the editors have drawn on the letters that remained in the 'Archivo' after Galdos had sent to Perez de Ayala those he thought were worthy of publication. There is no doubt that Galdos's judgment was on the whole sound; with the exception of those from Unamuno and Perez de Ayala and, possibly, Palacio Valdes, Ortega Munilla, and Manuel Tolosa Latour, the quoted letters, although from such wellknown writers as Azorin, Baroja, Valle-Inclan, Blasco Ibanez, Martinez Sierra, Amado Nervo, and Joaquin Costa, are generally lacking in interest. Since no letters from Galdos were included, it is to be questioned whether the book ought to have been published in this form. Each set of letters is preceded by an introduction written by one or other of the editors, and at the end of the book there is an 'Indice del Archivo Particular de Galdos,' which was prepared by Sebastian de la Nuez. Another collection of letters, Cartas entre dos

amigos deZ teatro. Manuei ToZosa Latour~ Benito Perez GaZdos,

edited and introduced by Ruth Schmidt, 21 is interesting for the light the letters throw on one of the author's closest friendships, his day-to-day activities, and his involvement in the world of the Spanish theatre. In 1975 Carmen BravoVillasante brought out a collection of Emilia Pardo Bazan's love-letters to Galdos, 212 with a prologue that is a shortened version of the commentary to the letters contained in the same author's Vida y obra de EmiZia Pardo Bazan (pp. 1-12). Quite a large number of letters, some with accompanying commentary, have appeared in periodicals or as parts of books. Four contributions are particularly significant. In an article published in Hispania (1933), H. Chonon Berkowitz discusses at length and quotes from 'the thousands of letters which were addressed to Galdos spontaneously and often anonymously by the people. ' 213 Mention is made of letters from children; hero worshippers; women admirers; political sympathizers and opponents; spongers and budding authors; and assorted species of cranks including poison-pen writers and would-be assassins - all of which Berkowitz shows to be 'so many significant

56

Galdos and His Critics

documents for the study of Galdos as a popular figure and national idol' (p. 249). Thirty years later W.H. Shoemaker published the absorbing letters exchanged by Galdos and Narcrs Oller, supplying a fine, detailed introduction. 21 ~ Another group of important letters - those of Galdos to his friend Francisco Navarro Ledesma - appeared in 1968 as an appendix to Carmen de Zulueta's Navarro Ledesma. El hombre y su tiempo. 215 It was not until 1971 that the most important of Galdos's letters were published. These are twenty-eight letters sent between 1876 and 1901 to Pereda, whose friendship mattered more to Galdos perhaps than any other. Carmen Bravo-Villasante confesses to having hurriedly got them together for publication in the Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos homage issue (1970-1). 216 The hurry shows: the letters lack an adequate introduction. But she is correct when she asserts that 'la publicacion de estas veintiocho cartas nos parece uno de los documentos mas importantes en este cincuentenario de Galdos, que puede aclarar muchas dudas acerca de la situacion espiritual de Galdos en determinados anos' (p. 9). Other letters have been published by Felipe Ximenez de Sandoval (1960); Joseph Schraibman (1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966); Sebastian de la Nuez (1964, 1965, 1973), Alfonso Armas Ayala (1965-7, 1966); William H. Shoemaker (1966); Rafael OlivarBertrand (1967); Robert Ricard (1968); Jose F. Montesinos, and Anonymous (1971). 217 Still more have appeared in recent years in the Canarian press. 218 Notable among the very few reviews of Galdos's published correspondence are those by Carmen Bravo-Villasante and by Robert Ricard. The first is a warm appreciation of Soledad Ortega's Cartas a Galdos, with particular reference to letters dealing with technical questions pertaining to the novel. 219 The second is a searching examination of Cartas a Galdos and W.H. Shoemaker's Una amistad literaria: la correspondencia epistolar entre Galdos y Narciso Oller. Robert Ricard's detailed commentary is a splendid contribution to the study of Galdos's correspondence. 220 Biographers rightly place great importance on letters, 221 for a few words written in a message to another may illuminate a hidden aspect or rooted tendency of an individual, or even provide pointers for an approach to the works. (Such nuggets are, however, usually buried among much chatter and trite comment.) Although many Galdosian letters are still unavailable, those that are at hand help to fill out the portrait and enlarge our understanding of Galdos. A reading of them brings confirmation of some aspects of his character

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The Biographical Approach

and personality discussed by friends and observers: his modesty, tolerance, generosity, good-heartedness and 'mansa tenacidad. ' 222 Less publicized characteristics, such as his vehemence, irritability, and sharp critical sense, are manifest too. Galdos can also be humorous and charmingly affectionate, as his moving letters to young Rafaelita show. 223 What emerges is a dedicated, sensitive, introverted, but engaging individual; a deeply complex creative being, outwardly calm and unruffled but at bottom intense and gnawed by doubt. From the biographical writings considered in the foregoing pages, the main features and events of the writer's life can be summarized as follows. Benito Perez Galdos was born on 10 May 1843 in the Canarian port city of Las Palmas, the tenth and last child of Don Sebastian Perez Macias, an army officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and his domineering wife, Dona Maria de los Dolores Galdos de Perez. Strictly brought up, he none the less found himself the centre of attention and was pampered by the whole family. In 1852 he was sent as a boarder to the Colegio de San Agustin, the leading secondary school in Las Palmas, where the liberal attitudes of its teachers left a lasting imprint on the author's outlook. Before leaving school in 1862 he had written various pieces in prose and verse and published articles in the local press. In September of the same year Galdos left the Canary Islands to study law at the University of Madrid. It was customary for middle-class Canarian families to send their sons to the Peninsula for their university education, but Galdos's parents appear to have had the additional reason of wishing to break up the love-relationship between Benito and Sisita, the illegitimate daughter of Dona Dolores's favourite brother, Jose Maria. The move to Madrid was decisive. After growing up in an easy-going, tolerant backwater like Las Palmas of the 1840s and fifties, the young Canarian found himself in the bustling and politically charged atmosphere of the capital. Somewhat out of his element at first but fascinated by the spectacle of metropolitan life, he applied himself assiduously to the task of exploring its many facets. At university Don Alfredo Adolfo Camus and Don Fernando de Castro, his professors of classics and history, impressed him, but his attendance at law classes became sporadic after a year or two and by 1866 he had abandoned his studies altogether. Two turbulent events profoundly affected Galdos at this period: the student uprising

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Galdos and His Critics

on the night of San Daniel (10 April 1865), and the Sergeants' Revolt (22 June 1866). While still a student he had begun publishing articles in the Madrid press, and 1865 saw him already working for a reputable journal, La Nacion, in which he brought out not only numerous articles but also the first translation into Spanish of Pickwick Papers. In the summer of 1867 he travelled abroad for the first time, with relatives to France. This visit proved to be a turning point in his life, for while in Paris he occupied himself in reading Balzac's novels. This encounter with the Comedie humaine probably encouraged him to write novels and envisage becoming the secretaire of Spanish society. He returned to France the following year and subsequently travelled widely in Europe, particularly in the 1880s. Travel for Galdos was a relaxing and reinvigorating as well as cultural experience; his frequent trips throughout Spain were undertaken with the further purpose of gathering information - in local archives and in conversations in trains, inns, and villages. Galdos had seen himself at first as a dramatist, but discouraged by his lack of success and attuned to the fact that the novel was the dominant genre of the time, cultivated by great figures like Balzac and Dickens, he resolved to become a novelist. His first novel, La sombra, was written in 1867 224 and was followed by La Fontana de Oro (1867-8). During the period of political unrest in the 1860s - the so-called Gloriosa Revolucion toppled Isabel II from the throne in 1868 - Galdos continued to be active in journalism, becoming general editor of the liberal newspaper, El Debate, in 1871 and in the following year taking up the editorship of the newly established Revista de Espana, an important cultural review in which he published in serial form the novel El audaz. The 1870s saw Galdos making great strides in his literary career. In 1873, he turned his back on journalism and embarked on the first series of Episodios nacionales, producing four volumes in less than a year. About this time he formed a number of lasting friendships with other literary figures, like Clarin, Pereda, and Mesonero Romanos; and in 1874 he entered into a partnership with a fellow-Canarian publisher, Miguel Honorio de la Camara y Cruz. He was revealing himself to be an astonishingly prolific writer, having by 1880 written seven novels and twenty Episodios nacionales within fourteen years. Two novels of the period bring out the ecrivain engage side of Galdos: Dona Perfecta (1876) and Gloria (2 vols, 1876-7). The liberal and anticlerical slant in these books drew attacks from political reactionaries and

59

The Biographical Approach

Catholic traditionalists, marking the beginning of Galdos's reputation as a controversial author. He was later to experience fierce opposition from the Establishment in Spain and find himself denied national and international honours that should naturally have fallen to him. In 1889 he gained entrance to the Spanish Academy but only after a crushing defeat at the hands of an obscure opponent. Stimulated by his reading of Zola around 1880, Galdos produced some of his finest novels in the ensuing decade, including El amigo Manso (1882), La de Bringas (1884), Fortunata y Jacinta (4 vols, 1886-7), and Miau (1888). A banquet organized in his honour by Clarin and others brought him squarely into the public eye in 1883. Three years later he accepted Sagasta's invitation to occupy a safe Liberal seat in the Congress. His activities as a deputy were minimal, but his three-year term allowed him an opportunity to observe the workings of the political process at close quarters. By 1890 Galdos was happy to retire to Santander for the winter. Since 1871, when he had met Pereda there, the writer had regularly spent part of his summers in Santander. He enjoyed the peace and quiet of the coastal resort and the opportunity of renewing contact with close friends, including Pereda, Menendez Pelayo, Amos de Escalante, and Estrani. In 1893 Galdos had his villa 'San Quintin' built on the outskirts of town. The 1890s were momentous years for Galdos. The novels of this period focus on spiritual matters and explore the meaning of religious experience. This new source of inspiration yielded several masterpieces: Angel Guerra (3 vols, 1890-1), the Torquemada tetralogy (1889-95),Nazarin (1895), and Miserioordia (1897). But during the 1890s another genre, drama, was making demands on his creative energies. For some years Galdos had been commenting on the decadence of the Spanish theatre in his articles for La Prensa, and no doubt he thought the time was ripe for an attempt to introduce the kind of serious drama that was being written by Ibsen and Hauptmann and staged in other parts of Europe. There was also the example of novelists like Zola and Daudet who were adapting their novels to the stage at about this time; and it seems that hope of financial gain also prompted Galdos into this fresh venture. He had always found it difficult to live within his means, even though his income was quite considerable throughout his literary career . It is true that the writer's family responsibilities were heavy: he paid off debts left at the death of his eldest brother, Domingo, and

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Galdos and His Critics

supported several members of the family who lived with him in Madrid. Generous to excess, he was the easy target of spongers and charitable organizations. His love affairs were also a constant drain on his resources; he provided for his daughter Maria's education and sent money to her mother, Lorenza Cobian; and he was vulnerable to demands from blackmailers.225 Moreover, the construction of his villa cost him more than he could afford. At all events, his plays of the 1890s (some of them original, others adaptations of his novels) did not bring the expected rewards, though the first one, Realidad (1892), and others were reasonably successful. He had his share of failures with Gerona (1893) and Los condenados (1894). His dramatic work was subjected to much adverse criticism, and in 1894 he retaliated against the frequently impudent disparagement of his plays in the prologue to Los condenados. At this time, Galdos and his publishing partner were no longer seeing eye to eye . In 1896, severely pressed for money, he accused Camara of defrauding him of some of his rightful profits, and proceeded to file a lawsuit against him. In an out-of-court settlement Galdos was awarded full rights to the publication of his works; but, with heavy debts payable to Camara and to his lawyers, he was scarcely in a better financial situation than before. So he set up his own publishing company and went back to writing Episodi os nacionales, works that had been great money-earners in the past. Yet even his titanic effort of producing ten volumes in two years failed to solve his monetary problems. Times had changed, and the works did not have the popular patriotic appeal of the earlier ones. Other features of these years are Galdos increasing despondency about the political state of the country and his reversion from a moderate to a more radical position reminiscent of earlier days. The Disaster of 1898 made a de~p impression on him, and his anticlericalism flared up again . Electra (1901) is another engage work, dealing with fanaticism and the conflict between progressive forces and hard-arteried, reactionary attitudes. The play was a riotous success in Madrid and the provinces, and had the effect of intensifying the division in Spain between progressives and reactionaries. With it Galdos earned himself a certain notoriety in Spain and abroad and secured great financial success as well as temporary favour with the Spanish literary avant-garde. The twentieth century began auspiciously for Galdos; but painful facts were soon to be faced: persistent impecuniousness, worsening health, and lack of due recognition for his

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The Biographical Approach

literary achievements. He continued to write novels, episodios, and plays, but none repeated the success of Electra (though El abuelo [1904] was highly praised), and he remained

bogged down in debt. The National Public Subscription Appeal launched in 1914 seemed to offer a way of putting the author on a sound financial footing, but it was not to be: many pledges were never paid, the rich and powerful refrained from making contributions, and Galdos drew heavily on the funds as they were collected. The episode ended unpleasantly with Galdos accusing the treasurer of embezzlement and threatening legal action. Galdos's finances were also undermined by his entrance into the Republican party. Despite his piecarious health - he had contracted arteriosclerosis early in the century, suffered a hemiplegic stroke in 1906, and started to have severe problems with his eyesight about the same time - Galdos publicly announced his espousal of Republicanism in 1907. He was promptly elected to the Cortes as a Republican deputy for Madrid and became titular head of the Republican-Socialist coalition, frequently appearing at political meetings and rallies in various parts of Spain. After December 1913, when he met the king at a performance of his own Celia en los infiernos, Galdos gradually withdrew from the political scene, though he consented to be the Republican representative for Grand Canary Island in 1914. His engagement in politics showed great courage and strength of conviction, and he became a popular hero of the working classes. But his antimonarchist and anticlerical views, being anathema to institutional Spain, cost him the Nobel Prize in 1912, when the Spanish Academy - headed by his friend and political foe, Antonio Maura - refused to endorse his application. In the last years of his life Galdos published little, faded from the national scene, and, visited by only a small circle of friends and admirers, led a quiet life, darkened somewhat by the gradual eclipse of his literary reputation. The darkness was not only figurative but all too real, for he had been virtually blind since 1912; and his general healthwasdeteriorating rapidly. After presiding over the unveiling of his statue (sculptured by Victorio Macho) in Madrid's Retiro Park in January 1919, at which few dignitaries were present and which the King, to Galdos's chagrin, failed to attend, his health took a decided turn for the worse . Almost exactly a year later, on 4 January 1920, Galdos died of uraemia. In death he was as controversial as he had been in life: he was eulogized by the liberal press and reviled

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Galdos and His Critics

by reactionary elements. Officialdom was niggardly in the funeral honours paid to Spain's greatest writer of modern times, but he was mourned by vast crowds of ordinary folk in Madrid, the city to which he had given enduring fictional life. A certain amount has already been brought out about the personality of Galdos, basically a retiring, inward-turned man who yet was fascinated by social life and produced an incomparable portrait of nineteenth-century Spanish society; a man who liked nothing better than to potter about in his garden but found himself at the centre of political controversy; a man with simple tastes but a deeply complex nature; a man who happened to be a creative genius without equal in his age and country. About the connection between mortal existence and the godlike gift of creation relatively little is known. Andre Maurois, writing of Balzac, has commented on this connection. 'However difficult it may be,' he remarks, 'to knit into one piece the demi-god who gave birth to a world and the fat man who revelled in childish puns, the effort must be made. By a ceaseless process of osmosis, the acts and thoughts and encounters of Monsieur Honore de Balzac nourished the Comedie humaine. We shall seek to discern some aspects of that mysterious alchemy. ' 226 The phrase 'that mysterious alchemy' is appropriate, for it takes unusual psychological insight and delicacy of discrimination to illustrate successfully this self-evident relationship between life and work. There are two basic methods that can be employed: starting with the author's biography and moving to the work; and moving in the opposite direction, from the work towards the life. In the first method information about the author is expected to yield an understanding of the work; in the second, the work itself is the source for understanding the man. Both methods are in use today, though the second is currently the more respectable, largely as a result of debate over theories like that of 'the implied author.' Some biographical critics use both lines of inquiry, as it suits their purpose. The second method appeals especially to writers themselves; in an essay on Dickens, Galdos observes: Pero si la vida de un escritor esta en SUS libros; si esa vida que existe y se manifiesta en las paginas de un libro, es mas importante y digna de ser conocida que los innumerables accidentes domesticos queen nada distinguen a un

63

The Biographical Approach hombre de la vulgar multitud; las novelas de Dickens nos revelan las altas condiciones de su espiritu, la inalterable bondad de su caracter, la rectitud y pureza de sus sentimientos, su vida, en fin esa individualidad biologica que nos interesa y atane masque los detalles de la historia exterior de un hombre, masque todos los accidentes ocurridos en eso que se llama carrera social o literaria de una persona. 227

Similar statements occur in writings by Proust and Perez de Ayala, 228 among other writers. Biographical criticism is to be found in the articles and full-length studies discussed in this chapter, but with few exceptions it is intermittent, undeveloped, or often little more than incidental comment. There are very few pieces of fully fledged biographical criticism dedicated to Galdos. In an article on the writer published in 1878, Armando Palacio Valdes 229 professes tobe a biographical critic and, employing the second of the two basic methods, confides that 'en cada pagina del libro, en cada rasgo de la pluma me complazco en ver al escritor. Me gusta sobre toda ponderacion adivinar su caracter y tendencias, sorprender en germen su inspiracion, seguir la marcha de SU espiritu a traves de los caprichos mas pueriles y de los mas insensatos extravios' (p. 337). A few lines later, however, he discloses that reading Galdos's works has given him no real notion of the author's character: 'No conozco a Galdos; no he tenido la honra de cruzar jamas la palabra con el ilustre novelista. He leido sus novelas, y me veo forzado a confesar que tampoco lo conozco. Delante de su obra, sumido en estatica admiracion percibo un genio poderoso y fecundo que respira dentro con brio, mas no acierto aver un caracter. Galdos no ha dejado gravada [sic] en ella una imagen sino una confusa silueta' (p. 338). And this is as far as Palacio Valdes gets with his bio-critical approach; the rest of the article is devoted to a discussion of Dona Perfecta and Gloria. Eleven years later Clarin addressed himself to the problem of the connection between Galdos's life and his works, 230 arguing that 'los novelistas, y especialmente los novelistas de la clase de Galdos, son acaso los escritores que menos se dejan ver a si mismos en sus obras. Esa impersonalidad del autor, de que tanto se ha hablado, sobre todo de Flaubert aca, si era en este y algunos otros novelistas conviccion sistematica, firme, seria, obedecida constantemente mejor que otros dogmas de escuela, es en Galdos todavia mas natural y

64

Galdos and His Critics

segura, sin obedecer acaso a propos1to tecnico, a una creencia estetica; es mas segura y natural porque nace del caracter y del temperamento' (pp. 14-15). Clarin is thus led to conclude that 'no es posible, sin grandes temeridades, inducir por los libros de nuestro autor mucho do lo que pudo haber sido en su infancia ... y mas adelante' (p. 16). Accordingly it is surprising and not a little ironic to find a Spanish critic adopting an opposing standpoint - more than eighty years later! In her biography of Galdos, Carmen Bravo-Villasante asserts that 'la intimidad de Galdos puede deducirse, en gran parte, de su propia obra' 231 But, apart from some biocritical judgments in passing (pp. 112-13; 162-3; 171-2; 256-7), she makes no effort to substantiate this claim, which must remain as nothing more than empty speculation. A much more conscientious biographical critic of Galdos is Walter T. Pattison. In his most thoroughgoing attempt at biographical criticism, 'El amigo Manso and El amigo Galdos,' Pattison mainly employs the first basic method to show that Galdos himself was 'one of the principal models' for the eponymous hero of El amigo Manso. 232 Highly documented and cogently argued, the article brings forward valuable information on Galdos's biography (particularly his act1v1t1es from 1879 to 1880) and on related literary and intellectual history. It also shows that Galdos drew on his personal experience to a greater extent than had earlier been supposed. But the author falls into the temptation of stating that the novel cannot be understood without the biographical information he has brought to light: 'The period 1879-1880 was uppermost in his mind as he sought material for and composed El amigo Manso. To understand this novel we must know as fully as possible what Galdos was thinking and doing during his unusually long stay in Santander' (p. 137). The information imparted by Pattison helps to extend our knowledge of the work, especially in relation to its genesis, but it emphatically does not help us to understand the work in a deeper way, since no attempt is made to deal with the whole novel: its expressive system, interlocking themes, and inner workings . The approach purports to be all-embracing, when really what it offers is an intense but essentially narrow focus. Undoubtedly the most satisfying and illuminating biographical critique of Galdos is Joaquin Casalduero's 'Conjuncion y divergencia de vida y arte en Galdos,' published in 1970. 233 At the beginning of the article he is explicit about the pitfalls and limitations of the biographical approach in criticism. 'Creo necesario una gran pulcritud,' Casalduero writes, 'el manejar los materiales biograficos y especialmente el no

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The Biographical Approach

precipitarse al pasar de la vida a la creacion artistica definida, determinada. El creador de una manera consciente, subconsciente e inconsciente somete las primeras materias, tanto las observadas como las vividas, a una continua elaboracion, lo que hay que tener siempre en cuenta al buscar el trasfondo vital y anecdotico de la obra de arte' (p. 828). Casalduero's approach entails a consideration of a feature of Galdos's life before examining a group of novels from a particular period, as a means of gaining insight into his inner leanings and convictions. He looks chiefly at the fact that Galdos remained single, offering speculations about reasons for this, and studies his treatment of prostitutes and relationships between married couples and pairs of lovers . And he reaches the following conclusion: Hemos podido seguir una trayectoria desde 1884 hasta 1907 en que lo novelescoes una repulsa constante del matrimonio, mientras las relaciones ilegales se transforman en un debate de conciencia, por parte de la mujer para llegar a ser verdaderamente ella misma, y el hombre tiene que dar a los valores tradicionales - dignidad y honor - un contenido nuevo. La pareja humana debe huir de las apariencias, de los principios, de los convencionalismos de la opinion establecida; debe romper con toda traba para labrarse en la libertad del trabajo una vida que tenga como base el amor limpio de todo egoismo. Para mi ese mundo es una proyeccion de la vida interior del escritor que le conduce a un nuevo concepto de la Historia. Vida, Arte, Historia y Naturaleza forman un complejo en una constante interrelacion . (pp . 833-4) In the final part of the article Casalduero takes a quick glance at the characters Dona Perfecta, Madama Esther Spinoza Morton, Dona Sales, and Dona Juana Samaniego, and contrary to the oft-repeated opinion, suggests that Galdos's mother was probably not the model for these characters. This assumption required further elaboration (perhaps in the light of Pattison's remark, 'What we know about Galdos's creative process leads us to believe that he almost never formed a major character on one single model'). 234 In any event Casalduero is able to round off his article neatly with the comment that the convergence and the divergence of art and life in Galdos need to be studied side by side. Though there are arguable points in Casalduero's study it remains a subtle and suggestive piece of writing.

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What can be seen from the preceding section is that the biographical approach to criticism tends to be hazardous and partial, and the mere quantity and quality of information adduced can never make it an integral approach. It can supplement other approaches and enlarge our knowledge of some aspect of a work; and if it combines boldness of thought and discrimination, it can provide new ways of looking at a work. Unfortunately, this has so far happened all too rarely in Galdos studies. In conclusion it can be said that, in comparison with the state of biographical studies of, say, Balzac or Dickens, investigation of Galdos's life is still far from maturity. Fifty years ago Ortega y Gasset could express the view that 'es una lastima que nuestros autores se queden siempre sin definir. No sabemos nada de Galdos - a pesar de tener tantos "amigos•~• 235 This is no pointless overstatement. Much against his own inclinations, Galdos became a legend in his own lifetime, opinions about his life being often based on little more than rumour and frivolous speculation. It is only in relatively recent times that much documentation has come to light and serious study undertaken. Even so, as late as 1970 a Galdos scholar like J.E. Varey comes close to echoing Ortega's lament, pointing out that despite recent advances, all that is available is an 'outline sketch' of 'Galdos's elusive personality. ' 236 Rodolfo Cardona, in an article published in the same year, also insists on the little that is known about the author. 237 Unquestionably much spadework remains to be done, but there is a danger too of painting the situation in excessively gloomy colours. Strides have been made in recent years; and biographical study, including collection of letters and other relevant documents, is underway, thanks to the existence of AnaZes Galdosianos, founded by Rodolfo Cardona, 238 and organizations like the Casa-Museo Perez Galdos, and especially to the efforts of a small group of devoted 'Galdosistas. ' 239 Yet the fact is that Galdos has still to attract outstanding biographers: there is no Maurois, Zweig, Sartre, Erikson, Painter, or Ellmann in the field. If no brilliantly provocative studies of Galdos's life along (for example) Marxian, Freudian, or Jungian lines seem to be in sight, it is to be hoped that the near future will bring a solid, full-scale biography, one that includes the finest perceptions of earlier biographers while incorporating substantial recent work and offering new findings and fresh biocritical aper~us.

2 Literary History

'La obra literaria es ahistorica •.. No existe historia literaria. ' 1 So wrote Damaso Alonso in 1950. The polemical thrust of these assertions is indicative of the controversial status of literary history in the present century. In point of fact Alonso's notion of the timelessness of literature reflects the critical attitude prevailing up to the late seventeenth century. It was only then that the historical approach to literature began to develop; by the second half of the nineteenth century it had reached the height of its influence. In the early decades of the twentieth century, both North America and Europe saw the historical method subjected to attack and displaced from its former predominant position in literary studies. Recent years have brought renewed interest in literary history and its various methods of analysis, as theorists have shown concern with pluralistic approaches to literature and applied themselves to a search for a synthesis of critical methods. Before the eighteenth century there existed biographies, catalogues of authors, manuscripts, and printed books, and bibliographies, but these lacked any firm historical perspective. In the medieval period literary criticism was largely guided by a concern with rhetoric and formalism; the mainstream of Renaissance literary theory sought precepts and standards of judgment based on the practice of Greek and Latin authors. The search for rules of literature continued to be a main preoccupation of literary critics in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century. This prescriptive turn of mind is plainly unhistorical, in that it presupposes the fundamentally unalterable character of human nature. But, as Rene Wellek has noted of the seventeenth century, 'more and more attention was paid to the climatic and historical conditions of literature, and increasingly literature

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was seen in terms of social conditions and intellectual atmosphere. ' 2 By the eighteenth century it was coming to be felt that human institutions, including literature, were affected by change and movement in time. Much of the credit for this awakening of the historical sense must go to the Neapolitan thinker Giovanni Battista Vico, who published in 1725 his epoch-making work on the philosophy of history, La soienza nuova. Another important impetus to the growth of the historical sense later in the eighteenth century was Herder's introduction of the notion of cultural evolution in Ideen zur PhiZosophie der Gesohiohte der Mensohheit. Certainly major changes in literary theory were being made under the influence of the quickening historical sense. By the late eighteenth century the neoclassical theorists with their literary laws and precepts were less influential; attention slowly began to be paid to medieval literature and folklore, and exclusive interest in Graeco-Roman civilization yielded to curiosity about remote cultural forms, such as Chinese tragedy and Oriental poetry. But despite the development of the sense of history and of individuality and the burgeoning of the antiquarian tendency, the actual achievements of literary his~ory in ~he sieoZe des Zumieres were by and large slight. Most of the histories produced were 'mere accumulations of biographical and bibliographical information, huge storehouses of raw materials' (p. 29). In this category are the works compiled by antiquaries like Muratori and Tiraboschi in Italy, P. Xavier Lampillas and P. Juan Andres in Spain, and the Benedictine group of St Maur. In sum, it seems clear that contributions to the historical study of literature made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were principally those of collecting materials, discovering the fact of historical change and development, and laying intellectual foundations. The important place occupied by history on the intellectual map of the nineteenth century has often been noted. Its prestige was greatly enhanced by the fruitful contact with philosophy and science. Eminent thinkers like Hegel, Comte, and Marx constructed imposing philosophies of history, and Darwin's evolutionary ideas, developed in The Origin of Speoies by Means of Natural SeZeotion, brought science in line with history to the extent that they shared 'a subject matter essentially progressive. ' 3 History, then, played a prominent role in the nineteenth-century intellectual revolution. (Rene Wellek has spoken of the nineteenth-century philosophical background pertinent to criticism and literary history in

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Literary History

terms of two opposing currents, stating that 'the change from the idealistic Hegelian atmosphere of the early nineteenth century to the prevalence of empirical, positivistic or materialistic allegiances and terminologies is too obvious to be missed.')~ Literary history thrived in Europe (particularly in France and Germany) as never before. No longer content with the mere collection of names, dates, and titles, the nineteenth-century literary historian, conversant with the idea of cultural causality and the sense of spiritual forces ruling the world order, sought to ascertain the leading ideas in works of literature and to trace the relations and developments of literary phenomena. Out of German Romanticism, which brought together 'poetics, history, folklore, and comparative religion,' 5 as W.K. Wimsatt puts it, came impressive literary history in the works of the Schlegel brothers. Taking their lead from Herder, they made brilliant incursions into the new field of Kulturgeschichte. The next German literary historian of note is G.G. Gervinus, whose Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen attempts to consider German literature in its political aspect as the expression of the Volksgeist. In France the celebrated critic Sainte-Beuve wrote literary history, but his special area of concern was the biographical branch of literary history. Lesser lights, such as Sismondi, Villemain, Ampere, and Chasles, are the representative figures in French literary history of the first half of the century. An earlier development of the historical study of literature had emerged in 1800 in the shape of Mme de Stael's La litterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions. In this work Mme de Stael tentatively engaged in the social explanation of literary history. This movement towards a sociological interpretation of literature made great advances with the appearance in 1863 of Hippolyte Taine's Histoire de la litterature anglaise. The introduction to the work stresses the significance of literature as a source for the understanding of 'la fa~on dont les hommes avaient senti et pense il y a plusieurs siecles,' 6 and contains the momentous proposition that literature is the product of deterministic forces, the outcome of the pressures of 'la race, le milieu et le moment. ' 7 After the mid-century, there was a proliferation of literary histories, most of them written under the influence of positivism. In Germany notable examples are Hermann Hettner's

Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im achzehn Jahrhundert and Wilhelm Scherer's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur.

Scherer follows Taine in using a triad formula in his approach

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to literature ('das Ererbte, das Erlernte, das Erlebte'), and his history shows great concern with sources and influences and the collection of facts. Of the literary historians writing in France later in the century, the two most conspicuous were Fernand Brunetiere and Gustave Lanson. Renowned for his Histoire de la litterature franqaise, Lanson has been called, by Henri Peyre, 'the master of literary history . ' 8 In other countries literary history was not cultivated with such energy and success. Britain produced no outstanding literary history before W.J. Courthope's A History of English Poetry, though interesting attempts were made by J.A. Symonds, Sir Leslie Stephen, and George Saintsbury, among others. In Italy Francesco de Sanctis's Storia della letteratura italiana stands in a class by itself . It is appropriate to dwell at greater length on the development of nineteenth-century Spanish literary history . In a brief study of the topic Guillermo Diaz-Plaja set down the main tendencies: 9 the incorporation of the eighteenth-century legacy of scholarship; the concern for collecting and editing texts, following the example set by Bartolome Jose Gallardo; and the invaluable part played by foreign (especially German) scholars in undertaking full-length historical studies of Spanish literature. The importance of German contributions by Bouterweck, von Schack, and Wolf is emphasized, and the smaller contribution of French, British, and American scholars briefly mentioned. The native tradition of nineteenthcentury Spanish literary history is traced from Alberto Lista's Lecciones de literatura espanola through Jose Amador de los Rios's Historia cr{tica de la literatura espanola and the predominantly medieval studies of Manual Mila y Fontanals, to emerge triumphantly in the work of Mila's pupil, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, who, to quote Damaso Alonso, 'creo sencillamente creo, entre nosotros, la historia de nuestra literatura; poblo un espacio inmenso de la cultura espanola, antes casi desierto. 110 The emphasis so far has been placed on the finished products, literary histories themselves. It is necessary to consider briefly the kinds of methods and concerns that contributed to the unprecedented rise of literary history in the nineteenth century. In Science and the Modern World, A.N. Whitehead referred to the crucial role of the Germans in the astonishing development of scholarship in the last century. 11 Scholars like Jakob Grimm, Franz Bopp, Friedrich Diez, and August Schleicher were to the fore in opening up the field of philology; and branches of literary history like textual

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Literary History

criticism, bibliography, Geistesgeschichte, cultural history, and genetic (sources, antecedents, filiations, and influences) studies were all industriously practised by German scholars. By the close of the nineteenth century, German scholarship exerted a dominant influence in the academic world at large and much fine work was accomplished; but it is not difficult to imagine how 'positivistic factualism' could be taken to excess by mechanical minds and soon lead to pedantry. This was precisely the order of things at the turn of the century: scholarship had turned sour. Eminent scholars like Americo Castro, Leo Spitzer, and Eugene Vinaver, 12 looking back to their early training in philology, have written with dissatisfaction of the positivistic, fact-digging, 'value-free' methods they were forced to use. The situation differed from country to country, but the reaction against philological historicism was widespread and sustained over several decades. Rene Wellek has dealt lucidly with the question in 'The Revolt against Positivism in Recent European Scholarship' and in 'American Literary Scholarship. ' 13 The reaction was particularly severe in Germany, 'the motherland of philology and the bastion of philological literary history in the nineteenth century,' 14 and in the United States, which had imported German philological scholarship more abundantly than other countries. 15 In France there was opposition to 'Lansonnisme' and academic literary studies but it was not pushed to such extreme limits, partly because scholarship was not so vulnerable to attack, its practitioners having retained a sound critical sense. Dominating the literary scene in Italy, Croce steered literary criticism and theory away from traditional channels and imposed his o~ theory of art as expression. There was discontent with the traditional methods of scholarship in Britain but objections were not formulated in any systematic way. Spain also shared in the reaction against positivistic scholarship, though it did so with less vehemence than other countries, simply be~ause positivism had not sent down such deep roots as it had in many other countries. Furthermore, the commanding presence of the distinguished scholar Ramon Menendez Pidal, a figure analogous to Croce in national influence if not in general outlook, acted as restraining influence. The academic approach in literary studies, with its accent on historical and (pseudo-) scientific methods, had led early in the century to mindless research into trivial details of authors' lives ('the lock of hair, the teapot, and the writing

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desk,' as Wimsatt graphically has it) 16 and into historical backgrounds, to frantic searches for parallels, sources, and influences, and, in effect, to inconsequential fact-gathering. As Harry Levin has remarked of academic research, it 'has concentrated so heavily on the background that the foreBround has been almost obliterated. ' 17 Early protest about this state of affairs came from Neo-humanists like Irving Babbit and figures like John Jay Chapman, but it has been the burden of a main line of twentieth-century criticism to attempt to correct this anomalous situation and to direct attention to the literary work itself. Developing out of the early criticism of T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and William Empson in England, the Anglo-American concern was to pursue an 'objective,' or 'cognitive,' kind of criticism that sought meaning and value in the form of a work of literature and its special way of using language. The movement, which came to be known in the United States as New Criticism and included such critics as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, R.P, Blackmur and W.K. Wimsatt, took shape in the thirties, gathered force in the forties, and finally established itself as a kind of orthodoxy around 1950. The English version of New Criticism flourished under F.R. Leavis and his associates who wrote in the quarterly review Scrutiny (1932-53). Controversy raged around both the American and the English critical groups, for their aim was to subvert the reigning academic Establishment (in England, the literary and even cultural Establishment, as well). One charge frequently laid against the New Critics and the Scrutineers was that they were unhistorical in their approach to literature. The unhistorical approach had been anticipated by T.S. Eliot; in a celebrated early essay, Eliot had stated that 'the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer •.• has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. ' 18 It now seems clear that, in the heyday of New Criticism, literary history was neglected in favour of an insistence on critical standards and on the central importance of 'close reading.' There was of course fierce opposition to New Critical ideas, and the apologists of the movement sometimes went to extreme lengths in their attacks on literary scholarship. This polemical climate inevitably produced a rift between scholars and critics, or, in the words of Eugene Vinaver, 'antagonism between methodical scholarship and literary discernment.' 19 Nevertheless, the critics of the new order did not wholly abandon interest in literary history.

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Cleanth Brooks and W.K. Wimsatt in the United States and F.R. Leavis in England concerned themselves, on occasions, with the subject. A particularly revealing instance of the dichotomy between the scholarly and the critical approaches is offered in the polemical exchanges, conducted at intervals over thirty years, between F.W. Bateson of Oxford and F.R . Leavis of Cambridge . The first phase of the exchanges started with Leavis's review of Bateson's English Poetry and the English Language and centred on problems related to literary history. 20 Leavis's ideas are interesting in that they represent a highly intelligent statement of some of the attitudes to literary history held by exponents and sympathizers of New Criticism. Leavis anathematizes traditional, run-of-the-mill literary history as 'the usual compilation for the use of examinees - names, titles, dates, "facts about," irrelevancies, superficial comments' (p. 12). He also insists that 'the essential thing about such a history will be the focus, the centre of interest : the centre of interest will always be in literature, the focus always upon literary values •.• the discrimination, the eye for significance, will be the literary critic's' (p. 13). A third point of interest for the present discussion is Leavis's central concern with the significance of the literary work as viewed from the present : 'Such a history, then, could be accomplished only by a writer interested in, and intelligent about, the present. It would, for one thing, be an attempt to establish a perspective, to determine what of English poetry of the past is, or ought to be, alive for us now' (p. 14). Bateson's position is that of the scholar who regards literary criticism as a pursuit separate from scholarship, and the writing of literary history as a much simpler task than the one envisaged by his adversary. 'A critical judgement ••. is,' he declares, 'the expression of an immediate intuition ... An element of faith on the reader's part and of impressiveness or persuasiveness on the writer's must always enter into the effective propagation of every form of literary criticism. For a literary historian, life is much simpler •. • The historian has simply to present his reader with the evidence upon which he has himself based his conclusions, and if the evidence proves to be trustworthy and adequate his reader can have no alternative except to concur in it. ' 21 The debate, resumed years later, was more generally concerned with the function of criticism, 22 and though Bateson is more conciliatory in his approach to criticism, the divide between his opponent and himself has not been closed. Leavis continues to insist on

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the importance of considering older works of literature from the point of view of the present age, and Bateson continues to emphasize the need to pay attention to their historical context. Leavis, in fact, ventured in 1948 into the field of literary history with The Great Tradition, as had Cleanth Brooks in 1939 with Modern Poetry and the Tradition, but neither work, containing, as it did, criticism of the first order, could satisfy any but the most ardent Leavisite or enthusiast of New Criticism, so idiosyncratic and exclusive is the sense of tradition in both works. Perhaps the most interesting discussion of literary history from the angle of New Criticism is contained in W.K. Wimsatt's essay 'History and Criticism' subtitled, significantly, 'A Problematic Relationship. ' 23 There Wimsatt deals cogently with the problems but is concerned not to seek a solution but to provide 'the delineation of a certain issue which arises between literary criticism and historical scholarship. This issue I look upon as something unavoidably problematic, part of a troublesome opposition which runs through all our experience - between the particular and the universal, between the contingent and what is in any sense necessary, probable, or ideal, between what merely was and what in any way is' (p. 253). A more typical New Critical approach to historical criticism is offered by R.P. Blackmur, when he notes that 'perhaps the sum of what is meant by historical criticism and scholarship is this: it gives a body of conscious knowledge to occupy our minds while we acquire - or re-acquire - the deep unconscious skills of combination and selection of perception of which literature is made. No skill is known in the arts until it has run into the fingertips of second nature. Meanwhile we have to busy ourselves at the portals, as if we were inside. 124 It was left to independent critics like Edmund Wilson, Rene Wellek, and Lionel Trilling (none of them opposed in principle to New Criticism) to reassert the central place of history in literature, literary studies, and human experience generally. Lionel Trilling, in particular, is judicious and penetrating in his comments on the historical approach to literature: 'The literary work is ineluctably a historical fact, and, what is more important, its historicity is a fact in our aesthetic experience . Literature, we may say, must in some sense always be an historical study, for literature is an historical art. ' 25 His remarks on the problems of past and present perspectives on literature are also illuminating: 'In the New Critics' refusal to take critical account of the

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historicity of the work there is, one understands, the impulse to make the work of the past more immediate and more real, to deny that between now and then there is any essential difference, the spirit of man being one and continuous. But it is only if we are aware of the reality of the past that we can feel it as alive and present' (p. 186). An insistence on the necessary role of history in criticism and critical theory has long been a recurrent theme in Rene Wellek's writings. In Theory of Literature he remarks that 'they implicate each other so thoroughly as to make inconceivable literary theory without criticism or history, or criticism without theory and history, or history without theory and criticism. ' 26 Through the sixties to the present day, a period in which a throng of critical systems (Marxist, existential, mythical, structuralist, and phenomenological, for example) vie for hegemony, there has been a steady call for a pluralistic and synthetic approach to criticism. Some theorists, like Murray Krieger, Geoffrey Hartman, and Claudio Guillen, are, in their differing ways, involved in the process of incorporating historical concern with the literary text into their formalist schemes and practices. Guillen, for instance, has stated recently that 'to explore the idea of literary history may very well be the main theoretical task that confronts the student of literature today. ' 27 An unhistorical approach to literature became influential in other countries during the present century. In Italy Croce attacked the positivistic attitude to scholarship and was unreceptive to the idea of history's relevance for the critical endeavour, arguing that history of literature could be written successfully only in the form of monographs on writers or works. A reaction against this extreme view is seen in the work of Natalino Sapegno and Mario Fubini. French writers like Paul Valery were hostile to the historical approach, but only in recent years has the quarrel between scholar and critic come to a head in the polemic between Raymond Picard, a noted traditional scholar, and Raymond Barthes, one of the leading French structuralist critics, who holds that literary history should be subsumed under the heading of history as a whole. 28 In England F.R. Leavis's influence was intense but by no means overpowering, for there were academic and independent critics who resisted his ideas and continued to employ traditional historical methods; over the last twenty years or so, sophisticated defences of the historical approach have come from such scholars as Dame Helen Gardner (The Business of Criticism, 1959) and George Watson (The Study of

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Li terature, 1969). Watson describes his book as a 'rationale of literary history' (p . 9) and makes a clear and impassioned plea for the recognition of history's important place in literary studies . In Spain the historical study of literature has a hallowed tradition, with major figures of the stature of Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo and his pupil Ramon Menendez Pidal. Both of these great scholars combined an historical approach with a strong aesthetic sense and considerable critical acumen . Menendez Pidal's antipositivistic employment of hypothesis as a working method has been pointed out by Guillermo DiazPlaja,29 who points out that 'el saber historico literario ilustre disciplina dentro de la ciencia espanola - esta hecho del sentido estetico, integrandolo en la nocion general de la sucesion historica' (p. 93). Little affected by a vigorous school of stylistics - deriving from the work of Saussure, Vossler, and Spitzer and implanted in Spain largely under the · aegis of Damaso Alonso (whose unhistorical view of literature has been noted) - Spanish scholarship and criticism produced much work along traditional lines, or went an eclectic way in response to a variety of influences, including those of Ortega y Gasset and Eugenio D'Ors, as can be seen in the polyfaceted work of a critic like Guillermo Diaz-Plaja . Certainly, no sustained attack on the historical approach has been mounted in Spain . It is fitting that the most impressive theoretical attempts to unite literary history and formalism should come from the homeland of Herder and Hegel. Hans Robert Jauss's attempt stresses the importance of the reading experience 30 and expounds 'an aesthetics of reception and impact' (p. 13); and Robert Weimann offers a sophisticated case for a dialectical consideration of literary works according to their 'past significance and present meaning. 131 The problems involved in writing literary history are numerous. Of the hundreds of literary histories that have been written, only a few are read from generation to generation by any other than academic specialists and their students . In our age a loss of confidence in the historiography of literature has declared itself. The fact is that in this century there has grown up a greater awareness of the problems related to historiography - problems having to do with ideology, causality, morality, chronology, and the nature of facts and events - and also a greater awareness of problems related to literary study, with its plurality of approaches and its disputes over aspects of literary theory. Literary history has

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Literary History

to take cognizance of both sets of problems. Then further questions present themselves: if literature is part of life, to what extent and in what ways is literature bound up with culture, institutions, and ideas in general? Wallace Fowlie has commented on the broadening scope of literary history, 'With the development of "les sciences humaines," which include sociology, ethnology, economics, psychology, and linguistics, there are new responsibilities not only for the discipline of history, but also for literary criticism and the history of literature .. • A literary historian has to be open to all schools and all persuasions. ' 32 There is no doubt that the writing of literary history at the present time demands an unusual range of abilities: deep knowledge of the subject, a firm critical sense, an intelligent concern with past and current tendencies in literary criticism and theory, a grasp of related disciplines, great flexibility, and a sure sense of the relevant. In the age of specialization, when the scholar's purview takes in one literature, one period, or even one author, the literary historian ranging over a wide field risks censure from a host of academic experts. There are even scholars who reject literary histories wholesale, as Damaso Alonso does, calling them 'vastas necropolis. ' 33 R.S. Crane, in his rigorous and penetrating essay 'Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History,' finds the leading literary histories written in English before 1950 very wanting. This essay offers a program for the future 'narrative historian of forms' who would be concerned with the history of literature treated as literature, not as social history or history of ideas. 34 Other theorists, such as Rene Wellek and Northrop Frye, 35 have called for a type of literary history conce,ived in its own terms rather than related to outside concerns. But this kind of project has been criticized as too narrow and formalist by the many present-day critics who are engaged in the study of the relations between literature and society. Thus, literary history is beset by all manner of problems, not the least being how to set about the task, now that the writing of positivistic, fact-packed literary history has lost status and validity. The historical mode of criticism continues to be much used. Brewster Rogerson has attempted to define the historical critic's aims and concerns as follows: For him the poem is essentially a historical phenomenon, ar1s1ng out of conditions of thought and experience that may differ in countless ways from modern conditions, and

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that therefore require to be studied if the poem is to yield up its full meaning. He attempts to set the poem once again in its original context in time, reconstructing the circumstances of its composition and public reception, pointing out its connections with the artistic and intellectual assumptions of its age, and thus restoring as fully as he can the aspect it would have worn for a contemporary reader. He may tend to identify the poem with its original meaning, and insist that it is accessible only to a thoroughly instructed reader ••• Or he may take the less stringent view that any poem will offer the reader more in proportion as he learns to see the sense it makes historically, and thus that the study of many sorts of detail - the conventions of courtly love, the psychology of humors, the political difficulties of Charles II, or the influence of Frazer's Golden Bough - may help to clarify and enrich a given poem here and now. Though he is well aware that a modern cannot turn himself into an ancient by an act of will, nor even arm himself with the appropriate knowledge, the historical critic nonetheless regards the past of the poem as implicit in its present, and devotes himself to learning as much of it as he can. 36 The historicist viewpoint is not ruled out of court as it was thirty years ago. This is partly because the reign of New Criticism as an orthodoxy has ended, and partly because a more flexible exposition of the principles of historical criticism has come from some of its advocates, particularly George Watson, who defends an approach to criticism based on 'wise eclecticism. ' 37 It seems dangerously dogmatic to deny that historical knowledge may throw light on a text, particularly if it belongs to an age remote from the present and contains words, symbols, and allegories unfamiliar to the reader of today. For all that,details of historical background can be inert knowledge, a mere show of learning. The touchstone is relevance, and relevance can be judged only in the finished performance of the critic. 38 Questions such as the notion of intentionality, whether literature is a mirror of historical context, and to what extent literature itself influences the historical context, continue to be subjects for debate. Some theorists like Ronald Peacock argue for the need to consider literary works from different temporal perspectives, that is, for instance, according to 'the triangular scheme of past, present, and ahistorical. ' 39 This kind of interest in a synthetic approach

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is not uncommon in the field of theory, but is rather rare in actual critical practice. Perhaps there is some truth in Robert Heilman's argument, advanced along psychological lines, that critics have an instinct either for 'differentiation' (historical critics) or for 'integration' (formalist critics),40 and that what have been 'for some decades called history and criticism represent generally, though not exclusively, these converse workings of the human mind; these opposing movements, one toward an atomization of authoritative time, the other toward the single vision sub specie aeternitatis' (p. 428). The historical approach to literature is bedevilled with problems, largely because of the complex ways in which a work resides and functions in time. A literary work is an historical entity, created at a particular time and place, and read, if it survives its first reception, by succeeding generations who themselves are part of the climate of an age. At intervals, therefore, as literary tastes change, past works of acknowledged merit require to be reinterpreted. Theoretical questions relating to the historical study of literature also remain subject to constant scrutiny and revision. It seems sensible to accept that, by virtue of education and cultural heritage, the Western critic naturally assumes a sense of history; because he is irrevocably of the present, he can never enter into the thinking processes of an Elizabethan but he can look back into the past and wonder what those processes were. In Galdosian scholarship a considerable amount of work has been conducted along traditional historical lines. The development of this type of study as applied to Galdos's works followed the rise of academic scholarship in the twentieth century. The critical attention accorded Galdos in the nineteenth century was almost exclusively the work of reviewers writing in the daily press or in cultural reviews like the Revista de Espana. Spanish literary scholars were then, as a rule, concerned with past literature. There were exceptions, of course, as when Menendez y Pelayo, in his speech welcoming Galdos to the Academy, concentrated on the task of defining the novelist's achievement, of 'placing' 41 him in a broad European context, dealing to this end briefly with sources and influences incorporated by Galdos into his works. 42 Most reviews of the author's works centre on moral, religious, and ideological issues, and on components of the works, such as plot, characters, and style. None the less, a well-informed

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critic like Clarin often indulged in the art of 'placing,' though this activity was not analytical and historically directed, but rather a means of focusing and clarifying his arguments, of using comparison, one of 'the chief tools of the critic,' as T.S . Eliot has said . 43 An extraordinary amount of historical scholarship devoted to Galdos consists of studies on sources and influences. This kind of study has attracted the derision of many scholars and critics, including Pedro Salinas, who calls it 'critica hidraulica,' and David Daiches, who speaks of 'the pedantic Einfluss hunter who fills learned periodicals with meaningless evidence of assumed influence of X on Y. ' 44 Too often the method was employed without flair or critical orientation, and without any sense of the complex problems involved. The notion of causal links between works was simply taken for granted. 'The unexamined assumption in such research' Rene Wellek has observed incisively, 'is the existence of a neutral fact which is supposed to be connected as if by a thread with other preceding facts. But the whole conception of a "cause" in literary study is singularly uncritical; nobody has ever been able to show that a work of art was "caused" by another work of art, even though parallels and similarities can be accumulated . A later work of art may not have been possible without a preceding one, but it cannot have been caused by it. ' 45 And then there was little sense of how subtle and elusive the actual play of influence can be; on this point Lionel Trilling has contributed the shrewd corrective remark that 'before the idea of influence we ought to be far more puzzled than we are; if we find it hard to be puzzled enough, we may contrive to induce the proper state of uncertainty by turning the word upon ourselves asking, "What have been the influences that made me the person I am, and to whom would I entrust the task of truly discovering what they were?"' 46 Writers themselves frequently protest against the simple-minded attribution of influence. 'Critiquecreateurs' like Gide and Azorin have made illuminating comments on the question: Gide noted his own tendency to suppress certain things later found in other writers, 4 7 and Azorin laid emphasis on the difficulty of separating literary influences from everyday pressures ('lo iliterario') . 48 The noxious effects of this widespread concern to track down sources and influences in literary works are well known. It has led scholars to turn habitually backwards to the past, and often the remote past, causing them to lose touch with literature as a going concern, one that involves creative

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artists seeking new directions, reacting against or seeking stimulation from the literary tradition, and writing for a particular community at a particular time. Einfluss study has also cut them off from any awareness that, as Henri Peyre has observed, 'there are such things as altogether new irruptions in a literary tradition, revolutionary creations ex abrupto and, for all practical purposes, ex nihilo' and that 'there is a simultaneous, if mysterious polygenesis of themes and ideas. ' 49 Scholarly work became tied up with extraneous undertakings and, as Keith Ellis puts it, 'emphasis on the detection of similarities and influences ... resulted in the kind of endeavour that is not central to the primary critical task of analyzing, explicating and interpreting the works themselves. ,so This is not to suggest that this kind of study is necessarily futile. Conducted in an imaginative and critically probing way, study of sources and influences can contribute to the understanding of works, writers, and whole literatures. It clearly has an important part to play in comparative literature, intellectual history, and cultural studies . The business of revaluing the function of this historical kind of study has fallen largely to comparative literature, which traditionally (and especially in France) had been concerned with literary influence and literary relations. Comparatists like Anna Balakian, Haskell M. Block, Wolfgang Clemen, Clau~io Guillen, Ihab H. Hassan, and Joseph T. Shaw 51 have sought to clarify such terms as source, influence, and indebtedness and demonstrate their interrelatedness with other concepts, such as analogy, tradition, literary fortune, and reception. Where 'influence' is concerned, the current tendency is to designate various types; for example, direct, indirect, negative, and trahison creatrice. S.S. Prawer has dealt lucidly with these and other forms of influence and emphasized the complex nature of the question, 52 remarking on 'the delicate balance, the dialectical relationship, of influence and originality, convention and innovation, conscious learning and spontaneous and deliberate transmutation' (p. 73). In dealing with the matter of how to conduct source and influence studies, R.S. Crane makes some luminous comments: The historian • •. will attempt to exhibit the special features which differentiate a particular writer's response to a common influence from the responses of his contemporaries; he will emphasize the peculiar conjunctions of materials from heterogenous sources which tend, even when the borrowings (as in Montaigne) are extensive, to set a

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Galdos and His Critics writer of some originality of mind apart from others; above all, he will take pains to discriminate causally among instances of indebtedness or influence by showing how much, precisely, they explain in an author's works, that is, whether the debt to an earlier writer or tradition is for subject matter, or for suggestions in handling the medium, or for devices of technique, or for the structural formula of a plot or of certain incidents or characters, or for the idea, directly or indirectly imparted, of formal effects to be aimed at, or for some combination of these possibilities.53

Also pertinent in this context is his comment on the subject of sources and influences that when 'any writer of more than ordinary originality and power' is under consideration, 'such a writer .•. is by definition, and antecedently to the writing of any particular work, a man who cannot help altering more or less, at the same time that he assimilates, the ideas and materials of his age and the tradition of art he has elected to follow. The historian of forms, while not neglecting the question of sources, will thus seek to handle it in such a way as to make clear the extent to which a given writer is himself a cause as well as an effect of the influences playing upon him' (p. 75). These are points worth keeping in mind in any examination of source and influence studies. In their search for sources and influences from past literature to be found in Galdos's works, scholars have often taken account of the author's stated interest in earlier writers . This procedure seems to offer at least a firm starting point. Galdos has written of his interest in Latin literature, which he had studied enthusiastically under Alfredo Adolfo Camus at the University of Madrid. Josette Blanquat has suggested that Camus's interpretation of Latin literature left a lasting imprint on Galdos, 54 but so far there have been few specific studies to support this. Articles by Alexander Haggerty Krappe, William H. Shoemaker, and Alfred Rodriguez 55 deal with small-scale borrowings from Lucretius, Plautus (or, more likely, Torres Naharro, a dramatist influenced by Plautus), Horace, and Virgil, respectively. A study by Stephen Gilman; 6 taking a broader approach, argues that the classical references in Dona PePfecta perform an ironic function and that the structure of the novel is built on the lines of a Greek classical tragedy.

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Several scholars, including Frank P. Bowman, Ciriaco Moron Arroyo, Alexander A. Parker, and Gustavo Correa, 57 have discussed the influence of the Bible on Galdos, particularly with reference to works like Nazar{n, Halma, and Miau. In a thorough article Jose Schraibman considers the biblical quotations contained in Misericordia, bringing out their function of contributing to the themes, content, and characterization of the novel. 5 8 Next to nothing has been written on Galdos's concern with medieval literature and ideas. Joaquin Casalduero, in his article 'Galdos y la Edad Media, ' 59 offers some hints and speculations regarding the possible impact on Galdos's production of such works as the Cantar de m{o Cid, the Divina commedia, La Celestina, and the Libra de buen amor . He also claims that Galdos reacted to the Middle Ages in a manner typical of his time. 60 These are unsubstantiated opinions, however, and need to be followed up with intensive studies of various aspects of the topic. Galdos expressed admiration for Shakespeare on several occasions, and wrote a glowing account of his v1s1t to Stratford-on-Avon. Before the staging of El abuelo, according to Eduardo Gomez de Baquero, 61 the Madrid press had reported that Galdos was adapting a version of King Lear for the Spanish stage. This, coupled with the fact that an adaptation of Antony an~ Cleopatra, by Eugenio Selles, was staged at about the same time as El abuelo, contributed to the propensity of contemporary reviewers to discuss the influence of Shakespeare on Galdos's play. On this matter, Casalduero, for one, has declared his failure to find any filiation between El abuelo and King Lear. 62 Shakespearean influence on Galdos has not yet been subjected to much extended scholarly treatment. But the articles that exist, by William H. Shoemaker, Alfred Rodriguez, and Hope K. Goodale, 63 are, each in its different way, very useful. Shoemaker's article reveals that Galdos came by the title of La de los tristes destinos, not directly from Shakespeare's Richard III, as had been presumed, but from a speech delivered by a Spanish politician, Antonio Aparisi y Guijarro, who in turn may have adapted it from Guizot's French translation of the Shakespearean work. In a perceptive article Rodriguez demonstrates how Galdos,with artistry and ironic intent, incorporated plot and character elements of Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice into Zaragoza. Goodale considers allusions to Shakespeare in Gal dos' s works, cone luding that the English

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dramatist was 'a major formative influence on Galdos's own career' (p. 259). The influence of Spanish Golden Age writers on Galdos has also received only sparse treatment. Sherman Eoff 64 deals illuminatingly with Galdos's assimilation of picaresque psychology into Lo prohibido, arguing that the novel contains a kind of 'creative' interpretation of Guzman de Alfarache. Influence of the life and works of Spanish mystics, particularly Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz, on Angel Guerra, Nazarin, Halma, and Misericordia is briefly examined in an article by Gustavo Correa. 65 Robert Ricard 66 has noted phrases reminiscent of St Ignatius of Loyola in Memorias de un cortesano de 1815 and in Torquemada y San Pedro, but mindful of Galdos's dislike of the Jesuits, cautiously suggests that Galdos may have drawn on his reading or recollections of books of devotion . Direct influence of Quevedo has been detected by Suzanne Raphael, 67 who compares several passages of La de Bringas with passages of Sueno del infierno in order to bring out a 'filiation resolument quevedesque par le ton, le mouvement, le vocabulaire et les themes' (p. 197). Galdos's critical appropriation of elements from the Calderonian tradition is considered by Gustavo Correa, 68 who discusses aspects of Calderon's ideas with reference to La Fontana de

Oro, Dona Perfecta, La familia de Leon Roch, El doctor Centeno, Fortunata y Jacinta, La incognita, Realidad, Angel Guerra, and El abuelo.

One Golden Age writer, Cervantes, stands out as a deep and enduring influence on Galdos . Galdos's devotion to the Quijote began in his youth and continued for the rest of his life; if the testimony of El Bachiller Corchuelo is to be trusted, he knew parts of the work by heart. 69 He also wrote articles on Cervantes, 70 and above all assimilated in the most fruitful way all manner of Cervantine ideas, materials, and techniques. This pervasive influence has been commented upon by Galdos himself, his contemporaries, and by all the major critics from Clarin to Gullon. A close friend, Emilia Pardo Bazan, roundly stated that 'toda la obra de Galdos responde a la estructura del Quijote,' 71 and ·in our time Montesinos has echoed this judgment when he declared that 'Galdos se hizo en la lectura del Quijote . Es increible lo que llego a deber a Cervantes •.. dire que Cervantes le ha hecho a Galdos los ojos. 172 Although references to Cervantine influence on Galdos abound in earlier reviews, articles, and books, it was not until 1933 that a scholarly article on the topic appeared.

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J. Warshaw 73 undertook to show the specific nature of the writer's debt to Cervantes, pointing to allusions, expressions, phraseology, antonomasia, characterization, parallel incidents, irony, parody, burlesque, and quixotism. Later specialists in the topic, like J. Chalmers Herman 74 and Antonio Obaid, 75 have built on the foundations laid by Warshaw. In 1955 J. Chalmers Herman published a monograph under the title Don Quijote and the Novels of Perez Caldas. 76 This work offers a solid account of the impact made by Cervantes and the Quijote on Galdos and of the types of influence that manifest themselves in his novels. Useful as it is, however, Herman's study offers a descriptive approach to the topic and does not go far in showing how 'el orbe artistico cervantino se transmute en un orbe artistico galdosiano,' to quote Francisco Ayala. 77 This is a task for a critic with a firm grasp of literary form and narrative techniques. Who better fitted than Ayala himself to undertake such a study? Unfortunately Ayala has not attempted to deal with the broad ramifications of the question, but has devoted a short study to a particular instance of Cervantes's influence on Galdos's narrative techniques which is a model of clarity and rigour (pp. 7185). Focusing his attention on the Torquemada series, he shows how Galdos employs two Cervantine procedures: first, that of erasing the boundaries between the fictional world and the real world so as to place the reader on a level with the characters; second, that of employing a series of narrators in order to create a multitude of ironic perspectives on the action that help to convey the illusion of shifting reality. Thus, Ayala brings out the way in which Galdos assimilates some of 'los mas sutiles secretos de la refinadisima tecnica desplegada en la elaboracion del Quijote' (p.

73) .

Another substantial contribution to the study of Cervantine influence on Galdos is Rodolfo Cardona's article, 'Cervantes y Galdos. ' 78 As the title suggests, this study adopts a general approach to the matter of Cervantine influence on Galdos: Discussed are such questions as Galdos's writings on Cervantes, the influence of Cervantes on Galdos's school essays and early writings and on La sombra, the editions of Cervantes's works in Galdos's library, annotations made by Galdos in books by Cervantes, books that influenced Galdos's interpretation of Cervantes, previous studies of Cervantine influence on the author, and technical influence relating to characterization, recurrence of characters, and

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Galdos and His Critics

the complex deployment of narrators. Cardona also emphasizes the crucial importance of Cervantes's influence on Galdos's literary career: Galdos situa en una categoria especial a Cervantes - junto a Shakespeare, Dante y Goethe-, categoria en la que no incluyo jamas a otros autores que fue descubriendo mas adelante, como Balzac y Dickens. Esto no equivale a negar el que Balzac y Dickens, al igual que muchos otros escritores, influyeran en Galdos de uno u otro modo. Loque quiero constar desde el principio es que todas estas influencias hubieran sido inutiles - como en realidad lo fueron para otros muchos novelistas espafioles de la epoca - si no hubiera sido por la profunda comprension que alcanzo Galdos del metodo de Cervantes para traducir al arte el mundo que le rodeaba y que, sin esto, Galdos se hubiera limitado a ser un simple epigono de los citados escritores ingleses o franceses, en vez de i?ualarles, de ser su equivalente en las letras espafiolas. 7 Another notable study approaches the question of Cervantine influence on Galdos from the point of view of Geistesgeschiahte. Julio Rodriguez-Puertolas endeavours to show that in Fortunata y Jacinta Galdos embodied certain ideas and concepts found in Cervantes's works that have to do with Nature (the primacy of Nature in human affairs), love (the animating force of Nature), and reality (each aspect of reality having a function to perform in the natural order). 80 According to Rodriguez-Puertolas, Galdos, like Cervantes, believes that man must live in consonance with nature and reality or find himself exposed to the danger of losing control of his life, or even of committing a fatal error; Galdos, however, perhaps under the influence of Hegel, goes beyond Cervantes in combining a concern with history into his outlook. Other articles concerned with the Cervantine presence in Galdos's works include those by Mariano Latorre, Joaquin Casalduero, Cesar Rodriguez Chicharro, Paul C. Smith, Gustavo Correa, Robert Ricard, Emilio Miro, Margarita Pedraz Garcia, John V. Falconieri, and Maria del Prado Escobar. 81 Few studies treat the question of eighteenth-century influence on Galdos. Jose Bergamin's essay 'Galdos y Goya' 82 compares the literary art of Galdos with the pictorial art of Goya. The influence of Moratin on Galdos has been demonstrated by Pablo Cabanas, 83 who claims that 'Moratin forma con Cervantes y Mesonero la gran trilogia nacional que orienta

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al mejor novelista del siglo pasado' (p. 226). The same scholar has also discussed Galdos's portrayal of the dramatist Comella in La carte de Carlos IV. 84 Francisco Yndurain has briefly discussed the influence of Ramon de la Cruz on Galdos in a recent short work. 85 More attention has been paid by scholars to the subject of nineteenth-century influences, literary and otherwise, on Galdos's sensibility and production. Although scholars may find the subject more inviting, it must be said that the more closely the particular study bears on a scholar's world, the thornier the problems that arise. Since each age possesses its own constellation of issues and problems, it is frequently difficult to distinguish between what elements in an author's work are original and what are simply 'in the air.' Hence influence is not easily differentiated from similarity or analogy, and often much debate and confusion are generated. The types of source and influence study pertaining to the nineteenth century are quite varied. Starting with the early twenties, some commendable studies of Galdos's historical sources for certain of the Episodios nacionales have been published. The French have excelled at this kind of close investigation, as shown in the articles by J. Sarrailh, Marcel Bataillon, and G. Boussagol. 86 These articles are rigorous and factual, but they also evince a concern with the ways in which Galdos incorporated historical data into his works. Other studies along similar lines have been made by Narciso Alonso Cortes, Carlos Vazquez Arjona, and Hans Hinterhauser. 87 A surprising instance of a non-literary source was discovered by E. Dale A. Randolph, 88 who makes a good case for Galdos's debt to Henry Maudsley's Physiology and Pathology of Mind, a work that appeared in England in 1867. This was 'a widely read clinical treatise from which he could have obtained all the details needed for his development of Maximiliano Rubin' (p. 55). In Randolph's opinion, Galdos could have read the work, if not in English, certainly in the French translation of 1879 or the Spanish one of 1880. From his early youth Galdos showed evidence of being a voracious reader; as a young man he seems to have been receptive to the major literary works that were emerging from Europe, particularly from France and England. There is ample proof that he read French with ease, but his knowledge of English was rather halting, as Walter T. Pattison's findings have shown (Galdos's translation of Pickwick Papers, assumed to be from the original English, was in fact made from the French translation). 89 The two eminent nineteenth-century

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European writers to whom Galdos gratefully acknowledged his indebtedness are Balzac and Dickens. Alleged influence on him of other writers, like Ibsen and Tolstoy, he repudiated. The subject of foreign influences on Galdos has continued to provoke scholarly interest and, on occasions, lively disagreement. The topic is treated in a general way by such authors of full-length critical works on Galdos as L.B. Walton, Joaquin Casalduero, Ricardo Gullon, and Jose F. Montesinos. 90 A perceptive study of Galdos's incorporation of a wide range of sources into Gloria and Marianela is to be found in Walter T. Pattison's Benito Perez Galdos and the Creative Process. 91 The opening chapter of this book is concerned with foreign influences on Galdos during his formative period. This study is undertaken 'on the basis of his autobiographical writings, such as his Memorias, of the hidden autobiographical references in his novels - especially in the later volumes of the Episodios nacionales, which picture the years when Galdos was serving his literary apprenticeship in Madrid - and finally on the basis of an examination of Galdos's private library, where the literary preferences and enthusiasms of the writer are often revealed by the number of volumes of a given writer and the amount of penciling and annotations they provoked' (pp. 6-7) . Pattison points to a whole network of influences that were operating on Galdos's sensibility at this time, mentioning names like Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, Lamartine, Thiers, Michelet, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Spencer, de Tocqueville, Gautier, Rousseau, Voltaire, Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Sand, Murger, and de Kock. 'I cannot agree,' he concludes, 'with Berkowitz in his statement that Galdos was then living in a trance. Rather I would compare this period to a renaissance, a fertilization of one literature by contacts with others, although in this case it is a personal, one-man renaissance' (p. 17). The study of links between Galdos and other European (particularly French) writers of the nineteenth century has attracted a fair number of scholars. The relations of similarity and dissimilarity between Balzac and Galdos and the influence of the former on the latter have been noted by Carlos Ollero and Maria Embeita, and discerningly explored by Francisco C. Lacosta. 92 Galdos's indebtedness to the French writer is examined in a more specific way by Marie-Claire Petit and A.G. Paradissis. 93 Petit proposes Pierrette as a source for La Fontana de Oro and El 19 de marzo y el 2 de mayo, and Beatrix as a source for Fortunata y Jacinta. Following Ricardo Gullon's lead, 94 Paradissis finds many points of

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similarity between Les Employes and Miau. Other source and influence studies relating Galdos's works to nineteenthcentury Franch authors and works have been made by Louise S. Blanco (Charles Nodier's short story 'Les Aveugles de Channnonay,' contained in Contes de la Veillee as a source for Marianela), 95 Walter T. Pattison (the influence of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and L'Homme qui rit, Eugene Sue's Le Juif errant on Marianela, and Octave Feuillet's Histoire de Sibylle on Gloria), 96 Alfred Rodriguez (Michelet's Le Pretre, la famille et la femme as a probable source for La familia de Leon Roch), Bernard Sicot (Octave Feuillet's Histoire de Sibylle as a source for Gloria), Robert Ricard (comparison between a passage of La familia de Leon Roch and of Flaubert's L!Education sentimentale, and between the final pages of Miau and a chapter of Alphonse Daudet's Le Nabab), and Monroe Z. Hafter (Anatole France's Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard as a source for El amigo Manso). 97 The nature and effects of Zola's influence on Galdos have been discussed on several occasions by Walter T. Pattison, and will be considered later in this chapter in connection with Galdos's relations with the Naturalists in Spain. Galdos and English literature is a subject that is still to be treated in depth. There are general articles by Antonio Mejia, Esteban Salazar Chapela, and Doireann MacDermott 98 that deal glancingly with the topic. Louise S. Blanco 99 has briefly indicated the resemblance between the plot of Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872) and Marianela (1878). Surprisingly enough the oft-mentioned Dickensian influence on Galdos has not yet been subjected to scrutiny, thou~h at least one academic article (by Effie L. Erickson) 10 has attempted to tackle the question - but to little avail. More interestingly treated have been the connections between Galdos and Sir Walter Scott. In the concluding comments to his examination of the subject, Antonio Regalado Garcia 101 states that 'las relaciones de Galdos con Scott son hondas y variadas, y de tal trascendencia que sin el precedente del autor escoces la novela historica galdosiana resultaria inexplicable' (p. 157). In a stimulating article on Cadiz, Daniel Devoto 102 has convincingly argued that a character of the novel, Lord Gray, is modelled on Lord Byron's eponymous hero of Don Juan. He goes on to show how Byronic and Cervantine elements are fused so as to give a 'supra-real' dimension to the novel. 103 It is well known that Galdos was irked by contemporary reviewers' allusions to Tolstoyan influence on his novels,

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starting from the appearance of Fortunata y Jacinta. 104 He protested vigorously against this alleged influence and even embodied a denial into his novel Halma. 105 The topic is a complex one, for at that period in his literary career Galdos was at the height of his powers and may have felt that any charges of Tolstoyan influence were calculated to belittle his own achievements; furthermore, concern with spiritual matters was not the preserve of Tolstoy only, it was a widely diffused phenomenon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. 106 The question was not seriously broached till the 1930s, when George Portnoff 107 attempted to show that Tolstoy's influence on Galdos was visible not in 'composition, technique, or plot, but in the observations, the artistic sincerity, the psychology, and the power of thought of the Russian author . 1108 Not many years passed before Joaquin Casalduero 109 stepped forward to refute Portnoff's conclusions. He writes: 'No intentare convencer al lector de que para comprender a Galdos no solo no es necesario acudir a Tolstoy, sino de que es contraproducente .•. Loque si me interesa es que nose confunda la formacion de un autor (lo que se suele llamar influencias) con la coincidencia de unos artistas con otros en la creacion y revelacion de una epoca' (p. 258). In recent years the question has been reopened by Vera Colin, 110 whose fundamental thesis is that Tolstoy's influence reveals itself in Galdos's concern to test out in certain novels some of the Russian writer's religious and moral beliefs, particularly those expressed in Ma religion. Subsequent work on the subject will have to take close account of Vera Colin's well-documented studies. Only a few articles exist on connections between Galdos and other nineteenth-century Russian novelists. The literary relations between Galdos and Turgenev are the subject of a brief discussion by A. Zviguilsky; and Vernon A. Chamberlin and Jack Weiner 111 have contributed a comparative study of Dona Perfecta and Fathers and Sons. Nazar{n has been compared, inan article by Julian Palley, 112 with Dostoievsky's El idiota, in terms of the main characters and the function of ideas within the works. Galdos reacted vehemently to the suggestion of Ibsenian influence on his work, and indeed elaborated on the matter in a contentious prologue to Los condenados, stating that 'ningun autor ha influido en mi menos que Ibsen. ' 113 Halfdan Gregersen's book on Ibsen and Spain 114 superficially considers parallels between certain Ibsen plays and Realidad, Mariucha,

Dona Perfecta (1876), La loca de ·la casa, La de San Quintin

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(1894), and Los condenados, but remains inconclusive about the question of influence. In a useful article Enrique Anderson Imbert 115 claims that Galdos fails to integrate certain Ibsenian borrowings (relating to ideas and expression) into the play El abuelo. Recently, however, Isaac Rubio 116 has come out strongly against any inkling of Ibsenian influence on Galdos; in a controversial interpretation of Galdos's theatre, he even asserts that 'si se comparan los sentidos que liberan las dramaturgias de Ibsen y de Galdos (sentidos, es decir visiones mas o menos coherentes, desveladas por las acciones y conflictos de los dramas) se podra comprobar que no solo no guardan ninguna analogia entre si sino que se oponen diametralmente' (p. 215). Apart from Kussky's shallow account of Galdos's interest in German literature and particularly in Goethe and his works, 117 little effort has been made to examine the question of Galdos's possible indebtedness to German writers. An exception is Walter T. Pattison's study of the influence of Wilhelm Meister on Marianela. 118 As far as a connection between Galdos and nineteenth-century Italian literature is concerned, there is a solitary article by Gilberto Paolini, 119 who finds 'a peculiar rapport and haunting similarity of theme, tone, and structure present in Benito Perez Galdos's Torquemada series and Giovanni Verga's Mastro don Gesualdo' (p. 327). A recent article situates Galdos and his work in an international perspective. Charles David Ley, 120 in a spirited attempt to gain recognition for the Spanish writer as a major European novelist, considers his art alongside that of Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Discussion of the impact on Galdos of these writers in addition to Scott and Zola leads Ley to observe that all these influences 'no hacen masque realzar la basica originalidad de Galdos y su enorme variedad' (pp. 11213). An area of study that tends to appeal to literary scholars, especially when an outstanding writer is in question, is an author's relation to his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. On the much-noted personal and literary relations between Galdos and Mesonero Romanos, the earliest scholarly article was by H. Chonon Berkowitz (1932), 121 whose treatment was highly informative. Later studies by Gaspar Gomez de la Serna and Carlos Seco Serrano underline the reciprocal influence exerted between the writers. 122 Other commentators on the topic are Eulogio Varela Hervias, Carlos Claveria, and Leo J. Hoar. 123 Robert Kirsner 124 has dealt briefly with the

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similarities between Galdos and Larra, remarking on their critical preoccupation with Spanish society, and Galdos's superiority over Larra in his capacity to objectify 'his agonizing vision of Spain' (p. 213) in the shape of characters 'who are not the human reflections of his personality' (ibid.). Concerning the influence of Fernan Caballero curtly denied by Jose F. Montesinos 125 - Brian J. Dendle 126 has contributed a brief study proposing Elia, o la Espana treinta anos ha as 'the source for certain aspects of the second series of the Episodios nacionales' (p. 103). In recent years attention has been paid to Galdos's contact with popular literature, especially that produced in the two or three decades before he began to make his mark as a writer. 127 Pierre L. Ullman 128 has likened the opening paragraph of Torquemada en la hoguera to the proem of a 'romance de ciego' (p. 258), urging suggestively that the novel constitutes a kind of 'historia de ciego novelada' (p. 259). Points of similarity between certain of Galdos's early novels and aspects of 'novelas por entregas,' or 'folletines' (chiefly those by Manuel Fernandez y Gonzalez 129 and Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco), have also received attention. Pioneering work on the topic was done by Jose F. Montesinos, who has been followed by Francisco Yndurain, Iris M. Zavala, Brian J. Dendle, and Julio Rodriguez-Puertolas. 130 of particular interest in this regard is Yndurain's perceptive short book Caldas entre la novela y el follet{n, which is primarily a study of El audaz with special reference to the 'resabios de literatura folletinesca' 131 to be found in the work. In opposition to the widely held idea of Galdos's prosaicness and lack of poetic sense, Alfred Rodriguez has pointed to the author's parodies, in his novels, of lines by Manrique, Garcilaso, Lope, Calderon, Becquer, and Zorrilla, and in another article shows how, with tellingly ironic effect, Galdos incorporated into Tormento the themes and manner associated with poets of his time such as Becquer and Rosalia de Castro. 132 Two interesting articles concentrate on the influence of aspects of drama on Galdos. Paul Patrick Rogers 133 demonstrates how Galdos effortlessly integrated into Lacorte de Carlos IV a dramatic device entailing the substitution of a real letter for a blank piece of paper, a device that he had borrowed from Tamayo y Baus's Un drama nuevo. Rafael Bosch 134 describes the deft creative way in which Galdos assimilated the plot and ideas of Echegaray's El gran Galeoto into Torquemada en el purgatorio. Both of these studies successfully

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bring out Galdos's procedure of borrowing, adapting, refashioning, and incorporating materials taken from fellow-writers, and add to our knowledge of the author's creative process. As Rogers notes, Galdos was 'a bold novelist' (p. 116) and 'a great borrower' (p. 117). With Tamayo y Baus and Echegaray, we come to the matter of Galdos's relations with his contemporaries, writers who were living in the same spiritual climate and reacting, in their diverse ways, to the same social, cultural, and political pressures. The studies that have been made of the interrelations between Galdos and figures like Pereda, Alarcon, Pardo Bazan, and Clarin are few in number and for the most part biographical in approach. The published correspondence of some of these writers offers, at present, the best means of assessing the literary relations and subtle play of influence and reaction between them. 135 The literary relations between the author and Alarcon have been touched upon by Robert Ricard and also by Antonio Regalado Garcia, 136 whose concern with the Episodios nacionales has led him to discover connections between Galdos's historical fiction and that of Alarcon, Navarro Villoslada, and Valera. There are two interesting articles on the relations between Giner de los Rios and Galdos. H. Chonon Berkowitz 137 considers Giner's criticism of La familia de Leon Roch and La desheredada, and Galdos's reply to Giner regarding the second work, also noting that the suggestion has been made (by Jose Rodriguez Mourelo, a close friend of Galdos) that the character Maximo Manso may have been based on Giner (p. 64). In a subtle essay William H. Shoemaker 138 covers the same ground, but then proceeds to show how Giner's criticism may have exercised influence over Galdos, helping to explain 'causas o motivos de aparentes vaivenes en su novelistica desde La familia de Leon Roch hasta El doctor Centeno, pasando por La desheredada y El amigo Manso' (p. 214) . Few substantial studies undertake to link Galdos to nineteenthcentury currents and set him historically within the literary generations and movements of his time. This kind of approach represents no easy task, however, for not only is nineteenthcentury Spanish literature a relatively unexplored area of study 139 (compared with that of the Middle Ages, the Golden Age, and the twentieth century), but also concepts of period, school, movement, and generation still need to be very much sharpened before they may be used with precision as 'tools of thought. ' 140 (Ulrich Weisstein has recently given an

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excellent account of the present state of affairs in regard to the analysis and illustration of these terms.) 141 In Spain the study of the idea of 'generation' has received particular attention. Under the influence of Dilthey, Ortega was the first to explore the subject, being followed by Pedro Lain Entralgo, Julian Marias, and, in a more modest way, Guillermo de Torre. 142 Marias has been working for several years to establish 'una escala de las generaciones espanolas desde el siglo XVIII hasta hoy.' His theori of generations, or what he calls his 'hipotesis metodica,' 43 is applied to Spanish writers such as Cervantes and Becquer in his recent book Literatura y generaeiones. With reference to Galdos, he merely touches on his generational position in passing: 'Galdos nace en 1843. Esta entre la generacion de Valera nacido en 1824 - y la de Menendez y Pelayo, Clarin y dona Emilia Pardo Bazan, nacidos en torna a 1856, exactamente la fecha de don Marcelino. Galdos, que se pone a novelar hacia 1870, se encuentra viviendo en ese periodo que podemos llamar "de transicion" - aunque toda la historia lo es - porque es de transieion entre dos epoeas: el Romanticismo y la actual, la que comienza con la generacion del 98. ' 144 This information is neither startlingly new nor especially helpful; and it must be said that Marias's theories await thorough testing in the literary sphere. Marias builds his theory on the central importance of birth dates, whereas other theorists regard experience as being the crucial factor. Guillermo de Torre, for example, in an interesting essay on the subject of literary generations, speaks of the 'fetichismo o espejismo de las puras fechas. ' 145 He offers a comprehensive and flexible definition of a generation: 'En terminos literarios o artisticos, una generacion es un conglomerado de espiritus suficientemente homogeneos, sin mengua de sus respectivas individualidades, queen un momento dado, en el de su alborear, se sienten expresamente unanimes para afirmar unos puntos de vista y negar otros, con autentico ardimiento juvenil •.• la edad cronologica no cuenta fundamentalmente, aunque tampoco pueda descartarse; lo que cuenta es la edad espiritual, la fecha de nacimiento de la obra, del espiritu propio que anima una corriente y define a un movimiento' (p. 76) . But, for all this theory, the concept of generation has received hardly any rigorous application to the field of Spanish literature, a notable exception being Pedro Salinas's examination of the Generation of '98 in accordance with Julius Petersen's eight pointers for determining a generation. 146

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Apart from Alejandro Casona's interesting but very brief treatment, there is nothing of substance on Galdos's relation to Romanticism . 147 The same can be said of his relation to Costumbrismo, for useful books on the subject like those by Margarita Ucelay de Cal and Jose F. Montesinos, 148 simply note in passing Galdos's connection to the movement. There is also a dearth of studies on Galdos's involvement with Realism. It is clear that much groundwork is still to be done, as emerges from Gifford Davis's cogent article 'The Spanish Debate over Idealism and Realism before the Impact of Zola's Naturalism. ' 149 In a chapter of a recent book, Iris M. Zavala looks at the question of Spanish Realism particularly in relation to politics and ideology, noting that 'esta reaccion anti-romantica ha tornado el nombre de " realismo . " Los escritores desecharon como artificial algunos aspectos de las novelas de tesis y criticaron con sorna, como hizo Galdos, los folletines de capa y espada, la truculencia, el culto al exotismo, la busqueda del heroe al margen de la ley . Rechazaban los temas y argumentos de las obras anteriores, y los ideales politicos que el romanticismo habia difundido, superados ya en una era de progreso y desarrollo. ' 150 If realism constitutes essentially 'that effort, that willed tendency of art to approximate reality, ' 151 in Harry Levin's phrase, it is easy to conclude that Realism is bound to be a vague group term. F.W . J. Hemmings has remarked that 'there were as many different realisms as there were major realist writers. ' 152 This comment on French Realism is just as apt for Spanish Realism. 'Resulta dificil,' Zavala points out, 'describir y delimitar con exactitud la corriente realista. Las definiciones son vagas, difusas. Entre los mas conocidos figuran Valera, Galdos, Pereda, Alarcon, Palacio Valdes . Algunos insistieron en el mundo ideal del espiritu, otros en la realidad material y cotidiana. Las polemicas sobre el realismo fueron igualmente contradictorias : figura alli tanto el que aboga por el compromiso social, como el que defendia el divorcio de la realidad, la creacion de un mundo artistico, autonomo. ' 153 Given this confused situation and heedful of Ulrich Weisstein's definition of a movement as 'the conscious and, in most cases, theoretically founded attempt, on the part of like-minded persons, to illustrate and propagate a new conception of art, ' 154 it would seem to be inappropriate to talk of a Spanish Realist movement. Nevertheless, J.D. Rutherford has latterly asserted that 'the acknowledged leader of the realist movement in Spain was Benito Perez Galdos

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(1843-1920). ' 155 Probably this is a loose way of saying that Galdos was the finest Spanish writer of his time writing in the Realist mode. This quibble apart, Rutherford's contribution to The Age of Realism, edited by F.W . J. Hemmings, is of considerable interest (pp. 265-309). He deals valuably with his subject, 'Realism in Spain,' describing its origins and lines of development . Galdos is considered in the company of other Spanish novelists, like Pereda, Valera, Alarcon, Pardo Bazan, Alas, and Palacio Valdes, and shown to be the most important figure in the shaping of the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. The term generacion de 1868 (and its variant generac~on del 68) had been used as a label by critics like Eduardo Gomez de Baquero, Alberto Jimenez, and Max Aub, 156 but it is only in recent years that a concerted effort has been made to give some methodological force to the term. Adopting a sociological approach inspired by Lucien Goldmann, Juan Ignacio Ferreras 157 has declared himself an ardent advocate of the term generacion del 68 156 as a means of designating a group of novelists whose work was published between 'la revolucion de septiembre y la promulgacion del Codigo civil de 1889' (p. 155). He claims that such novelists as Valera, Pereda, Alarcon, Galdos, Coloma, Pardo Bazan, Clarin, Palacio Valdes, Octavio Picon, and Ortega Munilla are all bourgeois writers, having a common way of thinking and a common vision of the world (p. 143). Ferreras defines the term Generacion del 68 as 'escritores pertenecientes a una clase, ideologos de la misma, traductores o materializadores de su vision del mundo . • . 0 la generacion del 68 es esencialmente burguesa o no es esencialmente generacion' (p. 160). In works like La Fontana de Oro and El audaz Galdos is the most politically engaged of the novelists, but he too creates 'una vision del mundo enraizada en la clase burguesa nacional espafiola' (p. 150). This is a challenging theory, but it must be said that the arguments, being very much at the schematic and exploratory level, represent at most a working hypothesis. Ferreras will have to deepen his study of the question by dealing in concrete terms with specific writers and works, if he is to convince others that there is much to be gained by lumping together dissimilar literary artists under the notoriously problematical blanket term bourgeois. 159 More fruitful has been the study of Spanish Naturalism, thanks largely to the efforts of Walter T. Pattison, whose books, El naturalismo espanol. Historia externa de un movimiento literario (1965), and Benito Perez Galdos (1975),

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and an excellent essay, 'Naturalism and the Spanish Novel' (1972), cast much light on the subject. 160 In these studies he brings out Galdos's marginal role within the movement the conditions for the use of the term according to Weisstein's definition seem to be met - as the 'only established writer to follow the new trend. ' 161 Elsewhere Pattison has shown that Galdos spent time between 1879 and 1880 studying Zola's methods and techniques. 162 The Spanish writer, however, demurred at any suggestion of the influence of Zola on his work; 163 and Pattison has cogently discussed the many contrasts between Galdos and his French confrere, emphasizing 'that the fundamental contrast between Zola's and Galdos's attitude to society lies in their concept of environment. Zola regarded the milieu as essentially bad, and the people formed by it as usually corrupt. For Galdos, environment is more complex. Although it is a powerful formative influence, its results are not always bad; and, even if sad, at times they result only in mediocrity or peccadilloes. The human spirit must be reckoned with: it can triumph even over baser drives. ' 164 As for the young Spanish Naturalists, they prized Galdos's interest in them and were elated by the author's adoption of naturalistic techniques. La desheredada, Pattison notes, was 'hailed bi the younger writers as the first good naturalistic novel.' 65 They even threw a banquet for Galdos, hoping that he might 'defend their school' (p. 312). This he did not do; he was in fact 'a leader lost to the Naturalists' (ibid.). Pattison observes that Galdos's was a 'mitigated naturalism,' representing 'a reconciliation of the traditional form of the novel with Zola's school. ' 166 It is clear that Galdos was not a writer who wished to be identified with any school or movement; he was too independent-minded and too deeply creative for that. But he did draw on the literary currents of his time, assimilating, as his artistic needs directed him, methods and techniques associated with such movements as Naturalism. Galdos's relation to the so-called Generation of '98 has been frequently noted but inadequately studied. This is perhaps not surprising, since the whole idea of the term raises a host of problems. (Is it accurate to speak of a generation rather than a movement? Who are the members of the group? What is the relationship between noventayochistas and modernistas?) These and other questions are the subject of heated debate; and when a leading specialist in the subject like Herbert Ramsden states that 'despite a profusion of scholarly works we are surely still far from a proper understanding

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of the movement of 1898,' 167 he is likely to gain ready assent from most other scholars in the field. As was shown in chapter 1, the attitude adopted towards Galdos by certain members of the Generation of '98, such as Unamuno and Baroja, appears very complicated and ambiguous when their published reactions to the author and his works are considered as a whole. However, at the turn of the century, particularly after the staging of EZectra, Galdos was seen as the focal figure of Spanish liberalism by writers and intellectuals, among them Martinez Ruiz, Baroja, and Maeztu, 'Los Tres' as they dubbed themselves around 1900. (On this specific topic there are two illuminatiny articles, one by E. Inman Fox and the other by Lily Litvak. 68 ) Moreover, in 1904 Unamuno told Ephrem Vincent in a letter (published in the Mercure de France) that some of the younger socially concerned writers were looking to Galdos as a possible leader. 169 Galdos preferred not to assume a position of leadership, and writers like Baroja, Unamuno, Azorin, and Maeztu were not long in making their mark without his guidance. Donald L. Shaw is close to the mark when he advances the cautious comment that 'parallel with the noventayochistas' rebellion against the Spain of their youth was their rebellion against her literary establishment with the possible exception of Galdos. 170 This early connection between Galdos and the younger writers has been commented on, but the broad question of influence and interrelations has not undergone much detailed scholarly examination. Historians of the Generation of '98, such as Hans Jeschke, Pedro Lain Entralgo, Luis S. Granjel, Guillermo Diaz-Plaja, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Donald L. Shaw, and Herbert Ramsden, do little more than note Galdos as a forerunner of the group - if they mention him at all. 171 Because the topic has been treated in such a vague way and much of the groundwork has still to be laid, the tendency is to look at the subject from the point of view of Galdos or that of the Generation of '98, but rarely from a neutral position. Hence we find an informative article by H. Chonon Berkowitz pressing for a close filiation between Galdos and the 'ninety-eighters, ' 172 and, by contrast, an article by Jose Angeles arguing that Galdos exercised little or no influence over writers of the Generation of '98 (by this term Angeles refers to Unamuno, Baroja, and Azorin only). 173 P. Alvarez Fernandez is the author of a biting article on the Generation of '98's failure to understand Galdos's greatness as a writer. 174 Articles by Jose Maria Monner Sans, Ricardo Gullon, Gustavo Correa, and Carlos Alberto Montaner 175 look

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at connections between Galdos and the noventayochistas from the standpoint of Galdos, but not in an obviously partisan way. Studies examining the relations between the author and his works and individual members of the Generation of '98 or writers associated with this literary group are generally more rewarding, as in writings on Galdos and Ganivet by Robert Ricard; 176 on Galdos and Unamuno by H. Chonon Berkowitz and Jose Schraibman; 177 on Galdos and Baroja by Jose Angeles, Joaquin Casalduero, Francisco J. Flores Arroyuelo, and Gabriel H. Lovett; 178 on Galdos and Azorin by Ignacio Elizalde; 179 on Galdos and Valle-Inclan by Rafael Carballo Calero, Francisco Yndurain, and Antonio Urrello; 180 on Galdos and Ortega y Gasset by Ciriaco Moron Arroyo; 181 and on Galdos and Perez de Ayala by Pierre E. Sallenave and Monroe Z. Hafter. 182 Little work has been done on the relations between Galdos and the modernistas, apart from Guillermo Diaz-Plaja's brief comments: 'El quehacer de Galdos, desde la optica del modernismo se aparece como desmanado. La tension estetica, la seleccion del substantivo, SU copula con adjetivos insolitos, el esteticismo cuidadoso que busca la musicalidad en cada frase, no aparece en la novelistica espanola del XIX y crea el menosprecio. ' 183 The study of Galdos's influence on subsequent generations is virtually unexplored territory. Surprisingly enough, most studies on the subject treat the Galdosian influence on Federico Garcia Lorca, a member of the Generation of 1927, which had in its heyday been considered hostile to Galdos and his art. 'Supongo haber vivido,' Vicente Aleixandre writes, 'la curva mas baja del "purgatorio" de Galdos. De 1920 (desde su muerte) a 1935, las nuevas generaciones se desentendian generalmente del novelista. El realismo de este y la masa misma sobre la que operaba estaba muy lejos de las preocupaciones esteticas de la epoca. ' 184 But over the last twenty years or so, members of this generation of poets have revealed their deep interest in Galdos. Aleixandre himself has told of Lorca's and his own intense admiration for the works of the Spanish novelist (ibid.). Alberti has written several essays on Galdos 185 and in his autobiography mentioned the deep effect made on him by the author's death; and Luis Cernuda has contributed a fine general essay on Galdos. 186 Lorca himself stated that 'aquel hombre maravilloso •.• aquel gran maestro del pueblo, don Benito Perez Galdos ... tenia la voz mas verdadera y profunda de Espana. ' 187 The studies of Galdosian influence on Lorca are managed with

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tact and intelligence. Emma Susana Speratti Pifiero 188 considers the similarities and dissimilarities between Dona Perfecta and Lacasa de Bernarda Alba; and Jacques Beyrie has devoted two articles to the subject, the first dealing with the connections between La Fontana de Oro, Dona Perfecta, and Lacasa de Bernarda Alba, and the second extending the discussion of connections to include Rafael Alberti's El

adefesio. 18 9

Novelists writing in post-Civil War Spain, like Juan Antonio Zunzunegui, Camilo Jose Cela, and Carmen Laforet, have declared their admiration for Galdos, but rejected the notion of any direct influence on their work. 190 Though writers' statements have to be treated with caution, since some are simply not good critics of their own work, it may be that searches for Galdosian influence on contemporary Spanish novelists would prove unfruitful. In this regard, Camilo Jose Cela's remarks are worth taking into consideration: 'En mi propia obra, al lado de otras influencias, ique peligrosa palabra!, no veo a Galdos, por lo menos de una manera directa e inmediata, que es como me preocuparia, ya que la forma de novelar de Galdos, esta muerta y masque muerta. Indirectamente, si ha influido en mi yen todos los que hemos venido detras de el, y jay de aquel que no pueda decir lo mismo! I (ibid.). None the less, Arnold M. Penuel 191 has pointed out the direct influence of El amigo Manso on Dolores Medio's El diario de una maestra, down to the use of the names Maximo and Irene for her main characters. According to Penuel, Dolores Medio transformed Galdos's mediocre Irene into an Irene who is impressive in a moral and intellectual sense, in order to bring out that 'woman, with her distinct "punto de vista," as well as man, may make a moral and intellectual contribution to society' (p . 96). Also little explored are the connections between Galdos's work and that of twentieth-century foreign writers. Studies of Galdos in relation to Spanish-American writers tend to dwell on specific works rather than take a broad view, 192 and are, by and large, competent and interesting. Otis H. Green considers links between the Torquemada series and Rufino Blanco-Fombona's El hombre de oro; Paul Rogers, between Un voluntario realista and El aguila y la serpiente; Ulrich Leo and David Sisto, between Dona Perfecta and Romulo Gallegos's Dona Barbara; Ernesto Krebs, between Marianela and Dona Barbara; and Julio Rodriguez-Puertolas, 193 between Casandra and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story 'Los funerales de la Mama Grande,' and between Lo prohibido and

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Julio Cortazar's Rayuela. (In his co1I1111ents on the latter, Rodriguez-Puertolas takes Cortazar to task for his 'maligna comparacion' between Galdosian and Cortazarian prose in chapter 34 of Rayuela, in which lines of the text alternate with lines of the opening section of Lo prohibido . ) Less successful, as a whole, are studies of Galdos's works placed alongside those of non-Hispanic writers of the twentieth century; these include articles by Bernardo Sanvisenti (Galdos and Pirandello), David T. Sisto (Galdos and Louis Bromfield), Francis S. Heck (Galdos and Mauriac), Luis Lozano (Galdos and Gide), and Maria de Villarino 194 (Galdos and J.M. Machado de Assis). Few substantial studies have been published on the reception of Galdos's works, 195 though worthy of mention are Josette Blanquat's 'Au temps d'Eleatra (documents galdosiens)' and Jean Lemartinel's 'Galdos en Francia, en 1900. ' 196 However, none of these studies resembles the approach advocated by Hans Robert Jauss, 197 who calls for greater attention to be paid to the role of the reader and the strategies employed in the text to solicit the reader's response, and for the need to adopt a synchronic approach to literary history. It is appropriate to consider briefly the image of Galdos and his works reflected in histories of literature. Literary history in Spain, as elsewhere in the West, has suffered a crisis of confidence in the twentieth century; and the tendency has been strongly marked towards the schematic, pedagogical 'manual' approach, the collaborative effort and literary history conceived along generic lines. It is difficult to single out a general literary history of Spain, covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for unreserved praise as far as scope, design, and detail are concerned, though a handful of histories of Spanish literature contain impressive pages. In view of Galdos's controversial opinions on religion and politics, it is hardly surprising that, in a country where literature is commonly judged according to ideological criteria, conservative Catholic literary historians should take exception to Galdos's ideas. This kind of approach is exemplified in Padre Francisco Blanco Garcia's La literatura espanola en el siglo XIX (1891). 198 Here Galdos is seen as 'el antipatico defensor de disolventes ideas' (p. 494) and reprimanded for his 'volterianismo de escalera abajo' (p. 510) in Angel Guerra and 'el sensualismo letal y pornografico'

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(p. 509) in Fortunata y Jacinta. Nevertheless, unlike many of Galdos's ideologically hostile critics, he expresses grudging admiration for the author's talent: 'Dificilmente se juzgara a Galdos sin mezclar de alguna manera al hombre con el novelista, ya que el ha elegido una bandera a cuya sombra milita, convirtiendo sus libros en arma terrible de combate •.. Yo, que he reprobado con energia sus pecados naturalistas y docentes, que no desconozco lo grave de sus tropiezos en el fondo yen el estilo, me coloco desde luego entre los admiradores de su ingenio' (pp. 512-13). Also representative of a conservative attitude to Galdos and almost as outmoded in conception and particular judgment is Julio Cejador y Frauca's section on the author in his voluminous history of Castilian literature (1918). 199 An enthusiastic appreciation of Galdos is contained in Andres Gonzalez-Blanco's Historia de la novela en Espana desde el Romanticismo a nuestros dias (1909). 200 But mere enthusiasm is nothing in criticism; the whole chapter on Galdos, prolix, diffuse, garrulous, and inconsequential as it is, constitutes a monument to impressionism at its worst. In the 1920s and 1930s, relevant studies by Eduardo Gomez de Baquero and Cesar Barja 201 are noteworthy. The two chapters devoted to Galdos in Barja's Libros y autores modernos are sharply analytical, and continue to form a most useful introduction to the works. During this period there were literary historians who, while not hostile to Galdos, offered a distorted impression of the author's works. Juan Hurtado y Jimenez de la Serna and Angel Gonzalez Palencia remarked that 'idealista a veces en su representacion del mundo, es frio, y no tiene llama lirica'; 202 and Aubrey Bell pronounced the inept judgment that 'many of Galdos's novels are rather bundles of charming shreds and delicious patches than individual works of art. 1203 It has to be remembered, however, that these comments were made during the time of Galdos's 'purgatorio. I Later reputable literary historians show a firmer understanding of Galdos's art, interesting contributions written in Spanish including those by Juan Chabas, Angel del Rio, Mariano Baquero Goyanes, Domingo Perez Minik, Emiliano DiezEcharri and Jose Maria Roca Franquesa, Emilio Gonzalez Lopez, Diego Marin, Max Aub, and Francisco Ruiz Ramon. 204 The most impressive of these contributions is unquestionably that of Angel del Rio. He places Galdos between two generations, that of Valera, Alarcon, and Pereda (referred to as the Generacion de 1874) and that of Pardo Bazan, Clarin, Palacio Valdes, and Blasco Ibanez, emphasizing his importance as a link

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between the two generations and as the central creator of the nineteenth-century novel (p. 181); and in his section on Galdos, entitled 'Galdos: sintesis de la novela y del espiritu de su epoca' (pp. 197-210), he gives an excellent account of the main features of the writer's production. This section is full of insight and fruitful generalizations; for instance, the internal development of Galdos's whole work is brought out in a few lines: Es .•• la obra de Galdos un caso claro de integracion y de desarrollo interno. Su evolucion podria definirse enterminos generales diciendo que va de lo historico y social a lo individual; de problemas generales, abstractos, a los problemas particulares del individuo y del alma humana; del realismo - que trate de revelar lo interno por la descripcion minuciosa, detallada de lo externo .•• - al analisis psicologico que penetra en el interior de la conciencia de sus personajes; de la materia al espiritu; y de un concepto positivista de la vida que busca la verdad en los datos recogidos por la pura observacion social del presente a un espiritualismo religioso que ve en el presente yen la realidad simples manifestaciones temporales de los valores eternos que clan sentido a la vida humana: amor, justicia, hermandad entre los hombres . (p. 200) Unlike most Spanish literary historians, Angel del Rio clearly marks the qualitative difference between Gal.dos and other Spanish novelists of the time: 'Con la obra de Galdos sale la novela espanola de las limitaciones que tiene en la de la mayoria de sus contemporaneos, escritores monocordes: regionalismo, real~smo superficial, dogmatismo. Hasta el psicologismo de Valera parece superficial y artificioso comparado con la riqueza de observacion psicologica y moral - estudio de los moviles de la conducta - que hay en el mundo novelesco galdosiano' (p. 207). In short Angel del Rio's survey of Galdos's production is lucid, poised, and perceptive, and can be highly recommended to the reader in search of a good short introduction to Galdos and his works. Though on a lower intellectual level, Emilio Gonzalez Lopez's chapters on Galdos are commendable, especially for the unusually detailed attention shown to Galdos the dramatist. 205 Given the lack of studies of the author's theatrical output, his assessment of Galdos's solid contribution to Spanish drama seems fair. Of histories of nineteenth-century Spanish literature organized according to genre, most are disappointing, largely

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because of the paucity of information available on authors, works, and the literary background, particularly where drama and the novel are concerned. However, Francisco Ruiz Ramon, in his history of the Spanish theatre, provides a stimulating critique of Galdos's drama, arguing that, for all his importance as a renovating force in modern Spanish drama, he never ceased to be essentially a novelist writing drama, incapable of transferring from 'la optica extensiva de la novela' to 'la vision esencializadora del drama. 1206 Literary histories of Spain have been written in several languages, usually with a pedagogical aim. In English, Gerald Brenan's The Literatu:re of the Spanish People 207 and Donald L. Shaw's A Literary History of Spain. The Nineteenth Century208 are especially noteworthy. Brenan's work is often frowned upon by dyed-in-the-wool academics for its unscholarly manner; and it must be admitted that he is something of an impressionistic critic. Yet the section on Galdos and his novels is written with such verve and intelligence that minor lapses of accuracy and questionable generalizations do not detract from the whole effect. More scholarly is Donald L. Shaw's competent account of Galdos's output and artistic achievement. There are also histories of Western literature, like those of J.M. Cohen and Segundo Serrano Poncela, 209 that include sections on Galdos. In a chapter entitled 'The Novel in Its Prime,' Cohen places Galdos on a level with Balzac, praising him for his 'social comedy,' which 'challenges comparison with the highest' (p. 277). Serrano Poncela, for his part, considers Galdos against a yardstick provided by writers of stature like Balzac, Dickens, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Eca de Queiroz, James, and Conrad. Remarking that Galdos 'no obstante su calidad y meritos, es poco conocido fuera [del orbe cultural hispanico]' (p. 605), he predicts that future generations of non-Hispanic readers will regard the Spanish writer 'como uno de los novelistas mas representativos del siglo XIX, junto a Dickens, Balzac, Dostoievski y Tolstoi' (p. 606). As a corollary to Serrano Poncela's remarks, it is interesting to look briefly at three books that deal with literature in an international perspective. Both A History of the Novel, by Richard Freedman, and The Reader's Companion to World Literatu:re 210 are the work of American scholars writing for the student and general reader, and give a rough idea of where Galdos stands in the hierarchy of 'world' literature, as seen from the United States . Freedman notes that 'most Spaniards regard [Galdos] as Dickens, Balzac, and

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Tolstoy all rolled into one.' He adds that 'Perez Galdos has never made the impact on the non-Hispanic world that he clearly deserves, with the effect that those who do not read Spanish can never hope fully to make his acquaintance. ' 211 The second book, edited by such established scholars as Leon Edel and Horst Frenz, does not have so much as an entry on Galdos, the only Spanish writers included being Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Lorca. The title of the work is a misnomer, since whole areas of world literature are excluded. More truly concerned with world literature is Martin SeymourSmith's recent Guide to Modern World Literature 212 which contains a succinct section on Galdos. The cautious phrasing of Seymour-Smith's overall judgment that 'it is not foolish to speak of him as on a level with Dickens, Balzac, or E~a de Queiroz' (III, p. 197), is an index of the insecure nature of Galdos's international reputation. The picture that emerges from the preceding commentary is not altogether a heartening one. There are few distinguished historically oriented studies on Galdos's works and many inferior ones; there is much dreary fact-dredging and little keen speculation. This is tantamount to saying that most topics have been inadequately investigated. Regarding works of literary history, it is plain that George Watson's reference, in connection with the development of literary history from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, to 'the sharp descent of literary history from the status of a great intellectual discipline to that of a convenient act of popularization,' 213 is as true of Spain as it is of Britain, if we bear in mind the striking contrast between the work of, say, Menendez y Pelayo and the many almost fully derivative manuals of literary history published in the present age. In the specific case of Spanish nineteenth-century literature, literary historians, following the dictates of fashion and prejudice, have tended until fairly recently to neglect it. There are consequently many glaring gaps to fill, but there is ·now no question that interest in Spain's literature of the nineteenth century is on the increase, and, for instance, the pioneer work of Jose F. Montesinos 21 ~ on the novel is being valuably supplemented by scholars like Benito Varela Jacome, Juan Ignacio Ferreras, and Iris M. Zavala. 215 Moreover, historically minded scholars of the present day often show more respect for critical concepts, and are more prudent and sensitive in their discussion of such matters as influence, as can be seen in the articles on Galdos by Monroe Z. Hafter

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and Brian Dendle in GaZdos Studies II. Though it seems unlikely that Hispanism will produce great literary histories in the immediate future - creditable as recent works like The Literary History of Spain, edited by R.O. Jones, and Juan Luis Alborg's three volumes of his still-unfinished literary history are - it is reasonable to expect sound historical studies to be done on such an outstanding writer as Galdos, whose status as a major European writer is now widely recognized.216

3 Literature and Ideas

It would seem to be axiomatic that literature, being a verbal medium and thus capable of making statements, should contain ideas. But there have been some who have claimed otherwise. Mallarme's assertion that poetry is made with words and not ideas 1 has been influential in some theoretical circles, but it has a special relevance to poetry of a specific kind : nineteenth-century French symbolist poetry. For this reason, it would be perilously dogmatic to extend its scope of reference to include other literary kinds. Literature is marvellously varied in its manifestations, and one of its genres, the novel, is rightly seen as an all-inclusive form ('un saco donde cabe todo' as Pio Baroja puts it), 2 which can accommodate within its loose confines all manner of ideas. But what do we in fact understand by the word idea? Newton P. Stallknecht has supplied the following useful definition: 'The term idea refers to our more reflexive or thoughtful consciousness as opposed to the immediacies of sensuous or emotional experience. It is through such reflection that literature approaches philosophy. An idea, let us say, may be roughly defined as a theme or topic with which our reflection may be concerned. ' 3 Of course, different turns of meaning have been given to the word by philosophers from Plato down to Heidegger, but the above definition is serviceable in the present context. In real life ideas are produced and mediated in countless ways; but literature, though part of life, is on a different scale, as are the ideas it encloses. The major qualitative difference between life and literature has been enunciated by Henry James : 'Literature is an objective, a projected result; it is life that is the unconscious, the agitated, the struggling, floundering cause. ' 4 Works of literature are verbal structures made out of human thought~ imagination,

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and experience. The relevant question to ask is how ideas operate in the literary work. Present-day critics commonly recognize that ideas in literature have their own special function to perform. 'In literature,' Malcolm Bradbury testifies, 'ideas are no longer quite ideas; they become part of a differently realized world of experience, in which ideas are related to linguistic enactments and to speakers, and in which the force of language is never wholly rational. 5 For all that, literature continues to be regarded by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and historians as a storehouse of ideas to be raided at will. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren have noted that 'frequently literature is thought of as a form of philosophy, as "ideas" wrapped in form; and it is analysed to yield "leading ideas". Students are encouraged to summarize and to abstract works of art in terms of such generalizations. ' 6 This approach is related to the subject called 'History of Ideas', whose founder and chief exponent was the American scholar A.O. Lovejoy. His procedure was to trace the development of 'unit-ideas' in philosophy, theology, and particularly literature; in the case of literature, the whole field is treated as a vast document from which illustrations may be drawn. Enlightening as his insights are, Lovejoy is not concerned with literature as a form; indeed, he has gone so far as to say that 'the ideas in serious reflective literature are, of course, in great part philosophical ideas in dilution. ' 7 R.S. Crane, taking his cue from Lovejoy's approach, has observed that 'ideas in literary works are what they are not only because of the circumstances, more or less external to literature, which have brought certain basic views about God, the universe, man, and philosophy, or certain special distinctions, doctrines, terms, methods, or modes of philosophic speech into prominence during a given time, but also, and no less decisively, because of the particular and highly differentiated functions which such materials may be made to serve in various kinds of works and in various "parts" of any kind. ' 8 Another illuminating treatment of the topic, which deals more with moral and cultural implications, is Lionel Trilling's essay 'The Meaning of a Literary Idea,' 9 in which he remarks that 'the most elementary thing to observe is that literature is of its nature involved with ideas because it deals with man in society, which is to say that it deals with formulations, valuations, and decisions, some of them implicit, others explicit' (p. 282), that 'the very form of a literary work, considered apart from its content, so far

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as that is possible, is in itself an idea. Whether we deal with syllogisms or poems, we deal with dialectic - with, that is, a developing series of statements' (p. 283), and that we should try 'to think of ideas as living things, inescapably connected with our wills and desires, as susceptible of growth and development by their very nature, as showing their life by their tendency to change, as being liable, by this very tendency, to deteriorate and become corrupt and to work harm.' (p. 303). In an article entitled 'Dickens and Social Ideas, 110 Raymond Williams goes one stage further than Crane and Trilling: he theorizes on the question, but is principally concerned to offer a critical analysis of the function of social ideas in the novels of the English writer. After the initial comment that 'there is an immense variety of relations between novels and ideas, and this must make any analysis tentative' (p. 328), he .proceeds to posit 'seven kinds of relation between fiction and ideas : briefly, works 1n which ideas are propagated; in which ideas are embodied; in which ideas are argued; in which ideas are conventions; in which ideas emerge as characters; in which ideas are dissolved into a whole fictional world; and in which, over and above the real action and its values, ideas are present as what can properly be called a superstructure' (p. 332). What can be established from these summary considerations is that literature does contain ideas, though not generally in the way that discursive prose does, in the shape of propositions and arguments in logical order; rather, it contains them in a multiplicity of forms that are variously integrated in particular works of art. If it is accepted that literature contains ideas in varying measure and in diverse ways, then all kinds of complex questions are immediately raised. Is literature a cognitive endeavour, a mode of knowledge? Does literature reveal the truth? What are the relations of literature to modes of thought and analysis like philosophy and science? These and other similar questions have been examined by various philosophers, thinkers, writers, literary theorists, and critics over a period of more than two thousand years. In his useful book Critical Approaches to Literature, David Daiches comments on some of the classic discussions of these perennial topics of literary theory. At one point in his study there is a passage containing a succinct account of the arguments of some notable earlier commentators, which brings out the diverse ways in which the matter of literature's cognitive status has been tackled: 'Plato •.• attacked the poets for

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providing only a second-hand reflection of truth; Aristotle defended the poet as presenting a more significant kind of probability than the mere factual recording of the historian; Sidney, asserting that ''the poet nothing lieth because he nothing affirmeth," saw the poet's task not as the liberal telling of the truth but as the provision of vivid and lively examples conducive to moral behaviour; and Shelley saw the poet as someone who was in touch with the eternal pattern of things that underlie all reality. ' 11 Since Shelley, a host of opinions, some informed but many not, has appeared in print on the broad question of literature as a form of knowledge. It is not hard to understand why there should be such variety of opinion on the topic, seeing that literature is so amazingly diverse in its functions and uses. Ronald Peacock has written luminously on this diversity: One of the major difficulties of art, especially if you include poetry and literature, has always been that it appears in so many contexts and relationships, including numerous contexts of use .•. since art is so often mixed up with other things, then its nature can only be defined by including in some way these other things ..•. The variety of aesthetic theories derives to some extent from the fact that one or another feature can be isolated and used as the central pivot of a theory; mimesis, expression, symbolism, formalism, intuitionalism, the semiotic, are all used in this way. But literature and art are, and do, several things simultaneously. They are a mode of knowledge, external or internal, affective, psychological; they are representation, and varyingly symbolic; they are play and exuberance, a mode of spiritual freedom or ecstasy; they are, applied to experience, a criticism of life, a medium of evaluation, implicit as in drama or fiction, or explicit as in comedy and satire; they are a kind of ritual, instrumental to belief. 12 There are in fact few studies that deal rigorously with the question of literature and knowledge. A contemporary philosopher, Dorothy Walsh, has devoted a book to a comprehensive examination of the topic, concluding that literature offers a kind of experiential knowledge, that is to say, 'literary art, when functioning successfully as literary art, provides knowledge in the form of realization; the realization of what anything might come to as a form of lived

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experience. The kind of knowledge, as well as the manner of knowing, is something familiar to us on the basis of life experience, and it receives acknowledgement in the common remark: "You don't really know what it is unless and until you've experienced it." This is knowing by living through, and it is something distinguishably different from knowing about. ' 13 In his essay 'Literature and Knowledge,' Eliseo Vivas, the well-known aesthetician and literary critic, follows Bergson in regarding the artist as a being who possesses the power to disclose the reality lying behind everyday appearances: There is no question here of a reality superior to the reality to which the physicist's formulas refer. There 1s a superior reality symbolized in the work of art - but it is superior, not to the reality of the world of physics, but to the alleged reality of our physical world, that is, of the cliche-cluttered, hastily grasped, by-passionblurred world in which we daily live. It is the reality of this world that the artist seeks, through his activity, which we now have to call not an act of creation, but of discovery ... The artist's task, then, is one of discovery: To discover in its specificity the nature and structure of experience as lived, and to present it in terms that men can grasp, is the creative task of the artist. 14 Dealing specifically with literature as a kind of knowledge, Cleanth Brooks uses similar arguments: 'The peculiar kind of knowledge that literature gives us is concrete - not a generalization about facts but a special kind of focusing upon the facts of the problem itself - not the remedy for the problem but the special presentation of the problem itself ••• 15 The knowledge that literature gives us is specifically a knowledge of ourselves •.• is always knowledge of a valuestructured world, not the abstract world of the mathematician or the physicist but a world conceived in human terms, which means conceived dramatically' (p. 10). Writers have ·often regarded themselves, particularly since the advent of Romanticism, as the conveyors of knowledge, but of different types of knowledge, for example, visionary knowledge as in Victor Hugo, social knowledge as in Zola, and moral knowledge as in D.H. Lawrence. Naturally enough, writers make high claims for their art, concerned as they are to see their labours recognized and rewarded. Their discussions of the matter tend to be emotional and assertive;

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they find no reason to apply cold logic to a subject that ought to be self-evident. Critics, theorists, philosophers, and aestheticians try to be dispassionate in their consideration of such questions as the relations between literature and philosophy, and between literature and science, and the problem of truth-claims, verifiability, and beliefs, with respect to literature . Philosophers like Rush Rhees, F.E. Sparshott, Morris Weitz, John Hospers, Stephen P. Ross and Julian Marias, among others, have written on the relations between literature and philosophy . 16 Morris Weitz, while noting the differences between the two activities, is particularly concerned to show the similarities between philosophy and literature containing philosophy: 'To discover true statements about how things are or ought to be is the aim of philosophy . . . Philosophical themes in literature similarly function as statements of truth-claims about how things are or how they ought be be. So the difference between philosophy in literature and philosophy proper cannot be in their aims, which are alike. They differ, then, primarily in their mode of presentation in that philosophy in literature supplants argument by dramatization. ' 1 7 John Hospers has suggested that works of literature present hypotheses about the human world, hypotheses that cannot be verified but that may prove 'empirically fruitful. ' 18 In the present century several philosophers have produced literary works, among them George Santayana, Gabriel Marcel, and Jean-Paul Sartre . In addressing themselves to the topic of literature and philosophy, both F.E. Sparshott and Julian Marias have referred to the interest in literature as a creative pursuit shown by existentialist philosophers . On the one hand Sparshott emphasizes the differences between literature and philosophy, noting that 'the better the narratives the more they become literature as opposed to philosophy, for literature is neither a form of philosophy nor a substitute for it, but something else entirely . If its methods are different, that is because the criteria of its success are different, too . By appealing to the imagination the narrator abandons argument, renounces proof in favour of persuasion. A novel cannot be refuted . But it is by argument and refutation that philosophy lives. And whatever is irrefutable is ipso facto unprovable too. ' 19 Julian Marias, on the other hand, brings out the connections between the novel and philosophy: 'La imaginacion novelesca hace posible un termino medio entre la concrecion absoluta de la realidad y la abstraccion de los meros esquemas conceptuales, y facilita el transito de una a otra zona. 120

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Another subject of intense debate, in which arguments concerning truth-claims, beliefs, and verifiability are raised, is the relation between literature and science. With the rise of science and technology in the West, the social and spiritual authority of religion was severely threatened, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, and some humanist critics, like Matthew Arnold, predicted that religion would be replaced by poetry, which would then complement science. 21 Today, almost a century later, this prediction appears outlandish, but it acted as a stimulus to the twentieth-century critic I.A. Richards. In his Science and Poetry Richards took his starting point from Arnold, urging, in contrast, the therapeutic value of poetry as a means of ordering the reader's impulses. 22 A corner-stone of Richards's theories is the distinction between 'emotive' and 'scientific' language, and related to this is his controversial term pseudo-statement. Attempting to clarify this term, Richards notes 'the fundamental disparity and opposition between pseudo-statements as they occur in poetry and statements as they occur in science. A pseudo-statement is a form of words which is justified entirely by its effects in releasing or organizing our impulses and attitudes (due regard being had for the better or worse organization of these inter se); a statement, on the other hand, is justified by the truth, i.e . , its correspondence in a highly technical sense, with the fact to which it points' (p. 60). The question of truthclaims and the relation between science and literature has been ably dealt with by an Australian philosopher, A. Boyce Gibson: We conclude, then, that truth-claims rate highly among the 'elements' from which art is built, but that what concerns the critic is not their standing as truth but earnestness as claims: their scope, their intensity, and in a broad sense, their charity •.. The work of art is complete in itself, whereas the scientific hypothesis awaits verification: it can be proved wrong, and a work of art does not move in that dimension. So the scientist finds the utterance of artists engaging but irresponsible. But in fact the work awaits its own kind of verification as anxiously as any hypothesis in science. Has it succeeded in incapsulatingtheworld, in interpreting new ways of feeling about the world, and in the relevant cases, moved people to behave differently? 23

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In dealing with the topic of illusions, Andre Maurois has brought out differences in the aims and procedures of science and literature. The starting point for the scientist and the artist, Maurois says, is in 'sudden intuition,' thereafter their efforts take them in different directions, since 'for the artist it is a matter of rediscovering sensitive impressions, unrevised by intellect; for the scientist a matter of erasing every last vestige of subjectivity. ' 24 He also notes epigrammatically that 'art creates lasting illusions; science dispels fleeting illusions' (p. 94). The broad question of literature's capacity to tell the truth is a thorny one. There is a strong impulse on the part of many writers and critics to insist that literature can indeed reveal the truth about life; as one critic has observed, literature since the early nineteenth century has largely become a 'truth-literature. ' 25 Conversely, art has been related to lies - by Oscar Wilde, for example, who provocatively asserted that 'lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. ' 26 Expressing a contrary point of view on this matter, D.H. Lawrence wrote that 'the curious things about art-speech is that it prevaricates so terribly, I mean it tells such lies. I suppose because we always all the time tell ourselves lies. And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth .•. Truly art is a sort of subterfuge.' 27 Eminent critics like Lionel Trilling and Alfonso Reyes, whose sensitive understanding of literary values is not in question, have, however, sounded warning notes about treating literature as the staunch bearer of truth. Trilling has stated that 'art does not always tell the truth or the best kind of truth and does not always point out the right way ..• it can even generate falsehood and habituate us to it. ' 28 Alfonso Reyes, for his part, shrewdly observes that 'la literatura, mentira practica, es una verdad psicologica. Bernos definido la literatura: La verdad sospeohosa. 129 Problems arise in dealing with the beliefs, philosophy, and Weltanschauung integrated in the literary work. It is clear that many critics look for an overall vision of life as expressed in a work or group of works. 'The great question as to a poet or a novelist,' Henry James has insisted is, 'How does he feel about life? what, in the last analysis, is his philosophy? When vigorous writers have reached maturity, we are at liberty to gather from their works some expression of a total view of the world they have been so actively observing. This is the most interesting thing their works offer us. 130 But how is the critic to deal with a work in which

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there are beliefs and attitudes of which he does not approve? Should he allow his disagreements to affect his judgment? It is all very well to counsel the critic to discipline his prejudices and give himself up to the work before him; but human feelings and dispositions are not so easily controlled. In practice, works of literature are frequently condemned on ideological grounds; and much bitterness can be created around the writer who is breaking new ground, as is exemplified in Flaubert and Madame BovaPy, James Joyce and Ulysses, and D. H. Lawrence and Lady ChattePley's Lover. T.S . Eliot has argued in his celebrated critique of Shelley that, in assessing the philosophical ideas in the work of a literary artist, the critic should use as his touchstone the notion of maturity, that is, the ideas, whether shared by the critic or not, should be capable of being accepted as 'coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of experience. ' 31 This procedure would prevent the critic from being cut off from many works towards which he may not feel any deep bond of affinity. In actual fact, literature can be a means of developing openness to experience and flexibility of feeling; and plainly the critic's range of acceptable opinions about life is usually far wider in his literary experience than in his actual workaday experience. Ideas enter into works of literature under many different guises and i~ many different ways. They become part of the world of literature, a world where, as Northrop Frye has said, 'there is no reality except that of the human imagination. ' 32 Through a process of perception, thought, and imagination, the reader can take possession of the literary work, itself the verbal configuration of the author's imagination. Imaginative experience cannot, however, operate in a vacuum, and it must have a meaningful relation to life and reality. Indeed, Wallace Stevens has neatly stated that 'the interrelation between reality and imagination is the basis of the character of literature. ' 33 But this begs the old question: What is reality? Stevens himself answers that 'reality is not what it is . It consists of the many realities which it can be made into' (ibid.). Clearly this is a far cry from the 'naive' realism of nineteenth-century writers, from Zola's tenet that 'le premier caractere du Roman naturaliste ••• est la reproduction exacte de la vie' (p. 64). The notion that literature can copy or reproduce reality is no longer seriously entertained. Contemporary literary theory tends to place great emphasis on the craft, artifice, and conventions of literature, but without losing sight of the referential

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aspect. A recent formulation of the complex way in which lit~rature exists as a form and as a relation to the 'real world' has come from Steven Marcus: The structures of literature are in the first place formal; they tend to create an internally coherent literary world and refer with some degree of self-sustaining autonomy to themselves, to the linguistic universe that any work of literature constitutes. But this same literary world is also connected to the real world - whatever that is and however we may wish, according to the occasion, to describe and define it. The structures of literature refer to this real world, comment upon it, represent it by means of a written language that is part of it, and are hence themselves parts of the same real world that they refract and reconstitute imaginatively. 34 Literature, then, is an imaginative reconstruction of life; there is no question of literature merely reflecting life, but, as Ronald Peacock observes, 'literature is a function of living •.. It is parallel to all living, with infinite plasticity, and shares its complexity as though it were life itself. 35 To be sure, some forms or genres, such as the lyric or ode, tragedy or comedy, have self-imposed limits in length, tone, and subject matter, but the novel is an endlessly open form, characterized by 'its sheer contingency and looseness,' its 'traditionally large dependence on social experience, its tendency to explore and substantiate by the making of worlds containing likely persons and places and causal sequences ... its disposition to represent personages •.. its narrative passion ••. and above all its need to establish its credit with the reader on the basis of some form of recognition, some basic appeal to veracity. ' 36 The novel can absorb all kinds of thought, feeling, and experience, and is therefore linked to other interpretive approaches to life - history, psychology, morality, and anthropology, for example. In recent years the links between literature and other fields, such as the social and biological sciences, have come to be regarded as closer than had been previously thought. Some experts in these fields view their writings as fictions, 'in the sense that they are "something made," "something fashioned - the original meaning of fictio,"' as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz puts it. 37 Similarly, writers like Michel Butor and more recently Barbara Hardy

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treat fictional narrative as a special form of day-to-day story-telling. 38 Thus, literature is shown to be in close connection with other forms of discourse and with daily living. If this is so for the actual creators of literature, it is no less so for their reading public. Readers come to literature from so many different directions and find such diverse functions and uses for literature that the approaches and responses to literature are correspondingly multifarious . If Marxism or Catholicism is a pressing concern in a person's life, it seems natural to expect that this kind of felt allegiance should manifest itself if he takes it into his head to write literary criticism. The theorizing faculty being strong in many critics and thinkers, it is not surprising that critical modes - such as Marxist criticism, Freudian criticism, archetypal criticism, and phenomenological criticism - should have quickly followed in the wake of these philosophical and psychological theories. Extraneous knowledge may be valuable to the critic but, at the same time, if he wishes to be taken seriously by other critics, he must avoid allowing this knowledge to obtrude on the exercise of his critical powers. As F.R. Leavis never tired of insisting, literary criticism is a discipline in its own right, in no way subservient to other interpretive ventures. None the less, many critics take their cue from perceptions and procedures drawn from other disciplines, such as sociology, political science, ethics, and psychology. It is not possible to discuss all these and other related approaches to literature and criticism in detail, but one in particular, the social approach, is a major centre of interest at present and requires close consideration. The study of literature in its relations to society is a complex subject, covering an enormous area, concerned as it is with diverse activities and phenomena associated with the triad of author, work, and reader. The spectrum of socioliterary studies is often designated by the term sociology of literature, but this concept does little to clarify the picture. For critics and sociologists examine distinct sectors of this broad field from many points of view. However, two main areas of study may be differentiated; first, that concerned with literature as an institution in society; and second, that concerned with society as a fictive world embodied in works of literature. The first area concentrates on such questions as the status, role, and function of writers, the organization, distribution, and reception of literature,

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and the social functions of literature and its effects on reading publics; whereas the second deals with the nature of societies in literary works and their connections with actual societies. Emphasis will be placed on the second area, which can be seen in a clearer sense as a critical approach. The complications surrounding the social approach are compounded by the fact that some elements with which it deals are susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations. For example, many commentators are at odds as to what constitutes a society, and one prominent critic-sociologist, Theodor Adorno, argues that the idea of society is indefinable . 39 Another complicating factor. is that several competing literary theories show a concern with the relations of literature and society. One venerable theory, first advanced by Aristotle and maintained in a highly modified form by many present-day critics, is based on the notion of literature as a mirror of society; another regards literature as constitutive of 'a heterocosm, another world, related to the real world by analogy';40 another theory calls for dialectical mediations between text and society; and various theories hold the common assumption that literature is at its best a kind of oracle, a revealer of truths about society and social life. 41 A brief consideration of the origins of the social approach to literature will be useful in showing the nature of some modern theories of the subject. From Plato and Aristotle down through the history of criticism, but particularly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (with the contributions of Vico, Herder, Mme de Stael, and the Vicomte de Bonald), interest was shown in the relations between literature and society, but it was an interest that remained hazy and unfocused until Hippolyte Taine produced 'the first real theory. 142 Taine's theory is prima facie a thoroughgoing materialistic one with high scientific pretensions. Well known is his equation of moral qualities with material phenomena, as expressed in the phrase 'Le vice et la vertu sont des produits comme le vitriol et le sucre. 143 In similar fashion, Taine reduces literature to the sum of three constituent causes ('trois forces primordiales'), proceeding to note that 'nous parcourons en les enumerant le cercle complet des puissances agissantes, et, lorsque nous avons considere la race, le milieu, le moment, c'est-a-dire le ressort du dedans, la pression du dehors et !'impulsion deja acquise, nous avons epuise, non seulement toutes les causes reelles, mais encore toutes les causes possibles du mouvement' (p. xxi). But, as Harry Levin

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has pointed out, Taine does not practise the extreme deterministic materialism he preaches: he imports into his critical analyses 'an easy-going system of psychology. 144 Going against his theoretical grain, he speaks of history (and, by implication, literature) as constituting fundamentally 'un probleme de psychologie,' the task of the historian-critic being to bring to light the writer's 'disposition maitresse,' his 'trait dominateur. ' 45 At heart Taine was a Romantic individualist, not a little influenced by Hegelian psychologism. 46 Seen as a whole, Taine's contribution to the study of literature and society may be judged, as for the most part, 'specious,' 47 but the importance of his theory lies in its having attracted widespread attention to the need to consider literature as a conditioned thing and in its having provided a pioneering stimulus to further debate on the complicated relations obtaining between literature and the society from which it springs. Using literature frequently as a social document, Taine showed no concern with the wholeness of the literary text. A kind of protostructuralist approach is sketched out in the theoretical chapters of L'Art au point de vue sooiologique, a work written by a neglected French writer, Marie Jean Guyau. 48 For Guyau, Jacques Leenhardt has observed, 'society is important before everything, but inasmuch as it appears in the structure of the work, as a system of points of reference. ' 49 Regrettably, as Leenhardt also observes 'Guyau was completely incapable of applying his theory to a concrete critical investigation' (p. 528). A more compelling and comprehensive social theory of literature might have been expected to develop out of the influential social and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, both of whom (but particularly Marx) had a deep and enduring interest in literature. 50 They unfortunately left little more than an outline of a theory; but their pointers and suggestions have given rise to the multitudinous, varied, and controversial writings that go under the name of Marxist criticism. 51 Briefly stated, Marx and Engels held that, within their general theory of dialectical and historical materialism, art formed part of the superstructure, a system of cultural elements that are conditioned by the forces and relations of production making up the economic structure of society or the economic base. 52 The superstructure contains 'certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production. But the superstructure contains more

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than this: it also consists of certain "definite forms of social consciousness" (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic and so on), which is what Marxism designates asideology. ' 53 The crucial question of the relation between literature (dwelling in the superstructure) and the economic base has been variously interpreted by Marxist critics. Engels himself, in a letter to Joseph Bloch written in 1890, denied that there was any simple, one-to-one correlation between the base and the superstructure (p. 9). Indeed, because the connections between base and superstructure operate in a dialectical process of causation, any of the components of the superstructure may operate on and influence the economic base. Literature, therefore, is not simply a determined phenomenon, but may also have a determing function. Marx too commented on the complex and indirect relationship of the base to the superstructure, calling attention to 'the unequal relationship of the development of material production ••. to artistic production' (p. 10). On the incomplete foundations left by Marx and Engels, Marxist critics and aestheticians have constructed a variety of theories. These theories deal centrally with the connections between literature and society, considering such questions as: In what way does literature register social processes? In what relation does literature stand to ideology? What is the function of the writer in a communist society? These questions have been dealt with in various ways, partly because Marxist criticism is practised in many countries and under widely differing conditions. Several well-known critics who are not avowed Marxists have availed themselves of Marxist insights into culture and literature, for instance, William Empson and Raymond Williams 54 in England and Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Burke in the United States. Marxist criticism is such a diverse and far-flung enterprise and so inescapably tied up with political and ideological issues that it is difficult to pin down. It always seems to lead to 'catcalling and defensive aggressiveness,' as one Marxist commentator puts it. 55 Some critics write off Marxist criticism as being vapid, mechanical, and tendentious, a point of view that betrays a benighted ignorance of the matter. No doubt there exist Marxist critical writings that deserve to be forgotten (including much of the Marxist criticism produced in Britain and the United States in the thirties, and a large quantity of that published in the Soviet Union from the thirties to the present day), but there is also work to be taken into account by interesting writers

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like Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Gramsci, Benjamin, Adorno, Brecht, Aragon, Sartre, Goldmann, and Macherey. Certain of these critics, including Lukacs, Goldmann, and Macherey, have produced theories that are important and worthy of consideration by readers and critics whatever their political persuasion. Lukacs has done fundamental work on such matters as 'realism,' literature considered as a reflection of social processes (at its best mirroring the complex totality of social experience); the search for typicality of individuals, actions, and social trends as the guiding aim for the realist writer; and on problems relating to the writer and his ideology. 56 Lukacs shows a preoccupation with form, absent in many early Marxist critics; and this is also true of Lukacs's disciple, Lucien Goldmann, who describes his critical method as 'structuralisme genetique. ' 57 Goldmann's concern is to examine the structural levels operating between the literary text, the 'vision du monde' of the class or group to which the author of the text belongs, and the historical situation out of which it emerges. 58 In accordance with the strain of Hegelianism in their thinking, Lukacs and Goldmann share the conviction that the literary work should cohere as a unified entity. It is precisely this notion of the coherent wholeness of the text that is rejected by Pierre Macherey, who considers the literary text to be essentially flawed, incomplete, 'de-centre.' This is because the text cannot register all the aspects of the ideology that encloses it. There are limits imposed on the text's capacity to speak out, and therefore there are gaps, fissures, and silences in it; and the critic's job is to focus on the ambiguities and contradictory meanings in the text and show how they arise from the text's complex relation to ideology. 59 Perhaps the one factor that unites the diverse approaches to literature deployed by Marxists is the deep (even deadly) seriousness with which they treat literature. For example, the American Marxist, Lee Baxandall, has recently declared that 'fundamentally, literature and the other arts are not an epiphenomenon of narrow class interests. Instead, they are a primary mediation and aim of humanity - a "weapon" in this sense, if you will - for the struggle with and the overcoming of alienation in all its aspects, and the realization of full human potential. ' 60 Here we see evidence of another aspect of the Marxist approach: the moral perspective. Marxists believe that literature can help to change the world, that it can affect a person's life. This matter has been cogently discussed by the Scottish Marxist, David Craig:

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If literature affects action or changes someone's life, it is not by handing out a recipe for the applying but rather by disturbing us emotionally, mentally, because it finds us (in Matthew Arnold's word), so that, after a series of such experiences and along with others that work with it, we feel an urge to 'do something' or at least to ask ourselves the question (the great question put by Chernyshevsky, Lenin, and Silone): 'What is to be done?' There is no one factor that leads to action. It is the whole of your personality that is involved when you act, and literature helps to mould or re-align your personality by widening and by sorting your experience. 61 This concern with the moral potency of literature is not of course a Marxist preserve; other critical traditions place importance on the moral aspect of literature, One such tradition regards the moral perspective as co-extensive with questions relating to culture, politics, society, and the individual, a tradition that in the English language runs from writers like Blake, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, and Morris through Lawrence, Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Orwell, L.C. Knights to Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in Britain and is represented in the twentieth century in the United States by figures like Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Steven Marcus, among others. Out of this tradition, perhaps the most central statements on the moral approach to literature have come from Matthew Arnold, D.H. Lawrence, and F.R. Leavis. In his criticism, Leavis has always laid great stress on the importance of the felt response and .of valuation; in an essay entitled 'Valuation in Criticism,' he states that 'significant art challenges us in the most disturbing and inescapable way to a radical pondering, a new profound realization, of the grounds of our most important determinations and choices. Which is what Arnold meant by saying ••• that literature is to be judged as "criticism of life." Another formulation, emphasizing the creative function, is that in creative literature one finds the challenge to discover what one's real beliefs and values are. ' 62 An echo of this moral tone can be discerned in the criticism of Knights, Trilling, Williams, and Hoggart, though these critics have devoted more specific attention to the relations between the areas of literature, culture, and society. They have also dealt with the relationship of literature and politics, a subject that has been explored by other non-Marxist critics writing in English, such as George Orwell, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Edmund Wilson, and Irving Howe.

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In Spain and Spanish America these broad relations of liter~ry study have also been discussed, especially in Spanish America where writers have traditionally seen politics and social and economic life as prime subjects for literary treatment. Literary criticism shaped itself around these creative interests to the extent that the sociopolitical approach may be accounted the major critical mode in Spanish America, practised by most of the leading critics from Andres Bello to Jose Antonio Portuondo and Fernando Alegria. 63 This approach to literature has not played such a predominantly important role in the Spanish critical tradition, but in recent years it has come very much to the fore, including among its exponents such prominent critics as Francisco Ayala, Francisco Yndurain, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, J.M. Castellet, Jose Carlos Mainer, and Andres Amoros. Literature is bound up with such other important areas of thought as religion, philosophy, psychology, and political science . Literate men and women often extend their interest in literature to one or several of these disciplines, and so connections between these subjects are explored and developed into what can be distinguished as an approach. Cleanth Brooks has said, 'Experience is ultimately a seamless garment and everything is related to everything else,' 64 but equally it must be said that every interpretive system has its guidelines and assumptions; when these are not respected, attempts at interdisciplinary study are not likely to be profitable . Richard Hoggart has clearly set out the conditions under which interdisciplinary approaches to literature ought to be undertaken: 'Everything must start with the experience of literature "in and for itself." Without that kind of attention to the uniqueness of the works, that constant concern for the integrity of their individual natures, we shall be led into premature pattern-making, genre-generalization and structural type-casting - all gained through some infidelity to the works themselves. ' 65 It is now not uncommon to find the Spanish nineteenth century being referred to as the 'siglo de Galdos' or the 'edad de Galdos,' in books, histories, or even tourist pamphlets . This kind of catch-phrase, which is widely applied to only a few literary figures, such as Shakespeare and Goethe, is often a kind of journalistic shorthand, too gross an exaggeration to be of much point. This is true in regard to Galdos, if the nineteenth century means the period from 1800 to 1900; but if one loosely thinks of the nineteenth century as stretching from the late 1860s to about 1920, then the phrase 'siglo de

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Galdos' has an undoubted force. Rafael Altamira and others spoke of Galdos's death as marking the end of an epoch. 66 Galdos was one of the outstanding Spaniards of his day, achieving renown as a writer and as a public figure. A nineteenth-century 'monstruo de la naturaleza,' his literary output represents one of the most vast and varied aesthetic worlds in the history of literature, enclosing a stupendously broad area of experience and thought. Sherman Eoff commented cogently on the author's far-ranging intellectual interests: 'In Galdos's case, especially, the author's identity with his age has a primary significance. The extension of thought involved reaches out in all directions to include physiology, psychology, sociology, the physical sciences, technology, the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, the prominence of the bourgeoisie, the rise of the proletariat; and over all this a philosophical consciousness attuned to a historical (evolutionary) conception of the universe. The student of Galdos is obliged to become a student of the nineteenth century . '67 Some of the subjects mentioned by Eoff form the backbone of this chapter. It is, of course, not easy or necessarily feasible to mark off boundaries between these subjects. This is particularly so in broad areas of experience and study like society, history, and religion, which overlap at countless points . Nevertheless, for the sake of order and convenience, an attempt will be made to differentiate between Galdosian studies relating to several main areas (society, politics, history, religion, morality, psychology, and philosophy) on the basis of subject matter and critical approach. One of the most significant concepts current in the nineteenth century was that of society, significant in the sense that society was increasingly regarded as complex and problematical, not only as something lived, imagined, and experienced, but as a phenomenon to be debated and studied. On this matter Francisco Ayala has commented acutely that 'el siglo XIX .. • puede ser considerado como la etapa mas rica en significacion yen contenidos espirituales del proceso de desarticulacion social a que se encuentra sometida la civilizacion occidental. No es casualidad queen else haya formado la sociologia como ciencia sistematica inmediatamente dirigida al conocimiento de la realidad social, pues solo al encontrarse el objeto "sociedad" dentro de una coyuntura critica pasa a ser problema ya ocupar como tal la atencion humana. ' 68 In the course of the century, systematic thinkers like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx focused their

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attention on the question of man in his relation to society . Referring to Comte, Alain has emphasized the far-reaching consequences of this increased awareness of man in his social aspect : 'Comte a mis en place une grande idee, certes, qui est comme la physique de nos sentiments et de nos pensees, c'est que l'homme n'est homme que par la societe des hommes, laquelle est autant naturelle et inevitable que le systeme solaire, avec lequel il faut bien tourner. ' 69 The 'scientific' preoccupation with the social side of human affairs manifested itself in the arts and found singularly rich and complex expression in the novel. The example of Balzac, who declared in the Avant-Propos to the Comedi e hwnai ne that 'la societe allait etre l'historien, je ne devais etre que le secretaire, 170 is symptomatic of the extent to which the nineteenth-century novelist came to see his task as that of depicting social reality. Born forty years or so after the French novelist, Galdos set out to be the chronicler of Spanish nineteenth-century society. In an early essay, 'Observaciones sobre la novela contemporanea,' published in 1870, Galdos discussed some of the problems facing the novelist in Spain and put forward his own theories as to how the novel should develop into a delicate and precise instrument for the analysis of society . His aims are altogether more modest and straightforward than Balzac's; the novelist should concentrate on the middle classes: Pero la clase media, la mas olvidada por nuestros novelistas, es el gran modelo, la fuente inagotable. Ella es hoy la base del orden social: ella asume por su iniciativa y por su inteligencia la soberania de las naciones, yen ella esta el hombre del siglo XIX con sus virtudes y sus vicios, SU noble e insaciable aspiracion, SU afan de reformas, SU actividad pasmosa . La novela moderna de costumbres ha de ser la expresion de cuanto bueno y malo existe en el fondo de esa clase, de la incesante agitacion que la elabora, de ese empefio que manifiesta por encontrar ciertos ideales y resolver ciertos problemas que preocupan a todos, y conocer el origen y el remedio de ciertos males que turban las familias. La grande aspiracion del arte literario en nuestro tiempo es dar forma a todo esto . 7 1 So, at the outset literary champion brilliant fashion literary program.

of his career Galdos saw himself as the of a social class in ascendancy, and in he proceeded to carry out his self-imposed However, his attitude to the 'clase media'

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changed drastically in the succeeding decades, becoming increasingly adverse as he came up against evidence of backsliding, failure of nerve, greed, and callousness. By 1897, the year of his entrance to the Royal Spanish Academy, Galdos perceived Spanish society as being in a state of confusion and disarray. In his Academy speech he arrives at the conclusion that 'la misma confusion evolutiva que advertimos en la sociedad, primera materia del arte novelesco, se nos traduce en este por la indecision de SUS ideales, por lo variable de sus formas, por la timidez con que acomete los asuntos profundamente humanos; y cuando la sociedad se nos convierte en publico, es decir, cuando despues de haber sido inspiradora del Arte lo contempla con ojos de juez, nos manifiesta la misma inseguridad en sus opiniones, de donde resulta que no andan menos desconcertados los criticos que los autores. ' 72 These programmatic statements deal centrally with the relations between the novel and society, but everywhere in his immense corpus of writings a concern with social matters is to be found. There are direct references to and comments on society in his novels, plays, essays, and occasional writings; and they come in the form of authorial commentary or remarks by characters delivered in diverse tones of voice, for example, the scoffing tone of Agustin Caballero's phrase 'senora sociedad' in Tormento. 73 Major long novels like Fortunata y Jacinta and the Torquemada tetralogy contain a high density of such references, and themselves dramatize the movements, conflicts, and complexities of Spanish society. Even Galdos's later novels, such as El caballero encantado, often dismissed as mythic, subjective, and even senile productions, are intensely concerned with contemporary Spanish society and its pressing problems. The study of Spanish literary criticism written during Galdos's lifetime, particularly during the latter part of the nineteenth century, presents great problems. For little work has yet been done to illuminate trends and orientations of the phase of literary criticism represented by figures like Manuel de la Revilla, Urbano Gonzalez Serrano, Clarin, Menendez y Pelayo, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Rafael Altamira, and Jose Yxart. Sergio Beser has pointed to the confusion of critical aims and standards during the Restoration, when 'desaparece o disminuye la influencia, predominante enteriormente, de las escuelas idealistas alemanas; muere la reaccion antifrancesa de la generacion del 68; la estetica deja de interesar y se huye de la teorizacion; la critica literaria se limita al estudio de la obra o autor examinado; y hay mas

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objetividad queen los escritores anteriores. ' 74 Critics of the next generation, after making exception of critics like Clarin and Menendez y Pelayo, considered the criticism of their immediate predecessors to be very wanting. Writing in 1893, Azorin stingingly commented that 'la critica espanola adolece, en general, de falta de penetracion; es mas retorica que otra cosa. ' 75 Six years later Ruben Dario is found wondering if 'ante todo, lexiste la critica espanola? Un amigo escritor me contestaba: "Critica no hay; hay criticos."' 76 A reading of the sparse theoretical remarks of some of the most able of these critics (Clarin, Emilia Pardo Bazan, and Urbano Gonzalez Serrano) confirms the correctness of Sergio Beser's judgment that this stage of Spanish criticism is characterized by 'cierto confusionismo teorico. i 77 This, in turn, reflects a state of affairs prevalent in European criticism, which was dominated by two divergent concerns: a search for a science of literature, and an enthusiasm for impressionism. Lacking a recent firm critical tradition upon which to draw, Spanish criticism tended to be eclectic in approach, latching on to theories imported from other countries, particularly France. Taine, in particular, appears to have left his mark on the critics of the period - Menendez y Pelayo, for one, was a great admirer of his (p. 63). Despite a common interest in the work of the French critic, it can hardly be said that any of the Spanish critics of the time were sociological critics. Yet writers like Clarin, Emilia Pardo Bazan, and Urbano Gonzalez Serrano did show theoretical interest in aspects of the relations between literature and society. In the prologue to Palique, Clarin declares: 'Estudiar la influencia del publico, del medio, etc., etc., en los autores, es legitimo; analizar las ideas y sentimientos que debieron de presidir a la realizacion del producto, es bueno y siempre oportuno; atender a la influencia de los organismos sociales en la forma de las literaturas (literatura de clase, tribu, ciudad, clan, raza, etc.) santo y bueno; escudrinar las causas y los efectos morales de la vida literaria, lpor que no?; relacionar el arte con el movimiento de la vida juridica, particularmente en su aspecto politico, labor excelente. 178 For Emilia Pardo Bazan, 1 toda manifestacion literaria responde a profundas raices sociales, entendiendo yo aqui por social, no las leyes, ni las instituciones, ni aun la Historia, ni esta o aquella clase, sino la reunion de todas estas cosas, y su peso y fuerza en la creacion espontanea e instintiva, aparentemente, del arte, en especial del literario. 179

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The critic most alive theoretically to the relationship of literature and society was Urbano Gonzalez Serrano, Krausist thinker and sometime sociologist. A recurring theme in his writings is the insistence that 'la literatura actual debe ser eco y resonancia de la vida moderna, la religion de todos, la que exprese mas y mejor el consenso directo de escritores y lectores, por nutrirse de cuanto excita y conmueve a nuestra inquieta sociedad. 180 Of particular interest is his essay 'Caracter social del arte,' which deals with such aspects of the topic as art considered as a social and historical document, the social effects of art, and the artist's duty to deal with social problems like the class struggle. The artist, in Gonzalez Serrano's eyes, is a superior being, a kind of social seer. 81 His utilitarian conception of art - literature regarded as 'un recurso euristico' (p. 12) - leads him to tilt his lance against aestheticism ('el arte por el arte'), which he stigmatizes as 'arte, que suena a hueco por el formalismo externo y las exquisiteces de filigrana, con que aisladamente se cultiva' (pp. 20-1). All this may give the impression that Gonzalez Serrano was predominantly a sociological critic, but this description is not at all valid, as he himself testified when he defined his critical approach as impressionistic. 82 In his criticism of particular works, he pays lip service to his sociological interests, but generally stays at the external moral-aesthetic level:

Marianela, idilio tragico ... La Desheredada, esbozo de problemas y enigmas sociales; el Abuelo, intento de acercar

el oro de ley de la buena raza a la escoria de la mala ralea, y tantas y tantas otras creaciones de Galdos, elevan la novela a la condicion que hoy la reconocen todos de epopeya moderna, con caracter enciclopedico, que cuenta las pulsaciones sociales y que, tratando omni re scibili, estimula a un mas alto pensar ya un mas hondo sentir, en cuya piramide ha de coincidir lo bello con lo bueno, el arte con la moral, sin necesidad de convertir la critica en esbirro de la conciencia del escritor. 83

If one were to judge her by her La revolucion y la novela en Rusia, 84 in which literary works are regarded as reflec-

tors of social, political, and moral experience, Pardo Bazan has a greater claim than Gonzalez Serrano to being considered a socially oriented critic. This would, however, be a misleading description, at least in the present sense of the words. None the less, she does deal somewhat more specifically

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than Gonzalez Serrano with social questions 1n her examination of particular texts; For instance, in her study of Realidad she discusses Galdos's relation to his reading public;85 and after commenting at length on Tristana, she focuses on the plight of the serious writer in Spain, who, if he fails to produce works that please, is set upon by hostile reviewers, the 'cuervos literarios,' who share much of the responsibility for making the literary world seem like a bullfight arena. 86 Interesting as these remarks are, they remain peripheral to her main concern, which is to examine the 'estructura' 87 and moral and aesthetic aspects of the work. The quotation from Palique shows Clarin's awareness of social and related approaches to literature, but as the continuation of the quotation brings out, the question for him was whether these modes of criticism could coexist with a strictly literary kind of criticism: 'Pero es preciso confesar que ninguna de esas es la cr{tica inmediatamente literaria, ni en general artistica, ni ahora ni nunca; sino critica etnologica, antropologica, sociologica, politica, etica, etc., en SU relacion estetica y particularmente literaria. ' 88 Though elsewhere Clarin had made it clear that the critic should look for 'relaciones de coordinacion y subordinacion entre la obra artistica y lo demas de la vida actual, ' 89 he was fundamentally committed to the idea that criticism should consist in 'un juicio estetico. 190 And indeed an aesthetic concern is the controlling factor in his critical writings, though it is persistently combined with the so-called non-literary types of criticism . Clarin's articles on Galdos concentrate on content, construction, and style, but another important touchstone is regularly employed - the mimetic fidelity of the literary work. In his article on Lo prohibido, he offers a lucid formulation of the nineteenth-century idea of realism: 'Especial mision del artista literario, sobre todo del literario, es este trabajo de reflejar la vida toda, sin abstraccion, no levantando un plano de la realidad, sino pintando su imagen como la pinta la superficie de un lago tranquilo. ' 91 The writer should represent reality as he finds it, and this entails the need to represent 'con propiedad y exactitud el movimiento de los sucesos sociales. ' 92 Writing of La desheredada, Clarin notes ironically that 'el autor nos presenta el cuadro general de una sociedad, muy parecida a la nuestra, en la que el arroyo quiere ser Guadalquivir, y el Guadalquivir ser mar; y como todo el mundo aspira al empleo inmediato superior, resulta

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un conjunto de trampas, miserias y bajezas que al lector idealista no le agradan' (ibid.). The criterion of faithful portrayal of Spanish society is widely applied to Galdos's works from the 1870s onwards. In 1878 Manuel de la Revilla observed that 'Perez Galdos se ha decidido ultimamente a cultivar la novela mas adecuada a los gustos y necesidades de la epoca; la que pudiera llamarse psicologico-social, por ser vivo retrato de la agitada y compleja conciencia contemporanea y plantear los arduos problemas de toda especie que tan hondamente perturban la vida publica y privada de nuestra sociedad. Ensayos notabilisimos en este dificil y peligroso genero han sido Dona Perfeeta y Gloria. 93 By the 1890s Galdos was receiving effusive praise for his capacity to depict Spanish society of his time, from both major and lesser-known critics. Commenting on Angel Guerra, Jose Yxart notes that 'en la ultima [novela) esta el Galdos de siempre todo entero, con SU observacion escrutadora que alcanza a revelarnos la verdadera vida nacional desde un punto de vista de pensador moderno, sustraido a toda influencia de raza, y con su narracion llena, robusta, abonada con toda suerte de conocimientos, que ahonda calladamente linea tras linea en el animo de los personajes. ' 94 Licenciado Pero Perez, in the conclusion to an article on Torquemada en la eruz, roundly asserts that 'Torquemada en la eruz es un estudio social que, con las demas novelas de Galdos, constituye la exacta pintura de la sociedad presente. ' 95 Nevertheless, there were dissenting voices on the subject of Galdos's achievement as a social novelist. In an ambivalent article in which adverse comment on novels from La desheredada to La de Bringas is mixed with grudging praise, Francisco Izquierdo Trol, writing under the pseudonym Orlando, charges that Galdos (in company with Balzac and Zola!) presents 'conocimientos parciales y confusos de ciertas cosas y estados de la vida de un pueblo, pero no la idea clara y completa de la sociedad y del espiritu general que informa una epoca como parece se pretende. ' 96 A resolute opponent of Naturalism, Orlando is presumptuous enough to insinuate that Galdos has the faculties, the 'potencia intelectual,' the 'saber enciclopedico' to write the kind of novel he, Orlando, can envisage, a novel that would contain 'todas las manifestaciones de la complicada vida moderna' (p. 446). This kind of inane thinking finds an apt counterbalance in the measured words of Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, who describes 'el cuerpo de las obras del Sr. Galdos' as 'un

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sistema de observaciones y experiencias sobre la vida social de Espana durante mas de una centuria. 197 Critics of the next generations, including members of the Generation of '98, also made gestures towards the various social aspects of literature, but these did not crystallize into a mature theory of the relations between literature and society. In the early part of the twentieth century, there was a call for new beginnings, for a leader in criticism, the ever-absent 'critico,' as comes out in articles by Azorin and Luis Bello. 98 In an article on Menendez y Pelayo, Azorin declares that 'ha habido entre nosotros grandes eruditos, grandes rebuscadores; ha faltado el critico.' He proceeds to state: 'Loque nosotros pedimos y lo que nose ha hecho todavia en Espana es, no una critica erudita sino una interpretacion. ' 99 And this kind of criticism did indeed emerge in the highly personal writings of authors like Azorin himself, Unamuno, Maeztu, and Perez de Ayala. These are all critique-createurs, and between their creative and critical work there is often only a fine line, or no line at all, as in Unamuno, who asserted that 'la misma critica, cuando es viva, es recreacion yes desecho de poesia. 1100 A more judicious, tolerant, and urbane kind of criticism is to be found in the reviews and essays of Eduardo Gomez de Baquero, who wrote under the pseudonym Andrenio. Both he and Azorin were interested in the contemporary trends of literary theory and criticism, though their own criticism tends to follow the direction not of the science of criticism but that of impressionism. They lingered, in their differing ways, over questions relating to literature and society, especially those having to do with the writer and the reading public, 101 but their comments are too isolated and sporadic to be seen as theories. 102 This period also marks the rise of the academic study of literature, represented at its finest in the work of Ramon Menendez Pidal, whose scholarship encompassed the fields of philology, linguistics, history, and literature. His theory of tradition, described by Gonzalo Sobejano as 'the transmission of the message of the spirit, sometimes patent, sometimes latent, throughout the generations; a chain of vital variations on the theme of something their own; in which the people feel united in language and circumstances, 1103 undoubtedly has connections with the social approach to literature, as do some facets of his historical reconstruction, La Espana del Cid. 104 But it was his linguistic studies that most deeply affected the course of Spanish literary theory

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and criticism because of their influence on the development of Spanish stylistics, a mode of criticism that also received impetus from the close concern with artistic values shown by Jose Ortega y Gasset and Eugenio D'Ors in their philosophically enriched criticism. Stylistics, with its detailed attention to the linguistic aspects of texts, has certainly provided the most distinctive approach to criticism in Spain during the past three or four decades; and it was only in the 1960s, under the pressure of a renewed creative interest in social problems and the influence of foreign theories in the sociology of literature (particularly from France), that the social stud1 of literature could truly enter the Spanish critical scene. 05 This slow rise in the sociological study of literature in Spain is reflected in Galdosian criticism: in the work of leading Spanish critics there are comments on the writer's social sense, his powers of social observation, and the complex social world of his novels, but there is not much sustained discussion of these matters until the sixties when interest in interdisciplinary approaches to literature becomes vigorous. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the young ValleInclan can be seen, in a review of Angel Guerra, marvelling at Galdos's ample know.ledge of Spanish society: 'Asombra en esta novela el conocimiento que Galdos tiene, de los distintos ambientes sociales, desde el sacristanesco al demagogico. 1106 In 1911 Ramon Perez de Ayala makes the same point ('Cuando se leen todas sus novelas, tan sociologica y humanamente trabadas unas con otras, causa maravilla el cumulo de personajes y personillas y figuras de toda laya queen ellas se mueven 1107 ), and stresses the fact that Galdos is pre-eminent, in Spain because of his supreme grasp of Spanish reality: 'Don Benito es un hombre que se da cuenta de la realidad corriente y moliente en todas sus formas eticas, esteticas, social y politica, mejor que todos sus contemporaneos. Por algo es el mas eminente en el arte patrio' (p . 1291). Two essays by Azorin deal with Galdos's social form of realism, his study of Spanish mores and manners, and his importance in forming a sense of national identity. Existe un elemento que ahora, en estos tiempos, ha entrado por primera vez en las esferas del arte. Nos referimos a la transcendencia social, el sentido en el artista de una realidad primera y visible, ostensible, a la relacion que se establece entre el hecho real, visible, ostensible, y

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la serie de causas y concausas que lo han determinado. El realismo moderno - implantado aqui por Galdos - estudia, por tanto, no solo las cosas en si, como hacian los antiguos, sino el ambiente espiritual de las cosas •.• Dentro de la modalidad que hemos indicado y sobre la base de preocupacion social y politica que expresamos, pongase un estudio agudo, minucioso, sutil, de las costumbres. De las costumbres esto es esencial - del pueblo, de la masa popular, de gente modesta, de empleados, de pequenos comerciantes, de ninos, de mujeres, de aventureros generosos, de quijotes de la ideologia (como Orozco y Nazarin y Angel Guerra). Loque hay de mas hondo, de mas permanente, de mas fundamental en un pueblo, lo estudiara Galdos; esa masa primaria y perenne sera la materia de SU obra .•. Galdos, en fin, ha iniciado la conciencia de Espana; desde Galdos, un pueblo - con sus paisajes, sus costumbres, sus tiempos, sus viejas ciudades - ha podido comenzar a considerarse a si mismo, a tener conciencia de si mismo. 108 An article by Miguel de Unamuno bears the promising title 'La sociedad galdosiana, 1109 but it amounts to a dozen or so paragraphs read over the telephone to the editors of El Liberal, who had requested a response from Unamuno to the work of the recently deceased Galdos. The article represents an adverse moral and ideological reaction to Galdos's novelistic world, which for Unamuno is the mere reflection of a society whose ethos is repugnant to him. The tone is dismissive, and no account is taken of the artistic dimensions of Galdos's novels. Part of Unamuno's diatribe runs as follows: 'El mundo social queen sus obras nos deja eternizado es el de la Restauracion y la Regencia, un mundo de una pobreza intelectual y moral que pone espanto. En la obra de Galdos, como un espejo fidelisimo, se retrata la pavorosa oquedad de espiritu de nuestra mal llamada clase media, que ni es media ni es apenas clase' (p. 1203). This intemperate judgment was atypical of the responses in 1920 to Galdos and his works; and as a corrective, Ramon Maria Tenreiro's essay 'Galdos novelista' 110 can be adverted to for a balanced assessment of the author's achievement. The concluding paragraph of Tenreiro's study lays emphasis on the breadth and depth of Galdos's social portrayal in his novels: 'En estas novelas, dilatado y admirable museo de cuadros de la vida publica y privada espanola de tiempos del autor, habra de hallar atesorado la posteridad, en forma plastica y v1v1ente, el espiritu de la Restauracion y la Regencia, con sus grandes

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faltas y SUS escasas virtudes, y Galdos habra de ser tenido siempre como la mas alta representacion de todo un siglo de literatura espanola' (p. 335). One of Galdos's most diligent and penetrating earlier critics, Eduardo Gomez de Baquero, synthesized his many writings on Galdos in a fine essay on the modern Spanish novel, published posthumously. 111 Focusing on the social dimension of Galdos's novels, he writes that 'en sus novelas, desde los "Episodios nacionales" hasta las "Novelas espanolas contemporaneas," vive un siglo de Espana, costumbres, pasiones, ideas, sentimentalidad. La descripcion historicopoetica de la sociedad espanola tiene un incomparable museo en la galeria novelesca de Galdos' (p . 124). And the Mexican critic Alfonso Reyes opened his Galdos centenary lecture in 1943 with an eloquent tribute to Galdos's pre-eminence as the socio-historical novelist of Spain: Dificilmente podra encontrarse - salvo el inevitable Balzac - otro 'Corpus' de la epica contemporanea comparable a este centenar de obras de Galdos, entre novela, drama y novela-drama, donde la imagen de un pueblo queda trazada para siempre lo mismo en los rasgos de la vida publica que le dieron su fisonomia, queen la intimidad de sus mas secretos impulsos; tanto en la majestuosa sinfonia de la historia, como en esa burlesca musica a la sordina que hace segunda a los destinos mas tragicos; en el rojo y negro de las batallas, o en la mediatinta y la mansedumbre cotidianas; en el rumor de los tropeles humanos que se precipitan hacia la muerte cantando y llorando; en la victoria yen el desastre; en la ternura yen la crueldad; en la razon yen la locura. 112 The year 1943 - the centenary of Galdos's birth - represents the beginning of a new era in Galdosian criticism. Leading younger critics of the time, born around 1900 and living outside Spain, like Joaquin Casalduero, Angel del Rio, Guillermo de Torre, and Francisco Ayala, contributed to the campaign of revaluing Galdos's works and winning for him due recognition as the greatest Spanish novelist of recent times. All these critics placed emphasis on the social aspects and import of Galdos's novels, though of course their critical purposes and perspectives differed. In this same year, Casalduero published his important full-length work Vida y obra de Ca ldas (1843-1920), 113 which addressed itself to the study of 'el desarrollo organico del mundo de Galdos'

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(p. 7); though his approach is rather abstract, he does not fail to underline the importance of society in Galdos's art. 114 At the Hispanic Institute in New York, Angel del Rio delivered a concise lecture on the subject of Galdos's ideals, and published a superb article 'Aspectos del pensamiento moral de Galdos'; as early as 1931 he had written impressively on Galdos's artistic preoccupation with the state of Spanish society, 115 and his subsequent studies on the author combined a penetrating socio-historical approach with a luminous moral concern. Guillermo de Torre and Francisco Ayala were among the first Spanish critics after the Spanish Civil War to show a theoretical interest in the sociology of literature. 116 In a series of articles published in Buenos Aires, de Torre was centrally concerned with the 'revaloracion de Galdos,' dealing to this end with the vicissitudes of the writer's literary reputation and his strengths and general characteristics as a literary artist. 117 Ayala's purpose was similar in a short and dense article in La Naoion. 116 In the article's concluding sentence he defined the basis of Galdos's greatness as 'haber tornado en sus manos poderosas el gran torso de la sociedad en que vivia y haber trabajado con su realidad plena, extrayendo de su mediocridad su espiritu' (p. 112). Other critics of roughly the same age as those mentioned above, like Amado Alonso and Jose F. Montesinos, have written perceptively on Galdos, and have not neglected to pay close attention to the social facets of the author's works . Amado Alonso's essay 'Lo espanol y lo universal en Galdos' is an intense meditation on the social, patriotic, and moral themes of Galdos's works. 119 He presents Galdos as a writer inspired by 'un ansia genial de comunion' (p. 203), a desire to bring together the ,citizens of 'una Espana desgarrada' (p. 206), as a writer who, 'por este imperativo patriotico ••• hizo de la sociedad el tema absorbente de su obra. Las ideas esteticas de su tiempo le pedian describir, y, en efecto, describe las mil diferentes clases de individuos que formaban la sociedad de su pais, todos los grados de la privacion; las diferentes ocupaciones y trabajos, pero mas aun las diferentes formas de indigencia' (p. 207). Montesinos's full-length studies form a high point in Galdosian studies; perhaps more than any other major critic of Galdos, Montesinos has pursued an integral approach in criticism, attempting to use in combination, as the occasion demanded, the biographical, historical, psychological, the moral, or the aesthetic modes; but fundamentally his critical method is a socio-historical one, by means of which he endeavours to come to grips with the

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social situation of literature, the pressures exerted by the society in which the work is produced, and the relations between the society artistically transcribed in the novel and its real-life counterpart. 120 Other major Galdosian critics, like Ricardo Gullon, Sherman Eoff, and Walter T. Pattison, give weight to the social perspective of Galdos's works. Gullon deals shrewdly with the leading aspects, themes, and techniques of the novels in his book on Galdos. 121 Galdos's ideas are the chief preoccupation of Sherman Eoff in his full-length study, 122 but he takes close account of Galdos's social concerns in the novels, as is suggested by his definition of the author as 'a sociopsychological novelist or literary social psychologist' (p. 13). Pattison's recent book on Galdos is strongly biographical in character, but attention is also yiven to sociohistorical questions raised by the works. 23 Some interesting work has been done by Hispanists in recent decades on social aspects of Galdos's works and closely related matters. Most of this work is to be found in articles published in scholarly journals and in chapters of books; three books that purport to deal with Galdos's works from a sociological standpoint are disappointing. In the monograph Et puebto visto a traves de ios Episodios nacionaies, Matilde Carranza imposes a rigid framework on the material that prevents her from tackling the subject in an overallt critical way: she fails to see the wood for the trees. 12 Pilar Faus Sevilla's book La sociedad espanoia dei sigto XIX en ia obra de Perez Gatdos 125 is more.ample in scope, more informative, and more intelligent within its limits, but it suffers from defects similar to those in Carranza's work. Faus Sevilla's study is very much the work of a social historian dabbling in literature; little awareness is shown of the complexity of the relations operative between literature and society, and the tendency is to offer information on the historical background of Galdos's time and then try to link it to the writer's works. It is difficult to exonerate the author from the charge of plundering quotations and references from Galdos's works so as to justify a set of notions held about Spanish nineteenth-century social history. This work, then, for all its merits as a reference tool, exemplifies the fact-obsessed sociological approach that considers literature to be a socio-historical document, failing to take into account the aesthetic and fictive nature of the literary text. In contrast, Federico Sopena Ibanez's book Arte y sociedad en Gatdos 126 is critically more alert, particularly

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with respect to the motifs of art and music in Galdos's works, but his approach is a piecemeal one, offering a series of loosely connected chapters that fail to lead to conclusions about the topic announced in the title. In dealing with the social aspects of Galdos's works, scholars and critics - particularly since the sixties when critical discussion of these matters became more sophisticated127 - also, on occasion, come to grips with issues relating to history, politics, ideology, realism, and so on. This trend is well illustrated by those commentators who have a broad interest in ideas, like Sherman Eoff, a literary scholar, Julian Marias, a foremost Spanish intellectual, and Manuel Tunon de Lara, a noted Spanish historian. These writers are variously aware of the inherent qualities of literature and of the complex existence of ideas in literature. Eoff, in 'Galdos in Nineteenth-Century Perspective,' mentioned earlier, noted that 'there is a great deal of subtlety in Galdos, and we can understand why scholars like to investigate multiple aspects of a novelistic production that continuously rewards them with new discoveries. The reward is greatest when we look for subtle connections in the realm of ideas. ' 128 Julian Marias's essay 'La idea de la vida en la novela de Galdos' 129 examines some main facets of the author's novels, concentrating on his representation of Madrid, his creation of individual lives that form a people, his concern with different classes of society (especially 'la clase media')s the temper of his liberalism, and his conception of life. 13 Marias places emphasis on Galdos's ability to create memorable characters set in their social background, and in this respect he contrasts the author with present-day novelists : 'Es frecuente en la novela actual la proyeccion del hombre sobre un plano, el plano economico, o el plano politico-social, con lo cual se lo reduce a una realidad bidimensional y sin espesor, en vez de ser tridimensional y de bulto. Galdos no hizo esto jamas. Por el contrario, traza las trayectorias vitales de los personajes, los presenta en interaccion unos con otros, sumergidos en una realidad colectiva, en un repertorio de vivencias, de usos, de costumbres, como el gran telon de fondo en que se apoyan y sobre el cual se recortan los proyectos individuales' (p. 87). He goes on to explain that Galdos managed to do this, 'presentando en forma increiblemente perfecta, la primera vigencia, la gran vigencia elemental de una sociedad: el lenguaje' (ibid.). Galdos in fact registers the language used in the society in which he lived: 'En la segunda mitad del siglo, es el

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decir topico de la genteel que suplanta toda vida individual y colectiva autentica. Esto es lo que nos muestra prodigiosamente la novela de Galdos' (p. 90). In sum, this essay constitutes one of the most illuminating short general treatments of Galdos and his novels. Similarly impressive are the pages devoted to Galdos in Manuel Tunon de Lara's Media siglo de cultura espanola (1885-1936). 131 In this interesting attempt at cultural analysis, Tunon de Lara is concerned to trace and discuss the 'ideas-fuerza' that predominated during a particular period of Spanish cultural history. 132 He presents Galdos (along with Clarin) as a representative figure in the period of Spanish culture between 1885 and 1895. The work of these writers is an expression of 'la realidad coetanea,' but it also has a critical, forward-looking aspect (p. 20). Galdos examines Spanish society in his Novelas contemporaneas from a bourgeois point of view, displaying 'la anatomia y los resortes de la sociedad espanola entre 1860 y 1880, y muy particularmente la sociedad madrilena. Da Galdos un corte vertical a esa sociedad, pero, naturalmente, no lo da desde fuera de la misma, sino desde dentro. Por ello que su optica sea ya la de la burguesia, ya la de ciertas clases medias (intelectuales, pequenos comerciantes, etc.), que van en la corriente de aquella' (p. 23). But in novels like Lo prohibido, Fortunata y Jacinta, and the Torquemada series, Galdos incorporates - Tunon observes - certain class and economic developments, demonstrating an increasingly censorious attitude to 'la alianza oligarquica de fines de siglo' (p. 24). Also dealt with are such topics as Galdos's 'populismo,' his 'anticlericalismo cristiano,' and his notion of 'intrahistoria,' as well as his treatment of 'temas esenciales a Espana,' like 'las dos Espanas,' 'el pueblo,' 'caciquismo,' and 'honor ..• como honradez.' Later in the book after commenting on Galdos's mounting radicalism in the early years of the twentieth century and his awareness of the 'pueblo' as 'el motor decisivo del progreso historico' (p . 122), Tunon de Lara sums up Galdos's contribution to the culture of his time: Galdos ••• lleva dentro de su obra la tematica esencial de la Espana de fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX, que, por otra parte, nose agota en esas fechas. Cualquiera de esos temas los enfoca .•. desde el angulo del hombre en sociedad y no del hombre aislado. Loque podriamos llamar valores galdosianos lo son en funcion de esa vida social

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del hombre, de todo hombre. Para todos los hombres escribio Galdos y de todos fue leido; la elite estuvo ausente de SUS preocupaciones y solo se refirio a los grupos minoritarios para criticar sus oligarquias. Por eso, en la gran division de la cultura espanola contemporanea, Galdos esta en la vertiente del hombre-pueblo. (p. 125) Tunon de Lara's socio-historical considerations of Galdos's works are stimulating and offer new avenues for discussion. 133 One scholar who uses Tunon's approach as a starting point is Vfctor Fuentes. In an interesting article, 'El desarrollo de la problematica politico-social en la novelfstica de Galdos,' 134 Fuentes declares: 'Siguiendo el enfoque historicosocial aplicado por Tunon de Lara en su trabajo sobre Galdos ••• mi lectura critica considera la obra novelesca galdosiana - genial creacion de una desgarrada conciencia burguesa como la negacion total de aquel corrupto sistema oligarquico y ve en ella un proceso dialectico en busca de la salida a la paralisis que aquel regimen habia llevado a la nacion' (p. 230). Several scholars have adopted a social approach to particular Galdosian texts. Concentrating on La inaognita (1889), ReaZidad, noveZa en ainao jornadas (1889) and ReaZidad, drama en ainao aatos (1892), Gonzalo Sobejano 135 studies 'la correspondencia entre las formas literarias aplicadas por Galdos al tratamiento de aquel solo y mismo asunto y las modalidades de su sensibilidad al interpretar el contenido social en ese asunto entranado' (p. 68), and concludes that 'las formas literarias son siempre, en los grandes artistas, formas de sensibilidad social' (p. 100). In an article published in AnaZes GaZdosianos, Peter G. Earle skilfully analyses the character Torquemada in the light of Ortega's conception of the 'hombre-masa. ' 136 Particularly interesting in the present context is a polemical article by Carlos Blanco Aguinaga. He takes issue with Stephen Gilman's symbolic interpretation of Fortunata's birth, 137 and insists on the importance of taking due account of socio-historical aspects of nineteenth-century novels: Steve Gilman seems to have set out to challenge the historical and/or sociological approach to literature which, to the dismay of many, insists on reminding us that no amount of imaginative symbolical criticism and imprecise textual reading, regardless of how buttressed up it appears by subjective theories of Literature, is sufficient to skirt

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the problems posed by the fact that a reasonable understanding of these complex relationships demands that we try to attend to 'history,' 'social categorizations' and, at times, to 'topography;' or, to make it less general: that we try to attend to those elements as much at least as the particular novelist in a particular novel attends to them. This is the least Fortunata y Jacinta deserves; it is certainly the minimum we owe to Galdos' profound sense of history. (p. 17)

Fortunata y Jacinta has also been subjected to sociological

analysis by Julio Rodriguez-Puertolas and John H. Sinnigen. 138 In an article in his book Galdos: burguesia y revolucion, Rodriguez-Puertolas draws on Marxist insights to examine the workings of bourgeois society as configured in the novel. 139 The main thrust of his thesis is contained in the following sentence: 'Pues lo que una lectura atenta de Fortunata y Jacinta nos ofrece precisa y escuetamente es la existencia de una burguesia avasalladora, que gracias a su omnimodo poder controla todo el mundo social de la epoca' (p. 55). Another article by the same scholar adopts a socio-historical approach in an attempt to revaluate El caballero encantado, 140 a work that is described by Rodriguez-Puertolas as being, above all, 'una novela politica y social, de serias implicaciones noventayochistas' 141 There seems to be no overwhelming reason why political and literary studies should not lend weight to each other, and strong reasons why indeed they should, as Conor Cruise O'Brien has argued: Man's imagination revealing itself in literature, including popular literature, in art and music, including pop art and music, in religion, including fetishism and in political concepts, ceremonies and institutions, is the same imagination, and students of the various aspects of it should be tending to converge instead of digging themselves in in their various 'fields'. Such converging studies, abjuring the affectation of an unattained and unattainable precision, could help, I believe, to bring about an increasing general awareness of wha~ man's political life is in relation to the rest of his life, from which is it not detached in practice, and from which it can never be detached in theory without some risk of distortion. 142

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But if the idea of 'converging studies' is appealing, it is also fraught with dangers. The political approach in criticism may help to reveal, among other things, where the writer's ideological commitments and allegiances lie, perhaps brini out, as Lukacs did in his well-known essay on Balzac, 14 discrepancies between the author's declared or intended political stance and the ideological outlook manifested in his art. Yet this kind of critical approach tends to attract commentators with an axe to grind, commentators whose parti-pris position leads them, consciously or not, to read their political op1n1ons into the work before them, often at the expense of offering a distorted interpretation of the text. The problematical nature of the political approach to literature is illustrated in two articles on La Fontana de Oro, by Albert Derozier and Guillermo Araya, 144 respectively. The French scholar takes Galdos to task for being an advocate of moderation, for being a conservative, for holding the 'pueblo' in contempt, for failing to depict the 'clases populares' and the 'burguesia' in their socio-economic background and for eschewing the important political issues, the 'verdadero problema.' His arguments are summed up in the following passage: 'Se hace Perez Galdos, siempre que lo puede, el apostol de la moderacion, del sentido comun y del justo medio. Estigmatiza a Coletilla, al rey, a la camarilla ya los absolutistas en general. Desprecia al pueblo, es decir a la "plebe fanatica," tomada en sus individualidades o globalmente. Se ensana contra la exaltacion, bajo diferentes pretextos. Pero se muestra llena de indulgencia frente a los pecados de juventud de tal "revolucionario" extraviado . Y alega en favor de un sistema ideal que excluiria todos los inconvenientes' (p. 307). For Derozier, Galdos is a propagandist writer concerned to denounce, 'a traves de la experiencia liberal, todas las aventuras democraticas o republicanas' (p. 309), a novelist who shows a complete disregard for 'el telon de fondo economico y social de Espana' (ibid.). In short, Galdos is the supporter of a political program based on 'prudencia, absentismo, vacio' (p. 311). Araya's article, entitled 'La Fontana de Oro de Galdos: cien anos de lucidez politica,' would seem to be a rebuttal of Derozier's adverse commentary on Galdos's ideological attitudes in the novel, though the French scholar goes unmentioned . Araya is careful to note that in this early novel Galdos reveals evidence of maturity and of being 'un novelista

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completamente formado,' adding that 'el realismo novelesco se manifiesta esponjadamente en La Fontana de Oro' (p. 89). The decision to write the article has been prompted - Araya explains - by the conviction that the Chilean political situation in the years from 1970 to 1972 resembles that described in Galdos's novel, and that Chileans would do well to reflect on the writer's 'aguda vision' in 1870 of the political situation in Spain from 1820 to 1823. 145 In order to point to Galdos's solidly liberal outlook as it is expressed in the novel, Araya pays close attention to the narrator's political stance: 'El ciudadano Benito Perez se aloja comodamente en el narrador de La Fontana de Oro ... El narrador adopta claramente el punto de vista de un liberal de su tiempo. Su analisis de los acontecimientos sucedidos entre 1820-23 hay que encuadrarlo dentro de esa perspectiva, y no de otra. El narrador enfoca la realidad de manera muy diferente a como era enfocada por contemporaneos suyos conservadores' (p. 90), later observing that 'el lector va conociendo un narrador que comparte claramente las ideas liberales en lo politico y social, capta facilmente su actitud comprensiva frente a los ilusos exaltados y percibe el rechazo y repugnacia que el narrador profesa al absolutismo ya sus sostenedores. El nivel de las opiniones del narrador es bastante aceptable . Sus ideas son claras, no muy originales, pero solidas y sensatas' (p. 203). The dangers implicit in employing a political approach to a literary text can be seen in these two articles, particularly in Derozier's. The main pitfall consists in judging the political import of a work anachronistically and using terms and labels whose significance is inappropriate to describe ideological attitudes expressed in an age removed from the present. Derozier's approach is prejudiced; his branding of Galdos as a conservative is suggestive of a disappointment at the author's moderate views and his failure to display a militant attitude; it would appear that Galdos fails to measure up to Derozier's criterion of left-wing political involvement as under~tood in present-day France. By contrast, Araya shows greater awareness of the historical distance separating his own point of view in the present from that of Galdos in 1870, and consequently he is more measured in his assessment of the writer's political position. But Araya's didactic purpose came to naught: the lessons he hoped Chileans might learn from the political clashes, intrigues, and rivalries enacted in La Fontana de Oro went unheeded.

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Throughout his career, Galdos had his detractors, few in number at most periods, it is true, and mostly consisting of Catholic conservatives who fiercely objected to Galdos's liberalism and anticlericalism. These anti-Galdosistas include forgotten names like Conrado Muinos Saenz, Francisco Garcia, Constancio Eguia Ruiz, and Gabriel Alomar. 146 An echo of this predictably biased attitude to Galdos is heard as late as 1970 in the words of a former bishop of the Canary Islands who wrote a letter to the editor of the Madrid daily newspaper Arriba describing Galdos as 'uno de los personajes mas nefastos de Espana en los ultimos tiempos ••• El estandarte y portavoz de aquella campana infame de Electra. El autor de tantas novelas rezumantes de anticlericalismo, anticatolicismo e immoralidad. ' 147 At the other end of the political spectrum, Galdos's works have been held up as heartening reading for revolutionaries in the Spanish Civil War. 148 'El que quiera cobrar' Rosa Chacel addresses co-revolutionaries, 'alientos en la lucha actual, el que necesite sentir en el corazon germinar una firmeza, altivamente espontanea, sustancialmente propia, hunda su pensamiento en las paginas galdosianas, lancese a atravesar esa extension, que es, al mismo tiempo y en cada uno de sus puntos, selva y paramo (p. 48). Here we have a clear instance of literature being exploited for ideological ends. The matter of Galdos's liberalism has been considered - in a more sober way - by several scholars and critics, including Ramon Perez de Ayala, H. Husges, Francis M. Kercheville, and signally by Clara E. Lida in her article 'Galdos y los Episodios galdosianos,' published in Anales Galdosianos in 1968. 149 In the same issue of this periodical Vicente Llorens published an enlightening article on a related topic, that of Galdos's relationship to the 'burguesia. ' 150 Galdos's political trajectory has been valuably summarized by Joaquin Casalduero in his article 'Historia y novela': 151 Galdos presenta objetivamente la realidad politica de Espana, en los afios 70, su propia realidad. El novelista no es ni se siente revolucionario socialista (en aquella epoca el socialismo era revolucionario); ademas, en esos anos el socialismo era de un valor politico nulo. Con sincera y honesta vocacion se podia uno dedicar a forjar el instrumento para la lucha y la victoria. Galdos no era revolucionario, era un burgues liberal. Su ideal es el orden y la ciencia, el trabajo y el ahorro que permiten

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acumular un capital. El individuo y la propiedad son para el algo sagrado. Galdos ni se engana a si mismo ni engana a nadie. Sigue un camino recto y honesto. Sus ideales no cambian en toda su vida, pero la clase a que pertenece, en lugar de ir mejorando y progresando, se va haciendo cada vez mas egoista, mezquina, infecunda, esteril y materialista. Al llegar a la vejez, su esplendida vejez llena a~n de energia y de fuerza creadora, tiene que decidirse a decretar la muerte de Dona Perfecta. Sin saber con que sustituirla, tiene que destruir esa fuerza politica, ese sistema eclesiastico-oligarquico-militar. La conmocion del novelista es profunda: sigue con los mismos ideales y tiene que rectificar por completo su actitud politica, sintiendo un profundo desprecio hacia la clase social a la que pertenece y de la cual no puede ya salir, aunque profetiza que la aurora asoma con el proletariado, la nueva clase a la cual no pertenece. (p. 310) History is an important topic in Galdosian studies and has provoked some impressive commentary. The capital importance of history in the nineteenth century is brought out in the following passage by A.L. Rowse: 'The nineteenth century saw a profound intellectual revolution, the full effects of which are only being worked out in our time. It was intimately connected with history; it was indeed mainly concerned with history; we may say that it was historical in character. ' 152 A man of his age in this regard, Galdos displayed a profoundly historical approach to life and art, and his whole production is suffused with a sense of history. Not far short of half the author's output is made up of episodios nacionales, historical novels sui generis. Galdos's addiction to pondering on history in an endeavour to draw from it lessons for the present is epitomized in the prefatory note affixed to his very first novel, La Fontana de Oro, written between 1867 and 1868 and published in 1870. 153 It has been noted by Graham Hough that 'the extent to which novels incorporate political and social history varies greatly, but they all incorporate it. ' 154 In the case of Galdos, it has to be said that he incorporates it to a very great extent. It has even been suggested by Maria Zambrano that nineteenth-century Spanish history is 'casi siempre convencional' and that the 'imagen del tiempo 1 is to be found in the Spanish novel of that time and specifically in that of Galdos. 155 Notable historians, both Spanish and foreign, like Rafael Altamira, G.P. Gooch, and Salvador de Madariaga, have praised Galdos for his 'condiciones de historiador. ' 156

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Several scholars have addressed themselves to the more general and theoretical aspects of Galdos's concerns with history, and notable studies have been written by Carlos Claveria, Madeleine de Gogorza Fletcher, Joaquin Casalduero, Vicente Llorens, and Peter G. Earle. 157 Three interesting full-length books - by Hans Hinterhauser, Alfred Rodriguez, and Antonio Regalado Garcia - deal with these matters in the course of examining Galdos's Episodios naaionales . 156 Regalado Garcia, in one of the most provocative studies of Galdos, adopts an eclectic approach based on the theories of Lukacs and guided by a predilection for writers of the Generation of '98, particularly Baroja. The unflattering picture he presents of Galdos is a controversial one, which has been criticized by several scholars, among them Raymond Carr and Peter B. Goldman. 159 Carr has conveniently summed up Regalado's main thesis: 'Galdos was a compromising bourgeois, not a liberal crusader. He feared the masses, underestimated the significance of workers' movements, and usually avoided "real" social issues. His anticlericalism was a mask to hide his reluctance to tackle the most fundamental issues in Spanish politics. To a large extent he was a hypocrite; he has what Professor Regalado calls a "cant mentality"' (p. 185). The English historian goes on to suggest that Regalado's conception of Spanish political history from the mid-nineteenthcentury up tQ Galdos's death is distorted by his 'rather jaded left-wing orthodoxy' (ibid.), and that he fails to take into consideration the fact that every novelist, however great he may be, has a 'range,' which is conditioned by such factors as 'class situation' and 'limitations of sensibility' (p. 187). Galdos could not offer a complete description of Spanish society, nor could Dickens of English society; it is pointless to think that they could. Goldman, for his part, lays particular stress on Regalado's historical 'shortsightedness' (p. 113). For all this criticism, Regalado's book has been widely and justly recognized as an important contribution to Galdosian studies. Some creditable studies have been made of the place and function of historical elements in particular works. Early commentators on this subject were Rafael Altamira and Eduardo Gomez de Baquero. Their successors include Emilio Gutierrez Gamero y de Laiglesia, Angel Gonzalez Palencia, Miguel Enguidanos, Antonio Ruiz Salvador, Juan Lopez-Morillas, Brian J. Dendle, Ricardo Gullon, Geoffrey Ribbans, Walter T. Pattison, Carlos Seco Serrano, Robert Ricard, Josette Blanquat, and Javier Herrero. 160 Some of these studies are illuminating, and, of course, among them are to be found differing emphases

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and conclusions. For example, Carlos Seco argues that the

episodios should be given greater consideration for their

value as historical sources, whereas Ricardo Gullon, in two splendid articles, challenges 'una inclinacion creciente a utilizar la obra galdosiana como documento, ' 161 insisting that novels like Canovas should be treated primarily as works of literary art. Gullon writes that 'lo historico y lo ficticio estan tejidos en la novela con la misma clase de fibra: cambia el color, no la calidad del hilo. Los personajes historicos actuan en la obra imaginaria como estimulos y representaciones de la invencion y no como extraidos de otro mundo e interpolados en el novelesco; no son incrustaciones en una taracea, sino partes vivas de un conjunto organico cuya creacion presupone y postula su presencia. ' 162 Here are seen the contrasting foci of two leading Spanish scholars, Seco in the field of history and Gullon in that of literature.

Mention should also be made of a rewarding study that adopts an historical approach to an early Galdos novel, namely, Josette Blanquat's 'De l'histoire au roman Dona Perfecta : approche methodologique. ' 163 In this article, Blanquat discusses aspects of 'la polemique engagee - sur tousles plans - entre les deux Espagnes' (p. 60), and brings out the massive importance of the religious question in the latter part of the nineteenth century (pp. 60-8) . This last fact is corroborated by scholars and historians like Juan Lopez-Morillas, Raymond Carr, and Joan Connelly Ullman. 164 Carr has observed of Spain that by the end of the nineteenth century 'religion was the prism through which all other social conflict was refracted. ' 165 Given the crucial significance of the relations between religion and society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is natural that in a writer with so powerfully developed a social sense as Galdos, religious affairs should be a dominant theme in his creative work. Writing in 1870 he underscored the importance of religion in the structure of family and social life: 'Descuella en primer lugar el problema religioso, que perturba los hogares y ofrece contradicciones que asustan, porque mientras en una parte la falta de creencias afloja o rompe los lazos morales y civiles que forma la familia, en otros producen los mismos efectos el fanatismo y las costumbres devotas . ' 166 Galdos's commitment to liberalism and the movement in favour of social progress, coupled with his anticlericalism and his 'vehement opposition to the neo-Catholics and to Carlism,' 167 served to bring down upon him the wrath of the

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defenders of traditional Catholic Spain. Their opposition to him was political, but more than that, it was religious, stemming from a condemnation of his anticlericalism and what were seen as his antireligious attitudes. Even the great scholar Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, a good friend of Galdos, went so far as to charge the author, in an early book, with being 'el enemigo implacable y frio del Catolicismo. ' 168 There were, however, those like Clarin and later Gregorio Maranon who considered Galdos to be 'profundamente religioso'; 169 and it is not difficult to adduce passages to demonstrate that Galdos was far from being implacably opposed to Catholicism. 170 The fact of the matter seems to be that he was wracked with religious doubts and simply lacked faith. 171 The whole question of Galdos's religious outlook is entangled with problems, particularly in view of Galdos's complex personality and the depth and scope of a literary production composed over a period of more than fifty years and hence subject to manifold influences and modifications. The topic, notwithstanding, has been so amply treated, especially in recent years, as to be regarded as one of the favourite subjects for the academic study of Galdos. In the present age the religious approach to literature has been quite widely practised, counting among its exponents distinguished critics like Jacques Maritain, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Alber~ Beguin, and W.H. Auden. 172 Though in most other respects it may be seen as dissimilar, the religious approach is akin to the political approach in representing a commitment to an integral way of looking at life, with all the attendant dangers of lending itself to the possibility of willed or unconscious distortion in the reading and judgment of texts. J. Hillis Miller has commented perceptively on the religious approach in criticism: It is natural for the reader of literature to have religious convictions, however vague and contradictory these may be. Even indifference to religious questions or rejection of them is of course a religious position. On the other hand, many works of literature have religious themes, whether overtly, as in the case of The Divine Comedy, the poems of St. John of the Cross, or Murder in the Cathedral, or more indirectly, as in the case of the poems of Holderlin, Keats, or Arnold. The problem arises when a critic, with his own religious convictions, confronts the religious subject matter of a work of literature. Critics have usually chosen one of three characteristic ways of

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dealing with the problem. Each may lead to its own form of distortion. The critic may tend to assimilate writers to his own religious beliefs. He may be led to reject writers because they do not agree with his religious views. He may tend to trivialize literature by taking an objective or neutral view towards its religious themes. 173 Galdos's early detractors, including clerics like Muinos Saenz and Blanco Garcia, chose the second way, whereas later commentators have usually followed the first and third ways, with varying success. Solid general study of the topic was not undertaken until 1927, when Stephen Scatori published his mono raph La idea religiosa en la obra de Benito Perez Galdos, 1 4 a work that offers a useful but rather plodding account of the subject. A more discerning approach is to be found in Robert Ricard's short study L'Evolution spirituelle de Perez Galdos, published in 1959. 175 Among other things he points out Galdos's failure to understand mysticism. In his conclusion he likens Galdos's spiritual constitution to that of Renan:

9

On pense

a

la fameuse phrase de Renan dans la preface des

Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse: 'Il me semble souvent

que j'ai au fond du coeur une ville d'Is qui sonne encore des cloches obstinees a convoquer aux offices sacres des fideles qui n'entendent plus!' Les cloches sonnaient sans doute encore dans le coeur de Galdos, il les entendait, mais il ne croyait plus a leur message et il ne leur obeissait plus. Les violentes explosions de l'ecrivain vieillissant dans des oeuvres extremistes comme Casandra ou Canovas sont peut-etre simplement le cri douloureux d'une ame qui voit approcher la mort sans avoir perce son mystere et qui pleure dans l'angoisse et le desespoir la foi qu'elle a perdue. (pp. 26-7)

In recent years further general study of the subject has been undertaken by scholars such John J. Devlin, Brian J. Dendle, and Francisco Perez Gutierrez. 176 Devlin offers an interesting synopsis of Galdos's 'religious commitments' in an entry on the writer in The New Catholic Encyclopedia. 177 Dendle's book The Spanish Novel of Religious Thesis 18761936, contains some concise and suggestive remarks on Galdos's religious views as embodied in his novels. 178 But the most complete study of the subject to date is Perez Gutierrez's long chapter on Galdos in his recent El problema

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reZigioso en Za generac~on de 1868. This systematic study employs a flexible biographical approach. As a starting point, the author notes that Galdos's religious attitudes have a contemporary flavour: 'Hay, en efecto, en la dimension de lo religioso en Galdos, mucho de contemporaneo, como un parentesco con nuestro hoy postconciliar y, si no "postcristiano," si - incuestionable - "postcatolico". ' 179 This may suggest that Perez Gutierrez is pursuing Hillis Miller's first way, that of assimilating a writer's religious views to those of the critic, but if in the deepest sense this is true, it is done in a stimulating rather than objectionable way. Galdos is characterized as 'un "irrequietum cor" agustiniano, dolorido, dilacerado, que disolvia sus punzadas en un sosiego aparentement estoico y enmascaraba su busqueda incansable en las peripecias de SUS criaturas' (pp. 183-4). Perez Gutierrez's study is far from being the definitive statement on Galdos's religious outlook, but it certainly represents a serviceable commentary on the subject. 180 Other scholars have concentrated on particular aspects of Galdos's religious views. The author's anticlericalism has received extensive treatment, starting with Vezinet's comments published in 1907 and by such later commentators as Eugene Savaiano, Manuel Tunon de Lara, Francisco Ruiz Ramon, John Devlin, Josette Blanquat, and Jose Agustin Balseiro. 181 Some other religious facets that have been discussed in a general way are the devil and diabolism, by Carlos Claveria and Gustavo Correa, respectively; priests by Robert Ricard and Francisco Ruiz Ramon; nuns by Walter Rubin; the Jesus figure by Frank P. Bowman; 'ecumenicism' by Jose Schraibman; and charity, in monographs by Gilberto Paolini and by Arnold M. Penuel. 182 Another group of Galdosian studies, centring on religious aspects of particular texts, contains some interesting critical commentary, including two important full-length works. Gustavo Correa's EZ simboZismo reZigioso en las noveZas de Perez Galdos 183 is a perceptive and richly documented study of religious aspects of a dozen novels, starting with Dona Perfecta and finishing with Casandra. Also impressive is Francisco Ruiz Ramon's Tres personajes gaZdosianos: ensayos de aproximacion a un mundo reZigioso y moraZ, 184 a work less ambitious in scope than Correa's but, none the less, containing some trenchant critical discussion, including the most complete account to date of Angel Guerra's 'proceso espiritual.' Other valuable studies in the form of articles have been made by J.B. Hall on Dona Perfecta; E.J. Rodgers on

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Gloria; Peter A. Bly on Marianela; both Josette Blanquat and Geraldine M. Scanlon on Angel Guerra; Eduardo Gomez de Baquero on Torquemada y San Pedro and Nazarin, and by both Alexander A. Parker and Ciriaco Moron Arroyo on this latter novel; and on Misericordia by Robert H. Russell, Theodore S. Beardsley, Jr, J.E. Varey, Robert Kirsner, Marcel Crespili and Donald W. Bleznick in collaboration with Mario E. Ruiz. 1 5

The fact that morality forms an important dimension of religion usually means that a concern with religious facets of literature entails at some point a consideration of moral questions. This can be clearly seen in the approach adopted to religious features of Galdos's works by Gustavo Correa when he states, for example, that 'la conciencia moral propiamente dicha aparece como uno de los pilares fundamentales de la novelistica de Galdos, ya sea en su forma individual o colectiva. ' 186 Indeed, it comes as no surprise to find that Correa has devoted an article to the examination of 'la concepcion moral en las novelas de Perez Galdos. ' 187 In a conversation in 1912 Galdos himself expressed the conviction that 'la literatura debe ser ensenanza, ejemplo. Yo escribi siempre, excepto en algunos momentos de lirismo, con el proposito de marcar huella. ' 188 A moralizing tendency is manifest in the articles of some of Galdos's early critics, whose bigotry led them to censure the writer's vision of life and his choice of subject matter (especially in his anticlerical works and his so-called naturalist novels). 189 Intelligent critics like Clarin, Palacio Valdes, Pardo Bazan, Menendez y Pelayo, and Gomez de Baquero deal more sensitively, in their writings on Galdos, with the moral implications of his work. A good nineteenthcentury example of the use of the moral approach to a Galdos novel is to be found in Jose Enrique Rodo's article on Misericordia, published soon after the novel's appearance in 1897. 190 'Es cierto,' Rodo observes at one point, 'queen su filosofia de moralista y de sociologo echara de menos el lector devoto de Tolstoi, la originalidad profunda, la innovadora audacia, el sello personal, la profetica intuicion de lo distante; - pero hay en ella un hermoso sentimiento de amor, un grande instinto de justicia, y hay un criterio constantemente limpio, - un criterio ecuanime y sereno, - en el que el buen sentido deja de ser vulgar y se convierte en fuente de sana y apacible hermosura' (pp. 253-4). A later distinguished critic and scholar deeply concerned with the moral dimension of Galdos's work was Angel del Rio, whose

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articles 'Aspectos del pensamiento moral de Galdos' and 'Los ideales de Galdos,' mentioned earlier, are memorable contributions to the subject. 191 Written out of a sense that 'la literatura, como el arte todo, como el pensamiento, como la vida, no tienen sentido si nose fundan en una jerarquia de valores morales y religiosos,' 192 they succeed admirably in throwing light on the complex workings of Galdos's moral sensibility. In recent years numerous Galdos scholars and critics have incorporated a moral perspective into their interpretation of whole texts and aspects of texts (relating particularly to characterization, humour, and tragedy). The approaches of these Galdosistas are very varied and usually combined with other guiding concerns - formalist, stylistic, thematic, or philosophical - but many would probably not dissent from Christopher Butler's statement that 'literature in general and tragedy in particular has profound moral effects provided we accept that literature throws light on the way we see the world and the beliefs we entertain about it. ' 193 A broad discussion of some moral implications of Galdos's novelistic world is to be found in Sherman Eoff's 'The Moral Perspective,' a chapter of his The Novels of Perez Galdos. 194 In a fine extended article, 'Canarias en Galdos,' Jose Perez Vidal presents a convincing case for the importance of Galdos's Canarian experience as an influence on his moral vision. 195 Anthony Zahareas considers the place and function of tragedy in Fortunata y Jacinta, in a stimulating and wellreasoned article first published in 1965. 196 A general approach to the question of tragedy in Galdos's novels has been attempted by Joaquin Santalo in a disappointing book. 197 Galdos's humour, however, is the subject of a most useful and rewarding book by Michael Nimetz, itself the subject of a substantial review-article by Gerald Gillespie. 198 A moral strain is particularly noticeable in a group of articles devoted to Miau with a view to challenging the interpretation of the novel offered by Robert J. Weber in his study The Miau Manuscript of Benito Perez Galdos, 199 and especially his judgment of the protagonist, Ramon Villaamil, described at one stage as 'a spineless, self-interested character who is unable to meet the problems of existence' (p. 86). It is not altogether surprising that the three articles that take their cue for disagreement from Weber's interpretation of the novel and employ similar lines of argument in support of their points of view, should come from Britain, where moral concern in criticism is a vigorously

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maintained tradition. Alexander A. Parker, Herbert Ramsden, and Geraldine Scanlon in collaboration with R.O. Jones, 200 concur in regarding Villaamil more as a 'tragic victim' than as a 'comic failure,' 201 and their studies, interesting and well argued in their differing ways, make a persuasive case for concluding that it is 'principally the system and not the individual that Galdos is criticizing. ' 202 Other studies that have a bearing on morality in Galdos's novels include G.A. Davies's 'Galdos's El amigo Manso: An Experiment in Didactic Method' and also an article by Richard A. Cardwell on Dona Perfecta, 203 which challenges Davies's view that 'Dona Perfecta best represents in its extreme form the [didactic] method of the early period' (p. 16). Cardwell is concerned to show that Dona Perfecta, with all its faults of execution, is a more accomplished novel than is generally supposed, and that, furthermore, it is not critically profitable to make a clear demarcation between the early so-called thesis novels and the later novels. At a more general level, Sherman Eoff discusses 'motives and values in Galdos' by contrasting the work of Galdos, Baroja, and Sanchez Ferlosio, 204 three writers who 'represent three distinct epochs and three sets of values or human motives in the realm of fiction' (p. 5). Eoff is also interested in the psychological and philosophical aspects of Galdos and has done fundamental work on these subjects. The relations of psychology and literature are complex and varied, having to do with, among other matters, the mental and emotional constitution of writers and diverse facets of their literary works. Psychology itself is a relatively new science, in which great advances have been made in areas like physiological psychology, perception, cognition, and Gestalt psychology, but one commentator, Frederick C. Crews, 205 claims that these branches of psychology have done little to assist literary criticism, arguing that 'psychoanalysis is the only psychology to have seriously altered our ways of reading literature' (p. 73), and noting that 'the historical prominence of psychoanalysis in literary studies is readily understandable. Literature is written from and about motives, and psychoanalysis is the only thoroughgoing theory of motives that mankind has devised. The moment we perceive that works of art can express emotional conflict, or that they contain latent themes, or that their effect on us is largely subliminal, we have entered the realm of interest that is uniquely occupied by Freudianism and its

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Literature and Ideas

offshoots' (p. 74). There can be no doubt that psychoanalysis constitutes an important source of interest for literary theory and criticism, and it counts among its advocates wellknown critics - who have drawn on its insights in varying measure - like Gaston Bachelard, Robert Graves, Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, Leon Edel, Lionel Trilling, Northrop Frye, and latterly Norman H. Holland. In Galdosian studies the sensitive and informed application of psychoanalytical approaches to the author's life and works is a very recent phenomenon. Earlier non-technical forumulations with a bearing on literary psychology are relevant to a consideration of Galdos's literary concerns. 206 In a famous essay, 'The Art of Fiction,' Henry James made some superb comments on the importance of experience for the writer: 'Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative - much more when it happens to be a man of genius - it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. 1207 Galdos was supremely in possession of experience in the Jamesian sense. His mind was wide open to impressions, individuals, ideas, and change - he was, to quote James again, clearly 'one of those people on whom nothing is lost!' (p. 33). Galdos prided himself on being an observer of life, as emerges in his Memorias de un desmemoriado, his essay 'Guia espiritual de Espana,' and, more specifically, in his preface to Miserioordia, where he tells of his factfinding expeditions. 208 Many Galdos commentators have remarked on the writer's striking powers of observation, among them Tomas Borras, who has interestingly linked the author's reticence to his genius as an observer. 209 On Galdos's psychological penetration there have also been numerous laudatory comments throughout the history of Galdosian criticism. Over fifty years ago Salvador de Madariaga made some acute remarks on the matter: 'en boca de una de sus creaciones mas admirables, Angel Guerra, pone un vocablo significativo, de su propio cufto: Impulsologia . No cabe nombre mas apto para designar la rama de la psicologia que tan bien conocio. Apenas hay cosa en los sotanos del alma humana que no haya sondeado y expresado con inimitable felicidad. Asi considerada, su obra podria definirse como el drama de los impulsos vislumbrado tras la comedia de la accion. ' 210 However, the close study of psychological aspects

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and implications of Galdos's works begins with Sherman Eoff's investigations, dating from the 1940s. A general analysis of these questions is conducted in his full-length study The Novels of Perez GaZdos: The Concept of Life as Dynamic Process, in which he argues that Galdos's psychological knowledge may be elementary by present-day technical standards, but that his novels are 'substantial and firmly constructed representations of life. ' 211 Attention is paid to the ~sychological implications of Galdos's narrative approach, 2 2 to his conception of personality, 213 and to the psychological structure of the novels. Concerning this last aspect Eoff notes that 'the basic psychological structure of Galdos's novels, the consequence of his- method, is in general solidly forged along a line representative of a rhythmical succession of moments of tension, rest, retardation, and advances. Whether we regard the personality change thus depicted as being sharply drawn or as an expansion of latent tendencies, the characters, seen in their ceaseless efforts to attain emotional stability, represent human nature in its restless, shifting movement, rather than in static form' (p. 63). Eoff's main ideas are recapitulated in the opening section of the chapter on Galdos in his The Modern Spanish NoveZ. 214 There he usefully places the author in his intellectual setting, observing that in contrast with Zola, Galdos showed 'a greater interest in psychology than in physiology' (p. 120), and suggesting that Wundtian psychology and the 'spiritual evolutionism of Hegel' may have exercised influence on the Spanish writer's 'psychological-philosophical outlook' (pp. 123-6) . Other general approaches to the subject include consideration of Galdos's interest in abnormal psychology by L.W. Elliott in collaboration with F.M. Kercheville, and by L.B. Walton; a study by Gerald Gillespie, who attempts to synthesize approaches by other commentators like Eoff, Schraibman, and Cardona, in an effort to work towards 'an emerging complex definition of the mind in Galdos's writing' (p. 852); and a recent article by Arnold M. Penuel, entitled 'Galdos, Freud and Humanistic Psychology. ' 215 Psychological approaches to particular works include studies of Fortunata y Jacinta by Sherman Eoff, and also one by Stephen Gilman. 216 Gilman takes his lead from Eoff in making a study of Fortunata's consciousness, characterized in the concluding paragraph of the article as 'a completely healthy consciousness, impervious to education, immune to society, without ambition, resistant to history - a consciousness

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Literature and Ideas

which, in spite of passionate excess and gross errors of judgement, grows, flourishes, exercises freedom, creates values, and radiates truth' (p. 65). Ricardo Gullon's article 'Una novela psicologica' deals with the psychological facets of La inaognita and Realidad, and more recently Nigel Glendinning has written cogently on the subject of psycholo~i and politics in the first series of the Episodios naaionales. 7 La sombra has been discussed in the light of Freudian theory by Rafael Bosch. 218 Other more technical studies conducted along psychological or psychiatric lines include those by Fernando Bravo Moreno, Angel Garma, and E. AmatandC. Leal. 219 A stimulating psychiatric study, 'Galdos as Psychiatrist in Fortunata y Jaainta,' has been published by Joan Connelly Ullman, a literary and historical scholar, writing in collaboration with George H. Allison, a practising psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and-physician. 220 Their study is divided into two parts, part one analysing Maximiliano's situation and behaviour in psychiatric terms to bring out 'Galdos' grasp of the dynamics of mental health, specifically the impact of unconscious motivation on personality structure and behaviour,' and part two exploring 'the possible sources of this knowledge: Galdos's own experiences, and his familiarity with the psychiatric theory and practice of his era. ' 221 The related subject of dreams in Galdos's works has been extensively treated by Joseph Schraibman, author of a useful monograph entitled Dreams in the Novels of Galdos. 222 Other commentary on this topic has come from Sherman Eoff, Gerald Gillespie, Ricardo Gullon, and Marie-Claire Petit. Another related topic, that of doctors and medicine, has attracted considerable attention, particularly in recent years. In the late fifties Gregorio Maranon noted the interest shown by Galdos and his family in doctors: 'Siempre hubo en aquella casa un medico que tenia magica autoridad. Su rostro aparece frecuentemente an las obras de Galdos. Era, en cierto modo, una preocupacion del siglo, este prestigio que el ialeno tuvo en la mente de los liberales del siglo XIX . ' 22 Studies on the subject have been contributed by J. Cortezo-Collantes, Luis S. Granjel, E. Amat and C. Leal, Jose Maria Lopez Pinero, Walter Rubin, and M. Gordon. 224 The efforts made by Sherman Eoff towards the clarification of philosophical aspects of Galdos's works are of fundamental importance. In the course of dealing with the psychological dimension of Galdos's works, Eoff to~ches on closely related philosophical questions . These are the focus of his attention

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Galdos and His Critics

in 'The Philosophic Perspective,' 225 chapter 7 of his book on Galdos. In the opening paragraph he notes that 'Galdos was opposed to hard and fast theory, just as he was to dogmatism, and with the possible exception of Realidad, he attempted no exclusively philosophical demonstration. Yet there is no question that he had a philosophical mind, and that he respected the search for truth which transcends empirical and scientific knowledge. He was certainly interested in metaphysical (ontological) aspects of life, and for the greater part of his career was actually seeking a philosophy in which experience is seen as purposeful activity in harmony with an ultimate cause of Being' (p. 131). Later in the chapter Eoff connects Galdos's 'idealism' with Krausism, and suggests that in the 1880s the author turned away from the 'diluted Kantianism and Hegelianism of Krause' towards 'Hegel's theory of self-consciousness' (p. 138). The possibility of a much broader Hegelian influence on Galdos is discussed with particular reference to novels like Fortunata

Jacinta, Angel Guerra, La loca de la casa, La incognita, Realidad, and El caballero encantado (pp. 138-50). Eoff's

y

treatment is undeniably valuable and thought-provoking, but like much of his critical work, it tends to be excessively schematic, failing to come to grips with the particulars of literary texts, their texture, tone, and irony. What is lacking in Eoff's writings is a flexible critical idiom, a mode of discourse that would enable him to integrate in a more subtle way the materials and insights he brings from philosophy and psychology. Other scholars concerned with Galdos and philosophy tend to deal with the influence of particular philosophers or philosophical currents on his work . 226 Several studies take up the question of Galdos's relation to Krausism and its impact on his sensibility and creative work. Walter T. Pattison presents interesting biographical information on Galdos's contacts with Krausism at the University of Madrid and the Ateneo, and considers the influence of 'the religious form of Krausism' on the conception of the early novel Gloria. 227 Juan Lopez-Morillas, whose El krausismo espanol 228 is a lucid and incisive study of the subject, has devoted an article to the examination of Galdos's attitudes to Krausism as shown in La familia de Leon Roch. 229 He draws the following conclusion: Galdos, atento ya por estas fechas al correlato determinista del naturalismo literario, no puede menos de ver con

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melancolica simpatia el empeno de un intelectual krausista en vivir a contrapelo de la sociedad contemporanea, encastillado en una.idea del mundo y del hombre que por ser racional tiene a la fuerza que ser viable. No seria aventurado sugerir que La familia de Leon Roch es el palanque donde, bajo el disfraz de una fabula novelesca, rompen lanzas el racionalismo optimista, muy siglo XVIII, de los discipulos de Krause y el determinismo pesimista que, mas acorde con los tiempos, acepta Galdos. No cabe duda de que lo acepta muy a pesar suyo, pues en Galdos queda siempre un trasfondo de perfectibilismo dieciochista. (pp. 101-2) Another interesting article on the subject of Galdos and Krausism has been contributed by Denah Lida, who provides a general treatment accompanied by a profusion of notes containing useful bibliographical information. 230 A small group of studies deals with Galdos's supposed appropriation of positivist ideas. In 1939 Joaquin Casalduero interpreted Marianela as a novelistic illustration of Auguste Comte's conception of the development of mankind through three stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and ultimately, the positivistic. 231 Galdos, Casalduero wrote, 'ha querido novelar la evolucion de la humanidad' (p. 211). The theory became influential; it was glossed in 1954 by Pattison, who added some biographical and background details and used it as a starting point for the chapter entitled 'The Creation of Marianela' 232 of his Galdos and the Creative Process. In the same year, however, Eoff questioned the validity of Casalduero's interpretation, declaring that 'to stress Comte's influence seems unwise. ' 233 Subsequently, several scholars, including C.A. Jones, Peter A. Bly, and Brian J. Dendle, have expressed scepticism with regard to the Spanish scholar's Comtian interpretation of Marianela. 23 ~ But support for Casalduero's approach has come from Gerald Gillespie. In a paper on Galdos and positivism, delivered in 1967, 235 Gillespie states that 'Galdos's early penchant for symbolism can be seen in the novel Marianela (1878), written in a period for which ample documentation exists of his exposure to French and English positivism' (p. 114). Later in the paper, however, Gillespie notes that 'Galdos must be credited with a rather rapid penetration to the paradoxes of the positivistic examination of humanity through reason,' and concludes that 'while Positivism gave Galdos a working model and reinforced his youthful courage to investigate the behaviour of his fellow men, he eventually discovered the incongruity of any mere

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Galdos and His Critics

model and the puzzling incongruity of life' (p. 120). Another philosopher has been proposed as an influence on Galdos's thinking : Plato. The initial advocate of this theory appears to have been Mario E. Ruiz, whose article 'El idealismo platonico en Marianela de Galdos' is both interesting and convincing. 236 Following Ruiz, Gustavo Correa has written a fine article on the subject of Galdos and Platonism 237 to show that 'una de las premisas de su arte fue la tradicion platonica' (p. 13). Neither Ruiz nor Correa neglects to mention the fact that Galdos's Platonism has to be placed within the sphere of 'la realidad galdosiana,' and that, at bottom, the author's creative method is inseparable from realism. 238 Galdos's early belief that 'no hay cosa mas hermosa que la realidad' 239 never seems to have deserted him, though his conception of reality and the forms he employed to register it changed greatly during his more than half a century as a creative artist. The notion of Galdos as an arch-realist has long been abandoned, because commentators interested in the general implications of Galdos's realism regard the question as complex. The tendency in recent years has been to extend the boundaries of the context in which Galdos's realism is considered. Thus, Rodolfo Cardona, 240 following the arguments set forth by Donald Fanger in his Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, writes : The following quotation from Professor Fanger's book concerning the rise of romantic realism is singularly applicable to Galdos and will help us clarify his possible relationship with this 'school': 'The very rise of romantic realism is traceable to the romantic impulse to see, and to present, the new urban life of the XIXth century at once in its truth and in its strangeness. Romantic realism would open up new areas of life to serious art and show what the properly attuned vision could find in them - what Dickens called "the poetry of fact."' This 'poetry of fact' is everpresent in the novels of Galdos. (p. 83) Another scholar, Jose Antonio Gomez Marin, in an interesting essay on El caballero encantado, 241 has discussed Galdos's 'realismo magico' in this late novel. And in a stimulating comparative paper entitled 'On Significant Reality: RobbeGrillet, Celaya, Galdos,' 242 Leon Livingstone comments on 'the concept of total reality that underlies the novelistic art of Benito Perez Galdos. ' 243 The importance of naturalism

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Literature and Ideas

for Galdos's creative endeavour is a disputed question 244 and the influence of this literary movement is confined to a specific area of his literary production, but a concern with realism is the hallmark of his entire work and his ambition to represent the 'imagen de la vida' 24 ~ the whole reality of his time, an enduring characteristic. He pursued this superhuman task with astonishing flair and energy, and for breadth of range and complexity of vision few writers can equal him. Using interdisciplinary approaches to Galdos and his works, scholars have, on the whole and particularly in recent years, produced quite promising - if far from definitive - studies. To be sure, some studies are of scant value, largely because of a failure on the part of their authors to pay due attention to the 'literariness' of the works in question. A few years ago, one of the finest Galdosian critics, Ricardo Gullon, expressed alarm at the possibility of a proliferation of merely extrinsic studies of Galdos: 'El riesgo de sepultar las novelas de Galdos bajo el Galdos sociologico, el Galdos historiador, el Galdos liberal, el Galdos burgues •. • es realmente grande. Como Cervantes, y por identicas razones, esta siendo explotado en todas direcciones, lo que no importaria mucho silos criticos de la literatura se mantuvieran en lo suyo, inmumes al contagio. 1246 The picture is not in fact as black as this quotation suggests. In the same article Gullon indicates that he is not opposed to the study of ideas in Galdos's novels, provided it is guided by a close concern with the novels' aesthetic structure; but the implication is that this type of approach is inevitably problematical (p. 299). Being problematical in no way invalidates it as a means of examining literary works. There are indeed some, though very few, masters of the interdisciplinary approach, for example, Steven Marcus and Richard Hoggart, two literary scholars who are first-rate 'close readers' as well as alert 'critical intellectuals. ' 247 In this area of Galdos studies there is at present no critical talent to compare with that of Marcus or Hoggart, though essays by Marias or LopezMorillas,248 among others, make refreshing and thoughtprovoking reading. It can be safely asserted that the groundwork for the study of ideas in Galdos's works is still in the course of being laid, as well it should be, since the best studies have brought a much-needed intellectual perspective to Galdosian studies. This particular area of study is likely to expand, because the interest in diverse interdisciplinary

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Galdos and His Critics

approaches to literature, though strongly challenged in some countries by formalist and structuralist schools, shows no signs of diminishing. But talk of interdisciplinary approaches may be misleading, for it tends to suggest that some tacit understanding exists between the various critical modes that can be classified under this heading. This is generally not at all true, as Francisco Ayala brings out in a recent paper entitled 'La disputa de las escuelas criticas . ' 249 Ayala neatly puts his finger on the dangers for literary analysis lurking behind the battles being waged between different critical factions, which are 'empenadas en defender cada una SU respectivo metodo como el unico provisto de legitimidad y eficacia' (p. 5). He explains that 'por lo general, tras este empeno se oculta una grave distorsion: la obra de arte deja de ser considerada como lo queen esencia es, objeto estetico, para tomarla y usarla - o abusar de ella - en cuanto documento sociologico, dato sico-biografico, ejemplo linguistico-estructural etcetera, cosas que, en efecto, sera tambien, no hay duda, pero solo de modo secundario o accesorio' (ibid.). It is to be hoped that this kind of salutary comment will be taken into full acount by those Galdos scholars and critics who are attracted to the specific study of Galdos's 'thinking intelligence. ' 250

4 Gald6s: The Novels

An English critic, Bernard Bergonzi, opened a review recently

by noting that 'the number of essential books' on the novel is no longer as 'comfortingly small, compared with all the studies devoted to poetry' as it was in what he terms 'the sweet critical innocence of the 1950s. ' 1 In the past twentyfive years, a plethora of critical and theoretical writings on the novel (and indeed on fiction in general) has appeared; it would seem that the novel has dislodged poetry from the centre of literary theorists' attention. But it has to be added that, despite all the speculative energy now being bestowed on the novel and other related fictional forms, theory of the novel still lags behind that of poetry in respect of subtlety, sophistication, and comprehensiveness. The novel is of course a much newer genre than poetry and has had to contend throughout its history with much prejudice against its form, content, and presumed immoral effects, from all kinds of adversaries : indignant clerics, scandalized matrons, cautious despots, and stick-in-the-mud theorists with an unswerving devotion to poetry - even such an eminent practitioner of the form as Sir Walter Scott remained unconvinced that it was 'an important branch of literature. 12 If the theory of the novel is still being charted, the field now appears to be at an exciting and expanding stage of its history. It is a commonplace of present-day literary history to regard Cervantes's masterpiece Don Quijote de la Mancha as the first major landmark in the history of the European novel. M.H. Abrams has said of Don Quijote that it is 'the single most important progenitor of the modern novel. 13 Given Cervantes's extraordinary achievement in this novel, of which subtlety of thought, power of characterization, narrative dexterity, and critical engagement with earlier traditions

162

Galdos and His Critics

of prose fiction are such marked features, it is not surprising to find a contemporary scholar, E.C. Riley, writing in 1962 that the Spanish author 'was one of the first European writers - perhaps the very first - to have had a theory of the novel of any considerable scope at all. ' 4 The cutting edge of Cervantes's theory is in his statement that 'la ep1ca tambien puede escrebirse en prosa como en verso. ' 5 Which amounts to saying that prose fiction can rise to the level of poetry. Being well aware of the novel's lowly status, Cervantes was naturally anxious to gain for it the prestige enjoyed by a favoured genre like epic poetry. One of the strategies he employed was to satirize the novels (i.e., romances) that were being heavily attacked for their supposedly harmful effects on readers. A theory of the novel similar to that put together by Professor Riley out of Cervantes's literary comments, could be pieced together from remarks made by an eighteenth-century novelist, himself indebted to Cervantes, Henry Fielding. Fielding, along with earlier writers like Defoe and Richardson and a later one like Sterne, is generally considered to be a major figure in the making of the modern novel. Notable among his comments on the 'new species of writing' is his definition, in the Preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), of 'comic Romance' (or novel, in modern parlance), as 'a comic Epic Poem in prose; differing from Comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy: its action being more extended and comprehensive; containing a much larger Circle of Incidents, and introducing a greater Variety of Characters. 16 Fielding was also preoccupied with the unity and coherence of literary works, as he brings out in his remark concerning 'the loose unconnected adventures in Don Quixote,' and in his warning to any 'little reptile of a critic' to hesitate before condemning 'any incidents in this our history as impertinent and foreign to our main design, because thou dost not immediately conceive in what manner such incident may conduce to that design. ' 7 Writing in 1884, Henry James noted the absence of novelistic theory in England: 'Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not diseutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it - of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. 18 In recent years it has been revealed that there was a good deal more novelistic theory produced in England in the eighteenth century than post-Jamesian critis had ever imagined. 9 Studies by Richard Stang and by Kenneth Graham on nineteenth-

163

The Novels

century English theory and criticism of the novel demonstrate conclusively that James is not to be taken strictly at his word. 10 These scholars describe and discuss a varied body of critical and theoretical writings - by critics like David Masson, G.H. Lewes, R.H. Hutton, W.C. Roscoe, and Leslie Stephen, and writers as varied as Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and George Eliot - that deal with the status and uses of the novel (and fiction in general), aspects of realism, morality, and ideas in the novel, and narrative and structural questions. In the opening paragraph to his book, Richard Stang is concerned to combat the entrenched cliche that 'criticism of the novel and discussion of theory of the novel someghow began ex nihilo with Flaubert in France, and that England remained remarkably insulated from these theories until infected or fertilized (depending on one's point of view) by either Henry James or George Moore in the eighties. ' 11 This of course should not be allowed to minimize the importance of Flaubert's memorable comments on the novel; for example, 'Le style c'est la vie! C'est le sang meme de la pensee!' and 'Vous me 208 Tafira (Canary Islands) 44 Taine, Hippolyte 69, 118-19, 127, 172, 175 Tamayo y Baus, Manuel 92, 93 Tannenburg, Boris de 15, 204 Tarrio, Angel 328, 329 Tate, Allen 72, 122, 147, 166 Teatro Espanol 20 Temps, Le 296 Tenreiro, Ramon Maria 133-4, 202, 204 Terry, Arthur 235-6 Tertutia, La 344 Thackeray, William Makepeace 163 Thiers, Adolphe 88 Thorny, Michele 298 Tierno Galvan, Enrique 303-4 Tiraboschi, Girolamo 68 Tocqueville, Alexis de 88 Todorov, Tzvetan 165 Toledo 29, 46 Tolosa Latour, Manuel 55 Tolstoy, Leo 88, 89-90, 91, 104, 105, 150, 263,

536

General Index

268, 269, 285, 289, 306, 326 Tomashevsky, Boris 165 Torre, Claudio de la 30 Torre, Guillermo de 23, 35, 53, 94, 134-5, 209, 216, 272 Torres, David 334 Torres Bodet, Jaime 218, 315 Torres Delgado, Rene 328 Toulouse-Lautrec, Count M. 190 Trend, J.B. 207 Treverret, A. de 190 Trillas, Gabriel 35 Trilling, Lionel 74, 80, 108-9, 114, 122, 153, 207 Trollope, Anthony 163 Trotsky, Leon 121, 318 Truel, Juana 304 Tsurinov, K.V. 321 Tuero, Tomas 186 Tunon de Lara, Manuel 137, 138-9, 149 Turgenev, Ivan 54, 90 Turnell, Martin 165 Turner, Harriet S. 235, 237, 338, 341 Turrell, Charles Alfred 269 Ucelay de Cal, Margarita 95 Ugarte, Manuel 14 Ullman, Joan Connelly 146, 155 Ullman, Pierre L. 92, 306 Ullman, Stephen 329 Unamuno, Miguel de 25, 34, 52, 53, 55, 98, 99,131, 133, 168, 202, 203, 204, 205, 233, 279, 312 United States 71, 73, 104, 120, 122, 164, 169, 190, 209, 210, 213, 219, 270, 274 Urban, Wilbur Marshall 230

Urbina, Luis Gonzaga 315 Urey, Diane 328, 329 Urrecha, Federico 194, 247, 254 Urrello, Antonio 99 Utt, Roger L. 230 Val, Mariano de 17 Valbuena, Antonio de 254 Valbuena Prat, Angel 274 Valdes, Mario J. 310 Valera, Juan 45, 46, 53, 93, 95, 96, 102, 103, 168, 170, 173, 181, 203, 308-9 Valery, Paul 75 Valis, Noel M. 334 Valle-Inclan, Ramon del 55, 99, 132, 168, 194, 205, 279, 298, 307, 312-13, 314, 320 Valls, Fernando 316 Varela Hervias, Eulogio 54, 91 Varela Jacome, Benito 105, 321 Varey, J.E. 66, 150, 218, 219, 232, 312, 333 Vargas Llosa, Mario Vasconcelos, Jose 315 Vega, Garcilaso de la 92 Vega, Ricardo de la 316 Vega Carpio, Lope Felix de 53, 92, 105 Verga, Giovanni 91 Vazquez Arjona, Carlos 87 Verdaguer, Jacint 45, 344 Verdaguer, Mario 40, 297 Verde y Rodriguez, Juan (sonin-law) 36 · Verne, Jules 30 Vezinet, F. 149, 204, 263 Viator. See Becker, Henry Vico, Giovanni Battista 68, 118 Villacorta Banos, Francisco 318

537

General Index

Villarino, Maria de 101 Ville, Pierre 204 Villegas, Juan 335 Villemain, Abel Francois Vinaver, Eugene 71, 72 Virgil 82, 88 Vivas, Eliseo 111 Voltaire 88 Vossler, Karl 76

69

Walcutt, Charles Child 227 Wallace, Elizabeth 263 Walsh, Dorothy 110 Walton, L.B. 33, 88, 154, 207, 208 Warren, Austin 7, 108 Warshaw, Jacob 33-4, 85, 207, 270, 272 Watson, George 75-6, 78, 105 Watt, Ian 165 Weber, Robert J. 151, 220-1, 280, 282 Weimann, Robert 76 Weiner, Hadassah Ruth 333 Weiner, Jack 90 Weintraub, Karl J. 23 Weisstein, Ulrich 93, 95, 97 Weitz, Morris 112 Wellek, Rene 7, 67-8, 71, 74, 75, 77, 80, 108, 17 4 Wellington, Marie A. 303, 306,310,314 Wharton, Edith 164 Whiston, James 233, 324, 331 White, Hayden 329 Whitehead, A.N. viii, 70 Wilde, Oscar 114, 250 Willey, Jack R. 343 Williams, Raymond 109, 120, 122, 238 Wilson, Edmund 74, 120, 122, 153

Wimsatt, W.K. 7, 69, 72, 73, 74, 167, 170 Winters, Yvor 122 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 233 Wolf, Friedrich August 70 Woodbridge, Hensley C. ix, 219, 329 Wordsworth, William 7 Wright, Chad C. 230, 335, 337, 339 Wundt, Wilhelm 154 Ximenez de Sandoval, Felipe 56 Yanez, Agustin 209, 218 Yndurain, Francisco 87, 92, 99, 123, 168, 218, 334 Yxart, Jose 3, 126, 130, 172, 194, 195-6, 247, 249, 250-3, 255,256,257 Zahareas, Anthony 151, 321 Zambrano, Maria 144, 208, 209, 218 Zamora, Charles A. 237 Zavala, Iris M. 92, 95, 105, 316 Zeda. See Fernandez Villegas, Francisco Zeraffa, Michel 168 Zlotchew, Clark M. 324, 325, 337 Zola, Emile 54, 59, 89, 91, 95, 97, 104, 111, 115, 130, 154, 163, 164, 173, 175, 186, 187, 188, 193, 262, 289, 298, 300, 301, 305, 311, 317 Zorrilla y Moral, Jose 92 Zozaya, Antonio 204 Zulueta, Carmen de 46, 56 Zunzunegui, Juan Antonio de 42, 100 Zviguilsky, A. 90 Zweig, Stefan 66