BENITO PEREZ GALDOS

IT is generally assumed that men of genius are rarely recognized during their lifetime. Whatever its merits so far as other countries are concerned, this pessimistic view can hardly be said to apply to Spain. It would be difficult to find a great name in the history of Spanish letters which had to wait for death in order to conquer immortality. Cervantes saw Don Quixote a famous book years before he took the trouble to write its second and better half. Lope de Vega was for the greater part of his life the idol of Madrid. In our own days, GalclOs has tasted the wine of glory—he delighted in it with his usual, almost childish relish for pleasure—and has seen himself acclaimed by his contemporaries as the greatest literary genius which Spain has produced since the Golden Century.

The reason for this instant recognition of genius by the Spanish public is not far to seek. It is twofold. On the one hand, the Spanish genius, even when universal in its essence, is strongly national in its manner and attire. On the other hand, it is creative, that is, it derives its strength from deep sources of inspiration and instinct, and therefore appeals directly to the very centre of understanding without having to reach our being through the devious road of the intellect. Hence, what it says is never caviare to the general, but the very substance of the general soul which recognizes itself in the work of genius and appreciates it instantly. That is why Gaid& achieved popularity during his lifetime. He is, like our great classics, a creator.

Spain invented the novel, and one of the three original types of theatre which the western world

BENITO PRREZ GALDOS.   47

knows. Gaid& is, therefore, in the true line of Spanish literary tradition, since he is above all a novelist with a strong dramatic tendency. The whole of his work can indeed be placed in a zone intermediate between the novel and the drama, for his novels are markedly dramatic and his dramas evolve with the vital continuity of novels.

The novel may be defined as the aesthetic expression of life, and this definition naturally leads to a division of the study of a novelist into three heads, namely, the scope of his work, the quality of his aesthetic attitude, and his style ; or, in other words, the subject, the artist, and the medium. It is hardly necessary to add that such a division cannot be understood nor even imagined literally. Matter, manner, and attitude in the work of an artist are as inseparable as body, soul, and environment in the life of a man. But it is the law of our intellect that, in order to analyse it must unfold in succession things that strike the mind at one and the same time, and so, at the risk of repetition, I shall deal in turn with each of these three aspects of GalclOs's artistic personality.

The subject of GaldOs's work could be defined thus ; human nature as seen by an unprejudiced observer of nineteenth-century Spain.

GalclOs's lenowledge of Spain is complete and all-embracing. From this point of view—as from many others—he is the only truly national writer of the nineteenth century. Pereda belongs to a region, the Montana ; Valera belongs to a class, the refined aristocracy.; Blasco Ibanez is in manner and mind a cosmopolitan, if not a French, novelist. GaldOs is Spanish, and he covers the whole of Spain, every province of its territory, every layer of its population, every shadow of its thought, and we may add, every year of its nineteenth century.