Galdes gave us the history of Spain as seen from the drawing-room of contemporaries, not from the study of the historian. It is a living history, not the historical novel in the somewhat grandfatherly manner of Erckmann-Chatrian, nor again in the romantic and even romanesque manner of Walter Scott, but a vivid and dramatic interpretation of the life of the people though the events of the century, their hopes, feelings, thoughts, and disappointments.

Apart from their literary merit, the Episodios Nacionales have been one of the most important elements in the formation of a Spanish national consciousness. Galdes was and is the most widely read of Spanish writers. His influence as an educator of the Spanish mind is incalculable.

A similar value must be attached to his non-historical novels,' a series of thirty works the subject of which is the life of the Spanish people during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

But though his immediate and concrete subject is the Spaniard of his age, his essential object is man. His outlook is human. If his characters are Spanish it is because creation is concrete and the Spanish genius never creates ex nihilo but from nature. His Spaniards, however, are as universal as those of Cervantes, for their life is woven with the eternal threads of love, destiny, and death.

If the novel is an aesthetic interpretation of life, it follows that novels may fail as works of art if conceived under ethical or intellectual preconceptions. Cervantes, it is generally admitted, set to work with an express ethical purpose when he wrote his Don Quixote. Fortunately, however, his creative instinct burst through his ethical intentions, and, as he pro-

His first novel, La Fontana de Oro is a kind of Episodio Nacional and can hardly be called non-historical.

ceeded, his end—the satire on chivalry books—soon became the means, while the means, the type of Don Quixote, became the real subject of the book and made it immortal.

Intellectual preconceptions were not yet strong in Cervantes' age. They had to wait till the nineteenth century, when Emile Zola tried to transform the novel into a branch of Natural History, closely connected with veterinary science.

Galdes is almost a pure novelist, that is, he is almost free from both ethical and intellectual preconceptions. Yet, not quite. There is in him a strong political passion which now and then breaks out and upsets his artistic impartiality. His famous anti-clerical series—Dona Perfecta, Gloria, La Familia de Leon Rochthough admirable novels, are undoubtedly written in a spirit of passion and partisanship. This spirit was strong in him, since it inspired his famous play Electra in 1901, twenty-three years after the publication of Leon Roch. Yet the evolution from Dona Perfecta to Leon Roch shows a gradual refinement of his ethical preconception and an effort to raise the conflict of religious prejudices to the level of tragedy.

As for intellectual preconceptions, Galdes victoriously resisted the influence of his great French contemporary and never tried to turn his art into a science, probably because, fortunately, the notion that such a transformation could be an improvement of art could not enter his Spanish head. The pathetic belief in science which for several decades shed a melancholy light over the age, left however its mark on Galdes's work. We can see it in the choice of his heroes, who ofteh, particularly in his first manner, belong to the noble scientist type—his Jose Rey, his Leon Roch, both mathematicians, astronomers, geologists. But Galdes is always greater than his creations, and it would be a mistake to imagine that his outlook

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