saints, adventurers, sweet maids, intriguers, passionate mothers, wives, and mistresses, criminals, and the motley variety of less definite types, all creatures whom he loved as the children of his heart, and in whom he will live as long as the Spanish language is spoken.

Galas would not be a Spanish creative genius if he had taken the trouble to write well. No great Spaniard ever did. The style of great Spanish works reflects the influence of two conflicting tendencies : that of the creative instinct of the race and that of the literary preconceptions of the age. The first, a natural tendency, leads the writer to disregard mere form and to concentrate on the living substance. The second, an acquired tendency, checks the free flow of expression, and in extreme cases, .as in the later development of Gongora or Calderon, overburdens the style with ornament.

There are now and then in GaldOs traces of this unfortunate influence of literary preconceptions over style. At times, he seems to be trying to imitate Cervantes, as for instance in the opening chapters of Dona Perfecta. Later he passed through a fever of inversions. But, despite these witnesses to a national failing which could not be wholly absent from a writer so typically Spanish, GaldOs's style flows clear like a river from a spring of creative inspiration. He is too great to treat style as more than a mere medium of expression. The cultivation of diction for the sake of diction is a sign of decadence, that is, of impotence ; and we know that GaldOs was anything but impotent. His prose is like a sail, more or less full according to the strength of the wind of inspiration. When he is moved, no one writes better ; when he is dealing with unimportant facts or fulfilling those menial tasks which are necessary in dramatic and narrative litera-

ture, he lets expression fall to the simple level of the occasion. He is above all sincere and true.

With him, expression is subordinate to impression ; words are tools. This is why we must not go to him for landscapes. His interest is in man, and to nature he gives exactly the same place which the painters of the Spanish school gave it, namely, the background. Not that his feeling for nature is poor or defective. Few writers speak of natural life with more sympathy and penetration than GaldOs. But, being an eminently dramatic genius, he could not suspend the development of his action in order to indulge in a kind of pictorial intermezzo. He has left few but splendid descriptions of natural events, tempests, shipwrecks, sunsets. . . . But in these cases nature finds a place in the action as one of the characters thereof, and her intervention is admirably timed to the enhancement of dramatic interest. Moreover, the Galdosian bend towards picturing concrete persons leads him to attribute to trees, plains, rivers, and even buildings, human motives and attitudes. An excellent example of all these features of GalclOs's treatment of nature will be found in the description of the tempest in Gloria. Nine-tenths of his style is the style of his characters, and in this, as in his interpretation of impulse, our great novelist shows how Protean his nature was.

Just as he describes his characters by their own actions, so he expresses them by their own words. Often indeed, even in his early novels, the narrative form is dropped altogether and the characters are left to speak in dialogue, the author putting in a rare occasional indication as to gesture, voice, or attitude, mere stage directions. There are novels—El Abuelo is a typical example—which are written in this form from beginning to end, a kind of writing which has no less a precedent than La Celestina. At other times GaldOs develops part or the whole of the novel (La Estafeta