6z   BENITO PtREZ GALDOS

that love may take in the world, its triumphs, failures, disguises and transformations, its wanton playfulness and deep but fleeting joys. He is far from giving a rose-coloured version of love and life. Many of his novels—perhaps most of them—end in utter disappointment, despair, death. As if he wanted to prove how far he is convinced that love is a wanton, senseless passion, he shows in Fortunata y Jacinta a triangle of unrequited love : on each side, a man in love with a woman and these two women both in love with a third man, while this third man, the apex on which all these lines of love converge, is a perfectly inane creature who seems incapable of loving anybody. Yet the book is not cynical, nor pitiless, nor pessimistic, nor tragic. It is full of human sympathy and so overflowing with vitality that one shuts it after the death of *MI and the locking up of Maxi in a lunatic asylum with the sense that life is worth living when people can die and go mad in such a way.

Gald6s, however, has no theory about love and does not claim to hold the secret of any panacta. With him love is not an idea but a living feeling which pervades all his work. He brings to Spanish literature a quality which is not very abundant in it, a delicate tenderness, wholly free from sentimentality, particularly noticeable when he speaks of children. No . other writer ever treats children with so delightful a touch, light, tender, a little humorous. He speaks in Gloria of the sexton's little boy with ' his dirty little fingers like rose leaves fallen in mud '. In Leon Roch, when relating the infancy of Maria Egipciaca and her brother, he describes how, in imitation of St. Teresa, they decided to run away in order to perish as martyrs at the hands of the Infidels, and adds : they fell asleep under the protection of a rock, and there, the Maker of all things, God Omnipotent, gave them a kiss and delivered them into the hands of the constabulary.'

BENITO PEREZ GALDOS   63

He knew, therefore, what he was saying when in the mouths of so many of his characters he put words which expressed his faith in love as the one positive force of the world, the one force which made life worth living and unhappiness itself desirable. He looked on all forms of love with mystic eyes, and saw them as forms of the eternal love of God. The love of God—he says in LeOn Roch—is nothing but the sublimation of the love of his creatures.' Angel Guerra, on his death-bed, sums up this philosophy in words of admirable simplicity : ' The only thing one gets out of this life is the pleasure and the joy of loving.' And Pepa Fitcar, in LeOn Roch, when asked to renounce her happiness for conscience' sake, has force enough while bowing to destiny to utter this eloquent protest : ' My conscience is to love.' An adaptation of this phrase might do for a brief description of GaldOs's work : his art was love.