Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha. Benito Pérez Galdós
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by the human mind.
These citations prove, at least, that Galdós was careful not to be caught enslaved by any dogma, and they show, too, that he set no store by the letter of the law, and prized only the spirit. That is the secret of his fondness for the dangerous situation of the beneficent lie, or justifiable false oath, which brought him severe criticism when he first used it in Los condenados (II, 16), and which nevertheless he repeated in an equally conspicuous climax in Sor Simona (II, 10). Galdós defended the lie through which good may come, in the preface to Los condenados, with reasoning like that of a trained casuist; and such a lie appears hypocritical upon the lips of Pantoja (Electra, IV, 8), though it is not so intended. As a dramatic theme the idea is not entirely novel, for Ibsen, in the Wild Duck, had said that happiness may be based upon a lie. As usual, Galdós provided his own antidote, for, with what appeared a strange inconsistency, and was really a desire for balance, the lesson of the very drama, Los condenados, is that "man lives surrounded by lies, and can find salvation only by embracing the truth, and accepting expiation." This idea also can be paralleled in Ibsen and Tolstoy, but it was overbold to exhibit both sides of the shield in the same play.
There still remain the major threads in the broad and varied fabric of Galdós' ideology. Stoicism, that characteristic Spanish attitude of mind, allured him often, and he succeeded in giving dramatic interest to the least emotional of philosophies. In Realidad and Mariucha is found the most explicit setting forth of that theory of life which enables an oppressed spirit to rise above its conditioning circumstances.9 At times Galdós appeared to dally with Buddhism: at least some critics have so explained the reincarnation of doña Juana in Casandra, novela. Another tenet of Buddhism, or, as some would have it, of Krausism, was often in Galdós' thought, and is emphasized particularly in Los condenados and Bárbara. Every sin of man must be at some time expiated; and not alone sins actually committed against the statutes, but sins of thought, sins against ideal justice, which is far more exacting than any human laws.10
All these phases of thought spring from one mother-idea, the perfectioning of the human soul. For Galdós, in spite of the unfortunate times in which his life fell, in spite of the clearness with which he observed the character of those times, was an unconquerable optimist. He believed that Spain could be remade, or he would not have worked to that end. He believed that humanity is capable of better impulses than it ordinarily exhibits, and his life was devoted to calling forth generous and charitable sentiments in men. Whether through stoicism, which is the beautifying of the individual soul, or through divine and all-embracing love, which is the primal social virtue, Galdós worked in a spirit of the purest self-sacrifice for the betterment of his nation and of humanity. He had grasped a truth which Goethe knew, but which Ibsen and his followers overlooked—that the price of advance, either in the individual or in society, is self-control.
VI. The Position of Galdós as a Dramatist.—The enemies of Pérez Galdós have often declared that he had no dramatic gifts, and should never have gone outside his sphere as a novelist. Other distinguished writers, among them Benavente, consider him one of the greatest dramatists of modern times. The truth lies close to the second estimate, surely. Galdós will always be thought of first as a novelist, since as a novelist he labored during his most fertile years, and the novel best suited his luxuriant genius. But he possessed a very definite theatrical sense, and it would be possible to show, if space permitted, how it enabled him to achieve success in the writing of difficult situations, and how he never avoided the difficult. Had Galdós entered the dramatic field earlier in life, he might have been a more skilled technician, but as it is, El abuelo and Bárbara are there to prove him a creative dramatist of the first order.
From what has been said in the preceding sections, it will be evident that Pérez Galdós does not fit exactly into any single one of the convenient classifications which dramatic criticism has formulated. His genius was too exuberant, too varied. Of the three stages which mark the progress of the modern drama, romanticism, naturalism, and symbolism, the second, in its strict dogmatic form, affected Galdós not at all. Realism, in the good old sense of the Spanish costumbristas, furnishes a background for his plays, but only a background. A picture of Spanish society does emerge from the dramas, indeed. It is a society in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty, in which the old titled families are generally degenerate and slothful, and the middle classes display admirable spiritual qualities, but are too often unthrifty and inefficient. Of the laboring classes, Galdós has little to say. Bitter religious and political intolerance creates an atmosphere of hatred which a few exceptional characters strive to dissipate. Galdós, however, was seldom willing to face these conditions frankly and tell us what he saw and what must result from such conditions. In the later period of his life, to which the plays belong, the sincere study of reality was swept away by a combination of romanticism and symbolism which lifted the author into the realm of pure speculation, giving his work a universal philosophic value as it lost in the representation of life. From the spectacle of his unfortunate land he fled willingly to the contemplation of general truth. El abuelo, because it unites a faithful picture of local society and well-observed figures with a sublime thought, is beyond doubt Galdós' greatest drama.
Menéndez y Pelayo pointed out that Galdós lacks the lyric flame which touches with poignant emotion the common things of life. He did not entirely escape the rhetoric of his race. And he was curiously little interested in the passions of sex—too little to be altogether human, perhaps. But his work appears extraordinarily vast and many-sided when one compares it with that of his French contemporaries of the naturalistic drama, who observed little except sex. He was not an exquisite artist; he was, judged by the standards of the day, naïve, unsophisticated, old-fashioned. But he was a creative giant, a lofty soul throbbing with sympathy for humanity, and with yearning for the infinite.
Galdós wrote but five tragedies: Realidad, Los condenados, Doña Perfecta, Alma y vida, Santa Juana de Castilla. Of them, Doña Perfecta creates the deepest, most realistic tragic emotion, the tragic emotion of a thwarted prime of life; and after it, Santa Juana de Castilla, the tragedy of lonely old age. El abuelo and Bárbara, also, in some way intimate the mysterious and crushing power of natural conditions,—the conception which is at the heart of modern tragedy. Galdós attained that serene vision of the inevitableness of sorrow too seldom to be ranked with the foremost of genuine realists. Instead, he reaches a very eminent position as an imaginative philosopher.
C. THE PLAYS OF PÉREZ GALDÓS
Galdós is said to have written two verse dramas before he was twenty-five, neither of which was ever staged. One, La expulsión de los moriscos, has disappeared. The other, El hombre fuerte, was published in part by Eduardo de Lustonó in 1902. (See Bibliography.) It appears from the extracts to be a character play with strong romantic elements. It is written in redondillas.
Some of Galdós' novels have been dramatized by others: El equipaje del rey José, by Catarineu and Castro, in 1903; La familia de León Roch, by José Jerique, in 1904; Marianela, by the Quinteros, in 1916; El Audaz, by Benavente, in 1919.
1. Realidad, drama en cinco actos. Madrid, Teatro de la Comedia, March 15, 1892. Condensed from the "novela en cinco jornadas" of the same name (1889). Ran twenty-two nights, but did not rouse popular enthusiasm.
Realidad presents the eternal triangle, but in a novel way. Viera, the seducer, is driven by remorse to suicide, and Orozco, the deceived husband, who aspires to stoic perfection of soul, is ready to forgive his wife if she will open her heart to him. She is unable to rise to his level, and, though continuing to live together, their souls are permanently separated.
Realidad has superfluous scenes and figures, and a scattered viewpoint. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most original and profound of Galdós' creations, a penetrating study of unusual characters. There are two parallel dramatic actions, the first, more obvious and theatrical, the fate of Viera; the second, of loftier moral, the relations of Orozco and Augusta, which are decided in a quiet scene,
See the criticism of