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DONA PERFECTA
POR BENITO PEREZ GALDOS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY A. R. MARSH
VOCABULARY BY STEVEN T. BYINGTON
=The Athenaeum Press= GINN AND COMPANY--PROPRIETORS--BOSTON--U.S.A.
PREFACE
This edition of one of the best known of modern Spanish novels has beenprepared for the use of college classes in Spanish that have alreadymastered the elements of Spanish grammar, but have not yet had muchpractice in reading. The editor has found by actual experience that itis safe to undertake the story in three or four months from the timewhen the study of the language is begun, that is, in the second half ofthe first year's work in the subject. As the book is not a long one, itshould be possible to read it entire before the close of the year.Indeed, with an earnest class, even less time than this will be found tosuffice.
The novel is printed exactly (save correction of printer's errors) as itappears in the eighth Spanish edition (Madrid, 1896). At the same time,great pains have been taken to make the orthography and accentuationconform in all respects to the standard of the last edition of theSpanish Academy's Dictionary. The Notes are considerably fuller than iscustomary in college editions of modern works in foreign languages. Thishas been made necessary in part by the dreadful insufficiency of theexisting Spanish-English dictionaries, and in part by the editor'sdesire to afford the student some aid in dealing with grammaticalpeculiarities not fully discussed in the more available text-books. As afurther help to grammatical study, numerous references have beeninserted to Ramsey's _Text-Book of Modern Spanish_ (New York, 1894) andto Knapp's _Grammar of the Modern Spanish Language_ (Boston, 1891).
A.R.M.
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS March, 1897
In the new impression of this book the accentuation has been conformedto the new (fourteenth) edition of the Academy's Dictionary, a smallnumber of misprints have been corrected, and a vocabulary has beenadded.
As is stated in the above preface, a considerable part of the notes inthe first impression were intended as a partial substitute for avocabulary. Obviously, the insertion of the vocabulary made such notesmainly superfluous; hence in the present edition such notes as seemed tobe mere duplication of the vocabulary are omitted. At the same time itwas inevitable that in the work of compiling the vocabulary someadditional occasions for making notes were found, and new light wasobtained on some places where notes already stood. The result is thatthe notes in the present impression, though shorter than before, contain(apart from vocabulary matter) more information, and it is hoped thatthey will at least maintain the reputation which this edition of _DonaPerfecta_ has gained.
Besides the references to the grammars of Ramsey and Knapp, referencesto Coester's _Spanish Grammar_ (Boston, 1912) are now given.
INTRODUCTION
The two literary _genres_ in which Spaniards have most excelled are thedrama and the novel. Indeed, outside of these two forms, it may be saidthat no Spaniard has won a literary success of the first order. Thus, inthe past six centuries there have been many Spanish poets of real worth;and yet in the list of the world's supreme poets no Spanish nameappears. Among the world's great philosophers Spain has norepresentative, though she has had thinkers of genuine power. She hashad no moralist, or historian, or political writer, or scientist of thehighest rank. Even religion, which at first sight would seem to be thepredominant interest of Spain, has not there inspired any work ofuniversal and permanent appeal to the race. The other nations of thecivilized world have at no time derived from Spain a powerful literaryimpulse in any of these directions. Palestine and Greece and Rome andItaly and France and Germany and England have all had somethinglastingly valuable to say upon one or more of these matters; but no onewould think of turning to Spanish books for the best that has beenthought and said upon any of them.
With the drama and the novel, however, the case is very different. HereSpain has had writers universally placed among the great artists of theworld. Calderon and Lope de Vega, with the crowd of lesser dramatists ofthe end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century (theperiod Spaniards call their _siglo de oro_), produced a body of dramaticliterature, which for extent, variety, poetic force, and originalnational feeling and conception can be compared only with the Greek andthe English drama. Of their own motion these poets learned all theessential secrets of the dramatic art. They acquired the faculty oftelling upon the stage any story they chose in such a way that it shouldseem a picture of life itself to their audience; and, at the same time,they managed to fuse with their tales all their accumulated reflectionupon men and things, all the various play of fancy, all the fine gold ofthe imagination, and all the humor, gay or grotesque, which the plainprose of life itself does not contain. Working freely, unawed by classicmodels whose perfection they would attain, they were easy in theirmotions, frank of conception, and ready to follow their matter whereverit might lead them. They had no dread of being dull or unpoetical orundignified; the best of them were constantly all these. But for thisvery reason they were large and free and powerful, scornful of trivialdifficulties and obstacles, and able to attain success where all thechances were against them. The thought and feeling, the hopes andaspirations, the delusions and absurdities of Spain in the period of hergreatest power and splendor are all mirrored in their verse. Like theElizabethan dramatists, furthermore, they exacted tribute from all otherliteratures and spent it as they would. And though their work has seldomthe rare distinction of ultimate perfection of form (indeed, in thisrespect falls below the best Elizabethan standard), no one can read itwithout perceiving that he is engaged with the rich and vital utteranceof artists who are masters of their craft.
Hardly less remarkable than the Spanish drama is the Spanish novel.Obviously, much the same qualities are demanded for success in the oneform as in the other; and from the earliest period Spanish story-tellershave known how to do their work well. There are tales in thefourteenth-century collection by Don Juan Manuel, known as _El CondeLucanor_, that are as skillfully contrived as could possibly be. Inspite of its prolixity, the once famous romance of _Amadis of Gaul_,which was given its Spanish form in the end of the fifteenth century,must still be regarded as a highly successful piece of narration. At theclose of the same century, the often indecent, but never dull'tragi-comedy' of _Celestina_ (a novel in fact, though dramatic in form)proved its excellence as a piece of literary workmanship by attainingspeedily a European reputation. The sixteenth century saw the evolutionof so-called _novela picaresca_, or rogue novel, one of the mostimportant and influential of modern literary forms. And, finally, in1605 Cervantes published the first part of one of the greatest of modernbooks, _Don Quixote_,--a novel in which the art of story-telling isbrought to almost unrivaled perfection.
In more recent times, the Spanish novel has, of course, suffered fromthe general intellectual decline of Spain as a whole. Its originalityhas been impaired by the inevitable and generally baneful influenceexercised by foreign models upon the taste of a people not confident inits own strength and superiority. The eighteenth century, in particular,produced little deserving even casual mention. Yet in no period haveevidences of the old power been entirely lacking; and as soon as theintellectual, no less than political, agitations that attended theopening of the present century began, these evidences at once becamemore numerous and more si
gnificant. The task of acquiring modernity has,to be sure, proved longer and more difficult in Spain than in any othergreat European nation, and the earlier literary work of the century hasabout it too much of the general spiritual and artistic uncertainty ofsuch a period of confusion and change to possess enduring excellence.But the trained observer can detect even in the unequal and hesitatingessays of the first half of our century indications of a renewal of theold skill and of the gradual evolution of a new type of novel, which,while modern in its methods and materials, still allies itself with whatis best in the older tradition.
The fruition of this period of growth has been seen since the middle ofthe century, and to-day Spanish novelists easily hold their own with thebest of the world. Indeed, in the opinion of many well qualified tojudge, there is in no language at the present time a body of fictionmore original, more various, more genuinely interesting than Spanishauthors have produced. Juan Valera, Pedro Alarcon, Jose Maria Pereda,Armando Palacio Valdes, the Padre Luis Coloma, Dona Emilia Pardo Bazan,and, last, the author of the present volume, Benito Perez Galdos, havesucceeded along very different lines, and with striking independence ofmanner, in composing a mass of fiction which depicts the real Spain ofto-day perhaps more adequately than the novelists of any other countryhave been able to render their native land. The reader of Valera isfilled with perpetual admiration of his fine cosmopolitan scepticism,combined with rich traditional culture of the true Spanish type,rendered in a subtle, gay, delightful style that derives from the purestsources of sixteenth-century Spanish. In Alarcon Spanish irony andSpanish rhetoric (_l'emphase espagnole_, as the French call it) combinein rarely personal admixture. Pereda studies the crude and homely lifeof the region of Santander with the care for detail of the mostscrupulous realist, but without the hard and brutal curiosity about themerely external that realism adopted as a literary creed seems to bringwith it. Valdes and Coloma and Senora Bazan, writing from very differentpoints of view, all reproduce for us with sure touches the sentimentsand ideals, the virtues and vices of Spanish society, high and low,urban or rural, of to-day. And Perez Galdos, the most fruitful of themall, has embraced the entire century in his work, and affords us, on thewhole, the clearest and fullest account of the recent spiritual andsocial life of his nation anywhere to be found.
Benito Perez Galdos was born at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, May10, 1845. The details of his early life are entirely unknown except tohimself, his invincible modesty denying them even to personal friendslike the writer of the only biography of him (a meagre one) that hasappeared, Leopoldo Alas. He studied in the local Instituto, and musthave profited by his opportunities, for the literary attainments shownin his novels can have resulted only from persistent labor from youthup. In 1863 he went to Madrid to study law in the University, but withlittle eagerness for his future profession. He already dreamed of aliterary career, and tried the hand of an apprentice at journalism andat pieces for the theatre, none of which, happily, as he has since said,was represented. In 1867, his mind being engaged at once by therevolutionary agitation of his own time, and by the similar interest ofthe still more violent upheaval in Spain in the first years of thecentury, he began a kind of historical novel, _La Fontana de Oro_, inwhich he undertook to study the inner motives and history of thatperiod, so all-important for modern Spanish history, and to illustratethe detestable character of Ferdinand VII as it appeared in one of hismost disgraceful moments. It was four years, however, before the bookwas completed and published. During this time Galdos had visited Franceand had returned to Madrid by way of Barcelona, where he was when theRevolution of 1868, which deprived Queen Isabel of her throne, brokeout. This he greeted with delight, believing the realization of hisconservatively radical political views to be at hand; but he speedilyfound himself sadly disillusioned. In 1871 his novel appeared, making nosensation, but attracting the favorable attention of a few competentjudges. The road was at last opened before him, and he pressed steadilyon in it.
His imagination had now become deeply stirred by both the political andthe social aspects of the great period of the awakening of Spain, when,to begin with, she freed herself by heroic efforts from the Napoleonictyranny, and then made her incipient advances towards modernity in theface of the opposition of the representatives of her traditionalreligion and of her outworn social order. In 1872 he had completed asecond novel, _El Audaz_, in which a phase of the struggle earlier thanthat studied in _La Fontana de Oro_, was his theme. Then, taking asuggestion perhaps from the success of the historical novels ofErckmann-Chatrian, he began a succession of consecutive tales,_Episodios Nacionales_, as he called them, which, in two series, coverthe whole agitated time from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 down to thedeath of Ferdinand VII in 1833. Each series has its hero, whose fortunesafford a slender thread binding the tales together, and whoseparticipation in the successive events or crises of the War ofIndependence and of the reign of Ferdinand VII enables the author togive these events their proper setting in the political and socialmovements of the period. Naturally, there is great inequality in theexecution of so long a list of tales (twenty in all), and the reader'sattention at times flags. Yet the care with which Galdos studied hismaterial, acquainting himself with the minutest details of the historyof the time, and the skill as a narrator that rarely fails him, make the_Episodios Nacionales_ incomparably the best documents in which toobtain a true understanding of one of the greatest movements in the lifeof a great and interesting nation.
Before he had concluded the _Episodios Nacionales_, however, Galdos hadbegun to feel the attraction of an even deeper and more significantmovement,--that of the modernization of the Spain of the present day.Here, to be sure, the situations are less famous and picturesque, thepart of action is diminished, and patriotic emotion is less evoked; butthe struggle to be studied is none the less violent and profound. Forreaders of our time this struggle perhaps gains in interest from beingrather inward than outward, and from demanding of him who paints itrather a study of souls than the delineation of stirring events. In fewcountries has the clash between the new and the old been so violent, orthe adjustment to the new produced so many and so startlingincongruities as in Spain. The deadly antagonism of the traditionalreligious and social feeling of the race towards the whole modern mannerof thinking, the ruinous effects of a first taste of modern luxury uponthose who come ignorantly and blindly under its spell, the agitations ofminds whose moral continuity has been broken by ill-understood freedomof speculation, the disasters produced by political or social ambitionsaroused in those grotesquely unfit for their attainment,--in short, theillusions, the vain hopes, the failures, the despairs, the hates, thewoe which every great movement of the _Zeitgeist_ inevitably causes inevery nation, these are the themes which Galdos has of late foundirresistibly attractive, and to which he has devoted much the richestand strongest part of his work.
The first novel in which the new interest was predominant was thepresent book, _Dona Perfecta_, finished in April, 1876. In it Galdosbrought the new and the old face to face: the new in the form of ahighly trained, clear-thinking, frank-speaking modern man; the old inthe guise of a whole community so remote from the current of things thatits religious intolerance, its social jealousy, its undisturbedconfidence and pride in itself must of necessity declare instant warupon that which comes from without, unsympathetic and critical. Theinevitable result is ruin for the party whose physical force is less,the single individual, yet hardly less complete ruin for those whomintolerance and hate have driven to the annihilation of their adversary.The sympathies of the author, as his closing sentence shows, are withthe new, but his conscience as artist has none the less compelled him togive to the old its right of full and fair utterance.
The same ignorant or stubborn religiosity, negative for good, workingevil for all affected by it, has been studied by Galdos in twosubsequent novels, _La Familia de Leon Roch_ and _Gloria_, which aregenerally reputed to be, with _Dona Perfecta_, the greatest of hisworks. _Gloria_, in particular,
has received great and deservedlaudation, in spite of some looseness and unevenness of the techniquedue to the rapidity with which it was written (the first part in hardlymore than a fortnight, the author tells us). The theme is not unlikethat of George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_, one of the protagonists beingan English Jew, with the profoundest attachment to the traditions of hisrace, the other a Spanish girl, in whom the faith of her fathers is anineradicable instinct. Few finer and more tragic situations have beenimagined by moderns than this. No less tragic, though less poetic, isthe ruin of Leon Roch, weighed down by the burden of an insanely bigotedwife.
Other groups of novels deal with the other aspects of the modern societyof Spain of which mention has been made. In one group we have thedisasters caused in lowly homes by the vanity of women who have caught aglimpse of the pleasures of the rich, and pitilessly demand them. Thepoor official, out of a place, in _Miau_, is goaded to suicide by theexactions of his wife and daughter and sister-in-law. In _La de Bringas_we have the squalid intrigues of a family on the edge of 'high life' andstriving to get within it. _El Amigo Manso_ loves, and is exploited forher social advantage by the woman whom he loves. A second group of talesdeals with the hard question how the woman, left to her own resourcesand without income, shall find her support. Here belong _Fortunata yJacinta, La Desheredada, Tristana_, and _Tormento_. It is the pathos ofthis problem, not its unseemly and revolting details, that impressesGaldos and that he strives to convey. And finally, there should bementioned those stories in which Galdos shows us the beauty anduplifting power of natural sentiment, as _Marianela_; or the positiveand beneficent results that may come from a certain pure and unbigoted,though somewhat mystical, religious feeling, as _Angel Guerra, Nazarin,_and _Halma_.
It is clear from the above hasty survey of Galdos' work that there runsthrough it all a profound moral sentiment, a sense of the tragedy ofmodern life, an impatience of the irremediable and hopelesscontradictions in which ignorance and intolerance involve us. At thesame time, it should not be supposed that the general impressionproduced by his novels is gloomy and forbidding. On the contrary, fewmodern writers show so constantly the play of a free and wholesomehumor, or in more manly fashion take life as it comes, without tears orwhining. He does not strive nor cry; nor does he moralize. He shows uslife as it appears to him in a critical period of his nation's history,unfolding it before us in its incessant variety, and not debauching usby lessons of unmanly pessimism any more than by alluring optimism. Andto give to his work its final and irresistible claim upon us, he is themaster of a singularly rich and virile style--a style not modeled upon afad, but expressive of the whole nature of the man; capable ofeloquence, of wit and humor, of anger and scorn; now simple andunadorned, now laden with a burden of reflection and of the greattraditional memories, literary and other, of the race. The Spanishpurists have indeed declared this style to be far from impeccable, andthis is altogether probable. But none the less it has something muchmore important than impeccability; it has life and strength, and, whenits master pleases, beauty.
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