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Updated: June 28, 2025
"Your Highness is wounded, and must therefore be bled at once. I will call the Doctor Galdos " "I tell you it is nothing," interrupted Don John. "Do as I order you, and bring Doña Dolores. Give me that drink there, first from the little table. In a quarter of an hour I shall be quite well again. I have been as badly stunned before when my horse has fallen with me at a barrier."
Other novels of Valera's, Doña Luis and El Comendador Mendoza, a number of essays on all sorts of subjects, critical and other, and poems which show great grace and correctness of style, have given this writer a high place in the literature of the age. Perez Galdós is a writer of a wholly different class, although he enjoys a very wide reputation in his own country and wherever Spanish is read.
Certainly, one learns more contemporary history by reading these Episodes of Perez Galdós, and realises all the scenes of it much more vividly than one would ever do by the reading of ordinary records of events.
He could not be all to the cause he honored that other men were men like Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and Tolstoy, and Galdos and Valdes because his intellectual youth had been nurtured on the milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time. He grew up in the day when the great novelists and poets were romanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first adored.
Perez Galdos, a writer of fiction, attacks the problem of modern life and thought, and represents with vivid and often bitter fidelity the conflicting interests and passions of Spanish life.
But one does not turn realist in a single night, and although the change in Galdos was rapid it was not quite a lightning change; perhaps because it was not merely an outward change, but artistically a change of heart.
There is the strange support of a bereavement in it, the consolation of feeling that for those who have suffered unto death, nothing can harm them more; that even for those who have inflicted their suffering this peace will soon come. "Is Perez Galdos a pessimist?" asks the critic Clarin. "No, certainly; but if he is not, why does he paint us sorrows that seem inconsolable?
But I like all the books of Galdos that I have read, and though he seems to have worked more tardily out of his romanticism than Valdes, since he has worked finally into such realism as that of Leon Roch, his greatness leaves nothing to be desired.
If I speak only of Galdos and Valdes by name, it is because I know them best as the greatest of their time; but I fancy the allure of the capital has been felt by every other modern more or less; and if I were a Spanish author I should like to put a story there. If I were a Spaniard at all, I should like to live there a part of the year, or to come up for some sojourn, as the real Spaniards do.
The poets now jettisoned the rotundities of the romantic and emotional schools of Zorrilla and Salvador Rueda, and substituted instead the precise, pictorial line of Ruben Dario, Juan Ramon Jimenez, and the brothers Machado, while the socialistic and republican propaganda which had invaded the theatre with Perez Galdos, Joaquin Dicenta, and Angel Guimera, bore fruit in the psychological drama of Benavente, the social comedies of Linares Rivas, and the atmospheric canvases which the Quinteros have painted of Andalusia.
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