



Produced by Dagny; John Bickers





DONA PERFECTA

by B. PEREZ GALDOS


Translated from the Spanish by Mary J. Serrano




INTRODUCTION

The very acute and lively Spanish critic who signs himself Clarin, and
is known personally as Don Leopoldo Alas, says the present Spanish novel
has no yesterday, but only a day-before-yesterday. It does not derive
from the romantic novel which immediately preceded that: the novel,
large or little, as it was with Cervantes, Hurtado de Mendoza, Quevedo,
and the masters of picaresque fiction.

Clarin dates its renascence from the political revolution of 1868,
which gave Spanish literature the freedom necessary to the fiction that
studies to reflect modern life, actual ideas, and current aspirations;
and though its authors were few at first, "they have never been
adventurous spirits, friends of Utopia, revolutionists, or impatient
progressists and reformers." He thinks that the most daring, the most
advanced, of the new Spanish novelists, and the best by far, is Don
Benito Perez Galdos.

I should myself have made my little exception in favor of Don Armando
Palacio Valdes, but Clarin speaks with infinitely more authority, and I
am certainly ready to submit when he goes on to say that Galdos is not
a social or literary insurgent; that he has no political or religious
prejudices; that he shuns extremes, and is charmed with prudence;
that his novels do not attack the Catholic dogmas--though they deal so
severely with Catholic bigotry--but the customs and ideas cherished
by secular fanaticism to the injury of the Church. Because this is
so evident, our critic holds, his novels are "found in the bosom of
families in every corner of Spain." Their popularity among all classes
in Catholic and prejudiced Spain, and not among free-thinking students
merely, bears testimony to the fact that his aim and motive are
understood and appreciated, although his stories are apparently so often
anti-Catholic.


I

Dona Perfecta is, first of all, a story, and a great story, but it is
certainly also a story that must appear at times potently, and even
bitterly, anti-Catholic. Yet it would be a pity and an error to read it
with the preoccupation that it was an anti-Catholic tract, for really it
is not that. If the persons were changed in name and place, and
modified in passion to fit a cooler air, it might equally seem an
anti-Presbyterian or anti-Baptist tract; for what it shows in the light
of their own hatefulness and cruelty are perversions of any religion,
any creed. It is not, however, a tract at all; it deals in artistic
largeness with the passion of bigotry, as it deals with the passion of
love, the passion of ambition, the passion of revenge. But Galdos
is Spanish and Catholic, and for him the bigotry wears a Spanish and
Catholic face. That is all.

Up to a certain time, I believe, Galdos wrote romantic or idealistic
novels, and one of these I have read, and it tired me very much. It was
called "Marianela," and it surprised me the more because I was already
acquainted with his later work, which is all realistic. 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. His
acceptance in his quality of realist was much more instant than his
conversion, and vastly wider; for we are told by the critic whom I have
been quoting that Galdos's earlier efforts, which he called _Episodios
Nacionales_, never had the vogue which his realistic novels have
enjoyed.

These were, indeed, tendencious, if I may Anglicize a very necessary
word from the Spanish _tendencioso_. That is, they dealt with very
obvious problems, and had very distinct and poignant significations,
at least in the case of "Dona Perfecta," "Leon Roch," and "Gloria." In
still later novels, Emilia Pardo-Bazan thinks, he has comprehended that
"the novel of to-day must take note of the ambient truth, and realize
the beautiful with freedom and independence." This valiant lady, in
the campaign for realism which she made under the title of "La Cuestion
Palpitante"--one of the best and strongest books on the subject--counts
him first among Spanish realists, as Clarin counts him first among
Spanish novelists. "With a certain fundamental humanity," she says,
"a certain magisterial simplicity in his creations, with the natural
tendency of his clear intelligence toward the truth, and with the
frankness of his observation, the great novelist was always disposed
to pass over to realism with arms and munitions; but his aesthetic
inclinations were idealistic, and only in his latest works has he
adopted the method of the modern novel, fathomed more and more the human
heart, and broken once for all with the picturesque and with the typical
personages, to embrace the earth we tread."

For her, as I confess for me, "Dona Perfecta" is not realistic
enough--realistic as it is; for realism at its best is not tendencious.
It does not seek to grapple with human problems, but is richly content
with portraying human experiences; and I think Senora Pardo-Bazan is
right in regarding "Dona Perfecta" as transitional, and of a period when
the author had not yet assimilated in its fullest meaning the faith he
had imbibed.


II

Yet it is a great novel, as I said; and perhaps because it is
transitional it will please the greater number who never really arrive
anywhere, and who like to find themselves in good company _en route_. It
is so far like life that it is full of significations which pass beyond
the persons and actions involved, and envelop the reader, as if he too
were a character of the book, or rather as if its persons were men
and women of this thinking, feeling, and breathing world, and he must
recognize their experiences as veritable facts. From the first moment
to the last it is like some passage of actual events in which you cannot
withhold your compassion, your abhorrence, your admiration, any more
than if they took place within your personal knowledge. Where they
transcend all facts of your personal knowledge, you do not accuse them
of improbability, for you feel their potentiality in yourself, and
easily account for them in the alien circumstance. I am not saying that
the story has no faults; it has several. There are tags of romanticism
fluttering about it here and there; and at times the author permits
himself certain old-fashioned literary airs and poses and artifices,
which you simply wonder at. It is in spite of these, and with all these
defects, that it is so great and beautiful a book.


III

What seems to be so very admirable in the management of the story is the
author's success in keeping his own counsel. This may seem a very
easy thing; but, if the reader will think over the novelists of his
acquaintance, he will find that it is at least very uncommon. They
mostly give themselves away almost from the beginning, either by their
anxiety to hide what is coming, or their vanity in hinting what great
things they have in store for the reader. Galdos does neither the one
nor the other. He makes it his business to tell the story as it grows;
to let the characters unfold themselves in speech and action; to permit
the events to happen unheralded. He does not prophesy their course, he
does not forecast the weather even for twenty-four hours; the atmosphere
becomes slowly, slowly, but with occasional lifts and reliefs, of such a
brooding breathlessness, of such a deepening density, that you feel the
wild passion-storm nearer and nearer at hand, till it bursts at last;
and then you are astonished that you had not foreseen it yourself from
the first moment.

Next to this excellent method, which I count the supreme characteristic
of the book merely because it represents the whole, and the other
facts are in the nature of parts, is the masterly conception of the
characters. They are each typical of a certain side of human nature,
as most of our personal friends and enemies are; but not exclusively of
this side or that. They are each of mixed motives, mixed qualities; none
of them is quite a monster; though those who are badly mixed do such
monstrous things.

Pepe Rey, who is such a good fellow--so kind, and brave, and upright,
and generous, so fine a mind, and so high a soul--is tactless and
imprudent; he even condescends to the thought of intrigue; and though
he rejects his plots at last, his nature has once harbored deceit. Don
Inocencio, the priest, whose control of Dona Perfecta's conscience has
vitiated the very springs of goodness in her, is by no means bad, aside
from his purposes. He loves his sister and her son tenderly, and wishes
to provide for them by the marriage which Pepe's presence threatens to
prevent. The nephew, though selfish and little, has moments of almost
being a good fellow; the sister, though she is really such a lamb of
meekness, becomes a cat, and scratches Don Inocencio dreadfully when he
weakens in his design against Pepe.

Rosario, one of the sweetest and purest images of girlhood that I know
in fiction, abandons herself with equal passion to the love she feels
for her cousin Pepe, and to the love she feels for her mother, Dona
Perfecta. She is ready to fly with him, and yet she betrays him to her
mother's pitiless hate.

But it is Dona Perfecta herself who is the transcendent figure, the
most powerful creation of the book. In her, bigotry and its fellow-vice,
hypocrisy, have done their perfect work, until she comes near to being
a devil, and really does some devil's deeds. Yet even she is not without
some extenuating traits. Her bigotry springs from her conscience, and
she is truly devoted to her daughter's eternal welfare; she is of such
a native frankness that at a certain