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3. Galdós' Philosophy.—Before passing to a consideration of Galdós' ideas, we should examine for a moment his manner of conveying them. He was able to express himself in forceful, direct language when he chose, but he came to prefer the indirect suggestion of symbolism.
Symbolism, of course, is nothing but a device by which a person or idea is made to do double duty; it possesses, besides its obvious, external meaning, another meaning parallel to that, but hidden, and which must be supplied by the intelligence of the reader or spectator.
The interpretation of a symbol may be more or less obvious, and the esoteric meaning may be conveyed in a variety of ways. Galdós has expressed his opinion about the legitimate uses of symbolism in his prefaces to Los condenados and Alma y vida, in passages capital for the understanding of his methods. In the earlier work he said, "To my mind, the only symbolism admissible in the drama is that which consists in representing an idea with material forms and acts." This he did himself in the famous kneading scene of La de San Quintín, in the fusion of metal in the third act of Electra, etc. "That the figures of a dramatic work should be personifications of abstract ideas, has never pleased me." Personified abstractions Galdós never did, we believe, employ in his plays, though critics have sometimes credited him with such a use.8 Nevertheless we should remember that precisely this kind of symbolism was very popular in Spain in the seventeenth century, and gave rise to the splendid literary art of the autos sacramentales. Galdós then goes on to refute the allegation of certain critics that he was influenced by Ibsen.
"I admire and enjoy," he says, "those of Ibsen's dramas which are sane and clear, but those generally termed symbolic have been unintelligible to me, and I have never found the pleasure in them which those may who can disentangle their intricate meaning." What a curious statement, in the light of the other preface, written eight years later! "Symbolism," he there wrote, "would not be beautiful if it were clear, with a solution which can be arrived at mechanically, like a charade. Leave it its dream-vagueness, and do not look for a logical explanation, or a moral like that of a child's tale. If the figures and acts were arranged to fit a key, those who observe them would be deprived of the joy of a personal interpretation.... Clearness is not a condition of art." Did Galdós change his mind in the interval between writing these two prefaces? I think not. The change merely illustrates the difference in viewpoint between an author and a reader. For very, very many persons in his audiences have regarded the symbolism of Los condenados (if it be there), of Electra, of Casandra, of Pedro Minio, of Santa Juana de Castilla, and especially of Alma y vida and Bárbara, with the same feeling of hopeless bewilderment which Galdós experienced when he read The Wild Duck, The Master-builder and The Lady from the Sea. To the creator his creation is clear and lovely.
Leaving aside the question of influence, it cannot be denied that the symbolism of Galdós has much in common with that of Ibsen. Both have the delightful vagueness which permits of diverse interpretations,—in Alma y vida the author was obliged to come to the rescue with his own version; in neither is the identification of person and idea carried so far that the character loses its definite human contour; and both are employed to convey a profound philosophy.
What is Galdós' philosophy? First and foremost, he believed that nothing in life is too insignificant or too wicked to be entirely despised. Sympathy with everything human stands out even above his keen indignation against those who oppress the unfortunate. A search through his works will reveal few figures wholly bad, too wicked to receive some touch of pity. César of La de San Quintín and Monegro of Alma y vida are probably the closest to stage villains, and this precisely because they are a part of the melodramatic elements of those plays, not of the central thought.
A corollary of his universal sympathy is the doctrine, not very profound or novel, that opposite qualities complement one another, and must be joined in order to give life a happy completeness. This thread runs through many plays, sometimes unobtrusively, as in La fiera, Amor y ciencia, La de San Quintín, sometimes erected into the dogma of primary concern, as in Alma y vida (the union of spirit and physical vigor), La loca de la casa (evil and good, selfishness and sacrifice), and Voluntad (practical sense and dreamy imagination).
This is one manifestation of that splendid impartiality, that impassiveness which enabled Galdós to retain his balance and serenity in the trials of a stormy and disastrous era. Another evidence of his desire to present both sides of each question is found in those dramas which appear to contradict one another. Pedro Minio supports literally, in a way to dishearten earnest toilers, the Biblical injunction to take no thought for the morrow, and to give away all that one has; but El tacaño Salomón teaches thrift. Most of Galdós' writing advocates change, advancement, rebellion against old forms; but Bárbara drives home the strange burden that all things must return to their primitive state. I do not add El abuelo, with its anti-determinist lesson, because Galdós never was a determinist; he never believed, as did Zola, that the secrets of heredity can be laid bare by a set of rules worked out 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, pregnant with spiritual values. Running counter to the traditional Spanish conception of honor, this drama was fortunate to be as well received as it was.
To understand the title one must know that Realidad, the novela dialogada, is only another version of the epistolary novel, La incógnita, written the year previous. The earlier work gave, as Galdós says (La incógnita, pp. 291-93), the external appearance of a certain sequence of events; Realidad shows its inner reality. Browning employed a somewhat similar procedure in The Ring and the Book.
2. La loca de la casa, comedia en cuatro actos. Madrid, Teatro de la Comedia, Jan. 16, 1893. This play, a success, is printed in two forms, one as originally written, the other as cut down for performance. In a foreword to the former version, the author protests against the brevity demanded by modern audiences. It was doubtless to the long version that Galdós referred when he included La loca de la casa in the list of titles of his Novelas españolas contemporáneas.
This is a drama of two conflicting personalities, united by chance in marriage: Pepet Cruz, a teamster's boy, grown rich after a hard struggle in America, and Victoria, the daughter of a Barcelona capitalist who has met with reverses.
Its merit lies in the study of these characters, especially in the very human figure of Pepet, homely, rough, and unscrupulous, who resembles in many ways Jean Giraud of Dumas' La Question d'argent. The theme, the conquest of a rude man by a Christian and mystic girl, is also the theme of Galdós' novel Ángel Guerra. The first two acts are the best; the third borders on melodrama, and the last, though containing some excellent comedy, is flat. The real flaw lies in the extensive use of financial transactions to express a psychological contest; Victoria's victory over Cruz is ill symbolized in terms of money.
The title is based on a pun: "la loca de la casa" is a common expression for "imagination."11
3. Gerona, drama en cuatro actos. Madrid, Teatro Español, Feb. 3, 1893. Never published by the author, but appeared in El cuento semanal, nos. 70, 71, May 1 and 8, 1908.—Galdós' worst failure on the stage; it was withdrawn after the first night, and critics treated it more severely than the audience.12
Gerona is a dramatization of the Episodio nacional (1874) of the same name, which describes the siege of the city of Gerona and its final surrender to the French (May 6—Dec. 12, 1809). There are many minor changes from the novel; among them, a nebulous love story is added as a secondary interest.
To a reader the play does not appear so bad as the event indicated. The first act is conceded to be a model; and, in spite of confused interests and some wildly romantic speeches, the whole presents a vivid picture of siege horrors, without melodrama or exaggeration. Possibly the failure was due to the fact that doctor Nomdedeu, the chief character, places his daughter's health ahead of patriotism, and to the final tableau, in which the defeated Spaniards lay down their arms before the French marshal.
4. La de San Quintín, comedia en tres actos. Madrid, Teatro de la Comedia, Jan. 27, 1894.—Aroused great enthusiasm, and received fifty consecutive performances in Madrid. Was given in Paris, in Spanish, in 1900 (?).
This "furiously romantic" drama, Galdós' most meretricious play, is intended to symbolize the union of the worn-out aristocracy and the vigorous plebs to form a new and thriving stock. The duchess of San Quintín, left poor and a widow, weds Víctor, a socialist workman of doubtful parentage. The last act is weak and superfluous, the devices of the action cheap, and the motivation often faulty. Víctor's socialism is more heard of than seen, and it appears that he will be satisfied when he becomes rich. He is not a laboring man in any real sense, since his supposed father gave him an expensive education. He is no true symbol of the masses.
However, the duchess Rosario is a charming figure, and the secondary figures are well done. There is excellent high comedy in the famous "kneading scene" of the second act, in which the duchess kneads dough for "rosquillas" while her lover looks on. The kneading is symbolic of the amalgamation of the upper and lower classes. Without doubt, the popularity of this play in Spain is in part due to its propaganda.
Again, a punning title. "La de San Quintín" means "a hard-fought battle" (from a Spanish victory outside the French city of Saint-Quentin, in 1557).
5. Los condenados, drama en tres actos. Madrid, Teatro de la Comedia, Dec. 11, 1894. (The Prólogo is important as a piece of self-criticism and an exposition of the author's aims.)—A failure, given three nights only, and severely criticized in the press.
Los condenados is an ambitious and fascinating excursion into symbolic ethics. Salomé, the inexperienced daughter of a rich Aragonese farmer, elopes with a wild character, José León, who does not repent till his sweetheart loses her mind as a result of his perversity. No play of Galdós contains more glaring weaknesses of construction or greater flaws in logic, many of them admitted by the author in his preface. To make two saintly characters take oath to a lie (II, 16) in an attempt to save a man's soul (spirit above letter) was, in Spain at least, a deliberate courting of failure. And why introduce a bold example of a justified lie into an indictment of false living? The purest romanticism reigns in the play, as Martinenche has pointed out; José León and Salomé are not other than less poetic versions of Hernani and Doña Sol. Paternoy, the spirit of eternal justice, resembles Orozco of Realidad, and still more, Horacio of Bárbara.
The lesson conveyed is that we all live in the midst of lies, and that salvation is attained only by sincerity and by confession of one's own free will, not under compulsion. This is an idea familiar to Ibsen and Tolstoy; the added element, that conditions fit for complete repentance can be found only after death, is perhaps original. Martinenche thinks the failure of Los condenados was due to the fact that the Spanish public was not accustomed to the spiritual drama. But one should remember that Calderón's autos are both spiritual and symbolic. The failure was more probably due to faults of form than to any inherent weakness of theme.
6. Voluntad, comedia en tres actos. Madrid, Teatro Español, Dec. 20, 1895. Coldly received. Ran six nights.
Voluntad, which contains some good genre scenes in a Madrid petty store, is meant to show how energy, in the person of a wayward daughter, can repair the faults of sloth and laxness. But Isidora, who saves her father's business, can hardly conquer the will of a dreamy idler whom she loves.
Yet there is no real conflict of wills, only of events, and the lover's conversion to a useful life by means of poverty is cheap, and the ending commonplace. On the whole, the stimulating exhortation to will and work is run into a mold not worthy of it.
Galdós has, in fact, mingled here, with resulting confusion, two themes which have no necessary connection,—the doctrine of salvation by work, and the doctrine of the necessary union of complementary qualities. (Cf. page xxiv.) The latter theory is the central one in Voluntad, and a failure to discern this fact has led critics to some unwarranted conclusions.
7. Doña Perfecta, drama en cuatro actos. Madrid, Teatro de la Comedia, Jan. 28, 1896. Adapted from the well-known novel (1876). Successful.
The novel Doña Perfecta, one of the best Galdós ever wrote, both as an artistic story and as a symbol of the chronic particularism of Spain, has been somewhat weakened in dramatization. The third act is almost unnecessary, the dénoûment hurried. One misses especially the first two chapters of the novel, which furnish such a colorful background for the story. Yet, as a whole, the play gives a more favorable impression of Galdós' purely theatrical talent than almost any other of his dramas. The second act, with its distant bugle calls at the end, is one of the best he ever wrote, and the first is not far behind. It is to be noted that the motivation, especially in the part of Perfecta, is made much clearer here than in the novel; the play serves as a commentary and exegesis to the earlier tale. The gain in clarity is offset, however, by the loss of the mysterious grandeur which clothes Perfecta in the novel. There, her reticences speak for her.
8. La fiera, drama en tres actos. Madrid, Teatro de la Comedia, Dec. 23, 1896. Coldly received.
La fiera is allied in subject to the Episodios nacionales, although it is not taken from any of them. The year is 1822, the scene, the city of Urgell, in the Pyrenees, attacked at that moment by the liberals under Espoz y Mina, and defended by the absolutists. A young liberal spy is loved by an absolutist baroness, and after numberless intrigues during which the hero's life is in danger from friends and enemies, he kills first the leader of the liberals, then the commander of the fortress, "the two heads of the beast," and the lovers flee toward regions of peace. As an appeal for tolerance, La fiera is unexceptionable, and Galdós, the radical, has painted the excesses of both sides with perfect impartiality. But as a drama, it is an example of wildly improbable romanticism, and might have been written in the thirties, except that in that case the comedy element would not be so insipid as it is, but would have tasted of the pungent realism which was the virtue of the best romantics. The characters are unconvincing, the love-story a poor parallel to Romeo and Juliet.
9. Electra, drama en cinco actos. Madrid, Teatro Español, Jan. 30, 1901. A wild success. A French adaptation made a hit in Paris in 1905.
This "strictly contemporary" drama depicts a contest for the hand and soul of Electra, an eighteen-year-old girl whose mother was a woman of dubious life. She loves the young scientist Máximo, but Pantoja, the religious adviser of the family with whom she stays, believing himself her father, desires her to enter a convent. Since he cannot otherwise dissuade her from marriage, he tells her falsely that she is Máximo's half sister. She cannot be convinced that this is a lie until the spirit of her mother reassures her.
Concerning Electra and the battle which it excited between radicals and clericals, one can consult contemporary periodicals, and Olmet y Carraffa, cap. XIV. Its estreno happened to coincide with a popular protest against the forced retirement to a convent of a Señorita de Ubao, and the Spanish public saw in the protagonist a symbol of Spain, torn between reaction and progress. Consequently, no play of Galdós has been so unduly praised or so bitterly attacked. Two facts appear to stand out from the confusion: (1) Galdós did not deliberately trade upon popular passions, since this play was written before the exciting juncture of events arose; (2) The enormous vogue of Electra, its wide sale and performance in many European countries, were not justified by its intrinsic value.
Electra appears now as a drama of secondary importance, with some cheap effectism, excellent third and fourth acts, and a weakly romantic ending. The ghost of Eleuteria is less in place than the corresponding spirits of Realidad and Casandra, both because it is unnecessary for the solution of the plot, and because it is an anachronism in a play devoted to the eulogy of the modern and the practical. On the other side, it is clear to an impartial reader that Galdós did not intend an attack on the clergy, much less an attack on religion. Máximo is careful to affirm his belief in God. And Pantoja is not the scheming hypocrite that some have seen in him; he is a man of firm convictions and courage, sincere in his religious mysticism. Galdós was interested in studying such a character and in showing that his religion is not of the best type.
A punning title. Beside the Greek allusion, Máximo's laboratory is a "taller de electrotecnia."
10. Alma y vida, drama en cuatro actos. Madrid, Teatro Español, April 9, 1902. (Published with an important preface.) Succès d'estime.
This play is Galdós' vital contribution to the sentiment aroused in Spain by the Spanish-American war. The heroine, Laura, an invalid duchess of the late eighteenth century, is ruled by a tyrannical administrator, until freed by the love of a vigorous young hidalgo. But the effort of will involved exhausts the delicate girl, and she dies just as the triumph of her partisans is announced. She was the divine beauty of the soul; without her there is left only a tyranny of one sort or another, and evil, injustice, corruption, are perpetuated.
Alma y vida is Galdós' most ambitious attempt to write a literary symbolic drama on a grand scale. In it he resumes, with Aragonese stubbornness (to use his own words), the attempt made unsuccessfully in Los condenados, only this time the symbolism is not abstract, but has a definite application to Spain. The extreme care which Galdós took with the costumes of the pastoral interlude in the second act, going to Paris for advice on their historical accuracy, the spectacular and costly settings, the length of time, four hours, consumed in the performance, the passages of verse,13 all demonstrate that Galdós put his full will into the elaboration of this drama. The result was disappointing. Audiences were bored, despite their desire to approve. They knew some symbolism was involved, but could not decide upon its character until the author solved the problem in his Prólogo. He there defended the vagueness of his play, as more suggestive than clearness, and explained that Alma y vida symbolizes the decline of Spain, the dying away of its heraldic glories, and the melancholy which pervades the soul of Spain; the common people, though possessing reservoirs of strength, are plunged in vacillation and doubt. The sad ending is the most appropriate to the national psychology of the time. Warned by Electra, he says, he deliberately avoided popular applause, and sought to gain the approval of cultured persons.
Although the pathetic figure of Laura is most affecting, the author did not fully reach the goal he had set for himself, yet "no mediocre mind or ordinary imagination could have conceived such vast thoughts."
11. Mariucha, comedia en cinco actos. Barcelona, Teatro Eldorado, July 16, 1903. Given for the first time in Madrid on Nov. 10, 1903. A fair success, especially in the provinces. The aristocratic portion of the Madrid public did not like it.
Mariucha carries a moral aimed directly at the Spanish people. Like Voluntad, it preaches firm will and the gospel of labor; like La de San Quintín, it points out a new path which the decayed aristocracy may follow in order to found a renovated Spain. In the exaltation of stoicism (V, 4) it resembles Realidad. Clericalism does not enter into the discussion. Instead it is caciquism which Galdós attacks in passing. The play overflows with daring and optimism; it is like a trumpet call summoning the Spanish youth to throw off the shackles of tradition and political tyranny, and to walk freely, confiding in its own strength. One's best impulses must be followed, no matter what ties may be broken or what feelings hurt in the process. We recognize here a favorite doctrine of Ibsen.
Mariucha is not quite so good a drama as its theme deserves. The two chief characters suffer from the weight of the message they bear, and are, in fact, rather symbols than characters or even types. The play possesses, however, many interesting features. One is the fact that the "good angel" of the play is a priest. His figure proves that Galdós grew in sympathy for the representatives of religion, if not for bigots, as he grew older. Another is the protest against thoughtless charity, which fosters shiftlessness. Galdós gave expression to a different point of view in Celia en los infiernos.
