reat inequality in the
execution of so long a list of tales (twenty in all), and the reader's
attention at times flags. Yet the care with which Galdos studied his
material, acquainting himself with the minutest details of the history
of the time, and the skill as a narrator that rarely fails him, make the
_Episodios Nacionales_ incomparably the best documents in which to
obtain a true understanding of one of the greatest movements in the life
of a great and interesting nation.

Before he had concluded the _Episodios Nacionales_, however, Galdos had
begun to feel the attraction of an even deeper and more significant
movement,--that of the modernization of the Spain of the present day.
Here, to be sure, the situations are less famous and picturesque, the
part of action is diminished, and patriotic emotion is less evoked; but
the struggle to be studied is none the less violent and profound. For
readers of our time this struggle perhaps gains in interest from being
rather inward than outward, and from demanding of him who paints it
rather a study of souls than the delineation of stirring events. In few
countries has the clash between the new and the old been so violent, or
the adjustment to the new produced so many and so startling
incongruities as in Spain. The deadly antagonism of the traditional
religious and social feeling of the race towards the whole modern manner
of thinking, the ruinous effects of a first taste of modern luxury upon
those who come ignorantly and blindly under its spell, the agitations of
minds whose moral continuity has been broken by ill-understood freedom
of speculation, the disasters produced by political or social ambitions
aroused in those grotesquely unfit for their attainment,--in short, the
illusions, the vain hopes, the failures, the despairs, the hates, the
woe which every great movement of the _Zeitgeist_ inevitably causes in
every nation, these are the themes which Galdos has of late found
irresistibly attractive, and to which he has devoted much the richest
and strongest part of his work.

The first novel in which the new interest was predominant was the
present book, _Dona Perfecta_, finished in April, 1876. In it Galdos
brought the new and the old face to face: the new in the form of a
highly trained, clear-thinking, frank-speaking modern man; the old in
the guise of a whole community so remote from the current of things that
its religious intolerance, its social jealousy, its undist