their own with the
best of the world. Indeed, in the opinion of many well qualified to
judge, there is in no language at the present time a body of fiction
more original, more various, more genuinely interesting than Spanish
authors 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, have
succeeded along very different lines, and with striking independence of
manner, in composing a mass of fiction which depicts the real Spain of
to-day perhaps more adequately than the novelists of any other country
have been able to render their native land. The reader of Valera is
filled 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 purest
sources of sixteenth-century Spanish. In Alarcon Spanish irony and
Spanish rhetoric (_l'emphase espagnole_, as the French call it) combine
in rarely personal admixture. Pereda studies the crude and homely life
of the region of Santander with the care for detail of the most
scrupulous realist, but without the hard and brutal curiosity about the
merely external that realism adopted as a literary creed seems to bring
with it. Valdes and Coloma and Senora Bazan, writing from very different
points of view, all reproduce for us with sure touches the sentiments
and ideals, the virtues and vices of Spanish society, high and low,
urban or rural, of to-day. And Perez Galdos, the most fruitful of them
all, has embraced the entire century in his work, and affords us, on the
whole, the clearest and fullest account of the recent spiritual and
social life of his nation anywhere to be found.

Benito Perez Galdos was born at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, May
10, 1845. The details of his early life are entirely unknown except to
himself, his invincible modesty denying them even to personal friends
like the writer of the only biography of him (a meagre one) that has
appeared, Leopoldo Alas. He studied in the local Instituto, and must
have profited by his opportunities, for the literary attainments shown
in his novels can have resulted only from persistent labor from youth
up. In 1863 he went to Madrid to study law in the University, but with
little eagerness for his future profession. He already dreamed of a
literary career,