urbed
confidence and pride in itself must of necessity declare instant war
upon that which comes from without, unsympathetic and critical. The
inevitable result is ruin for the party whose physical force is less,
the single individual, yet hardly less complete ruin for those whom
intolerance and hate have driven to the annihilation of their adversary.
The sympathies of the author, as his closing sentence shows, are with
the new, but his conscience as artist has none the less compelled him to
give to the old its right of full and fair utterance.

The same ignorant or stubborn religiosity, negative for good, working
evil for all affected by it, has been studied by Galdos in two
subsequent novels, _La Familia de Leon Roch_ and _Gloria_, which are
generally reputed to be, with _Dona Perfecta_, the greatest of his
works. _Gloria_, in particular, has received great and deserved
laudation, in spite of some looseness and unevenness of the technique
due to the rapidity with which it was written (the first part in hardly
more than a fortnight, the author tells us). The theme is not unlike
that of George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_, one of the protagonists being
an English Jew, with the profoundest attachment to the traditions of his
race, the other a Spanish girl, in whom the faith of her fathers is an
ineradicable instinct. Few finer and more tragic situations have been
imagined by moderns than this. No less tragic, though less poetic, is
the ruin of Leon Roch, weighed down by the burden of an insanely bigoted
wife.

Other groups of novels deal with the other aspects of the modern society
of Spain of which mention has been made. In one group we have the
disasters caused in lowly homes by the vanity of women who have caught a
glimpse of the pleasures of the rich, and pitilessly demand them. The
poor official, out of a place, in _Miau_, is goaded to suicide by the
exactions of his wife and daughter and sister-in-law. In _La de Bringas_
we have the squalid intrigues of a family on the edge of 'high life' and
striving to get within it. _El Amigo Manso_ loves, and is exploited for
her social advantage by the woman whom he loves. A second group of tales
deals with the hard question how the woman, left to her own resources
and without income, shall find her support. Here belong _Fortunata y
Jacinta, La Desheredada, Tristana_, and _Tormento_. It is the pathos of
this problem, not its unseemly and revolting details, that impresses
Galdos