Galdós, novelista moderno (Madrid, 1960), p. 63.

All page references are to the O. C. (Madrid, 1941), vol. IV. Italics in all quotations are mine.

Antiphrasis, confessio, consensio and concessio. V. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Book IX, 44-63.

The same process is apparent in Marianela, Gloria and more maturely in El amigo Manso and the later novels. V. Eoff, The Novels of Pérez Galdós (St. Louis, 1954), pp. 132-133 and M. A. Wellington, «Marianela: Nuevas Dimensiones», HBalt, LI (1968), 38-48 who both argue that Galdós was demonstrating the weaknesses of Positivism. G. A. Davies' article quoted in note 7 above considers the weaknesses of a single view in El amigo Manso.

«Pepe Rey se hallaba en esa situación de ánimo en que el hombre más prudente siente dentro de sí violentos ardores y una fuerza ciega y brutal que tiende a estrangular, abofetear, romper cráneos y machacar huesos» (450).

V. also other contradictions to the picture of a tactless Rey, «se abstuvo de manifestar el más ligero disgusto y siguió la conversación, procurando en lo posible huir de los puntos en que él... hallase fácil motivo de discordia» (420); and the discussion about the cathedral (422).

I recognise that many of Galdós' techniques are crude and aesthetically insensitive. Most obtrusive is the clumsy presentation of characters in situations of stress and the heavy irony. The two drafts of Doña Perfecta (1876) (see note 23) show that Galdós was aware of some of his shortcomings. His later acquaintance with Tolosa Latour, Dr. Ezquerdo and the reading of Wundt and Büchner undoubtedly helped to broaden his knowledge of psychology which enabled him to solve the question of presentation more satisfactorily than in his earlier books. We may therefore plead immaturity and lack of experience. It may also be uncertainty as to his own aims. It seems probable that having rejected a partisan approach he was uncertain what to put in its place. This essay attempts to analyse the nature of the techniques Galdós was to develop.

Eoff, The Modern Spanish Novel (New York, 1961), p. 122.

«Galdós' Marianela and the Approach to Reality», MLR, LVI (1961), 519.

Since going to press Dr. A. Yates has drawn my attention to Professor R. Cardona's excellent introduction to the Dell (Laurel Language Library) edition of Doña Perfecta (New York, 1965). The editor confirms a number of points in this article, independently made. The present writer accepts without reserve his comment that «the human novel does not unfold on the single level of an abstract collision -the Spanish province in antithesis to the metropolis. Galdós, within the formal pattern that he has chosen, is able to make us see and feel human actuality: he has taken a situation and an idea -a tendentious one, to be sure- and presented them in terms of specific human causes. If one views the novel simply in terms of schematic types and ideas, the narrative becomes a dense conflict of ideological abstractions and cannot transcend the plane of a thesis novel, which, at most, would only have an historical interest. But within this ideological framework Galdós has created a human situation that looks forward to the profound searching of the human soul that we find in his later novels», p. 28.