All quotations will be cited by volume and page numbers from the Aguilar edition under the care of Federico Carlos Sáinz de Robles, Obras completas de don Benito Pérez Galdós (Madrid, 1942).

The Novels of Pérez Galdós; the Concept of Life as Dynamic Process (Saint Louis, 1954), the best book overall, takes up at length, for example, possible Hegelian influences (pp. 147 ff.); but its argument that Galdós «integrates environmental influence with personality development» (p. 34) and that is «aware of the unevenness of psychological growth» (p. 59) can stand on its own merits; Eoff carefully shows that «at no time, however, does Galdós use a particular case to generalize upon the inability of the human species to rise above its surroundings» (p. 38), though he must be «regarded as a historian of society in movement» (p. 111).

Without very much interpretation of his materials, J. Chalmers Herman, Don Quijote and the Novels of Pérez Galdós (Ada, Oklahoma, 1955), has nevertheless compiled an impressive catalogue of quotations, allusions, themes and motifs from Cervantes.

Shakespeare and Calderón were the favorite dramatists of the German romantics, and as a result of their being well translated, they became standard poets in the German repertory -and still are. The romantics associated their own concept of creative freedom, i.e., «romantic irony», with the complex illusory reality of the seventeenth-century theatre and its sense of transcendental irony. The romantics themselves never created great drama, however, but rather analyzed it «ironically» in virtuoso demonstrations of the (if necessary, irrational) «spirit» controlling «matter». Thus plays like Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater actually are forerunners of Pirandello and the art of «absurdity», rather than continuations of the world-play of theodicy. The organic view, whose roots are in the late-Renaissance (Böhme, Bruno, et al.), seemed to offer a parallel principle of freedom, in contrast to mechanistic views (French rationalism, English empiricism).

Many psychologies existed after the considerable impetus given by late Renaissance thinkers like Richard Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy. But the developmental theory received its stamp at the same time the German Bildungsroman originated, a novel of education that included psychic processes; e.g., Moritz' Anton Reiser, ein psychologischer Roman, which followed a case history in analogy to natural growth, showing the interrelationship of early experience and later drives, psychosomatic factors, education, wish-fulfillment and illusions, etc., in the biography of a superior personage. Romantic scientists like C. G. Carus then codified such knowledge in accordance with the theory of biological evolution of the race; the «mind» of the individual grew organically during the history of its vessel, just as «spirit» developed organically during the entire story of humanity from unconsciousness in the primitive animal state through various levels of fulfillment. The romantics made the evolution of spirit into a vitalism.

Joseph Schraibman, Dreams in the Novels of Galdós (New York, 1960), catalogues the author's numerous instances of dream, revery, hallucination, vision, etc., according to storytelling functions, which are conceived of only as «devices»; the study is more a handbook of references and statistics, than an interpretation.

Anthony Zahareas, «The Tragic Sense in Fortunata y Jacinta», Symposum, XIX (1965), brings out the developmental interaction, «the mystery of human life in its clash between the 'inner' and 'outer' forces», by which Galdós «succeeds in destroying the formulas of human relationships given by some philosophers and many naturalists»; according to Galdós' presentation, «the spiritual life of man can at times be deformed, but not easily rationalized», as «man's position in the universe is first, to suffer, for it is a tragic position, and then, to understand» (p. 47).

This study is limited to what is described as «the second phase» and «apogee» by Robert Ricard, L'évolution spirituelle de Pérez Galdós (París, n.d.), pp. 6-8. The upper boundary line is roughly Misericordia. The upsurge of fantasy in the late works such as El caballero encantado (1909) does not indicate a revolutionary change in Galdós, but only the assertion of already latent and dormant traits, first notable in La sombra (1870). These traits will be touched on as they appear in El amigo Manso and the novela dialogada, Realidad within the «high» period.

Eoff, The Novels of Pérez Galdós, p. 143.

For an examination of Galdós' historical position, consult H. Chonon Berkowitz, Pérez Galdós: Spanish Liberal Crusader (Madison, Wisconsin, 1948); the tolerant humanity of Galdós' intellect so far as his stands on politics, moral issues, etc., are concerned is, of course, also an important contribution to Spanish literature, made through remarkable tenacity against the pressure of criticism, indeed an achievement of magnitude.