VII enables the author to give these events their proper setting in the political and social movements of the period.  Naturally, there is great 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 undisturbed 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.