Rosario, one of the sweetest and purest images of girlhood that I know in fiction, abandons herself with equal passion to the love she feels for her cousin Pepe, and to the love she feels for her mother, Dona Perfecta.  She is ready to fly with him, and yet she betrays him to her mother’s pitiless hate.

But it is Dona Perfecta herself who is the transcendent figure, the most powerful creation of the book.  In her, bigotry and its fellow-vice, hypocrisy, have done their perfect work, until she comes near to being a devil, and really does some devil’s deeds.  Yet even she is not without some extenuating traits.  Her bigotry springs from her conscience, and she is truly devoted to her daughter’s eternal welfare; she is of such a native frankness that at a certain point she tears aside her mask of dissimulation and lets Pepe see all the ugliness of her perverted soul.  She is wonderfully managed.  At what moment does she begin to hate him, and to wish to undo her own work in making a match between him and her daughter?  I could defy anyone to say.  All one knows is that at one moment she adores her brother’s son, and at another she abhors him, and has already subtly entered upon her efforts to thwart the affection she has invited in him for her daughter.

Caballuco, what shall I say of Caballuco?  He seems altogether bad, but the author lets one imagine that this cruel, this ruthless brute must have somewhere about him traits of lovableness, of leniency, though he never lets one see them.  His gratitude to Dona Perfecta, even his murderous devotion, is not altogether bad; and he is certainly worse than nature made him, when wrought upon by her fury and the suggestion of Don Inocencio.  The scene where they work him up to rebellion and assassination is a compendium of the history of intolerance; as the mean little conceited city of Orbajosas is the microcosm of bigoted and reactionary Spain.

IV

I have called, or half-called, this book tendencious; but in a certain larger view it is not so.  It is the eternal interest of passion working upon passion, not the temporary interest of condition antagonizing condition, which renders “Dona Perfecta” so poignantly interesting, and which makes its tragedy immense.  But there is hope as well as despair in such a tragedy.  There is the strange support of a bereavement in it, the consolation of feeling that for those who have suffered unto death, nothing can harm them more; that even for those who have inflicted their suffering this peace will soon come.

“Is Perez Galdos a pessimist?” asks the critic Clarin.  “No, certainly; but if he is not, why does he paint us sorrows that seem inconsolable?  Is it from love of paradox?  Is it to show that his genius, which can do so much, can paint the shadow lovelier than the light?  Nothing of this.  Nothing that is not serious, honest, and noble, is to be found in this novelist.  Are they pessimistic,