321
Benito Pérez Galdós, Obras completas (Madrid, Aguilar, 1967), V, p. 1293. All quotations are from this edition.
322
Monroe Z. Hafter in his article «'Bálsamo contra bálsamo' in Ángel Guerra», AG, IV (1969) affirms that the parallel conversions indicate Guerra's superiority to Dulce. Admittedly Dulce has more limited aspirations, nevertheless it seems evident that the main point of the parallel is to underscore the falsity of Guerra's vocation.
323
Part III, chapter iii, 4 and 5: the exact centre of Part III.
324
Ruiz Ramón, p. 103.
325
Doña Sales' bedroom is decorated with such pictures and it is under their influence that Guerra begins to pray for Ción.
326
In saying this I do not wish to suggest that Galdós himself knows exactly what, for a Christian, constitutes authentic religious experience; his difficulties in presenting and even understanding the nature of religious faith independent of humanitarianism have already been pointed to by several critics.
327
Curiously enough Ruskin, like Guerra, had wild schemes for setting up a religious (in a very broad sense) community -the Saint George's Company- as a reaction against, the organization of contemporary industrial society. In referring to this I do not, of course, mean to imply that Galdós had any knowledge of Ruskin's scheme.
328
See also note 340. In Chapter XVIII of De Cartago a Sagunto, there is a brief mention of the immediate aftermath of the siege of Bilbao in 1874, followed by other details of that war (See Obras Completas, III, ed. 19633, Chapter XVIII, pp. 1241-1242 et seq.). But in Zumalacárregui and Luchana the first two sieges of Bilbao (June 1834 and October 1836) are described in detail (See O.C. II, ed. 1964, Chapters XXVIII-XXX, pp. 402-410; and Chapters XXIII-XL, pp. 716-771, respectively).
329
Galdós' contributions to La Guirnalda from 1873 to 1876 have both a spasmodic and dual character, being divided almost evenly between short original creations apparently written for it alone, and of fragments of his already published episodios nacionales. On January 16, 1873, he contributed the first article («Biografías de damas célebres españolas») of what might have become a series similar to his «Galería(s) de españoles célebres», but was never continued. This was followed -in typical Galdosian fashion- by the republication in three installments (March 1, 16 and April 1, 1873) of the cuento, La pluma en el viento (1872) which had been published first in El Correo de España on May 20, 1872. Another cuento, La conjuración de las palabras followed in two installments on March 16 and June 1, 1873 as a reprint from its original appearance in La Nación on April 12, 1868. The remainder of Galdós' contributions to La Guirnalda up to and including part of 1876 were interesing chapters of the episodios published to date.
330
While on one hand we must doubt the accuracy of such studies of the Spanish press and of Galdós' journalism during the nineteenth century in such works as Eugenio Hartzenbusch's Apuntes para un catálogo de Periódicos Madrileños, 1661-1870, Madrid, 1894, and his Periódicos de Madrid, Tabla Cronológica, Madrid, 1876; Manuel Ossorio y Bernard, Ensayo de un catálogo de periódicos españoles, Madrid, 1904; Alfredo Escobar, Setenta años de periodismo, Memorias, 3 vols., Madrid, 1949; and Augusto Martínez Olmedilla, Periódicos de Madrid, Anecdotario, Madrid, 1956, et al, -because of the scope of their studies, their sources and the extremely complex nature of the task itself- the problem has been further complicated by Galdós, whose personal aversion to disclosures of this sort is notorious. For example, at no time during the active segments of his career did be ever reveal his association with Las Cortes (Madrid, 1869-1870) and his series of articles entitled «Crónica parliamentaria», at least not until 1912, during in interview with Antón de Olmet and Arturo García Carraffa, who reported it in their book the same year (Los Grandes Españoles: Galdós, p. 36). Similarly, Galdós never corrected the erroneous but commonly published data that he had worked for the diario, Las Novedades (Madrid, 1850-1866; 1868-1872), although his involvement in reality was the contribution of forty articles to a smaller subsiadiary of it, the Revista del Movimiento Intelectual de Europa. In the same manner, such artículos sueltos as «El Dos de Mayo» which appear in such a scattered manner throughout the Spanish press are condemned to even greater oversight and neglect.