Galdós - Amazon Web Services

I
Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
Although galdosistas are almost unanimously agreed that Orozco should be studied in relation to
the theme of charity in Galdós' novels, they are divided, as are the characters of the novel itself, as to
whether he is a « santo laico » or a « demente » 77 . The answer to this question, as well as to
what Orozco's illusions are, is to be found in Galdós' ideas about religion. A. A. Parker, in « Nazarín
, or The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to Galdós» 78 , has succinctly summarized these
ideas:
The traditional type of sanctity is incompatible with the modern world, in which there is no place
for hermits and contemplatives; the « vulgar » and « mediocre » world requires a «practical»
type of sanctity expressed in a Christ-like charity...
(p. 87)
Further, he continues:
What Galdós refrains from saying is as important as what he states. It has long been emphasized
that he conceived religion as practical social action and had no conception of contemplative prayer.
It should also be emphasized. that while there is nothing unchristian and uncatholic in his affirmation
of human and natural values against a puritanical asceticism, he yet never shows anything that could
77 See, e.g., Gilberto Paolini, An Aspect of Spiritualistic Naturalism in the Novels of B. P. Galdós:
Charity (New York: Las Américas, 1969), passim ; and Arnold M. Penuel, Charity in the Novels of
Galdós (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1972), pp. 71-76.
78 AG , 2 (1967), 83-101. For the historical background to these ideas, see Penuel, pp. ix-xiii.
Galdós' religious ideas were shared by his Victorian contemporaries: «All these novelists [Thackeray,
Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy] concentrate on the theme of love, and all in
one way or another see the relation of the self to the other as an attempt to satisfy religious longings
in a world where relations to God are blocked. To put this another way, Victorian fiction may be said
to have as its fundamental theme an exploration of the various ways in which a man may seek to
make a god of another person in a world without God, or at any rate in a world where the traditional
ways in which the self may be related to God no longer seem open» (J. Hillis Miller, The Form of
Victorian Fiction [Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968], p. 96). The theme of charity in
Galdós' novels is part of what Amado Alonso has called « Lo español y lo universal en Galdós »,
Materia y forma en poesía , 3rd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1969), pp. 201-221.
51