A SPANISH DRAMATIST
ARTISTICALLY no less than politically, Spain lies largely
beyond the orbit of the main European influences ; and only this fact can explain the long neglect, outside his own country and Spanish America, of so considerable a dramatist as Benavente. Since, however, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922, his existence has been increasingly realised in this country and in the United States. In a series of handy volumes, of which the fourth lies before us, Messrs. Scribner are issuing selections from his vast output of plays ; and the appearance of Mr. Starkie's very full and careful study of the man and his work should awaken further interest. If we have any quarrel with Mr. Starkie, it is that he has been almost too thorough and painstaking. Benavente, who began writing in 1892, has produced over a hundred plays, and Mr. Starkie dissects so many of them individually that it becomes a little difficult at times for us to see the wood for the trees. It is true that Benavente's work is so varied that any less detailed treatment of it might have seemed to Mr. Starkie to be inadequate. Nevertheless, if his main purpose in writing the book was to attract new students to Benavente, we think that a less comprehensive, and more impressionistic, survey would have been better calculated to achieve that end. Apart from this one criticism, however, we have nothing but praise for Mr. Starkic, who writes very pleasantly and with obvious authority.
Benavente was born in Madrid—at that time " the dirty, sordid city, still retaining much of the old picturesqueness that inspired Goya "—in 1866. His father was a doctor, a specialist in the diseases of children, by whom he was adored. On leaving school, Jacinto went to the University of Madrid and devoted himself to law. On the death of his father in 1885, however, lie abandoned all thoughts of a legal career and gave himself up to literature. He led for a time an unconventional career, "avid of intercourse with persons of all sorts and conditions, especially those whose lives were single and childlike in nature, where the heart was never far beneath the surface and the emotions ingenuous and strong." He travelled widely, becoming for awhile, among other things, the impresario of a circus which visited Russia.
A thorough cosmopolitan, he absorbed many of the modern influences that might have escaped him at home, and the interplay of these influences has produced in his hands a drama bewildering in its complexity. " It is very difficult to classify the works of this Protean master because of his contradictions.
His personality seems to waver between tenderness and irony, cold logic and sentiment, mingled with a desire to philosophise and evolve aphorisms in the ancient Spanish style. When he softens his mordant irony, it is to evoke the charming figure of a girl heroine who is in contrast with her brutal surroundings. Then the satirist in him disappears, and he turns from external events to tragedies of the soul."
The significance of Benaventc's plays, apart from their intrinsic merit as drama, lies, indeed, in the bridge which they offer between the new intellectualism and the old romanticism. In him the conflict between the two is never fully resolved, and his work thus reflects the doubts and uncertainties that perplex civilization to-day. Bcriavente sees the modern point of view, and can rival Mr. Shaw in his expression of it. Yet he is constantly falling back upon tradition. This duality of loyalties is evident' in The School of Princesses, one of the plays actually before us. The scene of the drama is laid in an imaginary country, Alfania. For political pur-
poses, Princess Constanza is required to maitry Prince Albert of Suavia, whom she has met casually but once or twice. She refuses, defending her choice of Duke Alexander, who does not belong to the Royal Family and poses merely as her lover, with all the force and logic of an Ibsen heroine. The modern feminist arguments could not be more powerfully presented. But they are presented only to be questioned. When Albert comes to Alfania, to marry Princess Felicia, who has gladly ceized the opportunity opened to her by her sister's obstinacy, Constanza falls under his spell, and discovers at the same time that her " lover," Alexander, is, after all, but a particularly plausible schemer. Constanza has ignored her duty towards the State, and in the end Benavente seems to suggest that only in sacrifice and renunciation can there be any happiness.
His conclusions, however, are never definite or explicit. He sees all points of view ; he explodes human foibles, con- ventions and conceits with the innumerable pinpricks of his satire : but he remains a destroyer. He has no solution to offer for the problems which he is so skilful in revealing. Pessimism is, indeed, one of the two prevailing character- istics of his work—a pessimism that is not so much cynicism as that " sad irony which cannot weep and so smiles." It is, in a word, a pessimism redeemed by pity—an overmastering sense of pity which alone gives some unity of outlook to Benavente's otherwise complicated and vacillating vision.
GILBERT THOMAS.
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