# Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series/Theory and Criticism: Notes on the Plays

If Lope de Vega, the Monster and Phœnix of Genius, is the most prolific of writers for the theatre, Jacinto Benavente may be accounted the most various and most baffling. A brilliant sophistication conceals and disguises the depth of his human feeling, mellowed by an experience which is at once highly idealized and of almost pedestrian common sense, presenting to the casual reader an enigma quite impossible of solution. The drama of the unconscious mind is, however, essentially a drama of contradictions. To have developed this subtle and most subjective of psychologic dramas among a people as crassly unmetaphysical as the Spaniards, who, through their picaresque tradition, have been parents of modern realism, is a stroke of subconscious humor as apposite as unexpected.
It has been said that the new theatre is constant only in its inconstancy. It has been pictured as unstable. Protean, presenting through its diversity the aspects of the work of several distinct individuals. Undoubtedly the consensus of critical opinion must be accepted as just, certainly in the superficial sphere, yet variety can never be inexhaustible. If criticism is to stop here, already its function has been abdicated. Art derives its richness from principles, from whose vigor its life is renewed. The richer, the more vital it is, the deeper its roots must be caught. Benavente's theatre, is not a theatre of change, it is a theatre of equivocation, of underlying realities as opposed to a world of appearances. His plays are so suggestive, so validly disparate because they are more profoundly conceived than other plays, more intimately born of the spirit. His drama is double in focus, moving upon double planes, poised between the objective ​and the subjective, between the conscious and the unconscious and unexplored. This is both its history and its explanation. It is all embracing and comprehensive for the reason that it is based upon a recognition of the irreducible dualism of life, and unfolds through a triple series of dualities—a double characterization, a double ideation, and a double plot or action, which are its distinguishing characteristics. The utter absence of sensational or disproportionately salient features renders it imperative that such dramas should be approached with a clear appreciation of their fundamentally subjective quality in order that the absolute unity of their conception and purpose may not escape the reader's mind in his attention to the trivial and the accidental.
The first article in Benavente's dramatic creed is the maintenance of the integrity of the objective world, an apparent respect for fact in itself. An external story is not only present in his plays, but, except in fantasy, it appears as self-sustaining and self-sufficient, provided with adequate motivation, constituting by every rule of the familiar theatre, a complete play. When the nature of the theme will permit, the story is decked out with all the apparatus and parade of mere external drama, upon which a dialogue has been imposed so sparkling and vivacious, so fertile in poetic and philosophic suggestion, that it challenges comparison because of its superficial virtues alone with the masterpieces of the objective stage. Although the logic of fact may be purely illusory, nevertheless it is the truth by which men live, coloring and conventionalizing the daily routine. Truth which is apparent to the senses, cannot habitually be questioned directly by the playwright. Benavente differs, therefore, from other dramatists of the unconscious primarily in the absolute inviolability of his external plot. The foreground, boldly and carefully elaborated, serves as a screen behind which the subjective drama is developed, but to accept the outward story at its face value, failing sedulously to perceive that it is but one of the pivots upon which the action turns, is an error so inviting that, in season and out, it has proved the undoing of a majority of the students of the Benaventian theatre.
​It has previously been remarked that Benavente takes his departure from conventional drama through employment of the double entente. A favorite device for the insinuation of allusions of doubtful taste becomes in his hands a statement and a reservation, what seems and what is, the obverse and reverse of character in a phrase or a word. The apparent character is thus discredited, and in its place a personality suggested compounded of reserves, which lie behind. As a consequence, the dialogue takes on the quality of conversation as it is actually heard, becoming a fabric of half-statements and approximations, to be co-ordinated by the spectator, yet possessing no inherent credibility of itself. The intention provides the motive power, but by no means necessarily the substance of speech. Character, obviously, can no longer properly be given by definition, but is metamorphosed into a process of induction, and in this way remains subjective. Instead of lending itself to statement, personality invites inference as being rather a matter of direction and tendency, to be caught on the wing as it hovers between the apparent and the real. Like the arbitrary moral standards of the past century, its sharpness of outline has been obliterated, and it has become dissipated and diffused among the uncertainties of the emotions and the will.
The dualism which is inescapable in human nature, and so conspicuously evident in the realm of feeling, has its counterpart, however, intellectually, in a dualism which underlies the world of ideas. Truth itself is merely relative. The psychologic theatre cannot avoid taking this most fundamental of antimonies into account, if it is to penetrate to the heart and reproduce the modalities of life. To conceive is to distinguish, to set apart from something else. An art which is dynamic can have no place for fixed ideas. Ideas are themselves positive and negative, varying in content and connotation with different peoples and times. They are instruments of knowledge, not matters of conviction. Here is potential contrast lying ready to the dramatist's hand. The proper presentation of the basic duality of thought offers, however, extraordinary difficulties to the artist. It is effected by Benavente through an antitechnique of opposi​tion, a complete system of positive and negative values, of antisymbols and antititles, of antiheroes and antiheroines, and of anti-ideals. Love appears to Princess Bebé as a deluded, hollow infatuation, masked behind a horrible and repulsive scar. Our Lady of Sorrows, in the play of that name, awakes to find herself beatified at last through the not wholly disinterested worship of a false, contemptible ideal. Crispin, too, of "The Bonds of Interest," notoriously an antihero, upon analysis is disclosed to be far less unheroic than he seems. Even the title of the comedy is an inversion, as was recognized at the time of its translation into Dutch as "Die fijne draad"—"The Fine (or Invisible) Thread"—in reference to the invisible thread of love which runs through the story, providing the positive element of the play. The antititle, indeed, is a favorite device of Benavente's—frequently the board from which the action springs. Equivocations of the sort are never even remotely accidental, but have their genesis in the rooted antipathy of his theatre to complete statement, with its inevitable suggestion of finality. It is not a question of theme, but of conception and approach, and Benavente's attitude has been well indicated by a Spanish critic in the assertion that he is always to be found at the point of the scales. But an art which refuses to identify itself with half truths, living instead in the emotions and the intelligence, is a sealed book to the unimaginative, literal mind. Other authors have suffered from opposition and prejudice, but the enemy to the comprehension of Benavente has always been sheer stupidity. Thought and emotion must meet with response in emotion and thought. Only one all-embracing contradiction has failed to attract his interest, and that has been cerebral drama without cerebration. The antitechnique is a discipline which obliges people to think—a species of legerdemain entirely congenial to his temperament and the very touchstone of his genius.
The extension of the antitechnique from the plane of character and idea to that of the dramatic action itself, completes the scheme of the Benaventian dramaturgy. It involves of necessity the creation of a secondary or antithetic inner action, which, while not obtruding upon the course of ​the outward story, or destroying its credibility, at the same time confers upon it dual quality and transcendence. The outer or written plot, which is the progress of the story and the history of the characters, must by its nature be direct and objective, and in precise proportion to the definiteness with which it is formulated, of limited significance. It acquires depth and universality from other, remotely hidden sources. Individual experience may properly be interpreted by the experience of the race, in whose generalizations it finds a corrective. Any act, moreover, in so far as it is at all intelligible, must look for explanation to the ultimate impulses and broad reactions of man's nature, to the faculties and processes of the mind which are most general, and so have come almost to have the force of personifications. This is the genesis of the type and universality of the idealist, which through the ages have by common consent constituted the hall-mark of great art. To draw upon these vast stores of experience, handed down immemorially through the ages as the gathered wisdom of the centuries, is the specific problem of the artist. Usually the task has been approached blindly, and the solution has been left more or less to chance, as a matter of accident or of temperament—the consequence of a happy stroke of what is vaguely called genius. The progress of science, however, has clarified our vision of the unconscious. Our insight into its mysteries is keener, more penetrating now than before. Casual knowledge has made way for system. In Benavente, the exploitation of this underworld replaces the banalities of the older playwrights, and is the result not only of genius but of method. From the common treasury of humanity, he conjures an inner, unwritten, suggested universal plot, which is not related to the outward story by any artificial means, and never itself definitely given form, yet which parallels and synchronizes with the outward course of events, underlying and interpreting them, always and under whatever conditions, containing within itself not only the motive and driving power, but also the criticism of the play. Without ever rising to the surface, never under any circumstances seeking expression in words, whether in dialogue or in stage directions, the under, buried ​plot conceals the mainspring of the action, which in the ultimate analysis is entirely dependent in this drama of double planes upon subjective elements for its significance.
As drama is feeling, not fact, emotion, not thought, it must perforce sink into the unconscious mind. In plays whose nature is wholly superficial, the action merely repeats the sense of the dialogue, and the curve of emotion is a simple one, complicated by no intellectual embarrassments. If the functions of dialogue and action are identical, however, clearly one must be superfluous, and the ultimate dramatic form be either pantomime or the literary closet drama. Gordon Craig attacks the dilemma, assuming drama to be primarily sculptural, a thing quite apart from words, and to express it his followers have sought to create a symbol, which shall be the drama as a presence, made manifest ocularly upon the stage. As conceived also by Benavente, drama is three dimensional, by its very nature incapable of being written; it is the setting over of something against something else progressively before the eye. Yet it is an unwritten action which is in constant flux, not a symbol or a series of tableaux sinking into pictorial art. The error of the exponents of the new stagecraft lies in the fact that they seek to extract from externals, from the mere trappings of a play, what is the very breath of its being, to be imparted at birth only by the playwright himself. A good play cannot really be read. Although a performance may be visualized from the printed page, the effect of the performance cannot be felt; too many imaginative and constructive processes intervene. Yet these effects of the unwritten action are precisely those in which true drama lies. The dramatic action, the unwritten action which is plastic, which lies behind the plane of language, is taken by Benavente to be the vehicle of his under plot—an unwritten action for an unwritten plot. The action in its purest form thus becomes the instrument of the subjective plot, which is the heart of the play. To disengage the action, to surprise its situations and effects, endowing them with emotional intelligibility of their own through coherence of mood, is to open up new reaches of the theatre. Mood lends itself clearly to independent development, yet ​by no other writer since the Greeks has it been dignified as a separate major factor of the dramatic structure. When emotion is treated in bulk and in the mass, upon compelling scale, it becomes perceptible as a dramatic entity, and achieves a power that is distinctive. Instead of following and waiting upon the dialogue, it imparts to it significance and strength, together with that peculiar appositeness which removes conversation from the realm of platitude and the abstract, to the province of art. Read for the plot, plays of this description are mere spectacular melodrama; read for the dialogue, mere literature, incomprehensible and strange, but apprehended in their own sphere, in the shifting planes through which they move, they are an experience at once refreshing and invigorating, as novel as it is deceptive.
In order to centre the attention upon the subjective action, Benavente dispenses with description of persons and scenes, suppressing details of appearance, time, and place, the presence of which might create false emphasis, and so prove both distracting and misleading. To follow the inner action as it is induced in the several types of play, in greater or less degree manifesting its ascendancy, is an adventure of illuminating possibilities. Sometimes the inner plot will be found so tenuous that it is little more than an idea of which the outward story is the exposition. This is true, for the most part, in strictly cerebral drama. Sometimes it remains back of the story, paralleling and reinforcing it with the sanction of an added symbolic quality, appearing independently in the action only upon occasion, at moments of exceptional transcendence. When the parallelism is close, the natural generalizing propensity of the mind will prove sufficient to effect the transition from the outer to the inner scheme. At other times, the inner plot detaches itself from the outward story, to mature in its own plane, where it arrogates to itself the life of the whole. The transition here takes place through a series of false leads, by means of which the outer plot falls away, usually at the end of the first act, while the situations become aborted or evaporate, and pale into the background of the unwritten theme. The attention is withdrawn insensibly from the objective plot and turned ​within, resulting to the literal-minded in virtual defraudation. More than any other, drama of this type refuses to be read; it is imperative consciously to induce the action if the reader desires to enter into possession of the play. The unwritten action occurs in most highly developed form in drama of the will, where the shocks and conflicts are most powerful, most striking, and most intense, and therefore sharper in outline and emotionally more articulate than in the case in drama of mental states and of ideas. With the pure psychologic drama, this drama of twofold, contrasted action in which the doings of man are projected against the vastness of a universal background, is the most original, as well as the most elusive creation of the Benaventian theatre, treacherous and inhospitable to the unwary, but finely conscriptive of the imagination, opening out into new vistas before those who have eyes to see, receding into unsuspected depths. However modern and metaphysical in form, is it indeed surprising that this most subtle, most subjective of dramas, this theatre of equivocation beneath a world of hard reality, should, after three centuries, have sprung from the stem of Cervantes and the line of Quixote?
"Saturday Night," the most important of the plays contained in the present volume, enjoying with "The Bonds of Interest" and "La Malquerida," wide popular reputation, invites attention as the earliest example of the mature subjective style. It is a composition of peculiar difficulty, the appreciation of which requires both effort and time. Imperia, or ambition, the will, trades upon and then forgets her youth, acquiring wealth and power, at last drawing near the throne of empire of which she has dreamed. Her ambitions already on the road to fulfilment, she turns to recover Donina, her youth, whom she finds amid the blare of a circus, from which she passes to take part in a scene of wild saturnalia, or witches' sabbath, to which all the characters repair. Here, in a striking dramatic crisis, her old life dies at the hand of youth, which is itself exhausted in the blow. Aghast, Imperia summons Leonardo, the imagination to her aid, from whom, long years ago in the dawn of her ​girlhood, she had derived her vision of the ideal. Under his tutelage, the material world fades away, until, at the end, she sacrifices her youth, her Donina, who dies immediately, and, by the sacrifice, Imperia achieves for herself character, the mastery of the world and all that is in it, which is the realization of her ideal. This ideal, however, when attained, she finds to be spiritual, entailing supremacy over the things of this earth, but not that crown of earthly empire which in her visions she had seen. Professedly a pageant of life upon the Riviera, "Saturday Night" unfolds in five tableaux, each the bold projection of a dominant mood—the first of sophistication and cold indifference, the second of reawakened feeling, reminiscent of the associations of a romantic past, the third of deep revulsion, so complete that no illusion may longer exist, the fourth of tragic resolution, hectic in collapse, while a placid beauty irradiates the fifth with the soft lights of the garden of the spirit, languorous with vistas of the sea down scented avenues of flowers. According to whatever criteria, the drama must be adjudged an extraordinary achievement. The heroine, Imperia, is a sister of the famous courtesan of that name, whose story has been handed down from the Italian Renaissance. The Countess Rinaldi, a companion figure, has also been drawn from a model of the epoch. Reminiscences of the North, too, occur, of the under and circus world which the author understands so well. Furthermore, there is a reflection of his early Russian experiences. The Spanish public was totally unprepared for drama of this content and complexity at the time "Saturday Night" was first presented in 1903, although it was readily perceived from the outset to be an unusual, glamourous, prophetic performance, to which the vague epithet Shakespearean was applied by the critics, in recognition of dimly suspected but hidden, wholly uncomprehended qualities. Having no affiliation with the traditions of Spanish literature or the Spanish stage, it was necessary that a decade should elapse before this remarkable fabric achieved definitive, popular triumph.
"The Prince Who Learned Everything Out of Books," composed for the inauguration of the Children's Theatre at ​Madrid, on the other hand is a fairy-tale that is clearly akin to simple allegory. The easy grace, the charm and humor of the childlike story of the Blue Prince, intrigue even the casual reader. Yet for all its simplicity, the tale is not as ingenuous as it seems. Equipped with the little knowledge, the material comfort that his parents, who are the Life-Givers, can bestow, a young boy goes forth into the world. He takes with him as he goes the illusions of his youth, which, too, it lay within their power to give. Deceived by appearances, the victim of his own innocence, through danger and difficulty he acquires experience, rescuing the Fool who accompanies him from the fleshly paradise of the Ogre, and the knowledge that is also his from aimless wanderings by the side of the road. The experience which he has gained in the world, whether of good or of evil, has still to be supplemented, however, in the half-lights of the spirit, in the more personal, intimate sphere, where he is saved from an impossible marriage with the daughter of pretense through the choice of unselfishness, whereupon his education is complete. The Powers of Life have then only to lay the treasures of their wealth and wisdom at his feet. Few fantasies reveal such abounding spirits, or are drawn with comparable vigor, or rejoice in equally incisive characterization. It is curious how, in this simple tale, the beguiling innocence of the theme, here, too, cloaks the customary absence of expected coups de théâtre. The subjective action has been reduced to little more than an attitude of mind in which the play is approached, which determines the key of the presentation, infusing it throughout with dignity and richness of feeling—spiritual analogues of the vigor and vivacity with which the outward story is unrolled. The mood of the author remains a knowing one. Benavente has enjoyed exceptional success in this genre, in which he meets the most skilful practitioners upon equal ground. Two of his later and most ingratiating works, "Cinderella" and "Once Upon a Time" (Y va de cuento), both excursions into fairy-land undertaken upon the grand scale, are not yet included in the collected edition of his theatre.
The two-act comedy "In the Clouds" bears all the ​stigmata of orthodox realism. With sober, unobtrusive detail, it mirrors faithfully the emptiness and hardship of middle-class life in modern Madrid. Psychologically true and photographic of fact, there is no compromise with adventitious relief. Don Hilario, the kindly family physician, affords a portrait of the author's own father. It is difficult to understand, from the vantage-point of a distant, more bountiful environment, the pressure of poverty in a country such as Spain, the absolute, hopeless destitution which there prevails, superseding both the social and the moral law with the primitive dictates of the struggle for existence. These ferocities admit of no exaggeration. "In the Clouds" offers a picture of poverty, poverty of means, poverty of surroundings, poverty of mind, poverty of will, which, materially and mentally, are but the husk of the intellectual and spiritual decay of the life that is about to pass. The play is at once realistic and idealistic, conceived below the plane of distinction of the schools, where the spirit and its manifestations are one. The differing address with which the simple folk confront the relentless barrenness of their existence as it looms above the action with menacing, crushing power, the interplay of the divergent forces in which the threat of poverty is exteriorized, to be gathered summarily and finally in the marriage problem, which provokes the crisis, at the same time providing the comic motive when developed in reverse, betrays admirably the hand of the master. Quintessentially Benaventian is the scene depicting the three young men, married, in fact just married, and just about to be married, chancing upon the curiously happy idea of calling to condole with the young man whose marriage has been deferred. Even dulness, when significant, may prove entertaining, while banality presents facets of wit, and is pregnant with comedy of the highest order. The neorealistic theatre assuredly yields no more salutary model for the student. In conjunction with that singular drama of peasant life, "Señora Ama," whose protagonist is the environment, "In the Clouds" must take rank among the major contributions of Spain to the newer art.
The brief colloquy, "The Truth," an exposition of an idea ​through strictly dramatic means, falls readily into the classification of pure cerebral drama. The indeterminate nature of the dialogue, the shyness and hesitancy of the characters through whom it is carried on, contrast strikingly with the truth that is so fondly sought, but which is revealed at the denouement by an anti-antithesis as something equally indeterminate, in whose dubiety lies the only certitude that we know. The piece is in the author's latest manner, where the conversation has attained a simple luminousness of phrase almost directly revelatory of the spirit.
Spanish criticism of Benavente, although laudatory, and frequently keenly sensitive, is regrettably in great part superficial, and seldom for any sustained flight, seriously intelligent. Much that has been written is occasional, composed in haste at the time of the production of the plays with which it deals, exhibiting not unnaturally the defects peculiar to reviews which have been improvised for the newspapers or other periodicals, and by no means enhanced in authority when incorporated afterward without revision in books. Volumes of far from promising antecedents, unfortunately often attain extensive circulation. Manuel Bueno's Teatro español contemporáneo, published in 1909 and since widely read, is probably better known abroad than any other general work dealing with the modern Spanish theatre. In addition to its occasional character, the criticisms included date from a period from two to seven years less recent than that of the book. Although frequently most apt, they betray little penetration. The plays, moreover, are assumed to have been composed in the order in which they were originally performed, which is notoriously far from the fact. Gaps of ten years, replete with struggle and growth, are glossed over by all critics with indiscriminate eulogy. This blemish disfigures the anthology in two volumes, edited with an introduction and an epilogue by Alejandro Miquis, and entitled Las mejores páginas de Jacinto Benavente. It is a work, however, which is much more soundly documented, of superior range, and perhaps as satisfying as any other not rising above the empiric point of view. José Francos ​Rodriguez's Teatro en españa, 1908 and 1909, though more fragmentary, deserves commendatory mention, together with the critical study of La Malquerida by José Rogerio Sánchez, the conclusions of which are repeated with amplification in the same author's comprehensive Autores españoles e hispano-americanos. With these the lengthy and enthusiastic study by Andrés González-Bianco, with which he begins his Dramaturgos españoles contemporáneos, may be consulted. It makes no attempt, however, at analysis, and remains wholly indefinite. Few Spanish writers of compendia of criticism, although of gifts and attainments unquestionably beyond cavil, convey the impression of having read the works of which they write. A series of scattered articles by R. Pérez de Ayala, an imitator and at one time youthful admirer, has been collected in that author's Las máscaras. They are based upon an æsthetic improvised as they go along, and are without adequate critical equipment.
Greater weight and importance may be attached to the opinions of Julio Cejador y Frauca, contained in the tenth volume of his encyclopædic Historia de la lengua y literatura castellana, to which a serviceable bibliography has been appended. "In this theatre that is upside down," writes Cejador, "the action, which was formerly the end, has been converted into the means." Although conscious of the antithesis between the theatre of Benavente and the theatre as it has existed hitherto, Cejador shows himself to be deficient in grasp of dramatic principle, besides displaying an almost unbelievable ignorance of the modern movement in European literature, which alone can account for the mistakes of the general fraternity of Spanish critics in interpreting the programme of the moderns as the personal achievement of Mr. Benavente. Cejador, it may be observed, devotes several pages of his monumental history to an examination of "The Yellow Jacket," the Chinese fantasy by George C. Hazelton and Benrimo, translated into Spanish by Benavente, and performed at the Teatro de la Princesa, Madrid, in 1916. He concludes that the reputed authorship of the comedy by Americans is a huge hoax, and pronounces the play the sole, original, and most highly characteristic work ​of Benavente. A previous run of two years in the United States, together with anterior productions in London, Berlin, and Moscow, have no weight with this authority. Well-informed criticism, careful, catholic, and judicious, has always been peculiarly sympathetic, and conducive to the growth of the rarer, more delicate forms of art.
Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín's discussion of Benavente's æsthetics, contributed to the first volume of the Ateneo in 1906, is superior in scholarship, continuing the authoritative tradition established by the late Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. Of necessity, however, because of its date, Bonilla's study is confined almost exclusively to the pre-dramatic period. Gregorio Martínez Sierra, an expert judge of the theatre, has written with equally keen perception of personal and dramatic values. His touch is not always sure in the treatment of individual plays. Similarly sensitive and informing, the confessedly random appreciations by the poet Manuel Machado, collected in his Año de teatro, exhibit perhaps a more complete realization of the implications of the new movement, whether psychologic or dramatic, than can be found elsewhere among his countrymen. They afford a welcome antidote to the crass, irremediable realism which forms the staple of every-day Spanish criticism.
Crossing the Pyrenees, the channel and the ocean, but little of importance concerning Benavente has as yet been made accessible in English. In general, English and American writers who are not habitual Spanish scholars, are far too dependent when they travel upon the particular native groups from whom their information is derived, to be in a position to acquire true perspective. Newspapers and literary reviews published in the English language almost without exception reveal themselves as lamentably deficient and ignorant. Articles which assiduous search disinters from the files of magazines may uniformly be set down as perfunctory. John Dos Passos, in a friendly paper devoted to Benavente, included in "Rosinante to the Road Again," slips by the subject entirely, and would have been out of date in large measure at the close of the last century. Forewords to the school and college texts of the plays which have been pre​pared in this country for the convenience of students of Spanish, while more thoroughly grounded, do not attempt to enter the critical field, nor will Fitzmaurice-Kelly's "History of Spanish Literature," a convenient handbook on many subjects, repay examination. Two experts upon the drama, however, write with ampler information. Isaac Goldberg's essay, appearing at the beginning of his "Drama of Transition," invites comparison with the best work of the Spanish critics. Exceptional insight and sympathy also illumine the pages of Storm Jameson's "Modern Drama in Europe," reflecting, perhaps, more satisfyingly than any other the spiritual side of this great idealist. Ignorance of the language has unfortunately compelled a reliance upon second-hand authorities in matters of detail, leading upon occasion to eloquent comparisons with a beatified Lope de Vega, endowed for the purpose with dramas of model construction, palpitating with vital, distinctive characters. In the cold light of truth, Benavente does not derive from the florid line of Lope. Except for his astonishing richness, his starry spirituality reminiscent, in Shelley's phrase, of the autos of Calderón, he has little in common with the Golden Age of the Spanish Renaissance. With a nicer intuition—the prophetic vision of the poet—Rubén Darío has visualized Benavente as of the major, nobler stock of the dialectical troubadour and knight of the spirit, who carried the banner of his country in the new dawn at the close of the Middle Ages throughout the Christian world: "Jacinto Benavente is the man who smiles… Amid the debacle with which the nineteenth century closed in Spain, his face smiles as from an invisible frame. He is Mephistophelian, a meticulous philosopher, whose isolation has become a weapon of defense. As he talks or writes, like a true prince, he always has a poignard at his side, or a fool. He possesses independence, which is more priceless to a man than any kingdom, and so he is the master of truth and the tamer of lies. His culture is cosmopolitan, and his mental processes, which are wholly foreign to his people, bewildering in the land of fixed tradition, but they will not astonish the observer who has the keenness to perceive how this soil, which has been so fertile of genius, has ​retained in its bosom in the hope of coming springs, the potentialities of a Ramón Lull."
Dramatically, Benavente's career falls into three divisions, approximately of equal duration. The first, from his début as a dramatist to the production of "Saturday Night," was a period of experiment, interesting chiefly for its brilliancy and the spell which it cast over his contemporaries. When Benavente produced at the Español, Madrid dined an hour earlier. The same tendencies are evident that appear in his non-dramatic prose, guiding the policies of La vida literaria, the periodical established by him in order to promote the radical ideas of the rising generation. "A Lover's Tale" and "Love of Loving" bring to the theatre the interests of the editor, testifying to a ready sympathy with new and foreign influences, while the more serious, if lesser, plays of the epoch reveal æsthetic and marked ethical preoccupations. Most popular, beyond question, were the satiric pieces, facile, graceful, with a suspicion of personal animus always lurking between the lines. Benavente's art, from the beginning, has been so nicely, so humanly centred that few of his characters have escaped identification with persons prominent in the social or political life of Madrid. Conspicuous among the earlier comedies, "The Banquet of Wild Beasts," Lo cursí, and "The Governor's Wife," reveal unmistakably, although in embryo, all the promise and essential properties of what was later to become the new theatre. It is easy to see in retrospect that too much emphasis has been placed upon the social and too little upon the human bias of these sparkling comedies, which, with the lapse of time, appear unambiguous and clear. An indifference to the mechanics of living—a corollary, indeed, of all thorough idealism—is fundamental even from the beginning. Society and the individual are pictured in apposition. Neither fashion nor custom is a spiritual force, but inasmuch as society has become bankrupt in ministering to the individual, the individual finds himself confronted with the choice of making his escape from society, or of asserting his independence through unremitting struggle, or else of accepting the alternative of surrender and spiritual ​defeat. Yet though society is defective, human nature is weak, and the tragedies of character in the last analysis are tragedies of the will.
Although Benavente's theory of art, as well as his philosophy of life, were fully developed in 1892, when he first began to write, and have undergone since no radical change, yet it is not until the maturing of his subjective manner that we encounter the master of the theatre, of the heart and human motive at his full stature. Technique and conception have now become distinctive and original. The monumental achievement of this, his second, period must be adjudged the cycle of five play's, incomparably rich in texture, iridescent in mood, whose subject is the great adventure of life, the faring-forth of the spirit to the conquest of what life holds, and the realization of its ideal. Benavente has here unfolded a "Pilgrim's Progress" of a secular, restless age. The prologue to the series, "Princess Bebé," is a comedy of questioning, of overtones. Youth looks out upon life, dissatisfied with the shams and substitutes which have imposed upon its innocence, and eagerly and earnestly puts the great interrogation, which is to be answered in the succeeding plays. In "Saturday Night" the solution is discovered through ambition, in "Stronger than Love" through duty, accepted at first as a convenience, but entailing inevitably renunciation and surrender. The fourth play, "The Bonds of Interest," depicts in turn the birth of the spirit directly through the transforming power of love, while the cycle concludes with a cameo-like epilogue, the beautiful comedy "The School of Princesses," presenting the discipline of sacrifice, which is conceived as the crown of experience and the unleashing of the spirit, and hence provides not only the subject of the epilogue but the climax and supreme moment of each of the preceding plays. An open and inquiring mind, an ambitious and resolute will, patient of duty, transformed by love, chastened by sacrifice—such is the genesis of the spirit and the measure of man. High feeling, glamourous expression, insight and sympathy, touched by a haunting suggestion of the ever-present awe and majesty of life, together place these dramas at the front of the modern ​theatre. "Field of Ermine" and "A Collar of Stars," although of more recent date, may also be listed in the catalogue of psychologic, symbolic drama in which the objective and subjective elements are contrasted with maximum power and effect.
The more important miscellaneous works composed at this period deal predominantly with the influence of character when achieved ("Autumnal Roses"), or with conditions and environments which react upon or inhibit its growth. As in "Señora Ama" and "In the Clouds," neither fact nor environment are of interest in themselves, but are presented as externalizations or postulates of volitional or other human elements. A more strictly psychologic bent further makes its appearance in what may be called comedies of mental states ("Brute Force"), while the lighter one-act comedy of equivocation continues as practised at an earlier day. The best of the one-act pieces belong also to these years.
With "La Malquerida," acted in 1913, Benavente enters upon another phase. As has been well said, the tragedy is not a study in psychoanalysis, but a psychoanalytical play, compact of inhibitions and suppressed desires, so intensively true that it has met with remarkable response both in Spain and in North and South America. Society and the will no longer furnish the theme; indeed, the volitional element has almost entirely disappeared, and we find ourselves enmeshed in a maze of reactions and determinations of the mind, in which the outward world is reduced to the lowest possible terms, the modicum indispensable for bringing the play upon the stage. The dramas of these later years are inexhaustible in variety. "The Evil That Men Do" offers a study of jealousy, "Thy Proper Self" of self-respect. A strange, absorbing projection of mirrored emotions, "A Traitor to All, Yet to All Be Ye Loyal," is concerned with the tragedy of character as reflected entirely from without, imposing itself in the place of the character that is real, as "Our Lady of Sorrows" attains true character within by virtue of a reflected character that is false. Not less moving is the powerfully austere tragedy of indifference and mis​take, "A Lady." Again, with "The City of Gaiety and Confidence," second part of "The Bonds of Interest"—itself the outgrowth of La canta de la primavera, or "Spring Song," published fifteen years previously—we enter the domain of the drama of ideas. What "The Bonds of Interest" does for the individual, "The City of Gaiety and Confidence" undertakes to do for the State, attempting to precipitate from that abstraction the vital principle which supports it, in which the being of the nation inheres. Neither a political satire nor a war play, this pageant of predigested ideas, tendencies, forces, assembled and marshalled under names, surrenders but partially to the spectator upon performance, reserving its message to be delivered up in the amplitude of leisure hours. Such creations, of course, have little relation to the commercial theatre, but are possible only to the master, who imposes his pleasure upon public and actors at will. Benavente, always versatile, comes at last to move with even greater facility, through a wider range of subject and style than before, touching new interests, reviving old, weaving into the most delicate patterns the threads of his phantasmagoric theatre. Insinuation replaces statement, revelation succeeds conflict, while the implication waits upon the approximations of thought. In the final estimate, the subjective drama, the drama of antitechnique, must be held to postulate an antitheatre, opposed in conduct and in content to all the canons which have hitherto accepted by theatrical art. Beside this most elusive of divinations, the experiments of the Expressionists and Monodramatists of the North, of the Futurists and other bizarre Italian cults, appear material and halting indeed.
Considered intelligently, with a mind unbiassed by preconceptions of the objective stage, these plays yield their own explanation, after much reflection and much love. During the next decade their study will repay the attention of all followers of the theatre.
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