Waterbury evening Democrat., 1889-02-14


 Looking the picture of misery
 those teeming years after 1880, when poets grew on every hedge and the romantic pas sion was abroad. The sketch had appeared in little privately printed volume which Edward Wallace had picked up by chance on the Paris quays. He had read it in an idle hour in railway, had seen it's capabilities, and had forthwith set to work to develop the sketch into play. But in developing it he had carefully preserved the character of the original conception. It was a conception strictly of the Romantic time, and the exc cution of it presented very little of that variety of tone which modern audiences have learned to expect. The play told one rapid. breathless story of love, jealousy, despair and death, and told it directly and uninter ruptedly, without any lighter interludes Author and adapter alike had trusted en- tirely to the tragic force of the situation and the universality of the motives appealed 70 The diction of the piece was the diction of Alfred dc Vigny or of the school of Victor Hugo. It was, indeed, rather q dramatic love poem than a play in the modern sense and It depended altogether for it's success upon the two characters of Macias and FL vira.
 In deviSing the character of Macias the Italian author had made use of q traditional Spanish type, which has its historical sources, and has inspired many Spanish poet from the Fifteenth century downward. Macias is knight poet and lover; his love is a kind of southern madness which withers every other feeling in its neighborhood, and his tragic death is the only natural ending to career so fierce and uncontrolled. Elvira, with whom Macias is in love. the daughter of Nuno Fernandez IS embodied gentleness and virtue, until the fierce progress of her fate has taught her that men are treacherous and the world cruel. For her love had been pros porous and smooth until by series of events It had been brought into antagoniSm with two opposing interests-those of her father and of a certain Fernan Perez, the tool and favor:te of the powerful Duke of Villena The ambition and selfish passion of these two men are enlisted against her Perez is de- termlned to marry her; her father is deter mined to sweep Macias out of the path of his own political advancement The intrigue devised between the two is perfectly success full Macias is enticed away; Elvira, forced to believe that she is deserted and betrayed, is half driven, half entrapped into a marriage with Perez, and Macias, returning to claim her against a hundred obstacles, meets the wedding party their way back to the palace of the duke
 The rest of the play represented, of course the struggle between the contending forces thus developed, In plan and mechanism tho story was one or a CORRIDOR romantic type neither better nor worse than hundreds of others of which the literary achives of the first half of the present century are full It required all the aid that fine literary treat mcat could give 1t to raise it above the level of vulgar melodrama and turn it into trag- edy. But fortune had been kind to it; the T ian sketch with delicacy and true tragic in- sight, and Edward Wallace had brought all the resources of a very evenly trained and critical mind to bear upon his task It could hardly have been foreseen tlat he would be attracted by the subject, but once ct work upon it he had woraed with enthusiasm
 The curtain drew up on the great hall of the Nlllena palace. Everything that antiquarian knowledge could do had been brought to bear upon the surroundings of the scene; the deli cate tile work of the walls and floor, the leather hangings, the tapestries, the carved wood and brass work of Spanish palace of the Fifteenth century, had been copied with lavish magnl6cence; and the crowded ex- pectant house divided its attention and ap- plause during the first scene between the beauty and elaboration of its setting and the play of the two tolerabie actors who repre- sented Elvira's father and tho rival of Maclas, Fernan Perez.
 Fernan Perez, having set the intrigue on foot which is to wreck the love of Maeias and E-vlra, had just risen from his seat when Wallace, who was watching the stage ill 0 torment of mingled satisfaction and despair, touched Mime. de Chateauvieu1's arm.
 'Now!" he said. That dcor to the left"
 Kendall, catching the signal, rose from his seat behind Mime. de Chateauvieux and bent forward. The great door at the end of the palace had slowly opened, and gliding through it with dropping head and hands clasped before her came Elvira, followed by her little maid Beatriz The storm which greeted her appearance was such as thrilled the pulses of the oldest habitue in the theatre. Tears came to Mime. Chateauvieu1 eyes, and she looked up at her brother
 What a scene! It is overpowering-it is too much for her! wish they would let her go on!"
 Kendall made her no answer, his soul was ill his eyes; he had no senses for any but one person. She was there within a few wards of him, in all the sovereignty of her beauty and her fame, invested with the utmost TO- nance that circumstances could bestow, and about, If half he heard were true. to reap a great artistic no less than great personal triumph. Had he felt toward her only as the Puollc leiC, lt would nave been an experience beyond the common run, and as it was-oh, this aching, intolerabe sense of desire, of sep aration, of irremediable need! Was that her volcea He had heard that tone of despair in 1t before-under over arching woods, wher. the June warmth was in the airl That white, outstretched hand had once lain close clasped in his own; those eyes had once looked with a passionate trouble into his l Ah, 1t was gone forever; nothing would ever recall it-that one quick moment of liv- ing contactl In deeper sense than met the ear, she was on the stage and he among the audience. To the end his gray life would