Plays by Jacinto Benavente - First series/Introduction

Jacinto Benavente was born at Madrid, August 12, 1866. He was the son of Mariano Benavente, a physician and distinguished specialist in the diseases of children, who had come up to the capital from Murcia, that most African and somnolent of European cities, some years before. If Adam should return to this earth, says the Spaniard, Murcia is the spot he would recognize first, for of all places it has changed the least. There is in many of the most fascinating pages of Benavente the sense of this semitropical, parched, unchanging landscape, where, as he himself has put it, civilization has not yet murdered sleep. Along the upper reaches of the River Segura lies many a town, baked into the arid hillsides through centuries of torrid noons, from which never a name has come forth into the currents of European life.

As a young man he entered the University of Madrid and there studied law, without, however, completing the course. But no routine study fixed his attention. In particular, he was avid of intercourse with persons of all sorts and conditions, especially with those whose lives were uncouth and primitive in their surroundings, and who were simple and childlike in nature, where the heart was never very far beneath the surface and the emotions ingenuous and strong. For a while he travelled with a circus; it is even said that he performed in the ring. Clowns fascinated him. All classes of itinerant folk have been his friends ever since. Subsequently he became an actor, appearing in the company of ​María Tubau, where his first part was that of a sportsman, at that period an exotic, incredible, not to say highly ridiculous figure in Spain. He has always been a peregrine, adventurous genius, and of the type nobody ever finds dull. He has travelled extensively and is conversant with the languages and literatures of western Europe and of America, in which he is familiarly at home. No vital subject is alien to him. His field is world-wide, and his sympathies are of cosmopolitan range.

While still at the University he gave evidence of literary predilections. His first volume was his "Poems," published in 1893. This was followed by "Plays of the Imagination," which contains some of the finest specimens of the lighter Spanish prose, and Vilanos, or "Thistledown," preparing the way for his "Figurines" and "The Ladies' Letter Writer," masterpieces in a cameo-like perfection of workmanship and fluent satiric style respectively. These early volumes are at once the model rhetoric and the inspiration of the writers of the younger generation, who have fashioned a new literature and moulded into a finer instrument the stately Castilian tongue.

With the exception of Cervantes and of certain other robust spirits, more or less associated with the vein of the romances of roguery, Spanish literature, since the day of Lope de Vega and the triumph of the romantic theatre, has been prone to generalizations and to broad emotions. It has been essentially a fabric of imagination and eloquence. It was not only brilliant, but splendid, with its heroic sentiment and its purple patches of diction, yet nevertheless compact of convention and conclusions a priori, exemplified in the traditional honor of the dramas of Calderón, the consecrated types of Zorilla, the poisoned rings and unrevealable secrets of the elder Echegaray. But with the coming of the gen​eration of 1898 a great change took place in the spirit of Spanish art. The forces of the New World penetrated the life of the Old. The loss of the colonies awakened the nation to a realization of the fact that it had been walking in a political and literary dream. Its traditions had become anachronisms of which it must rid itself before it could assume a position among the progressive peoples. Spanish letters to-day, in the hands of contemporary writers, such as Martínez Sierra, Pío Baroja, Valle-Inclán, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio and Manuel Machado, Azorín—a company from which the name of Rubén Darío must not be disassociated—is a generalization from experience, not an imitation of books. It is founded upon observation and insists upon detail, which must precede generalization, no matter how plausible. The style becomes supple, delicate, adapted to reflect the facets as well as the general form of the subject. Through the impetus of the new movement, Spanish criticism also took on new life, and cut its way through both the old and new literatures, to which the test of practical reason was relentlessly applied. So sweeping a revolution would not have been possible in any other country in so brief a time, but the intellectual life of Spain is centred at Madrid, and in a small circle at Madrid, the prestige of whose names is unquestioned wherever the Spanish language is spoken. The new era had been delayed longer than elsewhere, but nowhere had the triumph of its principles proved so radical or so absolute.

Although in no sense its promoter, Benavente has been the most stimulating and compelling figure in this latter-day renaissance. By a coincidence, perhaps, his evolution has kept pace strictly with the successive phases of its development. His first play, "Thy Brother's House," El nido ajeno, was acted in 1894, and failed to attract unusual attention. ​It was not an unusual play. On the performance of his second work, Gente conocida, "In Society," at the Teatro de la Comedia, Madrid, in 1896, it was at once recognized that an extraordinary talent had appeared. Here was a comedy which had no affinity with anything hitherto seen south of the Pyrenees, suggesting rather the technique of Lavedan or the Countess Martel than that of native writers, such as the Padre Coloma, whose sensationally popular sketches of Madrid life, Pequeñeces, had been the nearest approximation known until that time in the Spanish capital. The actors viewed the new play with suspicion during the rehearsals, and as time went on, even with utter disgust. At last the author himself lost faith. Yet the result confounded them completely. Its triumph on representation was instantaneous and final.

Gente conocida was followed by a brilliant succession of satirical comedies, dealing with Madrid society or with the fortunes of political adventurers from the capital condemned for a while to service in the provinces. "The Banquet of Wild Beasts" and Lo cursi are among the most typical of these plays, in which metropolitan routine is depicted as systematic preoccupation with everything in life which is not worth while. An even more mordant satire is "The Governor's Wife," apparently respecting nothing, much less virtue—or is it merely the eternal fool? For the greater part, the plays of this period were written for that most spirited of comediennes, Rosario Pino, and the association of these two remarkable talents, romping and slashing and making holiday together through every convention of the dull, the selfish, the idle, the commonplace, remains in the popular mind as the brightest and most dazzling feature of the modern Spanish stage.

At the beginning of 1905 Benavente had been active in the ​theatre for eleven years. He had written over thirty plays. A decade of varied production had brought the Spanish-speaking peoples to feel, as by common consent, that here was an achievement without precedent in the modern annals of one of the great dramas of the world. It might well have been accounted a life-work. A shorter period has almost invariably witnessed the rise and decline of the favorite Parisian playwrights. Yet Benavente did not purpose to decline. Instead, a subtle change takes place in his style, such as had come over that of Cervantes between the first and second parts of Don Quixote. He renews himself. His phrase becomes transparent, at the same time richer and more simple, more suggestive. It pervades the whole work with the effortless clarity of the last manner of Velázquez, which is as if it had never met with an obstacle in the world. Such a style is the synthesis of the experience of a great writer, and comes only to the maturity of a great artist. It has been said that every idea of Benavente's is an idea and a half. We see not only the thought, but its reverse and its ramifications, its genesis, as well as the nature by which it was conceived, against the background of the common mind.

"I do not make my plays for the public," he writes; "I make the public for my plays." This is true not only in the matter of fundamental conception and arrangement, but there is an entire absence of the lesser tricks and artifices of the stage. Indeed, few writers of the first reputation have been such practical men of the theatre. Not only was he an actor in the beginning, but he has recently impersonated Don Juan Tenorio in Zorilla's play of that name, the warhorse of all great Spanish actors. He created the rôle of Pepe in his own Sin querer, "In Perfect Innocence," and only a year ago he appeared at the Teatro Lara and assumed the ​leading part in his latest drama, La ciudad alegre y confiada, preventing thereby the closing of the house when the actor Thuillier was taken ill before one of the earlier performances. Benavente is in no sense a professional actor—far from it; these things have been the diversions of a restless and inquiring mind. He assisted in the formation of the Art Theatre, which was inaugurated by a series of matinées at the Lara, and played in his comedy, "A Long Farewell," at the opening matinée. His "House of Good Fortune" was staged by the Teatre Intim at Barcelona, and in 1911 he associated himself with the actor Porredón in the foundation of a Children's Theatre, after the manner of the Educational Alliance of New York, contributing, among other things, "The Prince Who Learned Everything out of Books," an allegorical fairy-tale of great delicacy. Unfortunately this venture proved short-lived. His greatest successes have uniformly been attained in the established houses, the Comedia, the Lara, the Español, and, of late years, the Princesa, to the distinction of which, under the direction of Maria Guerrero and Fernando Díaz de Mendoza, he has contributed in large measure. Only a master of the theatre could be so independent of its parade; rather he has espoused every reform by which the stage might be broadened or made more sincere. The theatre has been his workshop, not his life, and after each period of productivity he has withdrawn from public view, perhaps to his country home near Toledo, perhaps to travel, to lecture or to write, returning again with a fresh orientation and a keener sense of living values. "Ah!" he exclaims in the second volume of his "Table Talk," "let us have done with all counterfeits, of which the most common in the theatre are these: the confusion of the vapid with the literary, of the dull with the profound, of the extravagant with the new, the banal with ​the poetic, the gross with the courageous and bold. All these equivocations invariably end in one other—an empty house, which is explained by saying that the play failed because it was art and the public was unable to appreciate art. But the true art of the theatre is to do good business, and to do good business you must do good art. Shakespeare and Molière were both managers, and as managers both made a great deal of money."

No dramatist is less theatrical, yet none has written more theatrical plays. Especially during his earlier years, he composed a large number of occasional pieces for the benefits of friends, or otherwise for their accommodation, or to tide friendly stages over emergencies. There are many of these—one-act plays, musical plays, farces in one, two, and three acts. They are the fruit of his lighter moments, and are theatrical not in the usual acceptation which implies a distortion of the theme through resort to artifice, but in the very nature and conduct of their action, which is of the theatre, conceived for the purposes of an evening's entertainment, rather than out of the sphere of actuality and experience. On the other hand, as in compensation, Benavente has taken an unusual interest in the best in foreign drama, and has made some notable translations from the English, Catalan, and French. An adaptation of Molière's "Don Juan," first seen in 1897, was his initial undertaking in this field. His "King Lear," a prose version of the tragedy, is an admirable example of the translator's art, while his graceful, flexible rendering of "The Yellow Jacket," the fascinating Chinese drama of George C. Hazelton and Benrimo, is so successful that it almost cries to be turned back into English as an original work.

Nevertheless, these productions are secondary in the history of his reputation. They have interested him but mo​mentarily or in some very special connection, although they exceed in bulk and importance the accomplishment of the ordinary playwright. The real dramas of Benavente, in which he has expressed himself, recorded his impressions of life without hesitation or reserve, and made a distinctive contribution to the theatre, are far more numerous, as well as of greater richness and variety. "A Lover's Tale," an improvisation upon the theme of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," is held by fastidious judges to be one of the finest examples of modern Spanish prose. It was followed by other works in the same vein, and, after the close of the century, the series of comedies written for Rosario Pino was capped by "Sacrifice" and "The Victor Soul," both of a more sober nature, generally regarded as pessimistic in tendency when contrasted with the lighter works which had preceded them. The two great cycloramic spectacles, "Saturday Night" and "The Fire Dragon," in which the satirical, emotional, and moral elements were intertwined so inextricably that the public was confused and held its judgment for a time in reserve, brought the first decade of activity to an end. Benavente has since tried his hand at almost every genre, and he has been successful in them all—peasant drama and the tragedy of blood, so long associated with Spain in the minds of foreigners, satires of provincial and metropolitan society, of the aristocracy, dramas of the middle class, court comedy in the most subtle and refined of forms, in which by birth and breeding the personages are all royal. He has written romantic comedies and dramas, rococo spectacles, imaginative fairy plays of genuine poetic worth. Only the play in verse has remained unattempted, implying, as it no doubt does, through its diction a certain artificiality in the very processes of thought. In all these different genres he has moved with consummate ease, without the suggestion ​of effort, until the drama of character has seemed the most facile and casual of arts.

The four plays which make up the present volume have been chosen from the later works of the author, in which his style has attained full development. They are as representative, perhaps, as four plays selected for the purpose of introduction to an entirely new circle of readers can be. They will provide some basis for an estimate not only of the more superficial aspects of his genius, but of his conceptions and methods—to an extent of his opinions, as also of the personality which underlies them. It is not difficult for one versed in the theatre to recognize when the voice of the author speaks in his plays.

"His Widow's Husband," performed at the Teatro Príncipe Alfonso in 1908, is a comedy of provincial life, and as such was received with a certain disfavor by the more precious critics of the capital. By the public it was at once accepted as a thoroughly characteristic triumph. Here is a play whose theatrical qualities are obvious, dear to the actor's heart. In structure a farce, it is primarily an adventure in provincial psychology, and condenses into effectiveness the provincial atmosphere—the town itself, its society, its intellectual status. The characters seem to have no mentality; their minds are atrophied and slow. We become conscious of the outward feel of things, of the streets of the city as they appear to the eye; the personages seem to be present before us in the body, through which the retarded action of their thoughts struggles to the surface with effort. It is astonishing that one of the most spirituelle of writers should be capable of conveying such a vivid sense of crass reality. More closely considered, this Protean quality is implicit in his method. Benavente never describes characters; he has no inclination to serve them as tailor, nor ​does he give their ages away. In his plays there is no description either of persons or of locale. He does not set his scenes—the settings are implied, and the effect attained by an acute perception of mental processes which in themselves suggest the environment. Herein lies the secret of his versatility, in the highest art of description, which finds most perfect expression in Señora Ama, wherein the Castilian plains are painted in human terms, their bright, hard lights and vast, treeless distances being projected from the austere poverty of the minds of the aldeanos, or peasants, whose voices seem to break upon the surrounding void and are heard in the great silences of space.

In La Malquerida the process is carried even further from the point of view of drama. The tragedy was written at the close of 1913 as a tribute to María Guerrero, and is the last, as perhaps the most notable, of the series of peasant dramas presented with such distinguished success by the Compañía Guerrero-Mendoza. The detail is of the most meagre. We are shown a small town, apparently ill lighted or not at all. A brook, or arroyo, runs near by. Evidently the country is a rolling one. There are fields, a grove, a mill in the river bottom, a long road with a crucifix beside it, and mountains in the distance—"those mountains"—to which no adjective is ever applied. On the mountains there are brambles, thickets, and rocks. This is all. The drama is an emotional one in which the landscape and action are exteriorized from the realm of character and conscience, and partake of its nature, vague and blurred of outline, seemingly painted in broad but ill-defined strokes, which harmonize with a pervading sense of doubt and uncertainty, bewilderment of conscience and impending doom. The subject is the struggle of the individual conscience against the conscience of the mass, which is embodied in the talk of the town, almost the ​identical theme of José Echegaray's "Great Galeoto," but now developed in the manner of a peasant drama by Guimerá. It is the sort of drama that the Catalan would have written could he have written this sort of drama, in spirit and execution a creation entirely apart from its predecessors. Once before, Benavente had performed a similar sleight-of-hand, and it is difficult to acquit him of a certain malign pleasure in the achievement. "The Eyes of the Dead" is obviously just such a tragedy of mystery as those to the composition of which Echegaray had devoted a lifetime. Having proved to the actors that true drama cannot be written around papers, letters, mysterious rings, or any such momentous hoeus-poeus, and having actually convinced actors of the fact, he now turns about and through a typical transformation writes precisely such a drama, demonstrating that the mysterious letter is a device of the purest water, in no way incompatible with the possession of exacting taste.

Contrasting with a farce which is a comedy and an emotional drama which is a tragedy of character in reverse, "The Evil Doers of Good" is a comedy of manners, according to the classification of the schools. It is obviously a satire of complacency, of those fruits of religion which are not things of the spirit, and as such it was received at its first performance at the Teatro Lara, where it gave glorious offense. The Lara is the home of the sábado blanco, or innocuous matinée. No stage could have been selected where such an offering would have proved more unwelcome. Many ladies prominent in Madrid society and active in organized charity arose and left the house. Yet "The Evil Doers of Good," for all its wit, was in fact directed neither against piety nor organized beneficence. Benavente does not satirize individuals; he puts his finger instead upon inherent inconsistencies which need only to be presented in ​their native contradiction to appear what they are. His is a civilizing rather than a destructive or reforming force. In this comedy, character and environment react upon each other in the domain of the will, and its significance is to be sought in the story of Jesus and Nativity, washed in together from the sea, which is destined again to carry them away. In "The Graveyard of Dreams," the same two lovers, now called Cipriano and Rosina, are driven apart forever by a relentless poverty against which no satire can avail. An apparent contradiction; the solution is different, although the problem is the same. In the domain of experience every problem is a special problem, to be determined by the condition of the individual and his relation to his environment. The suggestion of this conflict is always present in Benavente, in terms of feeling and the heart. It prevents his most acrid satire from becoming artificial. As his plays unfold, slowly, imperceptibly it wells up in them—where, we can scarcely say, nor how—until at last we find ourselves afloat upon the drama of human experience, of which the author seems not until then to have been conscious, and whose development he has had no part in determining. The effect of some of the plays is optimistic, of others pessimistic, according to the degree in which the conditions of life they present are susceptible of domination or are immutably cruel.

In "The Bonds of Interest," presented at the same theatre two years later, this satire is directed against the duality of human nature itself. The comedy is so deft and facile that it is easy to pass its significance by. Every man has within him two irreconcilable selves, the good and the bad, the generous, the sordid and base. We are not now a Jekyll and now a Hyde, as in Stevenson's story, but the good is inextricably mixed with the bad, which serves or dominates ​it as the case may be. No man is so disinterested that he is insensible to the practical implications of his conduct. And with the worst there always goes some little of the best, so that no one may be said truly to know himself, nor what he is. In the play, Leander typifies the untutored best in man, which is good intention. He is unsullied by a life of hardship and defeat, of flight from a heartless justice, of cheats and deceptions and lies. Crispin is the slave, the servant—a rôle which he assumes voluntarily. All service that is worthy of the name is in some measure disinterested. Those who do the work of life must face the facts of life. If Crispin does this, if he does not lie to himself, however much he may lie to others, he will learn through observation and be taught by his own labor. In the end he changes places with Leander, the man of good intentions, who drifts upon the fortunes of others, for out of experience springs the knowledge of the true values of life, which is redeemed only by disinterested love, which is always service and sacrifice. With this the farce ends.

Spanish criticism has hesitated to define the personality of Benavente or to attempt any final generalization of his work. A product of eighty plays in little more than twenty years might well give the critic pause. But at a distance of three thousand miles, with the perspective of another literature, another stage, it ought not to be difficult to form some conception of this output in its totality as well as of its significance and tendencies.

From the days of the Goncourts and Henri Becque in France, the modern movement has been one of cults, of the ardors of the pioneer. It is the story of the rise of the free theatres, of new techniques passionately espoused, of reform. Yet to this writer art was a career, not a campaign. Strange ​to say, in a land of warm, soft, southern sun, he has been infected to a less degree than any of his predecessors with a desire to hurry his work upon the stage. His temper, perhaps, is more akin to D'Annunzio's than to that of any other writer of equal rank, although it is devoid of that absorption in the picturesque for its own sake, in himself, in the colorful romance of the past as a pageant, which is so conspicuous in the Italian. Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, the critic, has considered the development of his theatre from the literary point of view with authority, but the most penetrating and satisfying analysis of his personality has been made by Gregorio Martínez Sierra, himself a dramatist and scholar of cosmopolitan attainments, intimately associated with him professionally and as a man of letters throughout a period of many years. The portrait which he has drawn is both striking and definitive.

"Benavente does not compose," says Martínez Sierra, "he creates. The impelling force in his work comes wholly from within, and proceeds from the inside out, as a seed germinates, or perhaps more properly, as a crystal takes form. Naturally, good seed which has fallen on good ground produces good fruit, harmonious in development, luxuriant in bloom. There are in consequence, upon occasion, amazing achievements of technique in the total output of this great artist, but I will take my oath that, while writing, he has never for a single second concerned himself with these, nor sought to contrive an effect for a curtain, nor a situation in the course of an act. Is it urged, then, that he has chanced upon many? Beyond all question. As it is written: 'But seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.'

"I should say that the varied qualities which, when fused, constitute his genius, are susceptible of almost any adapta​tion. What are they? First of all, astounding clearness of mind. Few persons understand so quickly or so well as Jacinto Benavente. It might be said that he jumps from the first point to the conclusion without any intermediate process. To talk with him is the greatest possible rest to the mind. He needs no proof. He comprehends at a glance, without the necessity of waiting for the completed word to reach his ear. He sees ideas coming, and it is the same with events; he sees persons as well. This is why nothing astonishes him. If sometimes the course of events has been such as to give him pain, as must befall all of us who make this journey through life, I am confident that at least he has never been surprised. Hence his readiness at repartee, his irony; hence what has been called his 'detachment,' the oscillations of the moral sense backward and forward through his works. He understands everything, and while possibly he does not excuse it, he concedes it by virtue of the mere fact that it exists, a right to existence. Of what use to deny, since what is must be?"

Chronologically and spiritually, Benavente is the last of the moderns. Born a few years later than the writers whose names have hitherto been most illustrious in the modern theatre, he has been familiar with them all. He has had the advantage of a perspective which has permitted him to profit by their labors. When he began to write naturalism had already had its day and done its work; thenceforth its results might safely be assumed. It was no longer necessary to set them down in unending pages of detail. The theatric situation, which Ibsen had undertaken to rationalize, had already come into disfavor. Time was ripe for a new synthesis, for an inquiry into the inherent nature and necessity of those expedients which had, time out of mind, been accepted as mandatory upon the stage, whereby the writing ​of dramas had come to be regarded as a business of purveying carefully elaborated shocks and surprises to auditors who had been prepared for their reception. But of course drama is nothing like this. It is not constrained to leap from situation to situation; nor will it suffice to rationalize the theatric; it must be gotten rid of altogether. In its very conception it is a blight. If a play does not express itself in terms of interest, then it is imperfectly conceived, or uninteresting dramatically. It is useless to call in the stage doctor or to attempt to stimulate vitality by a resort to stage patent medicines. Similarly by their nature partisanship and propaganda are alien to so knowing and catholic a mind. Benavente is the most sophisticated of writers, and his characters and conceptions are introduced so unobtrusively into the minds of his readers that they seem always to have existed in them, and are welcomed as old friends. To understand, it is necessary first to feel—we must sympathize—and it is this feeling which, when rationalized, is productive of great art. He has expounded his theory in one of his prefaces. Great art must not only be original, it must be tolerant and sincere—qualities postulated in its breadth of view. "The function of the artist is to tranquillize emotion through the intelligence, and it is only in so far as he is able to do this that his work becomes good art; his aim is to bring serenity, not to create a tempest in the mind.… Every artist in communicating emotion, is under obligation to set down not what he imagines may move us, but what has in fact moved him. The true artist will fly from literary convention as infallibly as the true lover from the 'Lovers' Letter Writer,' which lies ready to his aid. Good actors know that the right gesture suggests the appropriate feeling. We begin by imitating the letter and end by imitating the spirit. In art, as in love, woe to him who reminds us of another, instead of inducing us to forget!"

​As early as the production of Gente conocida a positive element had made itself apparent in his comedy, amusingly characterized by him in a statement given to the press on the morning after the first performance. "If there is any moral idea underlying the play, it is this: that the aristocracy of brains, of politics, of skill, if it may be so called, laughs at and makes sport of the aristocracy of birth and wealth; but it is helpless in the presence of the aristocracy of the will, the unaided woman who is determined, whose conscience is active amid a society in which all other consciences are asleep.… I must confess, however, that I had no intention of conveying any such meaning. In fact, until this moment I had not the slightest idea that such a significance could be attached to my work." This interpretative element continually becomes more and more evident. A satire primarily psychological must in the end lead to some sort of generalization. The moral factor is explicit in such comedies as "The Evil Doers of Good" and "Autumnal Roses," and in the more recent serious plays, "The Graveyard of Dreams" and "His Proper Self," it assumes a dominant place. However, these are in no sense problem plays, nor may they be considered as expositions of themes. Always and in whatever form the drama of Benavente is a drama of character, never of character in its superficial aspects, its eccentricities, but in the human motives which underlie and determine its individual manifestations, without which it would be otherwise or cease to be. This is the source both of his unity and his complexity, which partake of the multifariousness of the modern world.

Benavente is not only an artist, he is much more; he is a master of life, of those human crises which arise amid the preoccupations of a complex society, when poverty, passion, or some other elemental force breaks for the moment through the dead tangle of convention. His drama is social, not ​anti-social. It is not a glorification of heroes and villains and supermen, impatient to enforce their desires, nor is it concerned with revolt or reform, except in a purely secondary sense. The attitude of personal protest is in reality not modern, but reactionary—somewhat naïve—an echo of the old fanaticism. Of course, there is much in society that is susceptible of immediate reformation. Courage and resolution can work wonders. But there is much more in the world as it exists about us which is fixed, at least within the span of man's days, which we must first recognize, then submit to or ignore. The subject of Jacinto Benavente is the struggle of love against poverty, of obligation against desire, of imputed virtue against the consciousness of sin. His point of attack is where, the individual and the social problem join. Upon these frontiers of the social life—which are also frontiers of the moral life—he is completely at home, in those fateful moments when society touches the individual to the quick, and he ceases to be his conventional self, and becomes for a brief space a free agent to make the decision which sets in motion again the wheels of the social organism which is to crush him, or to carry him along. In its structure and apparatus, society is the study of the sociologist rather than the preoccupation of the artist, yet it is always present in his drama as a background, as a silent partner, perhaps, or as a relentless opposing force. These are par excellence social dramas, in a word, of man in society, yet whose action is conceived never for its effect upon society, but always in its meaning and implication in the life of man.

By a curious yet not arbitrary contradiction, in his court comedies he has expressed himself most unmistakably. No one has excelled him in the depiction of the elegance and sophistication of what is still known as royalty, its perfect breeding in the sphere to which it extends, the shadowy ​unreality and irony of it all, daily becoming more manifest, while underneath there often lies an artless, childlike heart, masked by generations of veneer. The artificiality of the surroundings contrasts vividly with the simple directness and humanity of the theme, and throws his qualities into the highest relief. Only an aristocrat, says Benavente, can be a democrat. Such a luxury is not for the poor.

In the beautiful comedy, "The School of Princesses," Prince Albert sums up his point of view. "My philosophy is very simple—to accept my position in life with all its obligations, to realize that only by fulfilling them completely, that is, of my own free will, can I be happy; that in this way, and this way only, can we, in our unreal station, become the equals of other men who have not been born princes. You must not think that this has cost me no trouble. The government of oneself is a most difficult matter, but when once it is achieved, what splendid liberty! The day that each of us becomes a tyrant over himself, that day all men will become free, without revolutions and without laws."