Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/14

 realize upon the stage the inarticulate as well as the articulate elements of intellect and of character.

For all its seeming simplicity, his style is one of the most complex and highly personal in literature. Primarily, it is suggestive. With the thought, he contrives to convey the implication. The direct meaning is not of chief concern, but its connotations in the mind which harbors it. It is a style built upon contrast, seizing upon the inconsistencies in which human nature is most intimately revealed. Given one point, the spectator is led to infer another, so that, without visible means, or the appearance of doing so, the playwright turns his characters inside out, till we view them with him from all sides at once, while at the same time we see through them. He shows us not only what his people think, but how they feel when they think it, their doubts and accompanying reservations. His theatre has been called a theatre of ideas, and it is a theatre of ideas in so far as ideas are an expression of intense intellectual activity. But Benavente is not concerned with ideas, he is concerned with thought as it formulates itself—with ideas in the making. Thus his comedy stimulates the mind to an extraordinary degree, in which it is possible for him to communicate to an audience what under more usual circumstances it would fail to perceive. This is what he means when he says that he does not make his plays for the public, but the public for his plays. He creates the mental attitude which is necessary for their appreciation, and, by a subtle psychologic or character dialectic, through which personality is revealed by sharp reversals and successive mental jolts, disclosing the innermost workings of the soul and its springs of action, he induces the auditor to become for an evening a collaborator himself, reading between the lines. His style may best be compared to a rational cubist art, in which the elements are all valid and intelligible in themselves, but which surrender their true significance only when taken in juxtaposition.

With Benavente, the story is never of predominant importance, nor in the beginning was his treatment of it unusual, or markedly individual. His plots unfolded symmetrically and were sufficient to sustain the interest through the customary sequence of situations and climaxes. Yet as his dialogue matured in fertility of suggestion, obviously a