Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/15

 purely objective plot, a chain of circumstance and outward fact, with laws of its own, became an unsuitable vehicle for its transmission. The tendency of Benavente's art is away from the plastic toward the insubstantial, the transparent. A fresh adjustment became imperative. What he had accomplished with satire he next essays with plot, turning his attention to its secondary and suggestive values, transferring the emphasis from the events to the inferences which wait upon them, and the atmosphere which they create, either directly or through collocation. In the field of exposition, the method may be observed in the first act of "The Governor's Wife." A similar extension of plot had been attempted by the symbolists, through the imposition of parallel meanings upon the action. With Benavente, on the other hand, the events induce their own meaning, while, in order to permit them to do this, he deprives the story of definite form. In the polychromatic spectacles, "Saturday Night" and "The Fire Dragon," belonging to the years 1903 and 1904, vast, crowded canvases which might have been painted by Tintoretto or by Rubens, teeming with an abundance too multifarious to be imprisoned within the limits of the stage, the drama is removed from the domain of structural regularity, until it depends for its effect upon the impressions derived from a panorama of incident and of situation in which the story is swallowed up and upon occasion lost from view. These dramas may be considered the romantic outburst, the ungovernable adventure of the Benaventian theatre, by very lack of restraint stimulating the imagination to a perception, at once restless and inchoate, of the awe and majesty of life.

Variety so kaleidoscopic precludes, of course, unity of impression. At best, fact is inexpressive, and Benavente seems to have felt that, independently developed, whatever its transcendence, it was susceptible only of the broadest effects. Besides, instead of reinforcing his character satire, the sweep and apparatus of these great spectacles dissipated and bewildered it. He does not return to the manner again. Instead, he subordinates the story; it ceases to be the prime factor in the dramatic fabric, or, in any proper sense of the word, the action. Henceforward the story becomes subservient wholly to the main action, which thus is unified, and