Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/16

 this action is entirely psychological and subjective. In life as upon the stage, says Princess Bebé, the real entertainment goes on behind the scenes. "The Bonds of Interest" provides a typical example of this new dramaturgy. Rather than the outward history of the characters, the story becomes the window through which they may be seen, as they react upon each other, and so interpret themselves. The old values are present, but they are changed. The danger which besets the reader of Benavente is not that he will fail to appreciate him, but that he will fail to appreciate him at his proper worth. His drama is a drama of character, not because it is occupied with character, but because it takes place within it, and the conflict is joined in the play and interplay of thought and emotion, of volition and inhibition, of impulse and desire, as they are colored and predetermined by tradition, by heredity, by convention, by education, and all the confused network of motive and prejudice of which conscious assertion of personality is but a part. This is the struggle of modern life, which takes place in the individual consciousness, as it accommodates itself to the complex of society and of fixed environment, the denouement of which is already foreshadowed in the mind before it is projected, imperfectly and fragmentarily, into the region of deeds and of fact.

Drama so subtle that it hovers continually among the shadows of the subliminal self, might appear to be far divorced from the stage. Yet, in reality, Benavente is one of the most theatric of writers. It must not be forgotten that he was an actor, and that as an actor he began at the bottom. The tricks of the pantomimist, the directness of the low comedian and the clown, lie at the foundation of his dramatic training. The clown's art is very simple; it is dependent upon the immediateness of the audience's response. In the popular theatres and beside the circus ring, Benavente learned that any effect may be achieved in the theatre which is capable of immediate perception—it makes no matter how subtle, how elusive the idea, so long as it is perceived. All of his effects, if they are perceived at all, are perceived easily. "The most agreeable, as well as the most artistic, expression of force is lightness." He has been enabled to ignore the common precepts of craftsmanship because of his intimate knowledge of the small change, the minor symbols of the