Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/20

 of composition. One is a drama of youth and the other of middle-age; in one the subject is the venturing forth of the spirit, in the other its return home again, when the disillusionments of the wander-years find their compensation in the family and beside the hearth. It is an error, however, to pronounce "Autumnal Roses" to be a glorification of bourgeois morality, or an apology for marriage when liberally construed; to read the comedy in such a light is to misconstrue and to miss its meaning. The story of Isabel and Gonzalo is laid in the home, because it is in the home that the revelation of character is most intimate and most personal, and there it is that the pleasures and sorrows of life are most quickly and most keenly felt. Yet even the home has its conventions, its prescribed manners and modes of living, in which, too, according to Benavente, the heart does not reside—much less does it in any ideal perfection. Life matures in the affections, where alone its fruits are cherished, in those attachments in which the years at last yield up their reward, after persistent struggle and patient endurance, after trials and imperfections and misunderstandings, slowly ripening into esteem, and the respect which is of long growth, made but the gentler by much forgiving, and coming to all of us in due season, in one form or another, who have borne ourselves well in the journey through life.

The theatre of Benavente is dynamic, because it deals with thought in the process of crystallization. Hence the secret of its power. It anticipates appearances, and makes short work of artificialities. Although all classes of men and women are reproduced in his work, there are no types. Through all his scenes, one will search in vain for one hero, and one will search in vain for one villain. The machinery of life plays small part in his analyses, which delve beneath occupation. The human terms of problems engage him, the postulates which inhere in their solution, the working out of these in feeling and ways of thought, and in acts afterward of human and irremediable import. He is free from nostrums and posed problems; he neither courts nor wins the unimaginative, the dull mind, nor is his drama more portentous than life, but from page to page and scene to scene it lives with a strange, vivifying power, which infuses even the slightest