Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/15



If Lope de Vega, the Monster and Phœnix of Genius, is the most prolific of writers for the theatre, Jacinto Benavente may be accounted the most various and most baffling. A brilliant sophistication conceals and disguises the depth of his human feeling, mellowed by an experience which is at once highly idealized and of almost pedestrian common sense, presenting to the casual reader an enigma quite impossible of solution. The drama of the unconscious mind is, however, essentially a drama of contradictions. To have developed this subtle and most subjective of psychologic dramas among a people as crassly unmetaphysical as the Spaniards, who, through their picaresque tradition, have been parents of modern realism, is a stroke of subconscious humor as apposite as unexpected.

It has been said that the new theatre is constant only in its inconstancy. It has been pictured as unstable. Protean, presenting through its diversity the aspects of the work of several distinct individuals. Undoubtedly the consensus of critical opinion must be accepted as just, certainly in the superficial sphere, yet variety can never be inexhaustible. If criticism is to stop here, already its function has been abdicated. Art derives its richness from principles, from whose vigor its life is renewed. The richer, the more vital it is, the deeper its roots must be caught. Benavente's theatre, is not a theatre of change, it is a theatre of equivocation, of underlying realities as opposed to a world of appearances. His plays are so suggestive, so validly disparate because they are more profoundly conceived than other plays, more intimately born of the spirit. His drama is double in focus, moving upon double planes, poised between the objective vii