Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/16

 and the subjective, between the conscious and the unconscious and unexplored. This is both its history and its explanation. It is all embracing and comprehensive for the reason that it is based upon a recognition of the irreducible dualism of life, and unfolds through a triple series of dualities—a double characterization, a double ideation, and a double plot or action, which are its distinguishing characteristics. The utter absence of sensational or disproportionately salient features renders it imperative that such dramas should be approached with a clear appreciation of their fundamentally subjective quality in order that the absolute unity of their conception and purpose may not escape the reader's mind in his attention to the trivial and the accidental.

The first article in Benavente's dramatic creed is the maintenance of the integrity of the objective world, an apparent respect for fact in itself. An external story is not only present in his plays, but, except in fantasy, it appears as self-sustaining and self-sufficient, provided with adequate motivation, constituting by every rule of the familiar theatre, a complete play. When the nature of the theme will permit, the story is decked out with all the apparatus and parade of mere external drama, upon which a dialogue has been imposed so sparkling and vivacious, so fertile in poetic and philosophic suggestion, that it challenges comparison because of its superficial virtues alone with the masterpieces of the objective stage. Although the logic of fact may be purely illusory, nevertheless it is the truth by which men live, coloring and conventionalizing the daily routine. Truth which is apparent to the senses, cannot habitually be questioned directly by the playwright. Benavente differs, therefore, from other dramatists of the unconscious primarily in the absolute inviolability of his external plot. The foreground, boldly and carefully elaborated, serves as a screen behind which the subjective drama is developed, but to accept the outward story at its face value, failing sedulously to perceive that it is but one of the pivots upon which the action turns, is an error so inviting that, in season and out, it has proved the undoing of a majority of the students of the Benaventian theatre.