Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/17

 It has previously been remarked that Benavente takes his departure from conventional drama through employment of the double entente. A favorite device for the insinuation of allusions of doubtful taste becomes in his hands a statement and a reservation, what seems and what is, the obverse and reverse of character in a phrase or a word. The apparent character is thus discredited, and in its place a personality suggested compounded of reserves, which lie behind. As a consequence, the dialogue takes on the quality of conversation as it is actually heard, becoming a fabric of half-statements and approximations, to be co-ordinated by the spectator, yet possessing no inherent credibility of itself. The intention provides the motive power, but by no means necessarily the substance of speech. Character, obviously, can no longer properly be given by definition, but is metamorphosed into a process of induction, and in this way remains subjective. Instead of lending itself to statement, personality invites inference as being rather a matter of direction and tendency, to be caught on the wing as it hovers between the apparent and the real. Like the arbitrary moral standards of the past century, its sharpness of outline has been obliterated, and it has become dissipated and diffused among the uncertainties of the emotions and the will.

The dualism which is inescapable in human nature, and so conspicuously evident in the realm of feeling, has its counterpart, however, intellectually, in a dualism which underlies the world of ideas. Truth itself is merely relative. The psychologic theatre cannot avoid taking this most fundamental of antimonies into account, if it is to penetrate to the heart and reproduce the modalities of life. To conceive is to distinguish, to set apart from something else. An art which is dynamic can have no place for fixed ideas. Ideas are themselves positive and negative, varying in content and connotation with different peoples and times. They are instruments of knowledge, not matters of conviction. Here is potential contrast lying ready to the dramatist's hand. The proper presentation of the basic duality of thought offers, however, extraordinary difficulties to the artist. It is effected by Benavente through an antitechnique of opposi-