Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/18

 tion, a complete system of positive and negative values, of antisymbols and antititles, of antiheroes and antiheroines, and of anti-ideals. Love appears to Princess Bebé as a deluded, hollow infatuation, masked behind a horrible and repulsive scar. Our Lady of Sorrows, in the play of that name, awakes to find herself beatified at last through the not wholly disinterested worship of a false, contemptible ideal. Crispin, too, of "The Bonds of Interest," notoriously an antihero, upon analysis is disclosed to be far less unheroic than he seems. Even the title of the comedy is an inversion, as was recognized at the time of its translation into Dutch as "Die fijne draad"—"The Fine (or Invisible) Thread"—in reference to the invisible thread of love which runs through the story, providing the positive element of the play. The antititle, indeed, is a favorite device of Benavente's—frequently the board from which the action springs. Equivocations of the sort are never even remotely accidental, but have their genesis in the rooted antipathy of his theatre to complete statement, with its inevitable suggestion of finality. It is not a question of theme, but of conception and approach, and Benavente's attitude has been well indicated by a Spanish critic in the assertion that he is always to be found at the point of the scales. But an art which refuses to identify itself with half truths, living instead in the emotions and the intelligence, is a sealed book to the unimaginative, literal mind. Other authors have suffered from opposition and prejudice, but the enemy to the comprehension of Benavente has always been sheer stupidity. Thought and emotion must meet with response in emotion and thought. Only one all-embracing contradiction has failed to attract his interest, and that has been cerebral drama without cerebration. The antitechnique is a discipline which obliges people to think—a species of legerdemain entirely congenial to his temperament and the very touchstone of his genius.

The extension of the antitechnique from the plane of character and idea to that of the dramatic action itself, completes the scheme of the Benaventian dramaturgy. It involves of necessity the creation of a secondary or antithetic inner action, which, while not obtruding upon the course of