Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/21

 by no other writer since the Greeks has it been dignified as a separate major factor of the dramatic structure. When emotion is treated in bulk and in the mass, upon compelling scale, it becomes perceptible as a dramatic entity, and achieves a power that is distinctive. Instead of following and waiting upon the dialogue, it imparts to it significance and strength, together with that peculiar appositeness which removes conversation from the realm of platitude and the abstract, to the province of art. Read for the plot, plays of this description are mere spectacular melodrama; read for the dialogue, mere literature, incomprehensible and strange, but apprehended in their own sphere, in the shifting planes through which they move, they are an experience at once refreshing and invigorating, as novel as it is deceptive.

In order to centre the attention upon the subjective action, Benavente dispenses with description of persons and scenes, suppressing details of appearance, time, and place, the presence of which might create false emphasis, and so prove both distracting and misleading. To follow the inner action as it is induced in the several types of play, in greater or less degree manifesting its ascendancy, is an adventure of illuminating possibilities. Sometimes the inner plot will be found so tenuous that it is little more than an idea of which the outward story is the exposition. This is true, for the most part, in strictly cerebral drama. Sometimes it remains back of the story, paralleling and reinforcing it with the sanction of an added symbolic quality, appearing independently in the action only upon occasion, at moments of exceptional transcendence. When the parallelism is close, the natural generalizing propensity of the mind will prove sufficient to effect the transition from the outer to the inner scheme. At other times, the inner plot detaches itself from the outward story, to mature in its own plane, where it arrogates to itself the life of the whole. The transition here takes place through a series of false leads, by means of which the outer plot falls away, usually at the end of the first act, while the situations become aborted or evaporate, and pale into the background of the unwritten theme. The attention is withdrawn insensibly from the objective plot and turned