Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/25

 stigmata of orthodox realism. With sober, unobtrusive detail, it mirrors faithfully the emptiness and hardship of middle-class life in modern Madrid. Psychologically true and photographic of fact, there is no compromise with adventitious relief. Don Hilario, the kindly family physician, affords a portrait of the author's own father. It is difficult to understand, from the vantage-point of a distant, more bountiful environment, the pressure of poverty in a country such as Spain, the absolute, hopeless destitution which there prevails, superseding both the social and the moral law with the primitive dictates of the struggle for existence. These ferocities admit of no exaggeration. "In the Clouds" offers a picture of poverty, poverty of means, poverty of surroundings, poverty of mind, poverty of will, which, materially and mentally, are but the husk of the intellectual and spiritual decay of the life that is about to pass. The play is at once realistic and idealistic, conceived below the plane of distinction of the schools, where the spirit and its manifestations are one. The differing address with which the simple folk confront the relentless barrenness of their existence as it looms above the action with menacing, crushing power, the interplay of the divergent forces in which the threat of poverty is exteriorized, to be gathered summarily and finally in the marriage problem, which provokes the crisis, at the same time providing the comic motive when developed in reverse, betrays admirably the hand of the master. Quintessentially Benaventian is the scene depicting the three young men, married, in fact just married, and just about to be married, chancing upon the curiously happy idea of calling to condole with the young man whose marriage has been deferred. Even dulness, when significant, may prove entertaining, while banality presents facets of wit, and is pregnant with comedy of the highest order. The neorealistic theatre assuredly yields no more salutary model for the student. In conjunction with that singular drama of peasant life, "Señora Ama," whose protagonist is the environment, "In the Clouds" must take rank among the major contributions of Spain to the newer art.

The brief colloquy, "The Truth," an exposition of an idea