Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/28

 of Benavente. A previous run of two years in the United States, together with anterior productions in London, Berlin, and Moscow, have no weight with this authority. Well-informed criticism, careful, catholic, and judicious, has always been peculiarly sympathetic, and conducive to the growth of the rarer, more delicate forms of art.

Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín's discussion of Benavente's æsthetics, contributed to the first volume of the Ateneo in 1906, is superior in scholarship, continuing the authoritative tradition established by the late Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. Of necessity, however, because of its date, Bonilla's study is confined almost exclusively to the pre-dramatic period. Gregorio Martínez Sierra, an expert judge of the theatre, has written with equally keen perception of personal and dramatic values. His touch is not always sure in the treatment of individual plays. Similarly sensitive and informing, the confessedly random appreciations by the poet Manuel Machado, collected in his Año de teatro, exhibit perhaps a more complete realization of the implications of the new movement, whether psychologic or dramatic, than can be found elsewhere among his countrymen. They afford a welcome antidote to the crass, irremediable realism which forms the staple of every-day Spanish criticism.

Crossing the Pyrenees, the channel and the ocean, but little of importance concerning Benavente has as yet been made accessible in English. In general, English and American writers who are not habitual Spanish scholars, are far too dependent when they travel upon the particular native groups from whom their information is derived, to be in a position to acquire true perspective. Newspapers and literary reviews published in the English language almost without exception reveal themselves as lamentably deficient and ignorant. Articles which assiduous search disinters from the files of magazines may uniformly be set down as perfunctory. John Dos Passos, in a friendly paper devoted to Benavente, included in "Rosinante to the Road Again," slips by the subject entirely, and would have been out of date in large measure at the close of the last century. Forewords to the school and college texts of the plays which have been pre-