Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/30

 retained in its bosom in the hope of coming springs, the potentialities of a Ramón Lull."

Dramatically, Benavente's career falls into three divisions, approximately of equal duration. The first, from his début as a dramatist to the production of "Saturday Night," was a period of experiment, interesting chiefly for its brilliancy and the spell which it cast over his contemporaries. When Benavente produced at the Español, Madrid dined an hour earlier. The same tendencies are evident that appear in his non-dramatic prose, guiding the policies of La vida literaria, the periodical established by him in order to promote the radical ideas of the rising generation. "A Lover's Tale" and "Love of Loving" bring to the theatre the interests of the editor, testifying to a ready sympathy with new and foreign influences, while the more serious, if lesser, plays of the epoch reveal æsthetic and marked ethical preoccupations. Most popular, beyond question, were the satiric pieces, facile, graceful, with a suspicion of personal animus always lurking between the lines. Benavente's art, from the beginning, has been so nicely, so humanly centred that few of his characters have escaped identification with persons prominent in the social or political life of Madrid. Conspicuous among the earlier comedies, "The Banquet of Wild Beasts," Lo cursí, and "The Governor's Wife," reveal unmistakably, although in embryo, all the promise and essential properties of what was later to become the new theatre. It is easy to see in retrospect that too much emphasis has been placed upon the social and too little upon the human bias of these sparkling comedies, which, with the lapse of time, appear unambiguous and clear. An indifference to the mechanics of living—a corollary, indeed, of all thorough idealism—is fundamental even from the beginning. Society and the individual are pictured in apposition. Neither fashion nor custom is a spiritual force, but inasmuch as society has become bankrupt in ministering to the individual, the individual finds himself confronted with the choice of making his escape from society, or of asserting his independence through unremitting struggle, or else of accepting the alternative of surrender and spiritual