Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/31

 defeat. Yet though society is defective, human nature is weak, and the tragedies of character in the last analysis are tragedies of the will.

Although Benavente's theory of art, as well as his philosophy of life, were fully developed in 1892, when he first began to write, and have undergone since no radical change, yet it is not until the maturing of his subjective manner that we encounter the master of the theatre, of the heart and human motive at his full stature. Technique and conception have now become distinctive and original. The monumental achievement of this, his second,second [sic] period must be adjudged the cycle of five play's, incomparably rich in texture, iridescent in mood, whose subject is the great adventure of life, the faring-forth of the spirit to the conquest of what life holds, and the realization of its ideal. Benavente has here unfolded a "Pilgrim's Progress" of a secular, restless age. The prologue to the series, "Princess Bebé," is a comedy of questioning, of overtones. Youth looks out upon life, dissatisfied with the shams and substitutes which have imposed upon its innocence, and eagerly and earnestly puts the great interrogation, which is to be answered in the succeeding plays. In "Saturday Night" the solution is discovered through ambition, in "Stronger than Love" through duty, accepted at first as a convenience, but entailing inevitably renunciation and surrender. The fourth play, "The Bonds of Interest," depicts in turn the birth of the spirit directly through the transforming power of love, while the cycle concludes with a cameo-like epilogue, the beautiful comedy "The School of Princesses," presenting the discipline of sacrifice, which is conceived as the crown of experience and the unleashing of the spirit, and hence provides not only the subject of the epilogue but the climax and supreme moment of each of the preceding plays. An open and inquiring mind, an ambitious and resolute will, patient of duty, transformed by love, chastened by sacrifice—such is the genesis of the spirit and the measure of man. High feeling, glamourous expression, insight and sympathy, touched by a haunting suggestion of the ever-present awe and majesty of life, together place these dramas at the front of the modern