Page:The great Galeoto; Folly or saintliness; two plays done from the verse of José Echegaray into English prose by Hannah Lynch (IA greatgaleotofoll00echerich).djvu/15

 The very titles of these plays have a fine melodramatic ring—The Avenger's Bride, On the Sword's Point, In the Bosom of Death, and Death upon the Lips, etc. In Spanish the titles are beautiful and inspiring enough to justify choice. En el Seno de la Muerte is a particularly impressive play, which rings imagination back into the thirteenth century almost upon a thrill with its strong Hugoesque tinge of romance. There is no fluted fervour of lovers, no thrum of lute or impassioned sequidilla to enliven the roll of solemn wedded passion and betrayal. Remorse and stern hidalgic resentment stalk the stage grandiloquently to the blare of trumpets, royal entrances and exits, and the hum of the Roussillon wars. We have the inevitable struggle between love and duty, the inevitable sombre judgment and full-dress sentiments of virtue. Echegaray has apparently no understanding of vice except as subject for castigation. The bastard Manfred, beloved of his legitimate brother and seignor, loves his sister-in-law Beatrix. Don Jaime, the injured husband, has all the noble and melancholy charm of a Velasquez portrait, the model upon which the dramatist would seem to have drawn his unvarying study of the Middle Ages Don. They all carry their black velvet and plumes with the same high air, seem equally unacquainted with smiles and the lighter emotions, and breathe the same unapproachable perfection in domestic life. For each one the wife is sovereign lady, and if they betray anger, it is the anger of heroes who never forget that they are hidalgoes, and who are incapable of falling, upon any provocation, into triviality or pleasantry of speech. Small blame to the xi