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/38

 It is a relief to turn from this ghastly tragedy to the brighter movement of El Gran Galeoto. My printed copy of this play shows it to have run to the twentieth edition, which, for an unreading land like Spain, is an enormous sale. Bright is perhaps a misleading term, for the whole is tinged with the profound melancholy that strikes us in the Spanish gaze, in its character and in the tristful note of its popular songs and dances. The English are supposed to take their pleasures sadly. The saying were more appropriate to the rather dreary race beyond the Pyrenees. Whatever may be their preoccupation (generally speaking it is dulness or an empty mind they are afflicted with rather than sadness) they give the foreigner the impression of being the wholesale victims of a shattered organ which we have the habit of associating with the affections.

In these two dramas—Don Juan's Son and The Great Galeoto—enough will be understood of the passion of gravity with which the Spanish dramatist enters into the obscurer and less picturesque tragedies of life. Love with him is not the sentimental sighing of maids and boys, as he again shows in Lo Sublime en lo Vulgar, but the great perplexed question of married infelicity and misunderstanding. Don Julian dies broken-hearted and wilfully deceived, and his deception it is that forges the tempered happiness of his rival. In Lo Sublime en lo Vulgar we have two diverse husbands: Richard, an airy social success, full of elegant phrases, befittingly tailored, and of manners the best—the sort of man destined to float to the surface in all circumstances, and minuet with xxxiv