Hannah Lynch

“ But if Echegaray is less original, he is creditably more sane. The lack of depth carries with it a corresponding absence of crudeness and of an artlessness often so bewildering as to leave us imperfectly capable of distinguishing the extreme fineness of the line between genius and insanity. The lucid air of the south clarifies thought, and produces nothing less sober than Latin bombast and the high-phrased moods of the Don.
What is more to be deplored in Echegaray's plays is the absence of French art. An artist in the polished, complete sense he cannot be described. ”

“ When his friends are not discussing the symptoms of Lázaro's strange malady, he himself is enumerating them in merciless monologues. He talks of his greatness, of his fame, of the popularity of his works, and then falls into childish drivel and longs for playthings. 'His head is not firm,' says Don Nemesis to Carmen's father, in dubiety before the prospect of the marriage; 'that is why he is so stupendous at times, and all the world calls him a genius. Put no trust in geniuses, Timotheus. A genius may walk down one street, and hear the people cry, "The genius!" ”

“ I—It is a lie!' Lázaro burst out, in frantic horror. When the poor mother enters the scene and brings her maternal note of despair to the son's distracted terror, we feel that the modern drama has reached a pitch of tragedy unapprehended in healthier and more barbaric ages. 'Lose one's brains as one might lose a hat!' exclaims Don Juan when enlightened. 'Bah! idiots are born so ... but a man of genius!... Lázaro, who understands the finality without end as he knows the Paternoster!' ”

“ 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. ”

“ And not less capable is he of a jesting survey of life. Echegaray writes in no fever of passion, and wastes no talent on the niceties of art. The morality and discontent that float from the meditative North have reached him in his home of sunshine and easy emotions, and his work is pervaded nobly by its spirit. And unlike Ibsen, he illuminates thought with sane and connected action. Discontent never leads him to the verge of extravagance. Extravagance he conceives to be a part of youth, addicted to bombast and wild words. Man trades in other material than romantic language and rhodomontade. ”

“ From all this it will be understood that Echegaray presses into the service of pleasure the desperate problems of our natural history, and instead of laughter confronts us with mournful gravity; asks us to stand aghast at inherited injustice, and to doubt with him the wisdom of Providence at sight of such undiminished and idle wickedness in man, and such an accumulation of unmerited suffering. Now-a-days we are inordinately engrossed by such issues, and life weighs more heavily upon our shoulders than it did upon our fathers. ”

“ If indeed our society—but what the deuce am I doing with philosophy? Let each one solve the problem as best he can, and ask for the sun, the horns of the moon, or whatever takes his fancy. And if nobody is interested in the matter, it only proves that the modern Don Juan has engendered many children without Lázaro's talent. ”

“ There is a natural note in his simple cry to Beatrix to speak to him before she dies—to lie, feign, accuse him,—only speak. Also in the speech to Manfred that follows, when he recalls the time they were playmates together, and then tells bitterly the roll of his wrongs: 'It were kinder to kill me at once,' Manfred cries impetuously. By a curious ineffectuality, a lack of skill, it however falls just short of real pathos. Echegaray is never simple enough to reach pathos. ”

“ Nobody understands. Carmen's father is indignant. Lázaro's confidential friend asks if he has gone mad, and Lázaro, bewildered, turns despairingly to Don Juan: 'Father, father. You are my father. Save me.' 'With my life, my son.' 'You gave me life, but it is not enough. Give me life to live, to love, to be happy. Give me life for Carmen's sake. ”

“ We are introduced to the Tarifa girl, Don Juan's old mistress, now pensioned and respectably established on his estate on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Deeper and deeper are we forced to wade through unrelenting shadow. Now it is the frivolous Don Timoteo, sipping his manzanilla, and sneering at the young generation as personated by his daughter Carmen, Lázaro, and Lázaro's friend, the girl with her affected lungs, Lázaro with his dementia, and his friend formal and headachy. ”

“ In the first bloom of youth, a titled blackguard had surprised and dishonoured her, and Fernando, her son, is the unsuspected offspring of this shame. He is a fine-spirited young fellow, more fiery and blusterous than the implacably dignified Rodrigo. He loves, and is beloved by, Laura, the ward of his parents. ”

“ When Manfred has excited the king's anger by scornful rejection of the favour of a name and title that shall give him equality with his brother, we realise that the hour is a favourable one for Juana's accusation. Whatever rights a sovereign may arrogate to himself in the matter of his own morals, he is usually a keen arbitrator of the limitations of those of his subjects. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then he proceeds to point out to Fernando that henceforth Laura's honour must be as dear to him as his own, and after an eulogy on the virtue of the ladies of his house, he explains that if the stain of dishonour dimmed the splendour of the name of Moncada in a woman, it would be the duty of her husband, father, or brother to kill her on the spot. This is not lively talk for Doña Violante, but life was not a lively matter for women in those dull days—especially in Spain, where it still is the reverse of exciting for them. ”

“ Thought, perhaps, travels too persistently along the shadowed paths, and we should be thankful to find our world reflected through his strong glass, dappled with a little of the uncertain but lovely sunshine that plays not the least part in the April weather of our life here. ”

“ The one note of undiluted drama runs through all, and while the poet declaims upon a lofty level, it may be said that he chiefly reaches poetry through means of the felicitous vocables of the language he has the privilege to write, rather than by reason of any real genius as a poet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here there is not one victim only, but two. Don Juan, the middle-aged roué, has a friend, also a middle-aged roué. The daughter of his friend, Carmen, is consumptive, and is betrothed to his son, Lázaro, who is subject to vertigo. The play opens with three elderly roués, all ill-preserved after a life of scandal, holding converse the reverse of edifying over tobacco and alcohol. Here Echegaray shows how little he means to mince matters by the remarks he puts into the mouth of one of them in reply to Don Juan's boast that the genius of his son is inherited from him. ”

“ 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 grace round the ugliest corner. ”

“ What touches us more closely is Echegaray's manipulation of the modern conscience, and its illimitable scope for reflection, for conflict, and the many-sided drama of temptation. This is familiar ground, and we are ever pleased to welcome a new combatant. That the Spanish dramatist brings a novel note may be accepted after reading the curious prologue to his Gran Galeoto. It is the best and most popular of Echegaray's plays. ”

“ The note of unwavering sadness depresses. But, at least, it is not ignoble, and he conceives it borne with so much resignation and dignity that if the picture carries with it the colours of frailty, it brings a counterbalancing conception of the inherent greatness of man. ”

“ We feel it is more a revival than a youthful outburst, with all the promise of novelty. True, it is dominated by the modern need and its restless searching note; it must prove its mission as something more than the mere desire to divert. Not even a sermon could be more remote than this theatre from the old comedy of manners, of loose morals and diverting intrigue, all weighing as lightly on the dramatist's conscience as on the audience's. And it may be questioned if Echegaray, a professor of mathematics as well as a dramatist and poet, could be induced to accept Mr. ”

“ A rational man would have preferred to blink and turn away, with the safe conclusion that it was, after all, none of his business. But monarchs are allowed so many other attributes, that even out of Spain they may be fitly dispensed with reason. In an interview with the culprits, when a saner man would have been touched with the generous strife between them as to which should bear the blame and punishment, he decides that both shall die. ”

“ His tendency in youth was towards the exact sciences, with which he still coquets in the same spirit of pride that pushed Goethe to glory in his devotion to painting. He more readily offers to his friends a volume of his Modern Theories of Physics or the Union of Material Forces by which he is known to a select few, than one of his popular dramas. ”

“ But this was naturally no impediment to their own frailty, though not even Echegaray's sinners are for one moment permitted to give a cheerful aspect to sin. It is perhaps a double unwisdom to stoop to folly when they mean to be so persistently miserable over it. Certain it is, that in this case the lady's choice cannot have been prompted by any desire for a lively change. Manfred is only a more scowling, discontented edition of the legitimate Don. 'You are sadder than ever, and your hand avoids the touch of mine,' he complains to Beatrix in the beginning of the second act. ”

“ The situation is so poignant that there could be no other solution, and even the titled blackguard wins our sympathy in that last tragic scene.
The same gloom and power pervade The Avenger's Bride, the old story of Montague and Capulet But here the young Montague, one Don Carlos, slays the traditional family enemy, who happens to be the father of a weak-sighted maiden. She emerges into the strong sunlight just in time to recognise her father's assassin, and then is struck blind. ”

“ The Calvinists are painted in befitting blackness by a Spaniard, naturally glad of an opportunity to show that other lands had their Inquisition as well as Spain, and cruelty in those days was to be found as fierce elsewhere. ”

“ This fatal facility is one of the drawbacks of Spanish talent The race writes without difficulty, which perhaps is the reason that it writes without finish or distinction. Add to which in adopting French romanticism, upon which wave it was irresistibly carried, it did but accommodate the adoption of the natural bent of its own still mediæval nature. For modern Spanish romanticism belongs more probably to the sixteenth than to the nineteenth century. ”

“ Let him round the corner into another street, and he will hear the street arab shout after him, "The lunatic!" Much talent is decidedly a dangerous thing.' 'God defend us from it!' piously exclaims the elderly roué. ”

“ He is concerned more with striking situations than with development or revelation of character. In this line he is totally lacking in diversity and subtlety. He apprehends woman in none other but the crude, mediæval form. ”