him as charity, and let me tell you this—there are fewer poor men than gentlemen of the upper classes who will do it. You think that you are encouraging virtue, but what you are really doing is promoting hypocrisy. You think that you are educating the masses: you are holding out a piece of candy in one hand and hiding a ruler in the other hand behind your back."
There is no need to call attention to the Shavian qualities of the speech or of the thought behind it, but it is significant that almost without exception Benavente's satirical comedies, and these are the most popular and the most important of his plays, are based upon some sham of contemporary Spanish society. It is a society very different from ours, different in form and based upon a different social order, but many of the shams he exposes are universal. La Gata de Angora holds up to view the idle, pampered, useless woman of great wealth, the Angora cat as the title calls her, as pretty, as selfish, and as cruel. Lo Cursi reveals the ugliness of the modern marriage of convenience. La Comida de las Fieras strips bare the empty pretensions of the wicked, decayed nobility. And so on, through a whole series of over forty brilliant plays, Benavente has satirized the false and the undemocratic in the upper and middle classes of Spanish society. He is the first specialist of the land in this particular field, and though he has several imitators, as yet no worthy rival has appeared.
Much of the success of his satires is due to the skill with which, in the same play, he will balance frailties and vices with strengths and virtues. His characters are always an intimate mixture of goodness and badness, and while he never leaves a doubt as to their exact place in his satire, still they are easily recognizable as people from the workaday world. He finds no delight in running the sharp blade of his wit through a poor dummy stuffed with disagreeable traits, but he rejoices to make a red-blooded knave or a pious shrew ridiculous. His specialist's point of view is narrow, but the result he achieves in his plays has something of the breadth of that greatest of Spanish satires, Don Quixote. The best Spanish literature has always been national, and it seems to become universal only when its national spirit, as in Cervantes' novel, is most intensified. This holds good of Benavente's satirical comedies. He attacks an undemocratic, uncommercialized society, and an American winces at
