The Great Galeoto; Folly or Saintliness; Two Plays Done from the Verse of José Echegaray into English Prose by Hannah Lynch/Introduction
INTRODUCTION[1]
The Spanish theatre has for so long been out of fashion that a revived interest in it would carry us into a sort of renaissance. It is not virgin soil, like the drama of the north which has so lately caught the ear of Europe. This, perhaps, accounts for its lack of distinctive originality. For even in Echegaray's notable plays, strong and original as they are, there is an unmistakable ring of the past. 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. Stevenson's well-known and not inappropriate classification of the artist as of the family of Daughters of Joy. His is no neutral voice between vice and virtue, concerned solely for the pleasure or interest of the hour, suing approbation through laughter and wit, or sympathy through dramatic tears. Lest his audience should fail to carry their musings on the problems of life to the theatre in the proper modern spirit, he starts by pricking their conscience and exciting thought that as little relieves them from the pressure of reality as one of Ibsen's plays—though with the latter his having nothing else in common but this determined purpose.
José Echegaray was born at Madrid in 1832. The years of childhood were passed in Murcia, where at the university he studied and took out his degrees. 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. Of the scientific value of these works I am not in a position to offer any opinion. For career, he chose that of engineer, and, we are told, gave evidence in this line of quite exceptional diligence and quickness. Certain it is that in this department as well as in others that followed, he has amply proved that in individual circumstances the Don may be carried into a permanent frenzy of industry. In 1853 his studies in engineering terminated. Echegaray was appointed successively to posts in various provinces, until he returned to Madrid as professor of the School of Engineers. Here he taught theoretical and applied mathematics, and while building up a serious reputation in science, he found time to study political economy, and devour every form of literature, thus preparing for his future honours as poet and dramatist. He took part in the revolution of 1868, and was appointed Director of Public Works and Minister of Commerce. This post he resigned in 1872, and shortly afterwards that of Minister of Finances, which he was forced to give up on proclamation of the Republic. Then he emigrated to Paris, where he composed his first play El Libro Talonario. In 1874 the political situation permitted his return to Spain, and he was nominated Minister for the third time. After that he began to hold himself more and more aloof from public life, and took to writing for the theatre with prodigious activity. Well advanced in middle age, he seems to have taken Lope de Vega for his model in the matter of production. Within twenty years he has written more than fifty plays. In a letter before me, he offers me a choice of his recent plays (whose appearance can only cover a couple of years, I believe), and thus names them off:—El Critico Incipiente, Los Dos Fanatismos, El Haroldo, El Milagro en Egipto, Siempre en Ridicule, Sic vos non vobis, etc. etc., the double etc. suggesting at least half a dozen more, I suppose.
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. It is interesting to note the rebound with which Victor Hugo's bell cast this semi-civilised and dreaming people back into their own appropriate century. They prate to-day in Madrid glibly enough of English improvements, clubs, electricity, French vaudevilles, and all the pernicious refinements of our modern civilisation. But these elements are extraneous, a sort of diverting masquerade in their daily life. At heart they are purely mediæval. In all the great moments on and off the stage, they forget the silk hat and coat of civilisation, and walk and talk as if a sword still absurdly cocked the cloak of romance.
In this hour, when foreign Shakespeares are springing up around us with incredible profusion, it would be an agreeable task to come forward with a Spanish Shakespeare. But Don José Echegaray is no such thing. He bears no resemblance to the new geniuses hailed with such delight. He has none of the subtlety of Maeterlinck, and certainly offers entertainment by means of tricks less reminiscent of our start in modern languages. His literary baggage reveals neither the depth nor the flashes of luminous thought with which Ibsen startles us through an obscurity of atmosphere, a childish baldness, and an unconventional disregard of all the old-fashioned theories upon which the laws of dramatic criticism have been formed. 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. He has none of the French dramatist's incision, none of his delicate irony, his playfulness and humorous depravity, none of his beautiful clarity of expression, still less of his polish, his wit, and consummate dexterity. Poetry is his favourite form of dramatic expression, but it is not the suave measured poetry of M. Richepin; and while he often takes his inspiration from the Middle Ages, he offers us nothing like the ethereal and fanciful verse of M. Armand Silvestre, when that author condescends to forget that he is fin de siècle, and seeks to please through the sweetness and delicacy of some mediæval legend. Echegaray is poet enough to delight in these thrilling ages. But his treatment of them generally leaves us cold. It lacks fancy and buoyancy. Sombre passion does not adequately fill the place of absent humour. It is often thin and false, and glaringly artificial, like the mediæval romance of an inefficient author. It is a remarkable fact that such a play as Mar sin Orillas (Shoreless Sea) should have achieved popularity in a town so imitatively, not intellectually, modern as Madrid. It has no originality whatever, and offers nothing as compensation for dulness. It is of the Middle Ages, but without the captivating atmosphere of those plumed and belted centuries. It runs complacently along the old dusty highroad; swords clash, knights march off to glory and the Turkish wars, and beauty at home struggles with parental enmity, is sore distraught and belied, and while we are reminded in the high tone of the ancient singers, that
'Amor que á la guerra fué
Sabe Dios si volverá,'
we are confused by the stupidity of everybody.
This repertory is extended, but can hardly be called varied. 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. 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. To him she is simply a personality of divine and inexhaustible love—an exalted and inalterable ideal; and whether she wears modern raiment or the garb of remote centuries, she is never anything but a spiritualised stain-glass outline, which affords gross and barbaric males—Velasquez' heroes and high-toned villains—much opportunity to rant of saints and angels, and is a subject for continuous worship, ill-treatment, misunderstanding, and devotion to death.
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 ladies of such lords if they sometimes forget their oath of allegiance, and occasionally decline upon lesser natures. However picturesque, as housemates these Velasquez gentlemen are beyond endurance, and deserve to perish victims of their own relentless nobility.
Don Jaime adored his wife and loved his half-brother. Both in turn loved him, and recognised to the full his claim upon their mutual admiration. 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. And she replies: 'I am ever sad. Sorrow is throned within my bosom, and so imperious is its possession, that death alone can free its slave.' And then when Manfred prays for death as a mutual deliverance, she reproaches him: 'Does my love not then suffice you? If so, live and enjoy it, or confess that of our sin the vase only contains the bitterness, the shame and the disenchantment.'
Beatrix. 'Tis not so. You do not understand me.
Manfred. Yes, I understand you. You have only loved Jaime.
Beatrix. So deeply have I loved you, Manfred, that I have forsaken Jaime, noble as he is, for you who are so base. I have given myself to you, drawn by the attraction of the abyss which is your love. And I thought that I could live and be happy under cover of my sin, but it may not be. For ever between my breast and your arms he interposes.
They try to persuade themselves upon insufficient evidence that Jaime is dead, but Beatrix, the more nervous and impressionable of the two, endures the conviction of her senses that her husband lives as the added torture of fear to insistent remorse. Every sound that disturbs the silence, as they sit together by the fire, carries menace of his approach. 'Why are we not happy since we love one another?' Manfred bitterly cries, interrupting her terrified listening. Here is the keynote of Echegaray's philosophy, whether he marshals the dead centuries before us, or treats of the modern conscience. Even in the less complex ages, when the world was younger and fresher, he will not hear of obedience to instinct unpunished before even the fruit has had time to turn to ashes.
We understand that we are commanded to contemplate unrelieved gloom of sentiment and situation upon the entrance of Don Jaime, back from the Roussillon wars in company with Don Pedro, king of Aragon. The guilty lovers have an enemy in one Juana, the duenna and wife of Roger, the squire, who, discovering Beatrix and Manfred in a passionate embrace, is set upon by the infuriated bastard and inadvertently driven upon the sword's point into the family vault, where the door slams upon him with a secret spring. 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. On this principle, Don Pedro shows himself merciless to the sinners, though one happens to be his hostess and the other his host's much-loved brother. 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. Upon Manfred's petition, he consents that Jaime shall live in ignorance of his wrong, but the poor fool, for all his crown, was not sufficiently master of events to contrive this rash promise. Spanish history may furnish a precedent of such a situation, but we are not taught that the lives of the monarchs of the land explain it adequately. When Jaime enters and remonstrates with Don Pedro:—'I am her owner, sir. All your power, your crown, your greatness, the glory of Sicily and of the entire world—what are they against Beatrix! But smoke and dust,'—the king commutes her sentence to perpetual imprisonment, and orders the execution of Manfred in Barcelona. Upon this Jaime threatens to carry both away with him, forswear his king and country, and cross the frontier. A violent quarrel ensues between him and the king, and in the midst of recriminations, Don Pedro casts his dishonour in the teeth of his angry subject. The unfortunate nobleman, dazed and incredulous, reads Roger's letter, given him by Don Pedro, and falls into a spiritless despair. He asks his sovereign's pardon, and they part reconciled friends. Left alone by the family vault at night, he bursts into a sonorous soliloquy. We remember a somewhat similar situation in Victor Hugo, and are irritated by the reminiscence. 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. The climax has a false ring. Manfred dies by his own hand, and, following his example, Jaime stabs himself, and falls near him, in the shadow of the tomb.
D. Jaime. Manfred, too, lies dead, and you shortly will follow us. When you die, where will you fall?
Beatrix. By your side.
D. Jaime. Then come closer—'tis no lie? Answer. [Clasps her.]
Beatrix. No.
D. Jaime. And where will your tears flow?
Beatrix. Over your body.
D. Jaime. Then see. You must embrace my inert body. Do not cease weeping—so that—thus we drop into the bosom of death.
Death on his Lips takes us into quite another atmosphere. We are in foreign lands, on the distant shore of Lake Geneva, in the heart of the Calvinist Inquisition. The Don is introduced, but only as an exile, in the person of Miguel Servet, a famous Aragonese doctor who was martyred at Geneva in 1553. 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. It is a gloomy, a powerful, but not a very interesting play. Servet is well contrasted with the Genevese, the heaviness of the one race being dexterously made to appear so much less amiable and well-mannered than that of the other. The heroine, Margarita (naturally), is the usual heroine of Echegaray's choice—all heart, devotion, generosity, sincerity, and a certain broad intelligence. He may be trusted not to choose a fool, though he may never aspire to striking originality in his portrayal of what he evidently regards as the angelic sex.
On the Sword's Point attains a higher level of dramatic thought. Doña Violante is married to Don Rodrigo—the inevitable Velasquez, in plumes and black velvet. 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. An unconscious vein of humour runs through the pompous scene, in which he is found by these latter on his knees before the girl. Don Rodrigo is shocked at such indelicate boldness just like the amusing Marquis in The Sorcerer. 'They love each other,' Doña Violante expostulates. 'It is necessary to be severe with youth,' the Don replies, repressing his indignation at the bidding of his wife. 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. The young man's ardent youth puzzles Don Rodrigo, it is so unlike his own, and these perplexities are disturbed by the titled blackguard's sudden claim to Laura's hand—whom he describes as a mixture of Turkish houri and Christian virgin. Thereupon ensues a painful scene between the victim and the wrong-doer. The titled blackguard shows himself susceptible of the feelings of a gentleman, and deplores the sin of his rash youth—does he also not wear black velvet and a plumed cap? However, he has no mind to renounce his claim to Laura's hand though Doña Violante kneel to him, and Fernando swagger about with unsheathed steel. The duenna and the squire (from whom a little humour might not unreasonably be expected if it were possible to convict so serious a philosopher as the author with anything like deliberate pleasantry) contrive to muddle the carriage of Doña Violante's passionate letter to her betrayer, speaking of the fatal night with lamentable lucidity, so that it falls into Fernando's hands, who instantly believes that Laura is the injured woman. Some spirited scenes ensue, and Fernando interrupts an interview in the dark as he believes between Laura and his rival. A light reveals his mother's shame, and when Don Rodrigo enters after Laura he does not hesitate to sacrifice himself and the beloved by letting it appear that it was Laura he discovered at a clandestine meeting instead of his mother. The result is that Laura is condemned by the relentless Moncada to marry the titled blackguard, being now too damaged an article for the son of his house. This is a delicate dilemma for a youth with such traditions to live up to: to have to choose between his mother's death and dishonour and the dishonour and loss of his bride. His birth is only revealed to him by Doña Violante to prevent the sacrilegious duel between him and his father, and to guard the dreadful secret Fernando stabs himself. 'My death, mother, blots out your dishonour.' The third act hurries on through many strong effects, and the young man's death we feel to have the appropriate majesty of the inevitable. 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. Don Carlos woos her under another name, and an old lover, who is an enlightened oculist of the Middle Ages, restores her sight. Her lover Lorenzo had promised to kill the man she should name her father's murderer. When she cries out, 'Don Carlos,' he keeps his word, and she falls upon his corpse 'the avenger's bride.'
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. In its printed form it is dedicated to Everybody, which is the crowning insistance on the motif of the prologue, and there is an introduction by Señor Ignacio José Escobar from which I copy an interesting statement.
'And then came that unforgetable night the 19th March 1881, the night of the first representation of The Great Galeoto. There was neither strife nor contradiction, nothing but a universal concert of congratulation, praise, and applause. Here your treatment of a great social problem had the good fortune to run on lines that in all eyes seemed elevated and humane. What a splendid and legitimate satisfaction for those among us who had hesitated to share the general opinion!'
The Epoca wrote next day:—'Don José Echegaray has obtained an indisputable, an unanimous triumph. He has treated a great social question in a masterly manner. The great Galeoto felt the rod of shame upon its cheek, but it applauded without a single exception. The social vice exists, we know, and that vice was whipped with all the vigorous energy of a Greek tragedy. Everybody recognised the truth of the picture, though none cared to accept it as personal: but the social moral avenged by the creative genius of Señor Echegaray owes him a reward and satisfaction, and that reward and that satisfaction will be the union of all classes, those who may have once in a way formed part of the great Galeoto, and those who habitually protest against the facile habit of slander—to show their gratitude to the poet, the one for vengeance, and the other for the lesson received.
'A subscription not to exceed twenty reals (four shillings), which will be devoted to some work of art, will recall to Señor Echegaray while he lives that he may obtain triumphs as great as last night's, seeking his inspiration in the true sentiment of art.'
To the extraordinary and self-conscious prelude of The Great Galeoto which lifts a play quite out of the region of diversion, and, as the sensible Don Julian remarks, plunges us into philosophy, the written, not acted, prologue to El Hijo de Don Juan (Don Juan's Son) may be added as an excellent interpretation of Echegaray's personality, revealed already with passable clearness in the dramatic prologue quoted. He enumerates the conclusions of the critics. That the play was inspired by Ibsen's celebrated Ghosts. That the passions it deals with are more appropriate to Northern climes than to the South. That it treats of the problem of hereditary madness. That it discusses the law of heredity. That it is gloomy and lugubrious, with no other object than that of inspiring horror. That it is a purely pathological drama. That it contains nothing but the process of madness. That from the moment it is understood that Lázaro will go mad, all interest in the work ceases, and there remains nothing but to follow step by step the shipwreck of enfeebled intelligence. And so on. Echegaray regards all this as the lamentable exercise of dramatic criticism. The underlying thought of his work is different, but he declines to enter into further explanation of it, each scene and each phrase sufficiently explaining it already. To touch more closely upon the matter would be perilous. Besides, he adds, it is not his habit to defend his plays. Once written, he casts them to their fate, without material or moral defence, and the critics are free to tear themselves to pieces over them. There is one phrase alone that he defends energetically, because it is borrowed from Ibsen, and appears to him of singular beauty: 'Mother, give me the sun.' This he describes in his prologue as 'simple, infantile, half comical, but enfolding a world of ideas, an ocean of feeling, a hell of sorrows, a cruel lesson, the supreme watchword of society—of the family.' He continues, quite in the modern spirit:
'A generation consumed by vice, which carries in its marrow the venom of impure love, in whose corrupted blood the red globules are mixed with putrid matter, must ever fall by degrees into the abysm of idiocy. Lázaro's cry is the last glimmer of a reason dropping into the eternal darkness of imbecility. At that very hour Nature awakes, and the sun rises; it is another twilight that will soon be all light.
'Both twilights meet, cross, salute in recognition of eternal farewell, at the end of the drama. Reason, departing, is held in the grip of corrupting pleasure. The sun, rising, with its immortal call, is pushed forward by the sublime force of Nature.
'Down with human reason, at the point of extinction: hail to the sun that starts another day! 'Give me the sun,' Lázaro cries to his mother. Don Juan also begs it through the tresses of the girl of Tarifa.
'On this subject there is much to be said; it provokes much reflection. 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.
'Respectful salutations to the children of Don Juan.'
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. The good old spirit of fun is fast being trodden out of us by the pervading sense of a mission, and the laborious duty of converting somebody to something. We no longer go to the theatre to weep over fictitious wrongs and smile at imaginary joys. We go to study what we are pleased to call life; to sip at the founts of philosophy, to hear a sermon. It is not exhilarating, but we thankfully take the draught of wisdom offered us, and go our ways without a murmur that we have been depressed rather than entertained. Cervantes, with old-fashioned sanity of judgment, condemned the practice of preaching sermons through the veil of fiction. What sort of reflection would the pathological novel and drama inspire in so wise and witty an author? He might be led to create a type of character even more mad than the Knight Errant.
El Hijo de Don Juan (Don Juan's Son) is an infinitely crueller and more disagreeable play than Ghosts because it is more lucid, more direct. The characters themselves are more carefully drawn, and we have a closer actual acquaintance with them. 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. Paternal inheritance would be nothing but rheum or neurosis—'the sediment of pleasure and the residuum of alcohol.' Upon this Don Juan launches into poetry and describes the single moment in which his soul soared above material enjoyments and sighed for the glorious and impossible. It was after an orgy, and as his half-closed eyes saw the sun rise over the Guadalquivir through the silky waves of a girl's hair, he understood the beauty of poetry and Nature, and stretched out a hand to clutch the splendid orb. This desire is afterwards recalled to him in a moment of surprising horror, when his brilliant and beloved son, sinking into imbecility, sees the rising sun, and cries: 'How lovely! Mother, give me the sun.' 'And I also wanted it once,' Don Juan exclaims: 'My God! my son! Lázaro!'
Don Juan, as might be inferred from his name, carries on intrigues with ballet-girls and servant-maids under the nose of his wife and son. Lázaro seems blind enough to parental delinquencies. Not, as he explains himself when complaining of broken health, that he has been a saint because he has eschewed excesses. The scene where he first appears ailing and stupid is singularly painful, above all, towards the end, when, after an outburst of lucid eloquence, he falls drowsily upon the sofa, and feeling sleep upon him, begs that Carmen, his betrothed, should not be permitted to see him in a ridiculous attitude.
Xavier. Unless you are as beautiful as Endymion she shall not enter. [Pause. Xavier walks about; Lázaro begins to sleep.]
Lázaro. Xavier, Xavier!
Xavier. What?
Lázaro. Now I am—half asleep—how do I look?
Xavier. Very poetical.
Lázaro. Good. Thanks—very poetical. [Dreamily.]
The second act is somewhat livelier, and contains more spirited contrasts. That Echegaray could excel in lighter comedy may be seen in an amusing scene between the serious son and the dissipated, good-natured father.
Don Juan is alone with his son, who is walking restlessly about. The father asks his son what he is thinking of, and then apologises for disturbing weighty thought. Lázaro listlessly replies that his imagination was wandering, and he wandering after it. When he has received many assurances of not being in the poet's way, Don Juan calls for sherry, the Parisian newspapers, and Nana. Caught laughing over Nana, he asserts his horror of immoral books, and his conviction that literature is going to the dogs.
There is here a little humorous by-play between the servant and Don Juan, and afterwards a reference to the lugubrious theme in converse between her and Lázaro, whose listlessness, courtesy and musing, make an admirable relief against the alert and fussy affection and frivolity of his father.
Don Juan. Ha, ha! witty, exceedingly witty. Full of salt; hot as red pepper. Gil Blas is the only paper worth reading.
Lázaro. An interesting article? What is it about? Let me see.
Don Juan. [Hastily ramming the paper into his pocket.] A dull and shocking article. I must take it away, for the mischief would be in it if it fell into Carmen's hands.
Lázaro. You are quite right. [Beginning to walk again.]
Don Juan. I hadn't finished it. I must finish it later. [Takes up 'Nana.'] Stupendous! Monumental enough to make one die of laughing. Lord! why do we read but for amusement's sake? Then give us diverting books. [Laughing.]
Lázaro. Is it a witty book?
Don Juan. [In altered voice.] Perhaps. But this light literature soon wearies. [Seeing Lázaro approach, he hides 'Nana' in another pocket.] Have you anything substantial to read—really substantial?
Lázaro. [Looking through his books.] Do you like Kant?
Don Juan. Kant? Do you say Kant? The very thing. He was always my favourite author. When I was young I fell asleep every night over Kant. [Aside.] Who the deuce is he?
Lázaro. If you like I will [Looking for a passage.]
Don Juan. No, my son. Any part will do, if it can be read in divisions. Let me see. Don't trouble about me. Write, my son, write. [Lázaro begins to write, and Don Juan reads.] 'Beneath the aspect of relation, third moment of taste, the beautiful appears to us the final form of an object, without semblance to finality.' The Devil! [Holding book away and contemplating it in terror.] The devil! 'Or as a finality without end.' There are people who understand this! 'Since it is called the final form to the causality of any conception with relation to the object.' Let me see [holding book still further off]; 'final form to the causality.' 'Pon my word, I'm perspiring. [Wipes his forehead.] 'Conscience is this finality without end, is the play of the cognitive forces.' What! 'The play of cognitive … the play' … If it were play I should understand it. 'Conscience of this internal causality is what constitutes æsthetic pleasure.' If I continue I shall have congestion. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Only think that Lázaro understands the finality without end, the causality and the play of the cognitive forces. Heavens! what a fellow! [Reads again.] 'The principle of the methodical conformity of nature is the transcendental principle of the strength of judgment.' [Strikes the table.] I should lose myself if I read more. But what a fellow, who can read such stuff and keep sane!
Lázaro. Does it interest you?
Don Juan. Immensely. What depth! [Aside.] I am five minutes falling into it and haven't yet reached the bottom. I should think it did interest me indeed. But, frankly, I prefer
Lázaro. Hegel?
Don Juan. Just so (Nana).
After talk of Lázaro's health and engagement, Don Juan, learning that the young man is pensive or preoccupied, solely because he is projecting a drama, says he will leave him to thought. Glancing into Kant, he mutters, 'The—the—cognitive forces—the—the—finality,—yes, the finality.' 'Work, my son, work. Above all, write nothing immoral.' He drinks off a glass of sherry, and regretfully remarks that this finality has an end; then marches away with the bottle, Gil Blas, and Nana to study in solitude.
This is the sole touch of comedy in a play of ever increasing gloom, pervaded by the stupor of the hero and the cough of the heroine. 'My father loves me dearly, Carmen remarks to Dolores, Don Juan's embittered wife. 'Then he ought to have given you stronger lungs,' the elder woman retorts, with shocking directness. It is indeed, as Echegaray complains the critics assert, a pathological drama. 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!" 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. 'I have always been very careful not to cultivate it.'
It would be difficult to conceive a more needlessly disagreeable scene than the interview between the celebrated brain doctor and Lázaro, who, the night before, has been consulted by Dolores on behalf of a nephew, and innocently, but with terrible frankness, discusses the case with the unfortunate victim himself. 'We cannot with impunity corrupt the sources of life,' says Doctor Bermúdez, in the high scientific manner, without noticing the increasing emotion of his companion; 'the son of such a father must soon fall into madness or idiocy.' 'Ah! No! What? My father! 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!'
Don Juan. Good, I have always been a scoundrel. What more? But don't remember it now; above all, don't say it. Say that you forgive me. Forgive me, Dolores.
Dolores. What does it matter?
Don Juan. It matters to us both. If you should not forgive me, and if God should remember to punish me, and punish me through my Lázaro!Pitiful is the poor mother's wavering between softness and bitterness. At one moment she pardons him with all her heart, or only bargains that he shall help her to save their boy. And then when he vows to do so with his whole soul and the remainder of his life, she retorts cruelly, 'With what life you have left; what Heaven, in its mercy, still grants you.' 'Dolores!' the poor wretch exclaims, and again she softens: 'It is true; I had forgiven you.' Upon this the elderly scapegoat brightens and mentions Paris, Germany, England—'the English know so much. Bah! there is a good deal of science scattered over the world.' 'Then let us gather it all for Lázaro.'
This desperate situation is relieved by the entrance of Carmen's father in the black of etiquette, strictly solemn as befits a Spanish father offering his daughter in marriage to his old chum. He says reprovingly: 'Do not embrace me. Don't you see that I am all in black—in the garb of etiquette? It is a very solemn occasion. Call everybody except Lázaro—him later. Solemnity above all.' The afflicted parents have decided to conceal Lázaro's calamity from the world, and make a heart-broken effort to welcome the betrothal with delight, and the gloom of the situation is deepened by the young man's miserable behaviour when called to his beloved.
Don Juan. Yes, yes, but enough.
Lázaro. What infamy! What treason! Carmen!
Carmen. [Running to him.] Lázaro!
Lázaro. Go, away! Why do you come to me? You cannot be mine. Never, never, never.
Carmen. Do you give me up? Ah, I have already felt it. Mother! [Takes refuge in his mother's arms.]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. Give me more life, or cursed be that which you have given me.'
The third act is rendered more sombre if possible from the shabby chatter and airs of aged rake on the part of Carmen's father, with which it starts. 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. 'Ah, in my day we were other,' he sighs. 'Perhaps,' retorts the friend, 'it is because you were—other then that we are so now.' Then it is Lázaro, rough, distrustful, and sly, completely altered, afraid to sleep because he does not know how it might be upon his awakening or if he should ever awake, with swift leaps from childish drivel into the Don's plumed phrases, forgetful of modern raiment, and swaggering through imagery and sonorous syllables as if a sword clanked by his side and he carried the spurs of chivalry. And then the poor victim falls to drinking with his father's old mistress, and when half-drunk and wholly mad, plots with her to carry off Carmen. When she cries out that 'farewell' means tears, he exclaims inconsequently: 'Then you, too, will cry. We will all cry … Laughing fatigues, crying rests.'
Quite gay and reckless, he faces Carmen to propose elopement to her. He laments the former coldness of his words and moods, the insufficiency of the vulgar tongue to express passion so burning and impetuous as his, and terrifies her by his wild and flowery volubility. There is night all around him except for the ray of intense light that encircles her face. On that he concentrates all that remains to him of life, of manhood, of feeling, thought and love. He descends from this into weak complaining. Her happiness is threatened by inimical conspiracies, and yet how is he to defend her? He fancies he is in a desert full of sand, plagued with unquenchable thirst and menaced by a falling heaven. He mixes up in the dreariest way the sands of the desert and the old applause that greeted his genius, wonders if either will have an end, then doubts the end of anything, and implores Carmen to save him. 'Help me. Look at me, speak, laugh, cry, do something, Carmen, to keep me from wandering into the desert.' But already his look is vague, and he has ceased to see her. In vain she cries to him that she is near, weeps over him, holds him to her. 'I am Carmen, look at me. The little head you were wont to love so is close to your lips. I am smiling at you. Laugh, Lazaro, answer me. Wake up! Surely you hear me, you see me!' When his mother comes in response to the girl's agonised cry, a glimmer of intelligence gives a sort of dignity to his incoherent words. He wants his mother to console him, for he has to say 'a long, a sad, and solemn farewell to Carmen.' The girl protests she will not leave him, when he irritably orders her away—a great way off. He loved her much, but now it is adieu eternally. He only wishes now to be alone with his parents, until memory suddenly carries him back into the time of quarrel, reproaches, and jealousies of those two in his childhood. 'Don't contradict me, father; you used to quarrel and make me afraid.' He passionately orders him away, too, with Carmen, and turns for comfort to his mother. Then he remembers his school troubles, how his mother coldly parted with him, and to guard against complete loneliness, calls for Paca, his father's old mistress. 'Come, I am young and wish to live,' he cries, and when we find Don Juan aroused to indignation and threatening to fling the Tarifa girl over the balcony into the river if she does not instantly retire, we are ready to hail the mercifulness of Ibsen. This is to carry a sermon to an intolerable length, and drive us so out of love with both philosophy and science as to paint unreason with a double allurement. A father kneeling to his mad son to let an old mistress go, and the son, struggling out of the gathering torpor of intelligence to stare at the rising sun:—
'Mother, how lovely!'
'Lázaro!'
'So lovely! Mother, so lovely! Give me the sun.'
'My God! I also wanted it once,
sobs Don Juan.
is the last lugubrious note of Dr. Bermúdez.
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 grace round the ugliest corner. Bernard, whom he betrays and laughs at, is the commonplace, scarce presentable husband, married by a refined and poetical creature for his money, and blushed for by her at every moment while she is solacing herself with the elegant improprieties of her friend's husband, Richard. Here we have another picture of marital jealousy, justifiable in this case, and perhaps for that reason more merciful. Instead of turning from his faithless wife, the insignificant and vulgar Bernard wins her to him and to atonement by an unpretentious magnanimity, and the play ends hopefully with Richard's cry to his wife: 'Louisa, pardon!—and forget!' And Bernard, turning to Inez, his wife, explains his generosity in sonorous verse: 'Honour goes from the soul into the depth, and in the world I put no trust. Since my honour is my own, I understand it infinitely better than the world.'
Not even Tolstoi, with all that delicacy and keenness of the Russian conscience, that profound seriousness, which move us so variously in his great books, has a nobler consciousness of the dignity of suffering and virtue than this Spanish dramatist. 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. Hence he brings emphasis and plain speech to bear upon him when youth has had its fill through the long-winded, high-coloured phrases of his scribbling heroes. 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 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.
- ↑ Part of this introduction is reprinted from an article in the Contemporary Review, and my thanks are due to the publishers for the permission.