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.'
Manfred. Your love is but a lie, since I strain in my embrace naught but a cold and inert marble statue. While your soul, your mind, yourself—all that I most fondly love eludes the touch of my lips, and my heart hears the disdainful murmur: 'This is not for the bastard.'
Beatrix. 'Tis not so. You do not understand me.