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 unforgettable 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.