'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?