The author of the plays here done into English was born in Madrid on the Thursday in Holy Week of sixty-three years ago. In spite of a fair indication to go by, his friends are responsible for the curious assertion that he himself does not know, or has not taken the trouble to verify, the exact date of his birth. A reference to familiar sources of chronology enables us to make a respectful claim to better information on the point than the person most concerned. So the day of Señor Echegaray’s birth maybe fixed precisely as the 19th of April, 1832.
The first three years of the dramatist’s life were passed in the capital of Spain. In 1835 he was removed from Madrid by his father, who had just obtained the appointment of Professor of Greek at the Institute of Murcia. It was in Murcia that José received the rudiments of his education; and while still a child he entered the institute. Here he studied Latin under Professor Soriano, Natural History under Angel Girao, and Greek under his own father. The boy was early seen to be gifted with brain-power of the first order. And being of a docile and amiable nature, of active and laborious habits, having the advantage of excellent tutors, and being under the supervision of a kind and cultured father, it is hardly to be wondered at that his progress in learning was great and rapid. From the first he displayed that passion for mathematics which has never grown cool in him throughout life. His interest in literature itself was far from absorbing. He showed, indeed, some liking for novels and romantic dramas. For tragic writers of the stamp of Corneille and Racine he could not conceal his disrelish, though the fairness of his mind would never permit him to ignore or deny the many beauties of the classic drama. When he was fifteen years old he became Bachelor of Philosophic Science, and proceeded to Madrid in the month of October, 1847, to prepare for entrance into the Escuela de Caminos. In this great school the mathematical professor was Angel Riguelme, under whose able tuition young Echegaray devoted himself with increased ardour to his favourite study. His affection for literature, it is true, had been gradually strengthening. In the midst of his graver studies he had also frequented the theatres. But he never failed to return with an almost frenzied delight to the branch of knowledge which afforded such food to his voracious intellect. To use his own language, he “studied the higher mathematics ferociously, ravenously.” It has been maintained that in all the records of Spanish scientific history no one has ever been known to devote more eager and profound study to mathematics than José Echegaray. His whole spirit seemed to be inextricably identified with the subject, to be indissolubly enchained to it. Mathematics became for him the most absolute of necessities, the supreme of joys. The following is an experience related by a fellow student of Echegaray when both were at the Escuela de Caminos. “Every Saturday our professor of mathematics was fond of setting us problems of the most difficult kind, the solutions of which we were expected to hand in on the Monday. On a certain occasion the problem given out to us was of such an excruciatingly intricate nature that the huge majority of the class had to give up all hope of mastering it. I was among the unsuccessful ones. I had seen Saturday, Sunday, pass over without bringing me nearer to a glimpse of light. On the Monday morning I was all at once inspired with the idea of going to Echegaray to obtain some hint on a question which could not have failed to occupy his attention at least as much as mine. It was an hour before the time appointed for the opening of the Escuela and the delivering up of the answers. I set out for Echegaray’s lodging. I found my friend in his room. The curtains were drawn and the shutters were fastened over the windows. On the chimney-piece was an expiring lamp. On the edge of the bed—the clothes of which were tossed about in much disorder—sat Echegaray in his nightshirt. His head was bent, and he was in an attitude of deep thought. The noise which I made on entrance was as unsuccessful as my friendly greeting in withdrawing him from his abstraction. He confined himself to raising his hand with a gentle but expressive motion, and to saying ‘Hush!’ Suddenly he bounded up, undressed as he was, and, to my stupefaction, exclaiming, ‘Here it is!’ hurried across to a small board close at hand. He commenced to draw lines upon lines and circles upon circles, and dash down figures here and there, till at length he said, ‘The whole night have I been thinking of that problem, and—look there!’ And he drew back to show me the signs all fairly traced, the operation completed, the problem solved. This rehearsed performance he repeated in school that morning. He alone did it, to the admiration and almost to the alarm of the professor himself, who, I think, had really given out the problem without much serious thought of any one even attempting a solution.”
Echegaray had entered the Escuela de Caminos in 1848. He finished his course of study in 1853, carrying off with him the highest honours that the institution could bestow, and being placed far and away the first of all his contemporaries. Meanwhile the literary and dramatic instinct lay almost entirely asleep in him. It sprang up fitfully now and then in a curiosity to assist at the initiatory performances of pieces by first-rate, second-rate, and even third-rate authors. Echegaray was always held up as an exemplary pupil; he fulfilled his duties at school with almost exaggerated obedience and scrupulousness; and yet once—only once—he ran out of the Escuela de Caminos without permission that he might not be too late to buy tickets for the first night of Ayala’s drama, “El Hombre de Estado.” On leaving the Escuela, then, in 1853, Echegaray had already seen many dramas, and had read a vast number of French, English, Italian, and Portuguese novels, ancient and modern, of all kinds. But he had not himself essayed anything in literature. He had not written a verse. The making of verses appeared to him a thing quite foreign to his nature. In this the enemies of Echegaray are affable enough, for once, to agree with him; and they remain constant to their belief when he has long since had ample reason for changing his mind. The mathematical rigidity and angularity of much of his poetry, say these enemies, is not compensated for even by the daring originality of his conceptions, his nobility of sentiment, the richness of his imagery, the splendour of his language; they deny to him, for instance, the exquisite ease and melody of Espronceda, the bird-like spontaneity and perhaps fatal fluency of José Zorilla. In short, during these days of his dawning manhood, Echegaray had never dreamed of being a poet, still less a dramatic genius.
The requirements of his profession as tutor of mathematics, to which he now formally addressed himself, took him to various important cities—Granada, Almeria, Palencia—thus keeping him away for years from the capital, where he was destined to shine in whatever he undertook. At last the moment came for his return to Madrid. He was elected Professor of Mathematics at the Escuela de Caminos, at the very institution where he had achieved such triumphs as a boy and a young man, and where he had left behind him so many pleasing remembrances. And now his professional engagements, and the extraneous tasks which he voluntarily imposed on himself, scarcely left him time to breathe. During the thirteen years of his occupation of the mathematical chair an immense number of classes had the advantage of his teaching of the Infinitesimal Calculus, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Curve-tracing, Descriptive Geometry and its applications, Solid Geometry, and so on into the dimmest heights of the science. During this time he devoted himself to Political Economy, to Philosophy, to Geology, and to another study, entered upon with slight equipment by many men, very seriously and with all his faculties by this man—Politics. At the Bolsa and the Free Exchange Propaganda he delivered orations full of subtle thought and sound doctrine; in the Ateneo he spoke enthusiastically in favour of pure democracy; in presence of the Society of Political Economy he pronounced numerous discourses appropriate to their several occasions, and distinguished by an order of eloquence which was looked upon as remarkable, even in a capital where almost every one seems endowed with the gift of picturesque and ready speech. He published different articles in the Economista, La Razon, and other periodicals—it seeming impossible that he should give his attention to multitudinous labours of this kind, and at the same time devote eight or ten hours of his days and nights to private lessons in mathematics and to public lectures on other subjects, among which were Physics and Naval and Military Engineering. Such excessive work would have paralysed a nature less vigorous than Echegaray’s, but in the continuance of a portion of it he was unexpectedly stopped. The private lessons which he had been giving would have raised an independence for him. They were prohibited. Echegaray was made a victim of the administrative despotism to which the authorities of the Escuela de Caminos were compelled to bow. He applied for a special license; it was refused. In his indignation he was about to leave the Escuela. But there he was assured that he would be acting ill-advisedly. If he indeed abandoned his career in defiance, he would forfeit all his rights as a tutor in the public schools of Spain. The earnest remonstrances of his friends, joined to the promptings of his own reason, induced him to relinquish the design. His most powerful motive against precipitancy was that he had not the heart to break with the work of his whole life. He was the soul of the Escuela. He had become indispensable, alike to his fellow professors and to his pupils. Mathematics consoled him for all his trials, and to them he continued to consecrate himself with a loving fervour which even he had never surpassed. The mathematical treatises which he then began to send forth in rapid succession from the press will not be readily allowed to die by the scientific world of Spain.
Being about this time commissioned by the Spanish Government to study the works of tunnel making at Mont Cenis, and having no opportunity of doing so at leisure on his arrival, a very brief inspection sufficed for him to understand, or rather to guess, the whole of the internal mechanical arrangements of the perforators. And, thanks to this, and without bringing away with him sketches or plans of any sort, he, on his return to Spain, drew up a memorial with the most detailed description—a description subsequently proved accurate in all essential particulars—of the mechanism and procedure employed in the enterprise.
All this while there had been nothing in Echegaray’s tastes or performances that gave evidence of the poet, the dramatist, or even, in any distinct form, of the man of letters. His literary works, or rather such works of his as had even a suspicion of literary flavour about them, had been thus far confined to certain political orations, to articles on Political Economy, to publications on Mathematics, and to a humorous little sketch entitled, “The Comet, or a Carnival Joke,” which appeared in a Madrid newspaper. Echegaray’s partiality for the reading of novels and for the frequenting of theatres was the same. Still there was no awakening within him of any expressed ambition to write in emulation of those whose productions he admired as a spectator.
Towards the year 1864 it was that José’s brother Miguel, then a mere lad, wrote a little piece in one act and in verse entitled, “Cara o Cruz,” which was put on the stage, and was received in a friendly manner. And José, equally startled and amused at the spectacle of his boy brother writing smooth and harmonious verse, rapidly acquired the conviction that, after all, the writing of verses ought to have no stupendous difficulty about it. He did not long delay an experiment. He immediately set about putting together an appalling tragic argument, which he versified with tolerable ease. In this fashion was composed his first play. He kept it by him for a year. Having in the meanwhile dedicated himself with serious and characteristically energetic study to the whole question of dramatic writing, he drew the piece forth and read it a second time. He found it by no means equal to his first complacent judgment of its merits. He at once chose a safer hiding-place for it than previously, and it has never seen the light. Echegaray was becoming more and more immersed in these new subjects of interest, when an interruption came in the most notable public episode of his life. The revolution of 1868, and the flight of Isabella, launched him into the full tide of politics. His known ability naturally fitted him for the playing of a prominent part. He was very speedily selected for Cabinet rank in the newly-formed Government. He was created Minister for the Colonies. His new duties, entered upon and sustained with vigour and success, removed him for five years from the concerns of literature and the drama. Towards 1873, on the dissolution of the Permanent Commission of the Cortes, Echegaray’s name was proscribed. He was in imminent danger of death. He escaped to France. Eventually the ban was taken from his name, and his life was preserved, through the commanding influence of Emilio Castelar. This has been ever since gratefully acknowledged in a manner which does credit alike to the great orator and the great dramatist.
In the meantime, during his comparatively brief exile, Echegaray had written in Paris his drama, “El Libro Talonario.” It is the first of his pieces which was put on the stage, and the date of its production is February 18, 1874—not long after the author’s return to Spain. Nothing commonplace could come from Echegaray, yet neither in style nor in argument does the work give any revelation of the future greatness of the writer. Very little better was the reception accorded by the critics of Madrid to the second performance of the new poet, “La Esposa del Vengador,” also produced in 1874. There was not one, however, who failed to admit the numerous beauties of either play. The third effort, “La Ultima Noche,” again, was declared to be a chaotic conjunction of graces and monstrosities: as a work of genius unimpeachable; as a display of true dramatic quality, absurd.
On the other hand, the public of Madrid, roused to the highest pitch of interest in the new career marked out for himself by the celebrated mathematician, the ex-Cabinet Minister, the returned exile, had been receiving one after the other of his dramas with delight. This was not enough for a man of such iron will as Echegaray. He was deliberately bent on subduing his critics. His three first dramas had been experiments. He had been merely trying his hand.
On the 12th of October, 1875, was produced “En el puño de la Espada.” The play was welcomed with unanimous and boundless enthusiasm. The irregular and fiery genius, whose only enemy seemed to be his individual rashness, had stepped safely aside from down-rushing avalanches and gaping precipices, had scaled the heights reached by those few alone whose names will live, and was looking down in security and serenity alike on admiring critics and acclaiming public. From that night the severest judges of the Spanish capital recognised that there had come among them a dramatist of the first rank. Since that night Echegaray’s career has been one long triumphal march, his path strewn with flowers, his eyes rejoiced with the smiles of countless friends, his ears greeted with cries and songs of praise—and envy.