One of the most noted peculiarities in the onward course of Echegaray is the mixture of patient scorn and fierce energy with which he declines to look upon difficulties as insurmountable. Not merely in the solution of a hard problem in mathematics, or in clearing from his path the impediments which now make him rule the theatre of Spain as a monarch, does Echegaray show the force of his will. The rough term in which Ancient Pistol sums up the attributes of the Spaniard of Shakespeare’s time could not be more ludicrously applied than to such a man as José Echegaray.
In our country it is natural to conceive that we can pay no higher compliment to a man than by proclaiming him to be even as one of ourselves. Mr. Swinburne recognises—and with infallible justice—“a decisive note of the English spirit in Molière,” as well as in Rabelais. In one way, at least, in the moral if not in the intellectual sense, in his resolution to ignore defeat, however incongruous be the task he may undertake, there appears to the observer of Echegaray’s career something strangely English. Two anecdotes may be given, alike as proofs of his almost boundless versatility, and of his constancy in breaking through seemingly impenetrable obstacles. On one occasion, he being in a drawing-room with several of his friends, among whom was a philosophical critic of some renown, the conversation fell upon German philosophy. Echegaray, who knew little of the matter discussed, and less of the German tongue, deemed it presumptuous to hazard an opinion for or against the thesis advanced, and maintained an absolute silence. Gradually, however, the debate resolved itself into a dispute as to the possibility of making an exhaustive study of a certain school of philosophy within a relatively short period. There can hardly be a more modest or amiable man than Echegaray, and yet the mere breathing of the word “impossibility” has been known at times to rouse him into an attitude of imperial defiance almost worthy of Cæsar or Napoleon. He left the house with the secret intention of proving that nothing is difficult to a man with clear brain and indomitable purpose. From that hour he devoted himself with patient zeal to no less a task than that of studying the special school of philosophy just argued about in the very fountains from which it emanated, in the original text of the German authors themselves. With such effect did he apply himself that, two months later, being in almost the same company, and the conversation—as the narrators will have it, with the usual emphatic pointing to coincidence—veering round to the same theme, the new student of philosophy displayed a depth of discernment, an acuteness of independent thought, a readiness of argumentative resource, a fertility of citation from the German language itself, which confounded the listeners; and apart from the congratulations on his new linguistic acquirement, there was an unanimous admission that Echegaray had expressed himself on the subject as a master in the midst of novices.
Another time he was in the company of friends who were engaged in a most exhaustive dissertation on the art of fencing. Innumerable were the experiences detailed in illustration of practice with the sabre, the sword, and the foil. Those who were least excited by the discussion turned now and then to Echegaray with a courteous explanation and a general air of respectful apology for treating of matters in which he could take no conceivable interest. Echegaray, in truth, had never held an offensive weapon in his hand. Next day, however, he appeared at the rooms of one of the best-known fencing masters of Madrid, enrolled his name as a pupil, and took his first lesson instantly. There are living eye-witnesses who tell how, three months afterwards, the grave mathematician, the coming lord of the Spanish drama, in a desperate encounter with foils, repeatedly hit, and at length actually disarmed his fencing master himself, amid the intense amazement and uproarious enthusiasm of bystanders, who counted among them some of the most expert fencers in the Spanish capital.
Echegaray’s very career as a dramatist might in a measure be described as a gigantic experiment in the art of vanquishing difficulties, an elaborate and prolonged tour-de-force. He was a spectator of his brother Miguel’s boyish and successful entrance into the domain of dramatic poetry. He saw nothing to prevent himself from following in the same path. His own prescription for writing verse is concise, and contains a justification of his new departure. He sums up the full requirements of a poet in “A little grammar, a little imagination, and a tolerable ear for music.” This is a matter-of-fact style of putting things which may seem rather like a ruthless tearing aside of the veil from a sanctuary that should never be revealed to profane eyes. The great unpublished poets whose own works are the result of the purest inspiration will resent it accordingly. Yet there is reason for suspicion that Shakespeare might have expressed himself on the dread mystery in some such light-hearted manner as Echegaray. The Spanish dramatist, however, omits one important condition which he, at least, has well fulfilled. He has all through life acted up to the letter of Carlyle’s teaching as to the “perennial nobleness and even sacredness” of “Work.” With him the main necessity in all the ways of life is hard labour, untiring drill, constant self-perfection. In his own example he seems to declare that even poets cannot straightway claim to be in the charmed circle of Mascarille’s “gens de qualité” qui “savent tout sans avoir jamais rien appris.”
Perhaps one of the first things calculated to strike a student of Echegaray is the air of gloom which overhangs many of his graver dramas. Instances might be given in which a combination of nearly all the elements of woe and despair, frequently leads to a catastrophe, from the contemplation of which others besides the mere hysterical reader will find it difficult to turn away with calmness. Yet this writer may, in a certain sense, be said to have in him something of classic delicacy and reserve—with regard, in especial, to scenes of death. The introduction of death upon the stage seems invariably a matter of concern to him. Not that it is ever awkwardly shrunk from. Indeed, when used as a last resort, when “fear has had laid upon it as much as it can bear,” “when life is weaned and wearied till it is ready to drop,” then death in the hands of Echegaray comes forward at times with the weight of an almost overwhelming consummation. The Spanish dramatist, in short, may fairly claim a portion of that pleasing reverence for the dead which all true artists have. To adduce illustrations which must appear unfashionable in days when half a continent may be depopulated, without much protest, in the course of a single volume. The author of “Guy Mannering” and the author of “Monte Cristo,” in the very height of the gaiety, the gallantry, the majesty of their descriptions of their own and former times; Dickens and Thackeray, in the full flow of their mocking indignation or their lacerating irony, will be seen all at once to stop short. Their looks change. Their tones become softened and their eyes downcast. They uncover their heads and compel us to do the same. For they have led us into the presence of the dead; and before the lowliest or the loftiest of their fellows—Meg Merrilies or the Abbé Faria, Betty Higden or Colonel Newcome—these rare spirits incline themselves in solemn veneration.
Of Echegaray’s power over the pulses of sorrow and terror, without the intervention of death, an example may be found in “El Hijo de Don Juan.” And here, perhaps, a few words may not be out of place, even in view of Echegaray’s own “Prologue,” as to the true source of this drama. That it was inspired by the reading of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” we have the Spaniard’s own declaration. But were it permissible to put aside the fact that both works treat of the problem of heredity in its most hideous and harrowing form, and the minor circumstance of the borrowing of Oswald’s phrase, “Mother, give me the sun!”—words which, to the mind of Echegaray, embody such picturesque and profound significance—Mr. William Archer himself might not be reluctant to admit the essential originality of the Spanish play. The truth is that “El Hijo de Don Juan” is a sombre and relentless satire upon the real national hero of Spain, the being immortalised by Molière and Mozart, and more or less caricatured in the cruder imagination of José Zorilla. Don Juan, the gamester, the libertine, the duellist, the bully, has been transported from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. He is in entirely new surroundings and has become in a measure reformed. We find him past the sixtieth year of his age, with a wife whom he has indeed ill-treated, but with a son of whom he never tires of boasting. The disorders of his youth have left him with none the strongest of brains. And now the sins of the parent, in accordance with Echegaray’s unsparing rule, are visited upon the child. The father’s own mental weakness is developed in the most grim and terrible form in the gifted son. And so the flames in which Don Juan Tenorio was untimely plunged, are rekindled in the hell of misery and remorse with which the heir to his shameless renown sees the final overthrow of his boy’s intellect. It is hardly too much to say that the “Ghosts” is almost bright and frolicsome in comparison with the “Son of Don Juan.” Echegaray has here deliberately chosen colours of funereal blackness, and has laid them on with little regard for the feelings of the sensitive reader. Ibsen leads us to the edge of his own “Inferno,” and points to the pale faces of those whom his genius has condemned to immortal suffering; but he hurries us aside before we have time to become giddy. Echegaray drags us pitilessly down and holds us fast, while in our very presence his victims are whirled shrieking past us—borne along on burning winds, or stretched in agony on the rack. Still with all deductions, the gift of true impressiveness, which has been so abundantly acknowledged in Ibsen, will scarcely be denied to the Spaniard who so frankly admits the influence of the Northern master. This impressiveness may be set down to pathological causes, to the unwholesomeness of the subject, to the lugubrious moral atmosphere in which a pessimist like Ibsen, a teacher of Hebraic sternness like Echegaray, loves at times to fold himself round. But whether the effect of plays of this kind may or may not be illegitimate, it is, perhaps, within its peculiar limits, entirely unexampled. Plays of high name, plays filled with scenes of violence, with the ring and storm of battle, with midnight murder, with death in its worst forms, might be placed for comparison beside the “Son of Don Juan.” And though there is not a death, not a blow struck from beginning to end of the Spanish drama, such plays, with all their accumulations of misery and ferocity, might be found to yield in the element of sheer horror to the spectacle of the brilliant Lazarus, the poet, the dramatist, the coming glory of Spain, waking from a trance under the anguished eyes of his father, his mother, his betrothed, and bursting into the ravings of a hopeless madman.
Of Echegaray’s use of dramatic resources when he indeed brings death upon the stage, a few examples maybe quoted. In “El Gran Galeoto” the sudden exposure of the body of Julian to his unforgiven wife. In “Mariana” the bloody sacrifice of the heroine—in presence of her real lover—by the husband whom she loathes and defies. Lover and husband stand armed over the corpse; but the stage is not therefore converted into a shambles; we are merely left to conjecture that the two desperate men confronting each other will not long survive the woman who has coloured in such sinister fashion the lives of both. Another example, more openly verging on the melodramatic, may be encountered in an earlier drama than these, “En el seno de la Muerte.” Here is one of the rare instances in which Echegaray has chosen a purely romantic period for the scene of his play. A husband, treacherously wronged by the brother and the wife whom he had almost equally loved, contrives his revenge. He locks himself and the two culprits in the family mausoleum, of which he alone has the key and he alone knows the secret. He does not ignore, they do not ignore, the fact that there is no escape for any one of them. After a painful scene of reproach, at the end of which the traitor brother kills himself, the husband first throws the key which had locked them in, then the torch which had illumined the dismal magnificence of their surrounding’s, down a deep cavity which yawns between the monuments. Finally, in utter darkness, he stabs himself dead at his wife’s feet; and the curtain falls amidst an undefinable impression of haunting dismay at the alternatives of fate before the lonely survivor.
For obvious reasons Echegaray has been here referred to in connection with Ibsen. Whether an apology for such a conjunction of names might in reason be demanded by the most loyal of Ibsenites is doubtful, under the present conditions of criticism. It cannot but be a source of relief to any one helping to introduce a new author to the public, that the process of comparison has been simplified of late; that the qualifications exacted from competitors are drawn up in a spirit of charming leniency; that the certificate of immortality is made more than ever easy of attainment. Some years ago a writer thought fit, not only without seeming sense of shame, but with the complacent air of one who sees “a new planet swim into his ken,” to couple the names of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens. It must have been under the inspiration of such criticism as this that Shakespeare was immediately dethroned—for at least the hundredth time—and once again at the hands of “our lively neighbour the Gaul.” Corneille, Racine, and Victor Hugo were allowed to slumber tranquilly in their graves, and it was admitted on behalf of England—by the Paris Figaro—that the author of “Othello” was surpassed by M. Maurice Maeterlinck. Even under these encouraging circumstances, however, it will not be here contended that Señor Echegaray shows in his work anything comparable—“et oserai-je le dire,” as M. Mirbeau would say—“supérieure en beauté à ce qu’il y a de plus beau dans Shakespeare.” It might be suggested that “Mariana”—Señor Echegaray’s masterpiece in female creation—would have been readily accepted as a companion with Charmian and Iras in attendance on the most complex of all heroines—Cleopatra. Further than this it will not be safe to go.
Echegaray may be noted as displaying, even in the following mournful drama, a genuine and, as a rule, unforced sense of humour. In his comic passages, however, he has a fault which he shares with Shakespeare—and the editor of Punch. He is a remorseless punster.
This poet’s genius, as may have been remarked, burst into bloom at a time beyond the midsummer of life. He was forty-two before his first drama was produced. That is twenty-one years ago. Since then his activity has never known exhaustion. He is now the author of some fifty plays. There are particular years among the past twenty-one in the course of which he has put upon the stage as many as four dramas, not one of which is carelessly written, though one imitation from the German, “El Gladiador de Ravena,” was commenced and completed within three days. During these twenty-one years, indeed, he appears to have determined on making up for what, in other important respects, had certainly not been lost time. Civil engineers have found and still find it to their advantage to consult him on points which are the special study and occupation of their lives. He has published three formidable volumes on the “Modern Theories of Physics.” A well-known book of his has appeared on sub-marine vessels of war. He has lectured on Political Economy and Geology with equal success. He is admitted by Spaniards to be the chief of their own mathematicians; they further claim for him the honour of being one of the first mathematicians in the world. He is an orator who has won the applause of Castelar himself. There were only wanting his labours as a poet and a dramatist to set the seal upon a career of almost universal aptitude. Those labours have earned for him a renown which will assuredly not be allowed to die in his own country.