munity that they have unintentionally benefacted. This summary has been written purposely in terms that are abstract; and the reader will notice that thus formulated—it would be pertinent to a review of Get-Rich-Quick' Wallingford or of any of the twenty or thirty American comedies and farces that, in more recent years, have been written in emulation or in imitation of George M. Cohan's most celebrated play. Yet all of our American playwrights - following the lead of Mr. Cohan - have rendered a realistic treatment of this timeless story which has been passed down to our modern theatre from the ancient days of Plautus through the medium of Molière. They have all attempted to persuade the theatre-going public that this perennial plot is indigenous to America and peculiar to the present generation.

The result of this realistic treatment was inevitable. When Get-Rich-Quick' Wallingford was "revived," a few seasons ago, it failed dismally, because the public regarded it already as "out of date "; and none of our American plays of this type has sustained the test of being acted successfully in a foreign language overseas. The depiction of local life in the office of a small-town American hotel that was presented in the first act of Mr. Cohan's Wallingford was nothing less than masterly in sheer theatrical technique; but would this clever act, if translated into Spanish, be interesting to an audience in Madrid?

Yet The Bonds of Interest, when translated into English, was interesting to an audience in New York. The main reason is that Benavente in treating a

plot that has been traditional since Plautus - has sagely decided to set his story not in his native Spain but in an imaginary country; and the secondary reason is that, instead of attempting to restrict the project to the present period, he has preferred to launch it vaguely as a thing imagined to occur at the outset of the seventeenth century, when, as Rostand remarked in the initial stage direction of Les Romanesques, the costumes were pretty. By these simple expedients, the romantic Benavente succeeded in setting forth, so long ago as 1907, a play that has outlived already the many subsequent American elaborations of the same essential plot.

It must be said, however since an international comparison has unwittingly been instituted,— that our American playwrights easily surpass their Spanish rival in the desirable detail of a rapid rush of action. Benavente's comedy is elaborately literary and much too wordy for our taste. Our audience has not been trained, like the public of the Latin countries, to listen with approving patience to a lengthy drawing-out of lines.

The text of this play was translated into English by John Garrett Underhill, the foremost American scholar in the unfamiliar field of current Spanish literature and the official representative in this country of the Society of Spanish Authors. Mr. Underhill is a personal friend of Jacinto Benavente's, and his rendering of the text must be accepted as authoritative.

Most of our American plays seem pale and bloodless when compared with such a piece as La Malquerida,

a more emphatic composition by Jacinto Benavente,— which also was translated by John Garrett Underhill, and was presented under the altered title of The Passion Flower.

A young girl, Acacia, is about to be married to a young man, Faustino. On the eve of the wedding, Faustino is shot and killed from ambush. Suspicion is directed against Norbert, a former suitor of the girl; but Norbert is exonerated by the court when he has proved a faultless alibi. Slowly, by watching the gradual presentment of many little bits of evidence, we learn that the crime has actually been committed by a dastardly servant, Rubio, who had been hired to do the deed by Esteban, the step-father of Acacia herself. We wonder at Esteban's motive, and are ultimately shocked by the revelation that it arose from a guilty love for the girl, against which he long has vainly struggled. Esteban loves his step-daughter so intensely that he was more ready to procure the murder of her fiancé than to accept the possibility of her leaving his home. The girl herself has always repulsed the affectionate advances of Esteban, and has always felt jealous of him for having usurped the place of her dead father in the affections of her mother, Raimunda. But, in a terrible moment at the climax of the play, Acacia discovers that her imagined hatred for her step-father has merely resulted from a life-long repression of an over-mastering love for him. When this horrible revelation is made patent, Raimunda tries to come between her daughter and her husband; but the

guilty and befogged Esteban shoots her dead, and then gives himself up to the authorities.

La Malquerida is a play that deals with primitive passions; but these passions are analyzed by the author with a scientific insight that removes the drama from the bull-ring to the laboratory. It requires acting that shall be both powerful and subtle, both primordial and delicate. It is full of sound and fury, blood and sand. It offers a welcome contrast to the anæmic exhibitions that are customary in the current theatre of this country.

XX

UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIANS

Maxim Gorki's "Night Lodging "

Few statements are more silly than the usual assertion that human nature is the same the wide world over. The dog and the cat have different characters, though each of them is endowed with four legs and a tail; and we have lately learned that the psychology of the Germans is different from that of all the other races that walk upright on their rearward limbs. We shall never understand the Russians until we admit, in the first place, that human nature is not the same in Russia as it is in the United States. Mr. Kipling told us, long ago, that the Russians may be regarded either as the most eastern of western peoples or as the most western of eastern peoples. At any rate, they are not wholly of the Occident, as we are. When the Englishman is in trouble, he conceals his feelings, talks lightly of trivial matters that have nothing to do with the occasion, and resolutely "carries on." When the American is in trouble, he makes a joke of his difficulties and curses laughingly in the latest slang. When the Frenchman is in trouble, he analyzes his own situation clearly, arrives at a reasonable judgment from the facts, and then waves his hand aloft in a graceful ges