_Expressionism_ classifies the work of dramatists like Benavente, Molnar, and Capek. The methods used by the Spanish playwright to embody this principle are to “generalize” both the action and his characters, so that they become symbols of real life, appealing to the subjective element in readers. He has declared that, henceforth, he intends to write plays for publication and not for the theatre.... “The only way in which a play may be appreciated thoroughly is by being read,” he says. “I have written more than a thousand parts, yet of that number I can recall perhaps five which I have recognized as being truly the characters I had conceived, when they stepped upon the stage. I have not even seen some of my plays.”[155] This stress upon the futility of staging plays that should be interpreted by the reader’s own imagination and mind, is not unlike that by Maeterlinck, already noted in a previous chapter. Benavente not infrequently uses puppets in place of real characters to convey his inner meanings. Sometimes they are given real names but they are not the _true_ characters he wishes the reader to discover in them, as in the first scenes of _The Bonds of Interest_. In a brief parable-play, _The Magic of an Hour_,[156] he has two symbolic characters, “A Merveilleuse” and “An Incroyable,” two porcelain figures upon columns that converse about life and love, books and flowers, poetry and music. In this adroit, short comedy the author has interwoven some thoughts that express that peculiar idealism which is his, that contrast between weak humanity and the craving “for something which is not ourselves, and yet which is the breath of living.” The nearest approach to this ideal is love, which can transform, “by the magic of an hour,” evil, men-beasts, cowards, “devils in crime,” into “spirits of light, luminous with a divine wisdom through all instincts of the beast.”[157] In sentences of such groping faith, such idealism of the “inner eye,” scattered through the hundred and more plays by Jacinto Benavente, one may establish, in a measure, his right to the Nobel prize. With this is blended what Storm Jameson calls his “divine sanity.” On the score of literary achievement, he is an artist, versatile and sincere, delicate and yet vigorous in his workmanship. His plays vary in value for the student of drama; some of the later titles, like _A Pair of Shoes_ or _Doubtful Virtue_, indicate the types of psychological plays among Continental playwrights. In his finer, more characteristic plays, however, there are vital expressions of idealism. Mr. John Garrett Underhill (in a letter to the author of this book) says, “Benavente is an idealist of the highest type and his philosophy is best and most explicitly stated in _The School of Princesses_ and _Field of Ermine_--service and sacrifice.” FOOTNOTES: [147] Inscription with the Nobel Prize Award in Literature, 1904.