of life in the region of the Mediterranean. The first thought
when one gets up is to go out of doors to see what people are talking
of, the last thing before going to bed is to chat with the neighbors
about the events of the day. The home, cloistered off, exclusive, can
hardly be said to exist. Instead of the nordic hearth there is the
courtyard about which the women sit while the men are away at the
marketplace. In Spain this social life centers in the cafe and the
casino. The modern theatre is as directly the offshoot of the cafe as
the old theatre was of the marketplace where people gathered in front
of the church porch to see an interlude or mystery acted by travelling
players in a wagon. The people who write the plays, the people who act
them and the people who see them spend their spare time smoking about
marbletop tables, drinking coffee, discussing. Those too poor to buy a
drink stand outside in groups the sunny side of squares. Constant talk
about everything that may happen or had happened or will happen manages
to butter the bread of life pretty evenly with passion and thought and
significance, but one loses the chunks of intensity. There is little
chance for the burst dams that suddenly flood the dry watercourse of
emotion among more inhibited, less civilized people. Generations upon
generations of townsmen have made of life a well-dredged canal,
easy-flowing, somewhat shallow.

It follows that the theatre under such conditions shall be talkative,
witty, full of neat swift caricaturing, improvised, unselfconscious; at
its worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate strain almost
never. In Echegaray there are hecatombs, half the characters habitually
go insane in the last act; tremendous barking but no bite of real
intensity. Benavente has recaptured some of Lope de Vega's marvellous
quality of adventurous progression. The Quinteros write domestic
comedies full of whim and sparkle and tenderness. But expression always
seems too easy; there is never the unbearable tension, the utter
self-forgetfulness of the greatest drama. The Spanish theatre plays on
the nerves and intellect rather than on the great harpstrings of
emotion in which all of life is drawn taut.

At present in Madrid even cafe life is receding before the exigencies
of business and the hardly excusable mania for imitating English and
American manners. Spain is undergoing great changes in its relation to
the rest of Europe, to Latin America,