in its own internal structure.
Notwithstanding Madrid's wartime growth and prosperity, the city is
fast losing ground as the nucleus of the life and thought of
Spanish-speaking people. The _madrileno_, lean, cynical, unscrupulous,
nocturnal, explosive with a curious sort of febrile wit is becoming
extinct. His theatre is beginning to pander to foreign tastes, to be
ashamed of itself, to take on respectability and stodginess. Prices of
seats, up to 1918 very low, rise continually; the artisans, apprentice
boys, loafers, clerks, porters, who formed the backbone of the
audiences can no longer afford the theatre and have taken to the movies
instead. Managers spend money on scenery and costumes as a way of
attracting fashionables. It has become quite proper for women to go to
the theatre. Benavente's plays thus acquire double significance as the
summing up and the chief expression of a movement that has reached its
hey-day, from which the sap has already been cut off. It is, indeed,
the thing to disparage them for their very finest quality, the
vividness with which they express the texture of Madrid, the animated
humorous mordant conversation about cafe tables: _lo castizo_.

The first play of his I ever saw, "_Gente Conocida_," impressed me, I
remember, at a time when I understood about one word in ten and had to
content myself with following the general modulation of things, as
carrying on to the stage, the moment the curtain rose, the very people,
intonations, phrases, that were stirring in the seats about me. After
the first act a broad-bosomed lady in black silk leaned back in the
seat beside me sighing comfortably "_Que castizo es este Benavente_,"
and then went into a volley of approving chirpings. The full import of
her enthusiasm did not come to me until much later when I read the play
in the comparative light of a surer knowledge of Castilian, and found
that it was a most vitriolic dissecting of the manner of life of that
very dowager's own circle, a showing up of the predatory spite of
"people of consequence." Here was this society woman, who in any other
country would have been indignant, enjoying the annihilation of her
kind. On such willingness to play the game of wit, even of abuse,
without too much rancor, which is the unction to ease of social
intercourse, is founded all the popularity of Benavente's writing.
Somewhere in Hugo's Spanish grammar (God save the mark!) is a proverb
to the effect that the wind of