FOREIGN DRAMA ON ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STAGE 1 55 



and happy wife of Don Julian, chances to cross the public square at 

 Madrid with Ernesto, an intimate friend of her husband. The tongue 

 of gossip begins at once to wag. At first all three are quite unconscious 

 that trouble is in store for them. We see them in their true light — 

 noble, pure and generous. But the effects of the slander, baseless as it 

 is, gradually make themselves felt. Powerless to resist the subtle 

 effects of the intangible poison, they succumb. The wretched husband 

 loses his reason and dies. Forsaken by their former friends, Teodora 

 and Ernesto are forced to seek refuge in each other. Out of their 

 common sufferings springs true love. Together they fly, to begin life 

 elsewhere anew. This is the barest outline of the play, which is 

 written with a prologue in prose and three acts in verse. The unique 

 feature of the play is that the moving force, the villain, as it were, is 

 not a person, but an invisible influence which pervades and penetrates 

 from beginning to end. We do not see this evil spirit as we do in The 

 Devil of Franz Molnar, where the Hungarian dramatist allows the 

 malign influence which wrecks the life of a man and woman to appear 

 to us in the person of Satan himself, dressed in modern garb quite like 

 other people, but with a touch of red here and there, and with his hair 

 brushed up into tiny horns on his head, so that he is thus a visible 

 evil genius. The play of Molnar is brilliant and clever. The con- 

 ception of Echegaray is perhaps more subtle. In the English version 

 it is an effective play in spite of the many liberties taken with it by 

 the adapter, the most unwarranted of which is the introduction of a 

 character not to be found in the Spanish original, a liberty, however, 

 which, it must be admitted, is skilfully taken, and suspected by no one 

 not familiar with the original. 



There remains but one other Spanish playwright to mention, 

 Angel Guimera (1847-). He writes in his native dialect, the 

 Catalan, and when his plays are transferred from Barcelona to Madrid 

 they have to be translated into Castilian. His best-known play is 

 Tierra Baja {The Low Country). This play was produced under the 

 direction of Mrs. Fiske about ten years ago, under the title of Marta 

 of the Lowlands. Mrs. Fiske herself for some reason did not appear 

 in the play and the part of the heroine was taken by the distinguished 



