The Fine
Old Spanish Drama Is Vanishing Day By Day.
The masterpieces of Lope and
Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe, have sunk
almost utterly into oblivion.
The stage is flooded with the washings of
the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations are worse.
The original plays produced by the geniuses of the Spanish Academy, for
which they are crowned and sonneted and pensioned, are of the kind upon
which we are told that gods and men and columns look austerely.
This infection of foreign manners has completely gained and now controls
what is called the best society of Madrid. A soiree in this circle is
like an evening in the corresponding grade of position in Paris or
Petersburg or New York in all external characteristics. The toilets are
by Worth; the beauties are coiffed by the deft fingers of Parisian
tiring-women; the men wear the penitential garb of Poole; the music is
by Gounod and Verdi; Strauss inspires the rushing waltzes, and the
married people walk through the quadrilles to the measures of Blue Beard
and Fair Helen, so suggestive of conjugal rights and duties. As for the
suppers, the trail of the Neapolitan serpent is over them all. Honest
eating is a lost art among the effete denizens of the Old World.
Tantalizing ices, crisped shapes of baked nothing, arid sandwiches, and
the feeblest of sugary punch, are the only supports exhausted nature
receives for the shock of the cotillon. I remember the stern reply of a
friend of mine when I asked him to go with me to a brilliant
reception, - "No!
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Words from 1644 to 1913
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