[Footnote F: J. Ernest-Charles,ñaClarinesyMañ in _L'Opinion_, Dec. 2, 1911: "Tristan Bernard et Michel Corday nous conduisent une fois de plus dans ce monde complètement amoral qui est presque le seul que l'on soit admis à fréquenter au théâtre."]
In the later plays of the Quinteros one notices an increasing eagerness to impress the beauty of vigorous, right-minded living upon the audience. One must be frank, and say that the most successful plays are those in which the moral is best concealed. They do not always escape the pitfall of bourgeois sentimentality.
In dramatic technic the Quinteros and Jacinto Benavente have introduced in Spain an important change. The drama is the one literary genre in which one looks for action in abundance, for one-piece characters, intrigue, surprise, conflict of passions, climax, then the solution of the knot. Otherwise, of course, the drama is not dramatic. Scribe and Sardou are the arch effectivists, who harrow the spectators' feelings by sheer cleverness or brutality, and so induce him to forget that what he is witnessing is not life. In modern Spain, Echegaray has not disdained the coincidences, duels and other stage effects of this school, combining them with the moral or social problem of Ibsen. Benavente and the Quinteros have sought to discard all factitious devices, and to arouse interest solely by means of natural dialog, suggestive charm, color and accurate characterization. The eternal struggle in art between exact copying of nature and artificial selection and arrangement has swayed to the former side, perhaps farther than was ever before seen in the literature of the stage. Plot is always secondary with these writers, and in fact many of their plays could be denominated speaking tableaux of life better than dramas in the conventional sense. The Quinteros themselves define their theory: "El interés subsistirá por sencilla que sea la acción que se forje, siempre que haya un poco de arte en la composición. No estribe el interés en _lo que pasará_, sino en _lo que pasa_. El ideal sería que el público, durante la representación de (nuestras) obras, llegara a olvidarse de que se hallaba, en el teatro." (_El patio_, p. 71.) Intrigue is to be replaced, then, by marvelous rendering of atmosphere and states of character, just as Velázquez rendered planes in _Las meninas_. The personages unfold themselves before us in their natural environment, and we merely observe, like the limping devil, what takes place within their homes.