Jovellanos' «El delincuente honrado»

John H. R. Polt

University of California, Berkeley

Literary historians have been less than kind to Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos' El delincuente honrado (1773). A play enjoying a certain popularity in its author's time, it began to encounter severe criticism in the nineteenth century, although its humanitarianism continued to please¹; and more recently it has generally received only passing mention in broader discussions of Jovellanos, whose reputation admittedly rests on other, more solid bases. Its sentimentalism has made it a useful pawn in the game of finding «preromantics»; critics not engaged in this task have tended to believe with C. E. Kany that the play, «like most of [Jovellanos'] poetry, is mediocre, uninspired, and disappointing»². Such summary judgments, with vague references to the influences of Montesquieu and Diderot, cannot discharge the critic's obligation to a play which, in fact, is neither as novel as some would have it nor as devoid of interest as the majority seems to assume. At present, when interest in the period which gave birth to modern Spain seems to be increasing, a reexamination of El delincuente honrado may serve a clarifying purpose. The opinions repeated for more than a century should not be accepted un hesitatingly without analysis of the play as drama and as thought, without review and correlation of the circumstances surrounding its genesis, and without a new glance at the position of Jovellanos' work in the history of the Spanish stage. The remarks which follow are intended to provide some materials for such evaluation.

No better or more concise summary of the plot of El delincuente honrado could be devised than Ticknor's:

The play's five acts are in prose, with a fairly close adherence to the three unities of the neoclassic stage. The time of the play extends slightly over the limit of twenty-four hours: the first act begins at 7:15 a.m. (I.ii)⁴, the fifth at 11 a.m. on the following day (V.i). Unity of place is preserved within a liberal interpretation of the concept: the scenes of the various acts are laid in the Alcázar of Segovia, which served at that time partly as a military school and as a state prison⁵, and in which the corregidor, Torcuato's father-in-law, also resides with his family. These scenes are described in some detail, with indications as to the presence of furniture, books, etc., a significant concession to demands for greater realism on the stage, and one in keeping with the choice of a contemporary and well-known setting instead of the generalized hall or square of the strictest neoclassic tradition. The same attention to precision in detail is evident in Jovellanos' use of royal intervention and clemency. The king does not appear on the stage; he is, however, presumed to be at San Ildefonso, the summer quarters of the court and only two leagues from Segovia, making it possible to send two appeals to the monarch and to save the hero without greatly exceeding the limits of the unity of time⁶. Thus in outer form the play does not conform entirely to the standards either of neoclassicism or of the later Romantic drama; some liberties with the unities, as well as the precision of the setting, separate it from the former, while the number of acts and the relative adherence to unities separate it from the latter, and the contemporary setting, from both.

One need not go far into the play to find some of the peculiarities which delight the hunters for the «preromantic». There are melodramatic scenes such as the recognition of father and son in the gloom of the prison, the tearful pleas of Laura for the salvation of her husband, and the suspense of the characters who wait for the signal of Torcuato's execution as the successful Anselmo is speeding back to them with the royal commutation. A «música militar lúgubre» is to sound as Torcuato is led off to the scaffold (V.iii, 97b). This melodramatic and sentimental tone pervades the play from the very beginning, and tears are copiously shed by the characters⁷.

Torcuato himself, illegitimate son of an unknown father, orphaned of his mother, driven to the commission of an illegal act, forced to conceal his guilt from his wife, the widow of his victim-Torcuato, ready to tear himself from this wife to expiate his guilt, ready also to sacrifice his life to save that of Anselmo, is an easily recognizable precursor of the Romantic hero pursued by his adverse destiny, or, as Rivas would have it, by la fuerza del sino. From the beginning of the play it is obvious that he is legally guilty and morally blameless, compelled as he has been by a hostile fate (specifically, by his antagonist's intolerable allusions to his illegitimacy) to accept a duel. A genuine moral conflict within the character would have been conceivable before the duel, or in reaching the decision to abandon Laura after having married her; but Jovellanos, with scant regard for the motivation of this decision, ignores both dramatic possibilities. There is never the slightest doubt that Torcuato will do what he must. While bewailing the fate that tears him from his wife, he does not hesitate to leave her. When informed of Anselmo's sacrifice, he does not hesitate to confess his crime. And when he discovers that the judge who condemns him is his father (and the seducer of his mother), he cheerfully adjusts to this new revelation of his destiny.

In the meantime, Don Justo, the judge, has gradually realized that the accused is his son. Once again, Jovellanos' characterization eliminates all possibility of inner conflict: Justo has already been established as an incorruptible judge, humane and enlightened, but rigid in his adherence to duty. There is no question of a conflict in him between public obligation and paternal affection. Nor is there conflict between Justo and Torcuato. Neither is oriented toward the other; the rectitude of each is such that it precludes inner conflict and forces the character a priori to accept what fate (destiny, duty) has in store for him. Those motivations and affections which might give rise to conflict serve only to add pathos to the submission of the characters -a pathos which finds expression in sentimentality and tears. More than a conflict of motives, there is a juxtaposition of motives of which one is known to be dominant, its virtuousness enhanced by the inevitable sacrifice of the other. Thus the action of the play, as Ticknor summarizes it, is resolved into two irreconcilable pathetic situations; for a solution, Jovellanos is forced to resort to a deus (or rex) ex machina, since he has decided to allow Torcuato to survive. The dénouement is of course entirely extraneous to the plot; the pathetic situations of the characters have been achieved, the father (like Abraham) has in spirit sacrificed his son, and the end which the story may take is, for dramatic purposes, well-nigh irrelevant.

The basic conflict of the play must, however, be sought on a level entirely different from the sentimental one we have heretofore observed. Jovellanos establishes a contrast between two concepts of the law, embodied in the two magistrates, Don Justo and Don Simón, the corregidor. Don Justo is «un magistrado filósofo, esto es, ilustrado, virtuoso y humano», while Don Simón, «esclavo de las preocupaciones comunes, y dotado de un talento y de una instrucción limitados, aprueba sin conocimiento cuanto disponen las leyes, y reprueba sin examen cuanto es contrario a ellas.»⁸ In other words, Simón is unable to rise to a philosophic level on which he can judge not only individuals but also laws and institutions; his criteria are totally formalistic, and he accepts as valid whatever has been decreed by constituted authority. This position is in conflict with Justo's, since Justo not only judges individual guilt by legal standards, but also examines these standards themselves in the light of ethical principles. He is, therefore, both a minister and a critic of the society he serves; and through him Jovellanos expresses his demand for the adjustment of legal to ethical values. Don Simón is the foil to these opinions and consequently one of the major characters in the ideological struggle, although in the Torcuato-plot his role is secondary. His opinions and Justo's increase the piquancy of their situations. Simón finds that the man whose death he has so eagerly demanded is his son-in-law; Justo is forced to condemn his son in the name of a law which punishes alike the provoker and the provoked in a duel, and which, as a «magistrado filósofo», he considers unjust. Royal intervention supports Justos philosophy of law and the lesson which Simón has been forced to learn; but let us note that the king is not moved by reason, but by the pathetic plea of Torcuato's friend, Anselmo. In a most «Enlightened» fashion, royal sentimentality tempers royal rigor.

Although El delincuente honrado might in places seem Romantic, it would be a mistake simply to consider it an early appearance of the dramatic system of Hugo, Rivas, and Zorrilla. It had, in its time, an entirely different significance, which can be properly evaluated only by a review of the circumstances of its composition and some of its sources. Jovellanos wrote El delincuente honrado in 1773, about half-way in his ten-year sojourn as a magistrate in Seville. Prior to his arrival in 1768, he had received the first tonsure; he was, however, also learned in humane letters and devoted to the theater. In 1769 he wrote his patriotic tragedy, Pelayo; and as late as 1795 he was still active in the dramatic exercises of his students at the Real Instituto Asturiano⁹. By 1770 he had translated Racine's Iphigénie for performance at the Teatros Reales de los Sitios, recently founded by his protector Aranda and the scene for performances of Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, Marivaux, Destouches, etc.¹⁰, not to mention Molière, whose «divinos dramas» Jovellanos especially revered¹¹.

His attitude toward the national theater is somewhat ambiguous in 1777 he defends the productions of his countrymen from the attacks of a foreigner and expresses his esteem for Calderón, Moreto, Zamora, and Cañizares, blaming the degeneracy of the Spanish stage on the vulgar commercialism of its managers, the indifference of the government, and the rareness of that eighteenth-century shibboleth, «good taste»¹². In 1790, however, writing for the Academy of his own country and referring to the popular theater of the period, he asked:

Jovellanos thought of the theater as primarily an aristocratic pastime, an amusement for the idle rich, designed to instruct them and keep them from less desirable activities¹⁴.

That it was not always the most edifying of pastimes is clear from the account of a contemporary English traveller, who witnessed a performance of Moreto's El desdén con el desdén; accompanied by an entremés. «Between the comedy and the farce, tonadillas are sung: these are cantatas for two, three, or four voices, the music of which is national and uncommon.... After this performance there is usually a fandango danced on the stage»¹⁵. The theater in Seville in 1773 boasted sixty boxes; «I was there one evening: the actors were so extremely bad, that I could not get any person to accompany me thither, so that I soon quitted it, and repaired to the alameda»¹⁶. Cadiz at that time had three theaters: an Italian theater for the performance of opera, a French theater, «the most magnificent, and the best furnished with actors of any French theatre out of France», and a Spanish theater, in which was played a translation of Voltaire's Zaïre¹⁷. Such translations, especially popular in the royal theaters of the Sitios, catered to the neoclassic taste for French drama and opened for Jovellanos, as for any cultured amateur of his day, possibilities other than the imitation of the comedia. In the use which Jovellanos made of this liberty is to be seen the influence of his relationship with Pablo de Olavide.

The nature of these relations has been the subject of some controversy; in particular, Julio Somoza de Montsoriú, the eminent jovellanista, while admitting that Jovellanos attended Olavide's tertulia, heatedly denies that the two men were friends. They differed, he says, in age, in rank, in inclinations, education, and ideas¹⁸. Somoza's statement is of course at least partially correct, but one suspects that it may be an echo of the disputes concerning Jovellanos' religious orthodoxy. In their anxiousness to acquire Jovellanos, at least posthumously, as an adherent of their causes, the perpetually opposed ideological camps of nineteenth-century Spain resorted to quite liberal interpretations of every possible word of Jovellanos' which might lend credibility to their claims. They were consistently unwilling to view him as a figure, like Feijoo, dramatically astride the old and the new, balancing in uneasy truce the contradictions between faith and reason, between the calls of religion and patriotism and the ideals of the Enlightenment. It is necessary only to read the essays of the Carlist Cándido Nocedal in his editions of Jovellanos for the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles in order to see the lengths to which these polemics could go. For those who wished at all costs to catechize Jovellanos, dead or alive, it was of course necessary to minimize his connections with Olavide, whose chequered career led him into difficulties with the Inquisition in 1776. The facts, however, speak for themselves; and the names we wish to give them are of secondary importance.

Don Pablo de Olavide (1725-1803), born in Lima, was, during Jovellanos' stay in Seville, asistente of that city, then the greatest in Spain, with a population of more than 120,000¹⁹. His interest in the theater had begun in Lima, where it had also begun to bring him difficulties; in Seville, his position strengthened by an advantageous marriage, he continued to promote the drama, translating and acting in plays of Molière, Racine, Voltaire, and Sedaine (El desertor), as well as establishing an institution for the training of actors²⁰. During a visit to Paris he had won the friendship of such men as Voltaire²¹. Olavide was also the subject of a brief biographic sketch by no less an Encyclopedist than Denis Diderot, who gives us an interesting account of his friend's library: it included, we are told, the works of Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Jean-Jacques, the Dictionnaire of Bayle and the Encyclopédie, as well as translations of some of these works²². The possession and circulation of such books played an important part in the Inquisition's case against the asistente.

In Seville, Olavide maintained a regular tertulia, presumably at the Alcázar, where he lived «with the splendor of a prince»²³. Ceán Bermúdez, Jovellanos' friend, writing shortly after his death and certainly no hostile witness, describes the impact of these gatherings on Don Gaspar. Seville, he says,

Jovellanos' colleague, Martín de Ulloa, was also one who «contribuyó mucho, en honor de la verdad, a su ilustración» (p. 15).

We can easily imagine what this «ilustración» consisted of. When Jovellanos came to Seville, he found himself in a position of some importance which was thrust on him rather suddenly. He was accepted in the brilliant home of Olavide; and this transplanted colonial, nineteen years his elder, open to the most advanced (and dangerous) philosophical currents of his time, and enjoying the friendship and esteem of the intellectual titans of what passed for the most civilized nation in Europe, must have made a considerable impression on the young provincial fresh from the universities, the best of which were in eighteenth-century Spain in a lamentable state. And so in Olavide's company Jovellanos came to know «obras y autores extranjeros, que por ser nuevos no había visto»: Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, the Encyclopedia, and all the bright array of the French and English Enlightenment. A critic as friendly to Jovellanos and as hostile to the philosophes as Menéndez y Pelayo calls him the «íntimo amigo de Cabarrús y de Olavide»²⁴, and there can be little doubt as to the intellectual position of either. The works of Voltaire were for bidden in toto by the Inquisition of Toledo in 1762, this prohibition extending even to those who had dispensation to read forbidden books; although by one of those curious quirks of the censorial mind, translations of his plays were tolerated if the author's name was not mentioned²⁵. Olavide translated Voltaire as well as Le Déserteur; his enthusiasm for the French theater may well have been communicated to Jovellanos, who translated Racine in 1770. Among the other items from Olavide's library, the Encyclopédie was on the Index (since 1758), as were L'Esprit des lois (since 1751) and Bayle's Dictionnaire (since 1700). And lest one be tempted to dissociate Jovellanos from these tendencies of Olavide's, let us remember that his own Delincuente honrado ends with a quotation from Beccaria's Dei delitti e delle pene, on the Index since 1766, and that he read with evident approval Rousseau's Emile, prohibited in 1762²⁶. Regardless, therefore, of whether Jovellanos and Olavide were friends in every sense of the word, the influence of the latter is in disputable and probably considerable. It seems more than likely that from him and his circle Jovellanos received his introduction to the thought of the Enlightenment, as well as to its favorite artists and artistic forms. It is in this milieu that he composed El delincuente honrado.

Jovellanos himself, in a preface to the 1787 edition of his play, writes: «Una disputa literaria, suscitada en cierta tertulia de Sevilla a principios del año de 1773, produjo la comedia que ahora damos a luz» (BAE, XLVI, 77). For further details, we must turn once more to Ceán, who clarifies this passage:

As an afterthought to the last sentence, Ceán exclaims: «¡Pero cuántos de éstos nos han introducido los franceses!» According to Jovellanos, the purpose of his play is «descubrir la dureza de las leyes, que, sin distinción de provocado y provocante, castigan a los duelistas con pena capital» (BAE, XLVI, 79). But the play is also an exercise in a new genre, and an exercise intended for private perusal. Jovellanos did not intend his work for the public; the implied criticism of the decrees and policies of the reigning sovereign makes this all the more evident.

As to the genre of his work, Jovellanos hesitates. In his 1787 preface, he calls it a comedia; but later he qualifies this term:

Comedia tierna and drama sentimental are here equivalents. Earlier, Jovellanos had already called the work a drama, echoing the abbé de Valchrétien, who calls it drame (BAE, XLVI, 78-79). Jovellanos was experimenting with what he considered a new genre; along with everyone else, he recognized its novelty and seemed somewhat at a loss when the question of classification, so important to his contemporaries, arose. Sempere y Guarinos refers to El delincuente honrado as the first Spanish example of a comedy «de las que llaman lastimosas»; Martínez de la Rosa calls it a «comedia sentimental» or «llorona»²⁸ L. F. de Moratín considers it a tragicomedia²⁹. But Spaniards were not the only ones to be puzzled by the new theatrical phenomenon which seemed to grow out of nowhere to disturb the neat categories of the eighteenth century. Voltaire himself, while quite aware of the nature of the changes, was far from consistent in his attitude toward them, using his critical opinions as weapons in personal feuds³⁰. And one of the innovators in France, Fenouillot de Falbaire, makes the astounding statement that his Honnête Criminel is of a genre «entre la Comédie sérieuse & la Tragédie, ou plutôt c'est une vraie Tragédie bourgeoise dont le dénouement est heureux»³¹. In the midst of this apparent confusion, a new glance at Jovellanos' work and some possible French sources will show that it fits comfortably within the eighteenth-century drame, a genre defined by Gaiffe as «un spectacle destiné à un auditoire bourgeois ou populaire et lui présentant un tableau attendrissant et moral de son propre milieu» (p. 93).

We know precisely the audience for which El delincuente honrado was intended, the tertulia of Olavide, composed of a Sevillan officialdom which could well see «son propre milieu» depicted in Jovellanos play. The sentimental and moral qualities of the work have already been noted; it must, however, be remembered that the entire moral -or moralizing- direction which Jovellanos gives it forms part of a concept of theater which he holds in common with his French models. In his Memoria para el arreglo de la policía de los espectáculos y diversiones públicas, y sobre su origen en España, Jovellanos develops his concept of the theater as being essentially a pastime for the aristocracy or the idle rich; but the pastime itself is to be far from idle. What is it that Jovellanos wants in a play? The answer sounds, with rare exceptions, like a program for the production of more Delincuentes: reverence for the «Ser Supremo», and for the established religion, love of sovereign, country, and constitution, respect for ranks, laws, and authorities, conjugal fidelity, paternal love, filial tenderness and obedience, good and magnanimous princes, humane and incorruptible magistrates, virtuous and patriotic citizens, prudent and zealous patres familias, faithful and constant friends -«en una palabra, hombres heroicos y esforzados, amantes del bien público, celosos de su libertad y sus derechos, y protectores de la inocencia y acérrimos perseguidores de la iniquidad»³².

This «moral purpose» of drama is not in itself new; it is merely the utile dulci of generations of apologists for art. But the importance given to the «useful» element in the play itself is in keeping with a recognizable trend in latter eighteenth-century literature. Whereas in many a classical and neoclassic play the usefulness could be found only by a trained and not overly-scrupulous eye, in the newer works it is all too evident; the sweetness becomes the elusive quality. Already in the tragedies of Voltaire, «la recherche de l'utilité morale et sociale tend à supplanter le souci de la beauté artistique»³³; and among the drames, each teaches some salutary truth, «et l'on se rend compte bien vite que l'enseignement ne s'ajoute pas à l'œuvre d'art pour en augmenter la valeur, mais qu'il en est la raison d'être et le but final»³⁴. The moral lesson does not derive naturally from the characters and events but is expounded by the characters, making the play «une conférence dialoguée.»³⁵ This is true of much of the discussion of legislation and the administration of justice which lies near the didactic core of Jovellanos' play. What could serve as an illustration of the author's thesis -the situation of Torcuato torn between honor and civic duty and forced eventually to accept a duel- is not presented on the stage. It forms only the antecedents of the play, made known through lifeless narration. Of course the actual staging of such events would make it necessary to abandon at least the unity of time; as it is, the genuine drama of Torcuato is already past, and the play can only discuss what is to be done with him. The drama ceases to be human and becomes legal. This sacrifice of dramatic potential does not necessarily indicate a lack of dramatic talent, but it reinforces the view that what interested Jovellanos was precisely the legal-philosophical aspect of his story.

We have noted above Jovellanos' concept of the function of comedy, the last lines textually paralleling this passage in Diderot's Entretiens sur le Fils naturel: «DORVAL: Pour juger sainement, expliquons-nous. Quel est l'objet d'une composition dramatique? MOI: C'est, je crois, d'inspirer aux hommes l'amour de la vertu, l'horreur du vice [...]»³⁶. That Jovellanos should be directly acquainted with the work of Diderot is more than likely; entirely apart from the latter's European reputation, the connection Jovellanos-Olavide-Diderot is a highly suggestive one. Proof is not confined to verbal coincidences but is found at the very heart of Jovellanos' dramatic structure. There is not only a superficial resemblance between El delincuente honrado and Le Fils naturel, often and loosely mentioned together; both are, in fact, applications of Diderot's dramatic theories on what he calls le genre sérieux. This new genre is also to have its «rules»: it is to deal with an important subject in a simple, domestic, and realistic plot. No use is to be made of valets for the furtherance of the action. Laughter and coups de théâtre are frowned on; pantomime and tableaux are recommended -and, «que votre morale soit générale et forte»³⁷. On almost every point, Jovellanos' play complies with this view of the genre. We may question the simplicity of his plot; but we must grant him success in every other respect, especially in the avoidance of the comic and in the reliance on pantomime and tableaux. The movements of Torcuato in the first act, indicative of his troubled state of mind; the tears; the groupings and movements of characters in the fourth and fifth acts, with Torcuato in chains, in the dark prison area; the pleas and posturings of Laura; and the final release and embraces -all develop plot through action, movement, pantomime, and set up scenes designed to be visually impressive: tableaux. Jovellanos seems actually to have taken the lesson too much to heart; his French translator, the abbé de Valchrétien, writes him that «à raison de nos usages particuliers et de notre extrême délicatesse, j'ai été obligé de changer une grande partie de pantomime dans le cinquième acte. Le dénouement ne seroit pas assez rapide sur notre scène, et languiroit trop: votre pièce est trop bonne pour lui laisser aucun défaut»³⁸.

Diderot's preference for condition rather than character as the fitting subject for «comedy» is well known; he is particularly intrigued by the dramatic possibilities of the judge:

Don Justo seems made to comply with Diderot's request; his conflict is precisely that envisaged by the latter: the human emotions of the man opposed by the sacred obligations of the judge. Justo lives fully his social role, his condition, that of judge; hence the poignancy of his being compelled to condemn his own long-lost son. But the same importance of condition is also to be found in the characterization of Torcuato, with a slightly more complex grouping of roles: husband, friend, virtuous citizen, and criminal. The play's title indicates at once that the conflict of the play rests on the paradoxical nature of this combination. From this may stem also the difficulty of forming any clear concept of the characters, a difficulty already experienced by the abbé de Valchrétien (BAE, XLVI, 78-79). The characters do not seem to have any core of personality; rather they slip suddenly and sharply from one role into another, always fitting perfectly the preconceived norms of that role. Their personalities have facets, but no depth; like the title, they remain at the stage of unresolved paradox. It would seem that Jovellanos, moving from the abstract plane to the concrete, set up opposing concepts (husband, judge, father, etc.) and gave them names, rather than imagining the person and moving outward from a well-defined personality. The modern reader, always interested in psychological penetration, will find this unsatisfactory; Jovellanos' audience, far less interested in psychology than in the sociology that passed as «philosophy», apparently approved. Once more, what may to us seem a defect in the play should rather be viewed as conscious conformity with a dramatic theory, Diderot's⁴⁰.

Of Diderot's dramatic productions, Le Fils naturel (1757) is that most frequently mentioned in connection with Jovellanos, and justifiably so. The two plays have in common a sentimental, tearful tone, and a conviction on the part of the protagonist that he is the victim of an adverse destiny⁴¹. In both plays we find a pair of close friends (Torcuato-Anselmo, Dorval-Clairville), a duel forced by insulting comments (though this is not an issue for Diderot), and bastardy, though in the French play father and son already know each other and in the Spanish they do not. More specifically, Jovellanos' opening scenes strongly recall Diderot's, in which Dorval decides to leave early in the morning because of his guilty love for Rosalie. Torcuato plans a similar escape because of the guilty secret of the duel. Each character pretends to have pressing financial matters to attend to, one in Paris, the other in Madrid. Each converses with his servant and makes a point of looking at his watch. For Dorval, matters are complicated by Constance, a young widow who, like Laura, had «éprouvé tous les malheurs des nœuds mal assortis» (I.iv). These resemblances, in view of what we already know of Jovellanos' adherence to Diderot's dramatic theories, are too obvious to be the result of chance.

Another drame which is spoken of in connection with El delincuente honrado is Sedaine's Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765)⁴², the plot of which also centers around an illegal duel forced on a character by the laws of honor. Sedaine, however, unlike Jovellanos, has known how to case this circumstance not only for purposes of social propaganda (i. e., to laud the moral nobility of the merchant Vanderk), but also to exploit to the full the dramatic possibilities of the duel for Vanderk père and Vanderk fils. We witness the emotions of the characters before the duel, the anguish of the father during the time of the duel, and, finally, the unexpectedly happy solution. A technical detail of this surprise ending may well have been in Jovellanos' mind when he wrote his Delincuente: knocks on the door of Vanderk père, the prearranged signal to indicate his son's death, convince him that the duel has had the worst possible outcome; soon thereafter, however, the son enters, and it is disclosed that the servant who reported his death had, in his excitement, failed to observe accurately all that was happening on the «field of honor». Similarly, in El delincuente honrado, Torcuato is led off to be executed; and the shouts of the crowd and the ringing of the bell convince the assembled characters that he has died. All the greater, therefore, are their surprise and delight when he reappears and it is found that the bell has been rung by mistake, the ringer misinterpreting the crowd's agitation at the arrival of Don Anselmo with the royal commutation (V.v, 98b).

The attitude toward the duel and legislation affecting it is also much the same in the two works, and at times is expressed in strikingly similar language. Let us compare some pertinent passages: Vanderk père, informed of his son's plans, recognizes the justification for his position: «Je suis bien loin de vous détourner de ce que vous avez à faire. Vous êtes militaire, et quand on a pris un engagement vis-à-vis du public, on doit le soutenir, quoiqu'il en coûte à la raison, et même à la nature»⁴³. With a similar concept of the importance of honor, derived no doubt from Montesquieu, Torcuato attempts to justify duelling in the eyes of his father-in-law:

The third French work that has been most frequently mentioned in connection with El delincuente honrado is Fenouillot de Falbaire's L'Honnête Criminel (1767)⁴⁵. Jovellanos may have been familiar with this play also, especially since it was a literary repercussion of the Jean Calas case, of which he must have been aware. Like Torcuato, Falbaire's characters feel themselves persecuted by an adverse fate; as in El delincuente honrado, there is much praise of virtue and condemnation of a false sense of honor, with the addition of attacks on hereditary nobility which Jovellanos did not permit himself. L'Honnête Criminel deals with a young Huguenot, André, who has replaced his father in the galleys and thus suffers the penalty for a crime of which he is morally and legally innocent. In this he differs from Torcuato, who, in law, is guilty of the crime for which he is to be executed. André's father, who has long been searching for him, finds him and proclaims his innocence; in this recognition, the role of the father is a liberating one, quite different from Don Justo's in El delincuente. The old man, however, is also morally blameless, for the law under which he has been condemned is an unjust one; and since he, too, must now be saved, Falbaire resorts, like Jovellanos, to an outside force: a pardon is obtained with the expectation that the king will ratify it. These details, together with the similarity of titles, may indicate a direct relationship between the two plays; but they are not conclusive⁴⁶.

Two other French drames of this period, however, offer much greater possibilities, though they are scarcely taken into account in discussions of El delincuente honrado⁴⁷. The first of these is Sedaine's Le Déserteur (1769), a three-act work in prose with verse ariettes. Here Alexis, in order to escape a life made unbearable by the supposed marriage of his fiancée, admits to a crime (desertion) which he has not committed. After prison scenes, in which the pathos of Alexis' situation is contrasted with the clowning of his drunken cell-mate, Louise, the fiancée, determines to seek Alexis' pardon from the king, who happens to be in the vicinity. Alexis is led out to execution and is saved at the last possible moment by the arrival of the royal letter of clemency. While this play differs in important respects from El delincuente honrado, it deals with some of the same themes and coincides with it in the ending. If it was translated by Olavide, Jovellanos must have known it (see note 20).

The other drame in question is Mercier's Le Déserteur (1770), in which Durimel, who had deserted after extreme provocation, is arrested on the eve of his marriage to Clary. His father, Saint-Franc, who had long served overseas, recognizes him; Saint-Franc is the officer in charge of executing deserters. Durimel is not, like Torcuato, illegitimate; the effect of the recognition under peculiarly painful circumstances is much the same as in El delincuente, however. Like Torcuato, Durimel is a victim of fate: «DURIMEL, après avoir soupiré. A moi, quelque chose d'heureux! -Ah! Madame!... je ne m'en flatte plus»⁴⁸. Informed of his crime, Clary, like Laura under similar circumstances, determines to save him⁴⁹. The scene of recognition in which Saint-Franc reveals himself to his son must be read against the corresponding scene in Jovellanos' play:

Saint-Franc proceeds to console his son by assuring him that his soul will fly directly to God, a motif which is also used by Jovellanos:

Like Don Justo, Saint-Franc is faced by a conflict between duty and paternal love, made the more arduous for him by the shameful treatment he receives in his regiment. Mercier exploits the possibilities of this conflict more than does Jovellanos; there is some doubt as to whether Saint Franc will avail himself of the opportunity to escape with his son, although he determines finally to sacrifice Durimel, cheering himself with the assurance that the example of his death will do more good than could his life. In a pathetic scene, Clary tells Durimel her dream of obtaining a pardon from «ton Roi, de ce Roi que tu m'as dit si aimé, si bienfaisant» (V.i). But while the possibility of royal pardon is thus hinted at, it is not realized; and Durimel is led out to execution. As in all these plays, no bloodshed is to take place on stage. Drumbeats and shots are heard from off-stage, announcing, like the knocks of Le Philosophe and the bell of El delincuente, the death of the victim. Mercier, however, is not willing to rescue Durimel; and the hero dies.

It will be seen that the correspondence between Mercier's play and Jovellanos' is extremely close in the general outline of plot, in the wording of at least one scene, in some details, and in the dual roles assigned to the two chief characters (morally innocent criminal, father-judge). It is true that Durimel is apparently the legitimate son of Saint-Franc; but the recognition motif is the same, in keeping with the preference of a whole school of playwrights for the «mystère d'état civil»⁵⁰. The fact that Durimel is killed while Torcuato is not is of little importance; we have, already seen that Jovellanos' ending, with its recourse to a solution outside the drama, is largely irrelevant. In fact, the difference, rather than being an argument against the utilization of Mercier's drame, is an element of proof for Jovellanos' knowledge of Sedaine's Déserteur, where exactly the same device is used to save the hero. The two plays complement each other as sources for El delincuente honrado; in combination with Le Philosophe sans le savior, Le Fils naturel, and L'Honnête Criminel, they provide us with highly plausible antecedents not only for the general tone of Jovellanos' play, but also for the structure and development of the plot. The only major aspect of the play for which these sources do not entirely account is the role played by Torcuato's faithful friend, Anselmo, unless one accept Andre's self-sacrifice in L'Honnête Criminel as its prototype.

Jovellanos thus followed the dramatic theories of Diderot and borrowed heavily for his own work from Diderot's most famous drame and from the works of others who, directly or indirectly, acknowledged Diderot as their master⁵¹. We can be the more certain of this in view of what we know of Jovellanos' relations with Olavide and of the latter's ideas, literary activities, and readings. Among these readings was an author whose influence is noticeable in the authors of drames and the encyclopédistes as well as in Jovellanos: Montesquieu.

Jovellanos read Montesquieu in his youth⁵², and while in Seville «tradujo en verso del francés un idilio de Mr. de Montesquieu»⁵³. The new approach to the study and interpretation of laws which the Frenchman had advocated is reflected in El delincuente honrado, where Torcuato tells Don Simón: «Los más de nuestros autores se han copiado unos a otros, y apenas hay dos que hayan trabajado seriamente en descubrir el espíritu de nuestras leyes»⁵⁴. In his discussions of honor, Jovellanos makes the same distinctions as Montesquieu: there is a «true» honor consisting of virtue and fulfillment of duty, and a «false» honor, «una quimera», «un préjugé que la religion travaille tantôt à détruire, tantôt à régler»⁵⁵. Nevertheless the «false» honor is socially useful, and it is the governing principle in a monarchy⁵⁶. The demands of this honor must therefore be complied with, all the more rigorously when they are not in accord with the laws. This is the position taken by Montesquieu (IV.ii) and exemplified by Jovellanos in the situation of his Torcuato. The law in this case, designed to remedy the abuses of honor, is itself an evil; the harshness of the punishments it imposes is a greater evil than the abuses it is to correct⁵⁷. Jovellanos views it against the background of education, climate, customs, constitution, and «el genio nacional», finding it unjust because it does not correspond to them (IV.vi, 95a-b). His attitude is essentially Montesquieu's: the punishment must not only «fit the crime», but the definitions of «crime» and «punishment» must fit the human beings with whom they are ultimately concerned. For Jovellanos, the legislation on duels conflicts with the needs of the state; it undermines the principle of honor which it should protect and foment (I.v, 85b). In this predicament, he resorts to royal clemency as a solution for his protagonist, a solution foreseen by Montesquieu: «Dans les monarchies, où l'on est gouverné par l'honneur, qui souvent exige ce que la loi défend, elle [la clémence] est plus nécessaire» (VI.xxi). The figure of the king in El delincuente honrado is that envisaged by Montesquieu: the supreme arbiter, not above the law, but using his constitutional prerogatives to temper the harshness of the law and to reconcile judicial exactness and impartiality with concern for human values and motives. He is the father of his people; «une preuve qu'on l'aime, c'est que l'on a de la confiance en lui, et que, lorsqu'un ministre refuse, on s'imagine toujours que le prince auroit accordé. Même dans les calamités publiques, on n'accuse point sa personne; on se plaint de ce qu'il ignore, ou de ce qu'il est obsédé par des gens corrompus. Si le prince savoit! dit le peuple» (XII.xxiii). Jovellanos' Don Justo, when his petition for clemency has been refused, takes exactly this attitude: «¡No sólo aprueban su muerte, sino que quieren también atropellarla! [...] No; al Soberano le han engañado. ¡Ah! Si hubiera oído mis razones, ¿cómo pudiera negarse su piadoso ánimo a la defensa de un inocente?» (IV.vii, 96a).

The idea of judicial torture elicits from Jovellanos a genuine eloquence, paralleling one of Montesquieu's most moving passages: «¡La tortura!.. ¡Oh nombre odioso! ¡Nombre funesto! ¿Es posible que en un siglo en que se respetó la humanidad y en que la filosofía derrama su luz por todas partes, se escuchen aún entre nosotros los gritos de la inocencia oprimida?»⁵⁸ One could compare other passages in the two authors; but Jovellanos' most important debt to Montesquieu is the least easily documentable yet all-pervading one of a humanitarian view of laws and crimes, of the recognition that each new law, however praiseworthy in itself, must itself be judged in the context of an historical process. Customs, climate, the laws of the past-history shapes the character of a people, and it is folly and injustice to attempt a sudden and violent change, even for the better. This spirit of moderation informs Jovellanos' other writings as well. It separates him both from radical innovators and from reactionaries; because of it he was a man without a party in his lifetime and a center of controversy then and thereafter.

In the preceding pages we have attempted to review the nature of Jovellanos' play, its sources, and the circumstances of its composition. To survey fully its fate after 1773 would exceed the scope of the present article; suffice it to say that the work enjoyed numerous performances, editions, and translations until the triumphant Romantic theater swept it from public favor⁵⁹. From the above it will have become clear that El delincuente honrado corresponds very closely to a specific period in the intellectual and literary history of Western Europe, a period of optimism in which Reason, guided by a sentimental compassion for the misfortunes of men, was deemed a sufficient tool for the betterment of the world. Literature was to play its part in this saving enlightenment, and its aims were social rather than esthetic. Neither Diderot nor most of his followers had any real quarrel with the dramatic unities⁶⁰; they were less concerned with the superficialities of the theater than with the realities of life as they saw it. The same is true of Jovellanos, whom we can count among the followers of. Diderot. He experiments with a «género espurio»; he takes liberties -tame enough, to be sure- with the unities; and he fills his play with melodramatic contrasts, with tears, with sentimental victims of fate, and with the other stock-in-trade of Romanticism. But for such externals the Romantic dramatists had far more brilliant models in their French contemporaries. The essentially revolutionary aspect of El delincuente, that which sharply distinguishes it from the neoclassic drama, also differentiates it from the Romantic theater. This is its basically social orientation. The revolution of the Romantics was an esthetic one, specifically directed against the canons of the eighteenth century stage; the intellectual or philosophic content of its plays is negligible or at best vague. The Romantic drama is art for art's sake, just as the neoclassic tragedies are, albeit by different standards. If we seek in the nineteenth century an equivalent of Jovellanos' social drama, we must seek not among the Romantics, but among the realists of the latter half of the century, among such writers as López de Ayala with his «alta comedia», and Tamayo y Baus. It is there that we find again the concern with contemporary social problems in a contemporary setting, the realism in details of presentation, the view of man in society, and the mixture of sentimentality and moralizing that we have noted in El delincuente honrado. There, and not in the passions, the lyricism, the individualism, and the medievalism of Rivas, of Hartzenbusch, of Zorrilla. Jovellanos' play is not, therefore, the ancestor of the Romantic theater; it is both less and more. Like the French drames with which it must be grouped, it belongs to a school without direct posterity⁶¹; like them, it retains considerable interest as an experiment in a freer theater with social implications. It also retains its interest as a literary expression of Jovellanos' thought, of a moment in a life dedicated to the achievement of a better Spain and torn between the promise of the new and the affection for the old.