"What touches us more closely is Echegaray's manipulation of the modern conscience, and its illimitable scope for reflection, for conflict, and the many-sided drama of temptation.... Not even Tolstoi, with all that delicacy and keenness of the Russian conscience, that profound seriousness, which moves us so variously in his great books, has a nobler consciousness of the dignity of suffering and virtue than this Spanish dramatist. And not less capable is he of a jesting survey of life." Echegaray won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1904. This play was made into movies several times in both its original Spanish and in English.