Lope de Vega, as I have tried to persuade you in a previous lecture, may fairly be regarded as the real founder of the national theatre in Spain. His victory was complete, and the old-fashioned Senecan drama was everywhere supplanted by the comedia nueva in which the ‘unities’ were neglected. Playwrights who could no longer get their pieces produced took great pains to prove that Lope ought to have failed, and dwelt upon the enormity of his anachronisms and geographical blunders. These groans of the defeated are always with us. Just as the pedant clamours for Shakespeare’s head on a charger, because he chose to place a seaport in Bohemia, so AndrÉs Rey de Artieda, in his Discursos, epÍstolas y epigramas, published under the pseudonym of Artemidoro in 1605, is indignant at the triumph of ignorant incapacity:—

The meaning of this little outburst is quite simple: it means that Rey de Artieda was no longer popular at Valencia, and that he and his fellows had had to make way on the Valencian stage for such followers of Lope de Vega as Francisco TÁrrega, Gaspar de Aguilar, GuillÉn de Castro and Miguel Beneyto—all members of the Valencian Academia de los nocturnos, in which they were known respectively as ‘Miedo,’ ‘Sombra,’ ‘Secreto’ and ‘Sosiego.’

A very similar denunciation of the new school was published by a much greater writer in the same year. Cervantes ridiculed the comedia nueva as a pack of nonsense without either head or tail—conocidos disparates y cosas que no llevan pies ni cabeza; yet he dolefully admits that ‘the public hears them with pleasure, and esteems and approves them as good, though they are far from being anything of the sort.’ The long diatribe put into the mouth of the canon in Don Quixote is the plaint of a beaten man who calls for a literary dictatorship, or some such desperate remedy, to save him from Lope and the revolution. Whether Cervantes changed his views on the merits of the question, or whether he merely bowed to circumstances, we cannot say. But he tacitly recanted in El RufiÁn dichoso, and even defended the new methods as improvements on the old:—

Passing from theory to practice, Cervantes appeared as a very unsuccessful imitator of Lope de Vega in La Casa de los Celos Ó las Selvas de Ardenio. The dictatorship for which he asked had come, but the dictator was Lope.

All Spanish dramatists of this period came under Lope’s influence. He was even more supreme in Madrid than in Valencia, and other provincial centres. He set the fashion to men as considerable as VÉlez de Guevara, Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, and CalderÓn himself. Lope and Ruiz de AlarcÓn were at daggers drawn; but these were personal quarrels, and, original as was AlarcÓn’s talent, the torch of Lope flickers over some of his best scenes. These men were much more than imitators. If Lope ever had a devoted follower, it was the unfortunate Juan PÉrez de MontalbÁn; but even PÉrez de MontalbÁn was not a servile imitator, and it was precisely his effort to develop originality that affected his reason. Lope’s influence was general; he founded a national drama, but he founded nothing which we can justly call a school—a word which implies a certain exclusiveness and rigidity of doctrine foreign to Lope’s nature. So far was he from founding a school that, towards the end of his life, he was voted rather antiquated, and this view was still more widely held during CalderÓn’s supremacy. In the autograph of Lope’s unpublished play, Quien mÁs no puede, there is a note by CristÓbal GÓmez, who writes—‘This is a very good play, but not suitable for these times, though suitable in the past; for it contains many endechas and many things which would not be endured nowadays; the plot is good, and should be versified in the prevailing fashion.’ This is dated April 19, 1669, less than forty years after Lope’s death; he was beginning to be forgotten by almost all, except the playwrights who stole from him.

CalderÓn, on the other hand, did found a school. For one thing, his conventionality and mannerisms are infinitely easier to imitate than Lope’s broad effects. ‘Spanish Comedy,’ as Mr. George Meredith says, ‘is generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as of marionettes. The Comedy might be performed by a troupe of the corps de ballet; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an animated shuffle of feet.’ Whatever we may think of this as a judgment on Spanish comedy as a whole, it describes fairly enough the dramatic work produced by many of CalderÓn’s followers: with them, if not with their master, art degenerates into artifice—a clever trick. CalderÓn himself seems to have grown tired of the praises lavished on his ingenuity. He knew perfectly that neatness of construction was not the best part of his work, and, in No hay burlas con el amor, he laughs at himself and his more uncritical admirers:—

Unfortunately these stage devices—these concealed lovers, these muffled mistresses, these houses with two doors, these walls with invisible cupboards, these compromising letters wrongly addressed—were precisely what appealed to the unthinking section of the public, and they were also the characteristics most easily reproduced by imitators in search of a short cut to success. Other circumstances combined to make CalderÓn the head of a dramatic school. Except in invention and in brilliant facility the dramatists of Lope’s time were not greatly inferior to the master. In certain qualities Tirso de Molina and Ruiz de AlarcÓn are superior to him: Tirso in force and in malicious humour, Ruiz de AlarcÓn in depth and in artistic finish. There is no such approach to equality between CalderÓn and the men of his group. No strikingly original dramatic genius appeared during his long life, extending over three literary generations. He himself had made no new departure, no radical innovation; he took over the dramatic form as Lope had left it, and, by focussing its common traits, he established a series of conventions—a conventional conception of loyalty, honour, love and jealousy. The stars in their courses fought for him. He was equally popular at court and with the multitude, pleasing the upper rabble by his glittering intrigue and dexterous discreteo, pleasing the lower rabble by his melodramatic incident and the mechanical humour of his graciosos, pleasing both high and low by his lofty Catholicism and passionate devotion to the throne. Though not in any real sense more Spanish than Lope de Vega, CalderÓn seems to be more intensely national, for he reduced the espaÑolismo of his age to a formula. Out of the plays of Lope and of Tirso, he evolved a hard-and-fast method of dramatic presentation. He came at a time when it was impossible to do more. All that could be done by those who came after him was to emphasise the convention which, by dint of constant repetition, he had converted into something like an imperative theory.

It follows, as the night the day, that the monotony which has been remarked in CalderÓn’s plays is still more pronounced in those of his followers. The incidents vary, but the conception of passion and of social obligation is identical. The dramatists of CalderÓn’s school adopt his method of presenting the conventional emotions of loyalty, devotion, and punctilio as to the point of honour; and, having enclosed themselves within these narrow bounds, they are almost necessarily driven to exaggeration. This tendency is found in so powerful a writer as Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, of whom we know scarcely anything except that he was born at Toledo in 1607, and that he was on friendly terms with both the devout JosÉ de Valdivielso and the waggish JerÓnimo de CÁncer—who in his Vejamen, written in 1649, gives a comical picture of the dignified dramatist tearing along in an undignified hurry. In 1644 Rojas Zorrilla was proposed as a candidate for the Order of Santiago, but the nomination was objected to on the ground that he was of mixed Moorish and Jewish descent, and that some of his ancestors two or three generations earlier had been weavers and carpenters. These allegations were evidently not proved, for Rojas Zorrilla became a Knight of the Order of Santiago on October 19, 1645. The autograph of La AscensiÓn del Cristo, nuestro bien states that this piece was written when the author was fifty-five: this brings us down to 1662. Rojas Zorrilla then disappears: the date of his death is unknown. The first volume of his plays was published in 1640, the second in 1645. In the preface to the second volume he makes the same complaint as Lope de Vega and CalderÓn—namely, that plays were fathered upon him with which he had nothing to do—and he promises a third volume which, however, was not issued.

It has been denied that Rojas Zorrilla belongs to CalderÓn’s school, and no doubt he was much more than an obsequious pupil. Yet he was clearly affiliated to the school. He belonged to the same social class as CalderÓn; he was seven years younger, and must have begun writing for the stage just when it became evident that CalderÓn was destined to succeed Lope de Vega in popular esteem; and, moreover, he actually collaborated later with CalderÓn in El Monstruo de la fortuna. It is hard to believe that CalderÓn, at the height of his reputation, would condescend to collaborate with a junior whose ideals differed from his own. No such difference existed: as might be expected from a disciple, Rojas Zorrilla is rather more Calderonian than CalderÓn. Out of Spain he is usually mentioned as the author of La TraiciÓn busca el castigo, the source of Vanbrugh’s False Friend and Lesage’s Le TraÎtre puni; but, if he had written nothing better than La TraiciÓn busca el castigo, he would not rise above the rank and file of Spanish playwrights. His most remarkable work is GarcÍa del CastaÑar, a famous piece not included in either volume of the plays issued by Rojas Zorrilla himself. The natural explanation would be that it was written after 1645, and this is possible. Yet it cannot be confidently assumed. As we have already seen, La Estrella de Sevilla is not contained in the collections of Lope’s plays. Plays were not included or omitted solely on their merits, but for other reasons: because they were likely to please ‘star’ actors, or because they had failed to please a particular audience.

The story of GarcÍa del CastaÑar is so typical that it is worth telling. GarcÍa is the son of a noble who had been compromised in the political plots which were frequent during the regency of the Infante Don Juan Manuel. He takes refuge at El CastaÑar near Toledo, lives there as a farmer, marries Blanca de la Cerda (who, though unaware of the fact, is related to the royal house), and looks forward to the time when, through the influence of his friend the Count de Orgaz, he may be recalled. News reaches him that an expedition is being fitted out against the Moors, and he subscribes so largely that his contribution attracts the attention of Alfonso XI., who makes inquiries about him. The Count de Orgaz takes this opportunity to commend GarcÍa to the King’s favour, but dwells on his proud and solitary nature which unfits him for a courtier’s life. Alfonso XI. determines to visit GarcÍa in disguise. Orgaz informs GarcÍa of the King’s intention and adds that, as Alfonso XI. habitually wears the red ribbon of a knightly order, there will be no difficulty in distinguishing him from the members of his suite. Four visitors duly arrive at El CastaÑar, passing themselves off as hunters who have lost their way, and, as one of the four is decorated as described by Orgaz, GarcÍa takes him to be the King. In reality he is Don Mendo, a courtier of loose morals. Unrecognised, Alfonso XI. converses with GarcÍa, telling him of the King’s satisfaction with his gift, and holding out to him the prospect of a brilliant career at court: GarcÍa, however, is not tempted, and declares his intention of remaining in happy obscurity. The hunting-party leaves CastaÑar; but Don Mendo, enamoured of DoÑa Blanca, returns next day under the impression that GarcÍa will be absent. Entering the house by stealth, he is discovered by GarcÍa who, believing him to be the King, spares his life. Don Mendo does not suspect GarcÍa’s misapprehension, and retires, supposing that the rustic was awed by the sight of a noble. But the stain on GarcÍa’s honour can only be washed away with blood. In default of the real culprit, he resolves to kill his blameless wife, who takes flight, and is placed by Orgaz under the protection of the Queen. GarcÍa is summoned to court, is presented to the King, perceives that the foiled seducer was not his sovereign, slays Don Mendo in the royal ante-chamber, returns to the presence with his dagger dripping blood, and, after defending his action as the only course open to a man of honour, closes his eloquent tirade by declaring that, even if it should cost him his life, he can allow no one—save his anointed King—to insult him with impunity:—

Del Rey abajo, ninguno—‘None, under the rank of King’—is the alternative title of GarcÍa del CastaÑar, and these four energetic words sum up the exaltation of monarchical sentiment which is the leading motive of the play. Buckle, writing of Spain, says in his sweeping way that ‘whatever the King came in contact with, was in some degree hallowed by his touch,’ and that ‘no one might marry a mistress whom he had deserted.’ This is not quite accurate. We know that, at the very time of which we are speaking, the notorious ‘Calderona’—the mother of Don Juan de Austria—married an actor named TomÁs Rojas, and that she returned to her husband and the stage after her liaison with Philip IV. was ended. Still, it is true that reverence for the person of the sovereign was a real and common sentiment among Spaniards. Clarendon speaks of ‘their submissive reverence to their princes being a vital part of their religion,’ and records the horrified amazement of Olivares on observing Buckingham’s familiarity with the Prince of Wales—‘a crime monstrous to the Spaniard.’ This reverential feeling, like every other emotion, found dramatic expression in the work of Lope de Vega. It is the leading theme in La Estrella de Sevilla, and Lope has even been accused of almost blasphemous adulation by those who only know this celebrated play in the popular recast made at the end of the eighteenth century by CÁndido MarÍa Trigueros, and entitled Sancho Ortiz de las Roelas. The charge is based on a well-known passage:—

But it is not Lope who says that the King is the image of God. These lines are interpolated by Trigueros, who felt no particular loyalty to anybody, and overdid his part when he endeavoured to put himself in Lope’s position. What was an occasional motive in Lope’s work reappears frequently and in a more emphatic form in CalderÓn’s work. The sentiment of loyalty is expressed with something like fanaticism in La Banda y la flor and in GuÁrdate del agua mansa; and with something unpleasantly like profanity in the auto sacramental entitled El Indulto general where the lamentable Charles II. seems to be placed almost on the same level as the Saviour.

Rojas Zorrilla’s glorification of the King in GarcÍa del CastaÑar is inspired by CalderÓn’s example, and he follows the chief in other ways less defensible. Splendid as CalderÓn’s diction often is, it lapses into gongorism too easily. Rojas Zorrilla’s natural mode of expression is direct and energetic; his dialogue is both natural and brilliant in Don Diego de Noche and Lo que son mugeres; he knew the difference between a good style and a bad one, and he pauses now and then to satirise GÓngora and the cultos. But he must be in the fashion, and as CalderÓn has dabbled in culteranismo, he will do the same. And he bursts into gongorism with all the crude exaggeration of one who is deliberately sinning against the light. His little flings at the Gongorists are few and feeble as in Sin honra no hay amistad, where he describes the darkened sky:—

But a few pages later, in the second volume of his collected plays, he rivals the most extravagant of GÓngora’s imitators when he describes the composition and dissolution of the horse in Los Encantos de Medea:—

This is what Ben Jonson would call ‘clotted nonsense,’ and you find the same bombast in another play of Rojas Zorrilla’s—and an excellent play it is—entitled No hay ser padre, siendo Rey, upon which Rotrou’s Venceslas is based. In such faults of taste Rojas Zorrilla leaves CalderÓn far behind. You have seen him at his strongest in GarcÍa del CastaÑar: you will find him at his weakest—and it is execrably bad—if you turn to the thirty-second volume of the Comedias Escogidas, and read La Vida en el atahud. Here St. Boniface goes to Tarsus and is decapitated: in the ordinary course, you expect the curtain to fall at this point. But Rojas Zorrilla prepares a surprise for you. The trunk of the saint is presented on the stage, the martyr holding his head in his hand; and the head addresses Milene and Aglaes in such a startling way that both become Christians. It seems very likely that, if Ludovico Enio had not been converted by the sight of the skeleton in CalderÓn’s Purgatorio de San Patricio, Milene and Aglaes would not have been confronted with the severed head, talking, in La Vida en el atahud.

Like CalderÓn, though in a lesser degree, Rojas Zorrilla is not above utilising the material provided by his predecessors: even in GarcÍa del CastaÑar there are reminiscences of Lope de Vega’s PeribÁÑez y el Comendador de OcaÑa, of Lope’s El Villano en su rincÓn, of VÉlez de Guevara’s La Luna de la Sierra, and of Tirso de Molina’s El Celoso prudente. But, if he has all CalderÓn’s defects, he has many of his great qualities. Few cloak-and-sword plays are better worth reading than Donde hay agravios, no hay celos, or than Sin honra no hay amistad, or than No hay amigo para amigo (the source of Lesage’s Le Point d’honneur). Rojas Zorrilla has perhaps less verbal wit than CalderÓn, but he has much more humour, and he shows it in such pieces as Entre bobos anda el juego, from which the younger Corneille took his Don Bertrand de Cigarral, and Scarron his Dom Japhet d’ArmÉnie. Scarron, indeed, picked up a frugal living on the crumbs which fell from Rojas Zorrilla’s table. He took his Jodelet ou le MaÎtre valet from Donde hay agravios no hay celos, and his Écolier de Salamanque from Obligados y ofendidos, a piece which also supplied the younger Corneille and Boisrobert respectively with Les Illustres Ennemis and Les GÉnÉreux Ennemis. But observe that, in Rojas Zorrilla’s case as in CalderÓn’s, the foreign adapters use only the light comedies. The rapturous monarchical sentiment of GarcÍa del CastaÑar no doubt seemed too hysterical for the court of Louis XIV., and hence the author’s most striking play remained unknown in Northern Europe. You may say that he forced the note, as Spaniards often do, and that he has no one but himself to thank. Perhaps: Rojas Zorrilla adopts a convention, and every convention tends to become more and more unreal. Possibly the first man who signed himself somebody else’s obedient servant meant what he wrote: you and I mean nothing by it. But conventions are convenient, and, though nobody can have had much respect for Philip IV. towards the end of his reign, the monarchical sentiment was latent in the people. Moreover, the scene of GarcÍa del CastaÑar is laid in the early part of the fourteenth century. When all is said, GarcÍa del CastaÑar has an air of—what we may call—local truth, a nobility of conception, and a concentrated eloquence which go to make it a play in a thousand.

Nothing is easier to forget than a play which has little more than cleverness to recommend it, and many of the pieces written by CalderÓn’s followers are clever to the last degree of tiresomeness. There is cleverness of a kind in El Conde de Sex Ó Dar la vida por su dama, and, if there were any solid basis for the ascription of it to Philip IV., we should have to say that it was a very creditable performance for a king. But then kings in modern times have not greatly distinguished themselves in literature. You remember Boileau’s remark to Louis XIV.:—‘Votre MajestÉ peut tout ce qu’Elle veut faire: Elle a voulu faire de mauvais vers; Elle y a rÉussi.’ However, if El Conde de Sex would do credit to a royal amateur, it would be a rather mediocre performance for a professional playwright like Antonio Coello, to whom also it is attributed. Coello was already known as a promising dramatist when PÉrez de MontalbÁn wrote Para todos in 1632, but we can scarcely say that his early promise was fulfilled. The air of courts does not encourage independence, and Coello, apparently distrustful of his powers, collaborated in several pieces with fellow-courtiers like CalderÓn, VÉlez de Guevara and Rojas Zorrilla—notably with the two latter in TambiÉn la afrenta es veneno, which dramatises the malodorous story of Leonor Telles (wife of Fernando I. of Portugal) and her first husband, JoÃo LourenÇo da Cunha, el de los cuernos de oro.Shortly before he died in 1652 Coello had his reward by being made a member of the royal household, but he would now be forgotten were it not that he is said to be the real author of Los EmpeÑos de seis horas (Lo que pasa en una noche), which is printed in the eighth volume of the Escogidas as a play of CalderÓn’s. Assuming that the ascription of it to Coello is correct, he becomes of some interest to us in England, for the play was adapted by Samuel Tuke under the title of The Adventures of Five Hours. This piece of Tuke’s made a great hit in London when it was printed in 1662; four years later Samuel Pepys confided to his diary that ‘when all is done, it is the best play that ever I read in all my life,’ and when he saw it acted a few days afterwards, he effusively declared that Othello seemed ‘a mean thing’ beside it. There is a tendency to make the Spanish author—for Tuke adds little of his own—pay for Pepys’s extravagance. Los EmpeÑos de seis horas is nothing like a masterpiece, but it is a capital light comedy—neatly constructed, witty, brisk and entertaining. It is, indeed, so much better than anything else which bears Coello’s name that there is some hesitation to believe he wrote it. However, he has the combined authority of Barrera and Schaeffer in his favour, though neither of these oracles gives any reason to support the ascription.

As a writer of high comedy Coello had many rivals in Spain—men slightly his seniors, like Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, who became known in England through Fanshawe’s translations, and who must also have been known in France, since his play El Marido hace mujer was laid under contribution by MoliÈre in L’École des maris; men like his contemporary Álvaro Cubillo de AragÓn, whose El SeÑor de Buenas Noches was turned to account by the younger Corneille in La Comtesse d’Orgueil; men like his junior, Fernando de ZÁrate y Castronovo, the author of La Presumida y la hermosa, in which MoliÈre found a hint for Les Femmes savantes. But the most successful writer in this vein was AgustÍn Moreto y CavaÑa, who was born in 1618, just as CalderÓn was leaving Salamanca University to seek his fortune as a dramatist at Madrid. To judge by his more characteristic plays we should guess Moreto to have been the happiest of men, and the gayest; but late in life he gave an opening to writers of ‘hypothetical biography,’ and they took it. For instance, when he was over forty he became devout, took orders, and made a will directing that he should be buried in the Pradillo del Carmen at Toledo—a place which has been identified as the burial-ground of criminals who had been executed. This identification gave rise to the theory that he must have had some ghastly crime upon his conscience, and, as particulars are generally forthcoming in such cases, some charitable persons leapt to the conclusion that Moreto was the undetected assassin of Lope’s friend, Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla.

One is always reluctant to spoil a good story, but luck is against me this afternoon. A few moments ago I mentioned the ‘Calderona,’ and stated that she returned to the stage after her rupture with Philip IV.: that destroys the usual picturesque story of her throwing herself in an agony of abjection at Philip’s feet, and going straightway into a convent to do penance for the rest of her life. I am afraid that I must also destroy this agreeable legend about Moreto’s being a murderer. It is unfortunate for Moreto, for many who have no strong taste for literature are often induced to take interest in a man of letters if he can be proved guilty of some crime: they will spell out a little Old French because they have heard that Villon was a cracksman. Well, we must tell the truth, and take the consequences. The identification of the Pradillo del Carmen turns out to be wrong. The Pradillo del Carmen was the cemetery used for those who died in the hospital to which Moreto was chaplain, and to which he bequeathed his fortune: the Pradillo del Carmen has nothing to do with the burial-place for criminals, though it lies close by. Moreto evidently wished not to be separated in death from the poor people amongst whom he had laboured; but, as it happens, his directions were not carried out, for when he died on December 28, 1669, he was buried in the church of St. John the Baptist at Toledo. And this is not the only weak point in the story. Medinilla was killed in 1620 when Moreto was two years old, and few assassins, however precocious, begin operations at that tender age. Lastly, it would seem that Medinilla was perhaps not murdered at all, but was killed in fair fight by JerÓnimo de Andrade y Rivadeneyra. These prosaic facts compel me to present Moreto to you—not as an interesting cut-throat, not as a morose and sinister murderer, crushed by his dreadful secret, but—as a man of the most genial disposition, noble character, and singularly virtuous life.

He was all this, and he was also one of the cleverest craftsmen who ever worked for the Spanish stage. But nature does not shower all her gifts on any one man, and she was niggardly to Moreto in the matter of invention. He made no secret of the fact that he took whatever he wanted from his predecessors. His friend JerÓnimo de CÁncer represents him as saying:—

He did, indeed, find a brava mina in the old plays, and especially in Lope de Vega’s. From Lope’s El Gran Duque de Moscovia he takes El PrÍncipe perseguido; from Lope’s El Prodigio de Etiopia he takes La AdÚltera penitente; from Lope’s El Testimonio vengado he takes Como se vengan los nobles; from Lope’s Las Pobrezas de Rinaldo he takes El Mejor Par de los doce; from Lope’s De cuando acÁ nos vino ... he takes De fuera vendrÁ quien de casa nos echarÁ; from Lope’s delightful play El Mayor imposible he constructs the still more delightful No puede ser, from which John Crowne, at the suggestion of Charles II., took his Sir Courtly Nice, or, It cannot be, and from which Ludvig Holberg, the celebrated Danish dramatist, took his Jean de France. Moreto was scarcely less indebted to Lope’s contemporaries than to Lope himself. From VÉlez de Guevara’s El CapitÁn prodigioso y PrÍncipe de Transilvania he took El PrÍncipe prodigioso; from GuillÉn de Castro’s Las Maravillas de Babilonia he took El bruto de Babilonia, and from Castro’s Los hermanos enemigos he took Hasta el fin nadie es dichoso; from Tirso de Molina’s La Villana de Vallecas he took La ocasion hace al ladrÓn; and from a novel of Castillo SolÓrzano’s he took the entire plot of La Confusion de un jardÍn. This is a fairly long list, but it does not include all Moreto’s debts.

He has his failures, of course. El ricohombre de AlcalÁ looks anÆmic beside its original. El InfanzÓn de Illescas, which is ascribed to both Lope and Tirso; and Caer para levantar is a wooden arrangement of Mira de Amescua’s striking play, El Esclavo del demonio. If you can filch to no better purpose than this, then decidedly honesty is the best policy. Perhaps Moreto came to this conclusion himself in some passing mood, and it must have been at some such hour that he wrote El Parecido en la Corte and Trampa adelante, both abounding in individual humour. But such moods are not frequent with him. If you choose to say that Moreto was a systematic plagiarist, it is hard for me to deny it. Every playwright of this period plagiarised and pilfered, more or less, from CalderÓn downwards: we must accept this as a fact—a fact as to which there was seldom any concealment. Just as Moreto was drawing towards the end of his career as dramatist, a most intrepid plagiarist arose in the person of Matos Fragoso, of whom I shall have a word to say presently. But Matos Fragoso was sly, and a bungler: Moreto was frank, and a master of the gentle art of conveyance. He pilfers in all directions; but he manipulates the stolen goods almost out of recognition, usually adding much to their value. And this implies the possession of remarkable talent. In literature, as in politics, if he can only contrive to succeed, a man is pardoned for proceedings which in other callings might lead to jail: and Moreto’s success is triumphant. The germ of his play, El lindo Don Diego, is found in GuillÉn de Castro’s El Narciso de su opiniÓn; but for Castro’s rough sketch Moreto substitutes a finished, final portrait of the insufferable, the fatuous snob who pays court to a countess, is as elated as a brewer when he marries her and fancies himself an aristocrat, but wakes up with a start to the reality of things on discovering that the supposed countess is the sharp little servant Beatriz who has seen through him all along, and has exhibited him in his true character as a born fool. Don Diego is always with us—in England now, as in Spain three centuries ago—and El lindo Don Diego might have been written yesterday.

Still better is El desdÉn con el desdÉn, a piece which shows to perfection Moreto’s unparalleled tact in making a mosaic a beautiful thing. Diana, the young girl who knows no more of the world than of the moon, but who imagines men to be odious wretches from what she had read of them—Diana is taken from Lope’s La Vengadora de las mugeres; the behaviour of her various suitors is suggested by Lope’s De corsario Á corsario; the quick-witted maid is from Lope’s Los Milagros del desprecio; the trick by which the Conde de Urgel traps Diana is borrowed from Lope’s La Hermosa fea. Not one of the chief traits in El desdÉn con el desdÉn is original; but out of these fragments a play has been constructed far superior to the plays from which the component parts are derived. The plot never flags and is always plausible, the characters are full of life and interest, and the dialogue sparkles with mischievous gaiety. All this is Moreto’s, and it is a victory of intellectual address. It clearly impressed MoliÈre, who set out to do by Moreto what Moreto had done by others: the result is La Princesse d’Élide, one of MoliÈre’s worst failures. Gozzi renewed the attempt, and failed likewise in La Principessa filosofa. El desdÉn con el desdÉn outlives these imitations as well as others from skilful hands in England and in Sweden, and surely it deserves to live as an example of what marvellous deftness can do in contriving from scattered materials a charming and essentially original work of art.

Compared with Moreto, Juan Matos Fragoso is, as I have said, a bungler. In A lo que obliga un agravio, which is from Lope’s Los dos bandoleros, he fails, though he has the collaboration of SebastiÁn de Villaviciosa. He fails by himself in La Venganza en el despeÑo, which is taken from Lope’s El PrÍncipe despeÑado. There is some reason to think that he tried to pass himself off as the author of Lope’s El Desprecio agradecido. This play is given in the thirty-ninth volume of the Escogidas with Matos Fragoso’s name attached to it, and, as Matos Fragoso edited this particular volume, it seems to follow that he lent himself to a mean form of fraud. However, there is no gainsaying his popularity, and he may be read with real pleasure—as in El Sabio en el rincÓn, which is from Lope’s El Villano en su rincÓn—when he hits on a good original, and gives us next to nothing of his own. A better dramatist, and a far more reputable man, was Antonio de SolÍs, who was born ten years after CalderÓn; but SolÍs’s reputation really depends on his Historia de la conquista de MÉjico, which appeared in 1684, two years before his death. He was naturally a prose-writer who took to the drama because it was the fashion. And that play-writing was a fashionable craze may be gathered from the fact that Spain produced over five hundred dramatists during the reigns of Philip IV. and Charles II. So the historians of dramatic literature tell us, but perhaps even they have not thought it necessary to read all this mass of plays with minute attention. Here and there a name floats down to us, not always flatteringly; Juan de Zabaleta, for instance, is remembered chiefly through CÁncer’s epigram on his ugliness and on his failure:—

This is not the kind of immortality that any one desires, but this—or something not much better—is the only kind of immortality that most of the five hundred are likely to attain. The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth its poppy on the crowd, and the long line closes with BancÉs Candamo, who died in 1704. He was the favourite court-dramatist as CalderÓn had been before him. To say that BancÉs Candamo occupied the place once filled by CalderÓn is to show how greatly the Spanish theatre had degenerated. No doubt it must have perished in any case, for institutions die as certainly as men. But its end was hastened by two most influential personages—one a man of genius, and the other a fribble—who had the welfare of the stage at heart. By reducing dramatic composition to a formula, CalderÓn arrested any possible development; by lavish expenditure on decorations, Philip IV. imposed his taste for spectacle upon the public. The public gets what it deserves: when the stage-carpenter comes in, the dramatist goes out. Compelled to write pieces which would suit the elaborate scenery provided at the Buen Retiro, CalderÓn was the first to suffer. He and Philip,106 between them, dealt the Spanish drama its death-blow. It lingered on in senile decay for fifty years, and with BancÉs Candamo it died. It was high time for it to be gone: for nothing is more lamentable than the progressive degradation of what has once been a great and living force.