For some time before Lope de Vega’s death, it was evident that CalderÓn would succeed him as dictator of the stage. There was no serious competitor in sight. Tirso de Molina was becoming rusty; VÉlez de Guevara and Ruiz de AlarcÓn, both on the wrong side of fifty when Lope died, had given the measure of what they could do, and Ruiz de AlarcÓn’s art was too individual to be popular. No possible rival to CalderÓn was to be found among the younger men. His path lay smooth before him. He developed the national drama which Lope had created; he accentuated its characteristics, but introduced no radical innovation. He found the most difficult part of the work already done; he inherited a vast intellectual estate, and it is the general opinion that the patronage of Philip IV. helped him to exploit it profitably. This point may stand over for the moment. Here and now, it is enough to say that CalderÓn’s career, so far as we can trace it, was one of uninterrupted success. Unfortunately, at present, we can only sketch his biography in outline. Within a year of his death, a short life of him was published by his admirer and editor, Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel; but, as Vera Tassis was thirty or forty years younger than CalderÓn, he naturally knew nothing of the dramatist’s early circumstances. He begins badly with a blunder as to the date of CalderÓn’s birth, shows himself untrustworthy in matters of fact, and indulges too freely in flatulent panegyric. For the present we are condemned to make bricks with only a few wisps of straw; but if, as seems likely, Dr. PÉrez Pastor is as fortunate with CalderÓn as he was with Cervantes, many a blank will be filled in before long.

Pedro CalderÓn de la Barca was born at Madrid on January 17, 1600. He became an orphan at an early age. His mother, who was of Flemish origin, died in 1610; his father, who was Secretary of the Council of the Treasury, seems to have offended his first wife’s family by marrying again, was excluded from administering a chaplaincy in their gift, and died in 1615. CalderÓn was educated at the Jesuit college in Madrid, and later studied theology at the University of Salamanca with a view to holding the family living; but he gave up his idea of entering the Church, and took to literature. It has been said that he collaborated with Rojas Zorrilla and Belmonte in writing El mejor amigo el muerto, and he is specifically named as being the author of the Third Act. On the other hand, it is asserted that El mejor amigo el muerto was played on Christmas Eve, 1610, and, if this be so, we must abandon the ascription, for CalderÓn was then a boy of ten, while Rojas Zorrilla was only three years old. We may also hesitate to accept the unsupported statement of Vera Tassis that CalderÓn wrote El Carro del Cielo at the age of thirteen. Such ‘fond legends of their infancy’ accumulate round all great men. So far as can be gathered, CalderÓn first came before the public in 1620-22 at the literary fÊtes held at Madrid in honour of St. Isidore, the patron saint of the city; and on the latter occasion Lope de Vega, who was usually florid in compliment, welcomed the new-comer as one who ‘in his youth has gained the laurels which time, as a rule, only grants together with grey hair.’ From the date of these first triumphs onward, CalderÓn never went back.In 1621, four years before reaching his legal majority, he was granted letters-patent to administer his estate. Vera Tassis asserts that CalderÓn entered the army in 1625, and that he served in Milan and Flanders. If so, his service must have been very short, for he was at Madrid on September 11, 1625, and was still residing in that city on April 16, 1626. We find him again at Madrid, and in a scrape, in January 1629. His brother, Diego, had been stabbed by the actor Pedro de Villegas, who took sanctuary in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns; CalderÓn and his backers determined to seize the culprit, broke into the cloister, handled the nuns roughly, dragged off their veils, and used strong language to them. Such conduct is very unlike all that we know of CalderÓn; but this was the current version of his proceedings, and the rumour fluttered the dovecots of the devout. The alleged misdeeds of CalderÓn and his friends were denounced by the fashionable preacher, Hortensio FÉlix Paravicino, in a sermon delivered before Philip IV. on January 11, 1629. Calderon retaliated by making a sarcastic reference in El PrÍncipe constante to the popular ranter’s habit of spouting unintelligible jargon:—

But ‘the king of preachers and the preacher of kings,’ though ready enough to attack others, was not disposed to share this privilege: and he had Philip’s ear. CalderÓn was arrested. As the jibe does not appear in the text of El PrÍncipe constante, possibly the author was released on the understanding that the offensive passage should be omitted from any printed edition; but it is just as likely that CalderÓn, who had not a shade of rancour in his nature, voluntarily struck out the lines when the play was published after Paravicino’s death, which occurred in 1633.

The escapade does not appear to have damaged him in any way, and his fame grew rapidly. The chronology of his plays is not yet determined, but it is certain that his activity at this period was remarkable. It seems probable that he collaborated with PÉrez de MontalbÁn and Antonio Coello in El Privilegio de las mugeres during the visit of the Prince of Wales (afterwards Charles I.) and Buckingham to Madrid in 1623; El Sitio de BredÁ was no doubt written soon after the surrender on June 8, 1625; La Dama duende is not later than 1629, La Cena de Baltasar was performed at Seville in 1632, in which year also La Banda y la flor was produced and El AstrÓlogo fingido was printed; Amor, honor y poder with La DevociÓn de la Cruz and Un Castigo en tres venganzas were issued in a pirated edition in 1634. Two years later Philip IV. was so enchanted with Los tres mayores prodigios (a poor piece given at the Buen Retiro) that he resolved to admit CalderÓn to the Order of Santiago. The official pretensiÓn was granted on July 3, 1636, and the robe was bestowed on April 8, 1637. In 1636 twelve of CalderÓn’s plays were issued by his brother JosÉ, who published twelve more in 1637. These two volumes raised the writer’s reputation immensely, and well they might; for, besides La Dama duende and La DevociÓn de la Cruz (already mentioned), the first volume contained, amongst other plays, La Vida es sueÑo, Casa con dos puertas, El Purgatorio de San Patricio, Peor estÁ que estaba, and El PrÍncipe constante; while the second volume, besides El AstrÓlogo fingido (already mentioned) contained El GalÁn fantasma, El MÉdico de su honra, El Hombre pobre todo es trazas, Á secreto agravio secreta venganza, and the typical show-piece El mayor encanto amor.Apart from the popular esteem which he thoroughly deserved, CalderÓn was evidently a special favourite with Olivares, who never stinted Philip in the matter of toys and amusements, and levied a sort of blackmail (for this purpose) on those whom he nominated to high office. Great preparations were made for a gorgeous production of El mayor encanto amor at the Buen Retiro in 1639. The Viceroy of Naples was induced to make arrangements for a lavish display by the ingenious stage-machinist, Cosme Lotti. A floating stage was provided lit up with three thousand lanterns; seated in gondolas, the King and his suite listened to the performance; and the evening closed with a banquet. These freakish shows were frequent. In February 1640 we hear of a stormy scene at a rehearsal, which ended in CalderÓn’s being wounded. It is commonly said that he was at work on his Certamen de amor y celos when the Catalan revolt broke out in 1640, and that he finished it off hurriedly by a tour de force so as to be able to take the field. This is a picturesque tale, but, like most other picturesque tales, it seems to be somewhat doubtful. On May 28, 1640, before the rebellion began, CalderÓn enrolled himself in a troop of cuirassiers raised by Olivares, the Captain-General of the Spanish cavalry; and he did not actually take his place in the ranks till September 29. He proved an efficient soldier, was employed on a special mission, and received promotion. His health, as often happens with those destined to live long, was never robust, and forced him to resign on November 15, 1642. In 1645 he was granted a military pension of thirty escudos a month: it was not paid punctually, and he was more than once obliged to dun the Treasury for arrears.

He had now reached an age when men begin to lose their relatives and friends. In June 1645 his brother JosÉ was killed in action at Camarasa; his brother Diego died at Madrid on November 20, 1647. CalderÓn’s life was generally most correct, but he had his frailties, and his commerce with the stage exposed him to the occasions of sin. We do not know who was the mother of his son, Pedro JosÉ, but it may be assumed that she was an actress. She died about 1648-50, soon after the birth of the boy, who passed as CalderÓn’s nephew. In 1648 CalderÓn was dangerously ill, and in December 1650 he alleged his increasing age and waning strength as a reason for quitting the King’s service; he announced his intention of taking orders, and petitioned that his pension might, nevertheless, be continued. He had already been received as a Tertiary of St. Francis, and accepted the nomination to the living (founded by his grandmother in 1612) which he had thought of taking when he went to Salamanca University, some thirty years earlier. He was ordained in 1651, and seems to have been an exemplary priest.

An attempt was made to utilise his talents in a new direction. He was requested to write a chronicle of the Franciscan Tertiaries, undertook the task in 1651, but was compelled to abandon it in 1653 owing to his ‘many occupations.’ In a letter of this period addressed to the Patriarch of the Indies, Alfonso PÉrez de GuzmÁn, CalderÓn declares that he had meant to cease writing for the stage when he took orders, and that he had yielded to the personal request of the Prime Minister, Luis de Haro, who had begged him to continue for the King’s sake. In the same letter CalderÓn states that he had been censured for writing autos, that a favour conferred on him had been revoked owing to the objection of somebody unknown—no sÉ quiÉn—that poetry was incompatible with the priesthood, and he ends by asking the Primate for a definite ruling: ‘the thing is either wrong or right; if right, let there be no more difficulties; and, if wrong, let no one order me to do it.’ The drift of this alembicated letter is clear. The favour revoked was no doubt a chaplaincy at Toledo, and CalderÓn politely gave the Primate to understand that he should supply no more autos till he received an equivalent for the post of which he had been deprived. His hint was taken; he was appointed ‘chaplain of the Reyes Nuevos’ at Toledo in 1653, and his scruples were quieted. For the rest of his life he wrote most of the autos given at Madrid, and he readily supplied show-pieces to be performed at the palace of the Buen Retiro. Some idea of the importance attached to these performances may be gathered from the Avisos of Barrionuevo, who tells us that—while the enemy was at the gate, while there was not a real in the Treasury, while the King was compelled to dine on eggs, while a capon ‘stinking like dead dogs’ was served to the Infanta, and while the court buffoon Manuelillo de Gante paid for the Queen’s dessert,—there was always money to meet the bills of the stage-machinist Juan Antonio Forneli, to maintain a staff of from twenty-four to seventy actresses, and to import from Genoa hogsheads of costly jasmine-oil for stage-purposes.

Apart from the composition of autos and comedias palaciegas, CalderÓn’s life was henceforth uneventful. His position in Spain was firmly established, but foreigners were sometimes recalcitrant. The French traveller Bertaut thought little of one of CalderÓn’s plays which he saw in 1659, and thought even less of the author whom he visited later in the day:—‘From his talk, I saw that he did not know much, though he is quite white-haired. We argued a little concerning the rules of the drama which they do not know at all, and which they make game of in that country.’ This seems to have been the average French view.101 Chapelain, writing to Carrel de Sainte-Garde on April 29, 1662, says that he had read an abridgment of a play by CalderÓn:—‘par oÙ j’ay connu au moins que si les vers sont bons, son dessein est trÈs mauvais, et sa conduite ridicule.’ What else could a champion of the unities think?

Though a priest beyond reproach, CalderÓn was not left in peace by busybodies and heresy-hunters. His auto concerning the conversion of the eccentric Christina of Sweden was forbidden in 1656. Another auto, entitled Las Órdenes militares Ó Pruebas del segundo AdÁn, gave rise to no objection when acted before the King on June 8, 1662; but it was ‘delated’ to the Inquisition, the stage-copies were seized, and permission to perform it was refused. There can have been no heresy in this auto, for the prohibition was withdrawn nine years later. On February 18, 1663, CalderÓn became chaplain to Philip IV. (a post which carried with it no stipend), and in this same year he joined the Congregation of St. Peter, of which he was appointed Superior in 1666. He continued writing comedias palaciegas during the next reign: Fieras afemina amor and La Estatua de Prometeo were produced in honour of the Queen-Mother’s birthday in 1675 and 1679 respectively; and El segundo EscipiÓn was played on November 6, 1677, to commemorate the coming of age of Charles II. On August 24, 1679, an Order in Council was issued granting CalderÓn a raciÓn de cÁmara en especie on account of his services, great age, and poverty; this is perplexing, for his will (made twenty-one months later) shows that he was very comfortably off.

There is a disquieting sentence in the preface to the fifth volume of CalderÓn’s plays: Vera Tassis says that the dramatist tried to draw up a list of pieces falsely ascribed to him, and adds that ‘his infirm condition did not allow of his forming a clear judgment about them.’ What does Vera Tassis mean? Are we to understand that CalderÓn’s intellect was slightly clouded towards the end, that he could not distinguish his own plays from those of other writers, and that perhaps he had become possessed with the notion (not uncommon in the aged) that he would die in want? Surely not. The financial statements of petitioners are often obscure. CalderÓn’s memory may naturally have begun to fail when he was close on eighty, but in other respects his mind was vigorous. His Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, composed to celebrate the wedding of Charles II. with Marie-Louise de Bourbon, was given at the Buen Retiro on March 3, 1680; it was produced later for the general public at the PrÍncipe and Cruz corrales, and altogether was played twenty-one times—a great ‘run’ for those days. For over thirty years CalderÓn had been commissioned to write the autos for Madrid, and in 1681 he set to work as usual, but while engaged on El Cordero de IsaÍas and La divina Filotea, his strength failed him. He could only finish one of these two autos, and left the other to be completed by Melchor FernÁndez de LeÓn. He signed his will on May 20, took to his bed and added a codicil on May 23, bequeathing his manuscripts to Juan Mateo Lozano, the parish priest of St. Michael’s at Madrid, who wrote the AprobaciÓn to the volume of Autos Sacramentales, alegÓricos y historiales published in 1677. CalderÓn died on Whitsunday, May 25, 1681.

Almost all that we hear of him is eminently to his credit. Vera Tassis, who knew him intimately,—though perhaps less intimately than he implies,—dwells affectionately on CalderÓn’s open-handed charity, his modesty and courtesy, his kindliness in speaking of contemporaries, his gentleness and patience towards envious calumniators. CalderÓn was a gentleman as well as a great man of letters—a rare combination. Like Lope de Vega, he was apparently not inclined to rank his plays as literature, and, unlike Lope, he does not seem to have changed his opinion on this point. In his letter to the Patriarch of the Indies he speaks slightingly of poetry as a foible pardonable enough in an idle courtier, but one which he regarded with contempt as soon as he took orders; and his disdain for his own work is commemorated in a ponderous epitaph, written by those who knew him best:—

CAMŒNIS OLIM DELICIARUM AMÆNISSIMUM FLUMEN
QUÆ SUMMO PLAUSU VIVENS SCRIPSIT,
MORIENS PRÆSCRIBENDO DESPEXIT.

He was never sufficiently interested in his secular plays to collect them, though he complained of being grossly misrepresented in the pirated editions which were current. According to Vera Tassis, he corrected Las Armas de la hermosura and La SeÑora y la Criada for the forty-sixth volume of the Escogidas printed in 1679; but he did no more towards protecting his reputation, though at the very end of his life he began an edition of the autos, the sacred subjects of these investing them in his eyes with more importance than could possibly attach to any secular drama. It is by the merest accident that we have an authorised list of the titles of his secular plays. He drew it up, ten months before he died, at the urgent request of the Almirante-Duque de Veraguas (a descendant of Columbus), and it was included in the preface to the Obelisco fÚnebre, pirÁmide funesto, published by Gaspar AgustÍn de Lara in 1784. CalderÓn’s plays were printed by Vera Tassis who—though, as Lara is careful to inform us, he had not access to the original manuscripts in Lozano’s keeping—was a fairly competent editor, as editors went in those days. It is not rash to say that to this happy hazard CalderÓn owes no small part of his international renown. For a long while, he was the only great Spanish dramatist whose works were readily accessible. Students who wished to read Lope de Vega—if there were any such—could not find an edition of his plays; Tirso de Molina was still further out of reach. Circumstances combined to concentrate attention on CalderÓn at the expense of his brethren. With the best will in the world, you cannot act authors whose plays are not available; but CalderÓn could be found at any bookseller’s, and a few of his plays, together with two or three of Moreto’s, were acted even during the latter half of the eighteenth century when French influence was dominant on the Spanish stage.

CalderÓn thus survived in Spain; and, owing to this survival, he came to be regarded by the evangelists of the Romantic movement abroad as the leading representative of the Spanish drama. Some of these depreciated Lope de Vega, with no more knowledge of him than they could gather from two or three plays picked up at random. German writers made themselves remarkable by their vehement dogmatism. Friedrich von Schlegel declared that, whereas Shakespeare had merely described the enigma of life, CalderÓn had solved it, thus proving himself to be, ‘in all conditions and circumstances, the most Christian, and therefore the most romantic, of dramatic poets.’ August von Schlegel was as dithyrambic as his brother. Dismissing Lope’s plays as containing interesting situations and ‘inimitable jokes,’—Schlegel, On Jokes, is one of the many unwritten masterpieces, ‘for which the whole world longs,’—he turns to CalderÓn, hails him as that ‘blessed man,’ and in a rhetorical transport proclaims him to be ‘the last summit of romantic poetry.’ Nobody writes in this vein now, and the loss is endurable. We are no longer stirred on reading that CalderÓn’s ‘tears reflect the view of heaven, like dewdrops on a flower in the sun’: such imagery leaves us cold. But the rhetoric of the Schlegels, Tieck, and others was most effective at the time.

It was noised abroad that the Germans had discovered the supreme dramatic genius of the world; the great names of Goethe and Shelley were quoted as being worshippers of the new sun in the poetic heavens; the superstition spread to England, and would seem to have infected a group of brilliant young men at Cambridge—Trench, FitzGerald, and Tennyson. In The Palace of Art, as first published, CalderÓn was introduced with some unexpected companions:—

This motley company was dispersed later. In the revised version of The Palace of Art CalderÓn finds no place, and the omission causes no more surprise than the omission of ‘eastern Confutzee.’ He is admired as a splendid poet and a great dramatist, but we no longer see him, as Tennyson saw him in 1833, on a sublime and solitary pinnacle of glory—‘a poetical Melchisedec, without spiritual father, without spiritual mother, with nothing round him to explain or account for the circumstances of his greatness.’ As Trench says, there are no such appearances in literature, and CalderÓn has ceased to be a mystery or a miracle. Yet it was not unnatural that those who took the Schlegels for guides should see him in this light. The fact that the works of other Spanish dramatists were not easily obtainable necessarily gave an exaggerated idea of CalderÓn’s originality and importance, for it was next to impossible to compare him with his rivals. We are now more favourably situated. We know—what our grandfathers could not know—that Friedrich von Schlegel was as wrong as wrong can be when he assured the world that CalderÓn was too rich to borrow. In literature no one is too rich to borrow, and CalderÓn’s indebtedness to his predecessors is great. To give but one instance out of many: the Second Act of Los Cabellos de AbsalÓn is taken bodily from the Third Act of Tirso de Molina’s sombre and sinister tragedy, La Venganza de Tamar.

This was no offence against the prevailing code of morality in literary matters. Most Spanish dramatists of this period borrowed freely. Lope de Vega, indeed, had such wealth of invention that he was never tempted in this way: so, too, he seldom collaborated. So far from being a help, this division of labour was almost an impediment to him, for he could write a hundred lines in the time that it took him to consult his collaborator. But Lope was unique. Manuel de Guerra, in his celebrated AprobaciÓn to the Verdadera Quinta Parte of CalderÓn’s plays, calls him a monstruo de ingenio. The words recall the monstruo de naturaleza, the phrase applied by Cervantes to Lope, but there is a marked difference between the two men—a difference perhaps implied in the two expressions. Lope was possessed by an irresistible instinct which impelled him to constant, and often careless, creation; CalderÓn creates less lavishly, treats existing themes without scruple, and his recasts are sometimes completely successful. His devotees never allow us to forget, for instance, that in El Alcalde de Zalamea he has transformed one of Lope’s dashing improvisations into a most powerful drama, and they cite as a parallel case the Electra of Euripides and the Electra of Sophocles. Just so, when CalderÓn receives a prize at the poetical jousts held at Madrid in 1620-22, the extreme Calderonians are reminded of ‘the boy Sophocles dancing at the festival after the battle of Salamis.’ Why drag in Sophocles? There are degrees. It is quite true that CalderÓn has made an admirable play out of Lope’s sketch; but it is also true that the dramatic conception of El Alcalde de Zalamea is due to Lope, and not to CalderÓn.

Any other dramatist in CalderÓn’s place would have been compelled to accept the conventions which Lope de Vega had imposed upon the Spanish stage—conventional presentations of loyalty and honour. CalderÓn devoted his magnificent gifts to elaborating these conventions into something like a code. His readiness in borrowing may be taken to mean that he was not, in the largest sense, an inventor, and the substance of his plays shows that he was rarely interested in the presentation of character. But he had the keenest theatrical sense, and once he is provided with a theme he can extract from it an intense dramatic interest. Moreover, he equals Lope in the cleverness with which he works up a complicated plot, and surpasses Lope in the adroitness with which he employs the mechanical resources of the stage. In addition to these minor talents, he has the gift of impressive and ornate diction. It is a little unfortunate that many who read him in translations begin with La Vida es sueÑo, a fine symbolic play disfigured by the introduction of so incredible a character as Rosaura, declaiming gongoresque speeches altogether out of place. CalderÓn is liable to these momentary aberrations; yet, at his best, he is almost unsurpassable. Read, for example, the majestic speech of the Demon in El MÁgico prodigioso which Trench very justifiably compares with Milton. The address to Cyprian loses next to nothing of its splendour in Shelley’s version:—

It was once the fashion to praise CalderÓn chiefly as a philosophic dramatist, and it may be that to this philosophic quality his plays owe much of the vogue which they once enjoyed—and which, in a much less degree, they still enjoy—in Germany. As it happens, only two of CalderÓn’s plays can be classified as philosophic—La Vida es sueÑo and En esta vida todo es verdad y todo es mentira—and, with respect to the latter, a question arises as to its originality. French writers have maintained that En esta vida is taken from Corneille’s HÉraclius, while Spaniards argue that Corneille’s play is taken from CalderÓn’s. On a priori grounds we should be tempted to admit the Spanish contention, for Corneille was—I do not wish to put the point too strongly—more given to borrowing from Spain than to lending to contemporary Spanish playwrights. But there is the awkward fact that HÉraclius dates from 1647, whereas En esta vida was not printed till 1664. This is not decisive, for we have seen that CalderÓn was not interested enough in his secular plays to print them, and we gather incidentally that En esta vida was being rehearsed at Madrid by Diego Osorio’s company in February 1659. How much earlier it was written, we cannot say at present. The idea that CalderÓn borrowed from the French cannot be scouted as impossible, for Corneille’s Cid was adapted by Diamante in 1658.102 Perhaps both CalderÓn and Corneille drew upon Mira de Amescua’s Rueda de la fortuna—a play which, as we know from Lope de Vega’s letter belittling Don Quixote, was written in 1604, or earlier. But, whichever explanation we accept, CalderÓn’s originality is compromised. With all respect to the eminent authorities who have debated this question of priority, we may be allowed to think that they have shown unnecessary heat over a rather unimportant matter. Neither HÉraclius nor En esta vida is a masterpiece, and Sr. MenÉndez y Pelayo holds that En esta vida contains only one striking situation—the tenth scene in the First Act, when both Heraclio and Leonido claim to be the sons of Mauricio, and Astolfo refuses to state which of the two is mistaken:—

This amounts to saying that CalderÓn’s play is no great marvel, for very few serious pieces are ever produced on the stage unless the first act is good. The hastiest of impresarios, the laziest dramatic censor—even they read as far as the end of the First Act. But, if we give up En esta vida, CalderÓn is deprived of half his title to rank as a ‘philosophic’ dramatist. We still have La Vida es sueÑo, a noble and (apparently) original play disfigured, as I have said, by verbal affectations, such as the opening couplet on the

which is almost invariably quoted against the author. So, too, whenever La Vida es sueÑo is mentioned, we are almost invariably told that, as though to prove that life is indeed a dream, ‘a Queen of Sweden expired in the theatre of Stockholm during its performance.’ This picturesque story does not seem to be true, and, at any rate, it adds no more to the interest of the play than the verbal blemishes take from it. The weak spot in the piece is the sudden collapse of Segismundo when sent back to the dungeon, but otherwise the conception is admirable in dignity and force.

Many critics find these qualities in CalderÓn’s tragedies, and I perceive them in Amar despuÉs de la muerte. The scene in which GarcÉs describes how he murdered DoÑa Clara, and is interrupted by Don Álvaro with—

is, as Sr. MenÉndez y Pelayo says, worthy of Shakespeare; and it long ago reminded Trench of the scene in Cymbeline where Iachimo’s confession—

is interrupted by Posthumus with—

But, for some reason, Amar despuÉs de la muerte is not among the most celebrated of CalderÓn’s tragic plays, and it is certainly not the most typical—not nearly so typical as Á secreto agravio secreta venganza, and two or three others. Here the note of genuine passion is almost always faint, and is sometimes wanting altogether. Othello murders Desdemona in a divine despair because he believes her guilty, and because he loves her: CalderÓn’s jealous heroes, with the exception of the Tetrarch in El Mayor monstruo los celos, commit murder as a social duty. In Á secreto agravio secreta venganza Don Lope de Almeida, with his interminable soliloquies, ceases to be human, and becomes the incarnation of (what we now think to be) a silly conventional code of honour. DoÑa Leonor in this play is not so completely innocent in thought as DoÑa MencÍa in El MÉdico de su honra; but Don Lope de Almeida murders the one, and Don Gutierre Alfonso SolÍs murders the other, with the same cold-blooded deliberation shown in El Pintor de su deshonra by Don Juan de Roca, who has some apparent justification for killing DoÑa Serafina.

With all the skill spent on their construction, these tragedies do not move us deeply, and they would fail to interest, if it were not that they embody the accepted ideas concerning the point of honour in Spain during the seventeenth century. It is most difficult for us to see things as a Spaniard then saw them. He began by assuming that any personal insult could only be washed away by the blood of the offender: a man is killed in fair fight in a duel, but the survivors of the slain must slay the slayer. Modern Europe, as Chorley wrote more than half a century ago, has nothing like this, ‘except the terrible Corsican vendetta.’ And, as stated by the same great authority—the greatest we have ever had on all relating to the Spanish stage—‘beneath the unbounded devotion which the Castilian professed to the sex, lay a conviction of their absolute and universal frailty.’ In Spanish eyes ‘no woman’s purity,’ Chorley continues, ‘was safe but in absolute seclusion from men:—guilt was implied and honour lost in every case where the risk of either was possible,—nay, even had accident thrown into a temptation a lady whose innocence was proved to her master, the appearance of crime to the world’s eye must be washed out in her blood.’ It has often been said that, in CalderÓn, ‘honour’ is what destiny is in the Greek drama.

This code of honour seems to many of us immoral nonsense, and it is difficult to suppose that Friedrich von Schlegel had El MÉdico de su honra in mind when he declared CalderÓn to be ‘in all conditions and circumstances the most Christian ... of dramatic poets.’ It is hard to imagine anything more unchristian than the conduct of Don Gutierre Alfonso SolÍs which is held up for approval; but no doubt it was approved by contemporary playgoers. In this glorification of punctilio CalderÓn is thoroughly representative. He reproduces the conventional ideas which obtained for a certain time, in certain complicated conditions, in a certain latitude and longitude. This local verisimilitude, which contributed to his immediate success, now constitutes a limitation. The dramatist may be true to life, in so far as he presents temporary aspects of it with fidelity; he is not true to universal nature, and therefore he makes no permanent appeal. This, or something like it, has been said a thousand times, and, I think, with good reason. Still, it leaves CalderÓn where he was as the spokesman of his age.

He is no less representative in his comedias de capa y espada—his plays of intrigue, which are really dramatic presentations of ordinary contemporary manners in the vein of high comedy. Opponents of the Spanish national theatre have charged him with inventing this typical form of dramatic art, as though it were a misdemeanour. There is no sense in belittling so characteristic a genre, and no ground for ascribing the invention of cloak-and-sword plays to CalderÓn. They were being written by Lope de Vega before CalderÓn was born, and were still further elaborated by Tirso de Molina. Lope’s redundant genius adapts itself easily enough to the narrow bounds of the comedia de capa y espada, but he instinctively prefers a more spacious field. The very artificiality of such plays must have been an attraction to CalderÓn. All plays of this class are much alike. There are always a gallant and a lady engaged in a love-affair; a grim father or petulant brother, who may be a loose liver but is a rigid moralist where his own women-folk are concerned; a gracioso or buffoon, who comes on the scene when things begin to look dangerous. The material is the same in all cases; the playwright’s dexterity is shown in the variety of his arrangement, the ingenious novelty of the plot, the polite mirth of the dialogue, the apt introduction of episodes which revive or diversify the interest, and prolong it by leaving the personages at cross-purposes till the last moment. CalderÓn is a master of all the devices that help to make a good play of this kind. Character-drawing would be almost out of place, and, as character-drawing is CalderÓn’s weak point, one of his chief difficulties is removed. He is free to concentrate his skill on polishing witty ‘points,’ on contriving striking situations, and preparing deft surprises at which he himself smiles good-humouredly. The whole play is based on an idealistic convention, and CalderÓn displays a startling cleverness in conforming to the complicated rules of the game.

He fails at the point where the convention is weakest. His graciosos or drolls are too laboriously comic to be amusing. He has abundant wit, and the discreteo of the lover and the lady is often brilliant. But there is some foundation for the taunt that he is interested only in fine gentlemen and prÉcieuses. He had not lived in courts and palaces for nothing. The racy, rough humour of the illiterate clearly repelled his fastidious temper, and the fun of his graciosos is unreal. This is what might be anticipated. It takes one cast in the mould of Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Lope, to sympathise with all conditions of men. CalderÓn fails in another point, and the failure is certainly very strange in a man of his meticulous refinement and social opportunities. With few exceptions, the women in his most famous plays are unattractive. A Spanish critic puts it strongly when he calls the women on CalderÓn’s stage hombrunas or mannish. No foreign critic would be brave enough to say this, but it is not an unfair description. A man’s idea of a womanly woman is often quaint: he sees her as something between a white-robed angel and a perfect imbecile. That is not CalderÓn’s way. DoÑa MencÍa in El MÉdico de su honra and DoÑa Leonor in Á secreto agravio secreta venganza are distinctly formidable, and, even in the cloak-and-sword plays, there is something masculine in the academic preciosity of the lively heroines. It is manifest that CalderÓn has no deep knowledge of feminine character, that his interest in it is assumed for stage purposes, and that his chief preoccupation is—not to portray idiosyncrasies, nor even types of womanhood, but—to make physical beauty the theme of his eloquent, poetic flights. In this he succeeds admirably, though his flights are apt to be too long. You probably know Suppico de Moraes’ story of CalderÓn’s acting before Philip IV. in an improvisation at the Buen Retiro, the poet taking the part of Adam, and VÉlez de Guevara that of God the Father. Once started, CalderÓn declaimed and declaimed, and, when he came to an end at last, VÉlez de Guevara took up the dialogue with the remark: ‘I repent me of creating so garrulous an Adam!’ Most probably the tale is an invention,104 but it is not without point, for Philip and the rest would have been a match for Job, if they had never been bored with the favourite’s tirades. Like most Spaniards, CalderÓn is too copious; but in lyrical splendour he is unsurpassed by any Spanish poet, and is surpassed by few poets in any language. Had he added more frequent touches of nature to his idealised presentations, he would rank with the greatest dramatists in the world.

As it is, he ranks only just below the greatest, and in one dramatic form peculiar to Spain, he is, by common consent, supreme. Everybody quotes Shelley’s phrase about ‘the light and odour of the starry autos’; but scarcely anybody reads the autos, and I rather doubt if Shelley read them. It is suggested that he took an auto to mean an ordinary play, and this seems likely enough, for that is what an auto did mean at one time. But an auto sacramental in CalderÓn’s time was a one-act piece (performed in the open air on the Feast of Corpus Christi) in which the Eucharistic mystery was presented symbolically. We can imagine this being done successfully two or three times, but not oftener. The difficulty was extreme, and as a new auto—usually two new autos—had to be provided every year, authors had recourse to the strangest devices. There are autos in which Christ is symbolised by Charlemagne (surrounded by his twelve peers), or by Jason, or Ulysses; there are autos in which an attempt is made to evade the conditions by introducing saints famous for their devotion to the Eucharist. Such pieces are illegitimate: they are not really autos sacramentales, but comedias devotas.

CalderÓn treats the subject within the rigid limits of the convention,—as a doctrinal abstraction,—and he treats it in a spirit of the most reverential art. He does not fail even in El Valle de la Zarzuela, where he hampers himself by connecting the theme with one of Philip IV.’s hunting-expeditions. He tells us with a certain dignified pride that his autos had been played before the King and Council for more than thirty years, and he apologises for occasional repetitions by saying that these are not so noticeable at a distance of twenty years as when they occur between the covers of a book. But no apology is needed. CalderÓn dealt with his abstruse theme more than seventy times—not always with equal success, but never quite unsuccessfully, and never repeating himself unduly. This is surely one of the most dexterous exploits in literature, and CalderÓn appears to have done it with consummate ease. His reflective genius, steeped in dogma, was far more interested in the mysteries of faith than in the passions of humanity, far more interested in devout symbolism than in realistic characterisation. His figures are pale abstractions? Yes: but he compels us to accept them by virtue of his sublime allegory, his majestic vision of the world invisible, and the adorable loveliness of his lyrism.

His autos endured for over a century. As late as 1760 El Cubo de la Almudena was played on Corpus Christi at the Teatro del PrÍncipe in Madrid, while La Semilla y la cizaÑa was played at the Teatro de la Cruz. The autos were obviously dying; they were no longer given in the open air before the King and Court, and the devout multitude; they were shorn of their pomp, and played indoors before an indifferent audience amid irreverent remarks. On one occasion, according to Clavijo, after the actor who played the part of Satan had declaimed a passage effectively, an admirer in the pit raised a cheer for the devil:—Viva el demonio! There is evidence to prove that the public performance of the autos sacramentales was often the occasion of disorderly and scandalous scenes. Clavijo has been blamed for his articles in El Pensador matritense, advocating their suppression, and perhaps his motives were not so pure as he pretends. Yet he was certainly right in suggesting that the day for autos was over. They were prohibited on June 9, 1765. But they must soon have died in any case, for the supply had ceased, and later writers like Antonio de Zamora were mostly content to retouch CalderÓn’s autos.105 Zamora and BancÉs Candamo were not the men to keep up the high tradition, and the attitude of the public had completely changed.

The fact that his autos sacramentales are little read in Spain, and are scarcely read at all out of Spain, is most unfortunate for CalderÓn, for his noblest achievement remains comparatively unknown. His reputation abroad is based on his secular plays which represent but one side of his delightful genius, and that side is not his strongest. The works of Lope de Vega and of Tirso de Molina have become available once more, and this circumstance has necessarily affected the critical estimate of CalderÓn as a dramatist. Paul Verlaine, indeed, persisted in placing him above Shakespeare, but Verlaine was the last of the Old Guard. CalderÓn is relatively less important than he was thought to be before Chorley’s famous campaign in The AthenÆum: all now agree with Chorley that CalderÓn is inferior to Lope de Vega in creative faculty and humour, and inferior to Tirso de Molina in depth and variety of conception. But, when every deduction is made, CalderÓn is still one of the most stately figures in Spanish literature. Naturally a great lyric poet, his deliberate art won him a pre-eminent position among poets who used the dramatic form, and he lives as the typical representative of the devout, gallant, loyal, artificial society in which he moved. He is not, as once was thought, the synthesis of the Spanish genius, but no one incarnates more completely one aspect of that genius. Who illustrates better than the author of El Principe constante what Heiberg wrote of Spanish poets generally just ninety years ago:—‘Habet itaque poËsis hispanica animam gothicam in corpore romano, quod orientali vestimento induitur; verum in intimo corde Christiana fides regnat, et per omnes se venas diffundit’? The same thought recurs in The Nightingale in the Study:—

To most of us, as to Lowell, the Spain of romance is the Spain revealed to us by CalderÓn. Though not the greatest of Spanish authors, nor even the greatest of Spanish dramatists, he is perhaps the happiest in temperament, the most brilliant in colouring. He gives us a magnificent pageant in which the pride of patriotism and the charm of gallantry are blended with the dignity of art and ‘the fair humanities of old religion.’ And unquestionably he has imposed his enchanting vision upon the world.