ON THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF CALDERON. CHAPTER I. THE LIFE OF CALDERON. THERE are few poets who have been so differently judged-who have been set so high, and so lowas Calderon; few who have been made the objects, on one side, of such enthusiastic admiration and applause; on the other, of such extreme depreciation. and contempt. Consult the Schlegels, or any other of his chief German admirers, and you would suppose that in him Shakespeare had found his peer; that he had attained unto "the first three," to Homer, and Dante, and Shakespeare; and that he, a fourth, occupied a throne of equal dignity with theirs. For Sismondi, on the contrary, and for others not a few, he is little better than a dexterous playwright, an adroit master of stage-effect; a prodigal squanderer of poetical gifts (which, indeed, they do not deny to have 1* been eminent) on a Spanish populace, whose tastes he flattered, and from whom he obtained that meed of present popularity which was justly his due, being now to seek for no other. And perhaps there has been still greater divergence and disagreement in the estimates which have been formed of the ethical worth of this poet. "In this great and divine master the enigma of life is not merely expressed, but solved." These are the words of Frederic Schlegel, setting him in this above Shakespeare, who for the most part is content, according to him, with putting the tempting to resolve it." riddle of life, without at And again: "In every sit And again: uation and circumstance Calderon is, of all dramatic poets, the most Christian." And Augustus Schlegel, who had not his brother's Romanist sympathies to affect his judgment, in a passage of rare eloquence in his Lectures on Dramatic Literature,* characterizes the religious poetry of Calderon as one never-ending hymn of thanksgiving, ascending continually to the throne of God. Falling in, too, with the very point of his brother's praise, "Blessed man!" he exclaims, "he had escaped from the wild labyrinths of doubt into the stronghold of belief; thence, with undisturbed tranquillity of soul, he beheld and portrayed the storms of the world. To him human life was no longer a dark riddle." These two set the example; many followed in their train. * Lecture 29. Others, meanwhile, have not been wanting who have been able to see nothing but what is morally perverse and injurious in his poetry. Thus Salfi goes so far as to say that he can never read Calderon without indignation; accuses him of having no other aims but to make his genius subservient to the lowest prejudices and superstitions of his countrymen. And others in the same spirit describe him as the poet of the Inquisition (the phrase is Sismondi's), of Romanism in its deepest degradation, in its most extravagant divorce of religion from morality; what morality he has being utterly perverted, the Spanish punctilio in its bloodiest excess-with much more in the same strain. Many, too, of those who abstain from passing any such strong moral condemnation on the Spanish poet, or looking at his writings from any such earnest ethical point of view, while they give him credit for a certain amount of technical dramatic skill, have no genuine sympathy with him, no hearty admiration for his works. They find everywhere more to blame than to praise; brilliant but cold conceits, oriental hyperboles, the language of the fancy usurping the place of the language of the heart; and when they praise him the most, it is not as one of the stars shining with a steady lustre in the poetical firmament, but as an eccentric meteor, filling the mind of the beholder with astonishment rather than with admiration. Such a "frigid" character of him (it is his own word) Hal lam* has given, acknowledging at the same time the slightness of his acquaintance, both with Calderon himself and with the language in which he has written; and such the author (Southey? or Lockhart?) of an able article in the Quarterly Review,† with whose judgment Hallam has consented in the main. That my own judgment does not agree with theirs who set him thus low in the scale of poetical merit, still less with theirs who charge him with that profound moral perversity, I need hardly affirm. For, small and slight as this volume is, I should have been little tempted to bestow the labor it has cost me on that which, as poetry, seemed to me of little value; and still less disposed to set forward in any way the study of a writer who, being what his earnest censurers affirm, could only exert a mischievous influence, if he exerted any, on his readers. How far my judgment approaches that of his enthusiastic admirers - what drawbacks it seems needful to make on their praises as extravagant and excessive—what real and substantial worth will still, as I believe, remain-it will be my endeavor to express this in the pages which follow. But these considerations will be most fitly introduced by a brief sketch of Calderon's life, and of the circumstances of Spain before and during the period when he flourished, so far as they may be supposed to * Literature of Europe, vol. iii., pp. 532–541. have affected him and his art. So shall we be able better to understand (and it is not unworthy of study) that great burst of dramatic invention, undoubtedly after the Greek and English the most glorious explosion of genius in this kind which the world has ever beheld, and which, beginning some ten or fifteen years before Calderon's birth, may be said to have expired when he died. There are, indeed, only three great original dramatic literatures in the world; and this, in which Calderon is the central figure, is one. Greece, England, and Spain, are the only three countries, in the western world at least, which boast an independent drama, one going its own way, growing out of its own roots, not timidly asking what others have done before, but boldly doing that which its own native impulses urged it to do; the utterance of the national heart and will, accepting no laws from without, but only those which it has imposed on itself, as laws of its true liberty, and not of bondage. The Roman drama and the French are avowedly imitations; nor can all the vigor and even originality in detail, which the former displays, vindicate for it an independent position: much less can the latter, which, at least in the nobler region of tragedy, is altogether an artificial production, claim this; indeed, it does not seek to do so, finding its glory in the renunciation of any such claim. Germany has some fine plays, but no national dramatic literature; the same must be said of Italy; and the period has long since past for |