CHAPTER II.

THE GENIUS OF CALDERON.

(HIS PLAYS.)

THEY Convey altogether a wrong impression of Calderon, who, willing to exalt and glorify him the more, isolate him wholly from his age-who pass over all its other worthies to magnify him only-presenting him to us not as one, the brightest indeed in a galaxy of lights, but as the sole particular star in the firmament of Spanish dramatic art. Those who derive their impression from the Schlegels, especially from Augustus, would conclude him to stand thus aloneto stand, if one might venture to employ the allusion, a poetical Melchisedec, without spiritual father, without spiritual mother, with nothing round him to explain or account for the circumstances of his greatness. But there are no such appearances in literature: great artists, poets, or painters, or others, always cluster; the conditions which produce one, produce many. They are not strewn, at nearly equable distances, through the life of a nation, but there are brief peri

ods of great productiveness, with long intervals of comparative barrenness between; or it may be, as indeed was the case with Spain, the aloe-tree of a nation's literature blossoms but once.

And if this is true in other regions of art, above all will it be true in respect of the drama.* In this, when it deserves the name, a nation is uttering itself, what is nearest to its heart, what it has conceived there of life and life's mystery, and of a possible reconciliation between the world which now is and that ideal world after which it yearns; and the conditions of a people, which make a great outburst of the drama possible, make it also inevitable that this will utter itself, not by a single voice, but by many. Even Shakespeare himself, towering as he does immeasurably above all his compeers, is not a single, isolated peak, rising abruptly from the level plain, but one of a chain and cluster of mountain-summits; and his altitude, so far from being dwarfed and diminished, can only be rightly estimated when it is regarded in rela

* Little more than a century covers the whole period intervening between the birth of Æschylus, B. C. 525, and the death of Euripides, B. C. 406. A period of almost exactly the same duration includes the birth of Lope, 1562, and the death of Calderon, 1681; while in our own drama the birth of Marlowe, 1565, and the death of Shirley, 1666, enclose a period considerably shorter, and one capable of a still further abridgment of nearly thirty years; for, although the last of the Elizabethan school of dramatists lived on to 1666, the Elizabethan drama itself may be said to have expired with the commencement of the Civil War, 1640.

tion with theirs. And if this is true even of him, it is much more so of Calderon, who by no means towers so pre-eminently, and out of the reach of all rivalry and competition, above his fellows. The greatest of all the Spanish dramatists, he is yet equalled and excelled in this point and in that by one and another; as by Lope in invention, by Tirso de Molina in exuberant and festive wit. Let us regard him, then, not as that monster which some would present him to us, but, with all his manifold gifts, still as the orderly birth of his age and nation; and, regarding him as such, proceed to consider what those gifts were, and what he accomplished with them.

When we seek to form an estimate of Calderon, it is, I think, in the first place impossible not to admire the immense range of history and fable which supplies him with the subject-matter for his art, and the entire ease and self-possession with which he moves through every province of his poetical domain; and this, even where he is not able to make perfectly good his claim to every portion of it. Thus he has several dramas of which the argument is drawn from the Old Testament, The Locks of Absalom being perhaps the noblest of these. Still more have to do with the heroic martyrdoms and other legends of Christian antiquity, the victories of the cross of Christ over all the fleshly and spiritual wickednesses of the ancient heathen world. To this theme, which is one almost undrawn

upon in our Elizabethan drama-Massinger's Virgin Martyr is the only example I remember-he returns continually, and he has elaborated these plays with peculiar care. Of these, The Wonder-working Magician is most celebrated; but others, as The Joseph of Women, The Two Lovers of Heaven, quite deserve to be placed on a level, if not indeed higher than it. A tender, pathetic grace is shed over this last, which gives it a peculiar charm. Then, too, he has occupied what one might venture to call the region of sacred mythology, as in The Sibyl of the East, in which the profound legends identifying the cross of Calvary and the tree of life are wrought up into a poem of surpassing beauty. In other of these not the Christian but the Romish poet is predominant, as in The Purgatory of St. Patrick, the Devotion of the Cross, Daybreak in Copacabana,† this last being the story of the first dawn of the faith in Peru. Whatever there may be in these of superstitious, or, as in one of them there is, of ethically revolting, none but a great poet could have composed them.

Then, further, his historic drama reaches down from the gray dawn of earliest story to the celebration of events which happened in his own day; it extends

*See Immermann's Memorabilien, b. ii., pp. 219-229.

†Translated by Schack, author of the admirable Geschichte der dramatischen Literatur und Kunst in Spanien, 3 Bände, Berlin, 1845, 1846, to which I am often indebted.

from The Daughter of the Air,* being the legend of Semiramis, and in Goethe's judgment his most glorious piece† (Goethe, however, seems only to have been familiar with those which had been translated into German), down to The Siege of Breda, alluded to already. Between these are dramas from Greek history, and from Roman. Of these, The Great Zenobia is the best; The Arms of Beauty, on the story of Coriolanus, and as poor as its name would indicate, the worst. Others are from Jewish, and a multitude from the history of modern Europe. Thus two at least from English annals: one, rather a poor one, on the institution of the order of the Garter; another, The Schism of England, which is his Henry VIII., and, as may be supposed, written at a very different point of view from Shakespeare's. It is chiefly curious as showing what was the popular estimate in Spain of the actors in our great religious reformation; and displays throughout an evident desire to spare the king, and to throw the guilt of his breach with the church on Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey. But the great majority of Calderon's historical dramas are

*See Immermann's Memorabilien, b. ii., pp. 247-271. † Das herrlichste von Calderon's Stücken.

It need only be observed that his main authority here is the book of Nicholas Sanders (" or Slanders rather," as Fuller has it), De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani. A little essay on this drama (Ueber Die Kirchentrennung von England, Schauspiel des Don Pedro Calderon, Berlin, 1819) has been written by F. W. V. Schmidt, and is worth reading.