No man of letters has ever received such visible proofs of his own celebrity, and none has retained it so long. For something like half a century Lope had contrived to fascinate his countrymen, but even he began to grow old at last. Yet the change was not so much in him as in the rising generation.
The swelling tide of culteranismo was invading the stage; the fatal protection of Philip IV. was beginning to undermine the national theatre. Lope had always opposed the new fashion of preciosity, and he could not, or would not, supply the demand at court for a spectacular drama. One could scarcely expect him to help in demolishing the work of his lifetime. In his youth, and even in middle age, he looked down upon his plays as being almost outside the pale of literature. He lived long enough to revise his opinion, though perhaps to the last he would have refused to admit that his plays were worth all his epics put together. He lived long enough to revise his opinion, and a little too long for his happiness. His latest plays did not hit the public taste: his successor was already hailed in the person of the courtly Calderón whom he himself had first praised. To his artistic mortifications were added poignant domestic sorrows. He had dissuaded his son, Lope Félix, from adopting literature as a profession: the youth joined the navy, went on a cruise to South America, and was there
The drowning of his son in 1634 was a grievous blow to Lope, but a more cruel stroke awaited him. The flight of his favourite daughter, Antonia Clara, from her home filled him with an unspeakable despair. He could endure no more. With the simple, confiding faith that never left him, he believed that his sins had brought upon him the vengeance of heaven, and he sought to make tardy atonement by the severest penance, lashing himself till the walls of his room were flecked with blood. But the end was at hand. On August 23, 1635, Lope wrote his last two poems, fell ill, and on August 27 his soul was required of him.
Headed by the Duke of Sesa, the vast funeral procession turned aside so as to pass before the convent of the Barefooted Trinitarians where Lope’s gifted daughter Marcela had taken the vows in 1621. From the cloister window the nun watched the multitude on its way to the Church of St. Sebastian in the Calle de Atocha; there, to the mournful music of the Dies irae, Lope was interred beneath the high altar. His eloquent lips were silent; his untiring hand and his unquiet heart were still: his passionate pilgrimage was over. It might have been thought that all that was mortal of him was at peace for ever, and that the final resting-place of one so famous could not be forgotten. But, as if to show that all is vanity, it was otherwise decreed by the mocking fates. Early in the nineteenth century it became necessary to remove Lope’s coffin from the vault in which it lay, and no care was taken to ensure its subsequent identification. Hence he, whose renown once filled the world, now sleeps unrecognised amid the humble and the obscure.
It has been granted us to know Lope de Vega better than we know most of our contemporaries. He lived in the merciless light of publicity; his slightest slip was noted by vigilant eyes and rancorous pens; and he has himself recorded the weaknesses which any other man would have studiously concealed. Yet, gross as were his sins, his individual charm is irresistible. Ruiz de Alarcón taxed him with being envious, and from the huge mass of his confidential correspondence, a few detached phrases are picked out to support this charge. None of us is as frank as Lope; yet it seems highly probable that, if a selection were made from the private letters written in this city to-day and this selection were published in the newspapers to-morrow, a certain number of personal difficulties might follow. But let us test Ruiz de Alarcón’s charge. Of whom should Lope be envious? Not of Ruiz de Alarcón himself, undoubtedly a remarkable dramatist, but never popular as Lope was. Not of Tirso de Molina, another great dramatist, but a personal friend of Lope’s. Not of Cervantes, who had abandoned the stage long before he succeeded so greatly in romance. Not of Góngora, of whose poetic principles Lope disapproved, but to whom he paid sedulous court. Not of Calderón, who was nearly forty years younger than himself, and whom he first presented to the public. The accusation has no more solid base than a few choleric words dropped in haste.
The truth is that Lope is open to precisely the opposite charge of culpable complaisance. His genius, like that of Cervantes, was creative, not critical; his praise is fulsome, indiscriminating, and therefore ineffective. He was a most loyal friend, and to him all his geese are swans. His Laurel de Apolo is an exercise in adulation of no more critical value than Cervantes’s Canto de Calíope. Famous writers, once in port, are inclined to ‘nurse’ their fame by conciliating their rivals. Lope’s constant successes provided him with so many foes that it would have been folly to increase their number by attacking rising men. Like most other contemporaries he detested Ruiz de Alarcón; but Ruiz de Alarcón could take very good care of himself in a wrangle, and perhaps a man is not universally detested without some good reason. Apart from any question of tactics, Lope was naturally generous. There is a credible story that he dashed off the Orfeo to launch Pérez de Montalbán, who published it under his own name, and thus started on a prosperous, feverish career.
Lope was a sad sinner, but any attempt to represent him as an unamiable man is ridiculous. It is certain that he received large sums of money, and that he died poor: his purse was open to all comers. He lived frugally, loving nothing better than a romp with his children in the garden of his little house in the Calle de Francos. His pleasures and tastes were simple: careless remarks that drop from him reveal him to us. Typical Spaniard as he was, he disliked bull-fights, but he loved angling, and was a most enthusiastic gardener. He had, as he tells us in his pleasant way, half a dozen pictures and a few books; but the only extravagance which he allowed himself was the occasional purchase of flowers rare in Spain. He had a passion for the tulip—at that time a novelty in Europe—and, by dedicating to Manoel Soeiro his Luscinda perseguida (an early play, not printed till 1621), he handsomely expressed his thanks for a present of choice Dutch bulbs. But, even if such positive testimony were wanting, we should confidently guess Lope’s tastes from his poems, redolent of buds and blossoms, of gardens and of glades, of sweet perfumes and subtle aromas. In reading him, we think inevitably of The Flower’s Name: you remember the lines, but I may be allowed to quote them:—
It is very probable that Browning was not deeply read in the masterpieces of Spanish literature, and that he knew comparatively little of Lope; but in these verses we have (as it were) Lope rendered into English: they are Lope all over.
No competent judge questions Lope de Vega’s right to rank as a great poet, but scarcely any great poet—except perhaps Wordsworth—is so unequal. The huge epics upon which he laboured so long, filing and polishing every line, are now forgotten by all but specialists, and (even among these elect) who can pretend that he reads the Jerusalén conquistada solely for pleasure? On the other hand, no unprejudiced critic denies the beauty of Lope’s best sonnets and lyrics, nor the natural grace of his prose in the Dorotea, and in his unguarded correspondence. Had he written nothing else, he would be considered a charming poet, and wonderfully versatile man of letters. But these performances; astonishing as they are, may be regarded as the mere diversions of exuberant genius.
It is, of course, to his dramatic works that Lope de Vega owes his splendid pre-eminence in the history of literature. He was much more than a great dramatist: in a very real sense he was the founder of the national theatre in Spain. It cannot be denied that he had innumerable predecessors—men who employed the dramatic form with more or less skill; and he himself joined with Cervantes in acclaiming the metal-beater Lope de Rueda as the patriarch of the Spanish stage. But even the joint and several authority of Cervantes and Lope do not suffice in questions of literary history. No doubt Lope de Rueda is a figure of historical importance, and no doubt his actual achievement is considerable in its way. There is, however, nothing that can be called ‘national’ in Rueda’s formal plays, which are mostly adaptations from the Italian, and the bluff hilarity of his clever interludes is primitive. The later practitioners in the Senecan drama are of less significance than Miguel Sánchez and than Juan de la Cueva, both of whom foreshadow the new developments which Lope de Vega was to introduce. So far as the drama is concerned Miguel Sánchez is represented to posterity by two plays only, and it is therefore difficult to estimate the extent of his influence on the Spanish drama. Cueva’s innovating tendency is manifest in his choice of themes and his treatment of them: he strikes out a new line by selecting a representative historic subject, develops it regardless of the unities, and occasionally strikes the note of modernity by approximating to the comedy of manners—the cloak-and-sword play. Withal, Cueva is more remarkable as an intrepid explorer than as a finished craftsman, and he inevitably has the uncertain touch of an early experimenter.
Lope de Vega is on a higher plane as an executant, and is moreover a great original inventor. In its final form the Spanish theatre is his work, and whatever he may once have said of Lope de Rueda, he finally claimed the honour which undoubtedly belongs to him. Anticipating Tennyson, he pointedly remarks in the Égloga á Claudio that
The passage is well worth quoting. ‘Though I have departed from the rigidity of Terence, and though I am far from questioning the credit due to the three or four great geniuses who have guarded the infancy of the drama, yet to me’—he proudly continues—‘to me the art of the comedia owes its beginnings. To whom, Claudio, do we owe so many pictures of love and jealousy, so many stirring passages of eloquence, so copious a supply of all the figures within the power of rhetoric to invent? The mass of to-day’s productions is mere imitation of what art created yesterday. I it was who first struck the path and made it practicable so that all now use it easily. I it was who set the example now followed and copied in every direction. ‘I it was who first struck the path—I it was who first set the example.’ It is a daring thing to say, but it can be maintained.
One of the chief difficulties in dealing with Lope, or in persuading others to deal with him, is his prodigious copiousness. But it is not insuperable. For our immediate purpose we may neglect his non-dramatic writings—in every sense a great load taken off, for they alone fill twenty-one quarto volumes. There remain his plays, and their number is astounding. We shall never know precisely how many plays Lope wrote, for only a small part of what was acted has survived, and his own statements are not altogether clear. Roughly speaking, he seems to have written 220 plays up to the end of 1603, and from this date we can follow him as he gallops along: the total rises to 483 in 1609, 800 in 1618, 900 in 1620, 1070 in 1625, and 1500 in 1632. Four years afterwards Pérez de Montalbán published a volume of eulogies on the master by various hands—something like Jonsonus Virbius, to which Ford, Waller and others contributed posthumous panegyrics on Ben Jonson in 1638; and in this Fama Póstuma Pérez de Montalbán asserts that Lope wrote 1800 plays and more than 400 autos and entremeses. Consider a moment what these figures mean: they mean that Lope never wrote less than thirty-four plays a year, that he usually wrote fifty, that the yearly average rose to sixty as he grew older, and that in the last three years of his life it increased to over a hundred—say, two plays a week. Devout persons are sometimes prone to exaggerate the number of miracles performed by their favourite saint, and, if Pérez de Montalbán’s statements were not corroborated by Lope, we might be inclined to suspect him of some such form of pious fraud. As it is, we have no ground for thinking that Pérez de Montalbán was guilty of any deliberate exaggeration: most probably he set down what he heard from Lope, as well as he remembered it. But perhaps Lope’s calculations were wrong. If anything like 1800 of Lope’s plays survived, nobody would have the courage to attack them. Most have perished, and we must judge Lope by the comparatively few that have escaped destruction—431 plays and 50 autos.
This may seem very much as though we were shown a few stones from the Coliseum, and invited on the strength of them to form an idea of Rome. It is no doubt but too likely that among the 1369 lost plays there may have been some real masterpieces (in literature the best does not always survive); but it is inconceivable that only the failures have been saved, and, as the collected pieces range from a play written when Lope was twelve to another written shortly before his death, we have the privilege of observing every phase of his stupendous exploit. That is to say: we may have the privilege if we have the leisure. The student who sits down to the paltry remnant that has reached us will, if he reads Lope de Vega’s plays without interruption for seven hours a day, be over six months before he reaches the end of his delightful task. I say it in all seriousness—a delightful task—but it would be idle to pretend that there are no tracts of barren ground. A large proportion of Lope’s dramatic work is brilliant improvisation, and is not of stuff that endures; but there are veins of pure ore in his dross, and in moments of inspiration he ranks with the greatest dramatists in the world.
He has himself endeavoured to state his dramatic theory in the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, and the contrast with his practice is amusing. He opens with a profession of faith in Aristotle’s rules, of which he knew nothing beyond what he could gather from the pedantic schoolmen of the Renaissance, but goes on to confess that he disregards these sacred precepts because the public which pays cares nothing for them, and must be addressed in the foolish fashion that its folly demands. The only approach to a dramatic principle in the Arte nuevo is a matter-of-course approval of unity of action, the necessity of which has never been doubted by any playwright who knew his business. The rest of the unities go by the board, and the aspiring dramatist is solemnly exhorted to invent a clever plot, to maintain the interest steadily throughout, and to postpone the climax as long as possible so as to humour the public which loves to be kept on tenterhooks till the last moment. ‘Invent a clever plot and maintain the interest steadily throughout’—it is easily said, but how to do it? Lope proceeds to give his views as to the metres most appropriate for certain situations and emotions: laments are best expressed in décimas, the sonnet suits suspense, the romance (or, still better, the octave) is the vehicle of narrative, tercets are to be used in weighty passages, and redondillas in love-scenes. And Lope ends by admitting that only six of the 483 plays which he had composed up to 1609 were in accordance with the rules of art.
How familiar it sounds—this wailing over ‘the rules of art’! Just so Ben Jonson lamented that Shakespeare ‘wanted art’—that is, he paid no heed to the pseudo-Aristotelian precepts concerning dramatic composition. Nor did Lope: and it is precisely by neglecting to follow blind leaders of the blind, and by giving free play to their individual genius that Shakespeare and Lope de Vega have become immortal. Rules may serve for men of simple talent; but an original mind attains independence by intelligently breaking them, and thus arrives at inventing a new and living form of art. It is in this sense that we call Lope the founder of the Spanish theatre. His transforming touch is magical. Invested with the splendour of his imagination, the merest shred of fact, as in La Estrella de Sevilla, is converted into a romantic drama, living, natural, real, arresting as an experience suffered by oneself. And, with all Lope’s rapidity of workmanship, his finest effects are not the result of rare and happy accident: they are deliberately and delicately calculated. We know from the testimony of Ricardo de Turia in the Norte de la poesía española that Lope was an assiduous frequenter of the theatre; that, long after his reputation was established, he would sit absorbed, listening to whatever play was being given; and that he took careful note of every successful scene or situation. He was never above learning from others; but they could teach him little: he was the master of them all.
It is frequently alleged against him that his copiousness was an artistic blunder, and that he would have acted more wisely in the interest of his fame, if he had concentrated his magnificent powers on a smaller number of plays, and perfected them. In other words, he would have done more, if he had done less. This may be true; Virgil wrote ten lines a day, and they endure for ever: Lope wrote three thousand lines a day, and most of them have perished. But we must take genius as we find it, and be thankful to accept it on its own conditions. It is far from clear to me that Lope chose unwisely. He had not only a reputation to make, but a mission to fulfil. For the work that he was born to do—the creation of a national theatre—copiousness was an essential need. Continuous production, as Chorley puts it, is a vital requisite to ‘the existence of the drama in its true form, as acted poetry.’ This, however, is beyond the power of a few normal men of genius. Schiller and Goethe combined failed to create a national theatre at Weimar: no one but Lope could have succeeded in creating a national theatre at Madrid. At precisely the right moment Spain happily produced a most abnormal writer who could throw off admirable plays—many of them imperfect, but many of them masterpieces—in such profusion as twenty ordinary men of genius could not equal. Luzán declares that Lope so accustomed the Spanish public to constant novelty that no piece could be repeated after two performances. This is not quite exact. But assuming it to be true, you may say that Lope spoilt the public, as well as his own work. Well, that is as it may be: in our time, at all events, the plays that run for a thousand nights are not always the best.
Lope was equal to the demand made by exacting audiences, and he remained equal to it for an unexampled length of time. The most hostile critic must grant that Lope was the greatest inventor in the history of the drama. And he excelled in every kind. In tragedy he has given us such works as Las Paces de los Reyes and La Fianza satisfecha, and he would doubtless have given more had not the public rebelled against a too mournful presentation of life. Chorley, whom it is impossible to avoid quoting when Lope is under discussion, points to the significant fact that so great a tragedy as La Estrella de Sevilla is not included among Lope’s dramatic works, nor in the two great miscellaneous collections of Spanish plays—the Escogidas and Diferentes, as they are called. It exists only as a suelta. Great in tragedy, Lope is greater—or, at least, is more frequently great—in contemporary comedy, in the realisation of character: El perro del hortelano, La batalla del honor, Los melindres de Belisa, Las flores de Don Juan and La Esclava de su galán are there to prove it. There are obvious flaws in Lope’s pieces, but we can never feel quite sure that the flaws which irritate us most are not interpolations. He seems to have revised only the twelve volumes of his plays (Parts IX.-XX.) published between 1617 and 1625 inclusive, and two posthumous volumes; a large proportion of his work is so mishandled in the pirated editions that, as he avers, one line from his pen is smothered by a hundred lines from the pen of some unscrupulous actor or needy theatrical hanger-on.
The marvel is that such bungling has not been able to destroy the beauty of his conception altogether. Dramatic conception, and the faculty of distilling from no far-fetched situation all that it contains, are Lope’s distinctive qualities. He is less successful in maintaining a constant level of verbal charm; he can caress the ear with an exquisite rhythmical cadence, but he hears the impresario calling, sets spurs to Pegasus, and stumbles. The Nemesis of haste pursues him, and, as has often been remarked, some of his last acts are weak. La batalla del honor is a case in point: a splendid play spoiled by a weak ending. But this undeniable defect is not peculiar to Lope de Vega: it is noticeable in Julius Cæsar, the last act of which reveals Shakespeare pressed for time, and tacking his scenes rapidly together so as to put the play punctually in rehearsal. Let us be honest, and use the same scales and weights for every one: we shall find the greatest works by the greatest men frequently come short of absolute perfection at some point. Lope fails with the rest, and, if he fails oftener, that is because he writes more. Is it surprising that he should sometimes feel the strain upon him? He had not only to invent plots by the score, and create character by the hundred: he had also to satisfy a vigilant and fastidious public by the variety of his metrical craftsmanship, and in this respect he has neither equal nor second.
We must accept Lope as Heaven made him with his inevitable imperfections and his incomparable endowment. He has the Spanish desire to shine, to be conspicuous, to please, and he condescends to please at almost any cost. Yet he has an artistic conscience of his own, endangers his supremacy by flouting the tribe of cultos, and pours equal scorn on the pageant-plays—the comedias del vulgo which were so soon to become the fashion in court-circles. Lope needed no scene-painters to make good his deficiencies. In Ay verdades que en amor, he laughs at the pieces
And well he might, for his alert presentation would convert a barn into a palace. In the comedia which he invented—using comedia in much the same sense as Dante uses commedia—his scope is unlimited: he stages all ranks of human society from kings to rustic clowns, and is by turns tragic, serious, diverting, pathetic, or gay. He has the unique power of creating the daintiest heroines in the world—beautiful, appealing, tender and brave. He has the secret of communicating emotion, of inventing dialogue, always appropriate, and he is ever prompt to enliven it with a delicate humour, humane and debonair. He has not merely enriched Spain: in some degree not yet precisely known—for the history of comparative literature is in its infancy—he has contributed to almost every theatre in Europe.
Two or three illustrations must suffice. Rotrou, as the handbooks tell us, has borrowed four—perhaps five—plays from Lope: we may now say five and perhaps six, for in Cosroès Lope’s Las Mudanzas de la fortuna y sucesos de don Beltrán de Aragón is combined with a Latin play by Louis Cellot. Every one remembers that Corneille borrowed Don Sanche d’Aragon and the Suite du Menteur from Lope. There are traces of Lope in Molière: in Les Femmes savantes, in L’École des maris, in L’École des Femmes, in Le Médecin malgré lui—and perhaps in Tartufe. And, even in the present incomplete state of our knowledge, it would be possible to draw up a long list of foreign debtors from Boisrobert and D’Ouville to Lesage. Of Lope’s Spanish imitators this is not the time to speak. He did not found a school, but every Spanish dramatist of the best period marches under Lope’s flag. There are still some who, in a spirit of chicane, would withhold from him the glory of being the architect of the Spanish theatre. So be it: but even they acknowledge that he found it brick, and left it marble.
CHAPTER VIII
CALDERÓN
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:—