Y el mayor bien es pequeño
Que toda la vida es sueño
Y los sueños sueño son.”
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
It is a fine poetic reflection, well fitted to stand beside the yet more beautiful lines of the Tempest, but it is not wise to approach the play in the hope that all of it will be found at the same level.
As in the case of Lope, though not to the same extent, the critic who is severely limited in space must be content to speak in general terms of much of Calderon’s work. It would be interesting to take El Mágico Prodigioso (‘The Wonder-working Magician’), El Mayor Monstruo los Zelos (‘Jealousy the greatest Monster’), and La Puente de Mantible (‘The Bridge of Mantible’), and show what has been added in any of them—or a score of others which it were as easy to name—to the unchanging framework of the Spanish play. In the Mágico Prodigioso, for instance, perhaps the most generally known of Calderon’s greater dramas, which has been ineptly enough compared to Faust, we have, in addition to the usual machinery of dama, galan, and gracioso, a story of temptation by the devil. Looked at closely, it is a tale told for edification, and for the purpose of showing what a fool the devil essentially is. He is argued off his legs by Cyprian the hero at the first bout, beaten completely by stock arguments to be found in text-books. His one resource is to promise Cyprian the possession of Justina, and he signally fails to keep his word. The false Justina he has created to satisfy the hero turns to a skeleton at once, and Cyprian becomes a Christian because he discovers that the devil is unable to give him possession of a woman, and is less powerful than God, which he knew by the fiend’s own confession at the beginning. It is an edifying story to all who accept the premisses and the parade of scholastic argument, and are prepared to allow for the time, the nation, and the surroundings.
The school of Calderon.
Calderon wound up and rounded off the historical development of the Spanish drama so completely that little need be said of his school, which indeed only means contemporaries who wrote Lope’s drama with Calderon’s style. Yet Moreto was a strong man, and to him also belongs the honour of having put on the stage an enduring type, the Lindo Don Diego, who was the ancestor of our own Sir Fopling Flutter, of Lord Foppington, and of many another theatrical dandy. Francisco de Roxas, too, has left a point-of-honour play, not unworthy of his master, Del Rey Abajo, Ninguno—‘From the King downwards, Nobody.’ One feature common to all the later writers for the old Spanish stage may be noticed. It was their growing tendency to re-use the situations and plots of their predecessors. Moreto was a notable proficient in this, and Calderon himself did as much. It seems as if a theatre which dealt almost wholly with intrigue and situation had exhausted all possible combinations and could only repeat. When men began to go back in this fashion the end was at hand. Calderon, less fortunate than Velasquez, outlived the king who was their common patron, and saw with his own eyes the decadence of Spain. Beyond him there was only echo, and then dotage prolonged into the eighteenth century.