In classical Spanish drama the masks are few. The characters hardly have individual names. The lady in Calderon, for instance, if she is not Beatriz will be Leonor, and under either name so superlatively beautiful, young, chaste, eloquent, devoted, and resourceful, as to be indistinguishable from her namesakes in the other plays. The hero is always exaggeratedly in love, exaggeratedly chivalrous, and absolutely perfect, save for this heroic excess of sensitiveness and honour. The old father is always austere, unyielding, perverse, and sublime. All the maids in attendance possess the same roguishness, the same genius for intrigue and lightning mendacity; whilst the valet, whether called Crispin or Florin, is always a faithful soul and a coward, with the same quality of rather forced humour. No diversity from play to play save the diversity in the fable, in the angle at which the stock characters are exhibited and the occasion on which they versify; for they all versify in the same style, with the same inexhaustible facility, abundance, rhetorical finish, and lyric fire.
Why this monotony? Did Spanish life afford fewer contrasts, less individuality of character and idiom, than did the England of Shakespeare? Hardly: in Spain the soldier of fortune, the grandee, peasant, monk, or prelate, the rogue, beggar, and bandit were surely as highly characterized as anything to be then found in England; and Spanish women in their natural ardour of affection, in their ready speech and discretion, in their dignity and religious consecration, lent themselves rather better, one would think, to the making of heroines than did those comparatively cool and boylike young ladies whom Shakespeare transmuted into tragic angels. I think we may go further and say positively that it was Spain rather than England that could have shown the spectacle of "every man in his humour."
Even in the days before Puritanism English character was English; it tended to silent independence and outward reserve, preferring to ignore its opposite rather than to challenge it. In pose and expression the Spaniard is naturally more theatrical and pungent; and his individuality itself is stiffen No doubt, in society, he will simulate and dissimulate as an Englishman never would; but he is prompted to this un-English habit by the very fixity of his purposes; all his courtesy and loyalty are ironical, and inwardly he never yields an inch. He likes if possible to be statuesque; he likes to appeal to his own principles and character, and to say, "Sir, whatever you may think of it, that is the sort of man I am." He has that curious form of self-love which inclines to parade even its defects, as a mourner parades his grief. He admits readily that he is a sinner, and that he means to remain one; he composes his countenance proudly on that basis; whereas when English people say they are miserable sinners (which happens only in church) they feel perhaps that they are imperfect or unlucky, and they may even contemplate being somewhat different in future; but it never occurs to them to classify themselves as miserable sinners for good, with a certain pride in their class, deliberately putting on the mask of Satan or the cock's feather of Mephistopheles and saying to all concerned, "See what a very devil I am!" The Englishman's sins are slips; he feels he was not himself on those occasions, and does not think it fair to be reminded of them. Though theology may sometimes have taught him that he is a sinner fundamentally, such is not his native conviction; the transcendental ego in him cannot admit any external standard to which it ought to have conformed. The Spaniard is metaphysically humbler, knowing himself to be a creature of accident and fate; yet he is dramatically more impudent, and respects himself more than he respects other people. He laughs at kings; and as amongst beggars it is etiquette to whine, and ostentatiously to call oneself blind, old, poor, crippled, hungry, and a brother of yours, so amongst avowed sinners it may become a point of pride to hold, as it were, the record as a liar, a thief, an assassin, or a harlot. These rôles are disgraceful when one is reduced to them by force of circumstances or for some mean ulterior motive, but they recover their human dignity when one wears them as a chosen mask in the comedy of life. The pose, at that angle, redeems the folly, and the façade the building. Nor is this a lapse into sheer immorality; there is many a primitive or animal level of morality beneath the conventional code; and often crime and barbarism are as proud of themselves as virtue, and no less punctilious. If there is effrontery in such a rebellion, there may be also sincerity, courage, relief, profound truth to one's own nature. Hence the eloquence of romanticism. Passion and wilfulness (which romanticists think are above criticism) cannot be expected to understand that, if they merged and subsided into a harmony, the life distilled out of their several deaths would be infinitely more living and varied than any of them, and would be beautiful and perfect to boot; whereas the romantic chaos which they prolong by their obstinacy is the most hideous of hells. But avowed sinners and proud romanticists insist on preserving and on loving hell, because they insist on loving and preserving themselves.
It was not, then, moral variety that was lacking in Spain, always a romantic country, but only interest in moral variety. This lack of interest was itself an expression of romantic independence, intensity, and pride. The gentleman with his hand always on the hilt of his sword, lest some whiff from anywhere should wound his vanity, or the monk perpetually murmuring memento mori, closed his mind to every alien vista. Of course he knew that the world was full of motley characters: that was one of his reasons for holding it at arm's length. What were those miscellaneous follies to him but an offence or a danger? Why should he entertain his leisure in depicting or idealizing them? If some psychological zoologist cared to discant on the infinity of phenomena, natural or moral, well and good; but how should such things charm a man of honour, a Christian, or a poet? They might indeed be referred to on occasion, as fabulists make the animals speak, with a humorous and satirical intention, as a sort of warning and confirmation to us in our chosen path; but an appealing poet, for such tightly integrated minds, must illustrate and enforce their personal feelings. Moreover, although in words and under the spell of eloquence the Spaniard may often seem credulous and enthusiastic, he is disillusioned and cynical at heart; he does not credit the existence of motives or feelings better than those he has observed, or thinks he has observed. His preachers recommend religion chiefly by composing invectives against the world, and his political writers express sympathy with one foreign country only out of hatred for another, or perhaps for their own. The sphere of distrust and indifference begins for him very near home; he has little speculative sympathy with life at large; he is cruel to animals; he shrugs his shoulders at crime in high places; he feels little responsibility to the public, and has small faith in time and in work. This does not mean in the least that his character is weak or his morality lax within its natural range; his affections are firm, his sense of obligation deep, his delicacy of feeling often excessive; he is devoted to his family, and will put himself to any inconvenience to do a favour to a friend at the public expense. There are definite things to which his sentiments and habits have pledged him: beyond that horizon nothing speaks to his heart.
Such a people will not go to the play to be vaguely entertained, as if they were previously bored. They are not habitually bored; they are full to the brim of their characteristic passions and ideas. They require that the theatre should set forth these passions and ideas as brilliantly and convincingly as possible, in order to be confirmed in them, and to understand and develop them more clearly. Variety of plot and landscape they will relish, because nothing is easier for them than to imagine themselves born in the purple, or captive, or in love, or in a difficult dilemma of honour; and they will be deeply moved to see some constant spirit, like their own, buffeted by fortune, but even in the last extremity never shaken. The whole force of their dramatic art will lie in leading them to dream of themselves in a different, perhaps more glorious, position, in which their latent passions might be more splendidly expressed. These passions are intense and exceptionally definite; and this is the reason, I think, for the monotony of Spanish music, philosophy, and romantic drama. All eloquence, all issues, all sentiments, if they are not to seem vapid and trivial, must be such as each man can make his own, with a sense of enhanced vitality and moral glory. The lady, if he is to warm to her praises, must not be less divine than the one he loves, or might have loved; the hero must not fall short of what, under such circumstances, he himself would have wished to be. The language, too, must always be worthy of the theme: it cannot be too rapturous and eloquent. Unless his soul can be fired by the poet's words, and can sing them, as it were, in chorus, he will not care to listen to them. But he will not tire of the same cadences or the same images—stars, foam, feathers, flowers—if these symbols, better than any others, transport him into the ethereal atmosphere which it is his pleasure to breathe.
The Spanish nation boils the same peas for its dinner the whole year round; it has only one religion, if it has any; the pious part of it recites the same prayers fifty or one hundred and fifty times daily, almost in one breath; the gay and sentimental part never ceases to sing the same jotas and malagueñas. Such constancy is admirable. If a dish is cheap, nutritious, and savoury on Monday, it must be so on Tuesday, too; it was a ridiculous falsehood, though countenanced by some philosophers, which pretended that always to feel (or to eat) the same thing was equivalent to never feeling (or eating) anything. Nor does experience of a genuine good really have any tendency to turn it into an evil, or into an indifferent thing; at most, custom may lead people to take it for granted, and the thoughtless may forget its value, until, perhaps, they lose it. Of course, men and nations may slowly change their nature, and consequently their rational preferences; but at any assigned time a man must have some moral complexion, or if he has none, not much need be said about him.
But there is another point to be considered. Need human nature's daily food be exclusively the Spanish pea? Might it not just as well be rice, or polenta, or even beef and bacon? Much as I admire my countrymen's stomachs for making a clear choice and for sticking to it, I rather pity them for the choice they have made. That hard yellow pea is decidedly heavy, flatulent, and indigestible. I am sure Pythagoras would not have approved of it; possibly it is the very bean he abhorred. Against the jota and the malagueña I can say nothing; I find in them I know not what infinite, never-failing thrill and inimitable power, the power which perfection of any kind always has; yet what are they in comparison to all the possibilities of human music? Enjoyment, which some people call criticism, is something aesthetic, spontaneous, and irresponsible; the aesthetic perfection of anything is incommensurable with that of anything else. But there is a responsible sort of criticism which is political and moral, and which turns on the human advantage of possessing or loving this or that sort of perfection. To cultivate some sorts may be useless or even hostile to the possible perfection of human life. Spanish religion, again, is certainly most human and most superhuman; but its mystic virtue to the devotee cannot alter the fact that, on a broad view, it appears to be a romantic tour de force, a desperate illusion, fostered by premature despair and by a total misunderstanding of nature and history. Finally, those lyrical ladies and entranced gentlemen of the Spanish drama are like filigree flowers upon golden stems; they belong to a fantastic ballet, to an exquisite dream, rather than to sane human society. The trouble is not that their types are few and constant, but that these types are eccentric, attenuated, and forced. They would not be monotonous if they were adequate to human nature. How vast, how kindly, how enveloping does the world of Shakespeare seem in comparison! We seem to be afloat again on the tide of time, in a young, green world; we are ready to tempt new fortunes, in the hope of reaching better things than we know. And this is the right spirit; because although the best, if it had been attained, would be all-sufficient, the best is not yet.