No doubt, this is not the dramatic interest to which we are most accustomed and which we most value. But still it is a dramatic interest, and dramatic effects are produced by it. We are not to judge Calderon by the example of Shakspeare, any more than we are to judge Shakspeare by the example of Sophocles. The “Arabian Nights” are not the less brilliant because the admirable practical fictions of Miss Edgeworth are so different. The gallant audiences of Madrid still give the full measure of an intelligent admiration to the dramas of Calderon, as their fathers did; and even the poor Alguacil, who sat as a guard of ceremony on the stage while the “Niña de Gomez Arias” was acting, was so deluded by the cunning of the scene, that, when a noble Spanish lady was dragged forward to be sold to the Moors, he sprang, sword in hand, among the performers to prevent it.[627] It is in vain to say that dramas which produce such effects are not dramatic. The testimony of two centuries and of a whole nation proves the contrary.
Admitting, then, that the plays of Calderon are really dramas, and that their basis is to be sought in the structure of their plots, we can examine them in the spirit, at least, in which they were originally written. And if, while thus inquiring into their character and merits, we fix our attention on the different degrees in which love, jealousy, and a lofty and sensitive honor and loyalty enter into their composition and give life and movement to their respective actions, we shall hardly fail to form a right estimate of what Calderon did for the Spanish secular theatre in its highest departments.
Under the first head,—that of the passion of love,—one of the most prominent of Calderon’s plays occurs early in the collection of his works, and is entitled “Love survives Life.” It is founded on events that happened in the rebellion of the Moors of Granada which broke out in 1568, and though some passages in it bear traces of the history of Mendoza,[628] yet it is mainly taken from the half fanciful, half-serious narrative of Hita, where its chief details are recorded as unquestionable facts.[629] The action occupies about five years, beginning three years before the absolute outbreak of the insurgents, and ending with their final overthrow.
The first act passes in the city of Granada, and explains the intention of the conspirators to throw off the Spanish yoke, which had become intolerable. Tuzani, the hero, is quickly brought to the foreground of the piece by his attachment to Clara Malec, whose aged father, dishonored by a blow from a Spaniard, causes the rebellion to break out somewhat prematurely. Tuzani at once seeks the haughty offender. A duel follows, and is described with great spirit; but it is interrupted,[630] and the parties separate, to renew their quarrel on a bloodier theatre.
The second act opens three years afterwards, in the mountains south of Granada, where the insurgents are strongly posted, and where they are attacked by Don John of Austria, represented as coming fresh from the great victory at Lepanto, which yet happened, as Calderon and his audience well knew, a year after this rebellion was quelled. The marriage of Tuzani and Clara is hardly celebrated, when he is hurried away from her by one of the chances of war; the fortress where the ceremonies had taken place falling suddenly into the hands of the Spaniards. Clara, who had remained in it, is murdered in the mêlée by a Spanish soldier, for the sake of her rich bridal jewels; and though Tuzani arrives in season to witness her death, he is too late to intercept or recognize the murderer.
From this moment, darkness settles on the scene. Tuzani’s character changes, or seems to change, in an instant, and his whole Moorish nature is stirred to its deepest foundations. The surface, it is true, remains, for a time, as calm as ever. He disguises himself carefully in Castilian armour, and glides into the enemy’s camp in quest of vengeance, with that fearfully cool resolution which marks, indeed, the predominance of one great passion, but shows that all the others are roused to contribute to its concentrated energy. The ornaments of Clara enable her lover to trace out the murderer. But he makes himself perfectly sure of his proper victim by coolly listening to a minute description of Clara’s beauty and of the circumstances attending her death; and when the Spaniard ends by saying, “I pierced her heart,” Tuzani springs upon him like a tiger, crying out, “And was the blow like this?” and strikes him dead at his feet. The Moor is surrounded, and is recognized by the Spaniards as the fiercest of their enemies; but, even from the very presence of Don John of Austria, he cuts his way through all opposition, and escapes to the mountains. Hita says he afterwards knew him personally.
The power of this painful tragedy consists in the living impression it gives us of a pure and elevated love, contrasted with the wild elements of the age in which it is placed;—the whole being idealized by passing through Calderon’s excited imagination, but still, in the main, taken from history and resting on known facts. Regarded in this light, it is a solemn exhibition of violence, disaster, and hopeless rebellion, through whose darkening scenes we are led by that burning love which has marked the Arab wherever he has been found, and by that proud sense of honor which did not forsake him as he slowly retired, disheartened and defeated, from the rich empire he had so long enjoyed in Western Europe. We are even hurried by the course of the drama into the presence of whatever is most odious in war, and should be revolted, as we are made to witness, with our own eyes, its guiltiest horrors; but in the midst of all, the form of Clara rises, a beautiful vision of womanly love, before whose gentleness the tumults of the conflict seem, at least, to be hushed; while, from first to last, in the characters of Don John of Austria, Lope de Figueroa,[631] and Garcés, on one side, and the venerable Malec and the fiery Tuzani, on the other, we are dazzled by a show of the times that Calderon brings before us, and of the passions which deeply marked the two most romantic nations that were ever brought into a conflict so direct.
The play of “Love survives Life,” so far as its plot is concerned, is founded on the passionate love of Tuzani and Clara, without any intermixture of the workings of jealousy, or any questions arising, in the course of that love, from an over-excited feeling of honor. This is rare in Calderon, whose dramas are almost always complicated in their intrigue by the addition of one or both of these principles; giving the story sometimes a tragic and sometimes a happy conclusion.
One of the best-known and most admired of these mixed dramas is “The Physician of his own Honor,”—a play whose scene is laid in the time of Peter the Cruel, but one which seems to have no foundation in known facts, and in which the monarch has an elevation given to his character not warranted by history.[632] His brother, Henry of Trastamara, is represented as having been in love with a lady who, notwithstanding his lofty pretensions, is given in marriage to Don Gutierre de Solís, a Spanish nobleman of high rank and sensitive honor. She is sincerely attached to her husband, and true to him. But the prince is accidentally thrown into her presence. His passion is revived; he visits her again, contrary to her will; he leaves his dagger, by chance, in her apartment; and, the suspicions of the husband being roused, she is anxious to avert any further danger, and begins, for this purpose, a letter to her lover, which her husband seizes before it is finished. His decision is instantly taken. Nothing can be more deep and tender than his love; but his honor is unable to endure the idea, that his wife, even before her marriage, had been interested in another, and that, after it, she had seen him privately. When, therefore, she awakes from the swoon into which she had fallen at the moment he tore from her the equivocal beginning of her letter, she finds at her side a note containing only these fearful words:—
My love adores thee, but my honor hates;