But where the subject he selected was not thus fully fitted, by its own incidents, to his theory of the drama, he accommodated it to his end as freely as if it were of imagination all compact. “The Weapons of Beauty” and “Love the Most Powerful of Enchantments” are abundant proofs of this;[662] and so is “Hate and Love,” where he has altered the facts in the life of Christina of Sweden, his whimsical contemporary, till it is not easy to recognize her,—a remark which may be extended to the character of Peter of Aragon in his “Tres Justicias en Uno,” and to the personages in Portuguese history whom he has so strikingly idealized in his “Weal and Woe,”[663] and in his “Firm-hearted Prince.” To an English reader, however, the “Cisma de Inglaterra,” on the fortunes and fate of Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey, is probably the most obvious perversion of history; for the Cardinal, after his fall from power, comes on the stage begging his bread of Catherine of Aragon, while, at the same time, Henry, repenting of the religious schism he has countenanced, promises to marry his daughter Mary to Philip the Second of Spain.[664]
Nor is Calderon more careful in matters of morals than in matters of fact. Duels and homicides occur constantly in his plays, under the slightest pretences, as if there were no question about their propriety. The authority of a father or brother to put to death a daughter or sister who has been guilty of secreting her lover under her own roof is fully recognized.[665] It is made a ground of glory for the king, Don Pedro, that he justified Gutierre in the atrocious murder of his wife; and even the lady Leonore, who is to succeed to the blood-stained bed, desires, as we have seen, that no other measure of justice should be applied to herself than had been applied to the innocent and beautiful victim who lay dead before her. Indeed, it is impossible to read far in Calderon without perceiving that his object is mainly to excite a high and feverish interest by his plot and story; and that to do this, he relies almost constantly upon an exaggerated sense of honor, which, in its more refined attributes, certainly did not give its tone to the courts of Philip the Fourth and Charles the Second, and which, with the wide claims he makes for it, could never have been the rule of conduct and intercourse anywhere, without shaking all the foundations of society and poisoning the best and dearest relations of life.
Here, therefore, we find pressed upon us the question, What was the origin of these extravagant ideas of domestic honor and domestic rights, which are found in the old Spanish drama from the beginning of the full-length plays in Torres Naharro, and which are thus exhibited in all their excess in the plays of Calderon?
The question is certainly difficult to answer, as are all like it that depend on the origin and traditions of national character; but—setting aside as quite groundless the suggestion sometimes made, that the old Spanish ideas of domestic authority might be derived from the Arabs—we find that the ancient Gothic laws, which date back to a period long before the Moorish invasion, and which fully represented the national character till they were supplanted by the “Partidas” in the fourteenth century, recognized the same fearfully cruel system that is found in the old drama. Every thing relating to domestic honor was left by these laws, as it is by Calderon, to domestic authority. The father had power to put to death his wife or daughter who was dishonored under his roof; and if the father were dead, the same terrible power was transferred to the brother in relation to his sister, or even to the lover, where the offending party had been betrothed to him.
No doubt, these wild laws, though formally renewed and reënacted as late as the reign of Saint Ferdinand, had ceased in the time of Calderon to have any force; and the infliction of death under circumstances in which they fully justified it would then have been murder in Spain, as it would have been in any other civilized country of Christendom. But, on the other hand, no doubt these laws were in operation during many more centuries than had elapsed between their abrogation and the age of Calderon and Philip the Fourth. The tradition of their power, therefore, was not yet lost on the popular character, and poetry was permitted to preserve their fearful principles long after their enactments had ceased to be acknowledged anywhere else.[666]
Similar remarks may be made concerning duels. That duels were of constant recurrence in Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as earlier, we have abundant proof. But we know, too, that the last which was countenanced by royal authority occurred in the youth of Charles the Fifth; and there is no reason to suppose that private encounters were much more common among the cavaliers at Madrid in the time of Lope de Vega and Calderon than they were at London and Paris.[667] But the traditions that had come down from the times when they prevailed were quite sufficient warrant for a drama which sought to excite a strong and anxious interest more than any thing else. In one of the plays of Barrios there are eight, and in another twelve duels;[668] an exhibition that, on any other supposition, would have been absurd.
Perhaps the very extravagance of such representations made them comparatively harmless. It was, in the days of the Austrian dynasty, so incredible that a brother should put his sister to death merely because she had been found under his roof with her lover, or that one cavalier should fight another in the street simply because a lady did not wish to be followed, that there was no great danger of contagion from the theatrical example. Still, the immoral tendency of the Spanish drama was not overlooked, even at the time when Calderon’s fame was at the highest. Guerra, one of his great admirers, in an Aprobacion prefixed to Calderon’s plays in 1682, praised, not only his friend, but the great body of the dramas to whose brilliancy that friend had so much contributed; and the war against the theatre broke out in consequence, as it had twice before in the time of Lope. Four anonymous attacks were made on the injudicious remarks of Guerra, and two more by persons who gave their names,—Puente de Mendoza and Navarro;—the last, oddly enough, replying in print to a defence of himself by Guerra, which had then been seen only in manuscript. But the whole of this discussion proceeded on the authority of the Church and the Fathers, rather than upon the grounds of public morality and social order; and therefore it ended, as previous attacks of the same kind had done, by the triumph of the theatre;[669]—Calderon’s plays and those of his school being performed and admired quite as much after it as before.
Calderon, however, not only relied on the interest he could thus excite by an extravagant story full of domestic violence and duels, but often introduced flattering allusions to living persons and passing events, which he thought would be welcome to his audience, whether of the court or the city. Thus, in “The Scarf and the Flower,” the hero, just returned from Madrid, gives his master, the Duke of Florence, a glowing description, extending through above two hundred lines, of the ceremony of swearing fealty, in 1632, to Prince Balthasar, as prince of Asturias; a passage which, from its spirit, as well as its compliments to the king and the royal family, must have produced no small effect on the stage.[670] Again, in “El Escondido y la Tapada,” we have a stirring intimation of the siege of Valencia on the Po, in 1635;[671] and in “Nothing like Silence,” repeated allusions to the victory over the Prince of Condé at Fontarabia, in 1639.[672] In “Beware of Smooth Water,” there is a dazzling account of the public reception of the second wife of Philip the Fourth at Madrid, in 1649, for a part of whose pageant, it will be recollected, Calderon was employed to furnish inscriptions.[673] In “The Blood-stain of the Rose”—founded on the fable of Venus and Adonis, and written in honor of the Peace of the Pyrenees and the marriage of the Infanta with Louis the Fourteenth, in 1659—we have whatever was thought proper to be said on such subjects by a favorite poet, both in the loa, which is fortunately preserved, and in the play itself.[674] But there is no need of multiplying examples. Calderon nowhere fails to consult the fashionable and courtly, as well as the truly national, feeling of his time; and in “The Second Scipio” he stoops even to gross flattery of the poor and imbecile Charles the Second, declaring him equal to that great patriot whom Milton pronounces to have been “the height of Rome.”[675]
In style and versification, Calderon has high merits, though they are occasionally mingled with the defects of his age. Brilliancy is one of his great objects, and he easily attains it. But he frequently falls, and with apparent willingness, into the showy folly of his time, the absurd sort of euphuism, which Góngora and his followers called “the cultivated style.” This is the case, for instance, in his “Love and Fortune,” and in his “Conflicts of Love and Loyalty.” But in “April and May Mornings,” on the contrary, and in “No Jesting with Love,” he ridicules the same style with great severity; and in such charming plays as “The Lady and the Maid,” and “The Loud Secret,” he wholly avoids it,—thus adding another to the many instances of distinguished men who have sometimes accommodated themselves to their age and its fashions, which at other times they have rebuked and controlled. Everywhere his verses charm us by their delicious melody; everywhere he indulges himself in the rich variety of measures which Spanish or Italian poetry offered him,—octave stanzas, terza rima, sonnets, silvas, liras, and the different forms of the redondilla, with the ballad asonantes and consonantes;—showing a mastery over his language extraordinary in itself, and one which, while it sometimes enables him to rise to the loftiest tones of the national drama, seduces him at other times to seek popular favor by fantastic tricks that were wholly unworthy of his genius.[676]
But we are not to measure Calderon as his contemporaries did. We stand at a distance too remote and impartial for such indulgence; and must neither pass over his failures nor exaggerate his merits. We must look on the whole mass of his efforts for the theatre, and inquire what he really effected for its advancement,—or rather what changes it underwent in his hands, both in its more gay and in its more serious portions.