Certainly Calderon appeared as a writer for the Spanish stage under peculiarly favorable circumstances; and, by the preservation of his faculties to an age beyond that commonly allotted to man, was enabled long to maintain the ascendency he had early established. His genius took its direction from the very first, and preserved it to the last. When he was fourteen years old he had written a piece for the stage, which, sixty years later, he thought worthy to be put into the list of dramas that he furnished to the Admiral of Castile.[677] When he was thirty-five, the death of Lope de Vega left him without a rival. The next year, he was called to court by Philip the Fourth, the most munificent patron the Spanish theatre ever knew; and from this time till his death, the destinies of the drama were in his hands nearly as much as they had been before in those of Lope. Forty-five of his longer pieces, and probably more, were acted in magnificent theatres in the different royal palaces in Madrid and its neighbourhood. Some must have been exhibited with great pomp and at great expense, like “The Three Greatest Wonders,” each of whose three acts was represented in the open air on a separate stage by a different company of performers;[678] and “Love the Greatest Enchantment,” brought out in a floating theatre which the wasteful extravagance of the Count Duke Olivares had erected on the artificial waters in the gardens of the Buen Retiro.[679] Indeed, every thing shows that the patronage, both of the court and capital, placed Calderon forward, as the favored dramatic poet of his time. This rank he maintained for nearly half a century, and wrote his last drama, “Hado y Devisa,” founded on the brilliant fictions of Boiardo and Ariosto, when he was eighty-one years of age.[680] He therefore was not only the successor of Lope de Vega, but enjoyed the same kind of popular influence. Between them, they held the empire of the Spanish drama for ninety years; during which, partly by the number of their imitators and disciples, but chiefly by their own personal resources, they gave to it all the extent and consideration it ever possessed.
Calderon, however, neither effected nor attempted any great changes in its forms. Two or three times, indeed, he prepared dramas that were either wholly sung, or partly sung and partly spoken; but even these, in their structure, were no more operas than his other plays, and were only a courtly luxury, which it was attempted to introduce, in imitation of the genuine opera just brought into France by Louis the Fourteenth, with whose court that of Spain was now intimately connected.[681] But this was all. Calderon has added to the stage no new form of dramatic composition. Nor has he much modified those forms which had been already arranged and settled by Lope de Vega. But he has shown more technical exactness in combining his incidents, and arranged every thing more skilfully for stage-effect.[682] He has given to the whole a new coloring, and, in some respects, a new physiognomy. His drama is more poetical in its tone and tendencies, and has less the air of truth and reality, than that of his great predecessor. In its more successful portions,—which are rarely objectionable from their moral tone,—it seems almost as if we were transported to another and more gorgeous world, where the scenery is lighted up with unknown and preternatural splendor, and where the motives and passions of the personages that pass before us are so highly wrought, that we must have our own feelings not a little stirred and excited before we can take an earnest interest in what we witness or sympathize in its results. But even in this he is successful. The buoyancy of life and spirit that he has infused into the gayer divisions of his drama, and the moving tenderness that pervades its graver and more tragical portions, lift us unconsciously to the height where alone his brilliant exhibitions can prevail with our imaginations,—where alone we can be interested and deluded, when we find ourselves in the midst, not only of such a confusion of the different forms of the drama, but of such a confusion of the proper limits of dramatic and lyrical poetry.
To this elevated tone, and to the constant effort necessary in order to sustain it, we owe much of what distinguishes Calderon from his predecessors, and nearly all that is most individual and characteristic in his separate merits and defects. It makes him less easy, graceful, and natural than Lope. It imparts to his style a mannerism, which, notwithstanding the marvellous richness and fluency of his versification, sometimes wearies and sometimes offends us. It leads him to repeat from himself till many of his personages become standing characters, and his heroes and their servants, his ladies and their confidants, his old men and his buffoons,[683] seem to be produced, like the masked figures of the ancient theatre, to represent, with the same attributes and in the same costume, the different intrigues of his various plots. It leads him, in short, to regard the whole of the Spanish drama as a form, within whose limits his imagination may be indulged without restraint; and in which Greeks and Romans, heathen divinities, and the supernatural fictions of Christian tradition, may be all brought out in Spanish fashions and with Spanish feelings, and led, through a succession of ingenious and interesting adventures, to the catastrophes their stories happen to require.
In carrying out this theory of the Spanish drama, Calderon, as we have seen, often succeeds, and often fails. But when he succeeds, his success is sometimes of no common character. He then sets before us only models of ideal beauty, perfection, and splendor;—a world, he would have it, into which nothing should enter but the highest elements of the national genius. There, the fervid, yet grave, enthusiasm of the old Castilian heroism; the chivalrous adventures of modern, courtly honor; the generous self-devotion of individual loyalty; and that reserved, but passionate love, which, in a state of society where it was so rigorously withdrawn from notice, became a kind of unacknowledged religion of the heart;—all seem to find their appropriate home. And when he has once brought us into this land of enchantment, whose glowing impossibilities his own genius has created, and has called around him forms of such grace and loveliness as those of Clara and Doña Angela, or heroic forms like those of Tuzani, Mariamne, and Don Ferdinand, then he has reached the highest point he ever attained, or ever proposed to himself;—he has set before us the grand show of an idealized drama, resting on the purest and noblest elements of the Spanish national character, and one which, with all its unquestionable defects, is to be placed among the extraordinary phenomena of modern poetry.[684]
CHAPTER XXV.
Drama after Calderon. — Moreto. — Comedias de Figuron. — Roxas. — Plays by more than one Author. — Cubillo. — Leyba. — Cancer. — Enriquez Gomez. — Sigler. — Zarate. — Barrios. — Diamante. — Hoz. — Matos Fragoso. — Solís. — Candamo. — Zarzuelas. — Zamora. — Cañizares, and others. — Decline of the Spanish Drama.
The most brilliant period of the Spanish drama falls within the reign of Philip the Fourth, which extended from 1621 to 1665, and embraced the last fourteen years of the life of Lope de Vega and the thirty most fortunate years of the life of Calderon. But after this period a change begins to be apparent; for the school of Lope was that of a drama in the freshness and buoyancy of youth, while the school of Calderon belongs to the season of its maturity and gradual decay. Not that this change is strongly marked during Calderon’s life. On the contrary, so long as he lived, and especially during the reign of his great patron, there is little visible decline in the dramatic poetry of Spain; though still, through the crowd of its disciples and amidst the shouts of admiration that followed it on the stage, the symptoms of its coming fate may be discerned.
Of those that divided the favor of the public with their great master, none stood so near to him as Agustin Moreto, of whom we know hardly any thing, except that he lived retired in a religious house at Toledo from 1657, and that he died there in 1669.[685] Three volumes of his plays, however, and a number more never collected into a volume, were printed between 1654 and 1681, though he himself seems to have regarded them, during the greater part of that time, only as specious follies or sins. They are in all the different forms known to the age to which they belong, and, as in the case of Calderon, each form melts imperceptibly into the character of some other. But the theatre was not then so strictly watched as it had been; and the small number of religious plays Moreto has left us are generally connected with known events in history, like “The Most Fortunate Brothers,” which contains the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, both before they were inclosed in the cave and when they awoke from their miraculous repose of two centuries.[686] A few are heroic, such as “The Brave Justiciary of Castile,”—a drama of spirit and power, on the character of Peter the Cruel, though, like most other plays in which he appears, not one in which the truth of history is respected. But, in general, Moreto’s dramas are of the old cavalier class; and when they are not, they take, in order to suit the humor of the time, many of the characteristics of this truly national form.
In one point, however, he made, if not a change in the direction of the drama of his predecessors, yet an advance upon it. He devoted himself more to character-drawing, and often succeeded better in it than they had. His first play of this kind was “The Aunt and the Niece,” printed as early as 1654. The characters are a widow extremely anxious to be married, but foolishly jealous of the charms of her niece, and a vaporing, epicurean officer in the army, who cheats the elder lady with flattery, while he wins the younger. It is curious to observe, however, that the hint for this drama—which is the oldest of the class called figuron, from the prominence of one not very dignified figure in it—is yet to be found in Lope de Vega, to whom, as we have seen, is to be traced, directly or indirectly, almost every form of dramatic composition that finally succeeded on the Spanish stage.[687]