A History of Spanish Literature

by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

If Tirso excelled in sombre force, he was likewise a master in the lighter comedy of El Vergonzoso en Palacio, where Mireno, the Shy Man at Court, is rendered with rare sympathetic delicacy, and in the farcical intrigue of Don Gil de las Calzas verdes (Don Gil of the Green Breeches), where the changes of Juana to Elvira or to Don Gil are such examples of subtle, gay ingenuity as delight and bewilder the reader no less than the comic trio of the Villana de Vallecas, or the picture of unctuous hypocrisy in Marta la piadosa. Tirso's fate was to be forgotten, not merely by the public, but by the very dramatists who used his themes; and, as in Lope's case, the neglect is partly due to the rarity of his editions. Yet, even so, his eclipse is unaccountable, for his various gifts are hard to match in any literature. He has not the disconcerting cleverness of Lope, nor has he Lope's infinite variety of resource; moreover, his natural frankness has won him a name for indecency. Yet has he imagination, passion, individual vision, knowledge of dramatic effect. He could create character, and his women, if less noble, are more real than Lope's own in their frank emotion and seductive abandonment. At whiles his diction tends to Gongorism, as when—in El Amor y la Amistad—a personage, at sight of a mountain, babbles of "the lofty daring of the snow, the pyramid of diamond"; but this is exceptional, and his hostility to culteranismo inspired Góngora to write more than one stinging epigram. Tirso had not Lope's matchless facility, and, considering the maturity of the Spanish genius, it is strange that he should have written no play before 1606 or 1608. Moreover, he composed by fits and starts in moments snatched from duty, and, beginning late, he ended early. Even in these circumstances he could boast in 1621 that he had produced three hundred plays—a number afterwards raised to four hundred. Only some eighty survive: in other words, four-fifths of his theatre has vanished, and the loss is surely great for those who would fain know every aspect of his genius. But enough remains to justify his high position, and his fame, like Lope's, grows from day to day.

Of such dramatists as the courtly Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza (? 1590-1644), and the festive Luis Belmonte y Bermúdez (1587-? 1650) mere mention must suffice: the former's Querer por sólo querer may be read in an excellent version made by Sir Richard Fanshawe during his imprisonment "by Oliver, after the Battail of Worcester." Antonio Mira de Amescua (? 1578-1640), chaplain of Felipe IV., mingled the human with the divine, was praised by all contemporaries from Cervantes onwards, had the right lyrical note, and, if his plays were collected, might prove himself worthy of his dramatic fame; as it is, he is best known as a playwright from whom Calderón, Moreto, and Corneille have borrowed themes. A more original talent is shown by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (? 1581-1639), whose father was administrator of the Tlacho mines in Mexico. Ruiz de Alarcón left Mexico for Spain in 1600, and studied at Salamanca for five years; he returned to America in 1608 in the hope of being elected to a University chair, but the deformity—a hunched back—with which he was taunted his life long was against him, and he made for Spain in 1611. He entered the household of the Marqués de Salinas, wrote some laudatory décimas for the Desengaño de la Fortuna in 1612, and next year produced his first play, the Semejante de sí mismo, founded, like Tirso's Celosa de sí misma, on the Curious Impertinent. It was no great success, but it made him known and hated. He was far too ready to attack others, being himself most vulnerable. Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa, who had jeered at Cervantes for "writing prologues and dedications when at death's door," spoke for others besides himself when he lampooned Alarcón as "an ape in man's guise, an impudent hunchback, a ludicrous deformity." Tirso befriended the Mexican, while Mendoza, Lope, Quevedo, and the rest scourged him mercilessly; and when his Antecristo (which Voltaire used in Mahomet) was played, a band of rioters ruined the performance by squirting oil on the spectators and firing squibs in the pit. Yet the women always crowded the house when his name was in the bill, and they made his fortune by contriving that his play, Siempre ayuda la Verdad—probably written in collaboration with Tirso—should be given at court in 1623. Three years later he was named Member of Council for the Indies. His collected pieces were published in 1628 and 1634.

Ruiz de Alarcón was never popular in the sense that Lope and Calderón were popular; still, he had his successes, and no Spanish dramatist is better reading. Compared with his rivals he was sterile, for the total of his plays is less than thirty, even if we accept all the doubtful pieces ascribed to him. Lope excels him in invention, Tirso in force and fun, Calderón in charm; Ruiz de Alarcón is less intensely national than these, and the very individuality—the extrañeza—which Montalbán noted with perplexity, makes him almost better appreciated abroad than at home. Corneille has based French tragedy upon Guillén de Castro's Mocedades del Cid; French comedy is scarcely less influenced by his adaptation of the Menteur from Ruiz de Alarcón's Verdad Sospechosa (Truth Suspected). García has lied all his life, lies to his father, his friends, his betrothed, lies to himself, and defeats his own purpose by his ingenuity. He would speak the truth if he could, but he has no talent that way. Why trouble with truth when lying comes easier? His father, Beltrán, perceives that the miser enjoys money, that murder slakes vengeance, that the drunkard grows glorious with wine; but his son's failing is beyond him. The noble Philistine has not the artist's soul, and cannot understand why García should lie for lying's sake, against his own interest. Throughout the play Ruiz de Alarcón is never once at fault, and the gay ingenuity with which he enforces the old moral, that honesty is the best policy, is equalled by his masterly creation of character. Ethics are his preoccupation; yet, though almost all his plays seek to enforce a lesson, he nowhere descends to pulpiteering or merges the dramatist in the teacher. While in Las Paredes Oyen (Walls have Ears) and in El Examen de Maridos (Husbands Proved) the triumph of the Verdad Sospechosa is repeated, the more national play is admirably exampled in El Tejedor de Segovia (The Weaver of Segovia) and Ganar Amigos (How to Win Friends).

There are greater Spanish playwrights than Ruiz de Alarcón: there is none whose work is of such even excellence. In so early a piece as the Cueva de Salamanca, though there is manifest technical inexperience, the mere writing is almost as good as in La Verdad Sospechosa. The very infertility at which contemporaries mocked is balanced by equality of execution. Lope and Calderón have written better pieces, and many worse: no line that Ruiz de Alarcón published is unworthy of him. While his contemporaries were content to improvise at ease, he sat aloof, never joining in the race for money and applause, but filing with a scrupulous conscience to such effect that all his work endures. His chief titles to fame are his power of creating character and his high ethical aim. But he has other merits scarcely less rare: his versification is of extreme finish, and his spirited dialogue, free from any tinge of Gongorism, is a triumph of fine idiom over perverse influences which led men of greater natural endowment astray. His taste, indeed, is almost unerring, and it goes to form that sober dignity, that individual tone, that uncommon counterpoise of faculties which place him below—and a little apart from—the two or three best Spanish dramatists.

If there be an exotic element in the quality of Ruiz de Alarcón's distinction as in his frugal dramatic method, the españolismo of the land is incarnate in the genius of Pedro Calderón de la Barca Henao de la Barreda y Riaño (1600-1681), the most representative Spaniard of the seventeenth century. His father was Secretary to the Treasury, and, on this side, Calderón was a highlander, like Santillana, Lope, and Quevedo; he inherited a strain of Flemish blood through his mother, who claimed descent from the De Mons of Hainault. He was educated at the Jesuit Colegio Imperial in Madrid, and fond biographers declare that he studied civil and canon law at Salamanca; this is mere assertion, unsupported by any proof. Though he is said to have written a play, El Carro del Cielo, at thirteen, he was not very precocious for a Spaniard, his first authentic appearances being made at the Feast of St. Isidore in 1620 and 1622. On the latter occasion he won the third prize, and was praised by the good-natured Lope as one "who in his tender years earns the laurels which time commonly awards to grey hairs." His Boswell, Vera Tasis, reports that he served in Milan and Flanders from 1625 to 1635; but there must be an error of date, for in 1629 he is found at Madrid drawing his sword upon the actor, Pedro de Villegas, who had treacherously stabbed Calderón's brother, and who fled for sanctuary to the Trinitarian Church. The Gongorist preacher, Paravicino, referred to the matter in public; Calderón replied by scoffing at "sermons of Barbary," and was sent to gaol for insulting the cloth. Pellicer signals another outburst in 1640, when the dramatist whipped out his sword at rehearsal and came off second best. These are pleasing incidents in a career of sombre respectability, though one half fears that the second is fiction. In 1637 Calderón was promoted to the Order of Santiago, and in 1640 he served with his brother knights against the Catalan rebels, hastily finishing his Certamen de Amor y Celos (Strife of Love and Jealousy) so as to share in the campaign. He was sent to Madrid on some military mission in 1641; received from the artillery fund a monthly pension of thirty gold crowns; was ordained priest in 1651; was made chaplain of the New Kings at Toledo in 1653; became honorary chaplain to Felipe IV. in 1663, when he joined the Congregation of St. Peter, which elected him its Superior in 1666. On taking orders, Calderón's intention was to forsake the secular stage, but he yielded to the King's command, and, so late as 1680, celebrated Carlos II.'s wedding with Marie Louise de Bourbon. "He died singing, as they say of the swan," wrote Solís to Alonso Carnero. When death took him he was busied with an auto, which was finished by Melchor de León—a fit ending to a happy, blameless life.

Calderón's prose writings are small in volume and in importance. The description (written under the name of his colleague, Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado) of the entry into Madrid of Felipe IV.'s second queen is an official performance. More interest attaches to a treatise on the dignity of painting, first printed in the fourth volume of Francisco Mariano Nifo's Cajón de Sastre literato (1781):—"Painting," says Calderón, "is the art of arts, dominating all others and using them as handmaids." He had an admirable gift of appreciation, and he proves it by rescuing from the oblivion of the Cancionero General such a ballad as Escribá's, which he quotes in Manos Blancas no ofenden, and again in El Mayor Monstruo de los Celos. Churton's version of the song is not unhappy:—

"Come, death, ere step or sound I hear,

Unknown the hour, unfelt the pain;

Lest the wild joy to feel thee near,

Should thrill me back to life again.