Such songs as these are, perhaps, better to read than to hear, and Calderón is careful to supply a more popular interest. This he finds in three sentiments which are still most characteristic of the Spanish temperament: personal loyalty to the King, absolute devotion to the Church, and the "point of honour." Through good report and evil, Spain has held by the three principles which have made and undone her. These three sources of inspiration find their highest expression in the theatre of Calderón. A favourite with Felipe IV., a courtly poet, if ever one there were, he becomes the mouthpiece of a nation when he deifies the King in the Príncipe Constante, in La Banda y la Flor (The Scarf and the Flower), in Guárdate de la Agua mansa (Beware of Still Water), and in a score of plays. Ticknor speaks of "Calderón's flattery of the great": he overlooks the social condition implied in the title of Rojas Zorrilla's famous play, Del Rey abajo Ninguno (Nobody, under the King). A titular aristocracy, shorn of all power, counted for less than a foreigner can conceive in a land where half the population was noble, and the reverence which was centred on the person of the Lord's anointed evolved into a profound devotion, a fantastic passion as exaggerated as anything in Amadís. A Church which had inspired the seven-hundred-years' battle against the Moors, which had produced miracles of holiness and of genius like Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz, which had stemmed the flood of the Reformation and rolled it back from the Pyrenees, was regarded as the one moral authority, the sole possible form of religion, and as the symbol of Latin unity under Spain's headship.
The "point of honour"—the vengeance wrought by husbands, fathers, and brothers in the cases of women found in dubious circumstances—is harder to explain, or, at least, to justify; yet even this was a perverted outcome of chivalresque ideals, very acceptable to men who esteemed life more cheaply than their neighbours. Calderón's treatment of such a situation may be followed in FitzGerald's version of El Pintor de su Deshonra. The husband, who has slain his wife and her lover, confronts her father and friends:—
Prince.
"Whoever dares
Molest him, answers it to me. Open the door.
But what is this? [Belardo unlocks the door.
Juan (coming out).
A picture
Done by the Painter of his own Dishonour,
In blood.