Greater is the power of Heaven,
And the true Jove's mightier magic
Will thy virtuous purpose strengthen.
The Man.
Yes, thou'rt right, O Understanding;
Lead in safety hence my senses.
All.
Let us to our ship; for here
All is shadowy and unsettled."
As a writer of autos Calderón is supreme. Lope, who outshines him at so many points, is far less dexterous than his successor when he attempts the sacramental play. This kind of drama would almost seem created for the greater glory of Calderón. The personages of his worldly plays, and even of his comedias devotas, tend to become personifications of revenge, love, pride, charity, and the rest. His set pieces are disfigured by want of humour and by over-refinement—faults which turn to virtues in the autos, where abstractions are wedded to the noblest poetry, where the Beyond is brought down to earth, and where doctrinal subtleties are embellished with miraculous ingenuity. To assert that Calderón is incomparably great in the autos is to imply some censure of his art in his secular dramas. The monotony and artifice of his sacramental plays might be thought inherent to the species, were not these two notes characteristic of his whole theatre. Nor is it an explanation to say that much writing of autos had affected his general methods; for not merely are the secular plays more numerous—they are also mostly earlier than the autos, whose real defects are a lack of dramatic interest, an appeal to a taste so local and so temporary that they are now as extinct in Spain as are masques in England. Still the passing fashions which produced Comus in the north, and the Encantos de la Culpa or the Cena de Baltasar in the south, are justified to all lovers of great poetry. The autos lingered on the stage till 1765, but their genuine inspiration ended with Calderón, who, in all but a literal sense, may be held for their creator.