Apart from the popular esteem which he thoroughly deserved, Calderón was evidently a special favourite with Olivares, who never stinted Philip in the matter of toys and amusements, and levied a sort of blackmail (for this purpose) on those whom he nominated to high office. Great preparations were made for a gorgeous production of El mayor encanto amor at the Buen Retiro in 1639. The Viceroy of Naples was induced to make arrangements for a lavish display by the ingenious stage-machinist, Cosme Lotti. A floating stage was provided lit up with three thousand lanterns; seated in gondolas, the King and his suite listened to the performance; and the evening closed with a banquet. These freakish shows were frequent. In February 1640 we hear of a stormy scene at a rehearsal, which ended in Calderón’s being wounded. It is commonly said that he was at work on his Certamen de amor y celos when the Catalan revolt broke out in 1640, and that he finished it off hurriedly by a tour de force so as to be able to take the field. This is a picturesque tale, but, like most other picturesque tales, it seems to be somewhat doubtful. On May 28, 1640, before the rebellion began, Calderón enrolled himself in a troop of cuirassiers raised by Olivares, the Captain-General of the Spanish cavalry; and he did not actually take his place in the ranks till September 29. He proved an efficient soldier, was employed on a special mission, and received promotion. His health, as often happens with those destined to live long, was never robust, and forced him to resign on November 15, 1642. In 1645 he was granted a military pension of thirty escudos a month: it was not paid punctually, and he was more than once obliged to dun the Treasury for arrears.
He had now reached an age when men begin to lose their relatives and friends. In June 1645 his brother José was killed in action at Camarasa; his brother Diego died at Madrid on November 20, 1647. Calderón’s life was generally most correct, but he had his frailties, and his commerce with the stage exposed him to the occasions of sin. We do not know who was the mother of his son, Pedro José, but it may be assumed that she was an actress. She died about 1648-50, soon after the birth of the boy, who passed as Calderón’s nephew. In 1648 Calderón was dangerously ill, and in December 1650 he alleged his increasing age and waning strength as a reason for quitting the King’s service; he announced his intention of taking orders, and petitioned that his pension might, nevertheless, be continued. He had already been received as a Tertiary of St. Francis, and accepted the nomination to the living (founded by his grandmother in 1612) which he had thought of taking when he went to Salamanca University, some thirty years earlier. He was ordained in 1651, and seems to have been an exemplary priest.
An attempt was made to utilise his talents in a new direction. He was requested to write a chronicle of the Franciscan Tertiaries, undertook the task in 1651, but was compelled to abandon it in 1653 owing to his ‘many occupations.’ In a letter of this period addressed to the Patriarch of the Indies, Alfonso Pérez de Guzmán, Calderón declares that he had meant to cease writing for the stage when he took orders, and that he had yielded to the personal request of the Prime Minister, Luis de Haro, who had begged him to continue for the King’s sake. In the same letter Calderón states that he had been censured for writing autos, that a favour conferred on him had been revoked owing to the objection of somebody unknown—no sé quién—that poetry was incompatible with the priesthood, and he ends by asking the Primate for a definite ruling: ‘the thing is either wrong or right; if right, let there be no more difficulties; and, if wrong, let no one order me to do it.’ The drift of this alembicated letter is clear. The favour revoked was no doubt a chaplaincy at Toledo, and Calderón politely gave the Primate to understand that he should supply no more autos till he received an equivalent for the post of which he had been deprived. His hint was taken; he was appointed ‘chaplain of the Reyes Nuevos’ at Toledo in 1653, and his scruples were quieted. For the rest of his life he wrote most of the autos given at Madrid, and he readily supplied show-pieces to be performed at the palace of the Buen Retiro. Some idea of the importance attached to these performances may be gathered from the Avisos of Barrionuevo, who tells us that—while the enemy was at the gate, while there was not a real in the Treasury, while the King was compelled to dine on eggs, while a capon ‘stinking like dead dogs’ was served to the Infanta, and while the court buffoon Manuelillo de Gante paid for the Queen’s dessert,—there was always money to meet the bills of the stage-machinist Juan Antonio Forneli, to maintain a staff of from twenty-four to seventy actresses, and to import from Genoa hogsheads of costly jasmine-oil for stage-purposes.
Apart from the composition of autos and comedias palaciegas, Calderón’s life was henceforth uneventful. His position in Spain was firmly established, but foreigners were sometimes recalcitrant. The French traveller Bertaut thought little of one of Calderón’s plays which he saw in 1659, and thought even less of the author whom he visited later in the day:—‘From his talk, I saw that he did not know much, though he is quite white-haired. We argued a little concerning the rules of the drama which they do not know at all, and which they make game of in that country.’ This seems to have been the average French view.[101] Chapelain, writing to Carrel de Sainte-Garde on April 29, 1662, says that he had read an abridgment of a play by Calderón:—‘par où j’ay connu au moins que si les vers sont bons, son dessein est très mauvais, et sa conduite ridicule.’ What else could a champion of the unities think?
Though a priest beyond reproach, Calderón was not left in peace by busybodies and heresy-hunters. His auto concerning the conversion of the eccentric Christina of Sweden was forbidden in 1656. Another auto, entitled Las órdenes militares ó Pruebas del segundo Adán, gave rise to no objection when acted before the King on June 8, 1662; but it was ‘delated’ to the Inquisition, the stage-copies were seized, and permission to perform it was refused. There can have been no heresy in this auto, for the prohibition was withdrawn nine years later. On February 18, 1663, Calderón became chaplain to Philip IV. (a post which carried with it no stipend), and in this same year he joined the Congregation of St. Peter, of which he was appointed Superior in 1666. He continued writing comedias palaciegas during the next reign: Fieras afemina amor and La Estatua de Prometeo were produced in honour of the Queen-Mother’s birthday in 1675 and 1679 respectively; and El segundo Escipión was played on November 6, 1677, to commemorate the coming of age of Charles II. On August 24, 1679, an Order in Council was issued granting Calderón a ración de cámara en especie on account of his services, great age, and poverty; this is perplexing, for his will (made twenty-one months later) shows that he was very comfortably off.
There is a disquieting sentence in the preface to the fifth volume of Calderón’s plays: Vera Tassis says that the dramatist tried to draw up a list of pieces falsely ascribed to him, and adds that ‘his infirm condition did not allow of his forming a clear judgment about them.’ What does Vera Tassis mean? Are we to understand that Calderón’s intellect was slightly clouded towards the end, that he could not distinguish his own plays from those of other writers, and that perhaps he had become possessed with the notion (not uncommon in the aged) that he would die in want? Surely not. The financial statements of petitioners are often obscure. Calderón’s memory may naturally have begun to fail when he was close on eighty, but in other respects his mind was vigorous. His Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, composed to celebrate the wedding of Charles II. with Marie-Louise de Bourbon, was given at the Buen Retiro on March 3, 1680; it was produced later for the general public at the Príncipe and Cruz corrales, and altogether was played twenty-one times—a great ‘run’ for those days. For over thirty years Calderón had been commissioned to write the autos for Madrid, and in 1681 he set to work as usual, but while engaged on El Cordero de Isaías and La divina Filotea, his strength failed him. He could only finish one of these two autos, and left the other to be completed by Melchor Fernández de León. He signed his will on May 20, took to his bed and added a codicil on May 23, bequeathing his manuscripts to Juan Mateo Lozano, the parish priest of St. Michael’s at Madrid, who wrote the Aprobación to the volume of Autos Sacramentales, alegóricos y historiales published in 1677. Calderón died on Whitsunday, May 25, 1681.
Almost all that we hear of him is eminently to his credit. Vera Tassis, who knew him intimately,—though perhaps less intimately than he implies,—dwells affectionately on Calderón’s open-handed charity, his modesty and courtesy, his kindliness in speaking of contemporaries, his gentleness and patience towards envious calumniators. Calderón was a gentleman as well as a great man of letters—a rare combination. Like Lope de Vega, he was apparently not inclined to rank his plays as literature, and, unlike Lope, he does not seem to have changed his opinion on this point. In his letter to the Patriarch of the Indies he speaks slightingly of poetry as a foible pardonable enough in an idle courtier, but one which he regarded with contempt as soon as he took orders; and his disdain for his own work is commemorated in a ponderous epitaph, written by those who knew him best:—
CAMŒNIS OLIM DELICIARUM AMÆNISSIMUM FLUMEN
QUÆ SUMMO PLAUSU VIVENS SCRIPSIT,
MORIENS PRÆSCRIBENDO DESPEXIT.
He was never sufficiently interested in his secular plays to collect them, though he complained of being grossly misrepresented in the pirated editions which were current. According to Vera Tassis, he corrected Las Armas de la hermosura and La Señora y la Criada for the forty-sixth volume of the Escogidas printed in 1679; but he did no more towards protecting his reputation, though at the very end of his life he began an edition of the autos, the sacred subjects of these investing them in his eyes with more importance than could possibly attach to any secular drama. It is by the merest accident that we have an authorised list of the titles of his secular plays. He drew it up, ten months before he died, at the urgent request of the Almirante-Duque de Veraguas (a descendant of Columbus), and it was included in the preface to the Obelisco fúnebre, pirámide funesto, published by Gaspar Agustín de Lara in 1784. Calderón’s plays were printed by Vera Tassis who—though, as Lara is careful to inform us, he had not access to the original manuscripts in Lozano’s keeping—was a fairly competent editor, as editors went in those days. It is not rash to say that to this happy hazard Calderón owes no small part of his international renown. For a long while, he was the only great Spanish dramatist whose works were readily accessible. Students who wished to read Lope de Vega—if there were any such—could not find an edition of his plays; Tirso de Molina was still further out of reach. Circumstances combined to concentrate attention on Calderón at the expense of his brethren. With the best will in the world, you cannot act authors whose plays are not available; but Calderón could be found at any bookseller’s, and a few of his plays, together with two or three of Moreto’s, were acted even during the latter half of the eighteenth century when French influence was dominant on the Spanish stage.
Calderón thus survived in Spain; and, owing to this survival, he came to be regarded by the evangelists of the Romantic movement abroad as the leading representative of the Spanish drama. Some of these depreciated Lope de Vega, with no more knowledge of him than they could gather from two or three plays picked up at random. German writers made themselves remarkable by their vehement dogmatism. Friedrich von Schlegel declared that, whereas Shakespeare had merely described the enigma of life, Calderón had solved it, thus proving himself to be, ‘in all conditions and circumstances, the most Christian, and therefore the most romantic, of dramatic poets.’ August von Schlegel was as dithyrambic as his brother. Dismissing Lope’s plays as containing interesting situations and ‘inimitable jokes,’—Schlegel, On Jokes, is one of the many unwritten masterpieces, ‘for which the whole world longs,’—he turns to Calderón, hails him as that ‘blessed man,’ and in a rhetorical transport proclaims him to be ‘the last summit of romantic poetry.’ Nobody writes in this vein now, and the loss is endurable. We are no longer stirred on reading that Calderón’s ‘tears reflect the view of heaven, like dewdrops on a flower in the sun’: such imagery leaves us cold. But the rhetoric of the Schlegels, Tieck, and others was most effective at the time.