It was once the fashion to praise Calderón chiefly as a philosophic dramatist, and it may be that to this philosophic quality his plays owe much of the vogue which they once enjoyed—and which, in a much less degree, they still enjoy—in Germany. As it happens, only two of Calderón’s plays can be classified as philosophic—La Vida es sueño and En esta vida todo es verdad y todo es mentira—and, with respect to the latter, a question arises as to its originality. French writers have maintained that En esta vida is taken from Corneille’s Héraclius, while Spaniards argue that Corneille’s play is taken from Calderón’s. On a priori grounds we should be tempted to admit the Spanish contention, for Corneille was—I do not wish to put the point too strongly—more given to borrowing from Spain than to lending to contemporary Spanish playwrights. But there is the awkward fact that Héraclius dates from 1647, whereas En esta vida was not printed till 1664. This is not decisive, for we have seen that Calderón was not interested enough in his secular plays to print them, and we gather incidentally that En esta vida was being rehearsed at Madrid by Diego Osorio’s company in February 1659. How much earlier it was written, we cannot say at present. The idea that Calderón borrowed from the French cannot be scouted as impossible, for Corneille’s Cid was adapted by Diamante in 1658.[102] Perhaps both Calderón and Corneille drew upon Mira de Amescua’s Rueda de la fortuna—a play which, as we know from Lope de Vega’s letter belittling Don Quixote, was written in 1604, or earlier. But, whichever explanation we accept, Calderón’s originality is compromised. With all respect to the eminent authorities who have debated this question of priority, we may be allowed to think that they have shown unnecessary heat over a rather unimportant matter. Neither Héraclius nor En esta vida is a masterpiece, and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo holds that En esta vida contains only one striking situation—the tenth scene in the First Act, when both Heraclio and Leonido claim to be the sons of Mauricio, and Astolfo refuses to state which of the two is mistaken:—
Que es uno dellos diré;
pero cuál es dellos, no.
This amounts to saying that Calderón’s play is no great marvel, for very few serious pieces are ever produced on the stage unless the first act is good. The hastiest of impresarios, the laziest dramatic censor—even they read as far as the end of the First Act. But, if we give up En esta vida, Calderón is deprived of half his title to rank as a ‘philosophic’ dramatist. We still have La Vida es sueño, a noble and (apparently) original play disfigured, as I have said, by verbal affectations, such as the opening couplet on the
Hipogrifo[103] violento
que corriste pareja con el viento,
which is almost invariably quoted against the author. So, too, whenever La Vida es sueño is mentioned, we are almost invariably told that, as though to prove that life is indeed a dream, ‘a Queen of Sweden expired in the theatre of Stockholm during its performance.’ This picturesque story does not seem to be true, and, at any rate, it adds no more to the interest of the play than the verbal blemishes take from it. The weak spot in the piece is the sudden collapse of Segismundo when sent back to the dungeon, but otherwise the conception is admirable in dignity and force.
Many critics find these qualities in Calderón’s tragedies, and I perceive them in Amar después de la muerte. The scene in which Garcés describes how he murdered Doña Clara, and is interrupted by Don Álvaro with—
¿Fue
Como ésta la puñalada?—