He fails at the point where the convention is weakest. His graciosos or drolls are too laboriously comic to be amusing. He has abundant wit, and the discreteo of the lover and the lady is often brilliant. But there is some foundation for the taunt that he is interested only in fine gentlemen and précieuses. He had not lived in courts and palaces for nothing. The racy, rough humour of the illiterate clearly repelled his fastidious temper, and the fun of his graciosos is unreal. This is what might be anticipated. It takes one cast in the mould of Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Lope, to sympathise with all conditions of men. Calderón fails in another point, and the failure is certainly very strange in a man of his meticulous refinement and social opportunities. With few exceptions, the women in his most famous plays are unattractive. A Spanish critic puts it strongly when he calls the women on Calderón’s stage hombrunas or mannish. No foreign critic would be brave enough to say this, but it is not an unfair description. A man’s idea of a womanly woman is often quaint: he sees her as something between a white-robed angel and a perfect imbecile. That is not Calderón’s way. Doña Mencía in El Médico de su honra and Doña Leonor in Á secreto agravio secreta venganza are distinctly formidable, and, even in the cloak-and-sword plays, there is something masculine in the academic preciosity of the lively heroines. It is manifest that Calderón has no deep knowledge of feminine character, that his interest in it is assumed for stage purposes, and that his chief preoccupation is—not to portray idiosyncrasies, nor even types of womanhood, but—to make physical beauty the theme of his eloquent, poetic flights. In this he succeeds admirably, though his flights are apt to be too long. You probably know Suppico de Moraes’ story of Calderón’s acting before Philip IV. in an improvisation at the Buen Retiro, the poet taking the part of Adam, and Vélez de Guevara that of God the Father. Once started, Calderón declaimed and declaimed, and, when he came to an end at last, Vélez de Guevara took up the dialogue with the remark: ‘I repent me of creating so garrulous an Adam!’ Most probably the tale is an invention,[104] but it is not without point, for Philip and the rest would have been a match for Job, if they had never been bored with the favourite’s tirades. Like most Spaniards, Calderón is too copious; but in lyrical splendour he is unsurpassed by any Spanish poet, and is surpassed by few poets in any language. Had he added more frequent touches of nature to his idealised presentations, he would rank with the greatest dramatists in the world.
As it is, he ranks only just below the greatest, and in one dramatic form peculiar to Spain, he is, by common consent, supreme. Everybody quotes Shelley’s phrase about ‘the light and odour of the starry autos’; but scarcely anybody reads the autos, and I rather doubt if Shelley read them. It is suggested that he took an auto to mean an ordinary play, and this seems likely enough, for that is what an auto did mean at one time. But an auto sacramental in Calderón’s time was a one-act piece (performed in the open air on the Feast of Corpus Christi) in which the Eucharistic mystery was presented symbolically. We can imagine this being done successfully two or three times, but not oftener. The difficulty was extreme, and as a new auto—usually two new autos—had to be provided every year, authors had recourse to the strangest devices. There are autos in which Christ is symbolised by Charlemagne (surrounded by his twelve peers), or by Jason, or Ulysses; there are autos in which an attempt is made to evade the conditions by introducing saints famous for their devotion to the Eucharist. Such pieces are illegitimate: they are not really autos sacramentales, but comedias devotas.
Calderón treats the subject within the rigid limits of the convention,—as a doctrinal abstraction,—and he treats it in a spirit of the most reverential art. He does not fail even in El Valle de la Zarzuela, where he hampers himself by connecting the theme with one of Philip IV.’s hunting-expeditions. He tells us with a certain dignified pride that his autos had been played before the King and Council for more than thirty years, and he apologises for occasional repetitions by saying that these are not so noticeable at a distance of twenty years as when they occur between the covers of a book. But no apology is needed. Calderón dealt with his abstruse theme more than seventy times—not always with equal success, but never quite unsuccessfully, and never repeating himself unduly. This is surely one of the most dexterous exploits in literature, and Calderón appears to have done it with consummate ease. His reflective genius, steeped in dogma, was far more interested in the mysteries of faith than in the passions of humanity, far more interested in devout symbolism than in realistic characterisation. His figures are pale abstractions? Yes: but he compels us to accept them by virtue of his sublime allegory, his majestic vision of the world invisible, and the adorable loveliness of his lyrism.
His autos endured for over a century. As late as 1760 El Cubo de la Almudena was played on Corpus Christi at the Teatro del Príncipe in Madrid, while La Semilla y la cizaña was played at the Teatro de la Cruz. The autos were obviously dying; they were no longer given in the open air before the King and Court, and the devout multitude; they were shorn of their pomp, and played indoors before an indifferent audience amid irreverent remarks. On one occasion, according to Clavijo, after the actor who played the part of Satan had declaimed a passage effectively, an admirer in the pit raised a cheer for the devil:—¡Viva el demonio! There is evidence to prove that the public performance of the autos sacramentales was often the occasion of disorderly and scandalous scenes. Clavijo has been blamed for his articles in El Pensador matritense, advocating their suppression, and perhaps his motives were not so pure as he pretends. Yet he was certainly right in suggesting that the day for autos was over. They were prohibited on June 9, 1765. But they must soon have died in any case, for the supply had ceased, and later writers like Antonio de Zamora were mostly content to retouch Calderón’s autos.[105] Zamora and Bancés Candamo were not the men to keep up the high tradition, and the attitude of the public had completely changed.
The fact that his autos sacramentales are little read in Spain, and are scarcely read at all out of Spain, is most unfortunate for Calderón, for his noblest achievement remains comparatively unknown. His reputation abroad is based on his secular plays which represent but one side of his delightful genius, and that side is not his strongest. The works of Lope de Vega and of Tirso de Molina have become available once more, and this circumstance has necessarily affected the critical estimate of Calderón as a dramatist. Paul Verlaine, indeed, persisted in placing him above Shakespeare, but Verlaine was the last of the Old Guard. Calderón is relatively less important than he was thought to be before Chorley’s famous campaign in The Athenæum: all now agree with Chorley that Calderón is inferior to Lope de Vega in creative faculty and humour, and inferior to Tirso de Molina in depth and variety of conception. But, when every deduction is made, Calderón is still one of the most stately figures in Spanish literature. Naturally a great lyric poet, his deliberate art won him a pre-eminent position among poets who used the dramatic form, and he lives as the typical representative of the devout, gallant, loyal, artificial society in which he moved. He is not, as once was thought, the synthesis of the Spanish genius, but no one incarnates more completely one aspect of that genius. Who illustrates better than the author of El Principe constante what Heiberg wrote of Spanish poets generally just ninety years ago:—‘Habet itaque poësis hispanica animam gothicam in corpore romano, quod orientali vestimento induitur; verum in intimo corde Christiana fides regnat, et per omnes se venas diffundit’? The same thought recurs in The Nightingale in the Study:—
A bird is singing in my brain
And bubbling o’er with mingled fancies,
Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain
Fed with the sap of old romances.
I ask no ampler skies than those