But it is not Lope who says that the King is the image of God. These lines are interpolated by Trigueros, who felt no particular loyalty to anybody, and overdid his part when he endeavoured to put himself in Lope’s position. What was an occasional motive in Lope’s work reappears frequently and in a more emphatic form in Calderón’s work. The sentiment of loyalty is expressed with something like fanaticism in La Banda y la flor and in Guárdate del agua mansa; and with something unpleasantly like profanity in the auto sacramental entitled El Indulto general where the lamentable Charles II. seems to be placed almost on the same level as the Saviour.
Rojas Zorrilla’s glorification of the King in García del Castañar is inspired by Calderón’s example, and he follows the chief in other ways less defensible. Splendid as Calderón’s diction often is, it lapses into gongorism too easily. Rojas Zorrilla’s natural mode of expression is direct and energetic; his dialogue is both natural and brilliant in Don Diego de Noche and Lo que son mugeres; he knew the difference between a good style and a bad one, and he pauses now and then to satirise Góngora and the cultos. But he must be in the fashion, and as Calderón has dabbled in culteranismo, he will do the same. And he bursts into gongorism with all the crude exaggeration of one who is deliberately sinning against the light. His little flings at the Gongorists are few and feeble as in Sin honra no hay amistad, where he describes the darkened sky:—
Está hecho un Góngora el cielo,
más obscuro que su libro.
But a few pages later, in the second volume of his collected plays, he rivals the most extravagant of Góngora’s imitators when he describes the composition and dissolution of the horse in Los Encantos de Medea:—
Era de tres elementos
compuesto el bruto gallardo,
de fuego, de nieve, y aire; ...
fuese el aire á los palacios
de su región, salió el fuego,