One is always reluctant to spoil a good story, but luck is against me this afternoon. A few moments ago I mentioned the ‘Calderona,’ and stated that she returned to the stage after her rupture with Philip IV.: that destroys the usual picturesque story of her throwing herself in an agony of abjection at Philip’s feet, and going straightway into a convent to do penance for the rest of her life. I am afraid that I must also destroy this agreeable legend about Moreto’s being a murderer. It is unfortunate for Moreto, for many who have no strong taste for literature are often induced to take interest in a man of letters if he can be proved guilty of some crime: they will spell out a little Old French because they have heard that Villon was a cracksman. Well, we must tell the truth, and take the consequences. The identification of the Pradillo del Carmen turns out to be wrong. The Pradillo del Carmen was the cemetery used for those who died in the hospital to which Moreto was chaplain, and to which he bequeathed his fortune: the Pradillo del Carmen has nothing to do with the burial-place for criminals, though it lies close by. Moreto evidently wished not to be separated in death from the poor people amongst whom he had laboured; but, as it happens, his directions were not carried out, for when he died on December 28, 1669, he was buried in the church of St. John the Baptist at Toledo. And this is not the only weak point in the story. Medinilla was killed in 1620 when Moreto was two years old, and few assassins, however precocious, begin operations at that tender age. Lastly, it would seem that Medinilla was perhaps not murdered at all, but was killed in fair fight by Jerónimo de Andrade y Rivadeneyra. These prosaic facts compel me to present Moreto to you—not as an interesting cut-throat, not as a morose and sinister murderer, crushed by his dreadful secret, but—as a man of the most genial disposition, noble character, and singularly virtuous life.
He was all this, and he was also one of the cleverest craftsmen who ever worked for the Spanish stage. But nature does not shower all her gifts on any one man, and she was niggardly to Moreto in the matter of invention. He made no secret of the fact that he took whatever he wanted from his predecessors. His friend Jerónimo de Cáncer represents him as saying:—
Que estoy minando imagina
cuando tu de mí te quejas;
que en estas comedias viejas
he hallado una brava mina.
He did, indeed, find a brava mina in the old plays, and especially in Lope de Vega’s. From Lope’s El Gran Duque de Moscovia he takes El Príncipe perseguido; from Lope’s El Prodigio de Etiopia he takes La Adúltera penitente; from Lope’s El Testimonio vengado he takes Como se vengan los nobles; from Lope’s Las Pobrezas de Rinaldo he takes El Mejor Par de los doce; from Lope’s De cuando acá nos vino ... he takes De fuera vendrá quien de casa nos echará; from Lope’s delightful play El Mayor imposible he constructs the still more delightful No puede ser, from which John Crowne, at the suggestion of Charles II., took his Sir Courtly Nice, or, It cannot be, and from which Ludvig Holberg, the celebrated Danish dramatist, took his Jean de France. Moreto was scarcely less indebted to Lope’s contemporaries than to Lope himself. From Vélez de Guevara’s El Capitán prodigioso y Príncipe de Transilvania he took El Príncipe prodigioso; from Guillén de Castro’s Las Maravillas de Babilonia he took El bruto de Babilonia, and from Castro’s Los hermanos enemigos he took Hasta el fin nadie es dichoso; from Tirso de Molina’s La Villana de Vallecas he took La ocasion hace al ladrón; and from a novel of Castillo Solórzano’s he took the entire plot of La Confusion de un jardín. This is a fairly long list, but it does not include all Moreto’s debts.
He has his failures, of course. El ricohombre de Alcalá looks anæmic beside its original. El Infanzón de Illescas, which is ascribed to both Lope and Tirso; and Caer para levantar is a wooden arrangement of Mira de Amescua’s striking play, El Esclavo del demonio. If you can filch to no better purpose than this, then decidedly honesty is the best policy. Perhaps Moreto came to this conclusion himself in some passing mood, and it must have been at some such hour that he wrote El Parecido en la Corte and Trampa adelante, both abounding in individual humour. But such moods are not frequent with him. If you choose to say that Moreto was a systematic plagiarist, it is hard for me to deny it. Every playwright of this period plagiarised and pilfered, more or less, from Calderón downwards: we must accept this as a fact—a fact as to which there was seldom any concealment. Just as Moreto was drawing towards the end of his career as dramatist, a most intrepid plagiarist arose in the person of Matos Fragoso, of whom I shall have a word to say presently. But Matos Fragoso was sly, and a bungler: Moreto was frank, and a master of the gentle art of conveyance. He pilfers in all directions; but he manipulates the stolen goods almost out of recognition, usually adding much to their value. And this implies the possession of remarkable talent. In literature, as in politics, if he can only contrive to succeed, a man is pardoned for proceedings which in other callings might lead to jail: and Moreto’s success is triumphant. The germ of his play, El lindo Don Diego, is found in Guillén de Castro’s El Narciso de su opinión; but for Castro’s rough sketch Moreto substitutes a finished, final portrait of the insufferable, the fatuous snob who pays court to a countess, is as elated as a brewer when he marries her and fancies himself an aristocrat, but wakes up with a start to the reality of things on discovering that the supposed countess is the sharp little servant Beatriz who has seen through him all along, and has exhibited him in his true character as a born fool. Don Diego is always with us—in England now, as in Spain three centuries ago—and El lindo Don Diego might have been written yesterday.
Still better is El desdén con el desdén, a piece which shows to perfection Moreto’s unparalleled tact in making a mosaic a beautiful thing. Diana, the young girl who knows no more of the world than of the moon, but who imagines men to be odious wretches from what she had read of them—Diana is taken from Lope’s La Vengadora de las mugeres; the behaviour of her various suitors is suggested by Lope’s De corsario á corsario; the quick-witted maid is from Lope’s Los Milagros del desprecio; the trick by which the Conde de Urgel traps Diana is borrowed from Lope’s La Hermosa fea. Not one of the chief traits in El desdén con el desdén is original; but out of these fragments a play has been constructed far superior to the plays from which the component parts are derived. The plot never flags and is always plausible, the characters are full of life and interest, and the dialogue sparkles with mischievous gaiety. All this is Moreto’s, and it is a victory of intellectual address. It clearly impressed Molière, who set out to do by Moreto what Moreto had done by others: the result is La Princesse d’Élide, one of Molière’s worst failures. Gozzi renewed the attempt, and failed likewise in La Principessa filosofa. El desdén con el desdén outlives these imitations as well as others from skilful hands in England and in Sweden, and surely it deserves to live as an example of what marvellous deftness can do in contriving from scattered materials a charming and essentially original work of art.
Compared with Moreto, Juan Matos Fragoso is, as I have said, a bungler. In A lo que obliga un agravio, which is from Lope’s Los dos bandoleros, he fails, though he has the collaboration of Sebastián de Villaviciosa. He fails by himself in La Venganza en el despeño, which is taken from Lope’s El Príncipe despeñado. There is some reason to think that he tried to pass himself off as the author of Lope’s El Desprecio agradecido. This play is given in the thirty-ninth volume of the Escogidas with Matos Fragoso’s name attached to it, and, as Matos Fragoso edited this particular volume, it seems to follow that he lent himself to a mean form of fraud. However, there is no gainsaying his popularity, and he may be read with real pleasure—as in El Sabio en el rincón, which is from Lope’s El Villano en su rincón—when he hits on a good original, and gives us next to nothing of his own. A better dramatist, and a far more reputable man, was Antonio de Solís, who was born ten years after Calderón; but Solís’s reputation really depends on his Historia de la conquista de Méjico, which appeared in 1684, two years before his death. He was naturally a prose-writer who took to the drama because it was the fashion. And that play-writing was a fashionable craze may be gathered from the fact that Spain produced over five hundred dramatists during the reigns of Philip IV. and Charles II. So the historians of dramatic literature tell us, but perhaps even they have not thought it necessary to read all this mass of plays with minute attention. Here and there a name floats down to us, not always flatteringly; Juan de Zabaleta, for instance, is remembered chiefly through Cáncer’s epigram on his ugliness and on his failure:—