(1600-1681)
BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
The reputation of Pedro Calderon de la Barca has suffered in the minds of English-speaking people from the injudicious comparisons of critics, as well as from lack of knowledge of his works. To put Calderon, a master of invention, beside Shakespeare, the master of character, and to show by analogies that the author of 'Othello' was far superior to the writer of 'The Physician of His Own Honor,' is unjust to Calderon; and it is as futile as are the ecstasies of Schultze to the coldness of Sismondi. Schultze compares Dante with him, and the French critics have only recently forgiven him for being less classical in form than Corneille, who in 'Le Cid' gave them all the Spanish poetry they wanted! Fortunately the student of Calderon need not take opinions. Good editions of Calderon are easily attainable. The best known are Heil's (Leipzig, 1827), and that by Harzenbusch (Madrid, 1848). The first edition, with forewords by Vera Tassis de Villareal, appeared at Madrid (nine volumes) in 1682-91. Commentaries and translations are numerous in German and in English; the translations by Denis Florence MacCarthy are the most satisfactory, Edward Fitzgerald's being too paraphrastic. Dean Trench added much to our knowledge of Calderon's best work; George Ticknor in the 'History of Spanish Literature,' and George Henry Lewes in 'The Spanish Drama,' left us clear estimates of Lope de Vega's great successor. Shelley's scenes from 'El Mágico Prodigioso' are superb.
No analyses can do justice to the dramas, or to the religious plays, called "autos," of Calderon. They must be read; and thanks to the late Mr. MacCarthy's sympathy and zeal, the finest are easily attainable. As he left seventy-three autos and one hundred and eight dramas, it is lucky that the work of sifting the best from the mass of varying merit has been carefully done. Mr. Ticknor mentions the fact that Calderon collaborated with other authors in the writing of fourteen other plays.
Calderon was not "the Spanish Shakespeare." "The Spanish Ben Jonson" would be a happier title, if one feels obliged to compare everything with something else. But Calderon is as far above Ben Jonson in splendor of imagery as he is below Shakespeare in his knowledge of the heart, and in that vitality which makes Hamlet and Orlando, Lady Macbeth and Perdita, men and women of all time. They live; Calderon's people, like Ben Jonson's, move. There is a resemblance between the autos of Calderon and the masques of Jonson. Jonson's are lyrical; Calderon's less lyrical than splendid, ethical, grandiose. They were both court poets; they both made court spectacles; they both assisted in the decay of the drama; they reflected the tastes of their time; but Calderon is the more noble, the more splendid in imagination, the more intense in his devotion to nature in all her moods. If one wanted to carry the habit of comparison into music, Mozart might well represent the spirit of Calderon. M. Philarète Chasles is right when he says that 'El Mágico Prodigioso' should be presented in a cathedral. Calderon's genius had the cast of the soldier and the priest, and he was both soldier and priest. His comedias and autos are of Spain, Spanish. To know Calderon is to know the mind of the Spain of the seventeenth century; to know Cervantes is to know its heart.
The Church had opposed the secularization of the drama, at the end of the fifteenth century, for two reasons. The dramatic spectacle fostered for religious purposes had become, until Lope de Vega rescued it, a medium for that "naturalism" which some of us fancy to be a discovery of M. Zola and M. Catulle Mendès; it had escaped from the control of the Church and had become a mere diversion. Calderon was the one man who could unite the spirit of religion to the form of the drama which the secular renaissance imperiously demanded. He knew the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of the 'Summa' of St. Thomas as well as any cleric in Spain, though he did not take orders until late in life; and in those religious spectacles called autos sacramentales he showed this knowledge wonderfully. His last auto was unfinished when he died, on May 25th, 1681,—sixty-five years after the death of Shakespeare,—and Don Melchior de Leon completed it, probably in time for the feast of Corpus Christi.
CALDERON.