THE DRAMATIC SCHOOL OF CALDERÓN
Lope de Vega, as I have tried to persuade you in a previous lecture,
may fairly be regarded as the real founder of the national theatre in
Spain. His victory was complete, and the old-fashioned Senecan drama
was everywhere supplanted by the _comedia nueva_ in which the ‘unities’
were neglected. Playwrights who could no longer get their pieces
produced took great pains to prove that Lope ought to have failed, and
dwelt upon the enormity of his anachronisms and geographical blunders.
These groans of the defeated are always with us. Just as the pedant
clamours for Shakespeare’s head on a charger, because he chose to place
a seaport in Bohemia, so Andrés Rey de Artieda, in his _Discursos,
epístolas y epigramas_, published under the pseudonym of Artemidoro in
1605, is indignant at the triumph of ignorant incapacity:—
Galeras vi una vez ir per el yermo,
y correr seis caballos per la posta,
de la isla del Gozo hasta Palermo.
Poner dentro Vizcaya á Famagosta,
y junto de los Alpes, Persia y Media,
y Alemaña pintar, larga y angosta.
Como estas cosas representa Heredia,
á pedimiento de un amigo suyo,
que en seis horas compone una comedia.
The meaning of this little outburst is quite simple: it means that Rey
de Artieda was no longer popular at Valencia, and that he and his
fellows had had to make way on the Valencian stage for such followers
of Lope de Vega as Francisco Tárrega, Gaspar de Aguilar, Guillén de
Castro and Miguel Beneyto—all members of the Valencian _Academia de los
nocturnos_, in which they were known respectively as ‘Miedo,’ ‘Sombra,’
‘Secreto’ and ‘Sosiego.’
A very similar denunciation of the new school was published by a much
greater writer in the same year. Cervantes ridiculed the _comedia
nueva_ as a pack of nonsense without either head or tail—_conocidos
disparates y cosas que no llevan pies ni cabeza_; yet he dolefully
admits that ‘the public hears them with pleasure, and esteems and
approves them as good, though they are far from being anything of
the sort.’ The long diatribe put into the mouth of the canon in _Don
Quixote_ is the plaint of a beaten man who calls for a literary
dictatorship, or some such desperate remedy, to save him from Lope and
the revolution. Whether Cervantes changed his views on the merits of
the question, or whether he merely bowed to circumstances, we cannot
say. But he tacitly recanted in _El Rufián dichoso_, and even defended
the new methods as improvements on the old:—
Los tiempos mudan las cosas
y perfeccionan las artes ...
Muy poco importa al oyente
que yo en un punto me pase
desde Alemania á Guinea,
sin del teatro mudarme.
El pensamiento es ligero,
bien pueden acompañarme
con él, do quiera que fuere,
sin perderme, ni cansarse.
Passing from theory to practice, Cervantes appeared as a very
unsuccessful imitator of Lope de Vega in _La Casa de los Celos ó las
Selvas de Ardenio_. The dictatorship for which he asked had come, but
the dictator was Lope.
All Spanish dramatists of this period came under Lope’s influence. He
was even more supreme in Madrid than in Valencia, and other provincial
centres. He set the fashion to men as considerable as Vélez de Guevara,
Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón himself. Lope and Ruiz
de Alarcón were at daggers drawn; but these were personal quarrels,
and, original as was Alarcón’s talent, the torch of Lope flickers over
some of his best scenes. These men were much more than imitators. If
Lope ever had a devoted follower, it was the unfortunate Juan Pérez
de Montalbán; but even Pérez de Montalbán was not a servile imitator,
and it was precisely his effort to develop originality that affected
his reason. Lope’s influence was general; he founded a national drama,
but he founded nothing which we can justly call a school—a word which
implies a certain exclusiveness and rigidity of doctrine foreign to
Lope’s nature. So far was he from founding a school that, towards the
end of his life, he was voted rather antiquated, and this view was
still more widely held during Calderón’s supremacy. In the autograph
of Lope’s unpublished play, _Quien más no puede_, there is a note by
Cristóbal Gómez, who writes—‘This is a very good play, but not suitable
for these times, though suitable in the past; for it contains many
_endechas_ and many things which would not be endured nowadays; the
plot is good, and should be versified in the prevailing fashion.’ This
is dated April 19, 1669, less than forty years after Lope’s death; he
was beginning to be forgotten by almost all, except the playwrights who
stole from him.
Calderón, on the other hand, did found a school. For one thing, his
conventionality and mannerisms are infinitely easier to imitate than
Lope’s broad effects. ‘Spanish Comedy,’ as Mr. George Meredith says,
‘is generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as
of marionettes. The Comedy might be performed by a troupe of the _corps
de ballet_; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an
animated shuffle of feet.’ Whatever we may think of this as a judgment
on Spanish comedy as a whole, it describes fairly enough the dramatic
work produced by many of Calderón’s followers: with them, if not with
their master, art degenerates into artifice—a clever trick. Calderón
himself seems to have grown tired of the praises lavished on his
ingenuity. He knew perfectly that neatness of construction was not the
best part of his work, and, in _No hay burlas con el amor_, he laughs
at himself and his more uncritical admirers:—
¿Es comedia de don Pedro
Calderón, donde ha de haber
por fuerza amante escondido,
ó rebozada muger?
Unfortunately these stage devices—these concealed lovers, these
muffled mistresses, these houses with two doors, these walls with
invisible cupboards, these compromising letters wrongly addressed—were
precisely what appealed to the unthinking section of the public, and
they were also the characteristics most easily reproduced by imitators
in search of a short cut to success. Other circumstances combined to
make Calderón the head of a dramatic school. Except in invention and
in brilliant facility the dramatists of Lope’s time were not greatly
inferior to the master. In certain qualities Tirso de Molina and
Ruiz de Alarcón are superior to him: Tirso in force and in malicious
humour, Ruiz de Alarcón in depth and in artistic finish. There is no
such approach to equality between Calderón and the men of his group.
No strikingly original dramatic genius appeared during his long life,
extending over three literary generations. He himself had made no new
departure, no radical innovation; he took over the dramatic form as
Lope had left it, and, by focussing its common traits, he established
a series of conventions—a conventional conception of loyalty, honour,
love and jealousy. The stars in their courses fought for him. He was
equally popular at court and with the multitude, pleasing the upper
rabble by his glittering intrigue and dexterous _discreteo_, pleasing
the lower rabble by his melodramatic incident and the mechanical humour
of his _graciosos_, pleasing both high and low by his lofty Catholicism
and passionate devotion to the throne. Though not in any real sense
more Spanish than Lope de Vega, Calderón seems to be more intensely
national, for he reduced the _españolismo_ of his age to a formula. Out
of the plays of Lope and of Tirso, he evolved a hard-and-fast method
of dramatic presentation. He came at a time when it was impossible to
do more. All that could be done by those who came after him was to
emphasise the convention which, by dint of constant repetition, he had
converted into something like an imperative theory.
It follows, as the night the day, that the monotony which has been
remarked in Calderón’s plays is still more pronounced in those of his
followers. The incidents vary, but the conception of passion and of
social obligation is identical. The dramatists of Calderón’s school
adopt his method of presenting the conventional emotions of loyalty,
devotion, and punctilio as to the point of honour; and, having enclosed
themselves within these narrow bounds, they are almost necessarily
driven to exaggeration. This tendency is found in so powerful a writer
as Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, of whom we know scarcely anything
except that he was born at Toledo in 1607, and that he was on friendly
terms with both the devout José de Valdivielso and the waggish Jerónimo
de Cáncer—who in his _Vejamen_, written in 1649, gives a comical
picture of the dignified dramatist tearing along in an undignified
hurry. In 1644 Rojas Zorrilla was proposed as a candidate for the Order
of Santiago, but the nomination was objected to on the ground that he
was of mixed Moorish and Jewish descent, and that some of his ancestors
two or three generations earlier had been weavers and carpenters.
These allegations were evidently not proved, for Rojas Zorrilla became
a Knight of the Order of Santiago on October 19, 1645. The autograph
of _La Ascensión del Cristo, nuestro bien_ states that this piece was
written when the author was fifty-five: this brings us down to 1662.
Rojas Zorrilla then disappears: the date of his death is unknown. The
first volume of his plays was published in 1640, the second in 1645. In
the preface to the second volume he makes the same complaint as Lope de
Vega and Calderón—namely, that plays were fathered upon him with which
he had nothing to do—and he promises a third volume which, however, was
not issued.
It has been denied that Rojas Zorrilla belongs to Calderón’s school,
and no doubt he was much more than an obsequious pupil. Yet he was
clearly affiliated to the school. He belonged to the same social class
as Calderón; he was seven years younger, and must have begun writing
for the stage just when it became evident that Calderón was destined
to succeed Lope de Vega in popular esteem; and, moreover, he actually
collaborated later with Calderón in _El Monstruo de la fortuna_. It
is hard to believe that Calderón, at the height of his reputation,
would condescend to collaborate with a junior whose ideals differed
from his own. No such difference existed: as might be expected from a
disciple, Rojas Zorrilla is rather more Calderonian than Calderón. Out
of Spain he is usually mentioned as the author of _La Traición busca
el castigo_, the source of Vanbrugh’s _False Friend_ and Lesage’s _Le
Traître puni_; but, if he had written nothing better than _La Traición
busca el castigo_, he would not rise above the rank and file of Spanish
playwrights. His most remarkable work is _García del Castañar_, a
famous piece not included in either volume of the plays issued by Rojas
Zorrilla himself. The natural explanation would be that it was written
after 1645, and this is possible. Yet it cannot be confidently assumed.
As we have already seen, _La Estrella de Sevilla_ is not contained in
the collections of Lope’s plays. Plays were not included or omitted
solely on their merits, but for other reasons: because they were
likely to please ‘star’ actors, or because they had failed to please a
particular audience.
The story of _García del Castañar_ is so typical that it is worth
telling. García is the son of a noble who had been compromised in the
political plots which were frequent during the regency of the Infante
Don Juan Manuel. He takes refuge at El Castañar near Toledo, lives
there as a farmer, marries Blanca de la Cerda (who, though unaware of
the fact, is related to the royal house), and looks forward to the time
when, through the influence of his friend the Count de Orgaz, he may
be recalled. News reaches him that an expedition is being fitted out
against the Moors, and he subscribes so largely that his contribution
attracts the attention of Alfonso XI., who makes inquiries about
him. The Count de Orgaz takes this opportunity to commend García to
the King’s favour, but dwells on his proud and solitary nature which
unfits him for a courtier’s life. Alfonso XI. determines to visit
García in disguise. Orgaz informs García of the King’s intention
and adds that, as Alfonso _XI._ habitually wears the red ribbon
of a knightly order, there will be no difficulty in distinguishing
him from the members of his suite. Four visitors duly arrive at El
Castañar, passing themselves off as hunters who have lost their way,
and, as one of the four is decorated as described by Orgaz, García
takes him to be the King. In reality he is Don Mendo, a courtier of
loose morals. Unrecognised, Alfonso XI. converses with García, telling
him of the King’s satisfaction with his gift, and holding out to him
the prospect of a brilliant career at court: García, however, is not
tempted, and declares his intention of remaining in happy obscurity.
The hunting-party leaves Castañar; but Don Mendo, enamoured of Doña
Blanca, returns next day under the impression that García will be
absent. Entering the house by stealth, he is discovered by García
who, believing him to be the King, spares his life. Don Mendo does
not suspect García’s misapprehension, and retires, supposing that the
rustic was awed by the sight of a noble. But the stain on García’s
honour can only be washed away with blood. In default of the real
culprit, he resolves to kill his blameless wife, who takes flight,
and is placed by Orgaz under the protection of the Queen. García
is summoned to court, is presented to the King, perceives that the
foiled seducer was not his sovereign, slays Don Mendo in the royal
ante-chamber, returns to the presence with his dagger dripping blood,
and, after defending his action as the only course open to a man of
honour, closes his eloquent tirade by declaring that, even if it should
cost him his life, he can allow no one—save his anointed King—to insult
him with impunity:—
Que esto soy, y éste es mi agravio,
éste el ofensor injusto,
éste el brazo que le ha muerto,
éste divida el verdugo;
pero en tanto que mi cuello
esté en mis hombros robusto,
no he de permitir me agravie
del Rey abajo, ninguno.
_Del Rey abajo, ninguno_—‘None, under the rank of King’—is the
alternative title of _García del Castañar_, and these four energetic
words sum up the exaltation of monarchical sentiment which is the
leading motive of the play. Buckle, writing of Spain, says in his
sweeping way that ‘whatever the King came in contact with, was in some
degree hallowed by his touch,’ and that ‘no one might marry a mistress
whom he had deserted.’ This is not quite accurate. We know that, at
the very time of which we are speaking, the notorious ‘Calderona’—the
mother of Don Juan de Austria—married an actor named Tomás Rojas, and
that she returned to her husband and the stage after her _liaison_ with
Philip IV. was ended. Still, it is true that reverence for the person
of the sovereign was a real and common sentiment among Spaniards.
Clarendon speaks of ‘their submissive reverence to their princes being
a vital part of their religion,’ and records the horrified amazement
of Olivares on observing Buckingham’s familiarity with the Prince of
Wales—‘a crime monstrous to the Spaniard.’ This reverential feeling,
like every other emotion, found dramatic expression in the work of Lope
de Vega. It is the leading theme in _La Estrella de Sevilla_, and Lope
has even been accused of almost blasphemous adulation by those who only
know this celebrated play in the popular recast made at the end of the
eighteenth century by Cándido María Trigueros, and entitled _Sancho
Ortiz de las Roelas_. The charge is based on a well-known passage:—
¡La espada sacastes vos,
y al Rey quisisteis herir
¿El Rey no pudo mentir?
No, que es imagen de Dios.
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,
nieve, aire y fuego, quedando
agua lo que antes fue nieve,
lo que fue antes fuego, rayo;
exhalación lo que aire,
nada lo que fue caballo.
This is what Ben Jonson would call ‘clotted nonsense,’ and you find
the same bombast in another play of Rojas Zorrilla’s—and an excellent
play it is—entitled _No hay ser padre, siendo Rey_, upon which Rotrou’s
_Venceslas_ is based. In such faults of taste Rojas Zorrilla leaves
Calderón far behind. You have seen him at his strongest in _García del
Castañar_: you will find him at his weakest—and it is execrably bad—if
you turn to the thirty-second volume of the _Comedias Escogidas_, and
read _La Vida en el atahud_. Here St. Boniface goes to Tarsus and is
decapitated: in the ordinary course, you expect the curtain to fall at
this point. But Rojas Zorrilla prepares a surprise for you. The trunk
of the saint is presented on the stage, the martyr holding his head in
his hand; and the head addresses Milene and Aglaes in such a startling
way that both become Christians. It seems very likely that, if Ludovico
Enio had not been converted by the sight of the skeleton in Calderón’s
_Purgatorio de San Patricio_, Milene and Aglaes would not have been
confronted with the severed head, talking, in _La Vida en el atahud_.
Like Calderón, though in a lesser degree, Rojas Zorrilla is not above
utilising the material provided by his predecessors: even in _García
del Castañar_ there are reminiscences of Lope de Vega’s _Peribáñez y el
Comendador de Ocaña_, of Lope’s _El Villano en su rincón_, of Vélez de
Guevara’s _La Luna de la Sierra_, and of Tirso de Molina’s _El Celoso
prudente_. But, if he has all Calderón’s defects, he has many of his
great qualities. Few cloak-and-sword plays are better worth reading
than _Donde hay agravios, no hay celos_, or than _Sin honra no hay
amistad_, or than _No hay amigo para amigo_ (the source of Lesage’s
_Le Point d’honneur_). Rojas Zorrilla has perhaps less verbal wit
than Calderón, but he has much more humour, and he shows it in such
pieces as _Entre bobos anda el juego_, from which the younger Corneille
took his _Don Bertrand de Cigarral_, and Scarron his _Dom Japhet
d’Arménie_. Scarron, indeed, picked up a frugal living on the crumbs
which fell from Rojas Zorrilla’s table. He took his _Jodelet ou le
Maître valet_ from _Donde hay agravios no hay celos_, and his _Écolier
de Salamanque_ from _Obligados y ofendidos_, a piece which also
supplied the younger Corneille and Boisrobert respectively with _Les
Illustres Ennemis_ and _Les Généreux Ennemis_. But observe that, in
Rojas Zorrilla’s case as in Calderón’s, the foreign adapters use only
the light comedies. The rapturous monarchical sentiment of _García del
Castañar_ no doubt seemed too hysterical for the court of Louis XIV.,
and hence the author’s most striking play remained unknown in Northern
Europe. You may say that he forced the note, as Spaniards often do,
and that he has no one but himself to thank. Perhaps: Rojas Zorrilla
adopts a convention, and every convention tends to become more and
more unreal. Possibly the first man who signed himself somebody else’s
obedient servant meant what he wrote: you and I mean nothing by it.
But conventions are convenient, and, though nobody can have had much
respect for Philip IV. towards the end of his reign, the monarchical
sentiment was latent in the people. Moreover, the scene of _García del
Castañar_ is laid in the early part of the fourteenth century. When all
is said, _García del Castañar_ has an air of—what we may call—local
truth, a nobility of conception, and a concentrated eloquence which go
to make it a play in a thousand.
Nothing is easier to forget than a play which has little more than
cleverness to recommend it, and many of the pieces written by
Calderón’s followers are clever to the last degree of tiresomeness.
There is cleverness of a kind in _El Conde de Sex ó Dar la vida por
su dama_, and, if there were any solid basis for the ascription of it
to Philip IV., we should have to say that it was a very creditable
performance for a king. But then kings in modern times have not
greatly distinguished themselves in literature. You remember Boileau’s
remark to Louis XIV.:—‘Votre Majesté peut tout ce qu’Elle veut faire:
Elle a voulu faire de mauvais vers; Elle y a réussi.’ However, if
_El Conde de Sex_ would do credit to a royal amateur, it would be
a rather mediocre performance for a professional playwright like
Antonio Coello, to whom also it is attributed. Coello was already
known as a promising dramatist when Pérez de Montalbán wrote _Para
todos_ in 1632, but we can scarcely say that his early promise was
fulfilled. The air of courts does not encourage independence, and
Coello, apparently distrustful of his powers, collaborated in several
pieces with fellow-courtiers like Calderón, Vélez de Guevara and
Rojas Zorrilla—notably with the two latter in _También la afrenta es
veneno_, which dramatises the malodorous story of Leonor Telles (wife
of Fernando I. of Portugal) and her first husband, João Lourenço da
Cunha, _el de los cuernos de oro_. Shortly before he died in 1652
Coello had his reward by being made a member of the royal household,
but he would now be forgotten were it not that he is said to be the
real author of _Los Empeños de seis horas_ (_Lo que pasa en una
noche_), which is printed in the eighth volume of the _Escogidas_ as
a play of Calderón’s. Assuming that the ascription of it to Coello is
correct, he becomes of some interest to us in England, for the play
was adapted by Samuel Tuke under the title of _The Adventures of Five
Hours_. This piece of Tuke’s made a great hit in London when it was
printed in 1662; four years later Samuel Pepys confided to his diary
that ‘when all is done, it is the best play that ever I read in all my
life,’ and when he saw it acted a few days afterwards, he effusively
declared that _Othello_ seemed ‘a mean thing’ beside it. There is a
tendency to make the Spanish author—for Tuke adds little of his own—pay
for Pepys’s extravagance. _Los Empeños de seis horas_ is nothing like
a masterpiece, but it is a capital light comedy—neatly constructed,
witty, brisk and entertaining. It is, indeed, so much better than
anything else which bears Coello’s name that there is some hesitation
to believe he wrote it. However, he has the combined authority of
Barrera and Schaeffer in his favour, though neither of these oracles
gives any reason to support the ascription.
As a writer of high comedy Coello had many rivals in Spain—men
slightly his seniors, like Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, who became
known in England through Fanshawe’s translations, and who must also
have been known in France, since his play _El Marido hace mujer_ was
laid under contribution by Molière in _L’École des maris_; men like
his contemporary Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón, whose _El Señor de Buenas
Noches_ was turned to account by the younger Corneille in _La Comtesse
d’Orgueil_; men like his junior, Fernando de Zárate y Castronovo, the
author of _La Presumida y la hermosa_, in which Molière found a hint
for _Les Femmes savantes_. But the most successful writer in this vein
was Agustín Moreto y Cavaña, who was born in 1618, just as Calderón
was leaving Salamanca University to seek his fortune as a dramatist
at Madrid. To judge by his more characteristic plays we should guess
Moreto to have been the happiest of men, and the gayest; but late in
life he gave an opening to writers of ‘hypothetical biography,’ and
they took it. For instance, when he was over forty he became devout,
took orders, and made a will directing that he should be buried in the
Pradillo del Carmen at Toledo—a place which has been identified as the
burial-ground of criminals who had been executed. This identification
gave rise to the theory that he must have had some ghastly crime upon
his conscience, and, as particulars are generally forthcoming in such
cases, some charitable persons leapt to the conclusion that Moreto was
the undetected assassin of Lope’s friend, Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla.
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:—
Al suceder la tragedia
del silbo, si se repara,
ver su comedia era cara,
ver su cara era comedia.
This is not the kind of immortality that any one desires, but this—or
something not much better—is the only kind of immortality that most of
the five hundred are likely to attain. The iniquity of oblivion blindly
scattereth its poppy on the crowd, and the long line closes with
Bancés Candamo, who died in 1704. He was the favourite court-dramatist
as Calderón had been before him. To say that Bancés Candamo occupied
the place once filled by Calderón is to show how greatly the Spanish
theatre had degenerated. No doubt it must have perished in any case,
for institutions die as certainly as men. But its end was hastened by
two most influential personages—one a man of genius, and the other a
fribble—who had the welfare of the stage at heart. By reducing dramatic
composition to a formula, Calderón arrested any possible development;
by lavish expenditure on decorations, Philip IV. imposed his taste
for spectacle upon the public. The public gets what it deserves: when
the stage-carpenter comes in, the dramatist goes out. Compelled to
write pieces which would suit the elaborate scenery provided at the
Buen Retiro, Calderón was the first to suffer. He and Philip,[106]
between them, dealt the Spanish drama its death-blow. It lingered on
in senile decay for fifty years, and with Bancés Candamo it died. It
was high time for it to be gone: for nothing is more lamentable than
the progressive degradation of what has once been a great and living
force.