In classical Spanish drama the masks are few. The characters hardly
have individual names. The lady in Calderon, for instance, if she is
not Beatriz will be Leonor, and under either name so superlatively
beautiful, young, chaste, eloquent, devoted, and resourceful, as to be
indistinguishable from her namesakes in the other plays. The hero is
always exaggeratedly in love, exaggeratedly chivalrous, and absolutely
perfect, save for this heroic excess of sensitiveness and honour.
The old father is always austere, unyielding, perverse, and sublime.
All the maids in attendance possess the same roguishness, the same
genius for intrigue and lightning mendacity; whilst the valet, whether
called Crispin or Florin, is always a faithful soul and a coward,
with the same quality of rather forced humour. No diversity from play
to play save the diversity in the fable, in the angle at which the
stock characters are exhibited and the occasion on which they versify;
for they all versify in the same style, with the same inexhaustible
facility, abundance, rhetorical finish, and lyric fire.
Why this monotony? Did Spanish life afford fewer contrasts, less
individuality of character and idiom, than did the England of
Shakespeare? Hardly: in Spain the soldier of fortune, the grandee,
peasant, monk, or prelate, the rogue, beggar, and bandit were surely
as highly characterized as anything to be then found in England; and
Spanish women in their natural ardour of affection, in their ready
speech and discretion, in their dignity and religious consecration,
lent themselves rather better, one would think, to the making of
heroines than did those comparatively cool and boylike young ladies
whom Shakespeare transmuted into tragic angels. I think we may go
further and say positively that it was Spain rather than England that
could have shown the spectacle of "every man in his humour."
Even in the days before Puritanism English character was English;
it tended to silent independence and outward reserve, preferring
to ignore its opposite rather than to challenge it. In pose and
expression the Spaniard is naturally more theatrical and pungent; and
his individuality itself is stiffen No doubt, in society, he will
simulate and dissimulate as an Englishman never would; but he is
prompted to this un-English habit by the very fixity of his purposes;
all his courtesy and loyalty are ironical, and inwardly he never yields
an inch. He likes if possible to be statuesque; he likes to appeal
to his own principles and character, and to say, "Sir, whatever you
may think of it, that is the sort of man I am." He has that curious
form of self-love which inclines to parade even its defects, as a
mourner parades his grief. He admits readily that he is a sinner,
and that he means to remain one; he composes his countenance proudly
on that basis; whereas when English people say they are miserable
sinners (which happens only in church) they feel perhaps that they are
imperfect or unlucky, and they may even contemplate being somewhat
different in future; but it never occurs to them to classify themselves
as miserable sinners for good, with a certain pride in their class,
deliberately putting on the mask of Satan or the cock's feather of
Mephistopheles and saying to all concerned, "See what a very devil I
am!" The Englishman's sins are slips; he feels he was not himself on
those occasions, and does not think it fair to be reminded of them.
Though theology may sometimes have taught him that he is a sinner
fundamentally, such is not his native conviction; the transcendental
ego in him cannot admit any external standard to which it ought to have
conformed. The Spaniard is metaphysically humbler, knowing himself
to be a creature of accident and fate; yet he is dramatically more
impudent, and respects himself more than he respects other people. He
laughs at kings; and as amongst beggars it is etiquette to whine, and
ostentatiously to call oneself blind, old, poor, crippled, hungry, and
a brother of yours, so amongst avowed sinners it may become a point of
pride to hold, as it were, the record as a liar, a thief, an assassin,
or a harlot. These rôles are disgraceful when one is reduced to them
by force of circumstances or for some mean ulterior motive, but they
recover their human dignity when one wears them as a chosen mask in
the comedy of life. The pose, at that angle, redeems the folly, and
the façade the building. Nor is this a lapse into sheer immorality;
there is many a primitive or animal level of morality beneath the
conventional code; and often crime and barbarism are as proud of
themselves as virtue, and no less punctilious. If there is effrontery
in such a rebellion, there may be also sincerity, courage, relief,
profound truth to one's own nature. Hence the eloquence of romanticism.
Passion and wilfulness (which romanticists think are above criticism)
cannot be expected to understand that, if they merged and subsided
into a harmony, the life distilled out of their several deaths would
be infinitely more living and varied than any of them, and would be
beautiful and perfect to boot; whereas the romantic chaos which they
prolong by their obstinacy is the most hideous of hells. But avowed
sinners and proud romanticists insist on preserving and on loving hell,
because they insist on loving and preserving themselves.
It was not, then, moral variety that was lacking in Spain, always a
romantic country, but only interest in moral variety. This lack of
interest was itself an expression of romantic independence, intensity,
and pride. The gentleman with his hand always on the hilt of his sword,
lest some whiff from anywhere should wound his vanity, or the monk
perpetually murmuring _memento mori_, closed his mind to every alien
vista. Of course he knew that the world was full of motley characters:
that was one of his reasons for holding it at arm's length. What were
those miscellaneous follies to him but an offence or a danger? Why
should he entertain his leisure in depicting or idealizing them? If
some psychological zoologist cared to discant on the infinity of
phenomena, natural or moral, well and good; but how should such things
charm a man of honour, a Christian, or a poet? They might indeed be
referred to on occasion, as fabulists make the animals speak, with a
humorous and satirical intention, as a sort of warning and confirmation
to us in our chosen path; but an appealing poet, for such tightly
integrated minds, must illustrate and enforce their personal feelings.
Moreover, although in words and under the spell of eloquence the
Spaniard may often seem credulous and enthusiastic, he is disillusioned
and cynical at heart; he does not credit the existence of motives or
feelings better than those he has observed, or thinks he has observed.
His preachers recommend religion chiefly by composing invectives
against the world, and his political writers express sympathy with one
foreign country only out of hatred for another, or perhaps for their
own. The sphere of distrust and indifference begins for him very near
home; he has little speculative sympathy with life at large; he is
cruel to animals; he shrugs his shoulders at crime in high places; he
feels little responsibility to the public, and has small faith in time
and in work. This does not mean in the least that his character is weak
or his morality lax within its natural range; his affections are firm,
his sense of obligation deep, his delicacy of feeling often excessive;
he is devoted to his family, and will put himself to any inconvenience
to do a favour to a friend at the public expense. There are definite
things to which his sentiments and habits have pledged him: beyond that
horizon nothing speaks to his heart.
Such a people will not go to the play to be vaguely entertained, as
if they were previously bored. They are not habitually bored; they
are full to the brim of their characteristic passions and ideas. They
require that the theatre should set forth these passions and ideas as
brilliantly and convincingly as possible, in order to be confirmed in
them, and to understand and develop them more clearly. Variety of plot
and landscape they will relish, because nothing is easier for them than
to imagine themselves born in the purple, or captive, or in love, or in
a difficult dilemma of honour; and they will be deeply moved to see
some constant spirit, like their own, buffeted by fortune, but even in
the last extremity never shaken. The whole force of their dramatic art
will lie in leading them to dream of themselves in a different, perhaps
more glorious, position, in which their latent passions might be more
splendidly expressed. These passions are intense and exceptionally
definite; and this is the reason, I think, for the monotony of Spanish
music, philosophy, and romantic drama. All eloquence, all issues, all
sentiments, if they are not to seem vapid and trivial, must be such as
each man can make his own, with a sense of enhanced vitality and moral
glory. The lady, if he is to warm to her praises, must not be less
divine than the one he loves, or might have loved; the hero must not
fall short of what, under such circumstances, he himself would have
wished to be. The language, too, must always be worthy of the theme:
it cannot be too rapturous and eloquent. Unless his soul can be fired
by the poet's words, and can sing them, as it were, in chorus, he will
not care to listen to them. But he will not tire of the same cadences
or the same images--stars, foam, feathers, flowers--if these symbols,
better than any others, transport him into the ethereal atmosphere
which it is his pleasure to breathe.
The Spanish nation boils the same peas for its dinner the whole year
round; it has only one religion, if it has any; the pious part of it
recites the same prayers fifty or one hundred and fifty times daily,
almost in one breath; the gay and sentimental part never ceases to
sing the same _jotas_ and _malagueñas_. Such constancy is admirable.
If a dish is cheap, nutritious, and savoury on Monday, it must be so
on Tuesday, too; it was a ridiculous falsehood, though countenanced
by some philosophers, which pretended that always to feel (or to eat)
the same thing was equivalent to never feeling (or eating) anything.
Nor does experience of a genuine good really have any tendency to turn
it into an evil, or into an indifferent thing; at most, custom may
lead people to take it for granted, and the thoughtless may forget
its value, until, perhaps, they lose it. Of course, men and nations
may slowly change their nature, and consequently their rational
preferences; but at any assigned time a man must have some moral
complexion, or if he has none, not much need be said about him.
But there is another point to be considered. Need human nature's
daily food be exclusively the Spanish pea? Might it not just as
well be rice, or polenta, or even beef and bacon? Much as I admire
my countrymen's stomachs for making a clear choice and for sticking
to it, I rather pity them for the choice they have made. That hard
yellow pea is decidedly heavy, flatulent, and indigestible. I am sure
Pythagoras would not have approved of it; possibly it is the very
bean he abhorred. Against the _jota_ and the _malagueña_ I can say
nothing; I find in them I know not what infinite, never-failing thrill
and inimitable power, the power which perfection of any kind always
has; yet what are they in comparison to all the possibilities of human
music? Enjoyment, which some people call criticism, is something
aesthetic, spontaneous, and irresponsible; the aesthetic perfection of
anything is incommensurable with that of anything else. But there is a
responsible sort of criticism which is political and moral, and which
turns on the human advantage of possessing or loving this or that sort
of perfection. To cultivate some sorts may be useless or even hostile
to the possible perfection of human life. Spanish religion, again, is
certainly most human and most superhuman; but its mystic virtue to the
devotee cannot alter the fact that, on a broad view, it appears to be a
romantic _tour de force,_ a desperate illusion, fostered by premature
despair and by a total misunderstanding of nature and history. Finally,
those lyrical ladies and entranced gentlemen of the Spanish drama are
like filigree flowers upon golden stems; they belong to a fantastic
ballet, to an exquisite dream, rather than to sane human society.
The trouble is not that their types are few and constant, but that
these types are eccentric, attenuated, and forced. They would not be
monotonous if they were adequate to human nature. How vast, how kindly,
how enveloping does the world of Shakespeare seem in comparison! We
seem to be afloat again on the tide of time, in a young, green world;
we are ready to tempt new fortunes, in the hope of reaching better
things than we know. And this is the right spirit; because although
the best, if it had been attained, would be all-sufficient, the best is
not yet.
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