.-,-'. - . ,,--- r - - . - - .--'. .-,V'" ; /.,:, '. ,/\:V'-" : -'' %>'/; ;',: '.',,.: :'"'''' ',' m ' 1 ''^"'":: : '- ," " s^&J .- '-. . i ''''>/ - 1 nU ',' g - THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES m : j .... _ - . .. i .- ;'.:;:-,'- ' -'-.-^] i ' ' THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF CALDERON, Works by the REV. R. C. TRENCH, B. D. IN UNIFORM STYLE WITH THIS VOLUME. I. ON THE STUDY OF WORDS. 1 vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents. II. ON THE LESSONS IN PROVERBS. 1 vol. 12mo. Price 50 cents. III. SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 1 vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents. IV. ENGLISH, PAST AND PRESENT. 1 vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents. V. POEMS. 1 vol. 12mo. Price one dollar. VI. CALDERON, HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, WITH SPECIMENS OF HIS PLATS. 1 vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents. PUBLISHED BY J. S. REDFIELD, NEW YORK. CALDERON HIS LIFE AND GENIUS SPECIMENS OF HIS PLAYS RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, B.D. AUTHOR OP " THE STUDY OP WOBDS" " ENGLISH, PAST AND PRESENT" " LESSONS ON PBOVEHBS" "SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 1 ' "POEMS," ETC EBDFIELD 34 BEEKMAN STREET, NEW YORK 1856 PREFACE. THESE translations have lain by me for nearly twice the nine years during which Horace recommended that a poem should remain in its author's power. They formed part of a larger scheme long ago con- ceived ; but in the carrying out of which I presently discovered inner difficulties ; not to say that it would have required, as I also soon was aware, a far greater amount of time and labor than I was either willing or had a right to bestow upon it. The scheme was consequently laid aside. At the same time I did not lay aside the hope of rescuing a few portions of my work from the absolute oblivion to which the remain- der, written and unwritten, was consigned ; and of preparing these, if ever a convenient time should arrive, for the press. The time was long in arriving. It is, however, these portions which, with a few later b PREFACE. revisions, and here and there a gap filled up, consti- tute the verse translations occupying the latter half of this little volume. A first sketch of the Memoir prefixed to these translations dates back to the same period. I could not, however, let this go forth without seeking to bring up at least its literary notices to the present time ; and in doing this, in supplying what, as I passed it again under my eye, seemed to me most lacking in it, and in modifying earlier judgments, till they expressed more exactly present convictions, I find that, without having at all expected or desired this result, I have re-written the greater portion of the Memoir. ITCHENSTOKE, April 9, 1856. CONTENTS. ON THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF CALDERON. PAGE CHAP. I. THE LIFE OF CALDERON 9 " II. THE GENIUS OF CALDERON (his Plays) 34 " III. THE GENIUS OF CALDERON (his Autos) 76 " IV. CALDERON IN ENGLAND 98 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. i. LIFE'S A DREAM 117 II. THE GREAT THEATRE OF THE WORLD . 171 APPENDIX 221 ON THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF CALDERON, CHAPTER I. THE LIFE OF CALDERON. THERE are few poets who have been so differently judged who have been set so high, and so low as Calderon ; few who have been made the objects, on one side, of such enthusiastic admiration and ap- plause ; on the other, of such extreme depreciation and contempt. Consult the Schlegels, or any other of his chief German admirers, and you would suppose that in him Shakespeare had found his peer ; that he had attained unto " the first three," to Homer, and Dante, and Shakespeare ; and that he, a fourth, occu- pied a throne of equal dignity with theirs. For Sis- mondi, on the contrary, and for others not a few, he is little better than a dexterous playwright, an adroit master of stage-effect ; a prodigal squanderer of poet- ical gifts (which, indeed, they do not deny to have 1* " 10 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. been eminent) on a Spanish populace, whose tastes he flattered, and from whom he obtained that meed of present popularity which was justly his due, being now to seek for no other. And perhaps there has been still greater divergence and disagreement in the estimates which have been formed of the ethical worth of this poet. " In this great and divine master the enigma of life is not merely expressed, but solved." These are the words of Frederic Schlegel, setting him in this above Shake- speare, who for the most part is content, according to him, with putting the riddle of life, without at- tempting to resolve it." And again : " In every sit- uation and circumstance Calderon is, of all dramatic poets, the most Christian." And Augustus Schlegel, who had not his brother's Romanist sympathies to affect his judgment, in a passage of rare eloquence in his Lectures on Dramatic Literature* characterizes the religious poetry of Calderon as one never-ending hymn of thanksgiving, ascending continually to the throne of God. Falling in, too, with the very point of his brother's praise, " Blessed man !" he exclaims, " he had escaped from the wild labyrinths of doubt into the stronghold of belief; thence, with undisturbed tranquillity of soul, he beheld and portrayed the storms of the world. To him human life was no longer a dark riddle." These two set the example ; many followed in their train. * Lecture 29. THE LIFE OF CALDEEON. 11 Others, meanwhile, have not been wanting who have been able to see nothing but what is morally perverse and injurious in his poetry. Thus Salfi goes so far as to say that he can never read Calderon with- out indignation ; accuses him of having no other aims but to make his genius subservient to the lowest preju- dices and superstitions of his countrymen. And oth- ers in the same spirit describe him as the poet of the Inquisition (the phrase is Sismondi's), of Romanism in its deepest degradation, in its most extravagant divorce of religion from morality ; what morality he has being utterly perverted, the Spanish punctilio in its bloodiest excess with much more in the same strain. Many, too, of those who abstain from passing any such strong moral condemnation on the Spanish poet, or looking at his writings from any such earnest ethi- cal point of view, while they give him credit for a certain amount of technical dramatic skill, have no genuine sympathy with him, no hearty admiration for his works. They find everywhere more to blame than to praise ; brilliant but cold conceits, oriental hyper- boles, the language of the fancy usurping the place of the language of the heart ; and when they praise him the most, it is not as one of the stars shining with a steady lustre in the poetical firmament, but as an eccentric meteor, filling the mind of the beholder with astonishment rather than with admiration. Such a " frigid" character of him (it is his own word) Hal- 12 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. lam* has given, acknowledging at the same time the slightness of his acquaintance, both with Calderon himself and with the language in which he has writ- ten ; and such the author (Southey ? or Lockhart ?) of an able article in the Quarterly Review^ with whose judgment Hallam has consented in the main. That my own judgment does not agree with theirs who set him thus low in the scale of poetical merit, still less with theirs who charge him with that pro- found moral perversity, I need hardly affirm. For, small and slight as this volume is, I should have been little tempted to bestow the labor it has cost me on that which, as poetry, seemed to me of little value ; and still less disposed to set forward in any way the study of a writer who, being what his earnest cen- surers affirm, could only exert a mischievous influ- ence, if he exerted any, on his readers. How far my judgment approaches that of his enthusiastic admirers what drawbacks it .seems needful to make on their praises as extravagant and excessive what real and substantial worth will still, as I believe, remain it will be my endeavor to express this in the pages which follow. But these considerations will be most fitly intro- duced by a brief sketch of Calderon's life, and of the circumstances of Spain before and during the period when he flourished, so far as they may be supposed to * Literature of Europe, vol. iii., pp. 532-541. t Vol. xxv., pp. 1-24, The Spanish Drama. THE LIFE OP CALDEEON. 18 have affected him and his art. So shall we be able better to understand (and it is not unworthy of study) that great burst of dramatic invention, undoubtedly after the Greek and English the most glorious explo- sion of genius in this kind which the world has ever beheld, and which, beginning some ten or fifteen years before Calderon's birth, may be said to have expired when he died. There are, indeed, only three great original dramatic literatures in the world ; and this, in which Calderon is the central figure, is one. Greece, England, and Spain, are the only three countries, in the western world at least, which boast an indepen- dent drama, one going its own way, growing out of its own roots, not timidly asking what others have done before, but boldly doing that which its own na- tive impulses urged it to do ; the utterance of the national heart and will, accepting no laws from with- out, but only those which it has imposed on itself, as laws of its true liberty, and not of bondage. The Roman drama and the French are avowedly imita- tions ; nor can all the vigor and even originality in detail, which the former displays, vindicate for it an independent position : much less can the latter, which, at least in the nobler region of tragedy, is altogether an artificial production, claim this ; indeed, it does not seek to do so, finding its glory in the renunciation of any such claim. Germany has some fine plays, but no national dramatic literature ; the same must be said of Italy ; and the period has long since past for 14 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. both when it would have been possible that this want should be supplied. For us, who behold SPAIN only in the depth of her present bankruptcy, literal and figurative, it is diffi- cult to realize the lofty elevation of power, and dig- nity, and honor, at which she stood in the sixteenth century, and, while as yet the secret of her decadence was not divined, during a portion of the seventeenth ; the extent to which the Spaniard was honored with the fear, the admiration, and the hatred, of the rest of Europe. That sixteenth had been for him a cen- tury of achievements almost without a parallel. At the close of the century preceding, the Christians of Spain had brought their long conflict with the infidel at home to a triumphant close. But these eight hun- dred years of strife had impressed their stamp deeply on the national character. " As iron sharpeneth iron," so had this long collision of races and religions evoked many noble qualities in the Spaniard, but others also most capable of dangerous abuse. War with the infi- del, in one shape or another, had become almost a necessity of the national mind. The Spanish cavalier might not be moral, but religious, according to that distinction between morality and religion possible in Koman catholic countries, he always must be, by the same necessity that, to be a gentleman, he must be well born, and courteous, and brave. The field for the exercise of this Christian chivalry THE LIFE OP CALDEBON. 15 at home was no sooner closed to him, than other and wider fields were opened. Granada was taken in 1492 ; in the very same year Columbus discovered a New World, to the conquering of which the Spaniard advanced quite as much in the spirit of a crusader as of a gold-seeker ; and we wrong him altogether, at least such men as Cortez, if we believe that only the one passion was real, while the other was assumed. All exploits of fabled heroes of romance were outdone by the actual deeds of these conquerors deeds at the recital of which the world, so long as it has admi- ration for heroic valor and endurance, or indignation for pitiless cruelty, will shudder and wonder. But this valor was not all to be lavished, nor these cruel- ties to be practised, on a scene remote from European eyes. The years during which Cortez was slowly winning his way to the final conquest of the Mexican empire, were exactly the earliest years of the Refor- mation in Europe (1518-1521). This Reformation, adopted by the north of Europe, repelled by the south, was by none so energetically repelled as by the Span- iards, who henceforward found a sphere wide as the whole civilized world in which to make proof that they were the most Christian of all Christian nations, the most catholic of all catholic. Spain did not shrink from her part as champion of the periled faith, but accepted eagerly the glories and the sacrifices which this championship entailed. Enriched by the bound- less wealth of the Western world, having passed in 16 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. Philip the Second's time from freedom into despotism, and bringing the energies, nursed in freedom, to be wielded with the unity which despotism possesses, she rose during the sixteenth century ever higher and higher in power and consideration. It was toward the end of that century that is, when Lope de Vega took possession of the rude drama of his country, and with the instincts of genius strength- ened and enlarged, without disturbing, the old foun- dations of it that the great epoch of her drama be- gan. All that went before was but as the attempts of Kid and Peele, or at the utmost of Marlowe, in ours. The time was favorable for his appearance. Spain must, at this time, have been waiting for her poet. The restless activity whieh had pushed her forward in every quarter, the spirit of enterprise which had discovered and won an empire in the New World, while it had attached to her some of the fairest prov- inces and kingdoms of the Old, was somewhat subsi- ding. She was willing to repose upon her laurels. The wish had risen up to enjoy the fruits of her long and glorious toils ; to behold herself, and what was best and highest in her national existence, those ideals after which she had been striving, reflected back upon her in the mirrors which art would supply ; for she owed her drama to that proud epoch of national his- tory which was just concluding, as truly as Greece owed the great burst of hers, all which has made it to live for ever, to the Persian war, and to the eleva- THE LIFE OF CALDERON. 17 tion consequent on its successful and glorious conclu- sion. The dramatic poet found everything ready to his hand. Here was a nation proud of itself, of its fidelity to the catholic faith, of its championship, at all sacrifices, of that faith ; possessing a splendid past history at home and abroad a history full of inci- dent, of passion, of marvel, and of suffering much of that history so recent as to be familiar to all, and much which was not recent, yet familiar as well, through ballad and romance, which everywhere lived on the lips of the people. Here was a nation which had set before itself, and in no idle pretence, the lof- tiest ideals of action ; full of the punctilios of valor, of honor, of loyalty ; a generation to whom life, their own life, or the life of those dearest, was as dust in the balance compared with the satisfying to the ut- most tittle the demands of these ; so that one might say that what Sir Philip Sidney has so beautifully called " the hate-spot ermeline" the ermine that ra- ther dies than sullies its whiteness with one spot or stain was the model they had chosen. Here was a society which had fashioned to itself a code of ethics, which, with all of lofty and generous that was in it, was yet often exaggerated, perverted, fantastic, inex- orable, bloody ; but which claimed unquestioning sub- mission from all, and about obeying which no hesita- tion of a moment might occur. What materials for the dramatic poet were here ! Nor may we leave out of sight that there were cir- 18 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. cumstances, which modified and rendered less fatal than we might have expected they would prove, even those influences that were manifestly hostile to the free development of genius in Spain. Thus it is quite true that Spain may be said finally to have passed from a land of constitutional freedom into a despotism, with the crushing by Philip II. of the liberties of Ara- gon. But for all this, the mighty impulses of the free period which went before, did not immediately fail. It is not for a generation or two that despotism effect- ually accomplishes its work, and shows its power in cramping, dwarfing, and ultimately crushing, the fac- ulties of a people. The nation lives for a while on what has been gained in nobler epochs of its life ; and it is not till this is exhausted, till the generation which was reared in a better time has passed away, and also the generation which they have formed and moulded under the not yet extinct traditions of free- dom, that all the extent of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual mischief, becomes apparent. Moreover, it must not be lost sight of that the Spanish was not an anti-national despotism, such as the English would have been if Charles I. had succeeded in his attempt to govern without parliaments. On the contrary, it was a despotism in which the nation gloried ; which itself helped forward. It was consequently one in which the nation did not feel that humiliation and depression, which are the results of one running directly counter to the national feeling, and being the THE LIFE OP CALDEKON. 19 permanent badge of unsuccessful resistance to a de- tested yoke. Even the hateful Inquisition itself, by discouraging, and indeed absolutely repressing, all activity of ge- nius in every other direction destined as it was ab- solutely to extinguish it in all yet for a season gave greater impulse to its movements in one direction. There was one province, that of poetry and, above all, dramatic poetry over which it never seems to have extended that jealous and suspicious surveil- lance with which it watched every other region of human thought and activity. Such are some features of the Spain in which Lope de Vega, Calderon, and their peers, grew up ; under these influences they were formed. At the time, in- deed, when Calderon was born, and much more when he was rising into manhood, the glory of his country was somewhat on its decline. Gray hairs were upon her. She, however, knew it not. Many glimpses of her past glory gilded her yet. Many pledges and evidences of her former greatness, not a few bequests of that heroic past, remained with her still. The Netherlands were not yet hopelessly lost ; Portugal was still an appanage of the Spanish crown ; the youthful Conde had not yet destroyed at Rocroi the prestige of that hitherto invincible infantry of Spain. She might still believe herself rich, because the treas- ures of the Indies flowed through her coffers ; not knowing that these were barren-making streams for 20 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. her, extinguishing in their passage her own industry and manufactures, and then passing on to enrich for- eign or hostile soils. The secret of her decay was concealed, in great part, not merely from herself, but from others, from all but the most understanding. It was to Spain that our first James just at this period turned, when he sought a wife for his only son, as counting that alliance more desirable than any other in Europe.* And when that marriage came to noth- ing, and the prospects of a contest with Spain rapidly succeeded those of an alliance with her, how great she still was in the judgment of the statesmen of Eu- rope may be seen from the very remarkable Consid- erations touching a War with Spain, 1624, by Lord Bacon. " A war with Spain," he there declares, " is a mighty work :" and this, even while the keen-eyed statesman plainly saw that the colossus was not so great in reality as in appearance and reputation, and spied with a searching eye its weaknesses ; and, most important of all, did not fail to note that every day the relative strength of the two states was changing in favor of England, which was ever rising in strength as Spain was falling. Still the decadence of Spain was not openly ac- * Calderon was resident in Madrid in the year of Prince Charles's romantic visit to that city (1623) a young poet of rising fame, but as yet filling no such office as would cause him to take any share in the shows and triumphs with which that visit was celebrated. A few years later, and we should not probably have wanted some gorgeous mythological spectacle from his pen, in which the alliance and future nuptials would have been shadowed forth. THE LIFE OF CALDERON. 21 knowledge*! as yet. Long after others had divined, and even proclaimed, her own duteous children would have refused to see it. They certainly did not per- ceive it as yet. The near future of their country's fall was hidden from them. They saw not her who a little while before was the chief and foremost among the nations, already failing in the race, to fall pres- ently into the rear nay, to be thrown out altogether from the great, onward march of European civiliza- tion. It was well, at least for her poets and her painters, that to hide this from their eyes was possi- ble to them still. A very little later, when the symp- toms of her rapid decay became more numerous and also more palpable, so that even they could not have missed them, it would have been impossible for a great poet to have arisen in Spain. For a great poet, without a great country, without a great people for him to be proud of, and which in return he feels shall be proud of him, without this action and reaction, never has been, and can never be. Elegant and even spirited lyrics, graceful idyls, comedies of social life, with all the small underwood of poetry, can very well exist, as they often have existed, where there is little or no national life or feeling ; but its grander and sub- limer forms epos, and tragedy, and the loftier lyrics can grow out of, and nourish themselves from, no other soil than that of a vigorous national existence. The names of Calderon and of his great dramatic contemporaries of the most illustrious among the 22 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. Spanish painters (the lives of Velasquez and Murillo run pretty nearly parallel to his) are evidences that such a period was not yet overlived in Spain. At the same time, it must be owned that he stood on its ex- tremest verge. He who saw the sun of his country's glory, if not indeed at its zenith, yet still high in the heaven, saw it also in its swift decline and descent ; and, had his long life been extended only a little longer, he would have seen it set altogether. The most important source from which the materi- als for Calderon's life are derived is a short biogra- phy written by his friend Vera Tassis. This was prefixed by him to an edition of Calderon's plays, the first volume of which was published the year after his death.* Brief as this record is, it contains even less than the first aspect of its narrow limits would lead one to expect ; for it is composed in the worst style of affected eloquence, however this may be partially redeemed by the tone of true affection which makes itself felt even through a medium so unfavorable as this. Considering, too, the biographer's opportuni- ties of knowledge, derived from a sister of the poet who survived him, and from other of his friends, as well as from personal intercourse (for he speaks of Calderon's death as being to him the loss of a parent, a master, and a friend), its notices are very few and * This edition (Madrid, 1682-1691, 9 torn. 4to) is naturally the first which contains his collected plays. THE LIFE OF CALDEEON. 23 unsatisfactory. The writer would indeed have de- served much better of the after-world, if, instead of pompous and turgid eulogiums, which would have fitted almost equally well any great poet who had ever lived, he had given a few characteristic details of Calderon's life and habits. These, unfortunately, are wanting altogether. And even the information which he does afford us is not altogether accurate ; for he stumbles at the very threshold, making the year 1601 to have been that of Calderon's birth, a mistake which has since propa- gated itself widely ; while an extract from his bap- tismal register, preserved in a very trustworthy work called The Sons of Madrid* and entitled, as docu- mentary evidence, to far greater weight, gives Febru- ary 14, 1600, as the day of his baptism ; not to say that in another rare work,f published by a friend in his honor, and written immediately after his death, it is distinctly stated, on the authority of Calderon him- self, that he was born January 17, 1600. Madrid had the honor of being his birthplace. His father, secretary to the treasury board under Philip II. and Philip III., was of a good family of the Montana, a mountainous district so called in the neigh- borhood of Burgos ; his mother of a noble Flemish family long settled in Castile. His parents were, ac- cording to The Sons of Madrid, " very Christian and * Los Hijos de Madrid, t. 4, p. 218. t Obdisco Funebre. 24 THE LIFE OF OALDERON. discreet persons, who gave their children an educa- tion conformable to their illustrious lineage." These children were four: an eldest son, D. Diego, who suc- ceeded to the family estates and honors ; a daughter, who became a professed nun of the order of St. Clare, and survived the poet by a year ; D. Josef, who fol- lowed the career of arms, and fell in battle in the year 1645 ; and D. Pedro, the youngest, with whom we have to do.* He received his first rudiments of education in the Jesuit college at Madrid ; and then for five years studied philosophy and the scholastic theology (of which fact abundant traces appear in his writings) at the university of Salamanca. Leaving it at nineteen, he spent the five or six years that fol- lowed at the capital, having already in his fourteenth year shown the bent of his genius toward the stage by a drama, The Chariot of Heaven, which has not come down to us. Like so many other of the most distinguished au- thors of Spain, he began his active career as a soldier in his twenty-fifth year serving in the Milanese, and afterward in the Low Countries, his biographer assu- ring us that his studies were not through these his more active engagements at all intermitted. Some have supposed that he was present at the siege and taking of Breda by Spinola, the great Genoese cap- tain in the service of Spain (1625) ; inferring this from his singular familiarity with all the details of * Los Hijos de Madrid, t. 1, p. 305 ; t. 2, p. 218 ; t. 3, p. 24. THE LIFE OF CALDERON. 25 this famous feat of arms, as displayed in his play called The Siege of Breda* How long his military career lasted we are not told. We find him, at a date somewhat later than this, again at Madrid, whither he had been summoned by the reigning monarch, Philip IV. In 1630, his fame was so well established, that Lope de Vega recognises him as his true and equal successor ; while, five years later, the death of Lope (1635) left him the undisputed occupant of the highest place among the poets of Spain, a pre-eminence which he held without the challenge of a rival to the end of his life. It was observed just now that Calderon came to Madrid in obedience to the summons of Philip IV. This monarch, himself an author, and writing his own language with precision and purity ,f was passionately addicted to the drama. Indeed, some plays, said not * The surrender of Breda was a subject which employed the pencil of Velasquez as well as the pen of Calderon. The picture bearing this name is a chief ornament of the Eoyal Gallery at Madrid, and one of the greatest works of a great master. ( See Stirling, Velasquez and his Works, p. 148.) The play, though spirited, is too much a mere chronicle of the siege and capitulation. It was probably a mere piece for the occasion. It is pleasant to notice the justice which Cal- deron does to the gallantry of Morgan, an English captain, who, with a small body of his countrymen, as we know from other sources, assisted in the defence of the place. t Pellicer, a Spanish scholar of the last century, and librarian of the Royal Library at Madrid, states that in that library are preserved MS. translations by this king of Francis Guicciardini's History of the Wars of Italy, and also of his nephew's Description of the Low Coun- tries ; to the latter of which a graceful and sensible prologue has been prefixed by the king. ( Oiigen y Progresos de la Comedia en Espana, Madrid, 1804, t. 1, p. 162.) o 26 THE LIFE OP CALDERON. to be without merit, are ascribed, but on no sufficient evidence, to him. Unfortunately, he expended on his artistic and Jiterary pursuits a great portion of that time, and those energies, which would have been far better bestowed on the fulfilment of the kingly duties which were so greatly neglected by him. There was much, however, in the character of the youthful mon- arch (he was five years younger than the poet), which was gracious, amiable, and attractive;* and a little anecdote or two imply that the relations between the two were easy and familiar. Director of the court theatre, which was the post that Caldcron, whether nominally or not, yet really occupied now, does not appear a very promising, nor yet a very dignified one, for a great poet to assume ; yet one not very dissimi- lar Goethe was willing for many years to sustain at Weimar : and, no doubt, like so many other positions, it was very much what the holder was willing to make it. * For a happy sketch of his charactsr, see Stirling, Velasquez and his Works, London, 1855, pp. 46-48. Dunlop's Memoirs of Spain during the Reigns of Philip IV. and Charles II. (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1834), are not very profound, and their idiom is occasionally rather Scotch than English. They contain, however, enough of information agreeably conveyed, and which is not very easily found elsewhere, to occasion a regret that he never carried out a purpose entertained by him (see vol. L, p. 9; vol. ii., p. 415) of dedicating a third volume to the history of dramatic art in Spain during the seventeenth century. As it is, the intention of devoting an especial treatise to this subject has caused him almost wholly to pass by a matter, which, in the life of such a monarch as Philip IV., could else have hardly failed to occupy some prominence in his book. THE LIFE OF CALDERON. 27 A member of the military order of Santiago (for in 1637 he had received this honor), Calderon had the opportunity of showing in his middle age that his mar- tial ardor was not quenched. On occasion of the re- volt in Catalonia, in 1640, the members of the three military orders were summoned to take the field. His biographer tells us that it was only by a device that Calderon was able to take that part in the perils of the campaign to which in duty and honor he felt him- self bound. The king wished to detain the poet at his side. Garcilasso, the author of the most elegant lyrics after the Italian fashion which Spain had pro- duced, had perished quite in his youth at the storming of a fortified mill, leaving only the first-fruits of his graceful genius behind him. Philip may not have been willing to expose a far greater light to a like premature extinction. At any rate, he desired to hinder the poet from going ; and this he supposed that he had effectually done, when he gave him a festal piece to prepare, which, according to the king's anti- cipation, would abundantly occupy him until after the expedition had set out. Calderon, however, defeated his purpose bringing his appointed task with such rapidity to a close, that he was able to follow and join the army in time, as Yera Tassis tells us, to share with it all its dangers until peace was con- cluded. Such is the account of his biographer ; and such conduct would be entirely in keeping with the chival- 28 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. rous character of Calderon : yet it is not without its difficulties. In the first place, the king could only have expected, by such an artifice as this, to detain him from the perils of the campaign, on the assumption that the war would be over almost as soon as begun. A fleet which had once set sail it might be impossible afterward to join ; but infinite opportunities must have offered of joining an army only two or three provinces off, and between such and the capital there must have been constant communication. Perhaps such expecta- tion of immediate success may have prevailed at Ma- drid. As it proved, the contest in Catalonia lasted for twelve years, the revolt being only suppressed in 1652 which makes another difficulty. Vera Tassis states that Calderon remained with the army till peace was concluded ; which would be for these twelve years. It is quite certain that long before this he was again in attendance on the court. In 1649, he took a promi- nent share in preparing the shows and festivities which welcomed the arrival of Philip's new queen, Anna Maria of Austria, to Madrid ; while, in 1651, a year before the rebellion was quelled, he had taken holy orders : for, like so many other of his countrymen, illustrious in war, or statesmanship, or art, the career which he began as a soldier he concluded as a priest. In a church so richly endowed as the Spanish was then, and one in which the monarch had been so suc- cessful in keeping the richest endowments in his own gift, it was not likely that Calderon would long re- THE LIFE OF CALDEROX. 29 main without preferment. The favor of his royal patron speedily conferred more than one preferment upon him ; and he continued, from time to time, to receive new proofs of his master's liberality, and of his wish to attach him as closely as possible to his person. His high court favor ended with the life of Philip. The death of that monarch was doubtless to Calderon not merely the loss of a patron, but almost of a friend. This event took place in 1665, and with it the faint nimbus of glory, which had until then con- tinued, more or less, to surround the Spanish mon- archy, quite disappeared. A feeble minor, not less feeble in intellect than in age, occupied the throne. The court was the seat of miserable and disgraceful intrigues. From that empire, once so proud and strong, cities and provinces were rent away by the violence or fraud of Louis XIV., almost as often as he chose to stretch out his hand and take them. He was, indeed, only hindered from tearing that empire piecemeal, by the hope that a descendant of his own should ere long inherit it altogether. Literature, with everything else, felt the deeply de- pressing influence of the time. Calderon, however, still sang on; he belonged to a better epoch, and brought the poetic energies of that epoch into the evil days upon which he was now fallen ; though he too began about this time to show, in some degree, the effects of age, and, it may be, of the sunken splendors of his native land. To this later period of his life 30 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. belongs a very slight and transient glimpse which we obtain of the poet one however which, in default of fuller information, must not be passed by. Nor, in- deed, is this little notice without a certain point of its own ; it is, indeed, impossible not to admire the Frenchman's self-satisfied conviction of his immeasu- rable superiority as a critic over the benighted Span- iard, who was ignorant of the unities. It is a French traveller who, in his Diary of a Journey in Spain* thus writes : " Yesterday came the marquis of Eliche,f eldest son of Don Luis de Haro, and Monsieur de Bar- riere, and took me to the theatre. The play, which had been before brought forward, but was newly re- vived, was naught, although it had Don Pedro Calde- ron for author. At a later hour I made a visit to this Calderon, who is held the greatest poet and the most illustrious genius in Spain at the present day. He is knight of the order of Santiago, and chaplain to the chapel of the Kings at Toledo ; but I gathered from his conversation that his head-piece was furnished poorly enough. We disputed a good while on the * Boisel, Journal de Voyage d'Espayne, Paris, 1669, p. 298. I have never been able to fall in with this book, and the passage as given above is a translation of a translation r , and whether a perfectly accu- rate rendering of the original I can not be sure. t This was he who a few years earlier (in 1662) set on foot a small gunpowder plot of his own, and nearly contrived to blow up Philip IV. with the royal family at the theatre of the Buen Retire. He was pardoned for his father's sake. His good conduct in the field seems to have caused his treason to be forgotten ; and he rose in the suc- ceeding reign to the highest offices in the state. THE LIFE OF CALDERON. 31 rules of the drama, which in this land are not recog- nised, and about which the Spaniards make themselves merry." Though no longer a foremost favorite of the court, Calderon's relations to it still continued, and his ser- vices were put in requisition whenever the so-called fiestas, or dramatic spectacles for peculiar occasions, were needed. With the nation his popularity sur- vived undiminished to the close of his life. This life, which was one of singular peace and outward pros- perity, he brought to an end on Whit-Sunday, May 25, 1681, his years running exactly parallel to those of that century of which he was so illustrious an or- nament. A little volume of funeral eulogies, pub- lished the same year by a gentleman belonging to the household of his patron and friend, the duke of Vera- guas,* is almost utterly barren of any historical no- tices about him of the slightest value. The only two facts which can be gleaned from it are these : the first, that poor Charles II. shed tears at the announcement of his death, an act which the writer considers " not merely pardonable but praiseworthy," and which, whether true or only reported, seems to imply that 'his genius was in a measure still recognised even at the court ; the other, that three thousand persons with torches attended his funeral. This, though it fell infi- nitely below the extraordinary solemnity and magnifi- cence with which the obsequies of Lope de Vega were * Funebres Elogios, Valencia, 1681. 32 THE LIFE OF CALDERON. celebrated half a century before, yet tells of no slight honor in which the nation held its greatest, as he was the last of its great, poets. He was buried in the parish church of San Salvador, at Madrid, and a mag- nificent monument (so Vera Tassis calls it) , surmount- ed with his portrait, was raised over his remains.* All notices which we have of Calderon from con- temporaries are pleasant, and give us the impression of one who was loved, and who was worthy to be loved. In his old age he used to collect his friends round him on his birthdays, and tell them amusing stories of his earlier life.f Vera Tassis recounts the noblest names of Spain as in the list of his personal friends ; nor does he fail to notice the signal absence of all gall from his pen the entire freedom of his spirit from all sentiments of jealousy and envy. Cal- * With some alterations which had taken place in this church about the middle of the last century, a time probably when Calderon's fame was at its nadir, all traces of the exact place where his remains were deposited, and of his tomb itself, had disappeared. However, in 1840, in pulling down the decayed cloister of San Salvador, a tomb was dis- covered under the walls of the vestry, whose inscription proved it to be his. His remains were transferred, with considerable pomp and solemnity, to the church of our Lady of Atocha, which may be re- garded as a kind of national Pantheon. (Foreign Quarterly Review, April, 1841, p. 227.) It was, I suppose, upon this occasion, that Zor- rilla's Apoteosis de Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Madrid, 1840, was published. I do not know anything of the other poems of Zor- rilla, esteemed the best poet of modern Spain ; but this, though evi- dencing some insight into the true character of Calderon's genius, is on the whole poor and feeble. t Prologue to the Obelisco Funebre. I have never seen this rare vol- ume, but take this and a former reference to it from Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature. THE LIFE OF CALDERON. 33 deron's writings bear out this praise. All his allu- sions to those who might be accounted his rivals and competitors are honorable alike to him and to them. There were but two great authors, between whom and himself any rivalry could exist : the one certainly of more genial humor, of deeper and more universal gifts, Cervantes, who, dying in 1617, had passed from life's scene as Calderon was entering actively upon it ; the other, Lope de Vega, probably on the whole his inferior, but occupying then, by right of prior posses- sion, in the estimation of most, the highest seat in the Spanish Parnassus. There exist some pleasing lines of Calderon addressed to the latter, and he never misses an opportunity of paying a compliment to Cer- vantes. Indeed, he dramatized a portion of Don Quixote , although this work has not come down to us. If he indulges sometimes in a little playful rail- lery on the writings of his brother-dramatists, it is only of the same kind which from time to time he be- stows on his own. That his hand and heart were largely open to the poorer and less successful breth- ren of the poetical guild, his biographer very distinctly assures us. But, of a multitude of other things which we should care to know, he has not informed us. If we would complete our image of the poet, it must be from the internal evidence of his writings. Of his outer life we know almost nothing more than has here been told, 2* 34 THE GENIUS OF CALDEEON. CHAPTER II. THE GENIUS OF CALDERON. (HIS PLATS.) THEY convoy altogether a wrong impression of Cal- deron, who, willing to exalt and glorify him the more, isolate him wholly from his age who pass over all its other worthies to magnify him only presenting him to us not as one, the brightest indeed in a galaxy of lights, but as the sole particular star in the firma- ment of Spanish dramatic art. Those who derive their impression from the Schlegels, especially from Augustus, would conclude him to stand thus alone to stand, if one might venture to employ the allusion, a poetical Melchisedec, without spiritual father, with- out spiritual mother, with nothing round him to ex- plain or account for the circumstances of his greatness. But there are no such appearances in literature : great artists, poets, or painters, or others, always cluster ; the conditions which produce one, produce many. They are not strewn, at nearly equable distances, through the life of a nation, but there are brief peri- THE GENIUS OP CALDERON. 35 ods- of great productiveness, with long intervals of comparative barrenness between; or it may be, as indeed was the case with Spain, the aloe-tree of a nation's literature blossoms but once. And if this is true in other regions of art, above all will it be true in respect of the drama.* In this, when it deserves the name, a nation is uttering itself, what is nearest to its heart, what it has conceived there of life and life's mystery, and of a possible rec- onciliation between the world which now is and that ideal world after which it yearns ; and the conditions of a people, which make a great outburst of the drama possible, make it also inevitable that this will utter itself, not by a single voice, but by many. Even Shakespeare himself, towering as he does immeasura- bly above all his compeers, is not a single, isolated peak, rising abruptly from the level plain, but one of a chain and cluster of mountain-summits ; and his al- titude, so far from being dwarfed and diminished, can only be rightly estimated when it is regarded in rela- * Little more than a centnry covers the whole period intervening between the birth of .ZEschylus, B. c. 525, and the death of Euripides, B. c. 406. A period of almost exactly the same duration includes the birth of Lope, 1562, and the death of Calderon, 1681 ; while in our own drama the birth of Marlowe, 1565, and the death of Shirley, 1666, enclose a period considerably shorter, and one capable of a still fur- ther abridgment of nearly thirty years ; for, although the last of the Elizabethan school of dramatists lived on to 1666, the Elizabethan drama itself may be snicl to have expired with the commencement of the Civil "War, 1640. 8t) THE GENIUS OF CALDEROX. tion with theirs. And if this is true even of him, it is much more so of Calderon, who by no means tow- ers so pre-eminently, and out of the reach of all rivalry and competition, above his fellows. The greatest of all the Spanish dramatists, he is yet equalled and ex- celled in this point and in that by one and another ; as by Lope in invention, by Tirso de Molina in exu- berant and festive wit. Let us regard him, then, not as that monster which some would present him to us, but, with all his manifold gifts, still as the orderly birth of his age and nation ; and, regarding him as such, proceed to consider what those gifts were, and what he accomplished with them. When we seek to form an estimate of Calderon, it is, I think, in the first place impossible not to admire the immense range of history and fable which supplies him with the subject-matter for his art, and the entire ease and self-possession with which he moves through every province of his poetical domain ; and this, even where he is not able to make perfectly good his claim to every portion of it. Thus he has several dramas of which the argument is drawn from the Old Testa- ment, The Locks of Absalom being perhaps the no- blest of these. Still more have to do with the heroic martyrdoms and other legends of Christian antiquity, the victories of the cross of Christ over all the fleshly and spiritual wickednesses of the ancient heathen world. To this theme, which is one almost undrawn THE GENIUS OP CALDERON. 87 upon in our Elizabethan drama Massinger's Virgin Martyr is the only example I remember he returns continually, and he has elaborated these plays with peculiar care. Of these, The Wonder-working- Ma- gician* is most celebrated ; but others, as The Joseph of Women, The Two Lovers of Heaven, quite de- serve to be placed on a level, if not indeed higher than it. A tender, pathetic grace is shed over this last, which gives it a peculiar charm. Then, too, he has occupied what one might venture to call the re- gion of sacred mythology, as in The Sibyl of the East, in which the profound legends identifying the cross of Calvary and the tree of life are wrought up into a poem of surpassing beauty. In other of these not the Christian but the Romish poet is predominant, as in The Purgatory of St. Patrick, the Devotion of the Cross, Daybreak in Copacabana,-\ this last being the story of the first dawn of the faith in Peru. What- ever there may be in these of superstitious, or, as in one of them there is, of ethically revolting, none but a great poet could have composed them. Then, further, his historic drama reaches down from the gray dawn of earliest story to the celebration of events which happened in his own day ; it extends * See Immermann's Memorabilien, b. ii., pp. 219-229. t Translated by Schack, author of the admirable Geschickte der dramatischen Literatur und Kunst in Spanien, 3 Biinde, Berlin, 1845, 1846, to which I am often indebted. 38 THE GENIUS OF CALDERON. from The Daughter of the Air* being the legend of Semiramis, and in Goethe's judgment his most glori- ous piecef (Goethe, however, seems only to have been familiar with those which had been translated into German), down to The Siege of Breda, alluded to already. Between these are dramas from Greek his- tory, and from Roman. Of these, The Great Zeno- bia is the best ; The Arms of Beauty, on the story of Coriolanus, and as poor as its name would indicate, the worst. Others are from Jewish, and a multitude from the history of modern Europe. Thus two at least from English annals : one, rather a poor one, on the institution of the order of the Garter ; another, The Schism of England, which is his Henry VIII. , and, as may be supposed, written at a very different point of view from Shakespeare's.^: It is chiefly curi- ous as showing what was the popular estimate in Spain of the actors in our great religious reformation ; and displays throughout an evident desire to spare the king, and to throw the guilt of his breach with the church on Anne Boleyn and Cardinal "Wolsey. But the great majority of Calderon's historical dramas are * See Immermann's Memorabilien, b. ii., pp. 247-271. t Das herrlichste von Calderon's Stiicken. t It need only be observed that his main authority here is the book of Nicholas Sanders (" or Slanders rather," as Fuller has it), De Ori- gins ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani. A little essay on this drama (Ueber Die Kirchentrennung von England, Schauspiel des Don Pedro Calderon, Berlin, 1819) has been written by F. W. V. Schmidt, and is worth reading. THE GENIUS OP CALDERON. 39 drawn, as was to be expected in a poet so intensely national, and appealing to so intensely national a feel- ing, from the annals of his own country. These have the immense advantage of being the embodiment, for the most part, of events already familiar to the popu- lar mind. The heroes of Spanish romance and of Spanish history are here brought forward ; and not the remoter names alone, but those of the century pre- ceding Isabella of Castile, Charles V., the Con- quistadores, Philip II., Don John of Austria, Alva, Figueroa, and even some of those who were still liv- ing when he wrote. It is not easy to measure the effect which in their representation must have attend- ed some of these. The Steadfast Prince, of which, however, the hero is not Spanish, but Portuguese, is the most celebrated among them. Leaving the region of history, and in a world more purely and entirely ideal, Calderon has some exquis- ite mythological pieces, in which he does not, in Cow- ley's words, merely serve up " the cold meats of the ancients, new heated, and new set forth ;" but the old classical story comes forth new-born in the romantic poetry of the modern world. So is it, for instance, in the exquisitely graceful and fanciful poem, Echo and Narcissus ; but, above all, this is true where a Christian idea looks through the mythological symbol- ism, and informs it with its own life, as in The Statue of Prometheus, and in another founded on the well- 40 THE GENIUS OF CALDERON. known legend of Cupid and Psyche. In general, how- ever, it must be owned that these mythological are the weakest among his productions ; being, many of them, evidently intended merely as vehicles for show and scenic splendor. They are the works of the poet of the Buen Retiro, the director of the court enter- tainments. We pass from these to romantic dramas, in which the poet occupies a fable-land altogether of his own creation, as in Life's a Dream, an analysis of which, with large translations, will be found in this volume ; or draws on the later Greek romances, as in Theagenes and Chariclea; or on Boiardo and Ari- osto ; or, it may be, on the prose-tales of chivalry, as in The Bridge of Mantible, on which play Schlegel has bestowed the pains of translation. These form a not inconsiderable group. Then, further, among his Comedias, which is the general title whereby all in Spain that is not either on the one side farce, on the other religious mystery, is called, he has many tragedies, which, by their effect- ual working on the springs of passion, assert their right to this serious name. Some of these might al- most as fitly have been enumerated among his historic compositions. The Spanish drama moves too freely, too nearly resembles the free, spontaneous growths of Nature, to admit of any very easy or very rigorous classification. Like Nature, it continually defies and breaks through all artificial arrangements of its pro- THE GENIUS OF CALDERON. 41 ductions, and one must be content to class those under one head which might as well, or nearly as well, be classed under another. Still, as in some of these com- positions the tragic, in others the historic element is predominant, they may be arranged, even while they partake of both, according to this predominance. Among the noblest in this kind is Jealousy the Great- est Monster ; it is the story of Herod and Mariamne, and a genuine fate-drama, of colossal grandeur in both the conception and execution. The tragedies of a Spaniard writing for Spaniards, which should turn on jealousy, might beforehand be expected to claim espe- cial notice ; and indeed Calderon has three or four others in this kind, of shuddering horror, in which the Spanish pundonor is pushed to its bloodiest excess, but the fearful power and immense effect of which it is impossible not to acknowledge. The Physician of his own Honor is one of these, but less horrible, and perhaps therefore more terrible, is another, noticeable likewise as a very masterpiece of construction, For a Secret Wrong a Secret Revenge, which is one of the very highest efforts of his genius.* Hallam, not deny- ing but admitting freely its singular efficiency and power, has yet called it "an atrocious play ;" but he seems to me to have missed the point which certainly mitigates its atrocity, namely, that the murdered wife * It is translated into French by Damas Hinard, Chefs d'< Theatre Espagnol, t. i., pp. 318-374. 120 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. 549-551, 1842, by John Oxenford ; its metrical form, however, would not allow it to attain any great suc- cess. Some passages also from Life's a Dream ap- peared in a small, anonymous volume published in Edinburgh, 1830, but by one evidently litttle accus- tomed to overcome the technical difficulties of verse. I know not whether any other attempts have been made to introduce it to the English reader ; save, in- deed, that Mr. Hallam* has given a rapid account of the play, extending a certain toleration to it, and even bestowing upon it a qualified measure of approval. The scene opens in a wild and savage region of Poland. Rosaura, in man's attire, appears descend- ing from the heights above. She is following to the court of Poland Astolfo, duke of Muscovy ; who, be- ing engaged to her, and she only too far to him, is now seeking to wed Estrella his cousin, the niece, as he is the nephew, of Basilius, king of Poland. The king has no direct heir, and their rival claims being in this way reconciled, they will together succeed to his throne. She has lost her way in the mountain ; her horse has broken from her, and she with her ser- vant Clarin, the g-r arioso of the play, are wandering at random, when they are attracted by a light glim- mering in a cavern. Drawing closer, they hear voices of lamentation, with the clank of chains. Having advanced too far to retreat, they are compelled to * Hist, of Literature, vol. Hi., pp. 534-537. LIFE'S A DREAM. 121 overhear one who mourns over a captivity which has reached back to the hour of his birth. But to begin where Rosaura first catches a glimpse of the light. Mr. Hallam himself observes of these opening scenes that "they are impressive and full of beauty, even now that we are become accustomed in excess to these theatrical wonders." ROSAURA. Did ever any such adventures meet ! Yet if mine eyesight suffers no deceit, Which fancy plays on me, By that faint glimmer day retains I see, As I must needs believe, A dwelling-place. CLARIN. Me too my hopes deceive, Or I discern the same. ROSAURA. Amid these naked rocks the rugged frame Peers of a lowly shed, Timidly rearing toward the sun its head. In such a rustic style Shows the rude masonry of this wild pile, That, at the bottom set Of these tall, mountainous summits which have met The sun's great orb of light, It seems a loosened crag, rolled from the upper height. 6 122 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. CLARIN. Let us approach it, then ; For long enough we have gazed upon it, when 'Twere better we should try If the good folk within would generously Admit us. ROSAURA. Lo ! the door (Funereal jaws were name to suit it more) Yawns, and the night forlorn Thence issues, as in that deep centre born. [A clank of chains is heard. CLARIN. Hark ! what is that I hear ? ROSAURA. I am rooted to the spot, congealed with fear. CLARIN. Is't not the clank of chains ? Sure, we have here a galley-slave in pains ! Well did my fears say so. [SIGISMUND is discovered within, clothed in skins. SIGISMUND (within). Ah, miserable me ! ah, wo, wo, wo ! ROSAURA. List, what a doleful cry ! Clarin. LIFE'S A DREAM. 123 CLAEIN. What would you, lady ? EOSAURA. Let us fly The terrors strange of this enchanted tower. CLARIN. Nay, when it comes to this, I want the power. ROSAURA. Say, is not that a taper, That feeble star, that weak and tremulous vapor, "Which, with its pale rays crowned, And shedding ineffectual ardors round, Makes with a dubious light Yet darker this dark dwelling-place of Night ? Yes ; for by that faint gleam I can distinguish dimly what would seem A prison-house obscure, Which of a living corpse is sepulture : And, to enhance my fear, In skins of beasts a man doth there appear, With fetters fastly tied, And only by that light accompanied. Since flight would not avail, Let us from this listen to his sad tale, And all his story know. 124 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. SIGISMUND. Ah, miserable me ! ah, wo, wo, wo ! Heavens, why make ye me to mourn, More than all men else forlorn ? If my birth has been my sin, Yet what sinned I more herein Than others, who were also born ? Born the bird was, yet with gay Gala vesture, beauty's dower, Scarce it is a winged flower, Or a richly-plumaged spray, Ere the aerial halls of day It divideth rapidly, And no more will debtor be To the nest it hastes to quit, But, with more soul than it, I am grudged its liberty. And the beast was born, whose skin Scarce those beauteous spots and bars, Like to constellated stars, Doth from its great Painter win, Ere the instinct doth begin Of its fierceness and its pride, And its lair on every side It has measured far and nigh, While with better instinct I Am its liberty denied. Born the mute fish was also, LIFE'S A DEEAM. 125 Child of ooze and ocean-weed ; Scarce a finny bark of speed To the surface brought, and lo ! In vast circuits to and fro Measures it on every side All the waste of ocean wide, Its illimitable home ; While, with greater will to roam, I that freedom am denied. Born the streamlet was, a snake, Which unwinds the flowers among, Silver serpent, that not long May to them sweet music make, Ere it quits the flowery brake, Onward hastening to the sea With majestic course and free, Which the open plains supply ; While, with more life gifted, I Am denied its liberty.* Those acquainted with the construction of Calde- ron's dramas will observe that he is here true to his ordinary plan of beginning with a scene which shall * Calderon is so fond of introducing into his dramas persons who have been brought up in absolute solitude, and then are suddenly cast upon the world, and of dealing with the effects which are thus pro- duced upon them, that it is not to be wondered at that several pas- sages nearly resembling this, variations in fact upon it, are to be found in his other dramas one, for example, and a very beautiful one, in the first act of Echo and Narcissus. 126 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. rouse curiosity ; and only when he may have thus secured the spectators' attention, does he proceed to the orderly unfolding of his plot. An involuntary exclamation of Rosaura's makes the captive aware of the two that are so close to him. His first impulse, when he discovers that he has been overheard in the hour of his weakness, is to destroy the listeners, how- ever unintentional and unavoidable their listening may have been. Rosaura casts herself at his feet, and ob- tains his grace. But this is hardly so, when they are interrupted by the entrance of Clotaldo, the most trusted servant of the Polish king, and the only per- son acquainted with the secret of this prisoner's con- dition, or with the causes of his lifelong captivity. Clotaldo summons the guards of the tower, and the intruders are borne away, despite of Sigismund's furi- ous remonstrance and the passionate outbreaks of his rage. They have incurred the penalty of death, pro- nounced against any who should approach the place where this prisoner was confined. We have in the next scene the court of the king of Poland. The aged monarch, in solemn assembly of the chief estates of the realm, declares to Astolfo and to Estrella the conditions under which the inheritance of the kingdom may devolve on them. He narrates at length his addiction in former years to the science of astrology ; and how he had dived deeply into the mysteries of the future. Though counted childless, LIFE'S A DKEAM. 127 he too had once a son ; but reading at his birth his horoscope, he learned that this son should be fierce and ungovernable and cruel, and that he should him- self one day lie prostrate at his feet. This son, whom he has feared to acknowledge, still lives brought up in a remote tower, with only Clotaldo conscious of the secret. But now the father is touched with remorse, and repents of the cruelty with which he has sought to defeat the possible violence of his son. He will bring him forth, and make proof of his disposi- tion. These prophecies of the stars do but announce the inclination ; they can not impair the free will. Sigismund, for of course he and the captive of the first scene are the same, may overcome all the malig- nant influences of his stars ; for men are not servile to their circumstances or their instincts, but it is their higher task to mould and fashion and conquer these. If he bear himself well in his trial, he shall be ac- knowledged as an heir ; if otherwise, he shall be sent back to his dungeon, and Astolfo and Estrella shall inherit the kingdom. As now the secret is a secret no longer, and no motive for further concealment ex- ists, the prisoners are easily pardoned ; and Rosaura, who has resumed female attire, is taken into the train of Estrella. There is an underplot by which the lat- ter becomes acquainted with Astolfo' s previous en- gagement to Rosaura, which, graceful as it is, I yet shall not touch, as my purpose is only with the more 128 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. earnest side of this drama. It has its bearing on the ultimate issue, as in consequence of the discovery, Estrella breaks off her engagement with the duke. ACT II. IN the first scene of this act Clotaldo declares to the king the manner in which he has carried out his purpose. In mercy to the young prince it has been determined by his father that he shall be brought to the palace while under the influence of a sleeping po- tion ; so that, should he prove unworthy, being borne back to his dungeon under the power of another, he may be persuaded that all the pomp and glory with which he was surrounded for a brief moment was in- deed only a dream which he dreamed. There is something fine in Clotaldo's account of the manner in which he carried out this part of his monarch's plans. The passage is in assonants in the original, and there- fore in the translation. The assonants employed are e e, the weakest, unfortunately of all our vowels ; but the nearest possible approach which the language al- lows to the e a of the original. CLOTALDO. All, as thou command'st it, Has been happily effected. KING. Say, Clotaldo, how it passed. LIFE'S A DREAM. 129 CLOTALDO. In this manner it succeeded. With that mildly soothing draught, Which thou badest should be tempered With confections, mingling there Of some herbs the influences, Whose tyrannic strength and power, And whose force that works in secret, So the reason and discourse Alienateth and suspendeth, That it leaves the man who quaffs it Than a human corpse no better, And in deep sleep casting him Robs him of his powers and senses With that potion in effect, Where all opiates met together In one draught, to Sigismund's Narrow dungeon I descended. There I spoke with him awhile Of the human arts and letters, Which the still and silent aspect Of the mountains and the heavens Him have taught that school divine, Where he has been long a learner, And the voices of the birds And the beasts has apprehended. Then, that I might better raise And exalt his spirit's temper 6* 130 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. To the enterprise you aim at, For my theme I took the fleetness Of a soaring eagle proud, Which, an overbold contemner Of the lower paths of air, To the sphere of fire ascended, And like winged lightning there Showed, or comet fiery-tressed . Then I hailed its lofty flight, Saying, " Thou in truth art empress Of the birds, 'tis therefore just That thou be o'er all preferred." But there was no need of more, For if one of empire speaketh But a word, with high-raised pride Straightway he discourses ever ; For in truth his blood excites him, That he fain would be the attempter Of great things and he exclaimed, " In yon free and open heaven Are there any then so base That to serve they have consented ? Then when I consider, then f My misfortunes solace yield me : / For at least if I am subject, ^ Such 1 am by force, not freely, I Since I never to another Of freewill myself would render." LIFE'S A DREAM. 131 When I saw him maddened thus With these thoughts, the theme for ever Of his griefs, I pledged him then With the drugged cup ; from the vessel Scarcely did the potion pass To his bosom, ere he rendered All his senses up to sleep Through his veins and all his members Running such an icy sweat, That had I not known the secret Of his feigned death, for his life I in verity had trembled. In this lethargy he has been borne to the palace, like those whom Marco Polo tells of, that in a like condi- tion were carried into the gardens of the Old Man of the Mountain ; he has been placed amid all the splen- dor and magnificence of his father's royal apartments ; and now they are only waiting the moment of his awaking. There are tokens that this has arrived, and that he is approaching : the king and Clotaldo retire. Hardly have they done so, before Sigismund enters : servants are ministering to him, and he is full of wonder and admiration at the inexplicable change which has come over him ; but, as will be seen pres ently, justifying all the provisions in respect of him ; as, indeed, the king his father had taken effectual means that they should bo fulfilled. The scene, which 132 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. is a long one, is yet full of dramatic spirit and vigor, and I will give its chiefest part. SIGISMUND. ( Help me, heaven, what do I see ? \ Help me, heaven, what things are here ? N Filling me with little fear, J But with much perplexity ? ( I in sumptuous palaces, Costliest hangings round me spread, I with servants compassed, Gay and glittering as these ! On a couch so rich and rare I to waken suddenly, With this retinue to me Offering royal robes to wear ! Dream to call it, were deceit, For myself awake I knowj.. I uiii Sigismund even so. Heavens, let no delusion cheat Me, but say what this may be, That has overcome me, while Sleep my senses did beguile : Is itjtnith_orjghante,sy ? But what profit to debate, And this idle coil to keep ? Best the present joy to reap, And the future leave to fate. LIFE'S A DREAM. 133 FIRST SERVANT. What of sadness veils his brow ! SECOND SERVANT. Who were not distraught, to whom Should arrive such change of doom ? CLARIN. I for one. SECOND SERVANT. Speak to him now. FD3ST SERVANT. Wouldst thou they should sing again ? SIGISMUND. No, their singing pleases not. SECOND SERVANT. As thou wert so wrapped in thought, We had hoped to ease thy pain. SIGISMUND. Not with melodies like these I my sadness can assuage ; Nothing did mine ear engage But those martial harmonies. 134 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. Enter CLOTALDO. CLOTALDO. Let your highness, mighty lord, First give me your hand to kiss : I must not the honor miss First this homage to afford. SIGISMUND. 'T is Clotaldo ! he who used In my tower to treat me so ; Doth he now this homage show ? I am utterly confused ! CLOTALDO. With the strange perplexity Growing from thy new estate, Unto many doubts and great Reason might exposed be ; But I gladly thee would spare, If I might, them all and so I would give thee, sir, to know Thou a prince art, Poland's heir. And if until now thy state Has been hidden and retired, 'T was that it was thus required By the menaces of fate, Which pronounced a thousand woes To this empire, if in it LIFE'S A DREAM. 135 Should the sovran laurel sit Crowning thy imperial brows. But relying on thine heed, That thou wilt the stars o'ercome, For not servile to his doom Lives the valiant man indeed, Thee from that thy cell forlorn, While the might of deep sleep all Thy wrapped senses did enthral, They have to this palace borne. But thy sire, the king my lord, Will be here anon, and he What is more will tell to thee. SEGISMUND. But thou villain, wretch abhorred, If I do mine own self know, Know I not enough ? what more Need I to be told, my power And my pride of place to show ? How didst thou to Poland dare Act such treason, in despite Of all reason and all right, To me never to declare What my birth was ? woe is thee ! Thus thou didst the state betray, Flatterer to thy monarch play, Cruel tyrant unto me. 136 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. Thus for prongs so strange and rare Thee the state, the king, and I, Each and all condemn to die By my hands. SECOND SERVANT. Sir SIGISMUND. Let none dare Hindrance in my way to throw : 'T is in vain : by heaven, I say, If thou standest in my way, From the window shalt thou go SECOND SERVANT. Fly, Clotaldo. CLOTALDO. Woe- is thee! Sigismund, what pride thou showest, Nor that thou art dreaming knowest. [CLOTALDO flies. SECOND SERVANT. He did but SIGISMUND. No words with me. SECOND SERVANT. With the king's commands comply. LIFE'S A DREAM. 137 SIGISMUND. But in an unrighteous thing He should not obey the king ; And besides, his prince am I. Astolfo enters to pay his compliments in a set speech to the prince. Sigismund, however, cuts him short, and give him so haughty and insulting a reception that after some few angry words he withdraws. Es- trella enters on the same errand, whose hand he seizes, and to whom he pays such violent compli- ments, that the same servant who was so forward be- fore, and who knows that Astolfo is looking on at a little distance, interferes, and reminds Sigismund that it is not right so to behave to the affianced bride of another. SIGISMUND. * All this causes me disgust ; v^ Nothing appears right to me, \ Being against my phantasy. SECOND SERVANT. But alone in what is just By thyself I heard it said It was fitting to obey. SIGISMUND. And you also heard me say 138 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. Who in me displeasure bred. From the balcony should go. SECOND SERVANT. But that feat with such a one As myself were scarcely done. SIGISMUND. That we very soon will know. [Seizes him, and they go out struggling ; the rest follow. Enter ASTOLFO. ASTOLFO. What do I to see arrive ? ESTRELLA. Haste, if you his life can save. SIGISMUND (within). There, the sea may be his grave. [He re-enters. I could do it, as I live. Enter the King. KING. What has been ? SIGISMUND. Not anything. A fellow that was vexing me I tumbled from that balcony. LIFE'S A DREAM. 139 CLAEIN. Be aware ; it is the king. KING. From thy coining, oh, my son, Must a death so soon ensue ? SIGISMUND. But he said I could not do That which I have fairly done. KING. Prince, it brings me sorrow great, When I hither did repair, Thinking to have found thee ware, Triumphing o'er stars and fate, There has been such savage pride Thus in thy demeanor seen, That thy foremost act has been A most grievous homicide. With what feeling can I now Round thy neck mine arms entwine, Knowing the proud folds of thine Have been taught so lately how To give death ? Who, drawing near, Sees a dagger on the ground Bare, that gave a mortal wound, And can keep from feeling fear ? Or who sees the bloody spot 140 TRANSLATIONS FROM CALDERON. Where they slew another man, And to nature's instinct can Help replying, shuddering not ? I then, who in thine arms see Of this death the instrument, And the spot see, blood-besprent, From thine arms am fain to flee, And although I purposed For thy neck a fond embrace, Will without it leave this place, Having of thine arms just dread. SIGISMUND. Well I can without it fare, As I have fared until now. For a father who to show Harshness such as this could bear, Me has like a wild beast bred, Driven me wholly from his side. And all nurture has denied, Would have gladly seen me dead, It import but little can That he will not now bestow His embrace, who robbed me so Of my being as a man. KING. Oh that Heaven had thought it good I had ne'er given that to thee ! LIFE'S A DEEAM. 141 Then thy pride I should not see, Should not mourn thy savage mood. SIGISMUND. I should not of thee complain, Hadst thou never given me it, But that given, thou didst think fit To resume thy gift again : For though giving is well named Deed that honor high doth bring, Yet to give is meanest thing, When the gift again is claimed. KING. These then are thy thanks to me, That of poor and wretched thrall Thou a prince art ? SIGISMUND. What at all Owe I here of thanks to thee, thou cruel tyrant hoar ? If thou old and doting art, Dying, what dost thou impart ? Aught that was not mine before ? Thou my father art and king ; Then