Calderón thus survived in Spain; and, owing to this survival, he came to be regarded by the evangelists of the Romantic movement abroad as the leading representative of the Spanish drama. Some of these depreciated Lope de Vega, with no more knowledge of him than they could gather from two or three plays picked up at random. German writers made themselves remarkable by their vehement dogmatism. Friedrich von Schlegel declared that, whereas Shakespeare had merely described the enigma of life, Calderón had solved it, thus proving himself to be, ‘in all conditions and circumstances, the most Christian, and therefore the most romantic, of dramatic poets.’ August von Schlegel was as dithyrambic as his brother. Dismissing Lope’s plays as containing interesting situations and ‘inimitable jokes,’—Schlegel, _On Jokes_, is one of the many unwritten masterpieces, ‘for which the whole world longs,’—he turns to Calderón, hails him as that ‘blessed man,’ and in a rhetorical transport proclaims him to be ‘the last summit of romantic poetry.’ Nobody writes in this vein now, and the loss is endurable. We are no longer stirred on reading that Calderón’s ‘tears reflect the view of heaven, like dewdrops on a flower in the sun’: such imagery leaves us cold. But the rhetoric of the Schlegels, Tieck, and others was most effective at the time.
It was noised abroad that the Germans had discovered the supreme dramatic genius of the world; the great names of Goethe and Shelley were quoted as being worshippers of the new sun in the poetic heavens; the superstition spread to England, and would seem to have infected a group of brilliant young men at Cambridge—Trench, FitzGerald, and Tennyson. _In The Palace of Art_, as first published, Calderón was introduced with some unexpected companions:—
Cervantes, the bright face of Calderon, Robed David touching holy strings, The Halicarnasseän, and alone, Alfred the flower of kings,
Isaïah with fierce Ezekiel, Swarth Moses by the Coptic sea, Plato, Petrarca, Livy and Raphaël, And eastern Confutzee.
This motley company was dispersed later. In the revised version of _The Palace of Art Calderón_ finds no place, and the omission causes no more surprise than the omission of ‘eastern Confutzee.’ He is admired as a splendid poet and a great dramatist, but we no longer see him, as Tennyson saw him in 1833, on a sublime and solitary pinnacle of glory—‘a poetical Melchisedec, without spiritual father, without spiritual mother, with nothing round him to explain or account for the circumstances of his greatness.’ As Trench says, there are no such appearances in literature, and Calderón has ceased to be a mystery or a miracle. Yet it was not unnatural that those who took the Schlegels for guides should see him in this light. The fact that the works of other Spanish dramatists were not easily obtainable necessarily gave an exaggerated idea of Calderón’s originality and importance, for it was next to impossible to compare him with his rivals. We are now more favourably situated. We know—what our grandfathers could not know—that Friedrich von Schlegel was as wrong as wrong can be when he assured the world that Calderón was too rich to borrow. In literature no one is too rich to borrow, and Calderón’s indebtedness to his predecessors is great. To give but one instance out of many: the Second Act of _Los Cabellos de Absalón_ is taken bodily from the Third Act of Tirso de Molina’s sombre and sinister tragedy, _La Venganza de Tamar_.