The reputation of Calderon has suffered from the opposite evil to that which has injured Lope’s. The Phœnix of Geniuses has been punished in modern times for the wild overpraise of his own, by some neglect. German criticism has treated him as a mere amuser. Calderon, on the other hand, has been the victim of the incontinence in praise of the Schlegels, who were determined to make another, and a better, Shakespeare if they could not find one. Many readers who had formed an idea of him at second hand have probably suffered a severe shock on becoming acquainted with his work.[34]
No reader should expect to find a world poet in Calderon, who was a Spaniard of the Spaniards. No more intensely national poet ever wrote, and it is for that he must be read and appreciated. Moreover, he is a Spaniard of the seventeenth century, when the monarchical sentiment was at its height, and when all life was permeated by a religion in which the creed had, in Mr Swinburne’s phrase, replaced the decalogue. His conception of honour (we shall come back to the point of honour as a motive for Spanish plays) is that of his time--thoroughly oriental. It was not the sentiment which nerves a man against fear of consequences, and enables him to resist the temptation to do what is dishonourable, or, better still, makes him incapable of feeling it, but the fixed determination not to allow the world the least excuse for saying that somebody has done something to you which renders you undignified or ridiculous. As has been already said, he added nothing to the formal part of Spanish dramatic literature, not even to the _auto_. He was too much affected by the Góngorism of his early manhood, for even the most partial of editors cannot throw all, or even the most, of the errors in that style found in his plays on Don Juan de Vera Tasis.
Yet with his limitations Calderon was a considerable poet, and a very skilful master of the machinery of the Spanish comedy. When not misled into Góngorism he wrote magnificently, and there are lyric choral passages in the _autos_ which Mr Ticknor rightly praised as worthy of Ben Jonson’s masques. Indeed not a little of his work is identical in purpose with the masque, though different in form. As a Court poet he was called upon to write for the entertainment of the king and the courtiers, and to supply theatrical shows at royal marriages, births of princes, and so forth. There was no intrinsic novelty here, for Calderon did but give the high-bred Spaniard of the Court a finer poetic version of the dances, songs, and bright short pieces under various, names, which delighted the humbler Spaniard in the _patios_. The intensely national sentiment which he expresses may strike us at times as a little empty, but is high and shining, and lends itself to a certain stately treatment which he could give. The romantic sentiment was strong in Calderon, and even in the most purely Spanish trappings that is not remote from us. A poet who dealt not inadequately with great passions could hardly help sometimes piercing through the merely national to the universal, though it must be acknowledged that his characters rarely utter the individual human saying, and that he was far too fond of long casuistical amplifications, which are almost always frigidly pedantic, and not rarely bombastical. The most quoted passage in all his work, the lines which close the second act of _La Vida es Sueño_, gain by being taken apart from their context: