The Press. — London, England, 1856-09-06 00:00:00

SEPT. 6, 1856. only a square and a cube, but could be divided by two down to unity without throwing off a fraction. Others devoted their lives to the construction of " magic squares," or to attempts at trisecting angles or squaring circles—the votaries of the last-mentioned mystery being the most numerous, and actually persuading themselves that the same discovery which should enable them to square the circle would also contain the seeretofmaking gold, and securing immortality by the Elixir of Life. To thisclass of investigators Science owes something, as she must owe to those who de vote time and talent in faithful researches upon almost any subject. The author before us has well deserved a place among them. If we are unable to acknowledge any great scientific debt as due to his labours, the result must be attributed to his misfortune rather than to his fault. Clearly it was a mistake, over which he had no control, that he should have belonged to the nineteenth instead of the fifteenth century. Life's a Dream : the Great Theatre of the World. From the Spanish of Calderon. With an Essay on his Life and Genius by Richard Chenevix Trench. London : J. W. Parker and Son. TT is the design of Mr. Trench in this essay to hold the scales of justice evenly between those who extravagantly eulogise and those who extravagantly detract from the genius of the great Spanish dramatist. He places himself almost equidistant from the enthusiasm of the &Allegels and the sceptical coldness of Sis mondi. He weighs the claims of Calderon in every department of his art with great careful ness, and endeavours to ascertain his correct rank, not only in his native literature, but in that of the only other two countries in which the drama has flourished,—Greece and Eng land. By persons intimately acquainted with the Spanish language, and with the writings of Calderon, this little volume will doubtless be read with avidity; while the general public will find in it a well compressed stock of information upon one of those topics about which every educated man likes to know some thing, though unable to penetrate for himself to the original sources. When Calderon commenced writing, the Spanish drama was in the meridian of its brief but brilliant life,—the summer just waning into autumn. Of Calderon's position towards his contemporaries Mr. Trench writes : They convey altogether a wrong impression of Calderon, who, willing to exalt and glorify him the more, isolate hint 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 par. titular star in the firmament 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, without 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 nit strewn at nearly equable distances through the life of a nation, but there are brief periods of great productive- I'm with long intervals of comparative barrenness b•tween; 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 de• serves 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 reconciliation 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 hi:nself, towering as he does im• measurably above all his compeers, is not a single isolated peak, rising abruptly from the level plain ; hut one of a chain and cluster of mountain summits; and his altitude, so far from being dwarfed and diminished, can only be rightly estimated when it is regarded in relation with theirs. And if this is true even of him, it is much more of Calderon ; who by no means towers so pre•eminently, and gut of the reach of all rivalry anti competition, above his fellows. The greatest of all the Spanish dramatists, he is yet equalled and excelled in this point and in that by one and another ; as by Lope in invention, by Tirso de Molina in exuberant 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 suc h THE PRESS. proceed to consider what those gifts were, and what he accomplished with them. The remarks on Calderon as a Romanist merit deep attention : Calderon is, and probably will remain, the last great poet of Romanism. Saying this, I would not imply that there have not been since his time poets of considerable mark, who have been serious and earnest in their allegi ance to the Church of Rome ; Fiiicaja and Mailzuni would refute me, if I made any assertion of the kind ; nor yet that there may not be such again ; but he is, I am persuaded, the last great poet who will have found in the Roman Catholic as distinguished from, and, alas ! some times as contrasted with, the universally Christian, any portion of the motive powers of his poetry ; who will so believe in and live by this, that he shall be able in return to shed around it the glories of his own art. There will be abundance of ostentatiously Romanist art, poetical and other. There will be many a scornful challenge—" See what we can believe—how much more than you, poor un• believing Protestants ; what sources of inspiration are open to us, which are for ever closed to you." But that which the challengers produce will not for a moment im pose on the discerning; and the artist, at bottom as in- credulous in respect of his legend or his miracle as those whom he affects to despise, will be rewarded with hearers or spectators as incredulous as himself. But while I say this of Calderon, it must not be understood as implying that his inspirat►ons were predominantly Romanist as dis tinguished from Christian. Whatever is universally Christian in him or in any other is for all time; and this, I am persuaded, despite of all that Southey, Sismondi, and others have affirmed to the contrary, so far in him ex ceeds the distinctively Romanist, that he will hold his ground and maintain his place in the august synod of the great " heirs of memory," whose reputation is for all time: nay, at each reconsideration of his claims he is likely on the whole to take a higher, and not a lower, place than that which he occupied before. If on some points the orb of his fame must decrease, it will increase on others. On some it is true it must decrease ; he already suffers, and as the great stream of faith and passion recedes further from Rome, will suffer still more, from having committed himself so far to that, which will every da) be more plainly overlived ; and will by more be aban doned. There will thus be the need in reading him of large abatements and allowances. There will be that in him wherein an ever larger number of readers will sympa thise coldly ; there will be that wherein they will sympa• thise not at all; there will be that against which their whole moral soul and being will protest and revolt. Thus to say a word on this last point. What were that " Pecca fortiter," even supposing it meant, which it does not in the least, " Sin strongly, that so grace may abound " what were that, as compared with Calderon's theology in his " Devotion of the Cross "--despite of all its perversity a wonderful and terrible drama, but the very sublime of antinomianism ? Its hero Eusebio, after various disorders, takes to the mountains, becomes in the end a robber, a murderer, and a ravisher. He has never, however, amid all his crimes renounced his devotion to the Cross. nor yet his confidence that on the ground of this he shall be ultimately saved, as accordingly in the end he is. There is no poetry where there is no faith. With some rare exceptions, faith in Romanism is on the wane among the educated classes, especially in those countries where it is the established religion ; and this may possibly account for the condition of poetry both in Italy and Spain, no less than their political degradation. It is also to be observed that in the full-blown Romanism of the present day there is an element of coarseness, which, how ever much certain resolute partisans may shut their eyes to it, must always prove offensive to the refined sensibilities of a poet. Between Shakespeare and Calderon Mr. Trench draws a suggestive comparison : It is only in consistency with the profounder thought fulness, the more introverted eye of the great English dramatist, that in him the action is subservient to the character, while in Calderon the character !ti subservient to the action. In Shakespeare you are more concerned with what his people are, in Calderon with what they do. Of course this is not to be pushed on either side too far; Shakespeare often interests with his plots ; to Calderon was by no means denied the power of drawing characters. Of the drama of Shakespeare it has been said, " The soul of man is the subject of its delineation ; the action and the circumstances of the piece are entirely subordinate and subservient to the displaying of the passions and affections of the persons represented. The interest of the piece, though sometimes most skilfully maintained, is neverthe less a secondary object." When the same writer goes on to say, " In the Spanish theatre it is exactly the reverse ; the interest is everything, the characters comparatively are nothing," this, having its truth, is yet too strongly put. In Shakespeare, again, where everything is wonderful, there is yet perhaps nothing more wonderful than the way in which characters grow before our eyes, as the action of the drama proceeds. It is not merely that he gradually shows us more fully and from more various points of view what they are; but with the advance of the action his per sons are different from what they were when it com menced ; they are in process of becoming. As in actual life no character stands still, but all are changing, are either growing worse or better, so it is in the mimic life of his stage. You note, for instance, in his plays which have to do with our civil wars, the English barons growing worse and worse. more unscrupulous, more cruel, more treacherous, more vindictive at every step ; the poet thus unobtrusively showing the hideous moral effects of such , 859 wars upon those who are engaged in them. Or again you see in Margaret of Anjou the forward flirt passing into the unfaithful wife, and the unfaithful wife into the cursing bag. Calderon is not wholly without this, but there is comparatively little of it in him. Goethe has observed this; in Calderon, he says, you have the hands of the clock as they are seen upon the dial-plate, but in Shake speare all the inner works as well. Or more exactly to this point he has observed, in a piece of criticism on the Spanish poet, which, brief as it is, is the profoundest and moat satisfying that has yet been written,—ln Calderon you have the wine as the last artificial result of the grape, but expressed into the goblet, highly spiced and sweetened, and so given you to drink ; but in Shakespeare you have the whole natural process of its ripening besides, and the grapes themselves one by one fur your enjoyment if you will. As a brief summary of Shakespeare's leading excellencies, these remarks have seldom been equalled. The chapter upon the " Autos," or religious dramas of Calderon, is very interesting and apparently complete. The " Morality," a sort of improvement on the old " Miracle" play, was the foundation of these. They have hitherto inspired many of Calderon's readers— among whom Mr. Trench mentions Southey and Sismoudi—with, in his opinion, a most unjustifiable contempt : The bare enumeration (i.e. of their titles and dramatis persona) is alone trifficient to present ample material of ridicule to one unable or unwilling to plant himself in a region of art altogether new, and alien from all those in which he may hitherto have moved. But one who is able to plant himself there, and who cares to make ilbser ac quaintance with these poems, will very amp be filled with quite other feelings, as this acquaintance increases. He will be filled, l fear not to say, with an endless astonishment and admiration at the skill of the poet in conquering the almost unconquerable difficulties of his theme, at the power with which he masters and moulds the most heterogeneous materials, combining them and making them subservient to the purposes of his art, at the inexhaustible variety which he contrives by aid of new combinations to impart to materials which he may have been already compelled often to employ, at the transparent intention of his allegory, so that the inner spirit looks ever through the symbol, informs it with its own life, and leaves no doubt or hesitation about its meaning. Add to these merits the gorgeous poetic .fiction wherein he clothes the eights of an imagination, for which nothing is too bold, which dares to reach all worlds; while, greatest trinmph of all, he is able to impart even a dramatic inle• rest to that which, whatever other merits it might acquits in its treatment, seemed in its very nature incapable of this merit. Mr. Trench has some acute remarks on the difficulties of translating Calderon, but he has grappled with those difficulties with great skill in his translations from " Life's a Dream." The " Great Theatre of the World " is an Auto, in which God, the author, is described as distributing their various parts to men, the actors. After death, the following dialogue ensues:— Begg. Since the world in this rude fashion From its bosom thrusts us naked, Let us seek that splendid feast, Which has been prepared, the banquet Which shall recompense our toils. King. Wilt thou too affront my greatness, Daring thus to pass before me ? Has it from thy memory faded, Wretched mendicant, already That thou vast my slave so lately? Begg. Now that thy part is concluded, We are equal, slave and master, In this vestry of the tomb. What thou haal been, little matters. King. How forgettest thou that alms Yesterday of me thou cravest ? Begg. How forgettest thou that such Thou refused'st ? Beau. So soon failest Thou in the respect thou owest Unto me as richer, fairer? Disc. All of us are equal now, Having laid aside our garments; For in this poor winding•sheet No distinction more remsineth. Rich M. Do you go before me, villain ? Iluab. Leave this foolish dream of greatness; For, once dead, thou art the shadow Of the sun which thou west lately. Rich M. Some strange fear in me the prospect Of the Author's presence wakens. Begg. Author of the earth and heaven, All thy company, the pla3ers, Who that briefest comedy Played of human life so lately, Are arrived, of that thy promise Mindful, of that noble banquet. Let the curtains be drawn hack, And thy glorious seat unveiled. This metre wins upon the ear by degrees, till at last it becomes very musical. There is in it a strange melody, wonderfully well adapted to the subject; and we cannot but entertain a hope that Mr. Trench's labours in this direc- tion will not terminate with the present