Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 22
XXII
CALDERÓN[1]
I
Arturo Farinelli is an extraordinary man. Marino wrote:
The poet aims to stir the soul to wonder—
Farinelli seems to be carrying the same purpose into the field of literary history.
The first effect his books produce upon the reader is a sense of astonishment. Every one of his volumes is like one of those caves wherein Persian fancy pictures trees laden with rubies, stalactites of emerald, masses of topaz, heaps of diamonds. Everything gleams and flashes in the multiple reflections. If a child enters, he plays with the bright toys. If a miser enters, he crams them in his wallet.
It is not precious stones that shine in the works of Farinelli, but fragments and gems of poetry, of many kinds and of many ages. This jeweler of the spirit has in store all the treasures of thought, and he offers them by the handful, by the shovelful, by the cartful, making them sparkle under the eager eyes of his readers. For him there are no Alps nor Pyrenees, no chains that cannot be broken, no oceans that separate. Every realm pays him tribute, every land offers him its tithe of beauty. He has dug deeply in fields where others have but turned the sod. He has followed close after the pioneers in the exploration of unfamiliar lands. If we in Italy were accustomed to elect princes, Farinelli would certainly be the rightful prince of literary erudition.
Nor does he cast his Titanic learning about in haphazard fragments and fagots, as so many have done, especially in Germany. He can arrange and organize his magnificent material. He can embody it in a continuous discourse which moves on toward a single conclusion, though it may assume at times the color of imagery, or the power of eloquence. Farinelli is not a pure scholar, but a great scholar who makes use of his erudition as an architect makes use of stones and bricks. He has ideas, he has feeling; and he knows the most notable expressions of ideas and of feelings in every clime and every period. His books therefore are not external histories of literary genres, but histories of single passions or of single theories followed through the masterpieces of all literatures.
Such in particular is his last work, on Calderón’s Life is a Dream. For this work, when the third volume shall also have appeared, will be a universal history of the concept of life as nullity and illusion.
II
Farinelli states his intention with perfect frankness:
Calderón has been to me merely a pretext for following through the cycles of the ages that fundamental concept of life on which he built the famous drama which so many praise and so few understand.
The reader must not expect to find here a critical commentary of the usual sort. In the whole first volume the drama of Calderón is scarcely mentioned. That volume contains instead a complete history, rich in information and in comparisons, of those concepts of human life which begin with Buddha and end with the Spanish mystics of the Golden Age. In the second volume Farinelli examines the entire literary work of Calderón with a view to the full discovery of his conception of the world and of life. Only toward the end of the volume does he come to a direct analysis of the famous drama. Thus the play is treated as a single link in the chain of this universal epic of “life as a dream”—a link which is central and precious, but which appears merely incidental as we look back over the centuries. Here we have a definitive history of a single human intuition, not an exclusive study of one dramatic composition. The vicissitudes of a certain skeptical and pessimistic view of life are traced through religions, mysticisms, mythologies, through fiction and through philosophy—with an intensive treatment of a particular Spanish dramatic masterpiece of the seventeenth century.
The fact that this play stands out as the centre of the research is perhaps a result of the personal predilections of Farinelli, who has devoted the better part of his life to Spanish studies. All students of comparative literature are acquainted with his early studies of Calderón. But those studies were primarily bibliographical. Now the scholar gives place to the thinker; and the thinker proceeds from the examination of a particular plot to the contemplation of a moral drama which has the entire earth as its stage and the saddest geniuses of humanity as its dramatis personæ.
Calderón’s play has perhaps received more honor than it deserves. It was immensely popular in Europe in the Romantic period, thanks in particular to the two Schlegels and to other German critics. For a time it seemed the choicest fruit of Spanish genius. Some critics rated it above the greatest creations of Shakespeare. It was translated into all languages. It was revived on the stage. It was tormented by the speciousness of commentators and text-makers. In Italy, where a translation, or rather adaptation, had been made in the seventeenth century, it became popular again in the nineteenth century. Ernesto Rossi played it several times. It was after a performance given by him at Bologna in August, 1869, that Carducci wrote his essay on Calderón—an essay which is mistaken, as Farinelli points out, in its general interpretation and in certain individual facts and opinions, but contains none the less many just and acute remarks.
I have reread Life is a Dream in these last few days, in order that I might follow Farinelli more closely. And I have been greatly disappointed.
It was well known, even before the publication of Farinelli’s book, that the plot of the drama is not original, and that there is nothing original in the philosophic or mystic concept which gives it character. New and great works are sometimes written, to be sure, on ancient themes and myths: famous instances are to be found in all literatures. But the drama of Calderón is almost entirely lacking in constructive psychology. The conversion of Prince Sigismund when he wakes, as he thinks, from his dream of power—the event which should have been made the central point of the drama—is as sudden and miraculous as the conversion of any fabled saint. The beast turns human all at once; the ferocious creature becomes courteous and generous; the savage stands forth as a compendium of Christian virtues. As Farinelli says:
It is precisely this sudden intervention of the superhuman in the human that offends us in the play. Such inexorable suppression of all development in the character of the protagonist, such disregard of nature, makes the human spirit merely the slave of a thesis, of a doctrine.
That is precisely the point. Calderón wrote his drama in order to teach a moral lesson.
The plot is of course familiar. A certain king of Poland, Basilio, an old chatterer swollen with fantastic science, has a son, Sigismund, who is destined, according to the horoscope, to prove a rascal. Basilio therefore has the child imprisoned in a tower on a remote mountain, under the care of another pedantic old man, Clotaldo, who keeps the boy from contact with other human beings, and in ignorance of his identity. But when the boy grows up, the father takes it into his head to bring him out in order to see whether or not the astrologers were right. They give the youth an opiate—an old prescription, well known to the author of the Arabian Nights and to Boccaccio—and carry him into a room in the royal palace. When he wakes and finds out who he is, he goes into a fury, and maltreats those who come into his presence. He throws a man out of a window, insults his doting father, and all but kills his tutor Clotaldo. He is given another sleeping potion, and reawakes as a prisoner in his tower. He is told that he has been dreaming, and he believes it. He reels off a rosary of phrases on the idea that life is a dream and that dreaming is life, and becomes instantly a resigned and repentant model of Christian humility. King Basilio decides to abdicate in favor of the Duke of Moscow, a foreigner; but the army revolts, and soldiers break into the tower, liberate Sigismund, and hail him as king. He thinks he is dreaming again, and for a moment he hesitates. But then a military fury seizes him; and he sets forth. He declares war on his father, conquers him, pardons him, rescues a damsel, chooses a wife forthwith, and ends his career with a final volley of sententiousness.
With this plot there is interwoven a second and minor one which combines the barbarian themes of the daughter recognized by her unknown father, and the abandoned mistress who finally marries her fugitive lover. The public demanded a little complexity, and the ladies demanded a little love—and there had to be at least two heroines to make it a fashionable tale.
But the persons of the drama, whether men or women, have no life, no spiritual complications, no tragic accents or impulses. They utter a series of chilly conceits and pedantic maxims; they give us sermons or madrigals. Clotaldo, by way of informing us that he is going to fire a pistol, speaks thus:
… Aquesta pistola, áspid
de metal, escupirá
el veneno penetrante
de dos balas, cuyo fuego
será escándalo del aire.[2]
Sigismund compliments Estrella thus:
¿Qué dejáis que hacer al sol,
si os levantáis con el día?
Dadme á besar vuestra mano,
en cuya copa de nieve
el aura candores bebe.[3]
The whole drama is in this tone. Hyperboles and aphorisms, conceits and antitheses, puns and banality. The famous soliloquy of Sigismund ends thus:
¿Qué es la vida? un frenesí;
¿Qué es la vida? una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños sueño son.[4]
The mechanical artificiality of Calderón does not escape Farinelli:
The author designs and builds without inner compulsion. The crystallized thought remains dense and unstirred. There is no flow of life-blood in the drama. The words rise dryly; they never come eagerly or with a precipitate rush, and they yield themselves tamely to the skillful arrangement and intention of the artist. Simplicity is gone, selection governs. The commonplace is suppressed, instinct is slain, ornament and decoration are sought above all else. The poet forgets to mould the living clay spontaneously. Affectation becomes nature. In this drama, which deals with eternal human destiny, there are no great eternal utterances. The over-emphasis of the dialogue is on a par with its dialectic subtlety. A persistent play of logic chills the glow of the imagination. Every phrase is passed through the sieve of reflection. The rigid discipline of thought humiliates and ousts mere human feeling. The poet calculates, measures, ordains, divides, disposes.
So far as thought is concerned, the drama contains merely repetitions and amplifications of the very ancient idea that life is a dream. So far as poetry is concerned—there is none. The search for poetry reveals this one bit of ingenuous cynicism, which some follower of Nietzsche might take for his motto:
Nada me parece justo
en siendo contra mi gusto.[5]
Pues el delito mayor
del hombre es haber nacido.[6]
But of the true lyric there is not a trace. Not a single new and lovely image could I find in these thousands of lines. There is perhaps a breath of poetry in this paraphrase for the sunset:
Antes que la obscura sombra
sepulte los rayos de oro
entre verdinegras ondas.[7]
But even here there is a glimpse of a conceit which is by no means new.
Calderón had neither the desire nor the ability to write as a pure poet. In the theatre, indeed, pure poetry is but an intruder. Either the drama kills it, or else it kills the drama. Calderón sought to please his audience—and he succeeded, as the records amply prove. He sought to teach a moral lesson to the grandees of the earth, to picture a prince converted to Christian behavior by the discovery of the mystic commonplace that life is a shadow, an illusion, nothing.
It would be labor lost to seek hidden or lofty meanings in the play. It does not illustrate even that rigid application of a single principle which leads at times to magnificent absurdities. Two theories are superposed one on the other: all is a dream; yet one should act, and act worthily. But the first thesis implies the annihilation of action; and the second thesis by implication denies the first. If life is a dream and a fiction, why should we act? And if we must act, and act as Christians rather than beasts, we are forced to conclude that there is something certain in the world, that life has a purpose, that choice is inevitable. But if you thus deny the first thesis, you take away the whole imaginative and moral coloring of the drama, and you have merely a discursive elegiac exhortation, for which a few phrases would have sufficed. If you accept the common Christian thesis, the drama loses background and relief, and becomes an ordinary play in which the sudden and utter transformation of the protagonist has not the slightest motivation. The two theses are interwoven not by logical but by theatrical necessity. Life is a Dream might then be defined, in the last analysis, as a pair of old and contradictory ideas combined in old and lifeless forms.
Farinelli is perfectly well aware of the ideological and artistic bankruptcy of Calderón:
Quite so: even in the dream-world there is a certain law of nature, a certain truth. For the dream-world is purely an artistic creation. And the man who does not recognize the power of that truth and the reign of that law is beyond the pale of poetry.
- ↑ Written à propos of Farinelli’s La vita è un sogno (“Life is a Dream”), Vols. I and II, Turin, 1916.
- ↑ “This pistol, an asp of metal, will spit forth the piercing poison of two bullets, whose fire will astonish the air.”
- ↑ "What do you leave for the sun to do, if you arise with the dawn? Grant that I kiss your hand, in whose snowy cup the breeze drinks whiteness."
- ↑ “What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction, and the greatest happiness is small; for all life is a dream, and dreams are a dream.”
- ↑ “Nothing seems to me just if it be contrary to my liking.”
- ↑ “For the greatest sin of man is in having been born.”
- ↑ “Before the dark shadow buries the rays of gold amid green-black waves.”