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
