CALDERÓN
307
leads us on from stress to stress, from pain to pain. A mere doctrine pretends that it can absorb the practical experience of life, seeks even to make itself identical with life; but its endeavor is arrogant and hopeless. The chasm remains. The idea that life is a dream falls into emptiness, yet Calderón does not realize it. He moves his phantoms hither and yon in a dream-world remote alike from nature and from truth.
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.
