The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  Spain forgave him his mistresses for his plays. He wrote some eighteen hundred, in addition to four hundred short autos sagramentales (“sacramental acts”) for performance in religious festivals. He was reputed to have composed ten plays in one week, and one before breakfast. Cervantes gave up before this avalanche, and called his rival a “monster of nature.” Lope was a commedia dell’ arte in himself, composing as he improvised. Breeding with such careless fertility, he made no pretense to art or philosophy. In his New Art of Making Plays he confessed amiably that he wrote to butter his bread, and so catered to public taste.43 He might not have printed his plays except for piratical publishers who sent to his performances men of miraculous memory; after three hearings these men could recite a play by heart and provide a garbled text to printers, who paid the author nothing. Once Lope’s cast refused to go on with the play until one such mnemonic marvel had been thrown out44—publication might lessen attendance. But Lope published with loving care his poetic romances —Arcadia, San Isidro, Jerusalén conquistada, La hermosura de Angélica, La Dorotea—all melodious and mediocre.

  The plot in his plays is everything. The characters are seldom studied intimately, and one might say of these dramas what Thoreau said of newspapers—that if you merely change the names and dates, the contents are always the same. Nearly always the story turns on two hinges: the point of honor and the question who shall sleep with the lady. The public never tired of variations on the latter theme, not being allowed any of its own. Meanwhile it enjoyed the incidental humor, the lively dialogue, the lyric verses that fell trippingly from the tongues of fair women and brave men. The spirit of the romances, never extinct, took new life on the Spanish stage.

  The most famous of Lope’s plays is The Star of Seville (La estrella de Sevilla). Sancho the Bold, King of Castile, comes to Seville, praises the splendor of its streets, but asks his councilor Arias to tell him more particularly about its women.

  KING: And its ladies, divinely fair, why do you not mention them? … Tell me, are you not aflame in the light of such glories?

  ARIAS: Doña Leonor de Rebera seemed heaven itself, for in her countenance shone the light of the springtime sun.

  KING: She is too pale…. I want a burning sun, not freezing.

  ARIAS: The one who threw roses to you is Doña Mencia Coronèl.

  KING: A handsome dame, but I saw others lovelier…. One I saw there full of grace, whom you have left unmentioned…. Who is she who on her balcony drew my attention, and to whom I doffed my hat? Who is she whose two eyes flashed lightning like Jove’s thunderbolts and sent their deadly rays into my heart? …

  ARIAS: Her name is Doña Stella Tabera, and Seville in homage calls her its star.

  KING: And it might call her its sun…. My guiding star brought me to Seville…. What means, Don Arias, will you find for me to see her and speak with her? … O vision that inflames my inmost soul!45

  Stella, however, is in love with Don Sancho Ortiz, and she indignantly repels Arias’ proposal to let the King enjoy the droit du seigneur. Arias bribes the maid to admit the King to her mistress’ room; Stella’s devoted brother Bustos enters on the very point of honor, stops the King, and is about to kill him; but, awed by royalty, he lets him pass, scorned but intact. An hour later the King sees hanging on his palace wall the corpse of the maid who had accepted the bribe. He sends for Ortiz, asks if his loyalty to his king knows no bounds, receives a proud and satisfactory answer, and bids him kill Bustos. Ortiz meets Bustos, receives from him Stella’s message that she returns his love and accepts his suit; he thanks him, kills him, and almost goes insane. Fearing public revolt, the King hides the fact that the assassination was by his command. Ortiz is arrested and is about to be executed when Stella finds means to free him. But there is no happy ending; the lovers agree that the murder has poisoned their love forever.

  After producing a thousand such plays, Lope became the idol of Madrid. Nobles and commoners showered him with admiration; the Pope sent him the Cross of Malta and the degree of Doctor of Theology. When he appeared on the streets he was surrounded by eager crowds; women and children kissed his hands and begged his blessing. His name was given to any object supreme in its kind: there were Lope horses, Lope melons, Lope cigars.46 A critic who had found fault with him lived in daily fear of death from the poet’s devotees.

  Even so, Lope was not happy. He had been paid reasonably well for his plays, but he had spent or given away his earnings as fast as they had come; after so many successes he was poor and had to appeal for aid to Philip IV—who, out of his bankruptcy, sent him a generous dowry. But bereavements cut more deeply than poverty. His daughter Marcela entered a convent; his son Lope joined the navy and was drowned; his daughter Antonia eloped with Cristóbal Tonorio, taking with her a considerable quantity of paternal valuables; Lope disowned her, Cristóbal deserted her. Thinking these tribulations to be divine punishments for his sins, Lope locked himself in a room and macerated his flesh till the walls were stained with his blood. On August 23, 1635, he composed his last poem, “El siglo de oro.” He died four days later, aged seventy-three. Half of Madrid joined the funeral procession, which turned aside to pass the convent where his daughter could bid him farewell from the window of her cell. His apotheosis was enacted on a public stage.

  We cannot, like Voltaire, place him beside Shakespeare; but we may say of him that by his abounding genius, his effervescent verse, his lovable character shining through a thousand plays, he rose to the literary pinnacle of that Golden Age, where only Cervantes and Calderón could reach him.

  V. CALDERÓN: 1600–81

  Others briefly challenged Lope’s supremacy. Guillén de Castro composed (1591) Las mocedades del Cid (The Youth of the Cid), which some have preferred to Corneille’s more famous imitation. Luis Vélez de Guevara absented himself from his law practice long enough to write four hundred plays, including El diablo cojuelo, source of Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (The Lame Devil). And Tirso de Molina staged at Barcelona (1630) El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de pietra (The Mocker of Seville and the Stone Guest), which established Don Juan as a sensual blasphemer, provided the plot for Molière’s Le Festin de pierre and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and suggested Byron’s Don Juan. In these few lines are some hints of the immense influence of Spanish drama abroad. And in 1803 August Wilhelm von Schlegel startled Germany by announcing that in modern drama Pedro Calderón de la Barca was second only to Shakespeare.

  Calderón, like Murillo, concluded and outlived the Golden Age. Son of a finance minister under Philip II and III, he received at Salamanca all the education that the Jesuits could give and allow; the religious emphasis in his training strongly colored his work and his life. He studied law at Salamanca, but abandoned it on discovering that he could write successfully for the stage. One piece contained too clear a reference to gongoristic verbiage in the sermons of an influential preacher; Calderón was jailed for a time, but his reputation was made. A volume of his plays, containing La vida es sueño, was published in 1636 and won him at once the leadership of the Spanish theater. Philip appointed him in that year to succeed Lope de Vega as court dramatist. In 1640 he joined a company of mounted cuirassiers and won distinction by his gallant courage at Tarragona; in Spain, as in Islam, the man of letters has often realized his secret dream of being a man of deeds. Calderón’s health failing after two years of war, he was retired on a military pension. Bereavements turned him to religion; he became a lay member of the Franciscan order, was ordained a priest (1651), and for ten years served a parish in Toledo while continuing to write occasionally for the stage. After receiving all the honors of this world, he died at the age of eighty-one, in high hopes of some reward for having composed hundreds of autos sagramentales and having had only one mistress.

  His religious dramas are the finest of their kind, for there his lyric power was sustained by sincere devotion. His secular dramas had for a long time a wider international repute than Lope’s, being equally beautiful as poet
ry and superior in thought. He lacked some of Lope’s incredible vitality and variety; yet he too turned out “cloak-and-sword” plays (comedias de capa y espada) with verve and skill. Only one familiar with the Castilian tongue can appreciate him fully, but we note that two English poets felt his genius and struggled to evoke it from its linguistic crucible. Shelley, who agreed with Schlegel about Calderón, freely translated parts of El mágico prodigioso, and Edward Fitzgerald, in Six Dramas of Calderón (1853), tried and failed to do for the Spanish dramatist what six years later he did so well for Omar Khayyám.

  The Monstrous Magician is a variant of the Faust legend. Cyprian, renowned scholar of Antioch, interrupts a duel between two of his students, who both desire Justina; he sheathes their swords by agreeing to go to her and ascertain her preference; he goes, and he falls in love with her at sight; she dismisses him scornfully, and then longs for him. The students, also rejected, console themselves with her sister Livia, but Cyprian cannot exorcise his memory of Justina’s loveliness.

  So beautiful she was—and I,

  Between my love and jealousy,

  Am so convulsed with hope and fear,

  Unworthy as it may appear—

  So bitter is the life I live,

  That—hear me, Hell!—I now would give

  To thy most detested spirit

  My soul, forever to inherit,

  To suffer punishment and pine,

  So that this woman may be mine.47

  “I accept it,” says the Devil, but he finds Justina difficult. Finally he brings her to Cyprian; but as the scholar seeks to embrace her Justina’s veil opens and reveals nothing but a skull. Lucifer confesses that only the power of Christ could have played such a trick upon him. In the end, as both Cyprian and Justina are carried away to Christian martyrdom, she confesses her love.

  Among the plays translated by Fitzgerald El alcalde de Zalamea (The May or of Zalamea) has won high praise for its technical excellence. But La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) has deeper undertones. It puts aside the old themes of honor and love, and boldly brings to the stage an almost Oriental problem: How permanent and real are the vicissitudes and victories of life? Or are they surface illusions, maya, part of the veil that hides the basic, lasting reality? Basileus, King of Poland, imprisons his recently born son, of whom the stars prognosticate rebellion against his father. Sigismund is brought up in chains among forest animals, and grows to manhood more savage than any unharassed beast. The King, aging, relents and invites his son to come and share the throne; but Sigismund, ill-trained for rule, lays about him with such thoughtless violence that he has to be drugged into submission. When he recovers his senses he finds himself back in his woodland den and chains. He is told that his recent royalty was but a disordered dream, and, believing it, he talks like Shakespeare’s defeated Richard II:

  ‘Tis plain,

  In this world’s uncertain gleam,

  That to live is but to dream:

  Man dreams what he is, and wakes

  Only when upon him breaks

  Death’s mysterious morning beam.

  The king dreams he is a king,

  And in this delusive way

  Lives and rules with sovereign sway;

  All the cheers that round him ring,

  Born of air, on air take wing.

  And in ashes (mournful fate!)

  Death dissolves his pride and state.

  Who would wish a crown to take,

  Seeing that he must awake

  In the dream beyond death’s gate? …

  And in fine, throughout the earth,

  All men dream, whate’er their birth….

  What is life? A thing that seems,

  A mirage that falsely gleams,

  Phantom joy, delusive rest,

  Since is life a dream at best,

  And even dreams themselves are dreams.48

  Then, by another transformation very inadequately explained, Sigismund grows out of his savagery into reason; and when a revolution gives him the throne, he becomes a good king, humbly conscious that this exaltation is again a dream, an insubstantial bubble in the froth of life.

  The speeches are painfully long, and a gongorism of fanciful phrases waters the poetic wine; but it is a powerful play nevertheless, mingling action with thought and sustaining dramatic suspense to the end. If we had been differently domiciled and indoctrinated, and could understand Castilian well, we should probably consider this one of the world’s great plays.

  It is impossible for us now to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps of imagination out of the prison of our time and place, and realize how lively a role the drama played in seventeenth-century Spain, and what influence it enjoyed. In Italy it almost drove the native tragic drama from the boards. In France it provided plots for Hardy, Corneille, Molière, and a dozen others; it molded the form of French tragedy before Racine, stressing honor and spilling rhetoric. When we recall also the influence of Cervantes and other Spanish novelists upon Lesage, Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett, and through them upon Dickens and Thackeray, and when we compare the art of Elizabethan England, or even that of contemporary France, with the architecture, the sculpture, and the painting of Spain in that heyday, we may begin to understand why the Spanish-speaking peoples of the world yield to none in the pride of their heritage and their blood.

  * * *

  I. The story of the captive in Don Quixote (Part I, Book IV, chapters 12–14) is largely autobiographical.

  II. Only apparently on the same day as Shakespeare. England was still using the Julian calendar; by the Gregorian, which Spain had adopted, Shakespeare’s death fell on May 3, 1616.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Golden Age of Spanish ArtI

  1556–1682

  l. ARS UNA, SPECIES MILLE

  HOW shall we explain that in this period, when Spain lost command of the seas to England and of the land to France, and when all her material enterprises seemed to collapse in failure and bankruptcy, she could build the cathedral of Segovia, guide the sculpture of Hernández and Montañes, and inspire the painting of El Greco, Zurbarán, Velázquez, and Murillo? Was it because the Spanish Church was still rich, the Spanish court was still extravagant, American gold still entered Seville, and Spanish artists, nourished by faith and fees, still felt the glow of a glory not yet quite gone?

  The splendor was least in architecture, for there the triumphs of the past met all the needs of piety. At Seville the Church certified its victory over the Moors by topping a Moslem minaret with a Christian belfry that perfected the grace of the Giralda (1567); and a year later Bartolomé Morel crowned the whole with a figure of La Fé (Faith), weighing a ton, yet so lightly poised that it turns with every breath of wind to survey its worshipful domain. At Valladolid Juan de Herrera, architect of the Escorial, began in 1585 the austere Cathedral of the Assumption, on so vast a scale that it is still unfurnished. On a hill dominating Segovia two centuries of architects and craftsmen began in 1522 the monumental cathedral that proudly symbolizes the dominant and immovable devotion of Spain. At Salamanca Juan Gómez de Mora designed for the Jesuits, in Palladian Doric plus dome, the immense Seminario Conciliar (1617–1755).

  But even Spain was becoming secular, and palaces as well as churches were calling for art. At Aranjuez Philip II built (1575) a summer residence whose cool gardens could rescue him from the heat and solemnity of the Escorial. Philip III, as a center for his haunts, added the Palace of El Pardo, whose ornate Hall of Ambassadors is famous for its chandeliers. Philip IV and Olivares almost anticipated Versailles by building at the eastern gate of Madrid a pleasure garden, Buen Retiro (1631–33); in its court theater many plays of Lope and Calderón were staged. Stately town halls—ayuntamientos—were raised in this age at León and Astorga; and one at Toledo was designed by El Greco.

  Sculpture was almost wholly ecclesiastical in form and mood. The Gothic style was modified by Italian influence and baroque ornament, but the portrait bust so popular in Italy was disc
ountenanced in Spain with an almost Mohammedan taboo. Painters—even masters like Zurbarán and Murillo—lent their art to make sculpture impress the worshiper with the realism of crucifixions and martyrdoms; nearly all statues were in polychrome wood. Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, the erudite Scot who so loved and annaled Spanish art, thought Juan de Juni “the best sculptor of Spain.”1 Juan earned his renown by an altar in the Church of Nuestra Señora de la Antigua at Valladolid and, in another church there, the Mater Dolorosa, a statue so cherished by the people that, in the pathetic depth of their faith, they pleaded to be allowed to clothe it in costly raiment. Spain usually ranks still higher Gregorio Hernández; he too carved at Valladolid a Mater Dolorosa; with characteristic realism he painted bloodstains on her robe and set tears of glass into her face; this Sorrowful Mother, with the dead Christ lying in her lap, may be the supreme work of Spanish sculpture in this age.

  The greatest of these sculptors was Juan Martínez Montañes. He was only eighteen when he and his wife came (1582) to the Monastery of Dulce Nombre de Jésus at Seville, presented to it a figure of the Virgin, and received in grateful exchange free residence there for life. He pleased the Jesuits with statues of Ignatius and Xavier, and delighted the Hieronymite monks with his St. Jerome. The cathedral of Seville still shows his Crucifix, ranked by one historian of art as “perhaps the supreme rendering of the divine Victim.”2 When Pope Paul V, responding to popular demand, made belief in the Immaculate Conception obligatory on all Catholics, Spain was especially happy since, like France, it had concentrated its piety upon the Virgin. Montañes rose to the occasion by carving his chef-d’oeuvre (now in the Seville cathedral)—the young Mother of God meditating on the mystery of her freedom from original sin; this too has been ranked among the masterpieces of the world’s sculpture,3 but the Andalusian maiden seems too calm and satisfied, though weighed down with drapery.