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V.

CALDERON AND GOETHE IN THEIR RELATION TO SHAKSPEARE.

It would be a thorough misconception of the title of the present section, to suppose that it has for its object to exalt Shakspeare at the expense of his two great rivals. No doubt it has been disputed often enough which great man is the greater, and which the greatest of all. But there is something childish in all such comparisons, which, as they are generally made, follow either no fixed, or at best an arbitrary, standard. Undoubtedly there is an intellectual more or less. I, for my part, am convinced that Shakspeare is the greatest dramatic poet of all ages. But this my conviction cannot be otherwise made good to others, than by attempting, with the greatest possible accuracy, to determine in kind his artistic personality. For, in mind, quantity is at one and the same time quality-essence, and all mere measure of degree is absolutely excluded. But now, as already remarked, the personality of a poet cannot be set forth except by showing how, in conformity with his own character and times, and historical position, he first conceived the idea of art, and realised it afterwards in his own poems. When, therefore, the mutual relation of two or more poets is spoken of, it cannot be any comparison of their artistic greatness that is thereby meant, but merely their different relations to the idea of art, and especially of poetry-that is to say, the different character of their several conceptions and realisations of it. For in and by himself every genuine artist has an equal justification, and equally a vocation; rightly to be judged of, he must be viewed in his essential difference from all other poets; and it would be absurd to measure Calderon, for instance, or Goethe, by Shakspeare's personality, or, conversely, to judge of Shakspeare by theirs. But now, to the essence of an artist, the notion which he

entertains of the idea of art, his artistic view of life and the world, pre-eminently belongs. There is, therefore, in the idea of art a common centre for all, from which each may be presented in a definite, objective relation to all others. It is only of such a relation that it is allowable to speak.

But perhaps it will be here objected, that the idea of art is as yet incomplete-in a state of becoming, in so far as the history of art is merely the existing development of it; consequently the essence and notion of art are not yet fixed, and every philosopher gives for the idea of art so much only of its essence as has already unfolded itself. This, rightly understood, is perfectly correct. Philosophy ought not, neither does it, pretend to raise to self-consciousness more than what really is; no more, i. e. than life and history, and the therein ruling development of mind, with its creative faculties, thoughts, and ideas. Philosophy itself is but the consciousness of all this, gradually evolving itself in and with the history of humanity, and consequently is itself also in a state of continual movement. But still it does not follow from hence that what philosophy recognises at any period as the idea of art is not the idea thereof; for in truth the self-evolving idea remains throughout all its developments ever identical with itself. Still less does it follow that this idea cannot serve as a standard by which to determine the personality of each poetic genius in itself, as well as in its relation to others. Without some such standard, all history of art, all criticism and judgment, were absolutely impossible, and Kotzebue, Heine, Gutskow, &c. might claim the same rights and importance as Shakspeare, Calderon, and Goethe.

My design, therefore, is simply to give a characteristic sketch of Calderon and Goethe, similar to that which I have already drawn of Shakspeare in the third section of this work, and to which all my subsequent remarks will throughout have a reference. The matters which have been treated of at length in the I. II. and IV. Sections, in order to throw a clearer light on Shakspeare's personality and the peculiarity of his art, must in the present case be compressed within a few brief remarks, or rather hints, for otherwise this section would grow into two special treatises.

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And yet I hope, though thus brief, it will not be altogether useless. My immediate wish, and indeed my principal object in sketching an historical and critical parallel of this kind between these three greatest of all modern poets, is to delineate still more accurately than were otherwise practicable the distinctive peculiarities of Shakspeare. In the next place I wished to revive the memory of Calderon, who since Schlegel and Solger has been unduly neglected. Lastly, so much both that is clever and that is stupid, superior and inferior, is in these days written with or without the necessary quali fications, about Goethe-the age is so evidently struggling to obtain a clearer perception of the artistic personality of this so-called prince of poets-that I cannot let slip the opportunity of contributing my mite to the public treasury of thought and opinion.

CALDERON, it is well known, lived through more than three parts of a century. To the period when the thirty years' war was raging in Germany, destroying the olden, and scattering the slowly ripening seeds of modern art, and when in England the unnational drama had arisen out of the school of Ben Jonson, to be itself suppressed by the fanaticism of the Puritans, belong the years of Calderon's vigour-the flourishing time of the Spanish national theatre. Spain had remained almost entirely uninfluenced by the mighty reforming and regenerating spirit which in the sixteeenth and seventeenth centuries proceeded from Germany, and agitated the whole of Christian Europe, not excepting Italy itself. Here, under Philip the Third and Fourth, the [Roman] Catholic Church still flourished as powerful, generally speaking, and as undisturbed, as in the reign of the bigoted Philip the Second, and welcomed the spirit of the mediaval poetry, when it was retiring from the rest of Europe, even from Italy itself. This poetry dates its rise from the fourteenth century, and, as distinguished from that poetry of nature which found its utterance in the Nibelungen and Minnesinger of the twelfth and thirteenth, may be characterized as the poetry of art. When in Italy the epic of Dante had ennobled the genuine, and those of Tasso and others the more corrupt and degenerate, form of [mediæval] catholicism, and when Bojardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, again, had perfected the heroic

poetry of Christian chivalry, and when Petrarch had laid open all the rich fulness of lyrical poesy in manifold forms of beauty, we might well expect to find this country perfecting a drama in the same spirit of [mediæval] catholicism. But, on the one hand, its rise there was checked by new interests of the Church, and by the disorders and commotions of the sixteenth century; and on the other, by the revival of ancient literature, which was accompanied by a servile imitation of the classical tragedy, and by the national taste for music, which caught up and absorbed all the elements out of which such a drama might have been formed. This musical taste was at its height towards the end of the sixteenth century, and in the seventeenth was in such close and intimate connexion with the church and its worship, that when the Italian mind was powerfully excited with a view of the ancient tragedy, no less erroneous than it was enthusiastic, which regarded it as essentially musical, the already declining Mysteries passed over into and gave way, not to the Drama, but to the Opera. In Spain, on the contrary, music as an art (the national songs and dances do not here come into question) was not cultivated in so high a degree-it was not in short so national as in Italy; and although ancient letters were not wholly neglected, they never excited so general an enthusiasm, or so lively and pervading an emulation. Accordingly, while the first efforts of dramatic art which grew out of, and were fostered by, the religious representations, did not entirely disregard the ancient model, and the so-called rules of Aristotle, the latter were unable to establish their exclusive authority over the Spanish stage. The people were continually protesting against them, and at last compelled, as it were, their poets to accommodate themselves to the popular taste: thus Lope de Vega himself confesses, that, to please the multitude, he often offends against well-known laws. general, therefore, Spanish poesy, however stimulated and promoted by her close connexion with her Italian sister, followed nevertheless a truly national course. The present is not the place for a close investigation into the reasons why Spain, in spite of the extraordinary multitude of her heroic and historical poems, has produced no great Epic, even though both the life and character of

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the people were favourable. One chief cause, no doubt, was the long domestic and external struggles it had to maintain with the Moors. In so troubled and uncertain a present, there is no room for the development of the calm diffusive poetry of the past. But the very same cause has made Spain pre-eminently the land of chivalrous romaunts. In short, in lyrical songs or ballads of this kind on subjects well suited for an epos, did the epical spirit of the nation find its utterance. Springing up out of the truly epical soil of a glorious and heroic present, they form a great cycle, and celebrate a long series of valiant and chivalrous achievements. In these little brooks, however, the great stream of heroic poesy, and the poetical and imaginative spirit of chivalry, diffused and lost itself. Such productions occupied the time in which alone a grand national epos could have been formed. The great mass of heroic poems which were written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in celebration of Charles the Fifth, and the conquest of Spanish America, the fall of Numantia, &c. do not possess the true character of epic poetry. They follow reality too closely, and are moreover too deeply pervaded with an historical spirit. It was only in the numberless romances of chivalry that the Spaniard's inborn sympathies with the romantic life and fantastic adventures of knight-errantry found a suitable expression. Nevertheless, as the age became unconsciously more dramatic, these romances, the more modern at least, evinced less of poetic truth and vigour; they grew more or less unreal, hollow and artificial, and met consequently their death-blow in the Don Quixote of Cervantes. In the meanwhile, the existing elements of art, and especially that peculiar character of Spanish lyrics which from the first exhibited a tendency to a dramatic form and shape, were sufficient, at the fitting season, to bring forth the true drama out of the old and familiar representation of the Mysteries. Lope de Vega is rightly named the founder of the Spanish national theatre —not, indeed, on chronological grounds, but, what indeed gives a better title, on artistic and mental considerations. His immediate successor was Calderon, who perfected it, and was, in short, the Spanish Shakspeare.

The epic poetry of Italy and Portugal (Camöens), the Italian