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Updated: June 19, 2025
The haughty smile was yet on his lip when the door opened and the prince entered. The crowd, in parting suddenly, left Calderon immediately in front of Philip; who, after gazing on him sternly for a moment, turned away, with marked discourtesy, from the favourite's profound reverence, and began a low and smiling conversation with Gonsalez de Leon, one of Calderon's open foes.
In memory of the emotions which had convulsed me on leaving Berlin, and also as an indication of my mental mood to one worthy of the confidence, I added Calderon's words, 'Things impossible to conceal, yet impossible of utterance. By this I felt I had conveyed to a kindly disposed person, though with a happy vagueness, some idea of the secret knowledge which was my sole inspiration.
The operations of the Inquisition were too slow for the impatience of his fears; and as that dread tribunal affected never to inflict death until the accused had confessed his guilt, the firmness of Calderon baffled the vengeance of the ecclesiastical law. New inquiries were set on foot: a corpse was discovered, buried in Calderon's garden the corpse of a female. He was accused of the murder.
To many of Calderon's dramas we cannot refuse the name of pieces of character, although we cannot look for very delicate characterization from the poets of a nation in which vehemence of passion and exaltation of fancy neither leave sufficient leisure nor sufficient coolness for prying observation.
Perhaps, indeed, the greatness of Calderon's abilities made him too arrogantly despise the machinations of the duke, who, though not without some capacities as a courtier, was wholly incompetent to those duties of a minister on which he had set his ambition and his grasp.
His mind was hardly yet ready to feel the strange charm of this most imaginative of Calderon's dramas. Even where Herr Stahr undertakes to give us light on the sources of Lessing, it is something of the dimmest. He attributes "Miss Sara Sampson" to the influence of the "Merchant of London," as Mr. Evans translates it literally from the German, meaning our old friend, "George Barnwell."
The fruits of this occupation with Greek, Italian, Spanish, and German were Shelley's translations from Homer and Euripides, from Dante, from Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso", and from "Faust", translations which have never been surpassed for beauty of form and complete transfusion of the spirit of one literature into the language of another.
In Calderon's Zenobia the Great there is a scene in the second act between Zenobia and Decius where the latter says, Cielos, luego tu me quieres? Perdiera cien mil victorias, Volvi�rame, etc. Honour, duty, and fidelity succumb to it after they have withstood every other temptation the menace of death even.
"I do not care for a book that is a series of enigmas. Don Quixote needs no such guess-work. Shakespeare's characters are painted not from the petty models of yesterday and to-day, but from mankind in every age and every climate. Moliere's and Calderon's personages stand on as solid a basis. In less than half a century your 'Grand Cyrus' will be insufferable jargon."
Therefore much must be attached to Calderon's words, when he calls the horrible Semiramis a daughter of the air, yet introduces her as a daughter of seduction, after which follows the murder of the husband. Finally, it is the will to live presenting itself in the whole species, which so forcibly and exclusively attracts two individuals of different sex towards each other.
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