n Jonson in splendor
of imagery as he is below Shakespeare in his knowledge of the heart,
and in that vitality which makes Hamlet and Orlando, Lady Macbeth and
Perdita, men and women of all time. They live; Calderon's people, like
Ben Jonson's, move. There is a resemblance between the _autos_ of
Calderon and the masques of Jonson. Jonson's are lyrical; Calderon's
less lyrical than splendid, ethical, grandiose. They were both court
poets; they both made court spectacles; they both assisted in the decay
of the drama; they reflected the tastes of their time; but Calderon is
the more noble, the more splendid in imagination, the more intense in
his devotion to nature in all her moods. If one wanted to carry the
habit of comparison into music, Mozart might well represent the spirit
of Calderon. M. Philarete Chasles is right when he says that 'El Magico
Prodigioso' should be presented in a cathedral. Calderon's genius had
the cast of the soldier and the priest, and he was both soldier and
priest. His _comedias_ and _autos_ are of Spain, Spanish. To know
Calderon is to know the mind of the Spain of the seventeenth century; to
know Cervantes is to know its heart.

The Church had opposed the secularization of the drama, at the end of
the fifteenth century, for two reasons. The dramatic spectacle fostered
for religious purposes had become, until Lope de Vega rescued it, a
medium for that "naturalism" which some of us fancy to be a discovery
of M. Zola and M. Catulle Mendes; it had escaped from the control of
the Church and had become a mere diversion. Calderon was the one man
who could unite the spirit of religion to the form of the drama which
the secular renaissance imperiously demanded. He knew the philosophy
of Aristotle and the theology of the 'Summa' of St. Thomas as well
as any cleric in Spain, though he did not take orders until late in
life; and in those religious spectacles called _autos sacramentales_ he
showed this knowledge wonderfully. His last _auto_ was unfinished when
he died, on May 25th, 1681,--sixty-five years after the death of
Shakespeare,--and Don Melchior de Leon completed it, probably in time
for the feast of Corpus Christi.

[Illustration: CALDERON.]

The _auto_ was an elaboration of the older miracle-play, and a spectacle
as much in keeping with the temper of the Spanish court and people as
Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream' or Ben Jonson's 'Fortunate
Isles' was in accord with the tastes of the E