He was all this, and he was also one of the cleverest craftsmen who ever worked for the Spanish stage. But nature does not shower all her gifts on any one man, and she was niggardly to Moreto in the matter of invention. He made no secret of the fact that he took whatever he wanted from his predecessors. His friend Jerónimo de Cáncer represents him as saying:—
Que estoy minando imagina cuando tu de mí te quejas; que en estas comedias viejas he hallado una brava mina.
He did, indeed, find a _brava mina_ in the old plays, and especially in Lope de Vega’s. From Lope’s _El Gran Duque de Moscovia_ he takes _El Príncipe perseguido_; from Lope’s _El Prodigio de Etiopia_ he takes _La Adúltera penitente_; from Lope’s _El Testimonio vengado_ he takes _Como se vengan los nobles_; from Lope’s _Las Pobrezas de Rinaldo_ he takes _El Mejor Par de los doce_; from Lope’s _De cuando acá nos vino_ ... he takes _De fuera vendrá quien de casa nos echará_; from Lope’s delightful play _El Mayor imposible_ he constructs the still more delightful _No puede ser_, from which John Crowne, at the suggestion of Charles _II._, took his _Sir Courtly Nice, or, It cannot be_, and from which Ludvig Holberg, the celebrated Danish dramatist, took his _Jean de France_. Moreto was scarcely less indebted to Lope’s contemporaries than to Lope himself. From Vélez de Guevara’s _El Capitán prodigioso y Príncipe de Transilvania_ he took _El Príncipe prodigioso_; from Guillén de Castro’s _Las Maravillas de Babilonia_ he took _El bruto de Babilonia_, and from Castro’s _Los hermanos enemigos_ he took _Hasta el fin nadie es dichoso_; from Tirso de Molina’s _La Villana de Vallecas_ he took _La ocasion hace al ladrón_; and from a novel of Castillo Solórzano’s he took the entire plot of _La Confusion de un jardín_. This is a fairly long list, but it does not include all Moreto’s debts.
He has his failures, of course. _El ricohombre de Alcalá_ looks anæmic beside its original. _El Infanzón de Illescas_, which is ascribed to both Lope and Tirso; and _Caer para levantar_ is a wooden arrangement of Mira de Amescua’s striking play, _El Esclavo del demonio_. If you can filch to no better purpose than this, then decidedly honesty is the best policy. Perhaps Moreto came to this conclusion himself in some passing mood, and it must have been at some such hour that he wrote _El Parecido en la Corte_ and _Trampa adelante_, both abounding in individual humour. But such moods are not frequent with him. If you choose to say that Moreto was a systematic plagiarist, it is hard for me to deny it. Every playwright of this period plagiarised and pilfered, more or less, from Calderón downwards: we must accept this as a fact—a fact as to which there was seldom any concealment. Just as Moreto was drawing towards the end of his career as dramatist, a most intrepid plagiarist arose in the person of Matos Fragoso, of whom I shall have a word to say presently. But Matos Fragoso was sly, and a bungler: Moreto was frank, and a master of the gentle art of conveyance. He pilfers in all directions; but he manipulates the stolen goods almost out of recognition, usually adding much to their value. And this implies the possession of remarkable talent. In literature, as in politics, if he can only contrive to succeed, a man is pardoned for proceedings which in other callings might lead to jail: and Moreto’s success is triumphant. The germ of his play, _El lindo Don Diego_, is found in Guillén de Castro’s _El Narciso de su opinión_; but for Castro’s rough sketch Moreto substitutes a finished, final portrait of the insufferable, the fatuous snob who pays court to a countess, is as elated as a brewer when he marries her and fancies himself an aristocrat, but wakes up with a start to the reality of things on discovering that the supposed countess is the sharp little servant Beatriz who has seen through him all along, and has exhibited him in his true character as a born fool. Don Diego is always with us—in England now, as in Spain three centuries ago—and _El lindo Don Diego_ might have been written yesterday.