Chastised, I know The depth to which ambition falls; too mad Was the attempt, and yet more mad were now Repentance of the irrevocable deed:— Therefore I chose this ruin with the glory Of not to be subdued, before the shame Of reconciling me with him who reigns By coward cession.
It was once the fashion to praise Calderón chiefly as a philosophic dramatist, and it may be that to this philosophic quality his plays owe much of the vogue which they once enjoyed—and which, in a much less degree, they still enjoy—in Germany. As it happens, only two of Calderón’s plays can be classified as philosophic—_La Vida es sueño_ and _En esta vida todo es verdad y todo es mentira_—and, with respect to the latter, a question arises as to its originality. French writers have maintained that _En esta vida_ is taken from Corneille’s _Héraclius_, while Spaniards argue that Corneille’s play is taken from Calderón’s. On _a priori_ grounds we should be tempted to admit the Spanish contention, for Corneille was—I do not wish to put the point too strongly—more given to borrowing from Spain than to lending to contemporary Spanish playwrights. But there is the awkward fact that _Héraclius_ dates from 1647, whereas _En esta vida_ was not printed till 1664. This is not decisive, for we have seen that Calderón was not interested enough in his secular plays to print them, and we gather incidentally that _En esta vida_ was being rehearsed at Madrid by Diego Osorio’s company in February 1659. How much earlier it was written, we cannot say at present. The idea that Calderón borrowed from the French cannot be scouted as impossible, for Corneille’s _Cid_ was adapted by Diamante in 1658.[102] Perhaps both Calderón and Corneille drew upon Mira de Amescua’s _Rueda de la fortuna_—a play which, as we know from Lope de Vega’s letter belittling _Don Quixote_, was written in 1604, or earlier. But, whichever explanation we accept, Calderón’s originality is compromised. With all respect to the eminent authorities who have debated this question of priority, we may be allowed to think that they have shown unnecessary heat over a rather unimportant matter. Neither _Héraclius_ nor _En esta vida_ is a masterpiece, and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo holds that _En esta vida_ contains only one striking situation—the tenth scene in the First Act, when both Heraclio and Leonido claim to be the sons of Mauricio, and Astolfo refuses to state which of the two is mistaken:—