It Was Either My Misfortune That I Read
Lope And Not Calderon, Or That I Do Not Recall Reading Calderon At All,
And Know Him Only By A Charming Little Play Of Madrid Life Given Ten Or
Fifteen Years Ago By The Pupils Of The Dramatic Academy In New York.
My
lasting ignorance of this master was not for want of knowing how great
he was, especially from Lowell, who never failed to dwell on it when the
talk was of Spanish literature.
The fact is I did not get much pleasure
out of Lope, but I did enjoy the great tragedy of Cervantes, and such of
his comedies as I found in that massive volume.
I did not realize, however, till I saw that play of Calderon's, in New
York, how much the Spanish drama lias made Madrid its scene; and until
one knows modern Spanish fiction one cannot know how essentially the
incongruous city is the capital of the Spanish imagination. Of course
the action of Gil Bias largely passes there, but Gil Blas in only
adoptively a Spanish novel, and the native picaresque story is oftener
at home in the provinces; but since Spanish fiction has come to full
consciousness in the work of the modern masters it has resorted more and
more to Madrid. If I speak only of Galdos and Valdes by name, it is
because I know them best as the greatest of their time; but I fancy the
allure of the capital has been felt by every other modern more or less;
and if I were a Spanish author I should like to put a story there. If I
were a Spaniard at all, I should like to live there a part of the year,
or to come up for some sojourn, as the real Spaniards do. In such an
event I should be able to tell the reader more about Madrid than I now
know. I should not be poorly keeping to hotels and galleries and streets
and the like surfaces of civilization; but should be saying all sorts of
well-informed and surprising things about my fellow-citizens. As it is I
have tried somewhat to say how I think they look to a stranger, and if
it is not quite as they have looked to other strangers I do not insist
upon my own stranger's impression. There is a great choice of good books
about Spain, so that I do not feel bound to add to them with anything
like finality.
I have tried to give a sense of the grand-opera effect of the street
scene, but I have record of only one passage such as one often sees in
Italy where moments of the street are always waiting for transfer to the
theater. A pair had posed themselves, across the way from our hotel,
against the large closed shutter of a shop which made an admirable
background. The woman in a black dress, with a red shawl over her
shoulders, stood statuesquely immovable, confronting the middle-class
man who, while people went and came about them, poured out his mind to
her, with many frenzied gestures, but mostly using one hand for
emphasis.
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