ABSTRACT
TWO accusations, in appearance at least contradictory, have been brought against the Spaniards of different
ages. They have been charged with carrying chivalry ad absurdum, by preserving the form rather than the substance and by indulging a foolish, almost hysterical sensitiveness where the point of honour is concerned, and also with despising the more practical and humble virtues of social value. Their critics point to the conceptions expressed in the later Spanish drama, more especially in the dramas of jealousy and blood of Calderon, which repel the average modern reader and make it difficult for him to appreciate the artistic effectiveness of these plays.1 In reply we may say that these conceptions, far from being originally Spanish, represent a revival of the ideas of the scholastic moralists of an earlier age,2 and that the purpose of this machinery was not a representation of reality, but rather the use (or misuse) of a subject in itself dramatic, for purely resthetic ends. Calderon himself was conscious of the difficulty when he wrote the lines:-
(" Oh mad laws of the world I That a man who did everything he could for his honour, yet should not know if it has suffered! ... ")
The other accusation is more significant and perhaps more difficult to rebut. It is said that the Spaniards destroyed their
chivalry by prosaic commonsense, by ridiculing institutions and ideas of which they seemed only to notice the grotesque manifestations, forgetting the noble origin of these ideas and their value as an inspiration at all times. Everyonc knows that this attitude is commonly associated with the greatest of Spanish writers, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, in whose mind two eternal types took root, the two extreme forces which act on the Spanish character and which in their incarnations are called Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
