cannot be highly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remote ground, clean of all local coloring and association, such as is essential to the dramatist whose inspiration is poetical, and who therefore must reconcile the ideal with the real, by which reconciliation only can be produced the purest truth.  That, notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, his comedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of the breadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of his rich mind, and his superlative comic genius.

Of Alfieri’s twenty-two tragedies, three only are modern, and of these three the scene of one is in Spain.

Of the nine or ten tragedies of the foremost German dramatic poet, Schiller, three are German, “The Robbers,” “Intrigue and Love,” and “Wallenstein.”

Goethe’s highest dramas, “Iphigenia,” “Egmont,” “Torquato Tasso,” are all foreign in clothing.  “The Natural Daughter” has no local habitation, no dependence on time or place.  “Goetz von Berlichingen,” written in Goethe’s earliest days of authorship, is German and in prose, “Faust”—­the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivaling the greatest poems of all time—­“Faust” is not strictly a drama:  its wonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramatic necessity.

The drama of Spain, like the comedies of Moliere, is an exception to the rule we deduce from the practice of other dramatists; but it is an exception which, like that of Moliere, confirms the rule.  Unlike the ancient Greek and the French tragic poets, unlike Schiller, Shakespeare, Goethe, Alfieri, the Spanish dramatists do not aim at ideal humanity.  The best of them, Calderon, is so intensely Spanish and Romish, as to be, in comparison with the breadth and universality of his eminent compeers above named, almost provincial.  His personages are not large and deep enough to be representative.  The manifold recesses of great minds he does not unveil; he gets no deeper than the semi-barbarous exaggerations of selfish, passionate love; of revenge, honor, and jealousy.  His characterization is weak.  His highest characters lack intellectual calibre, and are exhibited in lyrical one-sidedness rather than dramatic many-sidedness.  He is mostly content with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled by the conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which have already passed away even in Spain.  He is a marvelously fertile, skillful, poetic playwright.

Thus we perceive that, with poetic dramatists, the prevailing practice is, to look abroad for fables.  Moreover, in the cases where these were drawn from the bosom of the poet’s own people, he shuns the present, and hies as far back as he can into the dark abysms of time, as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear.  The Greek tragic poets, having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era of Greece.  The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that of place as well as that of time; and he must have one or the other.