With all the skill spent on their construction, these tragedies do not move us deeply, and they would fail to interest, if it were not that they embody the accepted ideas concerning the point of honour in Spain during the seventeenth century. It is most difficult for us to see things as a Spaniard then saw them. He began by assuming that any personal insult could only be washed away by the blood of the offender: a man is killed in fair fight in a duel, but the survivors of the slain must slay the slayer. Modern Europe, as Chorley wrote more than half a century ago, has nothing like this, ‘except the terrible Corsican _vendetta_.’ And, as stated by the same great authority—the greatest we have ever had on all relating to the Spanish stage—‘beneath the unbounded devotion which the Castilian professed to the sex, lay a conviction of their absolute and universal frailty.’ In Spanish eyes ‘no woman’s purity,’ Chorley continues, ‘was safe but in absolute seclusion from men:—guilt was implied and honour lost in every case where the risk of either was possible,—nay, even had accident thrown into a temptation a lady whose innocence was proved to her master, the appearance of crime to the world’s eye must be washed out in her blood.’ It has often been said that, in Calderón, ‘honour’ is what destiny is in the Greek drama. This code of honour seems to many of us immoral nonsense, and it is difficult to suppose that Friedrich von Schlegel had _El Médico de su honra_ in mind when he declared Calderón to be ‘in all conditions and circumstances the most Christian ... of dramatic poets.’ It is hard to imagine anything more unchristian than the conduct of Don Gutierre Alfonso Solís which is held up for approval; but no doubt it was approved by contemporary playgoers. In this glorification of punctilio Calderón is thoroughly representative. He reproduces the conventional ideas which obtained for a certain time, in certain complicated conditions, in a certain latitude and longitude. This local verisimilitude, which contributed to his immediate success, now constitutes a limitation. The dramatist may be true to life, in so far as he presents temporary aspects of it with fidelity; he is not true to universal nature, and therefore he makes no permanent appeal. This, or something like it, has been said a thousand times, and, I think, with good reason. Still, it leaves Calderón where he was as the spokesman of his age.