He fails at the point where the convention is weakest. His _graciosos_ or drolls are too laboriously comic to be amusing. He has abundant wit, and the _discreteo_ of the lover and the lady is often brilliant. But there is some foundation for the taunt that he is interested only in fine gentlemen and _précieuses_. He had not lived in courts and palaces for nothing. The racy, rough humour of the illiterate clearly repelled his fastidious temper, and the fun of his _graciosos_ is unreal. This is what might be anticipated. It takes one cast in the mould of Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Lope, to sympathise with all conditions of men. Calderón fails in another point, and the failure is certainly very strange in a man of his meticulous refinement and social opportunities. With few exceptions, the women in his most famous plays are unattractive. A Spanish critic puts it strongly when he calls the women on Calderón’s stage _hombrunas_ or mannish. No foreign critic would be brave enough to say this, but it is not an unfair description. A man’s idea of a womanly woman is often quaint: he sees her as something between a white-robed angel and a perfect imbecile. That is not Calderón’s way. Doña Mencía in _El Médico de su honra_ and Doña Leonor in _Á secreto agravio secreta venganza_ are distinctly formidable, and, even in the cloak-and-sword plays, there is something masculine in the academic preciosity of the lively heroines. It is manifest that Calderón has no deep knowledge of feminine character, that his interest in it is assumed for stage purposes, and that his chief preoccupation is—not to portray idiosyncrasies, nor even types of womanhood, but—to make physical beauty the theme of his eloquent, poetic flights. In this he succeeds admirably, though his flights are apt to be too long. You probably know Suppico de Moraes’ story of Calderón’s acting before Philip IV. in an improvisation at the Buen Retiro, the poet taking the part of Adam, and Vélez de Guevara that of God the Father. Once started, Calderón declaimed and declaimed, and, when he came to an end at last, Vélez de Guevara took up the dialogue with the remark: ‘I repent me of creating so garrulous an Adam!’ Most probably the tale is an invention,[104] but it is not without point, for Philip and the rest would have been a match for Job, if they had never been bored with the favourite’s tirades. Like most Spaniards, Calderón is too copious; but in lyrical splendour he is unsurpassed by any Spanish poet, and is surpassed by few poets in any language. Had he added more frequent touches of nature to his idealised presentations, he would rank with the greatest dramatists in the world.