Unfortunately these stage devices—these concealed lovers, these muffled mistresses, these houses with two doors, these walls with invisible cupboards, these compromising letters wrongly addressed—were precisely what appealed to the unthinking section of the public, and they were also the characteristics most easily reproduced by imitators in search of a short cut to success. Other circumstances combined to make Calderón the head of a dramatic school. Except in invention and in brilliant facility the dramatists of Lope’s time were not greatly inferior to the master. In certain qualities Tirso de Molina and Ruiz de Alarcón are superior to him: Tirso in force and in malicious humour, Ruiz de Alarcón in depth and in artistic finish. There is no such approach to equality between Calderón and the men of his group. No strikingly original dramatic genius appeared during his long life, extending over three literary generations. He himself had made no new departure, no radical innovation; he took over the dramatic form as Lope had left it, and, by focussing its common traits, he established a series of conventions—a conventional conception of loyalty, honour, love and jealousy. The stars in their courses fought for him. He was equally popular at court and with the multitude, pleasing the upper rabble by his glittering intrigue and dexterous _discreteo_, pleasing the lower rabble by his melodramatic incident and the mechanical humour of his _graciosos_, pleasing both high and low by his lofty Catholicism and passionate devotion to the throne. Though not in any real sense more Spanish than Lope de Vega, Calderón seems to be more intensely national, for he reduced the _españolismo_ of his age to a formula. Out of the plays of Lope and of Tirso, he evolved a hard-and-fast method of dramatic presentation. He came at a time when it was impossible to do more. All that could be done by those who came after him was to emphasise the convention which, by dint of constant repetition, he had converted into something like an imperative theory.