CHAPTER IX

THE AGE OF LOPE DE VEGA

1598-1621

The death of Felipe II. in 1598 closes an epoch in the history of Castilian letters. Not merely has the Italian influence triumphed definitively: the chivalresque romance has well-nigh run its course; while mysticism and the pastoral have achieved expression and acceptance. Moreover, the most important of all developments is the establishment of the stage at Madrid in the Teatro de la Cruz and in the Teatro del Príncipe. There is evidence to prove that theatres were also built at Valencia, at Seville, and possibly at Granada. Nor was a foreign impulse lacking. Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_ records the invasion of England by Italian actors:—

"_The Italian tragedians were so sharp of wit, That in one hour's meditation They could perform anything in action._"

In like wise the famous Alberto Ganasa and his Italian histrions revealed the art of acting to the Spains. Thenceforth every province is overrun by mummers, as may be read in the _Viaje entretenido_ (1603) of Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, who denotes, with mock-solemn precision, the nine professional grades.

There was the solitary stroller, the _bululú_, tramping from village to village, declaiming short plays to small audiences, called together by the sacristan, the barber, and the parish priest, who—_pidiendo limosna en un sombrero_—passed round the hat, and sped the vagabond with a slice of bread and a cup of broth. A pair of strollers (such as Rojas himself and his colleague Ríos) was styled a _ñaque_, and did no more than spout simple _entremeses_ in the open. The _cangarilla_ was on a larger scale, numbering three or four actors, who gave Timoneda's _Oveja Perdida_, or some comic piece wherein a boy played the woman's part. Five men and a woman made up the _carambaleo_, which performed in farmhouses for such small wages as a loaf of bread, a bunch of grapes, a stew of cabbage; but higher fees were asked in larger villages—six _maravedís_, a piece of sausage, a roll of flax, and what not. Though "a spider could carry" its properties, says Rojas, yet the _carambaleo_ contrived to fill the bill with a set piece, or two _autos_, or four _entremeses_. More pretentious was the _garnacha_, with its six men, its "leading lady," and a boy who played the _ingénue_. With four set plays, three _autos_, and three _entremeses_ it would draw a whole village for a week. A large choice of pieces was within the means of the seven men, two women, and a boy that made up the _bojiganga_, which journeyed from town to town on horseback. Next in rank came the _farándula_, the stepping-stone to the lofty _compañía_ of sixteen players, with fourteen "supers," capable of producing fifty pieces at short notice. To such a troupe, no doubt, belonged the Toledan Naharro, famous as an interpreter of the bully, and as the foremost of Spanish stage-managers. "He still further enriched theatrical adornment, substituting chests and trunks for the costume-bag. Into the body of the house he brought the musicians, who had hitherto sung behind the blanket. He did away with the false beards which till then actors had always worn, and he made all play without a make-up, save those who performed old men's parts, or such characters as implied a change of appearance. He introduced machinery, clouds, thunder, lightning, duels, and battles; but this reached not the perfection of our day."

This is the testimony of the most renowned personality in Castilian literature. MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA (1547-1616) describes himself as a native of Alcalá de Henares, in a legal document signed at Madrid on December 18, 1580: the long dispute as to his birthplace is thus at last settled. His stock was pure Castilian, its _solar_ being at Cervatos, near Reinosa: the connection with Galicia is no older than the fourteenth century. His family surname of Cervantes probably comes from the castle of San Cervantes, beyond Toledo, which was named after the Christian martyr Servandus. The additional name of Saavedra is not on the title-page of the writer's first book, the _Galatea_. However, Miguel de Cervantes uses the Saavedra in a petition addressed to Pope Gregory XIII. and Felipe II. in October 1578; and, as Cervantes was not then, though it is now, an uncommon name, the addition served to distinguish the author from contemporary clansmen. He was the second (though not, as heretofore believed, the youngest) son of Rodrigo de Cervantes Saavedra and of Leonor Cortinas. Of the mother we know nothing: garrulous as was her famous son, he nowhere alludes to her, nor did he follow the usual Spanish practice by adding her surname to his own. The father was a licentiate—of laws, so it is conjectured. Research only yields two facts concerning him: that he was incurably deaf, and that he was poor.

Cervantes' birthday is unknown. He was baptized at the Church of Santa María Mayor, in Alcalá de Henares, on Sunday, October 9, 1547. One Tomás González asserted that he had found Cervantes' name in the matriculation lists of Salamanca University; but the entry has never been verified since, and its report lacks probability. If Cervantes ever studied at any university, we should expect to find him at that of his native town, Alcalá de Henares. His name does not appear in the University calendar. Though he made his knowledge go far, he was anything but learned, and college witlings bantered him for having no degree. No information exists concerning his youth. He is first mentioned in 1569, when a Madrid dominie, Juan López de Hoyos, speaks of him as "our dear and beloved pupil"; and some conjecture that he was an usher in Hoyos' school. His earliest literary performance is discovered (1569) in a collection of verses on the death of Felipe II.'s third wife. The volume, edited by Hoyos, is entitled the _Historia y relación verdadera de la enfermedad, felicísimo tránsito y suntuosas exequias fúnebres de la Serenísima Reina de España, Doña Isabel de Valois_. Cervantes' contributions are an epitaph in sonnet form, five _redondillas_, and an elegy of one hundred and ninety-nine lines: this last being addressed to Cardinal Diego de Espinosa in the name of the whole school—_en nombre de todo el estudio_. These poor pieces are reproduced solely because Cervantes wrote them: it is very doubtful if he ever saw them in print. He is alleged to have been guilty of _lèse-majesté_ in Hurtado de Mendoza's fashion; but this is surmise, as is also a pendant story of his love passages with a Maid of Honour. It is certain that, on September 15, 1569, a warrant was signed for the arrest of one Miguel de Cervantes, who was condemned to lose his right hand for wounding Antonio de Sigura in the neighbourhood of the Court. There is nothing to prove that our man was the culprit; but if he were, he had already got out of jurisdiction. Joining the household of the Special Nuncio, Giulio Acquaviva, he left Madrid for Rome as the Legate's chamberlain in the December of 1568.

He was not the stuff of which chamberlains are made; and in 1570 he enlisted in the company commanded by Diego de Urbina, captain in Miguel de Moncada's famous infantry regiment, at that time serving under Marc Antonio Colonna. It is worth noting that the _Galatea_ is dedicated to Marc Antonio's son, Ascanio Colonna, Abbot of St. Sophia. In 1571 Cervantes fought at Lepanto, where he was twice shot in the chest and had his left hand maimed for life: "for the greater honour of the right," as he loved to think and say with justifiable vainglory. That he never tired of vaunting his share in the great victory is shown by his frequent allusions to it in his writings; and it should almost seem that he was prouder of his nickname—the Cripple of Lepanto—than of writing _Don Quixote_. He served in the engagements before Navarino, Corfu, Tunis, the Goletta; and in all he bore himself with credit. Returning to Italy, he seems to have learned the language, for traces of Italian idioms are not rare even in his best pages. From Naples he sailed for Spain in September 1575, with recommendatory letters from Don Juan de Austria and from the Neapolitan Viceroy. On September 26, his caravel, the _Sol_, was attacked by Moorish pirates, and, after a brave resistance, all on board were carried as prisoners into Algiers. There for five years Cervantes abode as a slave, writing plays between the intervals of his plots to escape, striving to organise a general rising of the thousands of Christians. Being the most dangerous, because the most heroic of them all, he became, in some sort, the chief of his fellows, and, after the failure of several plans for flight, was held hostage by the Dey for the town's safety. His release was due to accident. On September 19, 1580, the Redemptorist, Fray Juan Gil, offered five hundred gold ducats as the ransom of a private gentleman named Jerónimo Palafox. The sum was held insufficient to redeem a man of Palafox's position; but it sufficed to set free Cervantes, who was already shipped on the Dey's galley bound for Constantinople.[16] He is found at Madrid on December 19, 1580, and it is surmised that he served in Portugal and at the Azores. There are rumours of his holding some small post at Oran: however that may be, he returned to Spain, at latest, in the autumn of 1582. And henceforth he belongs to literature.

The plays written at Algiers are lost; but there survive two sonnets of the same period dedicated to Rufino de Chamberí (1577). A rhymed epistle to the Secretary of State, Mateo Vázquez, also belongs to this time. We must suppose Cervantes to have written copiously on regaining his liberty, since Gálvez de Montalvo speaks of him as a poet of repute in the _Pastor de Fílida_ (1582); but the earliest signs of him in Spain are his eulogistic sonnets in Padilla's _Romancero_ and Rufo Gutiérrez' _Austriada_, both published in 1583. Padilla repaid the debt by classing the sonneteer among "the most famous poets of Castile." In December 1584, Cervantes married Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a native of Esquivias, eighteen years younger than himself. It is often said that he wrote the _Galatea_ as a means of furthering his suit. It may be so. But the book was not printed by Juan Gracián of Alcalá de Henares till March 1585, though the _aprobación_ and the privilege are dated February 1 and February 22, 1584. In the year after his marriage, Cervantes' illegitimate daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was born. We shall have occasion to refer to her later. Our immediate concern is with the _Primera Parte de Galatea_, an unfinished pastoral novel in six books, for which Cervantes received 1336 _reales_ from Blas de Robles; a sum which, with his wife's small dowry, enabled him to start housekeeping.[17] As a financial speculation the _Galatea_ failed: only two later editions appeared during the writer's lifetime, one at Lisbon in 1590, the other at Paris in 1611. Neither could have brought him money; but the book, if it did nothing else, served to make him known.

He trimmed his sails to the popular breeze. Montemôr had started the pastoral fashion, Pérez and Gaspar Gil Polo had followed, and Gálvez de Montalvo maintained the tradition. Later in life, in the _Coloquio de los Perros_ (Dialogue of the Dogs), Cervantes made his Berganza say that all pastorals are "vain imaginings, void of truth, written to amuse the idle"; yet it may be doubted if Cervantes ever lost the pastoral taste, though his sense of humour forced him to see the absurdity of the convention. It is very certain that he had a special fondness for the _Galatea_: he spared it at the burning of Don Quixote's library, praised its invention, and made the Priest exhort the Barber to await the sequel which is foreshadowed in the _Galatea's_ text. This is again promised in the Dedication of the volume of plays (1615), in the Prologue to the Second Part of _Don Quixote_ (1615), and in the Letter Dedicatory of _Persiles y Sigismunda_, signed on the writer's deathbed, April 19, 1616. For thirty-one years Cervantes held out the promise of the _Galatea's_ Second Part: five times did he repeat it. It is plain that he thought well of the First, and that his liking for the _genre_ was incorrigible.

His own attempt survives chiefly because of the name on its title-page. Pastorals differ little in essentials, and the kind offers few openings to Cervantes' peculiar humoristic genius. Like his fellow-practitioners, he crowds his stage with figures: he presents his shepherds Elicio and Erastro warbling their love for Galatea on Tagus bank; he reveals Mirenio enamoured of Silveria, Leonarda love-sick for Salercio, Lenio in the toils of Gelasia. Hazlitt, in his harsh criticism of Sidney's _Arcadia_, hits the defects of the pastoral, and his censures may be justly applied to the _Galatea_. There, as in the English book, we find the "original sin of alliteration, antithesis, and metaphysical conceit"; there, too, is the "systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom, and everlasting impertinence of the writer." Worst of all are "the continual, uncalled-for interruptions, analysing, dissecting, disjointing, murdering everything, and reading a pragmatical, self-sufficient lecture over the dead body of nature." But if Cervantes sins in this wise, he sins of set purpose and in good company. In his Fourth Book, he interpolates a long disquisition on the Beautiful which he calmly annexes from Judas Abarbanel's _Dialoghi_. As Sannazaro opens his _Arcadia_ with Ergasto and Selvaggio, so Cervantes thrusts his Elicio and Erastro into the foreground of the _Galatea_; the funeral of Meliso is a deliberate imitation of the Feast of Pales; and, as the Italian introduced Carmosina Bonifacia under the name of Amaranta, the Spaniard perforce gives Catalina de Palacios Salazar as Galatea. Nor does he depart from the convention by placing himself upon the scene as Elicio, for Ribeiro and Montemôr had preceded him in the characters of Bimnardel and Sereno. Lastly, the idea and the form of the _Canto de Calíope_, wherein the uncritical poet celebrates whole tribes of contemporary singers, are borrowed from the _Canto del Turia_, which Gil Polo had interpolated in his _Diana_.

Prolixity, artifice, ostentation, monotony, extravagance, are inherent in the pastoral school; and the _Galatea_ savours of these defects. Yet, for all its weakness, it lacks neither imagination nor contrivance, and its embroidered rhetoric is a fine example of stately prose. Save, perhaps, in the _Persiles y Sigismunda_, Cervantes never wrote with a more conscious effort after excellence, and, in results of absolute style, the _Galatea_ may compare with all but exceptional passages in _Don Quixote_. Yet it failed to please, and the author turned to other fields of effort. His verses in Pedro de Padilla's _Jardín Espiritual_ (1585) and in López Maldonado's _Cancionero_ (1586) denote good-nature and a love of literature; and in both volumes Cervantes may have read companion-pieces written by a marvellous youth, Lope de Vega, whom he had already praised—as he praised everybody—in the _Canto de Calíope_. He could not foresee that in the person of this boy he was to meet his match and more. Meanwhile in 1587 he penned sonnets for Padilla's _Grandezas y Excelencias de la Virgen_, and for Alonso de Barros' _Filosofía cortesana_. Verse-making was his craze; and, in 1588, when the physician, Francisco Díaz, published a treatise on kidney disease—_Tratado nuevamente impreso acerca de las enfermedades de los riñones_—the unwearied poetaster was forthcoming with a sonnet pat to the strange occasion.

Still, though he cultivated verse with as sedulous a passion as Don Quixote spent on Knight-Errantries, he recognised that man does not live by sonneteering alone, and he tried his fate upon the boards. He died with the happy conviction that he was a dramatist of genius; his contemporaries ruled the point against him, and posterity has upheld the decision. He tells us that at this time he wrote between twenty and thirty plays. We only know the titles of a few among them—the _Gran Turquesca_, the _Jerusalén_, the _Batalla Naval_ (attributed by Moratín to the year 1584), the _Amaranta_ and the _Bosque Amoroso_ (referred to 1586), the _Arsinda_ and the _Confusa_ (to 1587). It is like enough that the _Batalla Naval_ was concerned with Lepanto, a subject of which Cervantes never tired; the _Arsinda_ existed so late as 1673, when Juan de Matos Fragoso mentioned it as "famous" in his _Corsaria Catalana_; and our author himself ranked the _Confusa_ as "good among the best." The touch of self-complacency is amusing, though one might desire a better security than Bardolph's.

Two surviving plays of the period are _El Trato de Argel_ and _La Numancia_, first printed by Antonio de Sancha in 1784. The former deals with the life of the Christian slaves in Algiers, and recounts the passion of Zara the Moor for the captive Aurelio, who is enamoured of Silvia. We must assume that Cervantes thought well of this invention, since he utilised it some thirty years later in _El Amante Liberal_; but the play is merely futile. The introduction of a lion, of the Devil, and of such abstractions as Necessity and Opportunity, is as poor a piece of machinery as theatre ever saw; the versification is rough and creaking, improvised without care or conscience; the situations are arranged with a glaring disregard for truth and probability. Like Paolo Veronese, Cervantes could rarely resist the temptation of painting himself into his canvas, and in _El Trato de Argel_ he takes care that the prisoner Saavedra should declaim his tirade. The piece has no dramatic interest, and is valuable merely as an over-coloured picture of vicissitudes by one who knew them at first-hand, and who presented them to his countrymen with a more or less didactic intention. Yet, even as a transcript of manners, this luckless play is a failure.

A finer example of Cervantes' dramatic power is the _Numancia_, on which Shelley has passed this generous judgment:—"I have read the _Numancia_, and, after wading through the singular stupidity of the First Act, began to be greatly delighted, and at length interested in a very high degree, by the power of the writer in awakening pity and admiration, in which I hardly know by whom he is excelled. There is little, I allow, to be called _poetry_ in this play; but the command of language and the harmony of versification is so great as to deceive one into an idea that it is poetry." Nor is Shelley alone in his admiration. Goethe's avowal to Humboldt is on record:—"Sogar habe ich ... neulich das Trauerspiel _Numancia_ von Cervantes mit vielem Vergnügen gelesen;" but eight years later he confided a revised judgment to Riemer. The gushing school of German Romantics waxed delirious in praise. Thus Friedrich Schlegel surpassed himself by calling the play "godlike"; and August Schlegel, not content to hold it for a dramatic masterpiece, would persuade us to accept it for great poetry. Even Sismondi declares that "le frisson de l'horreur et de l'effroi devient presque un supplice pour le spectateur."

Raptures apart, the _Numancia_ is Cervantes' best play. He has a grandiose subject: the siege of Numantia, and its capture by Scipio Africanus after fourteen years of resistance. On the Roman side were eighty thousand soldiers; the Spaniards numbered four thousand or less; and the victors entered the fallen city to find no soul alive. With scenes of valour is mingled the pathetic love-story of Morandro and Lyra. But, once again, Cervantes fails as a dramatic artist; one doubts if he knew what a plot was, what unity of conception meant. He has scenes and episodes of high excellence, but they are detached from the main composition, and produce all the bad effect of a portrait painted in different lights. Abstractions fill the stage—War, Sickness, Hunger, Spain, the river Duero. But the tirades of rhetoric are unsurpassed by anything from Cervantes' pen, and Marquino's scene with the corpse in the Second Act is pregnant with a suggestion of weirdness which Mr. Gibson has well conveyed:—

Marquino.

"_What! Dost not answer? Dost not live again, Or haply hast thou tasted death once more? Then will I quicken thee anew with pain, And for thy good the gift of speech restore. Since thou art one of us, do not disdain To speak and answer, as I now implore;... Ye spirits vile, it worketh not ye trust! But wait, for soon the enchanted water here Will show my will to be as strong and just As yours is treacherous and insincere. And though this flesh were turned to very dust, Yet being quickened by this lash austere, Which cuts with cruel rigour like a knife, It will regain a new though fleeting life. Thou rebel soul, seek now the home again Thou leftest empty these few hours ago._

The Body.

_Restrain the fury of thy reckless pain; Suffice it, O Marquino, man of woe, What I do suffer in the realms obscure, Nor give me pangs more fearful to endure. Thou errest, if thou thinkest that I crave This painful, pinched, and narrow life I have, Which even now is ebbing fast away,... Since Death a second time, with bitter sway, Will triumph over me in life and soul, And gain a double palm, beyond control. For he and others of the dismal band, Who do thy bidding subject to thy spell, Are raging round and round, and waiting stand, Till I shall finish what I have to tell.... The Romans ne'er shall victory obtain O'er proud Numantia; still less shall she A glorious triumph o'er her foemen gain; 'Twixt friends and foes, both have to a degree, Think not that settled peace shall ever reign Where rage meets rage in strife eternally. The friendly hand, with homicidal knife, Will slay Numantia and will give her life._ [He hurls himself into the sepulchre, and says:— _I say no more, Marquino, time is fleet; The Fates will grant to me no more delay, And, though my words may seem to thee deceit, Thou'lt find at last the truth of what I say._"

Even in translation—still more in the original—the rhetoric of this passage is imposing; yet we perceive rhetoric to be contagious when Ticknor asserts that "there is nothing of so much dignity in the incantations of Marlowe's _Faustus_." Still more amazing is Ticknor's second appreciation:—"Nor does even Shakspeare demand from us a sympathy so strange with the mortal head reluctantly rising to answer Macbeth's guilty question, as Cervantes makes us feel for this suffering spirit, recalled to life only to endure a second time the pangs of dissolution." The school is decently interred which mistook critics for Civil Service Commissioners, and Parnassus for Burlington House. It is impossible to compare Cervantes' sonorous periods and Marlowe's majestic eloquence, nor is it less unwise to match his moving melodrama against one of the greatest tragedies in the world. His great scene has its own merit as an artificial embellishment, as a rhetorical adornment, as an exercise in bravura; but the episode is not only out of place where it is found—it leads from nowhere to nothing. More dramatic in spirit and effect is the speech declaimed by Scipio when the last Numantian, Viriato, hurls himself from the tower:—

"_O matchless action, worthy of the meed Which old and valiant soldiers love to gain! Thou hast achieved a glory by thy deed, Not only for Numantia, but for Spain! Thy valour strange, heroical in deed, Hath robbed me of my rights, and made them vain; For with thy fall thou hast upraised thy fame, And levelled down my victories to shame! Oh, could Numantia gain what she hath lost, I would rejoice, if but to see thee there! For thou hast reaped the gain and honour most Of this long siege, illustrious and rare! Bear thou, O stripling, bear away the boast, Enjoy the glory which the Heavens prepare, For thou hast conquered, by thy very fall, Him who in rising falleth worst of all._"

Here, once more, we are dealing with a passage which gains by detachment from its context. To speak plainly, the interest of the _Numancia_ is not dramatic, and its versification, good of its kind, may easily be overpraised, as it was by Shelley. First and last, the play is a devout and passionate expression of patriotism; and, as such, the writer's countrymen have held it in esteem, never claiming for it the qualities invented by well-meaning foreigners. Lope de Vega and Calderón still hold the stage, from which Cervantes, the disciple of Virués, was driven three centuries ago; and they survive, the one as an hundredfold more potent dramatist, the other as an infinitely greater poet. Yet, like the ghost raised by Marquino, Cervantes was to undergo a momentary resurrection. When Palafox (and Byron's Maid) held Zaragoza, during the War of Independence, against the batteries of Mortier, Junot, and Lannes, the _Numancia_ was played within the besieged walls, so that Spaniards of the nineteenth century might see that their fathers had known how to die for freedom. The tragedy was received with enthusiasm; the marshals of the world's Greatest Captain were repulsed and beaten; and Cervantes' inspiriting lines helped on the victory. In life, he had never met with such a triumph, and in death no other could have pleased him better.

He asserts, indeed, that his plays were popular, and he may have persuaded himself into that belief. His idolaters preach the legend that he was driven from the boards by that "portent of genius," Lope de Vega. This tale is a vain imagining. Cervantes failed so wretchedly in art that in 1588 he left the Madrid stage to seek work in Seville; and no play of Lope's dates so early as that, save one written while he was at school. In June 1588, Cervantes became Deputy-Purveyor to the Invincible Armada, and in May 1590 he petitioned for one of four appointments vacant in Granada, Guatemala, Cartagena, and La Paz. But he never quite abandoned literature. In 1591 he wrote a _romance_ for Andrés de Villalba's _Flor de varios y nuevos romances_, and, in the following year, he contracted with the Seville manager, Rodrigo Osorio, to write six comedies at fifty ducats each—no money to be paid unless Osorio should rank the plays "among the best in Spain." No more is heard of this agreement, and Cervantes disappears till 1594, when he was appointed tax-gatherer in Granada. Next year he competed at a literary tournament held by the Dominicans of Zaragoza in honour of St. Hyacinth, and won the first prize—three silver spoons. His sonnet to the famous sea-dog, Santa Cruz, is printed in Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa's _Comentario en breve Compendio de Disciplina militar_ (1596), and his bitter sonnet on Medina Sidonia's entry into Cádiz, already sacked and evacuated by Essex, is of the same date.

In 1597, being in Seville about the time of Herrera's death, Cervantes wrote his sonnet in memory of the great Andalucían. In September of this year the sonneteer was imprisoned for irregularities in his accounts, due to his having entrusted Government funds to one Simón Freire de Lima, who absconded with the booty. Released some three months later, Cervantes was sent packing by the Treasury, and was never more employed in the public service. Lost, as it seemed, to hope and fame, the ruined man lingered at Seville, where, in 1598, he wrote two sonnets and a copy of _quintillas_ on Felipe II.'s death. Four years of silence were followed by the inevitable sonnet in the second edition of Lope de Vega's _Dragontea_ (1602). It is certain that all this while Cervantes was scribbling in some naked garret; but his name seemed almost forgotten from the earth. In 1603 he was run to ground, and served with an Exchequer writ concerning those outstanding balances, still unpaid after nearly eight years. He must appear in person at Valladolid to offer what excuse he might. Light as his baggage was, it contained one precious, immediate jewel—the manuscript of _Don Quixote_. The Treasury soon found that to squeeze money from him was harder than to draw blood from a stone: the debt remained unsettled. But his journey was not in vain. On his way to Valladolid, he found a publisher for _Don Quixote_. The Royal Privilege is dated September 26, 1604, and in January 1605 the book was sold at Madrid across the counter of Francisco de Robles, bookseller to the King. Cervantes dedicated his volume, in terms boldly filched from Herrera and Medina, to the Duque de Béjar. In a previous age the author's kinsman had anticipated the compliment by addressing a gloss of Jorge Manrique's _Coplas_ to Álvaro de Stúñiga, second Duque de Béjar.

It is difficult to say when _Don Quixote_ was written; later, certainly, than 1591, for it alludes to Bernardo de la Vega's _Pastor de Iberia_, published in that year. Legend says that the First Part was begun in gaol, and so Langford includes it in his _Prison Books and their Authors_. The only ground for the belief is a phrase in the Prologue which describes the work as "a dry, shrivelled, whimsical offspring ... just what might be begotten in a prison." This may be a mere figure of speech; yet the tradition persists that Cervantes wrote his masterpiece in the cellar of the Casa de Medrano at Argamasilla de Alba. Certain it is that Argamasilla is Don Quixote's native town. The burlesque verses at the end indicate precisely that "certain village in La Mancha, the name of which," says Cervantes dryly, "I have no desire to recall." Quevedo witnesses that the fact was accepted by contemporaries, and topography puts it beyond doubt. The manuscript passed through many hands before reaching the printer, Cuesta: whence a double mention of it before publication. The author of the _Pícara Justina_, who anticipated Cervantes' poor device of the _versos de cabo roto_—truncated rhymes—in _Don Quixote_, ranks the book beside the _Celestina_, _Lazarillo de Tormes_, and _Guzmán de Alfarache_; yet the _Pícara Justina_ was licensed on August 22, 1604. The title falls from a far more illustrious pen: in a private letter written on August 14, 1604, Lope de Vega observes that no budding poet "is so bad as Cervantes, none so silly as to praise _Don Quixote_." There will be occasion to return presently to this much-quoted remark.

Clearly the book was discussed, and not always approved, by literary critics some months before it was in print: but critics of all generations have been taught that their opinions go for nothing with the public, which persists in being amused against rules and dogmas. _Don Quixote_ carried everything before it: its vogue almost equalled that of _Guzmán de Alfarache_, and by July a fifth edition was preparing at Valencia. Cervantes has told us his purpose in plain words:—"to diminish the authority and acceptance that books of chivalry have in the world and among the vulgar." Yet his own avowal is rejected. Defoe averred that _Don Quixote_ was a satire on Medina Sidonia; Landor applauded the book as "the most dexterous attack ever made against the worship of the Virgin"; and such later crocheteers as Rawdon Brown have industriously proved Sancho Panza to be Pedro Franqueza, and the whole novel to be a burlesque on contemporary politics.[18]

Cervantes was unlucky in life, nor did his misfortunes end with his days. Posthumous idolatry seeks to atone for contemporary neglect, and there has come into being a tribe of ignorant fakirs, assuming the title of "Cervantophils," and seeking to convert a man of genius into a common Mumbo-Jumbo. A master of invention, a humourist beyond compare, an expert in ironic observation, a fellow meet for Shakespeare's self: all that suffices not for these fanatical dullards. Their deity must be accepted also as a poet, a philosophic thinker, a Puritan tub-thumper, a political reformer, a finished scholar, a purist in language, and—not least amazing—an ascetic in private morals. A whole shelf might be filled with works upon Cervantes the doctor, Cervantes the lawyer, the sailor, the geographer, and who knows what else? Like his contemporary Shakespeare, Cervantes took a peculiar interest in cases of dementia; and, in England and Spain, the afflicted have shown both authors much reciprocal attention. We must even take Cervantes as he was: a literary artist stronger in practice than in theory, great by natural faculty rather than by acquired accomplishment. His learning is naught, his reasonings are futile, his speculation is banal. In short passages he is one of the greatest masters of Castilian prose, clear, direct, and puissant: but he soon tires, and is prone to lapse into Italian idioms, or into irritating sentences packed with needless relatives. Cervantes lives not as a great practitioner in style, a sultan of epithet—though none could better him when he chose; nor is he potent as a purely intellectual influence. He is immortal by reason of his creative power, his imaginative resource, his wealth of invention, his penetrating vision, his inimitable humour, his boundless sympathy. Hence the universality of his appeal: hence the splendour of his secular renown.

It is certain that he builded better than he knew, and that not even he realised the full scope of his work: we know from Goethe that the maker has to be taught his own meaning. The contemporary allusions, the sly hits at foes, are mostly mysteries for us, though they amuse the laborious leisure of the commentator. Chivalresque romances are with last year's snows: but the interest of _Don Quixote_ abides for ever. Cervantes set out intending to write a comic short story, and the design grew under his hand till at length it included a whole Human Comedy. He himself was as near akin to Don Quixote as a man may be: he knew his chivalresque romances by heart, and accounted _Amadís de Gaula_ as "the very best contrived book of all those of that kind." Yet he has been accused by his own people of plotting his country's ruin, and has been held up to contempt as "the headsman and the ax of Spain's honour." Byron repeats the ridiculous taunt:—

"_Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his own country; seldom since that day Has Spain had heroes. While Romance could charm, The world gave ground before her bright array; And therefore have his volumes done such harm, That all their glory, as a composition, Was dearly purchased by his land's perdition._"

The chivalresque madness was well-nigh over when our author made his onset: he but hastened the end. After the publication of _Don Quixote_, no new chivalresque romance was written, and only one—the _Caballero del Febo_ (1617)—was reprinted. And the reason is obvious. It was not that Cervantes' work was merely destructive, that he was simply a clever artist in travesty: it was that he gave better than he took away, and that he revealed himself, not only to Spain, but to the world, as a great creative master, and an irresistible, because an universal, humourist.

There is endless discussion as to the significance of his masterpiece, and the acutest critics have uttered "great argument about it and about." That an allegory of human life was intended is incredible. Cervantes presents the Ingenious Gentleman as the Prince of Courtesy, affable, gallant, wise on all points save that trifling one which annihilates Time and Space and changes the aspect of the Universe: and he attaches to him, Sancho, self-seeking, cautious, practical in presence of vulgar opportunities. The types are eternal. But it were too much to assume that there exists any conscious symbolic or esoteric purpose in the dual presentation. Cervantes is inspired solely by the artistic intention which would create personages, and would divert by abundance of ingenious fantasy, by sublimation of character, by wealth of episode and incident, and by the genius of satiric portraiture. He tessellates with whatsoever mosaic chances to strike his fancy. It may be that he inlays his work with such a typical sonnet as that which Mr. Gosse has transferred from the twenty-third chapter of _Don Quixote_ to _In Russet and Silver_—an excellent example, which shall be quoted here:—

"_When I was marked for suffering, Love forswore All knowledge of my doom: or else at ease Love grows a cruel tyrant, hard to please; Or else a chastisement exceeding sore A little sin hath brought me. Hush! no more! Love is a god! all things he knows and sees, And gods are bland and mild! Who then decrees The dreadful woe I bear and yet adore? If I should say, O Phyllis, that 'twas thou, I should speak falsely, since, being wholly good Like Heaven itself, from thee no ill may come. There is no hope; I must die shortly now, Not knowing why, since sure no witch hath brewed The drug that might avert my martyrdom._"

Hereunto the writer adds reminiscences of slavery, picaresque scenes observed during his vagabond life as tax-gatherer, tales of Italian intrigue re-echoed from Bandello, flouts at Lope de Vega, a treasure of adventures and experience, a strain of mockery both individual and general. Small wonder if the world received _Don Quixote_ with delight! There was nothing like unto it before: there has been nothing to eclipse it since. It ends one epoch and begins another: it intones the dirge of the mediæval novel: it announces the arrival of the new generations, and it belongs to both the past and the coming ages. At the point where the paths diverge, _Don Quixote_ stands, dominating the entire landscape of fiction. Time has failed to wither its variety or to lessen its force, and posterity accepts it as a masterpiece of humoristic fancy, of complete observation and unsurpassed invention. It ceases, in effect, to belong to Spain as a mere local possession, though nothing can deprive her of the glory of producing it. Cervantes ranks with Shakespeare and with Homer as a citizen of the world, a man of all times and countries, and _Don Quixote_, with _Hamlet_ and the _Iliad_, belongs to universal literature, and is become an eternal pleasaunce of the mind for all the nations.

Cervantes had his immediate reward in general acceptance. Reprints of his book followed in Spain, and in 1607 the original was reproduced at Brussels. The French teacher of Spanish, César Oudin, interpolated the tale of the _Curious Impertinent_ between the covers of Julio Iñíguez de Medrano's _Silva Curiosa_, published for the second time at Paris in 1608; in the same year Jean Baudouin did this story into French, and in 1609 an anonymous arrangement of Marcela's story was Gallicised as _Le Meurtre de la Fidélité et la Défense de l'Honneur_. This sufficed for fame: yet Cervantes made no instant attempt to repeat his triumph. For eight years he was silent, save for occasional copies of verse. The baptism of the future Felipe IV., and the embassy of Lord Nottingham—best known as Howard of Effingham, the admiral in command against the Invincible Armada—are recorded in courtly fashion by the anonymous writer of a pamphlet entitled _Relación de lo sucedido en la Ciudad de Valladolid_. Góngora, who dealt with both subjects, flouts Cervantes as the pamphleteer; but the authorship is doubtful. Cervantes is next heard of in custody on suspicion of knowing more than he chose to tell concerning the death of Gaspar de Ezpeleta, in June 1605. Legend makes Ezpeleta the lover of Cervantes' natural daughter, Isabel de Saavedra: "the point of honour" at once suggests itself, and the incident has inspired both dramatists and novelists. A conspiracy of silence on the part of biographers has done Cervantes much wrong, and is responsible for exaggerated stories of his guilt. He was discharged after inquiry, and seems to have been entirely innocent of contriving Ezpeleta's end. Many romantic stories have gathered about the personality of Isabel: she has been passed upon us as the daughter of a Portuguese "lady of high quality," and the prop of her father's declining days. These are idolatrous inventions: we now know for certain that her mother's name was Ana Franca de Rojas, a poor woman married to Alonso Rodríguez, and that the girl herself (who in 1605 was unable to read and write) was indentured as general servant to Cervantes' sister, Magdalena de Sotomayor, in August 1599.[19] Thence she passed to Cervantes' household, and it is even alleged that she was twice married in her father's lifetime. She has been so picturesquely presented by imaginative "Cervantophils," that it is necessary to state the humble truth here and now, for the first time in English. Thus the grotesque travesty of Cervantes as a plaster saint returns to the Father of Lies, who begat it. Confirmation of his exploits as a loose liver in gaming-houses is afforded by the _Memorias de Valladolid_, now among the manuscripts in the British Museum.[20]

Such diversions as these left him scant time for literature. The space between 1605 and 1608 yields the pitiful show of three sonnets in four years: _To a Hermit_, _To the Conde de Saldaña_, _To a Braggart turned Beggar_. Even this last is sometimes referred to Quevedo. It should hardly seem that prosperity suited Cervantes. Meanwhile, his womenfolk gained their bread by taking in the Marqués de Villafranca's sewing. Still, he made no sign: the author of _Don Quixote_ sank lower and lower, writing letters for illiterates at a small fee. The _Letter to Don Diego de Astudillo Carrillo_, the _Story of what happens in Seville Gaol_ (a sequel to Cristóbal de Chaves' sketch made twenty years before), the _Dialogue between Sillenia and Selanio_, the three _entremeses_ entitled _Doña Justina y Calahorra_, _Los Mirones_, and _Los Refranes_—all these are of doubtful authenticity. In April 1609, Cervantes took a thought and mended: he joined Fray Alonso de la Purificación's new Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, and in 1610 wrote his sonnet in memory of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. In 1611 he entered the Academia Selvaje, founded by that Francisco de Silva whose praises were sung later in the _Viaje del Parnaso_, and he prepared that unique compound of fact and fancy, the rarest humour and the most curious experience—his twelve _Novelas Exemplares_, which were licensed on August 8, 1612, and appeared in 1613.

These short tales were written at long intervals of time, as the internal evidence shows. In the forty-seventh chapter of _Don Quixote_ there is mention by name of _Rinconete y Cortadillo_, a picaresque story of extraordinary brilliancy and point included among the _Exemplary Novels_; and a companion piece is the _Coloquio de los Perros_, no less a masterpiece in little. Monipodio, master of a school for thieves; his pious jackal, Ganchuelo, who never steals on Friday; the tipsy Pipota, who reels as she lights her votive candle—these are triumphs in the art of portraiture. Not even Sancho Panza is wittier in reflection than the dog Berganza, who reviews his many masters in the light of humorous criticism. No less distinguished is the presentation, in _El Casamiento Engañoso_, of the picaroons Campuzano and Estefanía de Caicedo; and as an exercise in fantastic transcription of mania the _Licenciado Vidriera_ lags not behind _Don Quixote_. So striking is the resemblance that some have held the Licentiate for the first sketch of the Knight; but an attentive reading shows that he was not conceived till after _Don Quixote_ was in print. In 1814, Agustín García Arrieta included _La Tía fingida_ (The Mock Aunt) among Cervantes' novels, and, in a more complete form, it now finds place in all editions. Admirable as the story is, the circumstance of its late appearance throws doubt on its authenticity; yet who but Cervantes could have written it? Perhaps the surest sign of his success is afforded by the quality and number of his northern imitators.

"_The land that cast out Philip and his God Grew gladly subject where Cervantes trod._"

Despite assertions to the contrary, his _Gitanilla_ is no original conception, for the character of his gipsy, Preciosa, is developed from that of Tarsiana in the _Apolonio_; yet from Cervantes' rendering of her, which

"_Gave the glad watchword of the gipsies' life, Where fear took hope and grief took joy to wife,_"

and from his tale entitled _La Fuerza de la Sangre_, Middleton's _Spanish Gipsy_ derives. From Cervantes, too, Weber takes his opera _Preciosa_, and from Cervantes comes Hugo's _Esmeralda_. In _Las dos Doncellas_ Fletcher, who had already used _Don Quixote_ in the _Knight of the Burning Pestle_, finds the root of _Love's Pilgrimage_; from _El Casamiento Engañoso_ he takes his _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_; and from _La Señora Cornelia_ he borrows his _Chances_. And, as Fielding had rejoiced to own his debt to Cervantes, so Sir Walter has confessed that "the _Novelas_ of that author had first inspired him with the ambition of excelling in fiction."

The next performance shows Cervantes tempting fate as a poet. His _Viaje del Parnaso_ (1614) was suggested by the _Viaggio di Parnaso_ (1582) of the Perugian, Cesare Caporali, and is, in effect, a rhymed review of contemporary poets. Verse is scarcely a lucky medium for Cervantic irony, and Cervantes was the least critical of men. His poem is interesting for its autobiographic touches, but it degenerates into a mere stream of eulogy, and when he ventures on an attack he rarely delivers it with force or point. He thought, perhaps, to put down bad poets as he had put down bad prose-writers. But there was this difference, that, though admirable in prose, he was not admirable in verse. In the use of the first weapon he is an expert; in the practice of the second he is a clever amateur. Cervantes satirising in prose and Cervantes satirising in verse are as distinct as Samson unshorn and Samson with his hair cut. Fortunately he appends a prose postscript, which reveals him in his finest manner. Nor is this surprising. Apollo's letter is dated July 22, 1614; and we know that, two days earlier, Sancho Panza had dictated his famous letter to his wife Teresa. The master had found himself once more. The sequel to _Don Quixote_, promised in the Preface to the _Novelas_, was on the road at last. Meanwhile he had busied himself with a sonnet to be published at Naples in Juan Domingo Roncallolo's _Varias Aplicaciones_, with quatrains for Barrio Ángulo, and stanzas in honour of Santa Teresa.

Moreover, the success of the _Novelas_ induced him to try the theatre again. In 1615 he published his _Ocho Comedias, y ocho Entremeses nuevos_. The eight set pieces are failures; and when the writer tries to imitate Lope de Vega, as in the _Laberinto de Amor_, the failure is conspicuous. Nor does the introduction of a Saavedra among the personages of _El Gallardo Español_ save a bad play. But Cervantes believed in his eight _comedias_, as he believed in the eight _entremeses_ which are imitated from Lope de Rueda. These are sprightly, unpretentious farces, witty in intention and effect, interesting in themselves and as realistic pictures of low life seen and rendered at first hand. Of these farcical pieces one, _Pedro de Urdemalas_, is even brilliant.

While Cervantes was writing the fifty-ninth chapter of _Don Quixote's Second Part_, he learned that a spurious continuation had appeared (1614) at Tarragona under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. This has given rise to much angry writing. Avellaneda is doubtless a pseudonym. The King's confessor, Aliaga, has been suspected, on the ground that he was once nicknamed Sancho Panza, and that he thus avenged himself: the idea is absurd, and the fact that Avellaneda makes Sancho more offensive and more vulgar than ever puts the theory out of court. Lope de Vega is also accused of being Avellaneda, and the charge is based on this: that (in a private letter) he once spoke slightingly of _Don Quixote_. The personal relations between the two greatest Spanish men of letters were not cordial. Cervantes had ridiculed Lope in the Prologue to _Don Quixote_, had belittled him as a playwright, and had shown hostility in other ways. Lope, secure in his high seat, made no reply, and in 1612 (in another private letter) he speaks kindly of Cervantes. "Cervantophils" insist upon being too clever by half. They first assert that the outward form of Avellaneda's book was an imitation of _Don Quixote_, and that the intention was "to pass off this spurious Second Part as the true one"; they then contend that Avellaneda's was "a deliberate attempt to spoil the work of Cervantes." These two statements are mutually destructive: one must necessarily be false. It is also argued, first, that Avellaneda's is a worthless book; next, that it was written by Lope, the greatest figure, save Cervantes, in Spanish literature. Lope had many jealous enemies, but no contemporary hints at such a charge, and no proof is offered in support of it now. Indeed the notion, first started by Máinez, is generally abandoned. Other ascriptions, involving Blanco de Paz, Ruiz de Alarcón, Andrés Pérez, are equally futile. The most plausible conjecture, due to D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, is that Avellaneda was a certain Aragonese, Alfonso Lamberto. Lamberto's very obscurity favours this surmise. Had Avellaneda been a figure of great importance, he had been unmasked by Cervantes himself, who assuredly was no coward.

We owe to Avellaneda a clever, brutal, cynical, amusing book, which is still reprinted. Nor is this our only debt to him: he put an end to Cervantes' dawdling and procured the publication of the second _Don Quixote_. Cervantes left it doubtful if he meant to write the sequel; he even seems to invite another to undertake it. Nine years had passed, during which Cervantes made no sign. Avellaneda, with an eye to profit, wrote his continuation in good faith, and his insolent Preface is explained by his rage at seeing the bread taken out of his mouth when the true sequel was announced in the Preface to the _Novelas_. Had not his intrusion stung Cervantes to the quick, the second _Don Quixote_ might have met the fate of the second _Galatea_—promised for thirty years and never finished. As it is, the hurried close of the Second Part is below the writer's common level, as when he rages at Avellaneda, and wishes that the latter's book be "cast into the lowest pit of hell." But this is its single fault, which, for the rest, is only found in the last fourteen chapters. The previous fifty-eight form an almost impeccable masterpiece. As an achievement in style, the Second excels the First Part. The parody of chivalresque books is less insistent, the interest is larger, the variety of episode is ampler, the spirit more subtly comic, the new characters are more convincing, the manner is more urbane, more assured. Cervantes' First Part was an experiment in which he himself but half believed; in the Second he shows the certainty of an accepted master, confident of his intention and his popularity. So his career closed in a blaze of triumph. He had other works in hand: a play to be called _El Engaño á los Ojos_, the _Semanas del Jardín_, the _Famoso Bernardo_, and the eternal second _Galatea_. These last three he promises in the Preface to _Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda_ (1617), a posthumous volume "that dares to vie with Heliodorus," and was to be "the best or worst book ever written in our tongue." Ambitious in aim and in manner, the _Persiles_ has failed to interest, for all its adventures and scapes. Yet it contains perhaps the finest, and certainly the most pathetic passage that Cervantes ever penned—the noble dedication to his patron, the Conde de Lemos, signed upon April 19, 1616. In the last grip of dropsy, he gaily quotes from a _romance_ remembered from long ago:—

"_Puesto ya el pié en el estribo_"—

"One foot already in the stirrup." With these words he smilingly confronts fate, and makes him ready for the last post down the Valley of the Shadow. He died on April 23, nominally on the same day as Shakespeare, whose death is dated by an unreformed calendar. They were brethren in their lives and afterwards. Montesquieu, in the _Lettres Persanes_, makes Rica say of the Spaniards that "le seul de leurs livres qui soit bon est celui qui a fait voir la ridicule de tous les autres." If he meant that _Don Quixote_ was the one Spanish book which has found acceptance all the world over, he spoke with equal truth and point. A single author at once national and universal is as much as any literature can hope to boast.

In his own day Cervantes was shone down by the ample, varied, magnificent gifts of LOPE FÉLIX DE VEGA CARPIO (1562-1635): a very "prodigy of nature," as his rival confesses. A prodigy he was from his cradle. At the age of five he lisped in numbers, and, unable to write, would bribe his schoolmates with a share of his breakfast to take down verses at his dictation. He came of noble highland blood, his father, Félix de Vega, and his mother, Francisca Fernández, being natives of Carriedo. Born in Madrid, he was there educated at the Jesuit Colegio Imperial, of which he was the wonder. All the accomplishments were his: still a child, he filled his copy-books with verses, sang, danced, handled the foil like a trained sworder. His father, a poet of some accomplishment, died early, and Lope forthwith determined to see the world. With his comrade, Hernando Muñoz, he ran away from school. The pair reached Astorga, and turned back to Segovia, where, being short of money, they tried to sell a chain to a jeweller, who, suspecting something to be wrong, informed the local Dogberry. The adventurous couple were sent home in charge of the police. Lope's earliest surviving play, _El verdadero Amante_, written in his thirteenth year, is included in the fourteenth volume of his theatre, printed in 1620. Nicolás de los Ríos, one of the best actor-managers of his time, was proud to play in it later; and, crude as it is in phrasing, it manifests an astonishing dramatic gift.

The chronology of Lope's youth is perplexing, and the events of this time are, as a rule, wrongly given by his biographers, even including that admirable scholar, Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado, whose _Nueva Biografía_ is almost above praise. In a poetic epistle to Luis de Haro, Lope asserts that he fought at Terceira against the Portuguese: "in my third lustre"—_en tres lustros de mi edad primera_: and Ticknor is puzzled to reconcile this with facts. It cannot be done. Lope was fifteen in 1577, and the expedition to the Azores occurred in 1582. The obvious explanation is that Lope was in his fourth lustre, but that, as _cuatro_ would break the rhythm of the line, he wrote _tres_ instead. Some little licence is admitted in verse, and literal interpreters are peculiarly liable to error. At the same time, it should be said that Lope is coquettish as regards his age. Thus, he says that he was a child at the time of the Armada, being really twenty-six; and that he wrote the _Dragontea_ in early youth, when, in fact, he was thirty-five. This little vanity has led to endless confusion. It is commonly stated that, on Lope's return from the Azores, he entered the household of Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Ávila, who sent him to Alcalá de Henares. That Lope studied at Alcalá is certain; but undergraduates then matriculated earlier than they do now. When Lope's first campaign ended he was twenty-one, and therefore too old for college. He was a Bachelor before ever he went to the wars. The love-affair, recounted in his _Dorotea_, is commonly said to have prevented his taking orders at Alcalá: in truth, he never saw the lady till he came back from the Azores! He became private secretary to Antonio Álvarez de Toledo y Beaumont, fifth Duque de Alba, and grandson of the great soldier; but the date cannot be given precisely. As far back as 1572 he had translated Claudian's _Rape of Proserpine_ into Castilian verse, and we have already seen him joined with Cervantes in penning complimentary sonnets for Padilla and López Maldonado (1584). It may be that, while in Alba's service, he wrote the poems printed in Pedro de Moncayo's _Flor de varios romances_ (1589).

The history of these years is obscure. It is usually asserted that, while in Alba's service, about the year 1584-5, Lope married, and that he was soon afterwards exiled to Valencia, whence he set out for Lisbon to join the Invincible Armada. This does not square with Lope's statement in the Dedication of _Querer la propia Desdicha_ to Claudio Conde. There he alleges that Conde helped him out of prison in Madrid, a service repaid by his helping Conde out of the Serranos prison at Valencia, and he goes on to say that "before the first down was on their cheeks" they went to Lisbon to embark on the Armada. He nowhere alleges that they started from Valencia, or that the journey followed the banishment. In an eclogue to the same Conde, Lope avers that he joined the Armada to escape from Filis (otherwise Dorotea), and he adds:—"Who could have thought that, returning from the war, I should find a sweet wife?" The question would be pointless if Lope were already married. Moreover, Barrera's theory that the intrigue with Dorotea ended in 1584 is disproved by the fact that the _Dorotea_ contains allusions to the Conde de Melgar's marriage, which, as we know from Cabrera, took place in 1587. What is certain is that Lope went aboard the _San Juan_, and that during the Armada expedition he used his manuscript verses in Filis's praise for gun-wads.

He was a first-class fighting-man, and played his part in the combats up the Channel, where his brother was killed beside him during an encounter between the _San Juan_ and eight Dutch vessels. Disaster never quenched his spirit nor stayed his pen; for, when what was left of the defeated Armada returned to Cádiz, he landed with the greater part of his _Hermosura de Angélica_—eleven thousand verses, written between storm and battle, in continuation of the _Orlando Furioso_. First published in 1602, the _Angélica_ comes short of Ariosto's epic nobility, and is unrelieved by the Italian's touch of ironic fantasy. Nor can it be called successful even as a sequel: its very wealth of invention, its redundant episodes and innumerable digressions, contribute to its failure. But the verse is singularly brilliant and effective, while the skill with which the writer handles proper names is almost Miltonic.

Returned to Spain, Lope composed his pastoral novel, the _Arcadia_, which, however, remained unpublished till 1598. Ticknor believed it "to have been written almost immediately" after Cervantes' _Galatea_: this cannot be, for the _Arcadia_ refers to the death of Santa Cruz, which occurred in 1588, and it discusses in the conventional manner Alba's love-affairs of 1589-90. The _Arcadia_, where Lope figures as Belardo, and Alba as Amfriso, makes no pretence to be a transcript of manners or life, and it is intolerably prolix withal. Yet it goes beyond its fellows by virtue of its vivid landscapes, its graceful, flowing verse, and a certain rich, poetic, Latinized prose, here used by Lope with as much artistry as he showed in his management of the more familiar kind in the _Dorotea_. Its popularity is proved by the publication of fifteen editions in its author's lifetime. About the year 1590 he married Isabel de Urbina, a distant connection of Cervantes' mother, and daughter of Felipe II.'s King-at-Arms. Hereupon followed a duel, wherein Lope wounded his adversary, and, earlier escapades being raked up, he was banished the capital. He spent some time in Valencia, a considerable literary centre; but in 1594 he signed the manuscript of his play, _El Maestro de danzar_, at Tormes, Alba's estate, whence it is inferred that he was once more in the Duke's service. A new love-affair with Antonia Trillo de Armenta brought legal troubles upon him in 1596. His wife apparently died in 1597.

The first considerable work printed with Lope's name upon the title-page was his _Dragontea_ (1598), an epic poem in ten cantos on the last cruise and death of Francis Drake. We naturally love to think of the mighty seaman as the patriot, the chiefest of Britannia's bulwarks, as he figures in Mr. Newbolt's spirited ballad:—

"_Drake lies in his hammock till the great Armadas come ... Slung atween the round shot, listenin' for the drum ... Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound, Call him when ye sail to meet the foe; Where the old trade's plyin' and the old flag flyin', They shall find him 'ware an' waking, as they found him long ago._"

Odd to say, though, Lope has been censured for not viewing Drake through English Protestant spectacles. Seeing that he was a good Catholic Spaniard whom Drake had drummed up the Channel, it had been curious if the _Dragontea_ were other than it is: a savage denunciation of that Babylonian Dragon, that son of the devil whose piracies had tormented Spain during thirty years. The _Dragontea_ fails not because of its national spirit, which is wholly admirable, but because of its excessive emphasis and its abuse of allegory. Its author scarcely intended it for great poetry; but, as a patriotic screed, it fulfilled its purpose, and, when reprinted, it drew an approving sonnet from Cervantes.

The _Dragontea_ was written while Lope was in the household of the Marqués de Malpica, whence he passed as secretary to the lettered Marqués de Sarriá, best known as Conde de Lemos, and as Cervantes' patron. In 1599 he published his devout and graceful poem, _San Isidro_, in honour of Madrid's patron saint. Popular in subject and execution, the _San Isidro_ enabled him to repeat in verse the triumph which he had achieved with the prose of the _Arcadia_. From this day forward he was the admitted pontiff of Spanish literature. His marriage with Juana de Guardo probably dates from the year 1600. An example of Lope's art in manipulating the sonnet-form is afforded by Longfellow's Englishing of _The Brook_:—

"_Laugh of the mountain! lyre of bird and tree! Pomp of the meadow! mirror of the morn! The soul of April, unto whom are born The rose and jessamine, leaps wild in thee! Although where'er thy devious current strays, The lap of earth with gold and silver teems, To me thy clear proceeding brighter seems Than golden sands that charm each shepherd's gaze. How without guile thy bosom, all transparent As the pure crystal, lets the curious eye Thy secrets scan, thy smooth, round pebbles count! How, without malice murmuring, glides thy current! O sweet simplicity of days gone by! Thou shun'st the haunts of man, to dwell in limpid fount!_"

Two hundred sonnets in Lope's _Rimas_ are thought to have been issued separately in 1602: in any case, they were published that year at the end of a reprint of the _Angélica_. They include much of the writer's sincerest work, earnest in feeling, skilful and even distinguished as art. One sonnet of great beauty—_To the Tomb of Teodora Urbina_—has led Ticknor into an amusing error often reproduced. He cites from it a line upon the "heavenly likeness of my Belisa," notes that this name is an anagram of Isabel (Lope's first wife), and pronounces the performance a lament for the poet's mother-in-law. The Latin epitaph which follows it contains a line,—

"_Exactis nondum complevit mensibus annum_,"—

showing that the supposed mother-in-law died in her first year. Manifestly the sonnet refers to the writer's daughter, and, as always happens when Lope speaks from his paternal heart, is instinct with a passionate tenderness.

To 1604 belong the five prose books of the _Peregrino en su patria_, a prose romance of Pánfilo's adventures by sea and land, partly experienced and partly contrived; but it is most interesting for the four _autos_ which it includes, and for its bibliographical list of two hundred and thirty plays already written by the author. His quenchless ambition had led him to rival Ariosto in the _Angélica_: in the twenty cantos of his _Jerusalén Conquistada_ he dares no less greatly by challenging Tasso. Written in 1605, the _Jerusalén_ was withheld till 1609. Styled a "tragic epic" by its creator, it is no more than a fluent historico-narrative poem, overlaid with embellishments of somewhat cheap and obvious design. In 1612 appeared the _Four Soliloquies of Lope de Vega Carpio_: _his lament and tears while kneeling before a crucifix begging pardon for his sins._ These four sets of _redondillas_ with their prose commentaries were amplified to seven when republished (1626) under the pseudonym of Gabriel Padecopeo, an obvious anagram. The deaths of Lope's wife and of his son Carlos inspired the _Pastores de Belén_, a sacred pastoral of supreme simplicity, truth, and beauty—as Spanish as Spain herself—which contains one of the sweetest numbers in Castilian. The Virgin lulls the Divine Child with a song in Verstegan's manner, which Ticknor has rendered to this effect:—

"_Holy angels and blest, Through those palms as ye sweep Hold their branches at rest, For my babe is asleep._

_And ye Bethlehem palm-trees, As stormy winds rush In tempest and fury, Your angry noise hush; More gently, more gently, Restrain your wild sweep; Hold your branches at rest, My babe is asleep._

_My babe all divine, With earth's sorrows oppressed, Seeks in slumber an instant His grievings to rest; He slumbers, he slumbers, Oh, hush, then, and keep Your branches all still, My babe is asleep!_

_Cold blasts wheel about him, A rigorous storm, And ye see how, in vain, I would shelter his form. Holy angels and blest, As above me ye sweep, Hold these branches at rest, My babe is asleep!_"

Lope lived a life of gallantry, and troubled his wife's last years by his intrigue with María de Luján. This lady bore him the gifted son, Lope Félix, who was drowned at sea, and the daughter Marcela, whose admirable verses, written after her profession in the Convent of Barefoot Trinitarians, proclaim her kinship with the great enchanter. A relapsing, carnal sinner, Lope was more weak than bad: his rare intellectual gifts, his renown, his overwhelming temperament, his seductive address, his imperial presence, led him into temptation. Amid his follies and sins he preserved a touching faith in the invisible, and his devotion was always ardent. Upon the death of his wife in 1612 or later, he turned to religion with characteristic impetuosity, was ordained priest, and said his first mass in 1614 at the Carmelite Church in Madrid. It was an ill-advised move. Ticknor, indeed, speaks of a "Lope, no longer at an age to be deluded by his passions"; but no such Lope is known to history. While a Familiar of the Inquisition the true Lope wrote love-letters for the loose-living Duque de Sessa, till at last his confessor threatened to deny him absolution. Nor is this all: his intrigue with Marta de Nevares Santoyo, wife of Roque Hernández de Ayala, was notorious. The pious Cervantes publicly jeered at the fallen priest's "continuous and virtuous occupation," forgetting his own coarse pranks with Ana de Rojas; and Góngora hounded his master down with a copy of venomous verses passed from hand to hand. Those who wish to study the abasement of an august spirit may do so in the _Últimos Amores de Lope de Vega Carpio_, forty-eight letters published by José Ibero Ribas y Canfranc.[21] If they judge by the standard of Lope's time, they will deal gently with a miracle of genius, unchaste but not licentious; like that old Dumas, who, in the matters of gaiety, energy, and strength is his nearest modern compeer. His sin was yet to find him out. He vanquished every enemy: the child of his old age vanquished him.

Devotion and love-affairs served not to stay his pen. His _Triunfo de la fe en el Japón_ (1618) is interesting as an example of Lope's practice in the school of historical prose, stately, devout, and elegant. In honour of Isidore, beatified and then canonised, he presided at the poetic jousts of 1620 and 1622, witnessing the triumph of his son, Félix Lope; standing literary god-father to the boyish Calderón; declaiming, in the character of Tomé Burguillos, the inimitable verse which hit between wind and water. Perhaps Lope was never happier than in this opportunity of speaking his own witty lines before the multitude. His noble person, his facility, his urbane condescension, his incomparable voice, which thrilled even clowns when he intoned his mass—all these gave him the stage as his own possession. Heretofore the common man had only read him: once seen and heard, Lope ruled Castilian literature as Napoleon ruled France.

His _Filomena_ (1621) contains a poetic defence of himself (the Nightingale) against Pedro de Torres Rámila (the Thrush), who, in 1617, had violently attacked Lope in his _Spongia_, which seems to have vanished, and is only known by extracts embodied in the _Expostulatio Spongiæ_, written by Francisco López de Aguilar Coutiño under the name of Julius Columbarius. Polemics apart, the chief interest of the _Filomena_ volume lies in its short prose story, _Las Fortunas de Diana_, an experiment which the author repeated in the three tales—_La Desdicha por la honra_, _La prudente Venganza_, and _Guzmán el Bravo_—appended to his _Circe_ (1624), a poem, in three cantos, on Ulysses' adventures. The five cantos of the _Triunfos divinos_ are pious exercises in the Petrarchan manner, with forty-four sonnets given as a postscript. Five cantos go to make up the _Corona Trágica_ (1627), a religious epic with Mary Stuart for heroine. Lope has been absurdly censured for styling Queen Elizabeth a Jezebel and an Athaliah, and for regarding Mary as a Catholic martyr. This criticism implies a strange intellectual confusion; as though a veteran of the Armada could be expected to write in the spirit of a Clapham Evangelical! Religious squabbles apart, he had an old score to settle; for—

"_Where are the galleons of Spain?_"

was a question which troubled good Spaniards as much as it delighted Mr. Dobson. Dedicated to Pope Urban VIII., the poem won for its author the Cross of St. John and the title of Doctor of Divinity. Three years later he issued his _Laurel de Apolo_, a cloying eulogy on some three hundred poets, as remarkable for its omissions as for its flattering of nonentities. The _Dorotea_ (1632), a prose play fashioned after the model of the _Celestina_, was one of Lope's favourites, and is interesting, not merely for its graceful, familiar style, retouched and polished for over thirty years, but as a piece of self-revelation. The _Rimas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos_ (1634) closes with the mock-heroic _Gatomaquia_, a vigorous and brilliant travesty of the Italian epics, replenished with such gay wit as suffices to keep it sweet for all time.

Lope de Vega's career was drawing to its end. The elopement, with a court gallant, of his daughter, Antonia Clara, broke him utterly.[22] He sank into melancholy, sought to expiate by lashing himself with the discipline till the walls of his room were flecked with his blood. Withal he wrote to the very end. On August 23, 1635, he composed his last poem, _El Siglo de Oro_. Four days later he was dead. Madrid followed him to his grave, and the long procession turned from the direct path to pass before the window of the convent where his daughter, Sor Marcela, was a nun. A hundred and fifty-three Spanish authors bewailed the Phœnix in the _Fama póstuma_, and fifty Italians published their laments at Venice under the title of _Essequie poetiche_.

Lope left no achievement unattempted: the epic, Homeric or Italian, the pastoral, the romantic novel, poems narrative and historical, countless eclogues, epistles, not to speak of short tales, of sonnets innumerable, of verses dashed off on the least occasion. His voluminous private letters, full of wit and malice and risky anecdote, are as brilliant and amusing as they are unedifying. It is sometimes alleged that he deliberately capped Cervantes' work; and, as instances in this sort, we are bid to note that the _Galatea_ was followed by _Dorotea_, the _Viaje del Parnaso_ by the _Laurel de Apolo_. In the first place, exclusive "spheres of influence" are not recognised in literature; in the second, the observation is pointless. The _Galatea_ is a pastoral novel, the _Dorotea_ is not; the first was published in 1585, the second in 1632. Again, the _Viaje del Parnaso_ appeared in 1614, the _Laurel de Apolo_ in 1630. The first model was the _Canto del Turia_ of Gil Polo. It would be as reasonable—that is to say, it would be the height of unreason—to argue that _Persiles y Sigismunda_ was an attempt to cap the _Peregrino en su patria_. The truth is, that Lope followed every one who made a hit: Heliodorus, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso. A frank success spurred him to rivalry, and the difficulty of repeating it was for him a fresh stimulus. Obstacles existed to be vanquished. He was ever ready to accept a challenge; hence such a dexterous _tour de force_ as his famous _Sonnet on a Sonnet_, imitated in a well-known _rondeau_ by Voiture, translated again and again, and by none more successfully than by Mr. Gibson:—

"_To write a sonnet doth Juana press me, I've never found me in such stress and pain; A sonnet numbers fourteen lines 'tis plain, And three are gone ere I can say, God bless me! I thought that spinning rhymes might sore oppress me, Yet here I'm midway in the last quatrain; And, if the foremost tercet I can gain, The quatrains need not any more distress me. To the first tercet I have got at last, And travel through it with such right good-will, That with this line I've finished it, I ween. I'm in the second now, and see how fast The thirteenth line comes tripping from my quill— Hurrah, 'tis done! Count if there be fourteen!_"

The foregoing list of Lope's exploits in literature, curtailed as it is, suffices for fame; but it would not suffice to explain that matchless popularity which led to the publication—suppressed by the Inquisition in 1647—of a creed beginning thus:—"I believe in Lope de Vega the Almighty, the Poet of heaven and earth." So far we have but reached the threshold of his temple. His unique renown is based upon the fact that he created a national theatre, that he did for Spain what Shakespeare did for England. Gómez Manrique and Encina led the way gropingly; Torres Naharro, though he bettered all that had been done, lived out of Spain; Lope de Rueda and Timoneda brought the drama to the people; Artieda, Virués, Argensola, and Cervantes tore their passions to tatters in conformity with their own strange precepts, which the last-named would have enforced by a literary dictatorship. Moreover, Argensola and the three veterans of Lepanto wrote to please themselves: Lope invented a new art to enchant mankind. And he succeeded beyond all ambition. Nor does he once take on the airs of philosopher or pedant: rather, in a spirit of self-mockery, he makes his confession in the _Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias_ (New Mode of Playwriting), which his English biographer, Lord Holland, translates in this wise:—

"_Who writes by rule must please himself alone, Be damn'd without remorse, and die unknown. Such force has habit—for the untaught fools, Trusting their own, despise the ancient rules. Yet true it is, I too have written plays. The wiser few, who judge with skill, might praise; But when I see how show (and nonsense) draws The crowds and—more than all—the fair's applause, Who still are forward with indulgent rage To sanction every master of the stage, I, doom'd to write, the public taste to hit, Resume the barbarous taste 'twas vain to quit: I lock up every rule before I write, Plautus and Terence drive from out my sight, ... To vulgar standards then I square my play, Writing at ease; for, since the public pay, 'Tis just, methinks, we by their compass steer, And write the nonsense that they love to hear._"

Thus Lope in his bantering avowal of 1609. Yet what takes the form of an apology is in truth a vaunt; for it was Lope's task to tear off the academic swaddling-bands of his predecessors, and to enrich his country with a drama of her own. Nay, he did far more: by his single effort he dowered her with an entire dramatic literature. The very bulk of his production savours of the fabulous. In 1603 he had already written over two hundred plays; in 1609 the number was four hundred and eighty-three; in 1620 he confesses to nine hundred; in 1624 he reaches one thousand and seventy; and in 1632 the total amounted to one thousand five hundred. According to Montalbán, editor of the _Fama póstuma_, the grand total, omitting _entremeses_, should be one thousand eight hundred plays, and over four hundred _autos_. Of these about four hundred plays and forty _autos_ survive. If we take the figures as they stand, Lope de Vega wrote more than all the Elizabethan dramatists put together. Small wonder that Charles Fox was staggered when his nephew, Lord Holland, spoke of Lope's twenty million lines. Facility and excellence are rarely found together, yet Lope combined both qualities in such high degree that any one with enough Spanish to read him need never pass a dull moment so long as he lives.

Hazlitt protests against the story which tells that Lope wrote a play before breakfast, and in truth it rests on no good authority. But it is history that, not once, but an hundred times, he wrote a whole piece within twenty-four hours. Working in these conditions, he must needs have the faults inseparable from haste. He repeats his thought with small variation; he utilises old solutions for a dramatic _impasse_; and his phrase is too often more vigorous than finished. But it is not as a master of artistic detail that Lope's countrymen place him beside Cervantes. First, and last, and always, he is a great creative genius. He incarnates the national spirit, adapts popular poetry to dramatic effects, substitutes characters for abstractions, and, in a word, expresses the genius of a people. It is true that he rarely finds a perfect form for his utterance, that he constantly approaches perfection without quite attaining unto it, that his dramatic instinct exceeds his literary execution. Yet he survives as the creator of an original form. His successors improved upon him in the matter of polish, yet not one of them made an essential departure of his own, not one invented a radical variant upon Lope's method. Tirso de Molina may exceed him in force of conception, as Ruiz de Alarcón outshines him in ethical significance, in exposition of character; yet Tirso and Alarcón are but developing the doctrine laid down by the master in _El Castigo sin Venganza_—the lesson of truth, realism, fidelity to the actual usages of the time. Tirso, Alarcón, and Calderón are a most brilliant progeny; but the father of them all is the unrivalled Lope. He seized upon what germs of good existed in Torres Naharro, Rueda, and Cueva; but his debt to them was small, and he would have found his way without them. Without Lope we should have had no Tirso, no Calderón.[23]

Producing as he produced, much of his work may be considered as improvisation; even so, he takes place as the first improvisatore in the world, and compels recognition as, so to say, "a natural force let loose." He imagined on a Napoleonic scale; he contrived incident with such ease and force and persuasiveness as make the most of his followers seem poor indeed; and his ingenuity of diversion is miraculously fresh after nearly three hundred years. His gift never fails him, whether he deal with historical tragedy, with the heroic legend, with the presentation of picaresque life, or with the play of intrigue and manners—the _comedia de capa y espada_. This last, "the cloak and sword play" is as much his personal invention as is the _gracioso_—the comic character—as is the _enredo_—the maze of plot—as is the "point of honour," as is the feminine interest in his best work. Hitherto the woman had been allotted a secondary, an incidental part, ludicrous in the _entremés_, sentimental in the set piece. Lope, the expert in gallantry, in manners, in observation, placed her in her true setting, as an ideal, as the mainspring of dramatic motive and of chivalrous conduct. He professed an abstract approval of the classic models; but his natural impulse was too strong for him. An imitator he could not be, save in so far as he, in his own phrase, "imitated men's actions, and reproduced the manners of the age." He laid down rules which in practice he flouted; for he realised that the business of the scene is to hold an audience, is to interest, to surprise, to move. He could not thump a pulpit in an empty hall: he perceived that a play which fails to attract is—for the playwright's purpose—a bad play. He can be read with infinite pleasure; yet he rarely attempted drama for the closet. Emotion in action was his aim, and he achieved it with a certainty which places him among the greatest gods of the stage.

It is difficult to fix upon the period when Lope's dramatic genius was accepted by his public: 1592 seems a likely date. He took no interest in publishing his plays, though _El Perseguido_ was issued by a Lisbon pirate so early as 1603. Eight volumes of his theatre were in print before he was induced in 1617 to authorise an edition which was called the _Ninth Part_, and after 1625 he printed no more dramatic pieces, despite the fact that he produced them more abundantly than ever. We may, perhaps, assume that the best of his work has reached us. Among the finest of his earlier efforts is justly placed _El Acero de Madrid_ (The Madrid Steel), from which Molière has borrowed the _Médecin malgré lui_, and the opening scene, as Ticknor renders it, admirably illustrates Lope's power of interesting his audience from the very outset by a situation which explains itself. Lisardo, with his friend Riselo, enamoured of Belisa, awaits the latter at the church-door, and, just as Riselo declares that he will wait no more, Belisa enters with her pious aunt, Teodora, as _dueña_:—

Teodora.

"_Show more of gentleness and modesty; Of gentleness in walking quietly, Of modesty in looking only down Upon the earth you tread._

Belisa. _'Tis what I do._

Teodora.

_What? When you're looking straight towards that man?_

Belisa.

_Did you not bid me look upon the earth? And what is he but just a bit of it?_

Teodora.

_I said the earth whereon you tread, my niece._

Belisa.

_But that whereon I tread is hidden quite With my own petticoat and walking-dress._

Teodora.

_Words such as these become no well-bred maid. But, by your mother's blessed memory, I'll put an end to all your pretty tricks;— What? You look back at him again._

Belisa.

_Who? I?_

Teodora.

_Yes, you;—and make him secret signs besides._

Belisa.

_Not I! 'Tis only that you troubled me With teasing questions and perverse replies, So that I stumbled and looked round to see Who would prevent my fall._

Riselo (to Lisardo).

_She falls again. Be quick and help her._

Lisardo (to Belisa).

_Pardon me, lady, And forgive my glove._

Teodora.

_Who ever saw the like?_

Belisa.

_I thank you, sir; you saved me from a fall._

Lisardo.

_An angel, lady, might have fallen so, Or stars that shine with heaven's own blessed light._

Teodora.

_I, too, can fall; but 'tis upon your trick. Good gentleman, farewell to you!_

Lisardo.

_Madam, Your servant._ (_Heaven save us from such spleen!_)

Teodora.

_A pretty fall you made of it; and now I hope You'll be content, since they assisted you._

Belisa.

_And you no less content, since now you have The means to tease me for a week to come._

Teodora.

_But why again do you turn back your head?_

Belisa.

_Why, sure you think it wise and wary To notice well the place I stumbled at, Lest I should stumble there when next I pass._

Teodora.

_Mischief befall you! But I know your ways! You'll not deny this time you looked upon the youth?_

Belisa.

_Deny it? No!_

Teodora.

_You dare confess it, then?_

Belisa.

_Be sure I dare. You saw him help me; And would you have me fail to thank him for it?_

Teodora.

_Go to! Come home! come home!_"

This is a fair specimen, even in its sober English dress, of Lope's gallant dialogue and of his consummate skill in gripping his subject. No playwright has ever shown a more infallible tact, a more assured confidence in his own resources. He never attempts to puzzle his audience with a dull acrostic: complicated as his plot may be (and he loves to introduce a double intrigue when the chance proffers), he exposes it at the outset with an obvious solution; but not one in twenty can guess precisely how the solution is to be attained. And, till the last moment, his contagious, reckless gaiety, his touches of perplexing irony, his vigilant invention, help to thrill and vivify the interest.

Yet has he all the defects of his facility. In an indifferent mood, besieged by managers for more and more plays, he would set forth upon a piece, not knowing what was to be its action, would indulge in a triple plot of baffling complexity eked out by incredible episodes. Even his ingenuity failed to find escape from such unprepared situations. Still it is fair to say that such instances are rare with him: time upon time his dramatic instinct saved him where a less notable inventor must have succumbed. He could create character; he was an artist in construction; he knew what could, and could not, be done upon the stage. Like Dumas, he needed but "four trestles, four boards, two actors, and a passion"; and, at his best, he rises to the greatest occasion. In a single scene, in an act entire, you shall read him with wonder and delight for his force and truth and certainty. Yet the trail of carelessness is upon his last acts, and his conscience sometimes sleeps ere his curtain falls. The fact that he thought more of a listener than of ten readers comes home to a constant student. Lope had few theories as to style, and he rarely aims at sheer beauty of expression, at simple felicity of phrase. Hence his very cleverness grows wearisome at last. But, after all, he must be judged by the true historic standard: his achievement must be compared with what preceded, not with what came after him. Tirso de Molina and Calderón and Moreto grew the flower from Lope's seed. He took the farce as Lope de Rueda left it, and transformed its hard fun by his humane and sparkling wit. He inherited the cold mediæval morality, and touched it into life by the breath of devout imagination. He re-shaped the crude collection of massacres which Virués mistook for tragedy, and produced effects of dread and horror with an artistry of his own devising, a selection, a conscience, a delicate vigour all unknown until he came. And for the _comedia de capa y espada_, it springs direct from his own cunning brain, unsuggested and even unimagined by any forerunner.

It were hopeless to analyse any part of the immense theatre which he bequeathed to the world. But among his best tragedies may be cited _El Castigo sin Venganza_, with its dramatic rendering of the Duke of Ferrara sentencing his adulterous wife and incestuous son to death. Among his historic dramas none surpasses _El Mejor Alcalde el Rey_, with its presentation of the model Spanish heroine, Elvira; of the feudal baron, Tello; and of the King as the buckler of his people, the strong man doing justice in high places: a most typical piece of character, congenial to the aristocratic democracy of Spain. A more morbid version of the same monarchical sentiment is given in _La Estrella de Sevilla_, the argument of which is brief enough for quotation. King Sancho _el Bravo_ falls enamoured of Busto Tavera's sister, Estrella, betrothed to Sancho Ortiz de las Roelas. Having vainly striven to win over Busto, the King follows the advice of Arias, corrupts her slave, enters Estrella's room, is there discovered, is challenged by Busto, and escapes with a sound skin. The slave, confessing her share in the scheme, is killed by the innocent heroine's brother. Meanwhile, the King determines upon Busto's death, summons Sancho Ortiz, and bids him slay a certain criminal guilty of _lèse-majesté_. Herewith the King offers Sancho a guarantee against consequences. Sancho Ortiz destroys it, saying that he asks for nothing better than the King's word, and ends by begging the sovereign to grant him the hand of an unnamed lady. To this the King accedes, and he hands Sancho Ortiz a paper containing the name of the doomed man. After much hesitation and self-torment, Sancho Ortiz resolves to do his duty to his King, slays Busto, is seized, refuses to explain, undergoes sentence of death, and is finally pardoned by King Sancho, who avows his own guilt, and endeavours to promote the marriage between Sancho Ortiz and Estrella. For an obvious reason they refuse, and the curtain falls upon Estrella's determination to get herself to a nunnery.

Thus baldly told, the story resembles a thousand others; under Lope's hand it throbs with life and movement and emotion. His dialogue is swift and strong and appropriate, whether he personifies the blind passion of the King, the incorruptibility of Busto, the feudal ideal of Sancho Ortiz, or the strength and sweetness of Estrella. Of dialogue he is the first and best master on the Spanish stage: more choice, if less powerful, than Tirso; more natural, if less altisonant, than Calderón. The dramatic use of certain metrical forms persisted as he sanctioned it: the _décimas_ for laments, the _romance_ for exposition, the _lira_ for heroic declamation, the sonnet to mark time, the _redondilla_ for love-passages. His lightness of touch, his gaiety and resourcefulness are exampled in _La Dama Melindrosa_ (The Languishing Lady), as good a cloak-and-sword play as even Lope ever wrote. His gift of sombre conception is to be seen in _Dineros son Calidad_ (Money is Rank), where his contrivance of the King of Naples' statue addressing Octavio is the nearest possible approach to Tirso's figures of the Commander and of Don Juan.

Whether or not Tirso took the idea from Lope cannot well be decided; but if he did so, he was no worse than the rest of the world. For ages dramatists of all nations have found Lope de Vega "good to steal from," and in many forms he has diverted other countries than the Spains. Alexandre Hardy is said by tradition to have exploited him vigorously, and probably we should find the imitations among Hardy's lost plays. Jean Mairet is reputed to have borrowed generously, and an undoubted follower is Jean Rotrou, many of whose pieces—from the early _Occasions perdues_ and _La belle Alfrède_ to his last effort, _Don Lope de Cardonne_—are boldly annexed from Lope. D'Ouville, in _Les Morts vivants_ and in _Aimer sans savoir qui_, exploited Lope to the profit of French playgoers. It is a rash conjecture which identifies the _Wild Gallant_ with the _Galán escarmentado_, inasmuch as the latter play is even still "inedited," and could scarcely have reached Dryden; but it cannot be doubted that when the sources of our Restoration drama are traced out, Lope will be found to rank with Calderón, and Moreto, and Rojas Zorrilla.

Yet his chief glory must, like Burns's, be ever local. Cervantes, for all his national savour, might conceivably belong to any country; but Lope de Vega is the incarnate Spains. His gaiety, his suppleness, his adroit construction, his affluence, his realism, are eminently Spanish in their strength; his heedless form, his journalistic emphasis, his inequality, his occasional incoherence, his anxiety to please at any cost, are eminently Spanish in their weakness. He lacks the universal note of Shakespeare, being chiefly for his own time and not for all the ages. Shakespeare, however, stands alone in literature. It is no small praise to say that Lope follows him on a lower plane. There are two great creators in the European drama: Shakespeare founds the English theatre, Lope de Vega the Spanish, each interpreting the genius of his people with unmatched supremacy. And unto both there came a period of eclipse. That very generation which Lope had bewildered, dominated, and charmed by his fantasy turned to the worship of Calderón. Nor did he profit by the romantic movement headed by the Schlegels and by Tieck. For them, as for Goethe, Spanish literature was incarnated by Cervantes and by Calderón. The immense bulk of Lope's production, the rarity of his editions, the absence of any representative translation, caused him to be overlooked. To two men—to Agustín Durán in Spain and to Grillparzer in Germany—he owes his revival;[24] and, in more modest degree, Lord Holland and George Henry Lewes have furthered his due recognition. The present tendency is, perhaps, to overrate him, and to substitute uncritical adoration for uncritical neglect. Yet he deserves the fame which grows from day to day; for if he have bequeathed us little that is exquisite in art—as _Los Pastores de Belén_—the world is his debtor for a new and singular form of dramatic utterance. In so much he is not only a great executant in the romantic drama, a virtuoso of unexcelled resource and brilliancy. He is something still greater: the typical representative of his race, the founder of a great and comprehensive _genre_. The genius of Cervantes was universal and unique; Lope's was unique but national. Cervantes had the rarer and more perfect endowment. But they are immortals both; and, paradox though it may seem, a second Cervantes is a likelier miracle than a second Lope de Vega.

* * * * *

In 1599, the year following upon the issue of Lope's _Dragontea_, the picaresque tradition of _Lazarillo de Tormes_ was revived by the Sevillan MATEO ALEMÁN (fl. ? 1550-1609) in the First Part of his _Atalaya de la Vida humana_: _Vida del Pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache_. The alternative title—the _Watch-Tower of Human Life_—was rejected by the reading public, which, to the author's annoyance, insisted on speaking of the _Pícaro_ or _Rogue_. Little is known of Alemán's life, save that he took his Bachelor's degree at Seville in 1565. He is conjectured to have visited Italy, perhaps as a soldier, is found serving in the Treasury so early as 1568, and, after twenty years, left the King's service as poor as he entered it. A passage in his _Ortografía Castellana_, published at Mexico in 1609, is thought to show that he was a printer; but this is surmise. That he emigrated to America seems certain; but the date of his death is unknown.

His _Guzmán de Alfarache_ is an amplified version of Lázaro's adventures; and, though he adds little to the first conception, his abundant episode and interminable moralisings hit the general taste. Twenty-six editions, amounting to some fifty thousand copies, appeared within six years of the first publication: not even _Don Quixote_ had such a vogue. Nor was it less fortunate abroad. In 1623 it was admirably translated by James Mabbe in a version for which Ben Jonson wrote a copy of verses in praise of

"_this Spanish Proteus; who, though writ But in one tongue, was form'd with the world's wit; And hath the noblest mark of a good book, That an ill man dares not securely look Upon it, but will loathe, or let it pass, As a deformed face doth a true glass._"

It is curious to note that Mabbe's rendering appeared in the same year as Shakespeare's First Folio, to which Ben Jonson also contributed; but while the _Rogue_ reached its fourth edition in 1656, the third edition of the First Folio was not printed till 1664.

The pragmatical cant and the moral reflections which weary us as much as they wearied the French translator, Le Sage, were clearly to the liking of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries. Guzmán's experiences as boots at an inn, as a thief in Madrid, as a soldier at Genoa, as a jester at Rome, are told with a certain impudent spirit; but the "moral intention" of the author obtrudes itself with an insistence that defeats its own object, and the subsidiary tales of Dorido and Clorinia, of Osmín and Daraja—a device imitated in _Don Quixote_—are digressions of neither interest nor relevancy. The popularity of the book was so great as to induce imitation. While Alemán was busied with his devout _Vida de San Antonio de Padua_ (1604), or perhaps with his fragmentary versions of Horace, a spurious sequel was published (1601) by a Valencian lawyer, Juan Martí, who took the pseudonym of Mateo Luján de Sayavedra. Martí had somehow managed to see Alemán's manuscript of the Second Part, and, in so much, his trick was far baser than Avellaneda's. Alemán's self-control under greater provocation contrasts most favourably with Cervantes' petulance. In the true Second Part he good-humouredly acknowledges his competitor's "great learning, his nimble wit, his deep judgment, his pleasant conceits"; and he adds that "his discourses throughout are of that quality and condition that I do much envy them, and should be proud that they were mine." And having thus put his rival in the wrong, Alemán proceeds to introduce among his personages a Sayavedra who would pass himself off as a native of Seville:—"but all were lies that he told me; for he was of Valencia, whose name, for some just causes, I conceal." Sayavedra figures as Guzmán's bonnet and jackal till he ends by suicide, and he is made to supply whatever entertainment the book contains. Far below _Lazarillo de Tormes_ in caustic observation and in humour, _Guzmán de Alfarache_ is a rapid and easy study of blackguardism, forcible and diverting despite its unctuousness, and written in admirable prose.

So much cannot be claimed for the _Pícara Justina_ (1605) of Francisco López de Úbeda, who is commonly identified as the Dominican, ANDRÉS PÉREZ, author of a _Vida de San Raymundo de Peñafort_ and of other pious works. His _Pícara Justina_ was long in maturing, for he confesses to having "augmented after the publication of the admired work of the _pícaro_," Guzmán; whom Justina, in fact, ends by marrying. Pérez has acquired a notorious reputation for lubricity; yet it is hard to say how he came by it, since he is no more indecent than most picaresque writers. He lacks wit and invention; his style, the most mannered of his time, is full of pedantic turns, unnatural inversions and verbal eccentricities wherewith he seeks to cover his bald imagination and his witless narrative. But his freaks of vocabulary, his extravagant provincialisms, lend him a certain philological importance which may account for the reprints of his volume. It may be added that, in his _Pícara_, Pérez anticipates Cervantes' trifling find of the _versos de cabo roto_; and, from the angry attack upon the monk in the _Viaje del Parnaso_, it seems safe to infer that Cervantes resented being forestalled by one who had probably read the _Quixote_ in manuscript.[25]

A more successful attempt in the same kind is the _Relaciones de la Vida del Escudero Marcos de Obregón_ by Vicente Espinel (?1544-1634), a poor student at Salamanca, a soldier in Italy and the Low Countries, and finally a priest in Madrid. His _Diversas Rimas_ (1591) are correct, spirited exercises, in new metrical forms, including versions of Horace which, in the last century, gave rise to a bitter polemic between Iriarte and López de Sedano. Moreover, Espinel is said to have added a fifth string to the guitar. But it is by his _Marcos de Obregón_ (1618) that he is best known. Voltaire alleged that _Gil Blas_ was a mere translation of _Marcos de Obregón_, but the only foundation for this pretty exercise in fancy is that Le Sage borrowed a few incidents from Espinel, as he borrowed from Vélez de Guevara and others. The book is excellent of its kind, brilliantly phrased, full of ingenious contrivance, of witty observation, and free from the long digressions which disfigure _Guzmán de Alfarache_. Espinel knew how to build a story and how to tell it graphically, and his artistic selection of incident makes the reading of his _Marcos_ a pleasure even after three centuries.

As the picaresque novel was to supply the substance of Charles Sorel's _Francion_ and of Paul Scarron's _Roman Comique_, so the _Almahide_ of Mlle. de Scudéry and the _Zayde_ of Mme. de Lafayette find their root in the Hispano-Mauresque historical novel. This invention we owe to GINÉS PÉREZ DE HITA of Murcia (fl. 1604), a soldier who served in the expedition against the Moriscos during the Alpujarra rising. His _Guerras civiles de Granada_ was published in two parts—the first in 1595, and the second, which is distinctly inferior, in 1604. The author's pretence of translating from the Arabic of a supposititious Ibn Hamin is refuted by the fact that the authority of Spanish chroniclers is continually cited as final, and the fact that the point of view is conspicuously Christian. Some tittle of history there is in Pérez de Hita, but the value of his work lies in his own fantastic transcription of life in Granada during the last weeks before its surrender. Challenges, duels between Moorish knights, personal encounters with Christian champions, harem intrigues, assassinations, jousts, sports, and festivals held while the enemy is without the gates—such circumstances as these make the texture of the story, which is written with extraordinary grace and ease. Archæologists join with Arabists in censuring Pérez de Hita's detail, and historians are scandalised by his disdain for facts; yet to most of us he is more Moorish than the Moors, and his vivid rendering of a great and ancient civilisation on the eve of ruin is more complete and impressive than any that a pile of literal chronicles can yield. As a literary artist he is better in his first part than in his second, where he is embarrassed by a knowledge of events in which he bore a part; yet, even so, he never fails to interest, and the beauty of his style would alone suffice for a reputation. A story of doubtful authority represents Scott as saying that, if he had met with the _Guerras civiles de Granada_ in earlier days, he would have chosen Spain as the scene of a Waverley Novel. Whatever be the truth of this report, we cannot doubt that Sir Walter must have read with delight his predecessor's brilliant performance in the province of the historical novel.

The _Romancero General_, published at Madrid in 1600, and amplified in the reprint of 1604, is often described as a collection of old ballads, made in continuation of the anthologies arranged by Nucio and Nájera. Old, as applied to _romances_, has a relative meaning; but even in the lowest sense the word can scarcely be used of the songs in the _Romancero General_, which is very largely made up of the work of contemporary poets. Another famous volume of lyrics is Pedro Espinosa's _Flores de Poetas ilustres de España_ (1605), which includes specimens of Camões, Barahona de Soto, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Quevedo, Salas Barbadillo, and others of less account. Of minor singers, such as López Maldonado, the friend of Cervantes and of Lope, there were too many; but Maldonado's _Cancionero_ (1586) reveals a combination of sincerity and technical excellence which distinguishes him from the crowd of fluent versifiers typified by Pedro de Padilla. Devout songs, as simple as they are beautiful, are found in the numbers of Juan López de Úbeda and of Francisco de Ocaña, who may be studied in their respective _cancioneros_ (1588, 1604), or—much more briefly, and perhaps to better purpose—in Rivadeneyra's _Romancero y Cancionero sagrados_. The chief of these pious minstrels was JOSÉ DE VALDIVIELSO (?1560-1636), the author of a long poem entitled _Vida, Excelencias y Muerte del gloriosísimo Patriarca San José_; but it is neither by this tedious sacred epic nor by his twelve _autos_ that Valdivielso should be judged. His lyrical gift, scarcely less sweet and sincere than Lope's own, is best manifested in his _Romancero Espiritual_, with its _romances_ to Our Lady, its pious _villancicos_ on Christ's birth, which anticipate the mingled devotion and familiarity of Herrick's _Noble Numbers_.

ANTONIO PÉREZ (1540-1611), once secretary to Felipe II., and in all probability the King's rival in love, figures here as a letter-writer of the highest merit. No Spaniard of his age surpasses him in clearness, vigour, and variety. Whether he attempt the vein of high gallantry, the flattery of "noble patrons," the terrorising of an enemy by hints and innuendos, his phrase is always a model of correct and spirited expression. In a graver manner are his _Relaciones_ and his _Memorial del hecho de su causa_, which combine the dignity of a statesman with the ingenuity of an attorney. But in all circumstances Pérez never fails to interest by the happy novelty of his thought, the weighty sententiousness of his aphorisms, and by his unblushing revelation of baseness and cupidity.

To this period belongs also the _Centón Epistolario_, a series of a hundred letters purporting to be written by Fernán Gómez de Cibdareal, physician at Juan II.'s court. It is obviously modelled upon the _Crónica_ of Juan II.'s reign, and the imitation goes so far that, when the chronicler makes a blunder, the supposed letter-writer follows him. The _Centón Epistolario_ is now admitted to be a literary forgery, due, it is believed, to Gil González de Ávila, who wrote nothing of equal excellence under his own name. In these circumstances the _Centón_ loses all historic value, and what was once cited as a monument of old prose must now be considered as a clever mystification—perhaps the most perfect of its kind.

Contemporary with Cervantes and Lope de Vega was the greatest of all Spanish historians, JUAN DE MARIANA (1537-1624). The natural son of a canon of Talavera, Mariana distinguished himself at Alcalá de Henares, was brought under the notice of Diego Láinez, General of the Jesuits, and joined the order, whose importance was growing daily. At twenty-four Mariana was appointed professor of theology at the great Jesuit College in Rome, whence he passed to Sicily and Paris. In 1574 he returned to Spain, and was settled in the Society's house at Toledo. He was appointed to examine into the charges made by Léon de Castro against Arias Montano, whose Polyglot Bible appeared at Antwerp in 1569-72. Montano was accused of adulterating the Hebrew text, and among the Jesuits the impression of his trickery was general. After a careful examination, extending over two years, Mariana pronounced in Montano's favour. In 1599 there appeared his treatise entitled _De Rege_, with official sanction by his superiors. No Spaniard raised his voice against the book; but its sixth chapter, which laid it down that kings may be put to death in certain circumstances, created a storm abroad. It was sought to prove that, if Mariana had never written, Ravaillac would not have assassinated Henri IV.; and, eleven years after publication, Mariana's book was publicly burned by the hangman. His seven Latin treatises, published at Köln in 1609, do not concern us here; but they must be mentioned, since two of the essays—one on immortality, the other on currency questions—led to the writer's imprisonment.

The main work of Mariana's lifetime was his _Historia de España_, written, as he says, to let Europe know what Spain had accomplished. It was not unnatural that, with a foreign audience in view, Mariana should address it in Latin; hence his first twenty books were published in that language (1592). But he bethought him of his own country, and, in a happy hour, became his own translator. His Castilian version (1601) almost amounts to a new work; for, in translating, he cut, amplified, and corrected as he saw fit. And in subsequent editions he continued to modify and improve. The result is a masterpiece of historic prose. Mariana was not minute in his methods, and his contempt for literal accuracy comes out in his answer to Lupercio de Argensola, who had pointed out an error in detail:—"I never pretended to verify each fact in a history of Spain; if I had, I should never have finished it." This is typical of the man and his method. He makes no pretence to special research, and he accepts a legend if he honestly can: even as he follows a common literary convention when he writes speeches in Livy's manner for his chief personages. But while a score of writers cared more for accuracy than did Mariana, his work survives not as a chronicle, but as a brilliant exercise in literature. His learning is more than enough to save him from radical blunders; his impartiality and his patriotism go hand in hand; his character-drawing is firm and convincing; and his style, with its faint savour of archaism, is of unsurpassed dignity and clearness in his narrative. He cared more for the spirit than for the letter, and time has justified him. "The most remarkable union of picturesque chronicling with sober history that the world has ever seen"—in such words Ticknor gives his verdict; and the praise is not excessive.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] In Felipe II.'s time the normal value of an _escudo de oro_ was 8s. 4-1/4d. The actual exchange value varied between seven and eight shillings.

[17] One _real de vellón_ = 34 _maravedís_ = 2 pence, 2 farthings, and 2/3 of a farthing. One _real de plata_ = 2 _reales de vellón_. Unless otherwise stated, a _real_ may be taken to mean a _real de plata_.

[18] See _The Athenæum_, April 12, April 19, and May 3, 1873.

[19] See Cristóbal Pérez de Pastor's _Documentos cervantinos hasta ahora inéditos_ (Madrid, 1897), pp. 135-137.

[20] British Museum Add. MSS., 20, 812.

[21] This is taken by all English writers, and appears in the British Museum Catalogue, as a real name. I only reveal an open secret if I point out that it is a perfect anagram for Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, the excellent scholar to whom we owe the _Cancionero musical de los siglos xv. y xvi._ and the new edition of Encina's theatre.

[22] The seducer is conjectured to be Olivares' son-in-law, the Duque de Medina de las Torres.

[23] Lope's popularity spread as far as America. Three of his plays were translated into the _nahuatl_ dialect by Bartolomé Alba. See José Mariano Beristain de Souza's _Biblioteca Hispano-Americana_ (Mexico, 1816), vol i. p. 64.

[24] See M. Farinelli's learned study, _Grillparzer und Lope de Vega_ (Berlin, 1894).

[25] It seems probable that Cervantes and Pérez were both anticipated by Alonso Álvarez de Soria, who was finally hanged. See Bartolomé José Gallardo, _Ensayo de una Biblioteca Española_ (Madrid, 1863, vol. i., col. 285).