belongs, beyond question, to his Don Quixote,--the work which, above
all others, not merely of his own age, but of all modern times, bears
most deeply the impression of the national character it represents,
and has, therefore, in return, enjoyed a degree and extent of national
favor never granted to any other.[165] When Cervantes began to write
it is wholly uncertain. For twenty years preceding the appearance of
the First Part he printed nothing;[166] and the little we know of
him, during that long and dreary period of his life, shows only how
he obtained a hard subsistence for himself and his family by common
business agencies, which, we have reason to suppose, were generally of
trifling importance, and which, we are sure, were sometimes distressing
in their consequences. The tradition, therefore, of his persecutions
in La Mancha, and his own averment that the Don Quixote was begun in a
prison, are all the hints we have received concerning the circumstances
under which it was first imagined; and that such circumstances should
have tended to such a result is a striking fact in the history, not
only of Cervantes, but of the human mind, and shows how different was
his temperament from that commonly found in men of genius.
[165] My own experience in Spain fully corroborates the
suggestion of Inglis, in his very pleasant book, (Rambles in the
Footsteps of Don Quixote, London, 1837, 8vo, p. 26), that “no
Spaniard is entirely ignorant of Cervantes.” At least, none I
ever questioned on the subject--and their number was great in the
lower conditions of society--seemed to be entirely ignorant what
sort of personages were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
[166] He felt this himself as a dreary interval in his life,
for he says in his Prólogo: “Al cabo de tantos años como ha,
que duermo en el silencio del olvido,” etc. In fact, from 1584
till 1605 he had printed nothing except a few short poems of
little value, and seems to have been wholly occupied in painful
struggles to secure a subsistence.
His purpose in writing the Don Quixote has sometimes been enlarged by
the ingenuity of a refined criticism, until it has been made to embrace
the whole of the endless contrast between the poetical and the prosaic
in our natures,--between heroism and generosity on one side, as if
they were mere illusions, and a cold selfishness on the other, as if
it were the truth and reality of life.[167] But this is a metaphysical
conclusion drawn from views of the work at once imperfect and
exaggerated; a conclusion contrary to the spirit of the age, which was
not given to a satire so philosophical and generalizing, and contrary
to the character of Cervantes himself, as we follow it from the time
when he first became a soldier, through all his trials in Algiers,
and down to the moment when his warm and trusting heart dictated the
Dedication of “Persiles and Sigismunda” to the Count de Lemos. His
whole spirit, indeed, seems rather to have been filled with a cheerful
confidence in human virtue, and his whole bearing in life seems to
have been a contradiction to that discouraging and saddening scorn for
whatever is elevated and generous, which such an interpretation of the
Don Quixote necessarily implies.[168]
[167] This idea is found partly developed by Bouterwek,
(Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, Göttingen, 1803, 8vo,
Tom. III. pp. 335-337), and fully set forth and defended by
Sismondi, with his accustomed eloquence. Littérature du Midi de
l’Europe, Paris, 1813, 8vo, Tom. III. pp. 339-343.
[168] Many other interpretations have been given to the Don
Quixote. One of the most absurd is that of Daniel De Foe, who
declares it to be “an emblematic history of, and a just satire
upon, the Duke de Medina Sidonia, a person very remarkable at
that time in Spain.” (Wilson’s Life of De Foe, London, 1830,
8vo, Vol. III. p. 437, note.) The “Buscapié”--if there ever was
such a publication--pretended that it set forth “some of the
undertakings and gallantries of the Emperor Charles V.” See
Appendix (D).
Nor does he himself permit us to give to his romance any such secret
meaning; for, at the very beginning of the work, he announces it to
be his sole purpose to break down the vogue and authority of books of
chivalry, and, at the end of the whole, he declares anew, in his own
person, that “he had had no other desire than to render abhorred of
men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry”;[169]
exulting in his success, as an achievement of no small moment. And
such, in fact, it was; for we have abundant proof that the fanaticism
for these romances was so great in Spain, during the sixteenth century,
as to have become matter of alarm to the more judicious. Many of the
distinguished contemporary authors speak of its mischiefs, and among
the rest the venerable Luis de Granada, and Malon de Chaide, who wrote
the eloquent “Conversion of Mary Magdalen.”[170] Guevara, the learned
and fortunate courtier of Charles the Fifth, declares that “men did
read nothing in his time but such shameful books as ‘Amadis de Gaula,’
‘Tristan,’ ‘Primaleon,’ and the like”;[171] the acute author of “The
Dialogue on Languages” says that “the ten years he passed at court he
wasted in studying ‘Florisando,’ ‘Lisuarte,’ ‘The Knight of the Cross,’
and other such books, more than he can name”;[172] and from different
sources we know, what, indeed, we may gather from Cervantes himself,
that many who read these fictions took them for true histories.[173] At
last, they were deemed so noxious, that, in 1553, they were prohibited
by law from being printed or sold in the American colonies, and in 1555
the same prohibition, and even the burning of all copies of them extant
in Spain itself, was earnestly asked for by the Cortes.[174] The evil,
in fact, had become formidable, and the wise began to see it.
[169] In the Prólogo to the First Part, he says, “_No mira á
mas_ que á deshacer la autoridad y cabida, que en el mundo y _en
el vulgo_ tienen los libros de Caballerías”; and he ends the
Second Part, ten years afterwards, with these remarkable words:
“_No ha sido otro mi deseo_, que poner en aborrecimiento de los
hombres las fingidas y disparatadas historias de los libros de
Caballerías, que por las de mi verdadero Don Quixote van ya
tropezando, y han de caer del todo sin duda alguna. Vale.” It
seems really hard that a great man’s word of honor should thus be
called in question by the spirit of an over-refined criticism,
two centuries after his death. D. Vicente Salvá has partly, but
not wholly, avoided this difficulty in an ingenious and pleasant
essay on the question, “Whether the Don Quixote has yet been
judged according to its merits”;--in which he maintains, that
Cervantes did not intend to satirize the substance and essence
of books of chivalry, but only to purge away their absurdities
and improbabilities; and that, after all, he has given us only
another romance of the same class which has ruined the fortunes
of all its predecessors by being itself immensely in advance of
them all. Ochoa, Apuntes para una Biblioteca, Paris, 1842, 8vo,
Tom. II. pp. 723-740.
[170] Símbolo de la Fé, Parte II. cap. 17, near the end.
Conversion de la Magdalena, 1592, Prólogo al Letor. Both are
strong in their censures.
[171] “Vemos, que ya no se ocupan los hombres sino en leer libros
que es affrenta nombrarlos, como son Amadis de Gaula, Tristan de
Leonis, Primaleon,” etc. Argument to the Aviso de Privados, Obras
de Ant. de Guevara, Valladolid, 1545, folio, f. clviii. b.
[172] The passage is too long to be conveniently cited, but it is
very severe. See Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, Tom. II. pp. 157, 158.
[173] See _ante_, Vol. I. pp. 249-254. But, besides what is said
there, Francisco de Portugal, who died in 1632, tells us in his
“Arte de Galantería,” (Lisboa, 1670, 4to, p. 96), that Simon de
Silveira (I suppose the Portuguese poet who lived about 1500;
Barbosa, Tom. III. p. 722) once swore upon the Evangelists, that
he believed the whole of the Amadis to be true history.
[174] Clemencin, in the Preface to his edition of Don Quixote,
Tom. I. pp. xi.-xvi., cites many other proofs of the passion for
books of chivalry at that period in Spain; adding a reference
to the “Recopilacion de Leyes de las Indias,” Lib. I. Tít. 24,
Ley 4, for the law of 1553, and printing at length the very
curious petition of the Cortes of 1555, which I have not seen
anywhere else, and which would probably have produced the law it
demanded, if the abdication of the Emperor, the same year, had
not prevented all action upon the matter.
To destroy a passion that had struck its roots so deeply in
the character of all classes of men,[175] to break up the only
reading which at that time could be considered widely popular and
fashionable,[176] was certainly a bold undertaking, and one that marks
any thing rather than a scornful or broken spirit, or a want of faith
in what is most to be valued in our common nature. The great wonder
is, that Cervantes succeeded. But that he did there is no question.
No book of chivalry was written after the appearance of Don Quixote,
in 1605; and from the same date, even those already enjoying the
greatest favor ceased, with one or two unimportant exceptions, to be
reprinted;[177] so that, from that time to the present, they have
been constantly disappearing, until they are now among the rarest of
literary curiosities;--a solitary instance of the power of genius to
destroy, by a single well-timed blow, an entire department, and that,
too, a flourishing and favored one, in the literature of a great and
proud nation.
[175] Allusions to the fanaticism of the lower classes on the
subject of books of chivalry are happily introduced into Don
Quixote, Parte I. c. 32, and in other places. It extended, too,
to those better bred and informed. Francisco de Portugal, in the
“Arte de Galantería,” cited in a preceding note, and written
before 1632, tells the following anecdote: “A knight came home
one day from the chase and found his wife and daughters and
their women crying. Surprised and grieved, he asked them if any
child or relation were dead. ‘No,’ they answered, suffocated
with tears. ‘Why, then, do you weep so?’ he rejoined, still more
amazed. ‘Sir,’ they replied, ‘Amadis is dead.’ They had read so
far.” p. 96.
[176] Cervantes himself, as his Don Quixote amply proves, must,
at some period of his life, have been a devoted reader of the
romances of chivalry. How minute and exact his knowledge of them
was may be seen, among other passages, from one at the end of
the twentieth chapter of Part First, where, speaking of Gasabal,
the esquire of Galaor, he observes that his name is mentioned
_but once_ in the history of Amadis of Gaul;--a fact which the
indefatigable Mr. Bowle took the pains to verify, when reading
that huge romance. See his “Letter to Dr. Percy, on a New and
Classical Edition of Don Quixote.” London, 1777, 4to, p. 25.
[177] Clemencin, in his Preface, notes “D. Policisne de Boecia,”
printed in 1602, as the _last_ book of chivalry that was written
in Spain, and adds, that, after 1605, “_no se publicó_ de nuevo
libro alguno de caballerías, y _dejaron de_ reimprimirse los
anteriores.” (p. xxi.) To this remark of Clemencin, however,
there are exceptions. For instance, the “Genealogía de la
Toledana Discreta, Primera Parte,” por Eugenio Martinez, a tale
of chivalry in octave stanzas, was reprinted in 1608; and “El
Caballero del Febo,” and “Claridiano,” his son, are extant in
editions of 1617. The period of the passion for such books in
Spain can be readily seen in the Bibliographical Catalogue, and
notices of them by Salvá, in the Repertorio Americano, London,
1827, Tom. IV. pp. 29-74. It was eminently the sixteenth century.
The general plan Cervantes adopted to accomplish this object, without,
perhaps, foreseeing its whole course, and still less all its results,
was simple as well as original. In 1605,[178] he published the First
Part of Don Quixote, in which a country gentleman of La Mancha--full
of genuine Castilian honor and enthusiasm, gentle and dignified in his
character, trusted by his friends, and loved by his dependants--is
represented as so completely crazed by long reading the most famous
books of chivalry, that he believes them to be true, and feels himself
called on to become the impossible knight-errant they describe,--nay,
actually goes forth into the world to defend the oppressed and avenge
the injured, like the heroes of his romances.
[178] See Appendix (E).
To complete his chivalrous equipment--which he had begun by fitting
up for himself a suit of armour strange to his century--he took an
esquire out of his neighbourhood; a middle-aged peasant, ignorant
and credulous to excess, but of great good-nature; a glutton and a
liar; selfish and gross, yet attached to his master; shrewd enough
occasionally to see the folly of their position, but always amusing,
and sometimes mischievous, in his interpretations of it. These two
sally forth from their native village in search of adventures, of which
the excited imagination of the knight, turning windmills into giants,
solitary inns into castles, and galley-slaves into oppressed gentlemen,
finds abundance, wherever he goes; while the esquire translates them
all into the plain prose of truth with an admirable simplicity,
quite unconscious of its own humor, and rendered the more striking
by its contrast with the lofty and courteous dignity and magnificent
illusions of the superior personage. There could, of course, be but one
consistent termination of adventures like these. The knight and his
esquire suffer a series of ridiculous discomfitures, and are at last
brought home, like madmen, to their native village, where Cervantes
leaves them, with an intimation that the story of their adventures is
by no means ended.
From this time we hear little of Cervantes and nothing of his hero,
till eight years afterwards, in July, 1613, when he wrote the Preface
to his Tales, where he distinctly announces a Second Part of Don
Quixote. But before this Second Part could be published, and, indeed,
before it was finished, a person calling himself Alonso Fernandez de
Avellaneda, who seems, from some provincialisms in his style, to have
been an Aragonese, and who, from other internal evidence, is suspected
to have been a Dominican monk, came out, in the summer of 1614, with
what he impertinently called “The Second Volume of the Ingenious
Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha.”[179]
[179] Cervantes reproaches Avellaneda with being an Aragonese,
because he sometimes omits the article where a Castilian would
insert it. (Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 59.) The rest of the
discussion about him is found in Pellicer, Vida, pp. clvi.-clxv.;
in Navarrete, Vida, pp. 144-151; in Clemencin’s Don Quixote,
Parte II. c. 59, notes; and in Adolfo de Castro’s Conde Duque de
Olivares, Cadiz, 1846, 8vo, pp. 11, etc. This Avellaneda, whoever
he was, called his book “_Segundo_ Tomo del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don
Quixote de la Mancha,” etc., (Tarragona, 1614, 12mo), and printed
it so that it matches very well with the Valencian edition,
1605, of the First Part of the genuine Don Quixote;--both of
which I have. There are editions of it, Madrid, 1732 and 1805;
and a translation by Le Sage, 1704, in which,--after his manner
of translating,--he alters and enlarges the original work with
little ceremony or good faith. The edition of 1805, in 2 vols.
12mo, is expurgated.
Two things are remarkable in relation to this book. The first is,
that, though it is hardly possible its author’s name should not have
been known to many, and especially to Cervantes himself, still it is
only by remote conjecture that it has been sometimes assigned to Luis
de Aliaga, the king’s confessor, a person whom, from his influence at
court, it might not have been deemed expedient openly to attack; and
sometimes to Juan Blanco de Paz, a Dominican friar, who had been an
enemy of Cervantes in Algiers. The second is, that the author seems
to have had hints of the plan Cervantes was pursuing in his Second
Part, then unfinished, and to have used them in an unworthy manner,
especially in making Don Alvaro Tarfe play substantially the same
part that is played by the Duke and Duchess towards Don Quixote,
and in carrying the knight through an adventure at an inn with
play-actors rehearsing one of Lope de Vega’s dramas, almost exactly
like the adventure with the puppet-show man so admirably imagined by
Cervantes.[180]
[180] Avellaneda, c. 26.
But this is all that can interest us about the book, which, if not
without merit in some respects, is generally low and dull, and would
now be forgotten, if it were not connected with the fame of Don
Quixote. In its Preface, Cervantes is treated with coarse indignity,
his age, his sufferings, and even his honorable wounds, being sneered
at;[181] and in the body of the book, the character of Don Quixote,
who appears as a vulgar madman, fancying himself to be Achilles, or
any other character that happened to occur to the author,[182] is
so completely without dignity or consistency, that it is clear the
writer did not possess the power of comprehending the genius he at
once basely libelled and meanly attempted to supplant. The best parts
of the work are those in which Sancho is introduced; the worst are its
indecent stories and the adventures of Barbara, who is a sort of brutal
caricature of the graceful Dorothea, and whom the knight mistakes for
Queen Zenobia.[183] But it is almost always wearisome, and comes to a
poor conclusion by the confinement of Don Quixote in a mad-house.[184]
[181] “Tiene mas lengua que manos,” says Avellaneda, coarsely.
[182] Chapter 8;--just as he makes Don Quixote fancy a poor
peasant in his melon-garden to be Orlando Furioso (c. 6);--a
little village to be Rome (c. 7);--and its decent priest
alternately Lirgando and the Archbishop Turpin. Perhaps the most
obvious comparison, and the fairest that can be made, between the
two Don Quixotes is in the story of the goats, told by Sancho,
in the twentieth chapter of the First Part in Cervantes, and
the story of the geese, by Sancho, in Avellaneda’s twenty-first
chapter, because the latter professes to improve upon the former.
The failure to do so, however, is obvious enough.
[183] The whole story of Barbara, beginning with Chapter 22, and
going nearly through the remainder of the work, is miserably
coarse and dull.
[184] In 1824, a curious attempt was made, probably by some
ingenious German, to add two chapters more to Don Quixote, as if
they had been suppressed when the Second Part was published. But
they were not thought worth printing by the Spanish Academy. See
Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. VI. p. 296.
Cervantes evidently did not receive this affronting production until
he was far advanced in the composition of his Second Part; but in the
fifty-ninth chapter, written apparently when it first reached him, he
breaks out upon it, and from that moment never ceases to persecute it,
in every form of ingenious torture, until, in the seventy-fourth, he
brings his own work to its conclusion. Even Sancho, with his accustomed
humor and simplicity, is let loose upon the unhappy Aragonese; for,
having understood from a chance traveller who first brings the book to
their knowledge, that his wife is called in it Mary Gutierrez, instead
of Teresa Panza,--
“‘A pretty sort of a history-writer,’ cried Sancho, ‘and a deal
must he know of our affairs, if he calls Teresa Panza, my wife, Mary
Gutierrez. Take the book again, Sir, and see if I am put into it, and
if he has changed my name, too.’ ‘By what I hear you say, my friend,’
replied the stranger, ‘you are, no doubt, Sancho Panza, the esquire
of Don Quixote.’ ‘To be sure I am,’ answered Sancho, ‘and proud of
it, too.’ ‘Then, in truth,’ said the gentleman, ‘this new author does
not treat you with the propriety shown in your own person; he makes
you a glutton and a fool; not at all amusing, and quite another thing
from the Sancho described in the first part of your master’s history.’
‘Well, Heaven forgive him!’ said Sancho; ‘but I think he might have
left me in my corner, without troubling himself about me; for, _Let
him play that knows the way_; and, _Saint Peter at Rome is well off at
home_.’”[185]
[185] Parte II. c. 59.
Stimulated by the appearance of this rival work, as well as offended
with its personalities, Cervantes urged forward his own, and, if we may
judge by its somewhat hurried air, brought it to a conclusion sooner
than he had intended.[186] At any rate, as early as February, 1615,
it was finished, and was published in the following autumn; after
which we hear nothing more of Avellaneda, though he had intimated his
purpose to exhibit Don Quixote in another series of adventures at
Avila, Valladolid, and Salamanca.[187] This, indeed, Cervantes took
some pains to prevent; for--besides a little changing his plan, and
avoiding the jousts at Saragossa, because Avellaneda had carried his
hero there[188]--he finally restores Don Quixote, through a severe
illness, to his right mind, and makes him renounce all the follies
of knight-errantry, and die, like a peaceful Christian, in his own
bed;--thus cutting off the possibility of another continuation with the
pretensions of the first.
[186] See Appendix (E).
[187] At the end of Cap. 36.
[188] When Don Quixote understands that Avellaneda has given an
account of his being at Saragossa, he exclaims, “Por el mismo
caso, no pondré los pies en Zaragoza, y así sacaré á la plaza del
mundo la mentira dese historiador moderno.” Parte II. c. 59.
This latter half of Don Quixote is a contradiction of the proverb
Cervantes cites in it,--that second parts were never yet good for
much. It is, in fact, better than the first. It shows more freedom and
vigor; and if the caricature is sometimes pushed to the very verge of
what is permitted, the invention, the style of thought, and, indeed,
the materials throughout, are richer, and the finish is more exact.
The character of Samson Carrasco, for instance,[189] is a very happy,
though somewhat bold, addition to the original persons of the drama;
and the adventures at the castle of the Duke and Duchess, where Don
Quixote is fooled to the top of his bent; the managements of Sancho
as governor of his island; the visions and dreams of the cave of
Montesinos; the scenes with Roque Guinart, the freebooter, and with
Gines de Passamonte, the galley-slave and puppet-show man; together
with the mock-heroic hospitalities of Don Antonio Moreno at Barcelona,
and the final defeat of the knight there, are all admirable. In truth,
every thing in this Second Part, especially its general outline and
tone, show that time and a degree of success he had not before known
had ripened and perfected the strong manly sense and sure insight into
human nature which are visible everywhere in the works of Cervantes,
and which here become a part, as it were, of his peculiar genius,
whose foundations had been laid, dark and deep, amidst the trials and
sufferings of his various life.
[189] Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 4. The style of both parts of the
genuine Don Quixote is, as might be anticipated, free, fresh, and
careless;--genial, like the author’s character, full of idiomatic
beauties, and by no means without blemishes. Garcés, in his
“Fuerza y Vigor de la Lengua Castellana,” Tom. II., Prólogo, as
well as throughout that excellent work, has given it, perhaps,
more uniform praise than it deserves;--while Clemencin, in his
notes, is very rigorous and unpardoning to its occasional defects.
But throughout both parts, Cervantes shows the impulses and instincts
of an original power with most distinctness in his development of the
characters of Don Quixote and Sancho; characters in whose contrast and
opposition is hidden the full spirit of his peculiar humor, and no
small part of what is most characteristic of the entire fiction. They
are his prominent personages. He delights, therefore, to have them as
much as possible in the front of his scene. They grow visibly upon his
favor as he advances, and the fondness of his liking for them makes
him constantly produce them in lights and relations as little foreseen
by himself as they are by his readers. The knight, who seems to have
been originally intended for a parody of the Amadis, becomes gradually
a detached, separate, and wholly independent personage, into whom is
infused so much of a generous and elevated nature, such gentleness and
delicacy, such a pure sense of honor, and such a warm love for whatever
is noble and good, that we feel almost the same attachment to him that
the barber and the curate did, and are almost as ready as his family
was to mourn over his death.
The case of Sancho is again very similar, and perhaps in some respects
stronger. At first, he is introduced as the opposite of Don Quixote,
and used merely to bring out his master’s peculiarities in a more
striking relief. It is not until we have gone through nearly half
of the First Part that he utters one of those proverbs which form
afterwards the staple of his conversation and humor; and it is not till
the opening of the Second Part, and, indeed, not till he comes forth,
in all his mingled shrewdness and credulity, as governor of Barataria,
that his character is quite developed and completed to the full measure
of its grotesque, yet congruous, proportions.
Cervantes, in truth, came, at last, to love these creations of his
marvellous power, as if they were real, familiar personages, and to
speak of them and treat them with an earnestness and interest that
tend much to the illusion of his readers. Both Don Quixote and Sancho
are thus brought before us, like such living realities, that, at
this moment, the figures of the crazed, gaunt, dignified knight and
of his round, selfish, and most amusing esquire dwell bodied forth
in the imaginations of more, among all conditions of men throughout
Christendom, than any other of the creations of human talent. The
greatest of the great poets--Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton--have
no doubt risen to loftier heights, and placed themselves in more
imposing relations with the noblest attributes of our nature; but
Cervantes--always writing under the unchecked impulse of his own
genius, and instinctively concentrating in his fiction whatever was
peculiar to the character of his nation--has shown himself of kindred
to all times and all lands; to the humblest degrees of cultivation
as well as to the highest; and has thus, beyond all other writers,
received in return a tribute of sympathy and admiration from the
universal spirit of humanity.
It is not easy to believe, that, when he had finished such a work, he
was insensible to what he had done. Indeed, there are passages in the
Don Quixote itself which prove a consciousness of his own genius, its
aspirations, and its power.[190] And yet there are, on the other hand,
carelessnesses, blemishes, and contradictions scattered through it,
which seem to show him to have been almost indifferent to contemporary
success or posthumous fame. His plan, which he seems to have modified
more than once while engaged in the composition of the work, is loose
and disjointed; his style, though full of the richest idiomatic
beauties, abounds with inaccuracies; and the facts and incidents that
make up his fiction are full of anachronisms, which Los Rios, Pellicer,
and Eximeno have in vain endeavoured to reconcile, either with the
main current of the story itself, or with one another.[191] Thus, in
the First Part, Don Quixote is generally represented as belonging to
a remote age, and his history is supposed to have been written by an
ancient Arabian author;[192] while, in the examination of his library,
he is plainly contemporary with Cervantes himself, and, after his
defeats, is brought home confessedly in the year 1604. To add further
to this confusion, when we reach the Second Part, which opens only
a month after the conclusion of the First, and continues only a few
weeks, we have, at the side of the same claims of an ancient Arabian
author, a conversation about the expulsion of the Moors,[193] which
happened after 1609, and a criticism on Avellaneda, whose work was
published in 1614.[194]
[190] The concluding passages of the work, for instance, are in
this tone; and this is the tone of his criticism on Avellaneda.
I do not count in the same sense the passage, in the Second
Part, c. 16, in which Don Quixote is made to boast that thirty
thousand copies had been printed of the First Part, and that
thirty thousand thousands would follow; for this is intended as
the mere rhodomontade of the hero’s folly; but I confess I think
Cervantes is somewhat in earnest when he makes Sancho say to his
master, “I will lay a wager, that, before long, there will not
be a two-penny eating-house, a hedge tavern, or a poor inn, or
barber’s shop, where the history of what we have done shall not
be painted and stuck up.” Parte II. c. 71.
[191] Los Rios, in his “Análisis,” prefixed to the edition
of the Academy, 1780, undertakes to defend Cervantes on the
authority of the ancients, as if the Don Quixote were a poem,
written in imitation of the Odyssey. Pellicer, in the fourth
section of his “Discurso Preliminar” to his edition of Don
Quixote, 1797, follows much the same course; besides which, at
the end of the fifth volume, he gives what he gravely calls
a “Geographico-historical Description of the Travels of Don
Quixote,” accompanied with a map; as if some of Cervantes’s
geography were not impossible, and as if half his localities were
to be found anywhere but in the imaginations of his readers. On
the ground of such irregularities in his geography, and on other
grounds equally absurd, Nicholas Perez, a Valencian, attacked
Cervantes in the “Anti-Quixote,” the first volume of which was
published in 1805, but was followed by none of the five that
were intended to complete it; and received an answer, quite
satisfactory, but more severe than was needful, in a pamphlet,
published at Madrid in 1806, 12mo, by J. A. Pellicer, without
his name, entitled “Exámen Crítico del Tomo Primero de el
Anti-Quixote.” And finally, Don Antonio Eximeno, in his “Apología
de Miguel de Cervantes,” (Madrid, 1806, 12mo), excuses or defends
every thing in the Don Quixote, giving us a new chronological
plan, (p. 60), with exact astronomical reckonings, (p. 129),
and maintaining, among other wise positions, that Cervantes
_intentionally_ represented Don Quixote to have lived both in an
earlier age and in his own time, in order that curious readers
might be confounded, and, after all, only some imaginary period
be assigned to his hero’s achievements (pp. 19, etc.). All this,
I think, is eminently absurd; but it is the consequence of the
blind admiration with which Cervantes was idolized in Spain
during the latter part of the last century and the beginning of
the present;--itself partly a result of the coldness with which
he had been overlooked by the learned of his countrymen for
nearly a century previous to that period. Don Quixote, Madrid,
1819, 8vo, Prólogo de la Academia, p. [3].
[192] Conde, the learned author of the “Dominacion de los Árabes
en España,” undertakes, in a pamphlet published in conjunction
with J. A. Pellicer, to show that the name of this pretended
Arabic author, _Cid Hamete Benengeli_, is a combination of
Arabic words, meaning _noble, satirical, and unhappy_. (Carta
en Castellano, etc., Madrid, 1800, 12mo, pp. 16-27.) It may
be so; but it is not in character for Cervantes to seek such
refinements, or to make such a display of his little learning,
which does not seem to have extended beyond a knowledge of the
vulgar Arabic spoken in Barbary, the Latin, the Italian, and the
Portuguese. Like Shakspeare, however, Cervantes had read and
remembered nearly all that had been printed in his own language,
and constantly makes the most felicitous allusions to the large
stores of his knowledge of this sort.
[193] Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 54.
[194] The criticism on Avellaneda begins, as we have said, Parte
II. c. 59.
But this is not all. As if still further to accumulate contradictions
and incongruities, the very details of the story he has invented are
often in whimsical conflict with each other, as well as with the
historical facts to which they allude. Thus, on one occasion, the
scenes which he had represented as having occurred in the course of a
single evening and the following morning are said to have occupied two
days;[195] on another, he sets a company down to a late supper, and,
after conversations and stories that must have carried them nearly
through the night, he says, “It began to draw towards evening.”[196]
In different places he calls the same individual by different names,
and--what is rather amusing--once reproaches Avellaneda with a mistake
which was, after all, his own.[197] And finally, having discovered
the inconsequence of saying seven times that Sancho was on his mule
after Gines de Passamonte had stolen it, he took pains, in the only
edition of the First Part that he ever revised, to correct two of his
blunders,--heedlessly overlooking the rest; and when he published
the Second Part, laughed heartily at the whole,--the errors, the
corrections, and all,--as things of little consequence to himself or
any body else.[198]
[195] Parte I. c. 46.
[196] “Llegaba ya la noche,” he says in c. 42 of Parte I., when
all that had occurred from the middle of c. 37 had happened after
they were set down to supper.
[197] Cervantes calls Sancho’s wife by three or four different
names (Parte I. c. 7 and 52, and Parte II. c. 5 and 59); and
Avellaneda having, in some degree, imitated him, Cervantes makes
himself very merry at the confusion; not noticing that the
mistake was really his own.
[198] The facts referred to are these. Gines de Passamonte,
in the 23d chapter of Part First, (ed. 1605, f. 108), steals
Sancho’s ass. But hardly three leaves farther on, in the same
edition, we find Sancho riding again, as usual, on the poor
beast, which reappears yet six other times out of all reason. In
the edition of 1608, Cervantes corrected _two_ of these careless
mistakes on leaves 109 and 112; but left the _five_ others just
as they stood before; and in Chapters 3 and 27 of the Second
Part, (ed. 1615), jests about the whole matter, but shows no
disposition to attempt further corrections.
The romance, however, which he threw so carelessly from him, and which,
I am persuaded, he regarded rather as a bold effort to break up the
absurd taste of his time for the fancies of chivalry than as any thing
of more serious import, has been established by an uninterrupted,
and, it may be said, an unquestioned, success ever since, both as
the oldest classical specimen of romantic fiction, and as one of the
most remarkable monuments of modern genius. But though this may be
enough to fill the measure of human fame and glory, it is not all
to which Cervantes is entitled; for, if we would do him the justice
that would have been dearest to his own spirit, and even if we would
ourselves fully comprehend and enjoy the whole of his Don Quixote,
we should, as we read it, bear in mind, that this delightful romance
was not the result of a youthful exuberance of feeling and a happy
external condition, nor composed in his best years, when the spirits
of its author were light and his hopes high; but that--with all its
unquenchable and irresistible humor, with its bright views of the
world, and its cheerful trust in goodness and virtue--it was written in
his old age, at the conclusion of a life nearly every step of which had
been marked with disappointed expectations, disheartening struggles,
and sore calamities; that he began it in a prison, and that it was
finished when he felt the hand of death pressing heavy and cold upon
his heart. If this be remembered as we read, we may feel, as we ought
to feel, what admiration and reverence are due, not only to the living
power of Don Quixote, but to the character and genius of Cervantes;--if
it be forgotten or underrated, we shall fail in regard to both.[199]
[199] Having expressed so strong an opinion of Cervantes’s
merits, I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of citing the words
of the modest and wise Sir William Temple, who, when speaking
of works of satire, and rebuking Rabelais for his indecency and
profaneness, says: “The matchless writer of Don Quixote is much
more to be admired for having made up so excellent a composition
of satire or ridicule without those ingredients; and seems to be
the best and highest strain that ever has _or will be_ reached
by that vein.” Works, London, 1814, 8vo, Vol. III. p. 436. See
Appendix (E).
CHAPTER XIII.
LOPE DE VEGA.--HIS EARLY LIFE.--A SOLDIER.--HE WRITES THE
ARCADIA.--MARRIES.--HAS A DUEL.--FLIES TO VALENCIA.--DEATH OF
HIS WIFE.--HE SERVES IN THE ARMADA.--RETURNS TO MADRID.--MARRIES
AGAIN.--DEATH OF HIS SONS.--HE BECOMES RELIGIOUS.--HIS POSITION AS A
MAN OF LETTERS.--HIS SAN ISIDRO, HERMOSURA DE ANGÉLICA, DRAGONTEA,
PEREGRINO EN SU PATRIA, AND JERUSALEN CONQUISTADA.
It is impossible to speak of Cervantes as the great genius of the
Spanish nation without recalling Lope de Vega, the rival who far
surpassed him in contemporary popularity, and rose, during the lifetime
of both, to a degree of fame which no Spaniard had yet attained, and
which has been since reached by few of any country. To the examination,
therefore, of this great man’s claims--which extend to almost every
department of the national literature--we naturally turn, after
examining those of the author of Don Quixote.
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio was born on the 25th of November, 1562, at
Madrid, whither his father had recently removed, almost by accident,
from the old family estate of Vega, in the picturesque valley of
Carriedo.[200] From his earliest youth he discovered extraordinary
powers. At five years of age, we are assured by his friend Montalvan,
that he could not only read Latin as well as Spanish, but that he had
such a passion for poetry as to pay his more advanced school-fellows
with a share of his breakfast for writing down the verses he dictated
to them, before he had learned to do it for himself.[201] His father,
who, he intimates, was a poet,[202] and who was much devoted to
works of charity in the latter years of his life, died when he was
very young, and left, besides Lope, a son who perished in the Armada
in 1588, and a daughter who died in 1601. In the period immediately
following the father’s death, the family seems to have been scattered
by poverty; and during this interval Lope probably lived with his
uncle, the Inquisitor, Don Miguel de Carpio, of whom he long afterwards
speaks with great respect.[203]
[200] There is a life of Lope de Vega, which was first published
in a single volume, by the third Lord Holland, in 1806, and
again, with the addition of a life of Guillen de Castro, in two
volumes, 8vo, London, 1817. It is a pleasant book, and contains
a good notice of both its subjects, and judicious criticisms on
their works; but it is quite as interesting for the glimpses it
gives of the fine accomplishments and generous spirit of its
author, who spent some time in Spain when he was about thirty
years old, and never afterwards ceased to take an interest in its
affairs and literature. He was much connected with Jovellanos,
Blanco White, and other distinguished Spaniards; not a few
of whom, in the days of disaster that fell on their country
during the French invasion, and the subsequent misgovernment
of Ferdinand VII., enjoyed the princely hospitality of Holland
House, where the benignant and frank kindliness of its noble
master shed a charm and a grace over what was most intellectual
and elevated in European society that could be given by nothing
else.
Lope’s own account of his origin and birth, in a poetical epistle
to a Peruvian lady, who addressed him in verse, under the name
of “Amarylis,” is curious. The correspondence is found in the
first volume of his Obras Sueltas, (Madrid, 1776-1779, 21 tom.
4to), Epístolas XV. and XVI.; and was first printed by Lope, if
I mistake not, in 1624. It is now referred to for the following
important lines:--
Tiene su silla en la bordada alfombra
De Castilla el valor de la montaña,
Que el valle de Carriedo España nombra.
Allí otro tiempo se cifraba España;
Allí tuve principio; mas que importa
Nacer laurel y ser humilde caña?
Falta dinero allí, la tierra es corta;
Vino mi padre del solar de Vega:
Assí á los pobres la nobleza exhorta;
Siguióle hasta Madrid, de zelos ciega,
Su amorosa muger, porque él queria
Una Española Helena, entonces Griega.
Hicieron amistades, y aquel dia
Fué piedra en mi primero fundamento
La paz de su zelosa fantasía,
En fin por zelos soy; que nacimiento!
Imaginalde vos que haver nacido
De tan inquieta causa fué portento.
And then he goes on with a pleasant account of his making verses
as soon as he could speak; of his early passion for Raymond
Lulli, the metaphysical doctor then so much in fashion; of his
subsequent studies, his family, etc. Lope loved to refer to
his origin in the mountains. He speaks of it in his “Laurel
de Apolo,” (Silva VIII.), and in two or three of his plays he
makes his heroes boast that they came from that part of Spain to
which he traced his own birth. Thus, in “La Venganza Venturosa,”
(Comedias, 4to, Madrid, Tom. X., 1620, f. 33. b), Feliciano, a
high-spirited old knight, says,--
El noble solar que heredo,
No lo daré á rico infame,
Porque nadie me lo llame
En el valle de Carriedo.
And again, in the opening of the “Premio del Bien Hablar,” (4to,
Madrid, Tom. XXI, 1635, f. 159), where he seems to describe his
own case and character:--
Nací en Madrid, aunque son
En Galicia los solares
De mi nacimiento noble,
De mis abuelos y padres.
Para noble nacimiento
Ay en España tres partes,
Galicia, Vizcaya, Asturias,
O ya montañas le llaman.
The valley of Carriedo is said to be very beautiful, and Miñano,
in his “Diccionario Geográfico,” (Madrid, 8vo, Tom. II., 1826, p.
40), describes La Vega as occupying a fine position on the banks
of the Sandoñana.
[201] “Before he knew how to write, he loved verses so much,”
says Montalvan, his friend and executor, “that he shared his
breakfast with the older boys, in order to get them to take down
for him what he dictated.” Fama Póstuma, Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX.
p. 28.
[202] In the “Laurel de Apolo” he says he found rough copies of
verses among his father’s papers, that seemed to him better than
his own.
[203] See Dedication of the “Hermosa Ester” in Comedias, Madrid,
4to, Tom. XV., 1621.
But though the fortunes of his house were broken, his education was
not neglected. He was sent to the Imperial College at Madrid, and
in two years made extraordinary progress in ethics and in elegant
literature, avoiding, as he tells us, the mathematics, which he found
unsuited to his humor, if not to his genius. Accomplishments, too,
were added,--fencing, dancing, and music; and he was going on in a way
to gratify the wishes of his friends, when, at the age of fourteen,
a wild, giddy desire to see the world took possession of him; and,
accompanied by a schoolfellow, he ran away from college. At first, they
went on foot for two or three days. Then they bought a sorry horse,
and travelled as far as Astorga, in the northwestern part of Spain,
not far from the old fief of the Vega family; but there, growing tired
of their journey, and missing more seriously than they had anticipated
the comforts to which they had been accustomed, they determined to come
home. At Segovia, they attempted, in a silversmith’s shop, to exchange
some doubloons and a gold chain for small coin, but were suspected
to be thieves and arrested. The magistrate, however, before whom
they were brought, being satisfied that they were guilty of nothing
but folly, released them; though, wishing to do a kindness to their
friends, as well as to themselves, he sent an officer of justice to
deliver them safely in Madrid.[204]
[204] In the “Fama Póstuma.”
At the age of fifteen, as he tells us in one of his poetical epistles,
he was serving as a soldier against the Portuguese in Terceira;[205]
but only a little later than this, we know that he filled some place
about the person of Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Avila, to whose
kindness he acknowledged himself to be much indebted, and in whose
honor he wrote several eclogues, and inserted a long passage in his
“Jerusalem.”[206] Under the patronage of Manrique, he was, probably,
sent to the University of Alcalá, where he certainly studied some time,
and not only took the degree of Bachelor, but was near submitting
himself to the irrevocable tonsure of the priesthood.[207]
[205] This curious passage is in the Epistle, or Metro Lyrico, to
D. Luis de Haro, Obras Sueltas, Tom. IX. p. 379:--
Ni mi fortuna muda
Ver en tres lustros de mi edad primera
Con la espada desnuda
Al bravo Portugues en la Tercera,
Ni despues en las naves Españolas
Del mar Ingles los puertos y las olas.
I do not quite make out how this can have happened in 1577;
but the assertion seems unequivocal. Schack (Geschichte der
dramatischen Literatur in Spanien, Berlin, 1845, 8vo, Tom. II. p.
164) thinks the fifteen years here referred to are intended to
embrace the fifteen years of Lope’s _life as a soldier_, which he
extends from Lope’s eleventh year to his twenty-sixth,--1573 to
1588. But Schack’s ground for this is a mistake he had himself
previously made in supposing the Dedication of the “Gatomachia”
to be addressed to Lope _himself_; whereas it is addressed to
his _son_, named _Lope_, who served, at the age of _fifteen_,
under the Marquis of Santa Cruz, as we shall see hereafter. The
“Cupid in arms,” therefore, referred to in this Dedication, fails
to prove what Schack thought it proved; and leaves the “fifteen
years” as dark a point as ever. See Schack pp. 157, etc.
[206] These are the earliest works of Lope mentioned by his
eulogists and biographers, (Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. p. 30), and
must be dated as early as 1582 or 1583. The “Pastoral de Jacinto”
is in the Comedias, Tom. XVIII., but was not printed till 1623.
[207] In the epistle to Doctor Gregorio de Ángulo, (Obras
Sueltas, Tom. I. p. 420), he says: “Don Gerónimo Manrique brought
me up. I studied in Alcalá, and took the degree of Bachelor; I
was even on the point of becoming a priest; but I fell blindly
in love, God forgive it; I am married now, and he that is so ill
off fears nothing.” Elsewhere he speaks of his obligations to
Manrique more warmly; for instance, in his Dedication of “Pobreza
no es Vileza,” (Comedias, 4to, Tom. XX., Madrid, 1629), where his
language is very strong.
But, as we learn from some of his own accounts, he now fell in love.
Indeed, if we are to believe the tales he tells of himself in his
“Dorothea,” which was written in his youth and printed with the
sanction of his old age, he suffered great extremity from that passion
when he was only seventeen. Some of the stories of that remarkable
dramatic romance, in which he figures under the name of Fernando, are,
it may be hoped, fictitious;[208] though it must be admitted that
others, like the scene between the hero and Dorothea, in the first act,
the account of his weeping behind the door with Marfisa, on the day she
was to be married to another, and most of the narrative parts in the
fourth act, have an air of reality about them that hardly permits us to
doubt they were true.[209] Taken together, however, they do him little
credit as a young man of honor and a cavalier.
[208] See Dorotea, Acto I. sc. 6, in which, having coolly made up
his mind to abandon Marfisa, he goes to her and pretends he has
killed one man and wounded another in a night brawl, obtaining
by this base falsehood the unhappy creature’s jewels, which he
needed to pay his expenses, and which she gave him out of her
overflowing affection.
[209] Act. I. sc. 5, and Act. IV. sc. 1, have a great air of
reality about them. But other parts, like that of the discourses
and troubles that came from giving to one person the letter
intended for another, are quite too improbable and too much like
the inventions of some of his own plays, to be trusted. (Act. V.
sc. 3, etc.) M. Fauriel, however, whose opinion on such subjects
is always to be respected, regards the whole as true. Revue des
Deux Mondes, Sept. 1, 1839.
From Alcalá Lope came to Madrid, and attached himself to the Duke of
Alva; not, as it has been generally supposed, the remorseless favorite
of Philip the Second, but Antonio, the great Duke’s grandson, who had
succeeded to his ancestor’s fortunes without inheriting his formidable
spirit.[210] Lope was much liked by his new patron, and rose to be
his confidential secretary; living with him both at court and in his
retirement at Alva, where letters seem, for a time, to have taken the
place of arms and affairs. At the suggestion of the Duke, he wrote
his “Arcadia,” a pastoral romance, making a volume of considerable
size; and though chiefly in prose, yet with poetry of various kinds
freely intermixed. Such compositions, as we have seen, were already
in favor in Spain;--the last of them, the “Galatea” of Cervantes,
published in 1584, giving, perhaps, occasion to the Arcadia, which
seems to have been written almost immediately afterwards. Most of them
have one striking peculiarity; that of concealing, under the forms of
pastoral life in ancient times, adventures which had really occurred
in the times of their respective authors. The Duke was desirous to
figure among these somewhat fantastic shepherds and shepherdesses, and
therefore induced Lope to write the Arcadia, and make him its hero,
furnishing some of his own experiences as materials for the work. At
least, so the affair was understood both in Spain and France, when
the Arcadia was published, in 1598; besides which, Lope himself, a
few years later, in the Preface to some miscellaneous poems, tells us
expressly, “The Arcadia is a true history.”[211]
[210] Lord Holland treats him as the _old_ Duke (Life of Lope de
Vega, London, 1817, 2 vols., 8vo); and Southey (Quarterly Review,
1817, Vol. XVIII. p. 2) undertakes to show that it could be no
other; while Nicolas Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. II. p. 74) speaks
as if he were doubtful, though he inclines to think it was the
elder. But there is no doubt about it. Lope repeatedly speaks of
Antonio, _the grandson_, as his patron; e. g. in his epistle to
the Bishop of Oviedo, where he says,--
Y yo del Duque _Antonio_ dexé el Alva.
Obras Sueltas, Tom. I. p. 289.
He, however, praised the elder Duke abundantly in the second,
third, and fifth books of the “Arcadia,” giving in the last an
account of his death and of the glories of _his grandson_, whom
he again notices as his patron. Indeed, the case is quite plain,
and it is only singular that it should need an explanation; for
the idea of making the Duke of Alva, who was minister to Philip
II., a shepherd, seems to be a caricature or an absurdity, or
both. It is, however, the common impression, and may be found
again in the Semanario Pintoresco, 1839, p. 18. The younger Duke,
on the contrary, loved letters, and, if I mistake not, there is a
_Cancion_ of his in the Cancionero General of 1573, f. 178.
[211] The truth of the stories, or some of the stories, in the
Arcadia may be inferred from the mysterious intimations of Lope
in the Prólogo to the first edition; in the “Egloga á Claudio”;
and in the Preface to the “Rimas,” (1602), put into the shape of
a letter to Juan de Arguijo. Quintana, too, in the Dedication
to Lope of his “Experiencias de Amor y Fortuna,” (1626), says
of the Arcadia, that, “under a rude covering, are hidden souls
that are noble and events that really happened.” See, also, Lope,
Obras Sueltas, Tom. XIX. p. xxii., and Tom. II. p. 456. That it
was believed to be true in France is apparent from the Preface
to old Lancelot’s translation, under the title of “Délices de la
Vie Pastorale” (1624). It is important to settle the fact; for it
must be referred to hereafter.
But whether it be throughout a true history or not, it is a very
unsatisfactory one. It is commonly regarded as an imitation of its
popular namesake, the “Arcadia” of Sannazaro, of which a Spanish
translation had appeared in 1547; but it much more resembles the
similar works of Montemayor and Cervantes, both in story and style.
Metaphysics and magic, as in the “Diana” and “Galatea,” are strangely
mixed up with the shows of a pastoral life; and, as in them, we listen
with little interest to the perplexities and sorrows of a lover who,
from mistaking the feelings of his mistress, treats her in such a way
that she marries another, and then, by a series of enchantments, is
saved from the effects of his own despair, and his heart is washed so
clean, that, like Orlando’s, there is not one spot of love left in it.
All this, of course, is unnatural; for the personages it represents are
such as can never have existed, and they talk in a language strained
above the tone becoming prose; all propriety of costume and manners
is neglected; so much learning is crowded into it, that a dictionary
is placed at the end to make it intelligible; and it is drawn out to
a length which now seems quite absurd, though the editions it soon
passed through show that it was not too long for the taste of its
time. It should be added, however, that it occasionally furnishes
happy specimens of a glowing declamatory eloquence, and that in its
descriptions of natural scenery there is often great felicity of
imagery and illustration.[212]
[212] The Arcadia fills the sixth volume of Lope’s Obras
Sueltas. Editions of it were printed in 1599, 1601, 1602, twice,
1603, 1605, 1612, 1615, 1617, and often since, showing a great
popularity.
About the time when Lope was writing the Arcadia, he married Isabela de
Urbina, daughter of the King-at-arms to Philip the Second and Philip
the Third; a lady, we are told, not a little loved and admired in the
high circle to which she belonged.[213] But his domestic happiness
was soon interrupted. He fell into a quarrel with a nobleman of no
very good repute; lampooned him in a satirical ballad; was challenged,
and wounded his adversary;--in consequence of all which, and of other
follies of his youth that seem now to have been brought up against him,
he was cast into prison.[214] He was not, however, left without a true
friend. Claudio Conde, who on more than one occasion showed a genuine
attachment to Lope’s person, accompanied him to his cell, and, when he
was released, went with him to Valencia, where Lope himself was treated
with extraordinary kindness and consideration, though exposed, he says,
at times, to dangers as great as those from which he had suffered so
much at Madrid.[215]
[213] Her father, Diego de Urbina, was a person of some
consequence, and figures among the more distinguished natives of
Madrid in Baena, “Hijos de Madrid.”
[214] Montalvan, it should be noted, seems willing to slide over
these “frowns of fortune, brought on by his youth and aggravated
by his enemies.” But Lope attributes to them his exile, which
came, he says, from “love in early youth, whose trophies were
exile and its results tragedies.” (Epístola Primera á D. Ant. de
Mendoza.) But he also attributes it to false friends, in the fine
ballad where he represents himself as looking down upon the ruins
of Saguntum and moralizing on his own exile:--“Bad friends,” he
says, “have brought me here.” (Obras Sueltas, Tom. XVII. p. 434,
and Romancero General, 1602, f. 108.) But again, in the Second
Part of his “Philomena,” 1621, (Obras Sueltas, Tom. II. p. 452),
he traces his troubles to his earlier adventures; “love to hatred
turned.” “Love-vengeance,” he declares, “_disguised as justice_,
exiled me.”
[215] His relations with Claudio are noticed by himself in the
Dedication to that “true friend,” as he justly calls him, of the
well-known play, “Courting his own Misfortunes”; “which title,”
he adds, “is well suited to those adventures, when, with so
much love, you accompanied me to prison, from which we went to
Valencia, where we ran into no less dangers than we had incurred
at home, and where I repaid you by liberating you from the tower
of Serranos [a jail at Valencia] and the severe sentence you were
there undergoing,” etc. Comedias, Tom. XV., Madrid, 1621, f. 26.
The exile of Lope lasted several years, and was chiefly passed at
Valencia, then in literary reputation next after Madrid among the
cities of Spain. Nor does he seem to have missed the advantages it
offered him; for it was, no doubt, during his residence there that he
formed a friendship with Gaspar de Aguilar and Guillen de Castro, of
which many traces are to be found in his works; while, on the other
hand, it is perhaps not unreasonable to assume that the theatre, which
was just then beginning to take its form in Valencia, was indebted
to the fresh power of Lope for an impulse it never afterwards lost.
At any rate, we know that he was much connected with the Valencian
poets, and that, a little later, they were among his marked followers
in the drama. But his exile was still an exile,--bitter and wearisome
to him,--and he gladly returned to Madrid as soon as he could venture
there safely.
His home, however, soon ceased to be what it had been. His young wife
died in less than a year after his return, and one of his friends,
Pedro de Medinilla, joined him in an eclogue to her memory, which is
dedicated to Lope’s patron, Antonio Duke of Alva,[216]--a poem of
little value, and one that does much less justice to his feelings
than some of his numerous verses to the same lady, under the name of
Belisa, which are scattered through his own works and found in the old
Romanceros.[217]
[216] Obras Sueltas, Tom. IV. pp. 430-443. _Belardo_, the name
Lope bears in this eclogue, is the one he gave himself in the
Arcadia, as may be seen from the sonnet prefixed to that pastoral
by Amphryso, or Antonio Duke of Alva; and it is the poetical
name Lope bore to the time of his death, as may be seen from the
beginning of the third act of the drama in honor of his memory.
(Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. p. 494.) Even his Peruvian Amaryllis
knew it, and under this name addressed to him the poetical
epistle already referred to. This fact--that Belardo was his
recognized poetical appellation--should be borne in mind when
reading the poetry of his time, where it frequently recurs.
[217] _Belisa_ is an anagram of Isabela, the first name of his
wife, as is plain from a sonnet on the death of her mother,
Theodora Urbina, where he speaks of her as “the heavenly image
of his Belisa, whose silent words and gentle smiles had been the
consolation of his exile.” (Obras Sueltas, Tom. IV. p. 278.)
There are several ballads connected with her in the Romancero
General, and a beautiful one in the third of Lope’s Tales,
written evidently while he was with the Duke of Alva. Obras, Tom.
VIII. p. 148.
It must be admitted, however, that there is some confusion in this
matter. The ballads bear witness to the jealousy felt by Isabela on
account of his relations with another fair lady, who passes under the
name of Filis,--a jealousy which seems to have caused him no small
embarrassment; for while, in some of his verses, he declares it has
no foundation, in others he admits and justifies it.[218] But however
this may have been, a very short time after Isabela’s death he made no
secret of his passion for the rival who had disturbed her peace. He was
not, however, successful. For some reason or other, the lady rejected
his suit. He was in despair, as his ballads prove; but his despair did
not last long. In less than a year from the death of Isabela it was all
over, and he had again taken, to amuse and distract his thoughts, the
genuine Spanish resource of becoming a soldier.
[218] For instance, in the fine ballad beginning, “Llenos de
lágrimas tristes,” (Romancero of 1602, f. 47), he says to Belisa,
“Let Heaven condemn me to eternal woe, if I do not detest Phillis
and adore thee”;--which may be considered as fully contradicted
by the equally fine ballad addressed to Filis, (f. 13), “Amada
pastora mia”; as well as by six or eight others of the same sort;
some more, some less tender.
The moment in which he made this decisive change in his life was one
when a spirit of military adventure was not unlikely to take possession
of a character always seeking excitement; for it was just as Philip the
Second was preparing the portentous Armada, with which he hoped, by one
blow, to overthrow the power of Elizabeth and bring back a nation of
heretics to the bosom of the Church. Lope, therefore, as he tells us in
one of his eclogues, finding the lady of his love would not smile upon
him, took his musket on his shoulder, amidst the universal enthusiasm
of 1588, marched to Lisbon, and, accompanied by his faithful friend
Conde, went on board the magnificent armament destined for England,
where, he says, he used up for wadding the verses he had written in his
lady’s praise.[219]
[219]
Volando en tacos del cañon violento
Los papeles de Filis por el viento.
Egloga á Claudio, Obras, Tom. IX. p. 356.
A succession of disasters followed this ungallant jest. His brother,
from whom he had long been separated, and whom he now found as a
lieutenant on board the Saint John, in which he himself served, died
in his arms of a wound received during a fight with the Dutch. Other
great troubles crowded after this one. Storms scattered the unwieldy
fleet; calamities of all kinds confounded prospects that had just
before been so full of glory; and Lope must have thought himself but
too happy, when, after the Armada had been dispersed or destroyed, he
was brought back in safety, first to Cadiz and afterwards to Toledo
and Madrid, reaching the last city, probably, in 1590. It is a curious
fact, however, in his personal history, that, amidst all the terrors
and sufferings of this disastrous expedition, he found leisure and
quietness of spirit to write the greater part of his long poem on
“The Beauty of Angelica,” which he intended as a continuation of the
“Orlando Furioso.”[220]
[220] One of his poetical panegyrists, after his death, speaking
of the Armada, says: “There and in Cadiz he wrote the Angelica.”
(Obras, Tom. XX. p. 348.) The remains of the Armada returned
to Cadiz in September, 1588, having sailed from Lisbon in the
preceding May; so that Lope was probably at sea about four
months. Further notices of his naval service may be found in
the third canto of his “Corona Trágica,” and the second of his
“Philomena.”
But Lope could not well return from such an expedition without
something of that feeling of disappointment which, with the nation
at large, accompanied its failure. Perhaps it was owing to this that
he entered again on the poor course of life of which he had already
made an experiment with the Duke of Alva, and became secretary, first
of the Marquis of Malpica and afterwards of the generous Marquis of
Sarria, who, as Count de Lemos, was, a little later, the patron of
Cervantes and the Argensolas. While he was in the service of the last
distinguished nobleman, and already known as a dramatist, he became
attached to Doña Juana de Guardio, a lady of good family in Madrid,
whom he married in 1597; and soon afterwards leaving the Count de
Lemos, had never any other patrons than those whom, like the Duke de
Sessa, his literary fame procured for him.[221]
[221] Don Pedro Fernandez de Castro, Count of Lemos and Marquis
of Sarria, who was born in Madrid about 1576, married a daughter
of the Duke de Lerma, the reigning favorite and minister of the
time, with whose fortunes he rose, and in whose fall he was
ruined. The period of his highest honors was that following
his appointment as Viceroy of Naples, in 1610, where he kept a
literary court of no little splendor, that had for its chief
directors the two Argensolas, and with which, at one time,
Quevedo was connected. The Count died in 1622, at Madrid. Lope’s
principal connections with him were when he was young, and before
he had come to his title as Count de Lemos. He records himself
as “Secretary of the Marquis of Sarria,” in a sonnet prefixed to
the “Peregrino Indiano” of Saavedra, 1599, and on the title-page
of the “San Isidro,” printed the same year; besides which, many
years afterwards, when writing to the Count de Lemos, he says:
“You know how I love and reverence you, and that, many a night, I
have slept at your feet like a dog.” Obras Sueltas, Tom. XVII. p.
403. Clemencin, Don Quixote, Parte II., note to the Dedicatoria.
Lope had now reached the age of thirty-five, and seems to have enjoyed
a few years of happiness, to which he often alludes, and which, in
two of his poetical epistles, he has described with much gentleness
and grace.[222] But it did not last long. A son, Carlos, to whom he
was tenderly attached, lived only to his seventh year;[223] and the
mother, broken down by grief at his loss, soon died, giving birth, at
the same time, to Feliciana,[224] who was afterwards married to Don
Luis de Usategui, the editor of some of his father-in-law’s posthumous
works. Lope seems to have felt bitterly his desolate estate after
the death of his wife and son, and speaks of it with much feeling in
a poem addressed to his faithful friend Conde.[225] But in 1605 an
illegitimate daughter was born to him, whom he named Marcela,--the same
to whom, in 1620, he dedicated one of his plays, with extraordinary
expressions of affection and admiration,[226] and who, in 1621, took
the veil and retired from the world, renewing griefs which, with his
views of religion, he desired rather to bear with patience, and even
with pride.[227] In 1606, the same lady--Doña María de Luxan--who was
the mother of Marcela bore him a son, whom he named Lope, and who, at
the age of fourteen, appears among the poets at the canonization of San
Isidro.[228] But though his father had fondly destined him for a life
of letters, he insisted on becoming a soldier, and, after serving under
the Marquis of Santa Cruz against the Dutch and the Turks, perished,
when only fifteen years old, in a vessel which was totally lost at sea
with all on board.[229] Lope poured forth his sorrows in a piscatory
eclogue, less full of feeling than the verses in which he describes
Marcela taking the veil.[230]
[222] Epístola al Doctor Mathias de Porras, and Epístola á
Amarylis; to which may be added the pleasant epistle to Francisco
de Rioja, in which he describes his garden and the friends he
received in it.
[223] On this son, see Obras, Tom. I. p. 472;--the tender
_Cancion_ on his death, Tom. XIII. p. 365;--and the beautiful
Dedication to him of the “Pastores de Belen,” Tom. XVI. p. xi.
[224] Obras, Tom. I. p. 472, and Tom. XX. p. 34.
[225] Obras, Tom. IX. p. 355.
[226] “El Remedio de la Desdicha,” a play whose story is from
the “Diana” of Montemayor, (Comedias, Tom. XIII., Madrid, 1620),
in the Preface to which he begs his daughter to read and correct
it; and prays that she may be happy in spite of the perfections
which render earthly happiness almost impossible to her. She long
survived her father, and died, much reverenced for her piety, in
1688.
[227] The description of his grief and of his religious feelings
as she took the veil is solemn, but he dwells a little too
complacently on the splendor given to the occasion by the king,
and by his patron, the Duke de Sessa, who desired to honor thus a
favorite and famous poet. Obras, Tom. I. pp. 313-316.
[228] Obras, Tom. XI. pp. 495 and 596, where his father jests
about it. It is a _Glosa_. He is called Lope de Vega Carpio, _el
mozo_; and it is added, that he was not yet fourteen years old.
[229] Obras, Tom. I. pp. 472 and 316.
[230] In the eclogue, (Obras, Tom. X. p. 362), he is called,
after both his father and his mother, Don Lope Felix del Carpio y
Luxan.
After the birth of these two children, we hear nothing more of their
mother. Indeed, soon afterwards, Lope, no longer at an age to be
deluded by his passions, began, according to the custom of his time
and country, to turn his thoughts seriously to religion. He devoted
himself to pious works, as his father had done; visited the hospitals
regularly; resorted daily to a particular church; entered a secular
religious congregation; and finally, at Toledo, in 1609, received
the tonsure and became a priest. The next year he joined the same
brotherhood of which Cervantes was afterwards a member.[231] In 1625,
he entered the congregation of the native priesthood of Madrid, and was
so faithful and exact in the performance of his duties, that, in 1628,
he was elected to be its chief chaplain. He is, therefore, for the
twenty-six latter years of his long life, to be regarded as strictly
connected with the Spanish Church, and as devoting to its daily service
some portion of his time.
[231] Pellicer, ed. Don Quixote, Tom. I. p. cxcix.
But we must not misunderstand the position in which, through these
relations, Lope had now placed himself, nor overrate the sacrifices
they required of him. Such a connection with the Church, in his
time, by no means involved an abandonment of the world,--hardly an
abandonment of its pleasures. On the contrary, it was rather regarded
as one of the means for securing the leisure suited to a life of
letters and social ease. As such, unquestionably, Lope employed it;
for, during the long series of years in which he was a priest, and gave
regular portions of his time to offices of devotion and charity, he was
at the height of favor and fashion as a poet. And, what may seem to us
more strange, it was during the same period he produced the greater
number of his dramas, not a few of whose scenes offend against the
most unquestioned precepts of Christian morality, while, at the same
time, in their title-pages and dedications, he carefully sets forth his
clerical distinctions, giving peculiar prominence to his place as a
Familiar or Servant of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.[232]
[232] I notice the title _Familiar del Santo Oficio_ as early as
the “Jerusalen Conquistada,” 1609. Frequently afterwards, as in
the Comedias, Tom. II., VI., XI., etc., he puts no other title to
his name, as if this were glory enough. In his time, _Familiar_
meant a person who could at any moment be called into the service
of the Inquisition; but had no special office, and no duties,
till he was summoned. Covarruvias, _ad verb_.
It was, however, during the happier period of his married life that he
laid the foundations for his general popularity as a poet. His subject
was well chosen. It was that of the great fame and glory of San Isidro
the Ploughman. This remarkable personage, who plays so distinguished a
part in the ecclesiastical history of Madrid, is supposed to have been
born in the twelfth century, on what afterwards became the site of that
city, and to have led a life so eminently pious, that the angels came
down and ploughed his grounds for him, which the holy man neglected in
order to devote his time to religious duties. From an early period,
therefore, he enjoyed much consideration, and was regarded as the
patron and friend of the whole territory, as well as of the city of
Madrid itself. But his great honors date from the year 1598. In that
year Philip the Third was dangerously ill at a neighbouring village;
the city sent out the remains of Isidro in procession to avert the
impending calamity; the king recovered; and for the first time the holy
man became widely famous and fashionable.
Lope seized the occasion, and wrote a long poem on the life of “Isidro
the Ploughman,” or Farmer; so called to distinguish him from the
learned saint of Seville who bore the same name. It consists of ten
thousand lines, exactly divided among the ten books of which it is
composed; and yet it was finished within the year, and published in
1599. It has no high poetical merit, and does not, indeed, aspire to
any. But it was intended to be popular, and succeeded. It is written in
the old national five-line stanza, carefully rhymed throughout; and,
notwithstanding the apparent difficulty of the measure, it everywhere
affords unequivocal proof of that facility and fluency of versification
for which Lope became afterwards so famous. Its tone, which, on the
most solemn matters of religion, is so familiar that we should now
consider it indecorous, was no doubt in full consent with the spirit
of the times and one main cause of its success. Thus, in Canto Third,
where the angels come to Isidro and his wife Mary, who are too poor to
entertain them, Lope describes the scene--which ought to be as solemn
as any thing in the poem, since it involves the facts on which Isidro’s
claim to canonization was subsequently admitted--in the following light
verses, which may serve as a specimen of the measure and style of the
whole:--
Three angels, sent by grace divine,
Once on a time blessed Abraham’s sight;--
To Mamre came that vision bright,
Whose number should our thoughts incline
To Him of whom the Prophets write.
But six now came to Isidore!
And, heavenly powers! what consternation!
Where is his hospitable store?
Surely they come with consolation,
And not to get a timely ration.
Still, if in haste unleavened bread
Mary, like Sarah, now could bake,
Or Isidore, like Abraham, take
The lamb that in its pasture fed,
And honey from its waxen cake,
I know he would his guests invite;--
But whoso ploughs not, it is right
His sufferings the price should pay;--
And how has Isidore a way
Six such to harbour for a night?
And yet he stands forgiven there,
Though friendly bidding he make none;
For poverty prevents alone;--
But, Isidore, thou still canst spare
What surest rises to God’s throne.
Let Abraham to slay arise;
But, on the ground, in sacrifice,
Give, Isidore, thy soul to God,
Who never doth the heart despise
That bows beneath his rod.
He did not ask for Isaac’s death;
He asked for Abraham’s willing faith.[233]
[233]
Tres ángeles á Abraham
Una vez aparecieron,
Que á verle á Mambre vinieron:
Bien que á este número dan
El que en figura trujeron.
Seis vienen á Isidro á ver:
O gran Dios, que puede ser?
Donde los ha de alvergar?
Mas vienen á consolar,
Que no vienen á comer.
Si como Sara, María
Cocer luego pan pudiera,
Y él como Abraham truxera
El cordero que pacia,
Y la miel entre la cera,
Yo sé que los convidara.
Mas quando lo que no ara.
Le dicen que ha de pagar;
Como podrá convidar
A seis de tan buena cara?
Disculpado puede estar,
Puesto que no los convide,
Pues su pobreza lo impide,
Isidro, aunque puede dar
Muy bien lo que Dios le pide.
Vaya Abraham al ganado,
Y en el suelo humilde echado,
Dadle el alma, Isidro, vos,
Que nunca desprecia Dios
El corazon humillado.
No queria el sacrificio
De Isaac, sino la obediencia
De Abraham.
Obras Sueltas, Tom. XI. p. 69.
No doubt, some of the circumstances in the poem are invented for the
occasion, though there is in the margin much parade of authorities for
almost every thing;--a practice very common at that period, to which
Lope afterwards conformed only once or twice. But however we may now
regard the “San Isidro,” it was printed four times in less than nine
years; and, by addressing itself more to the national and popular
feeling than the “Arcadia” had done, it became the foundation for its
author’s fame as the favorite poet of the whole nation.
At this time, however, he was beginning to be so much occupied with the
theatre, and so successful, that he had little leisure for any thing
else. His next considerable publication,[234] therefore, was not till
1602, when the “Hermosura de Angélica,” or the Beauty of Angelica,
appeared; a poem already mentioned as having been chiefly written
while its author served at sea in the ill-fated Armada. It somewhat
presumptuously claims to be a continuation of the “Orlando Furioso,”
and is stretched out through twenty cantos, comprehending above eleven
thousand lines in octave verse. In the Preface, he says he wrote it
“under the rigging of the galleon Saint John and the banners of the
Catholic king,” and that “he and the generalissimo of the expedition
finished their labors together”;--a remark which must not be taken
too strictly, since both the thirteenth and twentieth cantos contain
passages relating to events in the reign of Philip the Third. Indeed,
in the Dedication, he tells his patron that he had suffered the whole
poem to lie by him long for want of leisure to correct it; and he
elsewhere adds, that he leaves it still unfinished, to be completed by
some happier genius.
[234] The “Fiestas de Denia,” a poem in two short cantos, on
the reception of Philip III. at Denia, near Valencia, in 1598,
soon after his marriage, was printed in 1599, but is of little
consequence.
It is not unlikely that Lope was induced to write the Angelica by
the success of several poems that had preceded it on the same series
of fictions, and especially by the favor shown to one published only
two years before, in the same style and manner; the “Angélica” of
Luis Barahona de Soto, which is noticed with extraordinary praise in
the scrutiny of the Knight of La Mancha’s library, as well as in the
conclusion to Don Quixote, where a somewhat tardy compliment is paid to
this very work of Lope. Both poems are obvious imitations of Ariosto;
and if that of De Soto has been too much praised, it is, at least,
better than Lope’s. And yet, in “The Beauty of Angelica,” the author
might have been deemed to occupy ground well suited to his genius; for
the boundless latitude afforded him by a subject filled with the dreamy
adventures of chivalry was, necessarily, a partial release from the
obligation to pursue a consistent plan,--while, at the same time, the
example of Ariosto, as well as that of Luis de Soto, may be supposed
to have launched him fairly forth upon the open sea of an unrestrained
fancy, careless of shores or soundings.
But perhaps this very freedom was a principal cause of his failure;
for his story is to the last degree wild and extravagant, and is
connected by the slightest possible thread to the graceful fiction of
Ariosto.[235] A king of Andalusia, as it pretends, leaves his kingdom
by testament to the most beautiful man or woman that can be found.[236]
All the world throngs to win the mighty prize; and one of the most
amusing parts of the whole poem is that in which its author describes
to us the crowds of the old and the ugly who, under such conditions,
still thought themselves fit competitors. But as early as the fifth
canto, the two lovers, Medoro and Angelica, who had been left in India
by the Italian master, have already won the throne, and, for the sake
of the lady’s unrivalled beauty, are crowned king and queen at Seville.
[235] The point where it branches off from the story of Ariosto
is the sixteenth stanza of the thirtieth canto of the “Orlando
Furioso.”
[236] La Angélica, Canto III.
Here, of course, if the poem had a regular subject, it would end;
but now we are plunged at once into a series of wars and disasters,
arising out of the discontent of unsuccessful rivals, which threaten
to have no end. Trials of all kinds follow. Visions, enchantments
and counter enchantments, episodes quite unconnected with the main
story, and broken up themselves by the most perverse interruptions,
are mingled together, we hardly know why or how; and when at last the
happy pair are settled in their hardly won kingdom, we are as much
wearied by the wild waste of fancy in which Lope has indulged himself,
as we should have been by almost any degree of monotony arising from
a want of inventive power. The best parts of the poem are those that
contain descriptions of persons and scenery;[237] the worst are those
where Lope has displayed his learning, which he has sometimes done by
filling whole stanzas with a mere accumulation of proper names. The
versification is extraordinarily fluent.[238]
[237] Cantos IV. and VII.
[238] La Hermosura de Angélica was printed for the first time in
1604, says the editor of the Obras, in Tom. II. But Salvá gives
an edition in 1602. It certainly appeared at Barcelona in 1605.
The stanzas where proper names occur so often as to prove that
Lope was guilty of the affectation of taking pains to accumulate
them are to be found in Obras, Tom. II. pp. 27, 55, 233, 236, etc.
As the Beauty of Angelica was written in the ill-fated Armada, it
contains occasional intimations of the author’s national and religious
feelings, such as were naturally suggested by his situation. But in
the same volume he originally published a poem in which these feelings
are much more fully and freely expressed;--a poem, indeed, which is
devoted to nothing else. It is called “La Dragontea,” and is on the
subject of Sir Francis Drake’s last expedition and death. Perhaps no
other instance can be found of a grave epic devoted to the personal
abuse of a single individual; and to account for the present one, we
must remember how familiar and formidable the name of Sir Francis Drake
had long been in Spain.
He had begun his career as a brilliant pirate in South America above
thirty years before; he had alarmed all Spain by ravaging its coasts
and occupying Cadiz, in a sort of doubtful warfare which Lord Bacon
tells us the free sailor used to call “singeing the king of Spain’s
beard”;[239] and he had risen to the height of his glory as second in
command of the great fleet which had discomfited the Armada, one of
whose largest vessels was known to have surrendered to the terror of
his name alone. In Spain, where he was as much hated as he was feared,
he was regarded chiefly as a bold and successful buccaneer, whose
melancholy death at Panamá, in 1596, was held to be a just visitation
of the Divine vengeance for his piracies;--a state of feeling of which
the popular literature of the country, down to its very ballads,
affords frequent proof.[240]
[239] “Considerations touching a War with Spain, inscribed to
Prince Charles, 1624”; a curious specimen of the political
discussions of the time. See Bacon’s Works, London, 1810, 8vo,
Vol. III. p. 517.
[240] Mariana, Historia, ad an. 1596, calls him simply “Francis
Drake, an English corsair”;--and in a graceful little anonymous
ballad, imitated from a more graceful one by Góngora, we have
again a true expression of the popular feeling. The ballad
in question, beginning “Hermano Perico,” is in the Romancero
General, 1602, (f. 34), and contains the following significant
passage:--
And Bartolo, my brother,
To England forth is gone,
Where the Drake he means to kill;--
And the Lutherans every one,
Excommunicate from God,
Their queen among the first,
He will capture and bring back,
Like heretics accurst.
And he promises, moreover,
Among his spoils and gains,
A heretic young serving-boy
To give me, bound in chains;
And for my lady grandmamma,
Whose years such waiting crave,
A little handy Lutheran,
To be her maiden slave.
Mi hermano Bartolo
Se va á Ingalaterra,
A matar al Draque,
Y á prender la Reyna,
Y á los Luteranos
De la Bandomessa.
Tiene de traerme
A mí de la guerra
Un Luteranico
Con una cadena,
Y una Luterana
A señora agüela.
Romancero General, Madrid, 1602, 4to, f. 35.
The Dragontea, however, whose ten cantos of octave verse are devoted
to the expression of this national hatred, may be regarded as its
chief monument. It is a strange poem. It begins with the prayers of
Christianity, in the form of a beautiful woman, who presents Spain,
Italy, and America in the court of Heaven, and prays God to protect
them all against what Lope calls “that Protestant Scotch pirate.”[241]
It ends with rejoicings in Panamá because “the Dragon,” as he is
called through the whole poem, has died, poisoned by his own people,
and with the thanksgivings of Christianity that her prayers have
been heard, and that “the scarlet lady of Babylon”--meaning Queen
Elizabeth--had been at last defeated. The substance of the poem is such
as may beseem such an opening and such a conclusion. It is violent and
coarse throughout. But although it appeals constantly to the national
prejudices that prevailed in its author’s time with great intensity, it
was not received with favor. It was written in 1597, immediately after
the occurrence of most of the events to which it alludes; but was not
published till 1602, and has been printed since only in the collective
edition of Lope’s miscellaneous works, in 1776.[242]
[241] He was in fact of Devonshire. See Fuller’s Worthies and
Holy State.
[242] There is a curious poem in English, by Charles Fitzgeffrey,
on the Life and Death of Sir Francis Drake, first printed in
1596, which is worth comparing with the Dragontea, as its
opposite, and which was better liked in England in its time than
Lope’s poem was in Spain. See Wood’s Athenæ, London, 1815, 4to,
Vol. II. p. 607.
In the same year, however, in which he gave the Dragontea to the
world, he published a prose romance, “The Pilgrim in his own Country”;
dedicating it to the Marquis of Priego, on the last day of 1603, from
the city of Seville. It contains the story of two lovers, who, after
many adventures in Spain and Portugal, are carried into captivity among
the Moors, and return home by the way of Italy, as pilgrims. We first
find them at Barcelona, shipwrecked, and the principal scenes are laid
there and in Valencia and Saragossa;--the whole ending in the city
of Toledo, where, with the assent of their friends, they are at last
married.[243] Several episodes are ingeniously interwoven with the
thread of the principal narrative, and, besides many poems, chiefly
written, no doubt, for other occasions, several dramas are inserted,
which seem actually to have been performed under the circumstances
described.[244]
[243] The time of the story is quite unsettled.
[244] At the end of the whole, it is said, that, during the eight
nights following the wedding, eight other dramas were acted,
whose names are given; two of which, “El Perseguido,” and “El
Galan Agradecido,” do not appear among Lope’s printed plays;--at
least, not under these titles.
The entire romance is divided into five books, and is carefully
constructed and finished. Some of Lope’s own experiences at Valencia
and elsewhere evidently contributed materials for it; but a poetical
coloring is thrown over the whole, and, except in some of the details
about the city, and descriptions of natural scenery, we rarely feel
that what we read is absolutely true.[245] The story, especially when
regarded from the point of view chosen by its author, is interesting;
and it is not only one of the earliest specimens in Spanish literature
of the class to which it belongs, but one of the best.[246]
[245] Among the passages that have the strongest air of reality
about them are those relating to the dramas, said to have been
acted in different places; and those containing descriptions of
Monserrate and of the environs of Valencia, in the first and
second books. A sort of ghost-story, in the fifth, seems also to
have been founded on fact.
[246] The first edition of the “Peregrino en su Patria” is that
of Madrid, 1604, 4to, and it was soon reprinted; but the best
edition is that in the fifth volume of the Obras Sueltas, 1776.
A worthless abridgment of it in English appeared anonymously in
London in 1738, 12mo.
Passing over some of his minor poems and his “New Art of Writing
Plays,” for noticing both of which more appropriate occasions will
occur hereafter, we come to another of Lope’s greater efforts, his
“Jerusalem Conquered,” which appeared in 1609, and was twice reprinted
in the course of the next ten years. He calls it “a tragic epic,” and
divides it into twenty books of octave rhymes, comprehending, when
taken together, above twenty-two thousand verses. The attempt was
certainly an ambitious one, since we see, on its very face, that it is
nothing less than to rival Tasso on the ground where Tasso’s success
had been so brilliant.
As might have been foreseen, Lope failed. His very subject is
unfortunate, for it is not the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christians,
but the failure of Cœur de Lion to rescue it from the infidels in the
end of the twelfth century;--a theme evidently unfit for a Christian
epic. All the poet could do, therefore, was to take the series of
events as he found them in history, and, adding such episodes and
ornaments as his own genius could furnish, give to the whole as much
as possible of epic form, dignity, and completeness. But Lope has
not done even this. He has made merely a long narrative poem, of
which Richard is the hero; and he relies for success, in no small
degree, on the introduction of a sort of rival hero, in the person of
Alfonso the Eighth of Castile, who, with his knights, is made, after
the fourth book, to occupy a space in the foreground of the action
quite disproportionate and absurd, since it is certain that Alfonso
was never in Palestine at all.[247] What is equally inappropriate,
the real subject of the poem is ended in the eighteenth book, by the
return home of both Richard and Alfonso; the nineteenth being filled
with the Spanish king’s subsequent history, and the twentieth with the
imprisonment of Richard and the quiet death of Saladin, as master of
Jerusalem,--a conclusion so abrupt and unsatisfactory, that it seems as
if its author could hardly have originally foreseen it.
[247] Lope insists, on all occasions, upon the fact of Alfonso’s
having been in the Crusades. For instance, in “La Boba para los
otros,” (Comedias, Tom. XXI., Madrid, 1635, f. 60), he says,--
To this crusade
There went together France and England’s powers,
And our own King Alfonso.
But the whole is a mere fiction of the age succeeding that of
Alfonso, for using which Lope is justly rebuked by Navarrete, in
his acute essay on the part the Spaniards took in the Crusades.
Memorias de la Academia de la Hist., Tom. V., 1817, 4to, p. 87.
But though, with the exception of what relates to the apocryphal
Spanish adventurers, the series of historical events in that
brilliant crusade is followed down with some regard to the truth of
fact, still we are so much confused by the visions and allegorical
personages mingled in the narrative, and by the manifold episodes and
love-adventures which interrupt it, that it is all but impossible to
read any considerable portion consecutively and with attention. Lope’s
easy and graceful versification is, indeed, to be found here, as it is
in nearly all his poetry; but even on the holy ground of chivalry, at
Cyprus, Ptolemais, and Tyre, his narrative has much less movement and
life than we might claim from its subject, and almost everywhere else
it is languid and heavy. Of plan, proportions, or a skilful adaptation
of the several parts so as to form an epic whole, there is no thought;
and yet Lope intimates that his poem was written with care some time
before it was published,[248] and he dedicates it to his king, in a
tone indicating that he thought it by no means unworthy the royal favor.
[248] See the Prólogo. The whole poem is in Obras Sueltas, Tom.
XIV. and XV.
CHAPTER XIV.
LOPE DE VEGA, CONTINUED.--HIS RELATIONS WITH THE CHURCH.--HIS PASTORES
DE BELEN.--HIS RELIGIOUS POEMS.--HIS CONNECTION WITH THE FESTIVALS
AT THE BEATIFICATION AND CANONIZATION OF SAN ISIDRO.--TOMÉ DE
BURGUILLOS.--LA GATOMACHIA.--AN AUTO DA FÉ.--TRIUNFOS DIVINOS.--POEM ON
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.--LAUREL DE APOLO.--DOROTEA.--HIS OLD AGE AND DEATH.
Just at the time the Jerusalem was published, Lope began to wear the
livery of his Church. Indeed, it is on the title-page of this very poem
that he, for the first time, announces himself as a “Familiar of the
Holy Inquisition.” Proofs of the change in his life are soon apparent
in his works. In 1612, he published “The Shepherds of Bethlehem,” a
long pastoral in prose and verse, divided into five books. It contains
the sacred history, according to the more popular traditions of the
author’s Church, from the birth of Mary, the Saviour’s mother, to the
arrival of the holy family in Egypt,--all supposed to be related or
enacted by shepherds in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem, at the time the
events occurred.
Like the other prose pastorals written at the same period, it is
full of incongruities. Some of the poems, in particular, are as
inappropriate and in as bad taste as can well be conceived; and why
three or four poetical contests for prizes and several common Spanish
games are introduced at all, it is not easy to imagine, since they
are permitted by the conditions of no possible poetical theory for
such fictions. But it must be confessed, on the other hand, that there
runs through the whole an air of amenity and gentleness well suited to
its subject and purpose. Several stories from the Old Testament are
gracefully told, and translations from the Psalms and other parts of
the Jewish Scriptures are brought in with a happy effect. Some of the
original poetry, too, is to be placed among the best of Lope’s minor
compositions;--such as the following imaginative little song, which
is supposed to have been sung in a palm-grove, by the Madonna, to her
sleeping child, and is as full of the tenderest feelings of Catholic
devotion as one of Murillo’s pictures on the same subject:--
Holy angels and blest,
Through these 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;--
Move gently, move 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,--
O, 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![249]
[249]
Pues andais en las palmas,
Angeles santos,
Que se duerme mi niño,
Tened los ramos.
Palmas de Belen,
Que mueven ayrados
Los furiosos vientos,
Que suenan tanto,
No le hagais ruido,
Corred mas passo;
Que se duerme mi niño,
Tened los ramos.
El niño divino,
Que está cansado
De llorar en la tierra:
Por su descanso,
Sosegar quiere un poco
Del tierno llanto;
Que se duerme mi niño,
Tened los ramos.
Rigurosos hielos
Le estan cercando,
Ya veis que no tengo
Con que guardarlo:
Angeles divinos,
Que vais volando,
Que se duerme mi niño,
Tened los ramos.
Obras Sueltas, Tom. XVI. p. 332.
The whole work is dedicated with great tenderness, in a few simple
words, to Cárlos, the little son that died before he was seven years
old, and of whom Lope always speaks so lovingly. But it breaks off
abruptly, and was never finished;--why, it is not easy to tell, for it
was well received, and was printed four times in as many years.
In 1612, the year of the publication of this pastoral, Lope printed
a few religious ballads and some “Thoughts in Prose,” which he
pretended were translated from the Latin of Gabriel Padecopeo, an
imperfect anagram of his own name; and in 1614, there appeared a volume
containing, first, a collection of his short sacred poems, to which
were afterwards added four solemn and striking poetical Soliloquies,
composed while he knelt before a cross on the day he was received into
the Society of Penitents; then two contemplative discourses, written at
the request of his brethren of the same society; and finally, a short
spiritual Romancero, or ballad-book, and a “Via Crucis,” or meditations
on the passage of the Saviour from the judgment-seat of Pilate to the
hill of Calvary.[250]
[250] Obras, Tom. XIII., etc.
Many of these poems are full of a deep and solemn devotion;[251] others
are strangely coarse and free;[252] and a few are merely whimsical and
trifling.[253] Some of the more religious of the ballads are still
sung about the streets of Madrid by blind beggars;--a testimony to
the devout feelings which, occasionally at least, glowed in their
author’s heart, that is not to be mistaken. These poems, however, with
an account of the martyrdom of a considerable number of Christians at
Japan, in 1614, which was printed four years later,[254] were all the
miscellaneous works published by Lope between 1612 and 1620;--the rest
of his time during this period having apparently been filled with his
brilliant successes in the drama, both secular and sacred.
[251] For instance, the sonnet beginning, “Yo dormiré en el
polvo.” Obras, Tom. XIII. p. 186.
[252] Such as “Gertrudis siendo Dios tan amoroso.” Obras, Tom.
XIII. p. 223.
[253] Some of them are very flat;--see the sonnet, “Quando en tu
alcazar de Sion.” Obras, Tom. XIII. p. 225.
[254] Triumfos de la Fé en los Reynos de Japon. Obras, Tom. XVII.
But in 1620 and 1622, he had an opportunity to exhibit himself to the
mass of the people, as well as to the court, at Madrid, in a character
which, being both religious and dramatic, was admirably suited to his
powers and pretensions. It was the double occasion of the beatification
and the canonization of Saint Isidore, in whose honor, above twenty
years earlier, Lope had made one of his most successful efforts for
popularity,--a long interval, but one during which the claims of the
Saint had been by no means overlooked. On the contrary, the king,
from the time of his restoration to health, had been constantly
soliciting the honors of the Church for a personage to whose miraculous
interposition he believed himself to owe it. At last they were
granted, and the 19th of May, 1620, was appointed for celebrating the
beatification of the pious “Ploughman of Madrid.”
Such occasions were now often seized in the principal cities of
Spain, as a means alike of exhibiting the talents of their poets,
and amusing and interesting the multitude;--the Church gladly
contributing its authority to substitute, as far as possible, a
sort of poetical tournament, held under its own management, for the
chivalrous tournaments which had for centuries exercised so great and
so irreligious an influence throughout Europe. At any rate, these
literary contests, in which honors and prizes of various kinds were
offered, were called “Poetical Joustings,” and soon became favorite
entertainments with the mass of the people. We have already noticed
such festivals, as early as the end of the fifteenth century; and
besides the prize which, as we have seen, Cervantes gained at Saragossa
in May, 1595,[255] Lope gained one at Toledo, in June, 1608;[256] and
in September, 1614, he was the judge at a poetical festival in honor of
the beatification of Saint Theresa, at Madrid, where the rich tones of
his voice and his graceful style of reading were much admired.[257]
[255] See _ante_, Vol. I. p. 338, and Vol. II. p. 79.
[256] The successful poem, a jesting ballad of very small merit,
is in the Obras Sueltas, Tom. XXI. pp. 171-177.
[257] An account of some of the poetical joustings of this period
is to be found in Navarrete, “Vida de Cervantes,” § 162, with the
notes, p. 486; and a good illustration of the mode in which they
were conducted is to be found in the “Justa Poética,” in honor of
our Lady of the Pillar at Saragossa, collected by Juan Bautista
Felices de Caceres, (Çaragoça, 1629, 4to), in which Joseph de
Valdivielso and Vargas Machuca figured. Such joustings became so
frequent at last as to be subjects of ridicule. In the “Caballero
Descortes” of Salas Barbadillo, (Madrid, 1621, 12mo, f. 99,
etc.), there is a _certámen_ in honor of the recovery of a lost
hat;--merely a light caricature.
The occasion of the beatification of the Saint who presided over the
fortunes of Madrid was, however, one of more solemn importance than
either of these had been. All classes of the inhabitants of that
“Heroic Town,” as it is still called, took an interest in it; for it
was believed to concern the well-being of all.[258] The Church of
Saint Andrew, in which reposed the body of the worthy Ploughman, was
ornamented with unwonted splendor. The merchants of the city completely
encased its altars with plain, but pure silver. The goldsmiths
enshrined the form of the Saint, which five centuries had not wasted
away, in a sarcophagus of the same metal, elaborately wrought. Other
classes brought other offerings; all marked by the gorgeous wealth that
then flowed through the privileged portions of Spanish society, from
the mines of Peru and Mexico. In front of the church a showy stage was
erected, from which the poems sent in for prizes were read, and over
this part of the ceremonies Lope presided.
[258] The details of the festival, with the poems offered on the
occasion, were neatly printed at Madrid, in 1620, in a small
quarto, ff. 140, and fill about three hundred pages in the
eleventh volume of Lope’s Works. The number of poetical offerings
was great, but much short of what similar contests sometimes
produced. Figueroa says in his “Pasagero,” (Madrid, 1617, 12mo,
f. 118), that, at a festival, held a short time before, in honor
of St. Antonio of Padua, five thousand poems of different kinds
were offered; which, after the best of them had been hung round
the church and the cloisters of the monks who originally proposed
the prizes, were distributed to other monasteries. The custom
extended to America. In 1585, Balbuena carried away a prize in
Mexico from three hundred competitors. See his Life, prefixed to
the Academy’s edition of his “Siglo de Oro,” Madrid, 1821, 8vo.
As a sort of prologue, a few satirical petitions were produced, which
were intended to excite merriment, and, no doubt, were successful;
after which Lope opened the literary proceedings of the festival, by
pronouncing a poetical oration of above seven hundred lines in honor
of San Isidro. This was followed by reading the subjects for the nine
prizes offered by the nine Muses, together with the rules according to
which the honors of the occasion were to be adjudged; and then came
the poems themselves. Among the competitors were many of the principal
men of letters of the time: Zarate, Guillen de Castro, Jauregui,
Espinel, Montalvan, Pantaleon, Silveira, the young Calderon, and Lope
himself, with the son who bore his name, still a boy. All this, or
nearly all of it, was grave, and beseeming the grave occasion. But at
the end of the list of those who entered their claims for each prize,
there always appeared a sort of masque, who, under the assumed name
of Master Burguillos, “seasoned the feast in the most savory manner,”
it is said, with his amusing verses, caricaturing the whole, like the
_gracioso_ of the popular theatre, and serving as a kind of interlude
after each division of the more regular drama.
Lope took hardly any pains to conceal that this savory part of the
festival was entirely his own; so surely had his theatrical instincts
indicated to him the merry relief its introduction would give to
the stateliness and solemnity of the occasion.[259] All the various
performances were read by him with much effect, and at the end he
gave a light and pleasant account, in the old popular ballad measure,
of what had been done; after which the judges pronounced the names
of the successful competitors. Who they were, we are not told; but
the offerings of all--those of the unsuccessful as well as of the
successful--were published by him without delay.
[259] “But let the reader note well,” says Lope, “that the verses
of Master Burguillos must be supposititious; for he did not
appear at the contest; and all he wrote is in jest, and made the
festival very savory. And as he did not appear for any prize, it
was generally believed that he was a character introduced by Lope
himself.” Obras, Tom. XI. p. 401. See also p. 598.
A greater jubilee followed two years afterwards, when, at the opening
of the reign of Philip the Fourth, the negotiations of his grateful
predecessor were crowned with a success he did not live to witness;
and San Isidro, with three other devout Spaniards, was admitted by
the Head of the Church at Rome to the full glories of saintship, by
a formal canonization. The people of Madrid took little note of the
Papal bull, except so far as it concerned their own particular saint
and protector. But to him the honors they offered were abundant.[260]
The festival they instituted for the occasion lasted nine days. Eight
pyramids, above seventy feet high, were arranged in different parts
of the city, and nine magnificent altars, a castle, a rich garden,
and a temporary theatre. All the houses of the better sort were hung
with gorgeous tapestry; religious processions, in which the principal
nobility took the meanest places, swept through the streets; and
bull-fights, always the most popular of Spanish entertainments,
were added, in which above two thousand of those noble animals were
sacrificed in amphitheatres or public squares open to all.
[260] The proceedings and poems of this second great festival
were printed at once at Madrid, in a quarto volume, 1622, ff.
156, and fill Tom. XII. of the Obras Sueltas.
As a part of the show, a great literary contest or jousting was
held on the 19th of May,--exactly two years after that held at the
beatification. Again Lope appeared on the stage in front of the Church
of Saint Andrew, and, with similar ceremonies and a similar admixture
of the somewhat broad farce of Tomé de Burguillos, most of the leading
poets of the time joined in the universal homage. Lope carried away the
principal prizes. Others were given to Zarate, Calderon, Montalvan, and
Guillen de Castro. Two plays--one on the childhood, and the other on
the youth of San Isidro, but both expressly ordered from Lope by the
city--were acted on open, movable stages, before the king, the court,
and the multitude, making their author the most prominent figure of a
festival which, rightly understood, goes far to explain the spirit of
the times and of the religion on which it all depended. An account of
the whole, comprehending the poems offered on the occasion, and his own
two plays, was published by Lope before the close of the year.
His success at these two jubilees was, no doubt, very flattering to
him. It had been of the most public kind; it had been on a very popular
subject; and it had, perhaps, brought him more into the minds and
thoughts of the great mass of the people, and into the active interests
of the time, than even his success in the theatre. The caricatures of
Tomé de Burguillos, in particular, though often rude, seem to have been
received with extraordinary favor. Later, therefore, he was induced
to write more verses in the same style; and, in 1634, he published a
volume, consisting almost wholly of humorous and burlesque poems, under
the same disguise. Most of the pieces it contains are sonnets and other
short poems;--some very sharp and satirical, and nearly all fluent
and happy. But one of them is of considerable length, and should be
separately noticed.
It is a mock-heroic, in irregular verse, divided into six _silvas_ or
cantos, and is called “La Gatomachia,” or the Battle of the Cats; being
a contest between two cats for the love of a third. Like nearly all the
poems of the class to which it belongs, from the “Batrachomyomachia”
downwards, it is too long. It contains about twenty-five hundred lines,
in various measures. But if it is not the first in the Spanish language
in the order of time, it is the first in the order of merit. The last
two _silvas_, in particular, are written with great lightness and
spirit; sometimes parodying Ariosto and the epic poets, and sometimes
the old ballads, with the gayest success. From its first appearance,
therefore, it has been a favorite in Spain; and it is now, probably,
more read than any other of its author’s miscellaneous works. An
edition printed in 1794 assumes, rather than attempts to prove, that
Tomé de Burguillos was a real personage. But few persons have ever been
of this opinion; for though, when it first appeared, Lope prefixed to
it one of those accounts concerning its pretended author that deceive
nobody, yet he had, as early as the first festival in honor of San
Isidro, almost directly declared Master Burguillos to be merely a
disguise for himself and a means of adding interest to the occasion,--a
fact, indeed, plainly intimated by Quevedo in the Approbation prefixed
to the volume, and by Coronel in the verses which immediately
follow.[261]
[261] The edition which claims a separate and real existence
for Burguillos is that found in the seventeenth volume of the
“Poesías Castellanas,” collected by Fernandez and others. But,
besides the passages from Lope himself cited in a preceding note,
Quevedo says, in an _Aprobacion_ to the very volume in question,
that “the style is such as has been seen only in the writings
of Lope de Vega”; and Coronel, in some _décimas_ prefixed to
it, adds, “These verses are dashes from the pen of the Spanish
Phœnix”; hints which it would have been dishonorable for Lope
himself to publish, unless the poems were really his own. The
poetry of Burguillos is in Tom. XIX. of the Obras Sueltas, just
as Lope originally published it in 1634. There is a spirited
German translation of the Gatomachia in Bertuch’s Magazin der
Span. und Port. Literatur, Dessau, 1781, 8vo, Tom. I.
In 1621, just in the interval between the two festivals, Lope published
a volume containing the “Filomena,” a poem, in the first canto of
which he gives the mythological story of Tereus and the Nightingale,
and in the second, a vindication of himself, under the allegory of the
Nightingale’s Defence against the Envious Thrush. To this he added,
in the same volume, “La Tapada,” a description, in octave verse, of
a country-seat of the Duke of Braganza in Portugal; the “Andromeda,”
a mythological story like the Filomena; “The Fortunes of Diana,”
the first prose tale he ever printed; several poetical epistles and
smaller poems; and a correspondence on the subject of the New Poetry,
as it was called, in which he boldly attacked the school of Góngora,
then at the height of its favor.[262] The whole volume added nothing
to its author’s permanent reputation; but parts of it, and especially
passages in the epistles and in the Filomena, are interesting from the
circumstance that they contain allusions to his own personal history.
[262] The poems are in Tom. II. of the Obras Sueltas. The
discussion about the new poetry is in Tom. IV. pp. 459-482; to
which should be added some trifles in the same vein, scattered
through his Works, and especially a sonnet beginning, “Boscan,
tarde llegamos”;--which, as it was printed by him with the
“Laurel de Apolo,” (1630, f. 123), shows, that, though he himself
sometimes wrote in the affected style then in fashion, to please
the popular taste, he continued to disapprove it to the last. The
Novela is in Obras, Tom. VIII.
Another volume, not unlike the last, followed in 1624. It contains
three poems in the octave stanza: “Circe,” an unfortunate amplification
of the well-known story found in the Odyssey; “The Morning of Saint
John,” on the popular celebration of that graceful festival in the time
of Lope; and a fable on the Origin of the White Rose. To these he added
several epistles in prose and verse, and three more prose tales, which,
with the one already mentioned, constitute all the short prose fictions
he ever published.[263]
[263] The three poems are in Tom. III.; the epistles in Tom. I.
pp. 279, etc.; and the three tales in Tom. VIII.
The best part of this volume is, no doubt, the three stories. Probably
Lope was induced to write them by the success of those of Cervantes,
which had now been published eleven years, and were already known
throughout Europe. But Lope’s talent seems not to have been more
adapted to this form of composition than that of the author of Don
Quixote was to the drama. Of this he seems to have been partially
aware himself; for he says of the first tale, that it was written
to please a lady in a department of letters where he never thought
to have adventured, and the other three are addressed to the same
person, and seem to have been written with the same feelings.[264]
None of them excited much attention at the time when they appeared.
But, twenty years afterwards, they were reprinted with four others,
torn, apparently, from some connected series of similar stories, and
certainly not the work of Lope. The last of the eight is the best of
the collection, though it ends awkwardly, with an intimation that
another is to follow; and all are thrust together into the complete
edition of Lope’s miscellaneous works, though there is no pretence for
claiming any of them to be his, except the first four.[265]
[264] Obras Sueltas, Tom. VIII. p. 2; also Tom. III. Preface.
[265] There are editions of the eight at Saragossa, (1648),
Barcelona, (1650), etc. There is some confusion about a part of
the poems published originally with these tales, and which appear
among the works of Fr. Lopez de Zarate, Alcalá, 1651, 4to. (See
Lope, Obras, Tom. III. p. iii.) But such things are not very rare
in Spanish literature, and will occur again in relation to Zarate.
In the year preceding the appearance of the tales we find him in a
new character. A miserable man, a Franciscan monk, from Catalonia,
was suspected of heresy; and the suspicion fell on him the more
heavily because his mother was of the Jewish faith. Having been, in
consequence of this, expelled successively from two religious houses
of which he had been a member, he seems to have become disturbed
in his mind, and at last he grew so frantic, that, while mass was
celebrating in open church, he seized the consecrated host from the
hands of the officiating priest and violently destroyed it. He was
at once arrested and given up to the Inquisition. The Inquisition,
finding him obstinate, declared him to be a Lutheran and a Calvinist,
and, adding to this the crime of his Hebrew descent, delivered him
over to the secular arm for punishment. He was, almost as a matter of
course, ordered to be burned alive; and in January, 1623, the sentence
was literally executed outside the gate of Alcalá at Madrid. The
excitement was great, as it always was on such occasions. An immense
concourse of people was gathered to witness the edifying spectacle;
the court was present; the theatres and public shows were suspended
for a fortnight; and we are told that Lope de Vega, who, in some parts
of his “Dragontea,” shows a spirit not unworthy of such an office, was
one of those who presided at the loathsome sacrifice and directed its
ceremonies.[266]
[266] The account is found in a MS. history of Madrid, by Leon
Pinelo, in the King’s Library; and so much as relates to this
subject I possess, as well as a notice of Lope himself, given
in the same MS. under the date of his death. It is cited, and
an abstract of it given, in Casiano Pellicer, “Orígen de las
Comedias,” (Madrid, 1804, 12mo), Tom. I. pp. 104, 105.
His fanaticism, however, in no degree diminished his zeal for poetry.
In 1625, he published his “Divine Triumphs,” a poem in five cantos, in
the measure and the manner of Petrarch, beginning with the triumphs of
“the Divine Pan” and ending with those of Religion and the Cross.[267]
It was a failure, and the more obviously so, because its very title
placed it in direct contrast with the “Trionfi” of the great Italian
master. It was accompanied, in the same volume, by a small collection
of sacred poetry, which was increased in later editions until it became
a large one. Some of it is truly tender and solemn, as, for instance,
the _cancion_ on the death of his son,[268] and the sonnet on his own
death, beginning, “I must lie down and slumber in the dust”; while
other parts, like the _villancicos_ to the Holy Sacrament, are written
with unseemly levity, and are even sometimes coarse and sensual.[269]
All, however, are specimens of what respectable and cultivated
Spaniards in that age called religion.
[267] Obras Sueltas, Tom. XIII.
[268] A la Muerte de Carlos Felix, Obras, Tom. XIII. p. 365.
[269] See particularly the two beginning on pp. 413 and 423.
A similar remark may be made in relation to the “Corona Trágica,” The
Tragic Crown, which he published in 1627, on the history and fate
of the unhappy Mary of Scotland, who had perished just forty years
before.[270] It is intended to be a religious epic, and fills five
books of octave stanzas. But it is, in fact, merely a specimen of
intolerant controversy. Mary is represented as a pure and glorious
martyr to the Catholic faith, while Elizabeth is alternately called a
Jezebel and an Athaliah, whom it was a doubtful merit in Philip the
Second to have spared, when, as king-consort of England, he had her
life in his power.[271] In other respects it is a dull poem; beginning
with an account of Mary’s previous history, as related by herself
to her women in prison, and ending with her death. But it savors
throughout of its author’s sympathy with the religious spirit of his
age and country;--a spirit, it should be remembered, which made the
Inquisition what it was.
[270] It is in Obras Sueltas, Tom. IV.