are drawn from common life is a more direct appeal, perhaps, than
any other of its class to the popular feeling. It is his “Captives
in Algiers,”[361] and has been already alluded to as partly borrowed
from a play of Cervantes. In its first scenes, a Morisco of Valencia
leaves the land where his race had suffered so cruelly, and, after
establishing himself among those of his own faith in Algiers, returns
by night as a corsair, and, from his familiar knowledge of the Spanish
coast, where he was born, easily succeeds in carrying off a number
of Christian captives. The fate of these victims, and that of others
whom they find in Algiers, including a lover and his mistress, form
the subject of the drama. In the course of it, we have scenes in
which Christian Spaniards are publicly sold in the slave-market;
Christian children torn from their parents and cajoled out of their
faith;[362] and a Christian gentleman made to suffer the most dreadful
forms of martyrdom for his religion;--in short, we have set before us
whatever could most painfully and powerfully excite the interest and
sympathy of an audience in Spain at a moment when such multitudes of
Spanish families were mourning the captivity of their children and
friends.[363] It ends with an account of a play to be acted by the
Christian slaves in one of their vast prison-houses, to celebrate the
recent marriage of Philip the Third; from which, as well as from a
reference to the magnificent festivities that followed it at Denia, in
which Lope, as we know, took part, we may be sure that the “Cautivos de
Argel” was written as late as 1598, and probably not much later.[364]
[361] Comedias, Tom. XXV., Çaragoça, 1647, ff. 231, etc.
[362] These passages are much indebted to the “Trato de Argel” of
Cervantes.
[363] See, _passim_, Haedo, “Historia de Argel” (Madrid, 1612,
folio). He reckons the number of Christian captives, chiefly
Spaniards, in Algiers, at twenty-five thousand.
[364] Lope, Obras Sueltas, Tom. III. p. 377. I am much disposed
to think the play referred to as acted in the prisons of Algiers
is Lope’s own moral play of the “Marriage of the Soul to Divine
Love,” in the second book of the “Peregrino en su Patria.”
A love-story unites its rather incongruous materials into something
like a connected whole; but the part we read with the most interest
is that assigned to Cervantes, who appears under his family name of
Saavedra, without disguise, though without any mark of respect.[365]
Considering that Lope took from him some of the best materials for this
very piece, and that the sufferings and heroism of Cervantes at Algiers
must necessarily have been present to his thoughts when he composed
it, we can hardly do him any injustice by adding, that he ought either
to have given Cervantes a more dignified part, and alluded to him with
tenderness and consideration, or else have refrained from introducing
him at all.
[365] The passages in which Cervantes occurs are on ff. 245, 251,
and especially 262 and 277, Comedias, Tom. XXV.
The three forms of Lope’s drama which have thus far been considered,
and which are nearly akin to each other,[366] were, no doubt, the
spontaneous productions of his own genius; modified, indeed, by what
he found already existing, and by the taste and will of the audiences
for which he wrote, but still essentially his own. Probably, if he
had been left to himself and to the mere influences of the theatre,
he would have preferred to write no other dramas than such as would
naturally come under one of these divisions. But neither he nor his
audiences were permitted to settle the whole of this question. The
Church, always powerful in Spain, but never so powerful as during the
latter part of the reign of Philip the Second, when Lope was just
rising into notice, was offended with the dramas then so much in
favor, and not without reason. Their free love-stories, their duels,
and, indeed, their ideas generally upon domestic life and personal
character, have, unquestionably, any thing but a Christian tone.[367] A
controversy, therefore, naturally arose concerning their lawfulness,
and this controversy was continued till 1598, when, by a royal decree,
the representation of secular plays in Madrid was entirely forbidden,
and the common theatres were closed for nearly two years.[368]
[366] The fusion of the three classes may be seen at a glance
in Lope’s fine play, “El Mejor Alcalde el Rey,” (Comedias, Tom.
XXI., Madrid, 1635), founded on a passage in the fourth part of
the “General Chronicle” (ed. 1604, f. 327). The hero and heroine
belong to the condition of peasants; the person who makes the
mischief is their liege lord; and, from the end of the second
act, the king and one or two of the principal persons about the
court play leading parts. On the whole, it ranks technically with
the _comedias heróicas_; and yet the best and most important
scenes are those relating to common life, while others of no
little consequence belong to the class of _capa y espada_.
[367] How the Spanish theatre, as it existed in the time of
Philip IV., ought to have been regarded may be judged by the
following remarks on such of its plays as continued to be
represented at the end of the eighteenth century, read in 1796 to
the Spanish Academy of History, by Jovellanos,--a personage who
will be noticed when we reach the period during which he lived.
“As for myself,” says that wise and faithful magistrate, “I
am persuaded there can be found no proof so decisive of the
degradation of our taste as the cool indifference with which we
tolerate the representation of dramas, in which modesty, the
gentler affections, good faith, decency, and all the virtues and
principles belonging to a sound morality, are openly trampled
under foot. Do men believe that the innocence of childhood and
the fervor of youth, that an idle and dainty nobility and an
ignorant populace, can witness without injury such examples of
effrontery and grossness, of an insolent and absurd affectation
of honor, of contempt of justice and the laws, and of public and
private duty, represented on the stage in the most lively colors,
and rendered attractive by the enchantment of scenic illusions
and the graces of music and verse? Let us, then, honestly
confess the truth. Such a theatre is a public nuisance, and the
government has no just alternative but to reform it or suppress
it altogether.” Memorias de la Acad., Tom. V. p. 397.
Elsewhere, in the same excellent discourse, its author shows that
he was by no means insensible to the poetical merits of the old
theatre, whose moral influences he deprecated.
“I shall always be the first,” he says, “to confess its
inimitable beauties; the freshness of its inventions, the charm
of its style, the flowing naturalness of its dialogue, the
marvellous ingenuity of its plots, the ease with which every
thing is at last explained and adjusted; the brilliant interest,
the humor, the wit, that mark every step as we advance;--but what
matters all this, if this same drama, regarded in the light of
truth and wisdom, is infected with vices and corruptions that can
be tolerated neither by a sound state of morals nor by a wise
public policy?” Ibid., p. 413.
[368] C. Pellicer, Orígen del Teatro, Madrid, 1804, 12mo, Tom. I.
pp. 142-148. Plays were prohibited in Barcelona in 1591 by the
bishop; but the prohibition was not long respected, and in 1597
was renewed with increased earnestness. Bisbe y Vidal, Tratado
de las Comedias, Barcelona, 1618, 12mo, f. 94;--a curious book,
attacking the Spanish theatre with more discretion than any
other old treatise against it that I have read, but not with
much effect. Its author would have all plays carefully examined
and expurgated before they were licensed, and then would permit
them to be performed, not by professional actors, but by persons
belonging to the place where the representation was to occur, and
known as respectable men and decent youths; for, he adds, “when
this was done for hundreds of years, none of those strange vices
were committed that are the consequence of our present modes.”
(f. 106.) Bisbe y Vidal is a pseudonyme for Juan Ferrer, the head
of a large congregation of devout men at Barcelona, and a person
who was so much scandalized at the state of the theatre in his
time, that he published this attack on it for the benefit of
the brotherhood whose spiritual leader he was. (Torres y Amat,
Biblioteca, Art. _Ferrer_.) It is encumbered with theological
learning; but less so than other similar works of the time.
Lope was compelled to accommodate himself to this new state of things,
and seems to have done it easily and with his accustomed address. He
had, as we have seen, early written _religious plays_, like the old
Mysteries and Moralities; and he now undertook to infuse their spirit
into the more attractive forms of his secular drama, and thus produce
an entertainment which, while it might satisfy the popular audiences of
the capital, would avoid the rebukes of the Church. His success was as
marked as it had been before; and the new varieties of form in which
his genius now disported itself were hardly less striking.
His most obvious resource was the Scriptures, to which, as they had
been used more than four centuries for dramatic purposes, on the
greater religious festivals of the Spanish Church, the ecclesiastical
powers could hardly, with a good grace, now make objection. Lope,
therefore, resorted to them freely; sometimes constructing dramas out
of them which might be mistaken for the old Mysteries, were it not for
their more poetical character, and their sometimes approaching so near
to his own intriguing comedies, that, but for the religious parts, they
might seem to belong to the merely secular and fashionable theatre that
had just been interdicted.
Of the first, or more religious sort, his “Birth of Christ” may be
taken as a specimen.[369] It is divided into three acts, and begins in
Paradise, immediately after the creation. The first scene introduces
Satan, Pride, Beauty, and Envy;--Satan appearing with “dragon’s wings,
a bushy wig, and above it a serpent’s head”; and Envy carrying a heart
in her hand and wearing snakes in her hair. After some discussion about
the creation, Adam and Eve approach in the characters of King and
Queen. Innocence, who is the clown and wit of the piece, and Grace, who
is dressed in white, come in at the same time, and, while Satan and his
friends are hidden in the thicket, hold the following dialogue, which
may be regarded as characteristic, not only of this particular drama,
but of the whole class to which it belongs:--
[369] Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641, ff. 110, etc. Such
plays were often acted at Christmas, and went under the name
of _Nacimientos_;--a relique of the old dramas mentioned in
the “Partidas,” and written in various forms after the time of
Juan de la Enzina and Gil Vicente. They seem, from hints in the
“Viage” of Roxas, 1602, and elsewhere, to have been acted in
private houses, in the churches, on the public stage, and in the
streets, as they happened to be asked for. They were not exactly
_autos_, but very like them, as may be seen from the “Nacimiento
de Christo” by Lope de Vega, (in a curious volume entitled
“Navidad y Corpus Christi Festejados,” Madrid, 1664, 4to, f.
346),--a drama quite different from this one, though bearing
the same name; and quite different from another _Nacimiento de
Christo_, in the same volume, (f. 93), attributed to Lope, and
called “_Auto_ del Nacimiento de Christo Nuestro Señor.” There
are besides, in this volume, _Nacimientos_ attributed to Cubillo,
(f. 375), and Valdivielso, f. 369.
_Adam._ Here, Lady Queen, upon this couch of grass and flowers
Sit down.
_Innocence._ Well, that’s good, i’ faith;
He calls her Lady Queen.
_Grace._ And don’t you see
She is his wife; flesh of his flesh indeed,
And of his bone the bone?
_Innocence._ That’s just as if
You said, She, through his being, being hath.--
What dainty compliments they pay each other!
_Grace._ Two persons are they, yet one flesh they are.
_Innocence._ And may their union last a thousand years,
And in sweet peace continue evermore!
_Grace._ The king his father and his mother leaves
For his fair queen.
_Innocence._ And leaves not overmuch,
Since no man yet has been with parents born.
But, in good faith, good master Adam,
All fine as you go on, pranked out by Grace,
I feel no little trouble at your course,
Like that of other princes made of clay.
But I admit it was a famous trick,
In your most sovereign Lord, out of the mud
A microcosm nice to make, and do it
In one day.
_Grace._ He that the greater world could build
By his commanding power alone, to him
It was not much these lesser works on earth
To do. And see you not the two great lamps
Which overhead he hung so fair?
_Innocence._ And how
The earth he sowed with flowers, the heavens with
stars?[370]
[370]
_Adan._ Aqui, Reyna, en esta alfõbra
De yerua y flores te assienta.
_Inoc._ Esso á la fe me contenta.
Reyna y Señora la nombra.
_Gra._ Pues no ves que es su muger,
Carne de su carne y hueso
De sus huesos?
_Inoc._ Y aũ por esso,
Porque es como ser su ser.
Lindos requiebros se dizen.
_Gra._ Dos en una carne son.
_Inoc._ Dure mil años la union,
Y en esta paz se eternizen.
_Gra._ Por la Reyna dexará
El Rey a su padre y madre.
_Inoc._ Ninguno nació con padre,
Poco en dexarlos hará;
Y á la fe, Señor Adan,
Que aunque de Gracia vizarro,
Que los Principes del barro
Notable pena me dan.
Brauo artificio tenia
Vuestro soberano dueño,
Quãdo un mũdo aunq̄ pequeño
Hizo de barro en un dia.
_Gra._ Quiẽ los dos mũdos mayores
Pudo hacer con su palabra,
Que mucho que rompa y abra
En la tierra estas labores.
No ves las lamparas bellas,
Que de los cielos colgó?
_Inoc._ Como de flores sembró
La tierra, el cielo de estrellas.
Comedias de Lope de Vega. Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641, f. 111.
Immediately after the fall, and therefore, according to the common
Scriptural computation, about four thousand years before she was born,
the Madonna appears, and personally drives Satan down to perdition,
while, at the same time, an Angel expels Adam and Eve from Paradise.
The Divine Prince and the Celestial Emperor, as the Saviour and the
Supreme Divinity are respectively called, then come upon the vacant
stage, and, in a conference full of theological subtilties, arrange the
system of man’s redemption, which, at the Divine command, Gabriel,
Accompanied with armies all of stars
To fill the air with glorious light,[371]
[371]
Baxa esclareciendo el ayre
Con exercitos de estrellas.
descending to Galilee, announces as about to be accomplished by the
birth of the Messiah. This ends the first act.
The second opens with the rejoicings of the Serpent, Sin, and
Death,--confident that the World is now fairly given up to them. But
their rejoicings are short. Clarionets are sounded, and Divine Grace
appears on the upper portion of the stage, and at once expels the
sinful rout from their boasted possessions; explaining afterwards to
the World, who now comes on as one of the personages of the scene, that
the Holy Family are immediately to bring salvation to men.
The World replies with rapture:--
O holy Grace, already I behold them;
And, though the freezing night forbids, will haste
To border round my hoar frost all with flowers;
To force the tender buds to spring again
From out their shrunken branches; and to loose
The gentle streamlets from the hill-tops cold,
That they may pour their liquid crystal down;
While the old founts, at my command, shall flow
With milk, and ash-trees honey pure distil
To quench our joyful thirst.[372]
[372]
Gracia santa, ya los veo.
Voy á hazer que aquesta noche,
Aunque lo defienda el yelo,
Borden la escarcha las flores,
Salgan los pimpollos tiernos
De las encogidas ramas,
Y de los montes soberbios
Bajen los arroyos mansos
Liquido cristal vertiendo.
Hare que las fuentes manen
Candida leche, y los fresnos
Pura miel, diluvios dulces,
Que aneguen nuestros deseos.
Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641, f. 116.
The next scene is in Bethlehem, where Joseph and Mary appear begging
for entrance at an inn, but, owing to the crowd, they are sent to a
stable just outside the city, in whose contiguous fields shepherds and
shepherdesses are seen suffering from the frosty night, but jesting
and singing rude songs about it. In the midst of their troubles and
merriment, an angel appears in a cloud announcing the birth of the
Saviour; and the second act is then concluded by the resolution of all
to go and find him, and carry him their glad salutations.
The last act is chiefly taken up with discussions of the same subjects
by the same shepherds and shepherdesses, and an account of the visit
to the mother and child; some parts of which are not without poetical
merit. It ends with the appearance of the three Kings, preceded by
dances of Gypsies and Negroes, and with the worship and offerings
brought by all to the newborn Saviour.
Such dramas do not seem to have been favorites with Lope, and perhaps
were not favorites with his audiences. At least, few of them appear
among his printed works;--the one just noticed, and another, called
“The Creation of the World and Man’s First Sin,” being the most
prominent and curious;[373] and one on the atonement, entitled “The
Pledge Redeemed,” being the most wild and gross. But to the proper
stories of the Scriptures he somewhat oftener resorted, and with
characteristic talent. Thus, we have full-length plays on the history
of Tobias and the seven-times-wedded maid;[374] on the fair Esther
and Ahasuerus;[375] and on the somewhat unsuitable subject of the
Ravishment of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, as it is told in the book
of Genesis.[376] In all these, and in the rest of the class to which
they belong, Spanish manners and ideas, rather than Jewish, give their
coloring to the scene; and the story, though substantially taken from
the Hebrew records, is thus rendered much more attractive, for the
purposes of its representation at Madrid, than it would have been in
its original simplicity; as, for instance, in the case of the “Esther,”
where a comic underplot between a coquettish shepherdess and her lover
is much relied upon for the popular effect of the whole.[377]
[373] It is in the twenty-fourth volume of the Comedias of Lope,
Madrid, 1632, and is one of a very few of his religious plays
that have been occasionally reprinted.
[374] “Historia de Tobias,” Comedias, Tom. XV., Madrid, 1621, ff.
231, etc.
[375] “La Hermosa Ester,” Ibid. ff. 151, etc.
[376] “El Robo de Dina,” Comedias, Tom. XXIII., Madrid, 1638,
ff. 118, etc. To this may be added a better one, in Tom. XXII.,
Madrid, 1635, “Los Trabajos de Jacob,” on the beautiful story of
Joseph and his brethren.
[377] The underplot is slightly connected with the main story
of Esther, by a proclamation of King Ahasuerus, calling before
him all the fair maidens of his empire, which, coming to the
ears of Silena, the shepherdess, she insists upon leaving her
lover, Selvagio, and trying the fortune of her beauty at court.
She fails, and on her return is rejected by Selvagio, but still
maintains her coquettish spirit to the last, and goes off saying
or singing, as gayly as if it were part of an old ballad,--
For the vulture that flies apart,
I left my little bird’s nest;
But still I can soften his heart,
And soothe down his pride to rest.
The best parts of the play are the more religious; like Esther’s
prayers in the first and last acts, and the ballad sung at the
triumphant festival when Ahasuerus yields to her beauty; but the
whole, like many other plays of the same sort, is intended, under
the disguise of a sacred subject, to serve the purposes of the
secular theatre.
Perhaps one of the most amusing instances of incongruity in
Lope, and their number is not few, is to be found in the first
_jornada_ of the “Trabajos de Jacob,” where Joseph, at the
moment he escapes from Potiphar’s wife, leaving his cloak in her
possession, says in soliloquy,--
So mayest thou, woman-like, upon my cloak
Thy vengeance wreak, as the bull wreaks his wrath
Upon the cloak before him played; the man
Meanwhile escaping safe.
Y assi haras en essa capa,
Con venganza de muger,
Lo que el toro suele hacer,
Del hombre que se escapa.
Yet, absurd as the passage is for its incongruity, it may have
been loudly applauded by an audience that thought much more of
bull-fights than of the just rules of the drama.
Still, even these dramas were not able to satisfy audiences accustomed
to the more national spirit of plays founded on fashionable life and
intriguing adventures. A wider range, therefore, was taken. Striking
religious events of all kinds--especially those found in the lives of
holy men--were resorted to, and ingenious stories were constructed
out of the miracles and sufferings of saints, which were often as
interesting as the intrigues of Spanish gallants, or the achievements
of the old Spanish heroes, and were sometimes hardly less free and
wild. Saint Jerome, under the name of the “Cardinal of Bethlehem,” is
brought upon the stage in one of them, first as a gay gallant, and
afterwards as a saint scourged by angels, and triumphing, in open show,
over Satan.[378] In another, San Diego of Alcalá rises, from being the
attendant of a poor hermit, to be a general with military command,
and, after committing most soldier-like atrocities in the Fortunate
Islands, returns and dies at home in the odor of sanctity.[379] And in
yet others, historical subjects of a religious character are taken,
like the story of the holy Bamba torn from the plough, in the seventh
century, and by miraculous command made king of Spain;[380] or like the
life of the Mohammedan prince of Morocco, who, in 1593, was converted
to Christianity and publicly baptized in presence of Philip the Second,
with the heir of the throne for his godfather.[381]
[378] “El Cardenal de Belen,” Comedias, Tom. XIII., Madrid, 1620.
[379] This play is not in the collection of Lope’s Comedias,
but it is in Lord Holland’s list. My copy of it is an old one,
without date, printed for popular use at Valladolid.
[380] Comedias, Tom. I., Valladolid, 1604, ff. 91, etc.
[381] “Bautismo del Príncipe de Marruecos,” in which there are
nearly sixty personages. Comedias, Tom. XI., Barcelona, 1618, ff.
269, etc. C. Pellicer, Orígen del Teatro, Tom. I. p. 86.
All these, and many more like them, were represented with the consent
of the ecclesiastical powers,--sometimes even in convents and other
religious houses, but oftener in public, and always under auspices
no less obviously religious.[382] The favorite materials for such
dramas, however, were found, at last, almost exclusively in the lives
of popular saints; and the number of plays filled with such histories
and miracles was so great, soon after the year 1600, that they came to
be considered as a class by themselves, under the name of “Comedias
de Santos,” or Saints’ Plays. Lope wrote many of them. Besides those
already mentioned, we have from his pen dramatic compositions on the
lives of Saint Francis, San Pedro de Nolasco, Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Saint Julian, Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, Santa Teresa, three on
San Isidro de Madrid, and not a few others. Many of them, like Saint
Nicholas of Tolentino,[383] are very strange and extravagant; but
perhaps none will give a more true idea of the entire class than the
first one he wrote, on the subject of the favored saint of his own
city, San Isidro de Madrid.[384]
[382] C. Pellicer, Orígen, Tom. I. p. 153.
[383] “San Nicolas de Tolentino,” Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza,
1641, ff. 167, etc. Each act, as is not uncommon in the old
Spanish theatre, is a sort of separate play, with its separate
list of personages prefixed. The first has twenty-one; among
which are God, the Madonna, History, Mercy, Justice, Satan, etc.
It opens with a masquerading scene in a public square, of no
little spirit; immediately after which we have a scene in heaven,
containing the Divine judgment on the soul of one who had died
in mortal sin; then another spirited scene, in a public square,
among loungers, with a sermon from a fervent, fanatical monk;
and afterwards, successive scenes between Nicholas, who has
been moved by this sermon to enter a convent, and his family,
who consent to his purpose with reluctance; the whole ending
with a dialogue of the rudest humor between Nicholas’s servant,
who is the buffoon of the piece, and a servant-maid, to whom he
was engaged to be married, but whom he now abandons, determined
to follow his master into a religious seclusion, which, at the
same time, he is making ridiculous by his jests and parodies.
This is the first act. The other two acts are such as might be
anticipated from it.
[384] This is not either of the plays ordered by the city of
Madrid, to be acted in the open air in 1622, in honor of the
canonization of San Isidro, and found in the twelfth volume of
Lope’s Obras Sueltas; though, on a comparison with these last, it
will be seen that it was used in their composition. It, in fact,
was printed five years earlier, in the seventh volume of Lope’s
Comedias, Madrid, 1617, and continued long in favor, for it is
reprinted in Parte XXVIII. of “Comedias Escogidas de los Mejores
Ingenios,” Madrid, 1667, 4to.
It seems to have all the varieties of interest and character that
belong to the secular divisions of the Spanish drama. Scenes of
stirring interest occur in it among warriors just returned to Madrid
from a successful foray against the Moors; gay scenes, with rustic
dancing and frolics, at the marriage of Isidro and the birth of his
son; and scenes of broad farce with the sacristan, who complains,
that, owing to Isidro’s power with Heaven, he no longer gets fees for
burials, and that he believes Death is gone to live elsewhere. But
through the whole runs the loving and devout character of the Saint
himself, and gives it a sort of poetical unity. The angels come down
to plough for him, that he may no longer incur reproach by neglecting
his labors in order to attend mass; and at the touch of his goad, a
spring of pure water, still looked upon with reverence, rises in a
burning waste to refresh his unjust master. Popular songs and poetry,
meanwhile,[385] with a parody of the old Moorish ballad of “Gentle
River, Gentle River,”[386] and allusions to the holy image of Almudena,
and the church of Saint Andrew, give life to the dialogue, as it goes
on;--all familiar as household words at Madrid, and striking chords
which, when this drama was first represented, still vibrated in
every heart. At the end, the body of the Saint, after his death, is
exposed before the well-known altar of his favorite church; and there,
according to the old traditions, his former master and the queen come
to worship him, and, with pious sacrilege, endeavour to bear away from
his person relics for their own protection; but are punished on the
spot by a miracle, which thus serves at once as the final and crowning
testimony to the divine merits of the Saint, and as an appropriate
_dénouement_ for the piece.
[385] A spirited ballad or popular song is sung and danced at the
young Saint’s wedding, beginning,--
Al villano se lo dan
La cebolla con el pan.
Mira que el tosco villano,
Quando quiera alborear,
Salga con su par de bueyes
Y su arado otro que tal.
Le dan pan, le dan cebolla,
Y vino tambien le dan, etc.
Comedias, Tom. XXVIII. 1667, p. 54.
[386]
Rio verde, rio verde,
Mas negro vas que la tinta
De sangre de los Christianos,
Que no de la Moreria.
p. 60.
No doubt, such a drama, extending over forty or fifty years of time,
with its motley crowd of personages,--among whom are angels and demons,
Envy, Falsehood, and the River Manzanares,--would now be accounted
grotesque and irreverent, rather than any thing else. But in the
time of Lope, the audiences not only brought a willing faith to such
representations, but received gladly an exhibition of the miracles
which connected the saint they worshipped and his beneficent virtues
with their own times and their personal well-being.[387] If to this we
add the restraints on the theatre, and Lope’s extraordinary facility,
grace, and ingenuity, which never failed to consult and gratify the
popular taste, we shall have all the elements necessary to explain the
great number of religious dramas he composed, whether of the nature of
Mysteries, Scripture stories, or lives of saints. They belonged to his
age and country as much as he himself did.
[387] How far these plays were felt to be religious by the crowds
who witnessed them may be seen in a thousand ways; among the
rest, by the fact mentioned by Madame d’Aulnoy, in 1679, that,
when St. Antony, on the stage, repeated his _Confiteor_, the
audience all fell on their knees, smote their breasts heavily,
and cried out, _Meâ culpâ_. Voyage d’Espagne à la Haye, 1693,
18mo, Tom. I. p. 56.
But Lope adventured with success in another form of the drama, not
only more grotesque than that of the full-length religious plays,
but intended yet more directly for popular edification,--the “Autos
Sacramentales,” or Sacramental Acts,--a sort of religious plays
performed in the streets during the season when the gorgeous ceremonies
of the “Corpus Christi” filled them with rejoicing crowds.[388] No
form of the Spanish drama is older, and none had so long a reign, or
maintained during its continuance so strong a hold on the general
favor. Its representations, as we have already seen, may be found
among the earliest intimations of the national literature; and, as we
shall learn hereafter, they were with difficulty suppressed by the
royal authority after the middle of the eighteenth century. In the age
of Lope, and in that immediately following, they were at the height
of their success, and had become an important part of the religious
ceremonies arranged for the solemn sacramental festival to which
they were devoted, not only in Madrid, but throughout Spain; all the
theatres being closed for a month to give place to them and to do them
honor.[389]
[388] _Auto_ was originally a forensic term, from the Latin
_actus_, and meant a decree or a judgment of a court. Afterwards
it was applied to these religious dramas, which were called
_Autos sacramentales_ or _Autos del Corpus Christi_, and to the
_autos de fé_ of the Inquisition; in both cases, because they
were considered solemn religious _acts_. Covarrubias, Tesoro de
la Lengua Castellana, ad verb. _Auto_.
[389] Great splendor was used, from the earliest times down to
the present century, in the processions of the Corpus Christi
throughout Spain; as may be judged from the accounts of them in
Valencia, Seville, and Toledo, in the Semanario Pintoresco, 1839,
p. 167; 1840, p. 187; and 1841, p. 177. In those of Toledo, there
is an intimation that Lope de Rueda was employed in the dramatic
entertainments connected with them in 1561; and that Alonso
Cisneros, Cristóbal Navarro, and other known writers for the rude
popular stage of that time, were his successors;--all serving to
introduce Lope and Calderon.
Yet to our apprehensions, notwithstanding their religious claims, they
seem almost wholly gross and irreverent. Indeed, the very circumstances
under which they were represented would seem to prove that they were
not regarded as really solemn. A sort of rude mumming, which certainly
had nothing grave about it, preceded them, as they advanced through the
thronged streets, where the windows and balconies of all the better
sort of houses were hung with silks and tapestries to do honor to the
occasion. First in this extraordinary procession came the figure of
a misshapen marine monster, called the _Tarasca_, half serpent in
form, borne by men concealed in its cumbrous bulk, and surmounted
by another figure representing the Woman of Babylon,--the whole so
managed as to fill with wonder and terror the poor country people that
crowded round it, some of whose hats and caps were generally snatched
away by the grinning beast, and regarded as the lawful plunder of his
conductors.[390]
[390] Pellicer, notes, D. Quixote, Tom. IV. pp. 105, 106, and
Covarrubias, _ut supra_, ad verb. _Tarasca_. The populace at
Toledo called the woman on the Tarasca, Anne Boleyn. Sem. Pint.,
1841, p. 177.
Then followed a company of fair children, with garlands on their heads,
singing hymns and litanies of the Church; and sometimes companies of
men and women with castanets, dancing the national dances. Two or more
huge Moorish or negro giants, commonly called the _Gigantones_, made
of pasteboard, came next, jumping about grotesquely, to the great
alarm of some of the less experienced part of the crowd, and to the
great amusement of the rest. Then, with much pomp and fine music,
appeared the priests, bearing the Host under a splendid canopy; and
after them a long and devout procession, where was seen, in Madrid,
the king, with a taper in his hand, like the meanest of his subjects,
together with the great officers of state and foreign ambassadors,
who all crowded in to swell the splendor of the scene.[391] Last of
all came showy cars, filled with actors from the public theatres, who
were to figure on the occasion, and add to its attractions, if not to
its solemnity;--personages who constituted so important a part of the
day’s festivity, that the whole was often called, in popular phrase,
The Festival of the Cars,--“La Fiesta de los Carros.”[392]
[391] The most lively description I have seen of this procession
is contained in the _loa_ to Lope’s first _fiesta_ and _auto_
(Obras Sueltas, Tom. XVIII. pp. 1-7). Another description, to
suit the festival as it was got up about 1655-65, will be found
when we come to Calderon. It is given here as it occurred in the
period of Lope’s success; and a fancy drawing of the procession,
as it may have appeared in 1623, is to be found in the Semanario
Pintoresco, 1846, p. 185. But Lope’s _loa_ is the best authority.
[392] A good idea of the contents of the _carro_ may be found in
the description of the one met by Don Quixote, (Parte II. c. 11),
as he was returning from Toboso.
This procession--not, indeed, magnificent in the towns and hamlets of
the provinces, as it was in the capital, but always as imposing as the
resources of the place where it occurred could make it--stopped from
time to time under awnings in front of the house of some distinguished
person,--perhaps that of the President of the Council of Castile at
Madrid; perhaps that of the alcalde of a village,--and there waited
reverently till certain religious offices could be performed by the
ecclesiastics; the multitude, all the while, kneeling, as if in church.
As soon as these duties were over, or at a later hour of the day, the
actors from the cars appeared on a neighbouring stage, in the open air,
and performed, according to their limited service, the sacramental
_auto_ prepared for the occasion, and always alluding to it directly.
Of such _autos_, we know, on good authority, that Lope wrote about
four hundred,[393] though no more than twelve or thirteen of the whole
number are now extant, and these, we are told, were published only that
the towns and villages of the interior might enjoy the same devout
pleasures that were enjoyed by the court and capital;--so universal was
the fanaticism for this strange form of amusement, and so deeply was it
seated in the popular character.[394]
[393] Montalvan, in his “Fama Póstuma.”
[394] Preface of Joseph Ortis de Villena, prefixed to the Autos
in Tom. XVIII. of the Obras Sueltas. They were not printed till
1644, nine years after Lope’s death, and then they appeared
at Zaragoza. One other _auto_, attributed to Lope, “El Tirano
Castigado,” occurs in a curious volume, entitled “Navidad y
Corpus Christi Festejados,” collected by Isidro de Robles, and
already referred to.
At an earlier period, and perhaps as late as the time of Lope’s first
appearance, this part of the festival consisted of a very simple
exhibition, accompanied with rustic songs, eclogues, and dancing, such
as we find it in a large collection of manuscript _autos_, of which two
that have been published are slight and rude in their structure and
dialogue, and seem to date from a period as early as that of Lope;[395]
but during his lifetime, and chiefly under his influence, it became
a formal and well-defined popular entertainment, divided into three
parts, each of which was quite distinct in its character from the
others, and all of them dramatic.
[395] The manuscript collection referred to in the text was
acquired by the National Library at Madrid in 1844. It fills 468
leaves in folio, and contains ninety-five dramatic pieces. All of
them are anonymous, except one, which is said to be by Maestro
Ferruz, and is on the subject of Cain and Abel; and all but one
seem to be on religious subjects. This last is called “_Entremes_
de las Esteras,” and is the only one bearing that title, The
rest are called _Coloquios_, _Farsas_, and _Autos_; nearly all
being called _Autos_, but some of them _Farsas del Sacramento_,
which seems to have been regarded as synonymous. One only is
dated. It is called “Auto de la Resurreccion de Christo,” and
is licensed to be acted March 28, 1568. Two have been published
in the Museo Literario, 1844, by Don Eugenio de Tapia, of the
Royal Library, Madrid, one of the most eminent Spanish scholars
and writers of this century. The first, entitled “Auto de los
Desposorios de Moisen,” is a very slight performance, and, except
the Prologue or Argument, is in prose. The other, called “Auto de
la Residencia del Hombre,” is no better, but is all in verse. In
a subsequent number, Don Eugenio publishes a complete list of the
titles, with the _figuras_ or personages that appear in each. It
is much to be desired that all the contents of this MS. should
be properly edited. Meanwhile, we know that _saynetes_ were
sometimes interposed between different parts of the performances;
that allegorical personages were abundant; and that the _Bobo_ or
Fool constantly recurs. Some of them were probably earlier than
the time of Lope de Vega; perhaps as early as the time of Lope de
Rueda, who, as I have already said in note 38 to this chapter,
prepared _autos_ of some kind for the city of Toledo, in 1561.
But the language and versification of the two pieces that have
been printed, and the general air of the fictions and allegories
of the rest, so far as we can gather them from what has been
published, indicate a period nearly or quite as late as that of
Lope de Vega.
First of all, in its more completed state, came the _loa_. This was
always of the nature of a prologue; but sometimes, in form, it was a
dialogue spoken by two or more actors. One of the best of Lope’s is of
this kind. It is filled with the troubles of a peasant who has come
to Madrid in order to see these very shows, and has lost his wife in
the crowd; but, just as he has quite consoled himself and satisfied
his conscience by determining to have her cried once or twice, and
then to give her up as a lucky loss and take another, she comes in
and describes with much spirit the wonders of the procession she had
seen, precisely as her audience themselves had just seen it; thus
making, in the form of a prologue, a most amusing and appropriate
introduction for the drama that was to follow.[396] Another of
Lope’s _loas_ is a discussion between a gay gallant and a peasant,
who talks, in his rustic dialect, on the subject of the doctrine
of transubstantiation.[397] Another is given in the character of a
Morisco, and is a monologue, in the dialect of the speaker, on the
advantages and disadvantages of his turning Christian in earnest, after
having for some time made his living fraudulently by begging in the
assumed character of a Christian pilgrim.[398] All of them are amusing,
though burlesque; but some of them are any thing rather than religious.
[396] This is the first of the _loas_ in the volume, and, on the
whole, the best.
[397] Obras Sueltas, Tom. XVIII. p. 367.
[398] Ibid., p. 107.
After the _loa_ came an _entremes_. All that remain to us of Lope’s
_entremeses_ are mere farces, like the interludes used every day in
the secular theatres. In one instance he makes an _entremes_ a satire
upon lawyers, in which a member of the craft, as in the old French
“Maistre Pathelin,” is cheated and robbed by a seemingly simple
peasant, who first renders him extremely ridiculous, and then escapes
by disguising himself as a blind ballad-singer, and dancing and singing
in honor of the festival,--a conclusion which seems to be peculiarly
irreverent for this particular occasion.[399] In another instance, he
ridicules the poets of his time by bringing on the stage a lady who
pretends she has just come from the Indies, with a fortune, in order
to marry a poet, and succeeds in her purpose; but both find themselves
deceived, for the lady has no income but such as is gained by a pair
of castanets, and her husband turns out to be a ballad-maker. Both,
however, have good sense enough to be content with each other, and to
agree to go through the world together singing and dancing ballads,
of which, by way of _finale_ to the _entremes_, they at once give the
crowd a specimen.[400] Yet another of Lope’s successful attempts in
this way is an interlude containing within itself the representation
of a play on the story of Helen, which reminds us of the similar
entertainment of Pyramus and Thisbe in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”;
but it breaks off in the middle,--the actor who plays Paris running off
in earnest with the actress who plays Helen, and the piece ending with
a burlesque scene of confusions and reconciliations.[401] And finally,
another is a parody of the procession itself, with its giants, cars,
and all; treating the whole with the gayest ridicule.[402]
[399] Obras Sueltas, Tom. XVIII. p. 8. “Entremes del Letrado.”
[400] Ibid., p. 114. “Entremes del Poeta.”
[401] Ibid., p. 168. “El Robo de Helena.”
[402] Ibid., p. 373. “Muestra de los Carros.”
Thus far, all has been avowedly comic in the dramatic exhibitions
of these religious festivals. But the _autos_ or sacramental acts
themselves, with which the whole concluded, and to which all that
preceded was only introductory, claim to be more grave in their general
tone, though in some cases, like the prologues and interludes, parts
of them are too whimsical and extravagant to be any thing but amusing.
“The Bridge of the World” is one of this class.[403] It represents
the Prince of Darkness placing the giant Leviathan on the bridge of
the world, to defend its passage against all comers who do not confess
his supremacy. Adam and Eve, who, we are told in the directions to the
players, appear “dressed very gallantly after the French fashion,”
are naturally the first that present themselves.[404] They subscribe
to the hard condition, and pass over in sight of the audience. In the
same manner, as the dialogue informs us, the patriarchs, with Moses,
David, and Solomon, go over; but at last the Knight of the Cross,
“the Celestial Amadis of Greece,” as he is called, appears in person,
overthrows the pretensions of the Prince of Darkness, and leads
the Soul of Man in triumph across the fatal passage. The whole is
obviously a parody of the old story of the Giant defending the Bridge
of Mantible;[405] and when to this are added parodies of the ballad of
“Count Claros” applied to Adam,[406] and of other old ballads applied
to the Saviour,[407] the confusion of allegory and farce, of religion
and folly, seems to be complete.
[403] It is the last in the collection, and, as to its poetry,
one of the best of the twelve, if not the very best.
[404] The direction to the actors is,--“Salen Adan y Eva vestidos
de Franceses muy galanes.”
[405] See Historia del Emperador Cárlos Magno, Cap. 26, 30, etc.
[406] The giant says to Adam, referring to the temptation:--
Yerros Adan por amores
Dignos son de perdonar, etc.;
which is out of the beautiful and well-known old ballad of the
“Conde Claros,” beginning “Pésame de vos, el Conde,” which has
been already noticed, _ante_, Vol. I. p. 121. It must have been
perfectly familiar to many persons in Lope’s audience, and
how the allusion to it could have produced any other than an
irreverent effect I know not.
[407] The address of the music, “Si dormis, Príncipe mio,” refers
to the ballads about those whose lady-loves had been carried
captive among the Moors.
Others of the _autos_ are more uniformly grave. “The Harvest” is a
spiritualized version of the parable in Saint Matthew on the Field
that was sowed with Good Seed and with Tares,[408] and is carried
through with some degree of solemnity; but the unhappy tares, that
are threatened with being cut down and cast into the fire, are nothing
less than Judaism, Idolatry, Heresy, and all Sectarianism, who are
hardly saved from their fate by the mercy of the Lord of the Harvest
and his fair spouse, the Church. However, notwithstanding a few such
absurdities and awkwardnesses in the allegory, and some very misplaced
compliments to the reigning Spanish family, this is one of the best
of the class to which it belongs, and one of the most solemn. Another
of those open to less reproach than usual is called “The Return from
Egypt,”[409] which, with its shepherds and gypsies, has quite the grace
of an eclogue, and, with its ballads and popular songs, has some of
the charms that belong to Lope’s secular dramas. These two, with “The
Wolf turned Shepherd,”[410]--which is an allegory on the subject of the
Devil taking upon himself the character of the true shepherd of the
flock,--constitute as fair, or perhaps, rather, as favorable, specimens
of the genuine Spanish _auto_ as can be found in the elder school. All
of them rest on the grossest of the prevailing notions in religion;
all of them appeal, in every way they can, whether light or serious,
to the popular feelings and prejudices; many of them are imbued with
the spirit of the old national poetry; and these, taken together, are
the foundation on which their success rested,--a success which, if
we consider the religious object of the festival, was undoubtedly of
extraordinary extent and extraordinary duration.
[408] “La Siega,” (Obras Sueltas, Tom. XVIII. p. 328), of which
there is an excellent translation in Dohrn’s Spanische Dramen,
Berlin, 1841, 8vo, Tom. I.
[409] “La Vuelta de Egypto,” Obras, Tom. XVIII. p. 435.
[410] “El Pastor Lobo y Cabaña Celestial,” Ibid., p. 381.
But the _entremeses_ or interludes that were used to enliven the
dramatic part of this rude, but gorgeous ceremonial, were by no means
confined to it. They were, as has been intimated, acted daily in the
public theatres, where, from the time when the full-length dramas were
introduced, they had been inserted between their different divisions or
acts, to afford a lighter amusement to the audience. Lope wrote a great
number of them; how many is not known. From their slight character,
however, hardly more than thirty have been preserved. But we have
enough to show that in this, as in the other departments of his drama,
popular effect was chiefly sought, and that, as everywhere else, the
flexibility of his genius is manifested in the variety of forms in
which it exhibits its resources. Generally speaking, those we possess
are written in prose, are very short, and have no plot; being merely
farcical dialogues drawn from common or vulgar life.
The “Melisendra,” however, one of the first he published, is an
exception to this remark. It is composed almost entirely in verse, is
divided into acts, and has a _loa_ or prologue;--in short, it is a
parody in the form of a regular play, founded on the story of Gayferos
and Melisendra in the old ballads.[411] The “Padre Engañado,” which
Holcroft brought upon the English stage under the name of “The Father
Outwitted,” is another exception, and is a lively farce of eight or
ten pages, on the ridiculous troubles of a father who gives his own
daughter in disguise to the very lover from whom he supposed he had
carefully shut her up.[412] But most of them, like “The Indian,” “The
Cradle,” and “The Robbers Cheated,” would occupy hardly more than
fifteen minutes each in their representation,--slight dialogues of the
broadest farce, continued as long as the time between the acts would
conveniently permit, and then abruptly terminated to give place to the
principal drama.[413] A vigorous spirit, and a popular, rude humor are
rarely wanting in them.
[411] Primera Parte de Entremeses, “Entremes Primero de
Melisendra,” Comedias, Tom. I., Valladolid, 1604, 4to, ff. 333,
etc. It is founded on the fine old ballads of the Romancero of
1550-1555, “Asentado está Gayferos,” etc.; the same out of which
the puppet-show man made his exhibition at the inn before Don
Quixote, Parte II. c. 26.
[412] Comedias, Valladolid, 1604, Tom. I. p. 337.
[413] All three of these pieces are in the same volume.
But Lope, whenever he wrote for the theatre, seems to have remembered
its old foundations, and to have shown a tendency to rest upon them
as much as possible of his own drama. This is apparent in the very
_entremeses_ we have just noticed. They are to be traced back to Lope
de Rueda, whose short farces were of the same nature, and were used,
after the introduction of dramas of three acts, in the same way.[414]
It is apparent, too, as we have seen, in his moral and allegorical
plays, in his sacramental acts, and in his dramas taken from the
Scripture and the lives of the saints; all founded on the earlier
Mysteries and Moralities. And now we find the same tendency again in
yet one more class, that of his eclogues and pastorals,--a form of the
drama which may be recognized at least as early as the time of Juan de
la Enzina.[415] Of these Lope wrote a considerable number, that are
still extant,--twenty or more,--not a few of which bear distinct marks
of their origin in that singular mixture of a bucolic and a religious
tone that is seen in the first beginnings of a public theatre in Spain.
[414] “Lope de Rueda,” says Lope de Vega, “was an example of
these precepts in Spain; for from him has come down the custom
of calling the old plays _Entremeses_.” (Obras Sueltas, Tom. IV.
p. 407.) A single scene taken out and used in this way as an
_entremes_ was called a _Paso_ or “passage.” We have noted such
by Lope de Rueda, etc. See _ante_, pp. 16, 22.
[415] Among the imitators of Juan de la Enzina should be noted
Lucas Fernandez, a native of Salamanca, who published in that
city a thin folio volume, in 1514, entitled “Farsas y Eglogas al
Modo y Estilo Pastoril y Castellano.” Judged by their titles,
they are quite in the manner and style of the eclogues and farces
of his predecessor; but one of them is called a _Comedia_, two
others are called _Farsa ó quasi Comedia_, and another _Auto ó
Farsa_. There are but six in all. I have never seen the book;
but the notices I have found of its contents show that it is
undoubtedly an imitation of the dramatic attempts of its author’s
countryman, and that it is probably one of little poetical
merit.
Some of the eclogues of Lope, we know, were performed; as, for
instance, “The Wood and no Love in it,”--Selva sin Amor,--which was
represented with costly pomp and much ingenious apparatus before the
king and the royal family.[416] Others, like seven or eight in his
“Pastores de Belen,” and one published under the name of “Tomé de
Burguillos,”--all of which claim to have been arranged for Christmas
and different religious festivals,--so much resemble such as we know
were really performed on these occasions, that we can hardly doubt,
that, like those just mentioned, they also were represented.[417] While
yet others, like the first he ever published, called the “Amorosa,” and
his last, addressed to Philis, together with one on the death of his
wife, and one on the death of his son, were probably intended only to
be read.[418] But all may have been acted, if we are to judge from the
habits of the age, when, as we know, eclogues never destined for the
stage were represented, as much as if they had been expressly written
for it.[419] At any rate, all Lope’s compositions of this kind show
how gladly and freely his genius overflowed into the remotest of the
many forms of the drama that were recognized or permitted in his time.
[416] Obras, Tom. I. p. 225.
[417] Obras, Tom. XVI., _passim_, and XIX. p. 278.
[418] For these, see Obras, Tom. III. p. 463; Tom. X. p. 193;
Tom. IV. p. 430; and Tom. X. p. 362. The last passage contains
nearly all we know about his son, Lope Felix.
[419] See the scene in the Second Part of Don Quixote, where some
gentlemen and ladies, for their own entertainment in the country,
were about to represent the eclogues of Garcilasso and Camoens.
In the same way, I think, the well-known eclogue which Lope
dedicated to Antonio Duke of Alva, (Obras, IV. p. 295), that to
Amaryllis, which was the longest he ever wrote, (Tom. X. p. 147),
that for the Prince of Esquilache, (Tom. I. p. 352), and most of
those in the “Arcadia,” (Tom. VI.), were acted, and written in
order to be acted. Why the poem to his friend Claudio, (Tom. IX.
p. 355), which is in fact an account of some passages in his own
life, with nothing pastoral in its tone or form, is called “an
eclogue,” I do not know; nor will I undertake to assign to any
particular class the “Military Dialogue in Honor of the Marquis
of Espinola,” (Tom. X. p. 337), though I think it is dramatic
in its structure, and was probably represented, on some show
occasion, before the Marquis himself.
CHAPTER XVIII.
LOPE DE VEGA, CONTINUED.--HIS CHARACTERISTICS AS A DRAMATIC
WRITER.--HIS STORIES, CHARACTERS, AND DIALOGUE.--HIS DISREGARD OF
RULES, OF HISTORICAL TRUTH, AND MORAL PROPRIETY.--HIS COMIC UNDERPLOT
AND GRACIOSO.--HIS POETICAL STYLE AND MANNER.--HIS FITNESS TO WIN
GENERAL FAVOR.--HIS SUCCESS.--HIS FORTUNE, AND THE VAST AMOUNT OF HIS
WORKS.
The extraordinary variety in the character of Lope’s dramas is as
remarkable as their number, and contributed not a little to render
him the monarch of the stage while he lived, and the great master
of the national theatre ever since. But though this vast variety
and inexhaustible fertility constitute, as it were, the two great
corner-stones on which his success rested, still there were other
circumstances attending it that should by no means be overlooked, when
we are examining, not only the surprising results themselves, but the
means by which they were obtained.
The first of these is the principle which may be considered as
running through the whole of his full-length plays,--that of making
all other interests subordinate to the interest of the story. Thus,
the characters are a matter evidently of inferior moment with him;
so that the idea of exhibiting a single passion giving a consistent
direction to all the energies of a strong will, as in the case of
Richard the Third, or, as in the case of Macbeth, distracting them
all no less consistently, does not occur in the whole range of his
dramas. Sometimes, it is true, though rarely, as in Sancho Ortiz, he
develops a marked and generous spirit, with distinctive lineaments;
but in no case is this the main object, and in no case is it done with
the appearance of an artist-like skill or a deliberate purpose. On
the contrary, a great majority of his characters are almost as much
standing masks as Pantalone is on the Venetian stage, or Scapin on the
French. The _primer galan_, or hero, all love, honor, and jealousy;
the _dama_, or heroine, no less loving and jealous, but yet more
rash and heedless; and the brother, or if not the brother, then the
_barba_, or old man and father, ready to cover the stage with blood,
if the lover has even been seen in the house of the heroine,--these
recur continually, and serve, not only in the secular, but often in
the religious pieces, as the fixed points round which the different
actions, with their different incidents, are made to revolve.
In the same way, the dialogue is used chiefly to bring out the plot,
and hardly at all to bring out the characters. This is obvious in the
long speeches, sometimes consisting of two or three hundred verses,
which are as purely narrative as an Italian _novella_, and often much
like one; and it is seen, too, in the crowd of incidents that compose
the action, which not infrequently fails to find space sufficient
to spread out all its ingenious involutions and make them easily
intelligible; a difficulty of which Lope once gives his audience fair
warning, telling them at the outset of the piece, that they must not
lose a syllable of the first explanation, or they will certainly fail
to understand the curious plot that follows.
Obeying the same principle, he sacrifices regularity and congruity
in his stories, if he can but make them interesting. His longer
plays, indeed, are regularly divided into three _jornadas_, or acts;
but this, though he claims it as a merit, is not an arrangement of
his own invention, and is, moreover, merely an arbitrary mode of
producing the pauses necessary to the convenience of the actors and
spectators; pauses which, in Lope’s theatre, have too often nothing
to do with the structure and proportions of the piece itself.[420] As
for the six plays which, as he intimates, were written according to
the rules, Spanish criticism has sought for them in vain;[421] nor
does any of them, probably, exist now, if any ever existed, unless
“La Melindrosa”--The Prude--may have been one of them. But he avows
very honestly that he regards rules of all kinds only as obstacles to
his success. “When I am going to write a play,” he says, “I lock up
all precepts, and cast Terence and Plautus out of my study, lest they
should cry out against me, as truth is wont to do even from such dumb
volumes; for I write according to the art invented by those who sought
the applause of the multitude, whom it is but just to humor in their
folly, since it is they who pay for it.”[422]
[420] This division can be traced back to a play of Francisco de
Avendaño, 1553. L. F. Moratin, Obras, 1830, Tom. I. Parte I. p.
182.
[421] “Except six,” says Lope, at the end of his “Arte Nuevo,”
“all my four hundred and eighty-three plays have offended gravely
against the rules [el arte].” See Montiano y Luyando, “Discurso
sobre las Tragedias Españolas,” (Madrid, 1750, 12mo, p. 47),
and Huerta, in the Preface to his “Teatro Hespañol,” for the
difficulty of finding even these six.
[422] Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias, Obras, Tom. IV. p. 406.
The extent to which, following this principle, Lope sacrificed dramatic
probabilities and possibilities, geography, history, and a decent
morality, can be properly understood only by reading a large number
of his plays. But a few instances will partially illustrate it. In
his “First King of Castile,” the events fill thirty-six years in
the middle of the eleventh century, and a Gypsy is introduced four
hundred years before Gypsies were known in Europe.[423] The whole
romantic story of the Seven Infantes of Lara is put into the play of
“Mudarra.”[424] In “Spotless Purity,” Job, David, Jeremiah, Saint John
the Baptist, and the University of Salamanca figure together;[425] and
in “The Birth of Christ” we have, for the two extremes, the creation
of the world and the Nativity.[426] So much for history. Geography is
treated no better, when Constantinople is declared to be four thousand
leagues from Madrid,[427] and Spaniards are made to disembark from a
ship in Hungary.[428] And as to morals, it is not easy to tell how
Lope reconciled his opinions to his practice. In the Preface to the
twentieth volume of his Theatre, he declares, in reference to his own
“Wise Vengeance,” that “its title is absurd, because all revenge is
unwise and unlawful”; and yet it seems as if one half of his plays go
to justify it. It is made a merit in San Isidro, that he stole his
master’s grain to give it to the starving birds.[429] The prayers of
Nicolas de Tolentino are accounted sufficient for the salvation of
a kinsman who, after a dissolute life, had died in an act of mortal
sin;[430] and the cruel and atrocious conquest of Arauco is claimed as
an honor to a noble family and a grace to the national escutcheon.[431]
[423] “El Primer Rey de Castilla,” Comedias, Tom. XVII., Madrid,
1621, ff. 114, etc.
[424] “El Bastardo Mudarra,” Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641.
[425] “La Limpieza no Manchada,” Comedias, Tom. XIX., Madrid,
1623.
[426] “El Nacimiento de Christo,” Comedias, Tom. XXIV., _ut
supra_.
[427] It is the learned Theodora, a person represented as capable
of confounding the knowing professors brought to try her, who
declares Constantinople to be four thousand leagues from Madrid.
La Donzella Teodor, end of Act II.
[428] This extraordinary disembarkation takes place in the
“Animal de Ungria” (Comedias, Tom. IX., Barcelona, 1618, ff. 137,
138). One is naturally reminded of Shakspeare’s “Winter’s Tale”;
but it is curious that the Duke de Luynes, a favorite minister
of state to Louis XIII., made precisely the same mistake, at
about the same time, to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, then (1619-21)
ambassador in France. But Lope certainly knew better, and I doubt
not Shakspeare did, however ignorant the French statesman may
have been. Herbert’s Life, by himself, London, 1809, 8vo, p. 217.
[429] See “San Isidro Labrador,” in Comedias Escogidas, Tom.
XXVIII., Madrid, 1667, f. 66.
[430] “San Nicolas de Tolentino,” Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza,
1641, f. 171.
[431] “Arauco Domado,” Comedias, Tom. XX., Madrid, 1629. After
reading such absurdities, we wonder less that Cervantes, even
though he committed not a few like them himself, should make the
puppet-show man exclaim, “Are not a thousand plays represented
now-a-days, full of a thousand improprieties and absurdities,
which yet run their course successfully, and are heard, not only
with applause, but with admiration?” D. Quixote, Parte II. c. 26.
But all these violations of the truth of fact and of the commonest
rules of Christian morals, of which nobody was more aware than their
perpetrator, were overlooked by Lope himself, and by his audiences,
in the general interest of the plot. A dramatized novel was the form
he chose to give to his plays, and he succeeded in settling it as the
main principle of the Spanish stage. “Tales,” he declares, “have the
same rules with dramas, the purpose of whose authors is to content
and please the public, though the rules of art may be strangled by
it.”[432] And elsewhere, when defending his opinions, he says: “Keep
the explanation of the story doubtful till the last scene; for, as soon
as the public know how it will end, they turn their faces to the door
and their backs to the stage.”[433] This had never been said before;
and though some traces of intriguing plots are to be found from the
time of Torres de Naharro, yet nobody ever thought of relying upon
them, in this way, for success, till Lope had set the example, which
his school have so faithfully followed.
[432] “Tienen las novelas los mismos preceptos que las comedias,
cuyo fin es haber dado su autor contento y gusto al pueblo,
aunque se ahorque el arte.” Obras Sueltas, Tom. VIII. p. 70.
[433] Arte Nuevo, Obras, Tom. IV. p. 412. From an autograph MS.
of Lope, still extant, it appears that he sometimes wrote out
his plays first in the form of _pequeñas novelas_. Semanario
Pintoresco, 1839, p. 19.
Another element which he established in the Spanish drama was the
comic underplot. All his plays, with the signal exception of the “Star
of Seville,” and a few others of less note, have it;--sometimes in
a pastoral form, but generally as a simple admixture of farce. The
characters contained in this portion of each of his dramas are as much
standing masks as those in the graver portion, and were perfectly well
known under the name of the _graciosos_ and _graciosas_, or drolls,
to which was afterwards added the _vegete_, or a little, old, testy
esquire, who is always boasting of his descent, and is often employed
in teasing the _gracioso_. In most cases, they constitute a parody
on the dialogue and adventures of the hero and heroine, as Sancho is
partly a parody of Don Quixote, and in most cases they are the servants
of the respective parties;--the men being good-humored cowards and
gluttons, the women mischievous and coquettish, and both full of wit,
malice, and an affected simplicity. Slight traces of such characters
are to be found on the Spanish stage as far back as the servants in the
“Serafina” of Torres Naharro; and in the middle of that century, the
_bobo_, or fool, figures freely in the farces of Lope de Rueda, as the
_simplé_ had done before in those of Enzina. But the variously witty
_gracioso_, the full-blown parody of the heroic characters of the play,
the dramatic _pícaro_, is the work of Lope de Vega. He first introduced
it into the “Francesilla,” where the oldest of the tribe, under the
name of Tristan, was represented by Rios, a famous actor of his time,
and produced a great effect;[434]--an event which, Lope tells us, in
the Dedication of the drama itself, in 1620, to his friend Montalvan,
occurred before that friend was born, and therefore before the year
1602.
[434] See the Dedication of the “Francesilla” to Juan Perez de
Montalvan, in Comedias, Tom. XIII., Madrid, 1620, where we have
the following words: “And note in passing that this is the first
play in which was introduced the character of the jester, which
has been so often repeated since. Rios, unique in all parts,
played it, and is worthy of this record. I pray you to read it
as a new thing; for when I wrote it, you were not born.” The
_gracioso_ was generally distinguished by his name on the Spanish
stage, as he was afterwards on the French stage. Thus, Calderon
often calls his _gracioso_ Clarin, or Trumpet; as Molière called
his Sganarelle. The _simplé_, who, as I have said, can be traced
back to Enzina, and who was, no doubt, the same with the _bobo_,
is mentioned as very successful, in 1596, by Lopez Pinciano,
who, in his “Philosofía Antigua Poética,” (1596, p. 402), says,
“They are characters that commonly amuse more than any other that
appear in the plays.” The _gracioso_ of Lope was, like the rest
of his theatre, founded on what existed before his time; only the
character itself was further developed, and received a new name.
D. Quixote, Clemencin, Parte II. cap. 3, note.
From this time the _gracioso_ is found in nearly all of his plays, and
in nearly every other play produced on the Spanish stage, from which
it passed, first to the French, and then to all the other theatres of
modern times. Excellent specimens of it may be found in the sacristan
of the “Captives of Algiers,” in the servants of the “Saint John’s
Eve,” and in the servants of the “Ugly Beauty”; in all which, as well
as in many more, the _gracioso_ is skilfully turned to account, by
being made partly to ridicule the heroic extravagances and rhodomontade
of the leading personages, and partly to shield the author himself
from rebuke by good-humoredly confessing for him that he was quite
aware he deserved it. Of such we may say, as Don Quixote did, when
speaking of the whole class to the Bachelor Samson Carrasco, that they
are the shrewdest fellows in their respective plays. But of others,
whose ill-advised wit is inopportunely thrust, with their foolscaps
and bawbles, into the gravest and most tragic scenes of plays like
“Marriage in Death,” we can only avow, that, though they were demanded
by the taste of the age, nothing in any age can suffice for their
justification.
The last among the circumstances which should not be overlooked, when
considering the means of Lope’s great success, is his poetical style,
the metres he adopted, and especially the use he made of the elder
poetry of his country. In all these respects, he is to be praised;
always excepting the occasions when, to obtain universal applause, he
permitted himself the use of that obscure and affected style which the
courtly part of his audience demanded, and which he himself elsewhere
condemned and ridiculed.[435]
[435] The specimens of his bad taste in this particular occur
but too frequently; e. g. in “El Cuerdo en su Casa” (Comedias,
Tom. VI., Madrid, 1615, ff. 105, etc.); in the “Niña de Plata”
(Comedias, Tom. IX., Barcelona, 1618, ff. 125, etc.); in the
“Cautivos de Argel” (Comedias, Tom. XXV., Zaragoza, 1647, p.
241); and in other places. But in opposition to all this, see his
deliberate condemnation of such euphuistical follies in his Obras
Sueltas, Tom. IV. pp. 459-482; and the jests at their expense
in his “Amistad y Obligacion,” and his “Melindres de Belisa”
(Comedias, Tom. IX., Barcelona, 1618).
No doubt, indeed, much of his power over the mass of the people of his
time is to be sought in the charm that belonged to his versification;
not unfrequently careless, but almost always fresh, flowing, and
effective. Its variety, too, was remarkable. No metre of which the
language was susceptible escaped him. The Italian octave stanzas are
frequent; the _terza rima_, though more sparingly used, occurs often;
and hardly a play is without one or more sonnets. All this was to
please the more fashionable and cultivated among his audience, who had
long been enamoured of whatever was Italian; and though some of it was
unhappy enough, like sonnets with echoes,[436] it was all fluent and
all successful.
[436] Sonnets seem to have been a sort of choice morsels thrown
in to please the over-refined portion of the audience. In
general, only one or two occur in a play; but in the “Discreta
Venganza” (Comedias, Tom. XX., Madrid, 1629) there are five. In
the “Palacios de Galiana” (Comedias, Tom. XXIII., Madrid, 1638,
f. 256) there is a foolish sonnet with echoes, and another in
the “Historia de Tobias” (Comedias, Tom. XV., Madrid, 1621, f.
244). The sonnet in ridicule of sonnets, in the “Niña de Plata,”
(Comedias, Tom. IX., Barcelona, 1618, f. 124), is witty, and has
been imitated in French and in English.
Still, as far as his verse was concerned,--besides the _silvas_, or
masses of irregular lines, the _quintillas_, or five-line stanzas,
and the _liras_, or six-line,--he relied, above every thing else,
upon the old national ballad-measure;--both the proper _romance_,
with _asonantes_, and the _redondilla_, with rhymes between the first
and fourth lines and between the second and third. In this he was
unquestionably right. The earliest attempts at dramatic representation
in Spain had been somewhat lyrical in their tone, and the more
artificial forms of verse, therefore, especially those with short lines
interposed at regular intervals, had been used by Juan de la Enzina,
by Torres Naharro, and by others; though, latterly, in these, as in
many respects, much confusion had been introduced into Spanish dramatic
poetry. But Lope, making his drama more narrative than it had been
before, settled it at once and finally on the true national narrative
measure. He went farther. He introduced into it much old ballad-poetry,
and many separate ballads of his own composition. Thus, in “The Sun
Delayed,” the Master of Santiago, who has lost his way, stops and sings
a ballad;[437] and in his “Poverty no Disgrace,” he has inserted a
beautiful one, beginning,
[437] “El Sol Parado,” Comedias, Tom. XVII., Madrid, 1621, pp.
218, 219. It reminds one of the much more beautiful _serrana_ of
the Marquis of Santillana, beginning “Moza tan formosa,” _ante_,
Vol. I. p. 372.
O noble Spanish cavalier,
You hasten to the fight;
The trumpet rings upon your ear,
And victory claims her right.[438]
[438] “Pobreza no es Vileza,” Comedias, Tom. XX., Madrid, 1629,
f. 61.
Probably, however, he produced a still greater effect when he brought
in passages, not of his own, but of old and well-known ballads, or
allusions to them. Of these his plays are full. For instance, his
“Sun Delayed,” and his “Envy of Nobility,” are all-redolent of the
Morisco ballads, that were so much admired in his time; the first
taking those that relate to the loves of Gazul and Zayda,[439] and the
last those from the “Civil Wars of Granada,” about the wild feuds of
the Zegris and the Abencerrages.[440] Hardly less marked is the use
he makes of the old ballads on Roderic, in his “Last Goth”;[441] of
those concerning the Infantes of Lara, in his several plays relating
to their tragical story;[442] and of those about Bernardo del Carpio,
in “Marriage and Death.”[443] Occasionally, the effect of their
introduction must have been very great. Thus, when, in his drama of
“Santa Fé,” crowded with the achievements of Hernando del Pulgar,
Garcilasso de la Vega, and whatever was most glorious and picturesque
in the siege of Granada, one of his personages breaks out with a
variation of the familiar and grand old ballad,--
[439] He has even ventured to take the beautiful and familiar
ballad, “Sale la Estrella de Venus,”--which is in the Romancero
General, the “Guerras de Granada,” and many other places,--and
work it up into a dialogue. “El Sol Parado,” Comedias, Tom.
XVII., Madrid, 1621, ff. 223-224.
[440] In the same way, he seizes upon the old ballad, “Reduan
bien se te acuerda,” and uses it in the “Embidia de la Nobleza,”
Comedias, Tom. XXIII., Madrid, 1638, f. 192.
[441] For example, the ballad in the Romancero of 1555, beginning
“Despues que el Rey Rodrigo,” at the end of Jornada II., in “El
Ultimo Godo,” Comedias, Tom. XXV., Zaragoza, 1647.
[442] Compare “El Bastardo Mudarra” (Comedias, Tom. XXIV.,
Zaragoza, 1641, ff. 75, 76) with the ballads, “Ruy Velasquez de
Lara,” and “Llegados son los Infantes”; and, in the same play,
the dialogue between Mudarra and his mother, (f. 83), with the
ballad, “Sentados á un ajedrez.”
[443] “El Casamiento en la Muerte,” (Comedias, Tom. I.,
Valladolid, 1604, ff. 198, etc.), in which the following
well-known old ballads are freely used, viz.:--“O Belerma! O
Belerma!” “No tiene heredero alguno”; “Al pie de un túmulo
negro”; “Bañando está las prisiones”; and others.
Now Santa Fé is circled round
With canvas walls so fair,
And tents that cover all the ground
With silks and velvets rare,--[444]
[444] It is in the last chapter of the “Guerras Civiles de
Granada”; but Lope has given it, with a slight change in the
phraseology, as follows:--
Cercada está Sancta Fé
Con mucho lienço encerado;
Y al rededor muchas tiendas
De terciopelo y damasco.
It occurs in many collections of ballads, and is founded on the
fact, that a sort of village of rich tents was established near
Granada, which, after an accidental conflagration, was turned
into a town, that still exists, within whose walls were signed
both the commission of Columbus to seek the New World, and the
capitulation of Granada. The imitation of this ballad by Lope is
in his “Cerco de Santa Fé,” Comedias, Tom. I., Valladolid, 1604,
f. 69.
it must have stirred his audience as with the sound of a trumpet.
Indeed, in all respects, Lope well understood how to win the general
favor, and how to build up and strengthen his fortunate position as
the leading dramatic poet of his time. The ancient foundations of the
theatre, as far as any existed when he appeared, were little disturbed
by him. He carried on the drama, he says, as he found it; not venturing
to observe the rules of art, because, if he had done so, the public
never would have listened to him.[445] The elements that were floating
about, crude and unsettled, he used freely; but only so far as they
suited his general purpose. The division into three acts, known so
little, that he attributed it to Virues, though it was made much
earlier; the ballad-measure, which had been timidly used by Tarraga and
two or three others, but relied upon by nobody; the intriguing story,
and the amusing underplot, of which the slight traces that existed
in Torres Naharro had been long forgotten,--all these he seized with
the instinct of genius, and formed from them, and from the abundant
and rich inventions of his own overflowing fancy, a drama which, as a
whole, was unlike any thing that had preceded it, and yet was so truly
national and rested so faithfully on tradition, that it was never
afterwards disturbed, till the whole literature, of which it was so
brilliant a part, was swept away with it.
[445] He says this apparently as a kind of apology to foreigners,
in the Preface to the “Peregrino en su Patria,” 1603, where he
gives a list of his plays to that date.
Lope de Vega’s immediate success, as we have seen, was in proportion to
his rare powers and favorable opportunities. For a long time, nobody
else was willingly heard on the stage; and during the whole of the
forty or fifty years that he wrote for it, he stood quite unapproached
in general popularity. His unnumbered plays and farces, in all the
forms that were demanded by the fashions of the age, or permitted by
religious authority, filled the theatres both of the capital and the
provinces; and so extraordinary was the impulse he gave to dramatic
representations, that, though there were only two companies of
strolling players at Madrid when he began, there were, about the period
of his death, no less than forty, comprehending nearly a thousand
persons.[446]
[446] See the curious facts collected on this subject in
Pellicer’s note to Don Quixote, ed. 1798, Parte II., Tom. I. pp.
109-111.
Abroad, too, his fame was hardly less remarkable. In Rome, Naples,
and Milan, his dramas were performed in their original language; in
France and Italy, his name was announced in order to fill the theatres
when no play of his was to be performed;[447] and once even, and
probably oftener, one of his dramas was represented in the seraglio
at Constantinople.[448] But perhaps neither all this popularity,
nor yet the crowds that followed him in the streets and gathered in
the balconies to watch him as he passed along,[449] nor the name
of Lope, that was given to whatever was esteemed singularly good
in its kind,[450] is so striking a proof of his dramatic success,
as the fact, so often complained of by himself and his friends,
that multitudes of his plays were fraudulently noted down as they
were acted, and then printed for profit throughout Spain; and that
multitudes of other plays appeared under his name, and were represented
all over the provinces, that he had never even heard of till they were
published and performed.[451]
[447] This is stated by the well-known Italian poet, Marini, in
his Eulogy on Lope, Obras Sueltas, Tom. XXI. p. 19.
[448] Obras Sueltas, Tom. VIII. pp. 94-96, and Pellicer’s note to
Don Quixote, Parte I., Tom. III. p. 93.
[449] This is said in a discourse preached over his mortal
remains in St. Sebastian’s, at his funeral. Obras Sueltas, Tom.
XIX. p. 329.
[450] “Frey Lope Felix de Vega, whose name has become universally
a proverb for whatever is good,” says Quevedo, in his Aprobacion
to “Tomé de Burguillos.” (Obras Sueltas de Lope, Tom. XIX. p.
xix.) “It became a common proverb to praise a good thing by
calling it _a Lope_; so that jewels, diamonds, pictures, etc.,
were raised into esteem by calling them his,” says Montalvan.
(Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. p. 53.) Cervantes intimates the same
thing in his _entremes_, “La Guarda Cuidadosa.”
[451] His complaints on the subject begin as early as 1603,
before he had published any of his plays himself, (Obras Sueltas,
Tom. V. p. xvii.), and are renewed in the “Egloga á Claudio,”
(Ib., Tom. IX. p. 369), printed after his death; besides which,
they occur in the Prefaces to his Comedias, (Tom. IX., XI., XV.,
XXI., and elsewhere), as a matter that seems to have been always
troubling him.
A large income naturally followed such popularity, for his plays
were liberally paid for by the actors;[452] and he had patrons of a
munificence unknown in our days, and always undesirable.[453] But
he was thriftless and wasteful; exceedingly charitable; and, in
hospitality to his friends, prodigal. He was, therefore, almost always
embarrassed. At the end of his “Jerusalem,” printed as early as 1609,
he complains of the pressure of his domestic affairs;[454] and in his
old age he addressed some verses, in the nature of a petition, to the
still more thriftless Philip the Fourth, asking the means of living for
himself and his daughter.[455] After his death, his poverty was fully
admitted by his executor; and yet, considering the relative value of
money, no poet, perhaps, ever received so large a compensation for his
works.
[452] Montalvan sets the price of each play at five hundred
reals, and says that in this way Lope received, during his life,
eighty thousand ducats. Obras, Tom. XX. p. 47.
[453] The Duke of Sessa alone, besides many other benefactions,
gave Lope, at different times, twenty-four thousand ducats, and a
sinecure of three hundred more per annum. _Ut supra._
[454] Libro XX., last three stanzas.
[455] “I have a daughter, and am old,” he says. “The Muses give
me honor, but not income,” etc. (Obras, Tom. XVII. p. 401.) From
his will, an abstract of which may be found in the Semanario
Pintoresco, 1839, p. 19, it appears that Philip IV. promised an
office to the person who should marry this daughter, and failed
to keep his word.
It should, however, be remembered, that no other poet ever wrote
so much with popular effect. For, if we begin with his dramatic
compositions, which are the best of his efforts, and go down to his
epics, which, on the whole, are the worst,[456] we shall find the
amount of what was received with favor, as it came from the press,
quite unparalleled. And when to this we are compelled to add his own
assurance, just before his death, that the greater part of his works
still remained in manuscript,[457] we pause in astonishment, and,
before we are able to believe the account, demand some explanation
that will make it credible;--an explanation which is the more
important, because it is the key to much of his personal character,
as well as of his poetical success. And it is this. No poet of any
considerable reputation ever had a genius so nearly related to that of
an improvisator, or ever indulged his genius so freely in the spirit of
improvisation. This talent has always existed in the southern countries
of Europe; and in Spain has, from the first, produced, in different
ways, the most extraordinary results. We owe to it the invention and
perfection of the old ballads, which were originally improvisated and
then preserved by tradition; and we owe to it the _seguidillas_, the
_boleros_, and all the other forms of popular poetry that still exist
in Spain, and are daily poured forth by the fervent imaginations of the
uncultivated classes of the people, and sung to the national music,
that sometimes seems to fill the air by night as the light of the sun
does by day.
[456] Like some other distinguished authors, however, he was
inclined to undervalue what he did most happily, and to prefer
what is least worthy of preference. Thus, in the Preface to his
Comedias, (Vol. XV., Madrid, 1621), he shows that he preferred
his longer poems to his plays, which he says he holds but “as the
wild-flowers of his field, that grow up without care or culture.”
[457] This might be inferred from the account in Montalvan’s
“Fama Póstuma”; but Lope himself declares it distinctly in the
“Egloga á Claudio,” where he says, “The printed part of my
writings, though too much, is small, compared with what remains
unpublished.” (Obras Sueltas, Tom. IX. p. 369.) Indeed, we
know we have hardly a fourth part of his full-length plays;
only twelve _autos_ out of four hundred; only twenty or thirty
_entremeses_ out of the “infinite number” ascribed to him.
In the time of Lope de Vega, the passion for such improvisation had
risen higher than it ever rose before, if it had not spread out more
widely. Actors were expected sometimes to improvisate on themes given
to them by the audience.[458] Extemporaneous dramas, with all the
varieties of verse demanded by a taste formed in the theatres, were
not of rare occurrence. Philip the Fourth, Lope’s patron, had such
performed in his presence, and bore a part in them himself.[459] And
the famous Count de Lemos, the viceroy of Naples, to whom Cervantes
was indebted for so much kindness, kept, as an _apanage_ to his
viceroyalty, a poetical court, of which the two Argensolas were the
chief ornaments, and in which extemporaneous plays were acted with
brilliant success.[460]
[458] Bisbe y Vidal, “Tratado de Comedias,” (1618, f. 102),
speaks of the “glosses which the actors make extempore upon lines
given to them on the stage.”
[459] Viardot, Études sur la Littérature en Espagne, Paris, 1835,
8vo, p. 339.
[460] Pellicer, Biblioteca de Traductores Españoles, (Madrid,
1778, 4to, Tom. I. pp. 89-91), in which there is a curious
narrative by Diego, Duke of Estrada, giving an account of one of
these entertainments, (a burlesque play on the story of Orpheus
and Eurydice), performed before the viceroy and his court.
Lope de Vega’s talent was undoubtedly of near kindred to this genius
of improvisation, and produced its extraordinary results by a similar
process, and in the same spirit. He dictated verse, we are told, with
ease, more rapidly than an amanuensis could take it down;[461] and
wrote out an entire play in two days, which could with difficulty be
transcribed by a copyist in the same time. He was not absolutely an
improvisator, for his education and position naturally led him to
devote himself to written composition, but he was continually on the
borders of whatever belongs to an improvisator’s peculiar province; he
was continually showing, in his merits and defects, in his ease, grace,
and sudden resource, in his wildness and extravagance, in the happiness
of his versification and the prodigal abundance of his imagery, that a
very little more freedom, a very little more indulgence given to his
feelings and his fancy, would have made him at once and entirely, not
only an improvisator, but the most remarkable one that ever lived.
[461] Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. pp. 51, 52.
CHAPTER XIX.
QUEVEDO.--HIS LIFE, PUBLIC SERVICE, AND PERSECUTIONS.--HIS WORKS,
PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED.--HIS POETRY.--THE BACHILLER FRANCISCO DE LA
TORRE.--HIS PROSE WORKS, RELIGIOUS AND DIDACTIC.--HIS PAUL THE SHARPER,
PROSE SATIRES, AND VISIONS.--HIS CHARACTER.
Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas, the contemporary of both Lope de
Vega and Cervantes, was born at Madrid, in 1580.[462] His family came
from that mountainous region at the northwest, to which, like other
Spaniards, he was well pleased to trace his origin;[463] but his father
held an office of some dignity at the court of Philip the Second,
which led to his residence in the capital at the period of his son’s
birth;--a circumstance which was no doubt favorable to the development
of the young man’s talents. But whatever were his opportunities, we
know, that, when he was only fifteen years old, he was graduated in
theology at the University of Alcalá, where he not only made himself
master of such of the ancient and modern languages as would be most
useful to him, but extended his studies into the civil and canon
law, mathematics, medicine, politics, and other still more various
branches of knowledge, showing that he was thus early possessed with
the ambition of becoming a universal scholar. His accumulations, in
fact, were vast, as the learning scattered through his works plainly
proves, and bear witness, not less to his extreme industry than to his
extraordinary natural endowments.
[462] A diffuse life of Quevedo was published at Madrid in 1663,
by Don Pablo Antonio de Tarsia, a Neapolitan, and is inserted in
the tenth volume of the best edition of Quevedo’s Works,--that
of Sancha, Madrid, 1791-94, 11 tom., 8vo. A shorter, and, on the
whole, a more satisfactory, life of him is to be found in Baena,
Hijos de Madrid, Tom. II. pp. 137-154.
[463] In his “Grandes Anales de Quince Dias,” speaking of the
powerful President Acevedo, he says, “I was unwelcome to him,
because, coming myself from the mountains, I never flattered the
ambition he had to make himself out to be above men to whom we,
in our own homes, acknowledge no superiors.” Obras, Tom. XI. p.
63.
On his return to Madrid, he seems to have been associated both with
the distinguished scholars and with the fashionable cavaliers of
the time; and an adventure, in which, as a man of honor, he found
himself accidentally involved, had wellnigh proved fatal to his better
aspirations. A woman of respectable appearance, while at her devotions
in one of the parish churches of Madrid, during Holy Week, was grossly
insulted in his presence. He defended her, though both parties were
quite unknown to him. A duel followed on the spot; and, at its
conclusion, it was found he had killed a person of rank. He fled, of
course, and, taking refuge in Sicily, was invited to the splendid court
then held there by the Duke of Ossuna, viceroy of Philip the Third, and
was soon afterwards employed in important affairs of state,--sometimes,
as we are told by his nephew, in such as required personal courage and
involved danger to his life.
At the conclusion of the Duke of Ossuna’s administration of Sicily,
Quevedo was sent, in 1615, to Madrid, as a sort of plenipotentiary
to confirm to the crown all past grants of revenue from the island,
and to offer still further subsidies. So welcome a messenger was not
ungraciously received. His former offence was overlooked; a pension of
four hundred ducats was given him; and he returned, in great honor,
to the Duke, his patron, who was already transferred to the more
important and agreeable viceroyalty of Naples.
Quevedo now became minister of finance at Naples, and fulfilled the
duties of his place so skilfully and honestly, that, without increasing
the burdens of the people, he added to the revenues of the state. An
important negotiation with Rome was also intrusted to his management;
and in 1617 he was again in Madrid, and stood before the king with
such favor, that he was made a knight of the Order of Santiago. On his
return to Naples, or, at least, during the nine years he was absent
from Spain, he made treaties with Venice and Savoy, as well as with
the Pope, and was almost constantly occupied in difficult and delicate
affairs connected with the administration of the Duke of Ossuna.
But in 1620 all this was changed. The Duke fell from power, and those
who had been his ministers shared his fate. Quevedo was exiled to
his patrimonial estate of Torre de Juan Abad, where he endured an
imprisonment or detention of three years and a half; and then was
released without trial and without having had any definite offence laid
to his charge. He was, however, cured of all desire for public honors
or royal favor. He refused the place of Secretary of State, and that
of Ambassador to Genoa, both of which were offered him, accepting the
merely titular rank of Secretary to the King. He, in fact, was now
determined to give himself to letters; and did so for the rest of his
life.
In 1634, he was married; but his wife soon died, and left him to
contend alone with the troubles of life that still pursued him. In
1639, some satirical verses were placed under the king’s napkin at
dinner-time; and, without proper inquiry, they were attributed to
Quevedo. In consequence of this he was seized, late at night, with
great suddenness and secrecy, in the palace of the Duke of Medina-Cœli,
and thrown into rigorous confinement in the royal convent of San Márcos
de Leon. There, in a damp and unwholesome cell, his health was soon
broken down by diseases from which he never recovered; and the little
that remained to him of his property was wasted away till he was
obliged to depend on charity for support. With all these cruelties the
unprincipled favorite of the time, the Count Duke Olivares, seems to
have been connected; and the anger they naturally excited in the mind
of Quevedo may well account for two papers against that minister which
have generally been attributed to him, and which are full of personal
severity and bitterness.[464] A heart-rending letter, too, which, when
he had been nearly two years in prison, he wrote to Olivares, should be
taken into the account, in which he in vain appeals to his persecutor’s
sense of justice, telling him, in his despair, “No clemency can add
many years to my life; no rigor can take many away.”[465] At last,
the hour of the favorite’s disgrace arrived; and, amidst the jubilee
of Madrid, he was driven into exile. The release of Quevedo followed
as a matter of course, since it was already admitted that another had
written the verses[466] for which he had been punished by above four
years of the most unjust suffering.
[464] The first is the very curious paper entitled “Caida de su
Privanza y Muerte del Conde Duque de Olivares,” in the Seminario
Erudito (Madrid, 1787, 4to, Tom. III.); and the other is
“Memorial de Don F. Quevedo contra el Conde Duque de Olivares,”
in the same collection, Tom. XV.
[465] This letter, often reprinted, is in Mayans y Siscar,
“Cartas Morales,” etc., Valencia, 1773, 12mo, Tom. I. p. 151.
Another letter to his friend Adan de la Parra, giving an account
of his mode of life during his confinement, shows that he was
extremely industrious. Indeed, industry was his main resource a
large part of the time he was in San Márcos de Leon. Seminario
Erudito, Tom. I. p. 65.
[466] Sedano, Parnaso Español, Tom. IV. p. xxxi.
But justice came too late. Quevedo remained, indeed, a little time at
Madrid, among his friends, endeavouring to recover some of his lost
property; but failing in this, and unable to subsist in the capital,
he retired to the mountains from which his race had descended. His
infirmities, however, accompanied him wherever he went; his spirits
sunk under his trials and sorrows; and he died, wearied out with life,
in 1645.[467]
[467] His nephew, in a Preface to the second volume of his
uncle’s Poems, (published at Madrid, 1670, 4to), says that
Quevedo died of two imposthumes on his chest, which were formed
during his last imprisonment.
Quevedo sought success, as a man of letters, in a great number of
departments,--from theology and metaphysics down to stories of vulgar
life and Gypsy ballads. But many of his manuscripts were taken from
him when his papers were twice seized by the government, and many
others seem to have been accidentally lost in the course of a life
full of change and adventure. In consequence of this, his friend
Antonio de Tarsia tells us that the greater part of his works could
not be published; and we know that many are still to be found in his
own handwriting, both in the National Library of Madrid and in other
collections, public and private.[468] Those already printed fill eleven
considerable volumes, eight of prose and three of poetry; leaving us
probably little to regret concerning the fate of the rest, unless,
perhaps, it be the loss of his dramas, of which two are said to have
been represented with applause at Madrid, during his lifetime.[469]
[468] Obras, Tom. X. p. 45, and N. Antonio, Bib. Nova, Tom. I.
p. 463. A considerable amount of his miscellaneous works may be
found in the Seminario Erudito, Tom. I., III., VI., and XV.
[469] Besides these dramas, whose names are unknown to us, he
wrote, in conjunction with Ant. Hurtado de Mendoza, and at the
command of the Count Duke Olivares, who afterwards treated him so
cruelly, a play called “Quien mas miente, medra mas,”--_He that
lies most, will rise most_,--for the gorgeous entertainment that
prodigal minister gave to Philip IV. on St. John’s eve, 1631. See
the account of it in the notice of Lope de Vega, _ante_, p. 185,
and _post_, p. 324, note 21.
Of his poetry, so far as we know, he himself published nothing with his
name, except such as occurs in his poor translations from Epictetus and
Phocylides; but in the tasteful and curious collection of his friend
Pedro de Espinosa, called “Flowers of Illustrious Poets,” printed when
Quevedo was only twenty-five years old, a few of his minor poems are to
be found. This was, probably, his first appearance as an author; and
it is worthy of notice, that, taken together, these few poems announce
much of his future poetical character, and that two or three of them,
like the one beginning,
A wight of might
Is Don Money, the knight,[470]
[470]
Poderoso cavallero
Es Don Dinero, etc.
is in Pedro Espinosa, “Flores de Poetas Ilustres,” Madrid, 1605,
4to, f. 18.
are among his happy efforts. But though he himself published scarcely
any of them, the amount of his verses found after his death is
represented to have been very great; much greater, we are assured, than
could be discovered among his papers a few years later,[471]--probably
because, just before he died, “he denounced,” as we are told, “all his
works to the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, in order that the parts
less becoming a modest reserve might be reduced, _as they were_, to
just measure by serious and prudent reflection.”[472]
[471] “Not the twentieth part was saved of the verses which many
persons knew to have been extant at the time of his death, and
which, during our constant intercourse, I had countless times
held in my hands,” says Gonzalez de Salas, in the Preface to the
first part of Quevedo’s Poems, 1648.
[472] Preface to Tom. VII. of Obras. His request on his
death-bed, that nearly all his works, printed or manuscript,
might be suppressed, is triumphantly recorded in the Index
Expurgatorius of 1667, p. 425.
Such of his poetry as was easily found was, however, published;--the
first part by his friend Gonzalez de Salas, in 1648, and the rest, in
a most careless and crude manner, by his nephew, Pedro Alderete, in
1670, under the conceited title of “The Spanish Parnassus, divided
into its Two Summits, with the Nine Castilian Muses.” The collection
itself is very miscellaneous, and it is not always easy to determine
why the particular pieces of which it is composed were assigned rather
to the protection of one Muse than of another. In general, they are
short. Sonnets and ballads are far more numerous than any thing else;
though _canciones_, odes, elegies, epistles, satires of all kinds,
idyls, _quintillas_, and _redondillas_ are in great abundance. There
are, besides, four _entremeses_ of little value, and the fragment of a
poem on the subject of Orlando Furioso, intended to be in the manner of
Berni, but running too much into caricature.
The longest of the nine divisions is that which passes under the name
and authority of Thalia, the goddess who presided over rustic wit, as
well as over comedy. Indeed, the more prominent characteristics of the
whole collection are a broad, grotesque humor, and a satire sometimes
marked with imitations of the ancients, especially of Juvenal and
Persius, but oftener overrun with puns, and crowded with conceits and
allusions, not easily understood at the time they first appeared, and
now quite unintelligible.[473] His burlesque sonnets, in imitation of
the Italian poems of that class, are the best in the language, and
have a bitterness rarely found in company with so much wit. Some of
his lighter ballads, too, are to be placed in the very first rank, and
fifteen that he wrote in the wild dialect of the Gypsies have been
ever since the delight of the lower classes of his countrymen, and
are still, or were lately, to be heard, among their other popular
poetry, sung to the guitars of the peasants and the soldiery throughout
Spain.[474] In regular satire he has generally followed the path
trodden by Juvenal; and, in the instances of his complaint “Against the
existing Manners of the Castilians,” and “The Dangers of Marriage,” has
proved himself a bold and successful disciple.[475] Some of his amatory
poems, and some of those on religious subjects, especially when they
are in a melancholy tone, are full of beauty and tenderness;[476] and
once or twice, when most didactic, he is no less powerful than grave
and lofty.[477]
[473] “Los equívocos y las alusiones suyas,” says his editor, in
1648, “son tan frequentes y multiplicados, aquellos y estas, ansí
en un solo verso y aun en una palabra, que es bien infalible que
mucho número sin advertirse se haya de perder.” Obras, Tom. VII.,
Elogios, etc.
[474] They are at the end of the seventh volume of the Obras,
and also in Hidalgo, “Romances de Germania” (Madrid, 1779, 12mo,
pp. 226-295). Of the lighter ballads in good Castilian, we may
notice, especially, “Padre Adan, no lloreis duelos,” (Tom. VIII.
p. 187), and “Dijo á la rana el mosquito,” Tom. VII. p. 514.
[475] Obras, Tom. VII. pp. 192-200, and VIII. pp. 533-550. The
last is somewhat coarse, though not so bad as its model in this
respect.
[476] See the _cancion_ (Tom. VII. p. 323) beginning, “Pues quita
al año Primavera el ceño”; also some of the poems in the “Erato”
to the lady he calls Fili, who seems to have been more loved by
him than any other.
[477] Particularly in “The Dream,” (Tom. IX. p. 296), and in the
“Hymn to the Stars,” p. 338.
His chief fault--besides the indecency of some of his poetry, and the
obscurity and extravagance that pervade yet more of it--is the use of
words and phrases that are low and essentially unpoetical. This, as far
as we can now judge, was the result partly of haste and carelessness,
and partly of a false theory. He sought for strength, and he became
affected and rude. But we should not judge him too severely. He wrote
a great deal, and with extraordinary facility, but refused to print;
professing his intention to correct and prepare his poems for the press
when he should have more leisure and a less anxious mind. That time,
however, never came. We should, therefore, rather wonder that we find
in his works so many passages of the purest and most brilliant wit and
poetry, than complain that they are scattered through so very large a
mass of what is idle, unsatisfactory, and sometimes unintelligible.
Once, and once only, Quevedo published a small volume of poetry, which
has been supposed to be his own, though not originally appearing as
such. The occasion was worthy of his genius, and his success was equal
to the occasion. For some time, Spanish literature had been overrun
with a species of affectation resembling the euphuism that prevailed in
England a little earlier. It passed under the name of _cultismo_, or
the polite style; and when we come to speak of its more distinguished
votaries, we shall have occasion fully to explain its characteristic
extravagances. At present, it is enough to say, that, in Quevedo’s
time, this fashionable fanaticism was at the height of its folly; and
that, perceiving its absurdity, he launched against it the shafts of
his unsparing ridicule, in several shorter pieces of poetry, as well
as in a trifle called “A Compass for the Polite to steer by,” and in a
prose satire called “A Catechism of Phrases to teach Ladies how to talk
Latinized Spanish.”[478]
[478] There are several poems about _cultismo_, Obras, Tom. VIII.
pp. 82, etc. The “Aguja de Navegar Cultos” is in Tom. I. p. 443;
and immediately following it is the Catechism, whose whimsical
title I have abridged somewhat freely.
But finding the disease deeply fixed in the national taste, and
models of a purer style of poetry wanting to resist it, he printed,
in 1631,--the same year in which, for the same purpose, he published
a collection of the poetry of Luis de Leon,--a small volume which he
announced as “Poems by the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre,”--a person
of whom he professed, in his Preface, to know nothing, except that he
had accidentally found his manuscripts in the hands of a bookseller,
with the Approbation of Alonso de Ercilla attached to them; and that
he supposed him to be the ancient Spanish poet referred to by Boscan
nearly a hundred years before. But this little volume is a work of no
small consequence. It contains sonnets, odes, _canciones_, elegies, and
eclogues; many of them written with antique grace and simplicity, and
all in a style of thought easy and natural, and in a versification of
great exactness and harmony. It is, in short, one of the best volumes
of miscellaneous poems in the Spanish language.[479]
[479] Perhaps there is a little too much of the imitation of
Petrarch and of the Italians in the Poems of the Bachiller de la
Torre; but they are, I think, not only graceful and beautiful,
but generally full of the national tone, and of a tender spirit,
connected with a sincere love of nature and natural scenery. I
would instance the ode, “Alexis que contraria,” in the edition of
Velazquez (p. 17), and the truly Horatian ode (p. 44) beginning,
“O tres y quatro veces venturosa,” with the description of
the dawn of day, and the sonnet to Spring (p. 12). The first
eclogue, too, and all the _endechas_, which are in the most
flowing Adonian verse, should not be overlooked. Sometimes he has
unrhymed lyrics, in the ancient measures, not always successful,
but seldom without beauty.
No suspicion seems to have been whispered, either at the moment of
their first publication, or for a long time afterwards, that these
poems were the productions of any other than the unknown personage
whose name appeared on their title-page. In 1753, however, a second
edition of them was published by Velazquez, the author of the
“Essay on Spanish Poetry,” claiming them to be entirely the work of
Quevedo;[480]--a claim which has been frequently noticed since, some
admitting and some denying it, but none, in any instance, fairly
discussing the grounds on which it is placed by Velazquez, or settling
their validity.[481]
[480] “Poesías que publicó D. Francisco de Quevedo Villegas,
Cavallero del Órden de Santiago, Señor de la Torre de Juan Abad,
con el nombre del Bachiller Francisco de la Torre. Añadese en
esta segunda edicion un Discurso, en que se descubre ser el
verdadero autor el mismo D. Francisco de Quevedo, por D. Luis
Joseph Velazquez,” etc. Madrid, 1753, 4to.
[481] Quintana denies it in the Preface to his “Poesías
Castellanas” (Madrid, 1807, 12mo, Tom. I. p. xxxix.). So does
Fernandez (or Estala for him), in his Collection of “Poesías
Castellanas” (Madrid, 1808, 12mo, Tom. IV. p. 40); and, what
is of more significance, so does Wolf, in the Jahrbücher der
Literatur, Wien, 1835, Tom. LXIX. p. 189. On the other side are
Baena, in his Life of Quevedo; Sedano, in his “Parnaso Español”;
Luzan, in his “Poética”; and Bouterwek, in his History. Martinez
de la Rosa and Faber seem unable to decide. But none of them
gives any reasons. I have in the text, and in the subsequent
notes, stated the case as fully as seems needful, and have no
doubt that Quevedo was the author, or that he knew and concealed
the author.
The question certainly is among the more curious of those that involve
literary authorship; but it can hardly be brought to an absolute
decision. The argument, that the poems thus published by Quevedo are
really the work of an unknown Bachiller de la Torre, is founded,
first, on the alleged approbation of them by Ercilla,[482] which,
though referred to by Valdivielso, as well as by Quevedo, has never
been printed; and, secondly, on the fact, that, in their general tone,
they are unlike the recognized poetry of Quevedo, being all on grave
subjects and in a severely simple and pure style, whereas he himself
not unfrequently runs into the affected style he undoubtedly intended
by this work to counteract and condemn.
[482] We know, concerning the conclusion of Ercilla’s life,
only that he died as early as 1595; thirty-six years before the
publication of the Bachelor, and when Quevedo was only fifteen
years old.
On the other hand, it may be alleged, that the pretended Bachiller
de la Torre is clearly not the Bachiller de la Torre referred to by
Boscan and Quevedo, who lived in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella,
and whose rude verses are found in the old Cancioneros from 1511 to
1573;[483] that, on the contrary, the forms of the poems published by
Quevedo, their tone, their thoughts, their imitations of Petrarch and
of the ancients, their versification, and their language,--except a few
antiquated words which could easily have been inserted,--all belong to
his own age; that among Quevedo’s recognized poems are some, at least,
which prove he was capable of writing any one among those attributed to
the Bachiller de la Torre; and finally, that the name of the Bachiller
Francisco de la Torre is merely an ingenious disguise of his own, since
he was himself a Bachelor at Alcalá, had been baptized Francisco, and
was the owner of Torre de la Abad, in which he sometimes resided, and
which was twice the place of his exile.[484]
[483] It is even doubtful who this Bachiller de la Torre of
Boscan was. Velazquez (Pref., v.) thinks it was probably _Alonso_
de la Torre, author of the “Vision Deleytable,” (circa 1465), of
which we have spoken, Vol. I. p. 417; and Baena (Hijos de Madrid,
Tom. IV. p. 169) thinks it may perhaps have been _Pedro Diaz_ de
la Torre, who died in 1504, one of the counsellors of Ferdinand
and Isabella. But, in either case, the name does not correspond
with that of Quevedo’s Bachiller _Francisco_ de la Torre any
better than the style, thoughts, and forms of the few poems which
may be found in the Cancionero of 1573, at ff. 124-127, etc., do
with those published by Quevedo.
[484] He was exiled there in 1628, for six months, as well as
imprisoned there in 1620. Obras, Tom. X. p. 88.
There is, therefore, no doubt, a mystery about the whole matter which
will probably never be cleared up; and we can now come to only one
of two conclusions:--either that the poems in question are the work
of some contemporary and friend of Quevedo, whose name he knew and
concealed; or that they were selected by himself out of the great mass
of his own unpublished manuscripts, choosing such as would be least
likely to betray their origin, and most likely, by their exact finish
and good taste, to rebuke the folly of the affected and fashionable
poetry of his time. But whoever may be their author, one thing is
certain,--they are not unworthy the genius of any poet belonging to the
brilliant age in which they appeared.[485]
[485] It is among the suspicious circumstances accompanying the
first publication of the Bachiller de la Torre’s works, that one
of the two persons who give the required _Aprobaciones_ is Vander
Hammen, who played the sort of trick upon the public of which
Quevedo is accused; a vision he wrote being, to this day, printed
as Quevedo’s own, in Quevedo’s works. The other person who gives
an _Aprobacion_ to the Bachiller de la Torre is Valdivielso, a
critic of the seventeenth century, whose name often occurs in
this way; whose authority on such points is small; and who does
not say that he ever _saw_ the manuscript or the Approbation of
Ercilla. See, for Vander Hammen, _post_, p. 273.
Quevedo’s principal works, however,--those on which his reputation
mainly rests, both at home and abroad,--are in prose. The more grave
will hardly come under our cognizance. They consist of a treatise on
the Providence of God, including an essay on the Immortality of the
Soul; a treatise addressed to Philip the Fourth, singularly called
“God’s Politics and Christ’s Government,” in which he endeavours to
collect a complete body of political philosophy from the example
of the Saviour; treatises on a Holy Life and on the Militant Life
of a Christian; and biographies of Saint Paul and Saint Thomas of
Villanueva. These, with translations of Epictetus and the false
Phocylides, of Anacreon, of Seneca “De Remediis utriusque Fortunæ,”
of Plutarch’s “Marcus Brutus,” and other similar works, seem to have
been chiefly produced by his sufferings, and to have constituted the
occupation of his weary hours during his different imprisonments.
As their titles indicate, they belong to theology and metaphysics
rather than to elegant literature. They, however, sometimes show the
spirit and the style that mark his serious poetry;--the same love of
brilliancy, and the same extravagance and hyperbole, with occasional
didactic passages full of dignity and eloquence. Their learning is
generally abundant, but it is, at the same time, often very pedantic
and cumbersome.[486]
[486] These works, chiefly theological, metaphysical, and
ascetic, fill more than six of the eleven octavo volumes that
constitute Quevedo’s works in the edition of 1791-94, and belong
to the class of didactic prose.
Not so his prose satires. By these he is remembered and will always
be remembered throughout the world. The longest of them, called “The
History and Life of the Great Sharper, Paul of Segovia,” was first
printed in 1627. It belongs to the style of fiction invented by
Mendoza, in his “Lazarillo,” and has most of the characteristics of its
class; showing, notwithstanding the evident haste and carelessness with
which it was written, more talent and spirit than any of them, except
its prototype. Like the rest, it sets forth the life of an adventurer,
cowardly, insolent, and full of resources, who begins in the lowest and
most infamous ranks of society, but, unlike most others of his class,
never fairly rises above his original condition; for all his ingenuity,
wit, and spirit only enable him to struggle up, as it were by accident,
to some brilliant success, from which he is immediately precipitated
by the discovery of his true character. Parts of it are very coarse.
Once or twice it becomes--at least, according to the notions of the
Romish Church--blasphemous. And almost always it is of the nature of a
caricature, overrun with conceits, puns, and a reckless, fierce humor.
But everywhere it teems with wit and the most cruel sarcasm against
all orders and conditions of society. Some of its love adventures are
excellent. Many of the disasters it records are extremely ludicrous.
But there is nothing genial in it; and it is hardly possible to read
even its scenes of frolic and riot at the University, or those among
the gay rogues of the capital or the gayer vagabonds of a strolling
company of actors, with any thing like real satisfaction. It is a
satire too hard, coarse, and unrelenting to be amusing.[487]
[487] Watt, in his Bibliotheca, art. _Quevedo_, cites an edition
of “El Gran Tacaño,” at Zaragoza, 1626; but I do not find it
mentioned elsewhere. I know of none earlier than that of 1627.
Since that time, it has appeared in the original in a great
number of editions, both at home and abroad. Into Italian it was
translated by P. Franco, as early as 1634; into French by Genest,
the well-known translator of that period, as early as 1644; and
into English, anonymously, as early as 1657. Many other versions
have been made since;--the last, known to me, being one of Paris,
1843, 8vo, by A. Germond de Lavigne. His translation is made with
spirit; but, besides that he has thrust into it passages from
other works of Quevedo, and a story by Salas Barbadillo, he has
made a multitude of petty additions, alterations, and omissions;
some desirable, perhaps, from the indecency of the original,
others not; and winds off the whole with a conclusion of his own,
which savors of the sentimental and extravagant school of Victor
Hugo. There is, also, a translation of it into English, in a
collection of some of Quevedo’s works, printed at Edinburgh, in 3
vols., 8vo, 1798; and a German translation in Bertuch’s Magazin
der Spanischen und Portug. Litteratur (Dessau, 1781, 8vo, Band
II.). But neither of them is to be commended for its fidelity.
This, too, is the character of most of his other prose satires, which
were chiefly written, or at least published, nearly at the same period
of his life;--the interval between his two great imprisonments, when
the first had roused up all his indignation against a condition of
society which could permit such intolerable injustice as he had
suffered, and before the crushing severity of the last had broken down
alike his health and his courage. Among them are the treatise “On all
Things and many more,”--an attack on pretension and cant; “The Tale of
Tales,” which is in ridicule of the too frequent use of proverbs; and
“Time’s Proclamation,” which is apparently directed against whatever
came uppermost in its author’s thoughts when he was writing it. These,
however, with several more of the same sort, may be passed over to
speak of a few better known and of more importance.[488]
[488] They are in Vols. I. and II. of the edition of his Works,
Madrid, 1791, 8vo.
The first is called the “Letters of the Knight of the Forceps,” and
consists of two-and-twenty notes of a miser to his lady-love, refusing
all her applications and hints for money, or for amusements that
involve the slightest expense. Nothing can exceed their dexterity, or
the ingenuity and wit that seem anxious to defend and vindicate the
mean vice, which, after all, they are only making so much the more
ridiculous and odious.[489]