CHAPTER XIII.
Lope de Vega. — His Early Life. — A Soldier. — He writes the Arcadia. — Marries. — Has a Duel. — Flies to Valencia. — Death of his Wife. — He serves in the Armada. — Returns to Madrid. — Marries again. — Death of his Sons. — He becomes Religious. — His Position as a Man of Letters. — His San Isidro, Hermosura de Angélica, Dragontea, Peregrino en su Patria, and Jerusalen Conquistada.
It is impossible to speak of Cervantes as the great genius of the Spanish nation without recalling Lope de Vega, the rival who far surpassed him in contemporary popularity, and rose, during the lifetime of both, to a degree of fame which no Spaniard had yet attained, and which has been since reached by few of any country. To the examination, therefore, of this great man’s claims—which extend to almost every department of the national literature—we naturally turn, after examining those of the author of Don Quixote.
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio was born on the 25th of November, 1562, at Madrid, whither his father had recently removed, almost by accident, from the old family estate of Vega, in the picturesque valley of Carriedo.[200] From his earliest youth he discovered extraordinary powers. At five years of age, we are assured by his friend Montalvan, that he could not only read Latin as well as Spanish, but that he had such a passion for poetry as to pay his more advanced school-fellows with a share of his breakfast for writing down the verses he dictated to them, before he had learned to do it for himself.[201] His father, who, he intimates, was a poet,[202] and who was much devoted to works of charity in the latter years of his life, died when he was very young, and left, besides Lope, a son who perished in the Armada in 1588, and a daughter who died in 1601. In the period immediately following the father’s death, the family seems to have been scattered by poverty; and during this interval Lope probably lived with his uncle, the Inquisitor, Don Miguel de Carpio, of whom he long afterwards speaks with great respect.[203]
But though the fortunes of his house were broken, his education was not neglected. He was sent to the Imperial College at Madrid, and in two years made extraordinary progress in ethics and in elegant literature, avoiding, as he tells us, the mathematics, which he found unsuited to his humor, if not to his genius. Accomplishments, too, were added,—fencing, dancing, and music; and he was going on in a way to gratify the wishes of his friends, when, at the age of fourteen, a wild, giddy desire to see the world took possession of him; and, accompanied by a schoolfellow, he ran away from college. At first, they went on foot for two or three days. Then they bought a sorry horse, and travelled as far as Astorga, in the northwestern part of Spain, not far from the old fief of the Vega family; but there, growing tired of their journey, and missing more seriously than they had anticipated the comforts to which they had been accustomed, they determined to come home. At Segovia, they attempted, in a silversmith’s shop, to exchange some doubloons and a gold chain for small coin, but were suspected to be thieves and arrested. The magistrate, however, before whom they were brought, being satisfied that they were guilty of nothing but folly, released them; though, wishing to do a kindness to their friends, as well as to themselves, he sent an officer of justice to deliver them safely in Madrid.[204]
At the age of fifteen, as he tells us in one of his poetical epistles, he was serving as a soldier against the Portuguese in Terceira;[205] but only a little later than this, we know that he filled some place about the person of Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Avila, to whose kindness he acknowledged himself to be much indebted, and in whose honor he wrote several eclogues, and inserted a long passage in his “Jerusalem.”[206] Under the patronage of Manrique, he was, probably, sent to the University of Alcalá, where he certainly studied some time, and not only took the degree of Bachelor, but was near submitting himself to the irrevocable tonsure of the priesthood.[207]
But, as we learn from some of his own accounts, he now fell in love. Indeed, if we are to believe the tales he tells of himself in his “Dorothea,” which was written in his youth and printed with the sanction of his old age, he suffered great extremity from that passion when he was only seventeen. Some of the stories of that remarkable dramatic romance, in which he figures under the name of Fernando, are, it may be hoped, fictitious;[208] though it must be admitted that others, like the scene between the hero and Dorothea, in the first act, the account of his weeping behind the door with Marfisa, on the day she was to be married to another, and most of the narrative parts in the fourth act, have an air of reality about them that hardly permits us to doubt they were true.[209] Taken together, however, they do him little credit as a young man of honor and a cavalier.
From Alcalá Lope came to Madrid, and attached himself to the Duke of Alva; not, as it has been generally supposed, the remorseless favorite of Philip the Second, but Antonio, the great Duke’s grandson, who had succeeded to his ancestor’s fortunes without inheriting his formidable spirit.[210] Lope was much liked by his new patron, and rose to be his confidential secretary; living with him both at court and in his retirement at Alva, where letters seem, for a time, to have taken the place of arms and affairs. At the suggestion of the Duke, he wrote his “Arcadia,” a pastoral romance, making a volume of considerable size; and though chiefly in prose, yet with poetry of various kinds freely intermixed. Such compositions, as we have seen, were already in favor in Spain;—the last of them, the “Galatea” of Cervantes, published in 1584, giving, perhaps, occasion to the Arcadia, which seems to have been written almost immediately afterwards. Most of them have one striking peculiarity; that of concealing, under the forms of pastoral life in ancient times, adventures which had really occurred in the times of their respective authors. The Duke was desirous to figure among these somewhat fantastic shepherds and shepherdesses, and therefore induced Lope to write the Arcadia, and make him its hero, furnishing some of his own experiences as materials for the work. At least, so the affair was understood both in Spain and France, when the Arcadia was published, in 1598; besides which, Lope himself, a few years later, in the Preface to some miscellaneous poems, tells us expressly, “The Arcadia is a true history.”[211]
But whether it be throughout a true history or not, it is a very unsatisfactory one. It is commonly regarded as an imitation of its popular namesake, the “Arcadia” of Sannazaro, of which a Spanish translation had appeared in 1547; but it much more resembles the similar works of Montemayor and Cervantes, both in story and style. Metaphysics and magic, as in the “Diana” and “Galatea,” are strangely mixed up with the shows of a pastoral life; and, as in them, we listen with little interest to the perplexities and sorrows of a lover who, from mistaking the feelings of his mistress, treats her in such a way that she marries another, and then, by a series of enchantments, is saved from the effects of his own despair, and his heart is washed so clean, that, like Orlando’s, there is not one spot of love left in it. All this, of course, is unnatural; for the personages it represents are such as can never have existed, and they talk in a language strained above the tone becoming prose; all propriety of costume and manners is neglected; so much learning is crowded into it, that a dictionary is placed at the end to make it intelligible; and it is drawn out to a length which now seems quite absurd, though the editions it soon passed through show that it was not too long for the taste of its time. It should be added, however, that it occasionally furnishes happy specimens of a glowing declamatory eloquence, and that in its descriptions of natural scenery there is often great felicity of imagery and illustration.[212]
About the time when Lope was writing the Arcadia, he married Isabela de Urbina, daughter of the King-at-arms to Philip the Second and Philip the Third; a lady, we are told, not a little loved and admired in the high circle to which she belonged.[213] But his domestic happiness was soon interrupted. He fell into a quarrel with a nobleman of no very good repute; lampooned him in a satirical ballad; was challenged, and wounded his adversary;—in consequence of all which, and of other follies of his youth that seem now to have been brought up against him, he was cast into prison.[214] He was not, however, left without a true friend. Claudio Conde, who on more than one occasion showed a genuine attachment to Lope’s person, accompanied him to his cell, and, when he was released, went with him to Valencia, where Lope himself was treated with extraordinary kindness and consideration, though exposed, he says, at times, to dangers as great as those from which he had suffered so much at Madrid.[215]
The exile of Lope lasted several years, and was chiefly passed at Valencia, then in literary reputation next after Madrid among the cities of Spain. Nor does he seem to have missed the advantages it offered him; for it was, no doubt, during his residence there that he formed a friendship with Gaspar de Aguilar and Guillen de Castro, of which many traces are to be found in his works; while, on the other hand, it is perhaps not unreasonable to assume that the theatre, which was just then beginning to take its form in Valencia, was indebted to the fresh power of Lope for an impulse it never afterwards lost. At any rate, we know that he was much connected with the Valencian poets, and that, a little later, they were among his marked followers in the drama. But his exile was still an exile,—bitter and wearisome to him,—and he gladly returned to Madrid as soon as he could venture there safely.
His home, however, soon ceased to be what it had been. His young wife died in less than a year after his return, and one of his friends, Pedro de Medinilla, joined him in an eclogue to her memory, which is dedicated to Lope’s patron, Antonio Duke of Alva,[216]—a poem of little value, and one that does much less justice to his feelings than some of his numerous verses to the same lady, under the name of Belisa, which are scattered through his own works and found in the old Romanceros.[217]
It must be admitted, however, that there is some confusion in this matter. The ballads bear witness to the jealousy felt by Isabela on account of his relations with another fair lady, who passes under the name of Filis,—a jealousy which seems to have caused him no small embarrassment; for while, in some of his verses, he declares it has no foundation, in others he admits and justifies it.[218] But however this may have been, a very short time after Isabela’s death he made no secret of his passion for the rival who had disturbed her peace. He was not, however, successful. For some reason or other, the lady rejected his suit. He was in despair, as his ballads prove; but his despair did not last long. In less than a year from the death of Isabela it was all over, and he had again taken, to amuse and distract his thoughts, the genuine Spanish resource of becoming a soldier.
The moment in which he made this decisive change in his life was one when a spirit of military adventure was not unlikely to take possession of a character always seeking excitement; for it was just as Philip the Second was preparing the portentous Armada, with which he hoped, by one blow, to overthrow the power of Elizabeth and bring back a nation of heretics to the bosom of the Church. Lope, therefore, as he tells us in one of his eclogues, finding the lady of his love would not smile upon him, took his musket on his shoulder, amidst the universal enthusiasm of 1588, marched to Lisbon, and, accompanied by his faithful friend Conde, went on board the magnificent armament destined for England, where, he says, he used up for wadding the verses he had written in his lady’s praise.[219]
A succession of disasters followed this ungallant jest. His brother, from whom he had long been separated, and whom he now found as a lieutenant on board the Saint John, in which he himself served, died in his arms of a wound received during a fight with the Dutch. Other great troubles crowded after this one. Storms scattered the unwieldy fleet; calamities of all kinds confounded prospects that had just before been so full of glory; and Lope must have thought himself but too happy, when, after the Armada had been dispersed or destroyed, he was brought back in safety, first to Cadiz and afterwards to Toledo and Madrid, reaching the last city, probably, in 1590. It is a curious fact, however, in his personal history, that, amidst all the terrors and sufferings of this disastrous expedition, he found leisure and quietness of spirit to write the greater part of his long poem on “The Beauty of Angelica,” which he intended as a continuation of the “Orlando Furioso.”[220]
But Lope could not well return from such an expedition without something of that feeling of disappointment which, with the nation at large, accompanied its failure. Perhaps it was owing to this that he entered again on the poor course of life of which he had already made an experiment with the Duke of Alva, and became secretary, first of the Marquis of Malpica and afterwards of the generous Marquis of Sarria, who, as Count de Lemos, was, a little later, the patron of Cervantes and the Argensolas. While he was in the service of the last distinguished nobleman, and already known as a dramatist, he became attached to Doña Juana de Guardio, a lady of good family in Madrid, whom he married in 1597; and soon afterwards leaving the Count de Lemos, had never any other patrons than those whom, like the Duke de Sessa, his literary fame procured for him.[221]
Lope had now reached the age of thirty-five, and seems to have enjoyed a few years of happiness, to which he often alludes, and which, in two of his poetical epistles, he has described with much gentleness and grace.[222] But it did not last long. A son, Carlos, to whom he was tenderly attached, lived only to his seventh year;[223] and the mother, broken down by grief at his loss, soon died, giving birth, at the same time, to Feliciana,[224] who was afterwards married to Don Luis de Usategui, the editor of some of his father-in-law’s posthumous works. Lope seems to have felt bitterly his desolate estate after the death of his wife and son, and speaks of it with much feeling in a poem addressed to his faithful friend Conde.[225] But in 1605 an illegitimate daughter was born to him, whom he named Marcela,—the same to whom, in 1620, he dedicated one of his plays, with extraordinary expressions of affection and admiration,[226] and who, in 1621, took the veil and retired from the world, renewing griefs which, with his views of religion, he desired rather to bear with patience, and even with pride.[227] In 1606, the same lady—Doña María de Luxan—who was the mother of Marcela bore him a son, whom he named Lope, and who, at the age of fourteen, appears among the poets at the canonization of San Isidro.[228] But though his father had fondly destined him for a life of letters, he insisted on becoming a soldier, and, after serving under the Marquis of Santa Cruz against the Dutch and the Turks, perished, when only fifteen years old, in a vessel which was totally lost at sea with all on board.[229] Lope poured forth his sorrows in a piscatory eclogue, less full of feeling than the verses in which he describes Marcela taking the veil.[230]
After the birth of these two children, we hear nothing more of their mother. Indeed, soon afterwards, Lope, no longer at an age to be deluded by his passions, began, according to the custom of his time and country, to turn his thoughts seriously to religion. He devoted himself to pious works, as his father had done; visited the hospitals regularly; resorted daily to a particular church; entered a secular religious congregation; and finally, at Toledo, in 1609, received the tonsure and became a priest. The next year he joined the same brotherhood of which Cervantes was afterwards a member.[231] In 1625, he entered the congregation of the native priesthood of Madrid, and was so faithful and exact in the performance of his duties, that, in 1628, he was elected to be its chief chaplain. He is, therefore, for the twenty-six latter years of his long life, to be regarded as strictly connected with the Spanish Church, and as devoting to its daily service some portion of his time.
But we must not misunderstand the position in which, through these relations, Lope had now placed himself, nor overrate the sacrifices they required of him. Such a connection with the Church, in his time, by no means involved an abandonment of the world,—hardly an abandonment of its pleasures. On the contrary, it was rather regarded as one of the means for securing the leisure suited to a life of letters and social ease. As such, unquestionably, Lope employed it; for, during the long series of years in which he was a priest, and gave regular portions of his time to offices of devotion and charity, he was at the height of favor and fashion as a poet. And, what may seem to us more strange, it was during the same period he produced the greater number of his dramas, not a few of whose scenes offend against the most unquestioned precepts of Christian morality, while, at the same time, in their title-pages and dedications, he carefully sets forth his clerical distinctions, giving peculiar prominence to his place as a Familiar or Servant of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.[232]
It was, however, during the happier period of his married life that he laid the foundations for his general popularity as a poet. His subject was well chosen. It was that of the great fame and glory of San Isidro the Ploughman. This remarkable personage, who plays so distinguished a part in the ecclesiastical history of Madrid, is supposed to have been born in the twelfth century, on what afterwards became the site of that city, and to have led a life so eminently pious, that the angels came down and ploughed his grounds for him, which the holy man neglected in order to devote his time to religious duties. From an early period, therefore, he enjoyed much consideration, and was regarded as the patron and friend of the whole territory, as well as of the city of Madrid itself. But his great honors date from the year 1598. In that year Philip the Third was dangerously ill at a neighbouring village; the city sent out the remains of Isidro in procession to avert the impending calamity; the king recovered; and for the first time the holy man became widely famous and fashionable.
Lope seized the occasion, and wrote a long poem on the life of “Isidro the Ploughman,” or Farmer; so called to distinguish him from the learned saint of Seville who bore the same name. It consists of ten thousand lines, exactly divided among the ten books of which it is composed; and yet it was finished within the year, and published in 1599. It has no high poetical merit, and does not, indeed, aspire to any. But it was intended to be popular, and succeeded. It is written in the old national five-line stanza, carefully rhymed throughout; and, notwithstanding the apparent difficulty of the measure, it everywhere affords unequivocal proof of that facility and fluency of versification for which Lope became afterwards so famous. Its tone, which, on the most solemn matters of religion, is so familiar that we should now consider it indecorous, was no doubt in full consent with the spirit of the times and one main cause of its success. Thus, in Canto Third, where the angels come to Isidro and his wife Mary, who are too poor to entertain them, Lope describes the scene—which ought to be as solemn as any thing in the poem, since it involves the facts on which Isidro’s claim to canonization was subsequently admitted—in the following light verses, which may serve as a specimen of the measure and style of the whole:—
Three angels, sent by grace divine,
Once on a time blessed Abraham’s sight;—
To Mamre came that vision bright,
Whose number should our thoughts incline
To Him of whom the Prophets write.
But six now came to Isidore!
And, heavenly powers! what consternation!
Where is his hospitable store?
Surely they come with consolation,
And not to get a timely ration.
Still, if in haste unleavened bread
Mary, like Sarah, now could bake,
Or Isidore, like Abraham, take
The lamb that in its pasture fed,
And honey from its waxen cake,
I know he would his guests invite;—
But whoso ploughs not, it is right
His sufferings the price should pay;—
And how has Isidore a way
Six such to harbour for a night?
And yet he stands forgiven there,
Though friendly bidding he make none;
For poverty prevents alone;—
But, Isidore, thou still canst spare
What surest rises to God’s throne.
Let Abraham to slay arise;
But, on the ground, in sacrifice,
Give, Isidore, thy soul to God,
Who never doth the heart despise
That bows beneath his rod.
He did not ask for Isaac’s death;
He asked for Abraham’s willing faith.[233]
No doubt, some of the circumstances in the poem are invented for the occasion, though there is in the margin much parade of authorities for almost every thing;—a practice very common at that period, to which Lope afterwards conformed only once or twice. But however we may now regard the “San Isidro,” it was printed four times in less than nine years; and, by addressing itself more to the national and popular feeling than the “Arcadia” had done, it became the foundation for its author’s fame as the favorite poet of the whole nation.
At this time, however, he was beginning to be so much occupied with the theatre, and so successful, that he had little leisure for any thing else. His next considerable publication,[234] therefore, was not till 1602, when the “Hermosura de Angélica,” or the Beauty of Angelica, appeared; a poem already mentioned as having been chiefly written while its author served at sea in the ill-fated Armada. It somewhat presumptuously claims to be a continuation of the “Orlando Furioso,” and is stretched out through twenty cantos, comprehending above eleven thousand lines in octave verse. In the Preface, he says he wrote it “under the rigging of the galleon Saint John and the banners of the Catholic king,” and that “he and the generalissimo of the expedition finished their labors together”;—a remark which must not be taken too strictly, since both the thirteenth and twentieth cantos contain passages relating to events in the reign of Philip the Third. Indeed, in the Dedication, he tells his patron that he had suffered the whole poem to lie by him long for want of leisure to correct it; and he elsewhere adds, that he leaves it still unfinished, to be completed by some happier genius.
It is not unlikely that Lope was induced to write the Angelica by the success of several poems that had preceded it on the same series of fictions, and especially by the favor shown to one published only two years before, in the same style and manner; the “Angélica” of Luis Barahona de Soto, which is noticed with extraordinary praise in the scrutiny of the Knight of La Mancha’s library, as well as in the conclusion to Don Quixote, where a somewhat tardy compliment is paid to this very work of Lope. Both poems are obvious imitations of Ariosto; and if that of De Soto has been too much praised, it is, at least, better than Lope’s. And yet, in “The Beauty of Angelica,” the author might have been deemed to occupy ground well suited to his genius; for the boundless latitude afforded him by a subject filled with the dreamy adventures of chivalry was, necessarily, a partial release from the obligation to pursue a consistent plan,—while, at the same time, the example of Ariosto, as well as that of Luis de Soto, may be supposed to have launched him fairly forth upon the open sea of an unrestrained fancy, careless of shores or soundings.
But perhaps this very freedom was a principal cause of his failure; for his story is to the last degree wild and extravagant, and is connected by the slightest possible thread to the graceful fiction of Ariosto.[235] A king of Andalusia, as it pretends, leaves his kingdom by testament to the most beautiful man or woman that can be found.[236] All the world throngs to win the mighty prize; and one of the most amusing parts of the whole poem is that in which its author describes to us the crowds of the old and the ugly who, under such conditions, still thought themselves fit competitors. But as early as the fifth canto, the two lovers, Medoro and Angelica, who had been left in India by the Italian master, have already won the throne, and, for the sake of the lady’s unrivalled beauty, are crowned king and queen at Seville.
Here, of course, if the poem had a regular subject, it would end; but now we are plunged at once into a series of wars and disasters, arising out of the discontent of unsuccessful rivals, which threaten to have no end. Trials of all kinds follow. Visions, enchantments and counter enchantments, episodes quite unconnected with the main story, and broken up themselves by the most perverse interruptions, are mingled together, we hardly know why or how; and when at last the happy pair are settled in their hardly won kingdom, we are as much wearied by the wild waste of fancy in which Lope has indulged himself, as we should have been by almost any degree of monotony arising from a want of inventive power. The best parts of the poem are those that contain descriptions of persons and scenery;[237] the worst are those where Lope has displayed his learning, which he has sometimes done by filling whole stanzas with a mere accumulation of proper names. The versification is extraordinarily fluent.[238]
As the Beauty of Angelica was written in the ill-fated Armada, it contains occasional intimations of the author’s national and religious feelings, such as were naturally suggested by his situation. But in the same volume he originally published a poem in which these feelings are much more fully and freely expressed;—a poem, indeed, which is devoted to nothing else. It is called “La Dragontea,” and is on the subject of Sir Francis Drake’s last expedition and death. Perhaps no other instance can be found of a grave epic devoted to the personal abuse of a single individual; and to account for the present one, we must remember how familiar and formidable the name of Sir Francis Drake had long been in Spain.
He had begun his career as a brilliant pirate in South America above thirty years before; he had alarmed all Spain by ravaging its coasts and occupying Cadiz, in a sort of doubtful warfare which Lord Bacon tells us the free sailor used to call “singeing the king of Spain’s beard”;[239] and he had risen to the height of his glory as second in command of the great fleet which had discomfited the Armada, one of whose largest vessels was known to have surrendered to the terror of his name alone. In Spain, where he was as much hated as he was feared, he was regarded chiefly as a bold and successful buccaneer, whose melancholy death at Panamá, in 1596, was held to be a just visitation of the Divine vengeance for his piracies;—a state of feeling of which the popular literature of the country, down to its very ballads, affords frequent proof.[240]
The Dragontea, however, whose ten cantos of octave verse are devoted to the expression of this national hatred, may be regarded as its chief monument. It is a strange poem. It begins with the prayers of Christianity, in the form of a beautiful woman, who presents Spain, Italy, and America in the court of Heaven, and prays God to protect them all against what Lope calls “that Protestant Scotch pirate.”[241] It ends with rejoicings in Panamá because “the Dragon,” as he is called through the whole poem, has died, poisoned by his own people, and with the thanksgivings of Christianity that her prayers have been heard, and that “the scarlet lady of Babylon”—meaning Queen Elizabeth—had been at last defeated. The substance of the poem is such as may beseem such an opening and such a conclusion. It is violent and coarse throughout. But although it appeals constantly to the national prejudices that prevailed in its author’s time with great intensity, it was not received with favor. It was written in 1597, immediately after the occurrence of most of the events to which it alludes; but was not published till 1602, and has been printed since only in the collective edition of Lope’s miscellaneous works, in 1776.[242]
In the same year, however, in which he gave the Dragontea to the world, he published a prose romance, “The Pilgrim in his own Country”; dedicating it to the Marquis of Priego, on the last day of 1603, from the city of Seville. It contains the story of two lovers, who, after many adventures in Spain and Portugal, are carried into captivity among the Moors, and return home by the way of Italy, as pilgrims. We first find them at Barcelona, shipwrecked, and the principal scenes are laid there and in Valencia and Saragossa;—the whole ending in the city of Toledo, where, with the assent of their friends, they are at last married.[243] Several episodes are ingeniously interwoven with the thread of the principal narrative, and, besides many poems, chiefly written, no doubt, for other occasions, several dramas are inserted, which seem actually to have been performed under the circumstances described.[244]
The entire romance is divided into five books, and is carefully constructed and finished. Some of Lope’s own experiences at Valencia and elsewhere evidently contributed materials for it; but a poetical coloring is thrown over the whole, and, except in some of the details about the city, and descriptions of natural scenery, we rarely feel that what we read is absolutely true.[245] The story, especially when regarded from the point of view chosen by its author, is interesting; and it is not only one of the earliest specimens in Spanish literature of the class to which it belongs, but one of the best.[246]
Passing over some of his minor poems and his “New Art of Writing Plays,” for noticing both of which more appropriate occasions will occur hereafter, we come to another of Lope’s greater efforts, his “Jerusalem Conquered,” which appeared in 1609, and was twice reprinted in the course of the next ten years. He calls it “a tragic epic,” and divides it into twenty books of octave rhymes, comprehending, when taken together, above twenty-two thousand verses. The attempt was certainly an ambitious one, since we see, on its very face, that it is nothing less than to rival Tasso on the ground where Tasso’s success had been so brilliant.
As might have been foreseen, Lope failed. His very subject is unfortunate, for it is not the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christians, but the failure of Cœur de Lion to rescue it from the infidels in the end of the twelfth century;—a theme evidently unfit for a Christian epic. All the poet could do, therefore, was to take the series of events as he found them in history, and, adding such episodes and ornaments as his own genius could furnish, give to the whole as much as possible of epic form, dignity, and completeness. But Lope has not done even this. He has made merely a long narrative poem, of which Richard is the hero; and he relies for success, in no small degree, on the introduction of a sort of rival hero, in the person of Alfonso the Eighth of Castile, who, with his knights, is made, after the fourth book, to occupy a space in the foreground of the action quite disproportionate and absurd, since it is certain that Alfonso was never in Palestine at all.[247] What is equally inappropriate, the real subject of the poem is ended in the eighteenth book, by the return home of both Richard and Alfonso; the nineteenth being filled with the Spanish king’s subsequent history, and the twentieth with the imprisonment of Richard and the quiet death of Saladin, as master of Jerusalem,—a conclusion so abrupt and unsatisfactory, that it seems as if its author could hardly have originally foreseen it.
But though, with the exception of what relates to the apocryphal Spanish adventurers, the series of historical events in that brilliant crusade is followed down with some regard to the truth of fact, still we are so much confused by the visions and allegorical personages mingled in the narrative, and by the manifold episodes and love-adventures which interrupt it, that it is all but impossible to read any considerable portion consecutively and with attention. Lope’s easy and graceful versification is, indeed, to be found here, as it is in nearly all his poetry; but even on the holy ground of chivalry, at Cyprus, Ptolemais, and Tyre, his narrative has much less movement and life than we might claim from its subject, and almost everywhere else it is languid and heavy. Of plan, proportions, or a skilful adaptation of the several parts so as to form an epic whole, there is no thought; and yet Lope intimates that his poem was written with care some time before it was published,[248] and he dedicates it to his king, in a tone indicating that he thought it by no means unworthy the royal favor.