CHAPTER XIV.
Lope de Vega, continued. — His Relations with the Church. — His Pastores de Belen. — His Religious Poems. — His Connection with the Festivals at the Beatification and Canonization of San Isidro. — Tomé de Burguillos. — La Gatomachia. — An Auto da Fé. — Triunfos Divinos. — Poem on Mary Queen of Scots. — Laurel de Apolo. — Dorotea. — His Old Age and Death.
Just at the time the Jerusalem was published, Lope began to wear the livery of his Church. Indeed, it is on the title-page of this very poem that he, for the first time, announces himself as a “Familiar of the Holy Inquisition.” Proofs of the change in his life are soon apparent in his works. In 1612, he published “The Shepherds of Bethlehem,” a long pastoral in prose and verse, divided into five books. It contains the sacred history, according to the more popular traditions of the author’s Church, from the birth of Mary, the Saviour’s mother, to the arrival of the holy family in Egypt,—all supposed to be related or enacted by shepherds in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem, at the time the events occurred.
Like the other prose pastorals written at the same period, it is full of incongruities. Some of the poems, in particular, are as inappropriate and in as bad taste as can well be conceived; and why three or four poetical contests for prizes and several common Spanish games are introduced at all, it is not easy to imagine, since they are permitted by the conditions of no possible poetical theory for such fictions. But it must be confessed, on the other hand, that there runs through the whole an air of amenity and gentleness well suited to its subject and purpose. Several stories from the Old Testament are gracefully told, and translations from the Psalms and other parts of the Jewish Scriptures are brought in with a happy effect. Some of the original poetry, too, is to be placed among the best of Lope’s minor compositions;—such as the following imaginative little song, which is supposed to have been sung in a palm-grove, by the Madonna, to her sleeping child, and is as full of the tenderest feelings of Catholic devotion as one of Murillo’s pictures on the same subject:—
Holy angels and blest,
Through these palms as ye sweep,
Hold their branches at rest,
For my babe is asleep.
And ye Bethlehem palm-trees,
As stormy winds rush
In tempest and fury,
Your angry noise hush;—
Move gently, move gently,
Restrain your wild sweep;
Hold your branches at rest,—
My babe is asleep.
My babe all divine,
With earth’s sorrows oppressed,
Seeks in slumber an instant
His grievings to rest;
He slumbers,—he slumbers,—
O, hush, then, and keep
Your branches all still,—
My babe is asleep!
Cold blasts wheel about him,—
A rigorous storm,—
And ye see how, in vain,
I would shelter his form;—
Holy angels and blest,
As above me ye sweep,
Hold these branches at rest,—
My babe is asleep![249]
The whole work is dedicated with great tenderness, in a few simple words, to Cárlos, the little son that died before he was seven years old, and of whom Lope always speaks so lovingly. But it breaks off abruptly, and was never finished;—why, it is not easy to tell, for it was well received, and was printed four times in as many years.
In 1612, the year of the publication of this pastoral, Lope printed a few religious ballads and some “Thoughts in Prose,” which he pretended were translated from the Latin of Gabriel Padecopeo, an imperfect anagram of his own name; and in 1614, there appeared a volume containing, first, a collection of his short sacred poems, to which were afterwards added four solemn and striking poetical Soliloquies, composed while he knelt before a cross on the day he was received into the Society of Penitents; then two contemplative discourses, written at the request of his brethren of the same society; and finally, a short spiritual Romancero, or ballad-book, and a “Via Crucis,” or meditations on the passage of the Saviour from the judgment-seat of Pilate to the hill of Calvary.[250]
Many of these poems are full of a deep and solemn devotion;[251] others are strangely coarse and free;[252] and a few are merely whimsical and trifling.[253] Some of the more religious of the ballads are still sung about the streets of Madrid by blind beggars;—a testimony to the devout feelings which, occasionally at least, glowed in their author’s heart, that is not to be mistaken. These poems, however, with an account of the martyrdom of a considerable number of Christians at Japan, in 1614, which was printed four years later,[254] were all the miscellaneous works published by Lope between 1612 and 1620;—the rest of his time during this period having apparently been filled with his brilliant successes in the drama, both secular and sacred.
But in 1620 and 1622, he had an opportunity to exhibit himself to the mass of the people, as well as to the court, at Madrid, in a character which, being both religious and dramatic, was admirably suited to his powers and pretensions. It was the double occasion of the beatification and the canonization of Saint Isidore, in whose honor, above twenty years earlier, Lope had made one of his most successful efforts for popularity,—a long interval, but one during which the claims of the Saint had been by no means overlooked. On the contrary, the king, from the time of his restoration to health, had been constantly soliciting the honors of the Church for a personage to whose miraculous interposition he believed himself to owe it. At last they were granted, and the 19th of May, 1620, was appointed for celebrating the beatification of the pious “Ploughman of Madrid.”
Such occasions were now often seized in the principal cities of Spain, as a means alike of exhibiting the talents of their poets, and amusing and interesting the multitude;—the Church gladly contributing its authority to substitute, as far as possible, a sort of poetical tournament, held under its own management, for the chivalrous tournaments which had for centuries exercised so great and so irreligious an influence throughout Europe. At any rate, these literary contests, in which honors and prizes of various kinds were offered, were called “Poetical Joustings,” and soon became favorite entertainments with the mass of the people. We have already noticed such festivals, as early as the end of the fifteenth century; and besides the prize which, as we have seen, Cervantes gained at Saragossa in May, 1595,[255] Lope gained one at Toledo, in June, 1608;[256] and in September, 1614, he was the judge at a poetical festival in honor of the beatification of Saint Theresa, at Madrid, where the rich tones of his voice and his graceful style of reading were much admired.[257]
The occasion of the beatification of the Saint who presided over the fortunes of Madrid was, however, one of more solemn importance than either of these had been. All classes of the inhabitants of that “Heroic Town,” as it is still called, took an interest in it; for it was believed to concern the well-being of all.[258] The Church of Saint Andrew, in which reposed the body of the worthy Ploughman, was ornamented with unwonted splendor. The merchants of the city completely encased its altars with plain, but pure silver. The goldsmiths enshrined the form of the Saint, which five centuries had not wasted away, in a sarcophagus of the same metal, elaborately wrought. Other classes brought other offerings; all marked by the gorgeous wealth that then flowed through the privileged portions of Spanish society, from the mines of Peru and Mexico. In front of the church a showy stage was erected, from which the poems sent in for prizes were read, and over this part of the ceremonies Lope presided.
As a sort of prologue, a few satirical petitions were produced, which were intended to excite merriment, and, no doubt, were successful; after which Lope opened the literary proceedings of the festival, by pronouncing a poetical oration of above seven hundred lines in honor of San Isidro. This was followed by reading the subjects for the nine prizes offered by the nine Muses, together with the rules according to which the honors of the occasion were to be adjudged; and then came the poems themselves. Among the competitors were many of the principal men of letters of the time: Zarate, Guillen de Castro, Jauregui, Espinel, Montalvan, Pantaleon, Silveira, the young Calderon, and Lope himself, with the son who bore his name, still a boy. All this, or nearly all of it, was grave, and beseeming the grave occasion. But at the end of the list of those who entered their claims for each prize, there always appeared a sort of masque, who, under the assumed name of Master Burguillos, “seasoned the feast in the most savory manner,” it is said, with his amusing verses, caricaturing the whole, like the gracioso of the popular theatre, and serving as a kind of interlude after each division of the more regular drama.
Lope took hardly any pains to conceal that this savory part of the festival was entirely his own; so surely had his theatrical instincts indicated to him the merry relief its introduction would give to the stateliness and solemnity of the occasion.[259] All the various performances were read by him with much effect, and at the end he gave a light and pleasant account, in the old popular ballad measure, of what had been done; after which the judges pronounced the names of the successful competitors. Who they were, we are not told; but the offerings of all—those of the unsuccessful as well as of the successful—were published by him without delay.
A greater jubilee followed two years afterwards, when, at the opening of the reign of Philip the Fourth, the negotiations of his grateful predecessor were crowned with a success he did not live to witness; and San Isidro, with three other devout Spaniards, was admitted by the Head of the Church at Rome to the full glories of saintship, by a formal canonization. The people of Madrid took little note of the Papal bull, except so far as it concerned their own particular saint and protector. But to him the honors they offered were abundant.[260] The festival they instituted for the occasion lasted nine days. Eight pyramids, above seventy feet high, were arranged in different parts of the city, and nine magnificent altars, a castle, a rich garden, and a temporary theatre. All the houses of the better sort were hung with gorgeous tapestry; religious processions, in which the principal nobility took the meanest places, swept through the streets; and bull-fights, always the most popular of Spanish entertainments, were added, in which above two thousand of those noble animals were sacrificed in amphitheatres or public squares open to all.
As a part of the show, a great literary contest or jousting was held on the 19th of May,—exactly two years after that held at the beatification. Again Lope appeared on the stage in front of the Church of Saint Andrew, and, with similar ceremonies and a similar admixture of the somewhat broad farce of Tomé de Burguillos, most of the leading poets of the time joined in the universal homage. Lope carried away the principal prizes. Others were given to Zarate, Calderon, Montalvan, and Guillen de Castro. Two plays—one on the childhood, and the other on the youth of San Isidro, but both expressly ordered from Lope by the city—were acted on open, movable stages, before the king, the court, and the multitude, making their author the most prominent figure of a festival which, rightly understood, goes far to explain the spirit of the times and of the religion on which it all depended. An account of the whole, comprehending the poems offered on the occasion, and his own two plays, was published by Lope before the close of the year.
His success at these two jubilees was, no doubt, very flattering to him. It had been of the most public kind; it had been on a very popular subject; and it had, perhaps, brought him more into the minds and thoughts of the great mass of the people, and into the active interests of the time, than even his success in the theatre. The caricatures of Tomé de Burguillos, in particular, though often rude, seem to have been received with extraordinary favor. Later, therefore, he was induced to write more verses in the same style; and, in 1634, he published a volume, consisting almost wholly of humorous and burlesque poems, under the same disguise. Most of the pieces it contains are sonnets and other short poems;—some very sharp and satirical, and nearly all fluent and happy. But one of them is of considerable length, and should be separately noticed.
It is a mock-heroic, in irregular verse, divided into six silvas or cantos, and is called “La Gatomachia,” or the Battle of the Cats; being a contest between two cats for the love of a third. Like nearly all the poems of the class to which it belongs, from the “Batrachomyomachia” downwards, it is too long. It contains about twenty-five hundred lines, in various measures. But if it is not the first in the Spanish language in the order of time, it is the first in the order of merit. The last two silvas, in particular, are written with great lightness and spirit; sometimes parodying Ariosto and the epic poets, and sometimes the old ballads, with the gayest success. From its first appearance, therefore, it has been a favorite in Spain; and it is now, probably, more read than any other of its author’s miscellaneous works. An edition printed in 1794 assumes, rather than attempts to prove, that Tomé de Burguillos was a real personage. But few persons have ever been of this opinion; for though, when it first appeared, Lope prefixed to it one of those accounts concerning its pretended author that deceive nobody, yet he had, as early as the first festival in honor of San Isidro, almost directly declared Master Burguillos to be merely a disguise for himself and a means of adding interest to the occasion,—a fact, indeed, plainly intimated by Quevedo in the Approbation prefixed to the volume, and by Coronel in the verses which immediately follow.[261]
In 1621, just in the interval between the two festivals, Lope published a volume containing the “Filomena,” a poem, in the first canto of which he gives the mythological story of Tereus and the Nightingale, and in the second, a vindication of himself, under the allegory of the Nightingale’s Defence against the Envious Thrush. To this he added, in the same volume, “La Tapada,” a description, in octave verse, of a country-seat of the Duke of Braganza in Portugal; the “Andromeda,” a mythological story like the Filomena; “The Fortunes of Diana,” the first prose tale he ever printed; several poetical epistles and smaller poems; and a correspondence on the subject of the New Poetry, as it was called, in which he boldly attacked the school of Góngora, then at the height of its favor.[262] The whole volume added nothing to its author’s permanent reputation; but parts of it, and especially passages in the epistles and in the Filomena, are interesting from the circumstance that they contain allusions to his own personal history.
Another volume, not unlike the last, followed in 1624. It contains three poems in the octave stanza: “Circe,” an unfortunate amplification of the well-known story found in the Odyssey; “The Morning of Saint John,” on the popular celebration of that graceful festival in the time of Lope; and a fable on the Origin of the White Rose. To these he added several epistles in prose and verse, and three more prose tales, which, with the one already mentioned, constitute all the short prose fictions he ever published.[263]
The best part of this volume is, no doubt, the three stories. Probably Lope was induced to write them by the success of those of Cervantes, which had now been published eleven years, and were already known throughout Europe. But Lope’s talent seems not to have been more adapted to this form of composition than that of the author of Don Quixote was to the drama. Of this he seems to have been partially aware himself; for he says of the first tale, that it was written to please a lady in a department of letters where he never thought to have adventured, and the other three are addressed to the same person, and seem to have been written with the same feelings.[264] None of them excited much attention at the time when they appeared. But, twenty years afterwards, they were reprinted with four others, torn, apparently, from some connected series of similar stories, and certainly not the work of Lope. The last of the eight is the best of the collection, though it ends awkwardly, with an intimation that another is to follow; and all are thrust together into the complete edition of Lope’s miscellaneous works, though there is no pretence for claiming any of them to be his, except the first four.[265]
In the year preceding the appearance of the tales we find him in a new character. A miserable man, a Franciscan monk, from Catalonia, was suspected of heresy; and the suspicion fell on him the more heavily because his mother was of the Jewish faith. Having been, in consequence of this, expelled successively from two religious houses of which he had been a member, he seems to have become disturbed in his mind, and at last he grew so frantic, that, while mass was celebrating in open church, he seized the consecrated host from the hands of the officiating priest and violently destroyed it. He was at once arrested and given up to the Inquisition. The Inquisition, finding him obstinate, declared him to be a Lutheran and a Calvinist, and, adding to this the crime of his Hebrew descent, delivered him over to the secular arm for punishment. He was, almost as a matter of course, ordered to be burned alive; and in January, 1623, the sentence was literally executed outside the gate of Alcalá at Madrid. The excitement was great, as it always was on such occasions. An immense concourse of people was gathered to witness the edifying spectacle; the court was present; the theatres and public shows were suspended for a fortnight; and we are told that Lope de Vega, who, in some parts of his “Dragontea,” shows a spirit not unworthy of such an office, was one of those who presided at the loathsome sacrifice and directed its ceremonies.[266]
His fanaticism, however, in no degree diminished his zeal for poetry. In 1625, he published his “Divine Triumphs,” a poem in five cantos, in the measure and the manner of Petrarch, beginning with the triumphs of “the Divine Pan” and ending with those of Religion and the Cross.[267] It was a failure, and the more obviously so, because its very title placed it in direct contrast with the “Trionfi” of the great Italian master. It was accompanied, in the same volume, by a small collection of sacred poetry, which was increased in later editions until it became a large one. Some of it is truly tender and solemn, as, for instance, the cancion on the death of his son,[268] and the sonnet on his own death, beginning, “I must lie down and slumber in the dust”; while other parts, like the villancicos to the Holy Sacrament, are written with unseemly levity, and are even sometimes coarse and sensual.[269] All, however, are specimens of what respectable and cultivated Spaniards in that age called religion.
A similar remark may be made in relation to the “Corona Trágica,” The Tragic Crown, which he published in 1627, on the history and fate of the unhappy Mary of Scotland, who had perished just forty years before.[270] It is intended to be a religious epic, and fills five books of octave stanzas. But it is, in fact, merely a specimen of intolerant controversy. Mary is represented as a pure and glorious martyr to the Catholic faith, while Elizabeth is alternately called a Jezebel and an Athaliah, whom it was a doubtful merit in Philip the Second to have spared, when, as king-consort of England, he had her life in his power.[271] In other respects it is a dull poem; beginning with an account of Mary’s previous history, as related by herself to her women in prison, and ending with her death. But it savors throughout of its author’s sympathy with the religious spirit of his age and country;—a spirit, it should be remembered, which made the Inquisition what it was.
The Corona Trágica was, however, perhaps on this very account, thought worthy of being dedicated to Pope Urban the Eighth, who had himself written an epitaph on the unfortunate Mary of Scotland, which Lope, in courtly phrase, declared was “beatifying her in prophecy.” The flattery was well received. Urban sent the poet in return a complimentary letter; gave him a degree of Doctor in Divinity, and the cross of the Order of Saint John; and appointed him to the honorary places of Fiscal in the Apostolic Chamber and Notary of the Roman Archives. The measure of his ecclesiastical honors was now full.
In 1630, he published “The Laurel of Apollo,” a poem somewhat like “The Journey to Parnassus” of Cervantes, but longer, more elaborate, and still more unsatisfactory. It describes a festival, supposed to have been held by the god of Poetry, on Mount Helicon, in April, 1628, and records the honors then bestowed on nearly three hundred Spanish poets;—a number so great, that the whole account becomes monotonous and almost valueless, partly from the impossibility of drawing with distinctness or truth so many characters of little prominence, and partly from its too free praise of nearly all of them. It is divided into ten silvas, and contains about seven thousand irregular verses. At the end, besides a few minor and miscellaneous poems, Lope added an eclogue, in seven scenes, which had been previously represented before the king and court with a costly magnificence in the theatre and a splendor in its decorations that show, at least, how great was the favor he enjoyed, when he was indulged, for so slight an offering, with such royal luxuries.[272]
The last considerable work he published was his “Dorotea,” a long prose romance in dialogue.[273] It was written in his youth, and, as has been already suggested, probably contains more or less of his own youthful adventures and feelings. But whether this be so or not, it was a favorite with him. He calls it “the most beloved of his works,” and says he has revised it with care and made additions to it in his old age.[274] It was first printed in 1632. A moderate amount of verse is scattered through it, and there is a freshness and a reality in many passages that remind us constantly of its author’s life before he served as a soldier in the Armada. The hero, Fernando, is a poet, like Lope, who, after having been more than once in love and married, refuses Dorotea, the object of his first attachment, and becomes religious. There is, however, little plan, consistency, or final purpose in most of the manifold scenes that go to make up its five long acts; and it is now read only for its rich and easy prose style, for the glimpses it seems to give of the author’s own life, and for a few of its short poems, some of which were probably written for occasions not unlike those to which they are here applied.
The last work he printed was an eclogue in honor of a Portuguese lady; and the last things he wrote—only the day before he was seized with his mortal illness—were a short poem on the Golden Age, remarkable for its vigor and harmony, and a sonnet on the death of a friend.[275] All of them are found in a collection consisting chiefly of a few dramas, published by his son-in-law, Luis de Usategui, two years after Lope’s death.
But as his life drew to a close, his religious feelings, mingled with a melancholy fanaticism, predominated more and more. Much of his poetry composed at this time expressed them; and at last they rose to such a height, that he was almost constantly in a state of excited melancholy, or, as it was then beginning to be called, of hypochondria.[276] Early in the month of August, he felt himself extremely weak, and suffered more than ever from that sense of discouragement which was breaking down his resources and strength. His thoughts, however, were so exclusively occupied with his spiritual condition, that, even when thus reduced, he continued to fast, and on one occasion went through with a private discipline so cruel, that the walls of the apartment where it occurred were afterwards found sprinkled with his blood. From this he never recovered. He was taken ill the same night; and, after fulfilling the offices prescribed by his Church with the most submissive devotion,—mourning that he had ever been engaged in any occupations but such as were exclusively religious,—he died on the 25th of August, 1635, nearly seventy-three years old.
The sensation produced by his death was such as is rarely witnessed even in the case of those upon whom depends the welfare of nations. The Duke of Sessa, who was his especial patron, and to whom he left his manuscripts, provided for the funeral in a manner becoming his own wealth and rank. It lasted nine days. The crowds that thronged to it were immense. Three bishops officiated, and the first nobles of the land attended as mourners. Eulogies and poems followed on all sides, and in numbers all but incredible. Those written in Spain make one considerable volume, and end with a drama in which his apotheosis was brought upon the public stage. Those written in Italy are hardly less numerous, and fill another.[277] But more touching than any of them was the prayer of that much-loved daughter who had been shut up from the world fourteen years, that the long funeral procession might pass by her convent and permit her once more to look on the face she so tenderly venerated; and more solemn than any was the mourning of the multitude, from whose dense mass audible sobs burst forth, as his remains slowly descended from their sight into the house appointed for all living.[278]