The invention in both kinds was beautiful, and it is wonderful to see with how little effort, and with what conciseness, they describe the scenery, the hero, and the feelings that agitate him. Now, it is the alcayde of Molina, who, entering the town, alarms the Moors by the report that the Christians are ravaging their fields; now, it is the unfortunate Aliatar, borne bloody and lifeless to his grave in melancholy pomp through the very gate whence the day before he was seen to issue, full of gaiety and life: there it is a simple beauty, who having lost her earrings, the keepsake of her lover, is in great affliction, dreading the reproaches that await her; and here it is the solitary and rejected shepherd, who, indignant at the sight of two turtles billing in a poplar, scares them away with stones.
The defects of these compositions spring from the same source as their beauties, or, to speak more correctly, are the excess or abuse of those very beauties. Their facility and freedom often degenerated into negligence and slovenliness, their ingenuity into affectation; puns, conceits, and false ornaments were introduced with so much the more liberty, as they more assisted those flights of gallantry which passed for refinements of speech, and as they appeared more excusable in works written merely for self-amusement. The principal authors of this poetry cannot be decidedly ascertained; but the golden epoch of the Romances was before Lope de Vega, Liaño, and a thousand others, not even remembered, introduced the bad taste which afterwards corrupted the whole literature of Spain; it comprises the youth of Góngora and Quevedo, and terminates in the Prince de Esquilache, the only one after them that succeeded in giving to the Romances the colouring, grace, and lightness, which they formerly possessed. But this taste, if on the one hand it tended to popularize poetry, to give it greater ease and sweetness, and to remove it from the bounds of imitation, to which former poets had restricted it, had an equal influence in making it incorrect and careless, the same facility of composition inviting to this looseness. Thus it is that the poets who flourished at the end of the sixteenth, and commencement of the succeeding century, more harmonious, more easy, more delightful, and above all, more original than their predecessors, will be found at the same time more negligent, and to exhibit less artifice and polish, less purity and correction in their style and diction.
At this period lived the three poets whose verses have possessed most amenity, richness, and facility. The first is Balbuena, born in La Mancha, educated in Mexico, and author of El Siglo de Oro and of Bernardo. No one, since Garcilasso, has had such command over the language, versification, and rhyme; and no one, at the same time, is more slovenly and unequal. His poem, like that New World in which the author lived, is a country spacious and immense, as fruitful as uncultivated, where briers and thorns are mingled in confusion with flowers, treasures with scarcity, deserts and morasses with hills and forests more sublime and shady. If at times he surprises by the freedom of his verse, by the novelty and vividness of his expression, by his great talent for description, in which he knows no equal, and even occasionally by his boldness and profundity of thought, he yet more frequently offends by his unseasonable prodigality, and inconceivable carelessness. The greatest defect of the Bernardo, is its excessive length; it being morally impossible to give to a work of five thousand octaves the sustained and continued elegance necessary to give pleasure. The eclogues of the Siglo de Oro have not the same defects of composition as the poem, and in the public estimation enjoy the nearest place to those of Garcilasso. They undoubtedly deserve it, considering the propriety of style, the ease of the verse, the suitableness and freshness of the images, and the simplicity of the invention. If his shepherds were not at times so rude, if he had had a more constant eye to elegance in diction, and beauty in the incidents; if, in short, he had thrown more variety into his versification, reduced almost entirely to tercetos,—there is no doubt but that good taste would have conceded to him in this branch of the art an absolute supremacy.
The second of these poets is Jauregui, celebrated for his translation of the Aminta, a florid poet, an elegant and harmonious versifier. He is the one who expressed his thoughts in verse with the most ease and elegance; but he had little nerve and spirit, and was, besides, poor of invention. His taste in early life was very pure, as his Rimas show. But after having been one of the sharpest assailants of Purism, he ended in suffering himself to glide with the current, and in his translation of the Pharsalia, and in his Orpheus, he has abandoned himself to all the extravagances he had before burlesqued.
But the man who received from nature the most poetical endowments, and who most abused them, was, without doubt, Lope de Vega. The gift of writing his language with purity, elegance, and the deepest clearness; the gift of inventing, the gift of painting, the gift of versifying in whatever measure he desired; flexibility of fancy and talent to accommodate himself to all sorts of writing, and to all sorts of colouring; a richness that never knows impediment or dearth; a memory enriched by a vast range of reading; and an indefatigable application, which augmented the facility he inherited from nature: with these arms he presented himself in the arena, knowing in his bold ambition neither curb nor limit. From the madrigal to the ode, from the eclogue to the comedy, from the novel to the epic—he ran through all, he cultivated all, and has left in all signs of devastation and of talent.
He brought the theatre under his subjection, and fixed upon him universal attention,—the poets of his time were nothing compared to him. His name was the seal of approbation for all; the people followed him in the streets; strangers sought him out as an extraordinary object; monarchs arrested their attention to regard him. He had critics who raised the cry against his culpable carelessness, enviers who murmured at him, detractors who calumniated him,—a mournful example, in addition to the many other instances which prove that envy and calumny are born with merit and celebrity; for neither the amiable courtesy of the poet, nor the placidity of his genius, nor the pleasure with which he lent himself to commend others, could either disarm his slanderers or temper their malignity. But none of them could snatch away the sceptre from his hands, nor abrogate the consideration which so many and such celebrated works had acquired for him. His death was mourned as a public calamity; his funeral drew an universal attendance. A volume of Spanish poetry was composed upon his death, another of Italian; and, living and dying, he was always hearing praises, always gathering laurels; admired as a prodigy, and proclaimed "the Phœnix of Wits."
What, at the end of two centuries, remains of all that pomp, of all the loud applauses which then fatigued the echoes of fame? When we see that, of all the poetry and poems he composed, there are few, perhaps none, which can be read through without our being shocked at every step by their repugnance; when we see that his most studied and favourite work, the Jerusalem,[P] is a compound of absurdities, wherein the little excellence we meet with, makes the abuse of his talent but the more deplored; when we see that of so many hundreds of comedies, there is scarcely one that can be called good; and finally, that of the many thousands of verses which his inexhaustible vein produced, there are so few that remain engraved on the tablets of good taste,—can we do less than exclaim, where are now the foundations of that edifice of glory raised in homage of a single man by the age in which he lived, and which still surprises and excites the envy of those who contemplate it from afar?
It was not possible for works written with so much precipitation to have any other result, with his utter forgetfulness of all rules, and neglect of all great models; without plan, without preparation, without study, or attention to nature. The necessity of writing hastily for the theatre, when he had accustomed the public to almost daily novelties, unsettled, and, as it were, relaxed all the springs of his genius, carrying the same hurry and negligence into all his other writings.[Q] Hence it is that, with the exception of some short poems in which he improved the happy inspiration of the moment, there are, in all his others, unpardonable faults of invention, of composition, and of style. Fatal facility! which corrupted all his excellencies, which led him to obscure the clearness, the harmony, the elegance, the freedom, the affluence, and even the strength with which he was alike gifted; giving place to unappropriate figures, to historic or fabulous allusions pedantic and ill-timed; to frigid and prolix explanations of the very thing he had said before; to weakness in short, to shallowness, to an insufferable tone, into which the rich abundance and amiable purity of his diction and versification degenerated.
The age then, it will be said, was barbarous, that tolerated such errantries, and that gave so much applause to a writer so defective. It was not barbarous, but excessively compliant. There were many men of talent who deplored this abuse; but they could not resist the popular approbation which the nature of Lope's writings carried with it, and which in some degree his genius authorized. The general sweetness and fluency of his verse; the lucidness of his expression, intelligible almost always to the most illiterate; the fine and polished language of gallantry which he invented, and brought into use in his comedies; the decorum and ornament with which he invested the stage;[R] the vivid and delicate touches of sensibility which he from time to time presents; the eminent and brilliant parts which the women generally sustain in his works; in short, his absolute dominion in the theatre, where acclamations have most solemnity and force; are all circumstances which concur to excuse the public of that day, who were not unjust in admiring most the individual that gave them most delight.[S]