The tractate consists of not quite 400 hendecasyllabic lines, arranged in irregular stanzas from five to fifty lines long, and blank except for the last two lines of each stanza, which form a rhymed couplet. It has a rather erudite air at first sight; but M. Morel-Fatio has ruthlessly shown that almost all, if not all, the passages which give it this appearance are translated literally from Robortello[[455]] or from Donatus. It begins by a complimentary address to the Academy of Madrid, which had, it seems, asked the poet for the treatise, and then passes into the slightly ignoble apology-boast, already referred to, as to his own knowledge of the preceptos and the barbarism, the rudeza, of the established and popular notion of drama. He defines comedy as imitating actions and manners of men—not royal and lofty actions like tragedy, but humble and plebeian—gives an exceedingly perfunctory sketch of Spanish, and a much fuller one of ancient, drama, and then relapses into his exercises and denunciations of
“La vil chimera deste monstruo cómico,”
with a promise to “gild” the error of the vulgar, and discover, if possible, a sort of via media. But one is not surprised to find that he has almost directly to blaspheme one of the very chief of his revered preceptos by admitting that
“Buen exemplo nos da naturaleza”
of the mixing of the tragic and the comic. So, too, like a new Naaman, he bows in the House of Rimmon by admitting that the Unity of Time must be broken, though you are to hide the breach if you can. Minor details of dramaturgy fill a large part of the piece, with an especial recommendation of keeping the interest of the audience on the tenterhooks. But he cannot finish (the finale includes a boast of having written 483 comedies
“Con una que he acabado esta semána”)
without another ungracious fling at the “vulgarity” and the “barbarism” of the Muse he serves, and a confession, in which some have seen humour, that all the 483, “except six,” sin gravely against true art. Certainly humour is not an unknown quality with Spaniards; but it cannot be said that, if Lope uses it here, he uses it gracefully.
Still Lope, if not very critical himself, was the cause of some noteworthy criticism from others. His assailants and defenders. From the lively controversy which arose over the character of his work, Señor Menéndez has extracted some documents, so exceedingly rare, that in one instance, at any rate, they consist of a unique copy of a reply to a libel, the original of which has perished altogether. This is the Expostulatio Spongiæ (1618) (the original and lost attack on Lope having been called Spongia), by a Julius Columbarius, who seems to have been the shadow of several gentlemen at once, the chief of them Lope’s friend, Francesco López de Aguilar. Appended to this is a dissertation by Alfonso Sanchez, professor of Hebrew at Alcalá, in which the clear method and universally intelligible Latin of the schools are utilised to put part of the Romantic case, as it was seldom put before the end of the eighteenth century. “Nature,” says Sanchez, “gives laws; she does not accept them.” Spaniards are men, and, for the matter of that, Roman citizens as well. And times change: and, for all our worship of Cicero, he would be a dinner-bell[[456]] if he orated in the Theatre of Alcalá. Let poetry follow the requirements of its time. Another of these documents is the Apology for Spanish drama, prefixed to a collection of plays by Valencian authors in 1616, and signed by Ricardo de[l] Turia, a nom de guerre not yet certainly identified, which is a special defence of Spanish comedy (i.e., “drama”) as such.
In face of these remarkable utterances (which could be multiplied greatly, and the answers to them supplied) it may seem hard, if not altogether unjustifiable, to limit the importance of Spanish criticism, as has been done above. The fight over the Spanish drama. But it has to be observed that all this was a merely passing, and in great part a merely personal, literary dispute, which had no real effect. While the great Spanish dramatists lasted, the drama was popular, and men invented reasons to defend it. But they founded no school, either acceptedly orthodox or strong-reasoned in its heterodoxy: and, when the great age passed, instead of a sounder criticism, as in Dryden’s case, founding itself upon the results, the formal and petrifying neo-classicism of Luzán froze all these reasonings up, just as Boileau had earlier frozen those of the Ogiers and the Saint-Sorlins in France. If we could validate that connection between Dryden himself and the Spanish critics, it would be something like a Missing Link: but we cannot.
The author of Don Quixote and the author of the Vida es Sueño contribute more irregularly to our matter. Cervantes and Calderon. The chief critical documents furnished by the former are the long poem of the Viaje del Parnaso, and not so much the world-famous passage of the burning of the romances of chivalry in Don Quixote, as the whole problem and purpose of that immortal book itself.[[457]] The Viaje,[[458]] putting aside the debated question of its literary value, is rather a disappointing book, in its allegory of the poetic ship, with glosses for portholes, and tercets for sweeps, and its endless, but rather pointless, citation, generally flattering, but sometimes the reverse, of poets and poetic kinds. Both praise and blame appear to be distributed very much on the principle of Miss Edgeworth’s Frank, when he proposed to give the odd piece of tart to good Henry, who had mended his bat, or to kind Edward, who had lent him his ball. As for the burning question of the libros de caballerías, Cervantes was beyond all question right in preferring Amadis and Palmerin; but it must be a very matter-of-fact reader who does not see that in fact he loved them all, however he might laugh at them. Indeed, the scene itself (D. Q., I. i. 6), though it ends in almost the whole library being left to the untender mercies of the housekeeper and the niece, makes constant exceptions both in favour of the romances themselves (including even such a dubious example as Tirante the White) and of other pieces in verse and prose from the Diana to the Araucana. And when the subject is taken up again much farther on (I. iv. 21) by the Canon of Toledo, his severe strictures on the Romances as they are change suddenly into a splendid panegyric of what they might be. This latter passage indeed shifts into one of the most remarkable of Cervantes’ critical deliverances, the attack (in rougher language than Lope’s own) on “irregular” plays, and the famous and very curious passage in which, immediately afterwards, the curate condemns the improbabilities of the chronicle-drama in words almost precisely similar to those which Sir Philip Sidney had used twenty years and more earlier, and adopts the whole “preceptist” view, with a special reference to Lope’s own compromises and a demand for rigid licensing of plots and romances alike, according to the principles of taste and learning, of Tully (secundum Donatum) and “eloquence.” One may entertain a passing doubt whether the chances of Don Quixote itself would have been altogether happy under such a censorship; and in this there is probably more following of the Italians[[459]] than deliberate critical preference. It, however, and other things (the famous contention that epics may be written in prose as well as in verse, though important from its actual illustration in the Don and its effect on Fielding, is in no sense original, and as an opinion hardly more than an echo of Scaliger) no doubt give Cervantes a certain status. But Calderon can hardly be said to give us anything except the odd inconsistency (to be paralleled, though in a different kind, with Lope’s) of his alternate ridicule and patronage of the Gongorist style.