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]
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.
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,
O noble Spanish cavalier,
You hasten to the fight;
The trumpet rings upon your ear,
And victory claims her right.[438]
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,—
Now Santa Fé is circled round
With canvas walls so fair,