And tents that cover all the ground
With silks and velvets rare,—[444]
it must have stirred his audience as with the sound of a trumpet.
Indeed, in all respects, Lope well understood how to win the general favor, and how to build up and strengthen his fortunate position as the leading dramatic poet of his time. The ancient foundations of the theatre, as far as any existed when he appeared, were little disturbed by him. He carried on the drama, he says, as he found it; not venturing to observe the rules of art, because, if he had done so, the public never would have listened to him.[445] The elements that were floating about, crude and unsettled, he used freely; but only so far as they suited his general purpose. The division into three acts, known so little, that he attributed it to Virues, though it was made much earlier; the ballad-measure, which had been timidly used by Tarraga and two or three others, but relied upon by nobody; the intriguing story, and the amusing underplot, of which the slight traces that existed in Torres Naharro had been long forgotten,—all these he seized with the instinct of genius, and formed from them, and from the abundant and rich inventions of his own overflowing fancy, a drama which, as a whole, was unlike any thing that had preceded it, and yet was so truly national and rested so faithfully on tradition, that it was never afterwards disturbed, till the whole literature, of which it was so brilliant a part, was swept away with it.
Lope de Vega’s immediate success, as we have seen, was in proportion to his rare powers and favorable opportunities. For a long time, nobody else was willingly heard on the stage; and during the whole of the forty or fifty years that he wrote for it, he stood quite unapproached in general popularity. His unnumbered plays and farces, in all the forms that were demanded by the fashions of the age, or permitted by religious authority, filled the theatres both of the capital and the provinces; and so extraordinary was the impulse he gave to dramatic representations, that, though there were only two companies of strolling players at Madrid when he began, there were, about the period of his death, no less than forty, comprehending nearly a thousand persons.[446]
Abroad, too, his fame was hardly less remarkable. In Rome, Naples, and Milan, his dramas were performed in their original language; in France and Italy, his name was announced in order to fill the theatres when no play of his was to be performed;[447] and once even, and probably oftener, one of his dramas was represented in the seraglio at Constantinople.[448] But perhaps neither all this popularity, nor yet the crowds that followed him in the streets and gathered in the balconies to watch him as he passed along,[449] nor the name of Lope, that was given to whatever was esteemed singularly good in its kind,[450] is so striking a proof of his dramatic success, as the fact, so often complained of by himself and his friends, that multitudes of his plays were fraudulently noted down as they were acted, and then printed for profit throughout Spain; and that multitudes of other plays appeared under his name, and were represented all over the provinces, that he had never even heard of till they were published and performed.[451]
A large income naturally followed such popularity, for his plays were liberally paid for by the actors;[452] and he had patrons of a munificence unknown in our days, and always undesirable.[453] But he was thriftless and wasteful; exceedingly charitable; and, in hospitality to his friends, prodigal. He was, therefore, almost always embarrassed. At the end of his “Jerusalem,” printed as early as 1609, he complains of the pressure of his domestic affairs;[454] and in his old age he addressed some verses, in the nature of a petition, to the still more thriftless Philip the Fourth, asking the means of living for himself and his daughter.[455] After his death, his poverty was fully admitted by his executor; and yet, considering the relative value of money, no poet, perhaps, ever received so large a compensation for his works.
It should, however, be remembered, that no other poet ever wrote so much with popular effect. For, if we begin with his dramatic compositions, which are the best of his efforts, and go down to his epics, which, on the whole, are the worst,[456] we shall find the amount of what was received with favor, as it came from the press, quite unparalleled. And when to this we are compelled to add his own assurance, just before his death, that the greater part of his works still remained in manuscript,[457] we pause in astonishment, and, before we are able to believe the account, demand some explanation that will make it credible;—an explanation which is the more important, because it is the key to much of his personal character, as well as of his poetical success. And it is this. No poet of any considerable reputation ever had a genius so nearly related to that of an improvisator, or ever indulged his genius so freely in the spirit of improvisation. This talent has always existed in the southern countries of Europe; and in Spain has, from the first, produced, in different ways, the most extraordinary results. We owe to it the invention and perfection of the old ballads, which were originally improvisated and then preserved by tradition; and we owe to it the seguidillas, the boleros, and all the other forms of popular poetry that still exist in Spain, and are daily poured forth by the fervent imaginations of the uncultivated classes of the people, and sung to the national music, that sometimes seems to fill the air by night as the light of the sun does by day.
In the time of Lope de Vega, the passion for such improvisation had risen higher than it ever rose before, if it had not spread out more widely. Actors were expected sometimes to improvisate on themes given to them by the audience.[458] Extemporaneous dramas, with all the varieties of verse demanded by a taste formed in the theatres, were not of rare occurrence. Philip the Fourth, Lope’s patron, had such performed in his presence, and bore a part in them himself.[459] And the famous Count de Lemos, the viceroy of Naples, to whom Cervantes was indebted for so much kindness, kept, as an apanage to his viceroyalty, a poetical court, of which the two Argensolas were the chief ornaments, and in which extemporaneous plays were acted with brilliant success.[460]
Lope de Vega’s talent was undoubtedly of near kindred to this genius of improvisation, and produced its extraordinary results by a similar process, and in the same spirit. He dictated verse, we are told, with ease, more rapidly than an amanuensis could take it down;[461] and wrote out an entire play in two days, which could with difficulty be transcribed by a copyist in the same time. He was not absolutely an improvisator, for his education and position naturally led him to devote himself to written composition, but he was continually on the borders of whatever belongs to an improvisator’s peculiar province; he was continually showing, in his merits and defects, in his ease, grace, and sudden resource, in his wildness and extravagance, in the happiness of his versification and the prodigal abundance of his imagery, that a very little more freedom, a very little more indulgence given to his feelings and his fancy, would have made him at once and entirely, not only an improvisator, but the most remarkable one that ever lived.