“Methought I saw,” he says, “a fair youth borne with prodigious speed through the heavens, who gave a blast to his trumpet so violent, that the radiant beauty of his countenance was in part disfigured by it. But the sound was of such power, that it found obedience in marble and hearing among the dead; for the whole earth began straightway to move, and to give free permission to the bones it contained to come forth in search of each other. And thereupon I presently saw those who had been soldiers and captains start fiercely from their graves, thinking it a signal for battle; and misers coming forth, full of anxiety and alarm, dreading some onslaught; while those who were given to vanity and feasting thought, from the shrillness of the sound, that it was a call to the dance or the chase. At least, so I interpreted the looks of each of them, as they started forth; nor did I see one, to whose ears the sound of that trumpet came, who understood it to be what it really was. Soon, however, I noted the way in which certain souls fled from their former bodies; some with loathing, and others with fear. In one an arm was missing, in another an eye; and while I was moved to laughter as I saw the varieties of their appearance, I was filled with wonder at the wise providence which prevented any one of them, all shuffled together as they were, from putting on the legs or other limbs of his neighbours. In one grave-yard alone I thought that there was some changing of heads, and I saw a notary whose soul did not quite suit him, and who wanted to get rid of it by declaring it to be none of his.
“But when it was fairly understood of all that this was the Day of Judgment, it was worth seeing how the voluptuous tried to avoid having their eyes found for them, that they need not bring into court witnesses against themselves,—how the malicious tried to avoid their own tongues, and how robbers and assassins seemed willing to wear out their feet in running away from their hands. And turning partly round, I saw one miser asking another, (who, having been embalmed and his bowels left at a distance, was waiting silently till they should arrive), whether, because the dead were to rise that day, certain money-bags of his must also rise. I should have laughed heartily at this, if I had not, on the other side, pitied the eagerness with which a great rout of notaries rushed by, flying from their own ears, in order to avoid hearing what awaited them, though none succeeded in escaping, except those who in this world had lost their ears as thieves, which, owing to the neglect of justice, was by no means the majority. But what I most wondered at was, to see the bodies of two or three shop-keepers, that had put on their souls wrong side out, and crowded all five of their senses under the nails of their right hands.”
The “Casa de los Locos de Amor,” the Lovers’ Mad-house,—which is placed among Quevedo’s Visions, though it is the work of his friend Lorenzo Vander Hammen, to whom it is dedicated,—lacks, no doubt, the freedom and force which characterize the Vision of the Judgment.[492] But this is a remark that can by no means be extended to the Vision of “Las Zahurdas de Pluton,” Pluto’s Pigsties, which is a show of what may be called the rabble of Pandemonium; “El Mundo por de Dentro,” The World Inside Out; and “El Entremetido, la Dueña, y el Soplon,” The Busy-body, the Duenna, and the Informer;—all of which are full of the most truculent sarcasm, recklessly cast about, by one to whom the world had not been a friend, nor the world’s law.
In these Visions, as well as in nearly all that Quevedo wrote, much is to be found that indicates a bold, original, and independent spirit. His age and the circumstances amidst which he was placed have, however, left their traces both on his poetry and on his prose. Thus, his long residence in Italy is seen in his frequent imitations of the Italian poets, and once, at least, in the composition of an original Italian sonnet;[493]—his cruel sufferings during his different persecutions are apparent in the bitterness of his invectives everywhere, and especially in one of his Visions, dated from his prison, against the administration of justice and the order of society;—while the influence of the false taste of his times, which, in some of its forms, he manfully resisted, is yet no less apparent in others, and persecutes him with a perpetual desire to be brilliant, to say something quaint or startling, and to be pointed and epigrammatic. But over these, and over all his other defects, his genius from time to time rises, and reveals itself with great power. He has not, indeed, that sure perception of the ridiculous which leads Cervantes, as if by instinct, to the exact measure of satirical retribution; but he perceives quickly and strongly; and though he often errs, from the exaggeration and coarseness to which he so much tended, yet, even in the passages where these faults most occur, we often find touches of a solemn and tender beauty, that show he had higher powers and better qualities than his extraordinary wit, and add to the effect of the whole, though without reconciling us to the broad and gross farce that is too often mingled with his satire.[494]
CHAPTER XX.
The Drama. — Madrid and its Theatres. — Damian de Vegas. — Francisco de Tarrega. — Gaspar de Aguilar. — Guillen de Castro. — Luis Vélez de Guevara. — Juan Perez de Montalvan.
The want of a great capital, as a common centre for letters and literary men, was long felt in Spain. Until the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, the country, broken into separate kingdoms and occupied by continual conflicts with a hated enemy, had no leisure for the projects that belong to a period of peace; and even later, when there was tranquillity at home, the foreign wars and engrossing interests of Charles the Fifth in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands led him so much abroad, that there was still little tendency to settle the rival claims of the great cities; and the court resided occasionally in each of them, as it had from the time of Saint Ferdinand. But already it was plain that the preponderance which for a time had been enjoyed by Seville was gone. Castile had prevailed in this, as it had in the greater contest for giving a language to the country; and Madrid, which had been a favorite residence of the Emperor, because he thought its climate dealt gently with his infirmities, began, from 1560, under the arrangements of Philip the Second, to be regarded as the real capital of the whole monarchy.[495]
On no department of Spanish literature did this circumstance produce so considerable an influence as it did on the drama. In 1583, the foundations for the two regular theatres that have continued such ever since were already laid; and from about 1590, Lope de Vega, if not the absolute monarch of the stage that Cervantes describes him to have been, was, at least, its controlling spirit. The natural consequences followed. Under the influence of the nobility, who thronged to the royal residence, and led by the example of one of the most popular writers and men that ever lived, the Spanish theatre rose like an exhalation; and a school of poets—many of whom had hastened from Seville, Valencia, and other parts of the country, and thus extinguished the hopes of an independent drama in the cities they deserted—was collected around him in the new capital, until the dramatic writers of Madrid became suddenly more numerous, and in many respects more remarkable, than any other similar body of poets in modern times.
The period of this transition of the drama is well marked by a single provincial play, the “Comedia Jacobina,” printed at Toledo in 1590, but written, as its author intimates, some years earlier. It was the work of Damian de Vegas, an ecclesiastic of that city, and is on the subject of the blessing of Jacob by Isaac. Its structure is simple, and its action direct and unembarrassed. As it is religious throughout, it belongs, in this respect, to the elder school of the drama; but, on the other hand, as it is divided into three acts, has a prologue and epilogue, a chorus, and much lyrical poetry in various measures, including the terza rima and blank verse, it is not unlike what was attempted about the same time, on the secular stage, by Cervantes and Argensola. Though uninteresting in its plot, and dry and hard in its versification, it is not wholly without poetical merit; but we have no proof that it ever was acted in Madrid, or, indeed, that it was known on the stage beyond the limits of Toledo; a city to which its author was much attached, and where he seems always to have lived.[496]