It might naturally have been foreseen, that, upon a movement like this, imparted and sustained by all the force of the national genius, any accidents of patronage or opposition would produce little effect. And so in fact it proved. The ecclesiastical authorities always frowned upon it, and sometimes placed themselves so as directly to resist its progress; but its sway and impulse were so heavy, that it passed over their opposition, in every instance, as over a slight obstacle. Nor was it more affected by the seductions of patronage. Philip the Fourth, for above forty years, favored and supported it with princely munificence. He built splendid saloons for it in his palaces; he wrote for it; he acted in improvisated dramas. The reigning favorite, the Count Duke Olivares, to flatter the royal taste, invented new dramatic luxuries, such as that of magnificent floating theatres on the stream of the Tormés, and on the sheets of water in the gardens of the Buen Retiro. All royal entertainments seemed, in fact, for a time, to take a dramatic tone, or tend to it. But still the popular character of the theatre itself was unchecked and unaffected;—still the plays acted in the royal theatres, before the principal persons in the kingdom, were the same with those performed before the populace in the court-yards of Madrid;—and when other times and other princes came, the old Spanish drama left the halls and palaces, where it had been so long flattered, with as little of a courtly air as that with which it had originally entered them.[787]
The same impulse that made it so powerful in other respects filled the old Spanish theatre with an almost incredible number of cavalier and heroic dramas, dramas for saints, sacramental autos, entremeses, and farces of all names. Their whole amount, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, has been estimated to exceed thirty thousand, of which four thousand eight hundred by unknown authors had been, at one time, collected by a single person in Madrid.[788] Their character and merit were, as we have seen, very various. Still, the circumstance, that they were all written substantially for one object and under one system of opinions, gave them a stronger air of general resemblance than might otherwise have been anticipated. For it should never be forgotten, that the Spanish drama in its highest and most heroic forms was still a popular entertainment, just as it was in its farces and ballads. Its purpose was, not only to please all classes, but to please all equally;—those who paid three maravedís, and stood crowded together under a hot sun in the court-yard, as well as the rank and fashion, that lounged in their costly apartments above, and amused themselves hardly less with the picturesque scene of the audiences in the patio than with that of the actors on the stage. Whether the story this mass of people saw enacted were probable or not was to them a matter of small consequence. But it was necessary that it should be interesting. Above all, it was necessary that it should be Spanish; and therefore, though its subject might be Greek or Roman, Oriental or mythological, the characters represented were always Castilian, and Castilian after the fashion of the seventeenth century,—governed by Castilian notions of gallantry and the Castilian point of honor.
It was the same with their costumes. Coriolanus was dressed like Don John of Austria; Aristotle came on the stage with a curled periwig and buckles in his shoes, like a Spanish Abbé; and Madame d’Aulnoy says, the Devil she saw was dressed like any other Castilian gentleman, except that his stockings were flame-colored and he wore horns.[789] But however the actors might be dressed, or however the play might confound geography and history, or degrade heroism by caricature, still, in a great majority of cases, dramatic situations are skilfully produced; the story, full of bustle and incident, grows more and more urgent as it advances; and the result of the whole is, that, though we may sometimes have been much offended, we are sorry we have reached the conclusion, and find on looking back that we have almost always been excited, and often pleased.
The Spanish theatre, in many of its attributes and characteristics, stands, therefore, by itself. It takes no cognizance of ancient example; for the spirit of antiquity could have little in common with materials so modern, Christian, and romantic. It borrowed nothing from the drama of France or of Italy; for it was in advance of both when its final character was not only developed, but settled. And as for England, though Shakspeare and Lope were contemporaries, and there are points of resemblance between them which it is pleasant to trace and difficult to explain, still they and their schools, undoubtedly, had not the least influence on each other. The Spanish drama is, therefore, entirely national. Many of its best subjects are taken from the chronicles and traditions familiar to the audience that listened to them, and its prevalent versification reminded the hearers, by its sweetness and power, of what had so often moved their hearts in the earliest outpourings of the national genius. With all its faults, then, this old Spanish drama, founded on the great traits of the national character, maintained itself in the popular favor as long as that character existed in its original attributes; and even now it remains one of the most striking and one of the most interesting portions of modern literature.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Historical Narrative Poems. — Sempere. — Çapata. — Ayllon. — Sanz. — Fernandez. — Espinosa. — Coloma. — Ercilla and his Araucana, with Osorio’s Continuation. — Oña. — Gabriel Lasso de la Vega. — Saavedra. — Castellanos. — Centenera. — Villagra. — Religious Narrative Poems. — Blasco. — Mata. — Virues and his Monserrate. — Bravo. — Valdivielso. — Hojeda. — Diaz and others. — Imaginative Narrative Poems. — Espinosa and Others. — Barahona de Soto. — Balbuena and his Bernardo.
Epic poetry, from its general dignity and pretensions, is almost uniformly placed at the head of the different divisions of a nation’s literature. But in Spain, though the series of efforts in that direction begins early and boldly, and has been continued with diligence down to our own times, little has been achieved that is worthy of memory. The Poem of the Cid is, indeed, the oldest attempt at narrative poetry in the languages of modern Europe that deserves the name; and, composed, as it must have been, above a century before the appearance of Dante and two centuries before the time of Chaucer, it is to be regarded as one of the most remarkable outbreaks of poetical and national enthusiasm on record. But the few similar attempts that were made at long intervals in the periods immediately subsequent, like those we witness in “The Chronicle of Fernan Gonzalez,” in “The Life of Alexander,” and in “The Labyrinth” of Juan de Mena, deserve to be mentioned chiefly in order to mark the progress of Spanish culture during the lapse of three centuries. No one of them showed the power of the old half-epic Poem of the Cid.
At last, when we reach the reign of Charles the Fifth, or rather, when we come to the immediate results of that reign, it seems as if the national genius had been inspired with a poetical ambition no less extravagant than the ambition for military glory which their foreign successes had stirred up in the masters of the state. The poets of the time, or those who regarded themselves as such, evidently imagined that to them was assigned the task of worthily celebrating the achievements, in the Old World and in the New, which had really raised their country to the first place among the powers of Europe, and which it was then thought not presumptuous to hope would lay the foundation for a universal monarchy.
In the reign of Philip the Second, therefore, we have an extraordinary number of epic and narrative poems,—in all above twenty,—full of the feelings which then animated the nation, and devoted to subjects connected with Spanish glory, both ancient and recent,—poems in which their authors endeavoured to imitate the great Italian epics, already at the height of their reputation, and fondly believed they had succeeded. But the works they thus produced, with hardly more than a single exception, belong rather to patriotism than to poetry; the best of them being so closely confined to matters of fact, that they come with nearly equal pretensions into the province of history, while the rest fall into a dull, chronicling style, which makes it of little consequence under what class they may chance to be arranged.